I’ve had to delete it due to pleading from my wife in case it ever comes back to haunt me by hammers looking for a nail.
This is a concern of mine too, that if the zealots win (due to lack of pushback and people being afraid of them, no doubt, which for a while was the case) and succeed in dismantling American culture, then we might have a future where roving bands of weirdoes go around checking people's histories (and even homes, perhaps) for objectionable material.
Like everything has had to be re-framed from the perspective of, "is this going to get me executed in ten years by a bunch of people dressed like clowns who have already gotten rid of the police so there's no one to call?" So I try to avoid any outward-facing public "offenses". I also try to get potentially-"objectionable" things on disc, like Blazing Saddles, Miami Vice, and now Dirty Harry (first thing I've bought on disc in a while) in case they ever get removed from all streaming.
History is entirely malleable, it turns out, when it's all stored in a "cloud" that people can just completely wipe out. See also how fast Dr. Seuss' banned books vanished from every online retailer on the planet within a day. I only have them because I managed to liberate them from the local libraries real quick.
Course, a search of my home is going to get me hammered quickly by the nails regardless, when I've got books like "Unmasked" by Andy Ngo on the shelves here, along with the aformentioned movies. It'll be to the guillotine with me quickly.
20,000 people were executed during the French Revolution, which was intended to just kill the aristocrats. ....there were not 20,000 aristocrats. The vast majority of those 20,000 offended in some other way. I once talked to this old guy who grew up in Mao's China and he told me it was like "peeling an onion" in that they were always finding new people who were "bad" and had to be punished/killed. So they'd get rid of one layer of bad guys, then figure out who were the next layer of bad guys. In other words, zealots don't just take out "the evil nazis" running things, they then move onto their direct supporters, then anyone who might be sympathetic based on the books they own, then anyone that looks like them.
You sure as fuck do not want Team Good Guys taking over. "we just want to end fascism and patriarchy and give everyone free health care" is code for "we want the power to fucking murder you if you aren't with us".
Anyway, that was all a bit heavy, back to Dirty Harry: Watched the fourth movie, Sudden Impact. That was the worst of the four by a lot, Rottentomatoes wasn't lying (it rates the first three at like 70-85% and the last two at about 50%). Wasn't into the rape storyline (I did like the vigilante woman and that she ended up with Harry) and it spent way too much time on the low-class pimp woman, following her around and listening to her blather on to the point where I was wondering what the point of spending time with this unpleasant character was from a moviemaking perspective.
Was crazy to see "Go ahead, make my day" several times in the movie, considering what an iconic phrase it immediately became. It's kinda too bad he didn't use that catchphrase for the entire series.
Clint looked way older in this one. Kinda sad that the series is almost over (one movie left) and there won't be anything else with this character, but I'm going to start getting ahold of all those other Eastwood movies people have mentioned.
I'm glad the man himself is still around, he's got to be around 95 years old by now. He must be dumbfounded at the youth of today. I'm dumbfounded and I'm not much older than they are.
