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Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#81

Post by corbulo »

abvdasker wrote: post #61
Dig1t wrote: post #51

When people talk about “woke”, this is exactly the kind of thing they are talking about. People on the left are apoplectic about banning books for kids, yet here they are literally rewriting them. That is every bit as bad as what they claim is happening with banning books. The worst edits IMO are the ones just marked removed

I think you're overestimating the extent to which anyone on the left or right approves of this kind of censorship. This is one bad decision by probably 2 or 3 people in a publishing company. The overwhelming consensus online seems to be that this is bad, and I can't seem to find anyone of any political persuasion who thinks otherwise.

You haven't spent enough time on reddit.

And I think more highly of you for it

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#82

Post by [deleted] »

agentwiggles wrote: post #47

Wow. This is so gross. I was a bit put out by the Dr. Seuss controversy a few years back, but at least in those cases, they just stopped printing the books (and, to be fair, the caricatures of various ethnic groups in If I Ran The Zoo are pretty bad). It feels much more disturbing, though, to just silently update the language in the books to be more in line with modern sensibilities. Dahl was a man of his time, and a…

[deleted]

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#83

Post by version_five »

Ekaros wrote: post #77
upsidesinclude wrote: post #62

While some of this is questionable the removal of the word 'fat' is an important one. 'Fat' should not be used in kids books as a derogatory, or at all frankly. Fat is an incredibly important and necessary part of a healthy diet and should be treared accordingly. Training people to think of fat in the antiquated notions of bad cardiogy isnt useful. So while this may have been a move centered around "body positivity",…

Why shouldn't fat be normal descriptor of well fat people. Should we next ban thin? Or short and tall? Those also can also be derogatory.

A simple solution that makes language more precise would just keep tall and thin, and then untall and unthin could be used. Adding "plus" could be used to indicate if someone was superlatively unthin

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#84

Post by jaybrendansmith »

stuckinhell wrote: post #3

Censoring old children's books. Yikes. This is frightening in more ways than one. Besides the obvious censorship, and rewriting the past being a bad thing. I can't wait to see what they do to "Brave New World", "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984". It'll be ironic and sad if they burn the old unedited Roald Dahl books. But also have we reached cultural stagnation, that old media still out competes new ones by such orders of m…

This is terrible. You cannot have Dahl without his irascible self. It's one key reason why he is so loved. There's a certain honesty in calling a character a 'fat old gnome' that appeals to children. Mrs. Sponge will always be 'the fat one'.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#85

Post by Avicebron »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #53

This is fucking outrageous! This is precisely the sort authoritarianism that I was taught to fear around the time I first read his books. Editing old books to comply with the current regime was one of the things that the bad guys did. That was one of the things our ancestors fought against in two world wars. What would Ronald Dahl say about this? How would you feel if they did this to your writing long after you are…

I agree that they shouldn't have removed it, it's up for rational thinking human beings of all ages to confront the reality of the past even if we don't like them. It's how we learn and grow (also like a kid would actually understand or conflate them in this modern time).

But to answer your question, I assume it's because Rudyard Kipling wrote "The White Man's Burden" (1899). It drives people apoplectic, although anyone with any history knowledge would realize that post wwI the Japanese applied an even stricter interpretation of this philosophy to Micronesia (obviously the white part wasn't the important part.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#86

Post by dang »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #39
version_five wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the motivations of the specific people who flagged it, and some could have wanted to shut down a story they didn't support. But generally these kind of threads don't lead to new or interesting discussion on HN so they get shut down. It's not about the story being unimportant, it's just that it (and the discussion it leads to, on both sides) doesn't fit with what the site wants to achieve. I don't think t…

Neither do threads about cryptocurrency, neither do threads about attempts to ban cryptography, neither do threads, for the most part, about so-called AI research. Most news and news sites in general are not about only things that are practically very new, and most articles around even new technologies are reiterating the same information. HN isn't robot9000. Not everything needs to be wholely original, nor is that H…

Those threads often get flagged too, especially the cryptocurrency ones

I think the OP is clearly worth overriding the flags for, despite the culture war aspect which does lead to crap threads, no doubt about it—though the comments here are mostly good so far, and one even talks about Rider Haggard.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#87

Post by dang »

haunter wrote: post #14

And of course this gets flagged. HN is very strange sometimes, sometimes even worse than the loathed reddit mods (or maybe it's just the overly-american audiance here). Maybe if this gets posted a Github gist with the changes alone it won't get removed?

Flags on HN are mostly from users, not mods. Sometimes we override user flags. We did that here. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850588.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#88

Post by dang »

gjm11 wrote: post #38
elliottkember wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Guardian is directly referencing the Telegraph. Paragraph 3.

Sure, but the point is that the Guardian doesn't have the same sort of right-wing-outrage-machine reputation that the Telegraph has, so (1) the tone of the article might be less annoying to those of a leftier bent, and (2) someone inclined to expect that the Telegraph would be outright dishonest on this subject might trust the Guardian more (even if it's citing the Telegraph as a source, one might hope that they've d…

HN's guidelines specifically ask people to "Please submit the original source*. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's true that the provenance of an article sometimes leads to complaints, but I don't think we should let that be the high-order bit or train for it (in the way that repeated moderation decisions slowly train the community). This is one of those cases where knowing what you're optimizing for shows which side of a tradeoff to opt for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

(* when it's publicly available - that's an implicit bit)

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#89

Post by ajross »

stuckinhell wrote: post #67
ajross wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also have we reached cultural stagnation, that old media still out competes new ones by such orders of magnitude ? Uh... Roald Dahl is one of, arguably the greatest children's author of the 20th century. It's not like we're reprinting old pulp here because we can't write new stuff. Frankly I think your hyperbole is misplaced. Dahl's works are republished, and they're children's literature, so it's not hard to i…

This is not simple republishing. The editing occurring is censorship because modern sensibilities are different today. Roald Dahl was notorious about hating people editing his works. Censorship via stealth editing is just extremely gross maybe even as bad as burning books. If those works don't meet modern standards, let new books be made. It certainly is Yikes territory to me and apparently thousands of others on red…

> This is not simple republishing. The editing occurring is censorship because modern sensibilities are different today.

Good grief. That's simply not what censorship means. "Editting" happens all the time. Are journalists being "censored" when the published article doesn't match their words? In fact with translations, "editting" happens every time, by definition. How many times has the Bible been censored by now?

If you want hyperbole about interpreting The Decline of Western Civilization into internet argumentation: how about how no one cares about words anymore and wants to call everything a maximalist insult. "Censorship" doesn't mean anything anymore, it just means "someone did something I don't like".

Seriously, go to the library and see if anyone is trying to censor Matilda.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#90

Post by stuckinhell »

ajross wrote: post #89
stuckinhell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not simple republishing. The editing occurring is censorship because modern sensibilities are different today. Roald Dahl was notorious about hating people editing his works. Censorship via stealth editing is just extremely gross maybe even as bad as burning books. If those works don't meet modern standards, let new books be made. It certainly is Yikes territory to me and apparently thousands of others on red…

> This is not simple republishing. The editing occurring is censorship because modern sensibilities are different today. Good grief. That's simply not what censorship means. "Editting" happens all the time. Are journalists being "censored" when the published article doesn't match their words? In fact with translations, "editting" happens every time, by definition. How many times has the Bible been censored by now? If…

You can try to redefine the words into whatever you think is right or wrong, but it doesn't make it true, and a very large amount of people disagree with you.
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