The rewriting of Roald Dahl is an act of cultural vandalism
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
This is the thing that I agree most with:
> The patrician urge of the sensitivity police to protect ethnic-minority children from certain words is infinitely more insulting to them than Dahl’s tales could ever be.
You'll find me generally on the side of preserving history as-is, and I'm against the loss of the original intent of the author, almost always. Mein Kampf should be available just as it was written, not so that the ideas may be passed on as valid and correct, but so that we remember and acknowledge that powerful people have put about these ideas in the past, and to give us some insight into why they might have done so. And let's not forget the consequences please.
However, I also have friends that I respect, who I think might be OK-with, or generally for this type of censorship (there's that pejorative language, not on purpose I promise). I still like them and I still respect them. I wish we could all just chill out a little. I would still say there are bigger fish to fry than this one right now anyway.
No, I'm not a minority child or even a fat old man, but this is still the opinion that I have.
In France (and probably a lot of other countries), Mein Kampf is freely available with annotations. I think it's a good compromise to distribute the book as it was written, but with inline analysis explaining historical context, fallacies and everything worth noting about the text.
If an old book is problematic or contains problematic language, it should be explained, not banned or censored.
Will people look back on our times with disdain and think how horrible we were for calling each other crazy, mad, fat and ugly? How we made such a big deal about gendering things?
Maybe we are "the old men shouting at clouds" (ahem... I mean "old people shouting at clouds" xd)? Maybe we should get with the times? Or is this really all "cancel-culture" and everybody else except us is wrong?
Unfortunately, I only have questions and no answers hahah
It would be wonderful if everyone was more civil and less vicious.
Anyone here who was bullied in high school, say, and enjoyed it? I sure didn't.
I don't think it will happen, but for words that become increasingly only employed as insults, I understand the desire to push back against those insults.
>Anyone here who was bullied in high school, say, and enjoyed it? I sure didn't...
People like you, who couldn't find a coping mechanism to deal with childhood bullying [all children are vicious wee thugs, until they learn otherwise] think that you can somehow control what people "feel inside" by controlling what words they can use to express themselves. Ditto the people who think you can somehow stop anyone having racist or homopobic attitudes by banning completely innocuous words [see Montenegro comment above] as people might see them as racist or hompophobic.
Kids will always bully other kids, racists will always hate other races and homophobic people will always hate gays. If you ban one word, they'll come up with another. If you ban that, they'll come up with another... rinse and repeat. As I've said before, if you follow that path to its conclusion, you end up with Newspeak [0]
The problem is when you change the book, effectively making a new one, but with the same name as the old one - which is not authentic.
That said, I struggle to see how these edits will ever be essential. Phrases like “brothers and sisters” is hopefully never as offensive as racial slurs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism
> Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974,[17] also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"
> Mentally disabled people were originally defined with words such as "morons" or "imbeciles", which then became commonly used insults. The medical diagnosis was changed to "mentally retarded", which morphed into a pejorative against those with mental disabilities. To avoid the negative connotations of their diagnoses, students who need accommodations because of such conditions are often labeled as "special needs" instead, although the word "special" has begun to crop up as a schoolyard insult.[
Because it's the reality of calling people crazy, mad, fat, or ugly that people find offensive, not the current vocabulary.
People will come up with other justifications (it causes harm, it's wrong, it's not inclusive) for why they're doing the above, but as all morals are ultimately relative (and thus their reasons are relative), it's just a means to an end.
Unless there was an earlier reference, this was from The Simpsons, where Grandpa Simpson was the subject. In this case "old man" would be correct and doesn't need to be de-gendered.
To the more general point, society and culture changes and (hopefully) progresses and improves. While this is uncomfortable for those of us who learned our societal norms a generation or two ago, and need to change our habits, I think it is an inherent feature of a healthy society. Thus it will be an ongoing issue, and is perhaps made even more prominent by today's faster and wider communications channels.
Thus while on a specific issue (Dahl's books in this case), there is no absolute right or wrong, there is moral relativity where everyone's starting point is different. Society as a whole, hopefully made up of reasonable voices, will work out the answer. Which of course, can change again over time.
I think that you are conflating two different things, and somewhat mixing cause and effect. We do not look back at those times with disdain because they used those words. Rather, we look at those words with disdain because of the attitudes with which they were used in the past.
Furthermore, those three words fall into somewhat different categories. While the [acronym of ginger] and the [en_GB cigarette] words were overwhelming used from the outset to target and attack people with no moral justification (under our modern sensibilities), that is not the same as the term retard which was a legitimate medical term to describe an individual with mental retardation. The fact that we now reject the use of that word is precisely because it became a convenient pejorative to insult somebody's mental capacity, hence it being the perfect example of the euphemism treadmill—in fact, retard itself arose as a euphemism for slow.
Will the euphemism treadmill catch up on the other two examples? Will "gay" or "lesbian", or "black" or "African American" become taboo? I bet they won't, for the simple reason that as a society we have (mostly) moved past the idea that there's anything wrong with being sexually attracted to people of one's own gender, or descending from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Regarding people in the future, if they do look at us with disdain for using the words fat, ugly, mad, etc, my bet is that it will only be for the euphemism treadmill effect, as there is something inherently negative about being overweight, unattractive, or mentally unhealthy. I find it hard to believe that any future euphemism for any of these three words could ever become immune to becoming an insult.
I was surprised, but I liked the approach. Disney gets to say that someone might be upset, but we the viewers are empowered to see the content and make our own decision.
Tear the page out if you like.
If there was a page with a warning in your book, you can do that. Then you have the book you wanted.
As long as the original is there and a publisher add some silly warning page I really don’t care.
Especially readers' club notes. Even Oprah's.
Then I give the books away when I'm finished. Want to read a book I had? I often edited and sometimes marked it up. That book is a living thing, used and passed around by people.
Or sometimes I throw them away to save everyone else the bother.
Disney gives us content that is often two or three generations of "thoughtful people who would never expose children to that" over and over. That was Walt's idea of "acculturating America."
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/septemberoctober/iq/walt...
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/disney-accused-of-whitew...
https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/general/original-disney-s...
One thing that the article gets wrong though is why changes like these are made. As I read it, the author seems confident that the (only) reason is to avoid offending children. I'd be surprised if that was ever the reason for anyone to advocate for using other phrasings. Instead, I'd argue, the idea is to stop reinforcing/introducing shitty (read: harmful to some degree) ideas. "Boys and girls" implies that those are the only two options. Using "fat" as something that only evil characters are and as something that should be laughed at implies that fat people are bad and that it's okay to ridicule them for being fat. And so on.
Now, the question about whether it's good and worth it to make these adjustments is one that imho can and should be discussed and that reasonable minds can differ on. But as is, the article seems to be written with either a lack of good understanding or good faith.
- Language translations are extremely culturally dependent, and is a known quantity. Modern translations frequently have many translator's notes explaining the decision or edits made.
- Modern translations are transparent about their editorializing, there's a marked difference between "accurate" and "lay person" translations.
- The source materials were written and translated in times when we, frankly, had lower standards.
Civil discussion is traditionally a value of the western culture you prize so much.
On the contrary, I'm being perfectly civil. Colorful descriptions that profess my disdain for the left's new mind-diarrhea is not even close to incivility. If you don't like my descriptions, then the proper course is to ask yourself why people might take issue with cry-bullies.
Are you at all open to discussion?
I’m projecting my own views a lot here, but I am pretty sure you’re not going to be swaying anyone even remotely left of center (most of whom would never engage in the acts you’re listing - and many of whom _are_ uneasy about many of the changes to Dahl’s works that sparked this discussion) in your direction by projecting such an angry, abrasive demeanor.
I really worry about the state of online discourse. I’d be willing to bet that if we were to sit down and discuss this over a beverage in real life this isn’t how the discussion would go.
How do you explain the horrific violence depicted in many of the Grimm's fairy tales to a kid? And what is the expected benefit of it?
I loved that stuff when I was a kid. "Then they made the evil queen put on red-hot iron boots and dance until she died."
Kids are a lot more resilient than people like to think.
But I honestly don't know how would I tell my kid that the Sleeping Beauty was a minor raped by a stranger who tripled her age. Nor I think it could provide any "life lesson" to a six year old.
The Sleeping Beauty is raped in her sleep, Little Red Hood fills up the wolf with stones after it has been cut in half to rescue her grandmother, and Cinderella has a confusing relationship with incest.
To me this is a case of "capital over all things" our censor is not the vandal, but us.
Is it cultural vandalism? Absolutely, although hilarious, like vandalism certainly can be.
“Your mother sews socks that smell…” “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday through Friday plane!” “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!” "Pardon my French, but you're an AARDVARK!" "Hand me the keys, you fairy godmother."
Be angry at copyright, not at the decision to attempt to modernize a work of art; without copyright, both versions could be circulated concurrently (and of course this is why you see both traditional & modernized Shakespeare productions, unlike Broadway where every tour is authorized and a replica (some exceptions for school versions and such)). Art is a product of its times, and imo it's completely reasonable to want to update a version to what makes sense in the modern day and what children can now empathize with, and see themselves reflected in.
As for:
> Isn't it worth preserving how things were in the past?
Oh, yes, absolutely, and this is why archivists and librarians have such an important profession; and also why copyright law sucks so much. Do be angry at copyright law, don't be angry at the decision to modernize the texts.
This is a difficult topic. It's complicated.
Given that, I agree with you about publishing houses and copyrighted literature.
Yes---while it's tempting to think of a particularly popular and beloved work of art or literature as part of some shared communal heritage, the reality of our legal system is that such works are private property unless they pass into the public domain.
In real property, there is the idea of legally declaring property as a historical site as a way to limit the private owner's rights when there is a strong community interest in the property. No such concept exists in copyright law.
Regardless of your opinions about the MCU and whether you actually feel this is part of your culture or whether you'd like it to be, I think this point is very salient. We're deprived of a collective mythos because of IP law.
Might be well and good to make open source characters? Licensed as public domains and able to be used by anyone?
Here are 49400 stories people have published set in the MCU [1]. 15600 include Captain America and 21400 include Iron Man. There's even 1300 where Captain America and Iron Man are in a romantic relationship with each other. This excludes stories that are crossovers between MCU and something else.
Here's another 397000 stories in the MCU (although there is probaby some overlap with the ones above) [2]. That list I've filtered down to stories that are in English and complete. 124000 include Captain America and 121000 include Iron Man. 67000 include them both. 24500 of them have those two in a romantic relationship
People seem to be doing fine at building a shared collective MCU mythology, and even taking it in some directions the Marvel would probably not approve of.
[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/movie/Avengers/?&srt=1&r=10
[2] https://archiveofourown.org/works?work_search%5Bsort_column%...
"While on their face, these fanfiction communities may seem like harmless outlets for fans, existing copyright doctrine actually renders much of these works as infringements of copyright. The problem is that most fanfiction could be characterized as derivative works of other already existing original works, as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101."
Marvel clearly tolerates online fan fiction to an extent, but I imagine if someone tried to publish an illustrated anthology of Marvel fan fiction and sell it on Amazon, or make and release a film based on it, they would probably find the limit of that tolerance.
I'm a bit lost here - my experience with Shakespeare productions is that (whether they're staged in modern times or not) they generally don't change the language. Things like the Reduced Shakespeare Company notwithstanding, of course.
The irony here is that it's a redacted Shakespeare that gives us the root of "bowdlerization".
But this isn't about copyright, they're changing it to appease to the woke authoritarian cult.
Yes, if "the audience" is a tiny population niche (but massively overrepresented in cultural and artistic power) of white, middle-class liberals (because it normally is) being offended on behalf of people they seem to feel need taking care of for whatever condescending and other psychological motivations that drive them.
"this audiobook was developed and recorded many years ago. It's a product of it's time and day. It contains discriminatory thinking and language which back then was not challenged or questioned sufficiently. Any discrimintation is wrong, back then and today, and it is inappropriate, as we understand today in our pluralistic and equal opportunity society. We have still made the deliberate decision to re-publish the audio book unmodified and to _not_ hide it's past cultural shortcomings. We recommend to critically reflect discrimination. We have gathered introductory and deepening material about discrimination on our website ... "
imnsho this is a much more helpful approach, as it leads to critical thinking instead of shohooing "bad stuff" under the rug.
The uncensored books are a learning opportunity for both parents and children, which is thrown out to present a sterile nice clean world. And this cleansing is doubling down on Roald Dahl, who very deliberately kept rough corners in all his works to get people thinking.
No, it tells you directly what to think about the material. That's the opposite of critical thinking.
This featured such mind-boggling concepts as:
>Jo Misra (short for Jyothi, a Hindi word meaning light.) She is a 12-year-old daughter of George Kirrin, and like her mother before her is a tomboy...
Ironically, the original books have now leap-frogged the excerable rewrite in PC box-ticking, as the original George character can now be viewed as being a very early positvely portrayed "trans" character:
----
“I say! Are you Georgina?”
The child in the opposite bed sat up and looked across at Anne. She had very short curly hair, almost as short as a boy’s. Her face was burnt a dark-brown with the sun, and her very blue eyes looked as bright as forget-me-nots in her face. But her mouth was rather sulky, and she had a frown like her father’s.
“No,” she said. “I’m not Georgina.”
“Oh!” said Anne, in surprise. “Then who are you?”
“I’m George,” said the girl. “I shall only answer if you call me George. I hate being a girl. I won’t be. I don’t like doing the things that girls do. I like doing the things that boys do. I can climb better than any boy, and swim faster too. I can sail a boat as well as any fisher-boy on this coast. You’re to call me George. Then I’ll speak to you. But I shan’t if you don’t.”
[From "Five on a Treasure Island"]
The question is much more whether it is the task of society to create an environment in which no one can be hurt anymore. If one continues the thought, one must inevitably come to the conclusion to forbid EVERY word. The N-word or F-word was not created as an "evil" word, but it describes a thought. And only by these thoughts these words got the weight which now "seems to hurt". To forbid it (or to avoid) does not prevent the thought behind it. Energy always finds its way and the thought behind it will therefore conclude in a new word.
And the revolution always eats its own children. The next generation will then be bothered by coffee makers because it reminds them of the unpleasant office life. And no - I don't mean that as a joke. Each generation has to set itself apart from the previous one by being more radical (and not necessarily more wise).
Roald Dahl also changed his own books so they would stay current.
it's like if a painter adds something to an already-completed artwork that they had painted and then describes the result as a refined version of the painting (fine), vs when someone who just happens to have bought the painting adds something and then argues that the resulting painting is now the "official" version of the painting, while still naming the original painter as the creator (not fine).
Yes, and they are now generally mocked by today's critics for doing so.
"Updating" these works is gross, but only because it's nothing but a cash-grab for them, selling and re-selling this material to new audiences just by tweaking a few words here and there.
The author of this article doesn't seem aware of, or just leaves out, the previous slaves-from-Africa origin of oompa loompas.
I wonder if he wants to roll that one back too.
People didn't see the censorship in the same way as that "fish don't have a word for water" bit.
> How many of us chortled at fat Augustus Gloop getting stuck in that pipe, or winced at the idea of witches posing as cashiers, or smiled deviantly at the vision of a ‘tremendously flabby’ old lady? And we turned out fine. We weren’t wounded, we didn’t become hateful.
I guess that you can say that "laughing about these specific fictional fat people" doesn't directly cause one to behave in hurtful ways towards fat real people. To me it still seems bizarre that the author decided to basically ask "Remember how we laughed at fat people and how good that was?" right before stating as fact that noone was hurt in consequence of any of the stuff in the book.
On the other hand, it's actually physically nauseating to have The Spectator pass any comment on integrity, cultural vandalism, RightThink etc. They've led the charge promoting fake news and alternative "facts" from Brexit to Covid.
Not much to see here. Time to move on.
It's sad because (despite being mostly on the left) I used to read the Spectator, in a "hear the other side, challenge your own point if view" way. And it was good. Decent pragmatic right leaning people. Then in the run up to Brexit it just sort of fell apart. Out was anyone with facts or reasons. In were pre-canned talking points, appeals to emotion and bare faced lies.
Idiots with a column discover they can make more money by stoking culture war outrage.
It's like a perpetual profit machine. Thanks for participating.
It's pretty funny that you never see these complaints when European folklore is butchered because it's deemed to be "unsafe for children", entire scenes are cut out of Leon or even Harry Potter is being attacked for promoting "witchcraft".
Sure rewriting Dahl is silly but it is funny to me to pretend this is a modern invention in Anglosphere culture. The puritan moral panic has a long history
Have you missed the 2000's on the internet? All the people mocking "fundamental Christian" outrages against things like Harry Potter, Pokemon (evolution lol) and even the utterance of the word "Magic"? A group that was so wide and loud, that EA organized a false-flag protest against itself on the release of Dante's Inferno--just to get publicity and support via that group?
The reason that you "never" see those complaints is that they have won, and any mention of magic or violence being harmful in fiction is instantly ridiculed. They became invisible by actually being the norm
"Updated for a modern audience" as they say, where "modern audience" is 0.01% chronically online unhinged activists.
So be it. Guess which tool is really awesome at spitting out such bland texts? Checkmate, "writers".
I don’t like this decision by Dahl’s estate, but I wasn’t the one pushing for massively long copyright protections. It was all the people who pretend to be free market capitalists did.
If you want to designate something as “culture” and then yet insist that it must be owned by a single private entity which is the only one that has the right to do anything with it, such things will be the inevitable consequence.
The only cultural vandalism is the one that does not allow anyone but a private entity to reprint this apparent cultural treasures.
And this wasn’t a result of woke-ism. It was a result of free market forces.
The story is good no matter the characters and those who want the original, cool. Those who want the new version, cool as well.
But the articles and “opinions” we keep seeing here and there all smell an awful lot like there’s gonna be a new chocolate factory remake coming out, just “coincidentally”…
It’s been kind of wild watching talking points get disseminated in real time on this one. A few days ago, most Twitter threads on the topic were nearly universal in expressing at least mild disapproval. If you look today (and not just on Twitter, this HN thread itself has several repeated examples), you’ll see a ton of reply guys snarkily parroting the same handful of snappy-but-vapid “gotchas” that don’t lend themselves to a rebuttal without going full “mucho texto”.
And thus the most commonly visible pushback is a useless-but-inflammatory reactionary screed about how “the Wokes are changing history to push a Marxist agenda”.
I’ve noticed a similar pattern with other recent events like the Ohio train derailment where every thread devolves into multiple people posting the same 2-3 obvious canned talking points and pointing fingers everywhere except at the company responsible or even the lack of comment/blame shifting by virtually all national leaders on both sides of the aisle.
The sheer speed at which propaganda is being disseminated, digested, and recited absolutely everywhere is leading to situations where a toxic mushroom cloud of smoke can hover over the heartland while GOP Governors and Dem Transportation Secretaries can declare “eh it’s no big deal”, the rail company can cut $25 checks to the affected while doubling train engineer workloads, and yet somehow they’ll all get away with it and the populace will blame The Other Team. Absolute dysfunction.
It seems to be blindingly obvious. Culture, art, writing - life, in fact - is of its time. It should be left alone. And we - as later, perhaps "better" (in some ways?) future generations - should examine these works and those times, and use this to encourage our own sense of morality and direction. We should use it to explain what went on - and in some cases to condemn, in others to reflect on what was better, and why.
To whitewash (sorry, oops, probably not supposed to..., ffs) this away and pretend things never happened IS censorship. It's the central tenet of 1984, or any dystopian vision, or that of dictatorships. This is the re-writing of history!
So - yes, we should have a "Black Boys Road" in Bristol, for example, and we should then use our museums and our history books to illuminate the horrors of slavery, the reality that Bristol was deeply involved in the slave trade, that Colston was a slaver - we should examine this deeply, and understand it, and condemn it in the strongest possible terms. But to just remove all the bits we find uncomfortable is a terrible error. It removes our means to question, our means to reflect. It's the same as talking about mental health issues in my opinion - if you hide shit away, the problem will never, ever resolve. The only way to get to any kind of resolution - painful though it is - is to talk about it.
All the above is a more general point about this terrible inflection point in our history where it seems certain people believe that All The Bad Things should be expunged, as if life can be made comfortable and easy, no bumps in the road here - and for god's sake don't "trigger me", I don't want to be sad... but in the Roald Dahl case, the example edits being quoted in the Spectator and other places are just so, so, SO misguided it hurts. I have teen children who can - and do - question the world, ask why things are as they are, point out the injustices of the past, know keenly what makes them (and others) sad. They're sometimes (gasp) sad themselves, and we work together to figure out what this means, and why. The world hurts sometimes, and we as humans need to learn how to deal with this stuff, without expecting some kind of sugar coated - and let's face it, insanely bland - landscape where everything is beautiful and happy and rose tinted all the time.
If society feels the need to flag things like Dahl as being "triggering" (I hate that word, what b/s) then so be it - ("The original work was written a long time ago and doesn't reflect many modern views") - but FFS leave the original work as it is.
…yet
There is also not a free speech issue at play here other than that already imposed by the copyright system. The Dahl estate is not being forced to make these changes, and indeed nobody can compel them to authorize publishing an unaltered version of the books (under current law).
But once you've set those grander questions aside, you can evaluate this specific case. Do you agree with the purpose of the edits? Do you think they're appropriate in degree and scope? I would say that I am somewhat sympathetic to the intention of some of the edits. Dahl fielded objections to his work during his lifetime, and pushed back strongly against the suggestion that his books were unsuitable for children for moral reasons [1], but he also changed (or permitted his publisher to change) the Oompa-Loompas from an African tribe to something more fantastical. These kinds of spot changes can be seen as analogous to a parent or teacher reading aloud and skimming past occasional material [2] that they don't find suitable for their audience.
It's the scope and degree of the changes here that I find inappropriate. This is not a scalpel removing a small blemish, it's a complete makeover. It's replacing Dahl's world (and his worldview) with a different one. Many of the changes feel arbitrary (Matilda can't read Conrad and Kipling? But Austen and Steinbeck are fine?) and others mutilate the humor or the meaning of the work. And there's no indication that unedited [3] versions of the work will be kept in print. For those reasons I think this is a terrible decision that should be reconsidered. If schools want reading material more compatible with modern mores there are many authors writing today. Or they can work to help kids get context on where Dahl was coming from. Authors don't need to be presented as moral exemplars.
[1]: https://www.hbook.com/story/charlie-chocolate-factory-reply [2]: I recall a schoolteacher skimming past a scene in a book where a teenage boy was drawing a picture of his girl friend -- later, reading the book, I realized there was a brief reference to him "flushing at the swelling of her breast" or something along those lines. [3]: Many books are edited with the author's permission after release, so what "unedited" means is complex (and makes some of the "you lose copyright if you bowdlerize your book" solutions I've seen to this difficult).
This is where Dahl bowed to early 70s wokery and erased the oompa-loompas' true identity as African slaves who would dribble for cocoa beans.
Film adaptations have struggled with the fact that oompa-loompas are, however you dress them up, slaves.
From this article which is much more interesting:
https://theconversation.com/from-pygmies-to-puppets-what-to-...
We should fix copyright rather than stoke useless culture wars. The publisher and Dahl’s estate are laughing all the way to the bank on this controversy.
I'm sorry, what now?
My local library here in Western Australia has a second edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1860, 3000 copies).
There's been no pressure that I'm aware of to acquire the first, third, fourth, fifth or sixth editions or the numerous translations that I'm aware of - many of these are carried by other libraries.
Who is going around libraries forcing them to get more recent editions?
I also think that revising a dead author’s work as was done here is tasteless.
Personally I think the problem is excessive copyright. Without ownership, anyone could rewrite Dahl however they like. And if someone prefers the original version, that's fine too.
Arguably a death is more tasteful than a rewrite but either has room for regret.
In fact, most of Walt Disney’s films were books adapted and changed and “modernized” without the consent of the original author. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is disgustingly racist and imperialist. Disney modernized the story significantly by removing many of those themes (although adding a few “modern” racist tropes of their own).
No one calls those adaptations “cultural vandalism” though.
However, these new editions are effectively replacing the old ones. I don't so much mind them rewriting the books so long as the originals continue to be published. However, I don't expect that will be the case. Eventually, anyone going to a bookshop to buy one of Dahl's books will struggle to find the original version. That's a real shame, I think.
Paraphrasing from Dahl's 2010 biography but worth reading in full https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Storyteller/fit6PwGW...
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) objected to the original film version on the grounds that the book was racist ... they were adament that the title of the movie also had to change because they did not want it to promote the book.
Roald agreed to "de-negro" the Oompa-Loompas in both book and movie ... The movies title was altered to "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory".
I can see how slaves might be offensive to people and be changed by the author but for example no one was offended by the word "screeching" and if they were I don't think we should let those people choose which words a book uses.
Copyright that persists long after the death of the author makes no sense to society at large. It’s just another form of rent-seeking capitalism.
So you're saying that in this story about giants that eat children, and a smaller giant that brings them joyous dreams via some sort of trumpet, dreams he catches with a butterfly net and then mixes himself, in a story about mobilising the British army to get rid of the aforementioned giants by means of giving the queen a nightmare, in a story about a young girl kidnapped in her pyjamas from an orphanage, there is a cloak? Moreover, a cloak whose original colour is somehow hurtful to some folks, while changing it is apparently cause for grave concern amongst some folks?
To that I say: huh.
(/Mal from Firefly)
What I perceive as a general normalization of obesity feels... very corporate, or certainly too convenient for corporate interests. Americans fail to consider many aspects of their lives regarding their health because they're trained to trust brands, and that doubly/triply extends to ignorance around diet and nutrition.
Food, sex, alcohol. All vices that Americans glorify and demonize in nearly exactly the least effective ways.
IDK, I don't want to preach but my body now, compared to with an extra 80-100lbs on it? It's hard to put into words how many aspects of my life are markedly better.
[0a]https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/ops/SNAPFo... [0b]https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/foods-typically-purchased-supp... [1]https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/explore-our-work/... [2]https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-closer-look-...
It is, IMHO, very visible in lingerie marketing.