Comment by mandevil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandevil | Hacker News Reader

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I might get down-voted for this, but I totally understand why Netflix, who bought the Dahl Company in 2021, is editing these stories.

I agree that it is important to have a full and complete historical record, but Netflix is interested in making money, and I recently read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my six year old and he loved it. So I started to read Charlie and the Glass Elevator to him and stopped only a few pages in when some very offensive caricatures of Chinese people talking in English showed up. And I haven't read my son any more Dahl since then, because I was genuinely shocked at what I had just read, stopped that book after that chapter, and went off to read something else instead, and haven't gotten around to James and the Giant Peach or Matilda again. It interrupted what could have been a lovely flow of Dahl books. So I can understand why the people who control the Dahl Company- and desperately want people like me to read his stories to people like my son- are stealth-editing them to kill the offensive stuff, so that I will buy more books, read them to my son, and then he will 30 years from now buy them and read them to his children because they have nostalgic value for him: they remind him of his dad reading to him.

This censorship isn't happening because of the iron hand of the state or anything like that. It's the result of people making choices within a capitalist system. It's because I have lots of great stories to choose from to read to my six year old, so why would I choose one that I have to explain lots of ugly bigotry? So Netflix is choosing to try and sand down those problems that might keep someone like me from reading the book to my kid, in a totally understandable way. And, as the rights owner trying to maximize revenue, that is their prerogative.

In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese. The Chinese don’t see such poking fun as a problem, nor do a great many other peoples on earth. Parts of Western culture, like yourself feeling such things interrupted the flow of the Dahl book, are the odd ones out here, and one might ask oneself if it has to be this way. Of course, I agree that there are powerful corporate motivations to avoid anything that might turn off potential consumers.

Moral relativism aside, there’s a taboo against “punching down” in humor and comedy. It’s obviously a fuzzy heuristic but in general, people from Western imperial powers making fun of the people they’ve exploited is pretty far in the unacceptable column.

A caricature of a French, British, or German person in American media, for example, is much more acceptable than a caricature of a Chinese person.

Even that taboo against punching down is a peculiarity of (some parts of) modern Western culture. The blind, deaf, crippled, and mentally retarded are a favourite butt of jokes all over the world.

Kindness and compassion seem to be lacking in that kind of behavior. Are those only western values? I don’t think so.

More and more, I find that sugar coating everything and coddling everyone is not kind or compassionate.

I'm not saying that we should be going out of our way to make fun of everyone every chance we get, but this idea that "oh, those people are different so they are off limits for jokes or criticism" is a good way to make sure those people never develop any level of resilience.

“No really, us making fun of you is actually for your benefit.”

There's a difference between poking fun and outright bigotry, though. I'm not saying Dahl is one thing and the Chinese media is another, but I think we need to look harder at all of these things to figure out what place it's coming from.

And even then, poking fun, to me, is a personal thing. There are poking-fun-type things I might say to a close friend that I would never say to an acquaintance. Making fun of a random-stranger foreigner who is doing you the honor of trying to learn your language is just mean-spirited, no matter how you look at it. Makes me wonder about the kind of people who would do that. As to your specific statement:

> In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese.

To me that just sounds like propaganda. The Chinese media is promoting the idea of Chinese superiority. "All those people from other nations look funny, and are too stupid to speak our language properly." Anecdotally, an ethnically-Chinese friend of mine who lived in China for a few years (and traveled around the country quite a bit) used to tell me that many, many native-born Chinese people speak Mandarin poorly, some to the point of being difficult to understand. So poking fun at foreigners for their bad Chinese is ironic, perhaps to the point of being a little sad.

In terms of ethnicity, isn't China something like 91% Han Chinese? I wonder if that has anything to do with the incentive structure behind why their media denigrates other races.

The irony being that if the public domain had actually been 28 years as it was originally legislated back in the 18th century in the United States, this kind of change wouldn't be controversial. People would be likely used to maintaining cultural media to keep it both relevant and free of changing taboos. And it would likely be decentralized enough that there wouldn't be any single Authorized Version except that which the original author published.

> So I started to read Charlie and the Glass Elevator to him and stopped only a few pages in when some very offensive caricatures of Chinese people talking in English showed up.

Couldn't you have just skipped over this bit? Or paraphrased it to your child? I understand that you may have been just reading along and found yourself reading out 'bad stuff' but for me, that would just be the point where I would have stopped and done either of the two options above (skip or summarise).

Yah, and there are others with issues. Lots of others. The Little House books for one.

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