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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.

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.

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.

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