The world in a Sand Grain
Hosted by Sand_Grain
Current debate about contemporary life, ancient historical issues, and just about everything in between in different languages
- 1114
MEMBERS - 43646
MESSAGES - 14
POSTS TODAY
Discussions
Roald Dahl Stalinized Lecture and Books
From: Apollonius (Theocritos)
22-Feb
Woke Censors Ruin Roald Dahl - The Daily Sceptic
Woke censors at Puffin have ruined the much-loved works of Roald Dahl, making hundreds of changes that replace his vivid, darkly funny writing with bland platitudes and outright propaganda.
Read more from The Daily Sceptic‘Sensitivity readers’ at Puffin have painstakingly gone through his classic books removing the vivid, darkly funny writing that captivated so many of us as children, replacing it with bland, woke platitudes and outright propaganda.
If your response to this is blind rage, then congratulations, you are a healthy functioning human being.
From: Apollonius (Theocritos)
22-Feb
The rewriting of Roald Dahl should disturb us all
Philistines and vandals have taken over art and culture.
Read more from www.spiked-online.com. .. We live in infantilised times – in which speech, culture and even history is censored and rewritten to avoid rattling our brittle spirits. And while we treat adults as children we seem to treat children as robots – to be programmed with the right views and sensibilities rather than left to explore. This can only impoverish literature and repel young people from it. Part of Dahl’s enduring appeal, in spite of JK Rowling’s hostile takeover of kids’ bookshelves, is precisely his appetite for the dark, violent and grotesque. ‘When writing stories, I cannot seem to rid myself of the unfortunate habit of having one person do nasty things to another person’, he once said. The magic and misanthropy of Dahl’s work, notes his biographer, was informed by the Norwegian fairy tales he was raised on and a personal life full of tragedy. To sanitise his work is to completely, utterly, idiotically misunderstand what marks it out in the first place.
These are the people who have taken over our cultural industries and institutions – idiots who have no idea what it is they are destroying. This sanitisation of literature isn’t coming from outside pressure. There was no big petition demanding Dahl’s works be given a rewrite. The barbarians are inside the gates. The sensitivity readers – a growing industry within the publishing world for many years now – were hired by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company, which is now owned by Netflix. The review began when the company was still run by the Dahl family. We desperately need to push back against this new philistinism among our elites; against this vandalism posing as progress.
From: Apollonius (Theocritos)
22-Feb
Bowdlerizing Roald Dahl | City Journal
A publisher's move to remove anything purportedly offensive from the author's books is the latest exhibit of an unfortunately timeless impulse.
Read more from City Journal... The sensitivity readers who go through books anticipating such distress—prevention is so much better than cure—have an immense and never-ending task before them (they need never fear unemployment), for they can always find new fears to anticipate and assuage. Just think of the work necessary to be done on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Why the White Rabbit, for example? Why not the Cross-Breed Rabbit? As for the White Queen, could there be any character more redolent of white supremacy? Surely the Mad Hatter should henceforth be the Neurodiverse Hatter? And being against the death penalty as we are, surely “Off with his head!” should now be “Give him community service!”
The editing is an insult to the sophistication of children, who quickly become aware of the difference between literal and other interpretation of words. This is forgotten, it seems, by some of their elders and betters.
Perhaps the sensitivity readers aim not merely to render certain thoughts and judgments impossible for children but also to create a world in which they will enjoy perpetual powers of censorship—and employment, courtesy of giant corporations such as Netflix, owner of the Roald Dahl Story Company.
Mrs. Bowdler was merely puritanical; the sensitivity readers combine puritanism with political tyranny. Mrs. Bowdler, meet Joseph Stalin.
From: Apollonius (Theocritos)
22-Feb
From the comments:
I don't believe C.S. Lewis can bettered on this horrible phenomenon:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
For anyone rightfully indignant by this violation of Mr. Dahl's work: buy his original books in physical form and keep them in good condition. In fact, do that for every work that you value or want preserved; if you think this lot will stop at deleting a few innocuous adjectives, you're about to be most unpleasantly surprised.
From: Apollonius (Theocritos)
22-Feb
A modest proposal for revisionist gothic literary thoughtcrimes against wokespeak - John Murawski, RealClear Politics, 22 February 2022
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/22/a_modest_proposal_for_revisionist_gothic_literary_thoughtcrimes_against_wokespeak_148892.html
- Edited 24 February 2023 15:00 by Apollonius (Theocritos)
From: Guard101
23-Feb
Extremely seen and identifiably, going into communism. ..
The new generation have been through along within brainwashed education, that's for sure.
From: Not a (Pinck0)
23-Feb
Will there be anything left unharmed as Historical pieces of evidence of the past or will there be a books burning as Hitler did??
This is insane!! totally
From: Not a (Pinck0)
23-Feb
Oops!
We can't seem to find the page you are looking for!
Error Code: 404
From: Not a (Pinck0)
23-Feb
[You read that right. The Sneetches are apparently racist because they look at the world in a race-neutral way, and because they learn to accept one another. They obviously have not read Ibram X Kendi or absorbed critical race theory.]