I took a cross-country Amtrak trip right before the pandemic, and most of the conductor's announcements were just to tell us when the next smoke break would be.
When the train got stuck waiting for cross traffic at a freight yard in rural North Dakota, an incipient passenger mutiny forced them to break the rules and let everyone pop out for some light trespassing and nicotine consumption.
It felt strange in a similar, but opposite way to what you're describing.
Modern aircraft still have ashtrays in the washrooms because they’d much prefer that somebody choosing to sneak a smoke puts their cigarette somewhere other than the washroom trash bin where there’s a history of them starting fires.
Most public libraries don't have the resources to archive materials. That's mostly down to academic and specialist libraries, and the library of congress.
Also, the person above could have been talking about compared to days past. I can tell you the libraries I had access to when and where I grew are less funded (many closed), but again depends on where and what you’re comparing against.
The US is reportedly 62nd in the world in libraries per capita. [1] Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we underfund our public library system is fairly obvious.
[1] https://onlinegrad.syracuse.edu/blog/best-countries-book-lov...
This is only the case if you think the proper level of funding is a function of population size or wealth instead of whatever is required to obtain sufficient results. If you're looking for results, it seems the proper level of funding would actually scale with population density (sparser areas require higher funding per capita to provide the same access).
I think you can make a case for that sort of model, but I don't think it's "fairly obvious".
That was the result of a specific deal Twitter made early on (itself a marketing stunt, of sorts). It doesn't mean the Library of Congress is generally in the business of archiving DRM-ed media on streaming services.
I’m in Illinois; under state law libraries exist as independent taxing bodies - the only way to underfund or otherwise interfere with them is at the ballot box, and it would take years of concerted effort by at least 60% of the local population (indicating that this is really what they want).
I have some family in Indiana; their libraries are funded and controlled at the county level to maximize what they can do cost-wise and to ensure that rural farmers also have access to all the resources. That structure also makes it much harder for goofballs to interfere.
And of course we have public libraries with all kinds of good media.
I don't think the comment your replying to is even talking about public libraries. I believe they're saying if society determines a person is cancelled and it's on a streaming service, it can instantly disappear from most streaming media.
They already do this frequently. 4chan has been tracking it for ages now.
I still believe that the insistence on erasing previous meanings rather than just using new words is 90% of why the USA is such a cultural cesspit and any kind of discussion turns into a battle but that’s only me.
It’s a good example how selective presentation of scientific realities can be abused to mislead.
Chromosomal defects in a binary system don’t constitute a new or between-state, and it also isn’t commonly described that way: XXY (Kleinfeltner) affecting males is the mainstream position.
In humans syndromes that lead to ambiguous (“intersex”) presentation and/or chromosomes are still operating in a binary system, eh Klinefelter affects boys.
The same is true for (very) rare hermaphroditism: in this case both gametes could in theory be produced, in practice though individuals are sterile.
Chromosomal abnormalities would be the modern term, it applies to both sexual as well as other chromosomal abnormalities like Down.
But to answer the question as asked: Yes, it fulfills the definition of the older term.
> Is it a birth defect?
Using accurate information? Not ignoring the complexities of the world?
That comment is absolutely correct; to make things more confusing, people whose sex appears female can turn out to have XY allosomes in some, or all[0], of their cells.
It doesn’t state anywhere that the patients are either female or belong to a novel category.
If you feel that this is incorrect, go to Wiki and try to edit Rachel Levine's entry to remove the word female and you can personally see how the community views this.
With regard to female sexual health panels this also appears to be a fabrication. I googled this and your comment was one of the first results, unless you mean the NowThis News panel with Biden? That being a progressive news org having a media moment with the president, not a female sexual health panel as you've called it.
Your last point is complete non-sequitur. You're operating from a place of discomfort and then working backwards toward rationalisation, that's much is clear from the half-truths you're telling. If there were any concrete concerns beyond your personal feelings you wouldn't feel the need to lie.
But yes, I did have the names wrong. The White House's Lesbian day of Visibility was with Richard Levine and Charles Clymer, the two male "lesbian females" at the table. https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/90533/tims-charles-charl...
This is Dylan Mulvaney who met Biden https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/94756/disgustingly-shall...
Thanks for the correction.
> With regard to female sexual health panels this also appears to be a fabrication.
"Rachel" Levine is the assistant health minister so that's every day for them.
> Dylan says she has tampons for other women, in separate other videos she talks about changes to her body.
"Her" body. Exactly.
> You're operating from a place of discomfort and then working backwards toward rationalisation,
It is very uncomfortable watching women being beaten https://www.gulf-insider.com/us-transgender-activists-attack... simply for asserting their rights to single-sex spaces.
I am very uncomfortable watching institutions that my daughter appreciated, such as girl guiding, being appropriated by crazy gun-toting men https://www.womenarehuman.com/women-interviewed-by-police-fo... and for the women who complain to be targeted by false reports and doxing.
I'm horrified watching politicians politicians give women's identities and rights away to men if they claim to be women https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/01/labour-to-c...
I would be as uncomfortable watching Rachel Dolezal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal being appointed presidential advisor for Black affairs.
The other three cases were all wars - an apples to oranges comparison.
Remember the Chinese military had no problem mowing down protestors if their bosses give the order.
That said, it is easier and safer to defend yourself from a government in modern society with information and free uncensored communication than with guns.
You seem to be completely off-base.
No, in the United States, the military and all federal employees explicitly swear an oath to the Constitution, and are forbidden from executing illegal orders, regardless of the chain of command.
Yeah, PLA goons in Communist China certainly do things differently.
In the United States, the people are the government. Where are you?
Also note all the leaked footage of our military gleefully mowing down children and keeping score. They are never prosecuted for war crimes either. Just part of the job.
That is how humans work everywhere. The US is not special.
Yeah, you've never been in the military and appear to have a knowledge based on memes of it. Read the officer's oath and see what we're trained to do.
The TV show Community is missing an episode on Netflix for some reason (edit: reason was Ken Jeong in what could be interpreted as blackface).
The IT Crowd is missing one in some geos because it was considered anti-Trans by some - that episode also has the unrelated and hilarious plot where Roy and Moss convince Jen that they're loaning her a "black box that holds the entire internet".
I'm not the type to rail against such things generally, but IMO it was unnecessary and misguided to remove these episodes: their humor came deliberately from how oblivious Dee was to the offensiveness of her act.
Indeed, her portrayals are usually immediately and explicitly critiqued by her fellow characters as being racist and insane.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IASIP/comments/hflb6t/list_of_its_a...
> After the series' release, a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that suicide among teenagers rose by 28.9% in the month after Netflix launched the show.
A few additional concerns with the paper:
-The authors made no effort to try and determine if any of the people who died had seen the show, or even had heard of it.
-Suicides were up the month before the show was released as well.
-In fact, suicides in that age group had been trending up for years according to their data, which is not mentioned in the discussion of results at all.
> inviting laughter and derision toward the... community
No. Just finding an occasion for the selected direction in creativity. Which the writer of the article seems to want to make ideological, with the exception of one use of the expression "«cheap laugh»" (which, for that matter, may bring attention to the other "celebrated" subplot of "the elders of the Internet" - using the same perspective, it would be as if "making cheap laughs through a sort of "ableism"").
It's a mean spirited gag, and the mere fact of being transgender is the punch line, over and over. It sucks. It makes revisiting the show more cringey and less fun.
The whole episode is about the clumsiness of living, consistently with the project idea ("the IT crowd", outcast specialists with little interface to the public, which is a mass of people thrown into some role "«not doing much work but constantly having affairs»" - confused humans -, with a link which is the portrait of incompetence trying to make a living - trying to live - into something she does not understand). All the characters do is "attempting", trying to fit a role. The difficulties of living roles could be a trigger for the development of the substory involving Douglas Reynholm and April (and the gender instrumental to that). The whole idea climaxes in the "collapse of civilization" when the "stakeholders", as "topmost layer of the role-players", are in front of the catastrophic loss of the Internet, and the "punchline from above" is that of Moss: «It really isn't that funny» - of course, because it is tragic.
While I could see that the "It's over" scene could be to some extent insensitive, given that the writers may have supposed that it would be something lived by a number in such group, it was instrumental to the fight scene, which is a consolidated topos. And the "victory" seems to be on the other side, since the "punchline from inside" is that of Douglas, which ends the episode crying, going "It's not the same!" (It's not the same without her, or him - as she was both the "other half" and the "pal"). So, not only I do not see a phobia, but on the contrary, I see the opposite message, towards seeing people for what they are, and to love that whatever they are (also since the premise of the whole is, as said, that they will be confused imperfect players) - Douglas could not and he is alone crying.
> Whether a show came out in 1955 or 1999, I just enjoy it as a product of it's time.
This is great when one can do it, and I think it's a fine approach. But of course, if you were gay in 1955 or trans in 1999, there's probably a lot of shows where certain issues— common enough at the time— would have really diminished your enjoyment and maybe even triggered some dysphoria, even 'at the time'.
"I mean", as if Douglas Reynholm (the "phobic" - finally, a literal case - in the episode) was drawn as an exemplary character, a model of a human being... "I mean II", I checked on a search engine for the spelling, and the first under-link stub that resulted is «Douglas Reynholm was an incredibly arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, cruel and elitist egomaniac who considered himself to be somewhat above everybody else. He viewed women as objects to feel and manipulate to his incredible sexual mania»...
Now... I will admit, it isn't always wrong (CP). But it often is the fruit of an unwitting narcissism.
with censorship nobody can watch it.
Do we know who actually pulled the content? Netflix clearly doesn't have a policy against streaming partial amount of content when they can't get it all from a provider but it's not clear to me if Netflix pulled a single episode of Community or if the licensers maybe refused to license that episode. I think I read that Sony was supportive of the episode being pulled.
I think most of this content will come back once the industry as a whole sort of figures out the positioning. There are something the creators are embarrassed by and it might never come back but I expect there to be a new rating or something similar (Disney+ does this already) where they'll indicate before the media plays that it may be offensive or insensitive. News shows do this when covering certain types of crimes.
Some smart-ass comic gets up on the stage and leads with "I always said you were the two talented ones in the family."
Ouch. And double-ouch at the big laugh it got from the audience.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one; though I don't think the ep should be removed, it is in poor taste and arguably defeats its own comic intentions. I suspect the deeper objection is not to the content per se but how it reads in the context of Graham Linehan subsequently aligning himself as a massive transphobe and making it into a political cause.
I don't know Linehan personally, but grew up near him and followed his career since long before he went into television, when he was writing film and TV reviews in an alt-weekly paper for beer money. He has always been a comic genius, able to turn excruciating social pain into hilarious farce, while also being willing to cheer on success. I remember he once opened a movie review for a film called Eat the Peach with 'At last, an Irish movie that does not make me want to run to the toilets and lick all four walls.'
That kind of self-criticality and emotional nakedness has deep roots in the Irish identity, and it is what makes Roy, an Irish man working for an incomprehensible and irrational corporation in London, such a compelling character. I find the show especially entertaining because I've been that person, doing that exact job, working for those kind of companies in London, often under bosses like Jen or Denholm/Douglas Reynholm. Linehan's character portraits, even for a single episode or scene, are incredibly sharp and truthful. In The Work Outing, where Roy and Moss unwillingly accompany Jen to the theater, there's a scene where Jerome, an extroverted PR guy, is introduced to Roy & Moss. No sooner has Roy diffidently said hello than Jerome exclaims 'Oh my god you're Irish! I love Irish people! They're all mad aren't they! They're just mad!' and the exchange spirals downward into cringe. The whole episode is a comic masterpiece, but this brief scene has a special place in my heart as I've had that conversation hundreds of times in my life.
In this scene but also in general, the engine of comedy is the mismatch between characters who are quirky and self-conscious (like Roy and Jen) and those who are quirky but oblivious (like Moss, Douglas Reynholm, and here, Jerome). When characters go against their 'natural' type they get punished in hilarious ways, by being stuck with the baggage of their transgression which then multiplies itself exponentially. The plot frame for this episode is that Jen tries to be oblivious in pursuit of a date with another oblivious-seeming person, who turns out to be even more painfully self-aware than she is. As in all restorative comedies, the characters who transgress end up feeling worse but wiser, nothing really bad happens, and everything returns to normal.
In The Speech (the 'banned' episode), hopelessly insensitive CEO Douglas Reynholm meets an attractive lady journalist, April, and romance blossoms. Despite her repeated advisories that she used to be a man, Douglas thinks he's found the perfect woman who not just tolerates but admires and enjoys his shallow hyper-masculinity, sharing and even exceeding his love of bad action movies, heavy drinking, and competitive sports. But gradually reality gets through even his dense skull and he ends the relationship - briefly taking responsibility for the situation, before reverting to type and deflecting blame back onto April. Mutual recriminations quickly escalate into a fist fight straight out of a bad action movie, with Douglas wins - thereby regaining his 'boss' status - by knocking April out. He is subsequently shown as being vilified in the press and sobbing over the loss of his erstwhile companion, with whom he was actually compatible.
(Roy, Moss, and Jen are relegated to the less-important plot frame story in this episode, which sets up but is peripheral to the emotional conflict of the main story. In dramatic and thriller forms, the emotional conflict sets up but is peripheral to the main plot action; John Wick is the purest distillation of this.)
The Speech breaks two comedy rules in that the climactic suffering is not just emotional but physical, and something really bad does happen (the knockout). While it's implied that April recovers (going on to write a negative magazine article about Douglas) and Douglas actually feels bad, the comedically awkward social conflict of incongruous gender expectations crosses a line into physical violence which writers normally avoid. The violence is also intense; while this is meant to parody the bad action movies both Douglas and April enjoy, most comedy violence involves characters either flailing around, missing their punches, and blundering into the furniture or escalating quickly to absurd extremes like explosions or natural disasters. Though there are multiple comic touches in the fight scene, it's choreographed as a conventional aggressive fistfight, with a lot of punches to the head in both directions.
This was a bit too close to reality for a lot of people, because transgender women do suffer a disproportionate amount of physical violence up to and including murder, and this often takes place in the context of relationships. Perpetrators often defend themselves in court by insisting that they were deceived by a transgender romantic or sexual partner and acted violently out of fear and panic, which many find wildly implausible. Complaints gradually mounted over a 12 year period and in 2020 the UK broadcaster of the show announced they were dropping the episode from reruns.
Graham Linehan, who wrote and directed the episode, reacted badly, announced he was cutting ties with the broadcaster (after years of fruitful partnership), and went on a vicious tirade on social which eventually led to the suspension of his Twitter account - strangely parallel to the trajectory of the fictional Douglas. Rather than compromising or de-escalating, he raised it to the level of a political issue asserting that his civil rights (of free speech) were under attack and going on to attack transgender people in general in the most vituperative terms. In the context of an ongoing trend of escalating violence towards trans people (nearly doubling in the last year) his increasingly strident position has alienated a great many of his former fans.
Curiously, in doing so, Linehan chanced upon an actual civil rights movement, of women losing single-sex spaces to males who choose to identify as women, and started championing this instead.
Though, many gender critical feminists find Graham's unasked-for presence in their activism rather embarrassing and irritating due to his generally quite aggressive behavior and his occasional bouts of sexism.
I read an article a while back about how old Friends episodes have movie posters in the background of films which were released after 2010.
Can't find any evidence of this at all.
Will see if I can find it. Indeed it is not easily dug up.
There are many ads about the coming trend of "Virtual Product Placement" but none that I can find which acknowledge the early attempts at it which I read about way back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/iiay9/digitally_inser...
https://www.outsourcemarketing.com/blog/help-product-placeme...
https://gizmodo.com/digital-ads-streaming-netflix-amazon-nbc...
For another thing, there is also at least some element here of the right to be forgotten. It's obviously different for groups vs individuals but our systems should allow some amount of agency to people who regret things they have produced in the past and wish for them to be forgotten.
I see such rewriting of the past, or at least attempts of that, on Wikipedia. It's not really hidden as there is a (hopefully!) integer edit history, but who reads the edit history anyway? Usually you just look at articles as they are at the current moment.
As we don't have much "hard copies" of a lot of stuff any more around the possibility to "rewrite the past" for significant amounts of people becomes a real thread as we rely more and more on digital and purely online data.
Given how "durable" our digital data is future historians will have a very hard time. Maybe our time will become a dark age when seen form the future. Have you tried lately to open some files from the 80'es that reside on some storage medium form that time? And that's only a few years in the past. Imagine 500 yeas in the future. What will be left of all the cat videos on YouTube (and maybe some more important data)?
Every time I look at a controversial article, and I'm unconvinced by the implicit narratives, I will look at the history, and more often than not there are interesting details lurking in the past versions.
And sometimes it's just fascinating looking at how details on a situation unrolled over time. Like for instance, go look at Jeffrey Epstein's Wikipedia history: there was an article on him preceding the publicity of his abuse.
I am under the impression right now that Wikipedia history is quite permanent unless an article is totally deleted, and that people do not prune the history of content they wish to censor. I hope it remains this way, cynically I don't think this will always be so, prove me wrong Wikipedia!
One person's collection serves that one person, but there are some really cool groups out there like DocuWiki[0] that try to archive every documentary out there and serve them on the eDonkey network. There's been numerous times I've failed to find a documentary by even the original publisher. Like I literally couldn't give them my money no matter how much I tried. And even libraries didn't have it. But good old DocuWiki always had my back
Torrents are kind of like a community archive
For example, one could make the argument that Alfred Hitchcock's entire library promotes negative stereotypes of women - and it's true, women in Hitchcock films are not the strong types, they're more often helpless victims who have to be rescued by male characters. This clearly, one could say, promotes negative female stereotypes which are damaging to young women so all those movies should be removed from streaming services.
One could continue in this manner, selectively pulling anime movies because they promote excessive violence and sexuality to a teenage audience, or war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr Strangelove that portray military generals as clueless maniacs, or if the pendulum swings back to the social conservative end, pulling all horror movies that don't portray Christianity in a positive light or have too many Satanic themes, and on and on.
Keeping hard copies in your personal possession is one way around this, but since the copyrights and hence distribution rights are held by these conglomerates that don't want to get in trouble with some political group or other by making them available, nobody else can view them without going through pirate sites - a very unfortunate situation.