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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32440 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.

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.

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