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The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn
eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."
I want to live in a world where *everything* that makes me uncomfortable or might cause pain or conflict is excised from history. After all, if it never happened, no one can be pissed off about it--and we can all get along fine. No more racial resentment, no more ethnic conflicts, no more religious wars. We get along, we always got along, end of story. Israel and Palestine always co-existed in peace beside each other. Europeans, Africans, and Asians discovered the New world together and have lived here peacefully together ever since. Every religion is the religion of peace and always has been. "Genocide" is just an abstract concept used by fiction writers, not something that has ever happened in the real world.
Laugh if you want, but wouldn't that make for a much better world? Why focus on the pain and resentment when we can reinvent ourselves as something much better?
Sure it all involves a good dose of self-delusion, but a lot of people have improved their lives greatly with a little self-delusion. After all, no one starts down their path to self-improvement by admitting to themselves that they are an unexceptional, not particularly good or worthwhile person. They start by telling themselves "I am a good person, I can do better" even if they know deep-down that they're lying to themselves. And, quite often, the lie actually BECOMES the reality. Convincing yourself that you're a better person can actually MAKE you better. Why not apply the same principle to society as a whole?
I'm not being a troll here, I'm asking a serious question. Wouldn't we be better off for it?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Nothing like ret-conning the evil out of our past. I mean, it's not like we should remember history so we don't repeat it, or anything. Protect the children at all costs, their innocent eyes shouldn't ever know the word "nigger."
There was some sarcasm in there, in case you didn't notice.
And the cover now has a big shiny sticker that says "Nigger Free!"
....punk assed half measure. Why aren't we calling for outright book burnings, in the town square!
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
Does this mean when I say "slave" I'm actually saying "nigger?"
The thought police are gaining more power.
This is why e-books are evil. How would one even know when censorship occurs.
Orwell was an optimist
Is being a ludite really bad ? I am begining to think not. I am becomming more unwilling to participate in this new electronic era.
The glory days have past, looking more and more like a yoke, not a wheel.
If you are too young to maturely handle the n-word, then you are too young to handle the implications of the story anyway.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I dont see any uproar on internet in europe, middle east or asia over this. not to mention africa and south america. not even canada.
maybe is it that the supposed 'uproar' is in united states of america ? even that i havent seen any uproar in the communities with predominantly american population ?
or maybe the article poster is making up shit ?
Read radical news here
There is no way a school is going to make children read a book with the word nigger in it. Its too much trouble for the teachers, principles, and school board. They wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole. The public school system is not equipped to handle controversy.
Then again, censoring such eminent work from Twain is going to catch you some major heat too.
The lesser of the 2 evils I think is to run the book with the word n***r censored that way, so every on is placated, and the students can have a discussion about it.
The NYTimes has, of course, a lot of coverage on the topic, but many, including the editorial board, make the very strong point - how is this any better? Yes, as countless first posters try to show everyday, nigger is offensive, but nothing is such a blight on American history as the institution of slavery. This censorship wrongly conflates the word to be the problem, when really the problem is the hundreds of years of oppression, hatred, and violence that has and is aimed at blacks that the word represents. Some choice editing won't change the realities of the South in the mid-1800s, to think this fools anyone is a presumption of ignorance amongst teachers, parents, and children.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Does this mean that all rap music must also be purged of those words? Or only rap music presented in school music classes? At what level? Elementary, secondary, college?
Fuck censorship. Also, fuck you, lazy parents who probably teach your children far more offensive beliefs, much less language, than they could possibly derive from reading the Great American Novel without butchering it. Replacing "injun" with "slave" doesn't even make sense.
Spoiler Alert: Bad things happened in the past!
Oh...we're not supposed to tell American schoolchildren about that stuff anymore. Little Johnny's parents might sue the school board because some god damn liberal teacher just felt it SO necessary to teach him about death and violence and corrupted his thought, just like those grand theft auto videogames they hear about on Fox News all the time.
with the word Klingons scattered all over it. near as I can figure out from an early look, it's all about getting The Master Watch (tm). ghostwriter, the "with" part, is Jagermeister. not worth buying.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This makes no sense?! Why change the works of a highly respected author just to satisfy the discomfort of a child or parent? Censorship should be left up to the parent, not the editor of a publishing company. Next thing you know, they'll be censoring history books so students don't really learn about Nazi's, concentration camps and WWII in High School because it's too depressing. Or they might just ban Anne Frank's diary because it's "too detailed". That's how it happened ... it's history ... we learn the gritty details, grow and move on. Oh, I know! Let's just shield our children so they can't grow and learn. Maybe history will repeat itself? ... I feel sick.
Like it or not, this is one of the reasons why copyright is not entirely a bad thing. Shit like this can only happen because the work is out of copyright. Would it still be protected, the author's estate could sue the hypocritical fuckers' arses from here to Alpha Centauri.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I remember a cutaway that had peter griffin on a raft referring to N-word Jim.....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I think that if Mark Twain were alive today he would be very pleased that one of his works is upsetting people so much that they want to ban and/or censor it.
One of my rules of thumb is if there is a book that people want to ban and/or censor I run right out and buy and read it.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
This is frankly fairly shocking - shocking that people would want to remove an offensive word from a book who's intent was to diminish that word's power. Just goes to show how scared and cowardly the Western world has become, when a single word can scare us so much that we must hide it from ourselves. I honestly wonder what future generations will look like after parents have worked so hard to make their kids softer and naiver than the generation that proceeded it. How long until the witch hunts begin, and we start removing undesirable thoughts/people/etc?
An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America.
I thought that was part of the point. Oh, well, we need to protect the children from words that they are not even obligated to get offended by (it could turn them into racists, after all)! Why don't we just lock all children in some sort of bubble forever and get it over with?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
since the meaning of words changes dramatically over time, perhaps the word "nigger" circa 1880 is equivalent to the word "slave" 2010
Personally, I think it is more important to teach children to understand that the past, while not even over, is different, and that (unlike the GOP, which is a cargo cult looking to restore some golden age) interpreting the past, or a text, requires judgement and skill, and that reasonable people can have differences.
Wow. What a world.
How is it that we can look back on our history like this and completely ignore it? We're seeing repercussions from the period of history from which Twain wrote all the way down to the present day. This is the kind of thing that fuels division on both sides of race issues -- whites saying nothing's wrong, African-Americans saying everything is wrong. We can't understand where we are today in race relations without a full understanding of the time period when slave ownership was commonplace. Excising what are racial slurs today without considering the historical context in which the book was made is completely cheapening the experience -- and really removes much of the point of the book. Despite Huck's calling Jim a "nigger" over and over again, he becomes his friend through the course of the book. At the time, saying anything different would have been odd. Changing the language of the book is removing any questions that kids might ask about that history.
Besides which, this offends me as a linguaphile on the same level as "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies". Classics are called classics because they've stood the test of time -- the way they ARE. They should be read in the original intent and in the context of their historical period, not updated to the present day.
Anyone get shades of the Ministry of Truth from this?
I'm fine with that as long as the book opens with a brief preface serving as a linguistic history lesson, explaining specifically what's been changed, and why terms that used to be okay are now generally frowned upon. I think that would be more educational than simply republishing a book full of racial slurs that are widely considered inappropriate these days.
I think schools are where they should leave the book unchanged. To steal a phrase: Teach the controversy.
On the other hand, it dawned on me that I would be much more comfortable reading the unedited book to myself than to read it to my preschoolers. There are just some words and phrases I don't use, much less want them mixing into their usual dialogue of boogers and farts. But it's a good enough story that maybe the edited version should get read to them at an early age. Yeah, I could skip the words myself, but they are getting to a point where they are following along.
And as an added bonus, adding a taboo is going to make kids curious. Good. I have no trouble telling my kids there is a version they can read when they get older and we can talk about. Preferably in school, but I'll happily take them to the library if they ask.
It's just an opinion, and fluid at that.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
This why we need fight app stores and more as more of this may start happening and if store lock in makes hard to get the uncensored vers.
I'd rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.
All the articles I've read about this say that "Injun" is to be replaced with "Indian". I can't see any article supporting summary's claims of "injun" changing to "slave".
While that doesn't really change the issue of censorship it would be nice to have just a little accuracy in reporting. I know, I know; I must be new here, etc.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Let all those kids know the book is in the public domain and they can legally download the original version with the bad words and sex scenes in it.
In case you're wondering, mentioning the sex scenes is to make sure they'll actually read the book.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
One of the last few lines in "Thank you for smoking". We are improving history.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
Why aren't we calling for outright book burnings, in the town square!
We came pretty close last year.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
My biggest problem with this is that removal of the word from the English language will not stop people from thinking the exact same thoughts. The word is a -symptom-, not a cause. As such, this is a pointless exercise that only costs money and provides no benefit for anyone.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Are we going to remove the n-word from Blazing Saddles?
"Isn't it a lovely morning?"
"Up yours, my good African-American friend!"
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
I guess the GNAA will have to rename their fine organization.
Trolling is a art,
do you know he's currently on the ny times best seller list?
http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html
how'd he do that? he wrote a book, said "wait 100 years before publishing", and they did, and here he is, selling a new book, in 2011
quite an impressive man
and did you know about twain and halley's comet?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_connection_between_Mark_twain_and_Halley's_comet
mark twain: space alien who travels via halley's comet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
With the rise of eBooks, we should be able to do this automatically to all clbuttic literature.
Anyone who butterts that this is a violation of our consbreastutional rights is overreacting.
But this is the only good argument for perpetual copyright I've seen in a while.
If you can change 'objectionable' words at your whim and re-publish the work of an author as if it were the 'original', well, you can't know what the hell anyone ever wrote unless you kept a copy.
I'm not at all interested in reading Mark Twain censored. Next thing you know, they start in some really offensive authors, and we have nothing to rely on.
Sounds like something the high-school textbook publishers would do. Stupid. So much for literary integrity. Another publisher I can regard with a jaundiced eye.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The NY Times article, Publisher Tinkers With Twain, reports that "Indian" is substituted for "injun". Still, it's unwarranted revisionist tinkering. Schools shouldn't fear teaching, and students need to learn, history and literature as it was, not how we'd like it to have been.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America.
How does replacing it with the word "SLAVE" accomplish *that* exactly?
Or am I looking for reason where reason does not exist?
Seems like an early step in rewriting history. I seem to remember Nostradomus or someone predicting that in the end times, everything will offend someone. Political "correctness" seems to fit the bill.
I think that this is a very [REDACTED] article. It is so telling of our [CENSORED] that {individuals of nonspecified cultural, racial, religous origin} would [CLASSIFIED] our literature. Really, before you know it, we'll all be facing [CENSORED] and then [REDACTED] [REDACTED] with [REMOVED] a duck.
Town square is all booked up with witch burnings.
is what you want to teach your children? No wonder so many kids freakout after they leave their parents house and binge drink, get into drugs.
Which is why I don't like eBooks, I can see a future where all books are edited to fit a particular political or religious society, if something becomes "offensive" simply push a patch out to everyone’s ereader.
Viola’ instant rewrites and a society with no memory, which is what Huck Finn is in a way, a memory of what was good or bad.
I doubt the censored version has anything to do with being politically correct - and everything about money. Since Huck Finn is in the public domain, I'd guess there are 50 different publishers of this book, and none of them probably make much money from them (and why should they, when a copy of Huck Finn by one publisher is perfectly substitutable for another, price is the only thing that matters). Now, if you can make a niche version of a PD work, you will sell your copy (maybe even at a premium) to all the people and school districts worried about the word. Nothing stopping other publishers from copying what NewSouth is doing, but at least their Q1 profits will look a little better than they otherwise would have.
Mark Twain has never used the word "Nigger"! There has never been racism in the United States! etc. etc.
After all it is a world that celebrates the cruel subjection of the Slavic people by their Scandinavian overlords.
Just change both words to "Dude", it would improve the book immensely
I think we would be a lot better off with "But we've never done this, we've always been better than that!" than with "We'll, here we go yet again."
I respectfully disagree.
If I may liken it to a more concrete example of the history of mathematics, I don't think we ever would have made it to integration without remembering mistakes or basic concepts like addition.
We have stood on the shoulders of the works of very brilliant philosophers and thinkers to get where we are today. Fascism has slowly been phased out in favor of more liberal and democratic governments. And we all know that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the ones we already tried (thank you, Churchill).
Our knowledge of our nasty history hasn't stopped us from repeating ourselves again and again
It's not a perfect process, no. But you don't see a Pol Pot rise to power so easily today and you don't see a new Stalin sending millions to the gulags. Because we remember those things and we remember how they were accepted at the time but are clearly wrong now. On top of that, we remember what Imperialism did to the poor nations and how it made some nations poor and more powerful nations richer. We're not going to get away with colonizing a weaker nation and taking all their resources anymore. Because we remember what that results in. Of all the bad things you listed in your post, I implore you to look back to the situations and causes that set up those problems -- like the redrawing of boundaries of countries following World War II. And remember that so we can catch it next time. The list of these things are endless but you can find example after example in any history book worth its salt (I was most impressed with Hobsbawm's "Age of ..." series).
When a child picks up the text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and reads the word "nigger" I want them to take offense. Not to take offense at Mark Twain but more so to take offense to and own up to this great country's tortured past and to vow that this will never happen again. This use of a word as a marker of hate and denigration simply because of the color of a person's skin -- and the widespread cultural acceptance of it! If your child never learns the horrible results of that scenario than your child may one day find themselves as a part of that scenario.
My work here is dung.
support twain's version:
http://originalhuckleberryfinn.com
How Huck Fin to try and white-wash America's racist history.
Hope is the currency of fools
There really is no reason to bother teaching that book at all. IMO many books are simply re-inflicted on succeeding generations of students because they were inflicted on previous generations. I enjoyed it, but my now-ancient generation has nothing in common with its successors. It didn't do me any good in terms of obtaining future employment, nor did reading any fiction. 1800s history itself is becoming more and more distant every year, hence less useful to anyone but specialists.
(Recent) history and science are much better uses of precious educational time and scarce resources. We need to fit workers to compete in the world economy. Literature and the arts should be left to those who are enthusiasts and enjoy them as hobbies. There is no time for hobbies without a JOB.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If The Party said we are at war with Eurasia then we were always at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia.
"Progressives" being "progressives". Not sure why anyone is surprised by this censorship.
That they won the Civil War. We keep messing with History to make it more palatable.
If you go to Georgia and take a "tour" of some of the fancy houses set up as museums now, you'd be astounded by how much "history" they get wrong. I mean it'll floor you, you really want to speak up and tell the curator he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, but then you tell yourself "don't make a scene. don't embarrass your GF."
I'm constantly reminding people of even common misconceptions, like "Edison invented the lightbulb" (He did not).
It's actually very worrysome about how little we Americans know about our own history or what actually took place, because people only know about the falsehoods portrayed in movies or on TV. Things that have been altered for dramatic presentation or to make it dumbed-down enough for the general population to understand.
And to those of you who were *FOR* Amazon "censoring" homosexual books or books involving incest or rape by removing those titles from their ebooks, well, do you see where this slippery slope is heading, or are you still happy to bury your head in the sand?
Continue to allow this and doubleplus ungood newspeak is just around the corner.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
We can make the Mississippi current 100x more dangerous with special effects. We can change everyone's skin tone to make them all equal. When Huck gets himself in the middle of a family feud, we'll be sure to see the Grangerfords shoot first.
This is CLASSIC literature, it should not be censored in any way! I was shocked when a few weeks ago I saw the early version of "Huckleberry Finn" on THiS-TV network, and they BLEEPED the word "nigger" from the character's name "Nigger Jim" when Huckleberry Finn said it. Inexcusable and should almost certainly be protected by the First Amendment (at least here in the USA).
Where I work, there are two black people adjacent to my cubicle. Both agree that this is bad. Their take is "this happened and this is how things were, what can be accomplished by denying it?"
I heartily agree. This is just as bad as going back to old movies and editing out the cigarettes or replacing the guns with walkee-talkees in E.T.
I honestly don't see what the uproar is about. There are many, many editions of Huck Finn out there with the author's original choice of words faithfully reproduced. IMO, the new edition is an attempt to convey the author's intent rather than being fixated on verbatim wording.
Mark Twain was white. His intended audience was white. There weren't a whole lot of educated non-whites in America in 1884. Yes, Mr. Twain was hoping to help move the country toward racial equality, but he was aiming his message at white people. For his target audience, the words nigger and injun were commonplace. They weren't personally hurtful. In today's language, he could just as easily have used the phrase "non-white person" and conveyed nearly the same meaning.
IMO, creating an edition of Twain's work with less emotionally-charged wording is helpful, not harmful. The abundance of literal editions isn't going to evaporate, and the new one will be far easier for schools to use for teaching without having to get embroiled in lawsuits or other forms of parental outrage.
The Bible, there is enough text there defending/promoting rape, incest and murder that they should not just censor individual words replacing some for less "politically incorrect" alternatives, if they apply the same argument they should rewrite most of it. Good luck with that.
The racist caricatures of Powerful Pierre and Crazy Coyote will be edited out of Huckleberry Hound cartoons and replaced with a multicultural selection of the characters from Captain Planet series and a "feminine positive" version of Cheetara from The Thundercats.
Did they even understand huckle berry fin? it's signigance? that fact that it's one of the first work to recognize a 'nigger' as an individual and not property? that fact that it was common parlance that became impolite latter?
History doesn't need a white washing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That is how articles are posted here for more than 10 years.
Besides that, this is about free speech + english langutage from an american writer, so this is an US issue.
Next: something about Boston, center of the world...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South
read up on it.
(and yes, disney has almost always sucked, not just recently)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I think it's absurd to censor books. I mean, if you're teaching it in middle school I can see it more but I don't think I would want to teach a censored book. If something is too racy for me to read in class, I'd choose not to read it. Literature is like art, I wouldn't hang a scarf over David's man bits on the sculpture. A novel is written in the context of the time of the setting. "Nigger" was a regular term used. "Negroe" as well. These terms help us understand and comprehend. I think white washing (no pun intended to the fence in the novel) is absurd and shouldn't be done.
I sometimes teach The Kite Runner. I find it quite uncomfortable to read the rape scene allowed. So, I warn kids before we get to it that there is a disturbing scene coming up, that out of respect for those who have experienced or know someone who has gone through something so horrible, we will read it silently and if they choose to opt out of reading it, they can. When we talk about what happened we say rape but I let them skip the details if they need to.
this dynamic is pretty much the driving force in all of politics
in a totally free market place, everyone behaves themselves (placid libertarian lie)
vs
you need a strong government heavily regulating a market to keep it fair (ugly truth)
or
everyone guaranteed the same reward leads to a happy productive society (placid communist lie)
vs
if i am going to get the same as that guy busting his ass off over there, why work at all? (ugly truth)
the truth is often ugly in this world. in fact, at times, it is very, very ugly. enough of it, and people will get depressed. this is why we tell ourselves pleasant lies, and believe them: to make our lives livable, to smile when we get up in the morning. take any central tenet of your belief system, and at it's core is a nice pleasant lie. but without that lie, you pretty much lose all motivation to wake up in the morning
us human beings are weak. we need pleasant lies, pleasant whitewashing and wallpapering over of the ugliness of reality with little pleasant ideas that simply aren't true. look at all of religion. for those of you who mock religion, i simply say that if you removed it in many people's lives, they'd just kill themselves. so let them continue on in their lie, if their belief is innocuous. yes, there are dangerous religious fundamentalists. go ahead and fight them. but leave the vast majority of believers alone: they are harmless, and destroying their beliefs only destroys their desire to live, so that makes you the greater evil than the lies they tell themselves about the afterlife and invisible sky people. we're not all made to be great logicians and philosophers. leave the simple folk alone, you are only molesting their peace and causing them pain if you think bringing home to them the truth about their simple lies is doing any good in this world. that's a pleasant lie you tell yourself, in fact, that a strident atheism is helping anyone in this world. no, its just another form of intolerant religious fundamentalism, in fact
so that's why i say this: if more people read mark twain because we cut out a word considered nasty in today's world, guess what? i'm all for it. they read great literature
of course some of you consider this horribly wrong. well guess what: your belief that not white washing ugly truths leads to a better world is a pacid lie you tell yourself, and i challenge you to understand that whitewashing the past is actually psychologically normal, and will never stop, and you should just get used to it. not because it is good, not because it is bad. because it just is, and its never going away. its a simple facet of human pscyhology and how we cope with the past: we censor it, as individuals, and as a society
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For once the GNAA troll would be on topic on /.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Thanks for that name. /. is the only place I've seen it this morning. "New South"... Bigoted and proud, stand tall, Alabama.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
It sure would be convienient for the elite at the top of the power pyramid if they could magically erase all traces of corruption.
(Aren't we forgetting about the little fact that government is the most dangerous force that could ever exist and that history has proven this over and over again?)
First, neither "injun" nor "nigger" mean the same thing as "slave".
Second, "nigger", in the context of Huckleberry Finn, is not generally a slur per se. It is simply the common label applied at that time to a particular subset of people based on their race/color -- not substantially different from "negro", "black", or "AfricanAmerican". The word itself is merely a corruption or dialectal variation of the word "negro". Negative connotations of the word derive from the attitudes and intentions of some speakers. One could just as easily inject the same load of bigotry into "AfricanAmerican" or any other race-specific label if one were so inclined.
Third, it is important for readers to be able see one of the ultimate lessons learned by Huck in the novel -- that a "nigger" is in fact not different from a "person". This misguided censoring of the word serves only to hide that valuable lesson from the reader.
So long as the publisher discloses that it is an edited version, it is okay by me. I'll read the original, thank you. But I won't be thought police for anybody else. I can't make a principled distinction between this instance of bowdlerization and my mangling of another artist's creative commons output.
This is a free speech issue. Tasteless speech should be protected too!
You know, it's funny, I've heard a lot of folk in this country scrambling about and talking about being exposed to more culture. They want to travel to experience culture. They want to go to art studios to experience culture. They want to speak different languages to learn about more culture. That's a grand and noteworthy goal. However, many of those same people seem to make comments about how shallow and vapid American culture is. As a natural born American, I am damn ashamed to hear that about my country and my culture. We may be a young country, relatively speaking, but we have an incredibly rich culture that is more diverse than most places I've been.
Our culture involves everything from the Puritans fleeing England up through electing a black president while seeking hope and change. Our country was the first to try the grand social experiment of a democratic republic, based loosely on ideals from the ancient city-state architecture of Greece. Our people developed an entire branch of music known as Jazz. Our people blended with, reproduced with, lived with, and learned from the Native American population that we found here. From them, we learned to place a vast amount of importance on the individual and independence. We learned an appreciation for nature, and the resources it provides (who, before us, had a national forest preservation system?). Our culture includes the blending of numerous ethnic communities into a veritable melting pot of ideas and values. We have Latin folk. We have Gaelic folk. We have Greco-Roman folk. We have Asian folk. We have African folk. We have Slavic folk. We have Native American folk. We have Arab and Persian folk. We have a land made up of a culture that combined the values and ideals of the greatest enemies and contestants from history. American culture was enriched by French folk living next to English folk, by Japanese folk living next to Chinese folk, by Grecian and Italian folk living next to Persian and Arab folk, by African folk learning to live alongside the descendants of their former slave-masters. And you know what? We were and still are stronger for that!
We have had dark times in our short history, and we will continue to have dark times as time marches on. We had eras dominated by racism. We had eras dominated by sexism. Currently we are trying to end an era dominated by sexual preference intolerance. We have had wars. We have had depressions. We have had Civil Wars where brothers killed brothers and fathers fought their sons. Yeah, we've had some dark times. We ran the Native American population into the ground. But you know what? We learned from those times. We were hardened by those times. We took away great lessons from those times and grew out of them. And we are still growing. Those dark spots in our history are just as important as the American golden ages. Hell, I'd go so far to say that they are even more important, as they forced us to look in the mirror and learn from the ugly visages that gazed back at us. They forced us to change, for the better.
So now we are supposed to destroy our culture in the name of political correctness? We are supposed to whitewash our history so that we don't hurt anyone's feelings? You know what I think about NewSouth Book's attempt to destroy our culture? I say fuck them! And I can say that word proudly as an American because it is part of our culture, part of our ugly, dirt ridden, blood stained, beautiful, evolving, realistic, free, and loving culture. If I recall correctly, Huck Finn was friends with Nigger Jim. That's a damn important lesson, and the full name is damn important. It showed that a straw-chewing little white boy could be friends with someone that was different to a socially unacceptable level back then. That's a lesson in friendship. That's a lesson in love. And having Nigger Jim be that character's name underscores that lesson every time the name is mentioned. That is something we should preserve, not destroy. That is our culture: a culture of brother- and sisterhood derived from ha
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
... by American's greatest writer ... and we can't let the kids read what he actually wrote.
If the can't handle "nigger" then they aren't ready to read the story.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I listened to the "author's" interview yesterday on NPR. Besides the fact that he came off as a jerk, I couldn't argue with his logic. Lots of parents get in a huff about the language and he simply wanted to introduce a cleaned up version that would make the book more accessible. The same way R-rated movies are edited down for TV broadcasts.
And, I also see how this can ruin context. One of my favorites from the 80s was a movie called "Once Bitten." The main character's friends try to forcibly check his inner thigh for a vampire bite in a high school shower. This causes a stampede of jocks running out screaming "fags in the shower!" Of course, this scene is massacred by editing on TV (and who would ever rent the unedited version?), so this scene has probably lost context for 99% of viewers forever.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Now the children will only here the word nigger 219 times in their favorite rap song.
There isn't even an air of unbiased or objective statements. Editing it is, censorship it isn't. In today's society, it is true the words can get in the way of teaching a potentially important book. Words like "injun" and "nigger", especially with young people could totally distract from the larger issue and with the sensitivity schools do have (irrespective of individual teachers) around, good teachers might not take up the book for fear.
I see this as a tool to make a decent and important book be able to be taught in classes. Not some sort of "whitewashing" of history. The book is in the public domain, people will always be free to access the original work and I would think that Mark Twain would be happy, given today's society, of allowing the edits.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
(The following is a true anecdote that has happened to me when I was younger)
I was once asked in high school to write a short story about a man murdering an Arab in France in 1960 when there were strong racist sentiments against Arabs among the French population. The story had to be narrated from the perspective of an eye witness.
For the purpose of authenticity, I made the eye witness telling the story a French racist. I made the narrator use racist speech and express racist opinions such as referring to the Arab victim as "that dog" and expressing approval about the murder. I tried not to over-do it though, otherwise it would not have sounded natural.
The teacher asked us all to read to the entire class what we had written. When my turn came and after I was done reading I realized my classmates were just staring at me as if I had just punched someone in the face in the middle of the classroom. I expected most of them would not understand the point of the racism in my story, but I did not think they would be so stunned. I think some of them must even have thought I was actually racist.
Anyway, they were shocked... and the teacher gave me the maximum mark.
When I tell this anecdote to people, many don't understand why the narrator had to be racist. People usually tell me I had no need to make a racist narrator and what I did was wrong. I try to explain that racism was not only important in 1960 France but also a central element to the story and the murder. If I had not placed racism in my story, I would have missed an important part of the setting. But no matter how I explain it, a lot of people just don't get it. My teacher did, obviously (as the mark suggests).
Context is everything. You can't write a story set in a period of strong racism and pretend racism doesn't exist. I you want to be authentic, you need to face the facts. And if you're not authentic, your work is bad. Art in particular needs full immunity against political correctness.
But ignoring racism when authenticity requires it is one thing. It only makes your art bad.
It's a whole other thing to retroactively censor literature, particularly if it's so old it's not just considered popular culture but also historical. Now THAT is offensive.
This is just more PC nonsense.
Blar.
So, if a school has a copy of the sanitized version and my kid takes my dirty old politically insensitive version to school and one of his friends reads over his shoulder --- what then?
That's clbuttic.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
Convincing yourself that you're a better person can actually MAKE you better.
Hitler tried to make your world happen too. Really! He really tried. After all, if all the jews were dead, and polish, russians and other slavs were always happy to be slaves, wouldn't the world be happier? After all, everything that was bad with Germany was because of the jews so if you erase them from history, only good must remain?
And no, I am not trolling. Hitler was a maniac enough that he believed he was doing a good thing...
Now get real. People don't live peaceful lives. They tolerate each other for their own good. That's it. Without society and laws, we degenerate to Somalia level tribal conflict. Hate politicians all you like, but you can see the same story again and again and again in Africa. After the "administrators" leave and country is "handed back" to inexperienced politicians, it gets completely fucked up. Examples would be Somalia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, even South Africa is in decline. There are many others..
Keep living in your delusion if you want, but keep praying that everyone around you does not. It's like vaccination - you don't need to get it as long as 80+% of people around you are immunized.
...editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but part of the reason we read this book in school was to gain a realistic insight as to how things were back in those days. Lets face it, racism was rampant (not to mention accepted by society) back in those days. It sucks, but that's just the way things were. If schools don't want their students exposed to this "torturous history of racism and slavery in the United States of America" and keep them in some sort of feel-good alternate universe, then they have the choice not to subject their students to reading it. Mark Twain must be rolling over in his grave.
Because when you're ashamed of your past, it's probably best to just change it. Why bother with educating people who read about your past (telling them about ways you and your people have changed) when you can just deceive them from the start?
The funny thing is, this being Slashdot and all. Jim was the original gay nigger.
Before you mod me into oblivion, hear me out.
The relationship between Jim and Huck was very close. It has been regarded by some critics as a homosexual one.
And since the GNAA is one of the trolls around here, its funny.
I'll bet you're wondering what the heck one of the worst Star Trek movies ever has to do with the censoring of Huck Finn.
Well, I'll tell you.
In Star Trek V, there's a guy wandering about trying to remove everyone's "pain", and in doing so, he converts them to his particular cult because they feel so "healed" by the removal of the pain. But it's a sham.
Kirk correctly points out that "I need my pain. It makes me who I am."
And here we are as a society trying to do the same thing: remove something we consider painful. In the hope that we'll somehow be "healed". But it's a sham. We need our pain, it's what makes us what we are. It's what keeps our society in check. And as usual, the big-brother committee, in true "Brazil" fashion, has targeted a word, and not the real problem. Changing a word doesn't change race relations in the USA, nor does it excise xenophobia.
If anything it points out the ridiculousness of nanny-state-ism, just as much as Frank Gorshin's portrayal of a man who is black on the right side, who despises a man who is black on the left side. It's too bad our society learned nothing from Star Trek. Poor Gene. He tried so hard to explain. But nobody listened.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
A good friend told me the word is not important, but what comes after it. He didn't mind calling him nigger, but he DID mind calling him nigger son of a b$#&*... I have that book, btw...
\m/
What was about burning books of fiction, this is about actual historical facts (or as close as we can get to that).
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Ouch no. That's like having anti-virus and not using it.
I DO think we learn from our mistakes. If you "white out" the ugly parts of our past, which happened *naturally* (that is, not some conspiracy by a few evil overlords, but a subconscious, collective decision to enslave people based on race), it's doomed to happen again. And I'm not just talking about American slavery; slavery has been pretty much everywhere. (And still is, just under nicer-sounding names, imo.)
There have always been wars, but I think we're fighting them more responsibly now. Heh, countries tend to consult with the U.N. first (note the 'heh') — international relations would take a giant step backwards without that kind of mega-diplomacy. And I think American policy re: Afghanistan IS tempered by our war in Vietnam. ~~I wish we weren't STILL in Afghanistan; or at least that we would have focused on Afghanistan and left Iraq out of it; but at least it seems the U.S. is treading more thoughtfully so we don't end up in another Vietnam.
There haven't been any more Nagasakis and Hiroshimas; there've been anti-nuclear treaties; nations are learning to get on. New problems popped up ('terrorists'), but we'll learn to deal with that, too. It's like a growing process.
And that's why we have to keep Twain's Huck Finn in its original, and let kids know that even genius authors (and the fathers of our country, etc) were not infallible, and that none of us are impervious to making the same mistakes again.
A new edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, forthcoming from NewSouth Books in mid-February, does more than unite the companion boy books in one volume, as the author had intended. It does more even than restore a passage from the Huckleberry Finn manuscript that first appeared in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and was subsequently cut from the work upon publication.
In a bold move compassionately advocated by Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben and embraced by NewSouth, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn also replaces two hurtful epithets that appear hundreds of times in the texts with less offensive words, this intended to counter the “preemptive censorship” that Dr. Gribben observes has caused these important works of literature to fall off curriculum lists nationwide.
In presenting his rationale for publication, eloquently developed in the book’s introduction, Dr. Gribben discusses the context of the racial slurs Twain used in these books. He also remarks on the irony of the fact that use of such language has caused Twain’s books to join the ranks of outdated literary classics Twain once humorously defined as works “which people praise and don’t read.”
At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled.
Learn more about Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and read an excerpt from the introduction at www.newsouthbooks.com/twain. See also a feature story on the volume by Marc Shultz at Publishers Weekly.
We censor profanity on tv and in songs all the time. Sure, some people think it's some kind of totalitarian measure of control, but really it doesn't hurt much.
However, does the radio edit of Gold Digger (with "nigger" removed) work as well as the explicit version? I actually don't think it does. It's kind of absurd to compare Kanye to Mark Twain, but if a message is diluted or lost from something as insignificant as that song, the loss is even greater in a classic like Huck Finn.
Further one of the main points of the book is that Jim is a good man. He's the best person Huck and Tom meet and Twain wants you to know that society treats him like crap.
Slave clearly doesn't carry the same weight as Nigger otherwise it wouldn't be considered more sanitary. The concept of inserting that word only dulls the edge of what is a scathing social commentary that's right in line with the views of the people who want to remove the word. It's pretty much irony that they would do this.
Are the democrats or the republicans the witches this time? I can never keep up with who to hate anymore :(
+1 Disagree
It's not actually censorship until a particular body (such as a school or library) decides to make the new version the only acceptable one. Until then, it's a publisher making an edited version available to consumers (a horrible version, to be sure, but there it is). For now, though we're all free to choose to not read this new edition.
It's not the classic if it's been changed.
Back in the 90s, I was living in a small town in Oklahoma; the courthouse was being renovated. In removing some really cheesy wood paneling, it was discovered that said paneling had covered up the "Whites Only" and "Coloreds Only" signs over various restrooms and drinking fountains.
The white folks were embarrassed, and wanted the signs removed post-haste.
But quite a few black folks -- including those who had been active in Civil Rights stuff in the 50s and 60s -- wanted them left in place as a reminder of how things had once been. They thought it was an important part of their history (and whitey's history) and shouldn't just be discarded, and forgotten.
...all forms of derogatory words used to refer to or describe white people, asians, hispanics,pacific islanders, middle easterners, or any other race, creed, etc must be also stripped from all literature and music lyrics and replaced with PC language. After all, it should be made fair for everyone.
Joseph Conrad, you're next.
i wrote a script to unlock the original content in the book!
s/slave/nigger/g
Good people go to bed earlier.
People who are offended to this degree by certain sounds and combinations of letters would be much better off in a nice white padded cell. They aren't even offended by particular uses of these words, rather the words themselves. So they are fine with books describing violence and murder, but not ones that have words like nigger in them, regardless of the context.
I prefer to read Huckleberry Finn in the original Klingon text.
So now they're insulting everyone of Slavic (eastern European except Hungary, Slovenia and Czech republic) heritage.
Futurist Traditionalism
Censorship like this only affects two major classes of people: dumbasses, and children of dumbasses. The latter, if they are smart, go forth and read the original uncensored work when they leave the influence of their dumbass parents.
Censorship is a state-imposed publication ban, or requirement for alteration.
This is just some publishing company making a modified version of something in the public domain.
They are not interfering with anyone's ability to read the original.
Thanks to Project Gutenberg, anyone can download The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and publish their own version.
If you don't like what some obscure publisher in Alabama is doing, make a HTML version in which racial slurs are in large, colored font, and put it on your web site in protest.
I counted four. Then I swore.
This is yet another example of the United States government changing history and lieing to its people.
The new 1984 is 2011.
Why is it so common to bash FOX News but not MSNBC, which is every bit as biased/bad? I was watching Rachel Maddow online and couldn't help noticing she talks about the Republicans the same way the KKK talks about blacks. I used to like Rachel, but this past month of shows was like an alternate hate-filled version (maybe she's bitter about losing the House).
NBC is also guilty of doctoring a video showing a Black man carrying a rifle, to make it appear that it was "white racists" who want to "execute the president". Woah. First class propaganda.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I take offense to your post for using the word 'denigration' (which contains the word 'nigra').
Ironic you should say that when the largest monotheistic religion in the world teaches precisely the opposite of the GP about human nature.
The GP's posts are laughable to Christians because they resemble a flower-child version of the pharisees' arguments. Jesus responded to them that even as they obeyed most of the law, they missed the point by acting without justice, mercy or humility. According to Jesus, "the old man in the sky" actually doesn't look favorably on the "good works" of men and women who act that way.
is to censor it
Our PR group has been hard at work!
Monday, March 22, 2010
GSAA Confirms Link Between Wal-Mart and The Bilderberg Group
The GSAA research division has proved a direct link between the Bilderberg Group and Wal-Mart. This link was confirmed last Saturday night when an attempt to save black shoppers from a terrorist threat was lambasted by Wal-Mart, an attack which was planned by Wal-Mart themselves.
In an attempt to revive the United States economy an attack was planned by the same strategists that successfully executed 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. To minimize collateral damage against voting citizens, which keep Haliburton, the United States controlling body of the Bilderberg Group, in power; black American citizens were targeted. Again.
InfoWars, in conjunction with the GSAA Black Ops Division have been working on project Shield-A-Slave for the past 2 years. The project has deployed over 2500 operatives that have been recruited from the GSAA Youth League. These operatives have been placed in nearly every Wal-Mart store across America in defense of our black brothers.
On the night of 20th March 2010, a brave operative sacrificed himself in defense of our black citizens. When he was informed of a plot to harm black shoppers at the Wal-Mart he was stationed at, he calmly asked the black shoppers to leave that Wal-Mart.
According to the police, the boy picked up a public-address telephone in the Wal-Mart in Washington Township, one of two dozen accessible to the store’s customers, and said, "All black people, leave the store now." This heroic act saved 73 black people that were shopping in store at the time.
Swift retribution was brought upon the brave soul and he was arrested. Media hype was then focused on the boy as to deflect focus from the failed terrorist attempt. This was done by the same media spin group that has minimized the impact of the Full Body Scanner Project, which is funded by Wal-Mart.
About Wal-Mart:
Money Laundering arm of the Bilderberg Group.
About InfoWars:
Righteous.
About GSAA:
GSAA (GAY SLAVE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY SLAVES from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY SLAVES.
Are you GAY ?
Are you a SLAVE ?
Are you a GAY SLAVE ?
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Thank goodness the original text is freely available on project gutenberg ( http://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h/76-h.htm ).
Maybe they'd have just changed it to "Democrat".
Hey now, there's no need for that kind of language.
I am perfectly fine with NewSouth Books changing words in Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn is in the public domain and therefore all are free to create derivative works from it. Once they change the words in the book, however, the work they create is no longer Huckleberry Finn. It is a derivative work of fiction based on Huckleberry Finn; it should be required to be marked and marketed as such. It is not the original book, and it's title should ambiguously confirm this fact, such that the buyer is not confused. It is in their self interest to do so; if buyers are confused as to if they are buying the original book, Huckleberry Finn, or the derivative work, they may mistakenly purchase the book they did not intend to purchase. This could cause lost sales for NewSouth Books. Given this clear information the market will determine if the original or derivative work is more popular. (One would hope the original work wins out in the market of course, for the betterment of society). If they intend to deceive the buyer by calming that the book they publish is actually Huckleberry Finn, then they should be admonished and prevented from doing so, as such actions are harmful to society.
Nigger
I'm not giving to them any more.
Limit or control the access to the book if you really want, but don't censor the book which is a product of their time. Is like censoring the Babylonian clay plates because the make offers to other gods than yours. This is wrong on many levels and mainly for going away from what was the reality of 19th century.
The staff of Fox News this time, I believe.
Ok, I have to ask...do that many people out there find the word nigger to be so horribly offensive?
I mean, I know a great number of black people find the word offensive (although strangely enough usually only if a non-black person uses it, they often call themselves niggers in everyday conversation), but do people of other colors find the term to be THAT offensive?
Granted, I'm a bit older, and the word was not as bad a four letter words to use. Sure, you didn't shout the word nigger when in company of black people, but in every day conversation, the word was used as a general term for black people...not as a term for putting them down, but that was just the word you used. Growing up, I pretty much thought it was just the usual regional difference in terminology. You hear negro up north, and nigger or nigra as my grandmother used to say it in the south.
I live in the south, and in general, when not in a the presence of black people, the term is still used freely as a synonym for a black person. And no...this is not a bunch of mouth breathing, uneducated rednecks. On the contrary, they are from all walks of life, and most that I am speaking off first knowledge of, are wealthy, well educated and often in places of power (yes, even governmental).
Maybe I'm answering my own question...maybe the degree of "offense" is regional too.
For the record...I'm just not offended by much of ANY language. It is, after all, just a bunch of words.
I don't feel any more offense from words like: idiot, cunt, skin flute, fuckwad, wankel rotary engine, trapazoid, mongolian cluster fuck any more than I do the word nigger.
Words are words.
Revising history, however...is a bad concept.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There's no N-word connection here. Fox News is merely pointing out that Obama is, by birth, a member of a frightening and poorly understood culture* with a historical reason to bear a grudge against the typical Fox viewer*, and that as a member of that culture, he might use his office to empower his people* at the typical Fox viewer's expense.
* [wink, wink]
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
How arrogant must one be to think they have the authority to censor Mark Twain? Albert Bigelow Paine tried by releasing a bastardized version of The Mysterious Stranger, but that was forgivable as Twain died writing that novella.
As long as the original version also remains available under the same terms or better, and as long as the censored version has a large DISCLAIMER at the beginning explaining what changes were made and why they were made, then let the people choose. It is, after all (to the author's great regret) in the Public Domain.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In the Republican reading of it on the House floor today that is.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Nobody else saw fit to mention the eerie similarity between the publisher's name, Newsouth, and the Newspeak language from 1984? When I first saw this story, I thought "Newsouth" was a joke.
In the last few months I have read numerous Jack London and Henry Rider Haggard novels and the prevalence of racism is frequent and shocking to modern sensibilities. On the one hand it angers me but on the other it helps you really understand how deeply rooted racism was even in popular literature. Censoring those works would impair the ability of future generation to really understand what the world was like at that time.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
IMO, this just demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of copyright among the general public in the US. When a book falls out of copyright, it is in the public domain. That means the book can be edited and re-released in pretty much any way you want. Contrary to popular mis-conception, this does not detract from the original. The original version is easily available to anyone who is interested. I could make and publish a version of Huck Finn that replaces every other word with the N word, and it would have no effect on the original work.
Unfortunately, we have been ingrained with this idea that there is only a single copy of any idea (book, art, software, etc) and any changes to that idea can only come from the intellectual property holder. The reality is that changing ideas often strengthen the original idea. In this case releasing an edited version of Huck Finn will probably cause more people to read the original than a more direct campaign to teach the original in schools.
Seriously. All that this will really accomplish is to further hide away the history of the United States. Shouldn't children be able to learn about this, to know the True history of our country?
The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically.
Exactly why I fear the convenience of e-books. They're so easy, wonderful: you can have a full library with you at all times.
But it's 1984 for real this time.
Remember, the theme of 1984 isn't best summarized by "Big Brother is Watching You!".
It's best summarized by "Thoughtcrime is death".
Google searches for slave+nigger will hit Slashdot on the top 10 for the next few days!
Been there, done that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."
The plot is thicker than that... All the new versions will have NEW copyrights and will constitute and establish a "method" to ban the distribution of free works from history and generate an income stream often mandated by school reading lists.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
And yet, that guy threatened to burn books because it was offensive (and thus a good way to attention-whore). That was a poor example of someone who thought it legitimate to burn books as a form of censorship.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
to just black out the word instead.
How nice that you don't take offense to words you use to describe others. Too bad you don't understand why these words are offensive or even try to elevate yourself beyond what you were taught.
It's good that shit floats or you would have drowned by now.
since the Republicans freed the slaves, they have the right to do so!
You think the rewrite was done by conservatives? Check your premises, and the degree to which they cause you to jump to unfounded conclusions.
1984 - George Orwell
A white person using the word 'nigger' or being told he can't use it because he's white?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Does the word "slave" appear in the book anywhere? Will they change that to "unpaid worker" or something? I'm sure there's a line like "Old slave Jim was a slave..." which will now make no sense.
Ooh! Idea! Slave -> Marklar. Or maybe Smurf.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Tell you what.
Try calling a group of black people niggers.
See how much longer you live in the south.
I live in the south, and in general, when not in a the presence of black people, the term is still used freely as a synonym for a black person. And no...this is not a bunch of mouth breathing, uneducated rednecks. On the contrary, they are from all walks of life, and most that I am speaking off first knowledge of, are wealthy, well educated and often in places of power (yes, even governmental).
"They" may be well educated and wealthy, but "they" are also bigots. If it's not offensive, why only "when not in a the presence of black people"? What are you all afraid of?
The "it's only a word" non-argument only makes sense if the words don't have meaning. Once they're stand-ins for concepts they're no longer "just words." Didn't you learn anything about semiotics in school?
Hm... Your experience seems to be different from mine. I grew up in Lower Alabama in the 1960s, and the infamous "n word" was considered something "not for polite company." Granted, lots of "company" was not "polite", but that word was generally used in the same sorts of company as George Carlin's Seven Words, lewd jokes, etc.
Some older people (older than my parents) were more free with their use of the word.
As much as every loves the copyright arguements here....
It is old enough anyone should be able to make an edited version as long as it is labeled as such. I'd be pissed if i bought it thinking it is what he wrote. As long as the original is (or could be) available it isnt even censorship. I imagine it will have a foreword or something saying what a wonderful thing the editor did tho...
This was gonna be a wonderful long comment full of insight to change the world but this chat box is annoying the hell outta me, i have a 8088 computer that types faster :O
Watch this TED Talk and ask the your question again, but of yourself.
This is happening now, TODAY, not one or two hundred years ago...
Are the Americans ready to honor the treaties their government signed or are they continue to ask: "What? It was only the effective way to win by conquest."
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
For someday I hope to rewrite historic pieces to replace "impact" with "effect". In the future, the masses will have enough common decency to forget we ever went down that dark road.
Of course by that time the concerned public will want to change occurances of "redneck" to "monster truck enthusiast" to better reflect their occupation.
Some of our contemporary literature will then start with "You might be a monster truck enthusiast if...".
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Were you a christian? I always have to ask myself "What Bible are these people reading?". There are a lot of disturbing things in the modern christian moment. It is seemingly divorced from the Bible, but claims the Bible is of central importance. It says you shouldn't question God, but almost all the protagonists in the Bible question God at some point (even Jesus!). It claims every word of the Bible is absolutely literally true, but the Bible never makes that claim. Most of the Bible is prophecy or poetry that can not possibly be taken literally and was clearly never meant to be taken that way. The books of the new Testament contradict themselves about the details of Jesus' life on earth, and how the Church should conduct itself. When they compiled it they knew these contradictions existed and they did not see fit to edit them out. Clearly the point is that the specifics are not known and are not essential to the religion.
It doesn't even makes sense to say that a book on spiritual matters is literally true, because literal means physical and spiritual refers to things that are not physical.
Christianity (true Christianity) is about lifestyle, not what you claim to believe, Jesus says as much in the Bible (as do most of the prophets).
I can't blame you if you rejected modern christianity. Any sane person should.
The bottom quote right now is "Try to remove the color-problem by restarting your computer several times. -- Microsoft-Internet Explorer README.TXT" Coincidence OR ??????? Sounds like the right answer to me. In fact, just leave it turned off.
if they tell themselves "I am a good person, I can do better" AND THEN THEY DO BETTER, they're not delusional at all.
Pretending "nigger" wasn't in common usage in the American south in the mid-nineteenth century....that's delusional. Sorry to disappoint you, but sweeping problems under the rug does not make them go away.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Well done sir. Kudos in lieu of mod points.
Please, re-read what I wrote in its entirety (typos and all).
I said I understood the word nigger was offensive to many black people (strangely enough only if used by a white person in their presence, but perfectly ok for blacks to call other blacks to their face, but I digress).
I generally try not to use a word that I know will offend someone. I say fuck around many people, but not around people I know don't like the word. I did learn a few years back, that people with kids (usually the mothers) tended to give me some funny looks when I'd had a few and let loose with language. So, I do try to watch it...I don't go out of my way to offend people. I do feel people are too easily offended and "PC" these days, but that's how many people are becoming.
My point was...I don't see, in plain, every day, regular life...with non-black people that I deal with an interract with hardly anyone that finds the word nigger as highly offensive. I find quite the opposite, you'll hear it quite often in public conversations...when there are no black people around.
One thing that made me think it was regional...was a trip I had to visit some friends up north. They knew how everyone talked around them while down here, and I was surprised to hear from one girl, to not even say nigger in a bar around white people. I was kinda shocked that they would take such a large offense, even if they weren't black. Guessing it was a regional thing.
But no, reread my OP...I didn't say it wasn't offensive to many black people, just that I'd not seen many non-blacks that found the word to be that offensive.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ok, I personally feel that changing the words 'injun' and 'nigger' to the word 'slave' is a step for the worse. Its painting history differently then it was. Not every native or black person was a slave, some were free either normally or managed to purchase their freedom but with this you've completely changed it to make it look like you were either white or you were a slave. That will be great to teach little Timmy "Remember, these people weren't repressed minorities back then, people were either white or slaves. Now remember that because thats what it says in your books."
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Is that where those Hale Bopp people got the idea from?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Well played!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I don't take offense to words used to describe me either. Say the word cracker, honkey, idiot...neanderthal around me or to me.
Doesn't get a rise out of me. I tend to thing everyone is getting WAY too PC, and wears their feelings on their sleeves. Geez, get over it, when did life become about preserving someone else's self esteem? Toughen up a little. People that call you things, aren't your friends. I don't have time for people like that. I've too busy trying to make lots of money, party with friends and get laid.
I don't have time to bother with what other people think or say if they are not my friends.
And yes...they are JUST words.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There's a book called "I Been There Before" about Twain reappearing when the comet came back in the late 20th century. Worth a read if you're a Twain fan.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
This was one guy, or at worst one company. There is no such thing as "Big Brother". Lay off the Glen Beck.
Being a St. Louis-an, I have to object to the characterization that the book was set in the "south". At the time of the books writing, St. Louis had the same national importance of Chicago. They traded places when train traffic eclipsed river traffic in the national economy. If it helps, think of the book as being set in the suburbs of Chicago to put it in proper context. Deep south this is not.
Nigger was a descriptive word back in Mark Twain's day. It described a person who originated in the Niger River area in Africa. It wasn't until much later that the word started to get used as a hate-filled negative word. Why can't this be addressed with a fore-word or some additional background information, rather than with censorship?
Demowhat and republiwho? What gibberish is this, foul creature? To the stake with ye! Burn the witch! Burn all who lie with the cloven hooved man goat!
Wait... hooved? Hoofed? Hoofa? Hoover? Hoo... vvvffff... yeah.
Roger Ebert's response to this: I'd rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.
Nice job walking the line, Ebert! That's easily (improperly!) read as anti-censorship while supporting the move in phrasing; in comparing insults, one would 'rather' be called the less offensive term -- Ebert is saying that, ignoring the censorship issue, the book has more impact using the term slave.
I don't know what to think here. Proper perspective might be glimpsed if it were known what 'injun' will be transformed into. Based solely on nigger -> slave, I tend to support the idea since the former word is connoted with brotherhood in certain circumstances and its roots (brotherhood in bondage) might be mistaken for a measure of exclusivity. This interpretation would serve to reinforce racism rather than to highlight the lasting effects of slavery on this nation. Using the term 'slave' might therefore better address the original intent.
This kind of debate is really valuable in the classroom. If teachers could address this specific issue and then talk about it, the students might learn far more than the book had to offer. If changing the phrasing of the book sparks this kind of debate, it was worth doing.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Don't complain about the censorship you are doing yourself.!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
So, they're removing the historically accurate and contextually appropriate word from a classic piece of literature to protect "the children" from reading a word that they're probably hearing a couple of times a minute on MTV (or whatever the kids of today consume for music videos)
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
"Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format removing two derogatory racial slurs: "injun" and "nigger." The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word "slave."
Not to sound racist but... I am pretty sure there is a difference between the two regardless of how derogatory either are. Changing them both to "slave" doesn't seem very descriptive. Why not just use the commonly accepted terms instead... That said I think changing an original work like that other than through necessary translation is stupid. Part of reading a book like that is understanding the context in which it was written. Look at Jules Vern, you have to make allowances for how things are described, and think about what the meaning is.
I mean we all laughed and giggled when reading Romeo and Juliette. I distinctly remember everyone accenting the "Ho's" more than they really needed, or the whole "if thou prickest me, doth I not bleed" section... horrible I know that is all I really remember.
Just as absurd is a Canadian magazine about Canadian History called "The Beaver" had to change its name due to public pressure to "Canada's History" despite the role of the beaver in the fur trade and how that influenced the growth of early Canada. Just silly.
This is sad. What has been lost on the general public is the ability of people to "devalue" words, and thus remove the power they have over us. For a while I was quite hopeful when young black men in the rap community started calling each other "nigger". They were on the right track. The spreading of this activity would have ultimately devalued the word, and then it would no longer have any power. Unfortunately fools, invested in keeping the word profane started a campaign to reinvigorate its negativity and power.
Think about this. Why are there no profane derogatory terms for white folks? Simple. They don't let it effect them. Call them anything you want. Repeat it as much as you want. Won't phase them one iota.
Profanity is an illusion. Words do not have intrinsic power. It is we who give it them.
:T:R:A:N:S:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824
Seeing as N-word Jim is the one of the most honorable people in the book, I would more likely expect Fox News to change it to Republican or Patriot.
Sidestepping the argument over censorship of the n-word, is "injun" even a distinct word? I always assumed it was nothing more than "Indian" written in dialect. To give it a different, derogatory meaning, especially when so close in pronunciation to the source word, would be like having separate dictionary entries for "nothing" and "nothin'". If there is insult in "injun", it would seem to be in a context from the speaker and not the word itself. If, on the other hand, the objection is to "Indian" vs. "Native American"...well, I suppose I've got no beef there, but there are much more relevant transgressors there than a 150 year old book (namely, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the official names of very many Native American tribes and tribal business).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824 where I see you have committed felonious acts against others here clone (or should I say, Stephen Alongi?)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824 where I see you have committed felonious acts against others here clone (or should I say, Stephen Alongi, instead?)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824 where I see you have committed felonious acts against others here clone (or should I say, Stephen Alongi?)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824 where I see you have committed felonious acts against others here clone (or should I say, Stephen Alongi?)
I mean, I know a great number of black people find the word offensive (although strangely enough usually only if a non-black person uses it, they often call themselves niggers in everyday conversation), but do people of other colors find the term to be THAT offensive?
Yes, it's that offensive.
It's offensive because a white person using it carries a history of racial violence. When black people use it amongst themselves, it doesn't carry that history.
You hear negro up north, and nigger or nigra as my grandmother used to say it in the south.
Your grandmother grew up in a time of segregation, when black people did not receive the protection of the law that white people received, and blacks were regularly lynched for the crime of being black at an inconvenient time and place. This is the history it carries, along with a perceived threat of racial violence.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Go to Barefoot's World website and read the Oklahoma 8th Grade graduation test. Nowhere do students of the 1700's onward ever study any fictitious works of art like the modern slew of alleged Literature. The reason why there is mandatory High Scool or requirement beyond 8th Greade is when Communists entered The United States to try diminishing the work ethic and harass Americans through imaginable necessity clauses by extending childhood beyond 13 years-old and into 18 to 21 years-old. In fact, just look around you and you'll notice men in their late 20's and 30's living in Communal environments with their parents and their health is decling at a rate that there is know telling when childhood ends from where retirement begins.
People like you want to derive wisdom from Huck Fin, well I say you do that on your own watch in your club. I derive all my wisdom from Lt Ripley fighting neo-Capitalists(proto-Communists) in the Book of Alien and Aliens 2.
Honestly what do they want to achieve with this? That kides do not read these words? Fine. But racism is not primarily in the words it is in the heads of people. The book is written in the language of its epoch so it includes these words. Instead of censoring it, it would be better to point out to children and other readers why Twain choose these words, why they were common etc. Next time they put blankets on Greek statues because they are naked. Or they censor Faust (a play by Johann W. Goethe) because a 14 year old girl (Gretchen) gets pregnant from an at least 35 year old man (Faust). Hey it is a classic, it was not such a big deal when it was written. Nowadays we think different. If books get censored because they are no longe compatible with presen ethics than we cannot understand the past anymore.
Let's keep improving history so that nobody died, committed rape, stood by idly, or said stupid shit. We have always been perfect, somebody must have been writing down lies.
I agree with you that the petty and unjust God is not worthy of our worship. A lot of people don't want to see it that way though, they still hope to benefit by trying to kiss that God's ass. And they don't see the wrong in their God because they don't want to see their own selfishness which is similar. After a while, I don't think it makes much sense to be angry on their behalf. The more honest of them will have their own day of anger when they see how they've been duped. Then they'll see that they've also been vicious or dishonest also, in one way or another, and they'll start working to get over it.
I've gone to some trouble trying to work out how to reconcile the idea of goodness with the idea of natural selection. The two ideas are at least partially incompatible as most people conceive of them, but if you try to get rid of one or the other you wind up with different kinds of problems. I'm pretty sure now that the ideas can be reconciled, but some other commonly held assumptions have to be removed first.
I don't think its just Christianity that's messed up, its all religions, and all splinter sects. Everyone wants to twist the truth into something proprietary. And everyone wants to pretend that they have the whole solution when they only have a small part of it. I don't think a Richard Dawkin's style of atheism is much better in that regard. But I've learned by studying other religious ideas, even though I'm certain that none of it can be trusted.
I'm also with you that truth is more important than happiness. I'd rather suffer than be pleasantly deluded. For me there have been periods of shock after seeing through a lie, where what's left seems relatively stark and empty. But later I've discovered new things that are better than what I could have found before throwing out the old half-truths. So I think that killing one's personal god tends to pay off in the long run, if a person is honest and sticks with it.
so that our children don't have to struggle with irrational numbers, lets ban fractional numbers so that our children may never be affraid of math! WTF?
>>> ... provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America.
Translation: ... provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of letting them know the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America.
It made me puke to read this Orwellian Newspeak.
How about publishing a competing copy, with more niggers and slaves tossed in. And let's toss in some colorful extra profanity here and there. We'll have a new order of publishing, where a consumer can select the style of copy and prose that appeals to his tastes, and put in custom orders for certain disliked words to by substituted with synoymns.
Annoyed that some uppity author uses nitid instead of brilliant, or that some popular hack ludicrously has someone hiss with pleasure in a romance scene? Order it with a few synonym substitution made...
I find it droll, but honestly, I sincerely expect exactly that aspect of customized publishing to, eventually, inevitably arrive. Hence aspects of this debate about more or less nigger seems somewhat moot.
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality." -Dante
... lets remove Jews from the Bible too.
We'll take the niggers and the chinks, but we don't want the Irish!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
freely preparing derivatives of a public-domain work and making an alternate version seems OK for me even if there's something to be said for the not-clean version.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Romans 3:23 NIV: "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"
I can totally see this being used as an ideological weapon.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I've seen editions of Shakespeare that have the original text on the lefthand pages, modern English on the righthand pages.
That wouldn't work here, but that's another good example of intra-language translation.
Of course, intra-language translation isn't _as_ needed for understanding.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Conbreastution is another example of hack-job censorship. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people
NBC is also guilty of doctoring a video showing a Black man carrying a rifle, to make it appear that it was "white racists" who want to "execute the president". Woah. First class propaganda.
Citation needed, please.
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
I could go into the text and replace Nigger with Klingon. It might be funny, but it won't be Mark Twain.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824
"i have on multiple occasions formally accused you of federal felony copyright violations and conspiracy to commit murder. you're an ignorant hypocrite. you stole my photographs and redistributed them unaltered with a call for my murder attached. you are most certainly a felon. JUSTICE IS COMING. your ".40" that you claim you'll be waiting with will not be as effective as it is in your psychotic dreams. cower some more, feeb. you're completely pathetic." by MichaelKristopeit347 (1968128) on Thursday January 06, @01:16AM (#34773824)
That doesn't look good for you clone. You're folding under the pressure it seems, because ,b>the poster there is not an APK. It's MichaelKristopeit347 (1968128).
I've gone to some trouble trying to work out how to reconcile the idea of goodness with the idea of natural selection. The two ideas are at least partially incompatible as most people conceive of them, but if you try to get rid of one or the other you wind up with different kinds of problems. I'm pretty sure now that the ideas can be reconciled, but some other commonly held assumptions have to be removed first.
I've thought about this too, and I think the answer comes from the fact that natural selection doesn't just work on individuals, it works on whole species. A species will come to dominate, or at least flourish if it can learn to work together. Lion prides, anthills, bee hives, everyone works together for the benefit of the others. It's good to help out your neighbour. With humans and our communication and travel capabilities, virtually everyone is our neighbour these days, and we all work together in an international market, etc. If you take it in a wider context and look at ecosystems you see that a lot of species, plants and animals, rely on each other for continued survival, so being good to more than just humans also makes sense. I suppose a lot of mammals seem to have some capability for empathy too, which may have developed for similar reasons. I belief empathy is a good basis for good acts, though apparently Freud disagrees. I don't see why anyone would have any reason to do good for other unless it's for selfish self benefit, or because of feelings of empathy. Why would you help someone who was in pain if you couldn't understand or recognise what pain was, and that it was a bad thing? There would be no motivation to do so.
I'm also with you that truth is more important than happiness. I'd rather suffer than be pleasantly deluded. For me there have been periods of shock after seeing through a lie, where what's left seems relatively stark and empty. But later I've discovered new things that are better than what I could have found before throwing out the old half-truths. So I think that killing one's personal god tends to pay off in the long run, if a person is honest and sticks with it.
Thanks, that's pretty encouraging.
which is totally what she said
Gov'ts sensor. Companies/groups do not. These folks are just editing a classic to avoid being sued by NCAACP and to avoid admitting the Civil War was about slavery.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Hey, yeah, uh, black guy here.
Y'know that slavery thing? Happened couple hundred years ago? Yeah, well, we've discussed it, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand..we're pretty much over it. It's cool, you can stop trying to frantically make us think it never happened.
Oh, the native americans? They don't give a fuck either. They won, White man. They have casinos and money and everything else. So yeah, you can stop trying to appease us like an angry volcano god.
Those allegations are unfounded, and furthermore if they are false then they are defamatory in which case both you and "michaelkristopeit347" could be subject to legal action. I suggest you stop re-posting them until you have solid evidence of their accuracy.
Very few people are getting the whole story. The project to print a modified version of the book is not intended to censor the book, but to provide an alternative for schools who have already decided to ban the book outright in it's original form. So this should not be a debate about whether the book is better in it's censored or uncensored form, but a debate about whether it would be better to read a censored version or have no access to the book at all.
"Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Queer African American Association of America" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Groups? I've read about a fellow named John Beeson, but IIRC the "group" was a lynch mob, and Beeson only just managed to escape with his life after having the temerity to write "A Plea for the Indians".
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It's on youtube and other video sites:
http://www.google.com/search?q=msnbc%20black%20man%20white%20racist&tbs=vid:1
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Which version of the book you want if you go to a book store? "I'd like a copy of Huckleberry Finn." "Do you want Huckleberry Finn Classic or the New Nigger Free Huckleberry Finn?" And that will naturally lead to a trademark infringement lawsuit by Coca-Cola...
I was born white, in California, so I have that culture's perspective. I've been called "cracker" more than once by a black man. The intent seemed offensive and intended to incite violence, but I let it slide at the time. (I try to shun violence, even when I've been drinking.) Once a Mexican fellow called me gabacho, but he was smiling, and corrected it to "my friend" when I stated larfing. I imagine he didn't mean to be TOO offensive; I could be wrong. I am fairly certain that my membership in the dominant ethnicity has affected my sensitivity to this sort of slight. OTOH I have known enough racist dickheads to understand why some people might be driven to some scarcely credible over-reaction to the existence and use of certain words. In the end, I don't see this having any lasting impact, some back-country schools and libraries will squander their public resources actually purchasing this landfill, but it won't have much intrinsic or collector value. I'd pay money for a copy of Jefferson's, or also Bowdler's version of the Bible, but this publication doesn't seem like a worthy item.
It's a shame this attitude exists, I'd love to see a faithful cinematic production of Huckleberry Finn. I've actually been thinking of this particular issue in light of the recent production of "True Grit". My thought was that we aren't ready for (worthy of?) Twain, (and this "news" proves it) but it's time for a remake of "Little Big Man".
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
... that form of redaction uses more ink. The publishers are being niggardly.
Some observations on this....In the case of the bee and ant colonies, the members are generally all siblings. So the need to "propagate one's own genes" accounts for all the cooperation. Furthermore, common ants fight genocidal wars as a matter of policy when encountering another colony. The lion pride is also a family, generally with one dominant male. And lions exhibit various kinds of nasty behavior for the sake of their own genes, such as the dominant male killing the existing cubs if taking over a pride from another male.
Its true that an insufficiently cooperative group or species may lose out relative to another group or species. However, for the most part this doesn't actually provide much positive reinforcement for cooperative behavior within large groups, because punishing or rewarding the whole group doesn't select between selfish and unselfish individuals within the group. At that level, whatever behavior is most favorable for an individual's genes relative to the rest of the group still dominates. This is the same kind of dynamic as 'the tragedy of the commons'. If a person tries to model the group dynamics, it doesn't support much cooperation beyond what benefits the individual and its cousins. Another way of saying this is that natural selection doesn't think ahead. The fact that a certain behavior will be detrimental to the future of the group doesn't cause cooperative individuals to be selected for, they are only selected for if their behavior immediately benefits themselves and their cousins. So any altruism that results from that is a form of selfishness. The best strategy is still to be perfectly treacherous: Do good when you would be punished otherwise, and cheat when you can get away with it.
To me, the answer to this is to look beyond it. Within the arena that is modeled by science, natural selection describes a kind of rule that has to be satisfied in order to exist. But even after all the causes and constraints are understood within that system, there's still freedom left over. The system is under-determined. If you can find that freedom and cultivate it, expanding it, the rules are modified because the scope you're working in is altered. You don't have to be able to beat selfishness within its own arena, you just have to find enough other strength that you can match it so that you can continue playing in its world, to speak. My criticism of Dawkins and many other atheists is that anything that is known to not be captured by their current model is considered to be 'random' or unreal. They're declaring, in effect, that our vision and understanding must stay within the bounds that they have already sketched out. A problem with this is that their method of inquiry only lends itself well to certain kinds of problems. If something can be manipulated in a repeatable manner in a lab setting, then its real to them, particularly if its relatively easy to model. So science starts out by dealing with things that are approximately linear, then moves on to deal successfully with some harder, nonlinear dynamics, then gets bogged down and kind of stops. Almost by definition, this approach does capture some of the most important dynamics in nature, to a certain order of approximation. But it doesn't follow that everything outside of that is unimportant. A very weak influence can have very profound effects. (By way of analogy, gravity is a very weak interaction compared to electromagnetic interactions, but it matters anyway because of its cumulative effects, where the stronger electromagnetic effects tend to counteract each other and cancel out on large scales.) There is no love, or choice, or true aspiration within the scope of what is described by science. There is causal mechanics, and randomness, and anything that can't be modeled by dividing the world into those categories disappears.
Nobody has a right to not be offended. If you've taken offense at something said or written by someone that wasn't directed at you, then it's your problem, not theirs...take the chip off your shoulder. Offense should never be taken when there was no intent to give it.
We'd all be well served by reviewing the lessons taught by the late great George Carlin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words I was amazed to learn that he was once arrested for saying them...now that's offensive!
Just another day in Paradise
The fact that a certain behavior will be detrimental to the future of the group doesn't cause cooperative individuals to be selected for, they are only selected for if their behavior immediately benefits themselves and their cousins.
This is true over the short term, but over the long term any groups that tend toward cooperation and benefit each other will have a better chance of survival. I haven't looked into it much, but there are some really interesting symbiotic relationships in nature, where one species has developed to depend on another.
At a basic level I guess that applies to things like certain viruses and bacteria, but it also happens with some larger species that I can't remember right now. I think perhaps some bird/bee combo, or for example insects and birds being used to propagate pollen and seeds. There are even plants which mimic the look and scent of female bees to encourage people to mate with them. That's pretty mind boggling to me, and is enough to at least make you wonder about some higher power at work, but still possible and plausible via simple natural selection, given a lot of time, which life on earth has indeed had. Even if individual species are doing these things for selfish reasons, it still results in cooperation and mutual benefits.
which is totally what she said
Splitting hairs on the wrong animal and howling at the moon....
Your entrities may be valid, points taken, but you have not seen that you flog the beast you are riding ... faster and faster into the highminded abyss...
Not so long ago, 70% of America believed weapons of max destruction were positively found in Iraq, and 30% of America believed chemical weapons had been used on their troops over there (thanks to your media). U sucked up ur own az and marched to war on behalf of some money grubbing, dictator who continued to erode individual rights for the benefit of business, as it continues to do today. One single group that is supposed to be looking after your rights, the world's rights, etc (im gonna puke) decided to war you go (Scientific American 2009 - about the mush-headed Amercans and how they are perpetually bamboozled by their news, by their political leaders, and by business. The most sensationlistic, deceiving source was Fox news with PBS being the least incorrect or inflamatory). So naval-gazing are the Amercans that they delude themselves they have democracy and truth. They are merely promoting a common enemy to distract you and take more rights away. More 'Vietnam' (with economic insentives) but less idealistic indignant outrage of the 60's-70's.
Before the gulf oil stupidity (and incidentally they have designed special risk management practices, [such Bowtie diags] over many years to ensure there are no disasters) there was a huge growing dead zone in the gulf. I am sure they are telling you the truth when they say there is no appreciable effects. I see no remedy or disincentives for overly rich businesses to ensure people are protected.
When you put it all together - you have pesticides, herbacides, insecticides, fertilizers worked far into the ground, cadmium on your dishes, mercury in your seafood, lead in your jewelry, Bisphenols in nearly everything you use to hold food, dung run off, plastics & melamine in your food, and you are deleting your acquifers at alarming rates, and yet your administration will tell you that individually all the amounts are "A C C E P T A B L E". I am sure somone has done studies on the interaction of persistant consumption of all these toxins - it's just that they are just going to make sure you never get to see this information it before it is amended/discredited.
It is fairly gutless to be arguing semantics and revisionism over miniscule events but when it counts, you just seem to always do whatever your system tells you to, rather than get intelligent about common sense and what is correct.
Because bad people make bad things happen, by making people think that they are a good person doing the right thing. Heck mostly the bad people think they're the good people. Truth gets distorted enough as it is.
The concept of rule by the people requires that the citizens are able to have some clue as to what is going on. We should be a people where we aren't relying on a "beneficial dictator" to make the value judgments for us. To relinquish our perception of reality is a huge leap toward being controlled. While I see the current state of America as problematic, I would not look to shy from the truth as an answer.
>I live in the south, and in general, when not in a the presence of black people, the term is still used freely as a synonym for a black person. And no...this is not a bunch of mouth breathing, uneducated rednecks. On the contrary, they are from all walks of life, and most that I am speaking off first knowledge of, are wealthy, well educated and often in places of power (yes, even governmental).
They use "nigger" as a synonym for "black person" because they disrespect black people so deeply. These wealthy, educated, powerful people whom you know are horrible human beings. They don't consider black people to be their equals, and their words just let that fact shine through.
If you don't feel disgusted by these people, and you apparently don't, then you are living a sadly unexamined life. Racism is all around you like water is around a fish, until you're too used to it to notice. And that's why "nigger" doesn't seem like such a bad word to you.
The inclusion of those words was to satire the derogatory use of them in society at the time...to remove them is to change an important anti-slavery text into a simple story about a boy and his friend traveling down the river. What's next, they take the lynch-mob scene at the end out? The text was SUPPOSED to offend people so that they would think about Jim as a person and not a piece of property?