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Comment by NDizzle | Hacker News Reader

This is not a particularly productive way to bring on a fruitful conversation. What is the point of just trying to offend or attest your emotional superiority?

Presumably it's to make the sorts of people who push for censorship feel embarrassed/ashamed of themselves so they will stop pushing for censorship so much

I personally think calling this censorship is cheapening the word and making it easier for real censorship to happen. If anything, we should make sure that everyone actually knows that mass-media has always been edited to fit the zeitgeist and that it is important to always be curious what the archival footage shows. Which brings me to my other nitpick: BBC are *not* censoring their archives as the title is suggesting, they are *editing* their current broadcast, which has been happening for centuries when old media is being reused.

> calling this censorship is cheapening the word and making it easier for real censorship to happen

It seems like this kind of thing goes hand in hand with real censorship.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60138866

I agree, discussing why these two are different would have been a much more interesting and fruitful talk to have. Subverting the main message of a piece of art is chilling and terrifying and it is what we should be up in arms about. Instead we are talking about the cutting out of an inconsequential racist joke. There is certainly a spectrum between these two extremes.

I agree. Especially with the differentiation between altering a message and cutting a scene that does not add to the overall story and message and is only an inconsequential point in the work of art.

There are really muddy waters to be traversed in other cases, but I fail to understand what the problem is in the specific case here.

To name an example I am thinking of: changing the guns in E.T. imho actually changed the message, made the movie/story less understandable and painted a more rosy/pacifist image of US law enforcement.

It changed the underlying critique against the government's reaction mode into nothingness.

Not even a scene cut, but altered in a way to tell a different story.

Also I would like for the originals to be preserved in an accessible way so that we can learn about gone times and what was normal/acceptable for people in these eras. To be able to have the 'true' sources as objects of study. And their reception and changing over time. This way we could learn.

Edit: Typo

They're either both works of art or they're both just films, that you like one over the other subjectively (and conveniently for your argument) is by the by.

My point is that these seemingly innocuous changes are not innocuous, they are correlated with what we would all agree is censorship, because it's an indication of a culture of censoriousness. A snip here is a snip there, it's all for your own good.

Censors definitely don't care about whether something is art, that's for sure.

But isn't it reasonable to make distinction between "edit the broadcast (so that it is still entertaining) and keep the archive accessible (so we can study who we were)" and "edit all accessible versions of the media"? We all agree the second is censorship. The first, I would say, can be done incompetently and insensitively (if it is done with zero acknowledgement), but I have very hard time calling it immoral/malicious/censorship.

Exactly. When people broadcast such immature emotional arguments, they can't be surprised when they get immature emotional responses.

Can I rattle off “sticks and stones…” or is that too aggressive in 2022?!

What’s next?

It’s not that I’m superior, not at all. I consider myself normal. Jaw dropping reactions to Peter Pan is not normal. Let’s agree to make that distinction now.

Again, my question was, how do you expect to start a fruitful conversation with someone if your opening salvo is to try to offend them. Do you expect you will change anyone's mind? It does not matter if you are right if you can not illuminate the people around you.

I'm gonna steelman here and say that "jaw dropping" and similar language describing the reaction of the original poster was hyperbole in the same realm as "I shit my pants at [jumpscare]"

>Again, my question was, how do you expect to start a fruitful conversation with someone

That's just it though, there _isn't_ a fruitful conversation to be had with someone suggesting that a "jaw dropping" reaction to a children's cartoon is normal.

You used the words "snowflake" to describe someone who was trying to start a conversation, and I assume you would ascribe it to me as well (there are old Mickey Mouse cartoons I would call "jaw dropping" and I would probably have used similar hyperbole to describe racist stereotypes in more recent media or recently changed names of sports clubs). Yet you are the only one acting triggered and refusing to even talk through what they found so silly or offensive in other people's behavior.

>You used the words "snowflake" to describe someone who was trying to start a conversation

I'm not the one you're talking about.

>Yet you are the only one acting triggered and refusing to even talk through what they found so silly or offensive in other people's behavior.

If you can't even be bothered to reply to the right person, I don't see how we can have a productive conversation.

My bad for the mixup! The rest still stands though, seems weird to start a conversation with an insult.

Sure, but I didn’t start our conversation with an insult so…?

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