This is just sparkling consequences, nothing more. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1357/
A new moralism is gripping the literary world
141–150 of 293 posts
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#142This is hilarious: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=persuasion.community
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 both raise some good points, but in your case you may at least understand what Hitler was trying to communicate when you decide not to adopt his view. To answer your question, a bad situation in my mind would be something like this example: a few years ago a relatively bright friend who had worked for a famous national politician got into a disagreement with me when I referred to The Colbert Report as satire. He…
> I fear too many might still not bother to dig deeper into the intentions of a writer to truly understand what they were hinting at.
Of course, how can you do this when people's experience with writing is mostly 120-character tweets that are read and reacted to on first emotional impulse.
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#144Uh, this is definitely going to be a "more heat than light" thread.
I've been trying to figure out why this topic in particular triggers exceptionally passionate discussion on HN. I have some pet theories, but they're really speculative, and I'm not very confident in them.
I have the feeling that this movement has the potential of destroying our public discourse culture, to undermine free thinking and remold our societies to be more unfair, capricious and despotic.
We're seeing the modern equivalents of witch hunts and book burnings.
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#145I've noticed this too. The recommendations I'm now getting from my audible account are full of newly-published titles promoting wokism and other morally and intellectually bankrupt junk rather than the classic titles I typically go for.
it's like if Spotify suddenly started recommending Christian Rock.
Spotify is doing stuff like that. I kept getting a bunch of podcast recommendations for things like "stop asian hate" and "navigating the workplace as a person of color". Over the summer I was getting recommendations for albums and songs called "Black Lives Matter" by no name artists. I ended up cancelling my subscription and switching to amazon music because the amount of space used to push woke political podcasts and music meant that new releases from artists I follow wasn't showing up.
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#146I'm surprised more writers don't advertise with slogans like "read the dangerous book they don't want you to read." It's also possible that the most interesting writing is happening in the self-published world, or the near-self-published world. That's where current classics like Lolita or Ulysses came from. Or much of D.H. Lawrence.
Neither of those novels was self-published, or “near”ly so.
I suppose the OP meant choosing (or being forced) to eschew mainstream publishers when publishing one’s book. Lolita and Ulysses both had to be put out by small presses in Paris where there was no censorship, though indeed this isn’t quite self-publishing because there was a publisher who took on the risk.
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "conflating" is addressed just a couple of paragraphs later: >The above cases are each distinct. You may agree with how the book world responded in some instances, and disagree in others. But what these cases convey is how much the literary establishment is struggling with a dread of “harm,” related both to content and authors. It speaks to the spreading sense that it thinks of itself as carrying out a moral miss…
I think saying that it's a "progressive activism" struggle to protest giving a credibly accused child molester money by purchasing his nonfiction is extremely weird, especially when it's being compared to something so innocuous.
It's about cancelling an author even without conviction.
Innocent until proven was once a progressive achievement but it got replaced by innocent until flame war. We are back to the of witch hunting where an accusation was tantamount to a conviction.
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#148I 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…
Yeah, I used to think the JK Rowling thing was just another example of Twitter activists blowing a celebrity's words out of proportion, then I watched the Contrapoints video on JK Rowling. Now I'm convinced she's not only a transphobe, but is intentionally manipulating a public which is largely ignorant of trans issues into thinking she's the victim. As you can see from plenty of the other comments, it's working.
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#149Earlier 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?
The Seuss foundation is free to stop publishing the books. I don’t see how that creates an obligation for Amazon or eBay to prohibit sale, nor for any library that was happily lending these last week to pull them from circulation entirely.
After all of this, it is considerably easier to procure the writings of Adolf Hitler than of Dr. Seuss. That is very strange and wrong.
Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few days ago they were one of the top torrents on a high seas themed site. I archived them if for no other reason than because I’ve been told that I shouldn’t.
Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. The publishers decided they weren’t comfortable selling them to be shown to children. I’m personally glad that you’ve helped preserve these once-beloved cultural artifacts. However, I’d hope that anyone would hesitate to give these particular books to children in 2021.
> Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. The publishers decided they weren’t comfortable selling them to be shown to children.
Unless they donated the book rights to the public domain, they literally are telling you exactly that.