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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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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.