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