Editing Dahl and others

Politics & News
1

LOL, who did they hire to do the edits?

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2

Try to find a defense to the Dahl stuff. You can’t.

3

It’s their books. Anyone who cares is an idiot.

Hows that?

4

Ive never read any of these books so I am not emotionally invested but I would say It’s their publishing rights.

5

Did you read the article summarizing the edits? A couple seem sensible, if editing a work is ever sensible as opposed to just choosing not to read it. The majority of them are ridiculous though. You can absolutely defend the original versions in many cases.

6

I agree.

Editing the original works is madness.

7

Ohh, gotcha. I thought you were saying the opposite.

8

Awful?

There is literally a pejorative going back hundreds of years for this kind of puritanical bullshit.

9

Shakespeare vs a kids book… okay.

10

There are many examples of historical whitewashing of literature. They, uh, haven’t gone well for your team!

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11

Is this a good thing?

12

It’s an editorial decision on a kids book. It doesnt matter. Its culture war bullshit. Find better things to care about.

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13

What about something like Huckleberry Finn? Should we replace the n word with “n word”? “N word Jim”?

14

I agree with Rushdie

https://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie/status/1627075835525210113

https://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie/status/1627375615165755392

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15

Isn’t this just IP owners exercising their ownership rights? I didn’t think that counted as censorship

16

the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.

Seems to fit.

17

Wrong.

This isn’t the same as uproar over dodgeball or trans bathrooms.

Dahl is a significant author whose works have been read for several decades: he is part of the canon of children’s lit. This is a legitimate slippery slope. These specific changes don’t mean too much, but once an editor/publisher decides to assert itself what’s to stop one with PETA sensibilities to change “Shooting an Elephant” to “Shooting a Can”?

18

This is akin to the ET re-release where the cops had flashlights instead of guns. You can argue that and the Dahl stuff are misguided, and call it self-censorship. And I guess there’s a distinction to be made here between one situation that was done with the approval of the original creator and the other than was done by a subsequent owner. But both situations are pretty different than the state taking books off of shelves.

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19

But even this distinction depends on where the pressure came from. Was it initiated by the Dahl estate, or by Puffin?

Like say that Rushdie made changes to The Satanic Verses that satisfied the Ayatollah and got the fatwa lifted. Censorship or just an IP owner exercising his ownership right? Just because Puffin is scarier than the Ayatollah, or perhaphs Dahl’s estate is more spineless than Rushdie doesn’t make it not censorship.

20

Where do you think the pressure came from here? Why? And if the answer is “its a desire to sell more books because this is ehat people want but nobody outright said ‘you MUST remove these references that we dislike’” then who really gives a fuck?