• DagwoodIII@piefed.social
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    4 days ago

    I had a hardcover book sitting on my shelf. Got it at a yard sale a while back. “The 13 Crimes of Science Fiction,” it was published in 1979 and most of the stories are much older.

    The level of racism was pretty amazing. One story referred to a mugger as a ‘black buck’ Another was set centuries in the future and had an anthropologist keeping some ‘primitive’ people in high tech chains and cages.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Agatha Christie is probably one of the most popular writers of the 20th Century, and one of her classics is now published under the title “And Then, There Were None.”

      If you’ve ever seen a movie, play, or game where a group of people are invited to a house only to be killed off one by one, you’ve seen something influenced by “And Then, There Were None”.

      Generally the victims are symbolized by figurines on the mantelpiece which get gradually destroyed one by one as the murders progress, eventually leaving “none”.

      The previously published title was the incredibly culturally insensitive “Ten Little Indians”, and the figurines were just that.

      The original published title, in the UK, in 1939 - an era when we DID IN FACT KNOW BETTER was “Ten Little removeds”.

      They did not change the title in the UK until 1985(!)

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None

      • UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
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        4 days ago

        Worth noting that the original n-word version is the title was taken from a popular song at the time the book was published.

        I point this out to demonstrate that this book title wasn’t a weird cultural aberration, it was plugging directly into popular culture of its era.

      • FelixCress@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Is quoting Wikipedia now banned on Lemmy? I was under impression arsehole censoring mods here were mostly focused on removing mentions of Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

            • FelixCress@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              There you go. This censorship is getting ridiculous. Next time people born in Fucking, Austria won’t be able to explain where they are from.

              • chloroken@lemmy.ml
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                4 days ago

                Chuds not being able to post the N word for a day — challenge level: impossible.

                Like, we all knew what the book was, but it was still SO important for you to post this. It was life or death for you. Not saying slurs physically makes your skin crawl. You cannot help but be a racist sack of shit.

                I would personally send you to the gulag.

                • Instigate@aussie.zone
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                  3 days ago

                  As an Australian who has never studied Agatha Christie in any context, I literally had no clue what the censored word was. I was, and am, appreciative of the context that was provided by other commenters. Be careful when you make blanket statements like “we all knew what the book was”, because you’ll almost always be confidently incorrect.

                  • chloroken@lemmy.ml
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                    2 days ago

                    Be quiet, nerd. Nobody needs your anecdote about how stressed you were not knowing the specific slur.

            • 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
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              4 days ago

              10 little subsets of the the human species with really high level of melanin in their skin.

              the screenshot is hosted on imgur.com, do you generally have problems with that one? it was just a screenshot of mentioned wiki article.

        • FlordaMan@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          It’s automated. Instances can setup a list of words that will automatically get removed. Has nothing to do where it comes from.

          Also, jordanlund is a mod himself, so…

        • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Bots will automatically remove certain words regardless of context.

          I used to see this all the time in the old Sega game “Phantasy Star Online” where objectionable chat was replaced with “*”.

          So “Nice shoes!” became “Nice s****!”

          You couldn’t arrange to play a game on “Sa****ay”.

          And god help you if you lived in a “ba*****t”.

          • BurntWits@sh.itjust.works
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            4 days ago

            Dark Souls would do something similar with names in PvP. For the most part it wasn’t a huge deal but being a medieval fantasy game, a lot of players you’d face would be called “___ K***ht”.

          • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            Variations on the way we used to handle the Scunthorp problems are almost always amusing for how bad they were

          • chloroken@lemmy.ml
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            4 days ago

            I love how your experience with regex censoring comes down to Phantasy Star Online. It’s so on the money for you to use as a reference.

            Truly king of the neckbeards.

        • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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          4 days ago

          Lemmy admins can create word filters. They replace words with removed when you use a word in the filter.

          Most admins only add slurs and other nasty things. In this case we’re talking about the N word, hard R.

        • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyz
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          4 days ago

          In Hungarian, it’s still “Tíz kicsi néger”, though “néger” does not carry the same connotation in the language, if anything, it’s archaic.

          You can be a mainstream politician and say it on live TV, and people will at most laugh at the old person.

          Our version of the n-word is spelled the same.