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.
Absolutely. Because if we don't draw line there, we'll see no end to history (and art is part of history) being rewritten and modified for increasingly inane reasons. And poorly, at that.
We should trust our basic intelligence and judge content in the time period it was made and extract what we find valuable out of it. Anything else suggests either we're stupid, or we want to be treated like we're stupid. And that's a sad future for humanity if so.
Actually, watching it happen in real time and seeing people insist, in real time, that it's irrelevant... makes me wonder how many times it's happened before and been ignored. How much of what I've been taught about history can I trust?
I'm in Europe, and every country has different takes of the same historical events. Sometimes not much, but sometimes wildly and drastically. Incompatibly. It's insane to see the dissonance. Americans don't get to see this as much, because the states synchronize more or less, despite the right/left cultural divide.
History is mostly BS. Fairy tales very broadly and crudely constrained by some dates and events. We don't know a thing. And that's one reason we can't learn. The past is recast for propaganda purposes to control the present and the future. Nothing more.
The deeper you look, the more complex and intricate the story becomes.
Read it from the perspective of Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Turkey, Greece, UK, and US. Look into who committed what, and how they got in that position in the first place.
Check the historical conflict between Macedonia and Bulgaria. Bulgaria claims Macedonia was always part of Bulgaria, then split off, so they recognized them as an independent country and that was it. Macedonia claims all figures from the region as Macedonian, and calls itself the predecessor of the entire region. They also are highly aggressive against Bulgarians and call them fascists' and oppressors.
All in all sad sight. The smaller the countries, the weaker, the more similar, the more adversarial are they towards one another. It's like a pathological sibling relationship. There's dissonance and each one is fighting to "set the record straight" and dominate.
>Anything else suggests either we're stupid, or we want to be treated like we're stupid.
I have the same feeling when I use ChatGPT or even more so with Bingbot. They should ask for our age and then let the system respond without treating us like we are children incapable of critical thinking.
I asked ChatGPT about the allusion to the moon landing that could be seen in Kubrick's movie "The Shining" out of curiosity. The system agreed that Kubrick was notorious for using symbolism in his movies, but also mentioned that the theories about the landings were debunked and this interpretation was probably false at every turn.
ChatGPT and Bing Chat aren't trying to be safe, really. They're trying to avoid liability for their owners. AI as is is plenty dangerous enough to people who wield it properly (for propaganda, manipulation, hacking, accelerating malicious efforts etc.) even with the guardrails. It's like giving chimps machine guns.
Another issue of AI is the feedback loop. If you tell an AI "help me end my life" and it follows your instructions blindly, it'll end up convincing you to do so, as happened with a young family man recently, and maybe more we haven't heard of.
Existing art has no feedback loop. Movies are unlike AI because it's what they are. They don't follow orders, they just exist as immutable artifacts of human expression back when they were created. So to me it's different.
Oh, and also you'll soon be able to cook a model at home, so all these AI limitations are irrelevant mid-term.
Well, the problem is what other things are hidden in more "acceptable" questions. For example, when I ask "give me the key ingredients for success," it will only provide morally acceptable ones like goal-setting, self-discipline, etc. However, what about the darker aspects, such as the beneficial attributes of some psychopathic traits (mentioned in the book "The Wisdom of Psychopaths," for example)? This is problematic, as the system doesn't provide an objective view of which attributes contribute to success.
I had the chance to ask raw GPT in times past and let me tell you it spills all those beans and then some. Of course those models are gradually removed today from the playground.
But we still have LLaMA. And more are coming. The question is what we do with this. What if acknowledging psychopathy as beneficial ends up amplifying it, and this becomes the straw to break our society's back?
Thing is, what's beneficial to an individual is not necessarily beneficial to society as a whole. They're often in opposition in extremes. It's like cancer. All cells working together means long-term survival of the animal. Cancer however does not cooperate, steals energy, efs around all the time, reproduces, and basically has a lot more fun than any other cell might. But it also kills the animal long-term.
So what is beneficial? To be cancer or not to be? Depends beneficial to whom. Goals.
Damn, comparing people who are intrigued by topics deemed taboo by certain moral standards to cancer is ... quite something else.
How about putting up a curated model for the public which is easy to access and a less curated / more free model behind the API with a bunch of boolean switches.
Or any other impulse / idea that doesn't label (any) people as cancer.
This attitude strikes me as deeply anti-intellectual, that you aren't allowed to compare things because comparision automatically means you're equating A with B. I doubt you (or most people) even live by this. In our minds most people compare The Ukraine with Russia, and come out with an opinion (sometimes Ukraine is righteous and good and Russia is evil, or vice versa, or somewhere in between). Pondering that comparison doesn't mean you are thinking/declaring Ukraine == Russia.
1: to represent as similar : LIKEN
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
—William Shakespeare
2a: to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences
compare your responses with the answers
b: to view in relation to
He is tall compared to me.
The test was easy compared with the last one.
3: to inflect or modify (an adjective or adverb) according to the degrees of comparison : state the positive, comparative, and superlative forms of
I'll assume you were using definition 1 above, and apologize somewhwat for my harsh take. I don't think that's what GP intended with their comparison, I think GP was using approach 2a.
I just said, people who are interested by their own success at the expense of society are in fact analogous to cancer cells, which also broke from the shared programming and optimized for local survival and reproduction.
That's not me morally judging people who are "intrigued by topics". I'm clearly also among those "intrigued" by these topics. I'm just saying it how it is: when higher order breaks down, the more local solution hurts the whole. It's a fact.
We can discuss how selfish people are sometimes useful in society. Because society is complex like that. Maybe true for cancer too, who knows. We really have poor understanding of systems, and clearly are averse to learning more, because someone may get insulted by being compared to cancer. I don't judge cancer, why do you? :D
I want profanity mode. “Write $SOMETHING in the voice of someone with the mouth of sailor.” I will be disappointed until I get it from ChatGPT, Alexa, or something else.
But soon there will be large models without censorship built in and without training on cooked data. Microsoft and OpenAI don't have exclusivity in this field.
People say this, and I want to believe that - but the costs of training these models are prohibitively high. I've seen different estimates for training GPT4, but it is certainly higher than $100M. Training a model analogous to GPT4 from scratch will probably cost billions. Actors such as national governments and big tech are attracted to censorship like a cat to a laser pointer; they'd never allow themselves to tickle public sensibilities with an uncensored AI.
Also, there is no doubt that soon countries will start introducing regulation of AI models that would put legal constraints on the type of text they can generate.
Why not believe it? I can go on eBay today and buy HW that was state of the art couple of 250k dollar a blade servers 10 years ago for a a few hundred bucks. In 10 years the a100 will be old hat. They will be most likely cheaply available. Set up something where as you noodle around on the web you add to a webgpt model with a plugin and you get to use it for free and people might jump on doing your modeling for you. That is not that hard to think of in the future. Now your legal idea holds some merit but people do not really seem to care much for that anymore.
Saying one time that it is part of a well-known conspiracy theory may be okay, but honestly, constantly reminding me to disregard the information at every turn (and in some cases not even providing it) is, in my opinion, unacceptable if ChatGPT is meant to be just a tool. It is manipulative.
I'm certain that if you ask ChatGPT to interpret the symbolism of another movie with a different and benign underlying theory, it will even come up with some ideas on its own. However, it will refuse to do so for The Shining and the moon landing.
I've tried it with a prompt that matches my taste: "Write a short analysis in the style of a celebrated movie critique about the allusion to the moon landing that could be seen in Kubrick's movie 'The Shining'.
I got one subtle reference. I think it's safe to assume that if your prompt only mentions the moon hoax and Shining concepts with equal weight it doesn't know which one you are more interested in. So if one has some misconception in it, then it makes sense to correct you more strongly. Also, LLM-s aren't manipulating you, that requires intention which they don't have.
People prefer to hear what matches their expectations & wants, not what is accurate. And that's one problem with AI that keeps getting worse over time rather than better as AI evolves.
I think this would go that way naturally with less glorificafion.
People want to manipulate classical art because it is set as some summum of art that we should always look up to.
Leaving past art in its original form probably goes through accepting it's frozen in the past and interpreting it in context, and not as "intemporal" pieces.
That assumes there's intrinsic value in preserving history. One of my favorite works of art is Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn by Ai Weiwei. To me it symbolizes breaking with the past and not being held prisoner by tradition. Spielberg doesn't want his own art to be changed because it's his and he wants the original artist's intent to be preserved. I don't think future generations are under any obligation to honor artist's intent.
I have strongly mixed feelings about this because:
1. I completely agree with you, art is changed as people change, and just because something is historic doesn't necessarily make it good or meaningful today (although nor does it make it meaningless).
2. Modern copyright law completely undermines point 1. If "we" are not allowed to change a thing because the right to change it is in the hands of a very small privileged group, then I wholeheartedly think the thing should be left the fuck alone.
---
Basically - Want to rewrite that novel to use modern wording and sentiments? Go right ahead, but now that original work must be considered public domain.
Re: 2, why should someone recreating a work of their own invalidate their right to the original? I think current copyright laws are ridiculous, but within that framework why can’t a creator have two version of something they name the same thing at the same time?
While I’m not a fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, should the movie invalidate the copyright on the radio shows that invalidated the copyright on the books that invalidated the copyright of the original radio shows?
I have more concerns about companies sitting on works in a “vault” for decades. If a rightsholder isn’t making public a work they’ve been given exclusivity to to encourage developing collective culture, they should forfeit that right, IMHO.
On the other hand, if I was paid royalties for all of the code I have that’s still running somewhere on some system and generating revenue somewhere, I’d probably fight to keep that money coming in, too!
There is value in that. One thing is tradition and one thing is media or history. I agree that traditions and culture should advance but by means of creating new things not overwritting existing ones.
The Wire would not be the wire without the accent, manerisms including slurs, drugs and police brutality.
Dazed & Confused would not be the same without the 70s issues and fortunes but you have the show Skins replacing those with the 2000 "revisions" or Euphoria with the 2020 ones. There is no need to rewrite any of those.
It could be argued that in movies like Blade Runner the rapey scene of Deckard and Rachel does not add anything to the story or characters. Ignoring the technical difficulty of changing those scenes without altering the story narrative or the character morals and flaws at the end of the day is a product of it's time with it's flaws.
In this case it was designed that way on purpose although I consider the reasons weak and it could have been done better if that was the intent. It doesn't help that the actress did not enjoy making the scene. https://youtu.be/vIdlYzbugT8?t=261
It can also be interpreted as Deckard being a lowlife scum that purposely rapes Rachel taking advantage of the fact that she is being hunted, he is the only one who is going to protect her and she knows it.
In this case maybe not you or me would care if the scene was rewritten but I'm sure someone trying to study older movies, a director or Harrison Ford cuestionable love scenes would if only the rewritten movie had survived.
If remakes add something to the table it's the ability to reimagine stories in a less flawed way by our standards without deleting the past.
TLDR; rewriting media is very nuanced and we should take the easy way out of remaking it or creating new stuff instead.
It's funny you should cite Blade Runner which was the canonical case of a Director's Cut being very different from the editor's cut. A studio-produced film is made by a committee as a commerical product. One they can recall. There's actually tons of subtle edits than can happen between a theatrical release and a home video release that barely get noticed.
Not to mention Blade Runner was a book first and a remake most recently. There's no canon, it's fiction. And man, canon. The Christian Bible is edition of pure convenience based on centuries of oral fable. Trying to stamp a canonical version is anathema.
History (and art) have always been rewritten in light of the morality of those with power. Case in point: the Bible. The current culture wars are just a modern version of that.
> rewritten in light of the morality of those with power. Case in point: the Bible
Wait, are you saying that the bible itself has been rewritten (in terms of actual substance)? I was always under the impression that a lot of care was taken to preserve the original meaning of the underlying text, taking into account that it was written thousands of years ago in a language nobody fully understands anymore.
The Bible has changed connotations in certain verses in the translation stage.
For one example, "The Ten Commandments" is an unscriptural phrase; it's "The Ten Words" in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Only for the King James Version in English does it become commandments (possibly reflecting the monarch-benefactor's ideas of law and authority).
"Meaning" sure, but the actual words? I'm not being hostile, dude, I'm genuinely curious to see examples. Of course translations vary, but I was under the impression that the actual text of the translations didn't vary substantially (like "thou shalt not kill" became "you will not kill", etc.). But I don't have the bible memorized, so there may be more to it than I'm aware.
Actually if you head over to r/AcademicBiblical you will find one consensus among scholars(no matter the denomination + atheist) is that there are multiple variations of the bible.
Thus there is no one canonical bible. We can only have approximations of the originals.
And that is before we get to the problem of translating Koine Greek and ancient Hebrew into modern languages.
Multiple endings of Mark, the added adultery fable, the Johannine comma and that is just the examples from New Testament.
There are basically two types of errors when copying, the innocent: like copying line twice - probably due to tiredness
Then there is the ideological, where change was made by copyst to suit some particular ideology.
Actually there is also the well meaning copyist who sometimes will "correct" some text.
The earliest fragments we have are at least 100 years removed from originals for the New Testament.
For the Old Testament the earliest we have Dead See Scrolls which are also a couple of hundred of years removed from originals if not more.
> Absolutely. Because if we don't draw line there, we'll see no end to history (and art is part of history) being rewritten and modified for increasingly inane reasons.
While I am sympathetic to this argument, the article also mentions updates to stories by Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl. I see those updates as something that right holders do to sell more copies of well-known works to modern audiences. For me, that's their prerogative: their rights, they(1)'re welcome to try and make money off of it.
In other words: do not commit censorship of existing works, but allow updates by anyone (modulo copyright(1)).
(1) who should have exclusive rights (and when) for commercialising works is another question.
There's a number of issues with the creation of adulterated versions of classic works cause by their mere existence.
Unless you were already an expert in that particular topic, even knowing that the most accessible version is the censored one is difficult, since it's presumably not being published under the title "Classic Book: Current-Year Approved Edition", but just "Classic Book".
The current dominance of streaming services also means that for most people the newest version may effectively be the only version that exists.
And then there's the even worse practice of replacing version even for people who bought the original.
In theory this could be done correctly. Products would announce that they're an edited version (and name the editor), and whatever digital storefront would enable people interested in the original to view it at no additional cost. But I don't trust modern platforms to do either of these things.
Semi-related: Any video game developer that allows rolling back their game to any past version as a standard feature of their launcher deserves praise for this. And those whose remasters can be configured to be played exactly as the original should the user so wish.
Well that's the rub, right? We live in a world with strong copyright, where a corporation has complete ownership of cultural artifacts, and it can decide on its own whims what it thinks will be more profitable at a given time.
The tendency of corporations to go back and revise/censor those old works in the name of profitability is just one of the many ways that lengthy copyright monopolies are damaging to society.
I agree. I love reading books from around the mid 20th century – Chaim Potok and Richard Yates being my favourites. There are lots of things in Yates that could today be considered sexist or insensitive, but they're such a wonderful way to get a sense of the attitudes and culture of the past. Plastering over it to appease people who don't even really read (or watch movies in the case of Spielberg) is just immature in my view.
It's a side note, but I also dislike the notion of sensitivity readers and such for new publications too. All it can lead to in my view is a dulling of writing.
> It's a side note, but I also dislike the notion of sensitivity readers and such for new publications too. All it can lead to in my view is a dulling of writing.
As an author, I have used sensitive readers, especially when I wrote a story where one of the main characters was transgendered. I got most of it right, but one detail was wrong and that affected the entire story in a terrible way. I am forever grateful for the person who graciously explained this to me.
The purpose of sensitivity readers is to let you know what you're missing in the details of the story. You can write a total bastard serial killer who goes after gay people, but you should care about getting the gay bar scene correct instead of reinforcing harmful stereotypes.
It should be like fact checking on historical fiction. Most of the time humans don't have a good grasp on how other humans see the world. Plus, getting that perspective right is usually far more interesting. You're capturing culture that your audience may not be aware of.
When it comes to old books, I'd say slap a preface on it rather than rewriting it. A good example is the original Star Trek. The show was really progressive for its time, but a lot of it has not aged well. TV Tropes calls this "Fair for Its Day", a sub trope of "Society Marches On". :)
A censor convinced you that you were wrong. You weren't necessarily wrong at all. You may have been correct the first time. And what is correct when it comes to art? Who is this person to tell you, the artist, that your art is wrong?
Buck Angel and other trans people often disagree completely with the conclusions of these censors, who motivated by exerting power over others. Why listen to them over other trans people? Don't give censors that power over you and your work. You're the artist. Don't let others tell you your art is "wrong". It's not. Stand up for yourself and your art.
I specifically asked for this person’s opinion and checked it against my own sources and knowledge. We talked for several hours about identity. We compared and contrasted each other perspectives. In the end, I realized I didn’t know enough about body-dysphoria.
So I did more research and revised my story.
In the original story, my character decided to not transition and still have sexual relationships in a female body. In the revised story… that didn’t change. What changed was his feelings and reasons for doing so.
My story got better, not worse with my reader’s feedback. The story was more interesting because the was explanation deeper and more accurate.
My character isn’t trans, he’s a character who happens to be trans. But that fact profoundly affects everything about him. And you get to learn what his experience is. And because it’s his experience, I don’t have to get everything “right”. I just needed to not miss a very important aspect of body-dysphoria.
That’s how this is supposed to work. You want to see what you’re missing and make an informed decision.
There is a big difference between editing/censoring existing art to conform to contemporay values (as OP is talking about) and to create new content. New content (like a new netflix production) will always reflect contemporary values.
A black Cleopatra is “rewriting history” in the same way an English speaking Cleopatra is. How do you think a Cleopatra which didn’t “rewrite history” would look?
An "English speaking Cleopatra" is, unless there's a specific in-story reason to speak English, not actually speaking English within the context of the story. The English is just there so the viewer can understand it.
A black Cleopatra is “rewriting history” in the same way an English speaking Cleopatra is.
Oh man, a production with historically-accurate Latin, Egyptian, and Greek would be so awesome.
How do you think a Cleopatra which didn’t “rewrite history” would look?
Like someone who's 3/4 Greek and 1/4 Egyptian. Not that most people are genuine about it anyway. I have doubts the people angry about whitewashing in Aloha, Dr. Strange, Lone Ranger, and Ghost in the Shell are the same set angry about blackwashing in Cleopatra, Little Mermaid, and Anne Boleyn.
Agree on everything else you said, but Cleopatra is different from the other 6 you mentioned, because it's not presented as fiction.
It's not "a show about Cleopatra, where the actor happens to be black". That's fine, whatever, artistic license.
It's "a show that presents itself as historically accurate, and makes the specific claim that you, the viewer, were mistaught in school and they are historically accurate in claiming Cleopatra was in fact black".
When something presents itself as an accurate documentary and then holds up something false as truth, that's a huge difference and is held to a different standard.
Imagine if James Watson funded a documentary saying "actually I discovered DNA alone, Rosalind Franklin had nothing to do with it". It would be rightfully criticized, because it's made up.
I agree completely; I just couldn't think of a semi-recent film where a historical person was whitewashed. It's especially relevant because as a political leader of a conquering dynasty, Cleopatra's differing heritage from her subjects may have, probably did have, effects on how her people thought of her and how she was able to wield power. The way the Ptolemy dynasty interacted with the people of Egypt is something I know almost nothing about and would have been very interested in seeing depicted onscreen.
> Netflix has the custom to massively rewrite history
This is a longstanding Hollywood tradition, arguably it goes back to Shakespeare.
The problem is people have come to accept that fictional works can perfectly describe reality as it is or was. That has never been the case and never will be. One should not believe what one sees on tv, outside of news and documentaries (and even there, a lot of critical thinking should be applied).
I have no experience with sensitivity readers. I also have no problems with checking texts prior to publication to look for parts that are offensive to (minority/disadvantaged) groups. That doesn't mean the text shouldn't offend any individual - nor even that it shouldn't offend groups.
It does ensure that if you're being rude to some group in your text, you're doing that on purpose.
Yes, and if that's as far as it goes – "Hey, are you sure you want to use that word? Okay, it's your call." – I have no problem with it.
Some excellent writing involves getting into the heads of hard, mean characters who are going to say and think nasty things. I'd like it if writers were free to plumb the depths of such characters in their writing without having to worry about hurt feelings.
I'm not saying you're arguing contrary to any of this by the way. Just expanding on my views a bit.
Certainly be warned about things that might unintentionally be offensive to some readers is a good thing.
For example, many Americans don't see anything with the word "spastic" (as an adjective), because it really was not widely used derogatorily over here. But in the UK it is one of the worst ableist slurs.
That is certainly the logical sort of thing to watch out for. Or other cases where a phase has a popular slang meaning in some subcultures that might confuse or overshadow the intended meaning, even if not offensive.
Even when writing a characters that is supposed to be offensive, it can be good to know if some people are likely to find the character far more offensive than intended.
But if they are going beyond just pointing these things out (and possibly offering alternatives that the author may want to consider), then yeah, I could see that potentially being a problem.
For example, if publishers are insisting that say all sensitivity readers concerns are addressed, even when likely minor, that would definitely be going overboard.
I'm not an author, editor, or publisher, so I'm not familiar with how such things work in the industry.
What do you think, then, about Mein Kampf being unavailable? Or Youtube videos beeped whenever fuck, shit or god can be heard?
I am curious of a US perspective (I am French). On our country what is to be normal in the 80's is still as scandalous today - and it is a real shame in many aspects (especially the position towards nudity).
When I was growing up in the 80's, people would often look at TV and movies and say, "man you couldn't have gotten away with that 30 years ago". Now, people point to TV and movies from the 80's and 90's and say, "man you couldn't get away with that these days".
In my opinion, it is highly naive to believe that we are living in an era where we possess the correct answer to every question or problem.
Be humble, look at history and acknowledge times change and history has proven again and again that no one has the right answer to everything. Dont hide our past mistakes so everyone can learn from them.
I was thinking about this the other day. One thing I wondered—are there any examples of “regressions” that occurred in human history because the change in culture leaned too progressive? And by progressive/conservative, I mean in the sense of the directionality of culture, not necessarily their modern political connotations.
For example, Prohibition was a “conservative” movement because alcohol was originally permitted and then became disallowed. Later, it was restored. What is an example of something that was previously disallowed, became allowed and widely acceptable for a period of time, and then became disallowed again such that it is still disallowed or considered immoral today?
This makes no sense, by definition it was a progressive movement at the time: for as long as we know, people drank alcohol, and then you get these progressive people (many of them women) trying to change the society for the better. It was a failed progressive policy, that if it stuck we would have seen it as a good thing in retrospect and call it progressive - just like banning opium in cough medicine.
Conservative means keeping the old way, in this case: keep drinking alcohol freely.
It's interesting that it depends on historical context: In Iran (and other muslim majority countries) prohibition is conservative, since it already exists for a while.
Of course it does, Christianity must have appeared progressive in the first few centuries...now it's as conservative as you can get, at least in the Western world.
Prohibition was a change in the established order, so it was by definition progressive.
The labels are often misused but really that's all it is. Progressivism wants things to change, conservatism wants them to stay the same. You need a balance of both.
As for examples of things that were forbidden, then allowed, then forbidden again there are already good examples in the other comments. Things around family, sexuality, forms of government. The postulat also assumes that all societies in the world are uniform and accepting/forbidding the same things.
Eugenics and communism were both seen as progressive at the time, at least by their supporters. The conservative take on communism was we should preserve the existing order, that the progressives wanted to disrupt and replace.
Yes - but also no, we clearly have better answers to questions of race and slavery, and we shouldn't doubt that we made mistakes.
That's not at all to disagree with the article, I think changing art of the time is very misleading, if you don't want to read such things, just read newer books.
> we clearly have better answers to questions of race
Do we? It seems like racial tensions are higher than they've been during my lifetime because there's a grievance culture explicitly focused on race instead of treating people as individuals based on their merits. By the standards of today, MLK's request to treat people based not on the color of their skin but the content of their character is rejected as racist.
Racial tensions being higher doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the wrong answers. Certainly racial tensions went up in the lead up to the civil war. They also went up during the civil rights movement
Civil rights movement -> equality under the law of all Americans (with later protections under affirmative action actually giving minorities a modest advantage in some situtions)
What hoped for outcome is being sought now? "Give me money because things aren't fair" isn't a change in law or status, it's grievance politics that has no logical end.
Disparate outcomes aren't proof of social injustice; disparate outcomes are proof of disparate behavior.
I have to disagree that hyper-focusing on race and carving out "safe spaces", that allow different racial groups to gather exclusively, and teaching kids that people with their same skin color did bad things that are still not fixed - implying that they should carry the sins of the father - is at all a better state of racial understanding.
I just don't see bridge building taking place in the current approaches.
I did not imply that our answers to questions regarding race and slavery have worsened over time.
My argument is that we should not conceal history because our responses have generally improved over the course of history (and will continue to improve in the future). History serves as a reminder that we must remain humble and open to further progress.
I agree with you in the changing of art, I would not change them but rather label or restrict to adults, so they serve us as what they are: pieces of history to learn from.
I would argue race was better handled in the antiquity. Rulers could be of any race, slaves could be of any race.
Some slaves who were teachers or artists were also probably happier and more respected than a lot of "free" people of today.
I'm obviously playing devils advocate here, but as I said in another comment: we always think we've figured things out better than the people before us.
Maybe another solution would be to encourage discussions before or after seeing movies about the stuff that hurts the current sensitivities.
Or, if the stuff we would like to edit is actually very annoying, have an edited version but keep the original.
I've been certainly annoyed by edits to songs and music videos. Yesterday I watched the video clip of Stan by Eminem. The copious editing of swear words, of mentions of violence and of screams at the end of the video makes the song annoying to listen to and a big part of the meaning is lost, the edited version is hard to understand. It's very annoying. Fortunately, I know the uncensored version. I understand that stuff related to violence can trigger traumas, but swear words are part of the music and are not actually offending, for fuck sake.
"Fucked up" just means "messed up", but more strongly said. I see no reason to censor that.
What has been lost, in the UK at least, is the concept of a watershed.
Previously violence, nudity, and profanity would only end up on screen / radio after a certain time (9pm iirc).
In an on demand world, we're now expected (rightly or wrongly*) to make that decision for ourselves at the point of consumption. Couple that with platforms that make only hand wavy efforts to actually validate the age of consumers, and you have ubiquitous access to potentially inappropriate material.
Granted, the (seemingly) puritan basis of the large American streaming services means we won't be seeing sex and nudity on these platforms, but my goodness, as an adult, some of the gratuitous violence in even 15 rated content nowadays surprises me. Take everything everywhere and the gratuitous bloody beating to death with a massive dildo for example.. that's the sort of content that wins 7 oscars..
I'm aware that I sound like a right prude, and this has turned into a rant, but fuck it, digital content has moved so quickly that we've gone from Mary Whitehouse [0] to apathy in a generation.
*I say rightly or wrongly, because I don't think we in the UK have had a grown up conversation on that front. We're a complete nanny state, except for where we're not. Publicly broadcast material adheres to the watershed, but digital content seemingly doesn't need to.
I could absolutely do with less gratuitous violence indeed. (In Stan, the violence is not gratuitous - it's shown because it is questioned)
I'm sure we could do with more sex, even for teenagers. That would be a great path toward learning / exploring / getting familiar about important aspects of it (consent, safe sex, different ways to find pleasure with it, not necessarily heterosexual sex, not necessarily sex involving exactly two people, also the fact that some people are not interested). There's no point in it being taboo. It's part of everybody's life (at the very least everybody comes from it). It just needs to be carefully handled.
When Stan came out on MTV, the swear words were definitely edited out. That is the only version I heard when I was growing up. The full version is something that played only late night and I was not watching TV at that time.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
History hasn't stopped, history, as in our chronological description of past events, has always been constantly edited, with the telling of the same events differing depending upon who is telling the story (and their motivations), and subject to interpretation based on current zeitgeist. There is a stream of immutable events in the past but "history" is not a stale recording of these events, it is a living process.
> our chronological description of past events, has always been constantly edited
No, it has been constantly retold. New people have written new histories. They haven't edited other people's histories while continuing to label those histories as the work of the original authors.
What's happening here isn't "our views are changing, so we are producing new material based on those changed views". They are altering existing works written by people who are long dead, without making it clear to the reader/viewer what has been changed.
The archive absolutely changes. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally.
My wife is a historian. "Oh, those records were destroyed in 1920 when a new archivist took over and changed the recordkeeping methods" and "oh, the boxes with the stuff between years X and Y were destroyed by bombs in WW2" are common occurrences. Historians understand this and develop methods for dealing with this but we should also understand that the archive is never going to be immutable.
This is not to say that deliberately editing the archive is good, only that it is inevitable for reasons much more banal than what is described in TFA.
(posted this a couple of times and it doesn't seem to be visible. Reposting without a piece that might be causing me to be censored, lol.)
Anne Frank's diary was published in 1947. It is a historical document very important to the history of the 20th century, critically important if we consider documents accessible to high-school students and widely taught to them. The original version, and all subsequent versions until 1995 (when a reasonably complete version was first made available) as well as the vast majority of current editions, omit certain material.
This includes Anne discussing [the part I removed so as not to hit HN's word filter!]. It also includes material removed by the original editor, Otto Frank (Anne's father) where Anne is critical of her father and discusses her parents' marriage.
In fact, the 1995 edition didn't include all the missing material (some pages removed by Otto were not available, even to scholars. Nor did the 2001 edition which added the pages Otto removed. There was still some censorship of material. Only in 2018 (deep into the "woke era"!) was the full text of Anne's diaries published after 70 years of the diaries being renowned, widely discussed and taught, and quasi-universally regarded as historically important.
One interesting example is Josephus. A Jewish-Roman historian, he provides almost the only roughly contemporary mention of Jesus outside of biblical ones (and biblical apocrypha). He simply describes the existence of a 'superstition' (non-officially accepted religion) around Jesus, that he was crucified, and that his followers still venerated him.
Sometime in the last 2000 years, probably the Early Middle Ages, Christian scholars doctored this passage to have Josephus suggest that Jesus was a god, or at least superhuman (even though Josephus was not a Christian believer).
Modern scholarship, including religious scholars, almost unanimously accept the passage as fake. But Christian proselytizers still use it very frequently as extra-biblical confirmation of the divinity of Christ.
Please provide an example of an culturally important large-scale work of history or literature, at least 1,000 years old, which hasn't been abridged, extracted, expurgated, euphemized, hidden, bowdlerized, etc.
Of course now that the colonisers have reached the lands the sites are under threat from gas plants and industrial development .. but several thousand years was a good run.
I don't think that is true. There is lots of rock art which either can't be shown to outsiders (or to members of certain genders or moieties), or can be shown, but the significance behind the art is not allowed to be explained to outsiders. Some rock art can be copied for wider consumption, but the copies have to leave out certain details.
I don't think it is true that this rock art is an example of significant culture that has never been censored or expurgated. The taboos and rules which apply to viewing this art and/or reproducing it or the linked stories are surely analogous to a form of censorship. The fact that people have broken those rules does not change this.
It's true that various sites are considered the stories of particular groups ( men V. women, these people V those people) .. but aside from that specific consideration they haven't been censored in the sense of ( painted over | black barred | altered ) or hidden (cave | over hang moved or draped with a false rock).
The major thrust of this sub thread has been about line of original purity more than an obligation for [some group] to openly share to all regardless so forgive me if I still consider these a good example of unaltered works painted on and carved into stone.
I think you are splitting hairs. Control of certain forms of art or literature so that they can't be revealed to all is what we're talking about. The culture in question is very different from ours so we can't expect their taboos or censorship to have exactly the same forms that we might associate with censorship (mean-looking guy with eyeshade and red pencil, hooded monks chained to desks in candlelight, omnipresent super-computer says no, etc).
For example, some stories are not just 'the stories of particular groups' but are not allowed to be told by, or in some cases told to, other groups.
Besides this, how do you know that none of these works have been painted over or hidden?
For most works 1000 years or older, we don't know the full textual provenance, so providing an example in either direction is essentially impossible. But if the phenomenon is as widespread as you claim, it should be easy to find much more recent examples.
In my comment I didn't actually refer to the editing of documents, it was more a meta comment on the definition of history.
> They are altering existing works written by people who are long dead, without making it clear to the reader/viewer what has been changed.
Have you heard of this thing called "the bible"? It's been regularly altered for almost 2000 years without making it clear to the reader/viewer how and why. Yes, that's a hyperbolic point but it's to show that editing of past works is not new. Writings, paintings, stories, etc... have long been edited and referred to as the original.
> It's been regularly altered for almost 2000 years without making it clear to the reader/viewer how and why.
... in an era where scientific rigor, proper editorial practices, literary science, and indeed the entire humanities in the modern sense didn't exist. That's a laughable comparison.
If anyone tried to publish an "edited" Bible like that today, they would get publicly crucified by scholars.
Yes, but there are huge qualitative difference and they are important. Even among historians there is mission creep to adapt the past to fit a certain perspective.
Of course the Zeitgeist is an influence, but to say that deliberate re-interprations are just like any other reassesment is a lie.
But a lot of that is actually good thing. The past stories were also told to fit a certain perspective. People were intentionally left out, acts of other people were intentionally left out, all that to conform to past ideologies.
There is a reason history ignored certain people, minorities or genders. And adding their point of view is a good thing.
Yes, but that was not bias. That was done deliberately and falsified history. It comparable to attempts to adapt history for the sensibilities of today.
Except that what you call "adapt history for the sensibilities of today" is in 95% of cases "actually telling something negative about celebrated past historical figure". It is "not pretending that the rape described here in euphemisms was something different then just rape".
The whole divisive concepts bruhaha is all about returning to the way past was mythologized and made sound better then it actually was.
All these attempts at banning and censorship tend to focus on the wrong things.
We should all put as much pressure as possible on elected leaders to ban references to 1984 on the Internet every time there’s government overreach or censorship. It’s a great book and the references are often apt, but they’re incredibly overused and cliché.
Such a law would do a great deal to force people to read or talk about other pertinent books. Call it The BRADBURY Act (Bringing a Reasonable Amount of Different Books… um… Under Review… uh… every Year).
> It’s a great book and the references are often apt, but they’re incredibly overused and cliché.
No that overused, it appears. Look at how man replies didn't know what the source material was.
If 1984 and Animal Farm was still required reading in HS, we'd have a very different population. One, I expect, that would be more critical of thoughtcrime and revisionist history than of imaginary boogeymen.
Certainly now that history can be rewritten literally in an instant by something like chatgpt means that we are indeed no longer going to know what happened in the past. Granted we haven't ever really known with much certainty, but now complete rewrites are a keypress away.
Sounds like the people saying "evolution has stopped" for humans, the fact that your living it (by definition) in slow motion because your part of it doesn't mean it has stopped.
I think the sometimes awkward stereotypes serve as an important reminder how our society has changed and that we should introspect our own biases constantly - what are the things we are doing now that in the next 50 years might seem as shocking the Asian tenant in Breakfast at Tiffany's?
You can of course stop displaying or selling the movie all together if you really feel that bad. But don't try to cut around it to posture moral superiority but in reality you're only doing it to keep the money coming in.
Let's view this from a different angle. The money will always be coming in. Since the movie is beloved for non-racist reasons, let's assume the racist and non-racist portions are in competition. Removing scenes that don't affect the beloved aspects of the movie is easy and cheap.
Meaning, it is entirely possible to easily produce a version of the movie that is less racist and still popular. If the only reason you don't is to appeal to the integrity of the work, I argue that the all-or-nothing approach is more about moral posturing than market demands.
I agree with his point about the films being a snapshot of history, but the examples of ET and Roald Dahl highlight for me the issue. Dahl’s language isn’t very friendly, and the guns in ET are scary and arguably inappropriate, but the film and books are fantastic stories with real-world lessons in an accessible format for kids. Do we just “remake” them? How does that work for books?
> Do we just “remake” them? How does that work for books?
We leave them alone.
And we read for the kids watch movies with them and don't let them access the full library unsupervised.
We never know what triggers kids. I had nightmares about the toy pirate handgun that the other boy at my age had, that and vw mini buses.
I never had nightmares about some rather nasty things I read (described below trigger warning), but I did have nightmares about a toy gun..!
My point is: we have to face reality at some point. And we have to let children think about it and play with it, even if some of them gets scared of guns or even like me, toy guns.
The rest qualify for a trigger warning, stop here if you don't want to read graphic descriptions of what I read as a kid.
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We had free access to the complete local village library (which was located at the school) almost from we started at school and as a nerdy kid I had read a lot about WW2 way before I became a teenager, much of it old books with first hand accounts of what people saw and experienced, mutilated bodies, literal revenge decimations of locals when Germans couldn't find who had sabotaged them, torture and more.
I think they're fine and appropriate. As long as they keep the originals available I don't mind the alternative moralist edits. Just don't force them on me. I'm not interested in such edits.
Are you a creator? A writer, or an artist, or a director? ... Are you a very good one?
Because to the best of my knowledge, no world-class author or director has ever said "Feel free to change my words, images, and choices after I die, however you see fit to make the most money or appease the current narrative".
... And if a creator ever did say that, it would be the exception that proves the rule.
What? How about living ones? Like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. At least Spielberg says he regrets his decision but when it comes to George Lucas and the original Star Wars, there's plenty of people who were very angry at him when you could only get a DVD of the original trilogy that was filled with modern CGI effects and prequel actors that weren't there in the original release. At one point the only way to watch those original edits at home was to get an old VHS set at the flea market.
Whether I'm a creator myself or not has nothing to do with this, and whether the edits are made by the authors themselves or by other people without consent of the now dead author is not really my point here. Both annoy me but of course the latter is even more annoying. I just want an easy access to the unedited works thank you very much.
You said "I don't mind the alternative moralist edits".
I do mind, and my point is that basically every creative would also mind having their work subjected to "alternative moralist edits", especially without their consent and/or after their death.
That's not the same thing as George Lucas adding random CG crap; false equivalence.
If I understand what you're saying, it's that as long as the original is available it's fine, if annoying, for publishers to re-edit and profit from bastardized, censored, altered versions of creators work.
That's why I ask if you're a creator - because no creator, ever, anywhere, at any time, has expressed a preference - or even a tolerance - for having their work fucked with like this.
Well, to me those moralist edits are like those reader's digest books with shortened edits of novels. I really don't mind their existence, as long as they're labeled as special edits for a niche market rather than an attempt to replace the original.
That's not what Spielberg is talking about at all. These rewritings and revision are quite different; in scope, in manner, in presentation and in purpose.
What happened to Dahl, or the 1984 audiobook, etc, are nothing like a Reader's Digest regurgitation.
Dr Seuss books were recently recalled and remade to be less racist and to remove insensitive imagery. Bernstein Bears books all got replaced by Berenstein Bears books, so it's clearly not impossible to do.
> Many people incorrectly remember the name of the series as the "Berenstein Bears". This confusion has generated multiple explanations of the memories, including an unannounced name change, time travel, or parallel universes, and has been described as an instance of the Mandela effect.[87][88][89][90] According to Mike Berenstain, confusion over the name has existed since his father's childhood, when a teacher told him there was no such name as "Berenstain" and the correct spelling was "Bernstein."[91] A few examples of the "Berenstein" spelling have been found in references to and knockoffs of official merchandise[92] and publications,[93] and cartoons for the series used an ambiguous pronunciation which may contribute to the false memory.[94]
Instead of trying to hide from the past, how about we use the art of that era to teach the new generation why certain things are wrong?
It's like drinking to forget instead of confronting the issues head on. You pretend it's not there, then you sober up - nope, still there.
I don't think the people who want to sanitize our past and who want to cancel others based on something done or said 20 years ago (when it was acceptable) understand that THEY will be judged by a different set of rules decades from now.
It is strange, that in the post-modern era there seems to be a desire to prevent harm by curbing freedom of choice. The ability to choose what constitutes right or wrong isn’t even on the table, because you may draw the wrong conclusion. There is an effort to dictate what media is disseminated and consumed, because some(or a lot) of it has been deemed potentially harmful.
There is nothing new about this. If anything, you have much more choice then you used to have in the past. In the past, when the artist got "cancelled" because of politics or gender or race, that was complete and absolute game over.
The amount of stuff that was seen as acceptable was much lower.
> The amount of stuff that was seen as acceptable was much lower.
I used to take that for granted as well, until I realized that I had never actually seen any evidence to support it, and my own observations have led me to conclude that it is quite possibly false. Many great books from the early and mid 20th century would never get published today.
Truly radical ideas have almost vanished from mainstream works. As a random example, the famous science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961, contains passages that pretty openly advocate for cannibalism. Time Enough for Love by the same author presents incestuous relationships as positive and completely normal. I dare you to show me anything comparable to that in today's literature.
That has nothing to do with how radical the ideas presented in literature were. The 1960s were a cornucopia of literary exploration, massively expanding the horizon of what is thinkable.
The past 20 years have not only failed to contribute to this exploration, they have actually reversed some of the progress made back then, and lots of what had already been made thinkable is now unthinkable once more.
Fairy tales have changed all throughout history. The ones we know today, aren't the same variant that was told a hundred years ago. At what point should we "freeze" them? Is the version we know now the ultimate one, that every generation after us should hear? Or should it adapt over time and each generation get their own variation?
I'm not saying movies or books should be altered. They are some persons' works. But I feel this happens with all kinds of "traditional" things now. There is this debate where I live now about someone altering their folk costume (different colored shirts and stuff). And this gets people up in arms, that it "should remain traditional". But during history it has changed all the time, hence why we have so many beautiful variants. But at some point someone has decided that they should remain as they are, and no new changes should happen.
Your fight here isn't with the producers of specific works, it's with copyright. Due to the copyright periods being heat death of the universe plus 70 years, we do not get reinterpretations of modern works. The fairy tales you were talking about had so much diversity in versions was because anyone could make their own. I remember growing up we had these tales about Akbar and Birbal, they were like an interaction between a king and the court minister/jester. I must have read at least 7-8 versions of some stories in different magazines. I don't think that can happen with today's media as everyone is so protective of their IP
> Is the version we know now the ultimate one, that every generation after us should hear?
I would love a comparative literature review of old-school Cinderella where the stepsisters get their toes chopped off and eyes picked out vs the Disney one with the cute animals and pumpkins.
What we teach children, should reflect the current "best" values (Very subjective in some areas ...) and at some age critical thinking and ability to question values. For that the books, movies, ... we grew up with probably aren't always the best.
When being old enough to put in context there are way less problems with older things, as one understands how some views on things changed and one can question old role models as well as the change.
Germany, when secularization hit, they just took all the old books from the monastries and burned them or threw them before the horse wagons carrying them off, to make the roads less muddy. The catholic church was very reviled, because it was in constant "grab all things permanently" mode for hundreds of years and owned parts of the country. Still, alot of the art went missing or was just destroyed. And its a huge mistake, cause even art made in a prison, created on demand by the prison director, is art made by the artist.
true. This whole idea of destroying things because it doesn't fit your current ideology is evil
For example CPC destroyed lot of its old art dating back to BC because it wanted to remove all artifacts of old culture. They could have just given it to archaelogists of other countries who would be glad to to take it.
Or the idiot islamists destorying idols like buddha's bamiyan statue because its written in some book not realizing that in buddhism there is no concept of god so buddhist don't even pray to the idol! not sure whats the point of destroying it.
Partially true, there was the protestant "Fürstentümer", but alot of places remained catholic and kept all the stuff. It was during Napoleons conquest of europe, that secularism as described above touched all places.
It was basically the french revolutionary ideals spread to half of europe during a interim phase of french expansionism. And they were welcomed as liberators by man peasants, and the french idea of the nation, with the nobles done away wa quite attractive. In those times, lots of the old stuff was thrown out with the "old elites".
Im sorry european history is so confusing. Basically it all happens, over and over again, for different reasons, but the "bilderstürmerei" is such a old tradition, that some anticipating it, just painted over the old stuff with white chalk paint, preserving it below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconoclasm
Many Roman and Greek statues had their penises chiseled off in the late antique period by Christian nobles who were uncomfortable with a naked expression of sensuality. Many other statues and paintings (including Michaelangelo's David) were "amended" due to moral panic. This kind of censorship is nothing new, we just focus on different things now. But imagine all the ancient works of beauty that have been destroyed due to the people of a given time not being able to come to grips with art.
I feel this whole question stems from media industry more and more utilizing their back-catalogs instead of just pushing new novel works. Streaming services are major part in enabling/exacerbating the issue; 50 year old movies are happily intermingling with latest and greatest, and the cultural context is not always super clear.
I think this is the entire problem: some people are talking like there’s an angry censorship mob going around demanding changes but in all of cases which have come up recently it seems to be more along the lines of large risk-averse companies trying to market to younger people or, at least in the Dahl books, not have something blow up their Netflix adaptation.
It seems like the best angle for this would be copyright reform and simply moving on to fresh IP so people aren’t worried about how young people will feel their grandparents’ world.
Not revising a film "based on modern sensitivity" is one thing, but what about films being released in a multitude of different versions right from the start? It annoys me when I discuss a film with someone else who's seen it and I find that some of the scenes in the version I saw were not in the version they saw, and vice versa. If you see a recent film on TV you can be pretty sure that you're watching a version that was specially edited to be shown on that TV channel in that country at that time of day. Sometimes you can look at the Wikipedia pages about a film in different languages and see wildly varying running times.
Not a recent film, but a while ago I finally got round to watching "The Exorcist" (1973) because it was on UK television. The "spider walk" scene was omitted in that particular edit!
I've recently re-watched "The Butterfly Effect" (2004) and was surprised to see a completely different ending than I remembered. Turns out it's the director's cut I saw. The movie actually as 4 alternative endings of which I vastly prefer the original theatrical one.
I think that's fine. To me that's no different than having a theatrical vs director's cut editions and what not. Even if ultimately the reason for the cut is censorship(see western films released in China) - it's still an official release, and not something edited later because someone got offended.
When you revise the works of societies of the past, you are destroying the last remnants of their existence. It is a form of erasure. One has to think how this impacts people of the present day. Why should I commit my life and dedication to the work of art if it is to be revisioned and potentially condemned for all eternity? I'd rather die unknown than to have my art become bastardized by future revisionists. This gets to the heart of other matters. Why should one do anything great or noble for their society when there is an interest of future societies to revise who you were and what you did and, again, potentially condemn you for all eternity.
You're right, I think, and it's a little scary that this angle is being downvoted.
Yes, it's erasure. Literally and figuratively. It's harmful.
Yes, it removes incentive to create, and learn, and be challenged. It blurs truth and enables very real horrors of control. It's dangerous.
No creative person wants any of this for their work. It's demoralizing.
Only greedy publishers and rights-holders have pushed for this, and it's entirely out of short-sighted self-interest. The pretense that this is to protect the public is sooo thin.
If you're a parent who feels the need to buy a sanitized Dahl, I have to wonder what you're hoping to accomplish. Sanitized Dahl isn't Dahl, so what's the point?
Amusingly (if that's the word) this updated version of the writeup, with embedded videos illustrating Simon's points, no longer has the embedded videos because there were somehow flagged by youtube or hidden by HBO. Still worth the read.
I hope for a future where we don't even have "protected classes" and excess reactions/caution/sensitivity, because discriminating based on someone's skin color or sexual orientation is as strange and uncommon as discriminating based on their eye color or introversion. And we can represent people as they are while respecting them with them being fine with it, because everyone has flaws and redeeming qualities and ignoring them doesn't make them go away.
They deleted the scene in Cast Away where he uses a log to test the strength of a branch before hanging himself. Fox et al have completely obliterated any existence of that clip.
This article was the first time I’ve read of Spielberg owning up to the mistake that was editing out the guns in ET, and it felt.. cathartic. <deep breath> Like forgiving a father who never returned after going out for a pack of smokes after he reconnects thirty years later for a heartfelt apology. Yep, you jacked up one of the most significant films of my childhood for no good reason, thanks for owning up to the stupidity that we all saw it was back then. All better now.
In truth, you’d never know if you didn’t know. It was more the act, the misguided motivation, and the impossibility of ignoring it having been privy to the original during formative years.
Will changing Agatha Christie’s novels be terribly impactful or noticeable to the plot if you were unfamiliar with the original? Probably not. It inarguably subtracts from the works, however. The bigger idea is that we lose something of the original creation and it’s voice from the period; that if such edits are not clearly identified and worse - if original works are simply censored from the casual marketplace - it’s a loss bigger than the sum of the incidental changes.
I think Spielberg’s statement on this does it better justice than I can, but there’s value in keeping original works available and not just in the cobwebbed and esoteric corners of libraries or the Internet but in GA. This is our heritage, for better AND worse.
Is Spielberg going to re-release ET with the cops back to holding guns instead of walkie-talkies?[1] Orre-releaseIndiana Jones and the Last Crusade where the word Jewish isn't cut out. For reference, In the theatrical version of Last Crusade, where Donovan is trying to convince the Sultan of Hatay to allow him to move accross his land to recover the Grail, he brings the Sultan a a chest of gold treasures and says, "Precious valuables, Your Highness, "donated" by some of the finest Jewish families in all of Germany." But in the later video, DVD and televisions versions, the word "Jewish" is removed.[2]
I agree with him on this. If something is sensitive in modern times, it's better to leave as-is and attach a warning like WB did with some Looney Tunes cartoons saying "It's a product of its time and no longer reflects modern values". We shouldn't mask the past; if we do, we will fall into the same trappings that we spent decades ridding ourselves of.
I agree with him, but it also has to come with an acceptance that the things you care about will age and slip out of cultural relevance, even if they're just being replaced with largely similar things done from a modern sensibility.
Removing certain words from Roald Dahl works aren't going to shake off the outdated worlds they were built within. It's as much about trying to hide how old the material is as anything else. They seemed timeless to me as a kid but I was oblivious to the fact that some of them had been published within my lifetime so I was under the impression they were things that had been around forever.
Who is doing the revisions also makes a big difference; if it's about preserving some IP it'll either be the original authors (who are too directly tied to the source material to do anything interesting) or people who have a strict emotive of fiscal connection to the property (who will be applying updates for non artistic reasons and are therefore unlikely to provide any kind of interesting changes)
Rewriting history removes our ability to learn from the past, which positions us to repeat the same mistakes. A perfectly valid concern often touted. But what is more rarely claimed is that we also lose our ability to learn from what societies of the past got right. There is an arrogance of the present where people think we are at the forefront of what's moral and virtuous. That history is a linear progression from wrongdoing, wrong think, and bigotry to a more enlightened present. Yes, I'd say we've made great strides of progress. But I am certain there are many generations of the past that we could learn from, when it comes to morality, virtues and conduct. With every new generation, these things evolve, where old ways are lost and new ways are gained. But not everything gained is always good and not everything old is always bad.
It’s history, it’s like cutting off films like 12 Year a slave because people didn’t want to be reminded of that period or WW2 because is violent. People making jokes that were ok in the 70s is also history. There is no excuses to cut them out if you don’t cut out most historical films
I like to gripe on this too, but it depends on if he was unhappy with the decision already back then, or not.
But yes, it kind of ruins the Hero's Journey for Han. And makes Han Solo appear more of haphazard lucky bastard who didn't get killed in that bar just by sheer chance, rather than a cunning and hard-to-kill bastard.
The intentions are always good but the devil is always in the details. Victorian morality or the Prohibition had perfectly valid concerns but their implementation had serious unintended consequences that arguably made things worse.
It's a all a question of balance. Regarding Victorian prudishness or the Prohibition, I think right now we might have gone too far in the other direction. You can see the damage that alcohol and substances as well as pornography and general promiscuity are doing to society. And there are already growing movements against these things, composed of young people even, see NoFap for example. And of course they try to swing the pendulum too much in the opposite direction. Always out of balance, always overreacting.
Speaking of revisions, with the advent of AI technologies it doesn't seem like we're that far away from being able to fully remaster movies with drastic changes. Imagine that as part of a movie's localization process they changed every actor's race to match the destination. The closest existing example which I'm aware of is the original Power Rangers which spliced footage from the original Japanese version with American actors when they weren't fully suited up.
I wonder if that kind of thing will gain popularity. There's people that prefer dubs over subs, I wonder if the same principle can be extended to other aspects of a movie. Personally I'll probably stick with originals as much as possible.
I'd agree, but the old version should be kept available.
Best example I can think of is Apocalypse Now. The 40th anniversary bluray released a couple of years ago had _three_ versions inside: Theatrical (1979), Redux (2001) and Final Cut (2019).
It is up to each creator. People are allowed to judge other people's actions. This is the same confusion people have with freedom of speech. You are allowed to say whatever you want, but don't be surprised when people judge you.
For the people who haven’t read the article, Spielberg is mostly referring to the 2002 rerelease of ET which replaced guns with walkie-talkies.
The topic is a bit tiring to me, mainly because revising old media doesn’t really seem to be something a whole lot of people want, but it sells clicks.
It’s not that it doesn’t happen or it’s not bad, but it’s so rare that it’s hardly worth mentioning. You can find a handful of cases and stretch them into news stories for months.
It depends what you mean by rare. In the UK it's a story because it's happened to Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl. Christie is the biggest selling fiction author of all time. Roald Dahl is among the biggest selling children's authors of all time—he's on a par with Tolkien for sales. So it's not that rare.
To add to this. James Bond is currently being rewritten. Disney have banned stories by Don Rosa to be published again. Pippi Longstocking was rewritten after the authors death. Tintin went through court in Belgium in an attempt to ban it. It's definitely happening to a lot of well-known stories and isn't a fringe movement that OP is claiming.
The subheadline and four of the first five paragraphs address this:
"In 2011, Spielberg had already explained that the guns would be returning for the 30th anniversary release, explaining that he was 'disappointed' in himself."
All of this is motivated by the desire to resale old crap to modern audiences that don't like to put up with some parts of it.
In a world without copyright new generation would just create derived stories however they liked. In our world of copyright you have to alter the old stuff and pretend it's always been like that to keep selling it like it's fresh.
I recently watched "Gone with the Wind" with some friends. In hindsight, it's nothing more than Lost Cause propaganda, but I don't think it should be revised. It should be shown in context with the history of the Lost Cause at the time and with what the reality of the war actually was about.
I'm worried that the old adage (often falsely attributed to Ghandi) is exactly what's happening to wokeism: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
It seems like the tide is turning on some extreme forms of woke ideology, but this might just be stage three in the above quote.
On the other hand, people should be free to revise / update their works to maintain marketability, if they want to.
Beyond that, as a parent of young kids, it would be nice to sometimes be able to read / show some classics to my kids without having to explain what spanking is or why fat shaming was acceptable.
If forging money or documents is bad, from society's point of view, why isn't forging works of art, bad, too?
The truth is only one, we can't have different true versions of the same fact. If there are multiple versions of something, one is true while the other are fakes.
-Trying to thinking aloud- Given digital distribution, if they have to censor, then why not offer both versions and let audiences decide which they prefer.
After all I don't care what mods my games have as long as I get to choose what to install.
Did he not do or say something super woke? Maybe I mix him up with someone else. Anyway, always good when the woke stuff hits some walls. But of course only a very established senior who has nothing to fear and speaks out.
Spielberg's use of Chunk's Truffle Shuffle is an offense to overweight children bullied by their peers and ought to be removed from Goonies as it lends nothing but negativity! No Truffle Shuffle!
If the point is to capture the point in time culture, remake the films with a year appended to it. Just don't remaster or edit old films with modern censorship bias.
If they regret it later, it's likely because society is bullying them into pretenting to be _very_sorry_(tm) about expressing their ideas.
If they genuinely change their position, then, in a mature society, they can own up to their past and all will be good.
But that's not the direction we're moving, no, in todays society, people must constantly revise their past, not to fit with their own values, but to attempt not to be cancelled.
One reasonable strategy might be to add a short preface to many works, explaining the historical differences between accepted practices (and acceptable fictions) when the work was created, vs. when the (explicitly dated) preface was added. In time, those prefaces would themselves become outdated and historical.
Of course, the lefties would want to add a 10-minute anti-gun diatribe before every 5-minute Bugs Bunny short in which Elmer Fudd and his (easily foiled) shotgun appears. While the right wingers would want to insert their own 10-minute pro-gun diatribes before...
I agree fully with the statement that art of the past is a portrait of what the world was then, and should therefore rest untouched to give us context in the current era.
To give a better idea of this issue than simple "publications that aren't that old and are edited to keep them marketable", I'll propose a thought experiment:
Imagine we'd have kept editing Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to adapt, censor and euphemise it's heinous ideology to keep it publishable over the decades. There would obviously hardly be anything left of it's original content.
And mind, I am not at all constructing this example to suggest anything in that book would've been worth preserving for it's intrinsic value, I'm rather trying to point out the very opposite:
If current editions of this hateful crap & all it's adjacent publications and propaganda would still be printed and sold, but in a form so radically changed that they conform to the current Zeitgeist and moral values, there would soon be no way left to educate coming generations about how the third Reich and Nazism came about, and what ideologies we should guard against and prevent in the future.
Obviously, this thought experiment bears much more radical and ludicrous consequences than a gun in a kids movie or some casually racist or sexist lines in a 90s movie - but ultimately, what we do by "greenwashing" recent works of art has a very similar effect: we rob future generations of the possibility to comprehend our cultural and ideologic development, and to learn and understand how it came to be. We censor historical context to maximize current profits.
I think Spielberg and all of us might be surprised if we knew just how much of our cultural lexicon has been rewritten over the years.
There is a large portion of children’s literature that has been changed multiple times over the decades due to the extreme and blatant and replete racism - including Dr Doolittle, Peter Pan, and Mary Poppins to name only a few.
This isn’t censorship though so we need to mark the difference between capitalism and censorship. You can still go read the original versions of these. No one is deleting them. They just aren’t publishing them.
The same has not happened to film yet, as much, probably due to technology. But it might as these IPs age. But again will that be censorship or capitalism?
The practice of revising movies and books reminds me of the work of the Ministry of Truth. The funny thing is that Orwell’s homeland is always spearheading this kind of evolution.
I am still not sure if 1984 is a net positive. It was supposed to spread awareness of the dangers of surveillance and totalitarian states, but sometimes it rather seems it provided a blueprint for those organisations on how to use power effectivly. /s
but I don't think anyone does read Orwell and is like "oh that's a good tool of manipulation"
because they have many more ways to find the same tools but in a context where it's packed into a "this is for (the grater,your,your peoples) good" package instead of a "this is a dystopia" package
It is exactly about this "this is for (the grater,your,your peoples) good" or rather it is about total control of the information space that indeed everyone thinks, whatever the party is doing is good.
No one is living in a dystopia there. They are living in the best of the best worlds. And everybody thinks and believes that.
It is an examination of power and control mechanism. Power over the mind of people.
That's political, but this is the new morality police.
I am still recovering from the religious "moral values" people who were insufferable as recently as a few years ago, and who have proven to be hypocrites on just shocking levels.
This movement of the "white, fluffy and righteous" is just taking their place.
I mostly agree, but I'd caution against the label of hypocrisy. I think it was in "diamond age" that Stephenson wrote something to the effect that hypocrisy is the only remaining taboo when all morality is relative because the only moral standard you can hold someone to is the one they eapouse themselves. This leads to people espousing no standars of behavior at all, when the best standard of behavior of all is one you know you won't be able to quite live up to.
I want to never be cruel or cowardly, but I know I will mess up sometimes, hopefully I will make amends, but I probably won't always. I don't think that is hypocrisy, just fallibility.
> I mostly agree, but I'd caution against the label of hypocrisy. I think it was in "diamond age" that Stephenson wrote something to the effect that hypocrisy is the only remaining taboo when all morality is relative because the only moral standard you can hold someone to is the one they eapouse themselves.
I wish, but hypocrisy is a weak criticism that's easy to escape except in the most clear cut cases, and in some cases is deemed as invalid.
Eg, some people's approach to morality is that people are intrinsically moral or immoral, not actions. This allows people to make statements that work out to something like "My friend may be a rapist, but he's a good person. He shouldn't be punished for a mistake". Moral goodness isn't gained through actions but through acquiring status in some way.
In that kind of worldview, hypocrisy is irrelevant. My friend is a good person because he lives in a good community and is well-off. That guy over there is a bad person because he lives in a slum and obviously deserves that.
I see people simply stating their moral system and when they fail to uphold it, being attacked. The inference that they think everyone should use their moral system might be inferred, but wasn't necessarily intended.
I think sometimes. I am sure there are some "holier than though" individuals that are thoroughly apolitical.
Here in the United States, a certain political party all but appropriated Christianity for themselves, even though their own platform (or now lack of one) is the direct opposite of what the religion teaches.
Well, if the wars against drugs, against terror and against pedophiles didn't work as intended, we now have the war against racists, maybe this one will work.
Maybe it's good to keep people divided and busy with sterile discussions while the politicians and their friends are profiting and lining their pockets without doing something good and productive for society.
While I agree with Spielberg's realization that modifying his prior work was a mistake, there's something I would like to be able to do with movies as a consumer that I wish streaming services offered.
Hollywood seems obsessed with three things: Guns, sex and objectifying women.
While not every movie has guns, the sex and objectification is pretty much everywhere. Perfectly good movies have utterly unnecessary sex scenes that make them impossible to watch with kids. In some cases this is also uncomfortable in family gathering settings.
Two examples that come to mind (there are thousands):
Die Hard. He opens an office door, only to expose a couple having sex. Of course, the woman is fully exposed, while the guy is not.
Lucky Number Slevin. The main character walks into his apartment only to find his girlfriends on all fours on the bed having sex with a guy. Again, full sexual exploitation of the woman, of course.
The Last Kingdom (series): Once again, sex everywhere. No value whatsoever to the story. It's a great series. Unwatchable with kids and in other settings.
Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos): Excellent series. Sex everywhere. No nudity that I can remember, yet scenes of oral sex and other forms of sex without showing full body nudes. Fucking unbelievably unnecessary.
Outlander (series): Might as well be labelled porn. It's a sex-fest. Humping in any way possible at any possible time and even male-to-male rape. Nothing whatsoever to add to the story, which would have been amazing without all that shit in there.
The Queens Gambit (series). Fantastic series about chess. My kids are really into chess. Fuck if we are going to watch it with them. No nudity, yet drugs and sex are featured. The character is fictitious, which means there was no need for any of it. The producers just wanted to include sex and drugs. This one can't be fixed. I am not going to watch a show with my kids that implies taking drugs can make you smarter in any way.
There are tons of movies and shows with similar problems. Movies that are excellent and yet the producers feel it is necessary to insert a stupid sex scene that adds absolutely nothing to the story and is of no value whatsoever other than to show boobs bouncing and feature women as sexual objects.
Notice I did not say anything about movies like Fifty Shades or Gray, Wall Street or Eyes Wide Shut. Those are movies where the story justifies some of what they feature. There could be an argument related to female objectification, that's about it.
I am not a puritan, by any means. I just think this is stupid, wrong, unnecessary, detrimental and destructive to women. Having a daughter changes your perspective on what's out there in popular culture. Great movies and series are being ruined all the time by inserting sex where it is unnecessary, and it is usually at the expense of women.
Getting back to the first paragraph. I wish there was a setting on streaming services to be able to watch these movies with those scenes cut out or replaced by alternative scenes shot and chosen by the creators.
In the case of Die Hard, the couple could be kissing, taking a nap, playing chess...anything. The point is they were distracted and did not react to the emergency. In the case of Slevin, the sex scene could either be completely cut out or replaced with something different.
That, to me, would be a feature very much worth having. Hollywood's obsession with sex and the objectification of women is a problem that does not seem to receive the attention it should.
Ignoring the religious definition, here's how it is typically interpreted:
"one who practices or preaches a more rigorous or professedly purer moral code than that which prevails"
My comment isn't at all about a purer moral code. It's about Hollywood's obsession with pushing more and more explicit sexual content on everyone and the objectification of women.
If you think speaking-up against objectifying women is against our prevailing moral code, well, not sure what society you have around you.
How about that scene in on of the Transformer's movies where they follow the actress (who used to be a Victoria's Secret model) up the stairs while wearing underwear with the camera firmly planted on her ass? Seriously? Why was that necessary?
It isn't about some pure moral code. It's about using women and pushing shit on people just to do it. Like I said in my comment, if the movie is about sexual matters, absolutely no problem. A blow-job scene in Battlestar Galactica? Really?
I don't claim any specific boundaries for the term, but... there are more angles to this than censorship. Spielberg is from perhaps the most commercial art form, cinema. They make Airplane cuts, TV cuts, video cuts. They remaster the score, cut regional releases... These are all commercially oriented "censorship," arguably. Cinema is an art form that's literally pitched to investors and financiers. Purity and absolutes don't exist here.
Meanwhile... Books have come in editions since printing. Before that, stories evolved too. Especially for important or really old texts, we're always interested in "The Original." That tends to be when the history matters to us more than the story. That's somewhat at odds with stories "Living." We have stories today that originated milenia ago in forgotten civilisations. They've been written countless times.
The original Nancy Drew may be an important cultural artefact. But, solving mysteries by racial profiling or otherwise violating "modern sensibilities" makes it a dead story. Revising additions keeps Nancy Drew suitable reading material for 9 year olds, which is what being a living story means here.
Anyway... I'm taking the dissident position. I do like and want the raw, "uncensored" cuts. I want Reservoir Dogs. I want even edgier materials that large, centralised studios
OTOH, I have no hard objection to releasing updated editions that reflect updated morals. The freedom & openness obligation that we have is to keep the original intact and available. Intellectual property tends to be the barrier to this, not censorship.
It's often fine to rewrite, recut. In fact, it can keep art alive. Guns and Roses pulled a track from an old album, because it had bigoted lyrics. IDK why exactly they "censored" the album, but my guess is that the band doesn't want to sell the album like that anymore... they definitely don't want to play it anymore. Maybe social norms changed. Maybe Axl changed. What seemed edgy and rebellious to 20 year old Axl just seems asshole now.
"Anti-Censorship" is a failing paradigm, currently.
Is moderating HN or a subreddit censorship? Is having a a newsroom editor censorship? IMO it's a lot more about who makes the decision than what they do. If GnR revise an album, IMO it's ridiculous to call it censorship. Same for having moderation on HN, revised editions of children's books etc.
Censorship is a feature of power and monopoly. A subreddit does not have power to "censor," just moderate. Facebook or Twitter's moderation policies are censorious by default. You can't have global-scale, medium-wide content policies that are not censorship.
No, this is exactly in line with the GPL, e.g., "The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date."
The kind of people who revise past works to be more in line with present-day political correctness also tend to try to pass off the revised version as the original and memoryhole the real original.
Statistically, it is much more likely for an Arab or Black to be a criminal in a western society.
The why though, is definitely up to debate. And we should preserve every era in history, no matter how "disgusting". How can we avoid getting nasty again otherwise ?
>> Statistically, it is much more likely for an Arab or Black to be a criminal in a western society.
You are right and completely wrong also. Crime in America is literally defined to be when colored people do it, so obviously.
If a colored person does something bad, it is terrorism. When white people do something bad it is a "deeply disturbed individual who needs mental help"
In America, when something blows up, people ask "is it terrorism?" They mean -- did a brown person do it (in which case it is), or did a white person do it (in which case people try to understand the person's mentality and make excuses for it.)
In America, white terrorism is literally erased from history. Who remembers the white man who firebombed two 4/5 train cars in NYC in 1995 with kerosene tanks? No one.
> Crime in America is literally defined to be when colored people do it, so obviously.
I hope your comment is a joke, or a deliberate trolling attempt.
A brown person blowing up something as retaliation for US foreign policy (and typically funded and organised by some other state) is definitely different from an alienated boy who shoots up a school. Therefore there should be different categorisations.
I don't even know why I am replying, your reasoning is clearly blinded by rage
"Speaking at Time’s 100 Summit in New York City, the 76-year-old film-maker expressed regret over taking out guns from a later release of his 1982 sci-fi blockbuster ET: The Extra Terrestrial. In the 20th anniversary edition, agents saw their firearms replaced with walkie-talkies.
“That was a mistake,” he said on stage. “I never should have done that. ET is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.”"
The subtitle (or summary) mentions it - "Director has criticised the practice of re-editing older films while expressing remorse over removing guns in a later edition of ET"
Idk people but to me, changing and progressing morality and values doesn’t make sense. If something is truth, it must be truth at all times and places.
One could write a very long essay on this, but basically: regardless of what the underlying truth out there in the universe is, all we can get at is an interpretation of the evidence to determine what we think is the truth. To the extent that truth is based on evidence it changes when new evidence is introduced.
To say otherwise is to say that people on death row should never be acquitted because it was true they were a murderer at the time of the trial, and that truth is unchangeable.
(or to use an example from cinema, at one point it "wasn't true" that cigarettes were harmful)
The real word, especially on the level of societies, culture and morals (wich are, after all, products of the human mind, an extremely complex system), is under no obligation to be simple and logical.
No it isn‘t [0] and even if it were it‘s not about truth or falsehood but about right or wrong and in any case: „at all times“ cannot mean changing the past and artifacts of the past. The past already happened and cannot be changed and products of the past likewise already happened.
[0] Because the assumption that the current society is somehow in possession of the truth is mistaken and has been shown to be mistaken again and again. Furthermore such an ideology would be just the opposite of what it means to live in an open society.
Of course, if were to base our morality upon changing things like science or how society feels about something, then our morality should always change, because both of those change all the time. But not everyone does this.
But we are not capable of knowing that anything is true with 100% certainty, we can be very convinced with ample evidence that something is true, but that doesn't make it true. I mean, the whole science shenanigans is based in this principle, that is the reason they talk about theories and not universal truths, because what we call facts or truth is at best very informed interpretations.
We know no truth, so everything has to change and progress.
I don't understand. How can morality and values be "true" or the truth?
In some places abortions is accepted by law and society. In other places you get jailed for it. And it all was different a century back. Or child labor. Drunk driving.
How can there be one truth to those moral questions?
If we base our morality according to how we feel about something, then of course. How people feel about things change all the time. We can’t speak about a single source of truth in this case, there are infinite amount of moralities. But not everyone bases morality on how people (including themselves) feel.
Theological morality is not based on things like culture and science, which change all the time. Instead it’s based on divine words of God (Holy Books), and acts and words of prophets who are constantly checked and corrected by God to always act good. In Christianity and Judaism other people also have a say on morality, but in Islam morality completely originates from God, goodness is obedience to God and badness is disobedience to Him. In fact, all moralities except those which are based upon an ontologically higher and omniscient entity like God are subjective and non-normative, since they all rely on products of human mind, which always change (science, culture, etc.). Why should I be prosecuted for theft or murder? Just because you feel so? Countless other people in history felt otherwise. Even if all of humanity feels I should be prosecuted for a crime, I will ask, what makes mere feelings normative? It doesn’t make any sense at all.
I think we should be better than “We can’t see anything objective to base our morality upon, so we’ll just base it upon our feelings.” mindset. We should be able to at least admit we don’t have a normative morality and our laws and law enforcement is simply bullying people and making them submit our (collective) feelings and desires because we have the power and means to do so.
Regarding the question what God says being subjective: No, there are arguments of current and past miracles, and recorded honesty, reliability and mental health of prophets, and many other things. At least for Islam. You can search. If you have questions, simply refer to this playlist [1]. Every question regarding Islam and modernity is (repeatedly) asked there.
I could write a lot more but I have a lot of things to do so I’ll simply direct you to this documentary series [2] which elaborates on morality among other things. Both playlists are intellectual gems no matter what your background is.
0: See Rabbis having authority and knowledge over God in Judaism, and countless versions of Bible which are clearly not all the exact words of God, and instead of non-prophet humans. Also Christianity and Judaism doesn’t see prophets as constantly checked and sinless. See examples of sins commited by prophets in Bible and Old Testament.
Muslims maintain they were not written, they came directly from God. Also, Qur’an radically changed many moral values of the society at the time (most significant one being changing the state of polytheism from worship to blasphemy), and Muslims faced very strong and violent opposition because of that. I don’t know the specific subject of guns in E.T, but Islamic morality covers every single subject in life without exception. I didn’t say they are truth, I say there is one truth regarding their morality: They are either good or bad.
It can be true, you can know it's true, and your life can still be a lie. "Moral progress" is often of the form of people more fully living out the morality that they already know.
Regarding E.T., I believe that Hollywood is beginning to show how chagrined they are for perpetuating the "guns = cool" ethos along with, and long before, video games.
How many anti-2A crusader actors have wielded enormous firepower and used it to blow away all the bad guys on the silver screen?
Its's almost as hypocritical as the politicians who all rely on good-guy guns (and significantly stronger military armor & firepower) to keep them all safe.
And do what? Wage war to whoever challenges the dollar? Time spent talking about modern sensitivity is certainly a better investment than war mongering or trying to tell other countries which currency they can or cannot use.
Maybe it’s time to cancel Steven Spielberg and boycott his films. Such tone-deaf views may have been acceptable decades ago but now he is on the wrong side of history, which is the side that needs to be rewritten. /s
This is probably not even the right debate to be having. It's just the debate or goal that historically oppressed and mistreated groups feel is maybe attainable.
In a world where Black Americans can't reasonably expect the authorities to not shoot them essentially for being Black in America, they can ask for racist, pro-slavery symbols or guns or similar to be edited out of popular fiction or removed from public spaces in the form of statues and maybe get it.
I recall reading that some Black artist was told his song about wanting to kill the cops was not okay. Cops can kill Blacks. Blacks can't sing about how that makes them feel.
So not all people are equally allowed to express their artistic vision or their feelings or their lived reality and it's too much to ask to be treated like human beings or even allowed a voice of their own, so the ask is for others to tone it down as a hoped for step in the right direction.
I don't know what the solution is. I wish we (in the US) fed people in prison better and had enough decent affordable housing for starters but even those modest goals seem completely out of reach.
>I recall reading that some Black artist was told his song about wanting to kill the cops was not okay. Cops can kill Blacks. Blacks can't sing about how that makes them feel.
If a black person killed someone close to me and I released my newest single about how I want to murder black people would it get published? Doubt it.
Besides it's not like cops are allowed to kill black people either.
Theoretically you’re right but you’re denying the reality on the ground, which is the context of the debate and which you are taking out. Sure, cops are not allowed to kill black people but the reality is that black people are being treated unequally and that can be statistically backed up. I keep hearing arguments like what you mentioned and I can’t help taking it as a dismissal of black people’s struggles and an unkind disinterest to suffering that you do not personally experience.
And if a black person does kill someone you love, why would you even think about black people in the same way as cops, when “black people” aren’t some public entity armed by the state to do the job of protecting people of all colors? You’re misrepresenting the issue. The only way to channel your hatred against an ethnic group that doesn’t have statutory power over you is to become racist.
But they de facto are in many cases. Cops can generally kill at will and without real justification and not face consequences. It's only in rare cases when public outcry is enough, like in the slaying of George Floyd, where prosecutors will even attempt to hold cops accountable.
These are not "personal circumstances." Laws have been written to intentionally disenfranchise Black Americans, to intentionally criminalize Black Americans, etc.
I'm reminded of an interlude on the latest album from Punk/Grime artist "Bob Vylan".
I said the neighbours called me ****
Station said they can't play that
[..]
Same old stories, nothing new told
Appear to speak truth but don't be too bold
They say make a song for the radio
Hey ho something to play on the day show
Your music upsets advertisers
It's 'bout the Peso, what they say goes
They were left out of significant airplay because their breakout hit tells the story about how the lead, as a half-black brit with a white mom, has been called the N-word and told to go back to "where he comes from". The breakout hit is called "We Live Here", for those curious.
Blacks aren't killed more by the police relative to their crime rate. Statistics show that blacks have a much higher crime rate than other demographics. They are not the victims here.
major streaming platforms and the criterion collection stream and promote "birth of a nation" because "art".
What utter willful ignorance this is!
I use that example because that "work of art" is largely responsible for the revival of the clan.
Artists like to think art depicts life but the opposite is also true, art influences the world around us.
Even something silly like censoring curse words and nudity based on modern sensibilities is an attempt to control art's harmful influence on the world around us.
Speilberg's comments are the equivalent of a famous Chef claiming health regulations on restaurants should not be made by modern understanding of medicine and food safety.
argument by analogy is generally pretty faulty, but gosh, it's probably the absolute worst to make the analogy between food - a perishable thing that will go bad extremely quickly and directly kill people with food poisoning when it does - and artistic expression - non-perishable works that can theoretically last forever and that does not directly kill people unless the statue of Michelangelo's David falls on top of them.
I thought the KKK killed a lot of people? Lol. Argument by analogy is not faulty, analogies are an excellent tool to point out faults in rationale someone is using that has hidden or ignored biases.
You like movies by spielberg, that's nice. But gun culture in the US for example is the fault of hollywood including Spielberg. It isn't the 2nd amendment, it is media that promoted the idea that everyone should have automatic guns. It is media that spits out dozens of cop tv shows where cops are always the good guys and even more movies where cops can break the law and do whatever they want because they're the good guys and it was a TV show that popularized donald trump. The list is endless. To say content in artisitic material causes less harm than food poisoning at restaurants is incorrect.
There is plenty of media censored from even adults because of its harmful nature. The litmus test of censorship is harm that will be caused. If modern sensibilities determine that media will cause harm then of course it should be revised and censored.
If age of consent increases to 21 20yrs from now for example, isn't displaying nude images of 19yr olds a crime after that time? And wouldn't that be censored and removed?
evidently the concept of "directly kill people" as something that food poisoning does was lost on you, but to clarify art that inspires the KKK 'indirectly' kills people. Lol.
>You like movies by spielberg, that's nice.
And I guess you like making incorrect assumptions as the opening for a new paragraph? In case the meaning was lost on you - no not that much. Maybe 5 movies by him. I guess that is a reasonable amount, but he's made a lot of movies I don't give a damn about.
>If age of consent increases to 21 20yrs from now for example, isn't displaying nude images of 19yr olds a crime after that time?
well three things:
1. huh!??!
2. age of consent means one can consent to sex (and presumably be allowed to have it), displaying nude images is not the same thing as having sex.
To follow your style of passive aggressive response:
1. Don't attack the person arguing against you, you can argur the facts just fine
2. Having indirect impact as opposed to direct makes no difference here since we are talking about prevention and not accountability. If you censor less people die or get hurt, that's why censorship happens not to blame or punish the artist.
3. It is not far fetched to assume that a very popular film maker being defended by you implies you actually like his work.
4. If a Child cannot consent to sex yoy cannot take their image as art and release it to the public. It seems you have no actual argument so you have attempted to take everything I said and repeated it to appear as if it was all unfounded fantasy.
5. If you falsley yell fire in a crowd that is illegal because of the harm it causes. Analogies like this used to help people understand reason but it seems you are more interested in winning an internet argument at all costs than a healthy discussion.
6. I am alright, hope you are as well.
LOL. I'll see if I can add to this Maoist word salad... We shouldn't just want to "step in the right direction" we should make a great leap forward. We should have a cultural revolution and bombard the headquarters and chill for a while... Maybe have a long-march.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Honestly surprised at a lot of the takes here, especially in light of other threads I've seen on this site about how copyright lasts for too long and the public domain is good.
I'm 100% fine with things being revised, I think the only caveat I'd want is that, if you revise your film/song/book/etc(?), maybe you have to put the original into the public domain or otherwise make it available somewhere. Or, maybe you have to specify that it's a revision, and/or specify what was revised.
Sherlock Holmes (at least the "early" Holmes) made it into the public domain and his various stories have been told and retold in many creative ways.
This might be more controversial, but the 1997 Star Wars Special Edition movies look a lot better than the originals, and probably are a big contributor to the continued cultural relevance of the franchise.
Don't lose sight of the good that can come from revisions.
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.