How to feed a dictator

Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil,' as I understand it, refers to human beings who are incapable of thinking. Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it. (In other words, the individual is not morally evil, but the system is designed to break things down so thoroughly that it renders those parts mindless, and that is the truly frightening part.)

In that sense, I can understand part of what the article is claiming. The phrase 'it was a great gig' seems to be the core of what it was trying to say. The high salary, the Mercedes, the abundant food supplies all point to the fact that the source of that funding came from the dictatorship.

An individual can be moral, but the system numbs them. That is why evil is not interesting; its desires are too simple. Wanting to earn more money, wanting to beat someone else, becoming consumed by such things. But in that regard, good is interesting. Because it means overcoming one's own contradictions, striving for the greater good, or even sacrificing one's life for the sake of everyone.

This is an interesting article backed by months of hard work. It offers perspectives we probably won't find anywhere else. The quote is pretty tangential.

I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why? There are no internet points awarded for maximum drive-by cynicism.

Later:

> By most measures, theirs was a great gig – logic that can excuse almost anything. “Saddam’s chef got a car every year,” Neel says. “That phrase, ‘it was a great gig,’ I think, actually runs the world. Like, ‘It was just business.’”

I’d say they understood the meaning.

I don't see a misrepresentation there - the need to eat and the love of good food is common to most of humanity and points to the fact that even dictators are also just people. Banal humans rather than cartoon villians.

> Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.

I think it's unfortunate to be so dismissive of an article over one quote from one person that you disagree with. You can still get something out of the piece if you open your mind a bit.

"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

But, uh, I don't think I'll necessarily assign that level of moral gravity to chef.

I think your interpretation is a little rigid. And did you read the rest of the article?

He does figure briefly in the discussion at the end and doesn't qualify for the full treatment yet as he's a dictator-in-waiting. In any case what is there to say about McDonald's? The man is as boring and tasteless as he is appaling.

There's only so much that one can write about McDonalds burgers and Diet Coke.

The man is by all accounts not a hedonist when it comes to food and drinks.

In the case of book reviews (and film reviews, I guess, since that's what this is) we often change the title to that of the book/film being reviewed.

We started doing this years ago after realizing that book review titles often do pirouettes on top of the book being reviewed; it's kind of a minor art form (a very minor art form!) and it doesn't serve the reader who just wants to know what-is-this.

In the present case I wouldn't call the article title a pirouette, but the pattern of following HN's original-title rule through an extra hop (from the review to the thing being reviewed) has held up so well that we do it pretty consistently now.

It's amazing how many sub-cases like this there are. Who would have thought that reviews need to be handled differently from non-reviews, but it actually does work better.