The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940) • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by elrostelperien » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:32 AM UTC

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…

Yet another music version: https://www.jamendo.com/track/967547/the-last-dictator (and with the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8mGEbxm6WI )

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

#282

Post by justanotherjoe » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:33 AM UTC

jdshaffer wrote: post #273

Interestingly enough, this speech ends up in Japanese High School English textbooks quite often. Like, for the last 10+ years at least.

I always find japanese curriculum very interesting with how much you are talking of western literature where other asian nations don't even know or care.

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

#283

Post by nicoburns » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:34 AM UTC

jvm___ wrote: post #276

chopete3 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is not referring to an individuals greed, for example an actor buying a few Ferrari's to satisfy their desires or a business person buying a yatch. He is referring to political/country leaders greed. Only their greed can cause violence and bloodshed at the level he is talking about. Ambition and greed both refer to the intense desire to achieve success. Sucess includes money, power, or status. The differen…

Convince someone buying a new iPhone to buy last years model or half the GB of what they can afford. That's the greed that's ingrained in all humans. "Humans take the perceived path of the most pleasure." is true in every human interaction I've witnessed or can think of. We're all greedy by default. I think Agent Smith was right when he was talking to Morpheus, humanity is a virus that consumes all the resources in t…

> We're all greedy by default

Perhaps, but we’re also all generous by default. Which wins out is determined by some combination of upbringing, circumstance and individual nature. There are many people in this world who will give away things they dearly need to those who also need them.

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

#284

Post by sanderjd » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

aprdm wrote: post #26

fumar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could help balance Amazon’s leadership principles.

Yet Jeff Bezos in his podcast appearance yesterday which was a 2h talk said that when data and anecdote disagree to trust the anecdote and gut feeling

Then why ever gather the data? The truth table of this is:

  data | gut | out 
    0  |  0  |  0
    0  |  1  |  1
    1  |  0  |  0
    1  |  1  |  1

The data variable is irrelevant here, so you might as well not waste all the resources it takes to collect and analyze it, right?

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

#285

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

bsdpufferfish wrote: post #97

flashback2199 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No mind control, he said what people wanted to hear after losing WWI Mind control was how Yuri helped the USSR win the Cold war in Red Alert 2 (joke ;)

> he said what people wanted to hear after losing WWI In other words, they believed it. It wasn’t a false manipulation.

[deleted]

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

#286

Post by the_af » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:47 AM UTC

jskrablin wrote: post #177

the_af wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those policies aren't proven to work and your caveat renders the assertion meaningless. But regardless: it is well studied that fascism is an appeal to emotion, not reason. Neither Italian fascism nor German nazism were rational or grounded in science. They were pseudoscientific and appealed to notions of blood, purity, sacrifice and nationalism -- that is, they appealed to emotion. They clouded the reason.

Every political system clouds the reason and appeals to emotion. There are very few policies anywhere that are grounded in science. They may be, initially, until they get massacred by politicians to get them aligned with currently dominant ideology (which by definition is a belief system, grounded mostly in fairy tales about who's better than everyone else). Just take a look at the current state of democracy... and l…

> Every political system clouds the reason and appeals to emotion

No, I don't subscribe to this.

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

#287

Post by the_af » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 12:51 AM UTC

lossolo wrote: post #185

the_af wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are effectively describing an appeal to emotions, not reason.

Every ideology appeals to emotions—liberalism, democracy, fascism, communism, etc. This is why we seldom see academic professors, who deliver lectures on TV, winning elections based solely on their lectures. Ideologies aim to harness people's emotions to gain support. Democracy, fascism, and communism all possess underlying logic. By analyzing these ideologies dispassionately, without moral judgments, one can discern…

Every ideology does, but it's question of how and how much.

Popular support for fascism is almost exclusively predicated on strong emotions felt about vague/changing subjects. Fascist speakers excelled at driving their audience into a frenzy.

Democracy is not consistently about this, and there's also rational debate about it. Rational debate wasn't the focus of fascism, and in fact it was actively shunned -- fascism was about sacrifice, blood and belief, not reason.

Someone else linked to the reflections on the language of the Third Reich, and how it was meant to drive emotions and irrational thinking.

Fascism cannot coexist with reason. Other forms of evil might, but not this one.

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

#288

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 1:04 AM UTC

narag wrote: post #201

lossolo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every ideology appeals to emotions—liberalism, democracy, fascism, communism, etc. This is why we seldom see academic professors, who deliver lectures on TV, winning elections based solely on their lectures. Ideologies aim to harness people's emotions to gain support. Democracy, fascism, and communism all possess underlying logic. By analyzing these ideologies dispassionately, without moral judgments, one can discern…

Every ideology appeals to emotions... I can't find the source right now, but someone said that believing in democracy is like believing in the metric system. And there's another (Churchill's?) one saying that it's the worst government system, except all the others. Not very exciting definitions, more like cynics' choice.

I really like Churchills sentiment here.

Democracy is very flawed in many aspects in my opinion, starting with the fact that it is the rule of majority over minority.

Yet all other systems of governance seem much worse to me (any rule of minority over majority system like monarchy or dictatorship for example). Monarchy for example is great as long as your monarch is a sensible, smart, and empathetic person - but terrible when the ones after them aren’t.

I really can’t come up with a better alternative to democracy (aka majority rule) even if I think many of the problems in contemporary western society stem from that majority rule.

Of course there are many more devils in the details and democracies can vary widely across the spectrum.

To me a socialist (as in social, as in having the interest of „the people“ as guiding principle) democracy seems to be the best system humans have been able to come up with so far - the best as in resulting in a good outcome for the biggest portion of people. The Nordic states seem to have gotten it right in most aspects, even if there are many problems even there.

I wonder if there are any other good propositions or systems of governance that have been tried and proven that I have been missing (Spain's anarchist or Mexican syndicalism comes to mind, but I know too little about them to pass any judgement - plus they have been very localised systems afaict)

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

#289

Post by jncfhnb » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 1:20 AM UTC

hermitcrab wrote: post #236

"Greed has poisoned men's souls" Greed used to considered a sin. Now it seems to be seen as a virtue by some. It's not enough to have a Ferrari - you need to have a whole garage full. It's not enough to have a yacht - it's got to be a super yacht.

This may surprise you, but people were in fact greedy previously as well

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

#290

Post by MichaelZuo » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 1:37 AM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #271

MichaelZuo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It applies to HN too, the vast majority of comments probably don't have more than, at most, a few minutes of serious, focused, thinking behind them. And with how good LLMs nowadays, probably a numerical majority don't even contain anything worth noting.

I think it's insulting to say that human opinion or observation is worthless because a small program with a neat dataset can answer a lot of questions. It's like saying that talking with friends about history and engineering is boring because wikipedia has the answers.

Why did your mind immediately jump to 'worthless'?

Plenty of things in this world have some small value but are not noteworthy. In fact most conversations in daily life fall into that category.