It goes well with this (truncated) version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PNV6Lg_ajA
The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
221–230 of 412 posts
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#222This part is very interesting. "Even now my voice is reaching millions" Chaplin knew this message was for future generations. When he says "even now" it means, hey im long dead but this message is finally being herd around the world. Chaplin & Nikola Tesla were friends. Tesla told Chaplin what was to come down the line like the internet, what he called "the transmission of intelligence" I honestly wouldn't be surpris…
The bits about "doing away with greed" and science and progress leading to rich life and happiness for all, they kind of read like he's predicting the United Federation of Planets. Alas, we've still got ways to go, we got stuck at the part where we double-down on greed to use it as the engine that makes the world go.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair to the people of the day, that pseudoscience was considered mainstream legitimate science at the time, strongly promoted by their equivalent of Elon Musk on their equivalent of ExTwitter. Just part of what terrifies me about the leadership of the world’s superpower from next year being a toss up between two guys who would have been taught that eugenics was settled fact in school.
I certainly do not support eugenics applied to humans but let's note that we are absolutely apply it to all other life forms on Earth to produce advantageous variants for our various purposes. It works to the extent allowed by genetics and is in effect settled fact for plants and animals. Highly respected public intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s thought it was a good idea to apply it to humans. We all know the resul…
Properly speaking the term eugenics applies exclusively to the selective breeding of humans to maximize and minimize behavioral characteristics (it turns out absolutely falsely) associated (by the ignorant) with the (it turns out nonsensical) notion of “race”.
The belief was that behavioral stereotypes (like, for example, frugality, trustworthiness, and work ethic) were inextricably linked to physical phenotypes (like skin color and hair texture) that, via some hand wavy magic around nationality and cultural origin, determined your race.
Eugenics isn’t the same as (or even a straightforward extension of) selective breeding in animals / plants, since no other known organism has ever organized around the entirely cultural artifacts of borders and tribes, nations and races.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#224Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Then again, the whole point of "scientific power" is to compensate for our innate weaknesses. Guided missiles may be new and perhaps not the best of inventions, but people are just as misguided by nature as they were at the dawn of history.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#225I 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…
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Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#226"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart" - I think many have this so very wrong. Is support for fascism is a sensible, logical, well-thought-out policy? No, it's a heart-felt, emotional appeal to scared, proud, paranoid, crude, brutal people (who seem to be about half of our neighbors). surely the mindful decision is empathetic, constructive, and wise - not just base.
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.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s a great many people around right now who’s primary redeeming quality is their impending mortality Ha ha, that's funny (but not nice — but I like it).
Sadly, it's true in some cases. Most notably Rupert Murdoch- while I do not wish death on the man, it's certainly true that he has a grip on the hearts and minds of people and often uses his media empire to convince people to go against their own interests. He will be replaced by someone similar, but seldom are people as effective as their predecessors.
> He will be replaced by someone similar, but seldom are people as effective as their predecessors.
I'm not a real believer in the "Great Man" theory of history - I think the ground needs to be set for an event for it to happen, I don't think the will of one person is truly sufficient to bend history - but there are certain people who you would have a very, very hard time replacing in a given scenario.
Rupert Murdoch is definitely one, and Donald Trump is another - without getting into specific judgements of the man, there's nobody else within easy reach who could do what he's done, and I don't really see his movement surviving him. He's a particular person for a particular moment, and it's hard to see anyone else doing what he has.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#228Earlier 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.
Glad you have a job and stable employment! When I think of who Amazon has "ground into dust," it's not Microsoft and Google. It's Barnes & Noble, Borders, Waldenbooks, hundreds of thousands of small independent bookstores, small businesses that once worried about Walmart moving into the neighborhood now contending with the omnipresence of Amazon. Some of them adapt, yes. Some were going to close anyway, of course. Bu…
Books are an interesting topic. The cost of publishing through amazon is far more accessible for authors, and the cost of the books themselves has decreased. I dont have enough time in my day to keep up with how many credits I receive from my audible subscription. Digital distribution has made both writing and reading more accessible, its the middle man that got cut out. That is in the nature of innovation, it frees the average person up from more menial tasks and allows them to create higher orders of value using a greater bredth of their creative inputs. That process can also be seen in the wide variety of goods offered on the amazon store, many of which are from those small businesses, the creative and productive factors remain without needing to take up physical real estate.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#229Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eugenics and Phrenology were very relevant at the time and used as a scientific basis to justify many attrocities. It's important to remember that science evolves, and what we "know" to be part of scientific knowledge today might be debunked in the future. Specially with the state of peer review in the social sciences my feeling is many things that are said to be scientific fact today will be proven wrong later, incl…
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