I take that back. Dugin is more censored. You can't buy his works anywhere in the U.S and they can only be obtained through piracy. Only commentaries on his works are available in the west and not the original texts.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-transgender-industrial-...
I'd say "wonder why that is?", but everyone here knows exactly why that is. He's not fooling anybody, and neither are you.
Of course, it is true that his books are unavailable on Amazon and Amazon-owned sites. I wish I knew what caused this, or how to find out.
https://arktos.com/people/alexander-dugin/
They look like complete nonsense, so I'm not surprised if no American publisher wants to buy the distribution rights.
To what end?
The book is available for free 3-day shipping at Barnes and Noble and it’s one of the “most censored books of the last 30 years?” Sorry that your favorite online retailer decided not to carry the latest ethnonationalist anti-semitic screed.
The comments naming _The Transgender-Industrial Complex_ by Scott Howard aren't flagged/dead, just like the comments linking the major American book retailer with the book on sale, or the original publisher.
> The Dahl estate owned the rights to the books until 2021, when Netflix bought them outright for a reported $686 million, building on an earlier rights deal. The American streaming service now has overall control over the book publishing, as well as various adaptation projects that are in the works.
I suspect they're hoping netflix will make movies based on his books. Netflix seems pretty sensitive to twitter opinions. They're probably trying to throw a bone to the twitter mob to make it less likely any new movies get "cancelled".
I'm sure they'd rather have less controversy around Dahl's work. And its pretty easy to imagine Dahl's estate making the 'conservative' choice and allowing these edits if there's even a risk of their netflix deal falling apart.
Not only can you make money while ignoring Twitter — but you can make money by ignoring Twitter screeching. Eg, by hiring Johnny Depp rather than engaging in misandry by supporting false accusations against him.
Hopefully, WarnerMedia eventually gets the memo — and stops discriminating against men while supporting abusers like Amber Heard (female) or Ezra Miller (non-binary).
I think a lot of companies have forgotten they need to treat people based on the content of their character rather than race/sex/gender/etc.
If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outrage over Hogwarts Legacy increased sales of the game. I don’t know if I would have heard about it at all if not for the outrage machine.
Louis CK did a show here in Melbourne a few months ago and the show was sold out. For better or worse, being canceled doesn’t seem like a life sentence.
The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population. Even if 100% of them loudly proclaimed anything anywhere on any social media platform, it would barely affect anything simply because they’re so small compared to the rest of the population. This is in the same sense that only a minority of the population are severely immunocompromised to the point where Covid is still a threat, and the lack of masking and other safety precautions actually makes their lives significantly worse but because they’re so small their voices literally don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
That is to say I don’t attribute the lack of irl effect to social media but due to demographic size. There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.
> There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.
There's an old quote - "Never assume a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. Its the only thing that ever has."
The radical left - for all that they're championing the rights of a small group of people, has been very effective at kicking up a fuss about diversity, inclusion and trans rights. It doesn't feel like a tiny fringe movement:
- Apparently most researchers and professors at a lot of universities now need to make "diversity and inclusion statements". Stanford is banning a lot of language. So is Google and other big companies.
- Authors like Roald Dahl are having their work retroactively edited to "meet modern norms".
- The pushback against this stuff is becoming a major rallying call for America's right. Now the american conservatives accomplished most of their big policy objectives in most states (concealed carry, banned abortions, etc). What can they use to "energize the base"? Fighting this stuff is being turned into a tool to get conservatives to the polls. (Source: The economist podcast.)
I'm not sure what the lived experience has become for trans people - but the fight for trans rights (as part of the fight for diversity and inclusion) seems to have made massive waves all over the place.
> The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population.
The only people affected by your decision to buy Hogwarts Legacy are the developers involved. I promise you, JK Rowling won't notice the extra 50 cents in her pocket if you buy, or don't buy the game.
If you want to support trans people, do that by supporting them. The lives of trans people are unaffected by your steam purchasing decisions.
Those people banned every single dissenting opinion and after a while started to think that their opinions are way more popular than they actually are.
"Everybody around here thinks that JKR is bad - so surely our boycott is going to be successful - I don't see anyone who disagrees."
If anything - this ridiculous hate campaign against JKR could decrease the support for trans people.
This was done by his estate, as a way to sell more books and/or to get it made as a netflix series. Capitalism drove this decision, not 'wokeness'
actually, i take that back: most people don't know about j.k. rowling's opinions. and even so over the last couple decades they've become much more aware and accepting of trans people.
There is not a single person anywhere in the world who is negatively affected by Hogwarts Legacy.
It's a kind of "movie about movie making or movie makers wins Oscar".
I've seen actual physical protests with people on the streets with placards that appear to get less attention from the press. It's incredibly lazy!
I'm not generally a contrapoints fan, but I really enjoyed the video she made about her experience with this on twitter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8
Or the TED talk "How one tweet can ruin your life" from 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI
We studied To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible when I was in highschool. I remember thinking how barbaric and despicable "mob justice" was. I didn't understand it, and I assumed I never would - I thought it was something we reference from history. But twitter really has brought the mob justice style witch hunts back.
I don't understand how anyone can claim its not a real phenomenon. Being cancelled is obviously quite a real experience for the people it happens to.
It wasn't in the file I have of upcoming games until that happened, so you can definitely also include me. It'll be on Switch later in the year, I'll be waiting for then.
15 years ago people were crowing that the "success" of anti-gay-marriage bills in California proved that gay people had lost the culture war. Oh the irony when that very same bill was used to legalize gay marriage nationwide. I see the "success" of Hogwart's Legacy in the same light, it will be an embarrassment in the side of WB for years to come. I'm an optimist though, maybe I'm wrong and trans people will be genocided out of existence. I hope I'm not wrong, though.
wouldn't her TERF friend publish a defense of her because her TERF friend is a TERF, not because j.k. rowling is bothered?
not that i doubt she is bothered, she's as hopelessly addicted to twitter as the people who hate her. it's how she became a TERF.
twitter is a game. it's played by posting. you score 1 point by getting praise from good people, 2 points by getting scorn from bad people. points can be exchanged for a sense of identity. and so people get sharper and sharper, and their concerns get more and more indesipherable to people who aren't playing the game.
Do they? They sided with Chappelle. They gave Norm Macdonald a talk show.
I think Netflix does a fairly good job trying to cater to everyone, woke and not.
I don't agree with these changes, but this argument makes no sense.
I'd wager that children's books represent a much larger percentage of the books the typical US citizen reads in their entire lifetime than anyone would like to believe.
If true, this would elevate their importance enough for matters like historical accuracy to be worth considering.
What an awful thing to say. It would be different if your comment taught us something, but it's little more than a well-written diss.
Imagine how you'd feel if the word "Men" were replaced by various ethnic groups, while still maintaining its accuracy.
At one time it was true to say that women were naturally bad at chess.
My wife supported me financially for close to five years. It's why I was able to learn ML so thoroughly. Maybe some men would view her as the competition, but I'm fortunate to be in a relationship where we don't feel threatened by the other. I recommend other men try to find this as well, since it's quite nice.
It's also nice to have a family where the roles are well-defined and reliable, and there's nothing wrong with wanting one over the other. It's personal preference, which you can't really control. But saying that men are bad at forming robust social safety nets is different than qualifying your statements with "some" or "most."
I'll be the first to say that it's a huge double standard to expect most men to be emotionally closed off most of the time, whereas women are expected to be more emotional in relation to men. But you're phrasing this in a highly negative way.
The women who don't become homeless often resort to sex work. It tends to be more difficult for men to do this in a financially successful way. Men are statistically more prone to violent crime; granted, and testosterone deserves to be scrutinized in its role regarding this. As for the addiction claim, I'd be curious to see the data, since my anecdata suggests mostly equal rates. https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/substance... claims the situation is a bit more nuanced:
> For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder. In addition, women may be more susceptible to craving and relapse, which are key phases of the addiction cycle.
More generally, if you're going to paint various segments of the population with negative traits, it's important to bring data to the discussion which backs up your assertions. That way it informs the reader rather than polarizing them.
That said, if you'd written a children's book, I wouldn't lobby for it to be changed. I'd buy different books, or explain it in context.
As a result I'd expect a lot of single men with below average income and a lot of single women with above average income who struggle to find worthy men. Statistically it is impossible meet two condition at once: 1. women on average earn at leas as much as men 2. In a family a husband has income higher than a wife.
I totally agree - my kids had Berenstain Bear's books (as random gifts and such) and I would avoid reading them because in particular the way they portrayed Papa Bear as a bumbling fool grated on my nerves. He's like a Homer Simpson without the heart. I'm certain mothers also don't appreciate the way Mama Bear is portrayed as always in the kitchen and the ultimate authority figure.
If these books were updated to modern sensibilities I wouldn't have a problem reading them to my kids. As it stands, I skipped them and they weren't a part of my children's upbringing. I don't mind.
(Interestingly, my own parents took that approach with the Berenstain Bears for exactly the reason you describe.)
But I'd prefer to either read something to my kids as originally written or not read it all. Or as they get older, read the original but with a parental aside on how it was a product of its time. (Might as well make it an opportunity for a brief history lesson.)
I'm definitely not a fan of this "force push" approach to updating established older works.
Which is probably why the Dahl copyright holders are doing this(1). Not to appease some sort of modern sensibilities, but to make money. Apparently they think the investment will pay off.
(1) a less money-focused reason could be because they truly believe these stories deserve to be shared in the future, and see the things they changed as barriers to that goal while of little import to the message. But again, they think this step will "pay off" - in continued popularity / enduring part of culture then.
Yeah, I agree that the copyright holders are acting rationally, but long term this will destroy our democracies. A key premise of Fahrenheit 451 is that they end up with sanctioned book burnings because of something boring like political correctness.
Seems like your problem here is easier to solve without messing with the other writers and potentially confusing your child about what, say, a Ronald Dahl book is actually like.
Everybody's family is different, but my childhood self would have been pretty disillusioned to discover my parents censoring books on my behalf. I really can't see how that's a good lesson for the kids, especially when you can just buy contemporary works that are as PC/woke (or not) as you want them to be.
Especially if it's just 0.001% of the content.
If a work of fiction is changed to not imply women are meant to stay at home and men are meant to go to work, doesn't that show that, to those offended, on some level those implications are core to what makes that work that work?
None of these changes drastically affect the storylines, character arcs, unique characteristics, etc of the stories. If the a book saying the N word despite it not being central to the story is so important to you then it doesn't seem like you care about the book so much as you care about saying the N word
The problem is that Dahl’s work isn’t an essay, or a treatise. It’s whimsical. It’s art! The words chosen, were chosen because they were the words that worked.
Say these two extracts out loud:
> “You mean Prince Pondicherry?” said Grandpa Joe, and he began chuckling with laughter. “Completely dotty, said Grandpa George. “But very rich,” said Grandma Georgina
> “You mean Prince Puducherry?” said Grandpa Joe, and he began chuckling with laughter
They mean essentially the same thing, but they feel quite different. The rhythm of “Prince Pondicherry” has a bounce to it, “Prince Puducherry” is more like walking down hill.
You might make the argument that this trade of is worth making, but it is in fact a trade of.
Old works of fiction also belong in historical narrative because it helps give us a window into popular culture at the time.
(Not that this should matter since my argument should stand on its own, but I’m not white. I just want to preempt any accusations.)
It’s not constructive to stick children’s heads into the ground, especially when that self-chosen ignorance will lead to much worse societal outcomes long term.
My name was romanized in a incorrect way a hundred years ago and technically the entire English speaking world mispronounces it. I deal with it by not being a goddamn baby about it. And yes, I figured this out when I was 10.
The problem is, changes are made simply because a fictional female character happens to stay at home. Which is fine if she wants that, or it happens in the story.
I don't get why parents are so untrusting of their children's ability to think, that they censor and change language found in old books. Are they worried their kids will become monsters if they're not spoon-fed censored content?
Many of us grew up surrounded by unchecked stereotypes, yet many of us have zero problems with women doing whatever they want to do.
They are worried they will imitate or become a character in a fictional fantasy
I skipped it when reading the story to my children.
I too would skip reading such material to my child. But it wouldn’t bother me for the child to read it themself when they are older. It’s a funny psychological thing: reading aloud to someone risks carrying some perceived level of approval. A child reading it themself can toss the ideas around in their head, take time to process it, question it etc. and surely they can tell that the prose is whimsical and not serious.
“All white people are slave owners”
“All black people love watermelon”
“All jews love money”
“All indians love curry”
etc.
Even if you’re not picking on a single group, you can still be perpetuating untrue (and even potentially harmful) stereotypes.