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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".)

sexualised image of a child

I was curious about this (as I'm always up for looking at a sexualized image of a child) having not heard of it before, looked it up, and must say that even by the standards of 2014 (which in my view quite frankly weren't that modest), calling such an image "sexualized" seems to me to be a major stretch. There's literally not a single part of the child's skin exposed but that on her face and a small amorphous portion of her leg near her knee and most of her clothed body is essentially entirely obscured by long hair and a giant boa. If it's sexualized, then so is my grandma going to bingo.

There's been more sexualized stuff on Nick Jr. (Stephanie is a legendary pedo fap icon, even making an appearance in the pedo visual novel that is in my username. They wiped a good portion of the clips of her in her classic outfit, which was later changed for obvious upskirt reasons, off of YouTube though, so that's the best example I could find at a glance. It's actually not strictly from Nick Jr. either as it is apparently a clip from Icelandic TV before the Western adaptation of the show, but she wears the same outfit in at least one season of that and in many cases exposes herself more (along with doing the same song and dance featured in the clip).)

Trying to say this in the least accusatory/inflammatory way possible, but I find it interesting how the posters here who are at least somewhat anti-woke and presumably anti-pedo (at least in explicit communication) can rant all day about how woke types are supposedly so silly for being on such a hair trigger about anything that might be right-coded, trying to get some truck driver or whoever fired for using the "OK" hand sign, and yet not look at what they so often decry as "sexualized" in regards to children and think that they're maybe doing basically the same thing, overreacting to every minor possible-but-probably-not-even-and-if-even-still-barely-anything instance of their chosen "worst thing imaginable" (or perhaps "bitch eating crackers"), which maybe explains the oversensitivity) issue (which for the woke left is equivalently racism). For example, this is another commercial from Korea that was also criticized as inappropriately sexualizing the young girl in it and it also just seems like not much at all to me.

Of course, I'm basing my opinions off of actual empirical evidence of what might actually trigger a sexual response in the types of people who might sexually respond to media of children were it sexualized (like me), which I suppose is not necessarily the standard your average "normie" is going to use, and yet it does seem to me to be a better one. After all, if "sexualization" doesn't have anything to do with actually being sexy or at least trying, then what is it?

Conversely, to me certain segments from this network television program did in fact depict some quite sexualized/sexy children (that is, I watched them more than once, occasionally at certain times) and yet I didn't seem to hear a peep of protest about them (except on /pol/, where the complaints were about the interracial pairings of some of the kids). (There is a search engine suggestion for "dancing with the stars juniors controversy" but it seems to be about people disagreeing with the final winner of "Disney Night".)

It very much often strikes me as similar to left-wing outrage: frequently random, illogical, and disproportionate with the offense even from their point of view, in my perspective. (Yet, much like on woke venues in regards to anything right-wing, due to how much even suggesting "This isn't even that [X]." tends to get you accused of actually being a crypto [X]ist (which in my case doesn't apply as I am an open [X]ist here), I am essentially the first person that I know of to bring this issue up in neutral company at all.)

Edit: Sorry for the sloppy proofreading. Two links have been fixed if you couldn't figure out they were just YouTube videos.

You linked twice to the domain namzso.eu, which I don't believe is registered. Is this a typo, or some weird local domain resolution?

Whoops, sorry. That's terrible proofreading of mine in this case. It's supposed to be namazso (which is a public mirror) as it is in one link. (I actually had it as another one but that one is more obscure and linked to me so I changed but I guess got the one I changed it to wrong twice as I don't use it very often legitimately, I had to run off a bit after making the post, and the word isn't in my standard mental dictionary to correct.) The links have been fixed.