A canny publisher wouldn't quietly discontinue the "original" (ignoring the fact that the books have been revised before) editions. They're merely announce that they're a limited run and that stocks are running out...
https://reason.com/2022/07/05/rise-of-the-sensitivity-reader...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/08/stop-m...
The Guardian might be closer to your views. Fine. But why try to appeal to some notion of the center of society instead of just posting the link? I'd wager outside of HN and Twitter, the Guardian article is obnoxious and trite.
But yes, to say that somebody is a "Guardian reader" is say they are somewhere in the left to center-left part of the spectrum.
I wouldn't even call Guardian center-left. Center-left is like the furthest right it goes. The average article is well left of center-left.
From what articles I've seen from Reason, they seemed to clearly lean right to me, that's why your comment came across as odd, albeit technically correct (it is slightly closer to center than the Guardian). Your comment suggested to me that they are a lot more in the middle than that, though.
Encouraging the sort of thought police present here sets off all sorts of alarm bells.
I would argue this idea is fundamentally contrarian to a true liberal value set.
Being liberal (in the traditional sense) means being willing to engage with all sorts of content - especially content that you might not agree with.
Simply disagreeing with content is a poor, poor excuse for removing it from the public space. Instead it should be countered with a compelling set of ideas that help the public understand why you don't agree with it.
Basically - policing books like this is WRONG. It's exactly the same thought process that leads to people calling for the ban of books they don't like. It's an authoritarian thought process that doesn't actually provide a compelling argument against an idea to win - instead it claims victory by removing any trace of the argument in the first place.
It's whitewashing in the extreme. It's the good intention that paves the road to Fahrenheit 451. It's a fucking disgrace of an approach.
If you don't like what those books say... buckle up and explain that to your kids. Don't hide it from them. You aren't doing them any favors that way.
What is the difference between "thought police" and simple editing?
For example, if I wrote a book and used a word like "gypped", I would appreciate an editor saying "Change this word to something like 'swindled'. 'Gypped' is derived from 'Gypsy' and is inherently an insult to the Romani people." Is that the editor being the "thought police" or them doing their job well?
Is the objection to the Dahl changes simply that this is happening after the books were already published?
And why did the Cloud-men become Cloud-people? Why is it sexist to call a group of men men? Why was the Trunchbul's description changed from horse face to just face? How does that help? Some people are ugly. It's a byproduct of the genetic lottery.
Overall I think sensitivity training is nonsense. All it does is force people to censor themselves before speaking at the risk of getting canceled. From your example: I'm not a gypsy, but even if I was don't you think the correct reading of that would be something akin to, "Gypsies in the past used to swindle, but now we can be cognizant of that behavior and not do it, thus being a better version of ourselves." I don't see why offense would necessarily be taken. Getting offended by reminders of the past that we didn't even live seem like nonsense to me.
I'm not going to go through every example you mentioned because this comment shows the exact problem with that. You are putting the origin of the term on some fault with the Romani people. Have you examined why that is? Are you sure that they did actually swindle people more than other groups? If they did, why did they do it? Was that a byproduct of their position in society? I admittedly don't know much Romani history, so I can't speak to it directly. However I know Jewish people were similarly thought of as swindlers because they were often bankers, and they were often bankers because that was one of the few jobs non-Jewish society would allow them to have. The fault doesn't lie with the Jews, it lies with the rest of society.
That same concept applies elsewhere. Like white generally being used to represent good and black bad. That is such a fundamental aspect of our culture that it seems silly to try to change it, but the silliness originates in a lack of examination of the origin of those standards.
My point is exactly that by not washing out these words, we allow ourselves to have conversations about and raise exactly those points you mentioned. It allows us to think about the root causes of these terms and reflect on our own behavior.
> That same concept applies elsewhere. Like white generally being used to represent good and black bad. That is such a fundamental aspect of our culture that it seems silly to try to change it, but the silliness originates in a lack of examination of the origin of those standards.
Have you considered that the white/black differentiation of not about color but about what humans can perceive? To me it seems as if it would have been established because humans can see during the day vs. can't do so well at night. There are many reasons outside of race where light/dark, black/white make sense.
Why do we assume that these books are always accompanied by these conversations and these conversations wouldn't happen without these books? Many times kids read these books alone and no one ever talks to them about these words. Other times they are read in specific classes in school in contexts that aren't ideal to address these issues. An English teacher shouldn't have to spend all their time teaching history to keep these things in context. Let those conversations happen in social studies and history classes.
>Have you considered that the white/black differentiation of not about color but about what humans can perceive? To me it seems as if it would have been established because humans can see during the day vs. can't do so well at night. There are many reasons outside of race where light/dark, black/white make sense.
Yes, but whether the origin lies in racism or not isn't necessarily the only deciding factor. Just the question of whether it originates in racism is often enough to distract from a book. Like an editor might suggest an author change phrasing to avoid an unintentional rhyme or pun, sometimes a word should be change to avoid distracting the reader with considerations about whether a term is racist or not. The obvious example is the word "niggardly"[1]. Its etymology has nothing to do with race, but editors will still warn you against using it because the distraction is causes makes it a poor word choice in most situations even if the word itself is inoffensive.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
The value of a book is that you experience the world through a viewpoint that is different than your own.
That viewpoint may not be pretty, or fun, or something you agree with. Honestly - most of the books that I value challenge me by exposing me to something raw and unfiltered that I have not experienced myself.
---
That editor also doesn't have the experiences of the author, and changing word choice is changing the world that author is speaking about.
If the author's goal is to actually tell a genuine story that they connect with - to expose the world to their own thoughts and feelings and history - then changing those things is not trivial.
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I don't want to read a bland mash of "editor approved" stories. I want to read stories that are told by individuals, with all their quirks and intricacies.
I want to hear their opinions and words. Not some filtered, white washed, toned down version of them.
I want to make up my own mind about whether that story was valuable, or touching, or compelling, or horrible, or repelling. I don't want to never hear it in the first place because an editor decided they didn't like it and struck it out.
---
Basically - if the author doesn't give a shit and is just trying to sell the most books... fine. Go with the editor's picks for the words. Let them control the narrative and story. They have the most experience with selling books and their advice is probably decent.
If the goal is to write down a story that is meaningful to the author... don't change the author's words.
I'm not acting as thought police because I literally didn't police their thoughts - I left them the fuck alone.
---
I'm struggling to tell if your comment is satire or not, because it's pretty dense (and not in the "filled with words" kind of way).
But this is fundamentally what editing is which brings me back to the original question of how is "thought policing" different from editing. In what situations is it acceptable to edit words that someone wrote?
>I'm struggling to tell if your comment is satire or not, because it's pretty dense (and not in the "filled with words" kind of way).
I'm just trying to understand your position by asking questions.
When the author is present and engaged in the process.
Would Dahl care about these changes? We don't know. And that's the problem. It's no longer his book - it's the diluted version.
Alternatively - if the author is gone... when the story is no longer bound by copyright seems a sane approach. If you want to edit his words, make them compete with the original versions (or other folks edits). If the edits are genuinely better - they will win out.
Does this mean you would be fine with this process if it involved the author in this process and they approved of changes to a book decades after it was originally released?
>Would Dahl care about these changes? We don't know. And that's the problem. It's no longer his book - it's the diluted version.
>Alternatively - if the author is gone... when the story is no longer bound by copyright seems a sane approach. If you want to edit his words, make them compete with the original versions (or other folks edits). If the edits are genuinely better - they will win out.
Does this mean that in situations in which the author is dead and the books are still under copyright that you are ok with a publisher that decides to stop publishing the book, basically the Dr. Seuss situation?
That's what I'm not getting; this isn't an external entity, it's the people who own the rights. Shouldn't they be allowed to do what they want with their property, even if you disagree with it?
This book should be public domain. The author has been dead for 33 years. I honestly don't give a flying fuck about who "owns the rights" to this story at this point.
But my broader point is salient outside of this - I think you're removing value from stories by trying to remove ugly parts. The world is ugly, hiding that and papering over it doesn't do anyone any favors. It's also beautiful and wondrous. How can we experience the highs without the lows? The good without the bad?
How can we know what the past was like when we change it to suit our mood? When we wash it away and drown it out. When we cannot to learn from it, because we have no idea what it even was? When we have nothing but a caricature of it hanging out to dry, with the complexity and nuance tossed aside, wrung out from it like it was a rag to be cleaned.
Nothing is being taken away here, only new things are being added. That's what I don't understand; why would you be upset about that?
If you want to write a book that doesn't call folks ugly, go knock yourself out. I'm all here for that and I support you. You may or may not find success, and that's life.
If you want to edit the words of a story because you find them unpleasant... if you want to censor an author after his death because you might sell more books... Then I find you ugly. You are willing to throw away content you disagree with, instead of tackling it head on, so both ugly and cowardly.
Where does it stop? What content is "you approved" in a way that we can all live with?
If we happen to live in a spot where those words are also owned, and we've decided that I don't have the rights to copy and distribute the original words because of the greed of Disney... then I find you both ugly and authoritarian in ways that are uncomfortable. I strongly dislike you.
You retain access to the original work, and I get a watered down version that's easier for me to read to my kids at bedtime. Feels like a win/win?
Why don't I have the same freedom of expression in your mind that you seem so intent on protecting on behalf of a dead guy?
But I don't, and that's the point.
Also, you can currently purchase every single Roald Dahl book on Amazon for at most ~$10, so in so many ways it's incorrect to say you lose access to Roald Dahl's original works.
"Original books to be kept in print following criticism".
Seems like that solves all of your issues…
Does it? If a library has a copy of the offensive censored one, they might not buy the original. There's only a limited amount of money available, every censored copy purchased means one less good copy.
You should be able to publish Animal Farm or the Communist Manifesto without being "edited" until your book simply affirms the status quo.
You can.
And wouldn't it be censorship to prevent me from publishing a clean version of Huck Finn? If his uncensored story exists, and my publishing of an alternative version in no way removes those works from circulation, there's not really an argument in place that I'm censoring anything.
But ownership in any sense irrelevant. Being the owner of a work does not preclude censorship. If the author himself censors his work, as Roald Dahl did do, that is still censorship.
Regarding intellectual property? Yes, that would be perfectly fine. That's an entirely law based creation, not a moral one.
> And it would be morally wrong to make changes to something once I own it, if I wasn't the originator of the thing?
That is not and has never been the problem. If you are a parent of a young child, then you should absolutely be aware of the content your child is seeing/reading. I doubt you will find anyone that disagrees.
The problem is the revisionist approach to rewriting works to appease modern readers' (apparently delicate) sensibilities.
Personally, I see this as shielding readers from harsh truths of the past (and in some cases just reality). Mr. Dahl is long dead, and yet we feel like we need to rewrite his words to ensure we don't accidentally offend someone. I mean, can you imagine a child reading the word <looks around> "fat"? Or "female"? My god, they would never be the same.
I'll help you, you wrote: publishing a “clean” version
What if your version of clean is my version of horribly offensive?
Are you really unable to see that people might have different opinions of things? If that's really true, I fear your have been "cleaning" your content far far too much.
It isn't like you can't publish your book. Some publishers just decided to implement this workflow. I think it's pretty dumb but it definitely isn't anything new.
Edit: oh, someone else did go to the trouble to quote the problematic part of the parents link, but they, too, where downvoted.
Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.> Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.
God, what kind of a horrible person would take up such a job. Jesus Christ I mean just don't publish the book don't hire some couch sjw to "fix" it. I guess the author can still choose to not publish
Take a job as an editor? That is all this person is doing. It is something that publishers have done forever except this editor has a more narrow scope of what they are editing.
I get that the publishers want to preemptively strike down / appease those outragers, but Jesus Christ, to like reading and to become a full-time “holier than thought”-er. This is so depressing
Maybe there's someone around you can ask who Kipling is, but there's a good chance they either don't know the issues or are going to be unwilling to have a conversation about the historical context of racism with some child over a one sentence mention of Kipling. More likely, the child will continue reading the book gaining at most a recommendation for future reading.
I don't know if that small recommendation should be changed, but I don't see it's inclusion as some potential learning moment. The line has been in the book for thirty years, and I doubt it's taught many children about the historical context of racism.
The line has been in the book for thirty years, and I doubt it's taught many children about the historical context of racism.
(Probably because they judge Joseph Conrad by the outdated language he used, rather than by the ideas and values he presented. Because they are shallow fools.)
> A certain enormous buck n*** encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the n*** I used to dream for years afterwards.
Have a look at the later criticism and counter criticism. Chinua Achebe and then Cedric Watts in particular. It turns out to be complicated.
Wikipedia editors dedicate an entire article to one persons essay on racist themes in Conrad's book. While Karl Marx racism is ignored, dismissed as anachronism or rebuked as irrelevant. Even worthy of forgiveness, in light of the greater good his work bestowed on the world.
People say, “You claim to be Marxists, but did you know that Marx was a racist?” We say, “He probably was a racist: he made a statement once about the marriage of a white woman and a black man, and he called the black man a gorilla or something like that.” The Marxists claim he was only kidding and that the statement shows Marx’s closeness to the man, but of course that is nonsense. So it does seem that Marx was a racist.
Now if you are a Marxist, then Marx’s racism affects your own judgment because a Marxist is someone who worships Marx and the thought of Marx. Remember, though, that Marx himself said, “I am not a Marxist.” Such Marxists cherish the conclusions which Marx arrived at through his method, but they throw away the method itself—leaving themselves in a totally static posture. That is why most Marxists really are historical materialists: they look to the past to get answers for the future, and that does not work.
If you are a dialectical materialist, however, Marx’s racism does not matter. You do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought. Whether or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to whether or not the system of thinking he helped to develop delivers truths about processes in the material world. And this is true in all disciplines. In every discipline you find people who have distorted visions and are at a low state of consciousness who nonetheless have flashes of insight and produce ideas worth considering. For instance, John B. Watson once stated that his favorite pastime was hunting and hanging n*****s, yet he made great forward strides in the analysis and investigations of conditioned responses.
Huey P Newton
Nowhere in it do I find any sort criticism of the harms that were done. He describes the awful conditions in the Congo, but does not necessarily oppose them
The language he uses to describe the Africans is hostile at best. A poignant example is the part about the "insolent black head" peaking through the doorway while Kurtz lay dying
Not saying that Penguin should've removed his name because that's a different argument, but I have no idea how/where you're getting anticolonialism out of Conrad and I'd genuinely like to know
Edit: what did I get out of HOD? The death of God. Kurtz goes out to a corner of the Earth that was yet to be corrupted by capitalism. Marlow goes on a journey with no message in particular, he's a witness to the historical event
Similar example: Tintin in Congo is by today's standards absolutely racist, but reflects the area when it was published. The last decade the (Belgian) publisher was sued multiple times to try and force it off the shelves.
Also: calls to remove statues of King Leopold II (who committed horrible atrocities in "his" Congolese colony).
In both cases, why not leave access to the original books/statue/... intact but add an introductory section on why this is no longer appropriate today. Or place a contrasting statue, opposite King Leopold II, that embodies the struggle for independence / the colonial horrors / the blight that is racism / etc.
Overall it feels like there's a drive to remove "inappropriate" materials from society, instead of leaving them accessible as living proof of the mistakes that were made, and to provide backstory, context, and the "appropriate" contemporary view.
I share this view, but I also recognize that as a white dude, what is to me a learning opportunity about the things that folks (who mostly look like me) have done in the past isn't necessarily seen that way by everyone.
Unfortunately, even if you get a whole mess of folks of different backgrounds to have an honest and meaningful conversation about what to do about these many things, you aren't going to please everybody. The easiest solution is to just remove the materials rather than having to continuously justify leaving them available and reinterpret the historical context for them from a contemporary standpoint.
The easiest solution is to just remove the materials
It is racists, more than anyone, who wish to hide the historical roots of racism. That we might find it impossible to recognise it's impending revival.
Society has larger problems if a few kids books and some statues were all that was preventing a slide into violent racism.
2. Mao stated himself in his revolutionary speech that they would indoctrinate the next generation if the current one was unwilling, and this is a perfect example of that applied.
The only place a statue of him belongs is in an exhibit on the worst actions taken against fellow humans.
Leopold II isn’t far down the list from Hitler and Stalin.
Edit: I didn't want to litter the thread with copypaste, but my reply to the same question from another user was:
In 1960s Germany, students where so outraged by the absence of Nazism from their history curriculum that they turned violent. They rioted, bombed, and killed because they felt they where being denied their right to learn their recent history. And they blamed this on the fact that their teachers and parents had been Nazis and thought they where trying to erase their crimes. In a flash of cruel irony, the state's desire to shelter the students from political violence ignited it again in the streets and in the hearts of their students.That’s fine, but putting up a statue of someone is usually seen as celebrating them. We aren’t hiding from what Hitler or Stalin did, so why don’t we have statues of them?
Perhaps it is the reason why the Reichstag still today has a mailbox with Hitler's name on it.
Another really cool feature is the this hall of mailboxes which was designed by a french artist and includes a mailbox for every democratically elected official in German history. The hall also contains officials such as Hitler and Goebbels because they were democratically elected but they often have to repair the box because people visiting will often punch and kick their boxes
Mind you, Leopold was a horrible person, did horrible things and the Belgian monarchy and state have only recently begun to issue apologies for their atrocities. The debate on statues is settled, except in the minds of those who glorify wrongdoing.
The other difference is agency - there exists a legal successor to the belgian monarchy and a legal successor to the powers of the monarchy in the form of the belgian state. These have power today to acknowledge and right the wrongs of the past. In contrast, Georges Remi and Roald Dahl are both dead, unable to correct their errors.
Roald Dahl is a very interesting target here, editing "fat" out of the description of Augustus Gloop, I assume, was to be more gentle towards more portly folks. The character seemed to have a real eating disorder though, those are real issues that real people also suffer with. Does a discussion of bulimia and anorexia need to accompany Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Is it read at an age appropriate for that? Was this edit even material? It seems like the real theme is one of greed and humbleness and the eating disorder is just a foil.
This sounds like critical race theory. That gets people far more fired up than changing a few words in some kids books ever will.
No: I am not defending it. I am just explaining it.
No. All these books were fine for countless decades until the woke fad. By your own logic they would simply switch to trendy "unproblematic" books instead of continuing to sell classics -- but that would mean having actual principles. Also it would also mean going broke.
There are no masses of people getting bent out of shape about Oompa-Loompas demanding edits. Everybody knows and agrees those candy midgets had it coming.
It's fine if you retroactively disagree with this and wish you had time traveled back to undo the SJWs of the 1970s before they could start. I am not personally interested in litigating whether or not publishers should edit books. I don't care about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it wasn't a book I read often growing up and I don't care for either movie. I care least of all about what you think of a book. You do you, random stranger on the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Fact...
Publishers editing books of their own accord after the author is dead to please imaginary mobs -- something else entirely. Not great. Bad. Very bad. Regardless of the type of edit or politics involved.
In what sense? The ownership of the copyright is the ownership of the right to create derivative works and refrain from publishing the original. That's the law and the whole of the law.
Please stop saying "cope". It's a meaningless ad hominem, you're accusing GP of living in denial of something and trying to "cope" with it. Very dismissive.
Well, that is probably because I am being very dismissive. Please cope.
(I am not in favor of editing the books or banning books from libraries because they are uncomfortable to a segment of the population)
It's difficult, sitting in the midst of history, to predict what history will be.
This fact isn't some kind of attack on history; it's a reflection of the fact that the stories we tell children change to reflect our values.
This publisher is in the business of selling new copies of stories for children. It'd be surprising if they didn't change.
Great, as a parent you are free to read whatever books reflect your values to your children.
If the plight of the fictional Oompa Loompas (I don't recall slavery being justified in the book, but hey, your interpretation is as good as any, that's the wonderful thing about books) is upsetting to you -- do not read or expose your kids to it.
Expose them to books that reflect your values. Or even write new ones if you have any talent.
Editing existing books in this manner is never necessary or justified.
Sales are relevant, and sales are down. Another version that sells better has no impact on the copy on your shelf.
(... and if they can goose sales by generating market buzz via controversy, more power to them. A tip of my hat to playing folks like us against each other to put coin in their pockets. ;) ).
>"The rise in demand has been even more extreme at Wob, an online seller with a reported catalogue of two million. It has seen a 600 per cent surge in sales of Roald Dahl compared to the week before, while the author accounts for eight of the 10 top-selling children’s books since Saturday. Not bad for someone who died more than three decades ago."
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/roald-dahl-books-s...
Hate to say it, but I think this is the only reason why.
Thank the absurd copyright laws that grant a piece of work two lifetimes of money extraction (70 years after the death of whoever made it) for whoever "owns" it.
The publishing company holds the copyrights, they make a lot of money from Roald Dahl, but they're worried about the long term prospects for that revenue stream due to social change. Maybe they have additional feedback from retail buyers or customers. They decided to take an approach of retooling their product to fit with changing mores, and either went too far or made a poor PR job of releasing the information.
As far as I know, nobody asked for this. It's fairly well known (at least in the UK) that Dahl harbored many prejudices typical of his generation and demographics, and himself watered down some of them to make his books more salable, eg the original Oompa-Loompas were modeled on African pygmies.
If they were following public demand, then why did they get so thoroughly blindsided by public opinion? They were clearly listening to a handful of fringe nuts and didn't actually have their finger on the pulse of the mainstream zeitgeist.
They have now realized their error and are trying to backtrack from it.
I am not privy to their sales data; perhaps it looks terrible and they panicked. While there has been a big backlash, I don't think adult nostalgia is as profitable as childhood enthusiasm; parents might buy Roald Dahl for their kids, but there are plenty of other authors competing for their attention.
You seem to be projecting some idea of your own onto me.
Or they're capitalizing on the backlash by offering both options, with the added benefit that they'll get to A/B test what direction the market wants them to go.
> If they were following public demand, then why did they get so thoroughly blindsided by public opinion?
Hey, if that's what you want to believe...
Because the copyright holders (Netflix, in this case[0]), decided it would be more more profitable.
This wasn't the result of an outside public campaign; it was initiated by the rightsholders.
Netflix makes money if they can market an entire franchise (akin to the MCU, albeit less crossover). If they feel that a more "palatable" version of the books helps them do that, they will.
[0] The editing began before Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl company, but it continued under them and they're the ones who decided to publish them (and now walk back the decision)
To get people talking about these books again with the intend of increasing sales.
The publishing industry has been taken over by a certain kind of person. The same kind of mildly privileged, free of adversity person who is looking for something to suffer from and fight against who is pushing this kind of "woke" nonsense all over the place.