Political Correctness Gone Mad

@Rhode57 🫂 🫂 🫂 🫂

@PhoenixPhail out of my way, I'm first off this crazy rock.

@robingoodfellow People are beating you to it right now.

@Convivial Rest assured that the only parts going to disappear in the future rewritings are passages such as "[i]it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of A needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God[/i]"

@Elessar are they going to keep all the parts where it talks about how everyone is going to crispify in Hell

@CestManan Yep, and they'll add new ones. Someone definitely gotta have to put the word "woke" in there

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout JIMMY?! You mean Jenny.

@Mikeawesome1986 I think it will simply be changed to "The Cygnet" and ruin the ending :P

@SunshineGirl Good for your niece! :-)

@ArishMell You are welcome to Google it. However many people are convinced he was a paedophile. A lot of his writings use euphemisms to describe sexual body parts.
In the kids book 'Charlie and the chocolate factory' he talks about 'Snozzberries' in previous writings he refers to the tip of the penis as the 'Snozzberry'.
Like I said ..it's easy enough to Google.

@Entwistle I tried googling and the only "creepy" stuff about him seems to be some comments not made until long after his death and which he wasn't around to refute.

@ChipmunkErnie So Google did help you? Cool.

@ChipmunkErnie That's right - let these kids read the original material and it's PTSD for life!

@ChipmunkErnie Is the latter to avoid upsetting mean people or horses...?

Sorry - "persons of mean-ness".

@ArishMell Have you got another description for the decisions of censoring works of Roal Dahl, Fawlty Towers, etc? Those aren't American and get the same sort of treament now. Taken from their original context they are judged lacking by some idiots and then hacked to pieces. Do I actually need to be confronted with Dahl's antisemitism? What use does that serve? Edith Blyton was even a worse human but the girl she created that wanted to be called George is still read with great joy. Isn't that mishandling of art and history not worth a proper name? PC isn't about the past and correcting that. Somehow there's a need nowadays to change established cultural icons just for the sake of not offending someone else's feelings. That's much more about selling and marketing than the proper concern of the people focused on. I've heard that the defence against the use of the word woke is all about either race or gender, but aren't we forgetting that words are just labels?

@val70 I can't think of a better word than "censoring"!

All I know it's what was reported, which is that the copyright owners and publishers altered the stories to avoid possibly causing offence; but it seems now that Penguin Books will be issuing original-text "archive" editions.

Even worse, I understand some UK authors are among many to be kept out of some states' school libraries and courses until passed as suitable by .... well by whom exactly?

There does seem a fashion in some circles to deride figures of the past no matter how great their achievements, for having opinions that are seen as wrong now but were commonplace at the time; and this leads to a total distortion of both creator and created.

Not just children's authors either, as we see with people trying to link Richard Wagner with the Nazis, simply because he was anti-Semitic and held political-revolutionary views. Not pleasant attitudes, no, of course they were not; but we should be able to accept his views were widespread in his 19C time, and concentrate on enjoying his music.

Similarly, the English scientist Dr. Marie Stopes is sometimes attacked for supporting "eugenics". She did do that, as did very many academics of the late-19 - early-20C. Whilst later events showed how that social philosophy, which was never a science, would be used evilly; its early proponents genuinely thought it a positive idea. What though concentrating on Dr. Stopes' views there does from our own time 100 years later, is deflect attention from her extremely positive life as both a palaeontologist with a special interest in the Coal Measures botany; and her tireless campaigning for women's health.

It's as if past do-ers must be rejected as bad, for having ideas of their time we now see as bad, and I am not sure how much of that is really just jealousy in critics who have yet to "do" anything notable themselves. It wants yesterday's heroes to be super-human, but they were not, they were human and made mistakes, were flawed; yet also did good work. Are their modern-day critics super-human?


For commercial reasons? You might be right, and I think for negative rather than positive reasons: fearing lost sales if a few readers become too noisy about supposed slights to this-or-that "community". Though no-one (i hope) wants gratuitous offence-giving even by accident, the fear forgets we are all of one "community".


"Labels" indeed, but it is odd that an era marked by a desire for overwhelming "equality" and "inclusivity" in our manifold differences, has created a desire to label everyone as if we are all standard items in some sort of rigid database menu. Database menus of course, have the characteristic of inflexibility, so if something does not match the menu, it creates problems. All very impersonal, even dehumanising.


Ending yesterday was an interesting 5-part series, just over an hour altogether, on BBC Radio Four, on the history of the word 'woke'; from its original meaning and intention to its often unpleasant, very different version now. It started in the 1930s as African-American slang meaning [i] stay [a]woken[/i] - to injustice - but in the last couple of years became a poisonous term of political abuse.

@ArishMell Somehow I don't think that censoring is good enough. It's like talking about American history and not Trump. It's getting us no where that. Another one, still very current, is the argument that nazism hasn't got anything to do with socialism. Fine, but what the heck is it in the actually chosen name for themselves then? Denying fact that terminology can change from one side to the other of argument is madness. I'm sorry, but I consider it still as madness when one points to a term to describe something has been too loaded because of its past. What else next? Oh yes, I got it. Don't talk about socialism because it's only for fascists and communists. One can't have it two ways. It's in there by the use at the time plus the history of socialism is indeed a bit more complex than black and white. Excuse the pun there. No, we have it currently at the wrong side of the stick when it's actually provided to us as fact. The BBC is entirely woke, and that's the viewpoint of not only both extremes but ordinary viewers like myself in the past too. Look for a debate on Question Time about Brexit in the recent eight years and the views of study groups are presented as being part of the argument going on in society like the opinion inside a political party would be. The perfect example of madness there was the total blanketing of the problem of the Northen Ireland there. No better example of this madness from above, and I'm afraid that the present meaning of the term will continue just because of all that

@Underconstruction ... or simply their egos.

@ArishMell Right.

@SW-User ... whereas the Sun is female and the Moon is male, in German! Makes no sense, but - hey, it's language! In French, the Sun is male (le soleil) and the Moon is female (la lune).

@helenS bestimmt

@Flipper111 Yes superlatives are double plus ungood.

@Thevy29 LOL!

If you really want to upset 'em futher, tell 'em you never believed the purple one of the Teletubbies (him with the handbag - was it Tinkywinky?) was any sort of "icon" for any sort of sexuality.

@ArishMell Isn't TinkyWinky the host every night on Fox's Clucker Carlscum tonight? 🤪

@spjennifer LOL! I haven't a clue! All I know about Fox is that some other SW users attack its political views!

I know the Teletubbies only as the show was. (My girlfriend liked it..... I don't know why. ).

It was made for very young children and was all very innocent and harmless, but some homosexual or other with nothing better to do, started waffling publicly about imagining the character as some sort of "gay icon".

It was sold to many countries around the world, but as well as that "gay icon" idiocy, it did attract two very weird attacks -

One was some pseud-in-a-suit "executive" (over-promoted filing-clerk) in German's public-service TV company thinking they looked like spacemen and would frighten the intended audience.

The other was a similar bureaucrat in a major US entertainments company (Warner I think) declaring the Teletubbies show "evil" for being always happy and cheerful.

Not sure which was the most stupid of those three nonentities! One might wonder if they never been aged under five, had never thought to ask young children for [i]their[/i] opinions, nor, probably, ever created anything themselves.

@Spotpot Good point.

There has, but the term "political correctness" is recent, and may reflect the impression given on much of SW that its native country (USA) turns any social sensitivity into party-politics "discussed" with more abuse than analysis.

In the past, when domestic cruelty, racism and other unpleasant "isms" and "phobias" were widespread but not really recognised except by the victims, the censoring was more often of anything sexual, even of what we'd now regard as simply saucy.

For example, the 19C English physician Thomas Bowdler published [i]The Family Shakespeare,[/i] with the plays edited by his sister Henrietta to be more suitable (in their view at least) for women and children of their time.

Such prissy over-editing soon became called "Bowdlerising", and what we see now with Roald Dahls' books is much the same although for different social mores.

@Misanthropic Also, the dumb and the weak strike back.

@PhoenixPhail Yeah, when you give them the wrong pronouns

@PhoenixPhail The dumb and weak are quite happy throwing soup at paintings or sitting in roads but where will they be on the battlefield when tanks come rolling in?