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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Another holiday, another uncomfortable intrusion of the culture war by psychos into my child's life.

Maybe I was oblivious as a kid. I probably was. But somehow I don't remember children's books being as blatantly propagandized as now. Literally every single book my 3 year old daughter got for Christmas is either packed to the gills with LGBTQ "families" or interracial families mixed to a degree that I'm pretty sure is genetically impossible. Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby. We didn't set out for books with overt propaganda. We wanted books about nature, farming, the seasons, the months, learning to read, numbers, etc. And yet here we are.

And like I said, maybe I was oblivious as a kid. But then again, I actually got my daughter a lot of the classics I grew up with, and I still don't see it. Goodnight Moon, Where The Wild Things Are, The Hungry Caterpillar, etc still seem like straightforward children's books to me.

It's just baffling to me that books like that appear to be the default option when you tell family "We want books about X" and they search the internet for "Children's Books about X" and just click Buy on the first 5 results. We got like, 12 pseudo random children's books for Christmas, and not one single family in any of them looks like her, despite us being the majority demographic of our nation. It's one thing to be an adult, seeing the precise opposite of reality being crammed down your throat by our cultural overlords. You can by and large tune it out, thanks to the decades of actual life you've lived standing in opposition to pretend nonsense. There is something profoundly disturbing about watching them attempt to brainwash your child any which way they can into believing the world is the opposite of the way it is.

Ah well, Merry Christmas I guess. She liked the stool I built her, and although she balks at me reading the copy of the Hobbit I slipped in the drawer. Just not old enough for all those words without pictures yet.

although she balks at me reading the copy of the Hobbit I slipped in the drawer. Just not old enough for all those words without pictures yet.

FWIW there's a pretty good comic version.

And a Merry Christmas to you!

the culture war by psychos

Don't do this, please.

I have a cousin in rural Montana with two teenage kids. Apparently, no CRT or overt LGBT stuff in their education there - thus far. Although his youngest (14) did make certain "friends" who tried getting her into TikTok and even injected this idea that she could be trans - which is strange, considering she isn't even a tomboy personality with masculine traits that should supposedly imply that she is. Anyway, she eventually fell out with them and is still figuring things out - but so far, so good. She's happier, more proactive with her hobbies, and has significantly cut down her time on social media. Her brother (18) will be going off to college soon though, and we do expect he'll be going through some courses that involve some culture war stuff and of course likely to be around a very left leaning circle. Honestly though, it'll be unavoidable throughout America in the next 5 years tops. Going forward, you may have to send your kid to do their degree in China or something, if you've lost all hope for American universities.

A lot of the non-woke college grads I personally know went to colleges that are in this group, The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities:

https://www.cccu.org/

Not that these are somehow inoculated from the wider culture war, but they seem to have higher survival rates for things like healthy Christian campus groups.

I just mention it because I wasn't really aware of the existence of schools like this until well into my 30s.

Well its a culture (assuming western anglo of some kind) that doesn't want your child to exist so what did you expect?

Don't post low-effort snarls like this. If you want to argue that Western Anglo culture literally doesn't want someone's child to exist, you need to put more effort into clarifying your thoughts, not just post Enoch Powell and Sam Hyde memes.

I haven't noticed this. My wife has been buying all the books though. Some of them I know are old classics like the Dr Seuss stuff. But maybe it's all old books and I just don't recognize most of them.

It also might be a situation like rock and roll music. Not many good rock and roll songs come out these days, because rock and roll has to compete with the entire back catalog. But country and rap only compete with the last few years of songs.

So for writing news kids books it might be better to target niche market of modern progressives, because no matter what they make it won't be as good as the old stuff.

I don't think there was any particular reason for this, but most of the children's books my parents read to me when I was a kid were from the early 20th century. They also read stuff from earlier and later periods. Why is the default to buy recently published books when it's all new to children anyway?

Why is the default to buy recently published books when it's all new to children anyway?

I mean, that's the problem. It's not in my mind. But it turns out, between my wife and myself, we remember a totally insufficient quantity of books to keep our kid entertained. And so the search for something new, or at least new to us, begins. And this search has been utterly ruined by SEO and good old fashioned media cartel behavior.

More or less every article you find on google about "Best X of Y", be it powertools, computer parts or children's books, looks like it was written by a chatbot sourcing the list from Amazon bestsellers and the attendant "user" reviews. In the case of powertools, this ends up with every top 10 list being full of the cheapest of chinesium desktop jointers. In the case of children's books, it's woke bullshit as far as the eye can see.

Well, don't use google you might say? Find a children's book review community. Why bother? My wife already suffered through the woke takeover of knitting, and I was around myself during the gamergate days and the fall of every community I previously enjoyed to ultra-woke moderation policies. Why after personally suffering those devastating losses of community, would I believe the first, second, third, forth and fifth community review site for children's books I come across to not also already be ultra-woke?

If I were religious, maybe I could rely on those institutions to pre-screen books for me. But we're not. And we both remember having weird religious neighbors and their thinly veiled religious polemics aimed at children. I guess it's better than the alternative, but we still feel adrift in a sea of info-hazards with zero way to navigate it.

I assume you've exhausted the list of Caldecott Medal books (older than 19xx)? That would seem like a place to start.

I think the reason to consume new media in general when usually whatever the new good media are likely aren't better than the best media from 30 years ago is that people like discussing media with others, and everyone consuming new media is something of an equilibrium. Where as if everyone just looked for the absolute best media in their interests from the past 100 years, they likely wouldn't have recently consumed as much in common with their friends.

Small children don't really discuss with friends anyways, so perhaps this is just outright irrational(parents defaulting to what's a rational preference in other spheres but not here), or maybe it's more so parents can discuss with other parents children's books.

Yeah, this is what I miss the most from my 'watching the latest hit show' days. Now I try not to watch anything started after Trump's presidency, and I am watching a lot less trash as a result, but it is a lot harder talking about it with people. Recently my friends and I have been deciding on a show to watch together, like a structureless book club, which works alright, but I am still missing it as small talk with strangers.

There are still a pretty decent amount of recent shows that are good on their own, and also have mass appeal that you can chit chat with strangers about. You didn't have to cut them all out.

This is why we only have classic little golden books and some innocuous stuff from the 80s and 90s on our bookshelf. Also Roald Dahl, he's great. As others have said, there's no reason to buy modern propaganda children's books. Not only are they proselytizing, but they're mostly objectively ugly.

I would also recommend checking out some Catholic publishers. They often stock children's book that have a classic aesthetic and pro-family messages, and they don't always even have overt pro-Christian messaging.

Also FWIW I appreciate your posts on this topic. I'm also concerned and vigilant about this sort of subtle messaging, but very few around me are, and reading posts like these assures me that I'm not (entirely) crazy.

Maybe I was oblivious as a kid. I probably was. But somehow I don't remember children's books being as blatantly propagandized as now.

I received a copy of Father Gander Nursery Rhymes as a child. It was published in 1986.

There are lots of classic books out there, there's no pressing need to ever buy a children's book under ten or even twenty years old. Dr. Seuss and Robert Munch I remember loving as a small child, and their books alone can fill a children's library.

Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby.

Unless they are cynically insinuating something about Mommy, but I agree that three is probably a bit young for the "cheating adulterous hos" rant 😲

I suppose just don't ask family to get books or specifically give them titles like "Goodnight Moon" or whatever. Give her another year or two for "The Hobbit", I think six or seven is about the right age for that if you're reading it to her.

Could have brought children from earlier relationships into the marriage, as well.

Or they could have literally bought children from the black market.

Cut the middleman, just have them kidnap the kids!

Give them credit for the pro-Natalist message with the interracial families, at least.

I’m sure it’s frustrating that everything, absolutely everything, has to be gay now, even when it’s irrelevant or makes no sense. Heck I find it frustrating and I usually don’t have to deal with it directly. Which raises the question of- is there any society which is able to be chill about the whole ‘gays are out of the closet now’ thing?

What does it mean to be "chill" about it? Having it normalized without being constantly brought up? The chillest way to deal with gays is the way the more extreme islamic countries do it.

Breeding so many deadly diseases, male gays are a huge risk to the population and humanity as a whole, which is why so many successful societies developed a strong aversion to them. Covid is a joke in comparison, and we forced everyone to stay home and wear masks for Covid. The truth needs to be countered with constant lies and propaganda.

  • -20

Without disagreeing with you- I certainly think that there's arguments in favor of suppressing homosexuality- I would say that "chill" means something like what you described to begin with-

Having it normalized without being constantly brought up?

A society where LGBT types get special legal privileges to dance down main street in their skivvies obviously doesn't count(eg the modern USA), but neither does a society where it's illegal to be out to children(eg Russia). And equally obviously a society like Iran where homosexuality is a capital offense doesn't count as chill about homosexuality.

What diseases are you talking about?

HIV, obviously, was deadly as fuck—from about 1975 to 2015. AIDS was unknown before the Thatcher years , and the HIV-1 zoonosis was almost certainly during the Taft administration. That particular deadly disease simply did not exist when successful societies we're failing to fail.

I can't think of any that did, but am here to be informed

If you want to avoid stds then be careful who you are having sex with. Gay people can only spread their diseases to people who are willing to have sex with them, they are not forcing disease upon anybody, therefore they are innocent.

Inflammatory claims require that you proactively provide evidence in proportion to how inflammatory your claims are, and "male gays are a huge risk to humanity as a whole, and the chillest way to deal with gays is to execute them" is extremely inflammatory.

You are allowed to make arguments about how homosexuality is bad and even that it should be suppressed, but you have to make those arguments in accordance with our rules, which means not just rolling with lazy hot takes about how gays are disgusting and hinting that we should kill them.

Woke propaganda is omnipresent in Western education in this day and age.

I got my degree outside of the West so I wasn't exposed to much of it in college.

But my younger brother studies in Canada, and I often hop on a video call while he studies. Humanities courses are fucked.

E.g., most universities have a first-semester course where they teach how to write an essay and common logical fallacies. I was taught this course very formally, the logical fallacies had latin names and the examples were all examples you come across in your personal life.

In contrast, the course my bro is going through; all the fallacies have revamped English names and alternate meanings. "Appeal to authority" is switched for "appeal to questionable authority". And all the examples are political, by happenstance, the left wing pov is the nonfallacious one. Quite a few fallacies' original meanings were extended.

Posts like yours are just another grain in the heap. The woke have complete institutional capture over education. Every student that passes through a college has to go through such a course.

Appeal to authority has always been flawed IMO. I raised this issue in class back in the day. They were trying to distinguish between good and bad kinds of appeal to authority.

Is it correct to believe the statements of oil companies about oil drilling/pipelines and so on? They're the domain experts after all. Yet they have a clear incentive to be economical with the truth.

Is it correct to believe the statements of doctors about medical treatments? Same issue.

All we were left with is that you shouldn't trust ridiculous nonsense like a Kardashian sponsored toothbrush. They don't know anything about teeth. But nobody would even bother seriously attacking that at a philosophical level. I suspect that what happens in the real world is that people just use appeal to questionable authority against their political enemies (oil companies) and defend it as legitimate for their allies (doctors). I sort of do the same thing against Kardashians unconsciously:

"Well of course the Kardashians don't know anything about teeth, they're airheads (I say despite knowing next to nothing about them, even presuming they probably have very white teeth/general cosmetics knowledge)"

"Well of course the oil companies don't know or care about safety, they only care about money (I say despite knowing nothing about the prevalence and danger of leaks on any kind of statistical basis, comparing cost/harm of oil leaks to the maintenance of industrial civilization)"

Appeal to authority is a fallacy in formal logic. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful heuristic. Likewise, if XYZ claims N, and you accurately say XYZ is a liar that doesn’t in a formal sense negate N but is is a useful heuristic in assessing the likelihood of N.

Understanding both is important.

Having taught a bunch of Intro to Critical Thinking Courses, I completely agree with this take, and I'd usually have a dedicated class on epistemic trust, authority, and expertise following directly on from the first round of fallacies stuff. The broad set of conclusions I'd generally try to move towards with the class were things like (i) we're inevitably reliant on epistemic trust sometimes because we can't be an expert in everything, (ii) there are some reasonable heuristics for assessing who we should trust on what subjects (e.g., certifications and qualifications, career achievements, track record), and (iii) these heuristics themselves should come into question in certain circumstances (e.g., when an expert faces misaligned incentives, has personal biases, or is operating outside their usual domain of knowledge).

Appeal to authority is a hack, a heuristic, a quick and dirty way to gather information in a world where our time and will is finite. It's like building a house on sand.

When you argue using authority, you're taking someone else's words on faith (or to be more generous/realistic, you're making a good bet). If you knew (ie have read and reasoned about) their argument, you might as well have used that. Since you did not, when the person you're arguing against starts questioning the authority, all that's left is to insist they have faith (or use and continue the authorities reasoning, as could've been done in the first place, without the appeal). No further argument can be made against you, except insofar as can be argued that you made a bad bet.

you shouldn't trust ridiculous nonsense like a Kardashian sponsored toothbrush

I figure that can be perfectly valid evidence for the quality of the product! A company shelling out money for sponsorships signal that they believe in the product itself, which is important in situations where the consumer needs confidence that they won't drop support for it in the near future. For e.g. tech like game consoles this is especially valuable.

The Kardashians also have a personal brand to protect. If they sponsor a product I can be more confident it won't be so bad it'll damage their image; ceteris paribus this is certainly better than nothing.

I don't know about that:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/07/kim-kardashian-floyd-mayweather-crypto-scam-lawsuit-dismissed.html

Much as I hate to diss crypto, coins whose primary selling point is some gimmick of burning supply when people buy/sell are garbage. There ought to be some kind of use-case. Well in this case the use-case is forking it and running off with people's ETH.

EMAX launched with a total supply of 2 quadrillion tokens, yet that circulating supply continues to decrease as our tokenomics include a 0% tax on buys, a 6% tax on sells and transfers, 3% of which remains in treasury and 3% is burned every other week.

Well, I mean evidence in the bayesian sense. When it comes to "new crypto coin with no clear practical use case" my prior is strongly on "scammy pyramid scheme"; the soft evidence of celebrity endorsements does not do too much to move that.

I had always understood “appeal to authority” as one of the “softer” fallacies, where it doesn’t sink the argument but you better make sure that it (and the authority) actually checks out.

In contrast, the course my bro is going through; all the fallacies have revamped English names, and alternate meanings. "Appeal to authority" is switchdd for "appeal to questionable authority". And all the examples are political, by happenstance the left wing pov is the non fallacious one. Quite a few fallacies original meanings were extended.

This is disturbingly fascinating to me; like the slogan edits in Animal Farm. I don't suppose you could get your hands on the course material (or a citation for it), and/or a complete list of names to share here?

I can. I'll post an update soon.

I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.

Literally every single book my 3 year old daughter got for Christmas is either packed to the gills with LGBTQ "families" or interracial families mixed to a degree that I'm pretty sure is genetically impossible. Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby.

I suspect most people are not thinking about the plausibility of genetic relationship between depicted family members when buying children's books. For one, people can have family members whom they are not genetically related to. For two, children's book authors are known to take creative liberties with reality for the purpose of telling an entertaining story or imparting a moral. For example, they may depict an animal doing something it is quite unlikely for it to do in reality (like a caterpillar eating chocolate cake) or imagine entirely new creatures which do not exist (like large furred horned hominids or dragons).

  • -16

It's called "representation" and while it has assorted supplementary arguments (e.g. "minority children benefit from seeing people like them in fiction"), at its core it isn't anything as coherent as a proposition. Like Scott discusses in Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments:

In a way, when we round people off to the Philosophy 101 kind of arguments, we are failing to respect their self-description. People aren’t out on the streets saying “By my cost-benefit analysis, Israel was in the right to invade Gaza, although it may be in the wrong on many of its other actions.” They’re waving little Israeli flags and holding up signs saying “ISRAEL: OUR STAUNCHEST ALLY”. Maybe we should take them at face value.

If it was a specific proposition it might have a stopping point. But it isn't "demographics in fiction should match the demographics of your real-life country", it isn't even "at least 50% of characters should be non-white'. It's that SJW types cheer or boo characters based on whether they're members of their favored or disfavored identity groups. So fiction influenced by them often ends up with demographics ranging from noticeably influenced to completely absurd. (And that isn't a stopping point either, even completely absurd levels of representation are often criticized for the representation being problematic in some way, having attracted a SJW-inclined audience that doesn't notice how hard it's trying to cater to people like them.)

Of course, this sort of sentiment regarding identity groups is not limited to fiction. For instance a major stated reason why the CDC recommended a COVID-19 vaccine-prioritization scheme that depriorited the elderly relative to "essential workers", contrary to their own estimates on what would save more lives, was because the elderly are more likely to be white, as I discussed in this post. Similarly various governments such as Vermont prioritized non-whites outright. As a matter of strict logical argument it doesn't seem like these things should be related, but in reality someone predisposed to like arguments in favor of the "underprivileged" will generally apply that bias whether the stakes are "realism in a fictional setting" or "many thousands of lives".

Ah come on mate, a caterpillar eating chocolate cake is fantasy anthropomorphism of the traditional sort in children's books from "A Wind in the Willows" to "Winnie the Pooh". White person and Latino person marry and have kids is reality, and in reality unless they are adopting, they won't end up with "Asian kid and black kid". If the book is about 'adopted families are real families', great fine that's a wholesome message, but if it's just meant to be ordinary typical "mommy and daddy and brother and sister" then it is pushing a message. "White mommy and Latino daddy have brown baby" is not a problem, but "White mommy and Latino daddy have Chinese baby" is, unless the text is explicit about "Mommy and Daddy couldn't have a baby of their own, so they adopted you and they love you just as much as if you were their born baby".

Well, at least it wasn't Anti-Racist Baby.

Well, at least it wasn't Anti-Racist Baby.

I thought that you were making it up, or that it was a parody, or something. But no, that book is dead serious. And it has overwhelmingly positive reviews, no less. I think that any hope I had for the US as a functional society has just died. :(

I wouldn’t read too much into overwhelmingly positive reviews- my priors are distinctly that the overwhelming majority of reviews are fake anyways.

I couldn't believe it either, but no, it's a real thing. Why am I still surprised at the entire industry around Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Mongering?

I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.

Miscegenation.

According to basic genetics, all human are a result of repeated "Miscegenation".

I am not saying this is my view, but it is perfectly consistent to say that you like the races as they are and don't want them to mix, even if other races had to be mixed to produce the current races.

If white Mommy and Latino Daddy are married, having kids within marriage, and Daddy sticks around so that the kids have a stable family with at least one breadwinner, I am all for that message being pushed to kids in preference to "Mommy has three babies by three different daddies which is why one is Asian, one is black, and one is brown, but Mommy never married any of the baby daddies who are off having more kids with a selection of hos, bitches, and side pieces. And this is fine and normal, now let's all sing along to the song about the newest Pride flag!"

It's not consistent because you need to define a clear boundary between what constitutes a race. I'm a strong believer in HBD but in this case the precise definition actually matters and the racial definitions always have some degree of arbitrariness, and even what we currently define as "black americans" in the US are actually racial hybrids.

If I find 1% ashkenazi or 1% black in some of these people can I stop considering them white and put them in their own categories? What even constitutes a White, do you have to have the right amount of Yamnaya? Do actual Caucasians or middle easterners count? It doesn't make sense.

It's not consistent because you need to define a clear boundary between what constitutes a race.

No you don't. You've never had to. Nothing in the way human society works relies on precision to such a degree.

What even constitutes a White, do you have to have the right amount of Yamnaya? Do actual Caucasians or middle easterners count? It doesn't make sense.

You don't need to make a rule for the 1% mixed or the octaroons, just enforce general social norms. People will work out the exceptions for themselves. That way "the good ones" will mind their own business nad you will not be having stupid bikeshedding nonsense arguments designed to grind the whole enterprise to a halt.

No you don't. You've never had to. Nothing in the way human society works relies on precision to such a degree.

Actually existing societies based on race always felt the need to establish legal boundaries of "pure race" with great detail and precision.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Casta_painting_all.jpg

And in most of these societies people routinely passed as a different race than they were born as, and no one cared very much. Particularly in IberoAmerica.

Why does it need to be precise?

I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.

To the exclusion of all else. That's what I'm complaining about. It's to the exclusion of all else. Representation of families like ours, the majority of my nation, if this semi-random sampling of search engine recommended examples is to be believe, have been all but completely extirpated from contemporary children's book.

If representation matters, as the people advocating inclusion of interracial or LGBT families claim it does, why have they erased my family?

My guess is that there's still going to be great amounts of older children's books available representing in the great majority heterosexual families of your country's majority ethnicity (or animals obviously intended to represent that ethnicity like Berenstain Bears in US etc.), no? At least when I go out in bookstores to check what they have, they usually have reprints of old classics front and center.

My guess is that a lot of modern children's books authors specifically think about the great majorities of existing children's books not showcasing groups other than heterosexual families of a country's majority ethnicity, and thus go above and beyond the call of duty to increase the general representativeness.

(or animals obviously intended to represent that ethnicity like Berenstain Bears in US etc.)

Wait what? How are bears intended to represent an ethnicity? Their clothing seems to be generic American farmer, to my non-American eyes based mainly on the father wearing overalls. Are overalls restricted to farmers of some particular ethnicity in the US?

What could make a family of bears represent a non-white family? All I can really think of is eating ethnic food instead of honey, or perhaps wearing clothing of a very specific ethnicity instead of generic farmer.

Is it impossible to create a generic family of animals who might represent any family of any group?

Wait what? How are bears intended to represent an ethnicity?

If they are brown bears native to Europe (with European names) it is obvious whom are they supposed to represent.

What could make a family of bears represent a non-white family?

Being species of bear originating from other part of the world?

Their names are "papa bear", "mama bear", "brother bear" and "sister bear". "Berenstain" is the name of the authors, not the bears, but Dr. Seuss (who assisted with the creation of the series) described them as "Berenstain bears" later to distinguish from other bear books after they became popular. I do not understand how you've determined they are Eurasian brown bears (which range from central Europe to Japan) instead of North American brown or grizzly bears (which was my assumption).

One possible way I can interpret this argument: any character, unless explicitly characterized as non-white, is assumed white and anthropomorphic characters of no particular ethnicity are impossible? E.g., baby shark is white (not Korean?!?) since it's a yellow shark of indeterminate gender who sings a 3 word song.

One possible way I can interpret this argument: any character, unless explicitly characterized as non-white, is assumed white and anthropomorphic characters of no particular ethnicity are impossible? E.g., baby shark is white (not Korean?!?) since it's a yellow shark of indeterminate gender who sings a 3 word song.

If the story is set in completely fantastic world unrelated to anything IRL, you are right that assigning RL racial identity to characters is absurd.

If the characters live in world that is just like our (North American suburban) world, except that the people are funny furry animals, assigning RL racial identity to characters is unavoidable.

Being species of bear originating from other part of the world?

Skidoosh.

As an American, the Berenstein bears are clearly intended to be white, exurban, and southern/lower midwestern.

What makes them white and exurban (as opposed to rural)? What would a black exurban (or rural) southern/lower midwestern family of bears look like?

Again - my question is how to make anthropomorphized characters (that fit the constraints of children's media, i.e. nothing complex) non-white? In India this could theoretically be accomplished by exploiting ethnic dress (e.g. Sindhis wear very distinct clothing, at least for special occasions) for characters that actually wear clothes. But as far as I'm aware the US has almost no ethnic dress - the only ones I can think of are either for obscure groups (Amish, American Indians) or racist stereotypes that would be poorly received ("gangsta" clothes, sombreros).

So lets make it very concrete. Here's monkey mechanic. He's a monkey and he likes to help people by fixing their cars (with a monkey wrench). His only non-fixing stuff interest that I've observed is bananas. How do you make Monkey Mechanic non-white? (Or feel free to make other characters non-white, e.g. the giraffe who keeps hitting his head on the roof of his car.)

Their neighborhood is depicted as exurban/far suburban, their clothing(particularly the hats) is distinctly white, semirural, and working class, and the way the very special episodes on diversity are framed is clearly white and southern/lower midwestern.

A black coded southern bear family would probably be black bears to begin with, with a few other aesthetic distinctions(eg clothing), but you'd also probably be looking at more emphasis on sport and probably older-behaving cubs, without getting into obvious stereotypes.

I admit, I am unfamiliar with the particular style of hats from 1962 so I'll have to take your word for it. What kind of hats did black exurban working class people wear? Or were there no exurban black people in the midwest?

Also, is it impossible to have anthropomorphic children's characters that are simply not coded as anything? Is it impossible for Baby Shark to simply have no attributable human ethnicity? Would the Berenstain bears no longer be white if they were nude and hatless?

More comments

Really? I was sure they were supposed to be a suburban Jewish family—but that might be because every time he hears the books mentioned, my dad exclaims, "They don't go to synagogue either!"

But there may not be textual evidence for his reading. I've mostly been able to avoid mentioning books since childhood

Aren't they shown celebrating Christmas?

Probably, but maybe it's a Jewish Christmas.

Do the books depicts a traditional Thanksgiving meal shared with Momma Bears family, then the traditional menorah lighting at least three states away from Papa Bear's nearest relative, and also show a Christmas Day where the bears unwrap the presents that are obviously books first spend hours of reading in silence, briefly thanking each other, then reading while they eat enchiladas?

If I could have my mom back for one holiday, it would probably be Christmas.

This has already been done. Hood Berenstain: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0NN0gtBcxtk

thus go above and beyond the call of duty to increase the general representativeness.

But that creates its own problem, the way that the actual percentage of any minority population within the general population is misrepresented. Whether that be thinking that black people are a greater share of the US population than they are, or LGBT people (especially trans). If people are presented with "Should we make sweeping social changes to accommodate 2% of the general population?" they are much less likely to say "yes" than if they are presented with "Should we make sweeping social changes to accommodate this sub-population (which you think is 10-20% of the population rather than 2%, because you've been deluged with books and social media where in an ensemble case of five, at least one is this particular sub-population)?"

It's also easy and lazy, and may be down to "do I want my book to be published?" even more than "do I want to be Diverse and Inclusive?" because see the YA fiction kerfuffles over race and transgender. Publishers nowadays may be more inclined to go for "we want DEI" and to not even consider a book that has all-white family, so if you're a kids' book author and you want a career, be darn sure to mix up the races and orientations of your characters.

There's also the stupid partisan political stuff, like the gay White House rabbits. No kid is going to read those books, but adults who want to feel like they're sticking it to the Man will fall over themselves to buy those kind of books. Personally I think the whole mania around the kind of pets the Presidents and Vice-Presidents own is crazy, but people do get all worked up over it. So the Pences had a pet rabbit, one of their daughters wrote kids' books about it, and of course this had to get political, because the fussbudgets can't let anything lie:

Pence himself was the focus of the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight, and John Oliver announced that the show was publishing its own children's book, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, and making it available on Amazon just days before the original version. It stars a black and white rabbit in a glittery bowtie who falls in love with another boy rabbit named Wesley, only to be told by a Pence-esque stinkbug that they can't get married. It promptly took the number one slot on Amazon, knocking James Comey's upcoming memoir down to second.

I don't know how many 6-8 year olds were longing for a book about a rabbit getting gay married, but hey, John Oliver is a hack and this let everybody show off how progressive they were. And it wasn't even thinly-disguised, the first page outright states that this rabbit is part of the Pence family. Haw-haw, Pence is anti-gay and wants gay conversion torture camps set up everywhere, let's make his daughters' pet rabbit gay and get gay married, that'll show him!

(How old is Oliver, again? I think 6-8 years of age is too high for his mental age).

I dunno, what amount of children's books would you surmise are about gay couples? We have a bunch of old and modern ones at our house, and leafing through them, I've spotted some cases where some background couple might be gay, but obviously since they're background they're not being featured in a major role.

I have perhaps more experience in watching kids' TV, and out of all the children's shows I've seen, I've seen one instance where there's a bit player gay couple (for the record it would be Chip & Potato, where the main character's family's (which is as traditional a straight 3-child family with a cop father and, for the most of the series, homemaker mom you could imagine) neighborhood also has a couple of smartly dressed male zebras who appear to have adopted children. They don't actually go "we're gay and have gay zebra sex in our bedrooms" or anything like that and feature in maybe two episodes. This is my understanding of the general extent of representation in this field, at the moment.

I think that John Oliver thing can indeed be marked in the category of "it's a bit, not actually intended for children's books oeuvre", as you indicated.

I wouldn't freak out about things like "fleeting background gay kiss" in a movie, even a kid's movie. I think the recent flop by Disney, Strange World, is being presented as (by both sides) "it was because it was gay/inter-racial/strong women" but I think mostly it was probably awful (I'm just going by the trailer and the synopsis in Wikipedia).

Funnily enough, had they made a movie about the family patriarch, Jaeger Clade, and his adventures in the Strange World, I think it would have been a lot better. He seems the most interesting character in the trailer; his grandson, Ethan, is only there to be Gay Teenager First Out LGBT Character in a Disney Movie, and Searcher (Jaeger's son, Ethan's father) is insufferably wet. Look at the trailer and see if you agree.

The art style is also terrible, I've read it described as "Cal Arts style" but I don't know if it's so. It's that recent style where all the faces look the same (big eyes, potato nose, small chin, generally expressions of surprise or anger) like the female faces in "Frozen" all being identical, and the male and indeed female faces in this one being the same. Black, white, male, female, all have the 'big eyes, potato nose, big open-mouth expressions'.

Do you feel particularly erased, seeing as you're the majority of your nation?

  • -14

The greater the percentage of some demographic in the country that isn't represented, the greater the number of people erased.

Only if the demographics of the books constitute "erasure" in the first place. You are begging the question.

Surely then nonwhite people shouldn’t complain about erasure of their experiences if people of their skin tone aren’t represented, then, if demographics of characters in books don’t count as erasure?

I was not aware that I had argued otherwise.

I assume you agree, then, that the progressive push towards showing disproportionately more minorities in media for representation and to combat erasure, etc etc., is similarly ill-argued.

More comments

Interesting to hear, that sounds frustrating.

I have a three year old and a one year old, and my main experience with new books are from the local library (non traditional books tend to be hispanic or occasionally highlighting things like Kwanzaa), the school book fair (highlights animal characters), and my own parents, who are very choosy and conservative. Working in a public school, I have not particularly encountered this.

White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby.

The first two children are apparently adopted.

We didn't set out for books with overt propaganda.

Surely if that is an example of propaganda, it is covert, rather than overt. For example, I am guessing that many people do not think it is sending the message that you think it is sending.

What message do you believe it is sending?

I'm taking my enemies at their word.

They believe not depicting LGBTQ and interracial couples is hurtful. They believe it stigmatizes the groups, and leads to mental health issues and underperformance of those groups broadly. They believe it pressures under represented groups into unnatural or unjust conformity with the represented majority. They believe erasing those groups in popular culture is the first step to erasing those groups in the real world. They believe the absence of representation is a sign of tribal supremacy.

Well, now my family is the under represented group. If these things are true, it's now being done to my family. If these things aren't true, but the people doing it to me believe they are, it's still a sign they hate me and want to erase my family, first from culture, then from the future.

Noone wants to erase you. And the ultimate proof of that is liberal women's love for white men. The same people behind all this crap.

The real thing erasing whites is modern "women's rights", which is now widely accepted by most conservatives. Women are wonderful, so they need to find scapegoats and get mad about children's books with mixed race children, when they should be mad at promiscuous, cheating, hypergamous and educated women annihilating the birth rates and killing male motivation which cause white extinction. Which sane man would want to defend a society in which he is a cuck with no rights and can only start a family with a ran through woman who is encouraged to cheat on him.

Also, people have natural self-preservation instincts but not so much on the race level. Those need to be socially induced, and are just one group identity among many. Why would any man, white or not, defend the white ethnicity which literally hates him and supports women's rights garbage and is exporting it all over the world.

Second warning. This place is for discussing the culture war, not just posting culture war screeds of your own.

Noone wants to erase you. And the ultimate proof of that is liberal women's love for white men.

Also, people have natural self-preservation instincts but not so much on the race level. Those need to be socially induced

Noone wants to erase you.

How can you reconcile these together? Regarding the entire topic of discussion this just supports the overall idea of OP, for much of the media and entertainment industry, including children's books, are pushing Anti-white/ Pro-miscegenation propaganda to influence more to the ideas of social progressivism. You say that pro-ethnic views need to be applied from the top down in order to be effective, yet OP is talking specifically about social agendas that are pushed the opposite way. And then through all of that you say that white women prefer white men regardless of the social programming, so how can racial self-preservation not be instinctual if still trending strongly regardless of those social influences?

What message do you believe it is sending?

It is sinister, clever-as-fox neo-postmodernist cultural marxist message.

1/Race mixing is good.

2/As everyone knows, race mixing is communism.

3/Therefore, communism is good.

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