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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

#591

Post by throway33 »

tsol wrote: post #582
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that this crisis of identity is actually on men, because men aren’t now the sole breadwinners and also don’t have girlboss feminism to bolster them. Men attain less education and are more prone to crime, homelessness, and addiction. The traditional role of a man is an emotionally closed-off breadwinner, and this doesn’t work in a world where women can rival men in breadwinning but also don’t have…

Both groups can have a crisis of identity? Conservative women aren't looked upon very positively in popular culture, this isn't much of a reach.

Yep. There's no shortage of crisis these days! Both of these groups are definitely suffering.

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

#592

Post by jemmyw »

NateEag wrote: post #380
jemmyw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also have we reached cultural stagnation, that old media still out competes new ones by such orders of magnitude Where is the next Dahl? Why is there no modern Beatrix Potter? Kids still love those stories and style of writing, which is less trite than most of the modern children's books. It does feel like stagnation, with lots of content being churned out but none of it with great staying power. Instead the ol…

As a father of young kids, I cannot recommend John Klassen's "Hat" picture books enough: I Want My Hat Back This Is Not My Hat We Found A Hat The Rock From The Sky They're beautiful exercises in minimal, precision watercolor. They're written with delightful economy, and have a rather Dahlian sense of justice and consequences. He wrote them all within the last twelve years, IIRC. For older kids, Pax (illustrated by Mr…

Thanks for the list. My older kids have already read the pax books.

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

#593

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

oska wrote: post #585
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pointing out that Jewish people are heavily involved in the media isn't inherently anti-semitic 'Jews are controlling the media' isn't antisemitic? 'der Stuermer' was depicting caricature Jews with long noses just for the fun of it? And yes, fictional conspiracies were a big deal in antisemitic propaganda - 'the protocols of the elders of zion' is just an example.

You're twisting the words of the person you replied to - you've changed 'heavily involved' to 'controlling'. And regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . The whole point of that book is that it was passed off as not being fictional. It was fraudulently presented as a real text.

Roald Dahl, as quoted in the article (I am assuming that we are talking about Roald Dahl)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/roald-dahl-fam...

“It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”

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

#594

Post by pasquinelli »

jquery wrote: post #468
Gigachad wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the success of Hogwarts Legacy shows you can just completely ignore twitter and nothing happens.

[flagged]

> Nothing happens, except the game is completely mired in controversy to a degree that it keeps the transphobe-in-chief JK Rowling up at night, to such a degree she called her TERF friend at the NYT to publish a defense of her.

wouldn't her TERF friend publish a defense of her because her TERF friend is a TERF, not because j.k. rowling is bothered?

not that i doubt she is bothered, she's as hopelessly addicted to twitter as the people who hate her. it's how she became a TERF.

twitter is a game. it's played by posting. you score 1 point by getting praise from good people, 2 points by getting scorn from bad people. points can be exchanged for a sense of identity. and so people get sharper and sharper, and their concerns get more and more indesipherable to people who aren't playing the game.

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

#595

Post by oska »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #593
oska wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're twisting the words of the person you replied to - you've changed 'heavily involved' to 'controlling'. And regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . The whole point of that book is that it was passed off as not being fictional. It was fraudulently presented as a real text.

Roald Dahl, as quoted in the article (I am assuming that we are talking about Roald Dahl) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/roald-dahl-fam... “It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”

Ok, I appreciate where you were coming from now, my apologies. Yes, Dahl explicitly talked about Jews controlling the media (although not in his fiction). So yes, I was wrong to jump in on this point.

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

#596

Post by vore »

wyager wrote: post #350
slothtrop wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not calling people crazy Wait until they realize that every single fucking insult in existence is equally "able-ist", by definition, or otherwise offensive in some way. Is the expectation that we slowly disallow insults in culture? No, it's going to be arbitrary whitelisting. Stupid (there I go being ableist). A change like this doesn't work as intended without fundamentally changing the narrative. If a character w…

> Is the expectation that we slowly disallow insults in culture The current equilibrium seems to be that we're on a sort of vulgar treadmill. The process goes as follows: 1. Decide that previously formal/medical/technical word like "idiot" has developed too many colloquial negative connotations. 2. Invent new formal term, like "mentally retarded", and tell people that they have to use that instead, because the old te…

The euphemism treadmill is not even just a contemporary phenomenon: it's age-old and not even exclusive to English.

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

#597

Post by [deleted] »

nonethewiser wrote: post #358
DanHulton wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Screeching" in english (at least North American english) is typically a gendered derogative. You generally wouldn't say a man was "screeching", not unless you also wanted to imply he was effeminate. By avoiding the word, you avoid insinuating the target's gender is part of the issue, and/or avoid insinuating that the target is effeminate when they "should not" be, i.e. you avoid homophobia.

This sounds like someone projecting their anxiety And self consciousness.

[deleted]

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

#598

Post by dang »

mandmandam wrote: post #246
tptacek wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yelling doesn't make the argument more persuasive. Not only is the word "shrill" gendered, it's famously gendered. If you were writing an article about the concept of gendered words, you could do worse than opening with the word "shrill". You could just Google this. Again: none of this --- nothing I've said, and nothing about the comment you've chosen to angrily respond to --- implies that these changes are good. May…

Kindly take your gaslighting and passive aggression somewhere else. I'm allowed to "yell" and write how I like. I haven't taken any personal shots at anyone - unlike yourself. Even if shrill is "gendered" (The Google says it "hints" at gendered language, btw), so fucking what . The implication in GPs comment is that this justifies Newspeak-ification... It doesn't. And neither does referencing less "agreeable" authors…

Your comments in this thread have unfortunately been well into the flamewar zone that the site guidelines ask users to stay out of.

Since we just asked you to stop doing it and you've kept doing it, I think we have to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I made a point of turning off the flags on this submission—I don't have any problem with the article and you can see from my comments in the thread what I think of these edits to Dahl. But you still can't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how provocative someone's comments are or you feel they are.

FWIW, while tptacek's comments to you were probably slightly edgier than usual and maybe a bit over the line, 'gaslighting' seems like a big exaggeration to me.

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

#600

Post by JohnFen »

rgmerk wrote: post #491

Rewriting stories for children to reflect the values and anxieties of contemporary culture has occurred forever. For instance, see “The Family Shakespeare” by the Bowdlers. Interestingly, critics seemed to pan it for similar reasons to HN’s commentators, but the book sold well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare I’m considerably less dogmatic about this than I used to be. Enid Blyton was a staple of…

But that's creating a derivative work. It's not passing that off as how Shakespeare wrote it.
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