81–90 of 293 posts
So no more Sci-fi Books from the alien point of view?
A Bugs Life is an abominable appropriation of insect culture. You're not an ant so you lack the authority to write or read anything that represents ant culture.
The difference is minority people can fight back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not true that JK Rowling was or is doing that. that's a misrepresentation.
I think this comment exemplifies the core of the issue. It’s not that many people actually have a problem with society holding famous people to account for their misdeeds. It’s that they simply don’t think they are misdeeds. They don’t find a problem with the things JK says and they feel like Woody Allen is probably a nice guy unfairly being attacked. Which like actually fine, that’s a legitimate position you can tak…
You can sanction Rowling, don't buy her books. You can criticize Rowling, you can publish books hating on Rowling, those are all great ways in a free society to show opposition. The problem is that activists want to destroy Rowling, erase her from public space, and deny others the right to buy and read her books. Rowling has enough power and stature where she isn't really threatened, but smaller authors are being "disappeared".
It's gripping the entire world. When things are judged, not by how the author intended, but by the readers interpretation, it's a bad situation.
I've been reading Alice Miller's book "For Your Own Good" this last week. Big chunks of her book excerpt "Mein Kampf", which I previous hadn't read at all. I have very little problem reading Hitler's text through my own critical lens, without adopting the authors intent. I have a very different view on the world than Hitler, and I have no problem at all saying that my views are less pathological than his and further,…
You can never know what the author intended when writing. And every reader has a different subjective experience of a piece of literature or a work of art.
So it's actually fucking impossible to even judge a work of art or writing based on the authors or readers perspective or in any thing beyond the aesthetic.
Because what you think about something may not be what someone else thinks about it.
And every persons thinking is influenced by so many different experiences: cultural, personal, moral, etc.
So to attempt to create a concrete narrative about the intentions of a specific work of art or literature is impossible.
This applies to reality as well.
I've never read Mein Kampf, but I assume Hitle has good intentions for his country and wants peace and prosperity for the particular ingroup of people he identifies with. This is the same that everyone wants for their particular ingroup. Hitler did terrible things to accomplish that.
So your perspective on Hitlers work is affected by the genocide that he commited.
However, history is written by the winners and the present reality is merely one narrative, that the winners create.
AMERICANS and every single other country in the world have commited genocide and other horrible atrocities.(see Native Americans during settler times and 400k innocent civilians killed in the middle east during the past decade)
However, they won.
If Hitler had won WW2 I can't help but wonder if the Jewish Holocaust would have been as minimized as the Native American Holocaust, and pushed under the rug.
And Hitler would have gone down in history as a hero based on the news media spinning that narrative and nationalistic exuberance.
Narratives are the most powerful thing in the world but also the most untrue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As long as you are able to do that, is it truly censoring? No ones burning books here. To say the publishing industry is especially censoring today than before is outrageous. The point is that it self censored in the ethnicity and gender of its authors instead of the material. I've been trying to get the older Seuss books. They're impossible to get. And if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are ast…
| if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors, so the prices for collectibles are high. That's not unusual. What are you proposing be done? Force the Seuss Foundation to publish books it doesn't want to publish?
I think the author here misrepresented the JK Rowling thing quite a bit. The idea is not to "scour" her texts for hidden anti-trans sentiment. The idea is that Rowling makes money off of selling her books and has built an empire, and the resultant power is now used by her as a platform to propagate anti-trans speech. Quite a different issue and also quite novel (pun unintended). Death of the Author is a concurrently…
i’m not familiar with JKR’s anti-trans speech. got a quote?
This article is ridiculous. The current wave of book burning, censorship and denunciation is completely different from previous ones, because I support the positions of the mob. I know that this wave of book burnings, censorship and denunciation will lead to a brighter tomorrow. I should point out that I don't support 100% of the positions of the mob, but I won't say which ones I disagree with because I don't want to…
Friendly reminder: It’s typically a good time to do some self-reflection when you find yourself saying “I support the positions of the mob”
Here's a take I don't necessarily believe, but is about as generous to the new left as I can make it: Ideas can be powerfully virulent, and we're especially susceptible to them when they support something we already suspect (confirmation bias). Under complete deregulation, people seek out information that confirms their biases, and our societal inertia continues unrestricted. The naive solution to me is something like we have now: introduce a friction factor. People are generally lazy, and if they don't have immediate access to something, they won't seek it out. If we make problematic media difficult to find but nevertheless available, we change the general cultural milieu without outright banning difficult texts.
This obviously falls apart when it comes to introducing new texts and ideas into the mainstream - if people are disincentivized to print anything that isn't playing by the rules, it's terrible for innovation and creates a whole new brand of inertia. It's also terrible in that it's an unstable equilibrium: if people care enough to keep their foot on the gas in terms of narrowing access to virulent media, it doesn't take much to convince them to go pedal-to-the-metal and start banning everything.
I think the author here misrepresented the JK Rowling thing quite a bit. The idea is not to "scour" her texts for hidden anti-trans sentiment. The idea is that Rowling makes money off of selling her books and has built an empire, and the resultant power is now used by her as a platform to propagate anti-trans speech. Quite a different issue and also quite novel (pun unintended). Death of the Author is a concurrently…
Uh, this is definitely going to be a "more heat than light" thread.
I have some pet theories, but they're really speculative, and I'm not very confident in them.
This article is ridiculous. The current wave of book burning, censorship and denunciation is completely different from previous ones, because I support the positions of the mob. I know that this wave of book burnings, censorship and denunciation will lead to a brighter tomorrow. I should point out that I don't support 100% of the positions of the mob, but I won't say which ones I disagree with because I don't want to…
This line of thinking has me gravely concerned for the future of liberal democracy. I don't know where parent lives in the world, but from my perspective in the United States, I deeply fear that there are many Americans who would support an anti-democratic coup (or mob) in a heartbeat so long as it aligned with enough of their political sentiments. Edit: maybe parent is a little too-secretly sarcastic, but even so I…