471–480 of 992 posts
As a genuine question, what is the best way to combat things like this as an individual? I will obviously choose not to buy egregious rewrites like this, but Penguin is out maybe ten bucks from my decision on that front. I've got neither the skillset nor the bandwidth to attempt to organize boycotts or anything, and don't have the pubic clout to call public retribution down on the publisher. I'm asking because I stro…
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Screeching is usually associated with high pitched sounds and that is associated with women, to the point men making loud high pitched noises usually gets called "screamed like little girl". I guess babies also count for screeching.
I mostly associate screeching with owls and monkeys, neither of which are coded feminine. To be clear (and conciliatory): I see how you connect the dots here. I just think you have to have your antennae extended extra high to pick this signal up, high enough that you'll need to be careful walking under overpasses and stuff.
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Surely the success of Hogwarts Legacy shows you can just completely ignore twitter and nothing happens.
Yeah; I don’t know why it’s taken people so long to realise this. I know it seems to people on Twitter that everyone is on twitter, but that’s really not true. About 10% of people in the USA use Twitter daily - which is a huge number of eyeballs. But that still leaves the remaining 90% of people choosing instead to enjoy our short time on this planet. If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outrage over Hogwarts…
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This Dahl situation seems ridiculous and deserving of derision. I would also like to bring your attention to the Florida school book ban which applies not just to new editions of one author, but to an entire state's education system. > Among the titles that have been removed and banned in the course of the vetting in her school district are Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye,’ ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini, ‘The…
>the Florida school book ban which applies not just to new editions of one author, but to an entire state's education system. I see no problem with the government determining what information can and can't be made available to children at public school. This isn't the government making certain information verboten universally, it's ensuring that other people cannot indoctrinate your children with information you find…
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What was the intent of this change? "Enormously fat" is a subset of "fat". Ostensibly, this would insult more people since there are more fat people than there are enormously fat people.
I edited quickly since I misspoke. To be specific - they edited things like “But Augustus was deaf to everything except the call of his enormous stomach” to “But Augustus was ignoring everything”. It's not just the description of Augustus they toned down, they even literally removed lines from the book which explains he was motivated by hunger.
A significant portion of my learning English came from reading books, and now that literature is being dumbed down, simplified, and sterilized, for no reason other than going woke.
Education for today's kids and the coming generations are going to be an even bigger shitshow than anything any of us ever saw in our times.
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The words siblings, parents and children all existed when Dahl wrote these books, yet he chose to use brothers and sisters, mom and dad, and boys and girls. He specifically used these words, because he's the author and wanted to convey a specific meaning.
I wasn’t trying to make a value judgement about replacing the existing words in Dahl’s already-written books. The parent comment wanted an explanation to _why_ someone might select ‘siblings’ over ‘brothers and sisters’ and I answered with my understanding. I do now attempt to use the single-word non-gendered collective nouns in speech myself for the reasons I gave, and I think it’s a good idea to do so. To discuss t…
I hate to be the guy that cries “1984,” but do we really have to completely neuter our language to avoid every imagined offense? Are there people out there who’s egos are so fragile that they can’t handle “gentlemen” coming after “ladies?”
I'd be interested in hearing the most credible/reputable sources speaking out in favor of these changes. I've exclusively seen commentators dunking on this (rightfully so), across the political spectrum. To be clear: I'm wondering if we can find specific people speaking up for this, not an analysis of whose side of the culture war is most culpable for it.
I'm neither credible nor reputable, but I'm in favor of a weak version of this. When reading older books to my young child, I replace language that suggests that women are supposed to stay at home and men are supposed to go to work. One day soon he'll be able to read, and at that point I'll wish that books that were a product of their time would have been updated for the current time, so that he could just read the b…
I totally agree - my kids had Berenstain Bear's books (as random gifts and such) and I would avoid reading them because in particular the way they portrayed Papa Bear as a bumbling fool grated on my nerves. He's like a Homer Simpson without the heart. I'm certain mothers also don't appreciate the way Mama Bear is portrayed as always in the kitchen and the ultimate authority figure.
If these books were updated to modern sensibilities I wouldn't have a problem reading them to my kids. As it stands, I skipped them and they weren't a part of my children's upbringing. I don't mind.
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I think that would be more like Roald Dahl doing it himself. This is like Disney doing those changes to Star Wars, and you could just imagine that outrage. I think it is sad that people think we must change stories to reflect 'modern contemporary thought.' Let stories reflect the world they were written in. We can have our discussions around them as to what they mean.
> I think that would be more like Roald Dahl doing it himself And Dahl actually did make some changes in new editions himself. Perhaps the most notable being his changes to the portrayal of oompa-loompas. Dahl commented : > I created a group of little fantasy creatures.... I saw them as charming creatures, whereas the white kids in the books were... most unpleasant. It didn't occur to me that my depiction of the Oomp…
But he wouldn't have approved of 99% of these changes. No way, no how. It's shockingly disrespectful of his estate to do this.
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You're making a general argument against revisionism but you seem to miss the point that the specific critique of gluttony / being fat / "fat shaming" is an aspect of the current morality that is imposing itself in many corners of culture. It is forbidden to say being fat is unhealthy, undesirable or to pathologize it at all.
> It is forbidden to say being fat is unhealthy, undesirable or to pathologize it at all. Does that seem sensible?
But whether it's acceptable to be fat or not, it's ultimately a social measurement that changes like the wind.
Objectively and biologically, being fat is not good for one's health. Period. There is no room for argument here. Being fat is unhealthy. Being too skinny is also unhealthy, incidentally.
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Half my ancestry is Jewish. I'm sure plenty of dead people hate me for one reason or another. But, they're dead and I'm alive. So why should I care? Its kind of a weird move but there's plenty of other ways we can weave meaning out of whats happening here. - We could say "Ha ha - you hate Jewish people but your life's work still involved giving beautiful books for me to enjoy! Sounds like you lose, Dahl!". Taking tre…
If those stories are allegorical or are reinterpreted in future, inspiring a new generation of anti-semites, then the vitality of the author quickly becomes irrelevant.
We don't get to control how people in the future will reinterpret the stories we have today. People in the future could reinterpret anything. That's their right, once we've moved on.
At a practical level, it makes no sense to live in the shadow of future generations' judgement. We're going to earn their scorn regardless. And so will they, if humanity survives long enough.