Hacker News Reader

Comment by samirillian | Hacker News Reader

There is a little complexity to the debate, and it really does get down to particulars.

1. Clothes badly painted onto nudes could be seen as itself an interesting/funny cultural artifact, and since it's at a library, you could have signs explaining the history.

2. I have no problem with Confederate statues being torn down or destroyed, since any perceived cultural/historical value is outweighed by other considerations. They are giant public symbols; little signs explaining "these statues were actually erected during Jim Crow and these guys were bad" are too...abstract.

3. Silently revising works of fiction seems especially wrong because we don't even know where the titties are getting painted over. The Roald Dahl edits weren't just removing "ugly" and "fat", they were also removing all reference to Conrad and at one point removing a reference to the color black applied to an inanimate object, a tractor I think.

View on HN

>> removing "ugly" and "fat"

The problem with replacing words with nicer sounding ones is eventually the replacement words start to sound equally negative. This is of course because fatness / ugliness are real things and cannot be eliminated by creating new words.

The false choice is that you either keep the statues up or you tear them down.

The obvious middle ground is to move the art somewhere else.

I disagree. This happened in my city. A confederate statue was quietly moved to a more welcoming town. To me, this is no solution. I simply don't accept moral equivocation about chattel slavery. All things in moderation, including moderation.

Trying to censor the hatefulness out of Roald Dahl is a futile gesture. Performatively-cruel comedy is a core feature of classic British children's lit. Tweaking a word here or there is absurd. If you don't want books that viciously mock people for their appearance, their weight, or their ethnicity, you should probably avoid them altogether.

In the specific case of Confederate statues, a lot of those were cheaply made garbage put up by neo-Confederates to try and glorify their extremely racist history. Sort of like the converse of the moral censorship being complained about here. Instead of censoring a historically notable artistic work that also offends modern sensibilities, they are adding a veneer of artistry and historicality to pretend like not celebrating a bunch of traitors to America would be censorship.

So, to summarize, your point is "this was art that I don't like made by people I don't like so it's ok to destroy."

That about it?

Yes, not everything is worth preserving. Space and resources are limited.

I'm pretty sure the ISIS folks would agree [1].

Or would you argue that their beliefs are wrong, and yours are right, so it's ok then?

Pretty sure they'd make a similar argument.

Or we could just... not destroy things?

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisatio...

Let me get this straight. The hill you're dying on is never destroy anything under any circumstances, no matter how useless, aesthetically repulsive, or morally reprehensible, because those things are merely subjective, but not destroying things is objective.

So like a Nazi furry Funko pop, we can't get rid of that.

> The hill you're dying on is never destroy anything under any circumstances, no matter how useless, aesthetically repulsive, or morally reprehensible, because those things are merely subjective, but not destroying things is objective.

Cool strawman! Here, I can do it too:

Why do you feel the need to be the ministry of truth and right-think, destroying and silencing anything that violates your "modern" sensibilities, regardless of it's historical significance?

It's not a strawman, it's a reductio ad absurdum.

Low-effort cookiecutter propaganda put up by lost-causers hoping to one day subjugate black people again probably doesn't need to be displayed prominently in front of courthouses, yes. And once removed, we probably don't need hundreds of unimpressive near-identical statues—a few would suffice, for any value they might hold.

These statues were mass-produced and cheaply made in order to dot the South with bits of propaganda from a defeated ideology trying to save face. In fact, this happened twice - first after the Civil War and second after the civil rights movement.

In other words, they are not art, they are spam. They have more in common with hustlebros spamming T-shirt and poster sites with AI-generated images than they do with art.

>they are not art, they are spam

I see, you get to decide what's art then?

How could that possibly go awry...

These Roman artifacts were mass produced by a slave owning nation too [1], probably ought to be destroyed along with the statues too, I guess.

[1] https://ancientimes.blogspot.com/2009/05/ct-scans-reveal-rom...

Dahl was basically dragooned into changing the nature of the Oompa-Loompas in his own lifetime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com