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founding

This is almost identical to the Great Dr Seuss Cancellation of 2021 and similar to the Mr Potato Head Gender Crisis of the same year. Because it's America, and because he is calamitously stupid, Kevin McCarthy made the Dr Seuss thing part of an argument against legislation to protect voting rights on the House floor. All this took us back to the time Ted Cruz - calamitously awful, but very much not stupid - recited Green Eggs & Ham on the floor of the Senate as part of his 21 hr attempt to filibuster Obamacare in 2013. That was performative bullshit too.

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Did anyone complain loudly when the Harry Potter books were 'Americanised' - although you could still get the original English version if you bought a copy from outside North America.

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What I find interesting is what *is* driving these business decisions to make their IP more sanitised. You say there was "no campaign to change Dahl’s writing" and you're right, there was no obvious public campaign, but surely the businesses making these "sensitivity edits" are responding to something? Maybe we downplay the online activism stuff but it’s actually having an effect, left and right. They’ve decided it’s better to be safe than sorry and avoid stuff that could get them a headline from either side – this story is being framed as “woke leftism” but I could easily see a scenario where Salon for example has a real problem with how the Witches are physically described if these changes weren’t made. Is this all just a pre-emptive response to media clickbait (which, in this case, backfired)? I think the drivers for what constitutes a corporate response to culture are a bit murkier than we might think.

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author

I’m saying this is complicated and interesting. But the corporate response is about their misunderstanding of things and their idea of self-protection. The media/press blaming it on “the woke left” are just taking advantage of an opportunity to push their usual agenda. Also: Dahl simply is grotesque to a wide audience these days and the company wants to make it as palatable as possible while just flailing about to achieve that. It speaks to the emptiness of corporate progressivism.

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