To be more clear, here is a quote from another article
> The company said it would publish 17 of the author's books in their original form as The Roald Dahl Classic Collection along with the planned edited versions so "readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl's stories they prefer."
To me, it feels like a way to quell anger but still proceed forward and possibly even make money. I bet that the “classic” editions will be quietly discontinued in a few years.
> I bet that the “classic” editions will be quietly discontinued in a few years.
So buy them now, before they go out of copyright.
This feels like a way to drum up publicity and sell more books. Many grandparents will be reading this outrage in the express and buying the full original set for their children this christmas.
(it seems that copyright will last until 2060, which is crazy - 100 years after they were written)
Copyright in general is far longer than most people expect. In most of the world it's at least 70 years after the death of the author. Most people will not live to see even their grandparents' generation's work enter the public domain.
Copyright lasts much longer than necessary to incentivize creators. The last Civil War veteran died in 1956. Imagine he had written a memoir of his wartime experience and that current copyright laws had always been in effect. That means a book about events from the 1850s would still be under copyright!
I think copyright should last long enough to encourage the following type of creation: An author writes a fantasy book series. The author publishes books in this fantasy world for the next 25 years. Then she signs a deal for the movie rights and the studio spends 15 years producing a trilogy. If copyright only lasted 50 years, the entire fantasy world would still be under copyright for a decade after the last movie was released (and that movie would be protected for 50 years).
Now think of the benefit to society. The '60s and '70s produced a wealth of cultural content, and modern culture would benefit from seeing that material enter the public domain.
Nonsense. Disney would make plenty of money on Frozen 17 with Snow White in the public domain. Extreme copyright lifetimes just stifle public creativity and are an excuse to implement draconian and authoritarian practices.
I know, but they don't. Outside of creative tech/art spheres, most people don't know much of anything about copyright, and telling them about "works expiring into the public domain" seems to violate their preconceived ideas about "property". It's tragic.
Actually I think this is their way of extending copyright isn't it? If they publish newly revised books doesn't copyright end sooner for the older version? Speaking of US law.
But since the original version gets into public domain, it will be hard to make money on the “improved” version. Unless there is a huge demand for the sanitized text.
I'm normally sympathetic to 'wokeisms' but this sickens me. A lot of the value of reading is in learning to expand your mind, expand your perceptive. Take in the book, read it, make your own decisions on how to process it and how to feel about it. This is flat-out reducing stories so that nobody learns anything more than what they already know.
I've got plenty of issues with modern literature written to confirm the readers opinions rather than challenge them. Reducing books from the past to fit the same modern views just history-washing. Let us all naively believe that all authors in the past have our same identical values so we are never challenged to look beyond them.
It's revolting and frightening. No one is ever going to learn anything outside of their narrow world view if this trend continues, and I have a bad feeling that it will. Who's next? C.S. Lewis? Tolkien? I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
I would truly be happier if these books got censored. Let them remain on the list of corrupting literature because at least then the bold reader can seek them out.
There is absolutely no reason to ever revise any books this way. If your delicate sensibilities are offended by the language, don't read the books. Wokeness is a long walk down a short plank. It leads to tyranny. Read Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 while you still can. That's the road we're on.
While I don't agree with all the specifics of what terms they censored out, I do think there's something to be said for updating outdated / offensive terminology. Language changes, acceptable terminology changes. Kids books are chosen for kids by their parents. If research showed that parents didn't want to buy their kids books with the word "fat", doesn't it make perfect sense to update it?
If Dahl was writing today, and his editor said they had to change some phrasing, of course he would have done it. The important thing is getting kids to read his marvelous stories, not insisting on some form of literary purity.
Is there a value in using numbered footnote references when there's only one and it's the next line and it comprises 33% of the comment's total sentence count?
It was done so poorly that this thought had already crossed my mind. A bunch of the changes were obviously unnecessary by any standard, and they didn't even pay attention to things like meter when editing poems.
I'm not even necessarily against this (we do this to kids' literature all the time and basically always have—as longs as the originals can still be had, not a big deal) but this was so lazy and awful that it's hard to believe they were serious—this was straight-up an illiterate editing effort.
It was a real initiative using a real company which specialises in this. They just aren't very good at preserving the intent of the author and the nuance of the text. Which is exactly what we should expect of any censor.
In France, nobody asked for dumbed down versions of books, yet the publishers rewrote many of them removing subjunctive mood and past simple over the last 15years.
Worse, most kid, young teenager books are using a "simplified" grammar and vocabulary.
Unless exception, one needs to reach translated books to get a normal grammar and vocabulary.
All that to say I am actually surprised they went back on their announce.
The US version of this is the shift of juvenile and young-adult literature to the first-person POV, which has been so complete that kids coming up now find the third-person off-putting and difficult to read.
Do you have sources for this or do you have personal experience with people affected? I haven't heard this before and I'd like to know more. Sounds strange to me that considering that most of the popular books I know of targeting that age group are 3rd-person perspective.
Writer Twitter/Blogosphere/Youtube (including publishers) where this trend's been much-remarked-upon for years, know some writers and what publishers/agents are saying to them, know some English teachers and what they say about juvi-fic and YA trends and kids' reactions.
If you want another sad-making observation, the teachers say teens are increasingly finding late-20th-century kids' books hard to read, because the language is too complex for them to follow—they're used to first-person with very simple sentences with redundancy for anything important (so it's harder to miss), and publishers are chasing simplicity/clarity-at-all-costs hard for fear of alienating any of their shrinking reader-base, which of course re-enforces that decline in ability to handle sentence- and paragraph-level complexity—even goes for "advanced" readers, I'm told. This part's been heading that way for a while, but I guess has gotten much worse fast over the last 5ish years.
Basically, the genres that people still read (YA and romance) are trending hard toward first-person and very simple language. If you write in third publishers and agents will either tell you to switch outright, or you'll get a lot of "seems too distant and impersonal" and such, which is just them asking for first person without saying it. Some get through anyway, especially from authors who got their start 10+ years ago and have more sway, but first is strongly preferred.
> the teachers say teens are increasingly finding late-20th-century kids' books hard to read
That doesn't surprise me at all, I'm sure 20th century teachers found the same trend in 20th century students trying to read 19th century books. It's a shame, but it is what it is. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from this, except that we should do what we can to encourage kids to read the classics despite (or even because) of the difficulty.
I think what's so shocking is these books are already so damn simple—they weren't considered challenging to their target age group even 20 years ago—but they're still too complex for 'em. It's like if there are two clauses they can't keep the first one in their head long enough to make sense of the whole thing, and god forbid you need to track an idea across multiple sentences.
I have a suspicion that the trend dates back much earlier (60s? 70s?), and owes to de-emphasizing poetry in English classes, since reading poetry requires heavy tracking of complex context over long stretches of text, making even fairly-complex prose mostly seem easy by comparison. This may just be a continuation of that trend—kids' lit gradually getting simpler in response to declining literacy that is itself due to shifts in curriculum focus, causing an ongoing, further decline.
You may be right, but I'm not convinced. I believe many Jules Verne novels were once considered "young adult" fare, but (in the original unabridged forms) became challenging for young adult readers in the 20th century. I think natural drifts in language are a major factor in this. The stories and characters are generally simple, but the texts themselves become more challenging as time passes.
Or take Shakespeare for example; he wrote for the unwashed masses yet his writings are considered sophisticated and challenging today. I have an anthology of English renaissance drama from various playwrights that I revisit from time to time. The stories are usually quite crude and funny (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Tis_Pity_She%27s_a_Whore), but understanding them well enough to appreciate that humor can be a chore. I don't think these stories were considered difficult originally, but became so over time.
Do you have a link where I can read more about this? I'm surprised kids find third-person difficult. My eight-year-olds and their friends are all starting the Harry Potter books, and I haven't heard this complaint.
I've got some young advanced-reader kids (I think my eldest had read all but the last couple Harry Potter books before turning 7? And they did understand them, we quizzed 'em quite a bit to make sure) like that and the difference is we're handing them older books we're familiar with before they'd ordinarily get to them. Most kids track closer to normal graded reading level and will learn largely on newer, first-person books provided by teachers and librarians who are desperate to get kids to read anything.
I haven't heard of this trend before, what you say seems very strange to me since I've always found first-person novels to be more than a bit odd and uncanny.
We Olds tend to, since it used to be (not even that long ago) rarely-used, and almost never without some good motivation or framing narrative demanding it. Kids coming up find it normal.
I heard recently that some people predict that the subjunctive will disappear from current French in another decade or so. Could this be true? Seems bizarre.
Subjunctive mood has 4 different tenses, present, passé, imparfait and plus-que-parfait.
The last one is rarely used and has been for at least 30years. It's also similar to the conditional past 2nd form. e.g. "(que) j'eusse fini".
For the other tenses, they are still used in sentences like "il faut que je fasse" and similar.
Now, if we are speaking about the past simple (passé simple), it could disappear within one more generation. For mine (born in the low 80s), it was already "deprecated" when speaking.
That negative public response came from all sides of the political spectrum, of course. If this hypothesis is accurate, it seems as if the problem might have been that the publisher uncritically accepted the hostile framing of "woke." Turns out it's not actually about censorship.
That’s an interesting point. Of course, corporations are willing to accept socially progressive language as a business matter, but they aren’t really “of the progress movement” so to speak.
“ It feels like a bait and switch, ignoring the very real issues with the writer while labeling as bad, wrong or offensive words that have no such inherent value.”
I read this as: editors are changing just some words in order to save Dahl, who should be banned completely. And Salon author calls their own stance “against censorship”. Hm.
Honestly, more like a malicious compliance way of doing it; designed to generate that backfire and aim atleast part of the blast at the "wokies" or whatever bullshit term you want to label non-conservatives.
As I said on reddit about this:
Warner Bros. have done fine with the pre-amble to their older cartoons that says something to the effect of "yo, this was written back when attitudes were different, they were shitty attitudes, but to erase them is to pretend it never happened."
A similar preface in the books would have worked much better, but wouldn't give you any amount of PR like this.
It's not about the specific books, it's about the principle of people other than the author rewriting books, whether fiction or non-fiction, to fit with present-day politics and sensitivities.
Should we edit Shakespeare to remove all that hard-to-read 'olde English'? Maybe edit Romeo and Juliet to give it a happier ending, and get rid of that nasty violence with daggers and poison? (that's much worse than Roald Dahl describing characters as 'fat' or 'female' isn't it?)
Even if it is it's not the sort of thing you can remove by changing a few words.
I liked his books quite a lot as a kid, and haven't prevented any children in my care from accessing them. But on revisiting as an adult there is a kind of... meanspiritedness to them. It's hard to describe but almost like, spiritual viciousness or a deep nasty pessimism about people.
Part of this may be why they appeal to children anyway. I didn't consciously notice as a kid but I suspect they registered as slightly transgressive in some way, and were alluring for that reason. Anyway none of the edits really address that, or could. To a significant extent that feeling is a fundamental part of the books and can't be removed.
> there is a kind of... meanspiritedness to them. It's hard to describe but almost like, spiritual viciousness or a deep nasty pessimism about people.
Yes, I felt this way about his books when I was a kid. I did like the books despite it, but there was always an element of grotesque cruelty to his books that I didn't particularly care for.
Still, removing that from the books is wrong. Read different books, or write your own books. Editing his books to remove the author's distinctive style is just plain wrong. What's the objective, to trick kids into thinking Roald Dahl was a different sort of man? To what end? Whatever the problem, deception is not the answer.
> Part of this may be why they appeal to children anyway. I didn't consciously notice as a kid but I suspect they registered as slightly transgressive in some way, and were alluring for that reason.
Oh, yeah, that is absolutely why they were so popular. This is arguably an example of what TVTropes calls "Seinfeld is unfunny" (the inventor of a new style of media seems derivative or at least uninteresting to modern audiences); today it maybe doesn't stand out so much, but Dahl was probably the first modern childrens' writer to write stuff like this.
Yeah even his biographical books (Boy and Going Solo) had that style of writing.
Personally I didn’t mind it. A lot of British comedic writing and entertainment was similar in vein. There’s a lot of emphasis places on barbed wit in a lot of their media (even as far back as Shakespeare), and I think Dahl essentially took that and formed it into a kids book.
Even when I was a child though, I felt any mean spritidness was always directed in a way towards the antagonist or received from a bully. It was largely in adversarial relationships. Maybe I misremember though.
Either way, I think his overall stories are almost always so incredibly charming , coupled with Quentin Blake’s wonderful art, that they’re a must read for children.
Kind of a tangent, but is it fair to define ppl up in arms about this as “anti-woke”?
Im basing this on the fact that anti-woke usually is considered right-wing/libertarian etc
Whereas nobody I talked to who opposed these changes would consider themselves “anti-woke”.
Im not trying to pick a bone with you, but I’ve been lately thinking about a common trope where if someone opposes a change/policy , they get labeled “anti-this” or the worst is they get hit with a question of “why do you care” Where the goal isn’t to debate the merits of the change but simply shun the other person.
Anyone that uses terminology like "woke" or "anti-woke" to label others is not concerned with what a fair definition of a person is until they themselves are targeted. I would go further to say most people don't consider what is fair when defining people in general. 99% of people who get called "woke" don't consider themselves "woke" or even use the word so I assume the same to be true of whatever the hell "anti-woke" is supposed to mean.
Maybe the problem you're trying to point out is that, like most labels, anti-thing leaves no nuance. To what level is a person against something? Are they questioning that thing to gain better understanding? Or are they trying to justify their bias?
> Im basing this on the fact that anti-woke usually is considered right-wing/libertarian etc
Maybe in your mind but not mine. Good liberals are anti-woke because woke is anti-liberal. It's a coercive force that any decent person should be against. At least anyone who critically examines it and the methods it uses to manipulate and gain unjust and unearned power over others.
Woke's are completely morally incoherent and no better than the Catholic inquisitors. Just a godless and soulless version of it suited to the modern day as it's people that think they are an authority on morality and decency and have some special insight into it that legitimizes their coercive methods to assume a better perch, without merit, in the social hierarchy they claim to hate.
People like you have always existed, suited in different skins, based on whatever gullible plebs could fall for or cowards could be frightened into.
Well you definitely have that certainty of your own righteousness we all know and love.
It's funny that you mention religion, because yes I am a christian and so I understand that one day I will stand before god in judgement of my actions. I have no certainty that I am able to do what is required of me, only that I must try and this is what drives me to fight for "the least of these." Why do you lick the boot?
can you be up in arms but not be considered anti-woke?
I get what you’re trying to say, I just wonder how many people decided not to be up in arms about this and other subjects similar to this and decided to keep quiet so they would not be considered anti-woke.
I say this cause in my work env, people are heavily pushing language shift recommendations and it seems like nobody dares speak up about it (me included) to stay polite/be considered part of the good ones. But in reality most people are not for the change at all.
And it’s usually a minority of people pushing for changes like this.
At the end of the day it sounds like you're trying to do what you think is right but are worried about becoming a pariah. These conversations can be hard because they're built upon core feelings about human behavior and what is "better" for us.
If the problem is that you want to have a thoughtful conversation about an issue but are worried about being labelled, first identify if being thoughtful or critical is the what the group wants or has the propensity to do. If you're lucky then you will be around people willing to have a discussion and can frame a lot of the conversation around you filling in your understanding (when in fact you're trying to get others to start thinking critically). Asking a lot of questions about the results of outcomes is also a great way to stop people from auto-piloting into popular opinions.
“Up in Arms” implies a furor about the response. The definition is “protesting vigorously”.
It seems like you’re conflating objecting to something with being up in arms about it.
A reasoned objection is very different than the over the top reaction from some people, even on here, saying “wokeness is the end of literary freedom etc”. Analyzing it on a case by case basis vs jumping to extreme conclusions based on one’s biases.
> Kind of a tangent, but is it fair to define ppl up in arms about this as “anti-woke”? Im basing this on the fact that anti-woke usually is considered right-wing/libertarian etc
You're right that one of these is unfair, but it is the latter not the former. "Woke" is the progressive fringe, not the mainstream. Opposition to woke is a set that includes both the moderate mainstream and the right fringe. Liberal enlightenment values, which represent the moderate majority today, are distinctly "anti-woke".
I wonder if part of the problem is a confusion of meaning for "woke", coupled with a tendency to misuse moderate criticism as full-throated support for the extreme opposition.
The classic liberal stance is "don't be shitty to people", and, in turn, "call out people for being shitty". But "shitty" is pretty subjective, and it runs the gamut from "going out of your way to be specifically, personally aggressive and hurtful" to "using a word that in a different context might potentially be understood as critical to someone". It seems like the most vocally anti-woke people clutch their pearls in equal dismay for any attempt at avoiding either case.
I think there is a performative element to a lot of "woke" efforts, but I have to be very careful about saying that, lest I inadvertently carry water for someone who wants to use my words to justify racial slurs or deliberate mis-gendering or any number of other things that I think are shitty. It should not be "this self-described liberal said that 'woke' is performative, therefore there's no real objection to me calling black people [racial slur]".
> Liberal enlightenment values [...] are distinctly "anti-woke".
How so? Enlightenment values include the commitment to universal human dignity and the rejection of prejudice and discrimination. This is consistent with the goals of social justice movements.
There is nothing liberal about censoring books. Stripping the word "fat" out of children's books is progressive, but certainly not liberal, and certainly not mainstream.
Enlightenment values place rejection of prejudice and discrimination far lower than the ability to express things freely even if these things contain prejudice and discrimination - e.g. "The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech." by Voltaire.
The changes were meaningless. Things like "fat" to "enormous." If you called a obese person "enormous," they would find it more offensive, not less. The only people who would care are culture warriors, and they predictably made enough of a stink to make this marketing campaign work out just fine.
Netflix is doing a bunch of adaptations, which will naturally draw a bunch of renewed interest to the books. They probably wanted to avoid discourse criticizing the books when the new shows came out.
Not a publicity stunt, and not something anyone asked for.
The publisher does not have a rational unified will. It is made of up people and its actions are a product of internal politics.
In this case, as is usual, a tiny group of hyper-motivated woke ideologues would have banded together to push for these changes, and deployed the usual array of ideological superweapons that the woke have access to in our culture-space (there are no antibodies to their power plays unlike traditional religions, and pushback against woke ideas in institutional contexts is often legally punishable by various mechanisms related to civil rights law).
This tiny group swung the publisher to its will, because they care with the self-destructive fervor of religious zealots, and everyone else is just trying to get along, so they win despite being a microminority.
It's another step in the long march through the institutions; basically all our academic, corporate, cultural, military, and scientific establishments have fallen under woke control by the same mechanisms.
I wouldn't characterize it as a stunt. I believe this review was initiated around 2020, back when "woke" was still a compliment. They brought in a firm that specializes in sensitivity readings, and they've now announced the results of the process that began several years ago. I'm sure they planned for the possibility that there would be a loud backlash, and they are now walking back their initial announcement.
This may result in some additional sales, as people scramble to get the old versions. But it also puts egg on Puffin's face, and may hurt their reputation among buyers and authors. Overall, it seems more like inertia and incompetence rather than a finely-tuned publicity stunt.
When they say original, do they mean just without this round of bowdlerization or really original?
Are people looking for the Oompa Loompas as African Pygmies from the original version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before they were removed in the 1972 edition?
In a country where people complained bitterly about the golliwog being taken off a jam label, I would suspect that yes, a certain segment of society would like that version back on shelves.
>Are people looking for the Oompa Loompas as African Pygmies from the original version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before they were removed in the 1972 edition?
The reasonable answer is "they should still be something people can readily access but not endorsed/actively reprinted" but usually these arguments boil down to very partisan takes on speech unfortunately.
Your example has been comprehensively dealt with before in this ongoing discussion (e.g. in previous threads on this matter). Dahl made the textual changes about the Oompa Loompas himself , after listening to some feedback on the original text that was made. I've quoted what he had to say on the matter before in previous threads, if you care to look. [1]
I believe you should understand "original" in the parent as in quotation marks as well. The "original" here is akin to referencing the "original" pledge of allegiance in the US, the one with "under god" appended during the red scare.
That is, the parent is saying they won't be surprised if Florida requires the line "catch a tiger by the toe" to instead be sung as "catch an [racial slur] by the toe".
If someone said "the original pledge of allegiance" I think most people would interpret that as being about its form before any alterations. And so, the 1892 "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
(Before the 1923 addition of "the Flag of the United States of America" and the 1954 addition of "under God")
He was also a raging anti-semite. Like, to the levels of proudly proclaiming "I have become anti-Semitic."
It shouldn't be terribly surprising that an old British guy was a bigot, nor that some of that bigotry crept into his works.
I'm not sure why this instance of censorship feels particularly egregious, though. It's ultimately for children, and we censor content for kids all the time. We do it with movies and TV shows and music, and I don't see much rage directed toward that practice.
Is it because it's a book? Is it because it's a medium that hasn't really been censored like this before? Is it because it was done posthumously? Is it the specific content being censored?
Something feels different about this one. Maybe it's just the fear that what was once sacred is now fair game for defilement, or the sinking realization that the dam is now broken and this will become the new norm.
> Is it because it's a book? Is it because it's a medium that hasn't really been censored like this before? Is it because it was done posthumously? Is it the specific content being censored?
It's because it is fraud. I want to buy a copy of Roald Dhall's original work - unadulterated by leftist wankers.
If censorship is required when reading to my children, I'll be the one to decide how to do it.
If they want to tone police literature, let them produce their own dull sanitised works and see if anyone wants to buy them. But they know that noone does want to buy them, hence why they have to mutilate someone else's work instead.
On the other hand, other parents may well wish to have access to cherished stories from their childhood to read to their own children _without_ first having to re-read them all in advance and prepare their own annotated versions.
I'm not even necessarily agreeing with the publisher's approach here, but I can certainly see there being a market for "modernised" versions of older books that tired parents can relax into reading aloud as a bedtime story, without that constant low-level unease about the possibility of some dodgy dated stuff popping up out of nowhere.
It's not so much that there are edits, but in the case of the Oompa-Loompas, Dahl made his own edits, after being convinced of the need to do it by the NAACP.
We don't know if Dahl would have been convinced of the need to make any of these new edits, because he died over 30 years ago. These unknown editors peddle their changes using his name, they trade on his popularity, rather than write their own unloved, status-quo compliant stories.
We the public are so lucky that the publishers deign to keep selling his original books in addition to their Bowdlerised versions. But if they felt like it, thanks to copyright law, they could stop that at any time for the next 40 years or so. It's ludicrious!
I agree with that the books "should be allowed to fade away", not changed if people judge them to be offensive, as it's said in the article.
It doesn't sit right to me that there is someone owning the rights of the deceased author's work and should try to profit maximize the catalog. That is kind of what is happening here, trying to change the text to sell a slightly different book. It is their incentive to try to keep their sales alive, but it feels like an artificial thing. I guess I'm not used to how this particular sausage is made.
Nah, copyright is 70 years after the author’s death. They’ve got another 40 years or so before they have to ruin that.
This was probably just a money/publicity grab. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reissues of the originals were the original goal, but copyright didn’t have anything to do with it.
The ridiculously long copyright is part of the problem here. If these books were out of copyright it wouldn't be up to the one publisher to make these decisions and everybody could get the edition they wanted.
(Though the antiwoke mob strangely seems to want to ban any modifications to classics).
You should read about sensitivity readers and the impact they are having on young adult literature in particular. It's a fundamental aspect of all new books being published and they wanted to generate renewed interest in Dahl's library of books for the new generation.
No way to tell. It would be an interesting UX idea to require a short explanation from each downvote.
Edit: oh, someone else did go to the trouble to quote the problematic part of the parents link, but they, too, where downvoted.
Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.
Dunno, Rosenfield's take seems a lot more reasonable than the pandering Guardian article that also infantilizes the reader by saying they are just moaning about sensitivity editors while using new words like "cisgender" that 90% of society doesn't even know.
The Guardian might be closer to your views. Fine. But why try to appeal to some notion of the center of society instead of just posting the link? I'd wager outside of HN and Twitter, the Guardian article is obnoxious and trite.
As someone who reads both Reason and the Guardian (I like to hear different perspectives), it's a bit silly to say the Guardian is close to the center. It's clearly and proudly on the left. Afaik, it's one of the most left-leaning major English language newspapers.
Maybe? It's hard to judge, especially since Libertarianism is a bit of a weird animal that doesn't map cleanly to the right--it tends to have more in common with the left on social issues, though identity politics is a big exception. I wouldn't say Reason or the Guardian provide anything close to a centrist perspective.
I wouldn't even call Guardian center-left. Center-left is like the furthest right it goes. The average article is well left of center-left.
They were pretty anti-Corbyn when he was in charge. That's one reason I peg them as centre-left. And they're currently cheerleading the centre-left version of Labour that's polling at 50% - that's why I reckon they're closer to the centre of politics (as measured by support) than Reason is.
At least according to AllSides, while The Guardian leans left a bit more than Reason leans right, it's not too much different. Guardian[1] has -2.4 out of -6, while Reason[2] is 1.8 out of +6.
From what articles I've seen from Reason, they seemed to clearly lean right to me, that's why your comment came across as odd, albeit technically correct (it is slightly closer to center than the Guardian). Your comment suggested to me that they are a lot more in the middle than that, though.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct! Anyway, it sort of depends on the definition of "left" and "right"; not sure how allsides.com defines them. Reason seems to be "libertarian", which is a mix of positions one might call [maybe even rather far-]left and [rather far-]right, and one might perhaps say that "the average" of these positions (if you could take a scalar average in a vector space, which of course what allsides.com does by necessity and so are we in this conversation) is "center." The Guardian is seemingly "left" in most ways according to typical current definitions.
Political opinion is a phase space with so many dimensions we're really on a hiding to nothing even discussing it. (And for added complexity, that link I gave was to Comment Is Free).
What is so bad about being aware of what content we show children? I can understand not wanting to ban the original works, but a) publishing a “clean” version and b) encouraging authors to be intentional with their words going forward doesn’t seem that bad to me.
Being aware of content shown to children is fine (although by the time they're a young adult, I would argue most content is appropriate literature).
Encouraging the sort of thought police present here sets off all sorts of alarm bells.
I would argue this idea is fundamentally contrarian to a true liberal value set.
Being liberal (in the traditional sense) means being willing to engage with all sorts of content - especially content that you might not agree with.
Simply disagreeing with content is a poor, poor excuse for removing it from the public space. Instead it should be countered with a compelling set of ideas that help the public understand why you don't agree with it.
Basically - policing books like this is WRONG. It's exactly the same thought process that leads to people calling for the ban of books they don't like. It's an authoritarian thought process that doesn't actually provide a compelling argument against an idea to win - instead it claims victory by removing any trace of the argument in the first place.
It's whitewashing in the extreme. It's the good intention that paves the road to Fahrenheit 451. It's a fucking disgrace of an approach.
If you don't like what those books say... buckle up and explain that to your kids. Don't hide it from them. You aren't doing them any favors that way.
>Encouraging the sort of thought police present here sets off all sorts of alarm bells.
What is the difference between "thought police" and simple editing?
For example, if I wrote a book and used a word like "gypped", I would appreciate an editor saying "Change this word to something like 'swindled'. 'Gypped' is derived from 'Gypsy' and is inherently an insult to the Romani people." Is that the editor being the "thought police" or them doing their job well?
Is the objection to the Dahl changes simply that this is happening after the books were already published?
After having read some of the changes, it seems to me more about language policing than offense reduction. For example,all references to black and white have been removed. The BFG no longer wears a black cape. The color of the cape wasn't removed because how could a black cape possibly offend? It was removed because of the ongoing Mao-styled cultural revolution.
And why did the Cloud-men become Cloud-people? Why is it sexist to call a group of men men? Why was the Trunchbul's description changed from horse face to just face? How does that help? Some people are ugly. It's a byproduct of the genetic lottery.
Overall I think sensitivity training is nonsense. All it does is force people to censor themselves before speaking at the risk of getting canceled. From your example: I'm not a gypsy, but even if I was don't you think the correct reading of that would be something akin to, "Gypsies in the past used to swindle, but now we can be cognizant of that behavior and not do it, thus being a better version of ourselves." I don't see why offense would necessarily be taken. Getting offended by reminders of the past that we didn't even live seem like nonsense to me.
>I'm not a gypsy, but even if I was don't you think the correct reading of that would be something akin to, "Gypsies in the past used to swindle, but now we can be cognizant of that behavior and not do it, thus being a better version of ourselves."
I'm not going to go through every example you mentioned because this comment shows the exact problem with that. You are putting the origin of the term on some fault with the Romani people. Have you examined why that is? Are you sure that they did actually swindle people more than other groups? If they did, why did they do it? Was that a byproduct of their position in society? I admittedly don't know much Romani history, so I can't speak to it directly. However I know Jewish people were similarly thought of as swindlers because they were often bankers, and they were often bankers because that was one of the few jobs non-Jewish society would allow them to have. The fault doesn't lie with the Jews, it lies with the rest of society.
That same concept applies elsewhere. Like white generally being used to represent good and black bad. That is such a fundamental aspect of our culture that it seems silly to try to change it, but the silliness originates in a lack of examination of the origin of those standards.
> I'm not going to go through every example you mentioned because this comment shows the exact problem with that. You are putting the origin of the term on some fault with the Romani people. Have you examined why that is? Are you sure that they did actually swindle people more than other groups? If they did, why did they do it? Was that a byproduct of their position in society? I admittedly don't know much Romani history, so I can't speak to it directly. However I know Jewish people were similarly thought of as swindlers because they were often bankers, and they were often bankers because that was one of the few jobs non-Jewish society would allow them to have. The fault doesn't lie with the Jews, it lies with the rest of society.
My point is exactly that by not washing out these words, we allow ourselves to have conversations about and raise exactly those points you mentioned. It allows us to think about the root causes of these terms and reflect on our own behavior.
> That same concept applies elsewhere. Like white generally being used to represent good and black bad. That is such a fundamental aspect of our culture that it seems silly to try to change it, but the silliness originates in a lack of examination of the origin of those standards.
Have you considered that the white/black differentiation of not about color but about what humans can perceive? To me it seems as if it would have been established because humans can see during the day vs. can't do so well at night. There are many reasons outside of race where light/dark, black/white make sense.
>My point is exactly that by not washing out these words, we allow ourselves to have conversations about and raise exactly those points you mentioned. It allows us to think about the root causes of these terms and reflect on our own behavior.
Why do we assume that these books are always accompanied by these conversations and these conversations wouldn't happen without these books? Many times kids read these books alone and no one ever talks to them about these words. Other times they are read in specific classes in school in contexts that aren't ideal to address these issues. An English teacher shouldn't have to spend all their time teaching history to keep these things in context. Let those conversations happen in social studies and history classes.
>Have you considered that the white/black differentiation of not about color but about what humans can perceive? To me it seems as if it would have been established because humans can see during the day vs. can't do so well at night. There are many reasons outside of race where light/dark, black/white make sense.
Yes, but whether the origin lies in racism or not isn't necessarily the only deciding factor. Just the question of whether it originates in racism is often enough to distract from a book. Like an editor might suggest an author change phrasing to avoid an unintentional rhyme or pun, sometimes a word should be change to avoid distracting the reader with considerations about whether a term is racist or not. The obvious example is the word "niggardly"[1]. Its etymology has nothing to do with race, but editors will still warn you against using it because the distraction is causes makes it a poor word choice in most situations even if the word itself is inoffensive.
The value of a book is that you experience the world through a viewpoint that is different than your own.
That viewpoint may not be pretty, or fun, or something you agree with. Honestly - most of the books that I value challenge me by exposing me to something raw and unfiltered that I have not experienced myself.
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That editor also doesn't have the experiences of the author, and changing word choice is changing the world that author is speaking about.
If the author's goal is to actually tell a genuine story that they connect with - to expose the world to their own thoughts and feelings and history - then changing those things is not trivial.
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I don't want to read a bland mash of "editor approved" stories. I want to read stories that are told by individuals, with all their quirks and intricacies.
I want to hear their opinions and words. Not some filtered, white washed, toned down version of them.
I want to make up my own mind about whether that story was valuable, or touching, or compelling, or horrible, or repelling. I don't want to never hear it in the first place because an editor decided they didn't like it and struck it out.
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Basically - if the author doesn't give a shit and is just trying to sell the most books... fine. Go with the editor's picks for the words. Let them control the narrative and story. They have the most experience with selling books and their advice is probably decent.
If the goal is to write down a story that is meaningful to the author... don't change the author's words.
>Easy - I started by not fucking changing the words they wrote down, because I assumed they intended to write them down.
But this is fundamentally what editing is which brings me back to the original question of how is "thought policing" different from editing. In what situations is it acceptable to edit words that someone wrote?
>I'm struggling to tell if your comment is satire or not, because it's pretty dense (and not in the "filled with words" kind of way).
I'm just trying to understand your position by asking questions.
> In what situations is it acceptable to edit words that someone wrote?
When the author is present and engaged in the process.
Would Dahl care about these changes? We don't know. And that's the problem. It's no longer his book - it's the diluted version.
Alternatively - if the author is gone... when the story is no longer bound by copyright seems a sane approach. If you want to edit his words, make them compete with the original versions (or other folks edits). If the edits are genuinely better - they will win out.
>When the author is present and engaged in the process.
Does this mean you would be fine with this process if it involved the author even if they approved of changes to a book decades after it was originally released?
>Would Dahl care about these changes? We don't know. And that's the problem. It's no longer his book - it's the diluted version.
>Alternatively - if the author is gone... when the story is no longer bound by copyright seems a sane approach. If you want to edit his words, make them compete with the original versions (or other folks edits). If the edits are genuinely better - they will win out.
Does this mean that in situations in which the author is dead and the books are still under copyright that you are ok with a publisher that decides to stop publishing the book, basically the Dr. Seuss situation?
Is it authoritarian? What "authority" is stepping in here? Isn't it the rights holder making this decision?
That's what I'm not getting; this isn't an external entity, it's the people who own the rights. Shouldn't they be allowed to do what they want with their property, even if you disagree with it?
Ah yes - ownership of ideas and thoughts and stories. Fun aspects of capitalism.
This book should be public domain. The author has been dead for 33 years. I honestly don't give a flying fuck about who "owns the rights" to this story at this point.
But my broader point is salient outside of this - I think you're removing value from stories by trying to remove ugly parts. The world is ugly, hiding that and papering over it doesn't do anyone any favors. It's also beautiful and wondrous. How can we experience the highs without the lows? The good without the bad?
How can we know what the past was like when we change it to suit our mood? When we wash it away and drown it out. When we cannot to learn from it, because we have no idea what it even was? When we have nothing but a caricature of it hanging out to dry, with the complexity and nuance tossed aside, wrung out from it like it was a rag to be cleaned.
I don't think there's a ton of value in calling a little girl "ugly and beastly" instead of just "beastly", but if you do think that, it sounds like you can still show your children how to call people names, and that's my point.
Nothing is being taken away here, only new things are being added. That's what I don't understand; why would you be upset about that?
If you want to write a book that doesn't call folks ugly, go knock yourself out. I'm all here for that and I support you. You may or may not find success, and that's life.
If you want to edit the words of a story because you find them unpleasant... if you want to censor an author after his death because you might sell more books... Then I find you ugly. You are willing to throw away content you disagree with, instead of tackling it head on, so both ugly and cowardly.
Where does it stop? What content is "you approved" in a way that we can all live with?
If we happen to live in a spot where those words are also owned, and we've decided that I don't have the rights to copy and distribute the original words because of the greed of Disney... then I find you both ugly and authoritarian in ways that are uncomfortable. I strongly dislike you.
You're allowed to think of me as ugly, not like me, call me names, all of that's totally fine! What I'm confused about is, when the original work remains completely available such as what the article we're talking about says, why you would care about me also wanting to have access to a less offensive version of the work?
You retain access to the original work, and I get a watered down version that's easier for me to read to my kids at bedtime. Feels like a win/win?
Why don't I have the same freedom of expression in your mind that you seem so intent on protecting on behalf of a dead guy?
> when the original work remains completely available
Does it? If a library has a copy of the offensive censored one, they might not buy the original. There's only a limited amount of money available, every censored copy purchased means one less good copy.
...yes you do? The title of the article literally includes, "Original books to be kept in print".
Also, you can currently purchase every single Roald Dahl book on Amazon for at most ~$10, so in so many ways it's incorrect to say you lose access to Roald Dahl's original works.
> What is so bad about being aware of what content we show children?
That is not and has never been the problem. If you are a parent of a young child, then you should absolutely be aware of the content your child is seeing/reading. I doubt you will find anyone that disagrees.
The problem is the revisionist approach to rewriting works to appease modern readers' (apparently delicate) sensibilities.
Personally, I see this as shielding readers from harsh truths of the past (and in some cases just reality). Mr. Dahl is long dead, and yet we feel like we need to rewrite his words to ensure we don't accidentally offend someone. I mean, can you imagine a child reading the word <looks around> "fat"? Or "female"? My god, they would never be the same.
This kind of post is the SJW equivalent of the alt-right "just asking questions" posts people complain about. Pretending that politically motivated censorship is "just being intentional" is just a weasel-ish way of trying to give equal play to a fringe and ideologically motivated agenda
To be clear, the "agenda" here is to help kids grow up healthy and happy. We can disagree on how to accomplish that, but the nefarious insinuation is a little silly, no?
I'll help you, you wrote: publishing a “clean” version
What if your version of clean is my version of horribly offensive?
Are you really unable to see that people might have different opinions of things? If that's really true, I fear your have been "cleaning" your content far far too much.
You are. You are censoring your own mind to the point that you seem unable to understand others. You should expose yourself to ideas that you don't like.
Why are we talking about legality? Do you believe that ownership is categorically a legal concept?
And wouldn't it be censorship to prevent me from publishing a clean version of Huck Finn? If his uncensored story exists, and my publishing of an alternative version in no way removes those works from circulation, there's not really an argument in place that I'm censoring anything.
The author is dead, any "ownership" of the work today is purely a legal concept.
But ownership in any sense irrelevant. Being the owner of a work does not preclude censorship. If the author himself censors his work, as Roald Dahl did do, that is still censorship.
So let me get this straight; the concept of transferral of ownership is, according to you, purely a legal concept. Absent laws, it would be perfectly acceptable for me to take your things if someone else made them for you? And it would be morally wrong to make changes to something once I own it, if I wasn't the originator of the thing?
Been happening since the beginning of time with publishing. There are stories written about authors meeting with execs who want to basically completely rewrite things.
It isn't like you can't publish your book. Some publishers just decided to implement this workflow. I think it's pretty dumb but it definitely isn't anything new.
> Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.
God, what kind of a horrible person would take up such a job. Jesus Christ I mean just don't publish the book don't hire some couch sjw to "fix" it.
I guess the author can still choose to not publish
>God, what kind of a horrible person would take up such a job.
Take a job as an editor? That is all this person is doing. It is something that publishers have done forever except this editor has a more narrow scope of what they are editing.
It doesn’t sound like those “sensitivity readers” are editors, more like some weaponized Twitter outrage mob.
I get that the publishers want to preemptively strike down / appease those outragers, but Jesus Christ, to like reading and to become a full-time “holier than thought”-er. This is so depressing
Lots of people want to work in publishing, especially middle-class English Lit graduates who are most likely to be politically aligned with this sort of editing work.
The publishing company holds the copyrights, they make a lot of money from Roald Dahl, but they're worried about the long term prospects for that revenue stream due to social change. Maybe they have additional feedback from retail buyers or customers. They decided to take an approach of retooling their product to fit with changing mores, and either went too far or made a poor PR job of releasing the information.
As far as I know, nobody asked for this. It's fairly well known (at least in the UK) that Dahl harbored many prejudices typical of his generation and demographics, and himself watered down some of them to make his books more salable, eg the original Oompa-Loompas were modeled on African pygmies.
> The publishing company holds the copyrights, they make a lot of money from Roald Dahl, but they're worried about the long term prospects for that revenue stream due to social change.
If they were following public demand, then why did they get so thoroughly blindsided by public opinion? They were clearly listening to a handful of fringe nuts and didn't actually have their finger on the pulse of the mainstream zeitgeist.
They have now realized their error and are trying to backtrack from it.
Why does any company's product launch fail? Arrogance, intellectual laziness, chasing a trend off a cliff. Same way company owners sometimes check out and hand over the reins to management consultants.
I am not privy to their sales data; perhaps it looks terrible and they panicked. While there has been a big backlash, I don't think adult nostalgia is as profitable as childhood enthusiasm; parents might buy Roald Dahl for their kids, but there are plenty of other authors competing for their attention.
So you're evidently privy to the company's reasoning when it comes to the initial decision to censor the books, but when it comes to the backtrack you just don't know. Got it.
I didn't express any view on the backtrack. It's very obvious they realized the move was unpopular and wanted to mollify their customers. As I mentioned above, nobody asked them to do this in the first place.
You seem to be projecting some idea of your own onto me.
Or they're capitalizing on the backlash by offering both options, with the added benefit that they'll get to A/B test what direction the market wants them to go.
A canny publisher wouldn't quietly discontinue the "original" (ignoring the fact that the books have been revised before) editions. They're merely announce that they're a limited run and that stocks are running out...
I imagine people (aka customers) were getting uncomfortable reading their kids children’s books that talked about how Willy Wonka enslaved the Oompa-Loompa tribe and shipped them over in packing crates. While people will portray this as censorship, what I see is a for-profit company relentlessly optimizing for book sales at any cost.
No: I am not defending it. I am just explaining it.
Of course there is always the simple and obvious (it was a marketing stunt dummies):
>"The rise in demand has been even more extreme at Wob, an online seller with a reported catalogue of two million. It has seen a 600 per cent surge in sales of Roald Dahl compared to the week before, while the author accounts for eight of the 10 top-selling children’s books since Saturday. Not bad for someone who died more than three decades ago."
No, I am actually explaining it. Publishing houses want to make money. You make money on popular children’s books that parents have nostalgia for. Parents want children’s books to be safe and unproblematic. There is always going to be a financial temptation to make these goals align, even at the cost of tampering with classic literature. Not sure why this is even surprising.
> Parents want children’s books to be safe and unproblematic.
No. All these books were fine for countless decades until the woke fad. By your own logic they would simply switch to trendy "unproblematic" books instead of continuing to sell classics -- but that would mean having actual principles. Also it would also mean going broke.
There are no masses of people getting bent out of shape about Oompa-Loompas demanding edits. Everybody knows and agrees those candy midgets had it coming.
This woke "fad" apparently began in 1973 when Dahl re-wrote the book to recast the Oompa-Loompas in a less racist manner. I don't know how old you are, but it's likely that the "classic book most people read as a child" is actually the rewrite. https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Roald_Dahl_and_Philo...
You're showing a lot of recency bias. There's no "woke fad as we know it". There have always been people advocating for social issues, just because the latest wave is the one that's the most prominent in your mind doesn't make it any more special than the others.
Please stop saying "cope". It's a meaningless ad hominem, you're accusing GP of living in denial of something and trying to "cope" with it. Very dismissive.
Sorry, just to be clear, the thing you're responding to isn't a troll proposigin a hypothetical, the Oompa-Loompa story got edited several times decades ago, in the decade after release. The edition you read growing up is an edited edition. This actually literally happened already.
It's fine if you retroactively disagree with this and wish you had time traveled back to undo the SJWs of the 1970s before they could start. I am not personally interested in litigating whether or not publishers should edit books. I don't care about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it wasn't a book I read often growing up and I don't care for either movie. I care least of all about what you think of a book. You do you, random stranger on the internet.
Your own link: Dahl found himself sympathizing with their concerns and published a revised edition -- that's great. His book, he can do what he wants.
Publishers editing books of their own accord after the author is dead to please imaginary mobs -- something else entirely. Not great. Bad. Very bad. Regardless of the type of edit or politics involved.
> Publishers editing books of their own accord after the author is dead to please imaginary mobs -- something else entirely.
In what sense? The ownership of the copyright is the ownership of the right to create derivative works and refrain from publishing the original. That's the law and the whole of the law.
I'm sorry but I want history to be safe and unproblematic. The 1860s and slavery are very upsetting to me, it is best not to discuss such things even in allegory or as something to learn from - We must erase the things I find upsetting from the history books and only reference them in the manner which I can cope with.
> it's a reflection of the fact that the stories we tell children change to reflect our values.
Great, as a parent you are free to read whatever books reflect your values to your children.
If the plight of the fictional Oompa Loompas (I don't recall slavery being justified in the book, but hey, your interpretation is as good as any, that's the wonderful thing about books) is upsetting to you -- do not read or expose your kids to it.
Expose them to books that reflect your values. Or even write new ones if you have any talent.
Editing existing books in this manner is never necessary or justified.
At the end of the day, my opinion of the content, and yours, are irrelevant to the publisher. We're drops in the bucket.
Sales are relevant, and sales are down. Another version that sells better has no impact on the copy on your shelf.
(... and if they can goose sales by generating market buzz via controversy, more power to them. A tip of my hat to playing folks like us against each other to put coin in their pockets. ;) ).
And an explanation of the specific substitutions made. Like, why erase Rudyard Kipling instead of having a conversation about the historical context of racism.
Similar example: Tintin in Congo is by today's standards absolutely racist, but reflects the era when it was published. The last decade the (Belgian) publisher was sued multiple times to try and force it off the shelves.
Also: calls to remove statues of King Leopold II (who committed horrible atrocities in "his" Congolese colony).
In both cases, why not leave access to the original books/statue/... intact but add an introductory section on why this is no longer appropriate today. Or place a contrasting statue, opposite King Leopold II, that embodies the struggle for independence / the colonial horrors / the blight that is racism / etc.
Overall it feels like there's a drive to remove "inappropriate" materials from society, instead of leaving them accessible as living proof of the mistakes that were made, and to provide backstory, context, and the "appropriate" contemporary view.
Perhaps it should, I don't know much about the statue or the way the community that hosts it perceives it. My point is only that harsh criticism of Leopold II doesn't rely on retroactive application of modern values. He was a fiend even when judged by the standard of popular contemporary European values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casement_Report
> Overall it feels like there's a drive to remove "inappropriate" materials from society, instead of leaving them accessible as living proof of the mistakes that were made, and to provide backstory, context, and the "appropriate" contemporary view.
I share this view, but I also recognize that as a white dude, what is to me a learning opportunity about the things that folks (who mostly look like me) have done in the past isn't necessarily seen that way by everyone.
Unfortunately, even if you get a whole mess of folks of different backgrounds to have an honest and meaningful conversation about what to do about these many things, you aren't going to please everybody. The easiest solution is to just remove the materials rather than having to continuously justify leaving them available and reinterpret the historical context for them from a contemporary standpoint.
The easiest solution is to just remove the materials
And so doom us to repeat the mistakes of our forebears and bring violent racisim back into fashion?
It is racists, more than anyone, who wish to hide the historical roots of racism. That we might find it impossible to recognise it's impending revival.
In 1960s Germany, students where so outraged by the absence of Nazism from their history curriculum that they turned violent. They rioted, bombed, and killed because they felt they where being denied their right to learn their recent history. And they blamed this on the fact that their teachers and parents had been Nazis, and thought they where trying to erase their crimes. In a flash of cruel irony, the state's desire to shelter the students from political violence ignited it again in the streets and in the hearts of their students.
1. This is happening across society and not solely in kids books and statues.
2. Mao stated himself in his revolutionary speech that they would indoctrinate the next generation if the current one was unwilling, and this is a perfect example of that applied.
I see no reason to keep around statues of a man that is responsible for countless atrocities in the Belgian Congo. A statue is an honor, not history. Removing a statue does not change history, despite what some people may try and tell you.
Leopold II isn’t far down the list from Hitler and Stalin.
One reason is to understand how such a man could come to rule. And how the people can be so easily fooled to revere such evil. Lest we forget and allow it to happen again.
I find it both interesting and highly telling that people like yourself (not you personally) were nowhere to be found when statues of people like Felix Dzerzhinsky were coming down.
Ok why aren’t there Hitler statues in Germany then? Are they going to forget Hitler was bad and have another Holocaust?
P.S. Leopold II came to power because he was the heir in a hereditary monarchy, we don’t need a statue of a genocidal aristocrat to know hereditary monarchy with actual governing power is bad.
Edit: I didn't want to litter the thread with copypaste, but my reply to a similar comment was:
In 1960s Germany, students where so outraged by the absence of Nazism from their history curriculum that they turned violent. They rioted, bombed, and killed because they felt they where being denied their right to learn their recent history. And they blamed this on the fact that their teachers and parents had been Nazis and thought they where trying to erase their crimes. In a flash of cruel irony, the state's desire to shelter the students from political violence ignited it again in the streets and in the hearts of their students.
In the absence of a reply, I’m assuming that you are saying that hiding history is bad.
That’s fine, but putting up a statue of someone is usually seen as celebrating them. We aren’t hiding from what Hitler or Stalin did, so why don’t we have statues of them?
Rather than censor in a thread about censorship, I think it best to counter uncomfortable comments with more information.
Another really cool feature is the this hall of mailboxes which was designed by a french artist and includes a mailbox for every democratically elected official in German history. The hall also contains officials such as Hitler and Goebbels because they were democratically elected but they often have to repair the box because people visiting will often punch and kick their boxes
Leaving the books as-is is one thing, but keeping a statue of a person implies they were worth honoring. Leopold II committed some of the most heinous acts ever done by any individual: about half the population of Congo was killed in the two decades he ran things.
The only place a statue of him belongs is in an exhibit on the worst actions taken against fellow humans.
there is a massive different between the two examples you use. A writer reflects society but a book and the damage it generally can do is in no way comparable to the actions of the state.
Mind you, Leopold was a horrible person, did horrible things and the Belgian monarchy and state have only recently begun to issue apologies for their atrocities. The debate on statues is settled, except in the minds of those who glorify wrongdoing.
The other difference is agency - there exists a legal successor to the belgian monarchy and a legal successor to the powers of the monarchy in the form of the belgian state. These have power today to acknowledge and right the wrongs of the past. In contrast, Georges Remi and Roald Dahl are both dead, unable to correct their errors.
This is the proper solution but it also shifts the goal posts in a way that is dramatically easier for the certain groups to attack and win. You also have to equip the teachers with the materials and skills for that conversation and they have to be up to that task. There are bad teachers that just want to have the kids read books and then test them on content. There are also different theories of interpretation, there is a school of thought the divorces the artist from the art and wants to study the art on its own merit regardless of the views of the artist. I think it's dramatically easier to attack a particular conversation about the artist and historical views and fight to remove that from a class than to "ban a book." There are efforts like the 1619 project which basically exist because of that. I think there are also a lot of class rooms where the teachers don't want to have those conversations just due to classroom culture and dynamics; think a suburban class room with 19 white, probably heterosexual, middle class kids and 1 black kid; how do you have that discussion and not single that student out?
Roald Dahl is a very interesting target here, editing "fat" out of the description of Augustus Gloop, I assume, was to be more gentle towards more portly folks. The character seemed to have a real eating disorder though, those are real issues that real people also suffer with. Does a discussion of bulimia and anorexia need to accompany Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Is it read at an age appropriate for that? Was this edit even material? It seems like the real theme is one of greed and humbleness and the eating disorder is just a foil.
Or why they tried to erase Joseph Conrad, despite Conrad being famous for his opposition to colonialism.
(Probably because they judge Joseph Conrad by the outdated language he used, rather than by the ideas and values he presented. Because they are shallow fools.)
> A certain enormous buck n*** encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the n*** I used to dream for years afterwards.
I read HOD a couple times, which is related to European subjugation of Africa
Nowhere in it do I find any sort criticism of the harms that were done. He describes the awful conditions in the Congo, but does not necessarily oppose them
The language he uses to describe the Africans is hostile at best. A poignant example is the part about the "insolent black head" peaking through the doorway while Kurtz lay dying
Not saying that Penguin should've removed his name because that's a different argument, but I have no idea how/where you're getting anticolonialism out of Conrad and I'd genuinely like to know
Edit: what did I get out of HOD? The death of God. Kurtz goes out to a corner of the Earth that was yet to be corrupted by capitalism. Marlow goes on a journey with no message in particular, he's a witness to the historical event
The sentiment Joseph Conrad expressed in his books is that colonialism is evil and corrupts the souls of anybody who participates in it. If you can't read his books because you can't get past the dated language he used, then you are rendering yourself culturally impoverished.
Yes.
I’m surprised you’d say the issues are simple. The criticisms explain the problems better than I do, which is why I suggested reading them. Have you read them?
You can understand the motives of the censors by considering which individuals are singled out for erasure, and which are to be forgiven for the same crimes.
Wikipedia editors dedicate an entire article to one persons essay on racist themes in Conrad's book. While Karl Marx racism is ignored, dismissed as anachronism or rebuked as irrelevant. Even worthy of forgiveness, in light of the greater good his work bestowed on the world.
People say, “You claim to be Marxists, but did you know that Marx was a racist?” We say, “He probably was a racist: he made a statement once about the marriage of a white woman and a black man, and he called the black man a gorilla or something like that.” The Marxists claim he was only kidding and that the statement shows Marx’s closeness to the man, but of course that is nonsense. So it does seem that Marx was a racist.
Now if you are a Marxist, then Marx’s racism affects your own judgment because a Marxist is someone who worships Marx and the thought of Marx. Remember, though, that Marx himself said, “I am not a Marxist.” Such Marxists cherish the conclusions which Marx arrived at through his method, but they throw away the method itself—leaving themselves in a totally static posture. That is why most Marxists really are historical materialists: they look to the past to get answers for the future, and that does not work.
If you are a dialectical materialist, however, Marx’s racism does not matter. You do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought. Whether or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to whether or not the system of thinking he helped to develop delivers truths about processes in the material world. And this is true in all disciplines. In every discipline you find people who have distorted visions and are at a low state of consciousness who nonetheless have flashes of insight and produce ideas worth considering. For instance, John B. Watson once stated that his favorite pastime was hunting and hanging n*****s, yet he made great forward strides in the analysis and investigations of conditioned responses.
Huey P Newton
This doesn't seem realistic. Imagine you're a ten year old sitting somewhere reading "Matilda" and came across that line.
Maybe there's someone around you can ask who Kipling is, but there's a good chance they either don't know the issues or are going to be unwilling to have a conversation about the historical context of racism with some child over a one sentence mention of Kipling. More likely, the child will continue reading the book gaining at most a recommendation for future reading.
I don't know if that small recommendation should be changed, but I don't see it's inclusion as some potential learning moment. The line has been in the book for thirty years, and I doubt it's taught many children about the historical context of racism.
The line has been in the book for thirty years, and I doubt it's taught many children about the historical context of racism.
Indeed, because the vast majority of people only know Kipling for The Jungle Book and If. But we must destroy the mans life work because he happened to live in a time of colonialism.
Because a lot of parents are reading these to their younger kids and don’t want to have a conversation about the historical context of racism, or if they do: they want to do it in the context of different books.
> We still don't know the answer to the most important question, IMHO: why?
Because the copyright holders (Netflix, in this case[0]), decided it would be more more profitable.
This wasn't the result of an outside public campaign; it was initiated by the rightsholders.
Netflix makes money if they can market an entire franchise (akin to the MCU, albeit less crossover). If they feel that a more "palatable" version of the books helps them do that, they will.
[0] The editing began before Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl company, but it continued under them and they're the ones who decided to publish them (and now walk back the decision)
Hate to say it, but I think this is the only reason why.
Thank the absurd copyright laws that grant a piece of work two lifetimes of money extraction (70 years after the death of whoever made it) for whoever "owns" it.
Good point. This debate got the queen consort and PM of UK to speak out, I wonder if you can get them to actually speak out on the incentives that actually matter for this issue here - among them copyright. (Of course we won't see anything like that.)
The publishing industry has been taken over by a certain kind of person. The same kind of mildly privileged, free of adversity person who is looking for something to suffer from and fight against who is pushing this kind of "woke" nonsense all over the place.
This is a very funny situation because it's the result of the mental shortcircuit caused by fetishizing both the past and the present at the same time for economic reasons
Let's say that I believe that past authors are problematic. Ok, then why reprint their works? Why not print children stories from modern and more sensitive authors? The job of the publisher is not to keep history alive, it's to provide customers with a good selection of children's content.
On the other hand the publisher knows that these books are cherished by the general population and are indeed immortal classics. So it would be stupid not to print them and leave a good chunk of money on the table.
So here comes the contradiction: we need to publish this author because we want the money, but at the same time we don't agree with him. The solution? Editorialize his works, not with footnotes but by destructively changing the verbiage of the stories! This way we can both get rich and alter history to our liking!
I predict that creative innuendo will always stay one step ahead of the AI censors, which will always be playing catch-up. It's just another form of euphemism treadmill.
When I was in public school, the adults got sick of kids using the word "retarded" as an insult so they renamed the class for people with actual disabilities to "special education". So kids started calling each other "special" as an insult synonymous with "retarded". Euphemism treadmills always lag, they're reactive and can't keep up with the rate at which people can invent new insults.
We haven't really come a long way from CleanFlicks[1] where they would take mainstream movies and edit out all the Jesus-unfriendly bits for the other flavor of 'sensitive readers'. Interestingly, that service got sued out of existence over copyright. I wonder if future AI-based on-the-fly purifiers will run into the same trouble?
After a few iterations with different AIs over a few decades, you'll have to find somebody who still has a paper copy. I would say to thank god for piracy, but the odds that we'll be able to run computers that aren't continually scanning for the rights, authenticity and content of the files on them are nil.
I’m assuming Full Throttle means as much modern interpretation of older texts and maximum modifications; while Grandma means keeping the book the way it was, why do they always have to change things, in my day we read whatever book we could find and we liked it?
I know no Grandmas that like when things they had on their youth are changed.
I read recently a sensible comment on the situation that it was the publisher that decided to do the changes because parents were increasingly uncomfortable with it, thus long term unwilling to buy them. That they're backing out now is kind of a confirmation. I read Charlie and the chocolate factory with my son a couple years ago and, um, did not have a recollection of Oompa Loompas which were basically little slaves. I was fond of the book as a child, but some parts haven't aged well.
Speaking of Oompa Loompas, they were even originally tiny black people, but Dahl changed them to white himself in a later revision.
I can understand the need, especially with kids books, to update them to keep parents willing to buy them. I own some of the original Hardy Boys books, and I won't be reading them to my kids. On the other hand, the Little House on the Prairie books contain things that go against modern sensibilities but I would prefer to keep unchanged due to the historical nature of the books.
I don't know what the right balance is, but it seems the recent Dahl changes missed the mark.
like the oompa loompas aren't just a whoopsie, didn't realize that was racist thing. dude said some racist grandpa shit, there's no beating around the bush on that one lol... and boy he had some thoughts on the jews too... in 1983.
so like yeah this is basically the "difficult literature from 50 years ago" question. Dude was kind of a racist and wrote some shit that would be pretty offensive to write today. On the other hand it's also good entertaining literature that's beloved by a lot of kids, minus some offensive pages and occasional themes. what do you do with that? answers vary - don't teach it, edit it to tone down a few things, or just teach it unfiltered with some flavor of "yeah, product of its time"?
I guess I personally fall into the "teach it as a product of its time" camp but I'm also not the one personally affected either, and over time it may fall more and more out of favor as sentiments on casual racism change, I'm sure there was a "teach it as a product of its time" for huck finn too and nowadays ehhhhhhh maybe we just find a better example for english lit. And that's really the danger if you don't want to tone it down (which, I'm not saying that's a good idea either), that it just falls into obscurity over time as people decide "nah african pygmies are a little too racist for 2050".
Teaching it as a product of its time works in the right context, and is a great idea.
But also — I mean, I guess nowadays there’s YouTube and TikTok, but some kids still read for fun, right? They are fun stories, so it is nice to produce a version that can be read lightly without having to address weighty historical issues.
Probably not, at least in the United States. The new texts would receive a new copyright, but the old ones would still enter the public domain at the same time as they would have before.
Imagine I created an annotated critical text of Oliver Twist. My new annotated text would be copyrighted from the date of publication, but Oliver Twist would still be in the public domain.
But what if you could get the original text cancelled? No right-thinking publisher would print it, no God-fearing bookseller would stock it, no teacher who valued their career would add the unsanitized version to their school library, and they would buy your annotated version instead.
I suppose someone could create a second censored version, but if the changes they made were too close to the current publisher's, they might lose a copyright case on that. So all the publisher has to do is keep up with the mores of the time on what must and must not be airbrushed out.
> But what if you could get the original text cancelled? No right-thinking publisher would print it, no God-fearing bookseller would stock it
Modern book "cancelling" is not (yet?) so effective as that. Huckleberry Finn is a popular target for cancelling, yet is still widely available. Being in the public domain gives the book relative safety; even if one publisher gets cold feet, another will jump in to fill the demand. The real threat is to books which aren't in the public domain and won't be for a long time.
I firmly believe social media is the cause to this even being considered. If words in a book offend you, don't read the book. Don't subject others to your limited world-view.
People should be exposed to all types of views on things, so they can better empathise with other people.
The original versions will be preserved on places like Library Genesis and similar electronic archives forever. They can try to hide the past, they can try to rewrite history but they will fail.
Score one for Library Genesis (et al.), -1 for these rewriters of history (et al.).
The market for used pre-2010 physical books will be huge.
Personally I've stopped buying online books because of this kind of shenanigans and reverting back to having local music and movies for similar reasons.
The idea that some remote working technocrats can change words of a book while I'm reading it just creeps me out.
Because it is the artists decision to make, not a committee by force of pressure from a small but aggressive and vocal group. For instance, Dahl changed the Oompa Loompas description in the original book from African Pygmies to what they are today. Regardless of if there was pressure to do so, it was his choice as the artist. He doesn't exist any longer and his will makes no mention of editing his works. So doing so is a crime essentially.
Most traditionally published authors don't really get to decide these things entirely on their own - their publishers will have a word.
In the case of deceased authors, ensuring your work is treated the way you want is why you put a literary executor in your will. In the absence of direct instructions, the literary executor gets to decide, and it's not relevant if there's no mention of changes in the will.
I don’t care about the legal aspect. I care about the authenticity. It isn’t the authors work anymore after it has been changed without their consent. It’s abhorrent.
Dahl made a choice not to lay down restrictions in his will and not to appoint literary executors who he'd ensured would refuse to change things. He may or may not have disapproved of any given set of changes, but the absence of any such terms is implicit consent for his estate to do as it pleases.
I have published books. They'll likely never be worth anything. But the absence of any terms about them in my will is intentional: Once I'm gone, I don't give a shit what my inheritors do with the rights for them. That's their business.
As for authenticity, the originals still exist. Nothing has erased them. Deposit laws means the original editions will be on file at relevant libraries even if every customer got rid of theirs. I'm all for ensuring original editions remain at least somehow accessible, but this obsession with changes to books now just strikes me as comical given how long abridged, simplified or simply reimagined versions of classics have existed.
Though chances are good that what you've read and consider "authentic" wasn't the original anyway, but one of the earlier revised editions. E.g. the version most people will have read was revised to change the Oompa-Loompas from African pygmies.
He made those changes though. Possibly under pressure yes but he still made them.
Any alteration to his work after his death is no longer his work.
I should add: that may or may not be important to someone. To me it is. I don’t consider the altered version his work any longer but rather a derivative work or more accurately, a vandalization of his work.
I don't understand the existence of two markets here.
I may be simple-minded but I would have thought that people either want to read a book or they don't. But now is there really a market for people who want to read a book but only if that book's content is made different from what it actually is? (I'm worried if that's the case).
This isn't a new thing. Abridged versions and children's editions and versions with updated language go back a long time. There is far more than two distinct markets here.
When I read the unexpurgated Gulliver’s Travels as an adult I was shocked. I knew I had read them in school, but certainly did not remember all those naughty bits. The children’s versions are heavily censored.
So long as the original remains available, I'm okay. Yes, I think there have always been people who'd prefer a 'sanitized' version of things --though maybe that wish wasn't always available or fulfilled.
And I certainly think that the original ought to remain. I'd hate for people to come down and revise Plato or Sun Tzu, etc., because some aspect or passages hurt their sensibilities. I feel the same about modern works as well. The Original must remain but it's okay to have a 'sanitized' or bowdlerized version as well.
One thing that seems dangerous is the practice where sanitized/bowlderized versions don't note that they are sanitized or abridged (sometimes significantly) so the readers think that they have read the classic book but have not really, as critical passages (especially those which are heavy enough to warrant discussion with others) were missing from what they read. Readers have to right to know if they are getting the original or not, so that the choice is informed and not accidental.
Actually, I think it's not OK to have 'sanitised' versions. No-one is forced to read a book but if you do you 'confront' the content. Sanitising everything, as seems to be the trend, is cowardly and weakening minds.
On the other hand, I fully understand that the aim of a publisher is to sell more.
The most common form of "sanitation" is probably abridgement, and I think there is a strong argument that abridgement is a net positive because it allows people who would never be able/willing to read the full book to get the gist of the story and still participate in / understand at least some of the cultural significance of that story. Not terribly unlike reasonably faithful film adaptations.
But what the publisher did in this case was not like that; these modifications weren't designed to make the books more accessible to people with low reading skill ('fat' is not a hard word.)
Maybe, but another alternative is that (mass-market) authors feel compelled to only write bowdlerized versions of what they had in mind to write and then you're left with fewer options.
Abridged and various adaptations of books exist, as do things like Kidz Bop and CleanFlicks (or at least its derivatives). Not to say that this is or isn't good but I don't think it's weird that various forms of the same "work" exist and that some people prefer a modified one over the original.
People have been willing to pay for this kind of thing for a long time.
It's a little different now in that it's the original rights-holder doing it but money talks and why argue over fair use when you can do it yourself?
This is like the 90s Christian companies that would strip out violence/language/sexual themes from movies and repackage them for families. I'm sure there's a market for woke-washed books, but I can't help but sense the same puritanical forces at play here.
> So long as the original is also available, why not?
You're making the assumption that rightsholders will continue to publish or allow others to publish the old edition. Maybe this time when it becomes a big deal in a news cycle, but the next time it happens, it won't be as big a deal. The tenth time it happens, nobody will know or care:
"Old news. Fascists trying to make a big deal out of something that happens every day. You didn't see them crying when they censored all of the atheist books, so why are they crying now when we're censoring all the Nazis? This is just foreign propaganda trying to exaggerate the differences between us, most normal people are united in their support of The Homeland against Eastern Mind Control." --comment on RedditHN circa 2035.
The thing that alarms me most is that these are people censoring extremely successful masterworks from revered authors. The stuff being written today, by nobody-yets, is being pre-corrected.
> The company said it would publish 17 of the author's books in their original form as The Roald Dahl Classic Collection along with the planned edited versions so "readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl's stories they prefer."
To me, it feels like a way to quell anger but still proceed forward and possibly even make money. I bet that the “classic” editions will be quietly discontinued in a few years.