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[return to "Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books"]
1. stucki+a2[view] [source] 2023-02-18 18:25:59
>>GavCo+(OP)
Censoring old children's books. Yikes. This is frightening in more ways than one.

Besides the obvious censorship, and rewriting the past being a bad thing. I can't wait to see what they do to "Brave New World", "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984". It'll be ironic and sad if they burn the old unedited Roald Dahl books.

But also have we reached cultural stagnation, that old media still out competes new ones by such orders of magnitude ?

This is a huge problem, when every year we graduate more and more people wanting to be writers, artists, etc. This will only get worse with books now being written by ChatGPT and art by Dall-E/Midjourney/Stable Diffusion.

Have we reached "peak multimedia" content ?

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2. ajross+Cm[view] [source] 2023-02-18 20:33:25
>>stucki+a2
> But also have we reached cultural stagnation, that old media still out competes new ones by such orders of magnitude ?

Uh... Roald Dahl is one of, arguably the greatest children's author of the 20th century. It's not like we're reprinting old pulp here because we can't write new stuff.

Frankly I think your hyperbole is misplaced. Dahl's works are republished, and they're children's literature, so it's not hard to imagine how mid-20th-century conceptions might be seen as a bit much for the target audience. No one's trying to prevent kids from reading the existing books[1], they're just trying to make a buck selling them to modern parents.

Does that make this a good idea? No, it's dumb. But it's hardly "yikes" territory either.

[1] Which would be the "censorship" you're talking about.

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3. stucki+8p[view] [source] 2023-02-18 20:50:38
>>ajross+Cm
This is not simple republishing. The editing occurring is censorship because modern sensibilities are different today.

Roald Dahl was notorious about hating people editing his works. Censorship via stealth editing is just extremely gross maybe even as bad as burning books.

If those works don't meet modern standards, let new books be made. It certainly is Yikes territory to me and apparently thousands of others on reddit and twitter.

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4. ajross+pv[view] [source] 2023-02-18 21:33:56
>>stucki+8p
> This is not simple republishing. The editing occurring is censorship because modern sensibilities are different today.

Good grief. That's simply not what censorship means. "Editting" happens all the time. Are journalists being "censored" when the published article doesn't match their words? In fact with translations, "editting" happens every time, by definition. How many times has the Bible been censored by now?

If you want hyperbole about interpreting The Decline of Western Civilization into internet argumentation: how about how no one cares about words anymore and wants to call everything a maximalist insult. "Censorship" doesn't mean anything anymore, it just means "someone did something I don't like".

Seriously, go to the library and see if anyone is trying to censor Matilda.

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5. stucki+8w[view] [source] 2023-02-18 21:39:31
>>ajross+pv
You can try to redefine the words into whatever you think is right or wrong, but it doesn't make it true, and a very large amount of people disagree with you.
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