MisterSwig

When has this happened? Obviously it's very hard (or near impossible) to do this with durable, cultural products that are published and distributed to many collectors. In ancient times, before printing presses and compact discs, perhaps it was much easier for official censors to collect and destroy banned versions of cultural items and leave the approved ones alone. But something similar still goes on today, because creators are often reliant upon others to finance and produce their work. This means that screenwriters and directors often create characters and stories that are censored or altered by studio executives who purchase the rights. In preproduction an original character or story might be radically changed (for better or worse) and the only version we'll know about is the one eventually released in theaters. Or in postproduction, during the editing phase, a director might clash with the studio, and we never get to see the director's cut of the film. If fans of Zack Snyder hadn't pressured Warner Bros., we probably never would have gotten the 4-hour version of Justice League. There are calls to release other director's cuts, but how many from the distant past have been totally destroyed and forgotten? And how many were changed for the worse? We might never know.

And co-written by Katie Dippold whose Twitter bio links to the BLM "Ways you can help" page. They would have been totally different stories with straight, white male leads.

They do it with the class issue too. Consider The Magnificent Seven. The original was actually an American remake of the 1954 Japanese movie Seven Samurai. Samurai was about a village of peaceful farmers hiring samurai to protect them from a gang of bandits. The original Seven consistently adapted this idea for an American audience in 1960, portraying a peaceful Mexican village hiring American gunslingers to protect them from a gang of outlaws. In both cases the enemy was a gang of bandits. The movie was remade in 2016 and they turned the enemy into an evil businessman, altering the original class dynamic and theme of the story, in my opinion reducing it to stereotypical anti-capitalist garbage.

Because what you originally said is indeed my thinking. But that is the point of Rand. It's one of many points she made, but she was a radical for capitalism. The point is "justifying capitalism." That means explaining why capitalism is rational and good. Afterward you dropped the justifying part. And that's why I said you know that's not what I said or meant.

In this episode we ask whether transwomen should be allowed to compete in women's sports. Why have women's sports in the first place? And do transwomen have an unfair advantage over women? Check it out!

In his new YouTube video, Bill Whittle argues that progressives are "cultural parasites." Similar to the fictional alien in Alien or the real parasitoid wasps, progressives use and kill their cultural hosts in order to reproduce. They inject their ideas into a beloved character or story, then they consume this cultural product from the inside out before moving to the next victim. Whittle gives several examples including "woke" Ghostbusters, which replaced the original male team with females, and a gay Captain America I'd never heard of. I think there's some truth in what Whittle claims. But this practice of altering and repurposing cultural products is nothing new. And it has the potential of producing an improvement on a flawed original, despite popularity. In my view the main problem is actually institutional censorship, when the original is systematically cancelled from existence and fades from memory, and then a truly parasitic version becomes the new host organism.

Conservatives (or people interested in conservatism) who are mostly under 35 years of age. We should care about them because they are interested in ideas and values, and they have a history of liking Rand's novels and some of her political philosophy. Yes, it's their channel. Plus, if you watch Prager he literally sits in his library and explains how he loves his thousands of books. So it's a good sign that he allowed this pitch to read Rand. There's no evidence it was forced to be watered down. That's speculation until someone at OSI or PragerU reveals the editing process. But you know that's not what I said or meant. And I don't think anyone watching that video is going to think philosophy starts with capitalism. I'm not sure what that means. Who is the bottom of the barrel? Prager? Who's at the top of the barrel?

Depends on the definition of "primarily". It's not the main focus of PragerU, as reflected on the page I linked and in their variety of videos.

At the end of YT URLs add this code: &t=1h12m24s But replace my madeup numbers with the particular hour, minute and second you want to start the video.

The video doesn't use the word "selfishness" but it communicates Rand's stance against "sacrifice" of self to others and others to self, and it argues for "personal profit." I don't see this a trying to dupe people, it's trying to meet an audience at their level of conceptual development. They aren't Objectivists yet, so they probably won't understand Rand's idea of "selfishness" without reading her long essay on it. If you can't properly convey an idea in a brief intro, it might be best to leave it for later. As for Rand's atheism, I don't think it's important to introduce her with her negative beliefs. Also, PragerU isn't primarily a religious group. He's already encouraging them. That's what the video is about. It's basically a pitch for reading her novels. But that is the point of Rand. It's one of many points she made, but she was a radical for capitalism. If Prager or PragerU starts labelling Objectivism "poison" then you might have a point. But we shouldn't stop spreading the message because random people in the crowd will try to cancel us. And people have been trying to taint Rand for a long time, that's no reason to avoid PragerU. It's a reason to go in there and present the positive case.

She read that article on the radio. ARI uploaded it to YouTube. At 18:36 she tells the story of James E. Robinson of Indian Head Mills.

Also, if you believe Plato, one of the charges against Socrates was impiety. So I think the Athenians took their gods pretty seriously.

Amazon might be trying to virtue-signal its way out of a controversy.

Huh? Madison was baptized Anglican, studied Presbyterian, and started the tradition of presidents attending service at St. John's Episcopal Church (his wife was Episcopalian). He mostly kept his beliefs private while fighting for separation of church and state, but he never renounced Christianity. While Presbyterian in youth, Hamilton was probably a deistic Christian as an adult, meaning he held to Christian ethics but didn't think God was involved in human affairs. After his famous duel, however, he notably begged a reluctant bishop for the final sacrament and died proclaiming his faith. The thing about deists back then, they often retained much of the Christian ethics while struggling to apply reason over faith. Jefferson, for example, famously cut out all the miracles in the Gospels and used the rest of it. For this sort of thing Hamilton smeared him as an "atheist." Jefferson was one of the most deistic of the bunch and even he relied on Christian morality.

Yeah, if you're Amazon you want to raise the minimum wage to ass-out smaller businesses trying to compete with you.

By what standard? If that's the standard, isn't it based on the conceptual packaging of "freedom" and "privilege"? If you earn money through voluntary trade, then you can spend it freely, because morally it is yours to spend. But if you receive money through involuntary taxation and distribution, aren't you spending it due to privilege because morally it is not your property? It's the difference between spending money you earned from working in a store all day versus spending money your father robbed from the store and gave to you as an allowance. It seems that UBI moves us closer to the privilege of spending unearned money, rather than the actual freedom to spend what you earn. I thought of this topic again after YouTube recommended this video to me. It's about the results of a UBI experiment in Stockton, California. According to the former mayor, the program was a major success. I have my criticism, but I'm curious what you think first.

I'm a little shocked by his level of absurdity and nihilism. He seems to evade the basics of mythology in his quest to destroy objectivity utterly. His concept of "the real world" is so thoroughly subjective that he thinks whatever nonsense the Athenian mythologists put to paper was actually their reality. I suppose in his view that's the only type of reality that could exist, a non-objective one of pure imagination. So is this the answer to the stolen concept fallacy? In the pluriverse concepts are the reality, so there is no logical dependency between one concept and another. They all exist equally with no hierarchical connection because there is no objective reality to impose such a hierarchy on them.

In America I think the left-right political dichotomy identifies a divide between people revolting against the American system and those still loyal to it. During the French Revolution loyalists sat on the king's right and those in favor of revolution sat on his left. Applied to America today, those who express gratitude and loyalty to the American Founders and the Constitution (our authority figures) are considered the right, while those expressing contempt and disloyalty (or outright anti-American revolution) are considered the left. Of course many people have had (and do have) a mixed opinion, finding themselves mostly loyal or mostly disloyal but also a little disloyal or a little loyal. But when the seriously disloyal challenge something considered sacrosanct to Americanism, that dividing line becomes more and more distinct and set in stone. Battle lines form. The right's loyalty turns to patriotic leaders who represent groups who embody the basic values of applied Americanism, while the left's disloyalty turns into tolerance of and obedience to whatever anti-American force can herd them into organized action against the loyalists. And that's what we're seeing now. Battle lines are being solidified because the left has gone racist again. You want examples of the left? Look for people who wear their skin color on their sleeves. And as Rand argued, racism is a form of collectivism. So that's why, politically, I equate the left in America with collectivism. Take a look at the Democrat Party and tell me if it's not thoroughly infested with racism. Then look at the Republican Party and tell me if it is. I think the difference is night and day.

Greg Anderson is a history professor at Ohio State University. He recently gave a TED talk on the pluriverse. He rejects objective reality, arguing that there are many realities which he calls the pluriverse. Essentially each culture (or group of people) has their own reality which they create themselves. (He uses the ancient Athenians as an example.) These realities are equally real and important, except perhaps for modern Westerners who believe in objective reality and a universe. Thus we need to take notes from all the indigenous peoples who believe in primitive gods and live sustainable lives. I suppose the "multiverse" concept is not subjectivist enough for the hardcore leftist academic. Multiverse comes mostly in the form of a physics theory subject to scientific scrutiny. But the "pluriverse" idea is sustained by pure imagination, by the various popular myths of different societies throughout time. The problem, however, is that an egalitarian metaphysics has an inherent enemy in anyone who claims a superior metaphysics, and so it must be implied, if not clearly explicated, that pluriverse is the one, true view of reality.

I don't know but I doubt it. My understanding is that with severe violations YT just nukes your channel and makes you start over, unless you're a special user. Also, if they had a couple strikes they wouldn't have been able to upload for a period of time, and I don't think that happened.

We've been willing, but you don't like our examples. What do you think of Jordan Peterson's take?

I like this analogy. But how do you factor in the permanence of speech on social media versus the impermanence of speech at a bar? Like a physical magazine, your social media posts have some permanence over time because they exist as an electronic document. They aren't ephemeral like the conversation you have with someone at a bar. Thus, platforms like Facebook aren't merely providing a place where people can come and talk to each other. They're providing tools for creating, publishing and distributing documents.

What sort of platform is it? What is your purpose in creating it? If you want to build a discussion forum devoted to foodies, you might restrict the chat to food-related topics and ban anyone who keeps ranting about Biden's verbal gaffes. But if you want to build a video hosting site devoted to other people's content, maybe you don't want to censor or ban them for expressing personal opinions that you don't like, especially if you call your platform "YouTube." It's disingenuous.

Maybe because it's considered art? I don't think I'll watch the video. I like some of the early music (not composed by Manson but by his bandmates), but I'm not really into his visual imagery or lyrics.

No, the basis is your personal values. Do you value such subversive talk or not? Is it good or bad for you personally? It's your property, you decide what you want to allow based on your objective assessment of the facts as they relate to your life and purpose. I don't think the platform's size matters. You're crossing the line if what you're doing harms your own life--or, in the case of a corporation, harms the corporation. Again, that depends on whether it harms you or Facebook, in which case the difference is between an individual and a corporation.