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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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A follow up to the Roald Dahl censorship story from last week for those who haven't been following UK news. Apparently the publisher as (partially) backed down and agreed to keep the original books in print, along with the modernised versions. Apparently criticism from the Prime Minister, the queen, global authordom and the French was enough to swing it.

For now. But they've betrayed their intentions. They own the IP, this is what they want, and they'll bide their time until they get another chance, or they think nobody is watching. It's what other organizations have done.

How do you decide this is a case of what they always intended instead of drumming up controversy to get attention?

If they were acting out of moral concern, why back down in the face of opposition? I suppose there's a chance that they simply hadn't considered the consequences of announcing they would do this, and I don't want to deny that people can sometimes just collectively fail to use their brains on accident, but that seems even more unlikely.

Moreover, they're book publishers. Are we to think they haven't had debates about this kind of thing for ages? I doubt this is the case either.

So either they ignored a debate that would have a very high chance of playing out in their business, or they tried capitalizing on controversy to sell books. When was the last time Roald Dahl even got in the news?

Not moral concern, moralist concern. It is performative and the reaction was way more negative than they expected - even the Queen gave them shit! I think you are right about it being a publicity stunt, but I strongly - like farm strongly - doubt that whoever was in charge of this move was counting on or even considered a negative reaction. They expected it to go like it has a dozen times before - anyone who didn't like it would be called a wrongthinker and hounded into silence, possibly with threats to their livelihood.

It is performative and the reaction was way more negative than they expected - even the Queen gave them shit!

I don't see how you say it is performative if they, as you argue, believe what they are doing something moral. It's not performative for me to do X if I think it is a moral thing to do, even if I don't necessarily think about it fully when I do it.

Sure it is. Goodwife Hetty sees young Henry and Constance canoodling by the river, even though Constance is betrothed to Matthew, the ostler's son. She tells her priest about it out of moral concern, but she tells everyone else about it performatively - the moral concern is just an excuse to raise her own standing in the community.

That's possible. It's also possible Hetty is zealous is enforcing the morality of her community, and informing everyone she's seen a bad thing happen would be her way of ensuring everyone knew of Henry and Constance's immoral actions.

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