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Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

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Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#321

Post by WalterBright »

js2 wrote: post #306
WalterBright wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll raise you "Gold Diggers of 1933". If you haven't seen it, enjoy! It'll change your mind about old movies. It was a long time before sexy movies returned.

I haven't seen it (I'll watch it soon enough...), but does anything top Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross for "sexiness"? I mean, I get it. The Hays code obviously altered movies. But I disagree it was only for the worse. In some ways, I think it improved the films of that era. Anyway, a nice article on the topic: https://web.archive.org/web/20180118002259/http://www.bfi.or... via https://letterboxd.com/flam…

The Sign of the Cross was 1932, pre-code!

Also, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023470/trivia?item=tr0684068

Thanks for the links!

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#322

Post by WalterBright »

js2 wrote: post #183
WalterBright wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the movies you mentioned were made after 1953. (The Hays code started in 1934.) You substantiated my point! Just for fun, watch several movies 1930-32. Then watch some in 34-35. It's like the life got sucked out of them. Yes, I know there were exceptions. One is "Top Hat", 1935, which skirted the Code with double-talk and innuendo. > When the Hays Office learned that several actors, who were known within the…

I’ll play: The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The…

It Happened One Night is considered pre-code, although it was released in 1934.

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#323

Post by Clubber »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #315
Clubber wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>to bad blatant misinformation This is also dangerous. Imagine what the government of Mississippi or Indiana during the Jim Crow era would label as blatant misinformation. Also, in a recent court case, Facebook admitted their fact checking was opinion and therefore protected from defamation. So to put those together, Facebook is censoring because of their opinion disagrees with the opinion of the censored. https://ny…

> Imagine what the government of Mississippi or Indiana during the Jim Crow era would label as blatant misinformation. But we're not talking about the government, we're talking about private platforms. Others are allowed to spread misinfo if they so choose. > Also, in a recent court case, Facebook admitted their fact checking was opinion and therefore protected from defamation. So to put those together, Facebook is c…

>But we're not talking about the government, we're talking about private platforms. Others are allowed to spread misinfo if they so choose.

Yes, but we are. A lot of the COVID misinformation isn't declared misinformation because the fact-checker isn't an expert at COVID, it's because they are cross checking it with what the government says (CDC/NIH/etc). So the fact checker is using the government's facts, so imagine if they used the government's facts on race during the Jim Crow era.

>Fact checking is an attempt at objectivity that is nevertheless partially subjective, but that doesn't mean it's not better than doing nothing.

Depends on who is doing the fact checking. To continue with the prior hypothetical, what if someone stated in 2003 that there weren't WMD's in Iraq. The fact checkers would check with the government's facts who states there were WMD's in Iraq. The fact checker (not an expert on WMDs) would possibly label that as misinformation. In this example, it would be better to have done nothing.

In the situation where the facts are whatever the government says, that's not fact-checking or journalism at all, that's just being a mouthpiece to power.

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#324

Post by js2 »

WalterBright wrote: post #321
js2 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen it (I'll watch it soon enough...), but does anything top Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross for "sexiness"? I mean, I get it. The Hays code obviously altered movies. But I disagree it was only for the worse. In some ways, I think it improved the films of that era. Anyway, a nice article on the topic: https://web.archive.org/web/20180118002259/http://www.bfi.or... via https://letterboxd.com/flam…

The Sign of the Cross was 1932, pre-code! Also, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023470/trivia?item=tr0684068 Thanks for the links!

Yes, of course it was. My comment was confusing. Having seen the Sign of the Cross but not Golddiggers of 1933, I was asking whether anything tops the former as a pre-code movie.

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#325

Post by js2 »

WalterBright wrote: post #322
js2 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll play: The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The…

It Happened One Night is considered pre-code, although it was released in 1934.

In retrospect, I think The Thin Man man is also considered pre-code. That movie is _so_ good. I should watch all the sequels at some point.

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#326

Post by Dylan16807 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #244
Dylan16807 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the earliest form of mass speech and the one most directly comparable to publishing something to your "1000 Twitter followers" But that's not what they're calling mass speech. It's not helpful to take someone's post and change the definitions out from under them. To rephrase it without that term: Printing press scale speech is great. This new ability that twitter gives us, trivially reaching millions, was not fores…

Something that's published to "a million followers" will attract criticism very quickly if at all merited. Remember Trump's Twitter feed? That's the scale you're talking about.

Now that's an actual counterargument to OP's idea.

But I don't know how much those criticisms help.

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#327

Post by tomlockwood »

vorpalhex wrote: post #314
tomlockwood wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure that's true. Isn't it the first amendment? Private corporations have radically more control over what its members say and repeat, than the government does. Might be that other governments are different, depending.

The government has been on the losing side of a lot of free speech cases. Just because the first amendment exists doesn't mean the government respects it. Also the government is not a singular entity but many small ones. See Cohen v California for a good example of this.

Yeah but what's the comparative case that respects free speech more than the government?

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#328

Post by dang »

useragent86 wrote: post #137
dang wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Mind-boggling, Dan. What did he say that even remotely comes close to "ideological flamewar hell"? Is "leftists" the keyword? Is criticism of "today's leftists" forbidden here? Meanwhile this thread[0] that rants about the supposed evils of the "US right" (burning Harry Potter books? complaining abut D&D and heavy metal? what is this, 1995?) is not flagged, not dead, and not officially chastised, despite being severa…

It's just a shallow dismissal of the article and a generic yay-my-side, boo-your-side ideological post. That sort of comment has probably the lowest information-to-indignation ratio of anything that gets posted here. Definitely not what this site is for! We want curious conversation. Ideological battle and curious conversation are disjoint sets.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#329

Post by dang »

tomlockwood wrote: post #93
dang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article seems thoughtful and within the range of what we treat as on topic. "Opinion piece" can cover a lot of different genres—for example, blog posts are mostly opinion pieces. We don't want shallow articles on garden-variety political ups and downs, but thoughtful ones on deeper topics are occasionally ok. They don't cover those on TV news. How to handle political topics on HN has been a hard problem over the…

I actually think this article is a pretty standard and trivial reading of the situation. I don't think its particularly thoughtful, and is probably upvoted because it conforms to the already-held views of many of the upvoters. Oh? So you were warning the left about censorship, for its own good? I *have* heard that one before. I'd prefer it stays flagged.

That could be. I didn't read it closely (I rarely do).

On the other hand, if you're going to make a case like this, it really helps to make it without reverting to the key of ideological battle yourself. Otherwise the comment pattern-matches, in my sandblasted moderator brain, to the automatic dislike of one ideological side for any information they perceive as favoring the opposite side. Conformance to already-held views, as you aptly describe this, is not interesting. It's a reflexive rather than a reflective reaction (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

Long, tedious experience has driven into me how mechanical such reactions are, and also that they amount to well over 90% (if not well over 99%) of the things that internet commenters have to say about disivive stuff. As moderators trying to look through the lens of 'what's interesting', as opposed to 'who does this favor', we're conditioned to perceive such comments as more noise than signal. Especially when accompanied by snark or other markers of aggression.

I mention this here because your post was an interesting case of starting out on the one foot and ending on the other. Perhaps that is helpful, or interesting, or neither.

Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health

#330

Post by scotty79 »

kbelder wrote: post #316
scotty79 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In open, freely expressed incitment to genocide that led to it and extended its scale. Free speech apart from its all wonderfull qualities is an excelent tool for demagogues. They all are pro free speech of things they like.

>They all are pro free speech of things they like So they're not for free speech.

About as for free speech as Fox News.
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