Someone put a list of changes on Reddit.
See https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-202...
Dahl was a transgressive writer also for his day - at least I've always had that impression. His macabre deliciousness and sharp wit are what makes his books so good—like an Edward Gorey for kids, but not too much for kids. So some of these edits are artistically consequential, the same way that the Bowdlers' "Family Shakespeare" was (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare).
Things go in cycles, so I wonder if the Bowdlers will be rehabilitated. Probably not, because their specific motives are so anachronistic now. Also, their name has been a term of derision for 200 years and that's a black hole to get out of. But if you abstract away from the ideological specifics, the phenomena are remarkably similar.
There’s an interesting recent YouTube video from Wisecrack on the topic:
* Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* Esio Trot - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* The Enormous Crocodile - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* The BFG - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* James and the Giant Peach - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* The Witches - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* Matilda - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* Fantastic Mr Fox - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* George's Marvellous Medicine - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
* The Twits - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds...
I would also like to bring your attention to the Florida school book ban which applies not just to new editions of one author, but to an entire state's education system.
> Among the titles that have been removed and banned in the course of the vetting in her school district are Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye,’ ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini, ‘The Stranger’ by Albert Camus, ‘Revolting Rhymes’ by Roald Dahl, and a skateboarding magazine called ‘Thrasher’.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/florida-bo...
That's probably a matter of interpretation, I am not an expert in these matters.
I also don't have to like his books, if I need to check upon these questions on a permanent basis. I got better things to do.
Also this post by @jasonhansel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849383#34853283
And Dahl actually did make some changes in new editions himself. Perhaps the most notable being his changes to the portrayal of oompa-loompas. Dahl commented :
> I created a group of little fantasy creatures.... I saw them as charming creatures, whereas the white kids in the books were... most unpleasant. It didn't occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist, but it did occur to the NAACP and others.... After listening to the criticisms, I found myself sympathizing with them, which is why I revised the book. (in Mark West's Trust Your Children: Voices against Censorship in Children's Literature, 1988). [1]
You can see it with successive movie adaptations: the decorations are the same, but all the messages get reversed, they focus on action, and they add hopeful endings.
This isn’t about what’s on a curriculum, it’s about what a teacher is allowed to have on their book shelf.
You can read the bill here if you have any questions. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1467/BillText/er/...
-- The Underground Grammarian
These are actually specific to the Duval school district, which was pulling books before the recent law, not to the "entire state's education system".
https://pen.org/banned-books-florida/ - 176 books removed from classrooms in Duval County, Florida, in January 2022 for “review.”
Local governments across the spectrum have always exercised the right to make choices appropriate for their communities, sometimes to great derision of opposing parties - e.g., left-leaning districts banning Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Removing them from the school library (but having them available in many other venues) seems like a much smaller problem than attempts to rewrite existing works to fit the current atmosphere.
The linking of 'secret societies who run the world' to an anti-Jewish message (to the readers of the books) is also a huge stretch and I think it wrong. That the people who actually 'run the world' are hidden was evidently part of Dahl's mindset. It's not an unusual mindset. Dahl attributed some powerful Jews as (at least part of) that 'secret society' in the real world, yes. I've read those anti-Jewish quotes from Dahl before and his thinking on the matter is pretty clear. But Matilda is a work of fiction. It's not at all strange that he reflected those 'secret power group' conceptions in one of his books with a cabal of witches actually running a fictional book world. But I don't think he in any way intended the book to be an explicit analogy to what he thought about our actual world situation, i.e. I don't think witches are meant to be a stand-in for Jews, and the big noses and wigs thing is pretty weak sauce to use to make that case, as I've already addressed. Contrast Matilda here to Orwell's Animal Farm which was written as an explicit analogy to the real world, and Orwell made clear links, e.g. Snowball == Trotsky, showing that he intended it as such. While Orwell's work is partly a warning against communism (and partly just a good story, well told), Dahl's Matilda isn't a warning against 'powerful secret societies who run the world', let alone Jewish ones; the secret, malignant society is simply a good fictional plot device and one that's been used many times before (sometimes with explicit prejudice, sometimes not).
[1] https://www.heyalma.com/is-roald-dahls-the-witches-antisemit...
How are students supposed to study for the test if the authors are banned? :)
https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2023/02/17/de...
Apparently book sales dropped in 2022
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/f...
So maybe it’s COVID’s fault.
He also killed at least one Vichy French Air Force pilot .. again there's no indication whether that pilot (or pilots) were Nazis.
[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/19487821/thomas-the-tank-engine-...
For instance, see “The Family Shakespeare” by the Bowdlers. Interestingly, critics seemed to pan it for similar reasons to HN’s commentators, but the book sold well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare
I’m considerably less dogmatic about this than I used to be. Enid Blyton was a staple of my childhood, but do I really have to explain to my daughter why golliwogs are offensive if I want to give her a copy of the Magic Faraway Tree?
The movie paints them with orange colored skin, no one was protesting that edition of the original text.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQkz_X1Rg60
Sounds like he had 'deep work' figured out before it was a thing.
Reminds of Linus famously coding in an empty room in his dressing gown.
I'm not generally a contrapoints fan, but I really enjoyed the video she made about her experience with this on twitter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8
Or the TED talk "How one tweet can ruin your life" from 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI
We studied To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible when I was in highschool. I remember thinking how barbaric and despicable "mob justice" was. I didn't understand it, and I assumed I never would - I thought it was something we reference from history. But twitter really has brought the mob justice style witch hunts back.
I don't understand how anyone can claim its not a real phenomenon. Being cancelled is obviously quite a real experience for the people it happens to.
It's also incredibly insulting and disrespectful to Dahl to meddle with his work.
The endless critiquing & editing types should instead write new books and see if anyone's interested in their 'new' ideas.
It all reminds me of the 1980's era of putting antibiotics in plastic children's toys in case they might chew on them and get 'contaminated' by germs. We have to build up resistance along with critical reasoning skills but there's lots of evidence the kids just built up a lot of resistance to the antibiotics and the germs were good at building up immunities.
In the Victorian era 'Father Christmas' was conceptually green, skinny and 'good'. His opposite was Krampus who was bad, with lots of scary images of him carrying off terrified children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus
Over time Coca cola et al made Santa's imagery fat, jolly, 'unopposed' and therefore meaningless, and now that tradition is reduced to a saccharin sweet gift giving orgy to children.
We are having similar conceptual erasure imposed on us in so many areas of society this decade and it is not going to end well.
"That man looks foreign" is one of many exact quotes from any number of her series.
It'd be really cool if someone familiar with what I'm linking to below could comment, especially regarding the word screech and its related forms!
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720347115
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/roald-dahl-fam...
“It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”
Since we just asked you to stop doing it and you've kept doing it, I think we have to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I made a point of turning off the flags on this submission—I don't have any problem with the article and you can see from my comments in the thread what I think of these edits to Dahl. But you still can't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how provocative someone's comments are or you feel they are.
FWIW, while tptacek's comments to you were probably slightly edgier than usual and maybe a bit over the line, 'gaslighting' seems like a big exaggeration to me.
So just talking about conspiracies isn't a good indicator of anti-Semitism.
What an awful thing to say. It would be different if your comment taught us something, but it's little more than a well-written diss.
Imagine how you'd feel if the word "Men" were replaced by various ethnic groups, while still maintaining its accuracy.
At one time it was true to say that women were naturally bad at chess.
My wife supported me financially for close to five years. It's why I was able to learn ML so thoroughly. Maybe some men would view her as the competition, but I'm fortunate to be in a relationship where we don't feel threatened by the other. I recommend other men try to find this as well, since it's quite nice.
It's also nice to have a family where the roles are well-defined and reliable, and there's nothing wrong with wanting one over the other. It's personal preference, which you can't really control. But saying that men are bad at forming robust social safety nets is different than qualifying your statements with "some" or "most."
I'll be the first to say that it's a huge double standard to expect most men to be emotionally closed off most of the time, whereas women are expected to be more emotional in relation to men. But you're phrasing this in a highly negative way.
The women who don't become homeless often resort to sex work. It tends to be more difficult for men to do this in a financially successful way. Men are statistically more prone to violent crime; granted, and testosterone deserves to be scrutinized in its role regarding this. As for the addiction claim, I'd be curious to see the data, since my anecdata suggests mostly equal rates. https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/substance... claims the situation is a bit more nuanced:
> For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder. In addition, women may be more susceptible to craving and relapse, which are key phases of the addiction cycle.
More generally, if you're going to paint various segments of the population with negative traits, it's important to bring data to the discussion which backs up your assertions. That way it informs the reader rather than polarizing them.
That said, if you'd written a children's book, I wouldn't lobby for it to be changed. I'd buy different books, or explain it in context.
The noun sense of female well precedes (going back to its Latin roots) the adjectival sense of the word. [1] The adjectival sense came from the noun, the exact reverse of what you are saying.
And this pattern of adjectives coming from nouns (e.g. leafy, greasy, beautiful, harmful, dangerous, adventurous) is common, while the reverse is not (I'm hard put to think of even one example). So what you are saying here is a nonsense, with no scholarly basis to it.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/female#etymonline_v_5841
> He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
There's an easy test to see if you understand someone's position in a disagreement. Just summarize their position back to them. They'll tell you if you got it right.
> a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.
This absolutely isn't my position. I don't think you understand why people disagree with you here.
[The full quote by Mill, if anyone is curious: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66643-he-who-knows-only-his... ]
> there is a difference between white people wanting to stick together and people of color wanting to stick together in a white supremacist society. In this case the white people stick together to maintain their oppression and exclusion, and the people of color stick together to find freedom and respite from their mistreatment.
Here's the problem. That bias is ok in some cases, and not ok in others, and the poster claims to tell us when that is the case. Assuming the society is a society of white supremacy, whites cannot gather, only by virtue of being whites.
The same applies for all categories you care to divide people in, in the oppressor/oppressor axis.
Your "let people associate with who they wish" is denied.
On the other hand these figures are wildly different among humans with similar genetic profiles in other countries, and among humans of the same country 1, 2 or 3 generations ago. In other words: it's not our genetic disposition that's making us fat, it really is our behaviour. And yes it's behaviour in a different food market, but it's behaviour nonetheless.
My parents for example simply as a rule do not buy much processed food and they've always had a normal weight, never dieted, never made any effort apart from eating 'normal' like they were taught or taught themselves. For them a normal diet is as normal as putting on clothes in the morning.
It really is absurdly simple to just buy many kinds of vegetables and eat them with little or no prep. It's really easy to choose to eat lentils. It's really easy to read labels. It's easy to apply the rule to not use sugar in a recipe. It's really easy to make your own salad, I had 'salad making duty' as a kid for the first 20 years of my life or so, we had a salad everyday (we grew up on welfare btw if anyone wants to make the healthy = expensive pricing argument, it's not true). It's really not that hard to eat healthy, in fact it's easier than ever. My grandparents had to visit 10 different small stores where I can go to one supermarket, they had to buy anything fresh constantly for lack of refrigeration where I can store many foods for a long time, they spent a large chunk of their income on food whereas staple foods for me are much cheaper etc etc.
That having been said, both my parents have had quite a bit of dental work as they aged, despite taking good care of their teeth.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...
Here's one to get you started : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Friendly...
Activist cast and crew. Especially Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick Sargent. No mistaking it.
Agnes Moorehead and Paul Lynde are gay icons from before anyone could be gay.
Salman Rushdie reacted: «absurd censorship» and «should be ashamed».
https://www.axios.com/2023/02/19/roald-dahl-childrens-books
--
Ok, now for the trigger of a mother of all reactions:
reportedly, some text was added in a paragraph of Dahl's about hags «bald under their wigs»:
> There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that
I didn't see personal attacks from tptacek. Some of his comments in this thread were edgier than I would like but I didn't see any that broke the site guidelines badly enough to warrant a scolding the way your comment did. Based on what I saw, this isn't a borderline call and (in case you're worried about this) it has nothing to do with disagreeing with you—just look at my posts on the actual topic.
> Every time I see him winding people up, you're there behind him, threatening anyone who stands up
The active ingredient there is "I see". What people see, and fail to see, is basically determined by their passions on a subject. If all these years of moderation have taught me one thing, it's that.
You're kidding me, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden
Anyways, I wouldn't be able to go into details in this answer as there are many, and many to explain. I found this summary which you may find interesting: https://www.abebooks.com/books/the-gruesome-origins-of-class...
One that particularly stroke me as exceptionally sadistic is the Bluebeard by Charles Perrault (a contemporary of H. C. Andersen and with similar acclaim).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: actually, I've banned this account because you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future, specifically the ones about flamewar, ideological battle, and name-calling.
Actually it took us years to begin thinking this way but once we figured it out as a principle it changed a ton about how we moderate HN threads.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
For anyone curious to why the word "folks" is chosen, here's great explanation:
They were sold 'raw" (uncoloured), enameled, or hand painted.
These are classic examples of you can't trust the name.
