The word “mafia” is never heard in The Godfather | Hacker News Reader

The word “mafia” is never heard in The Godfather

news.com.au

154 pointsnetworked176 comments

Its because its not a police movie, and these group didn't refer to themselves as Mafia...they referred to themselves as family (in Sicilian "Cosa Nostra" meaning "our thing" or "thing of ours").

You will hear "Family" plenty in the movie ("never tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking") even in the article, the mystery caller who threatens not to make the movie says:

>“Get the fk outta town. Don’t shoot no movie about the family here. Got it?”

To add to this; Cosa Nostra is Sicillian. Over the water, in Naples, it's "Camorra". In Puglia it's "Sacra Corona Unita". In Calabria, it's the awkward to pronounce"'Ndrangheta", who I believe are consindered to be the most dangerous, and closely aligned with the Albanian Mafia IIRC.

There are more, but those are the main active ones. Collectivley, they are Mafia type organisations.

The word Mafia itself is Sicillian in origin, and means "Swagger".

I believe Mafia is actually a combination of Arabic and Siciliano

“A less romantic and more likely derivation of the name Mafia is a combined Sicilian-Arabic slang expression that means acting as a protector against the arrogance of the powerful. Until the nineteenth century, the appellation mafioso, a Mafia member, had wide currency in Sicily as a noncriminal, resolute man with congenital distrust of centralized authority.”

Excerpt From: Selwyn Raab. “Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Mast Powerful Mafia Empires.” Apple Books.

So, they were anarchists?

Were and mostly still are, except now they're the one making the rules. They became the very same thing they were getting away from.

You mean dictators then (no rules except for the ones we want you to follow :-))

I've heard the opposite - that the Mafia formed to take advantage of a period when there was a vacuum of central authority in Italy and therefore little security for common folks.

The mafia served as the protectors - and if not paid, harassers - of the people in this situation.

Pretty much any government does the same- try not paying your taxes. Harassment will follow.

If you think that's crazy, try stealing a car or assaulting someone! Those darned government oppressors, always keeping us down with their taxes and laws and stuff. Who do they think they are anyway, the government?!?

It's payment for justice. We just call it taxes and police. They call it tribute and protection, or something else. The same basic functions are being fulfilled in different ways.

I agree that they share many characteristics and objectives, derived ultimately from certain realities of the ways humans operate.

But I do contend that the better forms of government that are less mafia-like. Obviously absolute monarchies and dictatorships aren't among them.

It's like they're the mafia or something.

Just because governments and mafias share that one characteristic doesn't mean they are the same. There is a whole lot more that governments provide to a society than collecting taxes.

Businesses also collect revenue, and if you don't pay them, harassment will also ensue, which you'd know if you've ever forgotten a payment and had a file sent to a collection agency, and ultimately to a civil court which is paid for by ... government. But that doesn't mean businesses are like mafias.

What distinguishes organized crime syndicates from governments and businesses is everything about them apart from "pay or be harassed" part, including but not limited to: the family-based structure and power inheritance model, the use of localized violence as coercion to payment (vs in exchange for services provided), and the lack of any transparent system of justice. Some governments (i.e. Saudi, North Korea) undoubtedly have more of those characteristics, but that doesn't mean that most governments are equivalent to organized crime syndicates.

I'm not saying they're the same, but they hardly share just the one characteristic with government. It's just a different combination of characteristics than what most are used to.

Monarchies and nobility have the family based power structures and inheritance.

And locals go to the family for justice, similar to going to elders for dispute resolution in some cultures.

And almost all government power over locals ultimately relies on the threat of violence, we just call it police power.

I'm not advocating for it as an ideal system of government (or any form of government that I want to live under), but to discount it entirely is to not truly understand the dynamics at play. Or the circumstances of how such groups come to power.

A similar thing is happening right now in Brazil. Ex-policemen are forming militias that supposedly "protect" the population in cities like Rio. If you don't pay them, you may very well be the target of "bad people".

If you don't pay money to your government, you'll be punished. It's not really different.

Everything the government does has to go through the justice system. Thugs will kill you without warning. This is very different.

Some governments will kill you without warning, either. I think the point to be making isn't that mafias are fundamentally different from government, they're just worse in almost every conceivable way.

There's plenty of mafia-like organizations with their own equivalent of justice system, and plenty of warnings before they decide to go with the ultimate option.

It was exactly this ill-conceived mentality that "mafia and government are the same" that brought mafia-style militias to Rio. I can almost imagine criminals laughing of this kind of idea.

Yup. When the State wouldn't help communities who needed protection, the Mafia families stepped in to serve that purpose. Of course, that's not to lionize them, but it explains why and how they came to power.

This is pretty common in general. Taliban started in a very similar way - their first public act as an organized movement was trial and execution a local warlord who raped children from a nearby village.

More like warlords or tribal leaders acting in the vacuum of authority

I wasn't certain what you meant by swagger in this context.

Dictionary.com tells us: 1870–75; < Italian < Sicilian: orig., elegance, bravura, courage

So swagger would seem to be an appropriate translation.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/mafia?s=t

Interesting, in the local language of the Italian region I was born (not Sicily), 'mafiosu' is used as a compliment for someone dressed elegantly. I always thought it was odd, but now it makes sense.

Mafias are downright cults.

You see the same thing in The Sopranos - about the only people who directly use the word are AJ and Meadow. Everyone else, "this thing of ours".

It would be unrealistic for anyone in The Godfather to mention the mafia. People involved in a criminal conspiracy typically do not refer to it as such, for fairly obvious reasons. You'll never see a memo with the words "Witness Tampering Plan" or "Quid Pro Quo" left out on a desk at such organizations either, for the same reasons. Such things are discussed via euphemism or outright code, even that as little and as privately as possible.

yeah but than again in the 1970s we had creep...for a disgraced president's reelection campaign

Nope! It was CRP, named CREEP by opponents as part of the disgracing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Re-Electio...

There's a funny little nod to things like this in The Wire. Stringer Bell, high level drug dealer, is trying to organize a coalition of all the differing gangs. He's studying at business school to help this. Learns about Robert's Rules of Order, runs meetings that way.

Until he looks over and sees one of his underlings with a yellow legal pad. "Yo, what is that?"

"Robert's Rules say we gotta have minutes of the meeting, right? These are the minutes."

"... Are you taking ... notes ... on a criminal fucking conspiracy?!? The fuck are you thinking, man?"

The words "power fantasy" never came up in any of the Marvel movies. Show, don't tell.

It’s heard in Godfather part 2, though: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=1m&v=L6DkVsss...

So debunked and bad article.

^The word “mafia” is never heard in The Godfather$

Not surprised, news.com.au is a famously bad news source in Australia. It constantly puts out tabloid level nonsense. Like many such outlets, it's owned by Murdoch's news corp.

Not really. The article is only about "The Godfather", not "The Godfather 2" or "The Godfather Trilogy". It only talks about the first film and never claims it's not mentioned in any of the sequels.

Well if you ask about or mention organized crime, many Sicilians will just ignore the subject as if it was never spoken of, gaslighting. Eventually they might lose patience and rebut that “the Mafia doesn’t exist”, “it’s just a fantasy of the Continentals”. And act offended, bloody idiots... (before you downvote, it’s family, i can see how this denial has devastated and is still hurting a whole country so rich of potential. I claim my prerogative to be bitter and angry at them.)

I’m sorry it appears you lost someone(s)

I don't want to speak on the OP's behalf, but it sounds as if they're complaining about something more systemic. Corruption throws sand in the gears of an economy. Italy is mentioned in the same breath with Greece as being on the verge of economic collapse. I don't know how much of that can really be pinned on organized crime, but it certainly wouldn't help.

Lived in Padova with Sicilian roomates for a year, and they certainly talked about it.

I mean, they kind of roll their eyes if it's the first thing someone mentions, because Sicily is an incredible, beautiful place with great food, beaches and Mt Etna - it's much more than the stereotype from the movies.

But it's an undeniable fact of life just the same.

I bet Medellin is such a great place too but who is to blame for its reputation? It's just that the locals got used with the families/cartels so they may not be bothered by the crime syndicates that much.

It's not an easy problem to solve. If you're the only one to speak up - or even a visible person - you or your family might get hurt or killed. These are very nasty, brutal people that run these organizations.

I was just trying to make the point that a lot of Sicilians do talk openly about it, but might react poorly if that's like the first thing you blurt out when you speak to them.

Wonderful city, what did you do there? University by any chance?

That's because mafia refers to itself as "Cosa Nostra", "'Ndrangheta", "Camorra", and "Sacra Corona Unita" depending on where in Italy is originated from.

"Ruddy also agreed that the script wouldn’t include “Cosa Nostra,” another name for the mafia"

Also mentioned in godfather part 2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=4m26s&v=L6DkV...

From the article:

"So Paramount agreed and [the League] thought it’d won this great victory despite the fact there was only one use of ‘mafia’ in the script.”

Although Corleone does greet Barzini right at the beginning, at Connie/Carlo's wedding, by saying "Benvenuto a casa nostra" -- "Welcome to our house" -- which I always figured was a mild pun of sorts on the writers' parts.

> because mafia refers to itself as "Cosa Nostra"

Doesn't "Cosa Mostra" translate to "this thing of ours"?

Yes. Pretty much. "our thing" maybe.

To add to OP, mafia or cosa nostra is just Sicilian, ndrangheta is Calabrian, camorra is from Naples/Campania.

Usually the word mafia is used worldwide to refer to organized crime in general, but mafia there is just one.

If you ask a person from Naples if there is mafia there, they'd say: we have no mafia, we have camorra.

Yes. Ans if you ask someone if that is bad they'll reply "No, that's how it works". There's no crime or illegal thing when you consider the activities from the inside, in this culture some people even deny its existence.

I wonder what the state of the mafia is these days. Referring to the Wikipedia article[1], the five families are still a thing in New York.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Families#Original_and_cur...

Not sure about the US but unfortunately it is still a thing in Italy, especially the 'Ndrangheta. This is an article from 2014 [1] but even so, back then they said that 'Ndrangheta had a turnover of €53bn, and I can imagine it did only go up in the meantime. The bad thing is that it has "captured" most of Northern Italy, too, or at least according to what I have read online and in the papers (I'm not from Italy myself), and it also has a strong European presence: Germany, Eastern Europe [2] etc.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/26/ndrangheta-maf...

[2] https://linx.crji.org/2019/08/30/bio-mafia-care-producea-in-...

I can't find the article now, but basically Ndrangheta ended up so effective and successful in black money laundering, all other bad actors (drug cartels, other mafias, any bad guys) are using them for a fee.

They are definitely in eastern/central Europe, in Slovakia government was toppled recently because its close ties to it, and because investigative journalist writing about it was executed with his fiancee. Mostly milking off EU subsidies, but whatever else gets the money, they want in, or they are already there.

I can't imagine easy way out of that situation, government capture was pretty effective. Election change few faces but underlying flows mostly remain the same.

Re: Germany

Stuttgart seems to be one of the mafia's strongholds in Germany. Just last year one famous local Stuttgart "restaurateur" got convicted, as the Italian Carabinieri uncovered that he was the southern German bridgehead for the 'Ndrangheta. He was dubbed the "celebrity chef" as the rich and famous frequented the one restaurant he actually owned quite often, including soccer players and elected officials. Even after mafia allegations existed for decades. [1]

Germany is often considered to be their backyard. Relatively wealthy. Even small villages will have enough italian food demand to sustain one of your restaurant/money-laundering-fronts. And a generally unsuspecting public and administration.

The last one being a pain in the neck for Italian law enforcement. Many grandees of Italian mobs thus seem to live under fake identities more or less unbothered in northern Germany. After reunification they bought vast strips of coastal property in the former communist part of Germany for cheap.

[1] https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.mafia-und-die-...

Southern Spain is packed with russian mafia.

https://www.propublica.org/article/fighting-russian-mafia-ne...

Without opening the link: Andalucia, right? And maybe Valencia.

In NY they siphon money from construction jobs and I've heard they control the carting (private waste disposal) business. Supposedly they took a lot of money from the ground zero cleanup after 9/11.

Last thing I read was that they exert control on things in construction that are time sensitive. Concrete mixers for example have to be loaded at a station with very specific measurements and then delivered to the site within a specific amount of time.

Is that why it's so expensive to fix the subways?

They are also up in Montreal, Canada.

South Florida is home to a lot of the Russian mafia. You see them a lot in the night scene.

James Comey's "A Higher Loyalty" touches on the mafia briefly. It's interesting.

The mob is still big on construction and related activities, mainly in NYC. They even have a powerful friend in the WH:

https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/politics/news-politi...

http://trumptrophy.com/index-3.html

Random fact: In Sicily they call the Mafia "Cosa Nostra" but here, in the US (and other places i believe), the detectives incorrectly added the article "la" in front of it (which is incorrect italian) calling it La Cosa Nostra, or LCN. So anytime you hear LCN, remember it is acronym for bad italian grammar.

Vietnam is never mentioned in any episode of Gomer Pyle either directly or indirectly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomer_Pyle,_U.S.M.C.

In the meantime, the Korean war has been mentioned countless number of times in MASH.

...which everyone read as "Vietnam".

?? I've never met anyone that confused the conflict setting of MASH as Vietnam. Where do you base that on? Because of the time it was aired/produced?

The show was set in Korea but wad made during the Vietnam war. The Korean setting was a facade for a show that was making commentary on the contemporary situation.

I always thought MASH was about Vietnam tbh

It was set in Korea, but the subtext was entirely the Vietnamese conflict, which was happening or recent (ish) for the film (Altman, 1970) and early years of the TV show (1972-1983).

Ewok and Jawa are never mentioned in the original Star Wars trilogy. Maybe never at all?

Luke, in Episode 4: "Why would Imperial troops want to slaughter Jawas?"

Well I'll be. OK just ewok then.

LUKE: These are the same Jawas that sold us Artoo and Threepio.

BEN: And these blast points, too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.

LUKE: Why would Imperial troops want to slaughter Jawas?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTKHZN8c2L8

I'm pretty sure the terms "X-Wing", "Y-Wing" and "TIE Fighter" are never mentioned in A New Hope, yet when when the movie came out everyone knew them.

Thaaaaaat's the one I was thinking of instead of Jawa. Dang.

Another thing I never thought I'd see on HN, Gomer Pyle, USMC.

I didn't exist in the original airings, but Nick @ Nite and TV Land gave me all those awesome shows when I was a kid. Dick Van Dyke, I Love Lucy, Bob Newhart, Rhoda, Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, The Munsters, Happy Days. The list goes on and on.

Before Nick @ Nite, those same syndicated shows were the primary content for channels in the UHF band. The major networks were in the VHF band. Back then, a show didn't qualify for syndication until it hit 100 episodes. That's why they made such a big deal about it. That's also why they would have 20+ episodes per season to get to 100 in as few years as possible. Once you got to 100, you didn't worry about getting canceled as much because you now could earn mail box money from syndication fees.

This is news? New generation discovering The Godfather for the first time? Wait until they find out 2001 isn’t about history - that will really blow their mind. ;)

Image the Hollywood re-make of 2001: My God, it's full of stars!

Like another Expendables movie? Hopefully not a remake of The Love Boat (if you never saw the show almost every episode had guest stars that were well known celebrities, but usually retired or semi-retired from acting)

Well, AI in 2001, surveillance state in 1984… It almost seems like these are chapter numbers in something like the 1984's inner book about how the modern world works.

I’ve yet to see AI. For that matter, where is my floating car and ray gun? Future is turning out to be more of the same.

Come on. For $50 I can buy a smart speaker that recognizes my voice and I can ask about the weather, news, events for a given day, factual questions, set reminders, play music of X genre, etc.

I know the limitations (I work in the field), it's way less powerful than Hal 9000, but by 20th century standards we definitely have AI.

...for sufficiently small values of "I".

The way they asked the computer questions in The Next Generation is closer to what we have today. Most of it would be doable, thinking of Siri/Google Assistant and Wolfram Alpha.

I’ve heard something like the following: “Any sufficiently useful AI research is considered a field of its own not relevant to AI, and, thus, the term AI and worthless research stays synonymous”

e.g. keyboard autocorrect, travel route finders, web search.

Heuristics and some hooked-up algorithms to a searchbox are not Artificial Intelligence. Nowhere in those software stacks is anything remotely intelligent happening. The tool is doing exactly what it was programmed to do: receive input, apply algorithm, wait for input. It's still completely dumb. Something like "artificially assisted" would make more sense.

I really don't understand why you were downvoted.

There's a flowchart from MIT about what AI is[1] since so people here seem to have an incorrect idea about it, and disappointingly hn is not immune from that.

[1]:https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612404/is-this-ai-we-drew...

This argument basically ignores how language works. When people say AI, they generally mean AGI or something resembling an artificial human. If enough people consider AI to have this meaning, then it has that meaning. Language does not care about smart-aleck charts or being correct at all.

And regular people are correct here, because calling things like smart speakers "artificial intelligence" is a bastardization of the term, in my humble opinion. We shouldn't need another term like AGI (which by itself makes no sense, intelligence vs general intelligence? ok...).

> disappointingly hn is not immune from that

What HN lacks is people who understand how linguistics and languages work. You can't point to a chart and go "see? you're saying it wrong", and actually have the language change. It just does not work that way, and I can point to many examples in the English language that are simple mistakes. The initial definition of AI is terrible for the combination of the words "artificial" and "intelligence". You can't blame people for wanting to go with a more intuitive definition that actually matches the words.

"Regular people" (myself included) can't even really define intelligence, so why would they be right in defining artificial intelligence?

What if I were to say that my speaker uses AI algorithms to help understand my voice?

It is not a bastardization of the term, it just reveals the depth of the conversation you are having with someone. Adjust accordingly.

> so why would they be right in defining artificial intelligence?

Because that's simply how language works. It doesn't really matter if you're "right", what matters is usage. If most people apply AI to mean "artificial intelligence" in the sense of "intelligent like a human or close to that", then that's the meaning.

> What if I were to say that my speaker uses AI algorithms to help understand my voice?

Then I would ask why you would think that to be the case, then go over why AI doesn't exist yet and move on.

"Hey siri, play <search term>"

"I didn't get that."

"Hey siri, play <search term>"

"Got it, playing <similar-sounding search term>"

"Hey siri, stop"

"Hey siri, play <search term (enunciating slowly)>"

"Got it, playing <similar-sounding search term>"

"Hey siri, stop"

---

"Hey siri, <a search term more complicated than one short sentence with a clear answer>"

"Sorry, I'm not able to show that. <opens web browser with term>"

---

We do not have AI, unless you mean in the loosest possible meaning. Everything is still dumb as rocks, we just have made voice recognition a convenience. Parsing sound into a search term and dumb-ly searching is still dumb. It's not AI just because I'm not manually typing it in.

Every system I've asked questions has failed on anything that's not fairly simple. Taking sounds and mapping that to a google search or a particular app is not AI. It's some engineer who decided that questions with a similarity to X or Y can be answered with Z app. (i.e. questions about the weather) Siri and others are still dumb as rocks.

Having used all three of Alexa, 'Ok Google', and Siri, I'd have to say Siri is the worst of the three. It's extremely far behind the the other two.

Try your voice searches with Google and it's very likely you'll get what you want.

Regardless of the brand, it's still not intelligent in any meaningful way. The capability of alexa/siri/whatever directly corresponds to whether or not some programmer implemented a match statement on that particular kind of question. Alex/siri are still just dumb tools, with voice recognition as a facade. That's not AI.

That is not AI, that’s just Eliza, seen that trick.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

For $50 I can buy a smart speaker

For $50 cash up front and all of your personal data, forever. It’s not as cheap as it first appears.

Siri has never tried to murder me, and I still can't book a ticket to a rotating space station (from Pan-Am, and stay at a Howard Johnson onboard the station).

The words you're looking for are "helicopter" and "laser pointer".

You're welcome :)

New generation discovering The Godfather for the first time?

I don't know why but I've never got round to watching it.

Godfather - Goodfellas - Casino, those are the three must see imo. That and every episode of the Sopranos, but it’ll take you at least a week to binge watch those.

> Godfather - Goodfellas - Casino, those are the three must see imo

Provided you are into graphic violence and fat Italian dudes :)

There's a lot of good movies that people don't discover, but it seems to me to less be about age of the movie - in the era of algorithmic reccomendations, you will get quality stuff surfaced. (Ex: I logged onto Prime Video one day to see the original Total Recall recommended)

OTOH, really good films that are not free on streaming are often not known.

I think we're missing out by relying on algorithms rather than doing research or talking to friends to find good content.

Try the counselor, you won't regret it.

https://www.imdb.com/videoplayer/vi185837849

Why is this surprising ? Actually curious why people think this is weird ?

Living up to your username I see :P

Do you run around all day talking about yourself in the third person ?

Why would these people ?

I think it is just more interesting WHY they didn't use the word, because threats from the actual mafia.

Because we are in the age of overstating and zero subtleness. So it is surprising for younger folks to see the opposite. Watch any current show based on the past. In the first few minutes, you will have a scene showing over-the-top discrimination with the bad guys (white, male) saying out loud how the minority group will never amount to anything forever and ever.

Al Ruddy (the producer) describes how this came about in his interview with Malcolm Gladwell[0]. It's quite a story.

[0]http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/39-chutzpah-vs-chutzp...

For anyone who hasn't seen the movies-- run, don't walk, to go get "Godfather I" and "Godfather II".

Don't bother with "Godfather III".

The book is great, too.

When I first started dating my wife she had never seen it and we watched them together. "Whoa, they really don't make them like that anymore" were the words out of her mouth.

While part 3 is a huge letdown, if you treat it like an epilogue (which I think Mario Puzo has referred it as) then it's easier to watch.

The book is not great. It goes on and on with stupid subplots (for some reason johnny fontane is an important character, go figure). Coppola hated the book and hesitated a long time before accepting to work on the movie.

The 3rd party is not on par with the other 2, but it gets more hate than it deserves. It is the closing of the Corleone saga and I found the 3rd act of the movie very powerful.

Coppola didn't like it on first reading, bu hated is too strong a word. He really liked it on the second close reading.

https://ew.com/books/2019/03/05/the-godfather-book-50th-anni...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs5KdzlWYNI

As for the book, it is a GAM, Great American Novel. It's intended to tell a broad story of immigration and assimilation. The movie, being a movie with limited budget and time, has to chop much of that away. Needless to say, I liked the book.

the third, while the weakest, is still worth watching at some point just to see how Michael's crazy story ends. sofia's miss or miss performance really drags it down though.

I highly recommend the book The Good Mothers. Even if you think you know about the mafia, the scale that they are operating on will blow your mind. The Calabrian-based mob control a medium-to-large country's worth of the world's money.

Gomorrah [1], the book, by Roberto Saviano is pretty good too.

[1] quick fun read on the origins of Sodom and Gomorrah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah

'Star Wars' is also not mentioned in Star Wars—which seems like a HUGE oversight in retrospect.

Ha! I always love it when characters in movies go out of the way to say the name of the movie. It is a good sign of a bad movie (not always of course but a lot of times.) I still remember giggling when I saw the Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider and one of the characters said, "Well, you're the tomb raider!"

In Star Trek: First Contact, they time-travel to post-apocalyptic Montana to help the inventor of the warp drive, who calls them "astronauts on some kind of star trek".

Fun fact: this was a question in the original Trivial Pursuit.

La cosa Nostra made the filmmakers not mention mafia in the movie.

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/03/20/archives/-godfather-film-...

really interesting article. this is one of my favorite movies and i've never even thought about that word

If you're curious about the story in more detail, Revisionist History has a good episode on it: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/39-chutzpah-vs-chutzp...

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his Revisionist History podcast: Episode 39 (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/39-chutzpah-vs-chutzp...)

See transcript: https://podscribe.app/feeds/https-feedsmegaphonefm-revisioni...

> word mafia is barely in the script it only appears once so I cross the word mafia I said Joe I'ma do this I'm going to take this out of the movie

I started near the end and thought that Columbo had been shot by the mafia. As in Lieutenant Columbo. The horror!

More seriously, though, they're great movies and I enjoyed them.

Can't help feeling though that some people come away with the wrong message: they think that mafia morality is how the world really works and so they must now embrace it.

Instead of noticing that Michael Corleone was trying to escape from it all and create a different life for his children. A life without the threats and violence.

(And then I think, hmm, perhaps mafia morality is still alive and well. It's merely that instead of being assassinated people are being deplatformed, disemployed, etc.)

I thought the point was that this was the way the world worked and that you couldn't get out of it. That, and the fact that good men are forced to do bad things by circumstances.

Yeah he tried to get out and he couldn't. Perhaps the secret is not to get sucked in in the first place.

Never seen the movies but in the book Michael absolutely could have gotten out. He chose not to because his honor would not suffer the insult to his family that occurred. He might have done differently if he hadn’t been in New York when the attack happened and the discussion over retaliation was going on. He was assumed to be on the outside. Sonny was in the family business. I don’t recall if Fredo was but Michael was thinking of becoming a professor and moving far from New York and the family.

Loyalty to family outweighed his personal ambitions. A common existential struggle.

That's my understanding of the first film as well. Michael, like most tragic heroes, was brought down by his own pride. Gangster and crime stories are often better understood as forms of tragedy; Scarface and Breaking Bad are also tragedies about men brought down by pride (and, in the case of Scarface, many of the other seven deadly sins as well).

He was born into it ... he didn’t have a choice that’s the point. It’s as much a riff on free-will vs determinism

But to begin with he was somewhat aloof from his father and brothers and he decided to kill that police captain. As I recall.

Michael is the one Vito was trying to keep clean in hopes that he'd eventually be able to rise into a position of legitimate power, outside the criminal underworld.

I don't see Michael Corleone as a good man, and I think the first film makes that part clear during the baptism scene.

Deplatforming and disemploying is fundamentally different in that it works by social consensus rather than an individual “fiat,” at the very least. I can’t deplatform you without getting the agreement of all relevant platforms.

That’s one big difference in the things you are comparing, without diving too deep into a different topic.

Good point. Although I think it tends to be a consensus among an influential minority of the populace rather than society as a whole.

That is fair, but realistically, I think that’s every social consensus… and the implications are much more far reaching than social media platforms :-)

Every motive factor in "society" is a consensus among an influential minority rather than the whole. Society is not a unified entity, nor are its boundaries even strongly defined, so there cannot be a consensus among a "whole" which doesn't exist.

Well, that's OK, provided we're honest about what it is, e.g. we don't use media to create the illusion of a majority consensus where none exists.

Mob rule is never actually mob rule, there's a complicated relationship between the mob and the demagogues who alternately control the mob while also being controlled by it.

Controlled opposition while shuffling the real dirty jobs on them and maintaining plausible deniability.

"Social consensus" in the case of deplatforming is a handful of yuppy bureaucrats in Silicon Valley deciding what people far less privileged than themselves are allowed to say.

It's not fundamentally different, just much more effete.

To confirm, your argument is that refusing to allow someone to advocate for genocide on your blog platform is fundamentally similar to killing a man for refusing to pay protection money?

Ludicrous hyperbole and a clumsy attempt at shaming.

It was a sincere question — are we talking about mafia killings and deplatforming, or something else?

I'm thinking of when they tried to deplatform the trans activist youtuber Contrapoints over one trans person who guest starred on her show one time turning out to have a view of certain gender things those people didn't like. The host probably wasn't even aware and it's gotten absurd how this can happen with such a degree of separation - dare to even interact with somebody guilty of wrongthink and now you and everyone you've associated with is also guilty and eaten alive. Very absolutist and reminds me of brainless zero tolerance policies in public education.

Except Contrapoints hasn't been deplatformed, so using her as an example of the extremist and arbitrary power of the "mafia morality" behind deplatforming to punish "wrongthink" doesn't work.

There was an attempt. Here's one article on it: https://medium.com/swlh/contrapoints-pronouns-canceled-twitt...

Sure, there was an attempt... but the fact that it wasn't immediately successful at erasing her and making her persona non grata with no effective means of interacting with society due to the absolute and arbitrary control that leftists have over the web, and by extension over free expression itself, contradicts the common fear-narratives around deplatforming.

I mean "dare to even interact with somebody guilty of wrongthink and now you and everyone you've associated with is also guilty and eaten alive" can't be true if it didn't happen. We can't be living in a fascist Orwellian dystopia where the SJW mafia and the pitchfork-wielding thought police control all that we see and hear if they can't actually deplatform someone as controversial as Contrapoints at will.

You left out a major detail. Contrapoints is a far leftist who was let off the hook after making a groveling apology.

Good luck with any of that if you are even slightly to the right of center.

In general she tows the party line of what is acceptable to the Silicon Valley hall monitors and tattletales. She only ran afoul of a few even further to the left of her. Trying to use her as a counter-example is laughable.

It's odd that you seem to believe "Silicon Valley hall monitors and tattletales" somehow control and arbitrate the entirety of LGBT discourse, such that Contrapoints "tows their party line," even though she upsets the left and LGBT community all the time, and has nothing to do with Silicon Valley as far as I'm aware, but whatever.

However... since it seems I only need to find a single example of someone "even slightly to the right of center" who has "run afoul" of the left without being deplatformed... J.K. Rowling. Engaged in behavior many consider to be transphobic[0] and bigoted, yet not deplatformed.

Or James Damore? Hasn't been deplatformed. Jordan Peterson? Not deplatformed. Stefan Molyneaux? Not deplatformed. Brendan Eich? not deplatformed.

Searching Twitter under tags and terms like alt-right, right wing, far right, gender-critical, mra, etc., reveals a lot of open and unapologetic discussion of definitely not left and extreme left politics, which shouldn't be the case. All of that should be memory-holed by the SJWs scrubbing the platform of wrongthink, shouldn't it?

[0]https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/12/19/21029874/jk-rowlin...

It is wildly disingenuous to try and pass off being deplatformed as an on/off switch.

There are many degrees to which one could be deplatformed, and sadly a segment of the sclerotic left have decided to use it as a political tool to squash dissent.

To try and suggest that deplatforming doesn't happen or isn't an issue because there isn't a magic button that can be pressed to instantly remove somebody from the public sphere is grossly manipulative and dishonest.

I wonder how many people forgot or never knew at all about the ultra liberal “activist” that shot up a YouTube office because they deplatformed/demonitized her/him.

You would THINK a shooting at a YouTube office would have been a big deal - but nope - memory holed.

This is a standard tactic of those in the deplatforming business - to claim that everything they are deplatforming is the same thing as advocating for genocide. It's a terrible argument, and the moral equivalent of asking somebody if they've stopped beating their wife.

If you can't make a good argument for deplatforming a specific person based on the specific things they've actually said, then maybe, just maybe, you're the bad guy.

Exactly. They jump to the most extreme case to try and put you on the defensive.

It is a smoke screen for what this is all about: silencing dissent and controlling what people are allowed to say.

In this case, I am speaking about the general act of deplatforming vs mafia hits. A great deal of people HAVE been banned from platforms for explicitly advocating genocide; that’s an actual thing that happens fairly regularly.

Many are deplatformed for other things, of course, and I would never say that everyone who is banned from a platform is banned for good reasons. But there are a lot of assholes out there in need of banning, imo.

And The Walking Dead never calls them Zombies.

The Walking Dead season 7: This is why the word 'zombie' is never used

It turns out horror maestro George A Romero doesn't exist in this show's universe

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the...

This has a lot of interesting implications. Is there still the rum cocktail called a zombie? That was invented in the 1930's, back when the term was still associated with Haitian folklore about necromancy. And what happened to Rob Zombie in this timeline?

Neat, but I think that's an in-universe explanation for a stylistic decision.

Like "Quiet does commando ops wearing a bikini because she breathes through her skin".

No, the game designers wanted her to wear a bikini, so they wrote in that she breathes through her skin.

Same here.

Terrible SEO by the makers.

The most interesting part of this article is that the aim of the Italian-American Civil Rights League was to combat derogatory stereotypes about Italian-Americans.

The IACRL promptly reinforced all those stereotypes by launching an intimidation campaign against the production of The Godfather.

The mafia is just government by other means, and "The government" hates the competition.

The book uses the word mafia quite a bit, 57 times according to my PDF reader.

Btw, ask any Italian if they have seen Godfather III: they know it exists, probably, but they hardly know its content: which is explosive

How is this on topic in the slightest?

It is about culture. Just because it's about the Mafia and those types of people are criminals doesn't mean they don't have their own culture. It being culture, it is interesting to people here on HN.

They never say "Star Wars" in Star Wars

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