Stupidity should be censored, not words

Young Mage said:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/05/huckleberry-finn-edition-censors-n-word

da fux bra? this only further reinforced the america's and the world's previous belief: South America is filled with rednecks attempting to get rid of any evidence of racism.

This is frankly similar to those ********, outlandish claims many European behind the Iron Wall made: jews? Holocaust? nah man. pipe dreams.
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This is stupid. Will they censor Faulkner, too? Literature isn't just stories and metaphors, it's a snapshot of the human condition at a given era, it's a microscope looking at human emotions and invoking insights that we usually don't bother to make.
 
Have you read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad?
Have you read Things Fall Apart by Chiwhuahah Achebe? (too lazy to look up how to spell his name)

Achebe is a moron; he thought Conrad was a "racist." Well no shit sherlock, for a time of his man, he was going to throw the word "******" around, using a "politically correct" substitute is downright idiotic. It would stand out and cause his peers to shun him.

Except Achebe is a bigger asshat than i imagined. Anyone having read the book realizes the europeans' "philanthropic" and "valiant quest" was used sarcastically. Joseph condemned the belligerent imperialists and their actions. He described the city of Bruxelles as the "whited sepulcher", a biblical allusion describing hypocrisy. Joseph described the Africans as wholesome and organic; they belonged there. The europeans clearly did not. The book's climax even has the antagonist reflect on his life and scream in disgust, "The horror! The horror!" before finally succumbing to tropical diseases.

One of my favorite quote from the book is "lies have the flavor of death" and I love how it still applies to racist republicans down south.
 
People in this day and age are so goddamn sensitive.

Leave books the way they were written. It was a different time so of course the language used was different but people should know this. It's like old people....some of them still have the old school mentality and way of thinking but that is just how they grew up and the time they lived in, they don't all mean anything by what they say. Just like in the years to come, things will change but we'll all be talking a certain way that may not be deemed appropriate but is just how we grew up. If people could use their brains to understand this, they wont get all upset over a friggin book.
 
Young Mage said:
Have you read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad?
Have you read Things Fall Apart by Chiwhuahah Achebe? (too lazy to look up how to spell his name)

Achebe is a moron; he thought Conrad was a "racist." Well no shit sherlock, for a time of his man, he was going to throw the word "******" around, using a "politically correct" substitute is downright idiotic. It would stand out and cause his peers to shun him.

Except Achebe is a bigger asshat than i imagined. Anyone having read the book realizes the europeans' "philanthropic" and "valiant quest" was used sarcastically. Joseph condemned the belligerent imperialists and their actions. He described the city of Bruxelles as the "whited sepulcher", a biblical allusion describing hypocrisy. Joseph described the Africans as wholesome and organic; they belonged there. The europeans clearly did not. The book's climax even has the antagonist reflect on his life and scream in disgust, "The horror! The horror!" before finally succumbing to tropical diseases.

One of my favorite quote from the book is "lies have the flavor of death" and I love how it still applies to racist republicans down south.
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Haven't bothered with Chinua Achebe. Heart of Darkness is a classic though. A lot of misunderstandings would be cleared up if people considered the context as well as the roles that characters, prose, and mood (including tone of words, violence, etc.) play in conveying a story.

Look at how women are portrayed in fighting games- voluptuous, simple-minded (for the most part), and playing side-dish roles. It only attests to our time. Third wavers decided that sexualizing the female without uprooting the patriarchy was the way to go, and now lots of fruits of feminism have been lost to Madonna and Lady Gaga types who objectify themselves and their fans. If this is the culture, then expressions of it- games, movies, books, etc. will still be tinged with the same sexualization. Just like how while Conrad sympathized with the natives and hated imperialism, his book retained elements of the mood of the time.

And people pointing fingers and shouting "hypocrite" have deluded themselves. Contradiction and hypocrisy are the norm.
 
Ugh, it's this kind of crap that really grinds my gears--when a well-to-do white person takes it upon themselves to "protect" people of another race/color/ethnicity from "scary words." We don't need protection, we need education. The whole book denounces racism at it's core, and removing such commonly used words from the time period completely defeat the purpose.
 
Huck Finn was subject to controversy for a long time. People who are offended are not looking into the setting of the story. Huck grew up in a time where Black people were considered as property. Throughout the book, Huck struggles between the values he was taught growing up and his friendship with Jim. Jim was a more of father figure to Huck than his own biological father, who was nothing more than a drunk and troublemaker. Mark Twain made a bold move of condemning racism in the late 1800's.

Of course there are pieces of literature that were blatantly racist, but I don't think we should censor them. We should just take them for what they are, products of their time, and move on.
 
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FlawlessVictor said:
Of course there pieces of literature that were blatantly racist, but I don't we should censor them. We should just a take for what they are, products of their time, and move on.
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Amen. It's funny.. Just the other day #onlywhitepeople was trending on twitter. But that was all well and good. I wonder if it had been #only__insertracehere_people. Now this. Pisses me off.. Sigh. But what can you do? Nothing.
 
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Misogynistic threads and racist silk are woven in the fabric of society. The pejorative garb blinds its master, rendering him myopic and skewing reality. There should be a zero-tolerance for this despicable behavior. And it doesn't just end with books, the swastika carries with it years upon years of stigma. The idiotic actions of a mere man caused this sign to be labeled as vile, noxious, and amoral. The sign cannot be cleansed; the stigma cannot be washed off. Religions groups and secretive communities have discarded this symbol because society shackles and imprisons them

Seriously, it's horrible how practically everyone my age, I'm 17, doesn't give a **** about any of this. I sure as hell hope nonsense like this doesn't transpire when my children are reaching the age of reason. I want them to be able to read all of the classics in their beautifully racist and 1800th century glory. I want them to realize class warfare isn't simply between the rich and the poor or the fags and the jocks or the intellectuals and the athletes.

It only seems logical that spending hours upon hours surfing the abyss of the Internet will eventually destroy your brain. Five minutes of reading YouTube comments alone should probably wipe out your capacity to do long division without a calculator. Reading lobbyist agenda has wiped out my capacity to duuuuurrrp derpity herp......Mirp.....

[/Troll Mode: on]
 
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Just wait till you get to college. Depending on which school you go to, there are more or less of the types you described. And it can be pretty disappointing when you learn that all the vigor and eagerness to learn in the world won't match up to following the exact rubric of your professor and doing every thing in your assignments to please them. Lots of kids in college don't care to the extent that you seem to say you do about learning, they just care about making the grade and graduating with a good GPA (and other stuff like honors societies). And after a couple years of college most kids end up taking that approach. It doesn't sap you from your vigor to learn, but it realigns you to a more practical approach. You learn to analyze, argue, collect data, manage time, please professors, and write research papers, which are all skills you need to be a good member of the workforce. Learning those qualities lets you do your real learning on the outside, with books and other pastimes, but in the classroom it's much more about method and discipline.

Real fun stuff comes in graduate school. I'm applying for a masters in philosophy and a masters in clinical psychology, then trying to take that clinical degree for the Ph.D. ride. The first two years you'll learn in a seminar environment (some of your upper level classes in college will be like this) and those courses work like this- you sit with a handful of other students and your professor and bounce ideas off each other based on the material of the day. It's much more open than a lecture and great for debate. After a master's, if you are going for the Ph.D., you get fellowships and institutional money to live on and conduct research for your 300 page dissertation that you have to defend against a board full of doctorates. The whole grad process affords much more freedom and personality to your learning. College is just a machine you go through to learn how to take it like a champ. But that's just my opinion.
 
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