As i said, I have never heard about these woke people. But, what I gather from Mooney_Driver, they seem to have the same attitude as all other extremists, whether political or religious.
It is largely to do with
I hope that in a few years’ time we look back on this period of human history with horror and amusement, in equal measure. Unfortunately many/most of those who had surgery – especially the very young – will regret it for ever. And the 0.1% or whatever will be looking for solutions as they always have been.
Peter wrote:
a number of men “changing their gender” to compete against women in sports, where they can easily win; most of these look like Geoff Capes in a wig, and have you noticed that it never happens the other way around (lesbian women “changing their gender” so they can compete against men)?
There have been cases in swimming, where women have an advantage over men.
I’m sceptical as to whether many people would undergo the hassle of gender reassignment and accompanying prejudice in order to gain an advantage in sports. I think it’s more likely in most cases that they genuinely wanted to change their gender and continue with their sports. There have long been related debates regarding intersex athletes, some of whom only found out that they were not genetically female due to routine testing of elite athletes (must be quite a shock). I’m not sure whether a person’s motivation or awareness of their sexual characteristics should have any bearing on whether they should be allowed to compete.
Peter wrote:
modern western 1st World society doing its best to be kind to all, with PC media having been totally hijacked along the way (always easily done; everybody wants to occupy the moral high ground no matter how ridiculous they look
Any kindness which may have been in the whole matter has long disappeared. Right now, you get hazing, extortion (do what we want or face a shitstorm on SM), bullying and all the other stuff associated with cancel culture and woke. The biggest mistake some companies and loads of politicians involved with those characters do is to try to appease. The very fact that a large German publisher has relented to those baying dogs and pulled back 2 children’s books is a total disgrace and will just cause more of the same. The very threat of a shitstorm seems to scare managers more than to throw away a whole printing run of a book, costing 10s of thousands of Euros. That has to stop. Right Now. Otherwise, it will be the Wokies who will define in the future what we are allowed to see and what not.
Apart, the press is not helping (well, who expected them to). They put gasoline into the fire by claiming that one of the state TV stations have pulled those movies out of their programming as a consequence, which was a ballant lie. Fact is that the license for the films went to another station in 2020.
You mean some in Germany are blocking Karl May, Winnetou, etc? Wonderful films! 1960s, made in Yugoslavia. Great music, too (I use it a lot for flying movies).
That’s bizzare.
Publishers have a problem in that they are stuffed with middle class people with Arts degrees and no analytical capability, who want to be on the right side of every social argument, always supporting the “oppressed and poor” without actually employing any of them. Publishers treated JK Rowling badly.
Publishers told JK Rowling that children’s books either don’t sell or have a very small market so most didn’t think her manuscripts were worth their while publishing.
A bit like Decca did with the Beatles.
But that is very different to not publishing due to pressure from some self interest group who believe that they are right and that everybody else should be cancelled, disparraged or abused in one way or another until they convert to the group’s way of thinking.
Remember the guy who has recently stabbed Rushdie several times in public has Prob99 never read his book.
Lots of oddities going on in TV. Through the cold war, at least through the entire 1980s there was a children TV series on national TV in Norway called “Jon Blund”. Jon Blund taught about human/children’s rights and science and prosperity in society, in a nice kind of way, then put all the children to sleep with some special dust. Jon Blund was loved by all children in Norway at that time (as well as parents 
)
The thing is Jon Blund was an imported series from Germany. Not West Germany (which had their own version), but from DDR. In DDR the series was called “Unser Sandmännchen”. The series was considered propaganda for DDR and communism, propaganda towards children.
At the time, no one reacted, the series were completely harmless, but later lots of people were going WTF! “National TV used as a propaganda machine for DDR and communism!!!”. Lots of fuzz about this, which eventually fizzled out after a while. The series IS harmless, and must be interpreted in the society, at the time where it is shown. We aren’t communists, not most of us In DDR it probably was propaganda, sort of perhaps, I don’t know how people there really reacted to the series.
However, the series was shown as a small part of a larger series for children, which went on air every day in the 24 days leading up to Christmas, through lots of years. That series was about a shoe maker living in a little town, doing little stuff, preparing for Christmas, and people and children visiting him. Very popular series. In hindsight, some (lots) of PC people “analyzed” this series, and found that this shoe maker was a tiny bit too found of children This created lots of fuzz about this particular theme, how national television would lead children into becoming easy targets for evil stuff. This eventually also fizzled out of course, and we can laugh of the whole thing today. AFAIK all of this can be found online in the archives to be seen by everyone.
I think society changes. Children literature in particular, is very much in the category of “best before xxx”. It may have lots of educational elements that is only “correct” in the time and in the society for which it was created. Astrid Lindgren was super popular when I was a little boy. Today, not so much, as children have difficulties relating to the essence of it (children today are already “free and outspoken”, this doesn’t interest them, they “want” other impulses). Perhaps in 50 years things will come back again?
It’s not like Astrid Lindgren, Jon Blund etc are banned or anything. It’s more that they are irrelevant today, children find it hard to relate to, and that people should make stuff that IS relevant and interesting for children of today. Some stuff is of course endless, like old folk fairy tales and HC Anderson etc.
There was another (Norwegian) series about two janitors called Pumpel and Pilt. It went on air for the first time when I was 5 or 6 perhaps. I just loved it (and still do), and so did approximately 1/2 of the children. The other half hated it. They had night mares about it, and still remembers the series as a big trauma for them (seriously). The series was full of surrealism and surreal humor, which some children find utterly scary for some reason. Today it is a cult
gallois wrote:
Remember the guy who has recently stabbed Rushdie several times in public has Prob99 never read his book.
Apparently Khomeini never read it either…
You could be right, LS, that this “fashion” will pass by. Every single person I know here is very much hoping it will pass by, and the sooner the better. In fact the opinions spoken in person could not be printed. Google on the Tavistock Clinic for one of the nastier examples.
I don’t agree that Mark Twain etc are “Children literature in particular, is very much in the category of “best before xxx”.” I think they were wonderful timeless stories about kids having adventures. IMHO what has changed is:
Whereas when I was a kid and I was bored, my parents gave me a book.
In Czechoslovakia, I had it pretty good reading-wise. The commies loved Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc, and at the bottom of many pages were footnotes written by specially selected loyal comm party twats about how superior socialism is, by avoiding slavery, the KKK, etc, all the while about 200M people were enslaved and impoverished by the USSR and their arse-licking ruling classes. The only relatively non-political-footnotable books were Jules Verne and RL Stevenson. We also benefited from the Czech books being direct translations from the 19th century originals, so lots of detail.
Peter wrote:
That’s bizzare.
The whole thing gets worse.
What happened is that a very reputable children’s books and game publisher published an accompaniment book for a new movie coming out now. They got a shitstorm on the net about how dare they write about Native Americans using the term “Indian” as they are not native Americans themselves. Consequently, after a few complaints, the publisher decided to withdraw the books.
What followed was that people really got annoyed about this, as it is simply a cowardly act to appease some nuts and certainly a bad management decision. Consequently, more moralists popped up and started throwing venom against Karl May’s work itself.
Enter “Bild”, Germany’s foremost tabloid. They felt, emotions did not go high enough, so they reported that the first public TV channel had cancelled showing the movies AS A RESULT of the complaints. This is a balant lie. The ARD did not renew it’s license to show those movies in 2020, it was picked up by the 2nd channel ZDF. So the movies can and hopefully will be shown on that channel. Bild and “Welt” aimed to achieve public outrage (which they did) and obviously were after clicks and with those money. IMHO, what they did is a criminal act and should be prosecuted, not only as bad journalism of the worst kind, but as kindling public unrest and outrage with malicious intent. IMHO, Bild and Welt should (not only for that reason) be taken out of circulation, as they keep violating journalistic ethics on a daily basis.
Only this action by the press got the whole affair of a bad business decision by Ravensburger completely out of hand. Obviously several radical moralists are exploiting this and are trying to fuel the fire further, with the press turbocharging the rage. The result of this whole thing is up in the air so far, but the backlash against both Ravensburger and the moralists is massive.
If this was an isolated incident, one could throw a bucket of water over it and be done. Alas, it is hardly isolated but part of today’s cancel culture, which is aided by the press in a imho unacceptable way. Now, if you consider how certain press organisations use such comparatively trivial content to generate shitstorms and upheaval, it doesn’t take much to imagine how they can influence much more important issues as well. Falsehoods, intentionally false reporting for malicious reasons imho are a clear and present danger.
