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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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An update to a post I made after Christmas lamenting the state of children's books, and all their on the nose, "current year" agenda pushing nonsense. Specifically an update in reply to this comment.

This is why we only have classic little golden books and some innocuous stuff from the 80s and 90s on our bookshelf. Also Roald Dahl, he's great. As others have said, there's no reason to buy modern propaganda children's books. Not only are they proselytizing, but they're mostly objectively ugly.

Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is 'fat' and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral

archive link

The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.

The review of Dahl’s language was undertaken to ensure that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, Puffin said.

You can read the litany of changes for yourself. I guess I missed the boat on stocking up on Roald Dahl children's books. As is feeling increasingly typical these days, there can be no escape from current year. Fuck me I guess.

Glad I got the box set of his works before this went down. Hard to believe that, surrounded by all of my screens and TBs of HDD space, I still find myself hoarding dead tree books. What a silly time to be alive.

Just like the Dr. Suess issue, this is what happens when you let greedy families of authors keep control of a work. Put in the public domain, and a thousand versions could come out.

Welcome to early Ingsoc. As more content goes digital, there won't even be any (legal) way to possess content that is deemed oldthinking and thoughtcriminal. The books would be edited right in your electronic device, and they would always have been like that.

In one of history's little winks almost the first book this happened to was 1984.

Some copyright SNAFU meant that Amazon had distributed the thing when it wasn't allowed to, so they disappeared it off people's Kindles. This wasn't an attempt at censorship, other editions were readily available, but it was a clear case of memory-holing.

I'm really wondering when is Amazon going to do something about the fact I buy cca 3 books from them for a year, but pirate roughly 10 each year, and put them all on the same device.

Been 3 uncalled for updates of the OS so far, and ..nothing ?

I don't know whether or not they scan Kindle's actively for sideloaded stuff. But there is probably specific pressure to go after you.

I think in the case above, Amazon wasn't acting out of a general programme to enforce copyright, they were reacting to someone with laywer who was upset about a particular e-Book that they had actively distributed.

You mean there isn't pressure to go after people who sideload ?

I expect there is, and I don't know how that affects Amazon's behaviour. That's a generalized thing though. Distinct from "some specific lawyers are going to sue us unless we do this specific thing".

Are you saying you think it will be made illegal to have physical books?

Or maybe I'm not being pessimistic enough and UK counter-terrorism will just make a huge list of books, TV shows, and movies that get you on a terrorism watchlist, such as "Yes Minister", John Locke, Carlyle, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

https://archive.is/5RQ0d

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1134986/Independent_Review_of_Prevent.pdf

Or maybe I'm not being pessimistic enough and UK counter-terrorism will just make a huge list of books, TV shows, and movies that get you on a terrorism watchlist, such as "Yes Minister", John Locke, Carlyle, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

This ship sailed long ago, check Terrorism Act 2000

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58

58 Collection of information.

(1)A person commits an offence if

(a)he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism

(b)he possesses a document or record containing information of that kind

(c)the person views, or otherwise accesses, by means of the internet a document or record containing information of that kind.

"information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" sounds so very very scary.

What exactly it means in practice?

In practice it means books you can easily and fully legally buy from Amazon.uk

If the cops feel like including ...check... Great British Railway Journeys among this super dangerous knowledge, it would be fully legal according to this act.

"Why are you watching documents about trains? Do you plan to cause derailment?"

(more examples here)

https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism/counter-terrorism-division-crown-prosecution-service-cps-successful-prosecutions-2016

Subsequent forensic analysis of the mobile device revealed four electronic documents, all of which contravened s58 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

The Anarchy Cookbook Version 2000,

The Improvised Munitions handbook Vol 1 1981

Mujahideen-Poisons Handbook

The Explosives Course.

.....

In a folder on the computer, analysts discovered PDF files containing five issues of Rumiyah, the Daesh propaganda magazine. Each of those contained an article in a section known as “Just Terror Tactics” that contravenes Section 58 Terrorism Act 2000 in that they contain instructional information likely to assist a person in the preparation of acts of terrorism. There was clear evidence of attribution to Zakaria Yanaouri. Those exact same files were duplicated on the Samsung Galaxy mobile phone and indications were that Zakaria Yanaouri had transferred the files from the computer to the phone.

.....

The police uncovered a wealth of data from five devices used by Harry Vaughan including a list of 129 internet accounts, usernames and passwords on a memory stick and a large volume of material linked to Siege, ISIS, Satanism, Neo-Nazism and antisemitism totalling approximately 4200 images and 302 files including videos.

.....

There were numerous digital copies of books on firearms, explosives and military tactics. These included manuals on how to construct homemade guns and ammunition. There were also several digital copies of books which tended to reveal extreme right-wing views and objectives.

No, they would just not print physical books anymore for mass market. At least not for the Western mass market. If you want to print it out by yourself, on your private printer - it probably would be possible, but not from copyrighted source directly (this function will be disabled in most consumer market devices, see how HD video signal is treated). You could probably hack around it, if you are technically proficient (most DRM is removable, and there are flourishing pirate markets for non-DRMed content) but most of the population would be unable to do it.

Can you elaborate on the HD signal?

What I mean is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection

Probably the HDCP requirement for 4K UHD video over HDMI/DisplayPort. DRM (albeit fully compromised) has been baked directly into the wire protocol. If you try to run without (on the cables, monitors, source, any other pieces of equipment passing the signal), you get downgraded to 1080p HD.

Oh okay, I consider 4K to be a meme and never looked into any tech adjacent to it, which explains why I haven't heard of this. Still bad for the future, I guess, but not immediately concerning.

Any computer monitor running a resolution higher than 1920x1080 over HDMI is also affected. For reference every current gen iPad on the market pushes higher resolution than that.

Most likely route is child protective services investigation for giving children dangerous and problematic books after your kid takes one to a show and tell. Like what would happen if they brought porn or Mein Kampf today.

If it sounds absurd, remember how CPS taking people's children for using the "wrong pronouns" was absurd last year, and now it's law.

Are you saying that's less likely than things that are already happening? Do you think all the rhetoric about "schools saving children from christo-fascist cults" is just talk? Parents having an old paper copy of Dr Seuss books is already passed around as a "red flag dog whistle" on the teaching and library subreddits

Parents having an old paper copy of Dr Seuss books is already passed around as a "red flag dog whistle" on the teaching and library subreddits

Do you have a link for us to gawk at? That sounds crazy even for Reddit...

I'll try to find it again. Was stalking the accounts of users supporting the Roald Dahl censorship (well, attacking anyone who opposed it as hateful bigots with no empathy, anyway), and ended up closing the whole window.

This is one of the reasons my preferred copyright regime would strongly incent active selling and action to maintain copyright. If you stop, your old work loses copyright protection and it becomes public.

Thing that would have seemed impossible and absurd even last year happens, people get temporarily upset, change nothing. Everyone gets used to it, desperately copes that "this is the high water mark," and goes on with their lives.

Then something even worse happens and the process starts all over again. This is how the last decade has gone. And this is how the next decade will go. And the one after that and the one after that.

I don't really see the point of even talking about it unless it's building actionable solutions.

The absurdity and bipartisan revolt leads me optimistically believe we're closer to the peak than not. It does not mean wokeness has peaked, but we're close to it . Rewriting classic books is something even many left-wing artsy types and progressives will not stand for. Losing the intelligentsia means losing the movement, because that is where the money is too.

Absurdity isnt an objective measure - it only demonstrates how far outside or inside the current overton window an idea is. The idea that prepubescent children can know that they somehow have the spiritual essence of the opposite sex would also have seemed absurd to most anyone 40 years ago. Heck, 1950's sock hops were absurd to Sayyid Qutb when he went to Colorado State Teacher's College. That an idea is absurd to a person only tells you where that person stands now. Not why they stand there now, and not where they'll stand tomorrow.

Surely it has some sort of telos or terminus, though, no? Civilization may appear asymptotic in terms of how much ruin and insanity it can withstand, but there must be some practical limit.

Fires eventually burn themselves out, but you should still be concerned if you find one in your home.

In Rwanda, men hacked their neighbors to death with machetes. People were condemned to death for wearing glasses and owning books in Cambodia. The Soviets slaughtered thousands of whales to meet quotas that served no purpose. How crazy can people get?

North Korea still exists.

I have no idea what the practical limit to a civilization's utter insanity is. I just know whatever that limit is, we appear to be dead set on suicidally testing it.

Something that's striking about some of the rewrites is that they're not just striking ostensibly verboten words, but actually making the writing worse. The first example from the table that @buffy_bot helpfully provides below:

Like all extremely old people, he was delicate and weak

Like most extremely old people, he was delicate and weak

First, note the moronically pedantic nature of this change - you can picture the dweeb interjecting, "ackshually, not all extremely old people are delicate and weak". To a first approximation, all centenarians really are delicate and weak, with the best counterexamples still being people that don't have half the strength of their youth and that can suffer severe injuries from falling down. More importantly though, it changes the rhythm and feel of the sentence in a way that I can't quite articulate, and not for the better.

The removal of anything to do with "fat" is a good example of what we were talking about with regard to victories of fat activists yesterday. I don't think they've actually made any inroads on convincing people that there's nothing wrong with being fat, but they have convinced people that ever referencing fat negatively in writing is a sin that's just short of using a racial slur.

“It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely… They all speak English now”

“They’ve told me they love it here”

Again, notice that this is just plain worse. It's not just getting rid of something that's putatively offensive, it's scrapping the underlying content, making it flat and dull. The original sentence gives you a vivid image of how the hell the oompaloompas wound up there (and it's not a pretty image). The update says nothing meaningful. This is a theme across these, replacing well-crafted sentences that call to mind an image with some simple descriptor conveys only the sequence of events. Perhaps the sensitivity editors all suffer from aphantasia and lack the capacity to visualize a scene from a few words; I can't decide if this explanation would be more or less charitable to them.

Matthew Dennison, Dahl’s biographer, said that the author - who died in 1990 - chose his vocabulary with care. “I’m almost certain that he would have recognised that alterations to his novels prompted by the political climate were driven by adults rather than children," he said.

Flow and tone matters. Some of these changes sound like adults “talking to kids” rather than “talking with kids”. It’s against the spirit of the stories.

It's called "condescension". The group who (claim to) hate it so much they invented another word for it are the people responsible for most of it.

And sure, the kids eventually pick up on it- nobody likes being treated as if they're beneath someone (which is partially why teen media is infamously edgy as well as the general trend of kids wanting to consume 'adult' media in general), but they're not even human beings so who gives a damn?

Plus, if you do it enough, you can even make some of them proud of this treatment so it's self-reinforcing after a while... exactly what one with power should want in order to retain that power forever.

Children's songs, too.

Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drei_Chinesen_mit_dem_Kontrabass) is about three Chinamen, and the way the song is sung plays with the idea of trying to speak foreign languages.

Nowadays the song has apparently been corrected, and is now about...fruit. Fruit talking to each other.

I've just downloaded the full collection as ebooks.

My kids can have kindles full of samizdat.

Got a link? I used to love Dahl's books as a kid, and this especially disappoints me.

I just want to second that if there was an online library with PDFs/kindle files/whatever of uncorrected works like these, I would want access to it.

In unrelated news: https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-returns-on-the-clearnet-in-full-hydra-mode-230213/

It's an underappreciated fact, possibly explaining to some extent the geopolitical and racial animus too, that very much of the world's piratical freedom is created and maintained by Russians. Not the old Cypherpunk part that's mostly reserved to the highly technical (Freenet, i2p, obscure IRCs...) but the publicly accessible freedom. I think this owes both to Communism and to its opposition in the form of Samizdat – and of course to older cultural traditions of coping with an effectively unbeatable but not highly competent power.

Libgen, Sci-Hub (well, to the extent that Elbakyan is Russian, but culturally she totally is), Z-lib, Tornado Cash and other parts of crypto infrastructure, Telegram, Vkontakte (back when it was owned by Durov), Hydra marketplace until Germans took it down; and that's only the explicit tip of the iceberg, when you start digging you find much more. Collaborating with Westerners on this kind of stuff, however, can give you the Aaron Swartz experience, with your project ending up gutted and mothballed, with parts repurposed for political ends.

It's ironic that I often have an easier time finding some Western author in Russian. E.g. here's Dahl – Flibusta is nearly flawless as a prose repository. Who knows, maybe it'll make more sense to do back-translations from there than hope for Amazon availability of old versions. @hydroacetylene knock yourself out.

Oh right, here's a better plan. https://www.btdig.com/search?q=roald+dahl+books

«BTDigg was founded by Nina Evseenko in January 2011.» Figures.

Hint: anal pain

Those random search suggestions never fail to make me smile.

I'm not sure what the relation with https://bt4g.org is. It has a nicer interface.

…After we are done with, I wonder if Hajnalis will figure out how to make these things accessible to more than the small circle of cranky snobbish Electrical Engineering grads, or if their… conscience will get the better of them and tip the scales in favor of regulation, surveillance and omnipotent woke schoolmarms.

This btdig thing is great. I think it's trying to tell me something

/images/16769142718173819.webp

My feelings towards Russia carry a number of ambiguities, but I will say I feel a definite sense of approval toward its existence as the global cultural counterweight to America, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Describing it as Samizdat in the form of a modern cultural "black market" (at least for westerners) is an interesting framing and lines up nicely with a lot of my more nebulous ideas of where the global powers sit.

How is Z-lib compared to libgen? I've always used the latter, but their search is pretty bad and there's a lot of low quality dupes of everything.

In my experience libgen has slightly higher quality, but Zlib has books that are not on libgen.

How do you know whether a given torrent is safe from viruses?

..how would a torrent spread viruses ? I'm curious. Unless you torrent an unknown executable or script and execute it, I don't really see a way.

More comments

Libgen and z-lib have direct download, no torrent required.

It's unclear to me whether they're taking the original versions out of print or not. I'm fine with a censored version being available for purchase, so long as the originals are too. Maybe they could slap a warning label on them, like the Looney Tunes Golden Collections.

If these versions are the only ones that are going to be available, then that's disturbing. This is worse than just removing the books from print. It feels like rewriting history. There needs to at least be a note inside that this isn't Dahl's original artistic vision.

While it is trivial to offer old editions of books alongside new ones, the idea is that new ones are better, so I wouldn't bet on it and, for usual reasons, would expect this to go the way of non-kosher food, only faster.

Now consider this manifestation of the dictatorship of the minority. In the United Kingdom, where the (practicing) Muslim population is only three to four percent, a very high number of the meat we find is halal. Close to seventy percent of lamb imports from New Zealand are halal. Close to ten percent of the chain Subway carry halal-only stores (meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs from the loss of business of nonpork stores. The same holds in South Africa where, with the same proportion of Muslims, a disproportionately higher number of chicken is Halal certified. But in the U.K. and other Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to reach a high level, as people may rebel against forceful abidance to other’s religious norms. For instance, the 7th Century Christian Arab poet Al-Akhtal made a point to never eat halal meat, in his famous defiant poem boasting his Christianity: “I do not eat sacrificial flesh”. (Al-Akhtal was reflecting the standard Christian reaction from three or four centuries earlier — Christians were tortured in pagan times by being forced to eat sacrificial meat, which they found sacrilegious. Many Christian martyrs starved to death.)

One thing I find most amusing about the dominance of kosher-friendly cuisine in the US is that literally every time I read a recipe from an American website, the recipe always specifies to use "kosher salt", rather than just "salt". This is true even if it's a recipe for pork chops, or prawn curry, or any other recipe which is non-kosher by definition.

It has to do with standardization, you're specifying to use salt that has this size and composition so your seasoning is the same as the recipe creator. Chefs like kosher salt because the grains are larger than in regular table salt (which is rather fine) but not as large as say a finishing sea salt which might be really big and flaky. They also don't have any anti-caking agents, so I guess it's more "pure"? In general it's also saltier due to having more sodium content, so if you substitute just regular table salt instead of kosher salt, your dish will be under-seasoned in my experience. None of it has to do with religion for most Americans, product just happened to be good enough to become a standard for chefs.

Huh, TIL.

This is (used to be?) how Americans say "sea salt." "Salt" usually refers to table salt. Sometimes you need to specify large crystal salt instead of fine table salt.

It used to properly be called "koshering salt" because it was the type of salt used in the koshering/kashering process for meat. But then English did what English does and now nothing makes sense anymore.

Ah hah! I am enlightened. Thanks; is been wondering about this for ages.

the way of non-kosher food, only faster.

I certainly hope so, because if there's something there is absolutely no shortage or deficit in the US that is non-kosher food. BTW, I hope you don't confuse kosher and halal, because those are completely different. Also, making food actually kosher if it's actual food and not something made out of a set of enumerated chemical components in a factory (like Coca-Cola) would be rather non-trivial task usually requiring at least periodical specialist human oversight. Which means outside of areas where there are a lot of religious Jews around (Israel, New York, LA, etc.) maintaining a kosher food production would be a non-trivial task to achieve. It is possible, but requires significant additional investment and in most cases outside areas above would be non-viable commercially. There could be non-commercial kosher food sources (e.g. a synagogue could run one, supported by donations - I've seen that happen) but nothing even remotely suggesting non-kosher food would go away in any type or form anytime soon anywhere.

In fact, even in Israel, where maintaining kosher has significant advantages, there is no shortage of non-kosher restaurants and grocery stores, which are very popular.

Sure, this only really works on the scale of a single store or restaurant: instead of offering both kosher and non-kosher (or halal and non-halal: the same principle applies, and for most non-Jews and non-Muslims the impact is similar) food, the easier choice is often to drop the type alienating a minority of customers entirely. Though for something like a chain supermarket, or Amazon that's a unified marketplace dominated by a single store (that is also invested in reputation of its partners), this logic also holds, with minor caveats.

I agree that Taleb's example with peanut allergy and peanut non-availability on planes would be more apt. But people with allergies are not really a political block and it has more to do with insurance, probably.

Can you easily find pork in Israel? I can't in Turkey.

the easier choice is often to drop the type alienating a minority of customers entirely

I don't know how it looks in theory, but I do know how it works in practice. In practice, in the US, the number of kosher restaurants outside of the "Jewish" areas is vanishingly small. On the contrary, the number of non-kosher restaurants in, say, Israel is quite decent. I didn't ever bother to pinpoint why exactly Taleb's argument doesn't work there, but it is absolutely clear it does not, and thus why it does not becomes rather a theoretical exercise.

Can you easily find pork in Israel?

Yes, very easily. For example, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiv_Ta'am or here: https://mania-m.co.il/ (sorry their English site seems to be broken, but the pictures are pretty clear).

There are also many restaurants that do not serve pork, but still do not maintain official kosher certification - either because of costs, or because of limitations on recipes and processes that involves. E.g. cheeseburger is very much not kosher, even if you use kosher beef. Thus, McDonalds has 2/3 of his locations is Israel non-kosher and 1/3 kosher (no cheeseburgers there, obviously). They do use kosher meat (so here Taleb's theory is correct - it'd be uneconomical to use two different types of beef) in both kinds.

Is kosher beef not much more expensive than non-kosher? In the USA there is a difference in price of 2-3 times. I have a hard time imagining that not making it economical to use two different types of beef.

I think in Israel, it wouldn't be much more expensive in practice, because you won't find any local supplier that would be big enough to supply McDonalds and yet not already set up to supply kosher beef - because most of other large consumers in Israel do want kosher meat. Meat is quite expensive in Israel, and limits on import is one of the reasons. But I think this applies to non-kosher beef too, which likely would be imported. In general, meat politics in Israel is complex and pretty bizzare and changing a lot, I am sure I'm not up to date on all the details.

I belong to a religious group which bans intentional consumption of actually halal meat, but not unintentional consumption or consumption of "halal" meat which does not follow the correct ritual. The statement that comes to mind on this was that Australian halal certified meat was OK to eat because the Australian imams grant the certification extremely loosely, like at the point of playing a tape recorder with the relevant prayer on it in the manager's office while making no other changes, and that Australian slaughterhouses for that reason practically all get halal certified without actually making any changes except buying the $100 stereo and $20 CD because it lets them sell to Saudi Arabia and Indonesia for $120 and the cost of sending some emails to an imam.

As we learned from the sudden banning of Dr. Seuss from every mainstream online marketplace, there won't be any integrity. These will be treated as the only versions that ever existed, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.

When the whole brouhaha happened, I made a point of getting every "problematic" Dr. Seuss book and finding out what exactly the thoughtcrime was (it was usually stereotypical depiction of people of non-European ethnicities, though in a couple of places I couldn't really figure out what it was). The main problem was most of the libraries I could access had rather long waiting lists on those, but I could get every problematic one eventually without paying anything out of pocket (obviously, I paid for the library from my property taxes already, but that's a different tangent). So I must conclude they weren't entirely banned, at least not from the libraries.

banning of Dr. Seuss

If there was a peak wokeness, the banning of Dr. Seuss books would be it. It was hard to find anyone who supported that.

But it was easy enough to find people who believed it wasn't actually happening. Who rationalized it by the existence of the second hand market. Despite ebay banning resale of the books because "nobody should profit off hate." Or they rationalized it because it was only a few Dr Seuss books. It wasn't even the ones most people had heard of. Or they went full "It's a private company and they can do whatever they want."

Turns out being unable to find anyone who actually supports it is cold comfort, when it's easy to find people willing to cling to any excuse that the thing they would absolutely not support isn't actually happening. It's just right wing misinformation and scare mongering.

The part of the Seuss debacle which really chafes my hide is the works were chosen for extinction, not even the clumsy editing of censors, or the clever redactions the liberal Geisel would have made to his own works to update them to the new ethos, were he still kicking.

On Beyond Zebra is one of my formative memories: a world tour of things so fantastic that they need to be described with entirely new letters like Yuzz, Thnad, and Spazz. …Oh wait, “spaz” is as bad in England as “retard” was here, and both are now hate speech. Ol’ Ted would have renamed it “Plazz” or “Svazz” or something.

One of the other cancelled Seuss books was a gorgeous book full of watercolors he painted, very unlike his usual cartoon style. One page would have needed editing.

BTW, Geisel was a liberal, but he also - at least for some time - held some views about racial and ethnic differences that would get him so much cancelled noways. He most likely abandoned those views later in life, but as we know, for cancellation purposes there's no excuse even for what you did in kindergarten. You can see some examples in an excellent book The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss - which I fully recommend for many reasons outside finding material to cancel Geisel.

He (and later, his estate) were known for cracking down pretty hard against pro-life groups using his biggest cultural touchstone, "A person's a person, no matter how small," from Horton Hears a Who. It really refers to oppressed people-groups, "A people's a people," but it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.

I borrowed the book on his early commercial works from the library, and he was as bold as any cartoonist back then in contributing to the general miasma of ethnic caricature. He survived the zeitgeist by his children's book publishers being far more careful than he, and by shifting his views with the times as most Democrats did.

The OP of a post in this over on /r/books listed out all the changes in table format. It’s crazy. One missing detail in your post is that the rights to the works are owned by Netflix. I wonder if they were the ones employing the sensitivity readers. Thank goodness I impulse bought his whole collection for my baby back in the fall. Not a moment too late.

Everything is worse than the original. Of course it must be. These books were written by a talented author, or authors. They are “corrected” by mediocrities.

Just checked my kid's copy of The Giant Peach. The centipede sings about the fat aunt. We got it at Costco, in a boxed set. They still seem to be selling it sometimes. Act now!

deleted

Here is a list of the changes. Roald Dahl could have written a whole book of short essays about each individual change and how it's retarded:

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds_of_changes_made_to_roald_dahls_books/

Ironically, they didn't race swap Charlie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Factory#Race_and_editing

Anyway, I can accept that new cultural products will tend to be terrible, for reasons including wokeness, but when it comes to the glories of the past, I think of us in the position of Irish monks in the Dark Ages: unable to produce, but duty-bound to preserve. So pushing back hard against this sort of thing (or indeed Puffin's past decision to put a sexualised image of a child on a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cover, on the grounds of giving it "adult" appeal, about which they have never repented, as far as I know) makes sense.

Time for sensitivity readers to modify problematic parts of Orwell?

By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. (Syme, explaining Newspeak to Winston in "Nineteen-Eighty Four".)

sexualised image of a child

I was curious about this (as I'm always up for looking at a sexualized image of a child) having not heard of it before, looked it up, and must say that even by the standards of 2014 (which in my view quite frankly weren't that modest), calling such an image "sexualized" seems to me to be a major stretch. There's literally not a single part of the child's skin exposed but that on her face and a small amorphous portion of her leg near her knee and most of her clothed body is essentially entirely obscured by long hair and a giant boa. If it's sexualized, then so is my grandma going to bingo.

There's been more sexualized stuff on Nick Jr. (Stephanie is a legendary pedo fap icon, even making an appearance in the pedo visual novel that is in my username. They wiped a good portion of the clips of her in her classic outfit, which was later changed for obvious upskirt reasons, off of YouTube though, so that's the best example I could find at a glance. It's actually not strictly from Nick Jr. either as it is apparently a clip from Icelandic TV before the Western adaptation of the show, but she wears the same outfit in at least one season of that and in many cases exposes herself more (along with doing the same song and dance featured in the clip).)

Trying to say this in the least accusatory/inflammatory way possible, but I find it interesting how the posters here who are at least somewhat anti-woke and presumably anti-pedo (at least in explicit communication) can rant all day about how woke types are supposedly so silly for being on such a hair trigger about anything that might be right-coded, trying to get some truck driver or whoever fired for using the "OK" hand sign, and yet not look at what they so often decry as "sexualized" in regards to children and think that they're maybe doing basically the same thing, overreacting to every minor possible-but-probably-not-even-and-if-even-still-barely-anything instance of their chosen "worst thing imaginable" (or perhaps "bitch eating crackers"), which maybe explains the oversensitivity) issue (which for the woke left is equivalently racism). For example, this is another commercial from Korea that was also criticized as inappropriately sexualizing the young girl in it and it also just seems like not much at all to me.

Of course, I'm basing my opinions off of actual empirical evidence of what might actually trigger a sexual response in the types of people who might sexually respond to media of children were it sexualized (like me), which I suppose is not necessarily the standard your average "normie" is going to use, and yet it does seem to me to be a better one. After all, if "sexualization" doesn't have anything to do with actually being sexy or at least trying, then what is it?

Conversely, to me certain segments from this network television program did in fact depict some quite sexualized/sexy children (that is, I watched them more than once, occasionally at certain times) and yet I didn't seem to hear a peep of protest about them (except on /pol/, where the complaints were about the interracial pairings of some of the kids). (There is a search engine suggestion for "dancing with the stars juniors controversy" but it seems to be about people disagreeing with the final winner of "Disney Night".)

It very much often strikes me as similar to left-wing outrage: frequently random, illogical, and disproportionate with the offense even from their point of view, in my perspective. (Yet, much like on woke venues in regards to anything right-wing, due to how much even suggesting "This isn't even that [X]." tends to get you accused of actually being a crypto [X]ist (which in my case doesn't apply as I am an open [X]ist here), I am essentially the first person that I know of to bring this issue up in neutral company at all.)

Edit: Sorry for the sloppy proofreading. Two links have been fixed if you couldn't figure out they were just YouTube videos.

calling such an image "sexualized" seems to me to be a major stretch.

It's the designated stereotype 1930s-boudoir-dancer-prostitute outfit; you can more easily accept that label if you make that association (I don't find that outfit attractive even when it's actively intended to be, and have no idea why people like it aside from maybe 'it leaves so much to the imagination' and connotations of 'those clothes will definitely be coming off soon').

The Korean commercial is... yeah, it's absolutely bait, but it's restrained and aesthetically pleasing enough that the people complaining about it can be mocked for what being mad about it says about them (weird how "no u" can work as a counter to claims of murderism).

overreacting

Don't traditionalists and progressives also agree that sex in general is bad with the relatively small distinction that progressives are more tolerant of the corner cases that don't involve a straight biological woman (using their blanket of "sex positivity" to deny a distaste for it)? I've yet to see one example in their propaganda literature that even portrays a woman at all much less a girl; it's exclusively boys and men interacting in ways that would only be appealing if you're reading it for the articles oppression narrative.

And clearly they're worried about nothing; we put more (admittedly, non-straight) sexual material in front of the average child's eyes and the rate at which they're getting laid is in massive decline. Maybe the trads doth complain too much; teaching that straight sex is morally wrong and that women are right to lord it over men because men have a duty to women is exactly what's being taught. Narcissism of small differences, after all.

After all, if "sexualization" doesn't have anything to do with actually being sexy or at least trying, then what is it?

"Sexualization" is the spear counterpart to "his advances made me feel unsafe".

Both have definitions of "what the viewer sees" embedded in it, and the "Hello, Human Resources?" implicit call to action is the same- it's a way to abuse the fact that people will/want to go white-knighting for the "victim", and men have figured out that invoking the social power [that having daughters give them an excuse to use] is as effective and just as abusable as women invoking the social power [that the capital class give them an excuse to use].

I don't think it's any more complicated than that; the only time anyone appears to use the word is when speaking critically (one would just say 'sexual' otherwise).

Conversely, to me certain segments from this network television program did in fact depict some quite sexualized/sexy children (that is, I watched them more than once, occasionally at certain times) and yet I didn't seem to hear a peep of protest about them

The protest space from the traditionalists is already closed over "all dancing is sexualization", so neither they nor their opposition can back off their positions even if they wanted to. Of course, neither side can consistently spot it which... suggests to me that the outrage is fake.

Don't traditionalists and progressives also agree that sex in general is bad

I feel like that depends on which traditionalists. Abrahamic traditionalists? Probably in most cases. Those informed more by pre-Abrahamic traditions? Powerful and dangerous especially in the wrong form or hands maybe, but I don't think automatically bad.

"Sexualization" is the spear counterpart to "his advances made me feel unsafe".

This is definitely an interesting comparison to make and I do largely agree.

The protest space from the traditionalists is already closed over "all dancing is sexualization"

Most modern dancing anyway. I don't think anyone fully believes that all dancing including many traditional, intentionally chaste forms of dancing is sexualized.

Yeah, the disproportionate, bizzare outrage for pedophilia is fairly universal in modern culture, and odd. It's particularly funny - and obvious something's not right - when rdrama does it. People who are more than happy to joke about mayocide or gay rape or whatever suddenly start seeing pedo conspiracies when someone makes the exact same jokes, almost word for word, that's tangentially related to something pedoish. (unless it's "homosexuals reproduce by r[a]ping kids", then it's okay).

It's so disproportionate it ends up completely mistargeted, too, and thus doesn't really prevent any child grooming (which incidentally is rarely literal pedophilia, 14yos get groomed wayyy more than 8yos do, the 'ITS EPHEBOPHILIA NOT PEDOPHILIA' thing is, in practice, crimestop preventing one from even trying to understand the risks involved). There are at least tens of thousands of parents who are incredibly angry about LGBT childrens books, tv shows, or teachers 'grooming' their children while their child is literally groomed into dming about nsfw things on discord or tiktok. Yet it can't be any other way - kids spend thousands of hours talking to random people on the internet, but much less time discussing lgbt stuff with teachers or reading books from school libraries.

14yos get groomed wayyy more than 8yos do, the 'ITS EPHEBOPHILIA NOT PEDOPHILIA' thing is, in practice, crimestop preventing one from even trying to understand the risks involved).

What kind of people do you hang out with, that "ackshully it's ephebophilia" doesn't immediately out someone as a pedo?

There are at least tens of thousands of parents who are incredibly angry about LGBT childrens books, tv shows, or teachers 'grooming' their children while their child is literally groomed into dming about nsfw things on discord or tiktok.

Aren't a lot of the places where this happens LGBT-themed as well? I mean, think, they breach the boundary of talking about sexuality with kids by design, it's pedo paradise.

Yet it can't be any other way - kids spend thousands of hours talking to random people on the internet, but much less time discussing lgbt stuff with teachers or reading books from school libraries.

Last I checked kids spent half their day at school, also what's taught there can contribute to kids having lower boundaries around sexuality in other contexts.

What kind of people do you hang out with, that "ackshully it's ephebophilia" doesn't immediately out someone as a pedo?

That's what I meant. That's the "crimestop". Wanting to groom a 14yo girl ie "ephebophilia", and wanting to groom an 8yo girl ie "pedophilia", are just not the same thing. And even if you're not endorsing either, just drawing the distinction, it does, yes, "immediately out one as a pedo". As most men are biologically attracted to anyone post-puberty*, most men have the ability to want to groom a 14yo girl, and if you're a social outcast / lonely / spend a lot of time on the internet, the lack of other options + lack of moral/shame-based reasons not to plus easy opportunity makes it very common. And those people aren't pedophiles, it's an entirely different thing from wanting to fuck 8yos.

Aren't a lot of the places where this happens LGBT-themed as well? I mean, think, they breach the boundary of talking about sexuality with kids by design, it's pedo paradise.

90%+ of them are not. They're just places for discussing television shows, video games, memes, etc. LGBT places are overrepresented for various reasons, but it's a 2%->5% overrepresentation rather than a 2%->80% overrepresentation.

Last I checked kids spent half their day at school, also what's taught there can contribute to kids having lower boundaries around sexuality in other contexts.

Yeah, but school is a regulated and regimented many-to-one environment. Teachers don't have one on one time with kids, teachers are teaching the material rather than having personal interactions with the kids, etc. Opportunities for having emotionally or sexually charged teacher/kid discussions are much rarer in 8 hours of school than 2 hours of after-school social media use.

*although because desires are 'on the same level' as social norms, most men suppress it (good, one would think), so they don't "notice" it. This is the same thing as "my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world to me" or "i'm not attracted to anyone under 25", but much stronger since it's a universally held taboo. Some people who say this are straight lying or telling white lies, but others genuinely believe and feel/experience it, because desires are commensurate with social norms or personal beliefs. But even among the most pious the 'natural' desire to fuck anything that's somewhat attractive is still there, and resurfaces quickly if e.g. they divorce.

also, it's pretty funny to be discussing this in the child comments of the self-proclaimed pedofascist, but witches or something idk

And those people aren't pedophiles, it's an entirely different thing from wanting to fuck 8yos.

You know (and not that I'm disputing your words in general, since hebephilia and pedophilia are indeed different), since you seem to be of the opinion that most men are naturally attracted to pubescent but not prepubescent girls, you might be interested in this study in which only 9 out of 80 subjects showed no arousal (via penile plethysmography) to nude photographs of prepubescent female children (compared to 4 for no arousal to nude photographs of adult females). Further, 21 out of 80 (26.25%) exhibited arousal to the prepubescent females equaling or exceeding their arousal to the adult females. (Keep in mind this was apparently just basic slides of nude girls standing there too, not the erotic hyperstimuli little girls are putting of themselves on social media nowadays, so I bet it would be much higher with that.)

(Yes it's definitely an aging study and just one (though it cites multiple prior studies itself that found similar results using the same methods) but despite its shocking results and it being cited 105 times according to Google Scholar there are barely any newer studies that have replicated its methods that I can find, with the newest phallometric studies in this meta analysis (which is authorially biased and pro-pedo, but the studies it cites are legit) being from 2000. I guess that shows you how little society is interested in confirming it.)

Perhaps I'll make a post about it sometimes, but it seems to me like "Legal, moral, and social concerns aside, most men are attracted to (on some level even if suppressed) and would bang an attractive 14 year old if they could." is the semi-approved "everyone knows" limited hangout uncomfortable (for modern men) truth meant to obscure the additional but equally valid truth that if you replace "14 year old" with "8 year old" the numbers don't go down much at all and still constitute probably a majority and at least a significant portion of men (which is not to say most of them would necessarily pick the 8 year old over the 14 year old (though a significant minority, possibly up to 25% of men though likely smaller, apparently would), but they'd probably still pick her seems like).

You linked twice to the domain namzso.eu, which I don't believe is registered. Is this a typo, or some weird local domain resolution?

Whoops, sorry. That's terrible proofreading of mine in this case. It's supposed to be namazso (which is a public mirror) as it is in one link. (I actually had it as another one but that one is more obscure and linked to me so I changed but I guess got the one I changed it to wrong twice as I don't use it very often legitimately, I had to run off a bit after making the post, and the word isn't in my standard mental dictionary to correct.) The links have been fixed.

Judging by the URL structure, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a more private YouTube mirror (clearly it's so private it doesn't even exist).

Sorry, that's terrible proofreading of mine in this case. It's supposed to be namazso (which is a public mirror) as it is in one link. (I actually had it as another one but that one is in fact more obscure and linked to me so I changed but I guess got the one I changed it to wrong twice as I don't use it very often legitimately, I had to run off a bit after making the post, and the word isn't in my standard mental dictionary to correct.) The links have been fixed.

So apparently the words "black" and "white" are now banned in every context. A "black figure" in the night becomes a "dark figure" and instead of a woman's face going "white" it goes "pale".

"She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling."

This passage is modified to:

"She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck."

The sorts of thinkers that a child should be reading - in the revised editions, at least, where Elizabeth Bennet is an engineer ("Better than Brunel, they say!") Jane Bennet is a badass lawyer, and Georgiana Darcy is Black. Jane is rewritten to have more sass, while Elizabeth is rewritten to stop being so mean. Mr. Darcy is rewritten to be a better role model for men: modest, empathetic, and socially competent. The story is about how Elizabeth and Jane can have Pride, while Mr. Darcy enjoys lessons from them about the importance of not having Prejudice.

The Oakleys are a queer collective of artists who are travelling to California to escape the prejudice of dumb rednecks. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea will be the Wise Latinx Woman and the Sea and of course she successfully brings the fish back in the end, because women can be just as good fisher-persons as men and other genders.

That "correction" is not even consistent. How the hell are Conrad and Kipling Problematic, but Hemingway is fine?

I can't work out the logic here - "can't have three males in a row, must include female". Okay, but why dump Conrad?

"India and Kipling racist attitudes". I do see that, but why is Africa and Hemingway okay then, what with hunting big game?

Because Hemingway fought for the communists in the Spanish Civil War.

why is Africa and Hemingway okay then, what with hunting big game?

You may be overestimating the knowledge of professional "sensitivity readers".

But there has long been criticism of Hemingway for "toxic masculinity" (even if the term wasn't used then); the bullfighting, the drinking, the guns, the womanising. If a dweller-under-a-rock like me is aware of that, then surely the publishers are too?

I mean, this is just total ignorance on display. People who have no memory extending past ten minutes ago. It's not just the censorship that is bad, it's the stupidity and lack of knowledge of anything past their own nose that is dreadful. They know nothing except how to squawk out the Right Thought Right Speech. Even bloody ChatGPT would be better than this.

Most Americans haven't read Hemingway, many haven't read Kipling, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find in most environments someone who would be able to tell you the title of more than one of Conrad's books (I only know two off the top of my head but the second is due to my naughty sense of humor, not because I'm well read). Your degree of familiarity with these subjects is likely unusual even if you want to roll in the highly educated. Most modern westerners (Americans specifically, speaking anecdotally and with a fuzzy understanding of the numerous studies done on literacy here) simply don't read and when they do they pick YA lit or the latest in ex-SOG power fantasies. I genuinely believe you might be typical-minding the motives of your outgroup. Even if I'm completely wrong about that I would remind you of the admonition of TLP, "If you're watching it, it's for you" as well as Scott's addendum "It's bad on purpose to make you click".

Engagement with minor egregor-level organizations or corporations makes you legible to them and opens you up as a source of sustenance to these entities. Don't feed the (metaphysical) trolls, they live on the psychic plane and should be forced to come out and visit you in the waking nightmare of life if they want to eat your joy for breakfast.

A witch working the tills in a supermarket is now a "top scientist". A good inconspicuous cover.

It's also very damn condescending to women who work in positions like on the tills or being cleaners or shop assistants or any job that is paid an hourly wage and is not some middle-class college degree salaried position. What are children whose mothers aren't "top scientists" supposed to think about that patronising classism?

This has been a problem for feminists since Hilary Clinton remarked that she decided not to stay home, bake cookies, and have teas. How do you encourage women into making the choices feminists want, without making them feel coerced or insulted?

It's writing off working class women in pink collar/manual labour jobs. The 'heroine' in the first Knives Out movie was a nurse; no wonder in the second movie it had to be a black woman scientist (or her twin sister imitating her). It's just not good enough to be ordinary, only the kind of college-educated type counts. Maybe there's an article waiting to be written on that, how political theory feminism has abandoned ordinary women for the sociology department adherents.

Maybe there's an article waiting to be written on that, how political theory feminism has abandoned ordinary women for the sociology department adherents.

Sure, but I don't think I'd have anything more to add about class struggle than the 19th century political writers who put that name on the concept.

Well, except for the gender angle.

God might have initially made the classes "male" and "female", but he also made Stanton Allen, Lynde Bradly, Simon Ingersoll, John Deere, Henry Ford, [the programmer who will be responsible for the neural network that forces as many women out of the workforce as the list of men above did] and, perhaps as impactful as all of those men combined, [the man who will go on to invent the first viable artificial wombs].

So now, we have to go a little deeper... and what we find is that one of those genders is "the one that for all of history is easily replaceable and so is biologically geared to do most of the hard work" and "the one that the former works for because it is not so easily replaced". Or in other words, "labor" and "capital".

And I agree- I think there's an article waiting to be written about the two genders actually being "capital" and "labor", and transgenderism is best defined by what happens when you cross those lines. So if you're a man, you're trying to become the capital-associated valued-for-your-existence gender, and if you're a woman, you're trying to become the labor-associated valued-for-your-actions gender. (Weird how the popular concepts of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' have always pointed at this across every culture, even the matriarchies.)

The upshot is that the labor-to-capital transitioners are useful to capital against labor in ways capital-to-labor transitioners are not (under typical socioeconomic conditions- post-disaster golden ages are an exception to this), which is why it's trans-capital (biological men) getting elevated and why trans-labor (biological women) more often find themselves treated the same way as 'normal' labor is. Sure, trans-labor women don't actively set out to do that, but capital women see it as not only a choice, but a betrayal- after all, they're supposed to be the gender that loots labor, not joins them, and with all the [unfair] advantages they've provided them how could they refuse their offer?

And to top it all off, there's the TERF faction that ignores this dynamic on purpose (they're doomed partially because they did that, and partially because that 'RF' part means they can't get the quantity of labor they need to build capital of their own).

It's also the kind of thing nobody dares write (or research) because it's the kind of thing that makes everyone who reads it get "misgendered" to a degree (I'm pretty sure most women think Ayn Rand is a gender-traitor already... and, well, I rest my case) and also probably doesn't cover all the cases. But then again, this effect is at the population-level so maybe I don't have to.

What are children whose mothers aren't "top scientists" supposed to think about that patronising classism?

Eh, those cheapskates are probably using hand-me-down books or buying from thrift shops, no need to cater to them.

Indeed, I forgot: lower class people don't read. Of course the children reading these books aren't going to identify with "Mommy works as an office cleaner" type jobs 🙄 That's me and my kind all wiped off the map of relevance, but who cares about the poor save as a chance to do the Lady Bountiful bit?

Well feminism is more or less a class interest group for a certain kind of disproportionately female professional person, so it makes sense.

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