Censored thought
“Nobody wants to offend. And, yet, this comes to mind. From ’Cheaper By the Dozen’: ’[Dad’s] primary rule was that no one could talk unless the subject was of general interest. Dad was the one who decided what subjects were of general interest. Since he was convinced that everything he uttered was interesting, the rest of the family had trouble getting a word in edgewise.’ …
“Now, conservatives of a religious bent get the message too. According to the Rawlsians, facts regarding postwar constitutional law are of exceptional interest, as are the latest findings of the social sciences, whereas the neighboring provinces of philosophy and democratic common sense are considered of but slight general interest, and events which transpire anywhere outside Rawls’ strict rules about ’comprehensive doctrines’ are of no interest whatsoever.
“It makes it a bit hard to have a conversation with somebody when someone is not trying to prove that you’re wrong about something, but instead trying to tell if you’re trying to import a ’comprehensive … ethical doctrine.’ If you betray that you actually have an internally consistent worldview, then you might as well just stop talking.”
— Joe Marier, writing on “Why John Rawls’ acolytes utterly frustrate me,” on Oct. 11 at his blog Going Noble
No longer censored
“Should films with antiquated, offensive treatment of race be seen? … How about ’Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs’? Or ’Jungle Jitters’? Those are two of the ’Censored Eleven,’ a group of infamous Warner Bros. animated shorts … that have been officially withheld from syndication by United Artists since 1968. Now, after forty-two years, these films are set for release sometime in 2011 through the Warner Archive, according to ToonZone, who learned the news this week at the New York Comic-Con.
“All eleven films can currently be seen via bootleg videos and on YouTube, including the most well-known shorts featuring Bugs Bunny. Eight of them were also screened earlier this year in association with the TCM Classic Film Festival, partly as a test to see if they’d be worthy of a DVD release. Like other controversial racially offensive works, they have long been deemed historically significant. However, it’s doubtful that, despite the collection being Warner’s ’most requested title,’ it will be heavily marketed, especially as a collection to be enjoyed by kids.
“The films, which were directed by animation legends like Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and [Chuck] Jones, are unmistakably important and worth a curious look … Even if this collection is a success, though, we’re still unlikely to see a home video release for ’Song of the South,’ which Disney CEO Robert Iger continues to claim is just too offensive.”
— Christopher Campbell, writing on “Looney Tunes’ Infamous Racist Cartoons to Be Released in 2011,” on Oct. 12 at Cinematical
Like to be censored
“Most Americans I meet seem rather complacent about the position of their country in the world. They tend to assume that the economic growth of China is not compatible with its political system, and that sooner or later it will blow apart. Ironically enough, this is a very Marxist view.
“When de Tocqueville went to America, he soon realised that the vocabulary of political philosophy and science that he had inherited was not adequate to describe the reality — the new reality — that he was seeing. He struggled to describe the forms of domination, tyranny and unfreedom that he saw developing in embryo under forms of liberal representative democracy.
“Certainly, it does not seem to me that the future necessarily belongs to freedom as we have known it, and such as it was, and that therefore China must break apart under demands for personal liberty. It is a mistake, in my view, to assume that all people want to be free, in the sense of the American pioneers. I think they much prefer to be comfortable; as the establishment of welfare states almost everywhere as the political summun bonum has shown, the greatest of all freedoms, the one that more people want more than any other, is the freedom from responsibility and consequences. It is true that the Chinese have never had the freedoms of speech, etc., that we have enjoyed and have taken for granted, but I am not sure how much they are missed there.”
— Theodore Dalrymple, writing on “Do we all want freedom?” on Oct. 13 at Axess
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