I grew up in a small city and one thing they had was some rich dude who donated a library, and filled the reading room with beautiful statues and paintings which were in the classical style, commissioned completely by himself. This was early 1800s.
Then in the later 1800s the townsfolk decided the paintings and statues were scandalous because they had nudes, so they painted over the breasts and genitals, and covered over the statues with togas / cloths.
Luckily in modern times it was easy to remove the cloths, but unfortunately the paintings are ruined. The cover-job was done poorly and the paintings have an off-color paint on it that looks wrong. There have been talks to fix it but I don’t think anything has been done.
My point is that, the desire to censor prior art that disagrees with fad-interpretations of what is taboo and scandalous, will certainly be looked at in a few decades as a very weird and Victorian era. Definitely should not re-cut movies to be “safe” or whatever.
The fact that even guys as influential as Spielberg and Tarantino are worried about having their past work censored is the most convincing reason I've seen to own your own data.
For movies it's as easy as obtaining DRM-free copies of the movies you care about, saving them to an SSD, and installing a copy of Plex.
Do that with the movies, music and books you love. They are a part of our cultural history. It's almost a guarantee that any copy you don't own and control will at some point in the future be revised. I want the real history not what the powers that be tell me it was.
It's virtually guaranteed that Amazon, Netflix et. al. will not store this stuff for you with integrity, it is built into the nature of the system.
Sometimes these edits can be pretty subtle as well: a while ago my wife and I started watching the original early-90s Beverly Hills 90210 on one of the streaming platforms. It’s a kind of absurd and fun pop-cultural time capsule of a show. After a few episodes, though, I started to realize there was something not quite right.
It turns out that much of the music featured in the original airing of the show wasn’t licensed in a way it could be used long term, and over the years it has been replaced with terrible stock songs or jarringly anachronistic choices that sound totally out of place.
Entire scenes and episodes have been cut from the seasons distributed on streaming platforms, because they featured live concerts that couldn’t be edited. The original had performances by the Flaming Lips, among many others, that simply can’t be watched now, except if by chance someone copied an old VHS to YouTube.
Music was a big part of the original show–in addition to the live shows it featured all sorts of great pop songs from the time, which was part of why it was such a hit with teenagers when it aired. It’s such a bummer they stripped it all out!
There are some places online with copies of early DVD releases that have more music, but still not all of it. The original is locked away in a vault somewhere and almost certainly won’t ever be enjoyed in a complete state.
So many shows are unavailable or different because of ridiculous licensing rules around music. Scrubs has several different versions of music, The Drew Carey Show is basically impossible to find because of music. If Congress wanted to ever do something pro-consumer, passing a law that ends all this nonsense around licensing and require all licensing to be delivery method agnostic. whether a show is premiering, a rerun, syndicated, streamed, or on DVD it should be the same show.
The State on MTV is one of these too. They had an interesting deal where they could use literally the entire MTV catalog of music for the show, but didn't have license to use any of it for distribution of the show afterwards. That made producing the show cheap, and up'd the quality since you'd have these hilariously scenes of mock teenage angst or whatever with REM's "Everybody Hurts" playing in the background. But in the long run, it sort of hurt a lot of careers of the comedians since the music was so entwined in the sketches distribution was all but impossible, and much of the future work from them are themselves cult hits, but haven't really become part of the cultural fabric. Comedies like Wet Hot American Summer or Drop Dead Gorgeous or Super Troopers.
We can't forget WKRP in Cincinatti, which had so much good music of the time, and even referenced it in the show which made for some butchered edits.
The most egregious example is from the classic "Turkeys Away" episode, there was a whole joke about Pink Floyd's "Dogs" which Johnny Fever was playing at the time. In the edited version Mr. Carlson just walks out mid-conversation.
> So many shows are unavailable or different because of ridiculous licensing rules around music. Scrubs has several different versions of music, The Drew Carey Show is basically impossible to find because of music. If Congress wanted to ever do something pro-consumer, passing a law that ends all this nonsense around licensing and require all licensing to be delivery method agnostic. whether a show is premiering, a rerun, syndicated, streamed, or on DVD it should be the same show.
And everyone knows that answer will be: "nothing stops potential distributors from licensing music now and releasing originals, the fact they are not willing to pay is not copyright holders problem". And there's some truth to it, licensing costs back then were lower because they were time constrained. No one would pay more for broadly licensed music in throwaway series. No one knew they would have lasting impact on popculture.
> So many shows are unavailable or different because of ridiculous licensing rules around music.
Or, often, because the original production bought licenses imagining more limited uses than later distribution opportunities presented, and chose not to spend extra money for things they didn’t expect to need.
This same music licensing issue happened to Charmed as well. The opening credits theme is gone; the guest bands that played at the end of each episode are gone. A ton of late 90s early 2000s culture, just... gone. No one who watches that show today will ever understand why it was enjoyable to those who originally watched it.
Now I'm really wondering if they cut that from the German dubs, or if I didn't pay attention, or if I simply didn't watch enough episodes, or not in full.
I think this is common in the move from TV to DVD.
From what I understand, TV broadcasts (at least in the US/UK) have a general/blanket exemption for copyrights w.r.t to things like music (RIAA). So no restriction when airing episodes, you can pick what music you like.
When looking to distribute DVDs however you have to get permission to use the music/pay for it. So it often gets changed.
Part of my job involves reviewing IP licenses. We don't negotiate technical details like aspect ratios. (Some IP owners do, like Disney.)
The decision to mutilate Friends was made by a software engineer (working for the Licensee) who couldn't be bothered to add black bars or convert ratios because "reasons."
Showing the original film means showing things the director thought would be out of frame.
In the 90s, film directors would often consider both the cinema and TV ratios, but TV directors? I kind of doubt it; changing the framing might be interesting, but it's not a good way to show it, IHMO. Debates over overscan are fine, but if it wasn't part of the original broadcast, and wasn't part of the directors' intent to be shown, it shouldn't be part of any distribution.
>Poker Night at the Inventory was delisted from Steam on May 23rd, 2019. Although Telltale did not offer the same kind of explanation that they did regarding Poker Night 2, the game was likely delisted due to expired licensing of one or more of the properties featured in the game.
Also see:
WKRC in Cincinnati, The Wonder Years, Beavis and Butthead
For these the loss of the original music was such an issue they eventually did (or attempted) to re-release with everything as it was. But don't trust things to always be like that. It holds for almost everything: if you want to keep something as-is the best thing is to store your own copy, second best is to rely on an archivist to store a copy but even that's risky.
Same thing with Supernatural. Season one especially was a Classic Rock masterpiece, but when the show hit Netflix they had to replace all the music due to licensing. :-C
It's already happened. Netflix and Hulu both removed the episode of Community where someone was cosplaying a dark elf because it looked too much like blackface. Never mind the fact the person doing it is insane, its resemblance to blackface is the joke, and his character dies and is removed from the show after less than a minute of screen time.
Incidentally they did themselves a favor, as biological sex differentiation is determined by the sex cells (aka gametes) an individual produces, not by chromosomes. In humans these are eggs in women and sperm in men.
Is there an issue with the removal of an actual scientific inaccuracy from a science program?
This:
> "See, there are only two possibilities: XX, a girl, or XY, a boy. The chance of becoming either a boy or a girl is always 1 in 2, a 50-50 chance either way. It’s like flipping a coin: X you’re a girl, Y you’re a boy.”
is out by a few percent .. numbers wise it's more inaccurate than claiming there's no gold in the earths crust. ( see [1] )
I thought you were going to mention how there are more male embryos than female embryos created since males have a higher death rate. Why is sex the only category in which we have to constantly qualify ourselves with regard to birth defects? Someone who's talking about how the three types of cones work to create color vision doesn't have to constantly harken back to how some people are color-blind, despite that population being an order of magnitude larger than intersex individuals. Not mentioning people with phocomelia does not mean your lesson on the anatomy of the arms and legs is wrong or inadequate.
If colorblind people were trying to indoctrinate kids and make them feel like they too might be colorblind because those children sometimes ponder if they see colors correctly, I'd be pretty annoyed too.
Even the simple dumbing down of gay rights to talk in schools about people who love others of the same gender, just let them love whoever they want! You have been free to love whoever you want for centuries. Im a male that loves my father, and would help a few of my friends fight to the death if they were being attacked. I love them. That has nothing to do with being gay. Why do we even need to have a flag raised at school that talks mainly about the right to stick sexual organs into other people? Because that's the only distinction I see between me loving my male friends and me being gay.
> You have been free to love whoever you want for centuries.
Um, no. It was a criminal act to be gay in the US earlier this century.
> Im a male that loves my father
Oh, I see. You're either practicing illegal love, or you're being purposely obtuse by conflating two different meanings of love.
> Because that's the only distinction I see between me loving my male friends and me being gay.
You hold hands with them? In public? You kiss and cuddle with them? In front of children? Because gay people have been murdered for that in living memory. I guess they just should have avoided touching sexual organs (in private) and everything would have been fine.
My entire point was that there are two different types of 'love', yet the left wants to talk to grade school children about LGB people 'loving' each other constantly. And since theyre not talking about family or platonic love, were talking about romantic/sexual 'love', I don't think that's an appropriate subject for school children.
Is attacking intersex people a political platform? I believe you're referring to transgender people who, while subject to all those horrible things you mention, have nothing to do with the biology of sex.
Exempting them from bans on genital surgery for infants/children certainly is a political choice.
That's very interesting, I didn't know that. Personally I believe in a blanket ban of all unnecessary surgical procedures/body mods on newborns and infants, including "genital correction", circumcision, and piercing.
is not true. The motivation for dehumanizing trans people is largely based on the (completely erroneous) twin ideas that "gender is sex" and "there are two sexes". Both of those things being false really takes the wind out of the argument.
In all seriousness, changing language to fit some weird political philosophy and then berating others for not going along is as dangerous as it is outrageous.
Constructs in your head are not real. When you die, they are gone forever. Yet, when they dig up your body 1,000 years from now as some sort of archeological dig, they will study your skeleton and determine your biological sex with certainty.
You (or anyone) is free to think whatever you want about yourself or others - but you are not free to force others to think like you, particularly when your thoughts are irrational and not grounded in reality or scientific fact.
And people make fun of the flat-earthers for denying reality and objective facts...
Woof, I'm not going to engage fully with this post. It is too loaded. I am not sure I can fully parse this post, but I am going to state some assertions that I believe respond to the statements made.
I am going to agree (?) that gender is a construct. I assert that it is a social construct. It does not exist inside our cells, only in our minds (individually and collectively).
I am going to disagree that sex is determined by our skeletons. I assert that skeletal structure and other phenotypical features are symptoms of sex, which is determined by genes. This is a scientific consensus as far as I can tell.
I believe I am disagreeing with you when I say that there are more than two possible outcomes of genetic sex determination. This is obvious, because there are multiple sex-determination systems in animals, not just XY. There is X0, there is ZW, and there are others.
Even within XY, there are variations. An individual can be born with XXY chromosomes. Or they can be born male with XX chromosomes, or female with XY chromosomes.
Or, a human can be born female with XX chromosomes, no outward differences from typical female phenotype, and feel they are a man. This is because, as stated above, gender is a social construct. Not actually sure if we agree or disagree on that.
There is no berating happening here or anything else that should make a person feel victimized. Just science. A little more advanced than grade school science, but still science.
> A little more advanced than grade school science, but still science.
"He who controls the language controls the masses." - Saul Alinsky
> Even within XY, there are variations. An individual can be born with XXY chromosomes. Or they can be born male with XX chromosomes, or female with XY chromosomes
We are not discussing extremely rare genetic defects. We're discussing people who slander biological genders by dressing as offensive caricatures and then demand everyone else participate in their mental illness.
You brought out emotionally charged language in response to my post about biological sex determination, which was in response to a post filled with emotionally charged language. It has nothing to do with whether or not we disagree. It's that you haven't expressed your ideas in a way that doesn't denigrate trans people and make you sound like the victim of their existence.
I don't call it hate speech because you aren't on my side. I call it hate speech because it treats transgender people as uniformly ill and invalidates their identity. (You'll find that if we stop doing that, their mental health tends to be pretty good.) And because the rigidness of the gender binary in modern western society is not universal across time and space within human cultures and it exists in opposition to scientific understanding.
You are saying right now that you want a genuine engagement. I'm a sucker for debate obviously. This is your chance to genuinely engage, lay out your scientific reasoning why a biologically female person with XX chromosomes should be forced by their peers into accepting the gender roles that other people say they must have regardless of what makes them feel good or happy.
> If she pretends to be a man instead, she isn't challenging gender roles, but is implicitly agreeing with the harmful idea that women must adhere to some roles, men must adhere to other roles, and anyone who doesn't do this is defective and must change themselves to fit this mould.
I appreciate your rational input. And to be honest, I don't completely disagree with this part. Trans people are not unaware of it either. However, [I must explain that] I was using "gender roles" in a very broad way, including pronouns like "she". This person doesn't need anyone to use specific words to describe their sexual phenotype if they don't want it. We don't have different a different form of "he" for children vs adults, nor for black people vs white people. It is a societal construct and they're allowed to opt out.
> Even worse is how such non-conformance to gender roles has been medicalized, so she may end up taking opposite-sex hormones, having her breasts removed and other cosmetic surgeries to appear as some odd facsimile of a man. Rather than rejecting this malignant, cultish ideology that advocates physical destruction of the self in lieu of bodily acceptance.
This is an extremely disgusting and transphobic thing to say though. I hope you didn't realize how hateful it sounded. Gender-affirming care is widely supported in the medical community as a life-saving intervention. As for whether or not you think it's appropriate for another person to have their body surgically altered, what do you think about tattoos? About facial reconstruction for burn victims? About a mastectomy for cancer? And why do you even care what other people do with their bodies?
I believe in treating people the way they ask to be treated so I always respect pronouns, bathroom choices, etc. What I've never been particularly clear on is why we've collectively agreed to cooperate with the social construct version of sex, i.e., gender but not anything else. If someone identifies as being tall, or older/younger than they are, or a different ethnicity, why doesn't anybody respect that identity as well? Is it just because there are a lot more people who don't feel like their assigned gender than there are people who don't feel like their assigned, say, eye color?
We used to teach people to accept others, and ourselves for who we are - flaws and all. We used to guide people into being comfortable and accepting of themselves - we are always our own harshest critic.
Most people undergo some period of time where they are unsure of their self, their future, their purpose, and perhaps even question their existence and the meaning of it all.
Now we teach people being uncomfortable and uncertain is unacceptable and that it obviously means you are the problem and must change. In doing so, we doom these people to a lifetime of hardship and uncertainty.
Imagine a world where having blue eyes was viewed as bad and had to be surgically and permanently altered to look more brown. Would these people feel any more confident after the operation? Why do celebrities continuously get plastic surgery over and over? They are never comfortable with themselves, and the further they go down the path of altering who they are, the more uncomfortable they become - ignoring whatever actual problems they may be experiencing in favor of cosmetic and superficial changes.
Indeed. I find it highly disturbing that the (very high) suicide rate for trans people has not precariously fallen as the number of people identifying as trans has risen. That doesn't make statistical sense if suppressing your trans nature is worse than embracing it. Something is wrong here. I wonder if perhaps we're classifying multiple conditions as "being transgender" and only some of them psychologically benefit from transitioning. Considering the charged political climate I doubt we're going to see any rigorous research on the topic for decades.
You may want to cite some source when asserting things that are contrary to well understood facts.
For instance, here's a NIH article studying extremely high suicide rates among transgendered people[1]. It cites many, many possible reasons for this, but the facts remain. Your assertion appears to have no supporting evidence.
> In doing so, we doom these people to a lifetime of hardship and uncertainty.
Let's allow them to "doom" themselves to increased happiness and just stop filling their lives with hardship.
> Imagine a world where having blue eyes was viewed as bad and had to be surgically and permanently altered to look more brown. Would these people feel any more confident after the operation?
Probably.
> Why do celebrities continuously get plastic surgery over and over? They are never comfortable with themselves, and the further they go down the path of altering who they are, the more uncomfortable they become
Is this what all your celebrity friends say? My celebrity friend circle mostly disagrees. Let's take a poll of all the celebrities we personally know and try to get some more data on what's going on inside the minds of "celebrities". Even though we already both know so much about the internal experiences of all celebrities.
"You (or anyone) is free to think whatever you want about yourself or others - but you are not free to force others to think like you"
No one cares what anyone else thinks. The only thing that matters is behavior. If your behavior is harmful to others, then we certainly are free to try and change that behavior.
If gender is not real, then why do you care what gender people are assigned.
> Yet, when they dig up your body 1,000 years from now as some sort of archeological dig, they will study your skeleton and determine your biological sex with certainty.
I mean, its thousands of years in the future, so maybe, but if we do it today, that’s not how it works; there’s a scale for skeletons of “Female, Probable Female, Intermediate, Probable Male, Male” and even the extremes are subject to caveats. But who cares? Why would what archeologists will think about your sex from your bones in some distant future constrain your gender expression in life?
No one said gender is not real, you are asserting an argument I did not make.
The notion you can be whatever you want - that is not real, that exists solely in your head.
As an adult, you are free to do whatever you want - so long as it does not impact me and my life. Which is the problem isn't it... people forcefully impacting my life to please themselves.
Forcing me to guess whatever pronouns you happen to what to use today is not a game I am going to play. If I demanded you refer to me as "King Alupis" in every one of your responses, you would probably not play that game either, despite the obvious happiness it would bring me.
"if someone says 2+2=5, the correct response is, ‘What are your definitions and axioms?’ not a rant about the decline of Western civilization".
From Wikipedia because math is hard, let's go right wing.
Use a wiki or something. Because when even I know that 2 + 2 = 5 can be true in some cases then you might want to reconsider your arguments.
BTW.
A + B != B + A also can be true.
> Constructs in your head are not real. When you die, they are gone forever.
Almost all of you is a construct, there are few things directly wired into the brain(but they aren't irrelevant) but most of it is learned. And when you die everything you had in your brain is gone forever. And then by your definition things that make us us are fiction. And they are as fictional as gender(btw. gender is not sex, and sex is more complex).
If there are more than two sexes, please describe what they are, and the additional types of gamete produced by these sexes. Your explanation should be applicable to all anisogamic species over the past billion years or so, including all that are hermaphroditic and all that are gonochoric.
> Exempting them from bans on genital surgery for infants/children certainly is a political choice.
Who is trying to do that? Gender-affirming genital surgery is not commonly, if ever, practiced on minors and no one is advocating for that except maybe a few people on the lunatic fringe.
The whole idea that doctors are going around performing genital surgery on trans-kids is a baseless political attack by people trying to ban reversible gender-affirming treatment like social transitioning and puberty blockers under the guise of banning more extreme treatments that aren't actually performed on minors.
Genital surgery typically isn't performed until the child is at least 16 years of age, usually older, but 'gender-affirming' breast removal is being done to female children as young as 12 years old.
There's increasing scepticism as to whether social transitioning is reversible in practice (see the interim report of the Cass Review for more detail on this), and the long-term adverse effects of puberty blockers are currently unclear.
This is part of the reason why the health authorities in many countries are starting to halt or restrict the gender-affirming approach, as it may be causing more harm than good to gender non-conforming children.
Australia, the country I live in, has an official passport that has for Sex: the valid responses M | F | X.
The reason for that is the actual verifiable existance of people who were born here clearly, scientifically, medically as neither M NOR F.
They are valid exceptions to the above quote from the Nye program and there are enough people born this way to number in the thousands in a country of some ~ 23 milllion or so.
The passport system was changed as a citizen of this country fronted and objected to having enter M or F when they were born clearly neither.
As someone with a science background who measures and models reality I approve of systems that track the world and its elements as it is and as they are .. rather than models that force a world view that doesn't match reality.
As Richard Dawkins recently clarified, "As a biologist, there are 2 sexes. And that's all there is to it." It's binary and there is no exception. People that claim otherwise are confused.
I believe there are cases of people being born with a set of sex chromosomes that are different from XY and XX. This is what your parent commenter is referring to and I fail to see how it's a valid point ("anti-science"), on the particular topic of determining biological sex in people.
If one wants to make a simple statement that encompasses the largest group of people they might say, "There are 2 sexes." If they want to make a more complex statement that encompasses all humans they might add a qualifier such that they instead say, "There are 2 typical sexes." That "typical" adds a whole lot of complexity in order to generalize the statement.
This is an opinion. Clearly there are at least some in Australia who have the opinion that they are indeed additional sexes or their passports wouldn't have more than 2 options. That's not "anti-science"; it is an opinionated interpretation of science.
Certainly the statement, "There are 2 sexes," simplifies the biological understanding we have of sex. To then add, "And that's all there is to it," makes the statement plainly wrong.
> The biological understanding of sex, as Dawkins points out, is that it is a binary of female and male.
It's taken as binary because the biological difference doesn't result in a meaningful physiological difference. That doesn't mean it's "anti-science" to have an alternative take. Consider that "The biological understanding of sex" as used in your comment should logically be understood as "A common interpretation of the biological understanding of sex". It might suddenly become clear that "it is a binary of male and female" as used in your comment is actually an opinion.
Anyway, I'm not deluding myself that this particular legal definition in Australia was not made in response to recent gender politics. It's more likely there for trans people than for a person who is biologically XXY and physiologically male. However, to say that it's "anti-science" to claim there are more than 2 sexes is mistaken. It is, as I said, an opinionated interpretation of a certain understanding of biology. You disagree with this opinion and you are mistaken when you say it is factually incorrect.
that column also contains the word "none" in some cases. And in either case it is all just a judgement call people made for the conditions.
The semantic sparring over sex and gender has a pretty simple compromise, that people who want to say it is a spectrum and people who want to say it is binary should be able to agree on and be happy with:
it is a bimodal distribution
of course the problem is that is a nuanced idea and humans can't handle nuance. Maybe you can, and I can, but WE as a human group can't. We prefer to drive ourselves literally insane over the semantic argument. oh well.
I mean, yes, the number of cultures is probably mathematically countable, but considering how quickly they split and merge and mix and such (and have been doing so for likely the entirety of human existence), do you really think it would be practical to do so? ;)
this isn't something that most people are familiar with, especially people who tend to see things in binaries (not because they're stupid, but because they're trained to see the world in binaries, because it's the simplest classification system which makes it easy to manipulate by politicians and media).
I was listening to the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" on Sirius last week and there's an entire verse that was just edited out of existence (if you're old enough to remember the song when it came out, you can probably guess which verse). Never mind that the verse itself was poking fun at people who talked like that.
It's ironic because so many of these things being targeted for censorship not only are completely inoffensive, but completely mocking the stuff in question. I suppose humor and irony are always the first victims of authoritarianism. Another excellent example is the adventures of Huck Finn. That literally the only genuinely good person in the book was called "[racial pejorative that would probably get this post auto-flagged] Jim" was the entire point.
Mark Twain was making a point about judging people by labels or how they look on the surface, instead of judging them by their character and actions. Of course now we're back to square one to judging people by labels and how they look on the surface, but this time it'll be different.
We as a species seem doomed to repeat history on loop, like some sort of real life Ground Hog Day.
He's not called that in the book. People constantly say he is, with an air of authority, but go read it yourself. Go do a search on the Project Gutenberg text. He's just called Jim. Not once is there any instance in the book where anyone takes his name to be anything other than Jim. I don't know where this popular misconception was invented. Yes, the racial term is said in the book, but not as part of his name.
I checked here [0] and you are correct. There is one match for "n-- Jim", however the n-word is used as an adjective, not as part of a proper noun, similar to "your coworker Bob". Searching for just the n-word brings up over 200 usages, however.
The entire song was (as I recall) poking fun at people who talked like that, and all of the lyrics in the song came were overheard by some working class patrons and their observations watching MTV.
It's insane how freaked people STILL get over black bars! Look, we get it, some aspect ratios don't work when on other aspect ratios! Just leave the content alone!
Getting back to the thesis, and without commenting on woke/not-woke (because I'm neither qualified nor care,) I am not sure what makes this particular comedy different from comedy we might otherwise consider problematic.
${X} joke about ${Y} -- if ${X} is only funny so long as ${Y} doesn't violate cultural taboos to make fun of, then we have an issue with the permanence of the joke. If a bad joke about ${Y} can be fixed by changing ${Y} to Republican (or whatever else is culturally acceptable to make fun of in time ${Z}, then the problem is not ${X} joke, it's our sensitivity to ${Y}.
> The fact that even guys as influential as Spielberg and Tarantino are worried about having their past work censored is the most convincing reason I've seen to own your own data.
No need to even go to censorship, you have people like George Lucas who go out of their way to destroy their previous productions.
I've deliberately sought the DVD edition of the unaltered original trilogy. The editing that makes Greedo shoot first looks cheap. It also doesn't make sense; someone pointing a gun at you is a clear sign of intent, and Han was simply defending himself. Han's decision to shoot first was also in line with his character as the rogue for hire.
Agh, I know the series is still raking in millions. But I can't enjoy the edits because my brain cries 'blasphmeny!'
There was a single run that included the THX LaserDisc version of the original Trilogy on DVD. I own it specifically because it included the original release and it’s the version I shown my kids. https://comic-cons.xyz/star-wars-original-trilogy-unaltered-...
At the time the excuse was that there were no longer any masters for the original trilogy to rescan for rerelease, so the LaserDisc version was the best that could be done.
When TVs were 4:3 and media playback was sending signals to control an electron gun, letterboxing was how you presented a 2.39:1 panavision feature. You’re screwed on resolution, but the framing is correct. HandBrake and other tools recognize and crop the matte giving you back a video in the correct aspect ratio (albeit still interlaced).
Edit: With the exception of getting LaserDisc releases of various vintages, the DVD release is the best, most accessible (excluding rarity) home video release of the original, unedited trilogy. They are not the highest quality, no doubt, but they are the best that was released. It could be argued that the despecialized editions are better for this reason or that, I personally consider them an incredible novelty, rather than a reference release.
When I tried those I found the brightness and colour balance odd in places. I'm told this is because they are optimised to look as close as possible to how they would in a cinema in 1977 (hence the name) so are optimised for viewing via a projector not an LCD TV.
There's a DVD "limited edition" of the trilogy that is 2 discs each, and the "extras" disc has either the original or laserdisc edit. This is good. The downside is that the black levels and audio are obviously dated/untouched. There's just no market for "remastering" without the content changes.
The whole point is that Han Solo is badass. So he doesn't need high bar to shoot. Luke is the crybaby. The original trilogy Han will totally opportunity shoot Grido in the back if he knew he was sent for him and Grido was walking the street. And the only thing he will feel is recoil. And I know blasters don't have any recoil.
Am I the only one who finds the end of Return of the Jedi to be the most horrible edit among all of the edits? I mean... I just want the song from my childhood not the garbage found in the blurays...
That and the insertion of Hayden Christensen. I know they wanted continuity, but it just throws me off every time I see him. It is as if the ghost represents the worst excesses of the prequels seeping through time.
Also don't start me on that 'thing' they have singing in Jabba's palace.
Entertainment media seem to have significantly different use-of-force standards than any real life legal or moral statutes. Maybe because the drama of protracted Mexican standoffs would be undercut if people reacted realistically to having guns pointed at them.
The Greedo scene has been tweaked multiple times. In the most recent version available on Disney+ (confirmed to be Lucas’ work), Greedo exclaims “macklunkey!” just before the shooting starts, which I find hilariously absurd.
In the book Tales from The Mos Eisley Cantina, the other two Rodians in the Cantina at the time of that scene were present to execute Greedo (for a clan rivalry). Solo shooting Greedo let them claim the bounty. Every story in that book centers around the scenes from the film that took place inside the cantina.
Literally the subhed of the article: "Director has criticised the practice of re-editing older films while expressing remorse over removing guns in a later edition of ET"
That was my first thought upon reading the title. However, people learn, grow, and change. I believe his argument will carry more weight with the acknowledgment and duscussion of his own prior decision. It's not hypocrisy; it's a lesson learned.
And he's a director! His job is to experiment and use new tools as they come available, and he's realized he made a mistake.
I have no problem with people making new versions of existing works; the problem I have is destroying the originals; even if destroyed by the author. The existence of copyright itself is a "deal" between society and an individual, we give the individual certain rights and privileges in exchange for certain benefits to society.
Only now has the ability to go back and change things resulted in large-scale destruction of personal copies of that original thing.
He didn't just remaster, he repeatedly altered the films, even changing the sense of some scenes, perhaps most notably and notoriously the stand-off between Han and Greedo. Most of his revisions have been questionable at best, ham-fisted and cringeworthy at worst.
Count me among the purists who think he ruined his good work ;-)
I think the Jabba scene is arguably worse because it simply repeats the same lines we already had in the Greedo scene for no real gain. It also undermines the dramatic reveal of the much-discussed but never-seen Jabba in ROTJ. Plus the unnecessary fan service of Boba Fett literally turning and staring at the camera at the end.
George Lucas has claimed that he cut and spliced the original negative when editing the Special Edition of the original trilogy, so that the master copies of the original films don't physically exist.
I'll make an exception for authors who want to tweak or improve their work.
Sometimes directors have to give into the limitations of their medium -- time, money, meddling producers, etc. If they want to revise it later to meet their original vision, more power to them.
Also entirely possible it was a cash grab; Skywalker Ranch needed a new wing or something.
For a positive example, Ridley Scott has a bunch of edits of Blade Runner. The huge improvement over the narration-riddled theatrical release was huge, and the pathological edits around hints towards Decker's replicant-ness are just kind of fun, in that different people are likely to have different views on the subject depending on which cut they watched.
I didn't follow the Lucasfilm acquisition too closely when it was all going down, but something that has confused me is that Lucas seems like a fairly talented guy with a passion for what he does, so how does it make sense that he actively wants to destroy his legacy?
I'm really doubtful that it's as simple as Lucas one day having a left-wing/progressivism epiphany or some other grand artistic change, sell Lucasfilm to Disney, then participate in the destruction of their IP.
Wasn't he promised "treatments" and general involvement in the latest trilogy, then Disney back-stabbed him last-minute? I vaguely remember some drama about that.
Anyway, long story short, I think that there is more to the story, such as him being promised one thing and another thing happening, etc.
Lucas hasn't shown any real passion or talent since Star Wars IV. Except perhaps for pitching ideas for the Indy films. He thankfully relegated the V and VI to other directors and screenwriters (even for IV, a lot of his contributions were cringe, and rightfully resisted by the rest of the crew). And let's not talk about the prequels (Jar Jar and midichlorians anyone? Not to mention his choice of protagonist).
My take is that he became complacent with the big money rolling in after the first Star Wars, and never had much to show for afterwards or subsequently cared for movies that much. Contrast this with his pal Spielberg who churned out great film after great film, and continued mastering his craft. Lucas is a "director" who made four movies and stooped for two decades when he made it big. That says it all about his "passion" or lack thereof.
Ah, wait. He did found a great passion in the early 80s: merchandise.
Watching the ILM documentary (Light & Magic) the thing that stood out about Lucas is that he hated having his moviemaking decisions set in stone, and it being expensive and hard to change stuff. He pushed to adopt digital compositing technology, digital audio, then digital cameras, and digital sets, because he was so frustrated by the slowness and friction of optical and location work.
I think what comes across in the prequels as this sort of ‘first take’ feel to the performances is a manifestation of his impatience - he wants to get the footage, edit it, get the effects, and see the thing in his head. And the ‘remastering’ he has done is similarly a bit of psychological desire to always feel like he can fix it later.
Waiting five days for Phil Tippett to stop motion ten seconds of tauntaun walking must have driven him crazy.
Underneath, it’s an engineer’s kind of laziness - the sort that drives innovation. I honestly felt after watching that documentary that I am slightly less annoyed by the clunkiness of Attack of the Clones because I actually now can see underneath it the excitement of Lucas to use all the toys he has spent a fortune investing in ILM to build and just make the damn movie.
>He pushed to adopt digital compositing technology, digital audio, then digital cameras, and digital sets, because he was so frustrated by the slowness and friction of optical and location work.
Yes, but he overemphasized those technical aspects (where his care went) over the movie aspects.
It's like the guy who builds an expensive studio, with a huge mixer console, high end microphones, state of the art Pro Tools rig, and then proceeds to record his farts.
I'm not a Star Wars fan, but that's pretty unfair to liken someone recording their farts to a whole movie with a huge crew and cast that each added their own speciality skills to the movie.
As much as you and I might knock Star Wars, it's wildly successful and is still seeing plenty of success in other mediums, so obviously it appeals to someone.
I'll defend Lucas til I die. His expanded universe is why I read so many books as a kid, and the huge number of star wars videogames in the 90s/2000s allowed game designers to tinker with different gameplay ideas with the star wars fans as a safety net. The phantom menace movie had a lot of flaws, yes, but without it we wouldnt have the podracing videogames. disney, comparitively, has released... what, two star wars videogames in 7 years?
What's your point? It still exists. It's only "not canon" if you view it through the angle of the sequel trilogy being canon. People are still free to enjoy the EU within the context of what came before the sequel trilogy, and it still tells the same story it did on release.
That's the neat thing about art, I can choose not to think the post-Disney acquisition cash-cow milking is canon, especially when none of the original storytellers are involved, and it is thus not their vision.
Call it what it is: they retconned to milk the cash cow they bought dry.
I think the argument is that the universe he created is amazing and rightly beloved, but his movie-making skills were troublesome. I also love the SW universe, but mostly for things that did not come directly from Lucas...
>The phantom menace movie had a lot of flaws, yes, but without it we wouldnt have the podracing videogames. disney, comparitively, has released... what, two star wars videogames in 7 years?
If the best you can say about a director is that "without him we wouldn't have as many franchize videogames" then I can rest my case :)
Sorry, you don't get to invoke the "reddit, mate" as if your point was twisted.
These are your literal quoted words, in their entirety:
"I'll defend Lucas til I die. His expanded universe is why I read so many books as a kid, and the huge number of star wars videogames in the 90s/2000s allowed game designers to tinker with different gameplay ideas with the star wars fans as a safety net. The phantom menace movie had a lot of flaws, yes, but without it we wouldnt have the podracing videogames. disney, comparitively, has released... what, two star wars videogames in 7 years?"
Want me to highlight your argument? Here it is...
"The phantom menace movie had a lot of flaws, yes, but without it we wouldnt have the podracing videogames. disney, comparitively, has released... what, two star wars videogames in 7 years?"
Lucas was an EP and writer for all three Indiana Jones films. I think these films hold up better than Star Wars, so I wouldn't say he has any passion or talent since Star Wars. With respect to the three Star Wars films though (and all the garbage that came later), I agree.
They do hold up better, but it's because of Spielberg who did the directing (I can't even imagine the cringe mess Lucas would have made - I'd rather we had a Tom Shelleck Indiana Jones movie, as was considered at one time, than a Lucas-directed one), Phillip Kaufman (who fleshed the story plot) and Lawrence Kasdan (who wrote the screenplay) rather than Lucas.
Lucas contributions were iconic, but not enough to get the movie to the level it is. From some dialogues I've seen between the whole team about the films [1], Lucas was more into throwing high level ideas, not about any core script work. So, the main concept, parts of the character design, and a high level plot summary. The rest had to make a full story, screenplay, and movie out of it.
George Lucas just saw making sci-fi movies as an effort to get reality as close as possible as the images he had in his mind. That meant seeing FX as an approximation, a constant compromise to reach the limits of what is possible to film. Lucasfilm were pioneers in digital FX and 3D for that very reason.
However, that also meant that each new work looked different from the previous, as real and digital FX diverged more and more with each passing year. He tried to rectify this by updating old works with new scenes and new effects. Had he stopped there, I reckon most people would have just plauded the novelty and moved on.
Unfortunately, while doing that, he also took the chance to modify what he saw as plot problems in the original movies - particularly the first, which was shot in isolation as a one-off, since there was no indication it would be as successful as it did (most actors thought it would be a one-and-done piece of trash, just to make a quick buck, particularly Sir Alex McGuinness). He made some dubious choices and the fandom never forgave him for that.
He knew his style of films were over, so he sold the franchise and let Disney take the burn for it.
It's difficult to see this as a political event, where he was outplayed.
He's worked with and against the big cats in Hollywood his whole career, he specifically made career decisions to 'get away' from Hollywood meddling in his work.
He knew what he was doing and this mythical George Lucas character, who is victim and hero in one man, is getting a bit long in the tooth.
When I consider this, I don't think there's any legacy there to ruin. The only thing that made the first movies watchable was gone long before Disney bought it up.
But like many story-spinners, he needs an equally phenomenal editor to sit on him. And it happens time and time again that a story-spinner gets so famous/rich/whatever that they can sit on the editor instead, and then the quality drops.
It's a very rare breed of story-spinner who can sit on themselves, offhand I can think of Tolkien perhaps.
He can spin stories and build worlds very well indeed, but he can't write dialog or direct actors worth a damn. He needs someone else to handle this stuff. His best work was when he came up with the grand vision for something, but someone else handled dialog, scriptwriting, and directing. Basically, the guy was a technical genius but had no eye for the human element.
> It's almost a guarantee that any copy you don't own and control will at some point in the future be revised.
This reminds me of the apple 'service' that automatically replaced your MP3s with its own 'sanctioned' digital files. It turned several of my tracks into unlistenable, censored versions and I've been incredibly wary of digital-only content ever since.
One of my favourite albums of all time ("Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls" by Coven, released 1969) was very recently taken off of streaming platforms
I don't know the reason it was removed but it was like a I was pinched and realised how little control I have over my favourite music.
The album is still on YouTube but I don't know for how long.
I bought the vinyl, even though i currently don't have a record player but plan to get one
I have to start preserving DRM free or physical copies of media I like. I always knew there was a risk of stuff being removed but always put off thinking about it for convenience, but not anymore
This has always been a pain about streaming services. The reason is almost always some licensing dispute or contract running out between the publisher, streaming company, and artist. Same kind of thing as when Netflix loses a movie or TV show. This is a good reason to still buy LPs, CDs, or DRM free mp3s since, for smaller artists, getting those rights back may not be worth bothering with for a giant like Spotify or Apple.
I'm not aware of this happening for explicitly censorious reasons, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it did.
Spielberg is "worried" about it, in part, because he did it himself. In later releases of E.T.: The Exta-Terrestrial, Spielberg edited a crucial scene so that it no longer showed police officers pointing guns at a group of children (among other changes).
It's a good sign that he has publicly acknowledged that the edits were a mistake and the original theatrical version of E.T. is available.
That already exists. It's called torrent trackers.
There used to be one called what.cd [0] that, to me, was like the Library of Alexandria, but for music. It was burned down in the name of commercial interest.
It might not be legal, but that's because the industry's interest is diametrically opposed to ours.
If it's moral and worthy of support, I'll leave for you to decide.
If you do use IPFS, then be aware that it has loads of traps you wouldn't expect.
1. A unique computer key identity is created on startup.
2. It announces every network adapter you have to the dHT, including localhost, docker virtual network adapters, everything.
3. If someone is sharing a specific hash content, you can query the network for their machine key and all their network interfaces, and everything else they're sharing.
4. I have early IRC communications that the ipfs.io gateway also quietly watches for 'bad hashes' and reports them to authorities. This was initially the decision they made to hunt down child porn predators, but this can be easily pivoted to copyright violators.
5. I also caught early on (in the 0.34 version) that google was already crawling computers, and all their shared hashes'. I had a few files I created that were very unique, and a curious search showed them to me, along with my machine's key.
For completely legal bulk data, IPFS is a terrific solution. But for anything that is illegal or might be illegal in the future, well, I have to question that usage for those aforementioned reasons.
> 1. A unique computer key identity is created on startup.
> 2. It announces every network adapter you have to the dHT, including localhost, docker virtual network adapters, everything.
This is totally insane, is there any client that don't enable those misfeatures? (like, generate a new key identity on startup, and don't publish any network adapter)
Guessing #1 has something to do with speeding up the notoriously-slow network. Probably allows more long-term route caching or something.
#2 does seem silly.
On a semi-related note, it's not that hard to set up a private IPFS. You just need a publicly-reachable "lighthouse" node (and it's extremely low-resource, the cheapest hosted VM you can find can likely handle the task without trouble) and some light config edits. IPFS isn't (and isn't trying to be) anonymous, but you can avoid sharing with the entire IPFS network and share only with trusted peers instead. The ordinary IPFS network won't even know you're there, because you won't be connecting to it.
I was there doing early testing, way prior to the filecoin offering.
The justification for a computer key (which is a base56 sha) was to make every machine a unique node on the network. Note that IPFS also purports to be a multi-network system that can be on top of ip4/6/tor/etc, so they wanted a backwards compat ID.
Now if my computer asks the dHT for hash X, I get a response back from all the computers with that hash. And it's similar to BitTorrent in that fashion. And the content hash is like Git.
There's also IPNS, which makes a connection from DNS to IPFS. You need unique machine identifiers for this.
With the sharing of every network interface, prior to 0.3 the idea was that ALL content loaded with IPFS could be shared. And 'nearness' ala STP could be used to provide local data to local machines. However, due to garbage copyright law, was not turned on by default.
The root problem is that basic security was never considered, as in the 'bad things someone can do with these identifiers'. Ideas like "one person loads a viral video and every device on the local network gets it from them" are amazing ideas, but preclude the bad side like 'who to DoS and doxx' and all these bad side of internet issues.
It sucks, cause I really think IPFS should have absolutely taken off. I could see this as solar system worthy networking for satellite to satellite. But there's inherent problems that I think would be better in the crucible of the IETF and not a commercial entity.
You seem to have invested a great time in knowing IPFS.
Just three questions I have:
-is performance an issue?
-can the source code and architecture be easily be modified so it becomes more safe where anonimity is concerned?
-if I run IPFS from a virtual machine and route the connections through socks proxy chains / ssh tunnels / VPNs / TOR it would still be able to spill info about me?
Performance: ugh yes. The GO implementation is a CPU and RAM hog. Basically, you cannot run it on a cheap vps, where you could easily run apache or nginx.
There's also significant bandwidth costs from a distributed hash table. That's a design implementation that really can't be avoided as the nature of dHT's. Running this on phones will blow through your monthly quota pretty quickly just on announce traffic.
I'm not well versed in GO, so I can't! However there's a LOT of customizations and settings you can turn off/on. For example, you can create a private IPFS network of just your machines. Or you can create piracy networks of friends. That sort of thing.
Just my complaints about the defaults are what I would classify as unsafe.
As for running through Tor or I2p, well yeah. I worked with another user who ended up figuring out a way to do it through Tor that only shared an internal 192.168.0.0/24 address. Basically they firewalled all internet comms other than Tor and forced through it. Also had to do MAC randomization because IPFS also shares that.
The IPFS folks initially said they were going to first-class Tor support. But when it got hard, they backed out. My guess was that would have turned IPFS into the biggest unstoppable piracy net. And Benet and gang were busy with filecoin. Tor doesn't make money, and has the smell of unsavoriness.
My recommendation is to get 2 machines, and bring them both up with a trivial 'hello.txt' file and prove all the details you can about the other. I don't think the protocol changed much... But I could be wrong.
I left using it because of massive resource usage, high network bandwidth, and user-hostile hosting environment due to insecure and everything-shared environment.
Right now, on the http(s) web, when you request a file, the provenance of that file is linked to the domain name and the HTTPS traffic.
On IPFS, the provenance of a file is its content hash, not some server you downloaded it from.
On IPFS, if I join in on hosting and sharing a hash of a file, I could be a malware spewer, but that doesn't change the hash.
Where this conflicts with copyright is, say you are on a IPFS enabled Movie server from CBS. By definition, only they are approved to transmit their files. But IPFS uses Git and BitTorrent to swarm download content. And default copyright, that's a civil tort matter.
The original idea for IPFS was that for the local network, that it did support BitTorrent like operations from browser cache. So if something went viral, it was 1 download from the internet connection, and then on-lical-network the rest of the way.
That feature was disabled EARLY on because it strictly violates copyright.
It's also why your computer published all the network interfaces to the dHT, so that you could find local nodes. But they didn't remove that; they only removed the dynamic sharing part.
I think there are settings to turn that back on, but I'm not 100% sure.
The current way torrents are designed is poor for archiving, because if you change the structure of the torrent even a little bit, the whole torrent has to effectively be recreated. Which is a problem if you didn't like the naming conventions used by the original seeder, or want to reorganise somehow. I believe there are already implementations that fix this, but they're not really being used.
The beauty about it's distributed nature is that you don't need anyone seeding for infinity. You just need somebody seeding at all times and if you ever use a private tracker, you'll see that that's not an issue at all.
I saw many torrents with 0 seeders. Someone will be seeding only if the interest in that content is great. Rare content won't get any seeders. Old movies don't tempt many people.
I liked DC++ approach on file sharing more. If someone in the network has the file, you can get it, no matter how rare. It can be an obscure film made in 1930 or an mp3 only few people know or care about.
Was that on a private tracker? Those usually have strict rules around sharing ratios to prevent that scenario and in my experience, it works pretty well!
I would—or, at least, I'd seed a whole lot longer—if there were a way to let me keep seeding after I normalize the file naming and structure. As it is, I have to render most downloads un-seedable in order to actually use them.
Well, then you haven't witnessed the beauty of What.cd or PTP. A bunch of data hoarders with webseeds. Find that rare promo release from 1978 on Vinyl? Check. Get a lossless copy of a professionally digitized Laserdisc release of a film? Check.
For now. But to survive generations you need a continual supply of new people interested in becoming data hoarders and seeding stuff they have absolutely never watched.
Which may happen for awhile, even a century. But it won't last thousands of years, unless storage space becomes infinitely big and cheap.
> There used to be one called what.cd [0] that, to me, was like the Library of Alexandria, but for music. It was burned down in the name of commercial interest.
Some data hoarder must have saved all this stuff, right? So why isn't it in a torrent?
I’m sorry to say that this is a rather naïve approach to long term preservation of data. There are surprisingly few solutions to preserve consumer data for more than a decade or so. If you really want to preserve your data for, say, decades, much less hundreds of years, then you need to think beyond the storage media you’re currently using. Even CDs fade after merely a few years of safe storage, leading to errors and data loss in the long run. Thus there are a multitude of factors you need to take into account before storing data for longer than a decade or so.
Well, over last two decades my mp3s, flacs, avis, mkvs, pdfs, epubs and others moved between CDs, DVDs, HDDs to land at a ZFS array replicated to another ZFS array at the moment. The way I use them has changed over the years (cloud streaming from navidrome, kodi for local playing, azuracast for radio broadcast etc.), but the media files themselves are the same.
As long as you don’t have real media files or other codecs that have disappeared (or will disappear - imagine if we move to a new cpu instruction set, I assume not every codec library will be recompiled).
If you maintain lossless storage you can switch formats as necessary; the problem really becomes a major issue when you have various formats you don't use very often and you don't notice that something became unplayable.
Luckily the number of people obsessed with emulating old systems saves the day for now. But at some point things like Video CDs and the Compact Disc-Interactive systems may fully fade into history.
This isn't really happening much any more. Spinning-platter HDs are barely increasing in size any more (I got a 4TB portable drive 5 years ago that I still use; now, looking at what's available, 5TB is the max and 4TB is still at the high end). SSDs are growing, but still not cost-competitive with spinning platters, and not really reliable for long-term offline storage anyway like spinning platters.
There just isn't that much demand for large-scale storage, since everyone just keeps their data "in the cloud" or has subscriptions to online services now. 20 years ago, HD sizes were doubling every year.
I would kindly recommend looking into Jellyfin. It's a FLOSS equivalent of Plex. (And unlike Plex, isn't closed source nagware on 'premium features')
But the rest I agree with.
And to your point, I just found a trove of rare 'banned' cartoons. Naturally, they're banned primarily for depictions of Japanese (WWII), and of black people in various degrading roles.
I do not take enjoyment in watching them. However, due to censorship, these could be lost. And that would be a bigger loss compared to their inherent lack of compassion.
> Naturally, they're banned primarily for depictions of Japanese (WWII), and of black people in various degrading roles. I do not take enjoyment in watching them. However, due to censorship, these could be lost. And that would be a bigger loss compared to their inherent lack of compassion.
Why do you feel this is worth preserving? It's designed to evoke positive emotion (laughter) and outrage/hatred about something we don't condone anymore. In addition to being propaganda, outside the context of warmongering, it's toxic.
We don't insist on archiving artifacts from smear campaigns between white politicians every election season. But we need to forever archive demeaning racist cartoons?
You'd have more of a case defending "Song of the South," which at least has artistic merit. We lose a musical experience with that one.
It's the "vampire" problem...immortality is not a good thing. Outdated/bad ideas are supposed to fade with the flow of time, not spread forever for later "research."
The counterexample is that some of us (including myself) are digital archivists.
I think it's worse in institutionally 'forgetting' via censorship, than to having that media.
I also think it would be improper to sell that content, as it'd be profiting on racism and sexism.
To the point, this set of files also included Fantasia, Songs of the South, WWII propaganda by Disney and Looney Tunes, and more.
Just because parts of history are horrific, does not mean we should self-censor and remove the uncomfortable parts from our collective memories. Frankly, these videos belong in a museum, or archive.org .
>The fact that even guys as influential as Spielberg and Tarantino are worried about having their past work censored
So I guess HN, or most Americans ( East or West End ) can now finally agree this is a serious problem?
I still remember in 2019 and even in 2021, HN's majority position was that people were too focused on culture war and this is only the minority of people who cares about it.
The music in Scrubs is pretty integral to the character of the show, but they had to change many of the songs for streaming, so the only way to watch the show as it was meant to be is from the dvds which will slowly disappear as demand for physical media dries up.
It's because, before TV on DVD became a major thing in the mid-00s, TV shows would get limited licenses rather than perpetual licenses as a way to keep costs down. Most episodes would air once or twice (its premiere, and a summer re-run), and if a show hit its 100th episode (at which point it became feasible to license it for syndication), the studio would renegotiate music licenses (and some popular shows never entered syndication because of a failure to renegotiate these licenses, while others, like The Wonder Years, entered syndication with radically altered soundtracks).
Once TV shows started to release on DVD in a big way, and then digitally a few years later, it became immediately obvious that shows would need longer music licenses, and so the issue has been solved for newer works.
It's honestly amazing how many of my saved favorites list on YouTube goes missing years later.
I know make sure to download any video I want to be able to watch again. Because between creators changing style, getting worried, going away, or getting stricken down by YouTube bots, it seems like anything worth watching won't actually be available to watch 3 years later.
A friend of mine recently made that experience. Her Amazon account got stolen, Amazon didn't care, and now she lost access to all movies and books she "owned".
Fortunately, with the rise of Z-Library, I was able to recover her books (she already paid for them, so I'm ok with downloading it from such a shady source).
I guess we have to fall back to piracy if we want to stay in control.
I would love to see an elaboration. I think you're saying this because it's in their interest for wide appeal and so will adjust their "products" as necessary to please.
I agree. I'm still annoyed that they started censoring It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. For example, they (Hulu) removed one episode where one of the characters does a black face. But the whole point of the show is to surface these social and political issues in a comedic way. They're not endorsing black facing, they're saying it's wrong. That's why it's funny.
This also reminds of something the comedian Ricky Gervais often says (I'm paraphrasing): You can joke about everything. The problem is people mistaking the target of the joke with the subject.
This is what I despise so much about modern sensibilities when it comes to being offended. Somehow we skipped right pass the intended meaning of a piece of art or language, and went right to "does this contain any imagery or words on our 'disallow' list". It's like the dumbest spam filter of all time.
The complete sociological ban on the utterance of any words that even sound like "the actual N word" is so bizarre to me. As a kid in the early 80s it was very clear and unambiguous to me that actually calling someone the N-word was extremely taboo and racist. But it wasn't like using the phrase in a sentence such as "Calling someone the <N word> is extremely taboo and racist" was considered offensive. When I first heard about a story where a college professor was suspended for giving a lesson in Chinese where the Chinese word just happened to sound like the N word [1], I was convinced it was either an Onion article, or an example of the right trying to make a caricature of anything that smelled of "wokeness". But alas, it was actually real, and just as absurd as I originally thought.
Chang was being a Drow or Dark Elf. I think it would be offensive to High or Wood Elves for them to be grouped in with Drow. Check your human privilege.
This really bothered me about censoring the Scrubs episode with blackface. Not that I think the joke was funny or good or needed to be preserved, but they censored it for the wrong reason.
The joke: Turk and JD go to a college party dressed as each other, in whiteface and blackface respectively. Turk gets distracted and leaves just as JD opens the door to an all-black frat. The frat beats the shit out of JD for his blackface.
It wasn't the blackface that made the joke racist, in my opinion. It was the tired stereotype of violent black men without deeper emotions. It was the assumption that racism is transactional in this way; you do a racism and you get your ass beat if you get caught.
Exactly, I never got how whole episodes get removed over bits where the joke is only funny if you agree blackface is very offensive. I've never seen a (modern) show that's doing it as a minstrel act.
Penny Arcade got in hot water over a strip for being a "rape joke" that only worked if you agreed that rape is pretty much the worst thing a person can experience multiple times without necessarily dying. Like, the joke works better the worse you think rape is, it's not making light of it at all, both for the overall point of the strip and for the incongruity-based humor of the specific way the situation is phrased to land, but they got in trouble anyway (then reacted defiantly in a classical-Internet manner, like "well that's obviously fucking ridiculous, so we're going to double down to mock how plainly absurd you're being" which just made things worse, because they didn't yet understand how modern Internet mobs work, which were juuuust starting to really become A Thing right around then)
This is the kind of humourless reaction that will literally make satire — and, potentially, absolutely all rhetoric — unviable. If we are no longer allowed to portray 'bad' people in fiction, what does that say about the quality of our storytelling and where it's going?
Please don't speak for people whoes motivation you probably dont fully understand. "Everyone" is always and per definition wrong, absolute statements like this only show that you are going to far and shouldn't be taken seriously.
I am a member of a minority, and I do enjoy jokes about my minority if they're well done and/or hit a nail on the head. Your statement effectively says you dont believe I am a member of "everyone", which is quite condescending.
The people in Always Sunny are awful people to be around: comically stupid, ignorant, selfish, sociopathic, repressed, narcissistic, scheming and oblivious. That is the joke. Take a group of morons with the above qualities, and worse, who own a bar in Philly. Hilarity ensues with how awful they are. Like a train wreck. That's the premise. And a further meta joke is on anyone who would "identify" with them.
Depiction is not endorsement. Do you think Leonardo DiCaprio is a racist for playing a slave owner in Django Unchained? Is Christoph Waltz a Nazi for playing Hans Landa?
There’s a bit of missing context here where the media went out of their way to deliberately photograph Ashcroft and other DOJ speakers with the nude sculpture in the background. From BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1788845.stm
> Photographers have gone to great lengths in the past to capture the scantily-clad female statue in the background as the Justice Department's top brass addressed the world's press.
…
> Hired drapes have previously hung in front of both statues for formal events, such as President George W Bush's visit to name the building after assassinated former attorney-general, Robert Kennedy.
…
> The drapes are reported to have been hanging since Monday, drawing to a close the sport of photographers who infamously sprawled on the floor to snap the former Attorney General Edwin Meese holding aloft his report on pornography in front of the female statue.
The awkward composition of the lead photo in the linked article is a decent example in itself.
To remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable from (a book, for example); expurgate.
[After Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818.]
Recently there was a controversy about the storage of Christian Krogh's historical painting of Leiv Eiriksson discovering America, which was previously on premanent display at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway. Apparently the argument used to take the painting down was that it is “too colonial.” The irony of the director of the museum being Danish, and the directing curator being Swedish, wasn't lost on most people, as Norway was once ruled by both their respective countries.
I would wager that a decent conservator would be able to “undress” the paintings - they probably went over the top of the old varnish. Even if they didn’t, most touch up work is removable, chemically or mechanically.
That said, at this point, the painted on underwear is part of the history, and at least one example of overwrought censorship should be preserved as an artefact of its era.
Utterly appalling. Seriously. So sad and pathetic that there are human beings out there with dirtiness on their minds and power to impose their interpretation of reality in something universal as art. Seriously, my blood boiled after reading that.
It only betrays their own insecurities and lack of restraint, doesn't it? If your morals are so strong then you needn't be worried about something you've presumably already experienced in private.
Any urge to smash things or ideas you disagree with is deeply human.
After ISIS took over parts of Iraq, they did what many have done before them through the millennia of destroying art and beauty because they disagreed.
A modern take is the climate activists destroying art because they fear the end of the world.
These differ in intent. The climate activists don't hate the underlying art, they just want to do some kind of stunt that gets people in the news. That's why these protests targeted art that was stored behind plexiglass; they wanted a protest medium that was highly disruptive and shocking but caused minimal harm.
ISIS on the other had specifically wants the art destroyed because their particular brand of brainworms is opposed to anything that isn't worm-shaped. The goal wasn't to shock people, it was to cause deliberate damage to human culture.
I believe many scholars said the goal of ISIS was to shock the mind, because shock creates abstract entities in the power of observers that can be used to wrestle control of and over them.
It was easier to terrify people into surrendering their mind than to defeat them physically (and have them surrender their SUV in the art example).
ISIS wanted to recreate the Caliphate, and shocking, violent videos were one of the most effective methods of recruiting young, belligerent, impressionable males. Martyrdom, beheadings, and violent Jihad were things long before ISIS, and they simply put on the mantle.
to put it another way, you only saw the violent propaganda, since it was in the interest of the US Gov, Israel, Turkey, et al, to make sure the world saw how brutal they were. You didn't watch the hundreds of hours of non-violent propaganda or theology, such as the recruiting videos aimed at young Islamic women.
This whole thread is full of takes like this - “how awful they have the wrong morals and erase things I agree with or don’t erase things I disagree with”.
It’s all power games. Trying to pretend your morals are correct is hypocritical.
The prevailing attitude is that this kind of social control is also widely accepted within certain religions, and nobody has the balls to address it even in the West. Nay, especially in the West.
Not sure if the "also" is necessary there, considering the above example was already religion based.
Also, the West interferes with the rest of the world quite enough - I'd suggest we try to stop exploiting the rest of the world before we 'save them from their backwards religions' or whatever.
There is a little complexity to the debate, and it really does get down to particulars.
1. Clothes badly painted onto nudes could be seen as itself an interesting/funny cultural artifact, and since it's at a library, you could have signs explaining the history.
2. I have no problem with Confederate statues being torn down or destroyed, since any perceived cultural/historical value is outweighed by other considerations. They are giant public symbols; little signs explaining "these statues were actually erected during Jim Crow and these guys were bad" are too...abstract.
3. Silently revising works of fiction seems especially wrong because we don't even know where the titties are getting painted over. The Roald Dahl edits weren't just removing "ugly" and "fat", they were also removing all reference to Conrad and at one point removing a reference to the color black applied to an inanimate object, a tractor I think.
The problem with replacing words with nicer sounding ones is eventually the replacement words start to sound equally negative. This is of course because fatness / ugliness are real things and cannot be eliminated by creating new words.
I disagree. This happened in my city. A confederate statue was quietly moved to a more welcoming town. To me, this is no solution. I simply don't accept moral equivocation about chattel slavery. All things in moderation, including moderation.
Trying to censor the hatefulness out of Roald Dahl is a futile gesture. Performatively-cruel comedy is a core feature of classic British children's lit. Tweaking a word here or there is absurd. If you don't want books that viciously mock people for their appearance, their weight, or their ethnicity, you should probably avoid them altogether.
In the specific case of Confederate statues, a lot of those were cheaply made garbage put up by neo-Confederates to try and glorify their extremely racist history. Sort of like the converse of the moral censorship being complained about here. Instead of censoring a historically notable artistic work that also offends modern sensibilities, they are adding a veneer of artistry and historicality to pretend like not celebrating a bunch of traitors to America would be censorship.
These statues were mass-produced and cheaply made in order to dot the South with bits of propaganda from a defeated ideology trying to save face. In fact, this happened twice - first after the Civil War and second after the civil rights movement.
In other words, they are not art, they are spam. They have more in common with hustlebros spamming T-shirt and poster sites with AI-generated images than they do with art.
Low-effort cookiecutter propaganda put up by lost-causers hoping to one day subjugate black people again probably doesn't need to be displayed prominently in front of courthouses, yes. And once removed, we probably don't need hundreds of unimpressive near-identical statues—a few would suffice, for any value they might hold.
Let me get this straight. The hill you're dying on is never destroy anything under any circumstances, no matter how useless, aesthetically repulsive, or morally reprehensible, because those things are merely subjective, but not destroying things is objective.
So like a Nazi furry Funko pop, we can't get rid of that.
> The hill you're dying on is never destroy anything under any circumstances, no matter how useless, aesthetically repulsive, or morally reprehensible, because those things are merely subjective, but not destroying things is objective.
Cool strawman! Here, I can do it too:
Why do you feel the need to be the ministry of truth and right-think, destroying and silencing anything that violates your "modern" sensibilities, regardless of it's historical significance?
I think what we have going on today is more than simply "weird" or scandalous on the level of nudity, but instead is remembered as the cultural cleansing mechanism that killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century.
This has some similarities but differs in that wrt movies and books, the original is still intact.
Also, for the most part none of this is being done due to law, but rather because the owner of the content wants to sell more of it and thinks this is the way to do it. Looked at like that, it's hard to see how you can stop it occurring.
I don’t think these moves are generally profit motivated vs motivated by true believers or people who see a way to enhance their own power within the decision making process.
The main reason I don’t think it’s profit motivated is that you see the exact same sort of culturally imperialist neo-Victorianism in entities without a profit motive like the ACLU or state govt.
That's different because reissuing a modernized version of a classic does not obliterate the classic. If somebody wants to experience it as it was originally created, it can still be made available.
As you've rightly observed, censoring the paintings was destructive.
Now, this is apart from the moral argument about whether we want to allow rightsholders to offer "modernized" versions of classic works. But it's still notable that the classic work does not cease to exist in this case, which makes it fundamentally different from the one you describe.
I mean the old media still exists. I still have a copy of Dr Suess' "if I ran the zoo" with the racist bits in it. Laserdisks of prespecialized Star Wars are rare collector's items but they exist.
Ideally the rightsholders would still offer the original editions for sale for those interested, but regardless:
The original work is just as available as it would be if it had gone out of print, which is a thing that happens to many genre classics.
So, if the originals are technically still available, then it's fine for the version that goes into the vast majority of people's minds to be altered as any rights-holder sees fit?
Er, what about our cultural heritage? Historical accuracy? Creative intent? The possibility for abuse?
Was 1984 just about a guy with a nice job "keeping things in print?" I mean, sure the guy made a lot of edits, with the express intent of manipulating people - but the originals were all around somewhere, so it's fine?
In general yes, particularly vandalising the paintings is criminal.
The thing with movies though is you can have multiple versions just fine. So while I have no interest in ‘updated’ versions it’s not necessarily as visceral an issue. The problem is more with the social pressure and lack of availability of original cuts.
One could argue that removing the clothes and the overpaint is just as wrong. It bears as a good reminder of the puritan era, of its destructive tendencies, and we are in some way still part of that era. It can also be a good whataboutist example when people are shocked that Taliban destroy the faces of ancient statues. Let's not try to obscure the barbarity of our ways. People who are scared of an uncertain future, trying to conceal the past.
fad-interpretations of what is taboo and scandalous
I hope there isn't a time in the future when people see the current wave of anti-racism, anti-slavery, and anti-misogyny as just a silly fad we had in the early 21st century. Although, I guess the people would have said the same about nudity in the mid-1800s...
You will not get an interesting conversation on these topics on an American discussion board. These topics are a minefield.
Plenty of the things which are pushed unconditionally in the US right now should be debatable and debated. Some concepts like cultural appropriation look clearly dubious to my French self. The issue is that having a debate has become impossible. In some circles, you will be quartered for daring to express that there exists differences between men and women which might not be socially constructed.
> Why have people become so afraid to speak their minds?
A sufficiently large group of people have realized that they can function legally as a social lynch mob.
A person can stand by their ideals all they want, but if their livelihood and/or social standing have been taken from them, then expressing those ideals doesn’t serve them very well.
Many people just find it easier not to engage.
History will not reflect kindly on these groups — they will be mocked (“crazy things people actually believed in the 2020s!”).
> We live in a democracy or not?
Regarding democracy, the most vocal zealots on both extremes of the political spectrum support decidedly undemocratic positions.
> So people like to speak about freedom but are afraid of actually living in freedom?
Many/most of the folks I know who speak out loudest about “freedom” are also the most willing to restrict it… for others.
What’s the saying… freedom for me but not for thee?
Before I come across as overly cynical, let me just add that most Americans I’m around have a very laissez faire attitude about most things. They are just very quiet about it, living their lives peacefully.
I’m a believer in the very moderate silent majority in the US. It’s just hard to notice that it exists when pretty much all mainstream media and social media are designed to favor the promotion of extremist stances.
In my opinion many want democracy but few only exercise their democratic duty (vote) and fewer are active beyond that.
Couch potatoes and complacent consumers will get ruled by dictators in the long run.
I don't see any contradiction between wanting to live in a democracy and taking an active part in it. In fact, quite the opposite — I think there's something truly anti-democratic about places like Australia where voting is compulsory. In my ideal world, fewer people would vote — everyone would still, of course, have the right to, just fewer would choose to.
> the most vocal zealots on both extremes of the political spectrum support decidedly undemocratic positions
My experience in the US is the opposite. It's only at the extremes that you'll find people concerned about our civil liberties slipping away, wanting to give everyone a voice, and accepting that there are opinions unlike their own and that's ok.
Probably because people on both ends are threatened by the middle party duopoly. The middle only allows conversation about wedge issues and nothing different or more substantive. The middle both decide for whom we can vote because they're corporations, not democratic entities. They collaborate only to make sure viable 3rd parties cannot exist and to ensure their donors' demands are met. Otherwise, they return to squabbling over wedge issues that neither party actually ever solves because the wedges are too useful to be solved. Our two middle parties are fundamentally anti-democratic - maybe that's why most Americans are independent.
Do you consider AOC extreme? Or do you support her positive attitude towards cancel culture? The consequence of having an even moderately contrarian opinion these days is getting fired from your job, not to meantion mob violence and threats.
All top-tier US politicians are extreme in one way or another. Moderation and nuance have no place in the US' bipolar system, so the only way to be noticed and reach the top is to become an extreme caricature of whatever topic is most dear to your voters' (or donors') hearts.
> That's a problem. Why have people become so afraid to speak their minds? We live in a democracy or not?
Always was, IMO what you're experiencing with this is just the Overton window shifting around you.
Goes both ways: People hardly ever discussed trans topics when I was a teenager and I don't know if that was a taboo or merely lack of awareness, but I do know that lesbian gay and bisexual topics were tabooed.
> Why have people become so afraid to speak their minds?
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I put the blame on those afraid to speak their minds.
I try always to speak my mind — whether it flies in the face of popular opinion or no. I take the downvotes — I sort of like that they have me pause and reconsider my opinion. But if in the end I feel I am still justified the downvotes just become a kind of war-wound or something that I take some small amount of pride in.
Downwoting me on HN or any online forum, doesn't affect me a bit. I can stand the enemies even if they outnumber me by 100x. Occasionally I can outsmart them, so I can take a point.
But denying me the possibility to provide food for my two kids, my wife and me, is another thing. And there are just two possible responses: either I won't talk anything meaningful to strangers, or, having calculated my chances, I would aggressively defend my right and my children's rights to speak our minds. And by aggressively I mean very, as in revolutionary very. You threaten my very existence, and then all bets are loose and anything that will let me and my people win over you is permitted.
Because for vast swaths of the population, even the tiniest risk that they could lose their job/livelyhood isn't worth it, and especially not worth it online.
Do _you_ want to be on the side that argues that our modern interpretations of age of consent may be a fad? Or that one day science may provide incontrovertible evidence that racism is entirely rational and appropriate?
Arguing these is pointless, because they are violate dogmas that underpin our modern ideology. They are not up for argument. If another ideology suggests that racism is actually a-ok, then we consider it clearly flawed, because dogmatically, ideologies that come to that conclusion must be flawed. And not just flawed, because these fundamental dogmas are what shapes our notions of "good" and "evil". Not adhering to these dogmas makes you evil.
I must add, this is not a fallacy of some sort. If I were thrown into another society where everyone approves of racism, I am still attached to my personal dogmas. I would consider such a society unjust and warped. As a matter of fact, there's plenty of personal dogmas our current society violates, and I consider our current society and its ideology unjust and flawed.
Which raises another point, which is that our society does not have a monolithical ideology. It has an emergent ideology that arises from common agreement, but there's plenty of people in our society these days who disagree with several of the dogmas. And that's what makes them "bad" or "evil".
The only way to argue someone out of a personal dogma is to convince them that whatever your dogmas are is reflective of absolute good, evil, and/or truth. This is the subject of what is likely one of the oldest philosophical debates and has spawned several religions.
> Do _you_ want to be on the side that argues that
This is not a two sided discussion where each camps agree in block with a set list of propositions. It's also not manichean with things being either completely true or false, right or wrong or, good or evil. You are not either for or against. If you believe that, you are the problem.
We should be able to explore these subjects in their full complexity with the disagreement that entails. It's not even possible anymore in academia.
> Do _you_ want to be on the side that argues that our modern interpretations of age of consent may be a fad
I mean it is a fad just a centuries old one.
My opinion is that morality is essentially a tips and trick of how to survive passed in a game of generational telephone.
E.g. ancient Greek hated cannibalism but practiced pederasty. Cannibalism can lead to catching prions and going crazy. For them it was god's punishment. Pederasty probably didn't have as many negative side effects at that time.
Proclaiming superiority over our predecessors is short lived. Imagine if there were two races of butterflies, one gray one white. The white blend better on trees and thus survive more, so white butterflies start arguing they are morally superior (favorite of God, etc.) to the gray ones, but that quickly changes once pollution grays the trees making now white butterflies the more visible prey.
Immanuel Kant had the idea of a supreme morality test. All things done by an individual which extended to all individuals would mean human kind extinction are imoral. All the rest are not imoral.
So killing, cannibalism and pederasty are obviously imoral.
> So killing, cannibalism and pederasty are obviously imomral.
Actually cannibalism is just eating of people, there is no requirement that said people get butchered for it. Someone might ritualistically eat an elder in their community to gain part of their wisdom for example, but there is not a requirement that they slay that elder first - they may just wait for them to die
Setting aside pedantry about the US being a republic and not a pure democracy, the fact is that wealthy elites decide election outcomes now. You ended up with Trump because elites in Russia wanted him elected more than elites in the US wanted Clinton. You got rid of him because elites in the US had woken up to the fact that they weren't the only player in that game anymore.
Culture wars are a proxy battlefield in much the same way that Ukraine is.
The Russians have an advanced, complex, and deep system of influence and espionage, but they're not the only players in this game. China, Israel, the Saudis, even allies like France, all push on US politics.
Some of them, like Israel and China, push pretty hard, albeit with different goals.
Also worth noting that in many cases they're just co-opting the system set up by US powerbrokers, e.g. Tucker Carlson of Fox News talking about how great Putin is.
I should really have said "elites, including those in antagonistic countries like Russia". My main point was more about the elites than where they are from.
No, they nailed it pretty unambiguously. It was a testament to weaponizing social media. In retrospect, an amazing time in history, glad we survived it (mostly because Trump isn't really very good at anything, including treachery).
Do you believe the appeal of Trump to disaffected Americans would be enough to win him the election, if big business (Koch et al) turned against the Republican party? Genuine question, because I feel like that is where the lever really is.
Moissanite is correct. It's rarely as simple as the sound bite would have it. It's a very interesting subject, honestly, especially in the era of AI popularization. Back in the day they did that work with humans, but the ways of tracking the results would be pretty much the same either way.
I'm the OP - and it's more complicated than that. Foreign powers fermented the discord in American society (which was already there for sure, but could have been much less toxic without external influence), hence describing it as a proxy war and not a foreign-backed coup.
The presidential campaigns had a billion dollars apiece, plus more from SuperPACs. Blaming the Russians for the outcome is just evading responsibility.
Blaming foreigners for anything that is wrong in your country. I thought, you guys, considered that a conservative feat. Are you copying the conservatives you blame, are you on a morally high ground and feel you have the right to affirm anything that helps your cause, whatever it might be?
Blaming foreign influence is not the same as blaming foreigners. Foreign influence is more about pushing the most convenient angle (to them) by means of propaganda, astroturfing or information laundering.
On a similar note, you can absolutely point to America for using the international monetary system in its favor, and that wouldn't be the same a blaming regular americans.
Any effect that Russia could have possibly had has been massively and wildly exaggerated. If anything, that election showed that elites don't decide the outcomes. Clinton did appeal to a lot of 'elites' but not to many rank and file Democrat voters, large numbers of whom didn't turn up and vote. Trump, on the other hand, didn't appeal to most 'elites', but did appeal to a lot of rank and file Republican voters, who did turn up and vote. That more than explains Trump's win without having to resort to foreign boogeymen (for which the majority of the evidence never solidified beyond being just hearsay) to explain the loss of an uninspiring candidate.
> Setting aside pedantry about the US being a republic and not a pure democracy,
Actually political scientists routinely refer to the US as a democracy. You're splitting a hair that experts do not. The word "democracy" does not only mean direct democracy. Mentioning this non-issue at all is a signal, but maybe not the one you hoped for.
I actually thought of this because of a line in The West Wing where the President is making a point about representation, then went off on a googling exploration to understand a bit whether it is a meaningful distinction - most of what I read seemed to reinforce the notion that the difference is important.
In day-to-day life it certainly doesn't matter - but when you are attempting to discuss the nature of that political system itself, I don't think it is at all unreasonable to call out the distinction and decide whether to discuss it further. No need for snide jabs.
> You will not get an interesting conversation on these topics on an American discussion board. These topics are a minefield.
I hope you're wrong, but...
It would be lovely to see some actual historical perspective on America's periodic obsessions. Post-9/11 anti-terrorism and airport security theater are still here. The Vietnam-era obsession of the left with being anti-war (while the right was still pro-war and anti-communist) has almost reversed. We had McCarthyism in the 1950's. Etc.
> You will not get an interesting conversation on these topics on an American discussion board. These topics are a minefield.
That's the point. Create a chilling effect to stifle discussion. Make it easy to draw sides and rally a demographic. Force opposition to take increasingly wild, extreme positions, then use those as a way to force your side to get even more extreme. Now you have 20-305 of the population who are rabid about issue X, and any real discussion about it is dead.
Makes it real easy to sidestep other discussions, like how broken housing or minimum wages are.
Nor is this a new thing, by a long shot; was an explicit tactic of the Soviet Union, and has been adopted by plenty of others, notably the US Right-wing.
> In some circles, you will be quartered for daring to express [view]
where [view] exists at any point on the political spectrum.
> that there exists differences between men and women which might not be socially constructed
It depends on the context for me. If you're stating that point to make an interesting and insightful comment, all well and good. If you're just using it to bash trans people, it's less valuable IMO.
I have no opinion whatsoever regarding transpeople outside of everyone should be able to do whatever they want with themselves but I'm amused that you could basically rephrase your sentence like that:
> If you're stating that point to [say something I agree with], all well and good. If you're just using it to [say something I disagree with], it's less valuable IMO
I think it's totally reasonable to argue that there's more value in interesting and informed debate than there is in attacking trans people (I accept that's not what you were doing in this case, of course).
I'd like to think society will be less racist, misogynist and such in the future. But there will be scrutiny of the specific actions taken, because frankly, a lot of "anti-racist" behavior has been upper-middle class white people doing easy, performative things to make themselves feel good and to promote themselves as an ally.
It hasn't even been 5 years, and already the 2020 "fight racism by renaming your master branch to main" movement feels like a tone-deaf embarrassment.
Whitelist/Blacklist. I find the word erasure issue very obnoxious.
One day we will realize all over again that hyper-focus on race only produces more division and more racism. But I'm lost as to whether or not those on the left doing it care. Maybe they want division and feel that minorities will come out on top and all white men will get their chance to "suffer". Not sure. I have been told as much in person by some who hold this philosophy.
Yep, I agree. In some cases (especially whitelist/blacklist), the newspeak names are actually better/more descriptive, and shorter (which I view as a win). Regardless of how you feel about the motivations behind it, I would hope that highly technical people can appreciate better clarity and brevity.
Did anyone ever make a claim that master —> main was going to have a significant, direct impact on the fight against racism? Obviously, it's a step, but it seemed like an entirely positive thing to me (shorter, more semantic) with essentially zero downside.
> Did anyone ever make a claim that master —> main was going to have a significant, direct impact on the fight against racism? Obviously, it's a step,
It's not obvious at all. The music industry has been using the term "master" for ages: master bus, master copy, mastering engineer. (It's worth noting this is the exact etymology of the git term, too, as opposed to master in the context of master and slave.) The Black community has overall had zero problem with this, and it hasn't stopped many Black musicians and artists from being successful. The music industry also had none of the "we have to rename the master bus" nonsense that came from the tech industry, despite, or more likely because, a significantly larger proportion of BIPOC and LGBT minorities being involved in music.
I don't care about the master vs main name in the abstract. Either branch name is a fine choice. It just completely doesn't matter and pretending that it has any positive impact or meaningful change on the racism and discrimination faced by Black people in America is insulting. It's purely driven by self-indulgent white people who don't want to make material changes to their own extremely comfortable lives while pretending they're fighting the good fight.
> Either branch name is a fine choice. It just completely doesn't matter and pretending that it has any positive impact or meaningful change on the racism and discrimination faced by Black people in America is insulting. It's purely driven by self-indulgent white people who don't want to make material changes to their own extremely comfortable lives while pretending they're fighting the good fight.
Exactly, and I agree with this completely as a Slavic person (from which the word slave is derived). I frankly consider this insulting as well as having a great grandparent used for forced labour in the Ukrainian Canadian interment camps during WWI, and a grandparent in the German forced labour camps during WWII.
If only there was no downside, but you can't change 15+ years of convention and not break something in the process. For example, I've had Homebrew upgrade fail because someone thought the "master" branch must not only be renamed but also permanently eradicated from a cask repo, Yocto had the same issue [1], etc.
> The nodeSelector and peerSelector for the route reflectors target the label `node-role.kubernetes.io/master`. In the 1.20 series, Kubernetes changed its terminology from “master” to “control-plane.” And in 1.24, they removed references to “master,” even from running clusters. This is the cause of our outage. Kubernetes node labels.
Yep, this has been a constant pain point for me nearly every day. Having dozens of repos I work in across multiple organizations, where half follow the old convention (master) and the other half follow new (main), when I want to switch branches I usually have to do it twice. First `git co main` and if that doesn't work, `git co master`. Vice versa doesn't work because older repos that have been converted have a master branch! It's usually way behind. There are also tons of scripts and CI/CD yaml everywhere that has to be modified for main vs. master.
Main is a better name IMHO (increased clarity and brevity) but it is far from "zero downside."
> I hope there isn't a time in the future when people see the current wave of anti-racism, anti-slavery, and anti-misogyny as just a silly fad we had in the early 21st century.
Maybe not, but there'll definitely be a time in the future when the current puritanical wave will be seen as a fad, an embarrassment in human history.
"You mean people actually self-censored in case they were punished for thoughtcrime?"
The problem is that nowadays very often the people pushing the "we just want to reduce obvious bad thing X" narrative are using it as a Trojan horse to smuggle in a plethora of other terrible ideas. We don't need to rewrite history or vandalize prior art to create a better future.
I think this is a bit too much of a strawman for an argument that's in line with what's actually discussed in the linked article. Especially when talking about a guy who directed Schindler's List.
> Spielberg was also asked about the controversial re-editing of Roald Dahl’s work which has included changing words like “fat” to “enormous” and “ugly and beastly” to just “beastly”.
> Initially he joked that “Nobody should ever attempt to take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka! Ever!” before adding “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage. I do not believe in censorship in that way.”
Roald Rahdl books were a big part of what I remember reading as a child. The words "fat" and "ugly" are absolutely grotesque, but also part of the palette he used to draw his worlds as he wanted people to see them. I think parents have the responsibility to have a proper conversation about the questions their children might have about the some of stuff those books bring up, or make the decision to not read them until the child is of a certain age. At least from my point of view, the central question would be that what is the proper age that a child is old enough to know about the existence of the words "fat" and "ugly".
'Fat' and 'ugly' are not grotesque words, they are unkind. If you want grotesque, look up 'hassan's rumpus room' from Naked Lunch. Should be around page 60 or so.
Euphemism treadmill is driven by people who believe in a fairly strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that the thoughts we have are bounded by the words we have. They think that the negative connotations of fatness are at least in part derived from the word "fat" itself and could therefore be at least partially erased by getting rid of that word and replacing it with another.
But even if we erased every single word for fatness from the minds of everybody in existence all in an instant, new words for fatness would be invented the very next instant when people around the world see fatness, can't find a word for it, and invent a new one. Words are tools for conveying understanding. Humans are tool-creating apes; when we need a tool, we make a tool. Remove a slur from people's vocabulary and people will invent a new one.
When I was young, my school had a program for retarded kids, the kids with profound mental disabilities. We also called each other retarded as a mild insult to impugn our friends' intelligence. The teachers and parents hated this, they banned the word retarded and renamed the class for the retarded kids to "Special Education". Anybody caught saying "retarded" would be scolded very severely and denied recess/etc. So what did we do? We started using "special", "special education" and "sped" as insults equivalent to retarded. You can't erase concepts by erasing words, least of all concepts that are so readily observable and self-evidently negative as the state of being mentally retarded or fat. Need a tool, make a tool.
Probably does. Although the words are definitely not equivalent. I'm not advocating any sort of age limit on Roald Dahl books, pretty much the opposite.
I also think the Dahl books shouldn't have been altered, but everything I've read about that suggests it was the publisher's decision, not government-mandated censorship. The issue here is more about authors' right and IP ownership.
Who said anything about the government? In the article, Spielberg laments his own decision to censor the guns in ET. It was his decision to alter his own movie, not government-imposed. The article isn't about government-imposed censorship specifically, it's Spielberg lamenting censorship generally.
inb4 "it's not real censorship unless the government does it"
I think the word censorship really has to relate to government action - if it's extended to an author reworking their own output, it really loses all sense of meaning.
Anyway, you're wrong and I think you know it because you said "government-mandated censorship." The first two words clarify the third. This wouldn't be necessary if the third truly implied the first two.
Have you ever heard of the Hays Code? It's quite infamous, you probably have; it was a system of self-imposed censorship from Hollywood to ban scandalous content from movies, such as people kissing or husbands and wives only having a single bed in their bedroom (oh the implications!) But the point is this censorship was self-imposed, there was no act of congress requiring it. The claim that true censorship must come from the government is simply wrong.
> if it's extended to an author reworking their own output, it really loses all sense of meaning.
It doesn't lose all meaning. It loses only the very narrow meaning you wish to impose (probably because it's an ugly word and you don't want to think yourself capable of censoring.)
The Hays Code and the Comic Code were both arguably an industry self-censoring "somewhat" (for whatever value of that you want) so as to side-step government legislation.
"I hope there isn't a time in the future when people see the current wave of anti-alcoholism as just a silly fad we had in the early 20th century." - someone in 1930
"I hope there isn't a time in the future when people see the current wave of anti-nude displays as just a silly fad we had in the early 17th century"
Proceeds to destroy hundreds of paintings by adding poorly drawn fig leaves and to censor masterpieces over tiny penises.
It is a fad; people will come to their senses and recognise the value of the original work; while accepting the fact that they were produced in a time where these behaviours were considered as acceptable but it's no longer the case.
I wonder if the enlightened future-people will consider the institutional exclusion of asian people from higher education on the basis that there are too many others of the same race in colleges, to be pro-racism or anti-racism.
White men applying for software and management jobs could make the same point. Positive discrimination almost always results in someone else facing negative discrimination because of the same attribute.
It can also lead to further problems. Is it still racist to point out the [race/gender/religion/etc.] [students/employees/etc.] on average aren't as good now they actually aren't due to [employment/selection] bias?
It’s not that those feelings are wrong, it’s when you decide to alter artistic work based on the current vogue. It’s when you cross the line into censorship.
Good half of people who complain about modern sensitivity are in it for inequality and for revenge.
You see that in a way they are perfectly fine with old sensitivity. As long as censorship and exclusion are done the way they have been done in past, they support it.
> see the current wave of anti-racism, anti-slavery, and anti-misogyny as just a silly fad
So... I certainly hope that being genuinely anti those things doesn't turn out to be a fad, those things are all bad things and should be opposed. Having said that I do hope that some of the ways people are choosing to be "anti" these things goes the way of the dodo because I believe they are ineffective and dumb.
As an example trying to get rid of the word "master" in tech... it's use in tech is in no way an endorsement of slavery. The suggestion it is racist to use this term is especially silly to me, because slavery has been practiced by all sorts of cultures for human history and because slavery is still a thing that is going on in the world (just look at that new stadium in the UAE).
Being anti slavery is fantastic. We can do that by boycotting companies that turn a blind eye to forced labour and by pressuring our governments to sanction countries that ignore it within their borders.
The same applies to being anti-racist or anti-misogynist or whatever. There are concrete actions that can be taken that will make a difference, but going back through old art and censoring certain words for fear that they get uttered as if this were Harry Potter and these words were Voldemort is just fucking silly.
I think the risk is more that the people will read Dahl or watch Spielberg and think that the cultural sensitivities from the 1960s-1980s we're exactly like those during the 2020s.
Like when all the books say we raised the chocolate ration..
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours?"
If there's anything to be sure of, it's that this is bound to happen. The core ideas will always have staying power, but the current implementations are already seen as a silly by large swaths of us who don't disagree with the core ideas. I suspect the future will judge social mores from this time period much more harshly than a silly fad though.
The example you provide doesn't match a more-reasonable scenario where people would want to alter a work. How about "Breakfast at Tiffany's" which may (or may not) be a good film -- would it be bad if there existed an altered copy of the movie you could watch that tastefully removed / altered (with AI perhaps) the extremely racist parts?
The idea I'm arguing for isn't to endorse irreversible erasure of the past, but addition of versions that are updated / edited.
The problem is that before long, the edited version becomes the only available version.
And once we start with these edits, say for blatant racism, do we also have to appease groups who are deeply offended by sexism/misogyny, profanity, blasphemy, nudity, drugs, gambling, alcohol, meat-eating, fossil fuels, and probably more?
Better off to leave the work intact, and when necessary just add a content warning up front, to remind people that a creative work was the product of a specific time period and in no way an endorsement of language/behavior that is seen as completely unacceptable today.
Many slopes do turn out to be fairly slippery, despite frequent claims that low-friction inclined surfaces are merely logical fallacies.
People complained about the very mild language policing of 'political correctness' way back in the 90s, and look where we are now, rewriting Roald Dahl to purge words like 'fat', and discussing whether we should actively edit the unpleasantness out of more of our cultural history, wondering whether a favourite book will even still tell the same story if I re-read it on Kindle in a few years time.
I don't really have issue with the roald dahl edits. They're books for children, not for adults to appreciate the art and historicity of the story telling. Kids books are usually about morals and entertainment, and they model their language and behavior after books to an extent that adults don't. So, edit away I say. But also make sure the originals are available somewhere(which they are, since they sold into the millions)
How kids talk to each other is way way worse now than when I grew up in my experience. Calling each other 'whores' or different combinations of 'fuck'.
Having a state-ish approved nomenclature that is way off their everyday one has to be phsycois inducing.
Then in the later 1800s the townsfolk decided the paintings and statues were scandalous because they had nudes, so they painted over the breasts and genitals, and covered over the statues with togas / cloths.
Luckily in modern times it was easy to remove the cloths, but unfortunately the paintings are ruined. The cover-job was done poorly and the paintings have an off-color paint on it that looks wrong. There have been talks to fix it but I don’t think anything has been done.
My point is that, the desire to censor prior art that disagrees with fad-interpretations of what is taboo and scandalous, will certainly be looked at in a few decades as a very weird and Victorian era. Definitely should not re-cut movies to be “safe” or whatever.