It's really interesting that such a bland, un-subversive show whose only mentions of sensitive topics are in bad throwaway jokes is so heavily censored. I guess a more interesting show would just not get aired at all.
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I would like to watch the edit of only deleted scenes strung together.
It chops pieces off reality when you do that.
Censorship is amazing. So popular (downvotes anyone?), so casually employed, yet so incredibly destructive.
Also, love the presentation on this page.
Easy example: compare the Marvel "Civil War" comics to the movies. The former was critical of the military in a way that could not happen in any big blockbuster movie.
You can effectively change reality by adjusting a tiny fraction of it. This is why the Overton Window is so important.
The question is why the people making the content in the US and China don't want to certain content. Is it because they're worried it won't be popular or because they're worried that it will be popular.
I can't prove anything (how would you?) but I tend to think in the U.S. it's the former and in the China the later.
Unpopular opinions can lead to censorship, firing, lawsuits and death-threats. It works pretty good.
It's a deeper level of indoctrination. When these things are covertly inserted in an innocuous sounding show, not only will you start thinking about them, you will subconsiously think of them in a tolerant light.
China has its own culture and mores, why should it allow that kind of soft projection of Western power.
I had a conversation once with a Chinese national, about an article about LGBTQ+ people in China.
"There's no Gay people in China"
(me, points at a picture of 2 young Chinese men in the article)
"They're from Hong Kong. There's no Gay people in China."
OK then!
(This was quite a while back, I suspect the same conversation today would play out differently, since the popular opinion is that HK is in fact part of China)
You can, in fact, have critical views of the military in blockbuster movies in the US. But not if you want to use US military bases and aircraft and ships as sets for those movies, or to get support of the US military in making the movie. Depending on the particular movie, this could be a make-or-break deal for them (Top Gun, for instance, would be pretty shitty with stock footage of US aircraft carriers and aircraft instead of actual footage staged for the movie).
Is this better than explicit censorship? That's more of an open question.
That is not my impression at all. See all the attempts to formalize consent in a way that does not really square with human sexuality. Consent apps? Wtf.
Not to mention all the attempts to criminalize buying of sex, which is basically an ultraconservative position multiplied by -1.
This is not outright government censorship - you can still make a picture that says “the US military sucks” - but it certainly has an effect on big-budget films that want every dollar they can get.
It most certainly "could" be made as there is nothing preventing a studio from doing so if they wanted to. It may not be commercially viable and thus it would not get green-lit by a studio but that's a world away from the government explicitly forbidding it.
I wonder if there are any seasonal discontinuities? Those could indicate anything from a cultural shift in the censors to actual individual censors retiring and getting replaced, since so much of censorship is very subjective.
But when the indoctrination collides with reality in a harmful way, it's a different matter. Objectively, it is true that gay people exists and that there is no good reason to restrict their rights.
Do you have any that state this?
The author was raised in another culture and I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here. There are plenty of cultures (even in the US!) that would lump together queerness and incest and forms of sexual transgression. The fact that the author included the parenthetical means that they are aware of the distinction. But the perspective of the Chinese censors is probably to consider non-normative sex as a single category.
Perhaps the author intended to highlight the negative effects of censorship by emphasizing the largest and most significant effect of that censorship?
I think this might just be a high-quality site, but I can't help but wonder if this prevents youtube or some other service from taking things down via supurious DMCA requests.
If you've ever watched the banal things that people go through to get something past daytime censors, or, get a PG rating for films etc. it's similar.
This is not 'Xi's authoritarian' system so much as 'different cultural standards of the moment'.
Respect that in some parts of the world they don't talk or joke about STD's in that context.
I wouldn't want to be subject to it, but this is not the kind of censorship that's a problem.
Note that in the West, we 'self censor' tons of jokes or things that might be a bit off.
Finally - I'm 100% certain there are examples of this kind of censorship which are problematic, for example, the mention of 'Taiwan' etc..
https://www.newsweek.com/comedy-central-caves-cancel-culture...
This article goes so far as to praise the censorship:
https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/the-office-edited-censor...
As usual, piracy (or the legal purchase and ripping of old DVDs) is now the only way to access this material, which was deemed suitable for public consumption as recently as a few years ago.
For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken") plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats, and the “passing off” remark implies that the Chinese restaurant owners are deceptive and would immorally and illegally serve their guests a different kind of meat than advertised. I can definitely see how that joke would be considered offensive.
The author labels that joke as "harmless" but you don't have to be a Chinese censor to interpret it as reinforcing harmful stereotypes. I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.
Similarly, the racist remarks about Chinese people made by Sheldon's mom are somewhat offensive if taken at face value. I guess the joke is supposed to be at her expense instead ("old people are racists" is an American comedy cliche, if a somewhat tired one) but it's conceivable that either the censors didn't get that, or they feared that their audience didn't get that, so they decided to cut it out entirely.
"They wouldn't get that" is probably also the right explanation for censoring the joke about Jews eating at Chinese restaurants during Christmas, which is a very American tradition. That doesn't imply the joke needs to go, but I can see how that would, at best, leave Chinese viewers scratching their heads.
This is probably the only reason I maintain a US iTunes accounts (used to have to buy gift cards from sketchy sites online to keep this going, but I recently discovered that my Indian Amex card works fine with a US address).
Also trivia for those who are wondering how cuts are made, at least for cinema content: all video and audio assets are usually sent to theatres in full, but there's an XML file called the CPL (composition playlist) that specifies which file is played from which to which frame / timestamp in what sequence. Pure cuts or audio censorship can be handled by just adding an entry to skip the relevant frames or timestamp, or by specifying a censor beep as the audio track for a particular time range.
US programming is highly censored.
30 Rock had to pull episodes because of a gag where a 'completely insensitive dupish character' wore black makeup, to sing as a black person. It wasn't a problem in 2010 but all of a sudden it is in 2020. NBC will not be releasing the original.
A ton of jokes and gags are self censored for a variety of reasons. Eddie Murphy's early specials would absolutely not be aired today for example and I suggest they may face some shelving at some point.
Cultural standards differ.
Now - obviously, there are political elements of censorship, and being in possession of 'banned materials' may be punishable etc. - and that form of censorship is 'not comparable'. But the cultural standards issue is.
It's not directly available. As in, you can't film on a US naval vessel or on a US military base without their support. Stock footage or footage from public spaces are allowed. You may also be able to get the support of another country or make use of mothballed or otherwise decommissioned systems if you have the right connections and money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Tide_(film)
Used footage of the real USS Alabama, used a decommissioned (and sold-off) submarine, and a French aircraft carrier.
>There are plenty of cultures (even in the US!) that would lump together queerness and incest and forms of sexual transgression.
And it's a not so great thing to do when the goal is safety and acceptance of the queer community.
>The author was raised in another culture and I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
I'm not ascribing any kind of malice or ill intent, just trying to highlight a (to some cultures, important!) distinction that was not made.
Correction: Xi and the CCP have their own culture and mores
The people, though, want to see The Big Bang Theory uncensored.
The people are different from Xi. They don't want the same things as he (except for the ones Xi has successfully brainwashed, or those who have a highly tribal brain).
> why should it allow that kind of soft projection
That sounds paranoid, I hope you don't mind. Reasoning in that way, almost all movies in the world wold be a "soft projection" and Nation State attack. But sometimes it's just jokes or reality and a good movie ... or would have been.
Another is censorship of LGBT books in certain states.
There's also a funny clip when Ross is trying to explain his ex-wife is a Lesbian. This part was censored, so you see Ross is about to say something, next his parents act like surprised. It actually made the scene funnier.
In I, Robot, a scene that showed in the European version did not show in the US version. It was a full body nudity shower scene and the point was to show you how extensive his robotic parts were. They had to find some other means to explain that to the audience in the US and it wasn't even a sexual scene. Just full nudity (of Will Smith, to be clear).
"Tentacle beasts" in, I think, Japan can do all kinds of sexual stuff that would be outrageous in the US and not shown here. I am not super familiar, so can't really elaborate.
We also have a long history of using "coded messages" to talk about racial stuff in the US. When Elvis first aired, he sounded so much like a Black musician compared to what was the norm for music at the time that they would talk about what high school he was from as code for "This is a White guy" because segregation was a thing, so naming his high school was signaling his race.
We have a history of censoring LGBTQ topics. I saw something once where they showed a deleted scene from an old black and white film about Roman history and the scene was a coded message about whether someone was gay or bisexual or something. They used some euphemism or other and it was considered too much and got cut.
Violence. I have become a fan of things that are careful in how they show violence, showing just enough to know something bad happened while sidestepping unnecessary gore. I think that's generally a good thing, but it is a form of censorship nonetheless.
https://www.bustle.com/p/what-does-the-plus-in-lgbtqia-mean-...
Though I'll admit the contentiousness of this designation, I don't think the intent of "+" was to include incest.
I'm sure you can find plenty of people in the west who believe stupid things. Does that mean that western countries are "removing pieces of reality"?
I think China in general is a good example of why the 1D, and even 2D political spectrum is a bullshit abstraction.
> authoritarian communist regimes were/are so far left that they kind of wrapped around and became conservative
Placing autocratic "communist" states on the same axis as modern feminist professors makes about as much sense as placing someone like Peter Theil on the same axis as Hitler, in both cases one would have literally killed the other.
One doesn't go from tolerating gay people to persecuting gay people the more "left" they are.
> Stalin was very prudish about sex, so maybe they just don't fit into the same political spectrum
Or maybe tolerance of gay people and "leftness" are actually completely separate variables that we only lump together because we're trying to project our modern ideologies onto historical figures
I read a scifi where digital personality-recordings became popular for various office/industrial applications. Sorta like an AI, but human. They were used for censorship. The remedy for ideological contamination? Full reboot every morning.
Yeah, the show isn't that funny.
>For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken") plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats, and the “passing off” remark implies that the Chinese restaurant owners are deceptive and would immorally and illegally serve their guests a different kind of meat than advertised. I can definitely see how that joke would be considered offensive.
I hadn't considered the cat/dog meat angle, thank you for the perspective. In that case, I'd probably cut it too. I was thinking more of chicken nuggets, where a dozen birds are liquified and poured into a mold.
Like if you ordered the pork and was served a hotdog, the "passing off as" bit would still work, you know?
I despise Chinese censorship, but I would support the Chinese government blocking The Big Bang Theory purely on the grounds that it stinks.
There isn't any obvious correlation between left wing economics and social progressiveness other than the coincidental alliance that has occurred in the US. Authoritarian communist regimes were, obviously, authoritarian.
And finally, "sex positivity" and dumb sitcom sexual jokes aren't really the same thing. They often have "man stupidly objectifies woman," "having same-gender parents is inherently funny," "man is an idiot because boobs," or if you go back to like the 80's, "man has poor understanding of consent" as a punchline. These aren't progressive ideas.
So in conclusion, no at every level.
Even blatant censorship like the Hayes Code or the Comics Code was never enforced by the government and therefore never in conflict with the 5th amendment. It was a voluntary "certification" manged by the industry itself, which just meant movies/comics not adhering to the code would not get a mainstream audience. So the code was implemented from the writing stage.
Some private companies vs entire undemocratically elected governments conversation aside…
What entire episode has been removed? I’m an office trivia buff and I’m not aware of this
When such misunderstandings are common here at HN, where people are a bit brighter that elsewhere (or so I think) -- then, such misunderstandings must be dangerously common outside HN. I wonder what consequences follow from that
On an individual level it is obvious that almost no one advocates for self-censorship. Most people are only enthusiastic about censorship when they are the censor and not the censored.
The communist dictatorship is a parasitic form of governance, but most cannot escape because they're stuck at a local maxima.
Did you see the recent video where the white guy dressed up in a poncho, big hat, and fake mustache and carried around maracas? He asked a bunch of white kids on a college campus if they thought his outfit was offensive to Mexicans, and they all said yes.
Then he went to the Mexican part of town and asked actual Mexicans, and they all said it was funny or that they liked that he was trying to honor their culture. Not one of them was offended.
So perhaps it would be good to ask a Chinese person if this joke offends them.
After reading that article that in various places calls out...
- "The plus is widely taken as a symbol to represent self-identifying members of the community who are not included in the LGBTQIA acronym"
- "The plus in LGBTQIA+ not only represents other sexual labels and identifiers, but also the experiences of those within the community."
besides the quote you already mentioned which includes the weasely "Some say", I personally don't really see as a strong of a consensus as your first comment suggests, but appreciate the perspective.
I'm sure they all know about Taiwan as well.
So mostly it's just keeping programming in terms of what they define as 'civil' - and - with the added element of pulling 'political censorship'.
It's about large audiences and averages not about the knowledge of a specific thing.
American censorship is honestly no better, it's just that the show was written with the specifics of American censorship in mind.
I really don't have a problem with services offering edited, family-friendly versions of media as long as its disclosed and there's a way to see the original.
In short, "bland", "un-subversive", "sensitive" are culturally relative terms.
So... you support government censorship of jokes that somebody, somewhere might be offended by?
What country/party has this position?
As a naive European, that sounds like you might be talking about the left in the USA that is still far to the right of the European idea of "left".
(Posting from Switzerland, where not only is sex work legal, it's regulated and taxed)
1) the acronym can only get so long because it becomes alphabet soup.
2) the default posture is to ally with groups that haven't been included yet.
Otherwise, the rest of censorship comes from social pressure; or someone with hurt feelings trying to twist the courts to enforce their will.
Nudity.. maybe. Sex? Most American shows I have seen just CANNOT STOP talking about sex. Sure, they won't display it, but it's all about it. Even TBBT.
(FWIW, comparing to Czech culture and TV series.)
Then you've got things like Full Metal Jacket, which I don't think is getting anyone to sign up for the forces.
Like Top Gun did well recently, but is one of the only movies I can think of in the past couple of years that actually portrayed the US military in a mostly positive light rather than the usual gamut which runs from ineffective bumbling ossfied and useless to straight up evil.
I'm just saying you can make whatever you want in the US and portray pretty much any idea or theme, that doesn't mean people will like it, but you can make it. In China there is no similar comparison they'll take your studio at best or imprison you at worst.
And not all racism / bias is equal. Maybe you are right that Chinese and Chinese-American people would not be offended by this, but it seems completely reasonable that they would be, and the onus on you would be to get data that they wouldn't. It really doesn't matter what liberal college students think at all, unless they happen to also be of Chinese or of Chinese descent (or they are southeast Asian, and tired of lazy racism that doesn't bother to distinguish such things).
edit: it was in fact PragerU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU) which is intended for entertainment. It should not be considered reliable or unedited.
In many ways the virtue signaling is doing the thing they are accusing others of - using a culture (that isn't theirs) as a weapon for social status.
China has no replacement generation, and they are facing internal turmoil within the next decade on a scale that has no historical precedent.
FWIW I have a few data points -- this is something my Chinese wife has literally said inside a Chinese restaurant, and some of her other family members have said similar things about not trusting that the food being served is what they said it was.
I pity that I didn't have the chance to visit the studios and be part of that laugh track :(
Some people just have no sense of humour and a fanatical devotion to a cause, they are useful if not very wise. This is one of those situations where they are useful.
I mean, I don't think it requires any sort of active attack, or paranoia about a malicious attack, to recognize that soft power is real and it can influence people's behavior even when nobody intended it. The Big Bang Theory, as a reflection of American culture, can work to perpetuate that culture and serve America's interests even without anybody in America or anybody working on the Big Bang Theory intending for that to happen.
Now, in the case of the Big Bang Theory, whether that is good or bad is somewhat up to whether you think American-culture-as-espoused-by-the-Big-Bang-Theory is good or not, but honestly as an American who generally thinks American culture is good about some stuff but not everything, the Big Bang Theory is pretty far down on the list of cultural exports I would consider good or important. There's a lot of stuff in the Big Bang Theory that I feel ashamed to be associated with, including some of the stuff mentioned in this article as cut, like the racist jokes about Chinese people.
Sorry, this "we're the same" retort is exhausting. The United States government does not employ censors to remove portions of shows before allowing them to air (or stream, whatever). The closest thing I can think of is DoD not giving access to a movie unless it paints Navy pilots in a certain light. Okay, fine. Not nearly the same as what this site is showing us.
Yes, we have cultural taboos, like any culture. Studios have more trouble presenting some viewpoints over others. Chappelle gets protested, that one episode of Community was memory-holed on Hulu (but not on Amazon!). We ban pornography on public airwaves (but not on streaming or cable or satellite, or Blueray).
If you compare and contrast the pervasiveness of censorship between China and the United States, the difference is huge.
When it comes to artistic freedom, the US is way better than China. Maybe you can say we can improve even more, sure. But that's a long way off from our censorship being "honestly no better".
The distinction between private and government censorship is increasingly irrelevant to consumers, as in heavily consolidated markets the end effect is the same.
I’d like to know how curious this would make non-HN people, and those living in more censored places.
My assumption is that they take it for granted and just continue to watch the show. It might be hard for them to even find the uncensored clips.
The audience reaction is useful feedback for the actors, but the laughter is canned.
That's the "beauty" of arbitrary censorship: they'll start to self-censor for fear of being butchered like this. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that they don't put into popular American media for fear that the censor board _might_ object.
The bit that actually makes the divs for each scene that was cut is here: https://github1s.com/the-pudding/censorship/blob/HEAD/src/co... , and the data is here: https://github1s.com/the-pudding/censorship/blob/HEAD/src/da...
Most people don't like being censored themselves, but don't confuse that for a moment with believing that most people want everything uncensored. For all public discourse in America constantly talks about free speech absolutism and the horrors of censorship, US TV has "decency" regulations and there's absolutely no mass movement to ensure that TV companies are not penalised for 'wardrobe malfunctions' and expletives are broadcast without bleeps. Why would people from a much more conservative culture where public discourse attaches no value to free speech but stresses paternalism and patriotism instead be so keen on hearing alleged rudeness about their country?
The US government hasn't been able to resist censorship entirely. Comedians have been arrested for "obscenity". The FCC will happily go after certain violations in TV and radio. The US government has also censored news broadcasts and journalists.
Bush in particular was very aggressive in censoring the news coverage of his war. Most notably, the flag-draped coffins of dead American soldiers were banned from TV news. During the Regan administration the Justice Department also briefly banned the Canadian film "If You Love This Planet" for being "foreign political propaganda".
One is a private company (either first or third-party) offering a censored version of a piece of media and the other is the government redacting things from a document that would normally not be released at all (at this stage) and the redactions were specifically done to prevent witnesses tampering or similar tactics by the accused.
To call those "similar" is just absurd.
It's not possible to "magically" create several hundred million young people, communism or no, to "fix it". So what do you do?
So the ones that seem "anti-Military" are really "anti-traitors-in-the-Military," and/or the healthy kind of self-criticism.
For example, during the AIDs epidemic, Reagan used his social and political power to effectively ban the mention of that word on primetime television (remember, not only was he the president of the United States, he was also once the president of the Screen Actors Guild). Not even Will And Grace, a 1998 sitcom about a gay couple, was allowed to mention AIDs or HIV at all in its 11 season run!
He's also the reason movies in the 80s got away with so much more than they did even in the 90s, when cultural values themselves hadn't changed that much comparatively. the MPAA board was completely sized up, what was allowed to be said on TV was changed, and seemingly arbitrary rules put in place ("Fuck" can be said only once in a PG-13 movie or once-an-episode in certain network shows ONLY if it's non-sexual). This is why you have classic kids movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, PG) that if they were re-released today would be either R or possibly not even allowed to be shown a wide release in theaters.
And you know, now we have the whole "banned books" things in (my home state of) Texas, Florida, etc, which almost exclusively censors books with deal with LGBTQ and race issues from even being available in a library to be checked out by a curious student on their own time (including, in a Dallas suburb and throughout Virginia, Anne Frank's Diary).
That would be the end-state of what inevitably happens when you adopt leftist policies.
What? Yes it does - the FCC has been doing this for a half-century at least.
Yes. The past 20 years or so the media ecosystems have been trying to do exactly that, at least in the US where I live. Remove the bits they don't like, and invent out of whole cloth replacement bits.
It's CBS. The channel for old people on a medium for old people.
>I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.
Yes, and? Everyone thinks they like 'irreverent' comedy until it violates the wrong proprieties. "On the way out of fashion" is a flavor of subversive comedy, often targeted at different audiences than "on the way into fashion" flavor of subversive comedy.
The people old enough to watch CBS are from a generation where they and their friends can exchange jokes at the expense of eachother's lineal stereotypes without it being inherently toxic. I just let them have their laughs, it seems pretty harmless.
Edit: it seems it's actually relatively easy to find jokes that are genuinely offensive and degrading in PG rated films. Why that's considered less potentially harmful to kids than showing sex between consenting adults I honestly don't know.
There's a big difference between using the rule of law to shape what can and cannot be said or sold or published. Compared to different private publishers/agents/etc deciding what they wish to do. The marketplace solves the latter problem - and it has!
People are getting caught up in the "chicken" joke, but if you read the read of the article you'll see that crime dramas had to be re-shot so the "side of justice" wins in the end.
What kind of anodyne cultural bullshit is that? Only the good guys win - BY STATE LAW.
So absolutely not, the US and China are not even remotely the same. To suggest so is so ridiculous offensive it opens one up to accusations that they are a Chinese sock puppet... and it's a totally reasonable opinion to hold!
An individual's rights should have nothing to do with the people who happen to surround them and what they happen to think.
If different countries allow different things, that would mean that what a person is allowed to do would depend on where they happen to live, which is usually close to where they happened to be born. That doesn't make any sense to me- the lottery of birth should have no impact on one's rights.
The 100 most popular movies produced in China are completely fine to stream in the US. Not a single scene or phrase is removed by our government before allowing us to watch them. Same with music, TV, books, and art.
The reverse is not even close. Can you give me a Western example that is analogous to Tank Man, or to Winnie the Pooh?
I'm not sure what your "worth the hassle" is about, they rented the same sound stage for YEARS to record the show. They're hardly tearing it down and setting it up daily!
> We ban pornography on public airwaves (but not on streaming or cable or satellite, or Blueray).
And the FCC has a very narrow scope. I also happen to disagree with their prudishness (Janet Jackson, 2003). It does not back the argument that we're "honestly no better".
For example, the Transformers movies: https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/
The general concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_compl...
The reality is most Americans have someone like that in their family. Read the rest of the scene: Leonard is distinctly uncomfortable, tries to politely correct the wordage, the comment is lost and the originator moves on.
In any case, are you saying that... words that offend you should be removed from media? You know, like... some kind of... woke person who is really sensitive to racism?
Is it actually "harmful" though? People are still going to Chinese restaurants as far as I know. The "harmful" adjective is being thrown around a lot, but it's never been very clear to me there is actual harm. People will cite things such as "violence against Asian-Americans has been on the increase!", but that seems entirely disconnected from some jokes in some sitcom.
(I don't know if your last, pro-censorship line was a joke, but if so, it was a lame one. But I'm against censoring or deleting it, though.)
Do you honestly think that America & the West have integrity with the Constitution & the spirit of the Founders? If you do, boy do I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
However, I don't see much diff between that and joking how incestuous Southerners might be or how they might eat squirrels.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_the_United_...
The global south & many westerners are tired of the lectures coming from the NeoLiberal Democracies & it's easy for them to identify a long list of hypocrisy.
This is why, in a sane society, liberal arts students are not consulted for their wisdom.
Two American credit card companies have an insane amount of say on the shape of the content on the internet. Beyond that, small special interest groups have time and time again successfully lobbyied for censorship that is far beyond what the majority thinks is reasonable.
"Will you be able to arrange for the population to be able to be fed, clothed, housed, and given medical care?"
The government of China does not do any of these things. China, despite their lip-service to historical Communist revolution, has some the worst social programs in the world.
I think it's pointless to try an appease everyone. People should make comedy for their audiences and those who don't find it funny are free to ignore it. Just like, I think people should write sci-fi or thrillers for their audiences, rather than for everyone.
By the way, here's the (uncensored) leaks from Julian: https://wikileaks.org/afg/
Edward Snowden really exposed the NSA almost 10 years ago. Yet I can still access the PowerPoints and other materials he leaked. They're on Wikipedia! That's like, the opposite of censored. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM)
Can you make a statement about Tank Man, or Xi's resemblance to Winnie the Pooh, or Peng Shuai and her accusations? Do it on WeChat. Let me know how that goes.
(reading that again I discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Film_Corp._v._Industria... ; the idea that movies were not counted as free speech for several decades in the US may come as a surprise to other HN readers)
Tell me, when Jimmy Kimmels producers go out on Hollywood Boulevard and find that not even one person can point to a country other than America on map (https://youtu.be/kRh1zXFKC_o) - do you think that’s real too? Or is that selectively edited for laughs?
Are you saying that a production company not airing craziness is the same as being arrested for calling your leader a cartoon bear? Is that the equivalency I'm supposed to be drawing? (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/tweets-01232020164342...)
The reason corporations follow the cartel's rules are financial agreements and the fear of PR backlash for not letting parents outsource parenting.
That same joke is made about a lot of food chains, especially fast food, like McDonald's. Replace chicken with beef and you have half of all the jokes ever made about Taco Bell (with the other half being poo jokes).
> I don't think there are any sensible "defaults" for human cultures.
But, you seem to think a lack of aversion to talking about sex to be a default? To your question, I've known many people whom are not practicing any religion and yet have an aversion to sexual discussion, within a population that has a lack thereof. There are many such topics that some feel are not keeping with decorum to be discussed openly and widely - and without religion being involved. Let's say in China there is a general aversion to sexual discussion. What will be your explanation given lack of puritanical religion?
> But I wouldn't expect aversion to talking any sex to arise spontaneously among a population
I don't see spontaneity to be relevant here.
Because it promotes social stability ? As much as I dislike defending religion - those values produced the most stable societies through history
And it's funny you ask about Kimmel, because I actually know the person who did those bits (she was the offscreen voice for the first few years and is actually the interviewer in this video). She said that while it was edited, they didn't have to edit it much, because about 80% of the people really were that dumb.
I genuinely don't know, that's why I asked. Presumably it's served some sort of purpose at some point. Or maybe, as another poster suggested, it was an trait borrowed from other cultures where puritanical religion did have an influence.
It is a common problem, if your job is to inspect something and you find nothing wrong, how do you show that you did your job?
Here is an anecdote: in the game "Battle Chess", the graphists were quite happy with how their work turned out, but they knew it will be reviewed, and the reviewers will have to say something. So they added a small duck going around the queen piece, in a way that was easy to remove. As planned, reviewers said "everything is fine, but remove the duck", which they did, leaving the original design intact.
(The early Soviet Union moved from abolishing marriage in favour of cohabitation to actively promoting it; the official stance on abortion, IIRC, flipped several times; and while the equilibrium was extremely prudish—“there is no sex in the USSR”—the adult literacy campaign of the first decade was not above commissioning and printing a literal porn ABC if it got the job done.)
I mean, they are totalitarian governments, they are defined by asserting control over the totality of people’s lives. But the fixation on sex, in particular, seems to go beyond that, and yet it’s fairly universal among them.
(If you have read Orwell and Zamjatin [which, let’s be honest, are nearly the same book] but not Moscow 2042, I highly recommend picking that up as well—the bizarre sexual Zeitgeist of the ripe Soviet state is much more vivid there than in the “serious” dystopian works. Though I don’t really know if it’s readable without at least an extensive set of footnotes, and given that it’s supposed to be bitterly funny that might be missing the point.)
Most channels not restricted by those rules (subscription cable & satellite) set in-house standards on content for commercial reasons. And of the broadcasters that are covered by the regulation, they are the old stodgy networks and never choose to get near the boundaries.
Content providers are censored by streaming providers for political reasons. Hate speech laws in England & Europe criminalizes (jail time) people for saying the wrong things about protected political groups.
Banks & the Canadian government have criminalized people donating to the Trucker protest. The protest leaders are still held in detention. Also journalists have doxxed the people who donate.
January 6th protesters are help in prison & finances ruined by having to fight a federal case for attending a protest. And if you want to call it an insurrection to excuse the authoritarian response China does the same against people who protests there.
Homosexuality actually became less tolerated in the 19th and 20th century through Western influence. Now the West has done an about face in the span of one or two generations and China is comparatively less tolerant.
All this to say that it's difficult to quantify since
- assigning a teleological direction to social mores is perilous at best
- comparing entire societies means you overlook specific cases that often aren't even evaluated along the same axis
- Societies ebb and flow at unpredictable rates and with meandering paths and influence each other in often bizarre ways
Social progress is inherently subjective (because progress in one value system is actually a regression in a different value system), and the observer always grounds their claim of 'behind' or 'ahead' in their culture's viewpoint.
I don't know the right answer, but I definitely think it would be understandable if someone didn't appreciate that joke. And worst of all, it's just in service of the cheapest, blandest kind of humor. The writers should be ashamed of such lazy work, regardless of bigger issues. "Would it work without a laugh track" clearly fails badly here, as it does pretty frequently in TBBT.
> Broadcasting obscene content is prohibited by law at all times of the day. Indecent and profane content are prohibited on broadcast TV and radio between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.
> Obscene content does not have protection by the First Amendment. For content to be ruled obscene, it must meet a three-pronged test established by the Supreme Court: It must appeal to an average person's prurient interest; depict or describe sexual conduct in a "patently offensive" way; and, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
via [https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr....]
Christ in the Original Star Trek run CBS had a censor employed on set for an episode where a character wore a risky outfit to make sure no nipples popped out. That isn't different to this Chinese company making sure their shows meet the restrictions of the Chinese authority.
Your weird puritan country will air a show where a character shoots someone with a gun in the street, in your copaganda shows, but god forbid one of them gets a tit out whilst they do it.
That's untrue. A trivial example is porn involving 17 year olds.
It's interesting how politically charged words mutate over time.
Men, in general, really like having their genes carried on. Men, in general, really hate wondering if a child is theirs or not.
Societies of n>100s. By tabooing sex you reduce promiscuous behaviour - which stabilises society. I don't really see how this would be controversial. Modern social values have unambiguously shown that they lead to a population decline. Huge difference being that technology makes us less reliant on population count for stability (hopefully).
Chinese folks being weary of restaurants with swapping ingredients for lower tier is not comparable to assuming chicken being swapped for cat, which is a tired joke. Usually reserved for pricer seafood, hence pick your victim tanks. Many restaurants do similar type of substitute shenangians, like I'm pretty sure the hipster burger joing is not serving genuine kobe beef patty for $15, but they're also not serving ground chihuahua either. Like even in PRC you're worried about things like gutter oil at a hole in a wall joint versus slightly cheaper grade of sea cucumber at a fancy restaurant. Even during the pork crisis, no one was particularly concerned that restaurants were feeding them cat/dogs instead.
E: relate back to your parent comment, there's somethigns like cultural appropriation that most (especially older gen) Chinese don't care about, i.e. they thumbs up for white girls wearing qipao.
Of course our incarceration rate now has nearly tripled to 640/100K, so thank God they're not following us.
Yes, not government censorship, but it’s almost worse when a private, unaccountable, entity is imposing its own moral values, especially when they reach the size that Blockbuster did during its heyday.
I don’t actually think the answers to these questions disprove your statement, because I have a painful lack of knowledge as to what those answers actually are. But I do feel that those answers need to be given before an argument such as yours can make sense.
(Granted, a trait that promotes societal stability can become common even if stability isn’t actually good, so the last question is not as important as the others. A dystopian equilibrium is still an equilibrium.)
Live audience laughter completely changes the timing for 3-camera sitcoms, because the actors have to wait for it to finish. Setting up audio recording for the audience is trivial.
You’re raising a point about RF broadcast of obscene content. That’s a tiny slice of available media. What China is censoring is being done as completely as they can muster. What the FCC censors is narrowed down to airwave broadcasts.
Surely you can see that there’s a difference here, right?
Tank Man is prohibited completely. Not just over a certain delivery method, during certain times of day.
The glitches serve to remind them daily that their government is manipulating them.
The dilemma that China's leaders have is that they need an educated workforce, capable of logical and critical thinking, but they can't stop that workforce thinking critically outside work.
That's not exactly right. Blockbuster simply had a policy not to carry X-rated films that became a no NC-17 rated films when the rating changed.
The video distributor of Bad Lieutenant created an R rated version of the film. The end result is still a wrecked/censored version of the movie, but it wasn't Blockbuster doing the silent editing. It is the choice of the film maker/studio/distributor to get the extra money from Blockbuster.
There is also a lot of censoring in the "western" world.
It's also mostly justified by the exact same "reasons" like the ones mentioned in that blog post. Especial the "but the children" "argument" is used the whole time. And if that gets boring than it's "terrorism". Than again "the children".
Also there are a lot of things one can't publicity say for political reasons.
In Germany for example most people know: If you want to watch some more "controversial" movies, or play uncensored games you need to get them on the gray or black market. The German versions are very often heavily censored, or there is just no German version at all because the content is outright verboten.
Also communication online gets censored. It's impossible by now to say some (still) completely "legal" but "not politically correct" things online especially around mainstream media.
The censorship in the EU gets also stronger every year. Now they banned "dangerous" foreign media… Actually without any grounding in established law. But who needs laws? It will take as always many many years until some judge will have the last saying and declare the things the government did as illegal. But than the game will just start again, also as always: Making illegal "laws" takes weeks. Getting rid of them takes decades. Then they change the wording, and you need to sue through all instance form the beginning. Ad nauseam.
That doesn't mean the underlying argument they propose can't be defended, just that the videos have no explanatory power whatsoever.
Internally produced TV in China has been censored for portraying "effeminate men".[3] The CCP has also, er, "encouraged", women to spend less time on social media and shopping. Internally the CCP says members must have three children.[4]
1. Here is military age population: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/15-49...
2. Here is fertility rate. The green line is "replacement", i.e. enough for a stable population: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...
3. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033687586/china-ban-effemina...
1. VidAngel purchases a bunch of Blu-ray discs and stores them in a warehouse
2. Tag all the content of a film and create filters so the user can, for example, filter out all sex and violence but leave in vulgarity
3. User "purchases" a Blu-ray for $20 (!!) and VidAngel says, "since we now know you're the owner of this copy sitting in the warehouse, we'll stream it to you right now instead of going to the bother of mailing it out" (This part legally qualified as a "performance", which was their big mistake.)
4. When user is done watching the film, VidAngel automatically buys back the Blu-ray – still sitting in their warehouse – for $19.
So users could essentially stream any film they want (with optional self-selected censorship) for only $1 per viewing. Of course they get a flood of users since they're the cheapest shop in town, and of course since what they were doing was illegal they got taken to court and had to shut down 90% of their business.
And then, they wrote an endless tream of publicity saying, "Big media doesn't want to give you the right to skip nudity and violence in your own home! Think of the children! They want to force their values on you!" Yeah, I don't think the film-makers loved the censorship platform, but it was the $1 performances that really got them riled up.
I don't believe that one bit. Just because they have an audience, doesn't mean they don't edit the laugh track. And just because the laugh happened in real time, it doesn't mean it's authentic.
Even for live TV shows, they prod the audience into laughing. This is made clear when they laugh at awkward times, when nothing funny is being said.
I see to your point, the joke leans to imply that Chinese people will lie about the ingredients served in their restaurants to save some money.
This stereotype, however, is predominant amongst Chinese people in China. This joke would fit right in on any Chinese TV show, questioning the legitimacy of the meat at a cheap restaurant is a joke older than the country. This may be why the author calls it "harmless".
It would be the equivalent of a Chinese sitcom where a character might suggest that visit a Texas Barbecue you might get shot by some revolver-wielding cowboy. I don't think many Americans would take offense.
But as the author mentions, strict self censorship amongst broadcasters has effectively cut all scenes that mention "China" or "Chinese" just to be safe.
The scale isn't black and white with China being terrible and USA being great here, it's a sliding scale of shitness, with one being a 4/10 and the other 9/10, but the 4/10 pretends to be a 0/10 and proports "free speech for all. Home of the Free world. The government can't tell you what you can say and do." and the other doesn't pretend it is.
Are you referring to the UK version of the 1987 animated "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" TV series? I never realized it was considered controversial! [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles_(...
It's not illegal to depict the Prophet, it's religious courtesy. (Also, it might interfere with profit (no pun intended.))
> 1. Here is military age population: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/15-49...
I've read that's one factor that makes the 2020s particularly dangerous: it's peak Chinese demographics and a period of Western military weakness (b/c there's a pent up need for long term investment/replenishment, because the War on Terror shifted budgets towards short-term operations). There's a now-or-never factor if China wants to take Taiwan by force.
Though to be fair, the political ideas that say that is a problem are pretty Western and (relatively) recent.
Here is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLdobKqTPB0
I personally tire of this pattern:
1. Article submitted to an international forum about X country doing Y bad thing
2. "Well the USA is just as bad, they also did/doing/will do Y bad thing"
Well yes, that is true, but people are voting up the submission because they found that X-doing-Y-today was interesting and don't care to rehash the history of the US every single time. YES the US has plenty of blemishes in its history. Yes it has censored, warred, raped, extorted, and imprisoned. Yes the US persists in directly doing some of those today, and through malice or ineptitude it fails to prevent others.
But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.
One of my favorite moments was watching Kick Ass in a sneak preview. No one knew which movie would be shown and Kick Ass starts with a shock moment of a guy shooting a little girl with a revolver. One guy in the back started laughing so hard and it was so inappropriate that the whole theater burst into laughter.
Doing a bit of post production on the real laughter doesn't make it canned laughter.
I can totally see why that’d be the default, simply because sex is such a charged act in any culture. Purely biologically: it’s a very vulnerable act and has tons of “political/social implications” in a social species. Who you have sex with and be that vulnerable with signals your “allegiance” in a sense.
Even chimps have taboos and social rules around sex for this reason. Who you have sex (or don’t have sex) with decides who’s in charge, who you support, what your clique is, and so on. A chimp caught having sex with the wrong chimp might be attacked.
In other contexts on sites like this, "do [common thing] but on a computer" patents get mocked and derided because "but on a computer" is seen as a farce, not a fundamental difference from the [common thing].
Anyway, I guess the mormons could get around this and achieve their desired effect by instead selling DVD players with a subscription to a service that distributes EDL files; instructions to the DVD player about which parts of movies should be skipped.
The argument wasn't even made that it was a violation of the first amendment (which would have only applied to laws by Congress, not states). The argument was more about things like whether it was a violation of interstate commerce to have to have different versions of a movie for different states. They did argue that it violated the Ohio state constitutional right to free speech.
“Honestly no better”
That’s what set me off, because it so obviously not true. It’s better in the US. Not perfect. But definitely better.
I.e. “stop subscribing to the censored service and back any company with the means and intent to stream the originals and everyone wins” as opposed to “vote and/or overthrow the dictatorship or die trying and possibly nobody wins”.
Huh, you weren't kidding. Banned and censored in the UK, banned in Canada, Germany, and several US states... because of Bruce Lee? Bizarre.
In particular, you can't just write up your own legal fictions and expect them to be honored. It would seem the developers in the story above learned this lesson the hard way.
I felt this pull at university, when I spent a brief time flirting with the art society. everyone there had these kinds of values, and it would have made fitting in significantly easier if I had vocally agreed with them. this would have been especially tempting if I was (more) lonely and desperate for company, as many people are
as it was I mostly just kept quiet or carefully found points of agreement. I suspect if I was the type of person to give in to this zeitgeist, and not particularly question my beliefs, it could easily have developed into something real without any need for narcissistic tendencies
Of course they did. PRC is country that skews old and conservative. Half the reason behind media crack down are cantankerous parents and grand parents telling governments they don't want loose western morals spoiling impressionable minds. Outside of western reporting, PRC libtards are relatively extinct compared to vast amount numbers of papa / grandpa wang who don't want to accidentally watch tits n ass or have uncomfortable imported culture war talks with their live-in kids. The only aggregious censorship that lowkey half of the population wants to get rid of is pornography but that's an Asian thing (also guess which half). There are many of policies easily explained by CCP having to appease the people where feasible because their legitimacy depends on it, unlike "democratic" systems where competing parties bunts the responsiblity to the next guy. Or that fractous multi-cultural societies make cultural wars different political party has idpol positions staked very difficult to win. In China, CCP gets pulse on mass culture and enforces it. Yes they can also manufacture identity for political ends but for something like imported mass media, much simpler/easier/pragmatic to embrace opinion of a billion conservative prudes.
I don't see one being necessarily linked to the other. Murder and violence are "taboos" yet adults talk about them all the time. Especially in TV shows.
> Having sex is taboo because if women have sex with more than one man
I don't see the link. If having sex with multiple men was taboo, then discussing or having sex with a single man would not necessarily be taboo.
Your argument also seems to be about unprotected sex, the kind which can lead to kids. So is protected sex not taboo, then?
It is affirming the stereotype Indian males lack confidence with women. Raj can’t speak with women without the use of alcohol, the show constantly mocks his accent, worshipping of cows etc.
I don't think it implies that, but to be honest, the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad. It's not spelled out, exactly, but that's how I read many comments here.
It may be just me, but that' s the vibe I get from HN in relation to China.
> But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.
I think this is unfair. I also don't think you truly think people asking about US behavior here are Chinese agents. That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-walmart-china/wal-mart-re...
> Wal-Mart will reimburse customers who bought the tainted “Five Spice” donkey meat and is helping local food and industry agencies in eastern Shandong province investigate its Chinese supplier... The Shandong Food and Drug Administration earlier said the product contained fox meat.
Isn't PragerU a far right site know for promoting bizarre things? I'd would definitely call it "unreliable".
INFORMAL
noun
1. BRITISH an embarrassing mistake. "the boob was spotted by a security expert at the show"
2. NORTH AMERICAN a foolish or stupid person. "why was that boob given a key investigation?"
plenty of pairs of both on American sitcoms!
Weak.
> It is affirming the stereotype Indian males
Is your claim that there are no Indian males who lack confidence with women? Or that there are no nerdy, geeky men who lack confidence with women?
What's an example of the show mocking his accent? You do understand that's his normal speaking voice, I hope. Kunal Nayyar (the actor) grew up in India.
https://www.peacocktv.com/watch-online/tv/the-office/4902514...
You need to purchase rights to display the video in public. No one can stop you from renting out the tape. You already possess the right to rent out your own property.
[1]: The Telegraph: BBC makes 'woke cuts' to archives, including Dad's Army https://archive.is/Y5nJw
That's pretty messed up ngl.
Oprah used to cover sex topics all the time.
IIRC, they then hatched a scheme where the retail availability of new movies on VHS would be restricted at least for a time, forcing video rental shops to pay more for copies of popular new movies.
The author is says that chinese bots are downvoting it. It may or may not be true.
Aren't all the male characters in the show this way?
Is the show doing "Character who is Indian male lacks confidence with women" ?
Or is it doing "Character lacks confidence with women because he's an Indian male"?
There's a world of difference.
I am not sure whether you are Indian or not, but if you fail to see why many Indians consider this portrayal problematic then we really need more anti-racism training in this country.
Yes, I am sure there are Indian men who lack confidence with women, but given India is 1.5 billion strong, I am sure men who are confident outnumber Raj Kuthrapalli types.
The FCC can and does regulate over‐the‐air broadcasts to a stricter standard, thanks to its exclusive authority over the inherently limited wireless spectrum. It restricts not just obscenity, but indecency (explicit sex) and profanity (bad language). However, this power does not extend to (e.g.) cable TV, which is not broadcast over the publicly owned airwaves.
The US really does generally have stronger free speech protection than the rest of the developed world. There is no equivalent in the US to a work being “refused classification” as seen in Commonwealth countries. The First Amendment would prohibit it. Some retailers won’t sell unrated or X‐rated films or AO‐rated games, but others can, because the ratings systems are formed by industry groups and are not compulsory.
When the Christchurch shooting happened, the New Zealand government banned both the shooter’s manifesto and the livestreamed video, making them illegal to possess or distribute. I doubt such a thing could happen in the US. (I remember my surprise that NZ actually has a government office named “Chief Censor.”)
Not when it comes to his accent. It's wholly unsurprising that someone who grew up in India speaks English with an Indian accent. That isn't "mocking" his accent. That's just what his accent is.
> I am not sure whether you are Indian or not, but if you fail to see
Weak. If you can't demonstrate where this supposed racism is in the show then I'd suggest you need to start considering the very real possibility that it's not there.
> Yes, I am sure there are Indian men who lack confidence with women
Well, there's some small progress.
The only ignorance and bigotry that's been exposed here would appear to be your own. Work on that.
On this, Dragon Ball is heavily edited too
So, as a German, should I be offended because of the squirrel/rabbit thing? Should Texans be offended? What about the career over partner theme, is that insensible to Germans divorcing due to career-induced burnouts?
No, it's just a joke. I don't believe anyone would think we ate squirrel, and I don't believe Texans do. (However, rabbit is in fact eaten around here. It's also a meat in France (who are famous for their cuisine) and... China. Says the Internet. But around here rabbit is more a delicacy, often for Easter or other special occasions; personally I think I haven't eaten rabbit meat in nearly a decade. Also, the rabbits-for-eating are large animals, not bunnys. Those are adored and loved as pets).
You can't buy a DVD and charge tickets to see the DVD played by you. You can't stream the DVD's contents over the Internet. But you can absolutely rent the DVD itself.
When I was young my cousin had a VHS of "Temple of Doom" recorded from the BBC. We didn't know this was the censored version. So there was this scene where the priest puts his fingers on top of the chest of the victim, and then next scene they lowered the victim into the pit.
We watched that movie a few times.
Needless to say, it scared the shit out of me when I saw that movie again another time, but all of a sudden his had went straight into the chest! :o
To put it in the Supreme Court's exact words: "Given Aereo’s overwhelming likeness to the cable companies targeted by the 1976 amendments, this sole technological difference between Aereo and traditional cable companies does not make a critical difference here."
(not just human) Males need to be sure of paternity. Males who don't mind whose children they are raising aren't well selected for. This should be apparent to anyone who has ever watched a nature documentary. Humans are simply not that different.
There are loads of sensible "defaults" for human cultures. Aversion and disgust at the practices of unfamiliar out-groups is one - keeps us from getting their diseases. Practices assuring paternity are another - males that are indifferent to who's children they raise aren't very well selected for. Risk aversion in, and preference for protection of, child-bearing females by the group is a third - harm to these females disproportionately affects the ability of the group to reproduce and pass its genes. There are many, many others, and we have many of them in common with our animal relatives.
I didn't made any argument up to now. I've asked for the moral of that blog post in the light of the fact that there is also quite some censorship elsewhere in the world.
Sure, Chinese censorship is bad (and the examples given are partly laughable in my opinion). But censorship is bad in general. This applies the same to for example the censorship we have in the EU. (And no, it's not "only some Nazi things").
Also it's a notable fact that the "justifications" given for our censorship are the exact same as the reasons given in, say, China (or likely elsewhere).
The concrete censored content may differ, but behind that is the exact same line of reasoning: That there is "inappropriate" content the people need to be shielded from.
That motivation is the part that is questionable at least. (Now I've made an argument).
Actually this reveals a lot in which way governments think about the population, no matter the country.
Still there seems to be a lot of black and white thinking in the line of "But we are the good ones, we have reasons, but just look what the bad ones do". I refuse to take part in this narrative. The world isn't as simple as that.
Anyway, since it's VHS release you can buy the uncut version legally, and sellers are allowed to advert for it. It is rated as suitable from the age of 6 (FSK 6) since 2005. It simply wasn't that successful in Germany to begin with.
Sources (all German): https://www.schnittberichte.com/special.php?ID=176&Seite=6 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meine_Lieder_%E2%80%93_meine_T...
That's the difference with democracy. In a democracy, the leaders have to explain themselves to the entire public. Also in a democracy, you can criticize governmental decisions, which might lead to better solutions, or even prevent them.
The solution? Make your country attractive for young Indian (and other) immigrants. Or just make the older generation "disappear". Communist seem to be especially well trained in letting people disappear.
But why does the Chinese government need that kind of control?
The quality is improving, though. A decade ago, there was "Sky Fighters", which is China's version of "Top Gun". That was produced by a film unit of the People's Liberation Army, and it's as heavy-handed as you might expect.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Practices_for_Televisi...
Having watch the show, the show never mocks his wealth but his dependence on his parents wealth (and even has an arc where he strives to be independent for it).
“We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries. The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than ‘the very existence of broadcast television as we know it’ is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own.… We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development. Hence, the proper course is not to bend and twist the Act’s terms in an effort to produce a just outcome, but to apply the law as it stands…”
Maybe my thinking is misguided, but this is exactly what I think. China has an abundance of labor and a strong appetite to perform just such tasks.
> That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.
It's not like you have to "infiltrate" anything here, it's an open forum and China would need to do little more than pay 2 people to take rotating shifts and they have essentially full coverage to counter any content critical of the country.
Since the readership of HN likely holds much more power than the average American, I'd think China silly to not make that investment.
1. Physically isolating females from males.
2. Conditioning females so they won't seek these opportunities.
In combination, these factors seem to taboo any discussion of sex at all in mixed male/female company. It seems our standards for what is "family friendly" grows out of these taboos. You'll notice that in exclusively male company discussing sex is generally much less taboo.
With the obviously problematic morality aside, this does seem like the most effective approach to assuring paternity, particularly in small, low-tech, tribal groups.
Edit: There's also the need to limit sexual violence, which also seems to be a factor in tabooing discussion of sex in mixed company.
Where social acceptance brings people “out of the closet” and the percentage stabilizes.
I hope we didn't reach Chines levels by now, and that there is still hope.
But yes, we're working hard on that and "like" to reach their level soonish. Our variant of the Ministry of Truth gets shaped out a little more with every year. Since the so called "Netzwerkdurchsuchungsgesetz"¹ we've got really close I guess. But there's already more coming: "Chatkontrolle"²…
> […] but companies aren't stooping to Germany.
Well, we're the country that had had shooter games with green blood for years, because reasons (and companies obeyed). Also there are of course special versions of movies, extra for the German market, that are "reworked" here and there to pass the censors. Freedom of speech and freedom of art have strict limits, you know… Something something, because Nazis. (The above mentioned laws get actually partly justified "because Nazis"; but judge for yourself).
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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act
>> The Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, NetzDG; German: Gesetz zur Verbesserung der Rechtsdurchsetzung in sozialen Netzwerken), also known colloquially as the Facebook Act (Facebook-Gesetz), is a German law that was passed in the Bundestag that officially aims to combating fake news, hate speech and misinformation online.
>> The Act obligates social media platforms with over 2 million users to remove "clearly illegal" content within 24 hours and all illegal content within 7 days of it being posted, or face a maximum fine of 50 million Euros. The deleted content must be stored for at least 10 weeks afterwards, and platforms must submit transparency reports on dealing with illegal content every six months. It was passed by the Bundestag in June 2017 and took full effect in January 2018.
>> The law has been criticised both locally and internationally by politicians, human rights groups, journalists and academics for incentivising social media platforms to pre-emptively censor valid and lawful expression, and making them the arbiter of what constitutes free expression and curtailing freedom of speech in Germany.
Of course it's only against "fake news, hate speech and misinformation online". Exactly like the laws in China…
Just for fun: Compare with the German Wikipedia page. Maybe you notice something. ;-)
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² https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-co...
>> The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time messaging and chat control and the end of secrecy of digital correspondence.
>> Other consequences of the proposal are ineffective network blocking, screening of person cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification leading to the end of anonymous communication, censorship in Appstores and the paternalism and exclusion of minors in the digital world.
They also care for Russia! That is friendship!
https://www.google.com/search?q=%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%...
> In Deutschland wurde der Film zunächst in einer stark gekürzten Fassung gezeigt, in der sämtliche Bezüge auf den Nationalsozialismus fehlten und der Film mit der Hochzeit Marias endet und nicht – wie in der Originalfassung – mit der Flucht der Trapp-Familie aus Österreich.
[eng]:
> In Germany, the film was initially shown in a heavily edited version, in which all references to National Socialism were removed and the film ends with Maria's wedding, and not—as in the original version—with the Trapp family's escape from Austria.
LOL, sounds even more scary than the Chinese version of Fight Club!
I'm a slav and from the balkans, we're either portrayed as tracksuit wearing thugs, drunks or in some relation to the balkan wars. So what?
We even have our own comedy tv series playing with the stereotypes (eg. Kursadzije), where all the stereotypes are used all the time (serbs and croats have historic "issues", montenegrins are lazy, bosnians are stupid and slovenians are femboys)... people like this, they laugh at this, and watch it, in all of the mentioned countries and wider.
Somehow it's always "someone else" that gets offended... same for 2balkan2you subreddit, where a (probably american) admin doesn't get the difference between romanians and roma/gypsy people.
Even with games... stuff like gta 4 just makes people trying to guess what Niko tried to say, because his serbian/serbocroatian accent/pronounciation is horrible in the game.
Which is still lame but very easy to believe
My guess is that it is a result of valuing austerity and stoicism and resisting temptations, which I suspect are quite important in confucianism.
The only reason rentals worked was because of the physical constraints that limited the distribution of each copy. Take that away, what you're left with is just thinly veiled copyright abolishment.
I, as a citizen and a consumer, want to know what rights I have when I purchase a product. The free market depends on perfect information when making purchasing decisions, and this is an area that is vague as all heck. If the rights the sellers of these movies claim I have matched the minimum guaranteed by law (or were even a super-set) then it would be clear. But they continue to claim I would get fewer rights than they are legally obligated to provide (technically playing it is a copyright violation according to their terms, never mind format shifting). They actually have it so ambiguous that it even seems anti-capitalistic.
Sure, VidAngel could have built some custom software to play back a real Bluray disc, skipping certain scenes based on configuration file per title, and then would mail the disc to customers, who then have to mail it back, but that would be a worse experience for customers, and would be more wasteful (unnecessary physical shipping, as well as wear-and-tear on the discs). I guess the studios would actually see more money from this kind of scheme, since the discs would wear out and need to be replaced after a while.
But... the world we live in where this sort of thing isn't allowed... is stupid. Calling this a "performance" is just a legal gambit to unreasonably restrict what people (or companies, even) can do with things they've bought and own.
The $20 "purchase" and $19 "buy-back" is creative, but it should also be fine to just charge an all-you-can-watch subscription fee, as long as they don't allow concurrent viewing at greater than the number of Bluray discs they've purchased. "Performance", my ass. Fucking copyright cartels.
> It is affirming the stereotype Indian males lack confidence with women
The whole show is about males lacking confidence with women. Did you even watch the thing? The only male there that has any screen time and doesn't have problems approaching women is Zack, I think. And he's a walking stereotype too and dumb as a ton of bricks.
> worshipping of cows etc
If you think Raj saying "I swear to cow" is supposed to be a portrayal of a real Indian person, as opposed to obviously completely ridiculous comedic gag, lampshading its own ridiculousness - maybe you shouldn't be watching comedy, it's not good for you. Stick to anti-harassment videos from HR, there's no comedy there.
The whole point was that all the main characters were stereotypical nerds and each displayed a different type social difficulty. I mean Sheldon was obviously supposed to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, how is that not ableist or whatever?
It was also apart of his character arc! If you watch the show, Raj eventually overcomes his fear of talking to women and ends up dating multiple women (sometimes at the same time) later in the show.
There are a ton of jewish stereotypes present in the show as well, but they are hilarious, and > 50% of the cast is jewish (as well as almost all of the producers AND the director), and obviously they were not offended and CHOSE to write and direct the show that way. My point being, it's just comedy and if you actually watch the whole thing, it has a good message.
Fascinating. I mean, the answer is obvious to everyone else in the world, but it'll be interesting to watch them figure it out over the next few decades.
Is Squid Games even allowed in China?
Then when the show was recorded, we actually did laugh pretty hard. You know how you laugh louder when you're at a comedy show or at a movie theater than when you're home alone watching the same thing? Because of peer pressure? It was like that. You laugh harder in the audience.
And then they would "enhance" the laughing by taking the recording of us from earlier and playing it over the spots where we laughed live, especially if they end up using a second or third take, since were didn't laugh as hard.
Also I remember in our episode there was a joke where as the live audience we could see the payoff right away, but on the TV the camera did a slow pull back to reveal the joke. They added in our recorded laughter for that. I remember because I laughed at home but not in the studio.
So it's sort of a combination. But except in those rare cases they don't really add in laughter where there was none. They just enhance the live audience.
I think a reasonable person would see that what you describe is an attempt to make an end run around both the spirit and letter of the law. But what VidAngel was doing was "one copy = one view", which is IMO entirely reasonable. There is zero moral difference between mailing someone a Bluray disc (with instructions -- either automated or manual -- of what parts to skip) vs. keeping that disc in a warehouse and streaming the (censored) contents to exactly one person at a time.
"In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:[8]
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. "
Look at Germany, for example. Big country, economic powerhouse, but German TV shows and movies have little broad international appeal.
As to your examples, they need work.
> It is affirming the stereotype Indian males lack confidence with women.
That's a behaviour that is not linked to race.
> Raj can’t speak with women without the use of alcohol
That's an exaggeration of a character flaw, standard fare for a sitcom.
> the show constantly mocks his accent
The actor provides the accent, what does he think about it?
> worshipping of cows
Americans are - in theory at least - allowed to mock religion. That is not racist, that's rational.
If the law really does say what VidAngel did is wrong, then the law is wrong and should be changed. I think it should be obvious to anyone who can read that the big media companies have (successfully) fought for decades to unfairly protect their bottom line, at the expense of everyone else. That's not ok; governments should not exist to protect crappy business models. Hell, there'd still be plenty of money to be made with much more lax copyright law.
Those videos are clearly optimized toward the desired impression, but I don't think that they used actors to make their points.
On the other hand you have problems like https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap... where you can construct a castle of lies and deception by only speaking selective truths...
To summarize my point: stories are ways to tell one of the many facets of the human experience, when told honestly they can be helpful to our understanding of both the common and the uncommon, when told dishonestly they can warp our perception of reality.
A recent example is Community which has an episode of a character dressing as a dark elf, and the joke is that another character assumes it's blackface, even though it's not. Well, networks and streaming services now removed it and unless you have the original discs, you simply can't watch that episode.
Unless, of course, you pirate it, which is how I watched it.
may i ask that you clarify this point?
tennant made a personal choice NOT to use his native/normal scottish accent for Dr. Who. he discusses this with Jodie Whittaker (also someone with quite a strong native accent) in an episode of his podcast, he TL;dr said it didn't feel quite right for him to use his native accent for the role [1].
whenever tennant does TV "as himself" (for example the voiceovers he has done for various shows or charity events like comic relief etc) he uses his own/native accent, is he doing this for laughs/jokes? surely he is doing them with a scottish accent because that is actually his literal normal voice?
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/jodie-whittaker/id1450...
1. Videos are easily selectively edited
2. Within an immigrant ethnic group, different subgroups will have different feelings due to their experiences. For example, 1st generation immigrants tend to be less cognizant of this sort of stuff.
Here's a bit of a rant for you- as an Asian person, I find these Asian jokes pretty fucking unfunny. It absolutely shits me when people will ask an Asian person from Asia what they think about some hot-topic issue within the Western sphere- yeah no shit they'll find it trivial. They're so geographically and politically disconnected from the issue it makes no sense to ask them.
They experience none of the effects, understand very little of the context and have very little stake in the matter, the only reason people would ask them for their opinion on these issues is so they can point to a foreign face and tell people like me "why can't you be as well behaved as them".
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/20/fish-s...
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2016/food/farm-to-fab...
I wasn't even aware that was a stereotype, after knowing (very closely, with some!) and interacting with hundreds of Indian males in my life.
Lacking confidence with women is a pretty standard "nerd"/"geek" stereotype, though, which, given the title and subject matter the show deals with, is what I would assume they were going for. Were you ever upset that Leonard was often awkward with women? Sure, he didn't have the "unable to talk to women without alcohol" bit, but Leonard wasn't exactly a ladies' man. So it's ok to portray a white man as being awkward around women, but if it's an Indian man, it's racist?
Re: accent mocking: accents are fun and the confusion that they can cause can be funny!
I do recall references to cow worship, which was a bit insipid and not that funny, but... c'mon, racist? Gimme a break.
The Chinese also believe it is the government's responsibility to maintain their culture over time, which is why the government exerts cultural control.
Sheldon is a white male who is desexualized.
Leonard is a white male who is desexualized.
Harold is a white male who is oversexualized in creepy ways.
And I'm not even sure "desexualized" is the right word. With both Raj and Leonard, at least, I remember there were many plot points about their difficulty with women. "Desexualized" to me would mean that they weren't even seen as people who are interested in sex or relationships -- that is, their status as having sexuality at all was minimized and never touched upon -- which was clearly not the case for either of them.
In any case, "relying on a stereotype" does not make something racist. When I watched the show (admittedly not for long; I probably got tired of it after a season or two), yes, there were certainly jokes that only worked because Raj was Indian, or Harold was Jewish, or Sheldon was neuro-atypical, but for the most part it was the stereotype "nerdy people are awkward in all sorts of social situations, especially when nerdy heterosexual men interact with women". Being Indian, or Jewish, or probably-autistic were secondary characteristics that gave them more color as people.
I'm almost certain there would be things seen as normal or inoffensive in China that would be seen as offensive and censored here. For example, a show that expressed criticism of homosexuality probably wouldn't be tolerated in the West. I'm guessing there could also be scenes that we would consider examples of animal cruelty given our differing views on animal welfare.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdAi5Y8DDoNyX-4qcEcd-5w
On the other hand, there's apparently a problem where pet stores are selling similar giant guinea pig breeds as pets, but they're too wild and don't have the temper to enjoy it.
I suspect that the vast majority of Chinese viewers barely notice, or just assume that there was some sort of problem with the source material when it was imported into their country. Most probably don't make the connection that portions have been censored, because this is just what they've grown up with, and seems normal.
I think you both under- and over-estimate Chinese people in this regard. Certainly they are well-educated, but they've been raised culturally very differently than you or I. It's not impossible to be smart and know how to think, but also close off your mind to certain classes of criticism because you've been raised to value unity and harmony above other concerns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOW1Wjb_oEI
Though I have to admit the reason I think of him when it comes to doing accents is his American accent that's supposed to be NorCal but sounds like it's everywhere else at the same time.
We also forget that, in the mid and late 1900s (or, like many of us, just weren't born yet), many (though not all) of the same kinds of censorship were present in American TV, and to some extent movies as well.
I do find the Chinese version to be more insidious (and more dangerous, given current surveillance and content-blocking technology), and much of it probably is, but I do think some of it is just unconscious nationalism and "othering" on my part, as much as I try to stamp out that kind of thinking in myself.
Also, is it just my own personal bias, or would I be right to say that imagery with such close bonding between males (2 particular example links below) would not have been used in the west due to concern of being interpreted as gay?
http://www.daokedao.ru/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/navek...
https://cs14.pikabu.ru/post_img/2022/03/11/4/164697462011834...
Of course, they're not really TV shows anymore when they're unregulated streaming programs.
I think there is an important conversation to be had about censorship by large corporations but equating them to widespread, governmental censorship is not helpful.
I will both agree and disagree. The show frequently oversteps what can be thought of as parody, so calling it racist is a fair assessment.
On the other hand, we also have to be careful. Think of the video clip in the article, the one with Sheldon's mom. The article makes it sound like it was censored since it was disrespectful to the Chinese people. While I can understand how that interpretation can be made, it is far more likely a commentary on racists tendrils that infest parts of America. Of course, Chinese viewers may not realize that so their interpretation would likely be different.
As for affirming the stereotype of Indian males lacking confidence with women, I didn't know that such a stereotype existed. If it does, I can see how it could (perhaps should) be labelled as racist. The "joke" runs too deeply throughout the show and it rarely appeared to be handled critically.
I believe the ultimate bar for judgment should be: does the joke reinforce stereotypes or does the joke force the viewer to reexamine their beliefs. Humour shouldn't be used as a carte blanche justification for racism. On the other hand, a lack of a sense of humour shouldn't be used as an excuse to label everything as racism.
Personally I would prefer someone coming out and being (mostly) honest about why they're trying to control others, not the religious "we're saving your soul!" nonsense.
[1] https://www.economist.com/china/2022/08/25/chinas-communist-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/asia/china-maoists-...
Not like this. The censorship occurring in China is state-mandated and absolute, which is completely different from a network or content provider voluntarily choosing to remove objectionable content.
> I'm almost certain there would be things seen as normal or inoffensive in China that would be seen as offensive and censored here.
Again, you're conflating different things. What's being described in the article isn't a network simply choosing to remove content that might be objectionable. It's the state telling the distributors that they cannot show certain things period because the state does not like them.
In the United States a content distributor can distribute such content if they choose to, as long as it's not on a regulated platform (e.g. public television has specific regulations about what can't be shown). In China, the content cannot be distributed at all without first being edited and approved by state censors. It's a completely different situation.
From the article:
> According to the state-owned media outlet Xinhua, streaming platforms received a private notification from regulators to remind them of one key rule:
> “imported American and British TV shows must be ‘reviewed and approved by officials before streaming to the public.’”
See also https://www.google.com/search?q=%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%...
This kind of assumption is naive (no offense) and reminds me of the denialism regarding Russian disinformation. You do not need to "infiltrate" the site with "agents". It's fairly easy to write a script checking the front page for mentions of China and manually checking the thread to possibly respond with a comment. Before dismissing concerns like this as conspiratorial or silly, you should do some research on the topic:
[1] https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf?m=146479...
[2] https://www.info-res.org/post/revealed-coordinated-attempt-t...
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2021/12/15/how-china-uses-western-i...
[4] https://www.state.gov/prc-efforts-to-manipulate-global-publi...
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/05/dozens-of-fake-news-websites...
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/28/china-m...
[7] https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-pro-china-propagan...
[8] https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/astroturfing-how-...
> the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad
The CCP is hostile to many Western values (e.g. free speech) and they are a primary geopolitical antagonist to the U.S. It's not unreasonable for a mostly U.S. user base to see the worst in CCP behavior or be biased against the CCP.
If you wanna change that, find some other way to compensate artists first. They are the value creator. Attacking the bloated middlemen in the delivery chain doesn't remove the need for creators to eat. That is VidAngel's moral failure, as least going by the scenario as described: they weren't returning value to where it came from, instead tried to create a legal fiction to justify rent-seeking behaviour.
Only people overly and unnecessarily obsessed with race could say such a thing. Rest assured, the rest of us just see a person. It's almost like you can't even imagine that there could actually exist a man who has problems speaking to women and just happens to be Indian.
Edit: and in case it escaped your attention, all the main characters lack confidence with women, this just manifests differently in each character. Raj's background is relevant only in your mind.
> Raj can’t speak with women without the use of alcohol
Sounds consistent with the previous character trait, but this doesn't sound consistent with the stereotype you're so concerned about. It's almost like Raj is not just a stereotype character.
> the show constantly mocks his accent,
It's almost as if accents cause humourous misunderstandings in real-life that people can relate to. Weird. Not sure why that's "mocking" exactly, but I've surmised that you're pretty sensitive about this stuff so I'll chalk it up to that.
Anecdotally from my own perspective, I see big waves of voting on HN that go in various political directions. Seems consistent with self-selection by topic combined with randomness.
None of it inspires confidence in your assessment of being "censored" on HN, or diagnosing the audience as less curious.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/entertainment/80s-hollywood-a...
St Elsewhere might have been the first in 1983. Golden Girls, Trapper John MD. There was plenty of hesitancy to deal with a difficult subject, and the gay element compounded the difficulty (openly gay characters were not common). But to suggest it was at the direction of the Federal Govt is totally absurd. Reagan was as disliked and mocked almost as much as Trump was.
Programmers seem to think about the law like a program, like a set of rules governing system behaviour and so long as they are not directly violated, this one neat trick judges hate will let them do whatever it is without recourse. But that's not true, firstly because the law is fuzzy and deals with human behaviour, including taking wider views, intent and mitigating circumstances into account, and secondly taking decades or centuries of established case law into account too.
It's why things like "smart contracts" are not the end run around the judicial process that their creators would like...
Are you sure this is true, and not an apocryphal story? I've seen the German and US version of the movie, and they are identical. There is a nude shower scene in both, and Will Smith uses has hand to cover his groin.
I've seen two interviews, one where he said his penis was so big they had to tape it down, and a second where it was so big, they had to CGI it out because it was distracting. They both seem like they may have been self serving jokes that got evolved into the "full frontal I Robot euro cut."
It is also possible that a Euro theatrical version with full frontal existed, but the DVD/BluRay releases used the US cut.
Would you be able to find any similar western imagery from that time frame?
It's not illegal to import/purchase the unedited original versions with guns, deaths, and nudity (excluding lolita). With online streaming being the norm now, the government has no say in the content consumed.
It does raise an interesting question for me though: is Hollywood losing out on profits by not offering censored versions of their content? Clearly there’s some demand. People like to make arguments about artistic integrity, but they have no problem censoring content to air on network tv.
My point is just that if you think it's a good idea to extend first sale doctrine to digital files without any restrictions you may first want to consider the logical consequences of that.
Will no one think of the pixels being exploited?
The older I get the more I realize that culture is what keeps us back. The Romans didn't invent steam engines not because they didn't want them but because they couldn't imagine a world where you wouldn't need slaves. The Catholic Church didn't survive the printing press.
Currently there is no society which is friendly to digital information. The first one which is will overtake everyone else in the same way that industrialization let the west overtake everyone else.
WTV ran service called "Zediva" that streamed video from physical DVD players to customers. The District Court of Central California (the same court that ruled against VidAngel) decided that this violated the performance rights of the copyright holders.
The cinemagoer was disgusted by what she had seen, and didn't understand how such an epic display of toilet humour, slapstick violence and general crude behaviour had attracted any sort of positive response, let alone the recommendations he had given.
The critic pointed out that it sounded like she had probably been to see "Guest House Paradiso", a very different movie...
What you can’t (legally) do is copy a page of your book and sell it/give it away (though maybe one could argue that a mere page would be a small enough excerpt to fall under fair use).
VidAngel (and the hypothetical 10 second streamer) fall under the latter, since streaming inherently makes a copy. As you pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it would be perfectly legal (but completely impractical) to cut up a VHS tape into individual scenes and resell those pieces of tape, since no copy was made.
Again, I’d be happy to discuss how western governments use soft power and financial incentives to accomplish their censorship goals. It’s an important topic. But I’m not going to do it from the basis that it’s equivalent to governmental action at the barrel of the gun.
I also won’t accept a boxing match where you can kick and eye gouge and I’ve got a hand tied up. If you think either of those things is equivalent, great, it’s your right in the west. It’s not in the regimes you are tacitly defending and I won’t explicitly condone it by engaging.
Jim Crow was a stereotype which plenty of people found funny 80 years ago, we don’t find it funny anymore(it was never funny), as we see it for the truth. It was an untrue racist portrayal that harmed Black Americans. Granted the portrayal of Raj isn’t nearly as harmful and it is not comparable to horrors of Jim Crow. Jim Crow was a billion times more harmful to a lot of Black Americans.
Portrayal of Raj probably has little to no impact on Indian Americans. However as a society we have to learn from the past, and it is time to abandon stereotypical portrayals of people.
Big Bang Theory is an old sitcom people found funny during its time, just like people abandoned the stereotypes of the past, people will dumb Big Bang Theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
Indian Americans have a median household income of $126,705. By comparison English Americans are at $78,078.
If you don’t understand the stereotype of Chinese restaurants the joke wouldn’t be funny to you.
Is it bad or legitimately harmful to perpetuate those types of stereotypes? Probably not. But I don’t think the quality of the joke makes up for it in this case.
That’s fair enough, maybe I’m over analyzing. But you probably wouldn’t find that joke on TV in America either.
But I wonder what would happen if we had some super-fast rocket drone delivery service so it's just a video rental shop on steroids?
Step one would probably be actually purchasing something instead of licensing it.
https://twitter.com/MTVIndia/status/379879685863129088?s=20&...
Just a few days ago Zuckerberg was discussing banning / suppressing discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop - https://nypost.com/2022/08/25/mark-zuckerberg-criticizes-twi...
Idk what to say about that. It’s not editorial decisions when DMs are being censored or social media posts. Particularly when the FBI / government is suggesting it.
2. This is a perfect example of my point. Most people don’t even realize they are surrounded by censorship. Or they outright agree with it. Look up the list of topics bannable on YouTube. On Twitter you can’t even call someone by the name their parents gave them if they disagree. In schools near where I live you can get suspended for using proper pronouns, if someone disagrees.
Censorship in the US is different, but very apparent.
Yeah a bit. I chose not to mention specific ethnicities and omit detail to keep my comment short. Regional humor has it's place, but in more nuanced contexts. A Chuck Lorre production isn't the first place I'd look to find anything thoughtful and nuanced, to be frank.
Main reason I used the broad brush for "Asian" is because in western society, 1+n generation Asian diaspora are less likely to segregate themselves by lines of national grievances back in Asia proper. In addition to that, nationality is rarely the deciding factor on whether an individual is subjected to racial jokes (from outside personal circles), it's their appearance. I've been jokingly accused of being a Chinese spy, despite not being ethnically Chinese.
Careful now, don't want to go spreading stereotypes that Jews control Hollywood or anything! /s
If we're being pedantic about a few stray electrons, you also make a copy when you stream it from the disc to your CPU, from your CPU back to a monitor, and so on. If VidAngel had a minimum "purchase" time of 1yr the case probably would have swung the other way. The issue isn't the streaming, but rather that the nature of the agreement was more akin to making a copy than not (with "sales" happening substantially faster than they would have in meat space).
Honestly I'd rather have the weak and ineffective Indian government "ban" something, than have the full force of corporate America collude to punish me for trying to serve "problematic" content.
The fact you responded with “hello troll” is a perfect example.
1. The “election fortification” comment is in regards to https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ it’s a tongue in cheek title from a group which helped “ensure the outcome of the election” as they put it.
2. Hunter Biden's laptop was confirmed legitimate. It was easily confirmable by multiple people who knew the Biden’s. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/who-is-tony-bobulinski-hunt... The senate report further confirmed it https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HSGAC_Finance_Rep...
I can keep going, but my general point was that if you didn’t read the reports in detail (not via a pundit). Particularly, if you didn’t / couldn’t review the source material. Then the censorship worked. There’s a great segment on CNN about wikileaks https://streamable.com/6g5v where you can’t read Hillary emails, you have to hear it from CNN. “Remember it’s illegal for anyone besides journalists to read her emails” a lie, but a form of censorship.
It doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, it’s wether the discussion is suppressed. That’s the censorship.
What good can they even accomplish if they get triggered by a disney character or a specific flag?
I'm glad that the CCP will disappear in our life time. Question is, how petty will the next Han Chinese led government be? They've always sucked badly at maintaining large bureaucracy.
> It's not illegal to import/purchase the unedited original versions with guns, deaths, and nudity (excluding lolita).
One could say the same about China. There's no law against importing uncensored movies for private consumption and any laws against their sale by local denizens, if such laws exist, go unenforced. Even in Beijing, you can buy high-quality, uncensored bootlegs of practically every American movie and TV show.
Let's take your first point for example. If I go on Fox News right now and search for articles about the 2020 election being stolen, I get plenty of articles and opinions talking about it. How exactly was it censored, and how is it comparable to censorship in China?
Besides, censorship is not inherently bad, and most stable democracies with a functioning legal system will have some form of censorship, to protect minors, for example.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Disagreement among private parties, or getting less private promotion than you wanted to get, is not “censorship”. It’s free speech in action.
There may come a day where the Berenstain Bears Mandela effect is the result of a legitimate conspiracy to change all the publicly available media.
As stated by OP, this is a subjective opinion: The enforcement of a particular viewpoint on the issue of portraying someone from [insert country/background here] is not an easy problem to solve.
Stereotyping will inevitably occur as a result of generalization & snapshots of an intended (X := culture/background/country/activity/etc): They're the result of picking the most commonly-seen & widely-known/believed aspects of X at that point in time & adding their stylizations to it, in an effort to conserve mental energy when it comes to recalling aspects of X. While bad stereotypes will definitely exist, to dismiss it as an outright "bad" is an overly broad stroke of opinion: They will exist because at that point in time, the stereotypes were relatively accurate to them when it came to portraying X.
> Jim Crow was a stereotype which plenty of people found funny 80 years ago, we don’t find it funny anymore(it was never funny), as we see it for the truth.
...There's a paradox in the "it was never funny" statement: If it was never funny to them, it wouldn't have been that popular in the first place - Either it was funny enough then to still be remembered & now be considered a (racist depiction)/(heavily-negative-stereotypical mimicry) in the Western world, or that it wasn't funny & consequently forgotten about right then and there. Various other states can exist in between the 2 aforementioned extremes, but it must've been funny enough to them to still be noted down in the written word.
> But I’m not going to do it from the basis that it’s equivalent to governmental action at the barrel of the gun.
Genuinely, why do you believe it isn’t? I understand that the threat of violence carries its own separate offense, but in terms of ability to suppress ideas, it is equivalent. At an individual level it’s a choice, but at a systems level it’s enforced as surely as at the barrel of a gun, by modulating influence according to conformance.
I’m not defending China, and more broadly I don’t think criticism of the USG is tacit support for China. Whatever happened to principles leading the good guys, instead of the other way around? And true, in China I wouldn’t have the freedom to express these ideas - maybe if they were smarter, they’d find a way to let me feel that freedom while still firmly controlling whether those ideas can spread and shape society.
The main problem is that you compare the freedom of social media platforms to regulate the content they host, to outright government-controlled censorship of all media. If it was actually the government censoring the topic, you would not have been able to link to a nypost article talking about it, and Trump wouldn't be able to post on his own social media platform.
> Look up the list of topics bannable on YouTube. On Twitter you can’t even call someone by the name their parents gave them if they disagree. In schools near where I live you can get suspended for using proper pronouns, if someone disagrees.
Why are those topics bannable? Could it be that there is some kind of "code of conduct" that makes sure people are respectful to each other? Those people disagreeing are still free to host their own service, if they desperately want to deadname someone.
The same cannot be said about China. Official online anime broadcasts are still censored if not outright banned.
There's no point in discussing bootleg and other illegal distribution channels. It's already illegal, why does censorship dodging matter for the distributors?
Also, your examples are not particularly illustrative. Reagan did not even publicly mention AIDs until 1985 (though reporters had been asking him about it since 1982), when it first started to become worrisome to straight people (and still created no presidential task force or dedicated funding until 1987). Golden Girls mentioned it after that. So did Trapper John, MD. St. Elsewhere was notable precisely because it was one of the only primetime shows that did when it was exclusively thought of as a "gay disease".
To truly understand how insidious Reagan's administration was, when doctors were ringing the alarm bells in press conferences years prior (and the next, and the next, and the next...) Reagan's response was to ask any reporter if they were gay to a crowd of laughter and move on. In fact, Nancy Reagan even arguably personally condemned movie star Rock Hudson, who was a personal friend of theirs, to an earlier death by explicitly refusing his appeal to have him admitted into a retroviral trial in France because they did want to be associated with the gay community in any way.
https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/03/nancy-reagan...
It's really not too big of a jump to make the connection between a man who basically started the "moral majority" movement and created virtually all modern film and tv regulation to this day (aside from the MPAA, he also repealed the FCC Fairness Doctrine, which basically is what gave rise to the giant split in media today, and really all major legislation around what can/cannot be shown on TV/in theaters that still persists to this day), would actively use his power to discourage AIDs from being talked about in media, just as he did Communism, anything non-nuclear family, and really anything that fell outside his bubble of conservative values.
This was the man who effectively started the war on Hollywood. He came from Hollywood. He knew the studio execs, the donors, the investors (they funded him!), it wouldn't take much for them to listen to him.
That said, if a private company like Twitter thinks Alex Jones is a liability because he spreads conspiracy theories of shape shifting lizard people from alternate dimensions sabotaging the Trump Presidency via the deep state because he’s prepping the military and cia to take out the satanic cultists that worship and appease said lizard shapeshifting creatures via the blood of post-coital children, well…
Instead, the solution that the USA's current legal system is going with is "You _can_ run an online rental service, as long as you have the copyright owner's permission (e.g., you have a contract with them in which you give them money and they give you their permission)"
Secondly, why are you responding to "Those topics are censored" claim with "Here are all the correct answers to those topics that my media tells me to believe"? GP didn't say whether they think there is a correct answer to a topic and what, if any, may that answer be, GP has simply observed that those topics are heavily and nakedly suppressed in legacy media and social media, often with hilarious results (e.g. Instagram banning Cochrane, a medical database of the highest quality, simply for mentioning Ivermectin).
Contradicting GP here would consist of bringing up evidence that those topics were, on the contrary to GP's claim, discussed fairly and found wanting. Talking about correct answers are irrelevant, we're talking about whether all questions and answers are allowed for discussion. Because Americans are often shocked that China hates things they consider elementary and bans them, GP is simply saying their own society frequently and obviously engages in this as well, often with cheering from those self same people.
Third, some of your points about masks are self-contradicting. If the CDC lied about masks once, why wouldn't they lie twice or third or tenth? You would be a fool if you trust a liar after the 1st time, and medical institutions have proven to be thoroughly partisan and rotten and corrupt during the entire crisis, anybody taking a covid-related claim from a medical institution at face value is a prime target for bridge selling.
Another point is that masks come in types, and only very few types protect adequately against the latest covid variants, and the vast majority of people don't buy those types (N95 or KN95) or don't wear them correctly. So masks, as worn in practice, are indeed very close to useless, as evidenced from the fact that they're not predictive of viral spread (i.e the fact that a country's population wears masks has no better than random chance correlation with whether it has lower infections, i.e masks are statistically useless).
This why your correct answers are wrong, at least in part, some of the time. This is why you need to be constantly questioning them, and not rushing to defend the censorship loving institutions and corporations who have no particular interest in you or your well being, and all the interest in Power and Money and Status.
Fourth, why the hell are you bringing up more evidence for censorship as evidence against GP? You're supporting them, not contradicting them. GP never claimed the censorship is done by only 1 party, only that is done. You're arguing for GP's claim while thinking you're arguing against.
Beyond that though, Chimps have social hierarchies around sex. It’s hard to imagine why something you believe to be so counterproductive would exist so persistently across cultures and times unless it had serious value.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3PIGLDscQ
https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1558060844549902338
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/FACEBO...
https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/government-dictating-what-soci...
I can keep going, but most of those people who are impacted you don’t hear from due to censorship.
We found Raj hilarious, and I don't know of anyone finding his portrayal "racist."
You see the same thing in Russian society. Stalin reinstituted anti-sodomy laws. Look at how LGBT are treated under Putin. Authoritarian governments seem to like oppressing cultural misfits.
Banana699 has the right to block you or otherwise tell you to fuck off from their private property, the 10 million viewers Banana699^TM Inc Ltd does not. Media corporations picking and choosing the type of the story to serve is a very plausible reason for the intense polarization and Rage-As-A-Service ecosystem we are in.
Otherwise, I don’t know what you’re suggesting to be done. Do you want to expand the powers of the government to moderate these companies and their property?
heres an example where the White House admits it: https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/white-house-flagging-posts-for...
That is censorship, because social media then bans (censors) those users and the discussion. Which was my exact point.
What do they do in China: “hey this snippet here looks like misinformation” then the company removes that snippet. They extend it to insults about the Chinese race, but don’t we do the same with gender pronouns?
How is it different materially?
My point was censorship is done universally, just in different ways and for different topics. It’s always the same reason though, to avoid some idea the people in power don’t want propagated. Could be a joke, could be “misinformation”, could be that there’s only one good race (no one dare make fun of), or you can have any gender. It’s all just power / politics.
The censored rarely take the time to learn what is being censored because they don’t think to know. You have to keep the idea from entering the mind of the opposition. That’s why you censor in the first place. You have to defame those who question the authority and call them “fascists” so no one listens to them. Self-censoring who you listen to and not telling others “hey this person has an interesting take!” It’s all the same game, a game to control the population.
> Besides, censorship is not inherently bad, and most stable democracies with a functioning legal system will have some form of censorship, to protect minors, for example.
I would argue we don’t see stable “democracies”, we see oligarchies. Why is it ruling families in the UK still effectively rule? Politicians are always from a certain class. Similar in France, when’s the last commoner who speaks like the rural folk who’s held the prime minister seat? We all see how Trump was treated for speaking plainly… then again, he was a “threat to democracy”
The oligarchs control what you can think, through managing what information you can read / see. “Democracy” in the US is a code word, for the status quo.
And US studios already has you covered for centuries worth of "representation" heavy film and TV, why is the Chinese allowing them important?
There’s an implied threat. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this previously. I expect in the next couple years as court cases about the censorship work through the courts, the same thing will happen again.
If the government was silent and the censorship occurred then MAYBE it’s legal. That of course depends on if it’s a common carrier or public space. Both arguably are true for social media, but again it takes time for the courts to figure it out. I would concede that point, but again government asked for the censorship here.
There’s a faction / ideology (across all party lines) in the west that is doing the same thing as China. For the same reasons “to be respectful to one another”.
That’s kinda the point I’m trying to make.
I watched a video essay on YouTube about Chinese horror movies and why they are so bad.
The reason was not just regulatory constraints (the ghost turns out to be a dream, because you can’t have ghosts in movies) but also that these changes on quite short notice.
So if you have an idea for a movie and you think it can wriggle around the current regulatory restrictions you better hurry up and film and edit it as fast as possible.
What about torrents and such? Have they been blocked by the firewall or is pirated movies still readily available online?
Unlike the ccp example here, where I would say they do have a great handle on what can and cannot be discussed on any public platform and dissenters are most definitely threatened with if not actually subjected to physical force.
I think they eventually stopped doing it just to appease the production companies and avoid their frivolous lawsuits.
But you can't cite a single one? That's pretty suspicious.
"It's really not too big of a jump"
So in a very long winded way, you are saying you made it up and have no evidence? wow...
Q: How exactly was it censored, and how is it comparable to censorship in China?
A: https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/white-house-flagging-posts-for... That is censorship, because social media then bans (censors) those users and the discussion. Which was my exact point. What do they do in China: “hey this snippet here looks like misinformation” then the company removes that snippet. They extend it to insults about the Chinese race, but don’t we do the same with gender pronouns? How is it different materially?
We know that geopolitical adversaries weaponize narratives to cause destabilization of the body politic of other nations. We know that the internet and social media have exploded in popularity in the last 20 years, giving 'foreign actors' unprecedented access to citizens.
What should a government of a 'free' nation do to counter that destabilization or those weaponized narratives?
> Let's take your first point for example. If I go on Fox News right now and search for articles about the 2020 election being stolen, I get plenty of articles and opinions talking about it. How exactly was it censored, and how is it comparable to censorship in China?
You have conveniently pivoted to a straw man argument about Covid-19 which was not mentioned.
And there are plenty of people on Facebook talking all sorts of crap about vaccines. If it was so stringently “censored” as you claim, it would be hard for us to argue about - as I would have never heard the anti vaxxers arguments. But good lord, they never shut up- so I’m exceptionally aware of their opinions.
There is a federal law on the books against obscenity, but it has never been used to arrest a comedian. Comedians like Lenny Bruce, and Musicians like Jim Morrison have run into trouble with city governments. Bruce was ironically arrested in both San Francisco and New York. Morrison was more expectedly arrested in New Haven.
the Justice Department also briefly banned the Canadian film "If You Love This Planet" for being "foreign political propaganda"
The film was never banned, classifying it as foreign political propaganda meant that before it was shown the audience had to be informed: "This material is prepared, edited, issued or circulated by the National Film Board of Canada, which is registered with the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., under the Foreign Agents Registration Act."
Honestly, with the ubiquity of CGI in film, whether the military choses to participate in a film is hardly a barrier to making a movie.
The local Christian cake shop are not a corporation and, by the very definition of 'local', almost certainly doesn't meet the legal prerequisites for fairness regulations, so they should not be forced to bake a cake against their will.
Jeesh - many reader of hn are in the US and if X interesting is happen elsewhere, they are reasonably interested that X is happening in the US. Also, many hn readers are India, they may describe X happening in India also. And notably, censorship in India is noted in a different post that seems properly to be getting attention as well.
And, of course, American censorship deserves mention because the USA has often presented as bastion of free speech. Just as much, something like a "feeling of freedom" is a big export of the US - in the sense that it's media products give people in more traditional societies that sensation. This was a big motivation of the original article after all.
Not all American media products are pro-American propaganda. Some are even anti-American. But the overlap/gray-area is significant and so the qualities of the USA aren't irrelevant to say the least.
2. My position has never been the government has to be doing the censorship. People censor, some in media, some in social media, some on HN, some in government, etc.
3. Censorship doesn't mean you cannot reach data; it's a suppression of speech (which Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Youtube admitted to censoring publicly). https://www.britannica.com/topic/censorship
> censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law.
4. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/did-social-media-actua...
> Ahead of the election, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube promised to clamp down on election misinformation, including unsubstantiated charges of fraud and premature declarations of victory by candidates. And they mostly did just that — though not without a few hiccups.
They have been open about censoring since before the election. Now, if we want to get into government, the FBI interfered by (1) strongly suggesting social media to "limit" (censor) information; and ironically (2) accused of not investigating or sharing relevant information about the candidates (https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/services/files/7CD44E16-BF...)
5. I know many people banned from social media. They can't post on any accounts. I also followed many people I didn't know personally banned. If you ask questions / discuss certain topics you will be removed; typically for sharing particular pieces of content.
> censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law.
Raj embraces the role-playing sex game with scientist woman. The scene fades out implying they have a night of sex and wine.
Where exactly is your "desexualisation"?
Once we got satellite and I started watching American channels I had my first encounter with censorship. Bleeps and blurs and random spots where audio cuts out. It was very jarring. I couldn't understand it at all and still can't. It really stands out, breaks the flow, makes everything feel cheap and ugly. In real life people swear and sometimes there is nudity. That never bothered me. But the jarring edits "protecting" me from these? Those certainly do.
Start to teach logical fallacies in primary schools. Encourage critical thinking. This comes at the cost that the government's own bs does not work so well anymore, because people now know how to spot a logical fallacy.
Shit load of money and resources for these nonesense censorships.
I fully understand, but there's got to be a better way to describe this line in the sand given that DVDs contain digital files. "Physical" doesn't work because networks have a physical layer. "Stream" is also problematic because bitstreams are present on any kind of media. Even "network" doesn't quite cut the mustard because a chain of video stores could be described as a trade network. "Tangible" comes damn close, but suppose the baud rate is slow enough and the voltage high enough that I can discern the download by touching the wire? What, then, is the unambiguous word for what we're talking about here?
If it really boils down to letting time elapse between views/customers, shouldn't that be what the law demands?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Taiwan#Music%20a...
I think people a lot of us started to get out of the common path because of the limitations (which censorship is at the basic level) we hit. My hypothesis would be that simply “curious” people get pushed into the “hacker” bucket by getting refused something that seems reachable with some creativity.
The dumb example is people will get creative and jumping through hoops to get foreign porn. Growing non-authorized plants is another example, where people have to learn so much by themselves to make it happen. Even getting pirated non-censored versons comes to require more and more technical proficiency I think, and looking at industry’s reaction it seems there’s a decent number of people sailing the seven seas.
Homosexuality is a natural observable phenomenon in the human species across time and cultures. It is an aspect of people as fundamental as height or skin tone. Not accepting them for any reason is intolerance and does not have to be tolerated. It is also intolerance to not accept Muslims, but you do not have to tolerate any intolerance that manifests from their beliefs.
People are not tolerant or intolerant, specific views held by and actions done by people are.
You don’t need values to reason about tolerance.
That's just self censorship for the global market. Why leave it to the censors when you can make a better product that works within the constraints.
The current Wiki page on authoritarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
The same page, but from 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...
The Wiki 'definition' of authoritarianism has shifted quite radically in recent years. There's a line in the older page, completely scrubbed at some point, that's quite relevant: "Democracies rarely exhibit much authoritarian behavior except in transition to or from authoritarian states. Many (if not most) citizens of authoritarian states do not perceive their state as authoritarian until late in its development."
Recent history (that extends beyond just the past 2 years) has emphasized that the vast majority of people are perfectly fine, if not enthusiastic, about authoritarianism when they share the values of said authority. This makes it near impossible to criticize authoritarianism, in and of itself, because it trends towards immediate hypocrisy. So instead people criticize a system of values they disagree with, while using authoritarianism as a convenient slur to make the critique sound more noble and meaningful than a simple value disagreement would.
The same thing has happened to the Wiki page. The older page emphasizes quite clearly that the West has long since entered into the world of authoritarianism, but we don't want to imagine this could ever happen. So instead we've redefined the word in an effort to focus largely on the differences between the United States and "the bad guys."
Using EDL files to edit movies for my family is something I've actually done before. I think a superfluous sex scene is okay in most contexts, but when watching a movie with parents/grandparents it's generally too cringe for me and everybody else in the room. I used mpv's EDL functionality for this: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.r...
Also, how do you feel about libraries rebinding their books to fix/prevent the books from wearing out?
The only form of intolerance Popper recognized was bigotry around beliefs. The concepts (and words) homophobia, racism, transphobia, and islamophobia were not even invented when he wrote about the paradox of intolerance.
When he described the intolerant, he specifically meant people who would use violence to stop others from expressing different beliefs - nothing else. He did NOT mean "intolerance" of any particular skin tone, or sexual behavior, identity group, etc.
This is important because intolerance of sexual behavior doesn't structurally break the system of discussion and truth-finding that we use. You could jail every blue-eyed person, just was we jail people who commit certain crimes, but as long as everyone can speak then our system for collective truth-seeking still works. The ONLY meaning for the word "intolerance" that breaks that is intolerance of free speech, and that's the only kind of intolerance that Popper said needs to be suppressed with force. And he was right.
I see this misunderstanding constantly online - honestly it's hideous to see people twisting Popper's pro-free-speech message into an excuse to crush those they misunderstand or disagree with. Literally inverting his meaning.
Then why do you get mad when China or the Middle East bans material they find objectionable? They simply have a different definition of what counts as objectionable, that's all, and it's well within their rights to enforce their different cultural values within their borders, just like you argue that a "democracy" has this right.
Also, when I go to Netflix and search for "LGBT", I see tons of material. So that must obviously mean censoring of LGBT is a pathetic lie, it's right there in one (very big, much bigger than Fox) media outlet so it's obviously not censored.
That'd avoid all the "breaking the DRM", "modifying the data", etc.
As provider you just offer a device that loads dvds from a user's in-datacenter storage cabinet into their in-datacenter dvd drives, and rent them a dvd drive.
That might be complicated enough to avoid the whole "performance" interpretation
It's like in 20 years if someone were to say that because neither Trump or Biden explicitly passed a singular law requiring you to work from home that they had no effect on the rise of remote work during Covid. That's what "It's really not too big of a jump" is meant to illustrate– that one thing directly leads to another. Obviously presidential policy isn't just purely laws. But here's a collection of links from a wide variety of sources (including his own foundation) that support my point. There's hundreds, if not thousands, more.
If I'm wrong, please provide _me_ some concrete proof that Reagan had nothing to do with US's societal paralysis and suppression of the AIDs epidemic, because I think that's the point that more obviously needs defending.
https://www.wpr.org/how-reagan-helped-usher-new-conservatism... https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/the-other-time-a-us-presid... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230616196_9 https://www.reaganfoundation.org/education/curriculum-and-re... https://www.press.umich.edu/331707/the_president_electric https://daily.jstor.org/ronald-reagan-the-first-reality-tv-s... https://www.vox.com/ad/18175876/ronald-nancy-reagan-white-ho... https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/beloved-media/ https://www.press.umich.edu/331707/the_president_electric http://www.wiu.edu/cas/history/wihr/pdfs/Banwart-MoralMajori... https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/29/20826545/hoberman-make... https://lithub.com/ronald-reagan-presided-over-89343-deaths-...
In fact, even the article you yourself linked (aptly titled Hollywood’s struggle to deal with AIDS in the ’80s) supports my point:
"So perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that it wasn’t until the mid to late ’80s that a few flutterings of references to the AIDS crisis began to pop up. And even then, many of the artists who first used their art to broach the delicate topic were obscure pop bands or directors of fringe movies."
Implying formal enfranchisement is required to choose when being loud in numbers petitioning/screaming at officials is enough and frequently more effective when said officials gets drown in shit if they fail to maintain political serenity. There's a reason Chinese trust in government is near record levels compared to declining trust in western systems which sure are good at choosing but miserable at delivering. Being performative is orthogonal to being performant. "They can't choose" is such a tired and useless gotcha when plurality of "choosers" / voters in prominenant democracies don't actually think voting is useful mechanism for choosing, until compared to highly performant authoritarian systems. Then it is, because reasons.
A dictatorship that disregards the will of the people it governs has only committed wrong in the eyes of these sensitive modern westerners, right? CCP tells the world its subjugates are happy and fulfilled so who are we to judge?
There is a difference between banning content that is objectively harmful (e.g. child porn) and banning content to control and suppress minorities. Just because they can doesn't mean it's good.
> So that must obviously mean censoring of LGBT is a pathetic lie
I never argued this.
To the point: it definitely would not be removed from Foreign-made media before shown on American services. Especially as a result of some government-driven mandate.
I see that what you're saying is that User X could watch the first 10 seconds and then the second 10 seconds while you start you're first 10 seconds but that would be sort of a ridiculous use case for the following reasons:
1. your system would include a bunch of extra work for your solution to make this work, easier and cheaper to buy 10,000 copies of the movie and stream as needed.
2. people pause movies thus your solution becomes even more expensive because it would need to calculate out who has paused their ten seconds at the 5 second mark etc. etc.
Thus it seems likely that any solution being built on the model of we have physical copy we stream you copy will be built with showing complete movie and not any clever cutting up of movie to make the number of physical copies we have stretch further. The way the law works each different use case - cutting up movie, showing complete movie - would probably be challenged and there is no reason to suppose that they would all be allowed to pass, in fact since the showing complete movie was not allowed to pass in the real world it seems unlikely that the weird edge case cutting up movie would be allowed to pass even if law was changed to allow showing complete movie was changed.
Case in point, there is a class at UCLA titled "Law of Elon Musk". I assume we both agree this class hasn't been polished for decades. And I imagine it's decidedly different than any prior class in related topics.
This is an unimaginably slippery slope. I think MOST american media these days stinks, but would not support any form of the above sentiment.
To be honest, I can't think of ANY current-event-protraying foreignly-produced media that would be shown on networked television in the US.
Translation: Eventually, however, the American production studio managed to ensure that this third act of the film was also shown in the German version.
Wikipedia isn't clear on the process or the timeline (and there is no source given), but I read it like this was "fixed" during the initial cinematic run.
Plus, whatever the cutting was, it's available uncut since at least the home video release, and I presume it was shown in cinemas uncut after at most a month. And the current rating is FSK-6 (suitable for children over 6). So it's not banned, and never was. The closest it gets is the 1966 initial cinema cut (which I agree to call a ban, but as stated, from the data given I don't believe lasted for long).
Of course this may be abuse of the fair use backup copy, but when talking digital, we are anyways inventing philosophies.
Other way could be the backup could be entitled to "one last rental" to recoup last 4 bucks or so. I think that would be fair use but others may not.
A friend of mine used to make family friendly edits of films just for his own kids when they were little.
Sometimes I try to make family friendly versions of otherwise vulgar jokes. It’s an interesting art form. Very niche.
Sex is how workers create workers, a means of production. So of course they try to seize control of it.
First, I will point out that almost no government, ever and everywhere, isn't full to the core with corruption and lying, like a decaying and rotten fruit left for weeks in a garbage dump.
Some Westerners are deluded with the strange thought that it somehow makes a difference that those who are bamboozling them do it through convoluted interlocking systems of protocols and processes, commonly called Democracy, and not through brute force or other such barbarous means.
From a dispassionate analysis of raw results, however, considering just the outside blackbox behaviour of a country without reference to its internal algorithms and data structures, almost every single thing China or Russia can do to a citizen, USA and Canada and UK And Germany can (and does), just maybe not as frequently and not as publicly (yet).
This rather large caveat\objection aside, I will take the question at face value : what can a (supposedly benevolent) government do in the face of outside propaganda? A lot.
First, propaganda is easy, especially when you're a government. If a foreign country is paying X to propagandize your citizens, you can afford to pay 10X, discounted by all the natural advantages you have when you're propagandizing your own citizens (same language and culture, official capacity to make and enforce laws, privileged position when dealing with media outlets, etc..., you literally rule). Indeed, for the same reason that religions always need a devil and revolutions always need enemies, the foreign propaganda might be a boon to you, a thing to rally against in your own propaganda, food for your propaganda artists.
Second, talk is cheap, and the vast majority of people would rather rage than do anything in real life. So, let propaganda fester, like a harmless fever. This an unfortunate effect of large human populations, known at the smaller scales as the bystander effect. In essence, everybody just says "not my problem" and just keeps shouting (if they do even that), hoping for someone else to actually do something, but everybody is thinking like that so nothing really gets done. This is bad for the people, but it's good for governments, it means most Free Speech is harmless. (which is bad news for any serious Free Speech advocate, because the goal isn't Free Speech in and of itself, but Free Expression, which starts with Free Speech but must end with Free Action. But again, this is all normative land, in actual material fact, most Free Speech is pure thunder without lightning or rain, and nobody loses anything by allowing it unless what they're hiding is truly egregious.)
Finally, returning to the first caveat again, maybe just fuck you, the government? Maybe the foreign government is actually correct and the citizens should revolt and create unrest and become ungovernable till their demands are met?
In summary, don't worry about the poor little governments, they can manage very well, with all the monopoly on violence and money printing and whatnot.
https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...
Then after abolishment of all censorship there were less good films from former USSR. It almost looked like directors tried to put all previously banned sex, violence and cursing on screen but in the process forgot how to film good stories.
Good luck with that in a society where pursuit of prosperity is a central tenet and consumerism is rampant.
If I remember correctly, they tried to buy from the company - Disney IIRC - but they were refused sale. Instead, they simply bought retail and rented those.
It doesn't have to be governments only as well, the Middle East is majority Muslim after all, and muslims do get incredibly offended at LGBT stuff (a lot of Arabic insults are just variations on "gay"). So, according to you, those private citizens and corporations should be allowed to ban the LGBT, it's not censorship if the government isn't doing it right?
>I never argued this.
No, but you did argue for something indistinguishably similar, which is that because a news story is found on Fox then this news story is not actually censored. So, by that same unassailable logic, LGBT stuff is on Netflix and therefore LGBT stuff is not actually being censored. All objections you have against my satire argument is applicable to your real argument.
In one example we have a government enforcing a systematic ban that prevented any access to content, in the other we have a singular streaming service making an editorial decision that was expressly rejected by their competitors and widely denounced. No access to content was lost.
The choice presented was a singular company making a widely publicized and denounced editorial decision, that a competitor did the opposite of with no consequences vs a systematic and effective censorship across all streaming services mandated by the government with criminal consequences.
Arguing those things are equivalent is a bad faith argument, full stop.
Is there any website that keeps track of censored parts of shows more generally?
The BBC has been censoring parts of shows it deems 'insensitive'. It would be interesting to know what the banned parts contain and to see how it changes over time.
It should require no cooperation to build an online version of DVD rental.
I think that's right. Paraphrasing Popper: "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance". It's not about being right or wrong, it's about how people should treat each other, even if they dislike how the other one acts.
Sex by its nature completely shatters any notion we have of being civilized, rational actors made of pure white spiritual light. Alas, it shows us as sweaty, ape-like animals needing, nay, wanting to exchange fluids to produce our offspring. Nothing about it is pure and orderly and it is completely at odds with common mental strategies handling our issues with mortality. Being made of divine spiritual energy is quite at odds with the actual reality of it all.
Oh yeah, that and it being a means of production: it makes workers. Which is to be controlled at all times. But that alone does not explain why this taboo is also common in other type of societies.
It's a little bit off-topic, but you have to live in a very different world to believe that, as the Catholic Church is by far the largest Christian church still today.
The only religion that is larger than it, not by an extremely large margin, is Islam (not sure if you split Islam in its different branches).
The reality is that after a short initial resistance, the Catholic Church quickly turned around and embraced printing. I would argue that the Catholic Church is probably one of the most agile among the main organised religions and adapts rather well to changes. It pains me to say that, but it's clearly not going to die anytime soon.
However, when I first started seeing this stuff as a kid I had no idea why and it really struck me as odd.
I think the funniest thing I've heard about censorship was Magnus Uggla, a Swedish artist, complaining that because he had a UK firm produce one of his music videos it was a real struggle getting them not to blur a scene where they're drinking shots.
The ruling also managed to make the law even more inconsistent. If I rent an antenna and install it in a datacenter for TV, that's kosher. If I rent an antenna and pay someone else to install it in a datacenter for TV, that's a copyright violation.
Btw, tolerance, like democracy is just a bulls$##t concept. Would you like to be tolerant of the neo-trans man going to the same toilet as your teenage daughters???
Let me make an analogy to Alex Jones and Trump: if the water company cuts someone off, but they continue to run a huge fountain in front of their mansion, then you can't reasonably claim they're being deprived of drinking water.
Yeah, it really is sad to see people so eager to embrace authoritarian sensibilities like this. The paradox of tolerence has seemingly become a buzzword without meaning, perverted beyond its original intent; a simple facade that enables people to feel self-justified about their own intolerance while still allowing them to claim progressive ideals.
I may lack huge parts of these contexts or misinterpret them, but there is something obvious in the pictures alone.
Kissing in a drama may have a very different connotation than in a sitcom, or may simply be one of the central scenes. The difference in the back exposing scenes is not in the back itself, but in the man in the background looking to the forward part of this back. I’m not pro censorship and mostly not pro conservatism, but this complete blindness to the difference in context and inability to hypothesize it feels, well, bizarre itself.
The bit of the Espionage Act that conflicts with my previous post is unconstitutional.
TV series or movies should be edited if they have the following content: (1) distorting Chinese and other countries’ culture and society; (2) defaming Chinese military forces, policemen, and judiciary; (3) showcasing obscenity content, either visual or verbal; (4) showcasing “excessive” images of murder, violence, horror, interrogation, drug-taking, and even gambling; (5) advertise negative and decadent values or deliberately exaggerate the negative part of society; (6) advocate religious extremism; (7) advocate environmental destruction and animal torture; (8) excessively showcase alcohol addiction, smoking, or other bad habits; (9) demonstrate other illegal content.
Why does a TV show have to show a lot of gore?
Why can we only laugh about sexual explicit jokes?
My only issue is with (9) because what is legal today can be illegal tomorrow. Simply no longer being allowed to mention something that was/is/going to be illegal is a bit far fetching I guess..
Then no sarcasm is allowed which is an important measure to critize a state and its behaviour.
> (2) defaming Chinese military forces, policemen, and judiciary;
Same as for (1), making these groups "untouchable" and "uncritizeable" (if that's a word)
> (3) showcasing obscenity content, either visual or verbal;
Who defines "obscene"? The Ministry of Truth? The president? The government? Your mother?
> (4) showcasing “excessive” images of murder, violence, horror, interrogation, drug-taking, and even gambling;
Is there any movie where such display is not used as a negative example in the end or to explore the boundaries of human downfall? Tony Montana is not really the hero in the end, same goes for Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill or Fight Club.
> (5) advertise negative and decadent values or deliberately exaggerate the negative part of society;
Yeah, please don't put your finger where it hurts, we don't like that so much, someone could have a bad opinion of a broken state.
> (6) advocate religious extremism;
"Being Christian" is enough to be considered extremist in China, I think. Or let's ask the Uigurs how well these rules work for them.
> (7) advocate environmental destruction and animal torture;
Especially China is very good at the practical side of this, really no need to make movies about that. Besides that: Are there any movies where animals are tortured?
> (8) excessively showcase alcohol addiction, smoking, or other bad habits;
Same as with (4).
> (9) demonstrate other illegal content.
Bingo. Wildcard.
> How would simply not putting this kind of negative stuff in our media not benefit us?
You can't simply close your eyes and hope everything will get better by itself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-...
Excessive profanity generally makes things sound less eloquent, but limited use can be really good for emphasis.
Here, let’s talk about the person who literally replied to your post. Quoting it since I’m sure they will, rightfully, get banned.
> Btw, tolerance, like democracy is just a bulls$##t concept. Would you like to be tolerant of the neo-trans man going to the same toilet as your teenage daughters??? [wawjgreen] [1]
This is hate speech. This is not an expression of belief or rational argument. It’s not even an argument at all, it’s just an emotional appeal to transphobia with the goal of changing your perception of trans women to that of man who is out to sexually assault teen girls, and a direct call to not tolerate them (i.e suppress their speech). Couldn’t have asked for a better example to just fall into the thread.
In contrast, someone expressing a belief or making an actual argument like, “I know that not allowing trans men and women to use the bathroom that matches their gender will cause them dysphoria, but as a matter of public policy here is why I think bathroom bills are necessary…” is not transphobia and is speech that should be tolerated.
[1] And also take a moment to appreciate an IRL instance of accidental-ally. Obviously we don’t want trans men in the women’s restroom.
But also I won't deny the copyright owners have done a great job in making the law do exactly what they want it to, nothing more and nothing less.
If we can joke about cops (reno 911), bar owners (it's always sunny in philadelphia), rural americans (king of the hill and many, many other), canadians (south park), italians (euro trip), gingers (south park), nerds (pretty much every college movie), french girls (malcolm in the middle), middle managers (basically, every office-based movie), bodybuilders (brooklyn 99), "aspiring actresses" (working as baristas), student cooks (usually by gordon ramsey), .... why not us? Oh and let's not forget blondes.
Do you assume all italians wear stockings and molest other guys on trains if you've seen Eurotrip (movie)? Nope. Do you assume all french girls don't shave? Nope. So if the whole of the balkans, including bosnia has many many jokes with "Mujo and Haso" (they represent a "stupid" couple of guys, where the pun is in their stupidity, why do you (I assume you're not from the balkans) get to be offended for other people? There's even a movie just with jokes about them... made by bosnians of course - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5085118/
We also have regional jokes, where in slovenia, people assume that people from gorenjska region are stingy (in serbia, it's people from pirot).
A joke is a joke, you don't have to get offended for other people.
edit: also, we don't start wars because we thing the others are subhuman, we just stereotipically hate eachother (as groups, not as individuals), due to historic reasons, mostly war-related.
ps: What you americans would call racism could only be mentioned maybe against gypsies here (eve though they're techncally the same race). And even that is mostly by assuming, that if someone stole your gutters around the house (or basically anything metal), that it was the gypsies. Usually it's even true.
Diversity in the global sense is cultural diversity, a step up from what is usually assumed to be diversity in American discource.
https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/07/papal-overl...
One of the more colorful moments, when the Pope owned England.
What we have left is the losers of a rear guard action which has been going on for 400 years.
How long were the FBI in possession of Hunter Biden's laptop, why is Mark Zuckerberg trying to blame them for the censorship of the NY Post's story, and do you consider the FBI to be part of the government?
There's no need for quotes around suppressing as it was suppressed, objectively.
> they were awfully bad at it
It was done to sway an election, which went the way was desired, and without any legal blowback. That is not being "awfully bad at it".
> as anyone who ever wanted to learn about them certainly won’t shut up about it.
But at the time and when it was most important people were shut up regardless of whether they wanted to be.
But what do I know I'm just a PC SJW you know how we are, constantly bitching about "no more violence", incredibly naive because of course there will always be pogroms, "it's just human nature". [canned laughter]
Or if you're going the SJW way, are we only alowed to joke about american white men?
Again, if you are somehow equating this hunter biden story with the censorship of, say, tiannamen square by the ccp, I encourage you to visit china and research the subject. Compare the efforts you mentioned were used to suppress the hunter biden story with what is outlined here, for example: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/a-look-at-the-many-ways-ch... and you will see how awfully bad the us gov is at censorship.
If the government was so concerned about trump as you say, then why did the same fbi re open an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server just weeks before the 2016 election?
Actually, tell you what, if you believe that the efforts to censor the hunter biden laptop story and tiannamen square are equivalent, I will make a bet. I will pay to print up two shirts: one with “hunter biden is a criminal” and a QR code to the New York post article. The other will say “remember June 5, 1989” with a QR code to the Wikipedia article titled “tank man”.
Wear both shirts in public outside the US capitol and take selfies. Then wear both shirts out in Beijing. Hell just try to get through customs wearing the June 5 shirt and let me know how that goes. I’ll pay for the shirts.
It isn't. You might as well say that because Matt Smith's sonic screwdriver was bigger than David Tennant's that's mocking David (but it, too, isn't):
> The CCP is hostile to many Western values (e.g. free speech) and they are a primary geopolitical antagonist to the U.S. It's not unreasonable for a mostly U.S. user base to see the worst in CCP behavior or be biased against the CCP.
That's neither here nor there. This is what I'm actually replying to:
> Did the article imply somewhere that China is unique in it's censorship?
And my answer is: maybe not the article itself, but everything that gets said here on HN (where the article got quoted) has that implication. In fact, your very answer has that explicit implication! So you are proving my point.
I would love to see someone explain the link between taboos about sex and male paternity claims, but so far I see not a single (even dubious) reference from subject matter experts, so I will continue being skeptical about this claim.
"It's obvious!" doesn't convince me.
I suspect people who say this DO find stereotypes funny - just stereotypes of people they consider to be the "other" side of the political spectrum from you. So it's really just hypocritical virtue signaling.
The government tells publishers all the time not to print things. The decision is up to the publishers. That’s free speech.
What do you think the government said when the Washington Post called them up and said “we have a bunch of top-secret stuff that one of your contractors stole from the NSA”? The Post published the Snowden stories anyway. This sort of thing happens a lot.
Many people posted and talked about the Hunter laptop story. None of those people went to jail for it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201014171957/http://breitbart....
Look, I’m just on my phone so I’m not going to dig up archive links showing the post article all over the web at the time, but really - what do you want? The emergency broadcast system activated to push the story to everyone’s phone like an amber alert?
I was there - and honestly the news about “suppressing” the ny post story just encouraged me to go read it more, ala the Streisand effect. Which is exactly what I did out of morbid curiosity. I encountered no issues finding the story, had no issues with authorities as a result of searching for it and reading it and took no precautions to protect my identity while doing so.
Now if you object, replace the word Mormon with Skinhead regarding mentality of others not in the group, and maybe you’ll get the picture.
Source: non Mormon with about 10 years living in Zion (SLC)
And some weird dry German shows had appeal in similar weird neighboring countries (Neitherlands, Russia, China, South Africa, ...) such as Derrick. Unrelated to the fact that its main actor was in the Waffen SS. This related factoid didn't help though.
Similar to the recent run of northern (danish & swedish) TV shows and trash literature in Germany. Proper quality foreign shows, like southern, indian or east asian shows would stand no chance.
The Wikipedia says this: "The character's name is derived from a bland and fairly inoffensive food, milk toast, which, light and easy to digest, is an appropriate food for someone with a weak or "nervous" stomach"
I never knew that this comic was a thing, but now I want to read it
Categorically yes, if your understanding of what's allowed doesn't allow your understanding of what's allowed. Not being able to discuss different politics isn't cultural diversity.
Sure, you’re supposed to read the foundational documents, think the old state was evil, say the dictatorship of the proletariat is coming, etc., but more often than not you’re paying lip service to the person who is apathetically droning out a butchered retelling of the whole thing. Occasionally they are actual starry-eyed devotees of the idea, but just what that idea is is somehow less important than uttering The Idea in hushed and reverent tones. (I promise I was not going for this Arendtian twist, it just came out.) More often than not, though, a position of ideological enforcer is more indicative of skill in navigating a slime pit of backstabbing bureaucrats than anything else. (There’s a reason why career man is one of the vilest late-Soviet curses—now extinct, funnily enough.) Hell, the very name of the state is a sad joke—the eponymous sovjets (literally, councils [of workers and farmers], but supposed to be local governments rather than advisory councils) were all but neutered by the end of the first decade if not earlier.
So, no. I don’t expect that the proclaimed ideology has much to do with it.
(None of this is to be taken as a defense of 19th-century German political philosophy as a viable economic strategy, mind you.)
"As the top-producing country, China puts out 90 million MT annually for 30 percent of global supply." -- https://investingnews.com/phosphate-outlook-2022/
So, I'll give you that Peter Zeihan might be trying to sell his books, but it's not like there's zero corroborating sources.
Doing a thing, but with Jesus branding, can get you very far in America beyond all logic. See also: nonprofits participating in politics, nonprofits doing public performances without proper licensing, nonprofits advertising to children in public schools, etc.
> and I presume it was shown in cinemas uncut after at most a month.
You're not form Germany, right?
Changing the mind of a public authority is in any case a very long process as a German authority (and especially the board of censors!) will never admit it did something wrong. Usually you need to go through all instances. Things like that can take decades.
I'm to lazy to research this case here as it's not really important but I'm quite sure it took at least a few years before they reverted any censoring decisions.
"Schließlich erwirkte" point in that direction actually. "Schließlich" would be better translated as "lastly" or "finally"—which means "after a long fight" most of the time.
Also the German Wikipedia is sneaky. You need to weight every word! It says "the last part was also shown in Germany". That does not mean they restored the Nazi references. I'm quite sure they didn't (at least fully) as most Nazi stuff is banned. They're more liberal with that in "art settings" just the last 20 years or so. Before that even small references have been heavily censored.
It took for example decades to unban Wolfenstein 3D in Germany. You know, that game where you kill Nazis. But because the Nazis in that game use Nazi symbols it was verboten for a very very long time. (They didn't accept that video game are art, so there were no exceptions like for example movies; that's something that changed just lately).
But still there are "international" versions of content and some "special versions" for some countries—and not an ultimately "pre-censored" version that would "please everybody" (or better said, all boards of censors at once regardless country).
For US audience you need for example to censor nipples. In Germany we make jokes about that. But here a swastika is a very big problem, US people would not mind OTOH. Making a Mohamed joke will get you banned elsewhere; and so forth.
So I don't really see an acute danger of "pre-censoring".
The actual scandal is that the content industry just obeys all that madness. Of course, because they're only interested in the money. The actual messages are completely irrelevant and get changed fundamentally at a whim without remorse. That's the part that makes me think.
As China becomes the either #1 or #2 global market for films, tv shows and video games, global media companies are lobotomizing their products to ensure they'll pass the CCP's censors / goons, and as a result, marginalized voices are ultimately going to be pushed further even further to the margins. Big globomediacorps won't take the risk that including whatever "Sensitive" subject matter the CCP has decided it's against that week will bar their product from the Chinese market, and as a result the Chinese censors don't even have to do anything as the film / tv / game companies are doing their job for them in advance.
I mean, just look at Legendary Entertainment. There hasn't been a single LGBT+ character in any of their films since Wanda group bought them in 2016, and I've got a bridge to sell you if you think that's anything less than intentional.
These discussions conflate voluntary censorship like age-gating with willingness to actually let someone lie to you, even in cases where you know the truth directly, and accepting it - ostensibly for the good of the group.
Basically, the kind of people who rose to the top of a system like the Soviet Union are control freaks, and they acted accordingly.
I believe the only comment I've made about my take on humor is that anybody who laughs at TBBT must be under the influence of laughing gas. But you think this is because I have puritanical beliefs? Are you accusing me of that, or have I misread your comment? This earnestly is not clear to me.
> It doesn’t fall under first sale doctrine if you stream a transcoded copy of the DVD you bought. This is why the laws around digital distribution and copyright aren’t exactly the same as the laws around physical distribution and copyright.
I don't think transcoding should matter, at least if it's done on the fly, but also it's entirely doable to throw raw DVD bits over the wire. And neither one should count as a copy any more than shining light onto a book makes "copies".
The woman reported her children kidnapped and showed the order to the police and they refused to do anything and said she should just wait and he would probably come back.
The man showed up at the police station a day later with her 3 children, dead.
So now we have the precedent that even in the most extreme and obvious cases, police have absolutely no duty to uphold their oath.
Thanks Scalia.
It seems like it should be a topic covered by Diamond's "Why is sex fun" but I can't remember an exact section devoted to taboos (nothing in the index etc.).
It was released uncut on VHS (1978 in the US, so 1979/1980 in Germany; VHS for home use came about 1976). So if it was "eventually/finally shown uncut" that probably refers to running in the cinema; this leaves only the option that (a) during the initial run they moved from the cut to the uncut version or (b) there was a rerun at some point [maybe for the VHS release].
Anyway, I find it difficult to research this and also don't care enough; the movie is just too obscure in Germany, and certainly not my favorite genre.
P.S.: Yes, I know about Wolfenstein; but that's a different medium in a different age.
In general, it's worth keeping in mind that the point of courts is not to decide whether the outcome of the case is ethically or socially desirable. They're there to look at the laws and precedent and figure out how it applies to a given case. If the result is undesirable, it's something for the legislature to fix.
> What I sometimes call Marx’s Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top. Wrong. People who most brutally and nakedly optimized for power would gain power; that's what “optimize” means.
I was only saying that the surface implications of the “means of production” rhetoric don’t really matter once you have Lenin in power, because that rhetoric is not what drives his actions. I took your previous comment to mean that they did. (That is not to say that the whole Russian anti-autocracy movement since 1815 was a power grab, even if a pie-in-the-sky gentleman anarchist introducing and promoting terrorism in European polite society[2] sounds a bit bizarre to modern sensibilities. Recall the Russian Empire had a serfdom system essentially equivalent to domestic slavery up until 1861.)
Still, though, my original puzzlement in this thread is that sex, specifically, seems to have even more importance to control freak governments than would generically be expected given their control freak nature. Little importance is given to the citizens’ diet, for example, or clothing, and even art is hit and miss, but sex is somehow always at the forefront (even if nobody says the word). Maybe it’s human passions in general?.. I don’t know, I don’t see it.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
https://twitter.com/MPSRegentsPark/status/974645778558980096
To be clear, I'm not saying that the enemy agitprop is all true. However, the most effective kind of agitprop is the one that uses facts as the foundation for the rest of the structure. So how about we start there?
There are also cases where a show gets "canceled" because of something the actor said or did - and unlike the West, when this happens, the removal is sudden and total:
https://dramapanda.com/2021/08/word-of-honor-back-online-aft...
There is, strictly speaking—it's part of the exclusive rights that Title 17 lays out for copyright owners[1]. It's just that (a) it forces you to be in the business of doing the rentals yourself (you don't get to just point at someone with an interest doing rentals and dictate terms to them, sans contract), and (b) even if you're doing your own rentals, if you're also selling copies, then there's nothing stopping someone from doing an end-run around your rental business by just buying a copy from you and doing things their way with that copy.
(Granted, this doesn't make the person you were replying to any more correct about what they meant when they said you couldn't do this.)
1. "distribute copies [...] by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending"
It isn't even a creative or original idea. Remember Jimmy Kimmel's "The Man Show" where he got women on the street to sign an "End suffrage now!" petition because "suffrage" sounds like "suffering"?
It is an easy trick to embarrass people by shoving a camera in their face and putting them on the spot. But it doesn't actually tell you anything. It isn't a data point.
Right. Aereo notwithstanding, one way around this might be to set it up like MP3Tunes[1] where you're a specialized digital locker service. The "fixed" "tangible medium" should originate with the customer, and a transfer from the customer-controlled copy to the business should be involved (rather than the other way around). With a large enough physical presence, you could get this down to pizza delivery time frames and/or Redbox levels of friction.
1. contrast with mp3.com
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2276921/porn-producer-s...
To give a specific example, there's an old Soviet joke about a guy buying meat pierogi from a street vendor; after closely inspecting them, he asks: "So, did this meat bark or meow?", to which the seller replies, "Neither; it asked too many questions."
- George Orwell, "Freedom of the Press" (1945)
Note that this predates Popper's paradox.
Except for all the pre-digital precedent that informs and agrees with my opinion.
> The shining light analogy is a little hyperbolic, I’m sure you know. Transcoding & streaming definitely is making a copy, because the bits exist in two places.
I don't think it reaches hyperbole. The bits only need to exist in two places for milliseconds. It should not count as a copy. It's only a copy in a pedantic technical sense.
> The point of copyright law is to give copyrights holder control over who gets to distribute and who gets to consume, and it may not make any difference whether there’s technically copying involved according to however you define copying.
Except they're supposed to lose a huge amount of control after the first sale. This feature of copyright is broken for digital items.
Your ability to know about a story does not tell us whether the wider population knew.
> At no point was it difficult to learn more.
And yet it was actively suppressed. I also wonder what topic you couldn't claim that for?
> Again, if you are somehow equating this hunter biden story with the censorship of, say, tiannamen square by the ccp
I didn't use that example, perhaps it was used further up. Regardless, equating is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Comparing would be a better fit. Yes, all instances of censorship can be compared simply because they are censorship.
> you will see how awfully bad the us gov is at censorship
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about this censorship because the government is bad at it compared to the Chinese government? That's not going to fly. I also think the obvious slippery slope here would be hard to characterise as fallacious, given we're provided with both ends of the slope, and in actual fact, the US is not at the top of the slope.
> If the government was so concerned about trump as you say, then why did the same fbi re open an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server just weeks before the 2016 election?
The government is not of one mind, it is made up of many departments, groups and individuals, each with their own attitudes, desires and intentions. Regardless, how am I supposed to answer that? Or more to the point, what kind of answer would satisfy you?
> if you believe that the efforts to censor the hunter biden laptop story and tiannamen square are equivalent
Did you mean to reply to me?
> I will make a bet
I skipped this as it was childish and unhelpful, and only builds on the straw man (intentional or not) that you are building.
The story is funnier because of stereotypes. That's the function mentioning the group serves. Taking a joke overly seriously and then having it explained to you is also a stereotype. It's just mildly humorous, and now it's slightly moreso.
That may well be true.
> The government tells publishers all the time not to print things. The decision is up to the publishers. That’s free speech.
If the mafia offer your business protection you could also make your own decision. Would that be freedom of conscience?
> What do you think the government said when the Washington Post called them up and said “we have a bunch of top-secret stuff that one of your contractors stole from the NSA”? The Post published the Snowden stories anyway. This sort of thing happens a lot.
Why does that incident mean that this incident is different? Were the same people involved?
> Many people posted and talked about the Hunter laptop story. None of those people went to jail for it.
Would people need to go to jail for the aims of the censor to be realised?
So many questions, so few answers.
You can backup software[1][2] (allowed by law, not fair use) but not movies.
[1] https://www.southerncaliforniapatents.com/articles/2014/10/0...
What is is Xunlei and BaiduPan?
The catch is that the only fast way to download files from your baidu drive is to install the client on your computer, which I’d only do inside a VM.
Laughs in Hong Kong.
But sure, look at China's long history of protest and tell me they respect the will of the people. You're right about one thing, "serenity" (or "harmony") is the name of the game. Lots of ways to pacify the people, giving them what they want is only one.
He may be an American but it sure sounds like he's on the payroll of the Kremlin. His son works for RT ever since 2015 and he has neatly parroted most Kremlin talking points regarding Ukraine up until the war itself.
> answer me: would you be comfortable if a MAN who says he thinks he is a woman went to the same toilet as your teenage daughters!? cowards downvote, if you are right, come debate me.
Let’s break it down, the imagery here is pretty simple. In both comments “neo-trans man” and “MAN” are front loaded and used with a lot of emphasis, they’re trying prime an image in your brain of a big scary hulking man and trying to get you to associate that image with trans women. Trans women are scary, trans women are dangerous. It’s a cute trick, because it’s actually misandry leveraged against trans women.
Next, “thinks he’s a woman” is also pretty simple. Using “he” in this context serves to keep the previous image fresh in your mind, remember we’re taking about a bad bad man here. And the whole thing characterizes trans women as delusional, unhinged, or “mentally ill.” Just like the first one, this actually leverages ableism against trans women.
And “same toilets as your teenage daughters”, hopefully this one is obvious. Now that we’ve established that trans women are mentally unstable dangerous hulking men we need to paint a picture of the consequences of that. Our victim, someone small, young, weak, defenseless and sympathetic (relying on misogyny here). Our location, somewhere people feel vulnerable and exposed in just the manner that points to sexual assault. Finally! We have an instance of direct transphobia — the fear that trans women are rapists dressing up as women to attack them when they’re vulnerable, and that they’re pedo groomers. Two for one special!
So let’s circle back, how does this suppress speech. Because it’s not a gun pointed at someone with the threat of pulling the trigger if they speak. It’s suppressing speech by way of character assassination and marginalization. The former is a way of discrediting anything they say because who would take anything a mentally unhinged monstrous rapist says seriously when they ask for “equal rights” — “yeah equal rights to diddle kids you sick freak.” And the latter by way of reach. Speech is pretty ineffective when you have no one to speak to and nobody wants to associate with monsters.
P.S. the reason people don't bother debating people like you, is that it's usually like playing chess with a pigeon and they know this.
Streaming is making a copy of the contents, which, if done without a license, usually violates the content owner’s copyright.
You asked "Why does it matter to you that your sexuality is depicted on screen? Sounds like a bizarre thing to worry about."
The fact that you find it a bizarre thing to worry about could be seen as indicating that you're unfamiliar with the lives of LGBTQ people, which condition would presumably be improved by seeing more depictions of their lives in mass media.
I mean, Europe's already working on it. I think we'll get there eventually.
And I'm not claiming most of what you seem to think I am.
American site with mostly American-lens topics. Maybe 50% American readers? Rest International.
Lots of long term systematic survey/polling methods from western institutions in last two decades (i.e. pre-Xi) all comport with basic trend that PRC citizens don't trust local gov but trust central gov. One could be cheeky as insinuate Chinese polling more reliable than western polling that has many predictive failures vs CCP polling because CCP still in power and PRC hasn't collapsed but have only gotten institutionally stronger.
>Laughs in Hong Kong.
Laughs in mainland PRC who overwhelmingly wanted to tame HK. 99% of population versus <1%, so obviously respecting the will of the people. Well minor exaggeration, if CCP respected will of the people they would have subdued HK 5 years earlier during Unmbrella. There's always implement lag, no system's perfect.
I'm familiar with protests in PRC, local protests get loud enough, concerns get forwarded to central gov... and where feasbile gets addressed, because central gov actually scared shitless to mass mobilization. Except CCP tends to deliver tangible results not like western short term virtual signalling.
>giving them what they want is only one ... >pacify the people
Isn't that governance 101, preserve peace and give people what they want?
> The email, which was recently disclosed during discovery in a federal lawsuit that Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed in May, vividly illustrates how the Biden administration engages in censorship by proxy, pressuring social media platforms to implement speech restrictions that would be flagrantly unconstitutional if the government tried to impose them directly. Landry and Schmitt, both Republicans, argue that such pressure violates the First Amendment.
> Judging from the examples that Schmitt cites, the tenor of these communications has been cordial and collaborative. The social media companies are at pains to show that they share the government's goals, which is precisely the problem. Given the broad powers that the federal government has to make life difficult for these businesses through public criticism, litigation, regulation, and legislation, the Biden administration's "asks" for stricter moderation are tantamount to commands. The administration expects obsequious compliance, and that is what it gets.
[1] https://reason.com/2022/09/01/these-emails-show-how-the-bide...
Let's not dwell too far for an example:) "Sacred Games" had enough sex, nudity and cussing - far more than average American sitcom
Someone else's words don't justify your use of force/violence. If you think they do, your values are broken and you're simply another authoritarian tyrant trying to crush the ethnic/cultural/religious/ideological group you don't like. Everyone in history has weak excuses for their tyranny like this. --
Also note that it's trivially easy to short-circuit your argument just by someone saying you're being white-phobic or misandric. Well, now you get to explain why _this_ "whateverphobic" statement is "violence" which demands a violent response, but _that_ "whateverphobic" isn't.
Ultimately you've just defined your beliefs as not violent, and others' as violent and denied the very legitimacy of any thoughts beside your own. Perfect authoritarian tyrant behavior.
Of course not, a crowbar isn’t a weapon until it’s used as such. I swear, entire generations have been set back when it comes to making progress on this due to that sticks and stones nonsense. It is ridiculous the idea that words somehow live in some abstract plane of existence unable to affect the real world if you just ignore them and that people don’t use words to achieve real life outcomes that hurt others.
> Also note that it's trivially easy to short-circuit your argument just by someone saying you're being white-phobic or misandric. Well, now you get to explain why _this_ "whateverphobic" statement is "violence" which demands a violent response, but _that_ "whateverphobic" isn't.
This isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Hate speech regardless of its target, including white men, is violence. You’re confusing the “prejudice plus power” definition of institutional racism with hate speech.
> Ultimately you've just defined your beliefs as not violent, and others' as violent.
I have not, in fact my position is entirely belief independent. Picking some generally agreed upon abhorrent views as example — if you want to write a missive about how people of dark skin are genetically inferior, that women are weak and a functioning society requires that they submit themselves to men, your findings that homosexuality is a disease and should be treated as one rather than accepted I’m not going to stop you because the beliefs themselves aren’t hate speech.