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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.

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".)

"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.

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.