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The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

charliechaplin.com

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Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#231

Post by godelski »

roughly wrote: post #113
zirror wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime I read about longevity research and how many people are in favor of it I can't stop thinking about this speech. And one of the endings of Cyberpunk 2077.

I think people generally, and the Silicon Valley set in particular, have a hard time abstracting from “would I like” to “would the world be a better place if”. Would I like to live a thousand years? Yes, with the obvious caveats. Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today. There’s a great many people around ri…

I think it's important to remember 2 things

1) Possible solutions aren't binary (true vs false) but trinary (true vs false vs indeterminate)

2) The devil is always in the details. The world is fucking complex and and a first order approximation isn't going to get you there anymore. We've had 100kyrs to solve problems, we got most of the simple ones down (appearing simple does not mean simple)

2.5) A clique wouldn't be a clique if it wasn't something practically everyone knows and can recite but is not something people demonstrate an actual understanding of by observing their actions. (Just like LLMs: just because you can repeat some knowledge does not mean you're able to (ineptitude), or have the will to (malice), use the knowledge in any meaningful way)

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#232

Post by lewhoo »

arrosenberg wrote: post #226
lewhoo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's so simple. Support for fascism can seem sensible and logical if you let yourself think that between you and greatness stands a minority whose sole purpose is to prevent you from becoming great. You could argue it's not emotion but a calculation coming from struggle and an easy explanation for that struggle. Not every wrong assumption comes from emotion and we have the whole history of science to pr…

That seems to be perfectly consistent - it's pure hubris and ego to believe that you are great or that a group of people would care enough about you to dedicate themselves so. That's not for you to judge, but for the rest of us. Pure emotion, no logic.

There are plenty of exceptions to recall here. People who thought of themselves as great but were diminished by others for being fools are easy to find in history of science in particular. I'd say if you invoke hubris or ego then you yourself are reacting emotionally - then who is right and who is wrong would probably only rely on the outcome of my endeavors (successful or not).

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#233

Post by Geisterde »

gedy wrote: post #203
Geisterde wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, hello, I work here, google is down the street, as is microsoft. I can assure you they are not dust. All amazon has done is build more data centers, they havent taken some kind of hostile action towards the competition. The money was on the table, those companies didnt want to spend the time or take the risk, so amazon will gladly hoover it up.

Amazon !== AWS, I think what's being referred to is smaller retailers, not other FAANGs. My brother's store is slowly folding, largely due specifically to Amazon selling cheaper than he can purchase wholesale.

Im sorry for your brother, that sucks. Ill grant this, amazon being a large and well connected company allows them to secure exclusive and vast financing that provides their ability to engage in otherwise unprofitable (anticompetitive) strategies that shouldnt otherwise be possible.

Unfortunately that battle is with our banking system, and until its won you will continue to see the proliferation of companies engaging in this behavior. That said, amazon will eventually be the dinosaur that walmart has become, and its very obvious from a ground level prespective that we dont have the right foundation for the infinite scale we seem to desire; too many "leadership principles", too much reworking of company policy, too much switching us from database to database.

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#234

Post by mukara »

It is said that Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged Chaplin to make the The Great Dictator. Indeed, around the time the film was made, the two men shared political views on a lot of things. When Churchill and FDR saw a pre-release private screening of the film, they liked it. (Incidentally, Chamberlain had vowed to ban it in England for fear of angering the actual dictator.) FDR even invited Chaplin to read this very speech on his inauguration in 1941.

Ironically, this is the film that made Americans turn against him. Later that year, he was subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating pro-war propaganda (this was a few months before the US entered the war.)

In the following years, Chaplin was extremely vilified by the Americans mainly for his pro-Soviet and communist views (or rather, for his refusal to be anti-Communist). This led to politically-motivated prosecutions, and culminated in him being exiled from the US when the president Harry Truman(!) canceled his re-entry permit while away on family vacation. (Chaplin was never an American citizen, despite living in the country for over 40 years.)

There’s a recent good book review summarizing this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/charlie-chapli...

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#235

Post by arrosenberg »

lewhoo wrote: post #232
arrosenberg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be perfectly consistent - it's pure hubris and ego to believe that you are great or that a group of people would care enough about you to dedicate themselves so. That's not for you to judge, but for the rest of us. Pure emotion, no logic.

There are plenty of exceptions to recall here. People who thought of themselves as great but were diminished by others for being fools are easy to find in history of science in particular. I'd say if you invoke hubris or ego then you yourself are reacting emotionally - then who is right and who is wrong would probably only rely on the outcome of my endeavors (successful or not).

> I'd say if you invoke hubris or ego then you yourself are reacting emotionally - then who is right and who is wrong would probably only rely on the outcome of my endeavors (successful or not).

Ah yes - "I am rubber, you are glue". Given that this is a hypothetical, and I have no stake in the outcome, I think it is reasonable to conclude I am not being emotional about this.

> People who thought of themselves as great but were diminished by others for being fools are easy to find in history of science in particular.

And how many claimed to be great that are not in the history books?

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#237

Post by throwaway171223 »

lewhoo wrote: post #213
ryanklee wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely straightforward to uphold Democratic principles over Fascistic enterprises. People who get this wrong are simply wrong, and it's likely emotional and psychological forces that got them there, not rational, historiographic, or empirical ones. The current headwinds are a result of ill-equiped individuals being manipulated by other ill-equiped individuals.

> It's absolutely straightforward to uphold Democratic principles over Fascistic enterprises. That may be, but it also seems perfectly logical to claim democracy is broken because a voice of an educated person carries same weight than that of a high school dropout. All you need to do is extend this logic a bit. I think it is because of our emotions, empathy or maybe something else that we see that this "flaw" in demo…

> to claim democracy is broken because a voice of an educated person carries same weight than that of a high school dropout

Is not logical.

> fascism wasn't only a manipulation

No successful ideology is only a manipulation.

> Had fascism succeeded

I doubt anyone really knows why, but the historical fact is that it didn't.

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#238

Post by supernova87a »

> " The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish ..."

If there was a good argument against the arrogance of billionaires who think they should have technology that lets them live forever, here it is.

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#239

Post by MichaelZuo »

squigz wrote: post #191
MichaelZuo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comments are the data? I'm not really sure what your asking for.

Well I suppose you're making your own point.

You are helping me prove the point with conveniently placed examples, so thanks. But why embarrass yourself?

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#240

Post by Loughla »

zozbot234 wrote: post #225
qingcharles wrote: post #44

I always liked this version with music added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibmcsEGLKo I remember sharing a jail cell with a 19-year-old Mexican kid once and we were talking about the guards being assholes and he said "they're like machine men"; and I said "with machine minds and machine hearts?" and he was like "YES! You know it?!" -- it was a good moment, we spent the next few days trying to remember the whole s…

[flagged]

Dude. Just stop. Take a breath and relax. Not everything is a battle in the culture war. Let that go, and just live your life.

You'll be happier, I promise.

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