Cancel Culture For All: China Bans Episode Of “The Simpsons” ; America Does The Same With “Nothing, Forever”

I don’t know why we bother with rhetoric that we may go to war with China over the next couple of decades when from a pop culture point of view we couldn’t be closer in terms of our viewpoints on restricting creatives from being outspoken, even if those creatives are machine-generated.

It was reported this week that Disney+ subscribers in Hong Kong will no longer be able to watch a newer episode of The Simpsons entitled “One Angry Lisa” after a line featured in the episode uttered by Marge made a slight at the fact that China is home to Bitcoin mining and forced labor camps where children make the smartphones we all buy and use.

Naturally, someone on the Chinese censorship board got wind of the line and, bimbo bambo, the episode disappeared off of the service. That said, China isn’t the first country to ban The Simpsons. Brazil, UK, Japan, and even Germany (“Cape Feare”) all have had instances where the local censorship boards felt that The Simpsons was too crazy for their lower viewers.

Not to be outdone, Twitch series Nothing, Forever got some flack this week and was put on a temporary ban for the next two weeks after it’s multitude of machine languages including DALL-E, OpenAI GPT-3, Stable Diffusion and others that you can see we broke down here, some how let slip this clip that wasn’t even being seen as transphobic by anybody except Twitch.

The scene features Larry Feinberg actually spouting about not doing transphobic jokes because “nobody is laughing” which, if actually taken on face value, I would think is a more liberal thought-gesture. Alas, this did not matter according to Twitch’s guidelines, but it does prove a point…everyone’s opinion on what is/is not offensive is subjective. Twitch essentially showcased its very “FCC-like” feature for the world to see, and now broadcast TV doesn’t seem so bad anymore.