When I read this story in the Daily Sceptic today my mind immediately jumped to 1984!! How weak minded do you have to be to be mortally hurt by words in a book???? A children’s book at that!!!!! I feel sorry for kids - life is going to be painful with these woke bed wetters in charge!!!
they already made all the playgrounds lame as lame can be, years ago, to protect precious yuppy children from all possibility of ....learning anything, frankly...
It is even creepier and more sinister than that I suspect. I had a child development teacher in San Francisco who worked twenty years past retirement fighting to keep kids in preschool able to climb and play and spin and run because that is how the brain and body synchronize and the somato-sensory system learns to function. Hanging upside down, as I dimly recall, does something for the cerebellum that matters. In the States they stopped recess as it was interfering with the time needed to drill kids on standardized tests, which were linked to school funding, then drugged them if they couldn't sit still. It is stealth evil going on for decades.
The creepy thing about the rewriting of kids' books, beyond like how the F dare they narcissistically engulf literature with their boundariless ideology, as if it were only a commodity, is that every individual opportunity for a parent and child, or a teacher and a classroom, to use whatever is outdated as what they call a teachable moment is destroyed. Suck on this ideology from on high. We are all just little cogs in the machine and that's if we are lucky. Rise like lions!
Yes, my first mate would stand on his head to be more awake. The brain gets blood and oxygen, and many use this and feel inspired after. Of course, cleansing and lightening occur. I loved hanging from the swing and side bars when I was younger, and my kids and I had a blast on the "merry go round", you know, the metal spinning platform you had to jump onto and figure out about centirpital and centrifugal, with your body senses/ Great education
Well, there's a generation or two now that's massively disabled from vaxxing, that's a real factor.
Yeah, first time I heard about the drugging was from my friend from NJ in 1970. Crap. At that time, NJ parent could call the police and say my kid is smoking pot, and the child would be put into a mental hospital.
Them NJ kids sure knew a lot. Also a law in NJ that made it illegal to kill oneself. If one didn't succeed, one was put in jail.
Read John Gatto's two books if you have not. On the school system in US. To "school" is to train, not to educate.
Buy old books, buy old cars, buy brick Nokia phones. Use pirated versions of old software to circumvent always-online DRM (you will own nothing and be happy already exists for Adobe products).
Yeah, screw this. I'm going to live in the woods and be that crazy angry guy who shouts at the sun every day.
It's bad enough what Disney's done to Brothers Grimm and Anderson over the years. They're sucking all the beauty, passion, character, and the life out of everything.
Reminds me of a children's story that I used to read to my children called the Rainbow Goblins (back when rainbows were just rainbows)....the goblins wanted to suck every last drop of color out of the world. It ended badly for the goblins, ensnared by the roots of the flowers theyd come to rob, and drowned in a surfeit of colors.
If only our modern goblins/censors/greedy could come to the same just end.
And why wouldn't we talk to animals, things and plants? Commune with the world. It seems humanity (which of us are still humans and not mutant lab rats anyway) no longer wants to be connected to nature...or anything else but self.
I have a copy of that CS release that the serial numbers were 'accidentally' released to appease the owners of the software just before they went pay for play. I'll never pay them a penny, especially now I've gone through the new programs to get my certs. They are charging outrageously for a few new filters. The program does no more than my old Adobe PS 5 did and A5 didn't have all the woke imagry that I had to wince at everytime I opened the stupid things.
You know, funny thing. I've been reading British authors for most of my life, and some of my absolute top faves occasionally make an egregiously snide or nasty reference to Jews, and I'll feel a moment's irritation that sometimes even people we really like can be absolute wretched morons about something or other, and I've never felt the need to either fling myself sobbing on my couch of pain or to set off all the smoke detectors by frying a paperback in revenge.
Dahl--quite the all-around schmuck, in every possible way, and the only book of his that ever moved me was his autobiography, and thinking of that little kid in that boarding school, turning his face, at night, towards home--you forgive a lot in the adult creature when you understand its childhood. The crushed and damaged parts weren't fixable, and there's a savage ugliness in his work that might make a healthier person recoil in pretty profound distaste.
But censorship? Withdrawing from circulation? Explanatory notes and slimy squirming apologies from the heirs? Spare us. Let us teach our kids to deal with life and people as they are; what's wise to improve on and what's not; that taking offense is one's individual reaction but not the benchmark for what is or isn't acceptable. Don't impoverish us any further; we lost too much already.
"...there's a savage ugliness in his work that might make a healthier person recoil in pretty profound distaste." That's a great sum-up of Dahl, from my point of view. I could never figure out how anybody could think his children's books were good, or funny, or fit to be read to or by children. The kindest thing I could think about Dahl was "I wonder what kind of trauma this man experienced as a child, that made him look at every aspect of the world through such awful 'ugly-lenses.' "
The "clean-up editing" of Dahl's books doesn't fix their ugliness -- just makes it less savage and more banal. This is not an improvement, from my point of view. If there's going to be poison in the world, better to leave its bitter taste just as it is.
I related to his works because of living in an orphanage and having an abusive foster parent who was exactly like the Trunchbull and a lot of the other mean parental figures in his books. Just because your childhood was all rainbows and sunshine doesn’t mean that everybody else’s wasn’t.
What? This person clearly said that they think that Dahl was abused as a kid or something. I don’t know why people want to cover up everything bad that happens in the world. Like how children are suffering in foster care and conservatorship which is basically adult foster care and all anybody wants to talk about is babies without pain receptors or capacity to suffer dying from abortion. I remember reading “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” and the main character was reprimanded by her teacher for her “sordid little stories” when she wrote about her experience of poverty and having an alcoholic father.
I think heirs would need to have almost superhuman self-control to refrain from making money, one way or another, off of the legacy of the original author. The Hollywood abominations are the worst, of course.
But one must be fair, too. These authors were often vile to their families and the legacy of that reaches succeeding generations, and sometimes profiting off one's horrible grandpa is the best revenge.
His widow approved of Tim Burton’s Chocolate Factory movie which was more accurate to the book than the one that came out while Dahl was alive which he hated.
I remember being repelled and disturbed by a collection of his short stories, particularly one involving some kids and a dead swan, I can still remember it over 30 years later... He must have had a horrible childhood for his writings to be so bitter and twisted. I read his story of his childhood but at too young an age to understand it properly (the only bit I can remember involved adenoids being removed): I must revisit it.
The only Dahl book I could stand to read to my kids was "Danny the Champion of the World". I used it as an example of how language can be used to make law-breaking seem reasonable, and the law-breakers into sympathetic characters. Anyway, we had many discussions about the manipulative writing. Why can't this also be an option for people who object to content in books? Surely it's better to discuss problematic language and attitudes than to rewrite the book? Read them to your kids and explain that things were different back then. Or even, don't read the book at all, for goodness sake, if you think it's so terrible...
To me the changing of language in Roald Dahl (and all literature) is arrogant, dangerous and made entirely possible by electronic storage. It could be done within hours for the whole of English literature, with the aid of chatGPT and the control of the information highway by Google. We are (or is that "once were"?) told to believe in diverse biological ecosystems but not (it seems) diverse cultural ones. Foolhardy. They have no idea of the repercussions. This is why I am scared.
I agree with "Don't throw out your books!" (Some people are saying that the books containing accounts of the COVID era are critical records because the internet will eventually be scrubbed of anything that contradicts The Narrative. . .) But I'm wondering if I need to build secret hiding places to keep the books safe from public health officials and the law enforcement agents they order to find and burn the books.
This is why I've supplied my children with real books, lots of them with hardcovers. They learned early that the "kindle" or the "cloud" means someone elses property. This Ministry of truth is truly insane.
Goes waaaaay back, this suppression of authors, books and ideas does. It's just that with digitalization it's a thousand times easier to implement...don't even have to burn books now, all you have to do is erase the words, the file, the entire offensive thing...those who control the platforms and the publishing houses can do whatever they want...and they call that freedom.
I’m currently reading East of Eden by Steinbeck. It’s full of words, images and concepts that would be verboten nowadays. And it’s giving me a wonderful view into how people thought and spoke at the time of its writing, even if I cringe a little when I read parts of it.
ah they are Wille-Wankers indeed with this masturbatory exercise in self-harm!!!! (an' harm to GREAT BOOKS) but they are NOT Willy Wonkas--no no no siree. Willy Wonkas are confectioners of deliciousness and nobody indeed can screw around with their PRISTINE recipe (words!) 'else they contaminate the entire batch like GLOOP (who wants gloopy in yer marvelous chocolate?). Gloop is sent down the shoot fer alterin' (contaminatin') Wonka's recipe. Much like the works of a great author, Wonka (like Dahl) would prefer someone to carry on his work unadulterated--clearly those mindin' his estate do NOT understand Charlie. Wonka chooses his ingredients carefully, so we are told. They are rare and carefully mixed (by Oompa loompas who are exotic themselves!). So Wonka's message is that we LET THE HONEST TRUE TO HIS NATURE CHILD be REWARDED for Candor (with Candy!--and lord knows the cavity-prone Dahl was a fan of sweeties....)...but the true, frank, honest (even if cheeky) child like Charlie, like Matilda....are the ones Wonka the Wonderful rewards-- NOT those who mess with his inventions. So doin' this to Dahl's perfected recipes--gives ME the willies!
Thankfully I have all my ol' hardcopies from the 1970s with all the politically incorrect illustrations to boot, much enjoyed by my own cheeky (teen/young adult) children. Ain't partin' with these--would NEVER buy anything "censored" (not for sensitivity, not fer all the tea in China--an' them censors kin stick THAT in their opium pipe n' smoke it!) Long live Dahl (an' all his deliciously devious verse!)
True, and Chomsky built that idea on how the celtic tribes were conquered and tamed and finally assimilated by the romans: no real tradition or practice of writing things down for posterity meant that the romans as victors could erase the celt's own culture in just two-three generations.
By Tiberius time the celts thought of themselves as romans.
The christians did much the same to any non-christian culture with little or no written tradition, such as my Norse ancestors. If not for a few hundred runestones surviving (the christians smashed or buried them) and Snorre Sturlason collecting what was left of the oral tradition and writing the Eddas, we'd barely know they existed at all.
And there are even older examples from Egypt of the BC era, where one pharao orders the total eradication of any mention of a previous one, to the point of re-working calendars, re-doing monuments and such.
Are used to think that Noam Chomsky was articular and forwardthinking, until I saw the video of him, extolling the virtues of vaccines just like Sadhguru, and the Dalai llama, all of whom have a irrevocably now revealed themselves to be fakes
When I read this story in the Daily Sceptic today my mind immediately jumped to 1984!! How weak minded do you have to be to be mortally hurt by words in a book???? A children’s book at that!!!!! I feel sorry for kids - life is going to be painful with these woke bed wetters in charge!!!
they already made all the playgrounds lame as lame can be, years ago, to protect precious yuppy children from all possibility of ....learning anything, frankly...
It is even creepier and more sinister than that I suspect. I had a child development teacher in San Francisco who worked twenty years past retirement fighting to keep kids in preschool able to climb and play and spin and run because that is how the brain and body synchronize and the somato-sensory system learns to function. Hanging upside down, as I dimly recall, does something for the cerebellum that matters. In the States they stopped recess as it was interfering with the time needed to drill kids on standardized tests, which were linked to school funding, then drugged them if they couldn't sit still. It is stealth evil going on for decades.
The creepy thing about the rewriting of kids' books, beyond like how the F dare they narcissistically engulf literature with their boundariless ideology, as if it were only a commodity, is that every individual opportunity for a parent and child, or a teacher and a classroom, to use whatever is outdated as what they call a teachable moment is destroyed. Suck on this ideology from on high. We are all just little cogs in the machine and that's if we are lucky. Rise like lions!
It appears that Netflix bought the rights on Dahl’s content so they must be the culprits. We are canceling our subscription.
You might want to do that. One of the owners if a descendant of Edward Bernays, the "father of modern propaganda and public relations. "
Bill Gates favorite kind of guy. Bernays was Freud's nephew. He was "mentored"...if that word can apply to insane Freud...by said uncle.
Such a brilliant post.
Yes, my first mate would stand on his head to be more awake. The brain gets blood and oxygen, and many use this and feel inspired after. Of course, cleansing and lightening occur. I loved hanging from the swing and side bars when I was younger, and my kids and I had a blast on the "merry go round", you know, the metal spinning platform you had to jump onto and figure out about centirpital and centrifugal, with your body senses/ Great education
Well, there's a generation or two now that's massively disabled from vaxxing, that's a real factor.
Yeah, first time I heard about the drugging was from my friend from NJ in 1970. Crap. At that time, NJ parent could call the police and say my kid is smoking pot, and the child would be put into a mental hospital.
Them NJ kids sure knew a lot. Also a law in NJ that made it illegal to kill oneself. If one didn't succeed, one was put in jail.
Read John Gatto's two books if you have not. On the school system in US. To "school" is to train, not to educate.
Buy old books, buy old cars, buy brick Nokia phones. Use pirated versions of old software to circumvent always-online DRM (you will own nothing and be happy already exists for Adobe products).
Yeah, screw this. I'm going to live in the woods and be that crazy angry guy who shouts at the sun every day.
Right there with ya.
It's bad enough what Disney's done to Brothers Grimm and Anderson over the years. They're sucking all the beauty, passion, character, and the life out of everything.
Reminds me of a children's story that I used to read to my children called the Rainbow Goblins (back when rainbows were just rainbows)....the goblins wanted to suck every last drop of color out of the world. It ended badly for the goblins, ensnared by the roots of the flowers theyd come to rob, and drowned in a surfeit of colors.
If only our modern goblins/censors/greedy could come to the same just end.
Checks list: live in woods? Check. Angry? Check. Crazy? Check. Shouts at the Sun? No, but talks to animals, things and plants? Check.
See you in the woods, baboon!
And why wouldn't we talk to animals, things and plants? Commune with the world. It seems humanity (which of us are still humans and not mutant lab rats anyway) no longer wants to be connected to nature...or anything else but self.
Yes adobe is on my blacklist. Just missed the last opportunity to buy a lightroom standalone before being discontinued. Of course it can be pirated.
I have a copy of that CS release that the serial numbers were 'accidentally' released to appease the owners of the software just before they went pay for play. I'll never pay them a penny, especially now I've gone through the new programs to get my certs. They are charging outrageously for a few new filters. The program does no more than my old Adobe PS 5 did and A5 didn't have all the woke imagry that I had to wince at everytime I opened the stupid things.
You know, funny thing. I've been reading British authors for most of my life, and some of my absolute top faves occasionally make an egregiously snide or nasty reference to Jews, and I'll feel a moment's irritation that sometimes even people we really like can be absolute wretched morons about something or other, and I've never felt the need to either fling myself sobbing on my couch of pain or to set off all the smoke detectors by frying a paperback in revenge.
Dahl--quite the all-around schmuck, in every possible way, and the only book of his that ever moved me was his autobiography, and thinking of that little kid in that boarding school, turning his face, at night, towards home--you forgive a lot in the adult creature when you understand its childhood. The crushed and damaged parts weren't fixable, and there's a savage ugliness in his work that might make a healthier person recoil in pretty profound distaste.
But censorship? Withdrawing from circulation? Explanatory notes and slimy squirming apologies from the heirs? Spare us. Let us teach our kids to deal with life and people as they are; what's wise to improve on and what's not; that taking offense is one's individual reaction but not the benchmark for what is or isn't acceptable. Don't impoverish us any further; we lost too much already.
"...there's a savage ugliness in his work that might make a healthier person recoil in pretty profound distaste." That's a great sum-up of Dahl, from my point of view. I could never figure out how anybody could think his children's books were good, or funny, or fit to be read to or by children. The kindest thing I could think about Dahl was "I wonder what kind of trauma this man experienced as a child, that made him look at every aspect of the world through such awful 'ugly-lenses.' "
The "clean-up editing" of Dahl's books doesn't fix their ugliness -- just makes it less savage and more banal. This is not an improvement, from my point of view. If there's going to be poison in the world, better to leave its bitter taste just as it is.
Yes.
I related to his works because of living in an orphanage and having an abusive foster parent who was exactly like the Trunchbull and a lot of the other mean parental figures in his books. Just because your childhood was all rainbows and sunshine doesn’t mean that everybody else’s wasn’t.
You're extrapolating a lot from this thread that doesn't actually exist in it.
What? This person clearly said that they think that Dahl was abused as a kid or something. I don’t know why people want to cover up everything bad that happens in the world. Like how children are suffering in foster care and conservatorship which is basically adult foster care and all anybody wants to talk about is babies without pain receptors or capacity to suffer dying from abortion. I remember reading “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” and the main character was reprimanded by her teacher for her “sordid little stories” when she wrote about her experience of poverty and having an alcoholic father.
You are replying to an argument that has not been made.
Still disgusted how people are so sheltered that they are averse to even hearing stories about childhood trauma.
Unfortunately , I think the heirs to the copyright of his novels are mainly motivated by money.
As almost always.
Nothing new to report, eh
I think heirs would need to have almost superhuman self-control to refrain from making money, one way or another, off of the legacy of the original author. The Hollywood abominations are the worst, of course.
But one must be fair, too. These authors were often vile to their families and the legacy of that reaches succeeding generations, and sometimes profiting off one's horrible grandpa is the best revenge.
His widow approved of Tim Burton’s Chocolate Factory movie which was more accurate to the book than the one that came out while Dahl was alive which he hated.
I remember being repelled and disturbed by a collection of his short stories, particularly one involving some kids and a dead swan, I can still remember it over 30 years later... He must have had a horrible childhood for his writings to be so bitter and twisted. I read his story of his childhood but at too young an age to understand it properly (the only bit I can remember involved adenoids being removed): I must revisit it.
The only Dahl book I could stand to read to my kids was "Danny the Champion of the World". I used it as an example of how language can be used to make law-breaking seem reasonable, and the law-breakers into sympathetic characters. Anyway, we had many discussions about the manipulative writing. Why can't this also be an option for people who object to content in books? Surely it's better to discuss problematic language and attitudes than to rewrite the book? Read them to your kids and explain that things were different back then. Or even, don't read the book at all, for goodness sake, if you think it's so terrible...
No kidding.
But every institution now is taken over by people who do not want us to teach our children how to think.
Don't throw out your books!
To me the changing of language in Roald Dahl (and all literature) is arrogant, dangerous and made entirely possible by electronic storage. It could be done within hours for the whole of English literature, with the aid of chatGPT and the control of the information highway by Google. We are (or is that "once were"?) told to believe in diverse biological ecosystems but not (it seems) diverse cultural ones. Foolhardy. They have no idea of the repercussions. This is why I am scared.
What do you think?
I agree with "Don't throw out your books!" (Some people are saying that the books containing accounts of the COVID era are critical records because the internet will eventually be scrubbed of anything that contradicts The Narrative. . .) But I'm wondering if I need to build secret hiding places to keep the books safe from public health officials and the law enforcement agents they order to find and burn the books.
The USA has already trashed a lot of old kids' books... https://www.city-journal.org/html/new-book-banning-10533.html
Eegad, what abominable stupidity made into law!
The UK is toast...
every place on the planet is toast unless this stupid microwave control agenda comes down and stays down
I think I'm going to be ill 🤢
Willy wonkers in the consent factory’s. Who needs ‘em.
More like wee willy wankers, lol.
This is why I've supplied my children with real books, lots of them with hardcovers. They learned early that the "kindle" or the "cloud" means someone elses property. This Ministry of truth is truly insane.
It seems to me that there are a lot of people without enough meaningful work to do.
That was my conclusion
Goes waaaaay back, this suppression of authors, books and ideas does. It's just that with digitalization it's a thousand times easier to implement...don't even have to burn books now, all you have to do is erase the words, the file, the entire offensive thing...those who control the platforms and the publishing houses can do whatever they want...and they call that freedom.
This is scary.
I’m currently reading East of Eden by Steinbeck. It’s full of words, images and concepts that would be verboten nowadays. And it’s giving me a wonderful view into how people thought and spoke at the time of its writing, even if I cringe a little when I read parts of it.
Dahl was a very funny writer. Sensitivity readers? not so much. (PS I've got some uncensored copies of Noddy books if anyone is interested!)
Those fucking bastards. Nothing is sacred. I am nearly in tears. I feel like a precious piece of my childhood is being desecrated.
ah they are Wille-Wankers indeed with this masturbatory exercise in self-harm!!!! (an' harm to GREAT BOOKS) but they are NOT Willy Wonkas--no no no siree. Willy Wonkas are confectioners of deliciousness and nobody indeed can screw around with their PRISTINE recipe (words!) 'else they contaminate the entire batch like GLOOP (who wants gloopy in yer marvelous chocolate?). Gloop is sent down the shoot fer alterin' (contaminatin') Wonka's recipe. Much like the works of a great author, Wonka (like Dahl) would prefer someone to carry on his work unadulterated--clearly those mindin' his estate do NOT understand Charlie. Wonka chooses his ingredients carefully, so we are told. They are rare and carefully mixed (by Oompa loompas who are exotic themselves!). So Wonka's message is that we LET THE HONEST TRUE TO HIS NATURE CHILD be REWARDED for Candor (with Candy!--and lord knows the cavity-prone Dahl was a fan of sweeties....)...but the true, frank, honest (even if cheeky) child like Charlie, like Matilda....are the ones Wonka the Wonderful rewards-- NOT those who mess with his inventions. So doin' this to Dahl's perfected recipes--gives ME the willies!
Thankfully I have all my ol' hardcopies from the 1970s with all the politically incorrect illustrations to boot, much enjoyed by my own cheeky (teen/young adult) children. Ain't partin' with these--would NEVER buy anything "censored" (not for sensitivity, not fer all the tea in China--an' them censors kin stick THAT in their opium pipe n' smoke it!) Long live Dahl (an' all his deliciously devious verse!)
Oh my gosh, wow. 😳
If I remember right... Noam Chomsky said that when a civilization is ending one of the ways you know is the language starts disappearing.
True, and Chomsky built that idea on how the celtic tribes were conquered and tamed and finally assimilated by the romans: no real tradition or practice of writing things down for posterity meant that the romans as victors could erase the celt's own culture in just two-three generations.
By Tiberius time the celts thought of themselves as romans.
The christians did much the same to any non-christian culture with little or no written tradition, such as my Norse ancestors. If not for a few hundred runestones surviving (the christians smashed or buried them) and Snorre Sturlason collecting what was left of the oral tradition and writing the Eddas, we'd barely know they existed at all.
And there are even older examples from Egypt of the BC era, where one pharao orders the total eradication of any mention of a previous one, to the point of re-working calendars, re-doing monuments and such.
Are used to think that Noam Chomsky was articular and forwardthinking, until I saw the video of him, extolling the virtues of vaccines just like Sadhguru, and the Dalai llama, all of whom have a irrevocably now revealed themselves to be fakes