“BBC remove Fawlty Towers’ iconic ‘Don’t Mention The War’ episode from UKTV streaming site” (The Sun):
The streaming service which is owned by the Corporation, have decided to take down the episode that also features racial terms.
This is the latest “classic” British TV show to be removed from a streaming service owned by the BBC, as broadcasters continue to re-assess old British television content.
This Fawlty Towers episode in question was first broadcast in 1975, also features Cleese’s bigoted character who was in hospital and was shocked when he was treated by a black doctor.
Where will people find the content that their morally superior overlords have decided needs to be stuffed into a memory hole? Is BitTorrent sustainable or can it be shut down easily by governments and ISPs under the rubric of protecting copyright (i.e., the right of the owner to block anyone from ever seeing something again)?
People are pirating copies of movies already, right? How are they doing it? Will the mechanisms of today still work in 20 or 30 years?
John Cleese in 2019, from the Daily Mail:
Related:
- “Gone with the Wind removed from HBO Max” (BBC)
- “John Cleese’s Alimony Payments Are No Laughing Matter” (HuffPost): In a new interview with the Sunday Morning Herald, the 74-year-old funnyman opens up about his 2008 divorce, touring, and the perception that he’s financially set thanks to his success with “Monty Python.” … “I will have paid my ex-wife, I think it is $23 or $24 million. That’s an awful lot of money. And when you have to pay it over a period of seven years, even if you sell a lot of properties — like I had five and I now have one — there’s still a lot of simple, hard work to be done just to earn the rest of it.” … The former couple has no children. [see Real World Divorce on England]
- “Berkeley Will Delete Online Content” (20,000 lectures withdrawn from the public due to “receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley’s free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues.”)
Figured the library of congress would be burned down. Might have to abolish all technology since it was invented by white males. The blog will have to go back to smoke signals.
While a lot of technology was invented by white males, much more than is credited was invented by (mostly, but not exclusively white) females. I distinctly remember a preponderance of women in my early Computer Science classes. Apparently, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the number of females in the field plummeted (according to one of my professors). Smoke signals could be a problem in non-smoking areas. I was always partial to paper tape: readable both by humans and machines. https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/ascii.htm 😉
PaulG: Actually, my memory is that it was primarily programmers who identified as “females of color” who invented everything that we value in computer science. E.F. Codd, for example, and the RDBMS. Mavis Minsky, the Mother of Artificial Intelligence. Joan Backus. Toni Hoare. Irene Sutherland gave us computer graphics and augmented reality. Violet Cer and Bobbie Kahn for TCP/IP. Tina Berners-Lee for HTTP and HTML.
> which file sharing service…
i2p is good for that… I mean, according to my friend.
Warner Media purged the guns from Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam in their new streaming of Looney Tunes on HBO Max. Remember the days when cable first arrived and HBO was controversial because it was raunchy, with R-rated films that unsupervised youngsters might see when their parents weren’t home?
https://ew.com/tv/elmer-fudd-no-gun-looney-tunes-reboot-hbo-max/
Now nudity is a controversial thing for Playboy (first they covered up, then they flipped back), HBO is all naked, all the time and any kind of sex goes, but Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd – those grave threats to humanity – have been disarmed.
Here’s the clip at that link. One thing I notice right away is that the fast-paced/fast-cut/short attention span timing of the cartoon has been amped up to the max. Kids today can’t handle the the slower pace of the old Looney Tunes, they don’t have the attention span. There’s no backstory to the Dynamite Dance, either. The colors are brighter, the pace is faster, but there’s no story there. And Elmer is carrying a scythe.
Days are numbered for this one too:
That is almost as depressing as when I realized Netflix movies would just “disappear” from my “to watch” list with no warning. Now they often show an expiration date (better than nothing). Now I understand why John Cleese (a “normally bigoted comedian” of his time — in real life anyway) is needing to tour around so much and do all these web meet & greets (“the divorce”). I helped him out (slightly) at the lovely Hanover Theatre in Worcester back in Feb (when crowds were acceptable): https://photos.app.goo.gl/fhjGiqnge6j6MyGb7
Philg, I recommend using the decades old Usenet! It is little known by the young ones, but still kicking strong. The plus: direct downloading from usenet binaries servers with SSL , thus no filesharing that reveals your IP and getting caught by the copyright lawyers. You can get a usenet server subscription (or flat GB rate), use SABnzd client, and a NZB indexer website. Downloads are very fast… been using for years without issues.
@Alex… oh my god that dynamite dance is just awful.
Goodbye Looney Tunes! BLM will cancel you too!
Speedy Gonzalez will obviously offend Mexicans!
After he dropped out of the Presidential race, Pete Buttigieg was allowed to make fun of the way Hispanics speak by using a real, live Hispanic man as a racist prop during his Jimmy Kimmel Live monologue.
“I spent most of the day teaching Guillermo how to pronounce my last name. I think we finally got it!”
Start at 4:00 in the video to watch Buttigieg roll out Guillermo. “I feel great, Meester Pete!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcucjd67HDc
They actually *wrote that* into the monologue and spent the time to festoon Guillermo with bumperstickers so they could ridicule his accent on national television. Buttigieg is gay, though, so doesn’t have any privilege. It’s OK.
This is actually a good think. It is about time to remove and erase any and all kind of racial, offensive, or whatever that liberals disagree with. In 10, 20 or 50 years, there will be no record of any kid of racial or offensive or whatever is it that liberals disagree with as such no one can claim anymore of being or were discriminated against.
It is happening [1], one statue / page at a time. This won’t take 50 years, in less then 10 years USA will have a clean record of no racial of inequality past to be ashamed of. We will all soon be saved and be equal just like in Equilibrium [2].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/us/new-york-theodore-roosevelt-statue-removal-trnd/index.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film)
They came first for the statues,
then they came for the cartoons,
then they came for the comedians,
then they came for me
if it progresses it will be like a Maoist Revolution. Let’s hope it doesn’t get there!
It’s on the way. Patrisse Cullors (co-founder of BLM) is a “trained Marxist” by her own proud admission:
https://disrn.com/news/video-surfaces-of-black-lives-matter-founder-saying-were-trained-marxists
Trailer is complete with Trump 2020 bumpersticker and YouTube ain’t deplatforming it, yo. Get your pre-order bundle with a donation to Black Lives Matter from the Cracka website:
https://crackaworld.com/
I do not see any force that can stop it.
According to the “Ages of Discord”, popular discontent by itself very rarely (if ever) bears fruits (I think Jack Goldstone was the first who came with this idea). If the level of intra-elite competition is low, the united elite front can easily put down a popular revolt of any kind (electoral or violent). In the current climate, potential for violence would be high if there were a high level of intra-elite competition expressed through the usual dim masses’ actions on both sides of the barricade, as proxy fighters.
However the good (or bad depending on one’s perspective) news is that the current revolution is likely going to be of the “velvet” kind as there is very little or none at all elite opposition to the current creeping cultural marxism (for obvious reasons). Whether the “status quo post” will culminate in re-education camps for the holders of white privilege Chinese style is unknowable at this point although there are some indications that it might (witness the Linkedin semi-successful attempt at re-education as well as many other companies at the same countrywide). Perhaps, the coercion would not even need to be Chinese/Russian bolsheviks style: the fear of losing a job will be quite sufficient to tolerate any sort of humiliation.
So all is good.
We allowed Marxists to establish themselves throughout academia and gave them the money, resources and institutional support to build out their networks and establish a revolutionary vanguard using taxpayer money. Nobody dared call it what it was. It’s too late now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism
https://libguides.wellesley.edu/blacklivesmatter
Well, Ivan, I don’t know how far the reeducation campaigns in this country will be taken in terms of locking people up in camps. It’s seems eminently possible to me that people’s children can be taken from them if a school administrator decides their parents are teaching them racism. The teachers in Lincoln, MA are going to be on the lookout.
Beyond that though, everyone’s subconscious mind is fair game, and race-neutral laws, statements and policies don’t cut it. I suppose we’re all going to find out what’s in store for people who want to eliminate “false consciousness.” Of course, the more you resist it because you’re “smart”, the more guilty you must be. There’s no escape from it, there’s no proving you’re not a racist, because you have to be a racist, by definition!
A fun article from 2014. This is science now! You can sketch out the ramifications yourself. I loved the quote from Erwin Chemerinsky, I met him a couple of times in a past life, he’s now the Dean of the Law School at U.C. Berkeley (where Boalt Hall no longer exists as of January 30, 2020).
This was all primed to go this year. It was going to happen whether or not George Floyd tried to pass a counterfeit $20 while drunk and stoned and got arrested by some bad cops.
https://www.cnn.com/2014/11/26/us/ferguson-racism-or-racial-bias/index.html?c&page=0
https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/01/30/boalt-hall-denamed/
Out of the Memory Hole:
Things are escalating fast. Around 300GB of police department and fusion center data spanning 24 years from all across the United States was taken by Anonymous from servers run by Netsential.com and published by DDosSecrets.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/06/blueleaks-exposes-files-from-hundreds-of-police-departments/
“DDoSecrets said the BlueLeaks archive indexes “ten years [actually it’s 24] of data from over 200 police departments, fusion centers and other law enforcement training and support resources,” and that “among the hundreds of thousands of documents are police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more.”
“Netsential confirmed that this compromise was likely the result of a threat actor who leveraged a compromised Netsential customer user account and the web platform’s upload feature to introduce malicious content, allowing for the exfiltration of other Netsential customer data.”
Maybe you don’t need to defund the police if you hack the police, but it’s more important than that. Fusion centers are counterterrorism, Homeland Security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center
A little over four months to the election and they’re leaking like sieves. It’s a glimpse into the workings of the surveillance state.