“Are We the Baddies?” — That Mitchell and Webb Look
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters use it as a shorthand joke when a person, group, or country seems to be doing something self-evidently villainous without noticing.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What it is
A 2m51s clip from the BBC sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look, remastered in 4K. Two SS officers, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, slowly realize they might be the baddies of World War II, with the line "Hans... are we the baddies?"
What people said
Cites TZubiri · 2025-02 · Hacker News · on “The Zizians and the rationalist death cult”
"Ziz believes there are two kinds of core, "good" and "nongood". "Nongood" cores are the most common (about 95% of the population)." [this video]
Cites somenameforme · 2025-05 · Hacker News · on “The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return”
No, it's the perfect example because we can't help but rationalize a way to justify pushing it. If you now gave every single person that button, humanity would be extinct within minutes - many of them rationalizing that they're saving humanity. This is the heart of where the saying that power corrupts comes from. It's not that power corrupts but that these sort of decisions are ones that will never be available to anybody without power. Yet for those with power it's not that far away from many practical scenarios. In other words, we start corrupt, but our impotence mitigates the relevance of that. Power just reveals our character. And no, religious people are obviously not immune from this,
Cites ben_w · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “China Is Flatlining”
I've been seeing such headlines for the last decade. What counts as "flatlining" when it's China would be above average for the USA. > The jobless rate among workers aged 16 to 24 stood at 18 percent last month. Headline figures for the USA and EU-27 look better (9.1% and 15.1%), but are not the same unit (urban youth vs. all). > Although China’s economy has been growing a respectable 5 percent annually for the past three years, the research firm Rhodium Group estimates that China’s actual growth rate was probably near 2 percent in 2023 and closer to 3 percent over the past two years. OK, so 2%, 3%, 3% ~= 8.2% from compounding, while the USA has been 2.9%, 2.8%, 2.1% ~= 8% from compounding,