That’s not at all what Arendt was writing about. She was writing about those who do evil things are rarely the “evil” monsters we imagine but rather bureaucrats motivated by things like promotions. Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.
> 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.
> “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”
Is still a misquote/misrepresentation. People can understand a subject but still say wrong things about it.
> 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.
The subject is interesting, which is why I clicked the link in the first place. I might check out the documentary. But the misunderstanding/loose invocation of Arendt is a turnoff imo
The right peddles it too, of course. But surely you can see how contrived these claims of "Trump is a dictator" are? It's completely bogus and they've been pushing it for a decade straight solely because it riles people up.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magazine-...
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.