161–170 of 293 posts
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If we're censoring ideas based on culture then computers, and cars, and planes, should only be allowed to be used by white men.
White isn’t a culture. Also BIPOC have made contributions to all those things. Way to erase them.
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White isn’t a culture. Also BIPOC have made contributions to all those things. Way to erase them.
> white isn't a culture FJ Haydn spent the bulk of his working career in Hungary, toward the end of his career he went to France and England and received large adoring audiences, not as some kind of exoticism, but because he was/is a giant of European/white culture. Why would anyone say “white isn't a culture” except to express animosity towards white people? Arch, Debian, Suse, etc. are cultures, but gnu/Linux isn't…
I hate this kind of anti-woke reactionary stuff. ... but for aspiring writers, there is a problem. On the one hand, writers should write what they know. They shouldn't try to assume they know some minority's lived experiences. On the other hand, literature should be inclusive. That means including minorities, and not just as peripheral characters. We don't need more My Magical Gay Friend stories. I haven't heard a go…
Part of the resolution is to make characters' identities peripheral. The problem with the Magical Gay Friend story isn't that they're gay, but that they're in the story to be gay. What if you took some other character and just randomly decided, "The person he's married to happens to be named Tom". That's it.
Another part is to collect characters. This is something every writer is supposed to do. They meet interesting people and build their characters using the pieces of real humans. So instead of this being "the gay character", it's based on Mike, the drone flying, amaretto-sipping, former gas station manager who went into security consulting, and really hates San Diego but has to go there all the time because his stepmom lives there. Oh, and he met his husband Tom when he needed help pumping gas because he was wearing a tuxedo on his way to a friend's wedding and didn't want to pump it himself.
Your story about Mike could be anything. He uncovers a spy ring. He's unhappy with his new job and can't figure out what to do next. He tried heroin and really, really liked it. He and Tom don't have to be gay in this story. All they have to do is be people.
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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.
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White isn’t a culture. Also BIPOC have made contributions to all those things. Way to erase them.
As a WASP man myself, I think you need to put the computer down. Or do you want to pretend that computers weren’t invented by my people?
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The other problem with this claim is that even if you do believe that J K Rowling's personal views are transphobic (and honestly, they probably are), she really doesn't seem to have been using her power to push them. The woke establishment that's been going after her, on the other hand, absolutely used their power to push transphobia in ways that actually mattered, including into UK law.
I mean we wouldn’t even be talking about this if she wasn’t you know a famous well respected author. I haven’t read her latest book, but my understanding is it has a character who is pretty close to the terf idea of what a trans person is which would seem like it’s using her writing to perpetuate her view
Is it influenced by her view? Of course.
Does it perpetuate it? Surely that depends on how readers react to it. We are free to interpret works as we like.
My own view on this is complex.
The problems JK Rowling outlines are clearly real, but of course so are the problems of trans people in gaining acceptance in society. Both TERFs and Trans people are groups that face gendered violence.
If the mere writing of a character that holds a view ‘perpetuates it’, then don’t we need to burn all books written before the 1990s?
Ooh, I just read Gurba's blog.
Her argument in essence: a white author's inexperience with a culture leads to bad writing.
Example from her blog: Mexican protagonist described by her husband as the smartest women he knows. But Mexican protagonist is continually shocked by occurrences that would not shock a Mexican, but would shock an outsider. Bad writing.
There are other points made in the blog. In fact there are some other accusations that stop short of plagiarism, but no examples are given which is pretty unprofessional IMO.
Regardless, Gurba is clearly and strongly asserting that the book is a piece of shit from a literary standpoint, and that the author's inexperience with the culture and people is the reason for that shittiness.
There's already a certain kind of click-baitiness to publishing a rejected piece that "dunks" on a popular book like this, ok, I get that. But the "New Moralism" author is downsampling that to a completely substance-free pure click-bait of "white people don't belong here" meme.
That is sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. If you got sucked in further to the article from that sentence you just got played by the author and possibly by HN's blackbox sorting algo, too.
Has anyone actually looked at the drawings in Dr. Seuss' books? His political cartoons? Has anyone actually read American Dirt?
I agree that we shouldn't be outright censoring books, but that hasn't happened yet. You can still read JK Rowling, you can still find the six discontinued Dr. Seuss books quite easily. And no doubt, some of the imagery is slightly offensive at best, to overtly racist at worst.
The next time someone decries the 'cancellation' of something. Look at their reasoning instead of knee jerk reacting.
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why is it TE to have an opinion?
That’s like asking “why is it racist to have an opinion?” It’s not. Its TE (or racist, or whatever) to have a TE (or racist, or whatever) opinion.
Or is it only ‘TE’ within the theoretical framework of Trans activists?
I'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.