Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may surprise you, but people were in fact greedy previously as well
Yes, but it gnerally wasn't considered a virtue.
That holds up pretty poorly against historical scrutiny to very obvious examples
The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
351–360 of 412 posts
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#352Earlier 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.
They believed the "stabbed in the back" narrative like the US establishment believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Irak.
It was a motivated belief, thoroughly uninformed by rational thought, and maintaining and spreading that belief took no small amount of blatant lies and cynicism.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#353I 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…
My partner is very partial to this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouzKl0oD6sU :)
No disrespect, but to me that thing just gave me the same emotion as when I saw that meme about the person who couldn't connect to the holocaust until an MLP pony was edited into it.
Raw humanity just isn't enough any more? Have we become so devoid of imagination and empaty?
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's great. It's true though, it would be hard to go from an anarchist to a ruler just because people think you would be good in that position. Humans find it very hard not to be corrupted by power.
> Humans find it very hard not to be corrupted by power. I will say yes, and also anarchists would argue that corruption of power is basically a simple function of the system. A ruler living in the capital will be unable to make appropriate decisions for rural farmers or urban factory workers. That those people should decide for themselves how best to operate, and they should do so by vote or elected and re-callable…
Yes and sometimes I think “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried” is especially true in providing voters a put option. That is - we are pretty good at removing bad governments.
I don't think I would argue that democracies produce the best candidates, political class and leaders. However it provides voters the ability to remove candidates at the polls every X years, and in some cases (recalls) more frequently. While negative partisanship may make it hard to produce great leaders, it also helps limit bad ones.
So democracies don't generally end up with leaders for life who become more and more disassociated from the populace and reality.. as we see in most dictatorships and direct monarchies.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#355"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.
"Follow your heart; but take your brain with you." ~Alfred Adler
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#356Earlier 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 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…
You seem to be confusing propaganda with the fundamental principles of an ideology. Can you specify which aspects of the defined fundamentals of fascism lack logic?
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#357"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.
Romanticism of 19th century can be thought of as rationality winning over less rational religion. The 'God is dead' sort of thinking. Yet in the midst of all of this rationality and scientific progress we end up with 2 world wars?
> Romanticism of 19th century can be thought of as rationality winning over less rational religion.
Quite the opposite: Romanticism was a reaction to (and rejection of) the rationality of the Enlightenment. Romanticism celebrated strong, overwhelming emotions, such as nationalistic zeal.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You seem to be confusing propaganda with the fundamental principles of an ideology. Can you specify which aspects of the defined fundamentals of fascism lack logic?
I'm not confusing anything and much has been written about how fascism wasn't a particular coherent or logical set of principles. There's not much you can point at and say "this is the logical core of fascism", because there is almost none. It's all very ad-hoc. "Propaganda" is almost all there is to fascism, if you take it away there's almost nothing left.
I hope you can understand this is a topic that exceeds the scope of an HN comment. If you want to read about this, there's tons of literature.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's like saying calories can't be counted with 100% certainty, so we should eat integers instead. > What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time. -- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the B…
> That's like saying I disagree with "that's like that". I think your analogy is very far. Calories metrics are actually much better researched and measured compared to human decency.
Human decency has been investigate, discussed, analyzed, dramatised since millenia, however not by using numbers.
Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Gathering the data might change the gut feeling.