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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

#881

Post by TaylorAlexander »

jessekv wrote: post #731
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its true that potato head might be borderline. I suppose I prefer to make the effort and adjust my choices when someone points out my error, than make no effort and ignore feedback I am getting from others. Potato head was new to me and seemed like a good idea, and I did use it against myself. I generally will not insult anyone else's intelligence, but I do suppose that calling myself a potato head might perpetuate t…

To me, git is ageist.

That’s fair. Where I grew up no one uses that, I just pulled it from some suggestions on Reddit. I’m not actually familiar with how it’s used.

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

#882

Post by thebigspacefuck »

pixelesque wrote: post #752
throwaway049 wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steinbeck was on the English lit syllabus when I went to school in Britain in the 90s.

Of Mice and Men... Still remember it more than the Shakespeare we had to do...

Tortilla Flat was also lit

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

#883

Post by thebigspacefuck »

bjowen wrote: post #781
double2helix wrote: post #606

I'm a gay man and I think we are going to far with this PC nonsense. I had a hard time growing up in the 90s knowing I was different and being tormented by my peers, so I'm happy to see gay "normalized" in current pop culture more because I think it teaches the younger generation to accept themselves and others. However I feel that it's going to far, for example I started reading a novel the other day but gave up a t…

Children aren’t exactly reading as literary historians. The tropes that have been lightened up in these changes are things like equating disfigurement with evilness, fatness with moral failure, femininity (in women) with virtue. Kids will absolutely repeat the unkindness that they pick up in works like these. If you read through them, the changes are not “covering up” anything or “forgetting” history, they’re clearly…

Next up, removing gluttony from the seven deadly sins

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

#884

Post by pronik »

travisgriggs wrote: post #233
bko wrote: post #15

Here's a good list of changes. Most are about removing any references to ugly or fat. But also other strange things like changing the author's Matilda likes to read to include Jane Austin and John Steinbeck, not calling people crazy, swapping screeching to annoying, removing brothers and sisters to favor "siblings" and using "folks" instead of "ladies and gentlemen" https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1626860237104…

Ugh. I liked Matilda. But Steinbeck? Seriously? To each his own I guess. How Matilda would have been a fan of Steinback is beyond me. Much less Austin. Matilda would have been a fan of, er, uh, Dahl. And maybe Oz, Baum, Seuss, and Carroll. And any other author whose general vibe was "I kinda like to mess with the world." Definitely Orwell as she got older.

Forget Steinbeck: what's wrong with Kipling all of the sudden? Or have I missed a big round of canceling?

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

#885

Post by [deleted] »

luxpir wrote: post #685
Dalewyn wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time, back about five hundred to a thousand years ago, when being fat was a positive trait because it was a social sign that you had the means to surplus nourishment. 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 unh…

Tedious counterpoints from everyone here. Very one dimensional. It's not about the relative merits of more or less body fat, it's about overweight people constantly being told they need to do something, either in person or in the media. Worse, people will try to shame them into action, probably on a weekly basis, taking the moral high ground that they didn't allow themselves to gain weight, despite having no idea wha…

[deleted]

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

#886

Post by dang »

AlbertCory wrote: post #857
dang wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no single doc. We keep https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html at the level of principles, not practices, because trying to compile a complete doc would be nightmarishly long and then no one would read it (except maybe the litigious types looking for loopholes). It's for similar reasons that we don't publish a full moderation log. There is tons of information about basically everything we do embedded…

Thanks, dang. Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN. Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair. I don't know what HN's internal database is, but it seems like it could be a simple query or set of queries to determine if [flagged] is being used by a group of people as a way of censoring com…

We do look at that sort of thing but I wouldn't say it's straightforward to determine because we don't have access to people's intent.

We turn flags off a small percentage of the time. I don't know how small because although we log the flagging history, we don't keep it in a form that's easy to compute.

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

#887

Post by dang »

swayvil wrote: post #807
dang wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34854743

[flagged]

No? Your question doesn't feel like a question and I'm not sure what your point is.

If your point is "the mods are censoring me because they disagree with me" - basically everyone with strong passions on a given topic feels that way when they get moderated. I've written about that a bunch of times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but the short version is that this is an illusion. Plenty of comments that agree with you don't get moderated; only the ones that break the site guidelines do—and the same for the comments from the opposite tribe.

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

#888

Post by dang »

SaltyGoodness wrote: post #751
dang wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't cross into personal attack.

I didn't. In fact, tptacek is right above you making a thinly veiled personal attack at me and others here. What is your relationship to tptacek dang? Every time I see him winding people up, you're there behind him, threatening anyone who stands up.

"Come on guy" and "people have been pointing it out to you for hours now" are rude and personal. Please make your substantive points without swipes. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I didn't see personal attacks from tptacek. Some of his comments in this thread were edgier than I would like but I didn't see any that broke the site guidelines badly enough to warrant a scolding the way your comment did. Based on what I saw, this isn't a borderline call and (in case you're worried about this) it has nothing to do with disagreeing with you—just look at my posts on the actual topic.

> Every time I see him winding people up, you're there behind him, threatening anyone who stands up

The active ingredient there is "I see". What people see, and fail to see, is basically determined by their passions on a subject. If all these years of moderation have taught me one thing, it's that.

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

#889

Post by cuteboy19 »

erenyeager wrote: post #849
double2helix wrote: post #606

I'm a gay man and I think we are going to far with this PC nonsense. I had a hard time growing up in the 90s knowing I was different and being tormented by my peers, so I'm happy to see gay "normalized" in current pop culture more because I think it teaches the younger generation to accept themselves and others. However I feel that it's going to far, for example I started reading a novel the other day but gave up a t…

[flagged]

Prejudice doesn't become non prejudice if you make it more verbose.

Absolutely nobody is talking about excluding opposite sex relationships. The normalisation of homosexual relationships has no consequences on hetreosexual relationships. It is unclear how this leap of logic is being made and of course the obvious answer is hatred/prejudice

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

#890

Post by neverrroot »

chaostheory wrote: post #758
double2helix wrote: post #606

I'm a gay man and I think we are going to far with this PC nonsense. I had a hard time growing up in the 90s knowing I was different and being tormented by my peers, so I'm happy to see gay "normalized" in current pop culture more because I think it teaches the younger generation to accept themselves and others. However I feel that it's going to far, for example I started reading a novel the other day but gave up a t…

In the world of Fahrenheit 451, Captain Beatty explains to Montag why books were banned. He says that before books were banned, they caused many societal problems. Beatty claimed that because there were so many different types of people in society, almost any book could be seen as offensive to any particular group of people. For this reason, authors began to water down their content so it was innocuous, and offended…

This!
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