The whole idea that colonial history needs to be swept under the rug is absurd. In fact it needs to be preserved, talked about and taught in a context of modern society. That’s how we stop the history from repeating itself.
One can read Kipling with one's eyes wide open (the more so for the eyebrows constantly raised) and find his views on race revolting, yet still have to admit that he was something of a genius.
> Possibly because both Kipling and Conrad wrote books with colonial themes
Keeping Hemingway in the list is the best joke
Yep, the wife cheater, womanizer, tabern fighter, alcoholic, animal cruelty lover that toke his own life, can stay. Good model for children. The other are subversive and must go (and our moral compass is not random at all)
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 magnitude ?
This is a huge problem, when every year we graduate more and more people wanting to be writers, artists, etc. This will only get worse with books now being written by ChatGPT and art by Dall-E/Midjourney/Stable Diffusion.
> 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 old stuff is regurgitated endlessly with less and less of it's original soul.
Maybe we have a culture have decided that we no longer value creativity in writers, artists, etc. We praise the chatgpt's et al of the world and laud their creators and evangelists, but it's pretty rare I see much about advocating for better salaries and opportunities that allow new Dahl's to exist. They're too busy being told as kids that they need to learn python.
Thats the real wow factor of chatGPT isn't it? We're able to automate & serialize creativity because our culture has become too serious to do it ourselves anymore.
A highly creative culture would have very limited if any desire for it.
> Where is the next Dahl? Why is there no modern Beatrix Potter
Do you have a child? There are all kinds of amazing children’s authors, loved by parents and kids, that have been creating books over the last 20 years.
I visit the bookstore with my kid regularly. She's 5. My older kids 11 and 14 do find plenty to read, but I disagree that there are plenty of magical modern children's authors capturing the 3 to 10 year old space. There are a lot of books, mostly dross.
And the stories... "I loved my cat/mom/dad then they died" I get it sad stuff happens and kids need to process it but these aren't books that are going to delight. "Your cat died so I got you a book about someone's cat dying"
You're right there are some gems but nothing serially good in the same way.
I've got all the Julia Donaldson books too. They're ok, aimed a little more at the pre reading level though. And the repetition: I get it helps kids learn but it's mind numbing. Also her books have terrible plot holes that kids see though, like if you're a princess captured by a wizard and you can change into anything turn yourself into a fucking dragon and spit roast the dude. Dahl just had a way with words and stories that speaks to children because he thought as they did, rather than like some adults think they do. Potter did world building with an extremely terse number of words.
I visit the bookstore with my kid regularly. She's 5. My older kids 11 and 14 do find plenty to read, but I disagree that there are plenty of magical modern children's authors capturing the 3 to 10 year old space. There are a lot of books, mostly dross.
And the stories... "I loved my cat/mom/dad then they died" I get it sad stuff happens and kids need to process it but these aren't books that are going to delight. "Your cat died so I got you a book about someone's cat dying"
> And the stories...[...] but these aren't books that are going to delight.
Dahl's best-known book is about a family of 7 that can barely afford to eat. One of his other famous books is about how giants stalk through the night to kidnap sleeping children and eat them. A third one is about a child prodigy who is treated to the point of mental abuse at home, finally gets to go to school, only to encounter physical abuse - by the folks that are supposed to keep her safe!
If you think those stories can do more than terrify and scar children for life, I see no reason why you'd be dismissive of other works in which far, far less horrible stuff happens.
True. Although her audience is a little older than I was thinking. Also I didn't think of her because I don't like her writing, I find it boring. The stories are ok but the way she presents it is dull, to me. Obviously that's a minority opinion given her broad appeal.
I don't think it will be a minority opinion, given the test of time. I think HP's star is already waning (and no, I don't mean because of the author's views on certain subjects; I think the faddishness of HP itself is already wearing off).
I think all that political stuff is over blown and her opinions are way more nuanced. Personally, I just don't like her writing. The stories are probably ok but the writing itself is boring. Plenty of people obviously like it though. However, her audience is for older kids than I'm talking about.
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. Klassen in the edition we picked up) is a lovely piece of writing, vaguely like a cross between My Side Of The Mountain and Old Yeller, but less tragic than Old Yeller, with a deftly-handled thread about emotional awareness and responsibility for one's own choices woven throughout.
Oh, and the How To Train Your Dragon books, by Cressida Cowell, are wonderful, hilarious pieces of work about self-discovery, loyalty, friendship, and the hard, slow struggle to achieve mastery and skill in a world where people expect you to be something rather different than you are. Vastly, vastly better than the popular movies loosely inspired by them, and quite different - closer to a child-friendly Hitchhiker's Guide than the Hero's Journey of the films.
Great new classics are still being written - it's just that the winnowing function of passing decades hasn't yet run its course, so they're harder to find.
> Great new classics are still being written - it's just that the winnowing function of passing decades hasn't yet run its course, so they're harder to find.
This is true, but I also think there are 'golden ages' for various genres of literature and I suspect we are not in a golden age for children's literature right now.
> It'll be ironic and sad if they burn the old unedited Roald Dahl books.
"They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em, while arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells, Rally round the family, pockets full of shells"
> 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 imagine how mid-20th-century conceptions might be seen as a bit much for the target audience. No one's trying to prevent kids from reading the existing books[1], they're just trying to make a buck selling them to modern parents.
Does that make this a good idea? No, it's dumb. But it's hardly "yikes" territory either.
[1] Which would be the "censorship" you're talking about.
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 reddit and twitter.
> 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.
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.
You are correct, it's not censorship. It's lying, fabricating a past that is more in line with the present. Creating a false consensus on modern sensibilities using the voices of dead authors.
Your mention of translation is apt - it often is used as a fig leaf for exactly this kind of deception. They call it "localization", and defend it by offering a false dichotomy between it, and literal word-for-word translation.
But in this case they don't even have that thin excuse to hide behind.
Meh. I still think you're just inventing Political Enemies Propagating Horrific Injustice when the simpler explanation is a publisher trying to sell more books. The kinds of edits here simply aren't consistent with the ideas you're trying to ascribe to them. It's just updating stuff like "jobs women do" to match modern standards. It's routine, and it doesn't change the art, and you know that.
It's just dumb. It doesn't have to be the end of the world, and we'd all be happier if people would stop with all the one-sided hyperbole. It's exhausting.
> you're just inventing Political Enemies Propagating Horrific Injustice when the simpler explanation is a publisher trying to sell more books.
I only described their actions. You're talking about motivation. Though the publisher's motivation matters little when it's the "sensitivity readers" doing all the changes.
FWIW: the "sensitive" people seem to be your cohort, no? Most of us just Don't Care. It's a dumb thing, but it's not a genuine affront to real fans of the art either. I mean, be real: have you actually read Matilda or The BFG to an actual child?
This is how of books were censored in the USSR. Or how the Chinese censor the Bible (in their version Jesus picks up the first stone to start a stoning)
Difference is the Soviet had the honesty to censor while the author was alive.
This is explicitly censorship. Film censorship boards would demand cuts and sometimes reshoots of particular parts of a film before they would allow its release. Censors of literary works, when those still existed, would do the same. Cuts or rewrites of parts of a literary work that they would not otherwise allow to be published.
Puffin/Netflix are censoring the works they have acquired the rights to. They are not allowing republication of the author's original works (they hold the rights and are the only party allowed to republish). They are cutting and rewriting the original author's book for new editions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security”. This is censorship.
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'.
> I can't wait to see what they do to "Brave New World", "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984"
You can see it with successive movie adaptations: the decorations are the same, but all the messages get reversed, they focus on action, and they add hopeful endings.
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 done some fact-checking).
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)
For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn't at all suggesting that the original submission should have been to the Guardian article rather than the Telegraph one, and I don't think anyone else was either. I was just trying to explain why someone might have bothered to mention the Guardian article in response to a complaint about the Telegraph allegedly being a right-wing outrage machine.
Leftist censors seldom deny that the story is true--often the facts are indisputable. They are just outraged that someone made the facts available beyond the pale of the progressive Magisterium.
As presented it is just designed to generate outrage, which it seems to be doing a grand job of on here. There's a relevant quote from the Guardian article...
But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
So, Roald Dahl's family and the company they still control are perfectly happy with this. Why aren't we?
If you look at the actual changes, the careful consideration resulted in aesthetic atrocities, reverting the punchy use of language that makes Dahl's work so wonderful and entertaining.
People are outraged because the actions are outrageous. I reject the notion that I shouldn't be upset.
Did they remove all the bits about all the little kids being eaten and only their bones being left, which is a major element of The BFG?
Or the plot of Esio Trot which is a guy tricking his downstairs neighbor into falling in love with him by swapping out her pet every few weeks with a larger one?
Or the whole plot of George’s Marvelous Medicine which is a boy who mixes up a potion with everything he can find in his house, and feeds it to his nasty grandmother?
He’s got a whole lot of crazy stuff, and I can only speak of things I’ve read to my kids recently.
Quite a lot of them are using modern language instead of anachronisms:
> Unsurprisingly given The Witches’ subject matter, many of the edits are to do with depictions of women. “Chambermaid” becomes “cleaner”. “Great flock of ladies” becomes “great group of ladies”. “You must be mad, woman!” becomes “You must be out of your mind!” “The old hag” becomes “the old crow”
There is some removing of fat as insult. There is that too. But pretty much all changes in above paragraph sound better then old ones.
Not so much sterilized as replacing things that sound odd and archaic. No one, literally no one is using "old hag" as insult. It is not a thing, it sounds funny rather then insult.
>But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
This is the first time I heard of this kind of language 'update'. That's not normal.
Shakespeare is genuinely hard to read and understand but we don't just change random phrases and words to match modern sensibilities. Even modern English translation will keep the original for reference.
>As presented it is just designed to generate outrage,
> So, Roald Dahl's family and the company they still control are perfectly happy with this. Why aren't we?
Why should we care what some trust fund babies want?
If I'm reading a book by Dahl I want to read it as he intended. If you read the article you'll see how idiotic the changes are and how they literally change the meaning of the passages when considered "problematic".
The reasons vary but could all be addressed by releasing distinctive new editions. Remastered/unplugged/snowflake edition - whatever you want to call it. Just label them as distinct from the originals and everyone can be happy.
(Attacking the person): This fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone's argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument. The fallacious attack can also be direct to membership in a group or institution.
(Also, the submitter did a fine job of rewriting the title to be less baity, as the site guidelines request: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Thanks GavCo!)
It's true that https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=telegraph.co.uk contains a lot of ideological battle articles that probably fall below the 'interesting' line. For that reason, that domain has a penalty on it—a medium-weight penalty that we put on every site in this category, regardless of which ideology they support.
However, it does look like there have been other good articles from this domain. For example:
So I'd say this domain is a good example of the kind that we'd penalize but not ban, and try to turn off the penalty when the occasionally genuinely interesting article does show up.
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 in my moderation comments but one has to use HN Search to find it (that's why I link to HN search so often). One of these years I might try to wrangle a bunch of those into a bunch of essay-style commentaries, if only because they would be easier to link to and would lighten the load of always having to explain the same things.
We're transparent in the sense of always trying to answer questions, though.
Comments by users can get manually unflagged by mods but I don't think there's a software way to do that. Flagkilled posts, though, can get unkilled by user vouches (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
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 comments they don't agree with. After all, they're not required to justify their flag.
Some simple statistics would answer this question. For instance, in "sometimes turn flags off" what percentage of the time does that happen?
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.
Sometimes it does! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850886 is superb - in my book, that's above the "one has no right to expect a comment of this quality on an internet forum" line.
You're right about raging and soapboxes of course. Unfortunately, angry repetition is in far greater supply than excellent comments sharing rare information. But this is an internet problem and indeed a human problem in general. We try to moderate in favor of the good posts as best we can. It's not clear how to do it much better.
They still seem to be there for me - the poster made a number of replies to the linked comment (one per book) with a table of changes. Direct links to each reply:
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?
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 there's any political motive for these stories getting buried (independent of what might motivate an individual flagger)
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 HNs purpose - there's pretty clear guidelines around reposting the same article in the guidelines, so why would multiple takes on the same event not be worthy of discussion, to the point of flagging?
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.
Suppression of opinion was the realm of dictatorship et al
Now it is the realm of HN
That's not to say I have a better way forward, but I don't think it is good to shutdown difficult conversations to appease the most offended -- that is arguably the group that should have least sway over discussion
But by empowering 'flaggers' and 'downvoters' we give them the most control...
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"
> Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people.
References to brothers or sisters, or mothers or fathers, is offensive to nonbinary people? In all seriousness, not trying to start a flame war, why is that? Is a reference to hair offensive to a bald person?
>For some reason the mental health profession has decided that this particular set of delusions should be reinforced, unlike other types of body dismorphia like anorexia.
I think the reason here is pretty simple: Turning someone into patient for life is profitable.
The reason to replace an aggregate ‘brothers and sisters’ with ‘siblings’, ‘mothers and fathers’ with ‘parents’, or ‘boys and girls’ with ‘children’ is because for all of these the replacement suffices without calling attention to gender when it’s not necessary to do so.
There’s also an argument that the ‘X and Y’ phrasing makes the ‘X’ seem more important than the ‘Y’, or makes it seem like the ‘default’ - just a little, but with repetition the impression is reinforced. If there’s an alternative collective word to use, it avoids this ‘ordering’ issue with no real downside.
Note that all these arguments make sense in even if you consider gender to be a binary thing.
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 the edits to Dahl’s work: I would argue that for these ‘Xs and Ys’ examples he was probably just using the popular idioms of the time rather than choosing them to convey a specific meaning as you say. That would certainly be what I would’ve done, without much consideration, 20 years ago!
But that’s obviously not the case for all the edits that are reportedly being made.
The edits in aggregate do make me uneasy. I’m not sure how I’d feel if they were more limited.
> I do now attempt to use the single-word non-gendered collective nouns in speech myself for the reasons I gave
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?”
No, it’s not the same thing.
Parents it’s plural of parent, “10 fathers” are “10 parents”, so are “10 mothers”. When you want to convey the important point that it’s both mothers and fathers, there is no alternative. Similarly for everything else.
Regarding the first occurrence being conceived as more important, it’s the reason usually females appear named first, a sign of courtesy to them. That was sorted out neatly long ago.
I think you’re assuming some sort of extreme militancy about non-gendered language that I don’t have.
Yes, of course you’d need to be specific if it was important. I’d use ‘10 parents’ only if it wasn’t important.
Your example isn’t great though. Even if you assume binary gender for all parents in the group, you couldn’t replace ‘10 parents’ with ‘10 mothers and fathers’ because it’s unclear whether there are 20 people or 10. You’d need to be specific (‘6 mothers and 4 fathers’ or the like).
I don’t think your second paragraph refutes mine at all. I obviously don’t agree that it was ‘sorted out neatly long ago’. You could assume that from the fact that I’ve rethought my own behavior. This world would be a much worse place than it is if people never reconsidered whether the status quo from long ago was optimal.
[Edit: I see now that this comment was not on the same branch as the one where I said I’d rethought my own behavior from a default of e.g. ‘boys and girls’ to ‘children’, so I take back the sentence about you not seeing that. The rest stands though.]
Step-brothers, step-sisters, step-mothers and step-fathers exist, as do foster parents, foster sibling, legal guardians, etc. Some kids' mother or father died, or they're divorced, estranged, etc.
Using the perspective from the OP, it's a kids' book, using a couple of different synonyms might help them better understand what they're reading and not walk away believing that there's something wrong with their family or themselves.
I can be (and in fact am) empathetic. At the same time, I still take the position that non-binary people and other cultural minorities can simultaneously enjoy non-edited older fiction and understand that it may not have been written with them in mind (and may even be mocking or a little mean).
Write new books. Make them as inclusive or exclusive as you want. I just think it's very telling that you hear so much about "erasure" and yet changing an author's words and intent like this is celebrated.
... Maybe you should read GP's comment again. It's not asking for empathy, it's judgmental and imo a little unhinged. It claims saying words like 'shrill' are "gendered", and certain authors are "more agreeable" (what the fuck?) as if that justifies these changes.
Ask for empathy in a preface, or an introduction, if you have to. Stay the fuck out of Dahl's work. You don't have to like it, but changing it is obscene - Dahl is not alive to permit these changes, and would probably be horrified. They're his fucking words.
The word "shrill" (unlike "screeching") is absolutely gendered. It's still fine to use it, and I wouldn't have made, well, any of these edits, but there is nothing unhinged about the comment you're replying to. Don't go looking for enemies on HN threads!
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. Maybe the previous commenter believes that; I don't know. But I can't read that out of anything they actually wrote.
I understand the urge to find someone, anyone, to take the other side of your argument. It's no fun to yell at the clouds! But you have to wait for someone to actually make the other argument. You can't just attribute it to people and then hammer away at them.
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, such as Joseph Conrad. I mean, wow dude. Talk about the worst possible takes.
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.
Moreover, when I feel empathy with someone who feels different and unrecognized by society, something still keeps me from advocating for the censorship and misrepresentation of a writer's ideas and internal logic.
I think what's stopping me is the knowledge that if I'm fortunate enough to write something that lasts beyond me, I sure as heck don't want anyone updating it for the sensibilities of 2053. Putting myself in someone's shoes, I think there's a word for that
I'd hardly call dang threatening, unless you're threatened by him politely asking you not to break the rules. And you were. If you find being politely asked to follow the rules threatening, you can politely leave.
"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.
"Come on guy" is "rude and personal"? A "swipe"? Shit. I bumped that down about three levels of rudeness before posting. That's my max.
And people were pointing out tptacek's errors in understanding. How is that rude or personal to state?
Tptacek wouldn't take any of it in, or respond to any of the points made. Instead he threw around actually rude and personal attacks.
> The active ingredient there is "I see".
I'm not "passionate" about tptacek, or HN, or yourself.
However, in your "years of moderation", you've seen plenty of people take issue with tptacek's habit of twisting of people's comments. I know you have. It's a regular sight.
The complaints are generally about issues quite a few steps above "Come on guy." Twisting people's words, personal attacks, wilful ignorance, etc.
So I'm left with the same question as before - what's your relationship exactly? Because it's pretty off-putting to see such bias. It makes me wonder.
Yes, what you posted counts as rude and personal by local standards and we ban accounts that do that repeatedly, so please don't do it again.
Re "twisting of people's comments" - that's your interpretation based on your priors. People make these judgments all the time—in fact they come up in nearly every argument as soon as emotions get activated. You're overestimating what moderation can do if you think we should impose our own such interpretations. And they wouldn't agree with your interpretations in any case (how could they?) so you wouldn't get what you wanted even if we did. No one would! In fact it would amplify the complaints about moderation by many orders of magnitude.
If someone is wrong or you think they are, the helpful thing to do is respectfully provide correct information. If you can't or don't want to do that, please just chalk it up to someone being wrong on the internet and walk away. The one who stops posting first in tit-for-tat exchanges is the one who wins anyway.
Also, HN conversations are basically never good once people start arguing about what each other is really saying, so when things take that turn, it's a sign that it's time to stop.
> Your triggers are your responsibility; you can just not read author instead of pushing for and celebrating desecration of their work.
The same argument can be made about people who are triggered by this edition of the book. You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners.
Sure, disclose it is the edited version for "sensitive readers offended by writing of the time" of minority group on the cover and I'm all fine with it.
But it won't happen because that would be honesty and we can't have that from people that push for the changes
> The same argument can be made about people who are triggered by this edition of the book. You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners.
Nobody would be upset if they were just making a new version of the book. The issue is they're trying to sweep the original under the rug and eventually memoryhole it.
"You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners"
The "owners" (who likely don't have a imaginative bone in their entire skeleton), if you'll pardon my vernacular, should stay the fuck out of the authors original work instead of mucking around with it, particularly inane changes like the removal of the word fat.
And by pushing a new addition of the book while discontinuing the originals they seek to erase the authors original work. If anything this particular addition should have a large CliffsNotes banner on the cover.
At this point, I am tempted for once to think favorably of John Randolph of Roanoke, who once proposed a law to ban the publication of bowdlerized editions of Shakespeare in the United States.
Well, he said the British were not as bad as the Belgians, I guess... so he must be censored? It's all become satire piled on satire to the point I was entertaining the notion that this story was some kind of early April Fool's edition or something like that.
Thank God. Saying Conrad wrote favorably about Colonialism is so completely wrong and crazy some would say. Heart of Darkness was one of the most anti-colonial books of the 19th century.
How would you articulate what it has to do with, exactly? I agree with you but I find this topic too slippery to pin down (which is probably intentional).
People really need to understand that empathy isn’t strictly good. I’m also surprised how little empathy people see in others. The call for more empathy tends to come off as very self centered and emotional. Childish, really.
"folks" is possible the most egerious of these as it's an American version of English and Roald Dahl, while not English was spoke in the English version of English, not the US version.
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.
I think it's conceivable Matilda could have been a fan of Austen, but Steinbeck is a very long bow. British children still read mainly British authors and, when taking into account that Dahl is writing from his own experience as a child, that goes more than doubly for the times in which he grew up.
> In Fantastic Mr Fox a description of tractors, saying that “the machines were both black”, has been cut. In the new Dahl world, it seems, neither machines nor animals can be described with a colour.
And removing any reference to color … for tractors.
Lengthy copyright is a big part of the problem here. Another recent censorship kerfuffle was over Dr. Seuss—one of the books in question was published when my grandmother was in diapers, yet the copyright holders have exclusive control today, more than three decades since Seuss’s death, and will retain it for another full decade from now.
I bet this is much more becase red tractors are easier to convey in the inevitable cartoon adaption. Or the hope John Deere will pay for them to be green.
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 was insulting someone, they should still be insulting someone. Want the story to be different? Write a different fucking book.
> 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 term is now considered offensive.
3. Because connotation emerges from denotation, the new term develops precisely the same colloquial negative connotations.
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 that kind of thing. Thanks for the suggestion!
You like changing your language because you convinced yourself that you’re part of the crew getting to make the changes. Just wait until you’re on the receiving end. Or even better forced to speak a different language, you don’t know, which has happened before under the banner of progress.
On the receiving end of what exactly? Does it feel worse to be called a fool rather than an idiot? I don’t see what you’re getting at.
> forced to speak a different language
It’s very weird to me that you view my choice to use different words as somehow forcing something on others. Culture shifts and changes and there are always people responsible for participating in those changes. Yes sometimes people have used violence to change the language and of course that has generally been horrific. But my choice to simply tweet differently is well within the bounds of the type of normal human change that happens in a healthy society. I’m not forcing anyone to do anything.
> Most of us stopped using “retard” a long time ago for example
This never happened
Its actually hilarious to me that the words you list out could all mostly be incredibly offensive to certain types of people, but you think its ok since its not "ableist".
Really points out how stupid policing literal insults is
That was my thought. Reading about all the changes had me looking askance at Roald Dahl: it's like, sheesh, somebody's far more edgy than they really needed to be.
But that's who that guy was. That's what came out when he set out to be edgy. Removing it, you might as well write a different book. Misrepresenting who the guy is in order to sugar-coat him seems not the right approach, to me.
So if you do that, you should DEFINITELY edit Harry Potter to get the terfliness out of it, simply because I'd like to see Rowling's reaction to that :)
I don't think the oppressed need their enemies painted over and hidden. I think they need allies. A little more 'You have my bow." "And my axe!"
"Let's just not mention Sauron k?", not really the same effectiveness.
> Rowling was a progressive darling for years until she expressed disallowed sentiments outside of her fiction writing.
Really? Talents based on heredity, the portrayals of the Dursleys as fat, the renditions of other cultures, the questions of whether the goblin bankers echoed anti-Semitic stereotypes, the domestic slavery, etc. got criticism for years. She got some kudos eventually for saying Dumbledore was gay but that was late and never in the books, so it seems pretty minor to hang that theory on.
25 years ago my secondary school English teacher told us that he didn't read Dahl to his kids because of how it equated ugly and fat with bad. Every time I see this trope it reminds me: I think he was right. The books are wonderful in other ways. This makes me more likely to read the them to my kids
> But also other strange things like changing the author's Matilda likes to read to include Jane Austin and John Steinbeck
No one will read this, but I believe the authors Matilda "liked" to read have been judged to be politically incorrect. And we wouldn't want to give sensitive young mind a reason to look them up. /s
The choice of the word female in the original feels intentional. Using a more clinical term like that instead of “girl” or “woman“ can change the whole feel of the sentence.
These are not exactly historical books. They are the kind of books you have no reason to read if they don't sound pleasant to today's ears.
Which is okay, to me it is OK if these books are not read. There are enough other books. But, people selling them will want then to sound like people talk today.
Using the term "female" to describe a woman can be perceived as reductive and dehumanizing because it reduces her to a biological category. By using the term "woman," the focus is shifted from her biological characteristics to her identity as a person, which is a more respectful and accurate way of addressing her.
Worth noting is that there is no equivalent term to "female" when referring to men, who are almost always referred to as "men." This is because there is an underlying cultural assumption that men are the default and women are the exception. While the use of the word "female" to describe a woman is not inherently wrong, using the term "woman" is more accurate and respectful, and nobody would use the term "male" to describe a man in the same way.
>Worth noting is that there is no equivalent term to "female"
“Male” is the word, and it is used in lots of books in exactly the same way as it’s being used here.
I have read tons of books that said something along the lines of “he was an excellent male specimen” or “a member of the male species”
Using the word female/male has a specific effect on the way the sentence reads, it gives it a clinical feel and is very useful. Rewriting usages to the approved, politically correct, version just smacks of 1984 style newspeak.
I personally would not call someone “a female”, for the reductive reasons you mention.
I also would not change the words of a dead author to reflect modern usage because I enjoy stepping into a the past and seeing how people used to write. Plus there is the alliteration, which is really the clincher here: those who edited this are philistines.
(Not throwing anything at you, webjunkie. You merely explained the change without opining on it. Just commenting in general.)
Good example of the artistic damage done by the committee. The wit of the original lay in the alliteration. Recall that alliteration is the oldest poetic meter in English. "Leoden litheost ..." -- Beowulf
In current American English, “female” has shifted to usually being an adjective, woman is a noun. Referring to people by noun-ing one of the adjectives that describes them is something considered reductive by a chunk of the population.
If someone is a fan of “female” as a noun: I’m not going to change your mind. I get that changing language is annoying sometimes. I’m pointing out that “female” as a noun does bother some people, “woman” only bothers people if they know it’s been changed and see it as bowing to PC pressure. Since most people don’t check the diffs from one edition to another when buying books, this is a really easy decision on the part of the publisher, who just wants to quietly make money for the most part.
As a native English speaker, I find it hard to keep up and understand everything that’s now been deemed inappropriate. I can’t imagine how a non native would understand.
Seems like there is an effort to intentionally keep making it more complex to show who really keeps up with twitter the most.
I don’t have a twitter account to get updates on this, so I just try to avoid nouning adjectives related to any hot button issues. I dunno, I’m not the Word Police, just interested in avoiding unnecessary conflict.
I’d hope that most people would give the benefit of the doubt people who aren’t native English speakers, though.
"[first thing] does bother some people, [second thing] only bothers people if they [condition]."
That phrasing (in particular "does" vs. "only") makes it sound like being bothered by the first thing is inherently justified but being bothered by the second thing isn't. And why do you specify the condition that will cause the second thing to bother the people but leave it ambiguous for the first thing?
"Woman" does bother some people because they have always used the word that way whereas "female" only bothers people who are hell bent on changing language.
> Referring to people by noun-ing one of the adjectives that describes them
The noun sense of female well precedes (going back to its Latin roots) the adjectival sense of the word. [1] The adjectival sense came from the noun, the exact reverse of what you are saying.
And this pattern of adjectives coming from nouns (e.g. leafy, greasy, beautiful, harmful, dangerous, adventurous) is common, while the reverse is not (I'm hard put to think of even one example). So what you are saying here is a nonsense, with no scholarly basis to it.
Media changes, art is reshaped by new generations. Roald Dahl is dead, the rights to his books have been sold and people are updating them to keep them relevant. This happens to translations (as an example) all the time as the popular lexicon changes. This is how media and art stays relevant. The world changes. The owners of the books have a vested interest in modifying them to continue to be relevant. The tweaks have not impacted the heart of the story, so why do people care? Other than a knee-jerk reaction to 'wokeness'.
I think exolymph did a good job of explaining why people care when she mentioned "the punchy use of language that makes Dahl's work so wonderful and entertaining" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850273). Some of these edits cross well into Bowdlerism. They're also surprisingly extensive. That alone is interesting!
Dahl was a transgressive writer also for his day - at least I've always had that impression. His macabre deliciousness and sharp wit are what makes his books so good—like an Edward Gorey for kids, but not too much for kids. So some of these edits are artistically consequential, the same way that the Bowdlers' "Family Shakespeare" was (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare).
These things probably go in cycles and it makes me wonder if the Bowdlers will soon be rehabilitated. Probably not, because their specific motives are so anachronistic now that no one would want to be associated with them. Also, their name has been a term of derision for 200 years and that's too much of a black hole to get out of. But if you abstract away from the ideological specifics, the phenomena seem remarkably similar.
Because the books came to be loved in their original form, and in that form were an expression of Dahl's creativity. Because the changes take place silently and impart a sense of moral value that wasn't originally present. Because in attempting to paper over things that we object to in our past, we lose the opportunity to talk about them and learn from them.
It's not just a knee-jerk reaction to 'wokeness' to be upset by this kind of thing. My opinion is that people _should_ be upset by the presumption of some faceless editor that they're too stupid and base to apply their own judgment to the original text.
I understand why the IP holders want to keep the revenue flowing by adapting the works to meet current market demands/expectations (while offering lofty talk of the "timelessness" of Dahl's art). Setting aside the question of what this sort of editing does to his art (though for the record, I think that the transgressive meanness of Dahl is an integral part of his artistry, whether one likes it or not), the fact remains that most art is timeful, not timeless -- even works that "work" very well in their own time are usually consigned to obscurity once the world moves on. I tried to read "King Solomon's Mines" a couple months ago, and it was truly unreadable to me -- it relied upon cultural assumptions that are just utterly alien to me, and I couldn't enjoy it. And that's okay. I don't want to read a version that excises all the cringe-inducing language, because forgetting one story makes space for new ones (I can enjoy Indiana Jones movies if I want adventure, for instance, and they might not have been made if H. Rider Haggard's work had been picked up for an updating and franchising.) And endlessly bowdlerizing the "classics" means leaving little room for new ones to be written, read, appreciated, and canonized.
Because we are being lied to about what Dahl wrote, and implicitly, the zeitgeist and sensibilities of his time. This is faking the past to serve Year Zero.
And no, noting that there were some changes in small print, then listing them in some remote document no child will read, does not make it alright.
They are not modifying them to stay relevant, they are modifying them to avoid any possible controversy that would impact the revenue stream. Woke cancelation is a real threat and they would lose a very expensive asset, so they are effectively butchering the original works in a way the author would definitely not have approved of and with little regard to the quality of the resulting text.
It's a clear example of financially motivated self-censorship.
I agree, while we're at it, let's repaint the Michelangelo paintings in the Vatican, way too much nudity and those clothes are way out of fashion and let's rewrite 1984, it used to describe a scary future dystopia, but now it seems like just a regular day in society.
They can call the book by a different name, "The new adventures of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" or something of the sort or even add a prominent "updated for modern readers" subtitle so as to avoid any confusion.
The problem I have isn't with somebody being able to edit or remix an old work, I think it's fantastic to do such a thing. It's that after this comes out it's going to be virtually impossible to find the old edition available for purchase, and only the re-write will be available. It's that the new intellectual property owners are replacing a classic book with their own in effect and what gives them the right to do this? Apparently just being rich.
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 as a general rule his books have good morals and values exhibited in them. They are perfect children's books, not afraid to dip into a little darkness or to poke fun at the adults who run the world, and that's a huge part of why they've been so successful and universally loved.
The mental attitude and sense of self-superiority it must take to feel comfortable taking the knife to something so well loved is really mind-boggling to me. I am very happy that I bought our collection of Dahl's books before this happened.
Adults don't, but children might. These books arn't consumed by people who are particularly aware of the cultural context of the ear in which they were written. Things are going to very much taken at face value. A lot of things have changed in the last 60 years.
We gonna edit all books so kids don't take the crazy parts at face value? Swift? Dickens? The Bible? The Torah?
There have been thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children's books written in the last sixty years. Leave the classics the fuck alone, especially when the authors are unable to defend their work.
All of your examples, bible etc, have all been repeatedly edited for different cultures and age groups.
People act like this is the end of Dahls legacy, yet his stories have probably been discussed more in the past 24 hours than the past few years combined.
I recommend the book Graveyard clay on the death on languages, and how the dead are still as chatty as the living- in many ways the dead are harder to silence.
Reinterpretation happens, but shit would hit the fan if you actually went ahead and published a bowdlerized, inclusive, LGBT-centric Quran. Salman Rushdie would have another friend in his misery.
It is worthwhile to meditate on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea that the most intolerant minority tends to win.
> These books arn't consumed by people who are particularly aware of the cultural context of the ear in which they were written
Part of reading these books as a child or adolescent is being introduced to the cultural contexts of other times (and perhaps places). When a modern child reads a Victorian children's book, for example, they pick up pretty quickly that it's coming from a different cultural context. And this is a great way to learn about some of the more 'confronting' aspects of other cultural contexts in a pretty non-threatening way (they're just words on a page).
It can be a hard choice with young children. I grew up watching Christmas Story every year. My son is two and I'm very hesitant to continue that tradition when he's a bit older. I don't want him to think that mocking people for their accents is something to be encouraged. It'd be nice to have a version of the movie where that scene is modified or redubbed because the movie is a creative treasure.
Of course, once he reaches an age where he's old enough to better understand explanations of racism in media, etc, that's a different story. All cultural history has attitudes that may have changed or that we may even view as repugnant. It's important that people learn about the past and what people were like in the past (or still today).
Maybe this type of thing would go off much better if parents were given a choice, and have the opportunity to confront these things with their children when they think they are ready.
I agree; the issue here is more than there's a Monkey Christ level of literary competence that went into these changes (and also what seems like much, much too much ambition about what to change).
I agree to a certain degree, the scope and fairly transparent agenda of the changes definitely make it more of a problem. I'm still put off by the project. I guess there's probably a small set of edits you could make that would be beneficial and not lose the original tone. I'm not convinced of the value of that project but maybe I could get behind it.
I think a more gifted set of writers could have made the same changes less dunkably, is I guess most of what I have to say here. I sort of do get the idea of excising the fat references, for instance --- I wouldn't, but I get it: these are books for kids, and that's a thing kids absolutely do get victimized over. But if you're going to do it, don't fuck up the music of the prose, or relocate the inflections to Oberlin, Ohio.
I think this is the approach they took in the play version: the restaurant staff sang with American accents and made some joke about what people were expecting, which seems fair.
>It can be a hard choice with young children. I grew up watching Christmas Story every year. My son is two and I'm very hesitant to continue that tradition when he's a bit older. I don't want him to think that mocking people for their accents is something to be encouraged. It'd be nice to have a version of the movie where that scene is modified or redubbed because the movie is a creative treasure.
I can understand what you are saying however I STRONGLY disagree on your conclusion. If those things bother you and don't express the values you want your options should be either to A) watch them and then have a discussion with your children to explain what wasn't acceptable or B) find new movies that display the values you want to pass on.
Changing the past to reflect the present or ideal future is a TERRIBLE idea. I don't know exactly when it was that we all decided that we can't ever tell new stories or create new things instead of rehashing creative works of the past but I'll be glad when that trend ends.
These situations are perfect for having actual, meaningful conversations with your kids. Not only will you clearly articulate expectations to your kids, but you'll grow closer.
Agreed. My 4 year old went through a phase where she loved the original Disney Peter Pan. Disney themselves have included a disclaimer at the beginning of the film now, but for my daughter I made sure to discuss with her that the portrayal of the Indians wasn't particularly nice.
>It'd be nice to have a version of the movie where that scene is modified or redubbed because the movie is a creative treasure.
How horrifying. This is where you as a parent are supposed to find opportunity for a lesson on evaluating media. "This is an inappropriate joke but the rest of this movie is so good that I'm letting you watch. Don't make fun of peoples' accents." If he's too young for that lesson, he's too young for the movie.
Perhaps they shouldn't silently update the new editions but... "Dahl was a man of his time" is a weak argument when millions of his contemporaries - also of his time, were aware of, and actively fighting, anti-semitism. He had access to the same information they had and made his choice. So he should be judged for it.
I must admit I'd never heard about his anti-Semitism until today. I looked it up and, well, his statements pretty much leave nothing to the imagination on that front. Shitty, to be sure, no argument from me.
Still, as a kid who read his books repeatedly, and as someone who has read most of them to my kids in the last few years, I feel comfortable stating that this anti-Semitic tendency doesn't come through on his work.
There might be room for arguments that other prejudices do come through. The Oompa-Loompas are definitely a little... problematic. And some of the language around women in The Witches hits the ear a bit oddly today.
When I say "he was a man of his time" I don't mean to excuse everything he said or wrote. I suppose maybe that's a junky phrase that kind of dodges what I actually mean, which is something like "he was who he was, and we should talk about what we find objectionable about him instead of papering it over."
There's also something funny about changing his writing in light of some of the worst things he had to say... By the same logic of the edits, maybe we should change the quotes where he expressed antisemitism to make them more palatable. (I'm being facetious obviously, but there is something worth thinking about in why one feels more reasonable than the other).
> By the same logic of the edits, maybe we should change the quotes where he expressed antisemitism to make them more palatable.
Right, that's precisely the problem. The publisher is changing history!
I'm okay with new books being published that clean up the old stories, but they can't rightly list Roald Dahl as the author. The author on the cover needs to be "Roald Dahl & Whoever".
> I'm okay with new books being published that clean up the old stories, but they can't rightly list Roald Dahl as the author. The author on the cover needs to be "Roald Dahl & Whoever".
That will probably happen — multiple times — as soon as the (original) books are in the public domain, but right now there is no way the publisher is going to give a cut of the sales to a 2nd named author (especially since anyone good would also push back on some of the ill-considered changes).
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.
I would consider myself somewhere not too far from woke and I don't agree with this 1984 style rewriting of literature at all. This is neither left nor right, this is just wrong.
Most litterature doesn't last for many centuries until the language is so outdated that laypeople find it difficult to read without translation. It will then be translated, adding a layer of interpretation. All translations have that layer from the very start.
Yet the original versions are still around for those who prefer them.
Is it not okay to be able to pick a 2023 version, or a 1960s version depending on your own preferences?
How is that nearly as bad as banning a book?
The only problem I have with changes like this is if there's a lack of transparency, which I would to some degree agree is the case here.
>The only problem I have with changes like this is if there's a lack of transparency, which I would to some degree agree is the case here.
This reads like a side-note tacked onto the end of your thoughts.
To people that have a problem with it, it's the entire goddamn point. I'm fully aware when I'm picking up a greek tradegy I'm reading a translated interpretation. Now the reader is being denied the chance to see how the author wrote and talked straight from their writings. If the author's use of language isn't pleasant or moral by my standards today, I don't want to be misled to think that the new way is how they've always written.
It's immoral to sanitise the past for children and lead them to believe that we've always had today's moralities figured out, to children unaware of the edits, they're being deprived of the fact that society evolves and fights and works these things out.
If they're unaware that society can update it's morals (because some nitwit decided to slyly change language in a book in a way that's not transparent), maybe they'll think they don't have the power to change anything themselves.
> Now the reader is being denied the chance to see how the author wrote and talked straight from their writings
I don't agree. These version are obviously new and not the original. Changes are often made to books in newer versions. Most people who are used to reading books will know that.
> It's immoral to sanitise the past for children and lead them to believe that we've always had today's moralities figured out, to children unaware of the edits, they're being deprived of the fact that society evolves and fights and works these things out.
Or the children will like the new versions better because they are not being mocked by them. No one is taking from them the option to go back and read the original books if they, or their parents, are curious.
> If they're unaware that society can update it's morals (because some nitwit decided to slyly change language in a book in a way that's not transparent), maybe they'll think they don't have the power to change anything themselves.
This seems very contrived to me. You are expecting children to read these books, ask why the moral is different, then have their parents tell them that the world changes, or derive that themselves? I think there are so many other, and more obvious, ways that children will naturally learn that lesson.
> I don't agree. These version are obviously new and not the original. Changes are often made to books in never versions. Most people who are used to reading books will know that.
Sure, even Roald Dahl rewrote his stories to remove insensitive language. The key is he was the one that did it. It matters. Massively. And what makes these versions “obviously” new to a reader? How will they know it’s missing entire sentences?
> This seems very contrived to me. You are expecting children to read these books, ask why the moral is different, then have their parents tell them that the world changes, or derive that themselves?
Yes. Many books I read as a child in school had the language “of the day” in it and the teachers were clear to point out and discuss why we don’t see that language anymore. I came away more educated as to the injustices of the time the book was authored. If I had got an edited version without any indication that it was an edit, then I’m being deprived of that knowledge.
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 gone?
Erasing Rudyard Kipling? WTF did he do wrong? His poetry was inspirational to me, as a child.
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.
Unsure why you're calling this authoritarian when the government isn't even involved, and this is just a result of the estate chasing for more profits.
IMHO, as long as the original remains available, it's fine.
Changing with the times for the sake of relevance and sales is the the right of the copyright owners. Preventing them from modifying the text would be akin to preventing renovation of old apartment buildings by new owners.
That said, I do think it is important to be reminded of how authors viewed the world in the past. We should be reminded, at least tangientially, that governments of the past colonized and recall the lessons learned from that practice. I.e., let's not forget and be destined to repeat what came to be loathed.
When you rewrite a book like this, does it reset the copyright? Matilda was set to become public domain in 2060 (70 years after Dahl's death). With the books now owned by a corporation and essentially recreated by them, the copyright extends another fifty years.
So, if the publisher changes a single word in a new copyright, and the old one expires, can the publisher sue someone who shared the old version? It'd only be one word off, so they could argue it's effectively infringement...
They could make that argument, but wouldn’t succeed (speaking from the US legal viewpoint, anyway). The only copyright held by the publisher would cover the additions and changes; the original work would no longer be copyrightable.
Yes, but the new copyright only applies to the creative aspects of the changes. And that's an extremely thin copyright. So once the originals enter the public domain, the only thing they would be able to sue over is "you bowdlerized the book in exactly the same way I did".
I suspect that, upon the expiration of the original copyright, there will be new bowdlerized versions made, but that those will bear little resemblance to the versions now being released, except that some of the same things will have been changed, though not changed in the same way.
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", it serves and higher purpose.
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
You seem to have missed the point. So allow me to reiterate: fat is a derogatory term which lends itself to the idea that food fats are bad.
Food fats aren't bad. So call them chubby or overweight or whatever you want. Using the word fat, when fat refers to a food product, gives dumb people the impression that fat is a bad thing.
Do you get this concept?
"Thin" isnt a food group. Short and tall, also not food groups.
"Fat" is an insult. It isnt hard to understand. Is it factually true that an obese person is 'fat', sure. It is still generally regarded as an insult.
Most of these replies are coming from idiots. This is both factual and an insult.
I havent made any remarks defending obesity or suggesting we need to curtail efforts of obese people to control their weight
Calling a character in a kids book "fat" doesnt help kids stay healthy and fit. Insulting and shaming kids doesnt help them stay healthy and fit. Their parents probably feed them garbage and have made poor lifestyle decisions.
> Food fats aren't bad. So call them chubby or overweight or whatever you want.
These are two completely different meanings of the word though? Are you arguing that they need to carry the same semantics?
Should we not call smart people "bright", because people might think light bulbs are intelligent too?
Also, if I call someone fat, that might be demeaning. But it also might just be a description.
Of course nobody wants a negative description applied to them, and it might make them sad, but it's not because of the word we're using: it's because we're ascribing that description to them.
This is just silly. Fat has two meanings. 1) noun, a type of animal tissue, which serves, as one of its purposes, to store excess energy from consumed food for leaner times. 2) adjective, describing a person or animal who has a lot of this tissue, possibly to a detrimental level. The first meaning is not derogatory (or shouldn't be), it's just a physiological description of a type of body tissue. It can be in the right places and of the 'right' amount, or it can be in the wrong places and too much or too little. That's when we get into the second meaning (derived from the first) where there is an excess and that excess is getting stored in the wrong places (both on the superficial level and deeper in organs and clogging up arteries & veins).
Thin, short and tall are all just straight adjectives. Them being that doesn't invalidate the double meaning of fat and somehow (by your logic) the word itself.
There's a very large difference between making sure you get the appropriate level of mono unsaturated fats that you would find in things like avocados and fresh fish, versus what Dahl is obviously referencing which is the concept of obesity.
You will not locate a doctor on this entire planet who would agree that obesity is healthy, it places far more load on the joints, and puts additional stress on your organs.
Either you have a deeply profound misunderstanding of the adjective fat versus the noun fat, or you're deliberately misconstruing the authors intent to fabricate an argument for why censorship is OK.
You are smart enough to know what's obvious to you, can you infer then what is so obvious to a child?
You have missed the point.
I'm not protecting the obese or advocating for censorship.
It is unwise to introduce some word associations to children, such as a negative conotation to a word, because they are limited in their understanding. This also seems obvious
Lipids (fat) are a macronutrient and necessary part of diet.
Being fat is not incredibly healthy, on the other hand - and there is absolutely no chance that there is any confusion between the two. This isn't to prevent Timmy from thinking certain people are called lipids.
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.
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.
The technical/organizational details around implementation of this and how it came to be realized would probably also be interesting to a readership as nerdy as hn. I think I’ve seen a few of these posts but can’t seem to remember them.
Your statement about Dugin is false---I (in the U.S., to be clear) was able to buy a copy of one book on BooksAMillion, and it looks like most/all of them are still available.
Of course, it is true that his books are unavailable on Amazon and Amazon-owned sites. I wish I knew what caused this, or how to find out.
The books by dugin appear well received in russia, are they only difficult to dind in the west? I indeed cannot find any book about the censored industrial complex. Not even sure if you are talking about the military or prison instance of this pattern.
> the actions of large tax exempt foundations to fund the [censored] movement in a coordinated fashion by founding hundreds of geographically distributed non-profit pressure groups with almost identical mission statements, and sympathetic intellectuals
I look forward to reading the future retrospective on the US right wing’s persecution-complex-industrial complex.
The book is available for free 3-day shipping at Barnes and Noble and it’s one of the “most censored books of the last 30 years?” Sorry that your favorite online retailer decided not to carry the latest ethnonationalist anti-semitic screed.
Even mentioning it indirectly gets my comment moved to shadow banned! That's why everyone is so confused where all this radical social change stuff came from. Anyone who even does research into this area gets shutdown with overwhelming force. There is no debate. Everything goes straight to censorship like an answer to the question I was replying to cannot exist. It is simply a mystery! The whole thing happened spontaneously all by itself as a fundamental process of history!
What's interesting is this is a great chance to understand how huge social changes take place and what all the moving pieces are. Heck, plan your own massive social change using this movement as a template. Create whole new consumer product categories the same way! Maybe everyone needs nose hair trimmers, how would you start that massive social change?
Your comment is dead because it's unsubstantiated nonsense, and enough people downvoted or flagged it. (Reading someone else's unsubstantiated nonsense doesn't count as "research".)
The comments naming _The Transgender-Industrial Complex_ by Scott Howard aren't flagged/dead, just like the comments linking the major American book retailer with the book on sale, or the original publisher.
If this were the case, I'd expect them to keep selling both the original and rewritten versions, since for both, there's at least a few people who'd be willing to buy one but not the other.
> The Dahl estate owned the rights to the books until 2021, when Netflix bought them outright for a reported $686 million, building on an earlier rights deal. The American streaming service now has overall control over the book publishing, as well as various adaptation projects that are in the works.
I suspect they're hoping netflix will make movies based on his books. Netflix seems pretty sensitive to twitter opinions. They're probably trying to throw a bone to the twitter mob to make it less likely any new movies get "cancelled".
I sympathize with the view of Netflix bowdlerizing to broaden the audience but they're also the platform with Dave Chappelle - which makes it hard to align them with "pretty sensitive to Twitter opinions" since a bunch of people have declared that fellow persona non grata.
True; but I don't think they paid to have Dave Chappelle produced. They stopped making House of Cards after the sexual harassment thing with Kevin Spacey.
I'm sure they'd rather have less controversy around Dahl's work. And its pretty easy to imagine Dahl's estate making the 'conservative' choice and allowing these edits if there's even a risk of their netflix deal falling apart.
Not only can you make money while ignoring Twitter — but you can make money by ignoring Twitter screeching. Eg, by hiring Johnny Depp rather than engaging in misandry by supporting false accusations against him.
Hopefully, WarnerMedia eventually gets the memo — and stops discriminating against men while supporting abusers like Amber Heard (female) or Ezra Miller (non-binary).
I think a lot of companies have forgotten they need to treat people based on the content of their character rather than race/sex/gender/etc.
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 Legacy increased sales of the game. I don’t know if I would have heard about it at all if not for the outrage machine.
Louis CK did a show here in Melbourne a few months ago and the show was sold out. For better or worse, being canceled doesn’t seem like a life sentence.
Because being cancelled isn't a real thing. It's usually just scoundrels angry they received the slightest bit of pushback. Dave Chapelle constantly whines that queer people are trying to cancel him while he cashes $20m Netflix checks on a regular basis.
Being cancelled is very much a real thing, since a lot of people have, e.g., spineless bosses who will immediately capitulate to the Twitter mob's demands.
We studied To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible when I was in highschool. I remember thinking how barbaric and despicable "mob justice" was. I didn't understand it, and I assumed I never would - I thought it was something we reference from history. But twitter really has brought the mob justice style witch hunts back.
I don't understand how anyone can claim its not a real phenomenon. Being cancelled is obviously quite a real experience for the people it happens to.
I have seen this a few times even as a dev, where people put way to much focus on twitter. I think its because there is a class of people that use twitter and they think twitter is really really important. But some random person on twitter tweets "@company x is bad" and its taken much more seriously than say an email, slack message, or whatever. Most people don't use twitter ever, most people on twitter rarely use twitter. We need to kill twitter and move on.
This is totally true. I've read articles in the BBC news about a 'Twitter backlash' against something where the number of tweets was an incredibly miniscule fraction of the population.
I've seen actual physical protests with people on the streets with placards that appear to get less attention from the press. It's incredibly lazy!
<I deleted a paragraph where I stated an unnuanced claim about canceling.>
The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population. Even if 100% of them loudly proclaimed anything anywhere on any social media platform, it would barely affect anything simply because they’re so small compared to the rest of the population. This is in the same sense that only a minority of the population are severely immunocompromised to the point where Covid is still a threat, and the lack of masking and other safety precautions actually makes their lives significantly worse but because they’re so small their voices literally don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
That is to say I don’t attribute the lack of irl effect to social media but due to demographic size. There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.
> There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.
There's an old quote - "Never assume a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. Its the only thing that ever has."
The radical left - for all that they're championing the rights of a small group of people, has been very effective at kicking up a fuss about diversity, inclusion and trans rights. It doesn't feel like a tiny fringe movement:
- Apparently most researchers and professors at a lot of universities now need to make "diversity and inclusion statements". Stanford is banning a lot of language. So is Google and other big companies.
- Authors like Roald Dahl are having their work retroactively edited to "meet modern norms".
- The pushback against this stuff is becoming a major rallying call for America's right. Now the american conservatives accomplished most of their big policy objectives in most states (concealed carry, banned abortions, etc). What can they use to "energize the base"? Fighting this stuff is being turned into a tool to get conservatives to the polls. (Source: The economist podcast.)
I'm not sure what the lived experience has become for trans people - but the fight for trans rights (as part of the fight for diversity and inclusion) seems to have made massive waves all over the place.
> The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population.
The only people affected by your decision to buy Hogwarts Legacy are the developers involved. I promise you, JK Rowling won't notice the extra 50 cents in her pocket if you buy, or don't buy the game.
If you want to support trans people, do that by supporting them. The lives of trans people are unaffected by your steam purchasing decisions.
You’re going off about a lot of stuff but all I’m saying is that if even 100% of all trans people loudly proclaimed they wanted to be against the Harry Potter game they probably wouldn’t accomplish shit just because they’re such a small population. I mean literally we have laws being passed in some states to ban all of 2 trans kids (in the entire state) from participating in sports. It’s not like they can do anything to defend themselves here.
If you ban someone from reddit or twitter - their opinions only disappear from your echo chamber not from the real world. Maybe echo chambers aren't such a good idea after all.
Those people banned every single dissenting opinion and after a while started to think that their opinions are way more popular than they actually are.
"Everybody around here thinks that JKR is bad - so surely our boycott is going to be successful - I don't see anyone who disagrees."
If anything - this ridiculous hate campaign against JKR could decrease the support for trans people.
i think people have gotten a lot more aware and accepting of trans people in the last couple decades. i think the real reason why people don't seem to be bothered by the harry potter game is because most people get that whatever j.k. rowling thinks or says or does doesn't really harm trans people, that she didn't make the game, and that playing a game is just playing a game.
actually, i take that back: most people don't know about j.k. rowling's opinions. and even so over the last couple decades they've become much more aware and accepting of trans people.
I don't understand the drama around that video game, and at this point, I don't think I want to understand what it's about. I did a few Internet searches and it's totally unclear what's wrong with the game, or what minorities are portrayed badly in it. The best I've come up with is: "The game is based on a fictional world written by an author who tweeted something bad, and even though the author has nothing to do with the game, we're going to boycott the game." Is that really all there is to it?
> If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outrage over Hogwarts Legacy increased sales of the game. I don’t know if I would have heard about it at all if not for the outrage machine.
It wasn't in the file I have of upcoming games until that happened, so you can definitely also include me. It'll be on Switch later in the year, I'll be waiting for then.
> 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.
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 book, without us having to have a conversation about how things were different then.
Your decision may be contributing to the crisis of identity of women who do want to raise a family though, and who have been crushed by a culture who pushes college and helping capital owners as the meaning to life.
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 as many barriers to forming a robust social safety net.
Wanting to stay home and raise a family (as a man, a woman, or anything else) is not "conservative", it's a lifestyle choice.
Maybe it's because I'm European but hearing the word "conservative" applied to a basic lifestyle choice so readily is really grating. There's more to life than conservative vs liberal and sometimes you just... don't need to give political labels to everything.
There's more to life than identity politics. Let people make non-political lifestyle choices without labelling them.
> Men attain less education and are more prone to crime, homelessness, and addiction.
What an awful thing to say. It would be different if your comment taught us something, but it's little more than a well-written diss.
Imagine how you'd feel if the word "Men" were replaced by various ethnic groups, while still maintaining its accuracy.
At one time it was true to say that women were naturally bad at chess.
My wife supported me financially for close to five years. It's why I was able to learn ML so thoroughly. Maybe some men would view her as the competition, but I'm fortunate to be in a relationship where we don't feel threatened by the other. I recommend other men try to find this as well, since it's quite nice.
It's also nice to have a family where the roles are well-defined and reliable, and there's nothing wrong with wanting one over the other. It's personal preference, which you can't really control. But saying that men are bad at forming robust social safety nets is different than qualifying your statements with "some" or "most."
I'll be the first to say that it's a huge double standard to expect most men to be emotionally closed off most of the time, whereas women are expected to be more emotional in relation to men. But you're phrasing this in a highly negative way.
The women who don't become homeless often resort to sex work. It tends to be more difficult for men to do this in a financially successful way. Men are statistically more prone to violent crime; granted, and testosterone deserves to be scrutinized in its role regarding this. As for the addiction claim, I'd be curious to see the data, since my anecdata suggests mostly equal rates. https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/substance... claims the situation is a bit more nuanced:
> For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder. In addition, women may be more susceptible to craving and relapse, which are key phases of the addiction cycle.
More generally, if you're going to paint various segments of the population with negative traits, it's important to bring data to the discussion which backs up your assertions. That way it informs the reader rather than polarizing them.
That said, if you'd written a children's book, I wouldn't lobby for it to be changed. I'd buy different books, or explain it in context.
Men may be have a crisis of identity but women still expect their husbands to be the main breadwinners and suffer from the mismatch of expectation and reality too. Women avoid marrying men who earn less and have no potential to earn more.
As a result I'd expect a lot of single men with below average income and a lot of single women with above average income who struggle to find worthy men. Statistically it is impossible meet two condition at once: 1. women on average earn at leas as much as men 2. In a family a husband has income higher than a wife.
Ask a few random people on the street in a major US city how many books they've read in the past five years.
I'd wager that children's books represent a much larger percentage of the books the typical US citizen reads in their entire lifetime than anyone would like to believe.
If true, this would elevate their importance enough for matters like historical accuracy to be worth considering.
I would imagine past highscool, or the last education level with mandatory book reading, book reading falls off a cliff. And ever for mandatory book reading,I guess about half of students just read some kind of notes instead of the actual book.
To be fair a lot of students don't bother to read books school assigns as textsx because the way schools run things actually reading, engaging, and thinking about it is a disadvantage. There are certain themes and points your teachers want you to mention in your answers and any analysis outside of that will be considered "incorrect" or given lower marks, even if they relate to the text and the theme being studied.
Academics and historians studying this will look at the original language of course. The publisher goes to great lengths to make available all the changes made and is very transparent about them. Obviously most people aren't reading children's books to their kids to teach them history though
> I replace language that suggests that women are supposed to stay at home and men are supposed to go to work
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.
I've taken the "Oh no! Sorry. That book was accidentally destroyed maliciously," approach before.
(Interestingly, my own parents took that approach with the Berenstain Bears for exactly the reason you describe.)
But I'd prefer to either read something to my kids as originally written or not read it all. Or as they get older, read the original but with a parental aside on how it was a product of its time. (Might as well make it an opportunity for a brief history lesson.)
I'm definitely not a fan of this "force push" approach to updating established older works.
Why not explain the historical context of these books instead? (That’s I what do with my children.) My children appreciate the transparency and extra discussion. That leads to a better longer term outcome for society than with the ease and convenience that censorship provides. History’s mistakes tend to repeat when society forgets them. We can’t rely on educational institutions doing our job for us since the same trend of censorship is happening in their realm.
Fair enough, and I applaud your approach, but IMO there's a time and place, and bedtime wasn't one of those times or places I wanted to get into these kinds of discussions.
Because there are enough (a veritable deluge of) alternatives that do not require extra work on my part.
Which is probably why the Dahl copyright holders are doing this(1). Not to appease some sort of modern sensibilities, but to make money. Apparently they think the investment will pay off.
(1) a less money-focused reason could be because they truly believe these stories deserve to be shared in the future, and see the things they changed as barriers to that goal while of little import to the message. But again, they think this step will "pay off" - in continued popularity / enduring part of culture then.
Maybe read other books instead of helping destroy classics?
Yeah, I agree that the copyright holders are acting rationally, but long term this will destroy our democracies. A key premise of Fahrenheit 451 is that they end up with sanctioned book burnings because of something boring like political correctness.
There are tons of books that actually are a product of the current time. Why not read those, and support living writers, instead of changing the meaning of older works?
Seems like your problem here is easier to solve without messing with the other writers and potentially confusing your child about what, say, a Ronald Dahl book is actually like.
At least in the Dahl case, they're explicitly trying to change the tone of the works, and not just the "content" -- whatever that word is supposed to mean in the context of literature.
Everybody's family is different, but my childhood self would have been pretty disillusioned to discover my parents censoring books on my behalf. I really can't see how that's a good lesson for the kids, especially when you can just buy contemporary works that are as PC/woke (or not) as you want them to be.
Right I really don't get why people are so offended by these changes
If a work of fiction is changed to not imply women are meant to stay at home and men are meant to go to work, doesn't that show that, to those offended, on some level those implications are core to what makes that work that work?
None of these changes drastically affect the storylines, character arcs, unique characteristics, etc of the stories. If the a book saying the N word despite it not being central to the story is so important to you then it doesn't seem like you care about the book so much as you care about saying the N word
> If a work of fiction is changed to not imply women are meant to stay at home and men are meant to go to work, doesn't that show that, to those offended, on some level those implications are core to what makes that work that work?
The problem is that Dahl’s work isn’t an essay, or a treatise. It’s whimsical. It’s art! The words chosen, were chosen because they were the words that worked.
Say these two extracts out loud:
> “You mean Prince Pondicherry?” said Grandpa Joe, and he began chuckling with laughter. “Completely dotty, said Grandpa George. “But very rich,” said Grandma Georgina
> “You mean Prince Puducherry?” said Grandpa Joe, and he began chuckling with laughter
They mean essentially the same thing, but they feel quite different. The rhythm of “Prince Pondicherry” has a bounce to it, “Prince Puducherry” is more like walking down hill.
You might make the argument that this trade of is worth making, but it is in fact a trade of.
OK, but how does an Indian child feel reading that, who has their name mispronounced every day (sometimes carelessly, sometimes with profuse apologies, sometimes deliberately), and knowing that Pondicherry could never be the name of an Indian prince?
How do children of any specific minority feel when they read historical accounts of racial injustice against their people? Probably really terrible, and maybe even scared. Should they not learn about that history because it makes them feel horrible? That would be extremely unwise since the mistakes of history tend happen again once society forgets.
Old works of fiction also belong in historical narrative because it helps give us a window into popular culture at the time.
(Not that this should matter since my argument should stand on its own, but I’m not white. I just want to preempt any accusations.)
That’s not the only point of fictional works including Dahl’s. Often there are allegorical messages, themes, and satire.
It’s not constructive to stick children’s heads into the ground, especially when that self-chosen ignorance will lead to much worse societal outcomes long term.
They deal with it knowing that the world is a complex place.
My name was romanized in a incorrect way a hundred years ago and technically the entire English speaking world mispronounces it. I deal with it by not being a goddamn baby about it. And yes, I figured this out when I was 10.
> "I really don't get why people are so offended by these changes..."
The problem is, changes are made simply because a fictional female character happens to stay at home. Which is fine if she wants that, or it happens in the story.
I don't get why parents are so untrusting of their children's ability to think, that they censor and change language found in old books. Are they worried their kids will become monsters if they're not spoon-fed censored content?
Many of us grew up surrounded by unchecked stereotypes, yet many of us have zero problems with women doing whatever they want to do.
Wouldn't a preface achieve a similar outcome without changing the original work? The conversation about things having changed is valuable as it demonstrates how society is progressing.
There’s an early chapter in Charlie and the Glass Elevator that feels like it was written by a racist 11 year old, with the idiot president making fun of every ethnicity in the most banal way possible.
I skipped it when reading the story to my children.
That book always seemed really out there in the Dahl pantheon. I loved reading it as a kid.
I too would skip reading such material to my child. But it wouldn’t bother me for the child to read it themself when they are older. It’s a funny psychological thing: reading aloud to someone risks carrying some perceived level of approval. A child reading it themself can toss the ideas around in their head, take time to process it, question it etc. and surely they can tell that the prose is whimsical and not serious.
It's the publishers desire to make money, that's it. I'd rather they kept he original text and add an advisory at beginning. It's insulting for those of us that read it and even realized back then they weren't so great.
That's not the alternative, it's an alternative, and a bad one at that. A good alternative would be to keep making the books available forever exactly the way Dahl originally wrote them.
"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.
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".
Sure, but at that point you're just saying that a neutral descriptive term is more commonly-applicable to one gender.
Is the word "sobbing" or the word "weeping" derogatory? Visibly-emotional crying is also associated with women, and isn't a stereotypically "manly" thing to do.
I'm saying it could be interpreted that way by extremely uncharitable individuals that try to make their existence out of being offended and fixing "social injustices", instead of recognizing that in vast majority of cases no actual person was even offended, author didn't mean anything close to offending anyone, and the word was just used to make writing more colorful.
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.
Yeah, I think trying to "correct" such "uninclusive" speech is utter bullshit; 99.9% of the time it is just used to add some colour and flavour to the language used and not to disparage any group
Sounds like a train of biases to me. Sure certain words currently have certain connotations, and certain words used to have some too. But isn't language allowed to evolve? If a word was used derogatorilly 100 years ago must we ensure that the word is never allowed to change. Rather than removing the connotation, these changes cement them by removing anyone's ability to change them.
To determine the meaning of every word as they've ever been and attempt to remove any that have ever been used in a way that could've upset anyone ever, just makes sure those words will continue to upset people and be painful. There are words with stronger denotations that would take generations to heal but these are words and concepts that the children of today might not even recognize. Should we attempt to solidify pain by hiding truth? Or would it be better to let the youngins change things the way they always do.
If you take their words, they'll just make more. And those new words will not have the ambiguity of our current language.
It ends up being used to dismiss women levying legitimate criticism. It basically gets used to enforce patriarchy. In practice the opposite is not really true of “bellowing” to the same extent. But even then, gendered insults are falling out of favor in general.
It's nonsense and presumably was made up on the spot. Unfortunately it's impossible to tell anymore if the people that write these things actually believe them or are just trolling.
Screeching (loud piercing sounds) is what eagles some other large birds do. It's also applied to tires which lose their grip on the road during a burnout or the like.
Looks like the character “Screech” will have to adopt a new (nick)-name.
No, the person you replied to was correct (for my region and presumably his). My knowledge of the term mirrors his and I'm kind of disappointed to see so many people asserting there is no common, derogatory, gendered use of the term just because they are unfamiliar with it.
I see a lot of people with no knowledge or experience with this common usage. That's fine, but it's arrogant to assume things you don't know are nonsense.
> I'm kind of disappointed to see so many people asserting there is no common, derogatory, gendered use of the term just because they are unfamiliar with it.
Maybe worth reconsidering if your understanding of the term is truly "common."
> That's fine, but it's arrogant to assume things you don't know are nonsense.
It also seems pretty arrogant to assert you know better than everyone else.
> It also seems pretty arrogant to assert you know better than everyone else.
I did not assert that. I made a correction, which was in fact correct.
The meaning does exist, and commonly, even if in regions you are unfamiliar with. I did not misuse the word common. I think you just emotionally reacted to being called arrogant, when in fact it was a merited criticism.
It may have a gendered connotation some places, I definitely don’t think it does in my English-speaking country (Australia). Screeching primarily used for inanimate objects (wheels, alarms, etc.) and animals and then secondarily mostly in a non-gendered way for children.
Interestingly the examples in both the entry from Oxford that Google brought up when I searched the term, and the second example in the Cambridge dictionaries are both boys doing the screeching. The other examples are inanimate and screeching describing the experience of tinnitus. So it seems the UK is similar.
So potentially for much of the English-speaking world this term wouldn’t bring up thought of any kind of gendered slur. So it goes both ways - just because something is the case in your region doesn’t mean it’s true across the board.
> So it goes both ways - just because something is the case in your region doesn’t mean it’s true across the board.
I never said nor suggested that it did. I was criticizing the people saying it is not a common usage because they hadn't heard it. You and the other user trying to correct me by repeating how you are from a place where the meaning is different both completely missed the point.
The meaning exists, and is used derogatorily, and definitely commonly in some places. None of what you wrote has any bearing on that.
It's not "nonsense" -- it's "woke praxis." By asserting this new understanding of language, woke activists are able to shape social reality. That's the point of the movement. So comments like this are a form of enacting that world. (And I suppose comments like mine are ways of pushing back against it.) Anyway, the wokies are correct about this very applied or pragmatic aspect of language.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. I know this topic is fraught but your comment here is a noticeable step in that direction ad we want to go exactly the opposite direction: curious conversation is not about smiting enemies or intensifying brawls.
I'm talking about stereotypes here. The _stereotype_ is that gay men are effeminate. I'm sure we both understand that gay men are all unique and have an infinite range of behaviour and action, but think about how many sitcoms have a "guy's guy" doing something traditionally coded feminine, and his buddies all start to get creeped out about him, to audience laughter. Go back far enough, and they'll probably outright even say, "Dude. Gay." (Early South Park, for an example, was rife with this.)
Haha, this is the classic example of answering a question which was merely a rhetorical whip. I love watching this stuff in action. I agree wholesale with you.
Screeching is most definitely more commonly used for women. That doesn't make it a bad word to use.
I mean, you won't catch me dead with these bowdlerized versions. The prose is atrocious and the motives for the changes are dubious.
But screeching is high pitched and when it's used for people is used mostly for women. I'm not going to pretend it's not. That's a comical rewriting of what is true just because you don't like some other rewriting.
Since it ultimately comes down to policing straight men and telling them they're not allowed to be effeminate, I'd say it's more misandrist than homophobic.
>"Screeching" in english (at least North American english) is typically a gendered derogative.
When HN can't tolerate such an obviously true statement such as this, yet plenty of dog-whistles supporting homophobia and racism and transphobia in this thread stay upvoted, it tells me I probably shouldn't be spending time here anymore. I don't know if I've changed or the community has changed. Probably a bit of both. Maybe it's time to grow up and move on.
Until I saw your comment, I interpreted the downvoting as people taking issue with the astonishing lack of self awareness and bizarrely neurotic hypothetical purity spiral at the end.
IE: Describing a straight male as shrill might make passersby assume he’s abnormal and abnormal men are viewed as homosexual and it would be really awful if you accidentally did a homophobia so stop using the word shrill.
I’d grant that benefit of the doubt if the rest of the thread wasn’t so illuminating on how HN feels about “woke” and how apparently a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.
I heard a new banger quote from John Stuart Mill the other day:
> He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
There's an easy test to see if you understand someone's position in a disagreement. Just summarize their position back to them. They'll tell you if you got it right.
> a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.
This absolutely isn't my position. I don't think you understand why people disagree with you here.
I wasn't talking to you, so it's awfully uncharitable of you to assume everyone else disagrees for such "noble" reasons such as yours. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
I do believe people when they tell me who they are. That’s why I find this claim quite uncharitable, and quite unbelievable:
> [HN believes] a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.
Do you have any evidence? Can you show me the comments where people “tell you who they are”, and say that having “a modicum of sensitivity toward minorities” will be the end of civilisation?
Your comment just reads as a bitter, low effort ad homenim attack.
I'm curious, have you never actually seen this happening? Like, for one, it's not "abnormal = gay", it's "feminine-gendered terms = gay".
For example, sitcoms used to do this all the time. You'd have two big buff contractors or whatever talking about some work they did, and one of them would say something along the lines of "Hey Frank, that's real cute." Then they'd both realize what was said, get real uncomfortable, the canned laughter would hit, and they'd both stand up, brush themselves off and change the topic hastily.
I understand it's pretty subtle, but jokes and insinuations like this have been a regular part of (at least North American english) culture for a long, long time now.
Interestingly, while I get what you're saying - and can agree that "screeching" probably is at least slightly gendered when applied to humans - in my experience I've more often encountered "screeching" applied to non-human entities, like birds. Enough so that I would not automatically make any connection to the use of the word "screeching" as specifically being a gendered derogative aimed at women (although context would dictate a lot about the interpretation of any specific case of course).
Probably a similar thing as with the word "shrill" — it's a word that's mostly applied only to women, so some people interpret the word itself as being sexist (apparently notwithstanding the fact that females have biologically higher voices).
Nothing except if people are predisposed to think it’s associated with women then that’s how they’ll read it. This tells you more about the censors’ minds being in the gutter than anything else.
In addition to what others said, it’s just not a common saying in modern English. If you described someone annoying as screeching, older people likely would understand but most would find it strange language for today.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 447 ms ] threadBurning books was at least honest.
> She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling
> She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck
Possibly because both Kipling and Conrad wrote books with colonial themes
At the same time, if that tone gets erased (e.g. the way Conrad writes about the Congo), they're erasing the premise of their erasing
Edit: the only way I can somewhat make sense out of their decision is because I've read the authors they omitted
- A person who grew up in a former colony
Keeping Hemingway in the list is the best joke
Yep, the wife cheater, womanizer, tabern fighter, alcoholic, animal cruelty lover that toke his own life, can stay. Good model for children. The other are subversive and must go (and our moral compass is not random at all)
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 magnitude ?
This is a huge problem, when every year we graduate more and more people wanting to be writers, artists, etc. This will only get worse with books now being written by ChatGPT and art by Dall-E/Midjourney/Stable Diffusion.
Have we reached "peak multimedia" content ?
But this sort of thing has been happening everywhere since forever whether we are talking about Wikipedia, “history” books, or religious texts.
See https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-202...
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 old stuff is regurgitated endlessly with less and less of it's original soul.
Probably crowded out of the market by the existing Dahl and Beatrix Potter books, which are plentiful and constantly in print.
..."oh but the market"
A highly creative culture would have very limited if any desire for it.
Do you have a child? There are all kinds of amazing children’s authors, loved by parents and kids, that have been creating books over the last 20 years.
I have a child which likes Dahl's books, tell me names of these amazing authors on par with him.
And the stories... "I loved my cat/mom/dad then they died" I get it sad stuff happens and kids need to process it but these aren't books that are going to delight. "Your cat died so I got you a book about someone's cat dying"
You're right there are some gems but nothing serially good in the same way.
I visit the bookstore with my kid regularly. She's 5. My older kids 11 and 14 do find plenty to read, but I disagree that there are plenty of magical modern children's authors capturing the 3 to 10 year old space. There are a lot of books, mostly dross.
And the stories... "I loved my cat/mom/dad then they died" I get it sad stuff happens and kids need to process it but these aren't books that are going to delight. "Your cat died so I got you a book about someone's cat dying"
Dahl's best-known book is about a family of 7 that can barely afford to eat. One of his other famous books is about how giants stalk through the night to kidnap sleeping children and eat them. A third one is about a child prodigy who is treated to the point of mental abuse at home, finally gets to go to school, only to encounter physical abuse - by the folks that are supposed to keep her safe!
If you think those stories can do more than terrify and scar children for life, I see no reason why you'd be dismissive of other works in which far, far less horrible stuff happens.
I don't think HP will become irrelevant any time soon.
And we all know what the deal is with her now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/opinion/jk-rowling-transp...
Working 3 jobs just to pay rent, they don't have the time or resources to write.
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. Klassen in the edition we picked up) is a lovely piece of writing, vaguely like a cross between My Side Of The Mountain and Old Yeller, but less tragic than Old Yeller, with a deftly-handled thread about emotional awareness and responsibility for one's own choices woven throughout.
Oh, and the How To Train Your Dragon books, by Cressida Cowell, are wonderful, hilarious pieces of work about self-discovery, loyalty, friendship, and the hard, slow struggle to achieve mastery and skill in a world where people expect you to be something rather different than you are. Vastly, vastly better than the popular movies loosely inspired by them, and quite different - closer to a child-friendly Hitchhiker's Guide than the Hero's Journey of the films.
Great new classics are still being written - it's just that the winnowing function of passing decades hasn't yet run its course, so they're harder to find.
This is true, but I also think there are 'golden ages' for various genres of literature and I suspect we are not in a golden age for children's literature right now.
But the strangest part is, they will watch youtube videos of people reading books or playing videogames. I'm still not sure what to think about this.
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 imagine how mid-20th-century conceptions might be seen as a bit much for the target audience. No one's trying to prevent kids from reading the existing books[1], they're just trying to make a buck selling them to modern parents.
Does that make this a good idea? No, it's dumb. But it's hardly "yikes" territory either.
[1] Which would be the "censorship" you're talking about.
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 reddit and twitter.
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.
Your mention of translation is apt - it often is used as a fig leaf for exactly this kind of deception. They call it "localization", and defend it by offering a false dichotomy between it, and literal word-for-word translation.
But in this case they don't even have that thin excuse to hide behind.
It's just dumb. It doesn't have to be the end of the world, and we'd all be happier if people would stop with all the one-sided hyperbole. It's exhausting.
I only described their actions. You're talking about motivation. Though the publisher's motivation matters little when it's the "sensitivity readers" doing all the changes.
Do you actually understand your own emotional reaction or are you trying to use a gross rhetorical trick here ?
Difference is the Soviet had the honesty to censor while the author was alive.
Puffin/Netflix are censoring the works they have acquired the rights to. They are not allowing republication of the author's original works (they hold the rights and are the only party allowed to republish). They are cutting and rewriting the original author's book for new editions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security”. This is censorship.
You can see it with successive movie adaptations: the decorations are the same, but all the messages get reversed, they focus on action, and they add hopeful endings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451_(2018_film)
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)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Censorship sucks generally. Stop flame baiting.
But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
So, Roald Dahl's family and the company they still control are perfectly happy with this. Why aren't we?
If you look at the actual changes, the careful consideration resulted in aesthetic atrocities, reverting the punchy use of language that makes Dahl's work so wonderful and entertaining.
People are outraged because the actions are outrageous. I reject the notion that I shouldn't be upset.
Or the plot of Esio Trot which is a guy tricking his downstairs neighbor into falling in love with him by swapping out her pet every few weeks with a larger one?
Or the whole plot of George’s Marvelous Medicine which is a boy who mixes up a potion with everything he can find in his house, and feeds it to his nasty grandmother?
He’s got a whole lot of crazy stuff, and I can only speak of things I’ve read to my kids recently.
> Unsurprisingly given The Witches’ subject matter, many of the edits are to do with depictions of women. “Chambermaid” becomes “cleaner”. “Great flock of ladies” becomes “great group of ladies”. “You must be mad, woman!” becomes “You must be out of your mind!” “The old hag” becomes “the old crow”
There is some removing of fat as insult. There is that too. But pretty much all changes in above paragraph sound better then old ones.
I'm guessing you've never met an English person then. Your grammar suggests this to be the case.
This is the first time I heard of this kind of language 'update'. That's not normal.
Shakespeare is genuinely hard to read and understand but we don't just change random phrases and words to match modern sensibilities. Even modern English translation will keep the original for reference.
>As presented it is just designed to generate outrage,
Because it is outrageous.
If I'm reading a book by Dahl I want to read it as he intended. If you read the article you'll see how idiotic the changes are and how they literally change the meaning of the passages when considered "problematic".
They can write their own books if they want.
(Attacking the person): This fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone's argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument. The fallacious attack can also be direct to membership in a group or institution.
https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definition...
The current article, I would say, easily clears the bar for interestingness on HN, despite its culture war aspect. Interestingness is the thing we care about here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
(Also, the submitter did a fine job of rewriting the title to be less baity, as the site guidelines request: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Thanks GavCo!)
It's true that https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=telegraph.co.uk contains a lot of ideological battle articles that probably fall below the 'interesting' line. For that reason, that domain has a penalty on it—a medium-weight penalty that we put on every site in this category, regardless of which ideology they support.
However, it does look like there have been other good articles from this domain. For example:
Elephants born without tusks in ‘evolutionary response’ to poachers (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33862385 - Dec 2022 (128 comments)
So I'd say this domain is a good example of the kind that we'd penalize but not ban, and try to turn off the penalty when the occasionally genuinely interesting article does show up.
What about flagging? When does a comment flagged by a user get unflagged, if that happens?
There is tons of information about basically everything we do embedded in my moderation comments but one has to use HN Search to find it (that's why I link to HN search so often). One of these years I might try to wrangle a bunch of those into a bunch of essay-style commentaries, if only because they would be easier to link to and would lighten the load of always having to explain the same things.
We're transparent in the sense of always trying to answer questions, though.
Comments by users can get manually unflagged by mods but I don't think there's a software way to do that. Flagkilled posts, though, can get unkilled by user vouches (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
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 comments they don't agree with. After all, they're not required to justify their flag.
Some simple statistics would answer this question. For instance, in "sometimes turn flags off" what percentage of the time does that happen?
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.
That led me to https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=HuShifang and posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074363. I mean wow.
You're right about raging and soapboxes of course. Unfortunately, angry repetition is in far greater supply than excellent comments sharing rare information. But this is an internet problem and indeed a human problem in general. We try to moderate in favor of the good posts as best we can. It's not clear how to do it much better.
What is this supposed to mean?
Someone put a list of changes on Reddit.
* Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* Esio Trot - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* The Enormous Crocodile - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* The BFG - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* James and the Giant Peach - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* The Witches - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* Matilda - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* Fantastic Mr Fox - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* George's Marvellous Medicine - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* The Twits - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
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 there's any political motive for these stories getting buried (independent of what might motivate an individual flagger)
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 HNs purpose - there's pretty clear guidelines around reposting the same article in the guidelines, so why would multiple takes on the same event not be worthy of discussion, to the point of flagging?
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.
Now it is the realm of HN
That's not to say I have a better way forward, but I don't think it is good to shutdown difficult conversations to appease the most offended -- that is arguably the group that should have least sway over discussion
But by empowering 'flaggers' and 'downvoters' we give them the most control...
https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1626860237104857089
Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people.
It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, once you take a position of empathy.
References to brothers or sisters, or mothers or fathers, is offensive to nonbinary people? In all seriousness, not trying to start a flame war, why is that? Is a reference to hair offensive to a bald person?
I think the reason here is pretty simple: Turning someone into patient for life is profitable.
The reason to replace an aggregate ‘brothers and sisters’ with ‘siblings’, ‘mothers and fathers’ with ‘parents’, or ‘boys and girls’ with ‘children’ is because for all of these the replacement suffices without calling attention to gender when it’s not necessary to do so.
There’s also an argument that the ‘X and Y’ phrasing makes the ‘X’ seem more important than the ‘Y’, or makes it seem like the ‘default’ - just a little, but with repetition the impression is reinforced. If there’s an alternative collective word to use, it avoids this ‘ordering’ issue with no real downside.
Note that all these arguments make sense in even if you consider gender to be a binary thing.
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 the edits to Dahl’s work: I would argue that for these ‘Xs and Ys’ examples he was probably just using the popular idioms of the time rather than choosing them to convey a specific meaning as you say. That would certainly be what I would’ve done, without much consideration, 20 years ago!
But that’s obviously not the case for all the edits that are reportedly being made.
The edits in aggregate do make me uneasy. I’m not sure how I’d feel if they were more limited.
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?”
Regarding the first occurrence being conceived as more important, it’s the reason usually females appear named first, a sign of courtesy to them. That was sorted out neatly long ago.
Yes, of course you’d need to be specific if it was important. I’d use ‘10 parents’ only if it wasn’t important.
Your example isn’t great though. Even if you assume binary gender for all parents in the group, you couldn’t replace ‘10 parents’ with ‘10 mothers and fathers’ because it’s unclear whether there are 20 people or 10. You’d need to be specific (‘6 mothers and 4 fathers’ or the like).
I don’t think your second paragraph refutes mine at all. I obviously don’t agree that it was ‘sorted out neatly long ago’. You could assume that from the fact that I’ve rethought my own behavior. This world would be a much worse place than it is if people never reconsidered whether the status quo from long ago was optimal.
[Edit: I see now that this comment was not on the same branch as the one where I said I’d rethought my own behavior from a default of e.g. ‘boys and girls’ to ‘children’, so I take back the sentence about you not seeing that. The rest stands though.]
Using the perspective from the OP, it's a kids' book, using a couple of different synonyms might help them better understand what they're reading and not walk away believing that there's something wrong with their family or themselves.
But … retired stories don’t sell and don’t get turned into remakes, ticket sales, etc…
Rewritten stories are fine, I like lots of them (the new ghostbusters, I adored..) but this, to me, seems like prep work for a lazy hollywood..
Write new books. Make them as inclusive or exclusive as you want. I just think it's very telling that you hear so much about "erasure" and yet changing an author's words and intent like this is celebrated.
Ask for empathy in a preface, or an introduction, if you have to. Stay the fuck out of Dahl's work. You don't have to like it, but changing it is obscene - Dahl is not alive to permit these changes, and would probably be horrified. They're his fucking words.
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. Maybe the previous commenter believes that; I don't know. But I can't read that out of anything they actually wrote.
I understand the urge to find someone, anyone, to take the other side of your argument. It's no fun to yell at the clouds! But you have to wait for someone to actually make the other argument. You can't just attribute it to people and then hammer away at them.
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, such as Joseph Conrad. I mean, wow dude. Talk about the worst possible takes.
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.
I didn't once get personal with any of these people, as they call for the devolution of cultural touchstones into Newspeak.
> "we just asked you to stop" - Where? I'm not seeing that.
> tptacek's comments to you were probably slightly edgier than usual
It wouldn't be the first time that account has jumped down my throat and twisted my words.
That's not what they mean when they say empathy. They misuse empathy when they mean compassion.
I think they do it because even they understand it's indecent to say they pity all of these people.
empathy: The ability to identify with or understand another's situation or feelings
compassion: Deep awareness of the suffering of another accompanied by the wish to relieve it.
Moreover, when I feel empathy with someone who feels different and unrecognized by society, something still keeps me from advocating for the censorship and misrepresentation of a writer's ideas and internal logic.
I think what's stopping me is the knowledge that if I'm fortunate enough to write something that lasts beyond me, I sure as heck don't want anyone updating it for the sensibilities of 2053. Putting myself in someone's shoes, I think there's a word for that
Come on guy, it's not that hard to see. People have been pointing it out to you for hours now.
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.
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.
And people were pointing out tptacek's errors in understanding. How is that rude or personal to state?
Tptacek wouldn't take any of it in, or respond to any of the points made. Instead he threw around actually rude and personal attacks.
> The active ingredient there is "I see".
I'm not "passionate" about tptacek, or HN, or yourself.
However, in your "years of moderation", you've seen plenty of people take issue with tptacek's habit of twisting of people's comments. I know you have. It's a regular sight.
The complaints are generally about issues quite a few steps above "Come on guy." Twisting people's words, personal attacks, wilful ignorance, etc.
So I'm left with the same question as before - what's your relationship exactly? Because it's pretty off-putting to see such bias. It makes me wonder.
Re "twisting of people's comments" - that's your interpretation based on your priors. People make these judgments all the time—in fact they come up in nearly every argument as soon as emotions get activated. You're overestimating what moderation can do if you think we should impose our own such interpretations. And they wouldn't agree with your interpretations in any case (how could they?) so you wouldn't get what you wanted even if we did. No one would! In fact it would amplify the complaints about moderation by many orders of magnitude.
If someone is wrong or you think they are, the helpful thing to do is respectfully provide correct information. If you can't or don't want to do that, please just chalk it up to someone being wrong on the internet and walk away. The one who stops posting first in tit-for-tat exchanges is the one who wins anyway.
Also, HN conversations are basically never good once people start arguing about what each other is really saying, so when things take that turn, it's a sign that it's time to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> once you take a position of empathy.
...and the usual thinly veiled "if you don't agree with my opinion you're a Bad Person". How about taking position of sensibility for once ?
The same argument can be made about people who are triggered by this edition of the book. You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners.
But it won't happen because that would be honesty and we can't have that from people that push for the changes
Nobody would be upset if they were just making a new version of the book. The issue is they're trying to sweep the original under the rug and eventually memoryhole it.
The "owners" (who likely don't have a imaginative bone in their entire skeleton), if you'll pardon my vernacular, should stay the fuck out of the authors original work instead of mucking around with it, particularly inane changes like the removal of the word fat.
And by pushing a new addition of the book while discontinuing the originals they seek to erase the authors original work. If anything this particular addition should have a large CliffsNotes banner on the cover.
Have you read Heart of Darkness?
If it turns out these beloved stories become out of fashion because of stuff like this, so be it.
Twisting it into something it isn't, to fit current tastes doesn't seem right.
It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, and it has nothing to do with empathy.
"Everyone" or "people" would make more sense
(I'll see myself out.)
You're kidding me, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden
And removing any reference to color … for tractors.
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 was insulting someone, they should still be insulting someone. Want the story to be different? Write a different fucking book.
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 term is now considered offensive.
3. Because connotation emerges from denotation, the new term develops precisely the same colloquial negative connotations.
4. Rinse and repeat.
You'll need to adjust your language as the language has changed.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-can-count-to-potato
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/acprjo/how_did_p...
Frankly any insult that attacks intelligence in any way is going to be ableist. Attack the merits or lack thereof of the argument.
Also a typo made me realize that “tool” is perhaps a good non ableist insult.
Useless seems the epitome of ableism, but what do I know - here it’s presented as a good alternative to ableist words:
https://web.augsburg.edu/english/writinglab/Avoiding_Ableist...
> forced to speak a different language
It’s very weird to me that you view my choice to use different words as somehow forcing something on others. Culture shifts and changes and there are always people responsible for participating in those changes. Yes sometimes people have used violence to change the language and of course that has generally been horrific. But my choice to simply tweet differently is well within the bounds of the type of normal human change that happens in a healthy society. I’m not forcing anyone to do anything.
Lots of older people have this experience as the world changes out from under them.
This never happened
Its actually hilarious to me that the words you list out could all mostly be incredibly offensive to certain types of people, but you think its ok since its not "ableist".
Really points out how stupid policing literal insults is
But that's who that guy was. That's what came out when he set out to be edgy. Removing it, you might as well write a different book. Misrepresenting who the guy is in order to sugar-coat him seems not the right approach, to me.
So if you do that, you should DEFINITELY edit Harry Potter to get the terfliness out of it, simply because I'd like to see Rowling's reaction to that :)
I don't think the oppressed need their enemies painted over and hidden. I think they need allies. A little more 'You have my bow." "And my axe!"
"Let's just not mention Sauron k?", not really the same effectiveness.
Have you actually read Harry Potter? What are you referring to within the books?
Rowling was a progressive darling for years until she expressed disallowed sentiments outside of her fiction writing.
Really? Talents based on heredity, the portrayals of the Dursleys as fat, the renditions of other cultures, the questions of whether the goblin bankers echoed anti-Semitic stereotypes, the domestic slavery, etc. got criticism for years. She got some kudos eventually for saying Dumbledore was gay but that was late and never in the books, so it seems pretty minor to hang that theory on.
If I were you I would revise this to "having read some recent shallow hit pieces about the author".
No one will read this, but I believe the authors Matilda "liked" to read have been judged to be politically incorrect. And we wouldn't want to give sensitive young mind a reason to look them up. /s
For anyone curious to why the word "folks" is chosen, here's great explanation:
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-folks/
What is the reasoning for this? Not following what is "wrong" in the original.
Which is okay, to me it is OK if these books are not read. There are enough other books. But, people selling them will want then to sound like people talk today.
Worth noting is that there is no equivalent term to "female" when referring to men, who are almost always referred to as "men." This is because there is an underlying cultural assumption that men are the default and women are the exception. While the use of the word "female" to describe a woman is not inherently wrong, using the term "woman" is more accurate and respectful, and nobody would use the term "male" to describe a man in the same way.
“Male” is the word, and it is used in lots of books in exactly the same way as it’s being used here.
I have read tons of books that said something along the lines of “he was an excellent male specimen” or “a member of the male species”
Using the word female/male has a specific effect on the way the sentence reads, it gives it a clinical feel and is very useful. Rewriting usages to the approved, politically correct, version just smacks of 1984 style newspeak.
The right example would be "He was a boisterous male."
I also would not change the words of a dead author to reflect modern usage because I enjoy stepping into a the past and seeing how people used to write. Plus there is the alliteration, which is really the clincher here: those who edited this are philistines.
(Not throwing anything at you, webjunkie. You merely explained the change without opining on it. Just commenting in general.)
If someone is a fan of “female” as a noun: I’m not going to change your mind. I get that changing language is annoying sometimes. I’m pointing out that “female” as a noun does bother some people, “woman” only bothers people if they know it’s been changed and see it as bowing to PC pressure. Since most people don’t check the diffs from one edition to another when buying books, this is a really easy decision on the part of the publisher, who just wants to quietly make money for the most part.
Seems like there is an effort to intentionally keep making it more complex to show who really keeps up with twitter the most.
I’d hope that most people would give the benefit of the doubt people who aren’t native English speakers, though.
I don't understand it. Respectfully, I also find it mildly amusing.
That phrasing (in particular "does" vs. "only") makes it sound like being bothered by the first thing is inherently justified but being bothered by the second thing isn't. And why do you specify the condition that will cause the second thing to bother the people but leave it ambiguous for the first thing?
I don’t think describing the conditional thing as conditional implies any judgement.
Fixed it for you.
The noun sense of female well precedes (going back to its Latin roots) the adjectival sense of the word. [1] The adjectival sense came from the noun, the exact reverse of what you are saying.
And this pattern of adjectives coming from nouns (e.g. leafy, greasy, beautiful, harmful, dangerous, adventurous) is common, while the reverse is not (I'm hard put to think of even one example). So what you are saying here is a nonsense, with no scholarly basis to it.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/female#etymonline_v_5841
Dahl was a transgressive writer also for his day - at least I've always had that impression. His macabre deliciousness and sharp wit are what makes his books so good—like an Edward Gorey for kids, but not too much for kids. So some of these edits are artistically consequential, the same way that the Bowdlers' "Family Shakespeare" was (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare).
These things probably go in cycles and it makes me wonder if the Bowdlers will soon be rehabilitated. Probably not, because their specific motives are so anachronistic now that no one would want to be associated with them. Also, their name has been a term of derision for 200 years and that's too much of a black hole to get out of. But if you abstract away from the ideological specifics, the phenomena seem remarkably similar.
The best stories are timeless. If you think a story is no longer relevant, it probably wasn't very good in the first place.
It's not just a knee-jerk reaction to 'wokeness' to be upset by this kind of thing. My opinion is that people _should_ be upset by the presumption of some faceless editor that they're too stupid and base to apply their own judgment to the original text.
Because we are being lied to about what Dahl wrote, and implicitly, the zeitgeist and sensibilities of his time. This is faking the past to serve Year Zero.
And no, noting that there were some changes in small print, then listing them in some remote document no child will read, does not make it alright.
It's a clear example of financially motivated self-censorship.
The problem I have isn't with somebody being able to edit or remix an old work, I think it's fantastic to do such a thing. It's that after this comes out it's going to be virtually impossible to find the old edition available for purchase, and only the re-write will be available. It's that the new intellectual property owners are replacing a classic book with their own in effect and what gives them the right to do this? Apparently just being rich.
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 as a general rule his books have good morals and values exhibited in them. They are perfect children's books, not afraid to dip into a little darkness or to poke fun at the adults who run the world, and that's a huge part of why they've been so successful and universally loved.
The mental attitude and sense of self-superiority it must take to feel comfortable taking the knife to something so well loved is really mind-boggling to me. I am very happy that I bought our collection of Dahl's books before this happened.
Everyone is a product of their time. People apparently need to be told this now.
There have been thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children's books written in the last sixty years. Leave the classics the fuck alone, especially when the authors are unable to defend their work.
People act like this is the end of Dahls legacy, yet his stories have probably been discussed more in the past 24 hours than the past few years combined.
I recommend the book Graveyard clay on the death on languages, and how the dead are still as chatty as the living- in many ways the dead are harder to silence.
Funny examples you list there, where reinterpretations still happen after 2000+ years.
The approach in your comment is very pop culture or mainstream religion view of this, not an actual, historical one.
It is worthwhile to meditate on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea that the most intolerant minority tends to win.
Part of reading these books as a child or adolescent is being introduced to the cultural contexts of other times (and perhaps places). When a modern child reads a Victorian children's book, for example, they pick up pretty quickly that it's coming from a different cultural context. And this is a great way to learn about some of the more 'confronting' aspects of other cultural contexts in a pretty non-threatening way (they're just words on a page).
Of course, once he reaches an age where he's old enough to better understand explanations of racism in media, etc, that's a different story. All cultural history has attitudes that may have changed or that we may even view as repugnant. It's important that people learn about the past and what people were like in the past (or still today).
Maybe this type of thing would go off much better if parents were given a choice, and have the opportunity to confront these things with their children when they think they are ready.
Is it though? A modified version of the scene seems like a dishonest solution to a problem that has good, straightforward solutions:
- Don't show them (if its a conversation you don't want to have yet)
- Show them and then discuss the scene
Norms change time... different people think different things are ok... these are lessons children need to learn just like any other.
I can understand what you are saying however I STRONGLY disagree on your conclusion. If those things bother you and don't express the values you want your options should be either to A) watch them and then have a discussion with your children to explain what wasn't acceptable or B) find new movies that display the values you want to pass on.
Changing the past to reflect the present or ideal future is a TERRIBLE idea. I don't know exactly when it was that we all decided that we can't ever tell new stories or create new things instead of rehashing creative works of the past but I'll be glad when that trend ends.
These situations are perfect for having actual, meaningful conversations with your kids. Not only will you clearly articulate expectations to your kids, but you'll grow closer.
How horrifying. This is where you as a parent are supposed to find opportunity for a lesson on evaluating media. "This is an inappropriate joke but the rest of this movie is so good that I'm letting you watch. Don't make fun of peoples' accents." If he's too young for that lesson, he's too young for the movie.
Still, as a kid who read his books repeatedly, and as someone who has read most of them to my kids in the last few years, I feel comfortable stating that this anti-Semitic tendency doesn't come through on his work.
There might be room for arguments that other prejudices do come through. The Oompa-Loompas are definitely a little... problematic. And some of the language around women in The Witches hits the ear a bit oddly today.
When I say "he was a man of his time" I don't mean to excuse everything he said or wrote. I suppose maybe that's a junky phrase that kind of dodges what I actually mean, which is something like "he was who he was, and we should talk about what we find objectionable about him instead of papering it over."
There's also something funny about changing his writing in light of some of the worst things he had to say... By the same logic of the edits, maybe we should change the quotes where he expressed antisemitism to make them more palatable. (I'm being facetious obviously, but there is something worth thinking about in why one feels more reasonable than the other).
Right, that's precisely the problem. The publisher is changing history!
I'm okay with new books being published that clean up the old stories, but they can't rightly list Roald Dahl as the author. The author on the cover needs to be "Roald Dahl & Whoever".
That will probably happen — multiple times — as soon as the (original) books are in the public domain, but right now there is no way the publisher is going to give a cut of the sales to a 2nd named author (especially since anyone good would also push back on some of the ill-considered changes).
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
And I think more highly of you for it
Yet the original versions are still around for those who prefer them.
Is it not okay to be able to pick a 2023 version, or a 1960s version depending on your own preferences?
How is that nearly as bad as banning a book?
The only problem I have with changes like this is if there's a lack of transparency, which I would to some degree agree is the case here.
This reads like a side-note tacked onto the end of your thoughts.
To people that have a problem with it, it's the entire goddamn point. I'm fully aware when I'm picking up a greek tradegy I'm reading a translated interpretation. Now the reader is being denied the chance to see how the author wrote and talked straight from their writings. If the author's use of language isn't pleasant or moral by my standards today, I don't want to be misled to think that the new way is how they've always written.
It's immoral to sanitise the past for children and lead them to believe that we've always had today's moralities figured out, to children unaware of the edits, they're being deprived of the fact that society evolves and fights and works these things out.
If they're unaware that society can update it's morals (because some nitwit decided to slyly change language in a book in a way that's not transparent), maybe they'll think they don't have the power to change anything themselves.
I don't agree. These version are obviously new and not the original. Changes are often made to books in newer versions. Most people who are used to reading books will know that.
> It's immoral to sanitise the past for children and lead them to believe that we've always had today's moralities figured out, to children unaware of the edits, they're being deprived of the fact that society evolves and fights and works these things out.
Or the children will like the new versions better because they are not being mocked by them. No one is taking from them the option to go back and read the original books if they, or their parents, are curious.
> If they're unaware that society can update it's morals (because some nitwit decided to slyly change language in a book in a way that's not transparent), maybe they'll think they don't have the power to change anything themselves.
This seems very contrived to me. You are expecting children to read these books, ask why the moral is different, then have their parents tell them that the world changes, or derive that themselves? I think there are so many other, and more obvious, ways that children will naturally learn that lesson.
Sure, even Roald Dahl rewrote his stories to remove insensitive language. The key is he was the one that did it. It matters. Massively. And what makes these versions “obviously” new to a reader? How will they know it’s missing entire sentences?
> This seems very contrived to me. You are expecting children to read these books, ask why the moral is different, then have their parents tell them that the world changes, or derive that themselves?
Yes. Many books I read as a child in school had the language “of the day” in it and the teachers were clear to point out and discuss why we don’t see that language anymore. I came away more educated as to the injustices of the time the book was authored. If I had got an edited version without any indication that it was an edit, then I’m being deprived of that knowledge.
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 gone?
Erasing Rudyard Kipling? WTF did he do wrong? His poetry was inspirational to me, as a child.
Good people cannot allow this to go unchallenged.
Edit: forgive me for expressing emotion.
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.
What a generous description.
Instead of banning the books we don’t like, why not just rewrite them?
Changing with the times for the sake of relevance and sales is the the right of the copyright owners. Preventing them from modifying the text would be akin to preventing renovation of old apartment buildings by new owners.
That said, I do think it is important to be reminded of how authors viewed the world in the past. We should be reminded, at least tangientially, that governments of the past colonized and recall the lessons learned from that practice. I.e., let's not forget and be destined to repeat what came to be loathed.
'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", it serves and higher purpose.
Food fats aren't bad. So call them chubby or overweight or whatever you want. Using the word fat, when fat refers to a food product, gives dumb people the impression that fat is a bad thing.
Do you get this concept?
"Thin" isnt a food group. Short and tall, also not food groups.
That a good diet includes some fat is orthogonal.
"Fat" is an insult. It isnt hard to understand. Is it factually true that an obese person is 'fat', sure. It is still generally regarded as an insult.
Most of these replies are coming from idiots. This is both factual and an insult.
I havent made any remarks defending obesity or suggesting we need to curtail efforts of obese people to control their weight
Calling a character in a kids book "fat" doesnt help kids stay healthy and fit. Insulting and shaming kids doesnt help them stay healthy and fit. Their parents probably feed them garbage and have made poor lifestyle decisions.
It is really simple.
These are two completely different meanings of the word though? Are you arguing that they need to carry the same semantics?
Should we not call smart people "bright", because people might think light bulbs are intelligent too?
Also, if I call someone fat, that might be demeaning. But it also might just be a description.
Of course nobody wants a negative description applied to them, and it might make them sad, but it's not because of the word we're using: it's because we're ascribing that description to them.
Thin, short and tall are all just straight adjectives. Them being that doesn't invalidate the double meaning of fat and somehow (by your logic) the word itself.
*Formerly extremely obese person.
You will not locate a doctor on this entire planet who would agree that obesity is healthy, it places far more load on the joints, and puts additional stress on your organs.
Either you have a deeply profound misunderstanding of the adjective fat versus the noun fat, or you're deliberately misconstruing the authors intent to fabricate an argument for why censorship is OK.
It's a book for children. That is quite obvious.
You are smart enough to know what's obvious to you, can you infer then what is so obvious to a child?
You have missed the point. I'm not protecting the obese or advocating for censorship.
It is unwise to introduce some word associations to children, such as a negative conotation to a word, because they are limited in their understanding. This also seems obvious
Being fat is not incredibly healthy, on the other hand - and there is absolutely no chance that there is any confusion between the two. This isn't to prevent Timmy from thinking certain people are called lipids.
Some of the changes to Dahl's books look like the dumb down the language. Is that an effort to sell into a market with smaller vocabulary?
more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34854743
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.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-transgender-industrial-...
I'd say "wonder why that is?", but everyone here knows exactly why that is. He's not fooling anybody, and neither are you.
Of course, it is true that his books are unavailable on Amazon and Amazon-owned sites. I wish I knew what caused this, or how to find out.
https://arktos.com/people/alexander-dugin/
They look like complete nonsense, so I'm not surprised if no American publisher wants to buy the distribution rights.
To what end?
The book is available for free 3-day shipping at Barnes and Noble and it’s one of the “most censored books of the last 30 years?” Sorry that your favorite online retailer decided not to carry the latest ethnonationalist anti-semitic screed.
What's interesting is this is a great chance to understand how huge social changes take place and what all the moving pieces are. Heck, plan your own massive social change using this movement as a template. Create whole new consumer product categories the same way! Maybe everyone needs nose hair trimmers, how would you start that massive social change?
The comments naming _The Transgender-Industrial Complex_ by Scott Howard aren't flagged/dead, just like the comments linking the major American book retailer with the book on sale, or the original publisher.
> The Dahl estate owned the rights to the books until 2021, when Netflix bought them outright for a reported $686 million, building on an earlier rights deal. The American streaming service now has overall control over the book publishing, as well as various adaptation projects that are in the works.
I suspect they're hoping netflix will make movies based on his books. Netflix seems pretty sensitive to twitter opinions. They're probably trying to throw a bone to the twitter mob to make it less likely any new movies get "cancelled".
I'm sure they'd rather have less controversy around Dahl's work. And its pretty easy to imagine Dahl's estate making the 'conservative' choice and allowing these edits if there's even a risk of their netflix deal falling apart.
Not only can you make money while ignoring Twitter — but you can make money by ignoring Twitter screeching. Eg, by hiring Johnny Depp rather than engaging in misandry by supporting false accusations against him.
Hopefully, WarnerMedia eventually gets the memo — and stops discriminating against men while supporting abusers like Amber Heard (female) or Ezra Miller (non-binary).
I think a lot of companies have forgotten they need to treat people based on the content of their character rather than race/sex/gender/etc.
If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outrage over Hogwarts Legacy increased sales of the game. I don’t know if I would have heard about it at all if not for the outrage machine.
Louis CK did a show here in Melbourne a few months ago and the show was sold out. For better or worse, being canceled doesn’t seem like a life sentence.
I'm not generally a contrapoints fan, but I really enjoyed the video she made about her experience with this on twitter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8
Or the TED talk "How one tweet can ruin your life" from 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI
We studied To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible when I was in highschool. I remember thinking how barbaric and despicable "mob justice" was. I didn't understand it, and I assumed I never would - I thought it was something we reference from history. But twitter really has brought the mob justice style witch hunts back.
I don't understand how anyone can claim its not a real phenomenon. Being cancelled is obviously quite a real experience for the people it happens to.
It's a kind of "movie about movie making or movie makers wins Oscar".
I've seen actual physical protests with people on the streets with placards that appear to get less attention from the press. It's incredibly lazy!
The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population. Even if 100% of them loudly proclaimed anything anywhere on any social media platform, it would barely affect anything simply because they’re so small compared to the rest of the population. This is in the same sense that only a minority of the population are severely immunocompromised to the point where Covid is still a threat, and the lack of masking and other safety precautions actually makes their lives significantly worse but because they’re so small their voices literally don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
That is to say I don’t attribute the lack of irl effect to social media but due to demographic size. There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.
> There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.
There's an old quote - "Never assume a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. Its the only thing that ever has."
The radical left - for all that they're championing the rights of a small group of people, has been very effective at kicking up a fuss about diversity, inclusion and trans rights. It doesn't feel like a tiny fringe movement:
- Apparently most researchers and professors at a lot of universities now need to make "diversity and inclusion statements". Stanford is banning a lot of language. So is Google and other big companies.
- Authors like Roald Dahl are having their work retroactively edited to "meet modern norms".
- The pushback against this stuff is becoming a major rallying call for America's right. Now the american conservatives accomplished most of their big policy objectives in most states (concealed carry, banned abortions, etc). What can they use to "energize the base"? Fighting this stuff is being turned into a tool to get conservatives to the polls. (Source: The economist podcast.)
I'm not sure what the lived experience has become for trans people - but the fight for trans rights (as part of the fight for diversity and inclusion) seems to have made massive waves all over the place.
> The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population.
The only people affected by your decision to buy Hogwarts Legacy are the developers involved. I promise you, JK Rowling won't notice the extra 50 cents in her pocket if you buy, or don't buy the game.
If you want to support trans people, do that by supporting them. The lives of trans people are unaffected by your steam purchasing decisions.
Those people banned every single dissenting opinion and after a while started to think that their opinions are way more popular than they actually are.
"Everybody around here thinks that JKR is bad - so surely our boycott is going to be successful - I don't see anyone who disagrees."
If anything - this ridiculous hate campaign against JKR could decrease the support for trans people.
This was done by his estate, as a way to sell more books and/or to get it made as a netflix series. Capitalism drove this decision, not 'wokeness'
actually, i take that back: most people don't know about j.k. rowling's opinions. and even so over the last couple decades they've become much more aware and accepting of trans people.
There is not a single person anywhere in the world who is negatively affected by Hogwarts Legacy.
It wasn't in the file I have of upcoming games until that happened, so you can definitely also include me. It'll be on Switch later in the year, I'll be waiting for then.
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.
Do they? They sided with Chappelle. They gave Norm Macdonald a talk show.
I think Netflix does a fairly good job trying to cater to everyone, woke and not.
Maybe it's because I'm European but hearing the word "conservative" applied to a basic lifestyle choice so readily is really grating. There's more to life than conservative vs liberal and sometimes you just... don't need to give political labels to everything.
There's more to life than identity politics. Let people make non-political lifestyle choices without labelling them.
What an awful thing to say. It would be different if your comment taught us something, but it's little more than a well-written diss.
Imagine how you'd feel if the word "Men" were replaced by various ethnic groups, while still maintaining its accuracy.
At one time it was true to say that women were naturally bad at chess.
My wife supported me financially for close to five years. It's why I was able to learn ML so thoroughly. Maybe some men would view her as the competition, but I'm fortunate to be in a relationship where we don't feel threatened by the other. I recommend other men try to find this as well, since it's quite nice.
It's also nice to have a family where the roles are well-defined and reliable, and there's nothing wrong with wanting one over the other. It's personal preference, which you can't really control. But saying that men are bad at forming robust social safety nets is different than qualifying your statements with "some" or "most."
I'll be the first to say that it's a huge double standard to expect most men to be emotionally closed off most of the time, whereas women are expected to be more emotional in relation to men. But you're phrasing this in a highly negative way.
The women who don't become homeless often resort to sex work. It tends to be more difficult for men to do this in a financially successful way. Men are statistically more prone to violent crime; granted, and testosterone deserves to be scrutinized in its role regarding this. As for the addiction claim, I'd be curious to see the data, since my anecdata suggests mostly equal rates. https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/substance... claims the situation is a bit more nuanced:
> For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder. In addition, women may be more susceptible to craving and relapse, which are key phases of the addiction cycle.
More generally, if you're going to paint various segments of the population with negative traits, it's important to bring data to the discussion which backs up your assertions. That way it informs the reader rather than polarizing them.
That said, if you'd written a children's book, I wouldn't lobby for it to be changed. I'd buy different books, or explain it in context.
As a result I'd expect a lot of single men with below average income and a lot of single women with above average income who struggle to find worthy men. Statistically it is impossible meet two condition at once: 1. women on average earn at leas as much as men 2. In a family a husband has income higher than a wife.
I don't agree with these changes, but this argument makes no sense.
I'd wager that children's books represent a much larger percentage of the books the typical US citizen reads in their entire lifetime than anyone would like to believe.
If true, this would elevate their importance enough for matters like historical accuracy to be worth considering.
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.
(Interestingly, my own parents took that approach with the Berenstain Bears for exactly the reason you describe.)
But I'd prefer to either read something to my kids as originally written or not read it all. Or as they get older, read the original but with a parental aside on how it was a product of its time. (Might as well make it an opportunity for a brief history lesson.)
I'm definitely not a fan of this "force push" approach to updating established older works.
Which is probably why the Dahl copyright holders are doing this(1). Not to appease some sort of modern sensibilities, but to make money. Apparently they think the investment will pay off.
(1) a less money-focused reason could be because they truly believe these stories deserve to be shared in the future, and see the things they changed as barriers to that goal while of little import to the message. But again, they think this step will "pay off" - in continued popularity / enduring part of culture then.
Yeah, I agree that the copyright holders are acting rationally, but long term this will destroy our democracies. A key premise of Fahrenheit 451 is that they end up with sanctioned book burnings because of something boring like political correctness.
Seems like your problem here is easier to solve without messing with the other writers and potentially confusing your child about what, say, a Ronald Dahl book is actually like.
Everybody's family is different, but my childhood self would have been pretty disillusioned to discover my parents censoring books on my behalf. I really can't see how that's a good lesson for the kids, especially when you can just buy contemporary works that are as PC/woke (or not) as you want them to be.
Especially if it's just 0.001% of the content.
If a work of fiction is changed to not imply women are meant to stay at home and men are meant to go to work, doesn't that show that, to those offended, on some level those implications are core to what makes that work that work?
None of these changes drastically affect the storylines, character arcs, unique characteristics, etc of the stories. If the a book saying the N word despite it not being central to the story is so important to you then it doesn't seem like you care about the book so much as you care about saying the N word
The problem is that Dahl’s work isn’t an essay, or a treatise. It’s whimsical. It’s art! The words chosen, were chosen because they were the words that worked.
Say these two extracts out loud:
> “You mean Prince Pondicherry?” said Grandpa Joe, and he began chuckling with laughter. “Completely dotty, said Grandpa George. “But very rich,” said Grandma Georgina
> “You mean Prince Puducherry?” said Grandpa Joe, and he began chuckling with laughter
They mean essentially the same thing, but they feel quite different. The rhythm of “Prince Pondicherry” has a bounce to it, “Prince Puducherry” is more like walking down hill.
You might make the argument that this trade of is worth making, but it is in fact a trade of.
Old works of fiction also belong in historical narrative because it helps give us a window into popular culture at the time.
(Not that this should matter since my argument should stand on its own, but I’m not white. I just want to preempt any accusations.)
It’s not constructive to stick children’s heads into the ground, especially when that self-chosen ignorance will lead to much worse societal outcomes long term.
My name was romanized in a incorrect way a hundred years ago and technically the entire English speaking world mispronounces it. I deal with it by not being a goddamn baby about it. And yes, I figured this out when I was 10.
The problem is, changes are made simply because a fictional female character happens to stay at home. Which is fine if she wants that, or it happens in the story.
I don't get why parents are so untrusting of their children's ability to think, that they censor and change language found in old books. Are they worried their kids will become monsters if they're not spoon-fed censored content?
Many of us grew up surrounded by unchecked stereotypes, yet many of us have zero problems with women doing whatever they want to do.
They are worried they will imitate or become a character in a fictional fantasy
I skipped it when reading the story to my children.
I too would skip reading such material to my child. But it wouldn’t bother me for the child to read it themself when they are older. It’s a funny psychological thing: reading aloud to someone risks carrying some perceived level of approval. A child reading it themself can toss the ideas around in their head, take time to process it, question it etc. and surely they can tell that the prose is whimsical and not serious.
“All white people are slave owners”
“All black people love watermelon”
“All jews love money”
“All indians love curry”
etc.
Even if you’re not picking on a single group, you can still be perpetuating untrue (and even potentially harmful) stereotypes.
But they were just old white cisgender oppressors, so who cares what they would think?
As a friend of mine said about the Seuss books, if you cannot understand why this is being done, you are part of the problem.
Seems like a quick and condescending way to shut down any critical thinking or debate.
“Agree with me, or suffer the same fate”.
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.
I guess babies also count for screeching.
Is the word "sobbing" or the word "weeping" derogatory? Visibly-emotional crying is also associated with women, and isn't a stereotypically "manly" thing to do.
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.
https://grammarist.com/usage/antennae-antennas/
I can't even.
To determine the meaning of every word as they've ever been and attempt to remove any that have ever been used in a way that could've upset anyone ever, just makes sure those words will continue to upset people and be painful. There are words with stronger denotations that would take generations to heal but these are words and concepts that the children of today might not even recognize. Should we attempt to solidify pain by hiding truth? Or would it be better to let the youngins change things the way they always do.
If you take their words, they'll just make more. And those new words will not have the ambiguity of our current language.
It's not.
>You generally wouldn't say a man was "screeching".
Sure you would. I've never seen it posed any other way or with any other intent.
I am under the impression that, on average, men's voices are lower than women's voices. Hence some connotation.
Doesn't mean men cannot screech, though. Just that there is some reason for making that connection, so at least some folks will make that connection.
I fail to understand why using these words is bad, though.
A screech is a high pitched sound, nothing more unless otherwise indicated.
more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34854743
Looks like the character “Screech” will have to adopt a new (nick)-name.
I see a lot of people with no knowledge or experience with this common usage. That's fine, but it's arrogant to assume things you don't know are nonsense.
Maybe worth reconsidering if your understanding of the term is truly "common."
> That's fine, but it's arrogant to assume things you don't know are nonsense.
It also seems pretty arrogant to assert you know better than everyone else.
I did not assert that. I made a correction, which was in fact correct.
The meaning does exist, and commonly, even if in regions you are unfamiliar with. I did not misuse the word common. I think you just emotionally reacted to being called arrogant, when in fact it was a merited criticism.
Interestingly the examples in both the entry from Oxford that Google brought up when I searched the term, and the second example in the Cambridge dictionaries are both boys doing the screeching. The other examples are inanimate and screeching describing the experience of tinnitus. So it seems the UK is similar.
So potentially for much of the English-speaking world this term wouldn’t bring up thought of any kind of gendered slur. So it goes both ways - just because something is the case in your region doesn’t mean it’s true across the board.
I never said nor suggested that it did. I was criticizing the people saying it is not a common usage because they hadn't heard it. You and the other user trying to correct me by repeating how you are from a place where the meaning is different both completely missed the point.
The meaning exists, and is used derogatorily, and definitely commonly in some places. None of what you wrote has any bearing on that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It'd be really cool if someone familiar with what I'm linking to below could comment, especially regarding the word screech and its related forms!
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720347115
https://github.com/chainsawriot/sweater
https://kawine.github.io/blog/nlp/2019/09/23/bias.html
You’re implying that homosexuals are effeminate?
Screeching is most definitely more commonly used for women. That doesn't make it a bad word to use.
I mean, you won't catch me dead with these bowdlerized versions. The prose is atrocious and the motives for the changes are dubious.
But screeching is high pitched and when it's used for people is used mostly for women. I'm not going to pretend it's not. That's a comical rewriting of what is true just because you don't like some other rewriting.
Guess Tom of Finland didn't get that memo.
You didn't watch Saved by the Bell?!
When HN can't tolerate such an obviously true statement such as this, yet plenty of dog-whistles supporting homophobia and racism and transphobia in this thread stay upvoted, it tells me I probably shouldn't be spending time here anymore. I don't know if I've changed or the community has changed. Probably a bit of both. Maybe it's time to grow up and move on.
IE: Describing a straight male as shrill might make passersby assume he’s abnormal and abnormal men are viewed as homosexual and it would be really awful if you accidentally did a homophobia so stop using the word shrill.
> He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
There's an easy test to see if you understand someone's position in a disagreement. Just summarize their position back to them. They'll tell you if you got it right.
> a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.
This absolutely isn't my position. I don't think you understand why people disagree with you here.
[The full quote by Mill, if anyone is curious: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66643-he-who-knows-only-his... ]
> [HN believes] a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.
Do you have any evidence? Can you show me the comments where people “tell you who they are”, and say that having “a modicum of sensitivity toward minorities” will be the end of civilisation?
Your comment just reads as a bitter, low effort ad homenim attack.
For example, sitcoms used to do this all the time. You'd have two big buff contractors or whatever talking about some work they did, and one of them would say something along the lines of "Hey Frank, that's real cute." Then they'd both realize what was said, get real uncomfortable, the canned laughter would hit, and they'd both stand up, brush themselves off and change the topic hastily.
I understand it's pretty subtle, but jokes and insinuations like this have been a regular part of (at least North American english) culture for a long, long time now.
Also, what should us older people call a screech owl?
Sorry for the confusion, language is context dependent, and the context the book used screeching is strange in modern English.