Tag: Simpsons

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Disney’s Memory Hole

Simpsons, China, censorship

China’s leaders fear Winnie the Pooh.

And The Simpsons.

The totalitarian regime’s opponents liken Xi Jinping, the latest Dear Leader, to Winnie the Pooh — due to an obvious resemblance. So Xi’s government works hard to expunge Winnie images.

The Chinazis also want everyone in China and Hong Kong (not to mention across the universe) to forget the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when hundreds or thousands of people demanding democratic reform were killed. 

The Walt Disney Company is eager to cooperate with this besieging of memory.

The Simpsons is part of its new streaming service in Hong Kong, where citizens have been losing the last remnants of political freedom permitted under the two-systems agreement of 1997. Whether preemptively or in compliance with instruction from the Chinese government, Disney has deleted a certain episode from the series’ archive available to Hong Kongers.

In the memory-holed episode, “Goo Goo Gai Pain,” Homer, presiding over the corpse of Mao, opines that Mao is “like a little angel that killed fifty million people.”

Another character has a stare-down with a tank, recalling the briefly effective “tank man” confrontation with a row of tanks in that fateful June of 1989.

The episode also satirizes the Chinazi determination to erase all discussion of Tiananmen. For instance, the Simpsons see a sign at Tiananmen Square announcing “on this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

Instead of appeasing Xi’s government, what should Disney do? 

What anybody who is paid to help repress a people and blank out the past: Stop doing that. 

Forfeit the money. 

Stand up for human rights. 

Or lose them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Twirling Towards Freedom?

Citizen Kang, Simpsons, Bernie Sanders, socialism, health care, income, welfare

Does Bernie Sanders remind you of “Citizen Kang”?

Vermont’s [S]ocialist Senator is whipping up a new plan for America: to “guarantee a job with at least a $15-per-hour wage and health benefits to every adult American ‘who wants or needs one,’” we are told.

What was it that the slavering alien Kang promised* in The Simpsons’ eighth season opening episode? Well, we know how that episode ended, with Homer Simpson revealing the ’90s’-era presidential candidates to be aliens in disguise, Kang being elected, humanity enslaved, and Homer uttering the immortal words “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”

And then Kodos, in cahoots with Kang, cracking the whip on Homer.

One shouldn’t have to read George Fitzhugh, the antebellum sociologist who attacked the very idea of free markets and free labor, insisting that slavery is a good thing and the very best form of socialism, to know that socialism and slavery go together hand in glove, whip in hand.

In an age of handouts for nothing, at least Sanders’ socialist proposal suggests productivity. But paying for it by nixing corporate “tax breaks”** is absurd. “Republicans have long opposed a federal jobs guarantee,” Fox News tells us, “saying such a plan would be too expensive and impractical.” And it’s productive people who would pay for it, making them de facto slaves to the system . . . even more than they are now.

But when socialists talk about “jobs,” worry about a more direct form of slavery.

And yes, I can imagine Bernie, with his four houses, flicking the whip.

I won’t be voting for him, if he runs.

Or for Kodos.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Actually, Kang was known not for a promise but for his campaign speech (as Bill Clinton), saying, “[W]e must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

** The only funding source mentioned in the reports I read.

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