Wow, that is a title! This story starts a few years ago when I was studying Computer Science, and I was reminded of it from some random thing in the news today about a group suing a school district because they were collecting toys for kids for Christmas and they were atheists, so it made them sad that others were having fun without them. Our story is about the removal of thousands of college lectures that were on YouTube because a group sued the school in California because these free videos had no subtitles.
So, this school in California was doing the cool thing at the time of recording lectures and putting them online so people who could not get to the school or afford it would be able to learn the same information. It sounds like a super progressive thing to do. I got into Computer Science because of the free videos produced by CS50 of Harvard explaining programming basics. In my school, we had teachers who would show these videos from more prominent schools. Some would play a new one every lecture, which did cause students to bring the issue that they were paying to learn this stuff but would watch YouTube videos instead.
Well, progressives are never happy. All those free videos were unedited and just uploaded to playlists on the school’s YouTube page. The cost of recording them was already something, but it was seen as a good cause. But a group found that there were laws in California that stated the schools must provide accessibility of all the school’s resources. Probably another good meaning progressive rule to make sure people could learn things while in school. But this new group used it to force the school to either remove all the videos or add sub-titles in something like a month.
The school figured it was easier and much less costly to delete all the videos than comply. It may have been out of spite. I think they were trying to help people, and the group comes in and craps all over their work. I found this bad that they would delete it, as that does not help anyone, only hurts people.
I found a news story about the removal of all that information and posted it to our CS group chat. Many people thought it was a bad idea to remove the content as they agreed that it was more important to provide the information to the many than cater to the few. It was also pointed out they could allow the people of the internet to help create the subtitles because people like to do that for fun. Then comes a progressive teacher who I was friends with until 2016. He would not see that the information was more beneficial to society, even if it was not perfect for everyone. He argued that it must also benefit the few no matter what.
Looking back, this is what makes progressives so bad. They want to help people so much that even if it hurts people along the way, they find it to be acceptable because they think they are helping a small portion of society, which they have deemed to be important. In this case, the videos were free. They existed to help people, and the judge who ruled over the case should have grandfathered all the existing content but required that the school have at least a good faith effort to add the additional subtitles in future videos. It should have also been set that the school should organize systems for others to add the subtitles. But because the court was not informed, the progressives did not care about everyone. The world lost a lot of information.
There was a guy Jeremy Kauffman who found this to be ridiculous that they would delete the videos. He set out to build an archive of the videos using blockchain so no one could technically delete them. I do not know precisely how it works, but now you can use the platform to host videos and view videos called LBRY.tv. The newer site is called Odysee, and they are trying to take on YouTube to prevent censorship. Anyway, check it out. We know progressives hurt everyone because they think they are always right, and the only way they can be taught is to never give in to their ridiculous demands. I did not know how to finish this and was getting sidetracked.
