I'm sorry to be a pedantic about this, but we are absolutely not living through Idiocracy. In the movie, the President wants to better the material conditions of his people, then seeks and listens to the advice of the smartest person in the world, who successfully delivers.
If you want a movie, we are actually living in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator.
> You MIGHT find some isolated instance where someone objects to this movie. However, they'll be in an extreme minority.
Really? Take a look at the reception of recent comparable movies - The Dictator (Larry Charles, 2012), The Interview, Jojo Rabbit. All of which, to a greater or lesser extent, have been overshadowed by controversy about their portrayal of these topics, often including claims that some movie is either promoting hateful attitudes or "trivializing" and implicitly minimizing past atrocities by the vey act of portraying them via satire and ridicule. The contrast with how The Great Dictator was received historically could hardly be any clearer!
Okay I see that majority of comments here on HN including yours have one big flaw. So I'll just try to share perspective as person who was actually born in Russia and lived there good chunk of the year till February 2022.
For some reason people from outside of ex-USSR usually suppose there is at least something rational about this war. But USSR does not exist for 30 years and there are no massive political machine. It's just a autocracy / kleptocracy where all decisions taken by a very small groups of incompetent people whos only goal is to preserve their power.
Neither there is any real ideology in Russia. Putin is a much closer to The Dictator movie than to Stalin or Hitler. He care of his giant palaces and yachts far more than about gaining 42M extra subjects to rule. This whole war is just a presidental PR campaign 2024 gone wrong.
PS: Yeah, that's it. It's not some great powerplay to control the world. Not a war with NATO or US. Not even a war over reasources or territory. It's just aging kleptocracy that stumbled and now is killing 100,000s in pointless war.
I don't know about you but a friend of mine told me he sometimes feel insulted to take orders from someone inexperienced who don't know what they are doing specially when there are female members on the team, the insult doubles.
Did you watch the movie dictator where the the great general Aladdin demands the rocket be made pointy?
At small companies CEOs act similar to a dictator, maybe not all? But they've the vision. It's mostly them who get it, other are called naive or stupid.
Stuff like this is what drives experienced people out of the door.
As you get older, it gets hard to keep up with that BS and some people prefer mental sanity over paychecks naturally the jobs gets filled by ones who are willing to do the crazy thing in order to keep the money coming in.
>this happened under a legal theory that would not apply in Snowden's case
how can he be sure that there isn't other legal theory secretly approved by secret court that would allow to subject him to simulated death (or something even more devilish) without leaving any evidence on his body? After all Snowden had security clearance, had friends in these agencies, heard stories, so he do knows better what is waiting for him...
>(it is impossible to consider him an enemy combatant)
why? isn't it is just an at-will designation by the executive branch without any roots in domestic or international law? And even if not enemy combatant, "enemy of the US" or "enemy of freedom" would work fine as well and would qualify him for "enhanced interrogation techniques 2.0 freedom deluxe edition" (nice movie "Dictator" btw)
VLC struggles with DVD playback. In fact most DVDs this year will simply not play at all in VLC due to the menus causing it to crash.
Some random examples: Thor, The Dictator, The Avengers Assemble, (essentially everything published by "Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment", and many things published by "Paramount Home Entertainment")
Now one might say to "just disable menus!" but unfortunately that is ineffective as they have put a bunch of fake tracks on the disc which cause you to bounce around the movie out-of-order.
Playback works fine on Windows Media Player, PowerDVD, and most hardware players. Only VLC and the DVD extraction software seem to crash. Unfortunately there are likely things in the spec' which allow this.
Hacker Cinema
9 comments on Hacker News
I'm sorry to be a pedantic about this, but we are absolutely not living through Idiocracy. In the movie, the President wants to better the material conditions of his people, then seeks and listens to the advice of the smartest person in the world, who successfully delivers.
If you want a movie, we are actually living in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator.
> You MIGHT find some isolated instance where someone objects to this movie. However, they'll be in an extreme minority.
Really? Take a look at the reception of recent comparable movies - The Dictator (Larry Charles, 2012), The Interview, Jojo Rabbit. All of which, to a greater or lesser extent, have been overshadowed by controversy about their portrayal of these topics, often including claims that some movie is either promoting hateful attitudes or "trivializing" and implicitly minimizing past atrocities by the vey act of portraying them via satire and ridicule. The contrast with how The Great Dictator was received historically could hardly be any clearer!
Okay I see that majority of comments here on HN including yours have one big flaw. So I'll just try to share perspective as person who was actually born in Russia and lived there good chunk of the year till February 2022.
For some reason people from outside of ex-USSR usually suppose there is at least something rational about this war. But USSR does not exist for 30 years and there are no massive political machine. It's just a autocracy / kleptocracy where all decisions taken by a very small groups of incompetent people whos only goal is to preserve their power.
Neither there is any real ideology in Russia. Putin is a much closer to The Dictator movie than to Stalin or Hitler. He care of his giant palaces and yachts far more than about gaining 42M extra subjects to rule. This whole war is just a presidental PR campaign 2024 gone wrong.
PS: Yeah, that's it. It's not some great powerplay to control the world. Not a war with NATO or US. Not even a war over reasources or territory. It's just aging kleptocracy that stumbled and now is killing 100,000s in pointless war.
The Interview, not The Dictator. The Dictator was the Sacha Baron Cohen movie.
They’re talking about the movie The Dictator and the North Korea hack of Sony.
I don't know about you but a friend of mine told me he sometimes feel insulted to take orders from someone inexperienced who don't know what they are doing specially when there are female members on the team, the insult doubles.
Did you watch the movie dictator where the the great general Aladdin demands the rocket be made pointy?
At small companies CEOs act similar to a dictator, maybe not all? But they've the vision. It's mostly them who get it, other are called naive or stupid.
Stuff like this is what drives experienced people out of the door.
As you get older, it gets hard to keep up with that BS and some people prefer mental sanity over paychecks naturally the jobs gets filled by ones who are willing to do the crazy thing in order to keep the money coming in.
I didn't know the details, thanks for sharing.
I believe that he shaped part of the US and World's culture with movies like "The dictator"[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sfJxdytYn4
>this happened under a legal theory that would not apply in Snowden's case
how can he be sure that there isn't other legal theory secretly approved by secret court that would allow to subject him to simulated death (or something even more devilish) without leaving any evidence on his body? After all Snowden had security clearance, had friends in these agencies, heard stories, so he do knows better what is waiting for him...
>(it is impossible to consider him an enemy combatant)
why? isn't it is just an at-will designation by the executive branch without any roots in domestic or international law? And even if not enemy combatant, "enemy of the US" or "enemy of freedom" would work fine as well and would qualify him for "enhanced interrogation techniques 2.0 freedom deluxe edition" (nice movie "Dictator" btw)
VLC struggles with DVD playback. In fact most DVDs this year will simply not play at all in VLC due to the menus causing it to crash.
Some random examples: Thor, The Dictator, The Avengers Assemble, (essentially everything published by "Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment", and many things published by "Paramount Home Entertainment")
Now one might say to "just disable menus!" but unfortunately that is ineffective as they have put a bunch of fake tracks on the disc which cause you to bounce around the movie out-of-order.
Playback works fine on Windows Media Player, PowerDVD, and most hardware players. Only VLC and the DVD extraction software seem to crash. Unfortunately there are likely things in the spec' which allow this.