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Comment by exe34 | Hacker News Reader

already, Disney has been censoring past episodes not even based on today's sensibilities but it seems purely based on keywords.

there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and hurts the people who need the extra time, and he should be less lazy and do the work, etc, and somehow that's too offensive now.

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Disney is only slightly better about nuking old “offensive” content than other providers. Many times they just gave an unskippable “this is culturally offensive to some” text and call it good. For example the old lady and the tramp has that “we are Siamese” song, which I guess is offensive… at least they still let you watch it.

Hulu on the other hand just pulls shit. For example they pulled my favorite it’s always sunny episode where they do that diehard movie. I guess the fact they do black face makes it racist (which they call out as such in the show itself!) and since we are all apparently too stupid to think for ourselves about the content we watch they better block it. After all they know better than me about what is offensive.

… shit like that… that is what is gonna lead me back to piracy.

in the case I mentioned, the episode "smarter and smarterer" just went down the memory hole, it's like it was never there.

I guess that means Hulu doesn't have Tropic Thunder?

The creators of always sunny pulled that themselves just fyi. They decided as artists that they weren’t cool with it and I think that is their right as creators, personally.

I believe the opposite on this actually. You may be the creator of something, but once you've shown it to me, it becomes the property of the human race. Something our species has done and enjoyed (or hated). You have no right to erase it from existence. You could make a big speech about how bad it was, put a warning at the start, etc, but removing it entirely from existence is just vandalism. Imagine if the Pharaohs decided to blow up the pyramids after they built them!

My hope is human nature will prevail. SOME are that sensitive but I think there’s a growing amount of people maybe even a majority that don’t want censorship and nannie’s in media / comedy etc.

What’s offensive changes from generation to generation. Blackface is a problem because racism is a problem. I can envision a future where racism against blacks is so low that blackface in itself is no longer triggering.

As an example: I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s with the feminist second wave. Women of my generation hated being called girl, for good reason! In that time, men were men, and women were considered children.

Their granddaughters don’t seem to mind the term girl at all. They didn’t suffer the same trauma their grandmothers did. Society has progressed, at least a bit.

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