Seen at Insty:
I’ve never been a fan of “Cloud”-based entertainment, whether literature or movies, because it’s always seemed too easy for the “Cloud” to remove stuff that you’ve paid for — Kindle books, Amazon movies, etc. — at their own discretion / whim. I don’t care that my well-filled bookcases take up a great deal of space in my apartment, or that they’d be a pain in the ass to move should I decide to live elsewhere; I bought them, they’re my property forever, and nobody can take them from me. Ditto movies. I have a large number of DVDs of the movies I love and can watch over and over again — not too many modern ones, because today’s movies largely suck — and like my bookcases, my DVDs are eternal. (I have a brand-new-in-the-box multi-format DVD player sitting in a closet in case the existing Philips gives up the ghost at some time in the future, and ALL my computers come with DVD players, just to be on the safe side.)
So when one of the great classic movies Gone With the Wind risks being taken offline because it supposedly supports Teh EEEEEVIL Confederacy, I just shrug and move on, because GWTW is very much part of my DVD movie collection. And if it’s discovered that John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart once called someone a spic or nigger, and their works are therefore doomed to be consigned to the 1984 memory hole, my copies of Stagecoach and Casablanca are perfectly safe.
Just to prove that I’m comfortable living with apparent contradiction, though, I will admit to owning a copy of child-rapist Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, because it’s fucking brilliant even though the little dwarf Polack himself is reprehensible. And even though I detest most of Woody Allen’s movies, I still have a copy of Midnight In Paris because it too is a lovely movie, and it’s safe from the baying mob who have declared the mild-mannered director persona non grata because he bonked someone he shouldn’t have, or something (I’m not familiar with the casus belli against Allen, nor am I sufficiently interested in looking it up).
That’s the whole point. The essence of all of this is choice — personal choice, not choice dictated by some foul censorship committee — and by going with the “physical media”, as Insty calls it, one is sheltered from the screaming assholes of political correctness.
And they’ll have to take my well-thumbed copy of Huckleberry Finn from my cold dead hand (the other hand will be clutching an empty 1911).
Not to mention, you can read that book after the electricity goes out for the last time, the last DVD player fails, and the internet gets turned off.
Its why I keep my Haggard & Kipling collection.
To be fair though I keep them because I love books in general, and theirs specifically. In my wildest dreams as a younker I never imagined they would the targets of this kind of thing.
Any digital goods that require phoning home to the mothership to be used are rentals pure and simple, and should be treated as such. Calling such transactions a “sale” is pure fraud.
I accidentally tuned into Fawlty Towers on PBS many years before the internet, when there was still some value to PBS in our society. I think there are only about a dozen episodes, in toto. Cleese has become a bit of a SJW in his dotage, he was anything but, back in the day, including his work in MPFC. Fawlty Towers is so f’ing funny it boggles the mind. I remember the “Don’t mention the war” episode very well and I haven’t seen it in 25 years. The great value of this kerfuffle is that whole generations of young people will likely be exposed to shows they never would have heard of otherwise. And they’ll enjoy them. I read Gone With the Wind in 8th grade for English class. It was a ginormous book, and didn’t have anything to do with cowboys or space aliens so I had real doubt that I would enjoy it. Thirty pages into it I was hooked and literally could not put it down. It was the longest book I’d read, probably until I discovered Ayn Rand. The movie is also great. These BLMers are truly the American Taliban, seeking to destroy every aspect of our culture that has any value.