[HN Gopher] 21st-century editors should keep their hands off of ...
___________________________________________________________________
21st-century editors should keep their hands off of 20th-century
books
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 177 points
Date : 2023-06-12 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Copyright is supposed to protect and promote cultural works. When
| a copyright holder stops doing that, and instead actively makes a
| work harder to find in its original form, their rights to that
| work should be revoked.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| This already happened for a long time with translations, I assume
| because it's easier to get away with mistranslation of originals.
| It's common to translate a phrase into the most current version
| of the phrase in the target language and to update the
| translation regularly. To me this always felt very noticeable,
| doing this requires an impressive level of entitlement to take a
| great work of literature and add your own artistry on top of it.
| I vaguely imagine you should get hard prison time for violating
| great works of literature like that, but that's just me. It's
| akin to defacing paintings or statues to hide genitalia which
| happened in the past.
| watwut wrote:
| > It's common to translate a phrase into the most current
| version of the phrase in the target language
|
| That is correct way of translating and not an violation. If the
| original author wrote the book with contemporary style,
| pleasant to read to people at the time, proper translation will
| produce contemporary text.
|
| There is no reason to use archaisms or outdated language in
| translation if the original author was not using archaisms or
| outdated language.
| tivert wrote:
| > This already happened for a long time with translations, I
| assume because it's easier to get away with mistranslation of
| originals. It's common to translate a phrase into the most
| current version of the phrase in the target language and to
| update the translation regularly. To me this always felt very
| noticeable, doing this requires an impressive level of
| entitlement to take a great work of literature and add your own
| artistry on top of it.
|
| Isn't that "impressive level of entitlement" a _basic
| requirement_ for translation? It does take artistry to make a
| translation. Even if you 're not going for a literary result,
| there are always going to be meanings that exist (or can be
| expressed efficiently) on one language but not the other. Then
| there are idioms and cultural references.
| vidarh wrote:
| Indeed, to the point where translations are often known
| relative to their translator because the translator is often
| part of what makes a given edition of a work.
| burnished wrote:
| My understanding was that this is a requirement of translation,
| specifically because many things do not translate literally?
| Like wordplay, or idioms, or euphemisms.
| googlryas wrote:
| Children don't need "historical honesty". They need simple tales
| that help them understand the world around them and spark their
| imagination. No one is saying to burn all 20th century prints of
| Dahl books, but I don't really understand why the stories can't
| be tweaked a little to more aligned with the world we live in
| now.
|
| I can't find much reason to alter Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming
| though, since those books are intended for adults.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Write a different book. There's no reason to believe the
| stories as they already existed aren't "aligned" with our
| world, just your own sensibilities. This is trivially reflected
| by the changes suggested.
| nradov wrote:
| You're projecting, and presenting a false choice. As a child I
| never needed or wanted such simple tales. Nor did they help me
| understand the world: rather the opposite.
|
| But perhaps your childhood was different.
| googlryas wrote:
| Boy, speak about projection. Believe it or not, but there was
| a time when you didn't know everything about the world, and
| even simple concepts needed to be explicitly taught to you.
| Flatcircle wrote:
| It's a line that shouldn't be crossed imho. Even if a work of
| art features offensive language or ideas, the art should still
| exist in its original form like the creators intended. To
| change art based on modern standards has been done before, when
| the clergy covered up nude paintings by "fig leafing" them, it
| was later seen for what it was. subsequent conservative social
| norms interfering with the purpose of the original art.
|
| It's absurd, it's tacky, and it won't age well.
| slg wrote:
| >Even if a work of art features offensive language or ideas,
| the art should still exist in its original form like the
| creators intended.
|
| Often these edits _are_ about preserving the creator 's
| intent. If an author used a word that was inoffensive a
| hundred years ago and is now offensive, it is more in line
| with the author's intent to change the word to the modern
| inoffensive equivalent than to preserve the offensive one
| that now conveys something different from what it meant to
| the author.
| xg15 wrote:
| We don't use that kind of reasoning in other fields though.
|
| I.e. preserving historical architecture is _not_ about
| restoring the building to how we believe it was supposed to
| be shown - otherwise, the Egyptian pyramids would have
| gotten back their white finish and gold tip long ago.
|
| Instead, we recognise that those buildings are from a
| different time and try to highlight the feats _of that
| time_ that make them remarkable still today.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _the Egyptian pyramids would have gotten back their
| white finish and gold tip long ago._
|
| GP isn't even advocating that. They're advocating redoing
| the finish with marble, or with frameless glass windows,
| because that would be the modern equivalent to what those
| buildings were to people in ancient Egypt.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| IMO, we should trust that audiences are capable of
| understanding the context of the time. If anything must be
| done, it is teaching the concept of the euphemism
| treadmill, and that events, conflicts, or works of
| literature can change the connotation of words. It's also
| important to understand that innocent words today could
| become taboo tomorrow, and not through any insensitivity or
| unawareness on the author's part.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| What about 20 years from now, when the current offensive
| word becomes just tacky, and then 20 years later, an
| euphemism? Many words end up stuck on such multi-
| generational loop.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| This assumes it's possible to fully understand an author's
| intent. Story and plot is part of it, sure, perhaps the
| most easily interpretable part. But there are myriad other
| concerns, the rhythm and musicality of the language,
| alliteration, presenting something as known or unknown to
| the POV characters, and cultural specificity.
|
| I would not want my work rewritten in any manner after my
| death, if still associated with my name. Folks are free to
| write their own materials that properly reflect their
| vocabulary values. And if they're any good, the free market
| will surely do its work.
| slg wrote:
| >This assumes it's possible to fully understand an
| author's intent. Story and plot is part of it, sure,
| perhaps the most easily interpretable part. But there are
| myriad other concerns, the rhythm and musicality of the
| language, alliteration, presenting something as known or
| unknown to the POV characters, and cultural specificity.
|
| Sure, and maybe the author had deeply held beliefs about
| typefaces and would be appalled that a user can now
| choose their own typeface on a Kindle. At a certain
| point, it is a little silly to try to fully understand
| and preserve every intent of the author. But a character
| going from good person to a racist due to nothing but the
| aging of their language is a pretty dramatic alteration
| of an author's intent that is easy to identify and
| rectify.
|
| >And if they're any good, the free market will surely do
| its work.
|
| Do realize this is exactly what's happening here? These
| new versions are happening because of capitalistic
| reasons in that it is harder to sell a book that has a
| bunch of accidental bigotry in it.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| > But a character going from good person to a racist due
| to nothing but the aging of their language is a pretty
| dramatic alteration of an author's intent that is easy to
| identify and rectify.
|
| The character is not going from a good person to a racist
| a due to their language. The character (in my scenario)
| remains entirely unchanged. What _has_ changed is your
| (and most modern reader's) _perception_ of the character.
|
| Which is part of the point. Characters exist in the world
| they inhabit, not yours or mine or anyone else's. A huge
| part of the artistic experience is reinterpreting and
| reframing the meaning of a work as society develops.
|
| Emotional and moral complexity is a goal in literature,
| not a bug.
|
| > Do realize this is exactly what's happening here? These
| new versions are happening because of capitalistic
| reasons in that it is harder to sell a book that has a
| bunch of accidental bigotry in it.
|
| Again I must gently disagree. First off, it's not
| "accidental bigotry". It's bigotry reflective of the time
| in which it was written. Today in America we find it very
| difficult to view someone who uses the N word as an
| unequivocally "good" person. Was that the case in 1830?
|
| Re: publishers releasing revised copies -- they're a
| business, and business often undercuts artistic intention
| for a profit. So it goes. If you want to say "I have no
| problem with rights holders revising (someone else's)
| work to which they hold a copyright, to remove
| challenging remnants of the past and better reflect the
| vocabulary of today, so they sell better" -- I agree 100%
| that's well within their rights (however much I dislike
| that state of affairs).
|
| But please don't attribute their edits to "preserving
| authorial intent". That's putting (even more) words in
| the mouths of the dead.
| damnesian wrote:
| >Children don't need "historical honesty"
|
| I'm inclined to think they do, actually.
|
| Often the revisions soften the weirdness or offensiveness of
| outdated mores, beliefs and customs, but by blurring them out,
| you miss a teaching opportunity: explaining how things were,
| how things are now, and why they changed.
|
| It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few
| hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's
| literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain,
| prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do.
| Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand
| the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.
| googlryas wrote:
| Kids eventually need to understand those things, and maybe
| once they're old enough it could make sense to buy a 20th
| century edition and try to spot the differences and figure
| out why they were changed. But before that can happen, kids
| need to understand the basics first. If I'm teaching someone
| how to play chess, I'm not going to introduce an en passant
| until they've established they understand the more common
| ways in which a pawn moves.
|
| Is there any indication that children who were read those
| stories from hundreds of years ago ended up kind, caring,
| mentally resilient, etc...with whatever traits parents want
| to instill in their children today?
| niccl wrote:
| > and maybe once they're old enough it could make sense to
| buy a 20th century edition ...
|
| Always supposing you _can_ still buy a 20th century
| version. Maybe I wouldn't feel so ambivalent about this
| editorialising if the editors committed to keeping both
| versions current
| googlryas wrote:
| Roald Dahl books have sold over 300 million copies
| worldwide. The stories have been digitized, archived,
| transcribed, and photocopied an uncountable number of
| times.
|
| I think we will have no problem finding the 20th century
| versions.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| But we will, and rather soon, because everyone who still
| has a physical or digital copy will be thinking the same
| thing you said - "oh, it's been printed in so many copies
| that there won't be a problem for you to find one" - as
| they shred their hard drive or throw the paper book into
| the fireplace.
|
| Just ask a random librarian or archivist how easy it is
| to find copies of local newspapers from 20+ years ago.
| Hint: often it's not possible, as the last library
| trashed its microfiche, in a mistaken belief that someone
| else surely digitized it already.
| googlryas wrote:
| I understand what you're saying, but that simply will not
| happen with something as widespread as Roald Dahl.
| Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not
| been. What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on
| the used book market would start trending upwards for the
| 20th century version, and at some point someone would
| decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the
| demand.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Sure, but then you don't want to rate a broad
| trend/policy by how it impacts the most high-profile
| cases, which by definition are mostly immune from
| negative consequences due to their notoriety. Move past
| the likes of Roald Dahl, towards less known authors, less
| widely spread works, and soon enough you may find works
| that are still culturally important, but not enough to
| secure their long-term survival.
|
| > _Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not
| been._
|
| To a degree, yes. But then it's also been long recognized
| that local newspapers are a critical, extremely valuable
| window into the past. That alone justifies keeping
| archived copies - and I'm not talking about filling every
| libraries full of archival copies of major newspapers,
| but rather couple institutions keeping microfilms or
| digitized versions. As it turns out, those institutions
| end up assuming that the burden of preservation belongs
| to someone else, and this diffused responsibility leads
| to those "archived works" being lost forever.
|
| > _What would happen in Dahl 's case is the price on the
| used book market would start trending upwards for the
| 20th century version, and at some point someone would
| decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the
| demand._
|
| Maybe, but I'm not sure if this holds in general, even
| for works of high notoriety. There may be _some_ interest
| for the old edition, but if the new edition is _good
| enough_ , there might be too few a people interested in
| the old one to make a reprint profitable.
|
| Or at least this is how it was before. These days, the
| cost of storing and delivering digital copies is near-
| zero, print-on-demand works even for niche works and very
| small audiences - but there's also so much content that
| the work could disappear simply because nobody cared
| about that work _in particular_ enough to bother keeping
| a copy. Bytes may be cheap, but human attention is not.
| watwut wrote:
| The most important lesson when giving kids fiction books is
| to teach them that these are fiction and not a historically
| accurate anything. That they can not take historical lessons
| from fictional words and assume real world worked the same
| way as the depicted in kids books. It is literally wrong to
| teach kids anything else.
|
| It is absolutely fine to tell the kids truth about history,
| including the fact that these or that popular people were
| widely cruel, racist or sexist or defrauded or whatever. But
| that is something completely different then giving the kid
| fictional story with schematic characters and claim that kid
| should learn facts about historical society from it.
|
| > It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few
| hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's
| literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain,
| prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do.
| Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand
| the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.
|
| Fun fact: censorship in the past was actually the thing. For
| example, German censorship during WWI made it unprintable to
| reference death in kids literature.
|
| Second, quite a lot of what was collected as fairly tales was
| not intended for toddlers and little four years old children
| the way we use them. Not just because of violence, they are
| just not structured for small kids, they are overly long and
| boring to them. They were for older children, stories then
| older people/youth told each other for fun. And in the past,
| what kids were actually pushed into were fairly often
| educational texts with clear moral learnings.
|
| They did not had movies in the past. There was no Marvel, no
| Game of Thrones. And quite a lot of these stories are
| contemporary equivalent of Game of Thrones - except shorter.
| Aloha wrote:
| A good editor can make a okay book, great - a bad editor can
| make a great book bad.
|
| These edits (as shown in the article) seem to do more to make
| good books bad - if the edits enhance sensitivity or not, is an
| aside.
| bl_valance wrote:
| It is absolutely insane that we are allowing the destruction of
| culture in this manner. Can people not leave works for what they
| were? What has happened to today's society that everything has to
| be sunshine and rainbows, they can't enjoy anything without being
| enraged by something they don't agree. Should we only consume
| media that we agree with? What a boring life that is.
| slg wrote:
| >But, in general, the best way to respond to language that some
| or most readers would find inappropriate is not with unexplained
| revisions but to surround original works with context, in the
| form of critical introductions as well as annotations in new
| editions, wherever possible.
|
| I agree with this, however at a certain point we have to be
| pragmatic and avoid the perfect being the enemy of the good.
| These works are often never put into context. Sometimes that is
| because a child is reading the work themselves. Sometimes it is
| because the government is actively trying to make it illegal to
| provide that context.
|
| Therefore I wonder if it is just easier to remove a word here and
| there when it is mostly irrelevant to the story. Changing
| "natives" to "locals" or "fat" to "enormous" doesn't change
| anything material about those works. If anything it makes the
| original more accessible because it removes a potential
| distraction for a modern reader.
|
| It seems a little weird to me to be so dogmatic about the
| importance of preserving the exact original text as in many
| instances those were in flux too. The fact that the article uses
| Oompa Loompas as an example is especially strange considering the
| version the article wants to preserve is already a politically
| correct update of the original in which they were more clearly
| African slaves.
| crote wrote:
| It is historical revisionism, and making superficial changes to
| it is overall _harmful_.
|
| If a work is written by a racist author, changing a few words
| isn't magically going to make the author not racist. Their
| opinions will have influenced the _entire story_. The article
| clearly demonstrates this with the Death on the Nile example:
| the entire work is based on the framework of British
| colonialism, removing a few racist stereotypes isn 't going to
| change anything about that! At best, you end up pretending that
| racism never existed - which isn't exactly a great thing to
| teach children either.
|
| Works like that should be provided as-is, with the required
| context as to why the work is the way it is. If we want to
| provide children with works that are more up-to-date with
| today's society, then _start providing newer works_. It 's not
| as if nobody has written a book in the last few decades!
| nemo44x wrote:
| When and where does it end? It's completely arbitrary. Why is
| the word you find offensive OK to edit but the ones I find not?
| It all becomes a political thing and everything gets ruined.
|
| We all know that controlling language is a form of power and
| that's the entire point of these revisions. Whoever controls
| the language controls the masses, it has been said. Destroy
| whatever was important and sacred to the culture you're
| colonizing and/or destroying. The first step is to change the
| meaning of words. And of course, it's "for the children".
| [deleted]
| slg wrote:
| >When and where does it end? It's completely arbitrary. Why
| is the word you find offensive OK to edit but the ones I find
| not? It all becomes a political thing and everything gets
| ruined.
|
| I don't buy this slippery slope argument. Where does it end?
| It ends wherever the rights holders of the books say it ends.
| If you want them to change a word you think is offensive, try
| to convince them to change it.
|
| >We all know that controlling language is a form of power and
| that's the entire point of these revisions. Whoever controls
| the language controls the masses, it has been said. Destroy
| whatever was important and sacred to the culture you're
| colonizing and/or destroying. The first step is to change the
| meaning of words. And of course, it's "for the children".
|
| This is a rather hyperbolic claim for changing a few
| sentences in a story about kids visiting a chocolate factory.
| No one is "controlling the masses" with Roald Dahl books.
| This isn't about changing the history books. It is ensuring
| that stories can still be enjoyed in the same way they were
| originally without being burdened with either an accompanied
| history lesson or what we now view as bigotry.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > If you want them to change a word you think is offensive,
| try to convince them to change it.
|
| Yeah, let's ratchet it up and take the culture war into
| absolutely everything. It's a bad precedent. You've already
| seen the right now taking up the left's tactics and it's
| not the kind of place anyone wants to be in.
|
| > This isn't about changing the history books.
|
| That's has been happening too! Revise so that everything
| was bad and everything we are doing is good.
|
| > what we now view as bigotry.
|
| "We"? who is "we"? If someone doesn't like our culture and
| wants their own then they should invent it. They are
| interlopers that should stop trying to take our culture and
| changing it to suit their belief system. They need to
| create their own idols and gods if the existing ones don't
| suit their arbitrary, new standard.
| slg wrote:
| >Yeah, let's ratchet it up and take the culture war into
| absolutely everything. It's a bad precedent. You've
| already seen the right now taking up the left's tactics
| and it's not the kind of place anyone wants to be in.
|
| What are you suggesting here? Should we curtail free
| speech by either restricting how a copyright holder can
| edit their work or that protests against those copyright
| holders should be limited?
|
| >That's has been happening too! Revise so that everything
| was bad and everything we are doing is good.
|
| What are you suggesting here? Should history never be
| reevaluated with modern context?
|
| >"We"? who is "we"?
|
| Society
|
| > If someone doesn't like our culture and wants their own
| then they should invent it. They are interlopers that
| should stop trying to take our culture and changing it to
| suit their belief system. They need to create their own
| idols and gods if the existing ones don't suit their
| arbitrary, new standard.
|
| I imagine this isn't your intent, but this might not even
| be indirect enough to be considered a dog whistle.
| Comments like "They are interlopers that should stop
| trying to take our culture" are exact phrases we might
| expect in a racist manifesto. Considering the topic at
| hand and your previous questioning of my use of pronouns,
| maybe be a little more cautious about your "our"s and
| "they"s.
| shapenamer wrote:
| "Careful, sir. I think you've had too much to think. Any
| more comments like that and the thought police may be
| alerted. We wouldn't want that, would we?"
| slg wrote:
| I gave that person the benefit of the doubt. I didn't
| call them bigoted, I just told them to mind their
| phrasing.
|
| You are the one who is setting up a direct link between
| free thinking and bigotry. You might be telling on
| yourself.
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| > What are you suggesting here? Should we curtail free
| speech by either restricting how a copyright holder can
| edit their work or that protests against those copyright
| holders should be limited?
|
| It's telling you use "copyright holder" and not "author".
| I wouldn't be against a law that forced them to slap a
| big "Edited without author's permission" label on such
| falsified books.
|
| I also don't buy your implied argument that if we can't
| find a perfect legislative solution to a problem, we
| shouldn't complain about it in the first place.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| > However at a certain point we have to be pragmatic and avoid
| the perfect being the enemy of the good. These works are often
| never put into context.
|
| Then just don't make changes, and trust that your readers are
| capable of withstanding raw, unfiltered, uncensored exposure to
| words from a different time and place. You don't need to
| "protect" people from wrong opinions, and they don't want to be
| protected
| dahwolf wrote:
| The problem of the idea "updated for a modern audience" is that
| the updates do not cater to the actual audience, instead a
| minority of motivated activists that seem to thrive in finding
| offense and extrapolating it.
|
| It's dysfunctional toxic behavior packaged as doing good.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| The part of me which holds a very dismal view of human nature is
| chuckling at this slow-motion Year Zero. Pull these books, edit
| others. Take these statues down; we start with some Confederates
| but we should be able to get Jefferson. While we are at it, why
| not go after the faces on Mount Rushmore.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Sure why not. Why does it matter? There's unhoused and hungry
| people in the US and where its military bases are.
|
| Instead of worrying about the country being founded by
| bourgeoisie supremacists whose writing the country still uses
| as its foundation...let's worry if Mount Rushmore or Jefferson
| get "cancelled". If they aren't cancelled, what of all the dead
| victims of the exclusionary foundation of the country?
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| I'm fine with such edits as long as the buyers know what they're
| getting. Otherwise I'm going to end up in a situation where I'm
| defending some author whose book wasn't racist at all, not
| knowing that I read an edited version of the racist original.
| crote wrote:
| The problem is that they are almost guaranteed to just be
| marketed as the "original", and the real original won't be
| available for sale anymore. Explicitly marketing a book as the
| "censored edition" wouldn't really go over well, would it?
| mcguire wrote:
| I'm finding their examples hilarious, especially considering one
| of them is Roald Dahl's _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,_ in
| which the Oompa Loompas were originally African pygmies.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Roald Dahl's stories are so full of inappropriate conflict
| resolution and outgrouping of others that it honestly feels
| silly to change a few words and call it fixed. I loved Dahl's
| stories as a kid specifically because it was obvious they were
| 'naughty' and like a lot of fiction they allowed me to explore
| darker feelings and desires without actually living them out in
| real life. However, that said, I don't particularly mind people
| updating stories to modern sensibilities as long is it is made
| obvious that it isn't the original edition, and those original
| editions are archived somewhere.
| tivert wrote:
| > I'm finding their examples hilarious, especially considering
| one of them is Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
| in which the Oompa Loompas were originally African pygmies.
|
| IIRC, that was done by the original author himself. That's far
| different than an anonymous committee quietly revising past
| works to conform to the current political line. I mean that's
| such a blatant parallel to a famous work of dystopian fiction
| that they should know better not to do it.
|
| Though, I honestly look forward to a revised version of that
| famous work, revised to conform to modern sensitivities. IIRC,
| there's some out-of-fashion racial descriptions and the whole
| disapproving take on doctoring older works has to go.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think that it's anti-black to de-racist-ify the past. Take
| it or leave it, but don't gaslight black people over the
| experience that they've had for the last century or four in
| relation to Europeans.
|
| As far as I can tell, a major component of woke
| bowdlerization of the past seems to be finding depictions of
| black people and either _eliminating_ them or making them
| conform to the idealistic stereotypes of modern white
| liberals. That 's stacking stereotypes on stereotypes, and
| the truth of the black experience gets buried even deeper.
|
| The way my grandmother spoke would be cut out of a modern
| novel as a racist stereotype.
| BenisMaximus wrote:
| It's like going through life with autism and being called
| "neurodiverse" as if you haven't lived with an active
| disability your whole life, you're just a little different
| from everyone else.
|
| Back in the early 2000s I saw someone refer to a
| wheelchair-bound person as "handicapable". The disabled
| fellow ran over his foot lol.
|
| Point being I think it's best not to minimize people's
| suffering. Acknowledge it, respect it, and try to move
| forward together.
| Aloha wrote:
| I dont think of Autism (as someone who has it) as a
| disability - even though it does make me different
| (normal people and their societal norms are often
| baffling to me, but I still follow those norms to the
| extent I am able).
|
| I don't want others to think of me as disabled either
| (though a little understanding might be nice when I fail
| to mask well enough).
|
| Maybe the problem is how we treat the disabled, not the
| words we use to talk about disability?
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Changing characters and their depictions is a thing that
| can be argued about, but there's definitely no need to
| print n-bombs in books printed in 2023.
|
| In general, it's (IMHO) not needed to have centuries old
| books full of stereotypes in modern curricula. There are so
| many works that have been published in the last decades
| that provide far better diversity of all kinds than even a
| "de-racisted" historic book can. Modern authors, modern
| artists, modern composers and other artists deserve their
| shine in the spotlight as well - it's ridiculous how much
| of curricula is spent on stuff that happened or got created
| hundreds to thousands of years ago. We have to refocus
| education on modern events if we want a modern society.
|
| And if you want something filled with racial or other
| stereotypes in curricula, ffs print it with commentary like
| we do with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" here in Germany. That is,
| coincidentally, the only way one is allowed to do a reprint
| in Germany due to copyright and anti-Nazi symbolism laws.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _but there 's definitely no need to print n-bombs in
| books printed in 2023._
|
| How can a word be a bomb?
|
| And I'm still at a loss how in a supposedly post-
| enlightenment world, a single word can be so evil that
| you have to resort to code to refer to it, no matter in
| which context or even when you're quoting.
|
| Yes, you shouldn't call people that way - and if you do,
| that is a clear sign of a racist mindset. But treating
| the word itself as some kind of forbidden symbol that
| must be purged from everything is not much better than
| medieval magical thinking.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I read an article last week where a DEI expert was angry
| about the new release of _The Little Mermaid_ because it
| wasn 't nearly racist enough; that 18th-century Caribbean
| people were friends and kind to each other no matter what
| their race or sex; it was unconscionable that history
| should be rewritten to leave out the allegedly horrible
| experiences being had by BIPOC in that place and time.
| watwut wrote:
| The Little Mermaid is not a history and does not contain
| historical lessons.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's a symptom of trying to rewrite white stories and
| stick black people into them. It's the same process as
| trying to rewrite male stories with female protagonists.
| It's the creation of fictional pasts. If all we see is
| fictional pasts where black people are just white people
| with tans, and women are just pretty men, what are black
| people and women complaining about? They should have just
| tried harder.
| slg wrote:
| And the reason we get these stories in this way is not
| because of anything related to wokeism, progressivism,
| DEI, or whatever buzzword you wanted use. It is because
| of risk averse capitalists. Disney knows a Black Little
| Mermaid is a safer investment than an original story with
| a Black protagonist so that is the version we get.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| That is rather racist isn't it?(Not your comment but the
| attitude held by the corporation)
| slg wrote:
| No, it is cynical, ignorant, and lazy, but I don't think
| it qualifies as racist. I would compare it to those
| people who like to claim they "don't see race". It isn't
| actually racist because it isn't discriminatory or
| putting one race above another. It is just ignoring
| something that often can't be ignored.
| watwut wrote:
| The original story was a fiction too and creates
| fictional past too. That exact same story with only males
| in it ... was a fiction. Those males never existed and
| never did any of those things. Variant of the same
| fictional story with a woman or a black person is ...
| exactly as fictional as original. The real world back
| then contained both men and women. None of them done the
| mythical things stories are about.
|
| Modern reimagining of The Three Musketeers make
| Musketeers sound more honorable and noble then actual
| text. Some comedies make them sound incapable, clumsy and
| funny. Dumas politics was not pro-ancient regime and he
| actually makes it clear. Making that into super honorable
| flawless dudes is as much "changing past fiction" as if
| you slapped gender or race or made them eskimos. But
| somehow that is fine.
|
| > If all we see is fictional pasts where black people are
| just white people with tans, and women are just pretty
| men, what are black people and women complaining about?
|
| In general, they complain about how they are or were
| treated back in real world. They also complain about
| being depicted in fiction as dumb simpletons without
| agency and then people on discussion forums claiming that
| those dumb simpletons depictions somehow constitute
| historical reality.
| civilitty wrote:
| _> The way my grandmother spoke would be cut out of a
| modern novel as a racist stereotype._
|
| That's nothing new sadly, especially in academia. It used
| to be considered proper literary form to "translate" how
| people actually spoke to "proper English" and you can
| imagine the demographic of the people doing the
| "translating."
|
| See for example _Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black
| Cargo"_ [1] about one of the last living former slaves in
| the US. It was published a few years ago nearly a century
| after it was written because the author refused to white
| wash the subject's language and couldn't get it published
| in her life time.
|
| Hell that criticism could easily be leveled at some of the
| most popular western canon like _To Kill a Mockingbird_ and
| _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracoon:_The_Story_of
| _the_...
| saalweachter wrote:
| Except it's never a faceless authoritarian committee in
| practice.
|
| It's one of two things:
|
| The copyright holders are publishing new editions edited to
| modern sensibilities to maximize their profits by selling to
| a new audience.
|
| The works are in the public domain, in which case anyone can
| edit up a new edition however they like, for fun or profit.
|
| What's the alternative? We take away the right of copyright
| holders to publish new editions of their IP? We disallow
| people to edit works in the public domain?
| xg15 wrote:
| "The copyright holders" may very well be a faceless
| committee instead of the original author (or estate), i.e.
| if some megacorp had bought the copyright and us the force
| behind the republishing.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I mean, that's what happens when you make copyright
| extend to 90 years past the death of the author. They and
| everyone they know dies, and the copyright still exists,
| and eventually it's a committee.
|
| But it's all different committees. There's no Grand Woke
| High Committee dictating these changes to these works
| from the shadows. It's just capitalism, copyright law,
| and market forces.
|
| Dr Seuss Enterprises is a private for-profit foundation
| established by the author's widow before her death, and
| while it's probably run by some sort of committee, it's a
| completely different committee than the board of
| directors at Netflix, and whatever VP heads up the Roald
| Dahl Story Company after its acquisition (I assume from
| the family, who were speaking for the company as recently
| as 2020).
|
| So do we _not_ allow the author or the author 's family
| to set up foundations or sell their work to a corporation
| for half a billion dollars?
| xg15 wrote:
| Good points. Though I think the dynamics by which DEI dos
| and donts propagate should probably be explained better,
| because apparently they do invite the image of some
| shadowy committee.
|
| I suppose groupthink is a more likely explanation though.
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| This is an extremely common type of reply: Refusing to
| condemn something as wrong, on the basis that it's hard to
| write a good law that would fix it.
|
| _Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book
| has been rewritten [1], every picture has been repainted,
| every statue and street and building has been renamed,
| every date has been altered. And that process is continuing
| day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
| Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party
| is always right._
|
| [1] But originals are still kept in archives, and available
| upon request, so it's okay! Only a negligible number of
| people will bother so they may as well not exist, but it's
| okay!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _But originals are still kept in archives, and
| available upon request, so it 's okay!_
|
| You'd wish. In reality, custodians of each archive
| assumed that there are still copies in the other
| archives, and trashed most of the works to save money,
| without realizing the other archives were doing the same
| thing to those same works.
| tivert wrote:
| >> That's far different than an anonymous committee quietly
| revising past works to conform to the current political
| line.
|
| > Except it's never a faceless ... committee in practice.
|
| > It's one of two things:
|
| > The copyright holders are publishing new editions edited
| to modern sensibilities to maximize their profits by
| selling to a new audience.
|
| Except that's _exactly_ a "faceless ... committee in
| practice" (I elided out your injection of "authoritarian,"
| because it missed the point).
|
| Then the marketplaces ban the resale of old editions:
| https://www.newsweek.com/ebay-removes-discontinued-dr-
| seuss-....
|
| And due to copyright, they have the power to effectively
| suppress older editions. There will be no easy way to get
| your hands on one other than figuring out when the changes
| was made (which likely wasn't publicized), then tracking
| down a tattered old copy on ebay.
|
| > The works are in the public domain, in which case anyone
| can edit up a new edition however they like, for fun or
| profit.
|
| That's not as concerning, because if the original version
| is public domain, it will remain easily available and
| bowdlerized versions are unlikely to be able to compete.
| domador wrote:
| An alternative: allow copyright holders to publish new
| editions but only if they 1) clearly label them as new,
| edited versions that are not the original and 2) make the
| unedited originals fully and completely available upon
| request, for a (truly) reasonable fee to anyone who
| requests access to them for whatever reason.
|
| If these conditions aren't met within a reasonable
| timeframe, then (by law) the original version would
| automatically become fully (or partially) public domain.
| ("Partial" public domain would mean than anyone could make
| or distribute copies of the original version. The copyright
| holders would temporarily retain the exclusive right to
| make edited versions, until the work fully becomes public
| domain when the standard copyright term lapses. At that
| point anyone could make and distribute the original version
| or their own, edited versions.)
| saalweachter wrote:
| So should Bill Nye be required to keep publishing the
| original version of his book "Undeniable"? [Between the
| publication of the hardcover and softcover editions, he
| changed his views on GMO foods, and updated the relevant
| chapter.]
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Key word here is that HE changed his mind and updated the
| chapter.
|
| If someone else changes the text on a book from a dead
| author... how do you know the author would have liked
| that?
|
| I remember a while ago I was reading on a stage play
| that's supposed to be only 4~5 men (no women on the
| play), and the - now dead writer - specified that this
| should never be changed. And some ppl try to do women-
| only, or mixed cast, and then the writer's estate sues
| and tries to intervene...
| saalweachter wrote:
| I honestly expected many more people to push back on this
| point, and not jump whole-heartedly to the extreme that
| even the original author should not be allowed to change
| a work once published.
|
| The only real counter-argument I can make to the position
| that the author can edit his works but his heirs cannot
| is that the author chooses his heirs; the author could
| have instead chosen to will his works into the public
| domain after his death, or establish a trust or
| foundation with a strict mandate to republish his works
| in their original form while returning the profits to his
| heirs.
|
| It's not a particularly strong argument -- many authors
| may not have the resources or foresight to make such
| provisions, and you could just as easily insist on
| authors who do wish their heirs to manage their works and
| not simply profit from them make explicit declarations on
| that point -- which is why I lead with the more extreme
| case of an author editing his own work.
| tivert wrote:
| > So should Bill Nye be required to keep publishing the
| original version of his book "Undeniable"? [Between the
| publication of the hardcover and softcover editions, he
| changed his views on GMO foods, and updated the relevant
| chapter.]
|
| Ideally, yes, but at a minimum he should provide a list
| of changes and their rationale(s) in the newer editions.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| If he changed his views and then edited his book to only
| show his new viewpoint then absolutely yes.
|
| If he edited his book to rebut his own argument and lays
| out the case then maybe not but it should be stated in
| the forward that the change was made.
|
| We are moving forward into a time where media is only
| digital and can be changed at will, it is important to
| establish a system where when we make changes we record
| them and also why we made the changes.
|
| If we do not, the only future is one where information is
| as ethereal as the morning dew and subject to the
| zeitgeist of the times.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Perhaps as an on-demand title. Add a foreword if he'd
| like, but yeah.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _[Between the publication of the hardcover and
| softcover editions, he changed his views on GMO foods,
| and updated the relevant chapter.]_
|
| In other words, the diff between editions may be even
| more interesting than the either edition by itself.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _make the unedited originals fully and completely
| available upon request, for a (truly) reasonable fee to
| anyone who requests access to them for whatever reason_
|
| Automatic compromise: your copyright to the original is
| compromised or shortened in a way that makes its survival
| no longer dependent on you.
| morkalork wrote:
| Editors have been pulling tricks forever. Taking Roald Dahl as
| an example, he published stories from his time as a pilot in
| WWII and one of them being autobiographical and about the time
| he crashed his plane. The editors didn't think that was
| exciting enough for their magazine so they changed it to imply
| he was shot down. Which is not what happened at all!
| linusg789 wrote:
| https://ghostarchive.org/archive/aZbLI
| krater23 wrote:
| I would love to read the revised non racist version of 'Mein
| Kampf' to my children...
| Freak_NL wrote:
| A historical work like _Mein Kampf_ you would read annotated
| with scientific insights and commentary (which is exactly what
| was done in Germany with that book a few years ago), or just
| straight up as-is if your German is up to it and you have the
| ability to place it in its proper context.
|
| It's a political pamphlet, not a novel.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And one hell of a hard book to read, not because zhe content
| is awful, but the writting is, apparently, incredibly bad...
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > non racist version of 'Mein Kampf'
|
| Peter Singer?
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I find this whole argument quite bizarre - we've been 'updating'
| books for centuries to match the current (at time of update)
| language, norms, fashions.
|
| The original Shakespeare is still available, but most people
| read/watch adaptations or revisions (partly because Shakespeare's
| English has long gone).
|
| So, as long as the originals haven't been burnt by the good
| people of Florida, who cares about the updates?
| low_tech_love wrote:
| A translation is a translation, a book is a book. Would you
| agree to retouch some paintings in the Louvre for the greater
| good? Or, less radically, take the originals down and put
| retouched versions up?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Look at all of those unrealistic beauty standards and white
| skin. It's time for the Ministry of Truth to put up the
| correct paintings.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I have a print of the Mona Lisa with sunglasses, a moustache
| (and goatee), the original is untouched, and unharmed by the
| print existing.
| okanat wrote:
| But you do know that the original one is the one in Louvre
| and saw a least a detailed photo of it, maybe even the real
| thing. Racist, misogynist or whatever, the art in its
| original form is still there.
|
| When the books are censored the opposite happens. The
| original in the people's mind changes and the original
| nuances of the art is lost. Moreover we lose our
| understanding of progress. The change of the worldview and
| the values is an important part of understanding art.
|
| If we would like to show the progress we made and our
| current values, we should create our own classics for
| generations to read and understand us, rather than muddying
| the water between us and the previous generations.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Books aren't being "censored"
|
| Please show me where all the book burnings are taking
| place.
|
| Please show me where librarians are being threatened
| physically for stocking the originals.
|
| Please show me where laws are being made preventing you
| from owning/accessing a copy of the original.
| crote wrote:
| > Please show me where laws are being made preventing you
| from owning/accessing a copy of the original.
|
| _This_ one is just called "intellectual property
| rights". If you don't already have a copy of the
| original, you won't be able to get one if the
| rightsholder chooses to withdraw it from sale.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Apparently me not selling you a copy is preventing you
| from buying any of the trillion other copies left in
| circulation.
|
| Also in no other industry is a company forced to sell you
| a version of anything, otherwise where can I buy me a
| brand new Ford AC Cobra
| jankyxenon wrote:
| I personally wouldn't touch an updated classic with a 10 foot
| pole - but there's a market for sanitized classics. If the
| publishers think it will help them sell more books, it's hard
| to fault them for it.
| bitwize wrote:
| The copyright holders of Shakespeare don't put the First Folio
| edition of _Romeo and Juliet_ out of print when Baz Luhrmann
| releases _Romeo + Juliet_.
|
| When works go out of print they become rare and hard to find.
| There are only 200 or so original prints of the First Folio in
| existence; Shakespeare is kept alive by subsequent reprintings.
| When publishers "update" old works for modern sensibilities,
| it's with an eye toward replacing the old version with the new;
| they simply refuse to publish the old version. If it's a print
| book it'll still be there, but become slowly harder and harder
| to obtain until it's nearly impossible, and most people don't
| even remember it anyway[0]. If it's an e-book, it's as good as
| gone; anyone who still has it has committed a felony to
| preserve it. Long copyright terms help enormously with this.
|
| Some books don't even get replaced. The word "nerd" is thought
| to have originated from the Dr. Seuss book _If I Ran the Zoo_ ;
| Seuss's publisher has decided the book is too racist to
| continue to be in print, so it too has gone on to book
| afterlife.
|
| [0] The black pygmy Oompa-Loompas were almost a "Mandela
| effect" thing for me; my school library had a 1960s edition of
| the book. Only when I read about the changes later in life was
| I like "Oh, so that's why the Oompa-Loompas are different."
| awesome_dude wrote:
| There's a bit to this
|
| The copyright OWNERS are to be denied their rights to do with
| their property what they wish?
|
| Further, they're forced to print some version of their
| property?
|
| Honestly, no, books go in and out of print all day long, and
| first editions have always been 'collectible' because they're
| 'original'
|
| Changes/edits happen all the time (hell some authors keep web
| pages of errata because their originals require updating),
| just that the edits in question have people clutching their
| pearls.
| bitwize wrote:
| Nice bit of so-what-you're-saying-is-ism.
|
| I'm not saying the copyright owners are to be denied
| anything, only that it's a crying shame they're doing what
| they're doing. They are within their rights to do so, and
| given that just about all public companies have ESG rules
| they need to adhere to, there may not have been a realistic
| alternative.
|
| It's a crying shame that George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to
| Disney, who proceeded to dismantle the Star Wars and
| Indiana Jones franchises. It's a crying shame that after
| the failure of the Amico, the current rightsholders to
| Intellivision are selling off their game IPs piecemeal,
| preventing another collection like Intellivision Lives from
| happening. But everyone involved in these actions is acting
| within their rights to the IP in question.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| > The copyright OWNERS are to be denied their rights to do
| with their property what they wish?
|
| Yes. The purpose of copyright is to protect and promote
| cultural works, that's why governments instituted it. If
| the institution is no longer serving its purpose, it should
| be reformed
| bitwize wrote:
| I don't mean to contribute to Alyssa Rosenzweig's
| observed toxic techbrosplaining and 'um, actually'ing
| here on Hackernews but, um, actually...
|
| In the UK the purpose of copyright was originally to give
| the King's approved publishers a monopoly on published
| material. The copyright was literally a right to copy, to
| operate a printing press.
|
| Even today, in France copyright is seen as a _droit d
| 'auteur_, a moral right to a work you have simply by
| being the author of the work. Forget promoting cultural
| works for the public's benefit. As the author you are
| entitled even to determine who may even see the work, and
| how they may see it. You can go full Prince and lock your
| magnum opus in a vault, that is a right that is legally
| and morally respected.
|
| It's only in the USA where the justification of copyright
| is to "promote the progress of Science and the useful
| Arts", and so we feel entitled to other people's work.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| The obvious answer to this: don't let people own history.
|
| Copyright shouldn't extend such an absurdly long time as to
| affect most of these books.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Whilst I agree that copyright is absurdly long - changing
| that isn't going to prevent people from creating updates
| that suit their whims (look at the Winnie the Pooh
| (original) cartoons people are able to create because
| that fell out of copyright recently.
|
| It's made zero difference to the original (which has been
| out of print for decades)
| acadapter wrote:
| Meh, language changes. 21st-century books will be edited by 22nd
| century people, that's for sure. And verbatim copies will be free
| to reprint as they fall out of copyright.
|
| Politically motivated changes might sometimes be ridiculous, but
| there's also the real need to update forgotten words, or words
| that have drastically changed their meaning.
|
| At least it's not done with the same level of fanaticism as
| Iceland's war against foreign loanwords, for example.
|
| The example with "fat" Augustus Gloop becoming "enormous" -
| that's actually a good thing, regardless of the politics
| involved! The causes of obesity were poorly understood back then,
| partially due to the sugar industry's lobbying. There's no need
| to propagate this misunderstanding to the next generation in a
| book for young people.
|
| Edit: Wow - this is a downvote magnet! Go and try reading Beowulf
| in the original Old English, or something.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| > And verbatim copies will be free to reprint as they fall out
| of copyright.
|
| Far from guaranteed, with today's ever-lengthening copyright
| terms, and DMCA making it a felony to keep original versions
| around.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 21st-century publishers should stop trying to endlessly flog
| 20th-century books that have severe dissonance with current
| values, then. There is a point where you just can't serve the old
| stuff up without a huge "hey it was sixty years ago and this
| author was a horrible product of Britain's racist, colonialist
| upper class" disclaimer in the front, or a major re-working.
|
| I find it kind of fascinating that this article is _fine_ with
| the changes made to Ursula K. LeGuin 's work, but is up in arms
| over Dahl and Fleming and Christie getting a de-upper-class-
| twitification. Why is this particular shit so sacred to the
| Post's "editorial board"?
| quacked wrote:
| I don't share your values, and I don't want you or people like
| you to have any control over what I read it or how I read it.
|
| There are many people who agree with me. It's "sacred" to the
| Post because the people writing for the Post believe these
| works have a place in the literary canon. People in society
| possess systems of morals that directly contradict each other.
| causi wrote:
| _I find it kind of fascinating that this article is fine with
| the changes made to Ursula K. LeGuin 's work, but is up in arms
| over Dahl and Fleming and Christie_
|
| It's a case of changing the meaning of the statement vs
| translating the vocabulary to more accurately reflect the
| original meaning. Editing Lord of the Rings so Frodo tosses
| another _bundle of sticks_ onto the fire doesn 't alter the
| meaning. His example from Death on the Nile is straight-up
| altering the personality of a character to make her a better
| person.
| slily wrote:
| I'd argue that any alteration to the prose is counter to
| authorial intent. Some people might be fine with that, but I
| don't want to read a book not knowing whether words were
| substituted for others because some editor thought that they
| were too antiquated or difficult for lowly readers. Footnotes
| exist for a reason (and dictionaries for that matter). Lately
| I often feel that publishers don't respect consumers'
| intelligence.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's a point in which you stop reading books as if they were
| about you, or models that you are expected to imitate, and you
| think of them as statements by the people that wrote them, at
| the time that they wrote them, and interesting if you want to
| understand the times they were written in.
|
| Spoiled children of privilege work at publishers because no one
| else can afford degrees from the right colleges, then move on
| to working for free in New York, or being handed the job by a
| friend of a friend. They have no concept of art that doesn't
| involve seeing themselves "reflected" in it, and they think
| "inclusion" is them _allowing_ other types of people to see
| themselves in art (and they think that they should be praised
| for this "tolerance" and "celebration" of "identities.")
|
| Real inclusion is having a system that includes people working
| in it that aren't all from the same flaky class, and with the
| new addition of _queer_ identities, all of your diversity can
| consist of wealthy straight white people (there 's barely any
| reason to pretend to be Native American, Hispanic, or black
| anymore.) Their awful scribbles on the works of their superiors
| (the significantly less narcissistic privileged white people of
| the past) age like fish, and their work will be seen by
| relatively normal people from the future as bowdlerized works
| are seen now: _as birdcage liner._
| ggm wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_Shakespeare
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What about remastered movies?
| andi999 wrote:
| Read my lips: Han. Shot. FIRST.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Not even that egregious. I often see remasters on top of
| remasters in 4k HDR for very old films. If these are really a
| better experience does that mean the original audience had a
| lesser experience?
| tehnub wrote:
| The original audiences saw them projected on film and the
| resolution was fantastic. I believe the contrast was not as
| good as an OLED TV or Dolby Cinema though.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| EDIT: Not sure how to delete, but people didn't understand my
| point.
| COGlory wrote:
| Which fascist things were people pretending to believe in the
| 90s?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| FYI: You can only delete comments within the first couple hours
| of posting (I'm not sure if it's the same as the edit window or
| less) _and_ if they haven 't been replied to. The other option
| is to reach out to the HN mods (see "Contact" at the bottom of
| the page).
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| quacked wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone that doesn't like the edits give the real
| reason that they are so upset about the edits. If the edits were
| politically slanted in a different direction, the edit-opposers
| would only oppose edits on principle. "Why, of course I don't
| support changing words in old works to make the work conform to
| modern standards, don't be ridiculous." But the edit-opposers are
| _angry_ because the edits are clearly the work of modern western
| hyper-progressives, who are simultaneously trying to retain the
| conquests and achievements of the Old World while erasing any
| moral belief left over from the Old World.
|
| I do not wish to see society remade by the vision of the modern
| western progressive, and so I don't want progressive edits to
| books I loved as a child.
|
| Edit: Editing books allows progressives to simultaneously avoid
| the label of "book banning", which they at least claim to detest,
| while also constructing an incorrect image of the people of the
| past to aid in the moral instruction of modern children. It is
| the same story, over and over again, whether it's communists or
| religious people: "you cannot have access to information that
| contradicts the moral worldview we wish you to have. This is for
| your own safety and for the good of your fellow man."
| COGlory wrote:
| I'm going to do a very poor attempt at explaining my feelings
| over this. For a long time I've idolized Teddy Roosevelt. Parts
| of his story just speak to me:
|
| * He was sickly but just worked very hard to compensate and
| overcome it to live an outdoors-centric life. I suffer from some
| undiagnosable(word?) arthritis, I work hard to still do my
| favorite activities (backpacking, hunting and fishing).
|
| * He was extremely well learned, thoughtful, and articulate. He
| kept a detailed journal. I admire those traits and try to emulate
| them. I pursued a PhD, I keep a journal, I frequently write to
| relatives and friends. I try to be thoughtful and articulate.
|
| * He was a legendary hunter (as I mentioned I love hunting), and
| conservationist. He is partly responsible for the National Parks,
| which I enjoy every free day (I live near Yellowstone and
| routinely pass under his arch).
|
| * He was empathetic and progressive for his time [0], despite his
| unshaking nationalism. He didn't seem to fall for toxic tropes of
| conservatism (although those political terms don't translate to
| today, Teddy is universally celebrated by the right). I believe
| strongly in what I consider to be core unshaking tenets of
| American national identity, but I also try hard to be empathetic
| and make sure no one is left behind. I don't believe the answer
| is exclusion of outgroups, which I think is a common conservative
| trope today. I have a lot of respect for Teddy (with some
| important caveats) [1].
|
| * He held himself, and those in government to a higher standard
| [2]. He believed he was a public servant, and fought tirelessly
| against corruption. There is nothing that makes me angrier than
| corruption and entitlement in political office today.
|
| I also learned, a couple years ago, he probably would have
| despised me, had our paths crossed. I'm mostly Italian-American,
| who he openly viewed as mostly criminals [3], and even went so
| far as to applaud a lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans
| [4].
|
| I think it's important that I learned this. I'm glad it wasn't
| erased or ignored or left out of the record. I learned a few
| things from it. I learned (well, I already knew, but it was
| reinforced) that no one is perfect. No one. And that perfection
| is the enemy of self-improvement, it is the enemy of progress,
| and it is the enemy of good. There's no part of me that I'm aware
| of that's worse for having held TR in such high esteem and tried
| to emulate the great things I found about him. In fact, his
| example has improved my life in a variety of ways, particularly
| my mental health and fortitude, seeing him as an example. Sure,
| it made me sad to learn that fact about him, but in terms of
| material affect? It had no change. Words, thoughts, opinions,
| ideas, are necessarily flawed and incomplete as a direct result
| of the human condition. Pretending they are not creates two
| things:
|
| 1) An impossible standard
|
| 2) A false sense of security and satisfaction
|
| I'm better at some things than TR. I don't have Italian Americans
| (or any minority group for that matter, my understanding was that
| he had similar feelings about natives). That alone is a major
| victory. By not having to draw myself against perfect examples, I
| can foster some feeling of accomplishment, but I can also learn
| that my idols were flawed and that even if I am flawed in many
| ways, I can hopefully still do some good. That's an important
| motivator.
|
| A perfect example is one I will never live up to, and in that
| case, why even try?
|
| [0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/theodore-roosevelt-
| mississ...
|
| [1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/08/theodore-
| roosevel...
|
| [2] https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2020/09/14/president-
| th...
|
| [3] https://theamericanmag.com/a-rather-good-thing/
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Same with a lot of historical figures.
|
| In school people worshipped figures like Winston Churchill.
|
| Later I learned he thought of brown people as subhuman savages.
| He would not respect me if I took a Time Machine to his era.
|
| He was a product of his time. Learn his strategical thinking
| and grant him for his confidence and love for country.
|
| Beyond that I will never respect him as a man. He's dead so I
| don't really care. If someone else takes issue with my pov,
| they can also take solace in knowing I don't respect them as
| people I won't ever acknowledge.
| californiadreem wrote:
| >He's dead so I don't really care. If someone else takes
| issue with my pov, they can also take solace in knowing I
| don't respect them as people I won't ever acknowledge.
|
| You seem to lack the restraint of a normal civilized person.
| I think there's a word for that.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| So you're an apologist of racists like Winny? The guy made
| a lot of awful statements about many people. And acted on
| many cases to oppress them further that resulted in many
| deaths.
|
| In a civilized society we should be allowed to call out
| horrific behavior. It's not like he was some average Joe
| Schmoe at the gas station saying nasty shit while drunk.
| His words had actual impact.
|
| Neither you nor I have that level of influence and nobody
| will care about us that much in the grand scheme of things.
| Be real dawg.
| [deleted]
| quacked wrote:
| > If someone else takes issue with my pov, they can also take
| solace in knowing I don't respect them as people I won't ever
| acknowledge.
|
| This is a strange perspective. Do you think if I went through
| the heroes of your own ethnicity that I would find
| exclusively people with noble moral systems that would
| respect me and what I stand for? Should I "refuse to
| acknowledge" you if you admire your culture's historical
| figures in opposition to my dislike of them, or their dislike
| of me?
| watwut wrote:
| The logical conclusion of your comment is that you never
| cared about heroes of his ethnicity, do not respect them
| and do not care. You never paid attention to them.
|
| So, it sounds symmetrical and fair?
| quacked wrote:
| I don't know what his ethnicity is, so I don't know if I
| know the heroes of his ethnicity or not. I know an
| unusual amount about world history and non-western
| cultures compared to the average person with my general
| characteristics, so I believe it unlikely that I "never
| paid attention" or "don't care".
|
| I am more interested in examining the moral double-
| standard implied by his comment, that it is just for him
| to refuse to acknowledge me if I admire Churchill, but
| that he would find it unjust if I refused to acknowledge
| him because he admired <hero from his own culture with
| beliefs I didn't like>.
| thx-2718 wrote:
| "Speaking as a Black man from America, which is a racist
| society, no matter how much you hear it talk about
| democracy, it's as racist as South Africa or as racist as
| Portugal, or as racist as any other racialist society on
| this earth. The only difference between it and South-
| Africa: South-Africa preaches separation and practices
| separation; America preaches integration and practices
| segregation. This is the only difference. They don't
| practice what they preach, whereas South-Africa preaches
| and practices the same thing. I have more respect for a
| man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong,
| than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing
| but a devil"
|
| - Malcolm X
|
| With Churchill I suppose people knew how he felt about
| them.
| Aloha wrote:
| Agreed, on whole.
|
| Humans need heroes, we need people to believe in, to aspire to
| - but we should never forget that our heroes are humans - and
| imperfect humans at that.
|
| One of my biggest issues with the new puritanism, is we dont
| let people evolve either - once you've done one bad thing - no
| matter what redemption or evolution you have later in life -
| you're just the guy who did the bad thing.
|
| Generally also, I think its bad to judge historical figures by
| current norms too.
|
| Like on TR - TR's views on... well pretty much everything
| evolved over time too (he notably became more progressive and
| more radical in that progressivism with age).
|
| His views on race evolved too as far as I know too (though I
| dont have sources handy to talk about it).
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| This piece on TR's African Safari and its impact on his views
| was posted recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35108692
| snapcaster wrote:
| Great comment, thanks for taking the time to write that out. I
| think for a lot of people they look to books or other things to
| tell them what to think. Other people (like you it sounds like)
| look to books to share a story or a perspective or an idea and
| that engaging with the idea doesn't imply endorsing it.
|
| Also, everyone wants to think that they would be the brave
| resistance fighter when in fact most of us don't "choose" sides
| in any meaningful sense and just go along with the status quo.
| I think seeing these really smart and progressive (for their
| time) people and what their blind spots were despite their
| brilliance can help me look inwards and see where I might be a
| "man of my time" and missing something later generations will
| judge me for
| Tade0 wrote:
| > undiagnosable(word?)
|
| Perhaps "subclinical"?
| causi wrote:
| It's important to judge people in context. Just as you wouldn't
| think as harshly of a thief who grew up in a poor, violent
| household, you shouldn't think as harshly of the ignorance of a
| historical figure as you would of a person of today who should
| know better. I suspect there are many things about the people
| of today which the people of a century hence will regard as
| utterly depraved.
| petsfed wrote:
| I think about the fragility of heroic personas a lot. During
| the peak of the 2020 protests and riots, there was a spate of
| statue toppling that, on their face, seemed excessive. Like
| various Confederate leaders, sure. But George Washington?
| Thomas Jefferson?
|
| But it turns out that George Washington owned a lot of
| slaves. Jefferson has a very complicated and questionable
| history with slavery in particular. I learned a bit about
| Robert E. Lee's history of slave ownership, and it's directly
| at odds with what I was taught in school. Its worth
| investigating if you've time.
|
| I eventually landed on this idea that there are specific
| _acts_ that we should encourage our children to emulate, but
| there is no entire person that any children should aspire to
| emulate. Oskar Schindler, we should recall, was a member of
| the Nazi Party (and, I 'm surprised to learn from wikipedia,
| was employed by the Nazi intelligence organization, and was
| convicted of spying on Czechoslovakia for the Nazis, prior to
| the German occupation).
|
| I am troubled by the idea that we should always forgive and
| forget, as it were, the things that get people canceled
| today. Yes, people change, and a questionable tweet by an 18
| year old should not dog them in perpetuity until the end of
| their life. But on the other hand, I feel like we should not
| grant blanket pardon for people who have not sought to
| redress their own sins, and sincerely apologized. E.g. Donald
| Trump's past is littered with exceptionally bad behavior, and
| it seems he never expresses contrition, but always asks that
| the public set aside that bad behavior.
| watwut wrote:
| Fairly often, people who lived in exactly the same time
| judged their contemporaries too by the exact same standards
| you complain about. There is this knee jerk assumption out of
| nowhere about pretty much any bad act by major popular figure
| being chalked up to their naivite or just them being product
| of times with zero own thinking agency.
|
| Sometimes it is the case, but also plenty of times these were
| conscious decisions or strongly criticized by contemporaries.
| pessimizer wrote:
| We're making the third choice, which is to edit the words of
| the people we worship in order to maintain that worship, to
| keep them heroic. Keeping people from idolizing racists by
| going back and making them not racist (so we can continue to
| worship the same things without guilt.)
|
| Instead we should just be adult, and recognize that being
| racist isn't an entire person, it's a component of a person
| that may have other components that are deeply admirable. The
| refusal to admit that causes difficulties for people whose
| almost entire academic life consisted of the study of the
| works of racists. Deleting their racism from history is a
| comfortable solution for people still living off the wealth
| that their racist ancestors accumulated.
| mandevil wrote:
| I might get down-voted for this, but I totally understand why
| Netflix, who bought the Dahl Company in 2021, is editing these
| stories.
|
| I agree that it is important to have a full and complete
| historical record, but Netflix is interested in making money,
| and I recently read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my six
| year old and he loved it. So I started to read Charlie and the
| Glass Elevator to him and stopped only a few pages in when some
| very offensive caricatures of Chinese people talking in English
| showed up. And I haven't read my son any more Dahl since then,
| because I was genuinely shocked at what I had just read,
| stopped that book after that chapter, and went off to read
| something else instead, and haven't gotten around to James and
| the Giant Peach or Matilda again. It interrupted what could
| have been a lovely flow of Dahl books. So I can understand why
| the people who control the Dahl Company- and desperately want
| people like me to read his stories to people like my son- are
| stealth-editing them to kill the offensive stuff, so that I
| will buy more books, read them to my son, and then he will 30
| years from now buy them and read them to his children because
| they have nostalgic value for him: they remind him of his dad
| reading to him.
|
| This censorship isn't happening because of the iron hand of the
| state or anything like that. It's the result of people making
| choices within a capitalist system. It's because I have lots of
| great stories to choose from to read to my six year old, so why
| would I choose one that I have to explain lots of ugly bigotry?
| So Netflix is choosing to try and sand down those problems that
| might keep someone like me from reading the book to my kid, in
| a totally understandable way. And, as the rights owner trying
| to maximize revenue, that is their prerogative.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners
| look and how they speak Chinese. The Chinese don't see such
| poking fun as a problem, nor do a great many other peoples on
| earth. Parts of Western culture, like yourself feeling such
| things interrupted the flow of the Dahl book, are the odd
| ones out here, and one might ask oneself if it has to be this
| way. Of course, I agree that there are powerful corporate
| motivations to avoid anything that might turn off potential
| consumers.
| civilitty wrote:
| Moral relativism aside, there's a taboo against "punching
| down" in humor and comedy. It's obviously a fuzzy heuristic
| but in general, people from Western imperial powers making
| fun of the people they've exploited is pretty far in the
| unacceptable column.
|
| A caricature of a French, British, or German person in
| American media, for example, is much more acceptable than a
| caricature of a Chinese person.
| kelnos wrote:
| There's a difference between poking fun and outright
| bigotry, though. I'm not saying Dahl is one thing and the
| Chinese media is another, but I think we need to look
| harder at all of these things to figure out what place it's
| coming from.
|
| And even then, poking fun, to me, is a personal thing.
| There are poking-fun-type things I might say to a close
| friend that I would never say to an acquaintance. Making
| fun of a random-stranger foreigner who is doing you the
| honor of trying to learn your language is just mean-
| spirited, no matter how you look at it. Makes me wonder
| about the kind of people who would do that. As to your
| specific statement:
|
| > _In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how
| foreigners look and how they speak Chinese._
|
| To me that just sounds like propaganda. The Chinese media
| is promoting the idea of Chinese superiority. "All those
| people from other nations look funny, and are too stupid to
| speak our language properly." Anecdotally, an ethnically-
| Chinese friend of mine who lived in China for a few years
| (and traveled around the country quite a bit) used to tell
| me that many, many native-born Chinese people speak
| Mandarin poorly, some to the point of being difficult to
| understand. So poking fun at foreigners for their bad
| Chinese is ironic, perhaps to the point of being a little
| sad.
| californiadreem wrote:
| The irony being that if the public domain had actually been
| 28 years as it was originally legislated back in the 18th
| century in the United States, this kind of change wouldn't be
| controversial. People would be likely _used_ to maintaining
| cultural media to keep it both relevant and free of changing
| taboos. And it would likely be decentralized enough that
| there wouldn 't be any single Authorized Version except that
| which the original author published.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Yah, and there are others with issues. Lots of others. The
| Little House books for one.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| As an author, a lot of this bugs me but not for the reasons
| listed in the article. Trying to patch over old stories just ends
| up making them worse most of the time.
|
| I'd rather see people retell the story without the stuff they see
| as problems. Get at the heart of the story and tell it better.
| (IIRC, this is what happened in Shakespeare's time.)
|
| But no one is going to do that. It's more work and everyone is
| looking to do this as cheaply as possible to make more money.
| Aloha wrote:
| Editing is supposed to be a collaborative process - and these
| people are dead - there is no author to collaborate with - it
| just makes a worse product in the end (in ever example cited in
| the article) - a good editor can make a good work great, a bad
| one can make a great work bad.
| blooalien wrote:
| > "I'd rather see people retell the story without the stuff
| they see as problems. Get at the heart of the story and tell it
| better."
|
| Isn't that what happened with the more famous version of "The
| Princess Bride" (the one that ended up made into a movie)?
| z0r wrote:
| The original story in that is just a metafictional narrative
| device - the original "The Princess Bride" is the one written
| by William Goldman
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > But no one is going to do that. It's more work
|
| Actually, most of the refusal is because of copyrights.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Copyright doesn't apply to ideas or plots.
|
| It's perfectly legal to take something someone else wrote and
| write something similar.
|
| Otherwise Star Trek Deep Space Nine would have infringed on
| Babylon 5.
| __alexs wrote:
| If you are the owner of a 20th century IP there is no reason you
| should not want to rework it for a new market if your motive is
| profit. It's not wokeism to make Rohl Dahl readable to zoomers,
| it's capitalism.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I mean, where's the lie?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Roald Dahl himself didn't agree with you. He didn't try to pass
| off a censored Cinderella as the original version. He wrote his
| own and published it under his own name.
|
| And you know what? His Cinderella was fucking terrible and I've
| been waiting decades to have a platform to point that out. His
| original IPs are way better than his retellings. Glad to get
| that off my chest.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Yet another reason why copyright shouldn't last for such an
| absurdly long time.
| coliveira wrote:
| The author claims that literature is not a consumer good, but
| that's wrong for most of 20th century books. This is exactly why
| author estates are doing this, to maintain the profitability of
| their products.
| tropdrop wrote:
| Minor gripe: there was no one "author." I found it interesting
| that this was "authored" by WP's Editorial Board. I sense that
| they wanted to avoid someone specific being dragged to shreds
| on Twitter (a lot harder to drag an entire editorial board of a
| publication than an individual). It is a smart move.
|
| And I agree with your point, and that it extends well beyond
| the 20th century back to the day of patrons and benefactors who
| would support a creative endeavor.
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