This sort of thing has happened before within a similar genre of literature, but I suppose the body of work (The Famous Five by Enid Blyton) wasn’t popular enou

This sort of thing has happened before within a similar genre of literature, but I suppose the body of work (The Famous Five by Enid Blyton) wasn’t popular enough to be amplified by the two opposing rage machines. It’s been kind of wild watching talking points get disseminated in real time on this one. A few days ago, most Twitter threads on the topic were nearly universal in expressing at least mild disapproval. If you look today (and not just on Twitter, this HN thread itself has several repeated examples), you’ll see a ton of reply guys snarkily parroting the same handful of snappy-but-vapid “gotchas” that don’t lend themselves to a rebuttal without going full “mucho texto”. And thus the most commonly visible pushback is a useless-but-inflammatory reactionary screed about how “the Wokes are changing history to push a Marxist agenda”. I’ve noticed a similar pattern with other recent events like the Ohio train derailment where every thread devolves into multiple people posting the same 2-3 obvious canned talking points and pointing fingers everywhere except at the company responsible or even the lack of comment/blame shifting by virtually all national leaders on both sides of the aisle. The sheer speed at which propaganda is being disseminated, digested, and recited absolutely everywhere is leading to situations where a toxic mushroom cloud of smoke can hover over the heartland while GOP Governors and Dem Transportation Secretaries can declare “eh it’s no big deal”, the rail company can cut $25 checks to the affected while doubling train engineer workloads, and yet somehow they’ll all get away with it and the populace will blame The Other Team. Absolute dysfunction.