Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

They don't want to have to pay royalties to Margaret Atwood when they implement the handmaids headgear.

> They've been transparent about their desires to censor media.

100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers".

I don't really know who to vote for to stop stuff like this. No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech. Instead it's always about censoring your opponents and their ideas while you're in power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controvers...

Except these revisions were driven by the publisher and not the Democratic party, as far as I can tell. An entirely different scenario.

Anything not aligned and christened by the MAGA movement is considered left/woke/Democratic Party/etc. which means it's bad until they change their minds and adopt it, if they ever do.

It does matter and it is not a minor detail that the left is acting to help people and the right is acting to hurt people. You can always disagree with what the left does, but the left and the right are nowhere near equivalent in the big picture that actually matters.

It's indicative of a broken world view if you believe you can help people by censoring speech.

It's not indicative of a "broken world view" at all. There are already laws against defamation, running afoul of those would lead to your speech being censored to help the victim of defamation, for example. This logic can be extended with care.

That apparent problem goes away once you recognize that you’re using the word “censor” incorrectly in one case to draw a false equivalency. In the case of the right-wing behaviour discussed here, “censor” is the correct word because the term refers to an official use of power to prevent something considered politically incorrect or obscene from being available even though the publisher, librarians, and reader all thought they should be accessible.

In the case of the Dahl revisions, there is no official power being used to suppress individual preference. The publisher decided they wanted better sales for an older item, realized that things like anti-Semitism were unappealing to modern audiences, and created a new edition of their own property. Every part of that process was entirely voluntary and nobody’s purchased property is affected in any way – quite unlike the right-wing telling libraries to remove books with significant literary value which their patrons want to read.

I've been saying since Clinton when it started to become clear, that liberals and conservatives will eventually kill the ideals of this Republic. (And not only the ideals expressed in the First.) They've been chipping away for long enough that they now believe it is safe for them to chop.

These people are all dangerous in the extreme. It's just that the conservatives have unmasked themselves and displayed the extreme danger they represent to our ideals in the US in a far more open fashion than liberals.

I might have given a shred of charitability to you if you said "far more open fashion than the left." but the fact that you said "liberals" tells me I shouldn't take your political perspective seriously

So “I would take your politics seriously if it aligned with mine”? I am afraid that whole point of politics is finding compromise with people who you don't agree.

it has nothing to do with alignment of politics, it's that your description of reality is so wrong that it would be difficult to seriously engage

It’s more about good versus bad faith: you can compromise with people who are willing to be honest, but that isn’t possible when someone is redefining terms or contradicting all available evidence to make their position work. That commenter was conflating two very different sets of activities to smear liberals, implying that they somehow know someone else’s true intention even though that contrasts with their actions and public statements.

Yeah, both parties are becoming more authoritarian. IMO the solution is a different voting system than first-past-the-post that allows multiple parties to exist to force different political factions to interact with each other and compromise. But until then though I'm going to vote for the lesser of two evils, since under FPTP not voting at all would not be acting against the greater of two evils.

Evidence for the Republican party becoming more authoritarian:

- attempted illegal book bans

- suppression of right to protest and free speech on university campuses with lawfare

- US citizens being black bagged and deported to foreign concentration camps without due process and against court rulings

- deploying the army to the states unconstitutionally

- continued gerrymandering over the ruling of state supreme courts (Ohio)

Evidence for the Democratic party becoming more extreme:

- ... I'm struggling to think of an example, maybe you hold that prosecution of violent insurrectionists and their ring leader, the current president, was political extremism and authoritarian, but one would be so far detached from the reality-inhabiting community if so I don't know what to tell you.

Note one massive difference: nobody was trying to make a law that Dahl’s books be sanitized or running around to libraries and getting his books banned. That was a publisher taking unilateral action changing works they own (for better or worse). I see a massive difference between the two things.

It was even done in consultation with the Dahl estate/family, although they choose to ignore Roald Dahl's professed opinions about editing his works.

The problem with censorship is in general never about any specific application of it, but rather the principle. When censorship becomes culturally acceptable, self censorship and political polarization follows as a natural consequence.

The massive difference between government censorship and private cooperation censorship is unlikely to effect how people feel and react to it.

Additionally, a lot of the language was very out of date with racists and discriminatory undertones so parents had stopped buying the books. It was driven by the market because if they didn't adjust the content to adhere to what parents expect in children's literature today the stories and moral lessons would be lost to the dustbin of history and merely interesting historical artifacts.

I would regularly see stories on Reddit where someone was gifted one of the more borderline Dahl novels and they binned it rather than giving it their child. I'm sure their internal metrics were painting a similar picture.

That's bad for business. It wasn't change for social justice. It was change or watch your IP die and everyone involved still wanted the money.

TIL that giving book buyers the choice between the classic uncensored version of a book and a revised version of a book with blatant antisemitism removed, a choice provided by a book publisher, is an example of the Democrats being almost as bad as Republicans.

Don't forget one is state censorship and other is independent private entity that (in the land of the free) can do absolutely what it wants if it holds the copyright.

> 100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers".

You realize that's significantly better, right? Like at least two orders of magnitude better?

In one case, the copyright holder of Roald Dahl's books decided to censor (incorrectly, I agree) their own books which they own the copyright to. That's a private organization doing a stupid thing, making their own content worse. A private organization censoring their own words. No elected officials or persons appointed by elected officials were involved.

In the other case, the government is unilaterally deciding to withhold information from the public. The government is censoring other people's words.

You realize how that's not even remotely similar, right? "The left" is way better on this one.

Without commenting on what's better or worse, note that the copyright holders are not censoring their own words. They're censoring the words of someone who died decades ago in books that are several generations old, and it's the government that says no one else is allowed to publish the originals. Granting exclusive rights to publish and modify the works several generations after they were written is government censorship. In this case the censored books become completely illegal to publish as well rather than simply unavailable in government libraries.

(Feel free to substitute the situation with Dr Seuss books if Dahl isn't a fit because that organization also publishes originals, but even if the originals were still available, derived works are also censored)

More stupid bothseideism.

Surely the Dahl's family censoring their own books is on progressives, and it's equally as bad as Republicans trying to overthrow an election, send the troops after protesters, build concentration camps on national territory, ban books, revoke women's rights to abortion, revoke civil rights...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com