Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
wsj.com
wsj.com
Free speech is about protecting the right of the un-popular and views that some may find utterly repugnant. Why? because, as we are seeing with all of the woke craziness, when you don't stand up for everyones ability (including views you do not like) to freely speak, the censorship will end up being turned against you.
The key things with all of this, is that if enough people were to collectively have the courage to push back against this craziness it would stop...people recognizing that there is a problem is a good first step.
I'm curious: do you believe that there is anything that one does not have the right to say?
Of course you do. Can you imagine what the world would be like if the government gave itself the power and created the bureaucratic machinery to stop people denigrating their fellow man? It would be a dystopian nightmare.
You're allowed to criticize anything, but if you knowingly publish lies, especially maliciously, then it crosses the line.
This is completely false. It's nothing more than a mis-quoted opinion of a justice in a very old case which was eventually overturned and allowed exactly this kind of speech.
Please inform yourself of the laws you're claiming exist before you try to make arguments about them.
Market economies allow for stupid mistakes. It really is civilized when the blast radius of such mistakes is "people who get all their books from ebay" instead of "everyone in the country."
Doesn’t this phrase imply that someone is being harmed? Who is being harmed in this case?
The estate that controls the publication rights is deciding not to publish these books, and eBay is deciding not to list the books on its own platform. No one is being penalized or punished, and these entities are acting fully within their rights.
So the harm seems proportional to the harm done by refusing to bake that wedding cake for the gay couple.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9318259/White-House...
We stumbled into accepting dictatorships in the emerging virtual realms without even realizing it.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...
Maybe illirik should consider that the cancel culture weapon could just as easily be turned on them.
Those people then receiving retribution for some action (whether they deem it reasonable or not) doesn't necessarily imply that they've come to see things your way.
[1] https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/undefined-cancel-game
Bezos was chatting with MBS on WhatsApp before MBS allegedly hacked him. It seems more likely he wasn't hacked by MBS and the culprit was his girlfriend's brother. Maybe Jeff and MBS are due to mend their friendship?
I wonder if Illirik is brave enough to make a selfie with one of the yesterday-OK, today-awful Dr. Seuss books and publish it on the social networks. Just to test how many conscientious minds will try to get him fired.
IMHO they are just stereotypical, but engaging in visual stereotypes is not the same as racism.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/elena-guthrie/racism-white-...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/jul/03/raceintheuk....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/10/19/... ( https://archive.md/Tm3KK )
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/loreal-paris...
https://www.newsweek.com/kyle-korver-racism-white-people-nba...
Of course, in practice, the demons are regular people with stones in their hands ...
... we've managed to turn magic and superstition into reality, just not in a way we expected.
"If you "denigrate" someone, you attempt to blacken their reputation. It makes sense, therefore, that "denigrate" can be traced back to the Latin verb denigrare, meaning "to blacken.""
This is hardly an isolated occurrance, as you well know.
So we have all of Big Tech acting in concert to ban what they deem wrongthink -- but, oh no, that's definitely not a power structure! Nothing to see here, folks!
It’s this that dominates the meeting of their leadership, who are always just hanging out with each other, combing through a list of things to cancel, put together a coordinated plan to cancel the thing, and then — in secret, nobody should know! - execute on that. Because what else could they possibly be bothered with?
No, it's predominantly white-driven top-down (upper 20% income bracket) classism run amok, proping up specialist careers and pretending to be about "caring" and "wokeness".
>there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here.
Yeah, no "power structure", just the mainstream media, the corporate world, ad agencies, governments, government agencies, web-mobs, FAANG - the biggest tech companies in the world plus Clouldflare and others, payment processors, the "good society" class wise and so on, with an increasing number of BS laws on their side too...
I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that racist caricatures are bad.
> Yeah, no "power structure", just the mainstream media, the corporate world, ad agencies, governments, government agencies, web-mobs, FAANG - the biggest tech companies in the world plus Clouldflare and others, payment processors, the "good society" class wise and so on, with an increasing number of BS laws on their side too...
My wording could have been better, but my meaning was that this "cancellation" (which is really just people acknowledging that something is bad) is not applied by some power structure, and is certainly not a weapon that can be aimed at arbitrary concepts at will. I agree that free speech is important, but hate speech is not.
Else, few, and only fringe usually crazy people would not agree that e.g. slavery, seggregation, jim crow, redlining, etc, were and are bad.
But a certain modern "anti-racism" is not used against the establishment or the white privileged class, and is not even driven by blacks themselves demanding justice.
It's driven by upper middle class whites and their wanabees in-preparation (e.g. higher end college students), against lower class whites.
And as such, it's not just classist, but also blind to the injustices working class whites and "white trash", blacks, latinos, etc, face because of poverty and inequality - it serves as a class signal to perpetuate 'woke white supremacy' (and as a career to some).
Then again, what I know? I'm not American, and we have been actual slaves ourselves in my country...
This is kind of like: should you be advertising cigarettes to minors? (Should you be advertising those at all?)
I do think it's quite painful to be cutting out culturally important artifacts like this, but I also understand the argument to do so, and it has pretty much nothing to do with upper-class vs. lower-class.
Most of the issues with these books seems fairly minor; it sounds like it should be feasible to release a new edition avoiding the negative stereotypes while retaining pretty much all of the cultural value. Not sure why the publisher didn't try to do that... or maybe they are, and this is just the way they're doing that so as to also hype up the new edition for sales. Who knows. (Yes, I realize eBay's decision is technically distinct from the publishers, but clearly they're trying to avoid negative PR here, i.e. being risk-averse by just following somebody else's lead - I doubt any of these dominos would have fallen without the publishers choices).
Either that or caricatures like "my opponents don't think racism is bad" are unhelpful straw-man arguments.
I would love to believe that, but there's been too much evidence lately that some people love racist caricatures.
I am pretty sure it’s the opposite considering how the concept of racism has morphed in recent years.
> my meaning was that this "cancellation" (which is really just people acknowledging that something is bad) is not applied by some power structure
This is oxymoronic. Perhaps you misunderstand what power structure means. It doesn’t have to be a legal institution or centralized in any way.
I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that wiping out history and culture is bad.
The question is what is the appropriate tradeoff. Should new editions of these books be published, targeted to children? Probably not. Should they be effectively banned from being sold (used)? At least not without due consideration to the alternatives, like marking them.
That include anybody that cares to point me to HN guidelines. Have a nice weekend, but fuck off in the mean time
Do you feel threatened? Fuck off.
Do you feel like an idiot? Fuck off.
Do you feel I'm having a bad day? Fuck off.
For the record. This post on Dr. Seuss has no place on HN. If it is allowed on HN but dissent ideas are not, then fuck off together with your woke HN points. I'm sick of idiots turned social warriors. Fuck off
This has nothing to do with conscientiousness. Buying a book to read at home by yourself is not the business of anyone else and neither eBay nor anyone else should be dictating what you're allowed to read.
To fix your analogy: Someone comes to YOUR house and demands you release a "problematic" work of fiction to the public from your private collection because people are censoring it and people need to see its no big deal. You refuse, because it's yours and you don't feel like it... maybe you agree with the rabble? Either way... you know your rights.
If you want to defeat cancel culture you should advocate for LESS property rights, less market "freedom", and strong labor protections. This whole idea that you can somehow defeat a moral panic with some sort of counter moral panic (or backlash) has been tried for over 40 years - it's not working.
Not really. It's more like Person A wants to sell a book. Person B wants to buy a book. Persons C through Z, who are not involved, haven't read the book, have no intention of ever having anything to do with the book, but saw a tweet that said it was bad, interject themselves and decide that persons A and B are not allowed to conduct their transaction.
If you want to live a life of restrictions you are more than free to do so. What you may not do is impose them on others.
Instead hire buyers to vet the merchandise you’re selling and stand behind it and take responsibility for it. You don’t get to have it both ways.
"Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay". Unless of course it offends someone.
I can't kick you out of my bar for being black, but I can kick you out for being loud.
If eBay decided to delist all copies of White Fragility we should oppose that too. Ideas need to be freely exchanged and debated not forcibly censored by whoever happens to have power at the moment.
You have many existing mechanisms for expressing that disagreement, including protest, and starting your own business and competing. If people agree with your values, you will succeed.
eBay choosing to delist all copies of a book is eBay exercising their own freedom of expression. Having the government coming along and censoring that freedom seems counter to the idea that "Ideas need to be freely exchanged ... not forcibly censored".
Do you think a bookshop should be free to choose to sell books written in German or not? If they have that freedom, what's that freedom called?
> eBay is (should be) a neutral party
There's no such thing as "neutral". People, organisations etc. have values which they try and reflect through their actions and practices.
> The person offering the book for sale is speaking for themselves, not for eBay. If people decide they don't want to buy the book, that's fine, but it is not eBay's speech
Are advocating that eBay should be forced to pay to do business that the shareholders, board and employees disagree with? Forced by the government?
Yes, exactly like if the shareholders, board, and employees didn't want to do business with Black people, the government forces them to do so anyway. It absolutely boggles the mind that the justification comes down to "well, some people don't want to do that". Tough shit! If you don't want to deal with all kinds of people from all walks of life with all kinds of backgrounds and opinions, don't run a public-facing business.
Do I disagree with the Dr. Seuss delisting? Yes. Do I think government regulations would be more harmful than helpful in this case? Yes.
If eBay was a monopoly, I'd be much more concerned (all the more reason for robust anti-trust legislation). But in practice, if you want to sell a Dr. Seuss book, take your business elsewhere.
Similarly, today we can look at what's happening and say "Hey this isn't great that businesses are allowed to restrict our speech and narrow down the realm of ideas to the least common denominator. It is destructive to the public discourse that a small group of people can claim outrage and shut down whoever they want", so we can decide not to let businesses do that, just like we decided not to let them refuse service to protected groups.
Who gets to decide that throwing them out is allowed or not?
Is there a line, in your conception, between what eBay should be forced to sell, and what they are allowed to prohibit? For instance, explicit pornography is legal. Should eBay be forced to sell explicit pornography? If so, is there anything in your mind that they should not be forced to sell on their website?
eBay is not selling anything. The users on eBay are selling things and they can choose what to sell or not sell. If Wal-Mart wants to decide not to sell the book, fine. If you purport to offer a marketplace where other people can sell and buy things, you should not be involving yourself in the customers' transactions unless they are illegal.
eBay is not the government. They are not arbiters of what we are and are not allowed to do. Many people have sacrificed their lives to ensure that we are not governed by arbitrary tyrants that we have no say in, and it's frankly shocking that people are now like "Well, they paid a lawyer to set up a C-Corp in Delaware so I guess it's fine that they decide what we're allowed to read now".
Unless you think that businesses, schools, and families should also be prohibited from blocking pornography, or should otherwise be forced to facilitate access to eBay, your suggestion is untenable from a business perspective.
Besides this is a ridiculous strawman. "If you allow people to sell Dr. Suess books, you must therefore also plaster the front page in explicit pornography." Obviously not.
The Internet is increasingly winner-take-all and is controlled by fewer and fewer larger and larger companies. Allowing a handful of corporations unrestricted reign to dictate what we are allowed to say to each other is antithetical to a free society. Reductio ad absurdum arguments are not going to help you when cabal of corporate censors with no accountability decide to eject you from society for daring to question the intellectual fashion of the moment.
You may have identified a real problem in society, but you have not proposed a viable solution.
"forced to allow"
vs.
"prevented from denying"
Think about that difference.
If the public doesn’t want to buy porn there, they won’t and the stand will go out of business.
If they do want to buy porn there, why do you think the farmers market owners should be allowed to dictate what adults are and are not allowed to buy?
What if you wanted to set up a stand that sold books exclusively by African-American authors and they told you you weren’t allowed to do that. Is that ok?
Its obviously not ok, but its not ok because its racist
The flaw in the argument is that Mein Kampf is not a children’s book. If hitler wrote a popular racist book series for kids, eBay would likely delist that too.
There absolutely is. Ebay is nipping in the bud a potential social media lynching.
One misstep nowadays and the CEO spends weeks grovelling about how they're still learning and are determined to do better and thank you Twitter mob for pointing this out.
You can't buy Doctor Seuss, but you can buy "The Anarchist Arsenal", hydrogen peroxide, acetone and a few pounds of screws in the same cart.
Edited typo by / buy
You may think that some of these demands have gone too far, and you may believe that some institutions have been too obsequious in adhering to these demands, but surely you must admit that the use of the word “lynching” in this context is offensive, no?
Pointing out that certain usage of language can be offensive? That we shouldn’t be unintentional when causing offense? That if we cause offense intentionally, we shouldn’t be surprised by the reaction of the party we have purposely insulted?
A surprisingly common phenomenon.
I wasn’t badly offended. I was offended enough to take the time to write these comments.
Keep in mind that on HN, rude and offensive comments are down-voted all the time. There is a politeness standard on this website, and perhaps that standard should incorporate the use of language like this!
Perhaps it's better if we all act like adults capable of understanding nuance in a discussion.
Perhaps the heart of the issue here is that when the sensitivities of certain people are not deemed to be worthy of polite respect, we are implicitly deciding that those people are not worthy of being our peers.
Reciprocation. Politeness goes both ways. Giving your peer the respect in understanding that clearly s/he was not invoking a term for its racial connotations is part of that.
> Perhaps the heart of the issue here is that when the sensitivities of certain people are not deemed to be worthy of polite respect, we are implicitly deciding that those people are not worthy of being our peers.
Yep. That's the "woke" movement in a nutshell.
The rest of us will just treat each other like adults capable of understanding nuance.
Is some behavior only rude if the person knows that it will be offensive? I think if a 16 year old picks his nose in a job interview, you’d still think he was rude, even if you knew his parents didn’t raise him right.
When I was growing up, we used the word “gyp” as a synonym for “cheat”. As in “Don’t g** me out of what you owe me!” Earlier generations would use the word “jew” as a verb in a similar way.
As kids, we were ignorant of the origin of these words. Does that fact make our use of them them less offensive and rude? What would you tell your kid if you heard him say to a friend, “You better not j** me out of what you owe me!” Personally, I would be mortified, even if I knew it came from a place of ignorance.
What’s the difference here?
If this were a peer you knew and respected personally, calling them out in front of other peers and suggesting others might think he meant it in a racist way when it doesn't relate to the issue at hand would be impolite. It implies you might think the speaker intended to invoke racist connotations, which derails the conversation and raises questions about the potential racism of the speaker in the minds of other participants.
> As kids, were ignorant of the origin of these words. Does that fact make our use of them them less offensive and rude?
The issue here isn't ignorance. Your examples are racial slurs. "Lynch" is not a racial term, nor is "firehose" or "bus". There are potentially offensive connotations to all of those words based on prior history, yet somehow we are able to grasp the nuance when used in a different context. At least today.
> What’s the difference here?
The meanings of the words.
Being able to make a theoretical case as to how something could be offensive (if framed in a way it was not framed) is not the same as usage of a racial slur. Dropping the n-word casually is not equivalent to using a branch named "master" in your git repo. We're way past "politeness" and well into viewpoint enforcement, and I think you know this.
Can some be ignored or do all have to be taken equally serious?
Because otherwise I'm sure you'll agree there's no end in sight. You're offended by my insensitivities, I am by yours, people start making things up just to silence people they don't like etc
In this context the word lynching clearly has nothing to do with hanging people from trees. Taking those words literally and then screaming intolerance will only lead to more misery.
Do you really think that's what's going on here? I see it differently.
Being polite is often about self-imposed constraints. We constrain our actions and our language as a sign of respect. Do we do it for everyone? No. But we do it for people we care to show respect to.
In the United States, after the Civil War, lynching primarily existed as a tool by which white mobs terrorized non-white communities into social and political subservience, by murdering people. By one measure, three-quarters of lynching victims were black, when only 12% of the population was black. In parts of the old south-west, lynching was part of a successful ethnic-cleansing effort to expel Mexican landowners from lands that white settlers wanted for themselves. Take a look at some of the pictures, read some of the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
This violent history hits hard when you identify with the victims, when those victims resemble your grandparents and great-grandparents, when you know that your grandparents and great-grandparents were also subject to painful repression within the same cultural and historical context. The word has a different energy.
I didn't take your use of thee word literally. I used the word "non-metaphorical" in my original comment because I wanted to flag that I understood you used the term metaphorically. There are some words, in some contexts that are offensive when used metaphorically.
Just to be clear, I'm not offended by you, nor do I think you are intolerant. I just thought that the word you used in the way you used it was offensive enough given the context to say something about it.
If you didn't have a sense before of how the word might be taken as offensive in the way that you used it, now you do. Do what you will with that information.
Good luck.
How do you deal with bad actors? How do companies like ebay deal with bad actors in this realm?
I disagree with you, but I have to say, well done. Point made.
This is different than using the word “master” to describe the trunk branch of a repository, because when we are talking about a “master branch” it is not in the context of a discussion of offensive racial caricatures being removed from eBay’s website.
As a member of a "minority group* myself, there's no connection to "minority groups demanding respect" here, just the typical outrage over the wildest reaches by those who feel they represent everyone else. By the way, treating people as monolithic groups is where bigotry comes from in the first place so why don't we just stop doing that all together?
If I were trying to win any popularity contests, I wouldn't be discussing this topic on HN. It's risky business!
> Nothing is rude and offensive on its own, nor do you know what everyone else thinks.
I'm not purporting to know what everyone else thinks, only that given the context, the usage of this particular word in this particular situation is offensive.
It's a strange thing for you to insinuate that I feel that I "represent everyone else." Is it not enough for me to be speaking for myself? And what's wrong with users of this website speaking up to negotiate the standards of discourse we all follow here? As I've commented elsewhere, there is a standard of civility, respect and politeness that we all expect from interactions on HN. What that standard comprises should be discussed from time to time.
> As a member of a "minority group myself, there's no connection to "minority groups demanding respect" here..*
If you are going to quote me, then please quote me accurately. I didn't equate OP's "social media lynching" with "minority groups demanding respect". The language I used referred to specific (albeit hypothetical) individuals doing a specific thing. I wrote that "members of those same minority groups" were using "cultural power...to demand respect". It is you who are talking about monolithic groups here—I'm talking about individuals.
If you are a member of one of the minority groups in the US that were historically terrorized by lynch mobs, or were ridiculed in the popular press by the kinds of caricatures that are referenced by the article, then absolutely your opinions on this matter are salient.
It shouldn't require membership in any particular group to view the juxtaposition within OP's metaphor as offensive, however.
The "potential social media lynching" that OP accused eBay of kowtowing to must by its nature be perpetrated by individuals who don't want denigrating, racist caricatures to be promoted and popularized. This is a straw-man in OP's argument, so we don't know precisely who OP would be referring to, but it's not too big a stretch to interpret OP's comment as referring to individuals whose ethnicities are being ridiculed in these books, including African, Native American, Chinese and Arab ethnicities. In fact, a brief search of media reports regarding this controversy would reveal that many prominent commentators on the subject have been African-American and Hispanic educators. Most of this actual commentary has been well-reasoned and civilized, however, and is not at all mob-like.
In contrast, "lynching" in the United States primarily existed as a tool by which white mobs terrorized non-white communities into social, economic and political subservience, by murdering people. Take a look at some of the pictures, and read some of the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
Lynching is not just some better-forgotten historical grievance. It was a tool for genocide and white supremacy—a tool used to rob Mexican and indigenous landowners of their property, and to keep black people subjugated and to deprive them of political power and economic independence. The last known lynching in the United States took place less than 40 years ago—within my own lifetime. The downstream effects of this violence persist today.
Lynching was also part of a continuum of white supremacist culture that included ethnic caricatures that were intended to ridicule subjugated people, and which had the effect of dehumanizing those people. Dehumanization is a necessary precursor to mob violence, and lynchings would not have been possible without the cruel, dehumanizing propaganda that promoted white-supremacy in the United States for more than 100 years after the civil war.
OP's metaphorical lynch mob would include individuals whose ancestors were terrorized by actual lynch mobs. To convert metaphor to simile, OP was saying that these individuals whose ancestors were terrorized by lynch mobs are themselves like a lynch mob when they complain about the on-going, present-day publication of imagery that was originally created to promote the persecution of those same ancestors.
Is this not offensive on its face? Even if you disagree with these people, how can you not see OP's metaphor as demeaning towards them? And even if you don't care about offending people in the wider world, what about those of us on this website who also fit the same description? Is it not rude to us?
Look, I don't want anyone to be shamed, punished, penalized or "canceled" here. That would be ridiculous. I wasn't even looking for any kind of apology. I'm just hoping that the standards of civility and respect followed by members of the HN community can incorporate an awareness of what this kind of language really means to some of us.
There are some things that no civilized person will say in polite society—that idea, I think, is not controversial. Let this particular use of the word "lynching" be one of those things.
Again, it's offensive to you.
I disagree, as I understand that the metaphor is about mob justice without evidence or due process; a concept that is well understood and easily separated from social history. If you truly think it's about individuals then I'm not sure what there is to discuss on such a subjective matter.
So his usage seems quite correct.
[Before anyone makes assumptions about my political views, i'm fine with publishers no longer publishing if tastes change, but i can't abide banning the sale of books in general. I don't really care what the content is]
[1] https://www.ebay.ca/itm/MEIN-KAMPF-1939-Complete-Unabridged-...
So yes, we do need distributed everything.
If the only store within a 2-hour drive is walmart, walmart is your equivalent of the soviet centrally-planned economy.
People getting that book have some idea what they are getting I hope.
I do not want racist stereotypes in books I read with my children
However children aren't the only people who read books like this. Dr Suess is one of the most influential children's authors. All of his books are certainly worthy of study from an academic perspective due to their long lasting influence.
Objectively false. eBay responded to a headline and will continue to permit the sale of many works of similar nature because it is ultimately apathetic
Leaving aside the question of whether the books in question actually denigrate people, what makes this case so special that eBay takes action? eBay is losing money by not allowing sales of the books; presumably they either feel like they would lose even more money if they did allow it or feel that the books are morally repugnant enough to be worth the loss. Any other options?
The second option does not seem to hold water given all the other things eBay allows. The first option leaves the question of why they would lose money. Digging into that is where you find the power structure you are refusing to see.
So far, the big platforms seem to be digging the hole of censorship deeper, and small platforms like Parler are deplatformed.
Unless we find a way to circumvent the tight control that smartphone manufacturers have over devices they sell, the only possible haven of free speech would be web on a Windows PC with some specific browsers. Because Google adding you to a list of dirty webs means that people using Chrome won't get to your website.
Deplatforming is an extreme measure when they perceive an existential threat like "abetting an insurrection."
Some users are bound to replay real-world conflicts there. Israelis and Palestinians will scream at each other, Europeans will draw Muhammad cartoons, Rs and Ds will love each other unconditionally as usual... and all this attention sells ads, but also creates uncomfortable side effects.
Political outrage drives engagement much more than cute cats.
AWS pulled the plug on Parler a few days after the Capitol riot, and then justified it with evidence of posts from before the riot. If the riot had not happened, then surely Parler would still be hosted on AWS today.
So the big players are not proactively censoring anything; it's all engagement metrics, then CYA when shit hits the fan. But take heart: that means that small platforms really can live under the radar.
Nobody is going to pull that particular plug.
We've seen revolutions before and they were not pretty.
Society will run away from this and the pendulum will swing again toward Morton Downy Jr., The Man Show, Politically Incorrect, 101 Ways TO Kill A Cat, Jerry Springer, etc.
The big platforms will quietly acquiesce to the public's "new found" acceptance of the risqué.
What we are seeing here is a consequence of our capitalist society. It is now more profitable for eBay and other companies to pull or ban things that may cause controversy. There's no censorship here. You can find these books at other retailers. In fact, you're likely to see some businesses thrive by specifically carrying the things that other retailers refuse to carry.
And the first amendment is not a definition of freedom of speech. Read it again.
In simple terms, is it a good idea to ban algebra if a vocal enough community of anti-algebra people convince ebay to not list it?
In US, the entire market is divvied up between various oligopolies. You can name an industry and you can usually find 3-4 dominant companies that drive the market. Ebay and Amazon have ridiculous market power and reach ( reinforced by Covid ), which effectively means that if book is not available on their virtual shelves, that book does not exist for the general population. Ergo, removal from Ebay equals removing of an idea from the 'marketplace of ideas'.
I am oversimplifying, but not by a lot.
If eBay was a tiny company, it would be nothing, but you cannot ignore the effects of scale and market dominance here.
It is similar to the smartphone world: if Google and Apple block you, in practice you are destroyed.
Is it OK for them to delist other things like spam and porn if enough people don't want to see them? If not, we're looking at a very different internet
If so, we can probably reason about the merits of delisting based on whether we feel algebra might be good and early twentieth century casual racism the rightsholders have disavowed might be bad (or at least, not so good eBay ought to feel compelled to incur reputational damage to continue to distribute it).
unlike adult content or spam, casual racism is an idea so important platforms ought not to impede its spread is an argument of course, just not a freedom of speech one.
I will open by saying that, from my perspective, in accordance with Sturgeon's law, 80% of books on Ebay and Amazon ARE spam and should be delisted for the well-being of general populace and positive feeling of accomplishment for busy-bodies, who seem to be running those operations. If we start removing spam, we better get the proper authorities ready to remove the superfluous, pointless and downright dangerous material that spam produces.
Still, is your standard 'did enough people complain'? If so, that is a bad standard, and most certainly not how internet was devised, or was intended to work.
I think the issue I have with 'casual rasism' in this book is that I do not see it, and yet my access to the book is limited, because sufficient amount of people whined. In short, I do not buy this argument.
But lets say I do, and we want to talk spreading bad ideas. US is ok with allowing Mein Kampf. How is it different? Why are those ideas ok to spread, but not that one? How is attempting to destroy an entire population less offensive than 'casual racism'? Do we have some sort of diagram that shows how victimhood is rated?
The answer is really simple. It is not better or worse. It is just an idea. And if 'casual racism' is an idea, then its spread is absofuckinglutely a freedom of speech issue. Just not one one can easily get behind, because it is, well, bad. But that does not mean you can just pretend it does not exist.
No, though obviously it is a factor. I'm pretty sure it's not eBay's standard either. The rights holders, who are extremely familiar with the content, took the view the books are too racist to continue selling; eBay could have chosen to argue the other side and profit from people buying second hand copies at absurd prices to own the libs, but I don't see any particular reason why it should. Frankly categorising spam is at least as prone to disagreement as categorising racism, and I don't think spam has worse consequences. It possible the Seuss Foundation and eBay are excessively prudish about some of the books and certainly eBay's moderation policies are inconsistently applied, but that doesn't imply a website adding a few books to the list of stuff it doesn't want to sell on the grounds of they're bad enough for the publisher to have unpublished is a particularly chilling violation of speech. The internet has been prudish for a long time, as anyone trying to use Big Tech to sell nudes knows, and I really don't see racism as a less sensitive subject than sex.
As for how the internet was imagined to work, I'm pretty sure it's expected to work in exactly the same way as things normally do in Western democracies: people and corporations are generally free to choose who they do business with and what they sell except in very specific circumstances where it is deemed harmful (like refusing to do business with a particular race, or using market power to squeeze a competitor, or being a public utility). It is possible to argue that racism is an intrinsically valuable idea which deserves this sort of special protection which other forms of speech don't, and it's also possible to argue that the risks of curtailing good ideas by restricting any kind of communication is so severe that major retail platforms should be treated like ISPs and not allowed to have any influence on what's distributed by their service at all. But one of those involves explicitly privileging racism and the other throws out the possibility of those platforms attempting even the most cursory moderation, and probably other stuff most people here endorse like centrally-administered spam filters and ad blocking services too. Beyond those arguments we're not discussing speech right principles, we're discussing the details of what's silly [not] to ban.
Some organizations decide [some] ads are too disgusting to host, others decide the same thing about [some] racism. I find the intersection of people on here who believe the former is fantastic and the latter is chilling quite strange. Frankly I'm more uncomfortable about racism than ads, and I use uBlock's list of undesirable content as much as everyone else here.
I do appreciate the civil reply and agree that moderation is not consistent though.
The kerfuffle is about values and whether moral people have power.
But for those of us under pandemic lockdown, all human contact outside the home is over private companies' platforms. Seems to me if you're banned from all the major private platforms that's de factor censorship, if not de jure government censorship.
More broadly, this also seems like a gigantic political victory for republicans: A few months ago the most high profile banned-on-all-major-platforms story was about Parler, a site that had literally been used to coordinate an attempt to overthrow democracy. Hardly an argument that a big 'cancel culture' exists or is running out of control!
Now, the most high-profile story is about a beloved children's author and famed anti-fascist getting banned? You couldn't ask for better evidence of a 'cancel culture' run amok.
If as a society we allow companies, that are equal to (if not more powerful than) the government we elect, to pick and choose what parts of public discourse are acceptable or not, we have no one but ourselves to blame when this inevitably goes pear-shaped.
Like many other things in the past, what is legal right now may not be ethically and morally correct in the future.
You are correct that society as we know it does not cease to function immediately after the giants like amazon, facebook, twitter, ebay, etc. take a specific action like banning a book or banning a user. However, the longer term implications are far more concerning and the time to start contemplating these issues was yesterday (or any other time in the last few years). The next best time is now.
I don't think(?) eBay globally banned selling of past copies of Meinkampf while the copyright was cleverly held by a German State. Doing so is pretending copyright is a right that extends to sold property that is a copy, extending a right too far, while banning a class of books like MeinKampf for your own reasons is perfectly valid.
If they want to ban racist children's media on their platform then they should. That includes a lot of TinTin, popeye, Tom and Jerry, etc, that has never been classified as racist by some copyright holder.
edit- s/published/printed
Of course, if you believe that copyright should prevent the resale of goods, that's an entirely different story that ignores the current state of affairs in the world and the legislated rights of people in many countries (where there are such laws that prohibit limiting the resale of goods).
Well, after WWII, the USA engaged in their "denazification" of Germany, where they censored and burned Nazi materials.
Which side would you say they were on?
There's probably a useful discussion about whether orphaned works should be protected by copyright.
But it's madness to suggest that once a publisher has published a book they're somehow compelled to continue publishing that book in perpetuity.
What we are seeing is not an inevitable consequence of capitalism and reducing it to a profit motive misses much of the picture. It may benefit eBay's bottom line, but there other other factors at play.
For example, the public expectations of private companies are changing, as more people want them to act as arbiters of morality. Similarly, corporations are increasingly adding social ideals to their objectives. While there is clearly a PR aspect at play, corporate leaders and shareholders can and do balance moral objectives against their bottom line.
I think what people are reacting to is the feeling that they are loosing control to corporations over the direction of social change. Just as individuals can feel disempowered in the face of corporate influence in political arena, individuals feel disempowered by corporate influence in field of morality and social change.
https://www.amazon.com/If-Ran-Zoo-Classic-Seuss/dp/039480081...
This questionable book that Dr. Seuss Enterprises no longer wishes to publish can be at your front door tomorrow. Enjoy.
Relegating books to a market outside of the largest sellers basically amounts to erasing them. Sure, in this case people could still find them, because they are from a famous author. But what about unknown writers, with views that don't align with what is approved by the PC crowd?
For the record, I have never read a Dr. Seuss book and don't encourage racial stereotyping, but there are other edgy subjects (like the legalization of certain substances) that I can imagine becoming less fashionable at some point in time. I don't want to see books supporting this idea suppressed at some point in the future.
We should be very careful with this new self regulating market, that follows the loudest outcry to determine what they allow to be sold.
The government isn’t involved. Or should it be and it force you to sell everything?
There are surely going to be more voices advocating for removing racist stuff than those arguing to keep it. One side inherently has the advantage. So without the government getting involved, what exactly are y’all suggesting?
Obviously every free market is self regulating, but we never had this mixture of a limited selection in dominating online sellers and the amplifying effect the internet has on any kind of outcry.
The government has nothing to do with my argument. We don't need laws against this (yet), but we should keep an eye out for changes that will push counterculture underground. Dialogue beats suppression any day in my book.
We have more selection at our finger tips than any time in history. I guarantee if I wanted those books, I could find them without leaving my desk.
I don't know how often I've had to point this out, but the US constitution is irrelevant here. You might as well refer to your favourite monty python sketch for all I care.
I'm not American, and in my country quite some speech is forbidden or can get you jailed (fuck de koning!).
So maybe for me such state censorship 'forbidding speech' is clearer distinct from 'decreasing the reach of speech'?
If you want to host some incredibly terrible text or blog, and magically no DDoS protection provider at all wants to protect you because you're such a terrible person, your reach is 0%, you are knocked off instantly and down 24/7. The government or state never had to say a thing.
In many parts of US, Walmart might be the only store people have access to, it is infeasible to get anywhere else. Having to drive several hours to the nearest city is practically reducing reach to nothing.
This obviously doesn't apply to people that can pop on Craigslist and pick up a copy of a book, or order it from eBay, or any of the hundreds of other shops that might have it. But there is a huge amount of the country where you are quite literally down to one or two retailers. Partially due to those one or two retailers completely taking over the area and outpricing every small shop there is.
But more important than that is the societal aspect: censorship is ultimately a propaganda tool. You don't have to imprison people to silence ideas; simply hiding them from the public is more than enough.
The reason this is the more important of the two is because it is what influences public opinion. Propaganda is an incredibly powerful political tool and freedom of expression is, also an opposing force to it.
The problem is that over time companies are consolidating into a few monopolies which are entirely out of public control, and these companies effectively control almost all distribution.
It depends what “power controlling entity” you see being the risk - is it the elected government or is it large powerful corporations with unelected leadership?
It is the same core sport, just a different team playing with less rules.
These companies don't operate on the same kind of logic as the courts do - this sets no precedent. Amazon and eBay could block the sale of any book tomorrow if they wanted to; they could have done it yesterday, as well. The real power these structures espouse is to get us bickering over children's books, rather than devoting our energies towards things that actually matter.
I did Not say "Legal Precedent". And it is Absolutely an "example" of Society believing that certain ideas, and not necessarily racism (and to be clear if you are a racist you are a complete idiot, and beneath contempt); should Not be allowed to be expressed.
Took a while to find a comment that sees to the heart of the issue.
The problem is Far bigger than that, and the implications are indeed frightening. And Why is that... simply because a societal precedent has been set which could allow the Government to use this as a linchpin to control All speech and by default All Thought. When you control what people can say you also control what they think.
What is the difference now, except that racially-insensitive material has replaced, say, pro-Soviet material as being too controversial for the biggest platforms to want to sully their brands with it?
Probably because of her wealth it allows her to be honest on twitter about how she feels about gender identity , the problem is the platform she chose to express those views i.e twitter , it tends to amplify a certain group think.
These are some children's books that contain illustrations that some people find offensive and the publisher (and sellers) are deciding they no longer want to be associated with and sell to children. There are internet forums where the images are available and people can view them without the police knocking your door down, and I'm sure these are available in 2nd hand bookshops.
The actions of the publisher and ebay enhance the first (freedom from) without inhibiting the second much (freedom to) for those that really want to view the images.
There's a difference between "utterly repugnant" content being available and it being casually given to children, and people and companies being forced to sell it.
You forgot to add: "to someone, probably a minority, possibly entirely wrong".
Because it seems like you are implying that it's option C by making this comment.
What is a culture if not the rules and customs a large majority of a certain population agrees on?
Some cultures try to accomodate minorities, but there's always a threshold to what's tolerated even in the most open societies. A certain minority may not like something the majority does, but unless there's very little cost for the majority to stop doing that, they won't, even if that offends some groups.
There's no way around this because there will always be groups who take offense in things you may consider completely and utterly harmless (I gave the example of Australia aborigines not being comfortable with talking about or depicting deceased people - obviously a problem in the age of movies and books). A society that tried to acommodate every group's sensibilities would be completely unable to function.
The more distant the groups, the more patently obvious this becomes. If you are not sure what I am talking about you probably should try to learn more about other cultures.
Oh my... I suppose you're writing this from prison as if you don't care about what society thinks you certainly must disagree with many laws of that society...
This is a really childish argument and thinking there's an absolute truth is an obvious sign of your lack of understanding of what humanity even means.
There is no absolute truth. Nothing has inherent value, not even life. We only give value to life (and really different values depending on what type of life we're talking about) because we have an obvious interest in keeping our species alive, but this is not inherently good, or an absolute truth in any way.
You now come up with an argument that's drowning in your own culture and the very recent past of your own society and you don't even realize that, thinking there's some kind of absolute truth behind your position. There isn't. You're so deep into your society mindset you're compleetely incapable of thinking outside of that.
You seem to be trying to refer to Sam Harris' Moral Landscape without actually understanding at all what he means.
The problem is you didn't focus on the real critical issue: why do the ends justify the means? "The ends" for medicine is saving thousands of lives. The ends for bullying is making one person feel better about themselves (maybe?).
This is the question you need to ask when you wonder "should we ban a book".
Maybe it's more important to look at the overall impact on society as it is right now, and in the context of where we want it to evolve, rather than what particular individuals may like.
Imagine if Australia bookstores followed the principle that even if a minority (and in this case, a very important minority as the aboriginal people are the "original owners" of the land) does not like a book, it should not be made available... you wouldn't be allowed to sell any books that contained or even mentioned deceased people.
But now, imagine that the British had not invaded and forcibly taken over Australia, so that the aboriginal people would be the current rules of the country. Now, you would probably expect no bookstores to want to offend their customers, so they would, presumably, avoid selling most books, arguably.
So, yes, I think that whether or not it's a minority that takes a certain stand makes a whole world of difference.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_avoidanc...
I don’t think that falls under ‘freedom to’, because nobody can list it going forward either.
If the enforcement effort is nontrivial (e.g., moderating a global social media platform), this dynamic is a moat for the company doing the enforcement. Every time they introduce a new rule that the majority of their users don’t care much about, they strengthen the moat. So over time they’ll find an equilibrium with the strictest rules they can get away with.
I don’t mean this happens intentionally, but rather in an evolutionary, survival of the fittest sort of way.
Mein Kampf is listed as a Best Seller on Amazon.
Edit: I'm not sure why I was downvoted. What I wrote is literally true. There is a Best Seller badge next to the first version that is listed, when searching for Mein Kampf.
Or are you just trying to suggest that Dr. Seuss is somehow comparable to Adolf Hitler?
Really? Trying the "check availability" feature on https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mein-kampf-hitler-adolf/112..., for example, it looks like most local B&N outlets have it in stock.
Wherever you stand on the issue of whether or not Ebay can/should be able to ban Dr. Seuss books on their marketplace that fact alone is damn weird.
"Every book is a children's book, if the kid can read."
Mitch Hedberg
But seriously, is who the book is aimed at relevant?
From the article at least, it appears eBay will also remove those books.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180705090957/https://www.ebay....
The 2018 one probibits "items that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance, or promote organizations with such views"
I am not sure to what extent or in what ways it has been enforced against what sorts of items. Perhaps it has been enforced unevenly or mostly not? I suspect that nazi memorabilia, at least, has been consistently rejected for a while.
But the policy is not new.
The today one at that URL gets into a lot more specific details than the 2018 one, including prohibiting "Items with racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise demeaning portrayals, for example through caricatures or other exaggerated features, including figurines, cartoons, housewares, historical advertisements, and golliwogs"
It looks like those details were there as early as Nov 2020, not sure how long before that. But that predates the current Seuss controversy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112030930/https://www.ebay....
In closing, the Internet Archive is doing some really important work. I should go send them some bucks again.
This is not like Facebook amplifying someone's vile posts and showing them to hundreds or thousands of people. It's just a 1:1 transaction for a physical object that contains racist depictions.
In WWII Bayer used slave labor in its factories that were inside of concentration camps.
Apparently, eBay has no problem with Adolf Hitler, but Dr. Seuss somehow is a horrible racist.
Hum... No, it's just a monopolist that gatekeeps a lot of people's right to commerce.
Are you claiming that the governments of the places it's relevant shouldn't care about what they do?
This seller has several listings of memorabilia.
What do you think eBay is?
Even absent any controversy about racially insensitive artwork (I mean seriously: there are africans drawn as half-monkeys and a chinese man whose eyes are slanted lines! This is not stuff modern kids should be presented with), these definitely aren't "classics".
But as far as a place to find them for adults who want to read them, that will curate them for posterity: have you tried the library?
We all grew up with those bugs bunny cartoons with the same depictions, some even going so far as to depict them as cannibals, and I can't say either of those made our generation really think that of either of those ethnic groups. I think it was a realistic trope that 90s kids usually watched cartoons in groups after school with every ethnic group, that Sunny Delight commercial comes to mind [0], as does Dave Chapelle's joke about purple drink.
People need to realize that the World is messy, and racism and prejudice exits in all walks of life: none greater than in social class, which transcends ethnicity. And the sooner children realize that the sooner they will be able to acknowledge it and develop a sense of agency in the World to deal with an imperfect World.
Instead, all this re-enforces is a helicopter parents 'Karen' antics on to their children in which complaining to no end is the only way to get one's point of view, that ultimately drives to discord in Society: be it person or on social media--with the latter being critical to sustaining it's way over-valuations which mask their Black Mirroresque business models which that often provoke this type of behaviour and should really be the focus here and not canceling Dr. Suess books.
Sidenote: I'm sure their is some SJW interpretation for canceling Sunny Delight to be made about this as well as the kid was 'accosted only after a white aggressor perpetuated violence which provoked the black one to do the same' type narrative, but either way it's just best to ignore them.
Yes, they do! I was explaining just this to my kids yesterday, in the context of this very controversy. I don't understand why you think I should have read them those particular books to them when they were toddlers. Seriously, that stuff is pretty vile.
My wife and I help guide the convo and but they draw their own conclusions. Critical thinking is a muscle which must be exercised and grown.
I find as a parent that I sometimes lump in my younger one with my older one and unfairly (to the younger) compare them to each other, even though the older one is just so much more developed. This sometimes ends up with me putting too high of expectations on the younger one unintentionally, and she feels inadequate.
Not trying to get all advicey here, but I know I have a hard time addressing each child at their own age and level, and while maybe the 4 year old appears to be keeping up, a 4 year olds’ brain is just not as developed as a 13 year old.
Don't outsource your tesponsibility to help guide the next generation. Don't shelter them from your idea of obcenity either. If you respect their capabilities; you let them set their boundaries on their own.
I swear this wokeness movement is getting so tone deaf they don't realize they're becoming the radical pearl clutchers that the actual Liberal's fought against the auspices of to make sure that knowledge was shared.
When you're in stark opposition to the cause of a bunch of Librarians, you're almost certainly in the wrong.
Some parents are totally clueless.
This is like expecting that children would develop phobia to birds after playing angry birds (have you seen this very obvious slanted eyebrows in the main character?).
A figure with slanted eyes pose the same danger currently as giving your son a tin toy with sharp angles. Could cut their skin if one single child in the planet would find that stuff remotely funny, or accept to play with it for money.
This old fart WWII bomb has been inactivated long time ago. Just can't compete the thousands of positive asian characters that are the bread and butter in the journey of the western child. Unlike 1945 farmers, the pokemon generation are very aware of anything remotely related with japanese culture. Can talk for hours about their favourite asian characters, specially the evil ones, that they absolutely adore.
I’m looking forward to Banned Book Week this year. It’s always interesting to see what small percentage of people are serious about their principles.
I'm sure there are plenty of Christian book stores / libraries out there who are unwilling to stock The God Delusion. And why would a LGBTQ bookstore sell LGBTQ hate propaganda?
I guess this could be taken to an extreme. Maybe a library in a highly conservative town chooses to not stock anything that has a hint of left-wing ideology, and maybe they have internet filters to block any left-wing web sites, and they only put front-and-center highly right-wing books.
I don't know, it's complicated.
The truth is, there is already plenty interference is private business, but it (seems) to not be evenly applied. If I request a library stock (or borrow) a book that I'd like to read, I don't consider political aesthetics to be a valid reason to refuse.
> I'm sure there are plenty of Christian book stores / libraries out there who are unwilling to stock The God Delusion
Do you mean a normal bookstore owned by Christians, or a specialist bookstore that only stocks christian literature? If the store could refuse any non-christian material (e.g. a cookbook) as well as Dawkins books, I'm not sure if that's censorship - a greengrocer can also refuse to stock The God Delusion on similarly reasonable grounds.
I think we've decided as a society that sexual orientation is a protected group. You cannot discriminate based on sexual orientation. But I think you can still discriminate based on views of what is racist and what is not? If a white guy walks into black-owned barber shop and throws around racial slurs at the barbers, can the owners of that barber shop refuse him service and kick him out? I certainly hope so... but am I being hypocritical?
Honestly I'm out of my depth here. I have opinions but I don't think my opinions are necessarily as informed as I want them to be.
What kind of example is this? Does it matter what the respective races are? How is this equivalent to the wedding-cake example?
As for "sexual orientation is a protected group"; religion is also protected.
But for the rest of it, I get what you’re saying. I definitely want to live in a world where there are Christian booksellers selling their curated collections, and left wing revolutionary bookstores selling theirs. That only adds to diversity of expression. On the other hand, if I started to see large numbers of previously neutral purveyors of books saying they wouldn’t carry anything that offends the church I’d criticize that. I don’t want to live under a new puritanism, even if everybody forwarding it is entirely within their rights to do so.
Doesn't the fact that there are more books in existence than any library can possibly stock forces them to pick and choose what gets onto shelves? That filter process cannot be divorced from people's values and baises unless we went with some sort of random selection of all texts that have ever existed, which would result in complete nonsense. We pick winners and losers all the time and not everybody is going to agree with those choices.
I guess I don't see it as unreasonable for a library to not want to stock what they view as racially insensitive books, especially kids books. But of course, people are going to disagree with exactly what that means. Maybe somebody out there truly thinks Green Eggs & Ham shouldn't be stocked because it glorifies exploiting animals for their meat and eggs. There's just no pleasing everybody I guess
Maybe we’ll get there. In my lifetime censors have been mostly concerned with childrens’ books with supernatural themes and more recently lgbt stories. I’d guess that’s still where most of the library “book banning” is focused.
If you were a Librarian and the Washington Post called to ask you whether you were going to keep circulating the books that everybody-even-the-publisher has acknowledged are racist, don’t you think you might interpret that as pressure to pull them? How about if Karen comes in and holds one of them in front of your face from the shelf and starts loudly demanding that racism not be allowed in your community any longer. Do you honestly think that won’t/hasn’t happened?
https://news.yahoo.com/connecticut-librarians-praise-decisio...
It’s like how white people think they invented colorism, even though the preference for fairer skin in women exists throughout the pre-colonial historical record in India, Africa, and Asia. (As a dark skinned person whose half white daughter came out darker than him, I applaud the trend away from fairer skin as a beauty standard! But white people thinking they invented the beauty standard to begin with is self-centered and paternalistic: https://quillette.com/2019/02/13/the-origins-of-colourism/ We had colorism in India long before white people.)
Japanese used to have a stigma related to being tanned as it represented manual labor. Not being tanned meant you didn’t work like a peasant. In western society oddly being tanned was associated with having leisure time to tan. All in all ‘not tanning’ was all around better than foot binding as a status marker.
Now, in Japan you see two situations people who want to look untanned and others who want to look ultra tanned (really dark make up).
I’m sure this will make these ultra sensitive types go into a tailspin.
Now in South Asia there is a tendency for middle class women to lighten their skin tone. Is that good, bad? I dunno. That should be up to them. To me it’s no different from other make up or getting hair transplants or nosejobs or other cosmetic surgery. But some people want to jam their preconception on other people’s freedoms.
White people engage in other forms of plastic surgery because various media has told them a certain form is the most beautiful. The difference here is that Western media has clearly spent over a century villianizing certain with Asian traits.
In India that meant dark skinned Dravidian natives were ruled by the light skinned upper classes or castes. As a result of minimal intermarriage, these Central Asian genes are found mostly in “groups of priestly status”, ie, Brahmins. This led to the standard of beauty becoming ingrained.
There’s other factors as well, in that it’s a status symbol for some families to make their women stay at home rather than work. Not having to work in the fields means you don’t get tanned, making such people appear more beautiful by this standard.
Side note, I’d like to apologise to the Indians who believe that they’re the original inhabitants of the country and that “others” (ie, Muslims) are “invaders”. However, notwithstanding your hurt feelings, you still gotta face facts.
Source - A new study squelches a treasured theory about Indians’ origins. The Aryans did not come from India; they conquered it (https://www.economist.com/asia/2018/04/05/a-new-study-squelc...)
People act like Indians had this authentic indigenous culture before British colonization, overlooking that it’s the synthesis of wave after wave of colonization over millennium. I spoke English, even before coming to America, because of British colonialism. But I’ve got a Hebrew last name because Muslims colonized India before the British and brought it over from the Middle East. The food I grew up eating is a product of those same Muslim invaders, plus ingredients (chili peppers) sourced from Europeans who got them from the Americas. If you removed the layers of colonization from the culture I’m not sure what you’d have left.
The British, of course, are themselves the result of wave after wave of colonization to the British isles. If you peeled away the influences of the Norman colonizers, the Saxons, the Romans, the Vikings, etc., what would be left?
Wonder if Classical Japanese art like this[1] will get banned?
Interestingly lots of Manga and Anime go the other way and give people vertical eye shapes (buggs bunny eyes).
[1] https://spokenvision.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Utamaro-...
I do see woodcuts using the same eye rendering for demons and other underworld characters, but I hope those don’t get banned by a foreign culture because it thinks it misrepresents its own people.
At this point people are on a veritable ‘witch-hunt’ looking for their witches and waiting for Bradburys Firemen to come burn them.
He was making anti-Japan propaganda, there's no doubt he made them into evil characters.
Proof
http://keyeventsofworldwar2.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/6/4/19640...
If that's how you view war propaganda, clearly nearly a century after the war things influenced by such propaganda should not be exposed to young children.
Those woodcuts you are referring to have a much different context. There's a big difference between a white man caracituring based on race and an asian culture using this depiction on their own terms.
And I don’t think things can only be described by people on their own terms. If it were the case then only descendants of imperialists (Japanese in Asia, Britons in India and America, etc) could talk about the aftermath. And only Africans can talk about things Africans and only Mexicans about Mexico, etc. That’s untenable.
How are you just ignoring his WWII career as a propaganda artist? I linked you one of the tamer examples, but he was creating cartoons depicting both Japanese and Germans as the evil enemy.
I respect your difference in opinion. I'm interested in how asian / black people feel about these Dr. Seuss books.
> And only Africans can talk about things Africans and only Mexicans about Mexico, etc. That’s untenable
I really don't think anybody is suggesting that
Which Asian and Black people? Inevitably, it seems like it’s some professor of ethnic studies that are consulted about these questions. (That’s actually exactly what happened here to decide on what Dr. Seuss books were racist.) But think about that for a moment. Do you think the opinions of a random white Columbia University social sciences professor are a fair gauge of “how white people feel” about some issue? Obviously not. Then why would you assume the same is true as to people of color?
As a person of color I am vigorously opposed to this trend of putting professors and activists in charge of speaking for people of color. It’s totally distorting the conversation we are having with the rest of America, and also amongst ourselves. My mom and aunts, immigrants from Muslim countries, fret over their kids being exposed to western moral values (divorce, premarital sex, disrespect for elders, aggressive individualism, etc.) I have never heard them complain about some depiction in some book or movie. Meanwhile, professors and activists are making a huge deal about pictures and depictions in our name. But they are simultaneously working with white social progressives to undermine things that typical people in these communities care a lot more about. It’s perverse.
Even "bad guys" can be good characters [0], the most complex/nuanced characters are also complex. Start dictating that <x> characters can't have negative attributes, and you end up with boring, simplistic caricatures of <x> thrown in as tokens, but never managing the highlight (because why would you want boring, restricted characters to be in central roles?).
[0]: Is Gregory House a good character? Is "Dexter"? What about characters from the shield, or breaking bad?
As for common, the estimates I can find show between 1/5th and 1/3rd of South Korean woman receive double eyelid surgery.
Yeah, and black people commonly use the N-word among themselves too. That doesn't mean it isn't offensive for me to use it.
What if the character is laughing and their eyes are virtually shut? Sorry, Ray, you need to draw the eyes, I can’t. Ok, now I can draw the hair.
In "Tropic Thunder" (2008) Robert Downey Jr. famously wore blackface. Of course I doubt he could do it today, but is that because it would be genuinely offensive, too controversial or both?
They were using blackface as a way to talk about race issues rather than the offensive way it has been used in other contexts.
Whether or not that kind of thing would fly today is a different question. I certainly hope that people could look at things holistically and not just have a knee-jerk reaction to something like this. I'm also interested in what black people think about this, because ultimately that's what matters most.
Although it is a bit ironic to see so many saviors valiantly offended. The entire SJW thing is more alienating than run of the mill, day to day racism. The gymnastics people pull off are astounding. Next they claim they're doing it on my behalf. Perhaps they'll call me a racist for disagreeing online. Those looking to be offended will always find a way. At a certain point we have to stop indulging them.
Dr. Seuss had some offensive cartoons in his early days, but I don't see that as illustrative of his entire character. I don't recall being offended as a child.
A lot of music is misogynistic and violent, same as old movies, books and so on. Sure, don’t frivolously add to it to cause pain, but don’t ban things that are today anachronistic but when produced were uncontroversial.
Let’s say hypothetically the Great Wall of China was built by prisoners of war, slaves and other spoils of war. Do we then not visit them? Are they denounced?
You have to take into consideration history and changing sentiments when looking at these things.
For example, a white man overly emphasizing asian-ness to an extent that it caricatures them and makes them a one-dimensional "other" is MUCH different than an asian culture portraying themselves this way in a better context.
Same with words like the b-word... a man using this word towards a woman is (usually) incredibly offensive. A woman using this word towards another woman CAN be endearing in the right context, or used to cut her down.
Words and depictions of people are HIGHLY context sensitive!
The kind of ridiculous physical caricature we see in this kind of artwork (slanted eyes and buck teeth on asians, long arms, huge lips and a completely non-representative chimpanzee circle around the mouth on africans, etc...) only makes sense when viewed from outside, in the "look at these strange and alien people" sense. No one drawing themself reaches for tropes like this.
Among other genres.
Maybe your mental model of people drawing themselves with "slanted eye representation" is more specific in nature?
I haven't seen the other tropes you've mentioned though.
It doesn't strike you as odd that in this whole enormous controversy which has consumed right wing media all week and driven this thousand+ comment thread to the top of HN...
... that no one thought to show you the actual artwork in question, and that you never looked it up for yourself?
Seriously, it's pretty bad. Go look.
My prior comment was in response to this gap.
With regards to the controversy stirred up by right-wing propaganda, Aesop's fable of the bull and the gnat applies for me.
Peace.
Chinese: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...
Korean: https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2007/05/25/2007052...
Japanese: https://www.irasutoya.com/2018/06/blog-post_724.html
One source among many: https://www.history.com/news/when-dr-seuss-went-to-war
It’s not like they were known for being chivalrous (Bataan).
There's a distinction here between demonizing the enemy you're fighting against and demonizing the citizens of your own country for having a particular national origin. The cartoon here implies that Japanese-Americans (depicted the same way as the Japanese emperor in other cartoons) are traitors. And Dr. Seuss was German-American himself and did not try to imply through his cartoons that German-Americans or Italian-Americans are traitors.
As it regards “murder”. I think people get overly excited about nuclear bombs. We Capet bombed Germany and Japan. Japan carpet bombed China. Germany sent over their V1 & V2s. Many more of your ‘civilians’ died in the carpet bombing campaigns. You also forget that in Japan the Emperor was a cult-like hero. The majority would have walked over a cliff for him. It wasn’t a bunch of innocents we were fighting in either theater.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_America...
Japanese internment isn't considered problematic because it led to Japanese nationals that were supporting the Japanese war efforts being interned. It's problematic because it was indiscriminate and race-based - nearly all Japanese Americans in the continental US ended in internment camps. There's no comparison here - Japanese Americans were treated substantially worse than even German nationals, actual citizens of the country the US was at war with.
> You also forget that in Japan the Emperor was a cult-like hero. The majority would have walked over a cliff for him.
I'm struggling to find a charitable interpretation for this. Could you elaborate? Are you saying that it's okay to consider Americans of national origin X traitors if the US is at war with X and the country X happens to be led by a cult-like hero?
I wonder if _some_ may feel guilt for their own past actions or a historical burden unfairly hefted upon them. Instead of approaching that, it _may_ be easier to externalize and blame others. This _could_ explain the rampant accusations of racism. It is easy to see how this could become a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
Isn't that also true of violence in games and movies?
Or any morally repugnant behaviour, now that we mention it?
In fact, why let them read anything except the Bible?
Yet.
And it's tiresome and boring to hear people pretend that any reasonable line will be drawn. History is full of racially "insensitive" things. What, are we going to make sure "modern kids" don't see that stuff too? What a nullified and pretentious existence.
>have you tried the library?
I have, and it turns out that the same people who think banning books is fine also run the library. Oh the irony!
I'm basing my understanding on the Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin.
> Freedom of speech ... means you are not bound and limited by something external
https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-re...
My answer to this situation is similar to that of Justice Holmes, we need a free marketplace of ideas as well as a free marketplace of products. Breaking up monopolies in commerce and discourse goes a long way towards those goals.
The fact that a few people might still be able to view images of these books (illegally, as they are copyrighted) on some tiny closed forum on the internet isn't a real comfort.
In the Soviet Union, there were also tiny isolated pockets where "forbidden books" were surreptitiously copied and read. However, the project to ban them was still very successful overall. The average subject of the Soviet regime would not have access to these books.
This is very much what is happening in the US right now. These books are being banned, and the next generations of US readers will have no access to them. The fact that one person in ten thousand might be able to find a used copy at a rare used bookstore (and pay pay thousands of dollars for it) doesn't really change anything, and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise.
This is book-banning, pure and simple.
> The actions of the publisher and ebay enhance the first (freedom from)
I would also like to thank our cultural commissars at Amazon and eBay for "freeing" us from dangerous ideas by forcibly preventing us from buying and selling the books which contain them.
eBay just took away the freedom of private individuals to sell books they legally own to each other.
You are calling this "freedom", using the word to refer to its exact opposite. This is Newspeak.
The books are available on Amazon.
> This is book-banning, pure and simple.
I'd wager that sales of these six books will be higher in the next week than they were in the last two years combined.
The Dr. Seuss books were banned not just by eBay but also by their publisher, which holds the copyright, so you can still buy them used on Amazon... for $1,500+ per copy: https://www.wane.com/news/prices-skyrocket-for-dr-seuss-book...
The reality is that these books will not be accessible to the vast majority of future American readers. This is just a fact at this point.
It doesn't even matter if Amazon keeps selling them, as the publisher banned them, so the number of (legal) copies will dwindle to zero. Also, with Amazon starting to ban books on similar political grounds, saying "but Amazon didn't ban this specific book (yet)" or "you can still get a copy at some obscure second-hand stores" is burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the reality of what is happening.
For the record, the same whitewashing (wokewashing?) happened to the Richard Scarry books which are all "abridged" because they were so offensively conservative about the role of women.
https://www.upworthy.com/8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-class...
Do you really have issues with the changes they made? They weren't abridged but just edited to show both sexes and different races doing jobs other than being maids and housewives. I'm not sure replacing milkman, fireman and cowboys with firefighters, gardeners and scientists is 'woke'
I do have a problem if they ban the older editions.
I don't see how they are "banned". Banning means "forbidden, disallowed, illegal". The older editions do not fall under any of the definitions. They are harder to get, because the author stopped selling them. You can still find them somewhere, and if you already have them you can keep them, they are just less convenient to acquire than they used to be.
You’re trying too hard to defend the indefensible. eBay and Amazon stopped the used book market for these not just the publisher and rights holder.
According to your take no book has ever been banned in the US and people who complained about book banning were clutching pearls.
Discontinuing the printing is different than preventing sales of used copies.
I'm with you; I don't think ebay should be forced to sell anything, but I think it was a bad decision to knee jerk ban auctions for the books in the news this week when they sell literal nazi medals.
I'm not angry with ebay, but I think they made a stupid choice and that they have highlighted how few alternative ways there are to purchase used books.
Upside is that it's good they are highlighting it now, finally. It's a very peculiar flex for them to decide to do, reselling books has a very long history of court cases saying the publisher cannot control the sale of an original purchased copy.
Sometimes it's because the copyright holders (which are not the authors) decided to stop publishing them for political reasons. This decision is all too easy to make when you are a massive copyright holder like Disney. The result is that these massive copyright holders can decide which ideas are allowed, and which ideas will be banned.
In other cases, these book bans are executed by large book distributors, like Amazon: https://ncac.org/news/amazon-book-removal. These are done very much against the wishes of the author, publisher, and copyright holder.
In still other cases, the book ban is enacted by a secondary market distributor, forcibly preventing one private legal owner of the work from selling it to another reader. This is what's happening here with eBay and the Dr. Seuss books.
This is a multi-pronged attack on the freedom to express and distribute ideas. And yes, it's all legal, much like the commissar control of all book publications under the Soviet regime.
You say that eBay is preventing one private owner from selling to another private buyer, but what’s the alternative? To force eBay to facilitate the transaction? How is that freedom? The owner and buyer are still free to sell and buy this book, just not thorough eBay. If there is enough demand for this kind of transaction then the market will find a way to facilitate it. That’s capitalism.
My opinion is that copyright should be limited to the lifetime of the author, at which point it goes into public domain. In this particular case, that would mean the books would have been in the public domain for a long time now and there wouldn't be a controversy over this particular issue.
But the issue could still arise if the author were alive. Imagine Dr. Seuss were alive today and made this decision himself. It's the same controversy: person/entity with control over IP makes a decision on distribution of IP, people get upset. But that's the deal - you want to promote the useful arts by granting limited monopoly rights over art, then you better actually grant limited monopoly rights over art. That means the right to not publish the art.
Do you honestly believe you're "suppressing art" if you fail to force the rightful owners if said art to go against their own will and instead follow your orders and desires on what others should do with what's rightfully theirs?
It sounds an awful lot like your are not as much interested in anyone's freedom as you're interested in imposing your personal will into everyone around you.
That's just not true. This was Random House Books' decision, not eBay or Amazon. The marketplaces are just following orders.
> The decision won’t affect Dr. Seuss’s best-known works, which publisher Random House Books for Young Readers and several booksellers on Tuesday said would remain available to customers.
> The review of the six books at issue was conducted last year by Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP, which oversees Dr. Seuss’s publishing interests and ancillary areas.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/six-dr-seuss-books-are-dropped-...
First of all, hat-tip for using that chilling phrase in this unintentionally appropriate context.
Furthermore, eBay is a secondary market bookseller. As such, they facilitate legal sales of privately-owned books between individuals. They have absolutely no duty to "follow orders" by a publisher. In fact, publishers would shut down all secondary markets if they could - it would help their sales of new books.
Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that a publisher "ordered" eBay to stop selling the books, and such "order" would be invalid and ridiculous.
This is a decision by eBay to flex their corporate muscles to ban books they find politically disagreeable.
Did google “ban” reader when they discontinued it?
...and the people with the copyright to the book thought about it and decided they do not want to distribute their book.
Are they not entitled to decide for themselves what to do with what's theirs?
If somebody were to publish the 6 banned Seuss books and get sued by the estate, they'd be able to make a compelling legal argument that the copyright laws that allow the estate to effectively ban books for 95 years are unconstitutional though they'd probably need a different Supreme Court to have a chance of winning and actually making the "science and useful arts" clause mean something again. It would probably be ill-advised to even attempt a challenge to copyright law on these grounds with the current court as it could lead to another bad precedent like Eldred v. Ashcroft (the "perpetual copyright is constitutional if Congress extends the terms every 20 years via Mickey Mouse Protection Acts" case where the FSF filed a brief in support of the plaintiff). I think a more productive course of action would be to use the right wing outrage over this to push for an "abandonware" exception to copyright law (basically a "keep it in print or lose your copyright" requirement) and possibly copyright term reduction. Given that the political party that is traditionally more supportive of corporate interests is now furious about corporate censorship, there is now a golden opportunity to roll back corporate power and those on both sides who share that goal (albeit for different reasons) should work together for the greater good.
So in essence, you could aim the current copyright law is inconsistent with the constitution.
I am not a legal scholar so I have no idea how naive this argument might be from a constitutional law perspective. I have a feeling it would be pretty naive, to be honest.
Let's move away from the Dr. Seuss example and look at another instance of where artists have used their exclusive right to restrict distribution of their work. In 2015 the Wu Tang Clan produced a single copy of their 7th album "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin". The album itself then went on a tour of its own and was showcased at museums until it was eventually sold to the infamous "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli for $2 million. The contract he had to sign included the following genius clause:
"The buying party also agrees that, at any time during the stipulated 88 year period, the seller may legally plan and attempt to execute one (1) heist or caper to steal back Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, which, if successful, would return all ownership rights to the seller. Said heist or caper can only be undertaken by currently active members of the Wu-Tang Clan and/or actor Bill Murray, with no legal repercussions." [1]
The legend behind this album has now birthed a forthcoming Netflix documentary [2]. So here is a situation where the author's exclusive control over their art has birthed not just a documentary, which is art, but a legal document which I would classify as art. None of this would be possible in a world where an author's exclusive copyright doesn't exist or could be infringed if they choose to restrict distribution of their work. So I would disagree with your conclusion that it's hard to claim that restricting the distribution of work doesn't "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
[1]: https://gizmodo.com/bill-murray-can-legally-steal-the-2-mill...
[2]: https://www.engadget.com/netflix-martin-shkreli-wu-tang-albu...
They're not deciding which ideas are allowed or banned.
They're not stopping anyone else from creating, espousing, publishing any other ideas at all. There's thousands of publishers, and even the very biggest only hold a tiny fraction of the publishing market, so this complaint seems quite overblown.
Should a publisher be forced to publish things they choose not to? I'd prefer not. There's plenty of others. And the internet makes it easy to post any ideas you choose, vastly easier than at any point in history for individuals to make their ideas available to billions of people.
Dr Seuss passed away in 1991, about 30 years ago, so he isn’t capable of being embarrassed any more.
This is an incomplete story. The company convened a panel of outside "experts" to make these determinations:
> Dr. Seuss Enterprises said that it had consulted a panel of experts including educators in reviewing its catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication of the six titles.
> In a statement to the Associated Press, Seuss Enterprises said it is “committed to listening and learning and will continue to review our entire portfolio.”
https://deadline.com/2021/03/dr-seuss-books-canceled-no-long...
Unlike other so-called "cancel culture" stories, the pressure campaign didn't play out publicly. But the language is the same and strongly suggests that the publisher is deferring to the judgment of outside "experts", hoping this will keep them in the good graces of the increasingly woke publishing and education worlds.
It's been a problem for years that there's been so redress available when a publisher either owns an IP and refuses to sell or license it freely, or when an IP falls into unclear ownership and the same basic thing results.
This all has nothing to do with anything political (because these are not being suppressed by a government, and citizens and organizations are free to choose their own speech and associations) and everything to do with just how garbage copyright law is.
You are talking about works that became incidentally unavailable for commercial reasons (not that many people are interested in 22 year-old strategy video games). The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.
Their publisher also didn't "shut down": they delibrately decided to stop publishing these books because they deemed them Politically Incorrect:
https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed...
> “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author and illustrator’s birthday.
And now eBay has decided that if you legally own a copy, you can't sell it to another reader, because it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.
I recently started a game of Alpha Centauri again. Good times.
As always, the only dynamic considered here by the publisher is money. They have made a calculation that doing this will benefit their bottom line in the long run. That's the free market and the way the system is designed to work. You may not like their decision, but it's their decision to make. That's the freedom they enjoy under our system. You have the freedom to complain about it and no one will stop you, but everyone is free to act however they best they see fit.
> And now eBay has decided that if you legally own a copy, you can't sell it to another reader, because it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.
eBay has not decided this. They have no power to decide this for you in our free market capitalist system. They have decided they don't want to facilitate the transaction, which is their right as a free enterprise. If you own the book you are still free to sell it to anyone you want. eBay is not going to help you though, and forcing them to do so would be against free market principles.
If I'm Disney, and I own millions of works, I can start banning some of them on a whim. My bottom line won't be meaningfully affected.
> They have decided they don't want to facilitate the transaction, which is their right as a free enterprise.
It was the legal right (duty, in fact) of Soviet commissars to vet any book before publication. The net effect was book-banning.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it won't lead to catastrophic consequences.
Standard Oil's complete monopolistic takeover of the US oil market was also legal at its time. Then we decided we can't live with these results and made laws against them.
The topic of discussion is a single publisher making a decision for themselves. You are all the way over in Soviet land talking about book banning and government censorship. None of that is happening, and the slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're imagining. Anyone in this country is free to write, publish, and sell works with content identical to those in the books Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to stop publishing, as long as they don't have images and words similar enough to violate their copyright. The ideas contained within are not banned by any government or monopoly.
I had a great chuckle at this.
The issue that is being tossed into a big pile of other issues is simple. Ebay, a private company, has taken the path of banning the sale of those now-discontinued books. This action is totally within their rights and is fully legal for them to do. You can, rightly, talk about the content of _this specific book_ as much as you want, but that's not the broader issue here. What is riling up some people is the idea that in the US we are, ostensibly, a country founded on freedom and they feel like that freedom is being encroach upon. You seem to feel like them banning the sale of the book is no big deal, but they are in a large market position and them preventing the secondary market sale has a large impact.
The even bigger issue is that what we are seeing are very vocal groups that push the idea that we have to prevent these kinds of thoughts from being in our society at all. They force these ideas onto the greater community as a whole by attacking any entity they deem as non-compliant. As a result you have companies preempt that attack and voluntarily comply. To use the theme from the previous poster, they are voluntarily banning or self-censoring. This _is_ an attack on freedom though. You cannot have freedom of speech if you make it so only the speech you _like_ is effectively allowed. And I purposefully said effectively and not legally.
This obviously doesn't get into the broader topics of corporate censorship. I have many thoughts, some of them conflicting, about that as a whole. The simplest distillation would be that as long as your free speech is not encroaching into illegal territory then I don't feel like you should be excluded from society, even if your communications are repugnant.
So, back to where this started. You claim the 'slope isn't nearly as slippery' as they were imagining. Perhaps today that is the case. Maybe it's the same next week or next year. At some point the thoughts being attacked may very well align with your personal beliefs and _then_ the shape of the slope will be drastically different _for you_.
And "Politically Incorrect" is sure a gentle way of describing the content. Maybe you should quote the line from the article you linked which describes some of the "politically incorrect" bits? Or do you recognize that they're actually pretty offensive. I sure wouldn't want to use my printing equipment to print copies of that "Politically Incorrect" book either, and I'd have a problem with the suggestion that someone should be able to force me to.
President Obama praised, quoted, and recommended Dr. Seuss's books in official press releases throughout his presidency, all the way to his last year as president - 2015:
https://nypost.com/2021/03/03/barack-and-michelle-obama-prai...
But now the Woke Mob has come for Dr. Seuss, and we're all instructed to recite that Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.
To quote Orwell: "The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."
People making a big deal out of the cancelling are blowing it into a far bigger thing than it is. He's not being cancelled, those works are just being recognized as offensive. There's no gotcha to Obama having praised some of his books, because those books are still worthy of praise.
> He hasn't been cancelled, it's just that a few of the more egregious books are being discontinued. Horton Hears a Who? Still a great message. The Grinch? Still great
You are clearly in favor of banning ideas you disagree with. Nice to see you are fine with the publication of books when you approve of their "message".
This is what happens when Amazon, for example, bans books that express views of transgenderism with which Amazon employees disagree.
The copyright holder / publisher can prevent any publication of books it holds copyright to, and has done so.
Distributors of books, like Amazon, can stop selling books they disagree with, and have now starting doing that too.
So the answer to your question is: all the above.
People want the book removed because it exists, someplace - not because someone has a metaphorical megaphone. Let's stop with the metaphors, by the way. This isn't literary critique, or English Literature 301. It's a discussion of censorship. Stopping someone-who-isn't-you from reading a work that has nothing to do with you, is censorship.
Wait, sorry, is someone confiscating the book? Burning it? Requiring it be burned? Arresting people who have it? Arresting the people who wrote it? Legally compelling the publisher to edit it? Legally compelling distributors not to distribute it?
As far as I can tell, everyone complaining is upset that distributors don't want to tarnish their brand with certain content, and authors and stakeholders have decided that certain content doesn't match their modern brands. None of these are censorship!
As an author, you are free to write dumb things. As a bookstore, I am free to not sell the the dumb things you wrote. That's not censorship.
As a publisher, I am free not to publish the dumb stuff you wrote for you. That's the metaphorical megaphone, in case that is unclear, and no one can force a publisher to give you one.
Yes, we won't be sending people with the naughty Dr. Seuss books to the gulag. No one is saying that. We're concerned about monopoly power combined with wokist ideology.
The Hollywood Blacklist was completely voluntary on the part of the movie studios which enforced it, a decision of certain private companies not to -- how did you phrase it? -- "tarnish their brand" by collaborating with people suspected of Communist tendencies. It is held to be morally repugnant today, and somehow I doubt you would defend it with the same argument you use in the Dr. Seuss case.
I worry about the authoritarian leanings of anyone who doesn't draw this distinction.
Some private actor X performs an action Y which other people Z find reprehensible. The action Y is within X's legal rights to perform.
You can focus on how reprehensible Y is and how Z are right to condemn it. Or you could focus on how X should be totally free to do Y if X so desires, even if we don't like Y.
What usually happens is that if you feel Z are right or you wish to support Z or you wish to not be seen as supporting "enemies" of Z, you will focus on condemning Y. It won't even occur to you to emphasize that doing Y is legal; if pressed you'll freely admit it is, but to you focusing on how Y is legal will look like hypocritical attempts to evade the real issue, which is the terribleness of Y.
On the other hand, if you dislike Z or like the "enemies" of Z, you will focus on how Y is legal and how Z's dangerous rhetoric about Y poses a real danger of conflating Y with actually illegal acts. You might or might not agree that Y is terrible, but to you it will seem a decidedly minor concern compared to the dangerous rhetoric issuing from Z.
The book exists. The publisher's just decided they won't sell it anymore.
Stop misrepresenting facts.
"“EBay is currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items,” a spokeswoman for the company said in an email. New copies of the six books were no longer for sale online at major retailers such as Barnes & Noble on Thursday afternoon, which put eBay among the most prominent platforms for the books to be sold."
This is a true statement. His behavior always showed this regardless of what obama said. Unlike your orwellian quote, we're not rewriting history, just changing our tolerances.
Also, if Dr. Seuss was always so racist, how come the left embraced him until very very recently?
Are you seriously claiming that all the many people on the left, including Obama, were embracing a clear and known racist as recently as a few months ago?
I don't really think this is a good-faith argument based on the language of the first sentence, but i'll reply anyways...
Yes the evidence is his clearly documented body of work. He used many racial stereotypes and derogatory imagery. He has images of Japanese Americans, Africans, East Asians, and they all use stereotypes and caricatures that are negative.
I can't speak for "the left" but he was embraced by most people because he was popular and many of his stories and books were benign. Lots of bad behavior was embraced by both left and right Americans throughout history. Past acceptance is not indication that the future must accept.
Yes. I am making the claim that people, including Obama (who is not the only image of the left, and not particularly important figure in a literary sense) were embracing Dr. Seuss. A lot of his more objectionable work is rather unpopular, so its not crazy to think that his supporters did not audit his behavior.
There is no doubt that people were embracing him. There is no doubt that much of his behavior is racist. There is no contraction here. People have embraced bad people before and that is (somewhat) ok as look as society learns and grows and corrects their behavior. This is the learning and growing. A book that sold 7k copies over the last few years is no longer in print because it portrayed people in bad ways.
Have you actually seen the imagery? This is not a good-faith characterization of what is happening. The images are just rude racist imagery (saying a chinese person has "slanted eyes" for example) that the IP owners were embarrassed by.
No, it really isn't. When a book edition goes out of print that does not mean it's banned. If the editor decides not to invest in a re-edit ion that does not mean it's banned. If you go to a book store and it doesn't have a book that does not mean it's banned. If you go to a library and it doesn't have a book in its inventory that does not mean it's banned.
If you lack arguments, please don't fabricate lies and misrepresentations like that. That only makes you look dishonest and desperate to grasp to an argument that even yourself acknowledge has no basis nor merit.
I would guess that eventually (if these books are popular enough) they will be edited and brought up to date like Richard Scary books:
https://www.upworthy.com/8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-class...
What is wrong is pulling it from stock as well as secondary marketplaces.
What if the Christian or Muslim clerics get to say what books should be pulled too?
As an immigrant from a Muslim country I’m super excited about this. I’m going to ban sex scenes on TV so I don’t have to skip past them.
"Thousands of books go out of print every year, so what's the problem with us banning these specific books for political reasons?"
"Does it really matter that we banned these dozens of books? Thousands others were not banned, and are available to the Soviet reader at the nearest bookstores!"
This is a slipper slope, and we're already sliding quite deeply into it. Amazon just banned a book about transgenderism that it considered "offensive":
https://ncac.org/news/amazon-book-removal
This is clearly the Soviet case: it's not banning a single book, it's banning the ideas that it presents, for being Politically Incorrect. Once the book is unavailable, American readers will not have access to these ideas anywhere. Any other book presenting these same ideas will also be banned on the same grounds.
This is precisely what was happening in the Soviet Union and similar totalitarian regimes that banned "forbidden / politically-incorrect" ideas.
This is not fighting corporations, this is getting bogged down in culture wars
And the term censorship is broad, and isn't specific to private entities versus government. Just because we don't have a Soviet-style government (good), doesn't mean that automatically everything is free and open. If I buy out all of a particular work of art and burn it in a bonfire, I've committed censorship. If not illegal, it should at least elicit some moral eyebrow-raising, no?
I don't see the problem here. The copyright owner's no longer wish to distribute certain items in their intellectual property collection? So? I don't see people concerned that Disney isn't pulling "Song of the South" out of their vault, or isn't streaming it on Disney+.
What's the alternative you want? The government to FORCE artists to publish? FORCE Ebay to list these particular Dr. Seuss books? What the hell?? Isn't that worse?
Yes, this is all legal. However, legally, the commissars of the Soviet Union also had the right and the power to ban ideas, books, works of art, and every form of expression.
The problem is the result: a small elite group of cultural commissars controlling the flow of ideas, and shutting undesirable ideas out of the public discourse and the public mind.
That is how totalitarian regimes are created and maintained.
Incidentally, the "government force" in copyright protection is the protection of copyright. That was done for the explicit purpose of fostering the publication of works, since the American lawmakers could never imagine that there will come a time in which huge corporations will ban books on political grounds.
All the government has to do is to stop enforcing copyright protection for copyright-owners who no longer publish the copyrighted works. Guaranteed other publishers will pick up these Dr. Seuss books, since he is by far the most popular children's books author of our time.
As things stand, bid these books adieu. Your children will not be able to read them.
The publisher deciding to no longer sell some part of their work is entirely different. It makes no difference to your ability to enjoy a copy you own or to sell it to someone else. Nor does it affect your ability to create a similar illustrated children's book including whatever stereotypes you desire. No one is 'banning' you from doing this, although it might diminish their opinion of you.
Once expressions of ideas are effectively banned, you are in a totalitarian, oppressive regime. It doesn't matter whether that banning was done by the state or by huge monopolistic corporations: the end result is the same.
Also, in this case, while corporations are leading the way, we also see increasingly loud calls for our government to step in and criminalize some forms of speech, for example those deemed "hate speech": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html
This is really a two-pronged attack on free speech and the free exchange of ideas: in the private sphere, individuals and companies move to effectively ban certain expressions, such as the publication of "objectionable" books. In the public sphere, there are moves to criminalize "objectionable" expressions.
The actions in each sphere reciprocally support each other, and normalize the idea that the free exchange of ideas must be policed and restricted.
It was public criticism, or the fear of public criticism that led them to make this decision in the first place, so this seems like a perfectly fine line of argument to make. (ie, that this was a poor decision on their part.)
I do not like to see what I am seeing in this HN thread. I think that not propagating offensive, dehumanizing views publicly seems perfectly wise.
I did ask a question. “Hilarious” how you missed that.
This have some logic to it in a child mind because they could assume they would know best how to take care of those animals.
It's obviously a caricature but nowhere does it say African people are animals or monkey. This is all originating from your own racism.
Man, isn't it just fantastic how easily you make my point for me. This is also the viewpoint that Dr Seuss' publishers imagined the public at large would hold, so accordingly they have ceased to publish a book that represents "Africans" with this picture:
https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/content/DrSuess_Board_2.png
So, now you see the issue yes?
Article I pulled the image from: https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/six-dr.-seuss-books-will-no...
Edit: I am unable to respond directly. The Africans are the monkeys holding the rod in that picture, that is the entire point of this whole "ceasing publication" business
Are you going to say the cat in the hat is offensive for people with Cleft lip ?
Your ridiculous deflection is saddening. You yourself stated the criteria the publisher made their decision under, and now you will act like you have not said it
Edit: the very image you linked shows "the African island of Yerka", where they're retrieving the bird from, and you expect me to believe you can't see the implication that the monkeys in skirts holding the shaped bar the bird resides on are the African residents of that island?
These are both very much among his classics.
Nobody will miss these books because they have been erased. Nobody missed banned books in the USSR either.
I'm sure some people will miss these books, but for those people they can go ahead and find a collector's copy on a marketplace, use a library which has them, find some other private holder, or use the internet to enjoy them in whatever capacity. This is because these books are not banned by a centralized government, but instead have been selected to cease publication by a private corporation.
These books arent gone, you can still find them and they are documented for historical purposes, but as a society we have decided that there is no need for them as childrens books. Nobody cares about the hundreds of books that go out of print every year
The books will be preserved, much like banned books in the Soviet unions typically were preserved, in some government archive.
The millions of readers of our generation, who had access to these books because they were offered for sale, will no longer have access to them.
My parents read these books to me. I will not be able to read them to my children.
"Nobody will miss them" is an incredibly false and irrelevant argument. Nobody "missed" all the books in the Soviet union that were blocked by the commissars and never published. How is that a valid justification for this happening in the US now?
You are justifying book banning, pure and simple, and you are using any available argument, and many dishonest ones, to do it. Ultimately, you yourself don't understand why you do this. You just follow the cancel mob.
I am a member of a minority that is supposed to be offended by these books. I am not. I would bet anything that you were not personally offended if you ever read them, too.
But the Cancel Mob has mobilized and you are mindlessly following, because it is the convenient choice, the easy choice, the SAFE choice.
This decision - to cease publishing select Dr Seuss books - was taken, with no external pressures, by the private corporation and legal owner of these books.
There is no “Cancel Mob” mobilizing here, except perhaps the right wing one that is acting as if a business is not free to remove some part of their inventory on a whim.
Your analogies to the USSR banning books is completely inappropriate as the USSR was a centralized government banning books. A private corporation is certainly not compelled to produce or sell any product they do not wish to continue to sell, and the books remain legal to possess, sell, or trade because no rights have been infringed by the US government nor any legal actions or pressures issued on this topic.
I found it for you, free for anyone with an internet connection to read. It was the first result when i googled the name of the story internet archive
This was nothing special, a low volume book taken out of print, politicized by people like you.
People who actually supported slavery, or Jim Crow, I would say are in fact evil, regardless of whether those views were acceptable in some circles.
You really must pay attention to intent, and this is a major failing of the modern edge of these progressive movements. If suddenly, some phrase quickly falls out of fashion, an I use the old antiquated phrase, it must matter whether I actually had any racist intent. Just the fact that I haven't kept up with the newest moral outrage is not enough on its own.
Ok, sure, this is a fair point in general, but how is it exactly applicable here?
Let's take the example of "If I Ran the Zoo", since it's one of the only images [0][1] I can find.
The synopsis of the book seems to be a child daydreaming about the animals he would keep at his zoo. Whether or not the "Africans" in this book are one of those animals is not clear to me, but this is a representation of African / Black people as literal monkeys.
How you can try to imply that representing black people as monkeys is not racism, given the hundreds of years of insults in that vein, pseudoscience from slave owners and sympathizers suggesting the same, and indeed all the folk with the moral failings of the time that you suggest who would hold and perpetuate this viewpoint?
> Dr Suess is not evil because he could not predict where the moral zeitgeist would lead us
I completely fail to see how you can infer that a publisher not generating additional copies of prose that has found itself in a morally compromised position implies that Dr Suess is evil, or that anyone thinks that.
Indeed, I believe Dr Suess to have published 60 or more books in his career, so merely 10% of his career publications have been selected to cease being replicated further because they partook and perpetuated the darker side of a slaver society's worldview. This is not saying the man was evil or that his works were nefarious, it is saying that science and society have moved us beyond those viewpoints and propagating them further does us no good.
Indeed, I'm not even sure how this is being portrayed as "canceling" or any such thing. A publisher with control over the book rights stopped producing the book rights. Your entire rant is predicated around this being a retaliatory act for perceived evils, but that's incredibly lacking in nuance.
Children develop their worldview thru the mediums of information they interact with, and to for a publisher to refine its selection to prevent children growing up with unconscious cognitive biases that are dated, far outside, and even contrary to mainstream societal views of our time is just a complete non-issue.
[0] image: https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/content/DrSuess_Board_2.png [1] article: https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/six-dr.-seuss-books-will-no...
I was originally going to issue a rebuttal based on my reading of "If I Ran the Zoo." But, it occurs to me that you can't really be very offended if you haven't even read the story. What's there to be offended by? You don't even know the context of the image which offends you.
>I completely fail to see how you can infer that a publisher not generating additional copies of prose that has found itself in a morally compromised position implies that Dr Suess is evil, or that anyone thinks that.
Although I still disagree with the publisher's decision, I take your point here.
>because they partook and perpetuated the darker side of a slaver society's worldview
What exactly is a "slaver society?" Dr. Seuss was born in 1904, after slavery was abolished. I doubt he was much of a "slaver," as in "someone who literally obtains slaves."
>Children develop their worldview thru the mediums of information they interact with,
Yes, precisely, and I don't believe it's appropriate that children learn to fear and ban ideas which they find distasteful.
Excuse me? Those monkeys in that picture are representing African humans. I know perfectly well what I've just seen, because I read the article I linked. Perhaps you have failed to do so?
> What exactly is a "slaver society"? Dr. Seuss was born in 1904
Ok, and the Tulsa Race Massacre was in 1921. State-backed murder of black people for the crime of being successful. The south was clearly deeply unhappy about their loss of slaves and backed a set of increasingly "plausibly deniable" laws over time that were designed to segregate, undermine, and condemn to failure Black people in the USA.
If you really think "slaver society" is an overkill to describe an entire region of the USA with extremely racist ideals towards people they consider slaves, let's instead say "because they partook and perpetuated the darker side of a society that wishes they were still slavers". I'm so sorry I was slightly pedantic for you
> I don't believe it's appropriate that children learn to fear and ban ideas which they find distasteful
What kind of horseshit disingenuous representation of the situation is that? These Fox News - not legally a news corporation btw - talking points are so stupid. Once again, just like the "USSR book banning" fear mongering analogy above, you are acting as someone who pretends that a private business ceasing publication of books with societally repulsive views is somehow analogous to "banning ideas".
I hope children grow up and learn that condemning and removing from modern discourse historical or traditional views that no longer match up with the ethical framework of society is the only way we can continue to increase human rights in the face of governments and billionaires increasingly concerned with removing those.
Your framing doesn't follow from your logic in any way, and you don't play with pedantry particularly impressively.
For the record, I don't watch Fox news, and I dislike it quite a bit.
Indeed, the fact that the first time you've ever hopped into a conversation around book publishing is to decry the fact that a publisher isn't generating more pictures of Africans represented as monkeys distances us even further.
Finally, the fact that you don't think "slaver society viewpoints" persisted in a society that murdered an entire city block of Black people merely for being Black people really hammers home how ignorant you are.
If you do not like Fox News, you should question why you are parroting their ridiculous mischaracterizations of a private corporation's normal business actions.
On a personal note, when I see groups banning ideas and views I automatically discredit the group and ideas behind the banning. The reason is that if a view truly has merit it should be able to stand up to healthy debate on it's own merits.
I agree with what you wrote here, but if you believe this I'm confused why you would take issue with what happened here. This is exactly what has played out. These books were created and published in an open market. Remember, in free markets there is the possibility of failure. That's what you're seeing right here. The publisher of these ideas have determined that they have failed in the market.
So what's the problem? No "large un-elected ministry acceptability" caused this to happen. It was the marketplace that rejected these ideas, and the publisher didn't want to bear the cost of continued publication, which they are free to do. Everyone involved exercised their individual freedoms in the marketplace. The system is working as intended. Where is the failure?
The marketplace hasn't rejected these ideas. The holders of the copyright - a law enforced by the government - have rejected these ideas and no one can oppose them. Because of copyright, no other publisher can publish these books in the marketplace. Ergo - no free market and an effective ban on the books.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to stop publication of their particular expression of these ideas because the ideas themselves are not popular enough to financially justify their continued publication. That's the method by which the whole system works. Ideas flourish in the marketplace when people support them. When people support an idea, it achieves financial success for those that express it. People who express unpopular ideas difficult to find financial success due to a lack of a support base.
How else do you imagine the marketplace of ideas works, and what exactly do you think happens to ideas that are rejected by the marketplace?
There is no flourishing of the market place here - it has been implicitly denied. If there were no copyright - you can be bet your years salary that there would be folks willing to publish these books for the audience that wishes to read them.
Remove the copyright - make it a true free market and THEN let's see if your argument that the ideas themselves are not popular enough holds true. Besides your statement of financial justification is utterly false. Dr Seuss tops the list of top 10 children's books.
No, its fascist ultra-left ideology that is responsible for these implicit bans. Some folks want to dictate what other should read - capitalism doesn't even come into the picture.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2019/03/01/dr-seus...
And I’m not trying to move any goalposts. In several conversations here I’ve been assured that the actual problem is not the discontinuation of these specific books, but the larger picture wherein under some slippery slope argument the general ideas could be eventually banned outright. But apologies if this is not your position and you take issue with the ability of these companies to control their own IP. I would agree with you there.
But at the same time I also recognize that copyright is built into our Constitution and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. So under that framework, I don’t see anything wrong with what Dr. Seuss Enterprises did. Copyright gives them freedom over the creative works they own. The freedom to distribute and the freedom not to distribute. Without the freedom to not distribute works, the decision to publish any works becomes risky for the author, because it cannot be undone, ever. This is going to have the necessary effect of reducing the number of ideas that are expressed, as riskier ideas cannot be retracted by their authors. After all, this is the general idea behind the concept of copyright and underpins the entire marketplace of ideas.
I have no doubt that if copyright were abolished, others would pick up the unpublished works and attempt to distribute them. But this comes at a cost of time and money. What if they don’t sell enough copies to recoup the effort, and they go out of business, thereby halting publication? What if seeing this failure, no one else takes up the mantle of publishing these books? We are in the exact same situation. Would you say they are banned? Of course not, they have just failed financially, which is what happens all the time to books, and what happened in this case.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises surmised that the continued publication of these books would hurt them financially. As your link indicates, they publish a number of very popular books, but notably none of the books in your link are being discontinued. We already know the ideas aren’t very popular because they don’t sell well as it is. If they were popular, they would be on your list.
Anyway, tldr; don’t blame leftist ideology for the perceived failure of a system of, by, and for capitalists.
I highly doubt this. I do not dehumanize others nor believe that likening enslaved races to monkeys is in any way appropriate. Besides, you are discussing free speech here - Dr Seuss in no way had his free speech curtailed. He is dead.
> Freedom of speech provides a natural check and balance by letting the best ideas thrive via an open market of ideas
This is a meaningless feel-goodism.
Freedom of speech protects citizens against government retaliation or censorship for most categories of speech, notably carving out exceptions for calls to violence / treason etc.. Freedom of speech basically means you can say whatever the hell you want if it's not too overtly tearing at the fabric of society.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence; I can say 2+2 = 5 but that doesn't make it smart. People will call me an idiot, and they have that right.
Freedom of speech doesn't protect authors from not "eternally having their works published by their copyright holders even after the author's lifetime has ended", and that is literally the only thing I can see you arguing for here. A publisher who owns the rights to these books has stopped generating more copies of them. What is wrong with that?
> On a personal note, when I see groups banning ideas and views I automatically discredit the group and ideas behind the banning
So, when you see Dr Seuss' publisher stop generating additional copies of books they believe further ideas and sentiments they wish to have no part of - surely, they are free to do this - you are automatically discrediting what group for this banning, exactly?
Slavery is terrible, and since black people were enslaved, literature about Black American's lives from before 1865 is not acceptable. This is bad.
Considering they were not that popular to begin with, it seems like only a few thousand Americans would really be without access.
We decided it'd be a lark, but the return probably wouldn't beat printing Bibles.
Really, all you'd need to do to make the point to yourself that belief isn't a finite resource here is change your mind.
I'm reminded of In-Q-Tel at times like these. I defy anyone to find more than 20% of wildly successful "tech giants" who have not received government funding and support. It's not a free market when some get tax breaks and government money. If you get those things, your utmost law should be the law that governs the government in your region. This will never happen, of course.
In FY19 the us government spent 4.5 trillion dollars.
To put that in perspective (these are the top 5 companies in the world by market cap and some quick googling): Saudi Aramco spent 150 Billion, Apple spent about 200 Billion, Microsoft was 82 Billion, Amazon spent 265 Billion and Google spent 127 Billion.
Combined the top 5 companies in the world spent less in an entire year than the US government spent in a single quarter (824B/year vs. 1,125B).
There is so much spend that it is difficult to have a company that in some way doesn't either directly do business with the USG or benefit within 1 degree of separation from USG spending.
Have you looked up the definition of the word "banned"?
"to prohibit, forbid, or bar;"
These books are no longer being published; this is a legal freedom that the publisher has. They are no longer sold on Amazon; this is a freedom Amazon has. They are still available somewhere in the US, they are still legal to read, and they are still legal to own. This isn't banning, this is becoming distasteful to the market.
They have simply become less convenient to acquire.
Here is something from 1981 for your daily dose of irony: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/opinion-censors-play-...
"The Pico case is only part of a pattern of intense local battles erupting around the country as opposing forces arm themselves for what could become a destructive war over books in America’s schools and school libraries. The insurgents, whose ideological supply lines extend deep into the right wing and its quasi-religious satellites, are well organized; and the advocates of civil liberty in the nation’s schools are reading reports from the front with alarm. “The community of the book,” as Random House vice president Anthony Shulte calls it, is beginning to prepare for a long struggle whose outcome is by no means clear."
...
"Unfortunately for the nation’s authors, their publishers, and readers, the AAP report understates the magnitude of the movement to ban books. Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), calls the proliferating challenges to books “an epidemic of future shock” among individuals who “have little more in common than insecurity and fear of a world they can no longer understand.” Judith Krug, director of the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, is alarmed that the number of reported incidents of attempted book censorship in school and public libraries ballooned immediately after the Nov. 4 election of Ronald Reagan, and has continued at a record rate along with the rising fortunes of the new right."
[p.s. I'ts even better than I thought. I missed the sidebar on the above 1981 page on Seuss:
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-dr-seuss-contro...]
Are you saying your bannings are the true bannings and others are illegitimate bannings? Or should they all be equally banned?
Are religious conservatives okay to get their list of bad books banned?
Throughout history society has decided what (legal) things are acceptable in public - public executions, graphic sexuality, violence. Today, (I think) the majority of society seem to have accepted that racism and racist stereotypes are bad and don't want to see them in childrens books, TV programs and films etc.
This is different from Mein Kampf or Marquis de Sade, or Lolita being available in bookshops - the majority of people reading them would know what they were getting into.
You do realize your comment perverts the very meaning of the word "freedom" to mean the opposite of its actual meaning, right?
You are "freeing" people from the freedom to access information and ideas you find unacceptable.
That is not freedom, that is the opposite of freedom.
Banning "unacceptable" ideas is the staple of Orwell's 1984, and appropriately, we are starting to use Newspeak as well: "Freedom is Slavery".
> Throughout history society has decided what (legal) things are acceptable in public
This is a dominant used book seller banning private individuals from selling a book to each other to read in private settings. Nothing about this is "public".
> This is different from Mein Kampf or Marquis de Sade, or Lolita
As if anyone will be surprised when our new commissar overlords at eBay and Amazon ban these books next.
It's not a perversion at all; in fact, this sense of freedom being more than raw ability to "do whatever you want" was recognized as early as Rousseau and possibly even earlier. This also led to the creation of the concepts of positive and negative liberty. "Freedom from" is absolutely a valid form of freedom, and a core one in our society. It's why things which aren't harms (and sometimes barely even hurts) are prohibited - public nudity, playing loud music on a bus, and other forms of nuisance. The canonical example is the fact that there is no harm-based reason to ban corpse desecration. In fact, it's a law based on the offence principle. There is some space in our society for laws like that, but we need to be careful with them, of course.
This case is even more benign - we have here a company refusing to sell these items. You speak of 'information and ideas', but these ideas can still manifest even on Ebay. No 'unacceptable idea' has been 'banned'. I'm not sure who you're saying is using Newspeak. As was pointed out by Marcuse in the 60s we're well past Orwell - now the contradiction is hidden in the noun itself.
What we describe as 'free societies' are full of restrictions on some freedom to ensure the development and use of greater freedoms. That's a core part of liberal society.
Freedom from saying forbidden words, freedom from thinking forbidden thoughts, freedom from all the people who write, research, or joke about controversial subjects, freedom from anything that could potentially offend or upset anyone ever, freedom from anything that doesn't comply with the dogma.
Boy, I can't wait to be liberated from all the wrongthink!
Do we want to live in a society where certain corporations decide which training wheels to put on us? The discussion isn't about their legal right, but about what their policy should be when X group comes along saying Y is offensive. I doubt these decisions were made from a cynical bottom-line perspective. No one as far as I'm aware was boycotting these places because they sold offensive children's books. The most disturbing thing to me is they did it purely because they thought it was the right thing to do. Their policy is what we're saying is wrong.
We 'attack' ideas all the time; in fact, that's what most of us are doing on HN. There's nothing wrong with such an 'attack' on an idea. In fact, if you open Ebay right now, you'll likely find works of philosophy and law debating whether parents and teachers can use offensive works to a productive end.
>The discussion isn't about their legal right, but about what their policy should be when X group comes along saying Y is offensive.
That's a good question, but it does not demand an answer culminating in an accusation that actually rather reasonable answers constitute an attack on the very idea of freedom. We recognize 'offense' even in law in every country on the planet, and it seems to me that so long as corporations have less power than governments, there is at least some room for reasoning from moral or practical principles that are not available (nor do we wish to be available) in law.
The very fact that it's a not a legal question actually seems to tilt the scales towards reasons why a private entity should exercise moral autonomy in the market.
>The most disturbing thing to me is they did it purely because they thought it was the right thing to do. Their policy is what we're saying is wrong.
This isn't disturbing to me; the market is a big part of our social life, and with the law generally more restricted on dealing with moral issues, actors in the market can step in and make those decisions for themselves. There is nothing repugnant about acting on the basis of what you find wrong or right. There may be something wrong with the moral reasoning of Seuss' estate and Ebay (if it even is moral reasoning - to a consequentialist this wouldn't even matter). But the form of the decision (moral reasoning) and its content (the morality of facilitating the sale of racist caricatures, if the books really are that bad) are two different questions.
I have zero problem with a stock exchange refusing to sell tobacco or even alcohol or strip club stocks. I may disagree with them - maybe I think alcohol and strip clubs are not morally wrong businesses. But I can't see any reason to disagree with their exercise of moral autonomy. Their exercise of moral autonomy is a contribution to the moral discourse, and censorship of that discourse is a bigger concern, and not merely from theoretical reasons.
To me these externally imposed training wheels hurt our ability to move forward. The _policy_ is misguided, and hiding the past destines us to repeat it. These companies are entering the business of vigilante thought police, there's really no other way to explain what's happening here.
What's funny is that it's the publishing house themselves that decided to stop selling the book. Shouldn't they have the freedom to decide that?
What the woke mob is doing right now is to extend this paradoxical definition of "freedom" to the extent that nobody will have any (real) freedom at all.
In a nutshell, the woke argument is: "I should have the 'freedom' from being offended, and this 'freedom' overrides and cancels all your freedoms."
For example, in this case: "I am offended by the idea that someone, somewhere, will read a book containing ideas I dislike, therefore your very important rights to publish and read such books are hereby revoked".
This is the same line of reasoning that led to the establishment of totalitarian utopias (favored by Marcuse) which inevitably end up as 1984-style dystopia.
All views of freedom are paradoxical other than the most basic view, which is that everyone has the freedom to do anything to anyone. The law provides freedom from armed bandits, or the worry of armed bandits, attacking you at night. At least, it aims to. Property rights provide freedom from your things being appropriated by others (including a government). The right to representation at trial provides freedom to fair judgements in the legal system. This isn't a dystopia.
>In a nutshell, the woke argument is: "I should have the 'freedom' from being offended, and this 'freedom' overrides and cancels all your freedoms."
Nobody has made that argument, but as I mentioned, the canonical case is corpse desecration. People in general desire freedom from that offense, and this freedom overrides and cancels the freedom to desecrate corpses.
>For example, in this case: "I am offended by the idea that someone, somewhere, will read a book containing ideas I dislike, therefore your very important rights to publish and read such books are hereby revoked".
I don't think we should do that, and I don't think the "woke mob" in general really thinks that either. Political philosophy consists of more than a worrisome story written eighty years ago.
No, there is a valid view of individual freedom that is limited by other people's freedom. In fact, that's the traditional American view of freedom.
I have the freedom to do anything that doesn't actively restrict the freedom of others. I can walk into an empty space. I can't walk into a space you occupy.
> Political philosophy consists of more than a worrisome story written eighty years ago.
If only 1984 was just "a worrisome story written eighty years ago".
Instead, it describes the totalitarian regime created by Marxist takeover of the Soviet union.
We are now experiencing an attempted Marxist takeover of our own society.
Books are being banned. Ideas are becoming unacceptable, shunned, erased from public discourse, and from our memories.
President Obama praised, quoted, and recommended Dr. Seuss's books in official press releases throughout his presidency, all the way to his last year as president - 2015:
https://nypost.com/2021/03/03/barack-and-michelle-obama-prai...
But now, barely 6 years later, the Leftist Mob has come for Dr. Seuss, and we're all bullied to recite that Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.
And his books are, accordingly, being erased. Cancelled.
To quote Orwell: "The past was alterable. The past never had been altered."
The real point isn't that Dr. Seuss is actually racist (he never was), but to condition us to reject, ban, and shun "unacceptable" ideas, thoughts, and expressions - on social command.
The overarching theme here is control: in the leftist vision, society must control and regulate the consciousness of all its members, in order to create a perfect Utopian centrally-controlled society.
Exactly! In this way, your freedom is limited for the sake of other freedoms. However, as with the corpse desecration example, your freedom is also limited for the sake of various freedom froms. With assault, for example, there is no freedom to write and post threatening letters. If I receive a threatening letter, my freedom to do things hasn't been impacted. However, my freedom from threats has been impacted. Even the traditional American view of freedom is very widely restrictive, and for good reason.
>We are now experiencing an attempted Marxist takeover of our own society.
If this is a 'Marxist takeover', I'd have to say the Marxists are doing a pretty poor job of it. I don't recall Marx writing that racist depictions in children's books shouldn't be sold at auction, though.
>But now, barely 6 years later, the Leftist Mob has come for Dr. Seuss, and we're all bullied to recite that Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.
No, you're not. Who's forcing you to say that? In fact, who's even forcing you to accept that view? The very fact that we're having this discussion is evidence that this isn't happening.
>but to condition us to reject, ban, and shun "unacceptable" ideas, thoughts, and expressions - on social command.
This is conspiratorial thinking. We are already conditioned to shun unacceptable ideas, thoughts and expressions; it comes from two elements of our world - freedom of association, and moral autonomy.
>The overarching theme here is control: in the leftist vision, society must control and regulate the consciousness of all its members, in order to create a perfect Utopian centrally-controlled society.
I'm a leftist and I don't share that view, at least. I can't really think of anyone who does. All the leftists with influence (from Marx to academics) has never shared this view. In fact, they called out the capitalist regulation of consciousness and its control through culture. The 'leftists' were the first to systematically investigate the role of ideology in the modern world.
If we are all "free" to not ever be offended, then nobody has any sort of freedom at all, because any expression or action might be offensive to someone, somewhere, at some point.
As soon as anyone is willing to claim offense (which is actively encouraged by the left), whatever happens to offend them is banned and cancelled.
We are actively cancelling books, people, scientific research, and numerous other ideas and expressions. Our politicians are explicitly promoting government-mandated limits on "offensive speech".
If you object or resist any of these social trends, you are a bigot, and you will be cancelled.
We are not yet in a 1984 zero-freedom Marxist dystopia, but we are well on our way there. The ideological foundations for this dystopia have been laid and accepted by most on the left, including those unaware of their ultimate outcome.
Marx and his original supporters likewise didn't intend or foresee the Soviet totalitarian dystopia that resulted from their ideology.
Much like leftists today, they excused incursions on individual freedom because it will lead to "greater good" such as "freedom from harm", "freedom from want", etc.
It ended with gulags, commissars, purges, mass executions, genocide, and the elimination of all actual human freedoms in pursuit of some idealized, self-contradictory mirage of "perfect freedom".
This was not intended, but it's also not an accident. Once you ideologically commit to sacrificing individual freedom in pursuit of other goals (social justice, a socialist Utopia, etc) then totalitarian oppression becomes a distinct possibility - arguably, an inevitability.
But the decision to stop selling this book was made by capitalists in a capitalist system. Marxists and leftists have nothing to do with this. You say "Once you ideologically commit to sacrificing individual freedom in pursuit of other goals (social justice, a socialist Utopia, etc) then totalitarian oppression becomes a distinct possibility", but this decision is due to individual freedom at its height. It's a perfect example of the exercise of individual freedom in the marketplace of ideas. Indeed, any other outcome would be a contraction of individual freedom.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to stop publishing the book. That is, they exercised their individual freedom to stop publishing the book. No one made this decision for them except for themselves, particularly not the government. In fact, it's only due to their limited monopoly over the rights of this work that they are able to have this freedom. Marxists and leftists would disagree with the concept of "intellectual property" outright. Dr. Seuss Enterprises would not be able to stop the publication of these books under a Marxist system because they would not have the right to make that decision; anyone could decide to publish them if Dr. Seuss Enterprises didn't want to. It sounds like maybe you are taking the Marxist position on this one.
eBay decided to stop selling the books. It is their right as a corporation to decide what they want and what they don't want on their platform. This decision was made by the capitalists who own and control the eBay corporation. The alternative would be the government forcing them to sell the books on their platform. How would that in pursuit of individual freedom? Marxists and leftists would say that the workers at eBay should make this decision, for they are the ones who should own and control eBay. But I fail to see how capitalists deciding what they should do with their platform, under a capitalist system, is somehow a reflection of Marxist ideology gone haywire.
If anything your problem is with capitalism.
Your imagined "takeover" is merely a 21st century re-imagining of literal nazi propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism
The idea that we're "being bullied" into believing that a man who drew extremely racist anti-Japanese war propaganda was perhaps not beyond reproach in terms of his views on race is, itself, revisionism. When you say "he was never racist", you're either woefully misinformed or lying.
He very much was racist; and after the war, regretted it, and ended up campaigning against the sorts of "America first" views he once championed.
Did you actually read the article? The owners and publishers of the books decided they contained images that they felt were offensive and didn't want to be associated with so stopped publishing. Should they be forced to continue? Why are their rights different from yours?
The 'ideas' in the books are still available to view on the internet, you can print them out and share them with your friends. The originals may be copyrighted but you can make similar pictures with the same ideas and sell your own books containing them.
You don't have that right. The world is not safe. Nowhere are you guaranteed happiness, or refuge from upsetting ideas. You are guaranteed the right to pursue happiness. The outcome is a function of how fast your legs are.
In a nation that sincerely values the concept of Liberty, the Public Safety (a subset of which is your presumed "freedom from") always takes a second seat. To have it any other way is to put an end to the very ideal at the center of the United States. Liberty is scary. Freedom makes no guarantees. Non-hackers can feel free to not consume in their own spaces, but don't start trying to dictate what others should or should not have access to.
Wonderful. And where do tech monopolies figure in the world view you've expounded ?
The libertarian argument used to support censorship is that a private group or business is free to do what it wants. However this misses the increasingly apparent fact that an insufficiently politically correct business in this environment is quickly targeted and perhaps even 'cancelled'.
So we have a systemic problem. Private entities are not truly free just as the de facto government is not truly accountable.
It is time to declare the old argument, since it's a private company it can do what it wants, and free speech should not apply, dead and outmoded. Yes, the 1st Amendment. But it's time to rethink the entire moral fabric that has informed us before the Internet Age.
What I find positively shocking is that, myself as a lifelong progressive, am seeing Woke people using that free market argument, to promote censorship and what they call antiracism. I think it goes hand in hand with large megacorporations like Amazon and Bloomberg promoting wokist ideology.
Bottom line, they want more, not less control over our minds. They know what's good. We must ask someone with a Ph.D. in __ Studies to tell us what our ethical path should be. It's positively insane.
Though you are largely correct, the "think of the children" angle is unnecessary to your argument and fundamentally flawed. Pornography and other materials that ought not end up in the hands of children are available on both eBay and Amazon, neither of which allow young children to have their own accounts.
How is my 6 years old son supposed to draw an ancient Chinese villager without being racist ?
Isn't Ebay acting here similarly over a preemptive concern of blowback from a small group of determined activists?
Freedom to cower.
People (eg, sex workers) have been getting deplatformed (often with the government assisting in - or requiring - the deplatforming!) for decades, and I didn’t hear the free-speech / right-wing types complaining.
But now that some private companies don’t want to support racism, it’s a brand new problem we need to fight against? :P
(I agree with the overall point that censorship is a two sided blade; just find it funny when some people think that this is new, when in fact it’s been happening for longer than I’ve been alive, it just seems new to them because they’ve never been on the receiving end before)
I’m neither a lawyer nor an American (I assume we’re talking about America here), but my reading and experience would suggest that the first is glorified, the second is tolerated, and the third can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of fines even if it’s a fraction of a second by accident (eg the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show being a particularly well-publicised incident. The $550,000 fine was eventually dismissed, but only because “it’s unfair to apply this rule retroactively”, not because there’s anything wrong with the rule...)
- violence: tolerated
- nipple: becoming more accepted, barring antiquated FCC rules that only really impact things like Superbowl. streaming seems to completely allow it.
- dirty words (f-bomb, s-bomb, etc.): roughly same as nipple. Yippie kie-yay Mister Falcon.
- racism: depictions of historical racism, e.g. History Channel are fine. racial slurs, racialized depictions (Apu on Simpsons) risk randomly getting episodes or entire series effectively banned (delisted and never shown again). applies to actors' and producers' personal lives, twitter feeds, etc.
- sexism, other-isms: racism-lite. there is a bigger emphasis on sexism in personal lives vs. racism in the actual show content. Seinfeld wasn't cancelled over Michael Richard's Laugh Factory incident and there are tons of sexist tropes on 80's/90's sitcoms that haven't haven't (yet) resulted in cancellation.
IMO “Government requires a filter” is a waaaay bigger problem than “private company decides to stop selling a thing"
The case of the Dr. Seuss Estate deciding not to reprint these books, it's the estate itself making their own decision what's best for the estate they're managing, and is not remotely comparable to censorship, deplatforming or any form of "cancel culture". Ebay banning other people's books arguably is.
You mean like Twitter?
Obviously there's the issue of protection of speech from government (protected by first amendment) vs. corporations (undermined by first amendment); but that's not the point I'm interested in.
There is a huge difference in speech that intentionally conveys an unpopular opinion for the sake of discussion, and speech in which that's not the point at all, and instead merely casually includes something toxic, or even accidentally. Essentially: whether the potentially unpopular or toxic message is explicit, vs. implicit.
The first category of speech (explicitly controversial) is highly important when it comes to transparency and the ability to think and debate clearly about uncomfortable issues. As far as I know, this is actually the only reason to protect speech in the first place; transparency and healthy debate matter.
The second category of speech (implicitly controversial) happens to be protected by the first amendment too; but it's more like collateral damage due to a limitations in the law (including because the distinction isn't always obvious).
Ideally, we'd replace the first amendment with something that more strongly protects the explicit category - even from corporate control - and at least tries to avoid protecting the second category, because such protections are easily abused (e.g. they're the reason why it's legal for a few corporations to effectively muzzle speech, and why it's so hard to control fake news).
As applied to dr. Seuss books - clearly there's no issue with transparency or debate here; no explicit point is being muzzled. There's no risk to free speech here, even if we happen to disagree on the policy of it's removal.
Put it this way: sometimes controlling speech (regardless of who is doing so) is harmful to free and open debate, hence it's worth protecting free speech. But conversely it does not hold that every infringement upon "free speech" necessarily impacts transparent and open debate. Quite the opposite; some forms of control can actually support transparency and open debate, e.g. control over spam and sheer volume (and this is one of the places where our current laws fail).
TL;DR: Slapping a "ZOMG free speech is under attack" statement under anything that happens to exercise editorial control misses the point of free speech in the first place. While we may have opinions on the specifics here, there is no question at all that this specific action does not harm the open, transparent debate needed for a healthy democracy. (And on a technical level it's alas the case that free speech is only protected from infringements by the state, not other powerful actors).
Progressives aren’t stopping you from reading racist books to your children.... just don’t expect most people to want to sell them to you or pat you on the back for making the next generation toxic against fellow citizens.
Also, maybe teaching your children to be toxic towards anything won't really improve the world they will have to live in?
Also, being tolerant to intolerance breeds autocratic and non free societies. A lesson mankind seems to have to learn over and over and over again. My children will be taught that you do not suffer the Nazi, the Communist, the self-righteous conservative calling for a ban or the SJW.
could you provide some examples of what you are referring to here?
Propaganda has been very strong the last few years, and people feel like defending racism is actually some sort of legitimate fight because they actually believe that things like Antifa, Social-Justice-Warriors, and government bans initiated by progressives are real organized things. They are invented ideas and tools used by propagandists to keep people divided and working against the interests of other Americans.
Did you even go through this list?
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks...
Most of them might be "banned" in a few select conservative/christian schools and that's it. Come up with actual examples of the things you are claiming or stop fear-mongering.
these rights are supposed to protect compensation, not as a means of suppression or censorship.
Why should society protect IP for this purpose, or compensate IP owners for which there are no damages?
But I don't think any one is getting these books to teach their children to be racist, or that reading children this would have that effect. An image of African tribesmen is not even racist. It was historically accurate as of 1937. Any one reading kids this book would undoubtedly explain the book is 80 years old and a product of its time.
EBay has a right to do any thing it wants, but I think it overreacted because of pressure from people who are uptight and looking for dragons to slay and people to push around.
> when your speech offends someone
“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."
Stephen Fry
The people that do want to sell them to you aren't allowed to do so.. meaning you are prevented in reading them.
This is precisely the same logic that led the Conquistadors to systematically destroy the history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
And do you work for the publisher? Or are you just pretending like you know that Karen never called the publisher?
A school district in Virginia said over the weekend that it had advised schools to de-emphasize Dr. Seuss books on “Read Across America Day,” a national literacy program that takes place each year on March 2, the anniversary of Mr. Geisel’s birth.
“Research in recent years has revealed strong racial undertones in many books written/illustrated by Dr. Seuss,” according to the statement by the district, Loudoun County Public Schools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/dr-seuss-mulberry-s...
I think the pressure to enforce covid lockdowns is as ridiculous as these people wanting to censure Dr Seuss. Where I'm at we're back to lockdowns on Sundays only, so stupid.
Basically we need to get on with life and ignore the overly-anxious who want to control/censure everyone.
I don't understand their decision here, but so what? It's their store, why should you or I tell or anyone else them what to sell?
Woke crazies try to impose their ideology on others by complaining and shaming on the Internet. I think you're doing the same thing here. The difference are the specifics of the ideology. If you support liberty only for things you agree with, you don't support liberty.
I get worried when people promote the idea that compelling others speech is pro free speech. It's the modern newspeak.
People can say that they really think eBay is doing the wrong thing, and maybe even boycott them, without necessarily saying they should be forced by law to stock children's books that became out of fashion thirty seconds ago.
You have the luxury of never having seen your country and culture being taken over by Nazis. Never living with the regret of being tolerant of Nazis. I have. It sucks.
It's so easy to talk in platitudes like this when you know your own life won't be affected in any way. How about supporting the right of QAnon adherents to spread their poisonous propaganda? What about when you see it's support growing rapidly? Would you still support it if it looked like you might be living in a society where the majority are QAnoners?
I know the answer to that question. And so do you.
Unless you grew up in Weimar Germany, you have never seen your country taken over by Nazis
I would argue that what ebay is doing is simply a permutation of this idea. Woke companies deciding what is and what is not suitable for you to spend your money on (shaming you for not spending your earned value on something 'worthy'). Meanwhile they don't seem to have a problem with mein kempf or however its spelled.
If this doesn't scare you, it should.
"The Internet" became "social media", which quickly became "the media".
Game, set, match.
What are you suggesting? If a company is branded "Silicon Valley" it should no longer be allowed to make their own content decisions? If not them, then *who will make those decisions for them?*
A political government board? Talk about scary.
Obviously, the American political system is not in an ideal state (to put it mildly), but at least the sweeping bureaucratic inefficiencies make it hard enough to really change the temperature of the water by more than a few degrees in either direction.
"Silicon Valley" is just shorthand for "massive tech monopolies that have an outsized, inescapable, and pervasive influence on the way that every living person goes about their daily business"; and when you have amoral, profit-driven corporations that can "move fast and break things" - who are incentivized to wield their influence in whatever way serves their immediate interests - the human condition be damned, well... you end up where we are, here, now.
I am suggesting that we are not prepared to regulate companies like FAANG & Friends in a way that keeps them from remaking humanity in their own image as a means to their own ends. I am suggesting that it is horrifying that privately-held companies without any incentive to be responsible for the consequences of their actions against humanity, writ large, are able to effect social policy so much.
The concern is over what society feels is shameful and how it's handled. Right now we are ashamed of things we shouldn't be and the remedy we're choosing is exclusion. That doesn't sound like a formula for success.
On top of that, this is all being pushed by a tiny minority that has gained more power than we realized. Surely some tiny fraction of people think Dr. Seuss is offensive. A tiny fraction of people overall, a tiny fraction of eBay employees/shareholders, etc. It's always concerning when these tiny minority views can push everyone else around.
President Obama praised, quoted, and recommended Dr. Seuss's books in official press releases throughout his presidency, all the way to his last year as president - 2015:
https://nypost.com/2021/03/03/barack-and-michelle-obama-prai...
But now, barely 6 years later, the Leftist Mob has come for Dr. Seuss, and we're all bullied to recite that Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.
To quote Orwell: "The past was alterable. The past never had been altered."
The real point isn't that Dr. Seuss is actually racist (he never was), but to condition us to reject, ban, erase and cancel "unacceptable" ideas, thoughts, and expressions - on social command.
The overarching theme here is control: in the leftist vision, society must control and regulate the consciousness of all its members, in order to create a perfect Utopian centrally-controlled society.
Sometimes it's just for the sake of fear, sometimes it's for convenience. I wouldn't be surprised if the people who initiated this Dr Seuss hate have a stockpile of his books.
"Racism" used to mean that you were actually and actively promoting a racist mindset. Now the Leftist Mob persecutes people for, essentially, making mistakes that superficially look like racism. Donald G. McNeil was fired and cancelled from the New York Times for asking whether someone used a racial slur, in the context of talking about racial slurs. A Chinese professor was cancelled for teaching a Mandarin word that sounds (vaguely) like a racial slur.
Nobody really thinks any of these people are racist. But control must be enforced, that is the point. Catching someone uttering a "forbidden word" is just an excuse.
The point isn't to eliminate racism, sexism, or any of these other bigoted discriminations which have long been illegal in the US. The point is to exercise absolute control over our thoughts, expressions, and behavior - and make us accept that control, view it as normal, justifiable, and even desirable.
That said, I'm interested to know more about why you're sad about this. As in, the current liberal reality is so removed from anything leftists want or care about, and it seems so impossible to achieve any of the 'leftist' goals, that abandonment is more something to accept and be depressed about, rather than something that is actively pursued.
Personally I don't know how to feel about all this. In part, it's just different being a leftie in a European social democracy. But also I feel a lot can be achieved even in a climate that in general seems to stacked against leftist goals. It's understandable to be dejected that Bernie lost, or whatever, but something like, say, fighting for worker rights at Amazon can be a worthy battle to engage in.
What? No one is trying to cancel Dr Seuss. No one is suggesting that he was a bad or hateful person. His estate has decided to no longer publish a small number of his books. They are doing this because they feel that they contain hurtful stereotypes: https://www.seussville.com/statement-from-dr-seuss-enterpris...
I have used stereotypes and language in the past that, in retrospect, I recognize as hurtful, despite thinking it was not a big deal at the time. I no longer use those terms, or tell those jokes. That is part of maturing as a person.
The estate has a duty to protect the legacy of Dr Seuss, which was very positive and inclusive. I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that, were Dr Seuss still alive, he might consider whether a Chinese-American child would feel uncomfortable with the images in "And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street", or whether an African-American child would feel uncomfortable reading "If I Ran the Zoo", and revise those works.
This is factually false, as we have people in this comment thread who claim that Dr Seuss was always a clear, known racist:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26360503
I'm sure some people who support the cancellation of 6 of his books see it, like you, as just these 6 books being cancelled, and not as a complete destruction and cancellation of Dr. Seuss as a person.
However, as we've all seen in past cancellations, once you start labeling any specific act of a person as "cancelable", the mob will typically proceed to label the entire person cancelable.
This really is the normal progression, and we already see it in comments like the one I linked. If Dr. Seuss somehow escapes this fate, and isn't labeled overall "objectionable" and canceled wholesale - then it would be an exception, likely made precisely because he is such a mainstream figure, because he was in fact highly liberal even in his time, and in order to make this argument that you just made: that we are merely cancelling 6 of his books, and not all his books and everything about him.
In other words, parts of the mob decided that at this point, it will be a little too shocking to cancel such a mainstream, beloved, liberal figure, so unlike practically every other instance of Cancel Culture, in which the entire person and everything pertaining to them was canceled as soon as any "sin" was found, in this case only these specific books will be canceled.
Normally Dr. Seuss and his entire legacy would labeled "objectionable" and canceled, and parts of the mob are certainly eager to do that, as in the comment I've linked.
As someone who read Dr. Seuss as a child, I disagree that there are any "hurtful" representations in his books. There are cartoonish representations, which also exist in many, many other mediums, notably caricatures, cartoons, and animated shorts.
Incidentally, I am a member of one of these minorities who were supposed to be "offended" by these depictions. I am not.
This is all an instance of Cancel Culture, par excellence. To pretend otherwise is dishonest, and to pretend that nobody is trying to cancel Dr. Seuss is demonstrably false.
My question is, who's decision is it to make?
Yours? Mine? The government's (through laws or regulations)? Or ebay's?
I don't want to override the decision. But there is a disturbing context to the decision that's worth discussing.
Why are people making these decisions? Why are they coordinated and collective? Who are the beneficiaries?
And have we, as voters, shareholders, etc., put trust in the wrong leaders? Maybe all this crazy stuff professors have been promoting all this time wasn't just for attention. Maybe they meant it and taught their students to do it. And we are now seeing the results.
"They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em" -RATM
Not exactly, no. Even the most laissez faire among us would probably agree that you need to set and enforce some ground rules to prevent monopolies, externalities, information assymetries, and other market failures. Also ebay isn't a bookseller choosing what books to stock; it's just an exchange for buyers and sellers to directly transact with each other.
Sure, of course there are ground rules. Things that are illegal are not permitted. But what are you suggesting the rule would be that would apply in this case?
And by rule, we're taking about a law, right? Otherwise, it wouldn't be binding and we're right back to where eBay is within its rights to decide not sell (or list, if you prefer) these books.
To be clear, I think it's fine to complain about ebay's stance here. I don't agree with it. But you can't do it in the name of free speech or liberty generally as the previous poster is attempting to do.
>I get worried when people promote the idea that compelling others speech is pro free speech. It's the modern newspeak.
That is essentially what the woke crazies do all the time by getting people fired and other economic consequences if they don't fall in line.
Conversely, I think other people are criticizing the decision of the company, and the company culture that lead to the decision. That's different than compelling speech or considering using the gov't to compel speech.
Why should freedom of speech apply only to authorities from the public sector?
I also dont like the power that massive corporations have over our lives, but the solution isnt some absurd regulation, its to break them up
What is freedom of association, isn't that different from freedom of speech?
>I also dont like the power that massive corporations have over our lives, but the solution isnt some absurd regulation, its to break them up
I think you're probably right about that. Maybe another option could be to create a publicly funded, rather than corporate advertising funded, "town square" social media platform as a viable alternative, where all lawful speech could be voiced and protected?
Is that true though? The government is doing nothing here. There's nothing stopping anybody from owning these book or passing them around to somebody else. There's nobody in government stopping somebody from publishing these books.
What's happening is that a few megacorporations have acquired so much power they are beyond influencing. Are a few angry people going to vote with their wallets to defeat eBay? Please, there is no recourse - eBay has essentially no competition in its sector and is accountable to nobody but their shareholders.
And the publisher? Well, the publishers have lobbied for our politicians to grant them infinite copyright, so now they can do as they wish with our culture. If they choose to bury it and stop publishing, this is the right our politicians have agreed to give to them.
This isn't really a free speech issue at its heart, even if it feels like it. This is really a power imbalance where control in all sectors of commerce (and in almost every aspect of our lives) is being distilled into a handful of unassailable monopolists to whom our politicians have gradually ceded their power.
Wrong. From the third paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
"""Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."[4]"""
First, offensive caricatures can fall squarely into "libel" and "slander" and harming someone's dignity.
Second, EBay is not being forced to delist the books by the government.
A few months ago I was reading about schools banning the book "To Kill a Mockingbird" because it contains basically the "n" word. I'm not american, and and havent read that book. I watched the movie, through, and it seemed to me to be a very anti racism message.
I think instead of banning, schools should work provide context to kids and teens that read this books, of how society was when they where written, so people don't forget the past, but are able to make better decisions to the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_Books_Week
This has almost always been metaphorical, because only a tiny minority of these cases involved someone trying to make a book illegal for everyone to possess or sell. You could accuse the ALA and the ABFFE of exaggeration, maybe rightly, in choosing the word "ban" (it seems like they early-on chose to clarify it as "banned and challenged"), but it has a fairly long history.
Edit: There's an interesting subtlety here where Banned Books Week has generally tended to assume that teachers and librarians, in particular, were well-equipped to make good judgments for their communities, while anyone who tried to pressure them to change their decisions (in the direction of less access) was engaged in something questionable. So if teachers chose not to teach a book, that wasn't usually called "banning", whereas if someone tried to get a school board or school principal to make teachers stop teaching a book, that was "banning". Likewise for librarians' decisions to make books available (or not). The most common formulation seemed to be that these professionals are entitled to a kind of academic freedom that gives them autonomy to make these decisions without second-guessing by others, and in particular that a teacher's or librarian's (or bookseller's) decision to make something available to an audience should be respected, while someone else's decision to prevent or discourage these professionals from doing so should be questioned or criticized.
Maybe because Banned Books Week and similar observances are mainly organized and promoted by associations of teachers, librarians, and booksellers, they seem to cast blame and scrutiny mainly outside of their own professions. :-)
In the 1980s and 1990s most of the challenges highlighted by these organizations came from the right, against books that featured sexual minorities, people questioning or mocking their religious upbringing, or children in intense or extreme situations. At the time, many booksellers, librarians, and teachers thought that these books were, at least sometimes, appropriate for children because it was a good thing for them to think about these topics, and not likely to harm them. I don't know what to anticipate from these professions now as they're confronted with a very different set of challenges to intellectual and cultural freedom.
Yesterday it was one about "yelling less and praising less" [0]. We had a great discussion about the concepts. Then some fun trying out faint praise and faint yelling.
I think discussing with kids how things used to be, and why we try and do things differently now, is super powerful - that notion of historical change helps kids think at a higher level. Yes, things were not always rosy, and they aren't even now.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/03/hunt-gath...
Meaning that reprinting his books and replacing the n word with the more neutral "slave" risks whitewashing the terrible suffering that black slaves endured.
Many books have fallen out of use over the decades and one should also consider that the publishing house will probably also have an eye on protecting the unproblematic Dr. Seuss books. Over the long run racial stereotypes will hurt the Seuss brand, by deciding not to publish those, they protect the brand and the sales of the other books.
As if white people have enforced themselves to just pretend the word has magic powers and it is the one who shall not be named.
That’s giving an enormous amount of power over people who want to control language in a inherently racist way (your skin color determines your ability to say a word).
I refuse to accept that this amount of power extends to typing the word as a discussion of it.
To illustrate your point: https://youtu.be/VsJIUJjQ4OA
Jackie Chan, in Rush Hour - an innocent tourist, trying to be friendly, and following the rules of „When in Rome...“
“His cultural appropriation of “that“ word was an act of violence itself, in the movie they were initially defending themselves from Chan. This must be canceled and never aired again. This 24 year old movie is clearly reflective of Chan’s personal beliefs and he must apologize with a sizable donation to “the cause” which conveniently are all ActBlue affiliated charities”
murican, nazi, polack, ching chong?
Slurs can be hurtful, so you shouldn't direct them at people or use them in a derogatory way if you don't want to be hurtful.
The idea that words can't be spoken in any context is counterproductive.
People seems to care just as much as ever when they are called a slur, and are even more offended when they see them used in non-malicious ways
* Why exactly the n-word is exclusive to black people. In my mind, either no one uses the word if it's offensive, or everyone can use it in a neutral way. I don't know of any other single word which is gatekept. I mean, I never want to use it, so it's not about that. I guess it has to do with pride and being able to use a word which was once used to insult you. Maybe it gives power, don't know. But it can't be that clear, seeing as how the whole world seems to be confused about the reasoning and usage of this word. Essentially, I don't really mind that I can't say it, but I just don't understand it.
* Cultural appropriation - I see people get cancelled for wearing, eating or celebrating things which aren't "from their culture". This is so shocking to me and sounds like something fashists would say. "Keep to your cultures and races", wtf? It also seems to be very one-sided. I understand it if we talk about sacred things, native american headwear as an example. But things like food, hair styles and certain clothing? Just seems to divide people more. Isn't it a better sign if I as a white dude like other cultures food, clothing etc.? That should signal to these cultures that I appreciate, accept and like them, right?
Again, I'm white and from europe and I know that these are very sensitive and hot topics.
This. I'm as left wing as they come, and agree wholeheartedly with 99% of the current far-left discourse. But some of this "cultural appropriation" stuff is just nuts.
But stuff like yoga, jazz/hip-hop, or even food? There it turns into an argument for cultural segregation, where minority cultures are effectively not allowed to become mainstream.
I'd rather have people eat food, wear clothes and hairstyles from other cultures instead of saying "I hate X-Cultures-food and/or clothing."
As you said, there are of course things which should be considered bad. You mentioned native american headdresses, which I think is a good example. But dreadlocks, cornrows? Come on....
But knotting into dreadlocks is also something that hair just does naturally if you don't comb it.
But cultural appropriation is really something I don't understand/can't get behind...
I think that the cultural appropriation is a legitimate concern, and certainly problematic. I was just agreeing with you, that this legitimate concern is sometimes used to criticize natural and harmless things, like braiding your hair or eating certain types of cuisine.
Some of the people who defend this are so over the top that they seem "double agents". Like those who harass others that wear dreadlocks while being of the wrong race. Seriously, what the fuck. What kind of reaction do they expect for their actions, other than a visceral rejection of the whole concept of cultural appropriation?
You can peel off a far simpler concern that culutural heritage can be lost or devolve. France, for instance, goes to some lengths to preserve the French language. I went to some Scottish heritage group, and we all dressed up in kilts and ate haggis and such.
And it's a tough problem. Getting people on board with preserving cultural heritage is hard, especially because young people are precisely the ones you need to attract, and they tend to want to do things that are new and exciting.
It's...not.
> Isn't it a better sign if I as a white dude like other cultures food, clothing etc.? That should signal to these cultures that I appreciate, accept and like them, right?
While I personally think some of the specific complaints of cultural appropriation that are made are...well, let's just say not things that I personally think are as problematic as the people raising the complaints seem to, still, no, decontextualized mimicry of isolated elements of culture, or similar consumption of products of the culture, while participating in structures of oppression of the people whose culture is being mined for your entertainment isn't seen by any audience, within or without the exploited culture, as a sign of appreciating, accepting, or liking either the culture (which is an abstract aggregate) or, more critically, the concrete people in the culture.
You sure about that? Is that really something debatable?
Thanks for trying to explain cultural appropriation, I don't know if my english is not good enough or if your explanation is really difficult to understand, but I didn't really get it, sorry :)
A lot of the most enthusiastic book burners get caught up in the intermediary events and don't make it to the regret phase.
Providing context is good, but frankly also really difficult and why not just provide newer childrens books that are more inclusive.
Also, do you think that skinhead became a better person by not being able to buy that book? I don't think so.
Something for the parent comment: I also don't like the downvote hype here when you say anything pro-censorship. We get it already, let people discuss without making them #eee.
Who knows how harmful Mein Kampf publishing in Germany could have been from 1950-2000, but surely, there was no harm in having it banned.
You must understand that in post-war Germany the threat of fascism still lingered, with successor-parties to Adolph Hitler's NSDAP even managing to get parliament seats in the first parliamentary elections, etc.
Funnilly enough, I think a main driver for AfDs formation as an neoliberal-turned-alt-right party are the books by Tilo Sarrazin and their public discussion in the both-sides style (often blatantly ignoring the core racist message correlating genetics to intellect, etc.).
In that respect, I think one can make an argument that certain "cancelling" (refusal to publish/discuss/sell a book by private persons or companies/platforms) that is not censorship (prohibiting a book by the state) surely is something a society must be willing to perform in order to at least not foster certain ideas within the group of people among them, that is susceptible to fascism.
If you came away enlightened, you probably already held very strong Nazi tendencies before you even opened the book.
Some people pay attention to the things said by those they aim to control, and then feed that back to them. I could literally feel it tugging at my brain. It was one of the most visceral “I’m dodging a bullet right now” feelings I’ve ever had.
Critical thinking is a critical skill!
Also on the point of gangs, there’s a documentary that shines a great light on how people fall into it, and on the other side of the coin, parts of law enforcement: The House I Live In.
For me, the original "Mein Kampf" was a rather boring book to read. Since 2016, it is possible to buy a commented version of this book. It's available with the ISBN 9783981405231 for 59 € in Germany.
Though, really, why not just read the text through tor?
The book has this kind-of-mystic aura of a "rebellious, banned book too dangerous for people to read" but it's really just a complete trash and should be forgotten (outside of historian scholars who may have to read it, but I feel sorry for them).
Sounds a lot like Facebook.
It's important to remember that the power of Mein Kampf lies in its status as a symbol, not its actual contents. Nobody actually reads Mein Kampf, nor have they ever (just like nobody actually reads the Bible unless they're actual preachers). It was (and still is) about the personality cult of a strong man and his message of power via blaming and oppression of minority groups, not the actual words themselves. People remember only simple things, and like simple reasoning and solutions, which is what made him popular in the first place.
So the banning of this book was an attack on the symbol (and only incidentally on the literature), and the banning of the symbol is of questionable value since it basically causes a Streisand effect. Banning a symbol only adds to its power. It might have been better to just ignore it, and instead focus on prosecuting the actual hate crimes themselves.
I was engaging in hyperbole to illustrate a point, not making an absolute statement.
Why do you think my comment is elitist?
There were different reactions to WWII. The most helpful one is "Never again." That, in turn, leads to understanding WWII. That, in turn, leads to reading books like Mein Kampf.
A lot of people read Mein Kampf, and I believe more than use it as symbol. Understanding how one man was able to do what he did is key to making sure you're not influenced the same way.
I'm firmly of the belief America is starting to head the same (very general) way; the polarization is extreme. I'm curious whether this is internal or external.
Yeah, that’s had no effect. See Rwanda, Burma, Xinjiang, Libya. Humanitarian intervention is a cloak for power, not something that happens when Great Power interests are at stake.
The lesson taught in a lot of cultures hit hardest by Germany is understanding:
* Personality cults
* Hate
* Polarization
... and the path by which Hitler came to power. Understanding what Hitler said and why it persuaded people is central to not being persuaded yourself.
If you're young, think of it as a 1945 version of social media misinformation literacy. Part of the way you learn to recognize misinformation is by looking and decomposing misinformation.
It's done pretty well for limiting the rise of charismatic hate-mongers for a pretty long while. We're now starting to see the rise again as the majority of voters are starting to view WWII as irrelevant history long gone, as opposed to something that happened to Mom and Dad.
The "people" part is just the standard evolutionary psychology that affects all of us. We have to take mental shortcuts because otherwise we'd expend too much energy thinking through everything. So we stick to simple explanations for most things in our lives without even thinking about it, especially when it comes from a source we trust. Propagandists have taken advantage of this vulnerability for generations, and will continue to do so for many more since our only defence is the few who actually DO devote much energy to examining all messages from the leadership (and we rarely listen to them). For the rest of us, simple reasons and explanations will have to do in our busy lives.
I did a study when I was younger of "readers" of the Bible, and found that, although many people will say that they read it, very few had enough knowledge to make that statement believable (Even on simple questions like "Who baptised who when Jesus met with John the Baptist, and why?" or "Why was Jesus so down on the Pharisees?" - many couldn't even tell me how many gospels there are!). So I find readership statements suspect, and stick to my original assessment that people rarely read the iconic works of the world, but rather rely upon what "everyone knows" about them.
Yes that's clear. I was put off by the "people" comment, and separately by the "hyperbole" (which I still think are just wrong statements but it is fine if we disagree).
> I did a study when I was younger of "readers" of the Bible, and found that, although many people will say that they read it, very few had enough knowledge to make that statement believable (Even on simple questions like "Who baptised who when Jesus met with John the Baptist, and why?" or "Why was Jesus so down on the Pharisees?" - many couldn't even tell me how many gospels there are!). So I find readership statements suspect, and stick to my original assessment that people rarely read the iconic works of the world, but rather rely upon what "everyone knows" about them.
Fair enough, I suppose. Another point of view: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299433/bible-readership-....
I'm an ardent atheist, but I do actually read the bible from time to time. I enjoy to read the three gospels, and spot the differences between them. I also enjoy some songs in the psalms. Most of the rest is quite annoying, but I enjoyed Crumb's illustration of the first book of Genesis.
As you dive deeper into Nazi era history a lot is based around the question who knew what, how plausible the denial of that person or this organisation was. Seeing the publicly distributed book that may or may not contain specific details regarding plans for war or "The Jewish Question" for yourself is an excellent starting point, no? I agree with other commenters here that the read was not particularly good, but definitely insightful.
I actually do not agree that banning symbols is bad: Especially the Nazis really had a hand for designing good looking stuff, and that will bleed into pop culture if you don't stop it, unconsciously associating the Nazis with "cool". Just look at the Hydra organisation in the Captain America Movies or Japanese Anime, where using Nazi design language was obviously not taboo. Of course, as you said, banning a symbol does not eradicate it, but it does not have to to have positive effect.
I did read a bit from the Koran for a while, just I was interested about what's in it (and why so many people die because of this book) even I don't believe in any god at all.
The Bible is the single most influential work of literature in the history of human civilization. Comparing it to a "personality cult of a strong man" and Mein Kampf is perhaps the most uninformed comment I have ever read on this website.
I find the comparison apt: Both are iconic texts, both have international historical and present influence, and both are rarely actually read, despite people feeling confident about their contents.
Compare that to Mein Kampf, which is a rambling book by a dictator that was only "relevant" in the world for about 25 years. Even then, people didn't really read it. It certainly had zero influence on Nazi legal codes or culture. It was more like the political books that come out today: written mostly to make some money and get one's ideas into the public sphere. Not as a holy document.
As I said, your comment is just deeply, deeply uninformed.
I'm just pointing out why your comment is misinformed. I don't consider that to be "picking a fight."
I'm also not a Christian, so it has nothing to do with being offended, unless the abuse of basic historical facts is something one can be offended about.
That's precisely why people should read it. That personality cult developed because Hitler's narrative of oppresion by Jews resonated so strongly.
> just like nobody actually reads the Bible unless they're actual preachers
Nonsense. Christians not only read it, but study it as a guide to life. There was an informal thing at my work where they'd read and discuss a passage every week or so.
It is an almost unreadable piece of shit. But, I have no doubt that some people will still read it. I doubt that it would turn 'normal people' into fascists, but 'normal people after falling into a youtube-video rabbit hole with right wing content', I guess suddenly it might be appealing.
Banning the symbols is effective in Germany, the same goes for the swastika. By banning this symbol, the society makes clear that the symbol and what it represents is not desired and not mainstream.
Not as such. Rather, the owner of the copyright - the state of Bavaria, where Hitler had his formal residence - decided not to allow reprints. The copyright expired in 2016, and a new, commented edition has been published which Germans can freely buy for 60€ in bookstores of their choice, including Amazon.
However, distribution for reasons other than educational purposes is potentially 'Volksverhetzung' and hence can be illegal depending on circumstances. But again, this is not a blanket ban on sale (except in case of minors as it's considered 'harmful to young persons'). This had already been tested in court in 1979, when the Bundesgerichtshof ruled you could legally own and sell historical copies of the book.
Do you think the skinheads then went on to join a moderate left party because they could actually read their party program?
At the point where you are already committed to an ideology to the point you drastically alter your appearance, you are hardly going to be deterred by a slightly harder to get book.
On the other hand, I don't see how anyone is going to turn Nazis by reading Mein Kampf. The book is hardly relevant today and a mediocre read at best, so the only ones that will make it to the end are academics, people seeking context or people that are already committed to Nazism anyway.
I replied to a comment that said that all book-bans would be evaluated to be harmful/net-negative in retrospect. I don't think that this general statement is true and brought up the ban of Mein Kampf as a counterexample. As simple as that.
Are you comfortable with an unpaid 20-something intern doing the deciding for you? Because, for example, that's who staffs a lot of 'fact checking' sites that Facebook then uses to keep content from you.
How about a fundamentalist Christian making those decisions for you?
>and some skindheads wanted to buy it, it wasn't available. They went away.
They went away eh? I take it Neo-nazism has been solved in Germany? And how, prey tell, did they become skinheads without reading the book?
>why not just provide newer childrens books that are more inclusive.
Who says these books weren't inclusive? They were read by hundreds of millions of children over the decades and translated into many languages. Show me the harm.
It's also distasteful that people who have read and enjoyed these books are now willing to deprive future generations of children from the same enjoyment ... even when it clearly did not hurt them.
As a counter-datapoint I grew up in a country that effectively banned religion. One could go to prison for selling a Bible -- subversive literature, yada yada. It worked for a while, but you cannot completely cut the flow of information from the world outside; so sooner or later people who did not have a strong opinion either way see such bans as unquestionably evil. And very soon after that the majority believes that the main reason for such bans is the inability to argue against the banned literature on merits.
I suspect that instead of letting the subject fade into obscurity such bans often provide the best advertising the topic can get. My 2c.
But back in the day if you really wanted to read it you would mail-order it from abroad.
The book is required reading for most American students for basically that reason.
There's another interest group promoting the idea that they should have the power to denounce other people and objects. Their goals are advanced by denouncing To Kill a Mockingbird; if it works, it's evidence that they really do have that power. The more they can denounce, the stronger they are.
The first group is concerned with the content of the book; the second group has no particular reason to be.
For those people, To Kill a Mockingbird is very dangerous, because it espouses the MLK philosophy (colour blindness) which most people agree with, but which they hate.
For these modern "anti-racists", we must instead see race everywhere, and factor it into every aspect of our lives, making constant calculations and adjustments which we can never hope to do correctly, and which contain internal contradictions we can never resolve. This hands those people tremendous power.
They are like parasites who have taken over a host. It took massive effort to reach the point in society where almost everyone agreed racism was unacceptable, and legitimately feared being called a racist. Like all "isms", we reached the point where almost everyone stopped thinking about what these terms actually mean, and just started substituting the word for a value judgement: racism bad, anti-racism good. This is the perfect setup for someone with different goals to hijack the concept.
He also explicitly stated that programs that specifically benefited black people and only black people as a mechanism to address prior injustice would be justified.
“A society that has done something special against the negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the negro”.
The modern "anti-racists" have very different beliefs, which would have very little support if the implications were spelled out clearly to everyone, and therefore these beliefs need to be laundered and disguised as something more respectable. Hence the language games.
My point is that if you want to complain about modern anti-racists, you are very likely also complaining about MLK's beliefs too. That can be a thing you can do, but your moral foundations become less automatically rock solid and require some justification.
Again: It’s about the specific idea, not a person. And the idea is what is being hijacked, to mean almost the opposite of what was generally accepted.
I agree. MLK is consistently used as a cudgel to defend color-blindness despite never supporting that approach.
Eh. I like to think someone might have answered along the lines of "you shouldn't throw people in jail for crimes they didn't commit".
There are plenty of novels about defending people against crimes they didn’t commit. This one is about much more than that.
I can agree in general, but the case in To Kill a Mockingbird is a little more complex than that. Tom Robinson actually committed the offense of having sex with a girl whose father didn't approve of him. This was shoehorned into the legal system by accusing him of the crime of "rape". This approach is quite current today under the name "statutory rape", and is applied in a race-blind manner.
So it's plausible that if Tom Robinson had been a comparably undesirable white, something very similar would have happened. A lot of things that did happen were specific to him being black, but the very basic framework of the case wasn't.
Take that one element away by making him white, and it remains an interesting story but now it’s about something very different, and I doubt it would be as famous today. It’s also not clear Harper Lee would have bothered to write it.
It would be Bridge of Spies, which makes the same comments on what it should mean to be a lawyer, and on the nature of mob justice, while making the two changes that the defendant is (1) white and (2) actually guilty of the same offense he's charged with.
The main reason is that, if people of a particular group have been treated very badly by society for a long time, simply stopping that treatment is unambiguously a good thing, but it leaves that group in a disadvantaged position which can persist long after the persecution stops. Black people start off life (on average!) with a substantial disadvantage, so if we want people to have equal opportunities to achieve great things regardless of the colour of their skin, you have to do something to redress the balance.
This is why they sometimes advocate for preferential treatment for minorities: equal opportunity is no good if one group of people do not have equal access to those opportunities because they were born poor as a result of historical injustices.
An analogy sometimes used is that of a house on fire. If your house is on fire, you'd like the fire brigade to focus their attention on your house, rather than nearby houses that are not on fire. To an anti-racist, the idea of ignoring the colour of people's skin entirely is as misguided as the idea of fire-fighters focussing on all houses regardless of whether they are on fire.
And if your ultimate goal is a society where race is irrelevant and we all treat each other equally, exactly how does doing the opposite get you there?
To me, ultimate goal is a society that is not biased for or against any racial group. Currently society is biased against some racial groups, so to redress the balance I believe that we should give more support to those that society is biased against.
Maybe it's a silly metaphor, but imagine a seesaw. Currently more weight is on the left than the right, so it's unbalanced. I'd like it to be equally balanced so at the moment, I think the best thing to do it place more weight on the right.
How will your two dimensional seesaw work when there are millions of dimensions to consider in making these “adjustments”?
And what does your dream unbiased society look like? It sounds like a colour blind society to me. So why deliberately move in the other direction?
And once implement your schemes, and then the fixes to correct the problems it introduces, and then the fixes for those fixes, how are you going to reverse it all?
Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.
Of course there are millions of dimensions to account for. That doesn't mean that you give up on trying to address them! That line of argument lets you discredit any attempt at doing good.
Help black people who are discriminated against in the workplace? But what about asians!
Make life easier for deaf people by adding accessibility features to websites? But what about people who can't afford a computer!
Save the rainforest? But what about the arctic!
> So why deliberately move in the other direction?
Because western society is not currently colour-blind, in a very particular direction! That was the point of the seesaw metaphor: not to say that race is one straight line with black at one end and white at the other, but to say that if you want people to have equal opportunities regardless of their race then you have to help the people who are currently at a disadvantage.
> Conversations like these make me extremely glad that I don’t live in America.
Me too :)
Do you think this applies to all disadvantaged groups, or just when discussing issues of race?
What's more common: black people attempting to pass as white, or white people attempting to pass as black?
I hadn't thought of equality of opportunity in this way before, but it does appear to be an innate problem of that approach.
As a counter-argument, I think the preferential treatment approach is upside down. Hiring less qualified people to redress historical inequalities is a top-down approach, authoritarian and minimally impactful. The individuals you hire help them, but not the disadvantaged community at large. We should be taking a bottom-up approach where the disadvantaged are afforded more community funding to bring up their access to opportunities. It is a slower approach because it takes a few generations to see the results, but it leads to long-term change, not band-aid fixes which I feel preferential treatment delivers.
As a counter-country-argument, why not take both approaches? There's something about trying to fix a wrong with more wrongs that I feel will damn the entire system.
Preferential treatment can mean many things. For example, you can provide programs for ethnic minorities to retrain as developers. It could mean scholarships that are only available to black people, or immigrants, or deaf people. It could mean training recruiters and interviewers so that they are less biased in their evaluation of candidates - in ways that they might not even realise.
That said, aiming to hire more people from disadvantaged groups can have positive effects beyond just the people that you hire. It gives young people a wider variety of role models. It can increase your team's performance because you have a wider variety of viewpoints. It can lead to wider cultural change in the company as a whole, making qualified people from disadvantaged backgrounds feel more comfortable applying for senior roles.
And it doesn't have to mean hiring worse people. Perhaps it just means focusing more on problem solving and creativity and less on education and 'culture fit' in your interview process, or advertising your jobs in places where they will be seen by a more diverse group of people.
I think I understand where it comes from, but to me this safe bubble that is trying to be created, generates more problems than solves.
EDIT: Like someone commented below, it just gives those words more power when used in derogatory way.
There are levels here. you’re legally obliged to have schooling up to age 16, the state provides it to most. The removal is about the state “mandating” the reading of a book. That and the maturity of the audience. How many public schools require the reading of the Bible, Koran, Marx, hitler, or Nietzsche?
You’re right, context is everything. In the current us political climate, that might be very hard to achieve right now.
In stable societies the power ladder is at least partially correlated with creating added value. Getting people to buy your product, getting people to elect you into office, even helping out your friends so one day they will help you haul that fridge upstairs. They also have some checks and countermeasures, like the universally trusted independent judicial system, that somewhat impedes attempts to break this correlation. Except now it's breaking apart.
Now we have a growing socioeconomic group that wields increasing power over what others can say by just claiming that they are fighting for a good cause. As long as you are anti-$BUZZWORD and have a sufficient network of followers, nobody dares to oppose you and nobody will protect those who dare.
It's not really about what is in the book or what pronouns someone uses. It's about the fact that a power-hungry person can have the pleasure of telling 1000 other people what to say, and financially obliterate those who don't comply. And no, there won't be a happy blissful day at the end of the road when we have finally eradicated all friction points and everybody can go have a beer together. The power-seekers won't self-disband. They will keep finding a target after target because that's where they get their kicks from.
Entire fucking history of USSR is littered with different power-hungry people using noble goals to chop their competitors' heads off. It didn't end well for them and it didn't end well for the country. I'm happy we are not at the head-chopping stage yet, but I keep wondering how long do we have left...
> Some people are more power-hungry than others
True. Also, some people are more violent than others, but we try to keep those away from the rest of the population and gradually titrate them out of the gene pool.
I would love to live in a society that treated insatiable thirst for power the same way.
Where do you see that happening?
I have a cousin in Los Angeles with three kids (last I heard about a decade ago) and he's in and out of prison all the time. I'm just having my first. Idiocracy wasn't too off the mark.
One particular strength of male humans is their long reproductive years. There are many cases of 80 and 90 year old men reproducing.
ttps://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/bjs/vospats.pdf
> Based on admissions data for 1992 to 1994, violent State prisoners had an average sentence of about 10 years and were expected to serve slightly less than 5 years on average.
That's nearly zero impact on a man's reproductive life.
Before civilization, it used to be that the most violent person in the group could simply take whatever they wanted. At some point we managed to "civilize violence" by creating a special caste -- police officers -- whose career is the use of violence in a controlled way, to prevent the violent from having whatever they want. Although the police abuse this "violence license" they haven't managed to subvert it into supreme dictatorial power. The fact that almost everybody knows what the phrase "police state" means, and that it's a bad thing, is probably part of this.
I imagine there is some similar recursive trick with power-thirst, getting the political schemers to spend their lives chasing each other instead of the rest of us, the way the DEA spend their lives chasing drug lords but never make any real progress. Note that the drug lords are generally pretty happy that the DEA exist, or else their trade would not be nearly so lucrative. And the DEA are happy that the drug lords exist, or else they'd be out of a job.
It might take us a few more millenia to acquire the vocabulary needed to describe the recursive trick, let alone discover it.
My understanding is that in hunter-gatherer societies, that is not the case and they were (and are) quite egalitarian. E.g. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201105...):
>The writings of anthropologists make it clear that hunter-gatherers were not passively egalitarian; they were actively so. Indeed, in the words of anthropologist Richard Lee, they were fiercely egalitarian.[2] They would not tolerate anyone's boasting, or putting on airs, or trying to lord it over others. Their first line of defense was ridicule. If anyone—especially some young man—attempted to act better than others or failed to show proper humility in daily life, the rest of the group, especially the elders, would make fun of that person until proper humility was shown.
>One regular practice of the group that Lee studied was that of "insulting the meat." Whenever a hunter brought back a fat antelope or other prized game item to be shared with the band, the hunter had to express proper humility by talking about how skinny and worthless it was. If he failed to do that (which happened rarely), others would do it for him and make fun of him in the process. When Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice, the response he received was the following: "When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way, we cool his heart and make him gentle."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinookan_peoples#Historic_c...
The Makah were required to free their slaves and abandon the practice as an explicit condition (Article 12) of their peace treaty with the United States:
https://www.fws.gov/pacific/ea/tribal/treaties/MAKAH_1855.pd...
The Quinault were required to do so as well (Article 11):
https://goia.wa.gov/resources/treaties/quinault-treaty-1856
[1] In many senses the Olympic Peninsula's West-slope rainforest is the ultimate ecosystem for hunter-gatherers: so rich in food sources that none of the native tribes had to develop any form of agriculture, yet most of them had developed written language. It was certainly the last such ecosystem to experience "first contact" (~1850 C.E.) with modern technological society, and as a result we know more about the natural state of hunter-gatherer civilization there than anywhere else.
Are you advocating for eugenics?
Which is where I'm pretty sure the memetic tools came from to capture and wield this power over people. Where exactly? Marxism. Not it in and of its self, but along with the French Post structuralists a universal solvent of philosophy has been weaponized and let loose (and encouraged to grow) in North America... and sadly seeded to the rest of the world.
To me this looks like the end game of a small but clever team of cold war era Soviets. 1970's USA was in no way prepared to fight an idea war.
Though the country that launched it is no more, the fall out will, I fear, kill us all. How? These power game playing people will continue to ascend until they get to the top. Then, there, they will implement absurdist anti-sense anti-science policy. When? Two more generations tops. Let's say 2060, that's a nice round number, and we'll see wide spread famine and a new kind of gulag in North America.
But that's worst case scenario. Maybe it'll all fade away? I hope so. Previous washes of political correctness have come and gone. And, like I love to tell myself, from Obama's lips 'Reality has a way of asserting itself'. And these bizarre, predictable power games are tethered from reality.
This wave has very strong economic foundation. Remember we used to laugh 10 years ago about those people taking $30K loans to study for basket weaving degrees? Well, it got worse. This generation took $50K loans to study social justice degrees. And these degrees taught them that the real source of problems are not the colleges that sold them the worthless degrees. Not the corporations that outsourced the production jobs they would have otherwise taken. Not the interest rates and pro-corporate policies that made many small businesses unsustainable. No, they think it's their neighbor who studied 10x harder to get a STEM degree and occupy one of the last remaining spots in the economy that pays well. And now this neighbor is a privileged $BUZZWORD supremacist who dares to have kids and wants to put them into a good school and hence must be dealt with.
And they will "deal" with them. Or, rather, us. Because burning witches and heretics had been a popular entertainment for centuries and the factors that held it back since the Enlightenment age are fading away very fast.
[0]: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-t...
The point is "Aufheben der Kultur" - the abolition of culture. They attack Seuss because he's a beloved children's icon and a common cultural reference point we love and share. The point is to permanently taint him so we no longer have that reference point, detaching us from our shared culture so that these ideologues can shoehorn in some garbage woke propaganda to children at the youngest age possible.
Make no mistake: Dr Seuss won't be the last icon they come for.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/04/air-pollutio...
Sure we are. There has been discussion. Just because you weren't involved in it, which is natural since I doubt you work for Dr. Seuss Enterprises, doesn't mean it didn't take place. The onus is on them to protect Dr. Seuss' legacy and it is important to change with the times.
This is not the first time something like this has happened and it won't be the last. There are plenty of examples to be found online of popular family cartoons which depicted racial stereotypes.
Go check out the Anti-black imagery in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia and see if you think, by following the same logic you displayed in your comment, this stuff should still be allowed while keeping in mind it was mainstream acceptable during its time.
Why, exactly? I wouldn't buy any such a thing, but I know several institutions that have good reasons to.
People in general have some obsession with the Nazi and the last war. As if WWI never happened, and great wars before it. Because of this obsession, many people seem to think that the cause of a future war would be a kind of Nazism, completely disregarding the fact that it wasn't the cause of WWI and other earlier wars. Paradoxically, they also seem to forget what were the actual reasons of the rise of Nazism in post-WWI Germany (huge WWI retributions, enormous inflation and omnipresent poverty - basically people were very unhappy, and this very unhappiness was abused by Hitler; the ideology came afterwards).
But I was factually wrong ; It is not illegal to sell them, at least in the countries I had in mind (France & Germany).
However in France it is forbidden to exhibit them. So in order to be sold they must only be described but not shown.
Yahoo & eBay do ban the sell of such items, notably since being sued for that.
While there is a grey area around general German WW2 artifacts, including those associated with the Nazi government, eBay explicitly disallows Nazi propaganda. It has a blanket ban on any item with a swastika that was made after 1933.
While some are going around to “point out” Mein Kampf can be bought on eBay, eBay only allows critically-annotated copies designed for scholars.
Accusation is a term of conflict. Terms of service changes are decisive outcomes of compassion.
This is an "execution"?
Maybe try using language proportionate to the offence here.
> The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company, which was founded by Seuss’ family, told AP
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-dr-...
eBay has an existing policy that removes racist materials. They're just applying it based on the Seuss info.
> Items with racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise demeaning portrayals, for example through caricatures or other exaggerated features, including figurines, cartoons, housewares, historical advertisements, and golliwogs
https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...
From one of the listed items:
> This item has been listed previously. eBay removed it with this reminder of the guidelines:
> "You listed the book Mein Kampf, but it is not a critically annotated edition. eBay only allows critically annotated versions of Mein Kampf to be listed on the site. While we appreciate that you chose to utilize our site, we must ask that you please not relist in this case."
> This is their policy and this edition is compliant with that policy.
That's a good point. I didn't realize they were annotated by modern scholars.
This fine example is ok too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Protocols-of-the-Learned-Elders-of-...
But Mulberry street is the problem.
Incidentally this isn’t true:
> Books advocating for segregation.
Or, rather, if such books are available it is against eBay’s policy and they should be reported. eBay has a specific policy against items that glorify racism or endorse racist stereotypes: https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...
It does not have a policy against everything morally icky, but it’s quite clear about racism. Mulberry Street and If I Ran The Zoo are both racist and against eBay’s policy.
Even worse, hateful and racist content that is ideologically aligned is explicitly allowed. One would be hard-pressed to find anything more blatantly racist than White fragility or works of Dr Kendi, and yet you would not see eBay banning them, up until they fall out of favor.
If one was actually banning books that did harm, those books ought to be at the top of the list.
But they are not banned (not should they be IMO). So books that've incited less violence then them ought not be either.
Once again: eBay’s policy is not to ban harmful ideas generally or anything that might be morally icky. They have a specific policy against racist items, in any form. That includes the blatant racism in some of Dr. Suess’s books. The policy is reasonable and not that complicated. If you want to buy something racist, there are other websites.
eBay is not trying to police everything, they just don’t want racist stuff on their website. That is their perogative as a business and is hardly a meaningful threat to free speech even considering eBay’s market share.
Part of the reason this preposterous “debate” keeps raging is that people keep inappropriately elevating the issues to abstractions, since the specifics of the case are really not controversial:
- Just as YouTube and Twitch do not allow pornography, eBay does not allow racism. That does not mean that porn and racism are banned under the 1st Amendment. Likewise there’s plenty of stuff on YouTube that’s more immoral than any legal pornography, but YouTube never claimed to ban everything bad. They just don’t want to be associated with porn. Likewise, eBay doesn’t want to be associated with racism.
- Some of Dr. Seuss’s children’s books have bigoted depictions of nonwhites, including cartoons black people that resemble “darky iconography,” which anyone in good faith would agree are deeply racist.
- Since eBay doesn’t allow racist items (and had good reason to be concerned about racists rushing to buy discontinued Dr. Seuss books), it banned the items from its store.
Nobody seriously thinks that YouTube is censoring the porn industry. It is true is that the “buy racist crap to own the libs” industry is much smaller than porn and probably can’t easily survive without eBay’s help. I fail to see how that’s eBay’s problem.
Edit: This comment doesn't deserve response, it deserves to be silenced.
E.g. the oft denounced 'On the Jewish Question' that is predictably cited in your link is a work arguing for the political emancipation of Jewish people.
It does so with language that is offensive to a modern reader by turning around and mocking the arguments used by Bruno Bauer who argued against political emancipation.
That [use of language] makes it problematic, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone without commentary on the polemical debate it was a part of.
But Marx is addressing and attacking the very kind of political oppression of Jewish people that forced his father to convert to Lutheranism - which the article of course mentioned without later citing its relevance to 'On the Jewish Question' -, making the point that Jewish people should have political rights without being forced to abandon their religion.
As evidence of Marx willingness to use now-unacceptable language, it works. As evidence that he hated Jews it's a massive own goal for the article writer to use an article that argued for expanding Jewish peoples rights.
There are many legitimate criticisms to level against Marx' language. But this article is dishonest or ignorant in it's presentation of a lot of it.
To address specifically the Communist Manifesto, suggesting it is talking of a conspiracy suggests you have not read it, or understood it. If anything one of the key aspects of Marxist thinking was to directly denounce the idea that the individual actions of a few have much - if any - impact on history, and to present a conception of the way society changes as one controlled by historical and economical necessity, inevitably developing based on market forces.
The idea of capitalism as a conspiracy runs directly counter to the Marxist idea of historical materialism, so it's bizarre to try to frame his work as promoting a conspiracy theory.
Furthermore, the whole first chapter is fan-boy level praise for capitalism as having brought humanity to a level of development not seen before, and for how the free market is the "battering ram" that over time forces even the worst bigots to drop xenophobia, driven by economic forces.
If he was promoting a conspiracy, he was speaking awfully well about the supposed conspirators, given the idea of the development of new modes of production as the wheel of progress is a central thesis of Marxist thought, and his insistence that socialism/communism is a necessary consequence of capitalism rests on the idea that economic progress is inevitable and detached from the actions of individuals.
The Communist Manifesto presents capitalism as a huge step forward, just still flawed and something that would eventually give way to another step forwards.
This idea of Marx as promoting a conspiracy is an inherent demonstration of a lack of understanding of Marx writing, because it lifts up the idea of great leaders where Marx consistently put that idea down and criticised it, by talking of whole movements in terms of forces and modes of production within which the individuals - even the capitalists themselves - are trapped and playing out a role they have little control over.
This seems worse than an outright ban on all copies.
(Edit: I'd really like to see some thought out defense on how censorship doesn't injure scholarship. Downvotes are just limp concessions.)
https://babylonbee.com/news/skynet-is-a-private-company-they...
Given how frequently people reference historians and history in these discussions, I'm surprised that nobody ever seems to ask them their opinions.
I guess?
History is something that historians do, not study. There is a meaningful difference between an expert applying actual methods and an interested layperson reading primary sources for their own edification. Not to say that people should be prevented from doing that, but it does seem like a bait and switch to say "what about the historians" and then swap to "what about this entirely different set of people" when it becomes clear that historians aren't actually using ebay in the method you describe.
If you really care about laypeople having access to primary sources, a way bigger problem is the fact that most archives will not allow non-credentialed people to access their materials. There's way more "censorship" going on there than anything happening on ebay if that counts.
Consider an algorithms class in undergrad. You can read about all sorts of algorithms. But learning the Nth algorithm won't transform your work into original algorithms research. You are only consuming information, not producing it. Similarly, just reading other history research can teach you things but isn't what historians are doing. A lot of "history buffs" fall into this category and love to read pop history and consider themselves experts.
Now consider somebody who wants to develop an original algorithm. But they've never learned any analysis methods and they've never critically engaged with the literature. They don't know how to prove an algorithm's correctness or behavior rigorously. There are a ton of these people online. They often gravitate to trying to solve P=NP. This would be comparable to somebody who never learned historiography (the method of doing history) reading primary sources and trying to replicate what historians are doing. Like any field, history has methods. It isn't just ad-hoc decision making from people who happen to have a title next to their name.
In CS this is largely harmless. But for many fields within history, accessing the archive also damages it because people are touching one-of-a-kind objects. So archives are selective in who they choose to allow to access their materials.
While I don't mind cleaning up/modernizing certain things and not printing the originals anymore, not allowing the existing originals to be sold even by independent third-party sellers is just horrible.
We've got a lot of old books purchased second hand because historians tend to like old books, but none of them are primary sources used for research. All of the primary sources are coming directly from archives or inter-library-loans.
Yes, there are plenty of of options if you can't find a copy on eBay, especially these days, but nonetheless, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for historians and laypeople alike to want originals of old works.
I think they mean execution of a sentence/task, not of a person.
“Okay” is now considered racist.
It’s super pernicious too, but effective bludgeon. Making “Okay” racist is obscure enough that most normal people (ie those not obsessed with wokeness) have never heard of it.
Consider that you’ve never heard until now that “okay” is racist and you did the okay symbol in front of a political commissar (I mean a woke person, can’t keep up) that doesn’t like you. You’re done.
> In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.
> In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.
> Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
> The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.
This can only happen in a toxic mono-culture or a corrupt dictatorship. This kind of thing is coming straight out of academia and there are little to no checks and balances on the kinds of insane cultural shifts are being made. The left and far left absolutely dominate that space and they have lost touch with reality, as anyone can clearly see when 99% of their accusations are unjust and hasty and simply ridiculous to anyone who isn't part of the cult.
And in any case, it was not a sudden "canceling" or anything approaching that. Seuss's estate, managed by his family, made the decision after much deliberation to cease the publication of only six books due to the content. You could even see it as an anti-cancellation - Seuss's family wants to avoid him being associated with the obviously racist content of some of his work.
Or, is it possible there's an interpretation of the sentence (and a perfectly reasonable one) where they spent months deciding whether they should stop publishing a publication that they had decided was racist?
The decision matrix might have been more complicated than: "does the work contain racist content".
> Seuss actually grew to become more aware of his harmful images later in his life, and to regret them, eventually revising the Mulberry Street text and illustration. "I had a gentleman with a pigtail. I colored him yellow and called him a 'Chinaman,'" Seuss said. "That's the way things were 50 years ago. In later editions, I refer to him as a 'Chinese man.' I have taken the color out of the gentleman and removed the pigtail and now he looks like an Irishman."
[1] https://theweek.com/articles/969777/complicated-quagmire-dr-...
I wanted to write in or call in, but it was too late.
This one is crazy, but I have my own causes and that ain't one of them! I find it peculiar and I'm aware "they are coming for the trade unionists next" but I think I can navigate this reality and stay out of the re-education camps.
How? I think they'll get to you next. As commenters above pointed out, there is a "long march" through institutions before it starts trickling down.
There were plenty of solutions to navigate before the .... last one. I think the parallels will hold pretty well this go-around, easily navigable options.
Sorry, what ‘o’ word? I'm seriously asking.
Call me crazy, but haven’t we seen social media being manipulated (bots) to push narratives?
These accusations or problems crop up fairly quick and then the media gets on it and then whoever/whatever is destroyed.
If social media can be manipulated to swing stock markets or elections, then isn’t it possible it can swing to push narratives or keep us constantly fighting ourselves?
eBay deciding unilaterally that people can't buy or sell already-printed copies is just icing on the weirdness cake. This is the same website where searching for "minstrel" or "mammy" turns up a veritable smörgåsbord of racist caricatures, and yet some Dr. Seuss books cross the line for them?
These racist caricatures have a long and ugly history, and they persist. They may seem mild to you, but to people who have to deal with racist caricatures every day of their lives, it's unpleasant. Not just having to explain to your children why they've been presented like that in this book targeted to them, but why all of the other children they know will have been exposed to the same images.
I don't think you intended to diminish that in your post, but I think it's worth taking note when you tell other people that they shouldn't be offended by something when you don't experience it.
Take a look at the images, and you can see why the publishers felt that they were better off without them. As for why eBay decided to glom onto that... that I can't say.
Maybe I'm old fashioned but all I see is a smiling boy, in traditional Chinese dress, eating what appears to be rice out of a bowl with chopsticks. Are there actually Chinese people who find this offensive? Why?
This is just cancel culture playing out. Weak, risk-averse executives cowardly bending the knee to a small group of malicious, narcissistic activists.
This reminds me of the "What is the problem with Apu?" fiasco. No Indian I knew cared, but a small number of sociopathic activists forced the hands of the cowards in charge.
> forced the hands of the cowards in charge
So you support a white actor voicing an Indian character, and don't want some Indian-Americans added to the show? Change is good when something is messed up. Our problem wasn't with the show itself, its how the show influences the behavior of society negatively, and the fact that there was simply no other representation of Indian-Americans in media at the time.
South Park, Simpsons, Family Guy and all the greats are packed full of racially-adventurous humour and that's part of what makes these shows great. Scottish, British, Indian, Japanese, Jewish, Muslim and virtually everyone is picked on.
They're equal opportunity offenders.
If you don't like it, that's your prerogative, but don't force your preferences on the rest of us.
This seems to belie the entire concept of fiction writing. Must that writer also be a straight married male with children and own a convenience store? Can a male writer write a book with female characters, or vice versa?
Hank literally agrees with me. Of course I'm not saying that in general, but in this specific case its absolutely the right thing to do.
I don't know what's special about this case. I mean I understand what's of special importance to you, but if writer <-> character matching is required here, I don't see what would prevent it from becoming a universalizable rule that would turn "write what you know" from a piece of hackneyed advice into a moral principle.
As to why not have whites play Asians even in a cartoon when they can just as easily play space aliens and pink unicorns? The same reason we all hate Big Bang Theory, it leads to tired and insulting jokes based on shallow stereotypes. This is why Asians don't like Apu, because most of the jokes around him are based on lazy and frequently negative stereotypes. The jokes about space aliens and pink unicorns could also be lazy, but there's no space aliens or pink unicorns to get affected by them, fortunately. Remember that Nahasapeemapetilon isn't even a name in any culture, it's made up to sound funny to western audiences.
Apu is on the whole a very positive stereotype - a successful and responsible small business owner who's respected by his and contributes to his community.
Compare him to someone like Cletus who is a negative stereotype of white Southerners, portrayed as an extremely low IQ ignoramus. Or Kyle's cousin in South Park who's a negative stereotype of a Jew, portrayed as a hypersensitive money-grubber. And so on.
Your injury is nothing more than an imagined grievance.
"This is why Asians don't like"
Speak for yourself. You aren't a spokesperson for South Asians, and not all of them are on the same wokeness bandwagon.
EDIT to ask: how do the Dr. Seuss books fare in that regard?
I didn't even grow up in America, but it's irritating when your coworkers think that they are meaningfully connecting with you based on what they "learned" from some hackneyed stereotype in a mildly funny adult cartoon. Doubly so when that coworker happens to be in a management position above you.
My advice: if you have a South Asian coworker, put away the Apu jokes unless they like it and bring it up for some reason.
Compare it to some of the deliberately-racist cartoons that Giesel drew during World War II:
https://reimaginingmigration.org/dr-seuss-political-cartoons...
This wasn't intended to offend, and I don't know how many people were offended by it. But if I were the publisher the similarities would distress me.
There was a white person presented in an exaggerated, outdated costume in that very same drawing.
Discriminated against in college admissions? Erased in discussions of diversity in tech? Who cares. Call me back when we can use you to get mad at a children's book.
Outdated? These cartoons were drawn in the 1930's and 40's... 90+ years ago. They were not outdated at the time.
Regardless if we find some of these drawings racist by today's standards - they are historical and should be preserved as such.
1984 becomes more real by the day...
They aged pretty f-ing fantastically considering what they could have drawn back then.
As for the wardrobe, no, it doesn't look that dated, especially for the time. Maybe the style of it, but conical hats and wooden shoes are both practical and still commonplace throughout East and Southeast Asia, last I checked. The clogs are probably the most objectionable aspect, and only because I don't know if anything resembling Japanese geta was common in China.
And further, the whole book is from the point of view of a child's imagination, so expecting it to map particularly closely to reality is entirely ignorant of literary context.
Nobody cares at all.
I'm sure that actual Chinese people have more to worry about -- though the black people living in America definitely have current fears from people living up to the racist stereotypes presented here. This is about us and dealing with our own difficult past that still afflicts us today.
Anyways, IMO the white character's coloration is just as exaggerated as the Chinese character's. "White" people aren't actually 0xFFFFFF. The white character's physically improbable nose length and hair situation are also reminiscent of racist caricatures of white people.
It's kind of a stereotype of rural farmers in China. If you do a Google image search for "rural Chinese farmers" or even "Chinese peasants" you can still see the same type of grass hat being worn today. Then remember that in the 1930s the industrial revolution hadn't reached China yet; it was very much an agrarian society (much like the US a century before then) and nearly everybody was a farmer like that.
Is Dr. Seuss's cartoon offensive? Meh, it just feels dated and out of touch with what modern China has achieved, culturally and economically. I personally don't find it any worse a stereotype than what one sees today if they do a Google Image Search for "Texan", "Frenchman", or "Englishman" but YMMV.
(Actually, the GIS result for "Frenchman" is rather amusing; perhaps Google owes France an apology for being "offensive".)
Is it, though? The wardrobe seems a fair bit elegant for some rural farmer; I'd expect a straw hat and simpler garb.
I ain't familiar with Chinese formal wear from that time period, but if I were a child in the 1930's trying to imagine a formally-dressed Chinese man (i.e. the literary context of that depiction) that's probably what I'd imagine. The white rice contributes to that perception of wealth, too; from what I understand, white rice is a symbol of affluence in a lot of Asian cultures, and brown rice a symbol of peasantry (see also: the Imperial Japanese Navy's experience with thiamine deficiency because sailors subsisted themselves entirely on "fancy" white rice instead of brown: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history). The Chinese man's presentation alongside a formally-dressed magician contributes further to that interpretation.
[ACT1] Comment here: "What bothers me is the speed with which this process ... happens. We are not discussing things anymore."
[ACT2] jfengel discusses racism. Gets repeatedly downvoted.
This is the part that bothers me.
Publishers can do whatever they want, and it's nice that they're at least willing to try to be progressive, even if this particular case of outrage is maybe a bit exaggerated.
Ebay jumping on the bandwagon seems like it's just for brownie points with whatever faux-woke nerd happens to scroll past the announcement.
eBay isn't deciding that, it is deciding unilaterally that it will not participate in the buying or selling of those items.
eBay probably has no interest and in any case has no power to make decisions about what can be bought and sold, only about what it will participate as a facilitator of buying and selling.
/s
eBay has a natural monopoly due to the nature of auctions. If they decide not to list something, it becomes at the very least much harder to trade.
Online auctions aren’t the only places to buy and sell goods.
They aren’t even the only places to buy and sell goods online.
Plenty of places still selling them (though, because of the announcement that they won’t be published, prices are insane right now, as they’ve become instant high-interest speculative collectibles.)
And if that sounds like it’s going to far can they at least have no say in the right to resale?
eBay is not "unilaterally" deciding anything. I can't remember the last time I bought or sold anything on eBay for instance. As I see it, they probably want to avoid the resulting controversy from any of these items, and don't want anything to do with them on their platform.
As an immigrant to the US, this is what I don't get. Isn't the whole idea of capitalism supposed to be that eBay's delisting is an opportunity for ten other websites specializing in obscure Dr. Seuss books to pop up and eat their business? [1]
Or would you rather have one centralized government agency in charge of deciding which books can and can't be sold?
--------------------------------------------------
[1] What I personally suspect (without much evidence) is that there is very little of a secondary market for these books. Sure, some are going for $500 because people will collect anything, but the person simply doesn't care about them one way or the other.
It is. And don't get me wrong: eBay's well within their rights to restrict what people can buy and sell on their platform. It's just weird that this is where they draw the line; the message here seems to be "we're totally fine with selling things depicting racist caricatures, except for these old children's books".
That is: eBay having the right to do something does not make them above criticism or scrutiny.
Yes, the inconsistent policy applications you mention does mean that eBay is a terrible site if you want to find well-vetted products. Honestly, I have never gotten a particularly "trustworthy" vibe from eBay, so this doesn't come as a huge surprise to me.
It is another (and overstepping imo) for Ebay to restrict individual people from selling to others goods that are not illegal or in violation of their other practical rules (no selling jewelry, monetary equivalents, etc).
This falls into the category of taste / political opinions and has gone too far too quickly. Much as I don't like what the silly cartoons are, and of course while I don't think Ebay is a public forum that has any obligations (they can do what they want), I think Ebay is getting in deeper than it should.
Will they apply the logic here to all categories of goods for sale? T-shirts? Political buttons? Historical political pamphlets? Current political pamphlets or campaign material? How about baseball team merchandise that has racist mascots? (Why haven’t they?) Merchandise of companies where the CEO may have bigoted views?
How about books that have words in them that discuss race, or in any way describe an unflattering picture of a certain group? Or scientific studies that may come to race-based findings?
I think the other thing that bothers me is that to be protected by such measures, you have to be popular. And it's flimsy. This year it's <x> group, next year that group is forgotten and it's on to <y> group. Woe to the actually wronged group of people who can't garner enough popular support, and who fall by the wayside of laws that are less enforced because people thought the social-media driven justice system took care of it.
Ps. And edit just to add, lest someone discount my opinion as from a privileged position, I am among one of the groups said to be portrayed in a racist way in those books. If only people’s concern about racism in cartoons extended to more important matters as well.
Edit, to add: as a comment below notes eBay only allows annotated versions of the book. So maybe they are consistent; I didn’t click through any of the listings when I searched. I also have no idea how you annotate Mein Kampf to not be racist/anti-Semitic propaganda...
It really was not that long ago... like 20 years we knew that all the things we’re seeing now are wrong and even had an idea why they were wrong.
There is going to be a kick back from all of this. I think we all know it, just not what form it will take.
It's the power of peer pressure combined with the apparently human tendancy to encourage others to do things we know are wrong for our own amusement. It's the playground mentality where a bunch of kids stand around goading another kid into doing something terrible chanting "do it, do it". With each success the groups find new levels of perversion to push their members to.
Most people wouldn't call a version with just a disclaimer annotated. I assume annotated versions of Mein Kampf refute Hitler's claims.
I wouldn't be surprised if this started as a copyright issue. Bavaria inherited Hitlers copyright and aggressively banned any sale of Mein Kampf, only annotated versions got around that ban and even that was a legal uphill battle as far as I remember.
Private libraries can do whatever they like. Public ones should be required to carry even the most offensive book.
Given that, libraries shouldn't be required to carry every book, they should optimize their collections for what their local users want to read. If it turns out that old out of print childrens' books aren't popular, then why should they carry them?
Libraries come and go, and should be treated as temporary collections (fair enough re space constraints). To attempt to erase history (“cancel it”?) is to ignore its teachings.
Edit: In retrospect, this comment reads like I'm dismissing the parent or grandparents' concern, but really I'm just saying that you can definitely buy old stock that's been taken off shelves.
The precedent of books being illegal has already been set in many countries. Now all that is missing is the political will to have them banned (and at the rate things are deteriorating, I expect this will come sooner rather than later).
And beyond that, I don't think you mean what you generally say here, that libraries should have books that are considered controversial by elites. I can think of plenty of books that are controversial to leftist elites and plenty of books that are controversial to right wing elites.
they can surely stop publishing additional copies, but existing copies should not be burned.
were their local readers asked if these books were offensive? Or was this pushed over them?
Ebay is a private merchant. They can choose what to list too. Maybe this presents a copyright problem with clones, we don't know.
I found the books by googling the title and PDF because I was curious about why they were removed. Curiosity satisifed and I still love Dr. Seuss.
Someone (probably), in 1934 Hacker News: "BASF, Deutsche Bank, Hugo Boss, Bayer, BMW, and Siemens are private merchants. They can choose what to sell, and to whom. Maybe this presents a survival problem for the Jews, we don't know."
I guess it's ok since the public-private authoritarianism and book-burning is left-leaning this time?
So make a company yourself that specializes in trading items banned from other shops. It wouldn't be the first and it's completely legal. I bet someone is already capitalizing on the outrage over this news. I don't know how exactly and I don't mean the media.
About the companies you list, we study them to look at the rise of Hitler, and we have put anti-discrimination laws in place to hopefully stop someone from abusing their positions like that again.
This isn't the state entering your home and burning books. Wrong hill.
If you make a social media site that organizes domestic terror and your bank cancels you then that's your problem.
You do realise that most of the organisation of the "domestic terror" was done on Facebook right ?
The same is true for content platforms like Reddit or Facebook. They were pro-free speech until they started to get bad publicity from it.
Guess what? It's totally fine and valid to criticize private entities even when their conduct is perfectly lawful.
Thought experiment: imagine eBay and Amazon started to promote Neo-Nazi literature on their home pages in the same way that they now promote anti-racist books and such. What would be the appropriate response: outrage, or "bUt iTs a pRiVaTe cOmPaNy!!!"?
I don't expect eBay to cater to my banned Dr Seuss book needs.
Are you saying they don't want freedom of religion because they are happy with no religion or are happy with theirs? That may be true for folks who've never experienced anything different from the way they were raised. I think the majority would like the freedom to choose something different when one thing is not working for them.
At what point to we step up and say, these megacorps have as much power over our lives as the government. And in some cases more. The US government would struggle to ban a book world wide but ebay and amazon can do it pretty easily.
Back in the 1950s, Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, decided that he wasn't going to buy any more screenplays from communists, or anybody who had communist friends, or even anybody who'd been accused of having communist friends.
MGM was a private company, so that was perfectly okay.
Right?
Right?
It's also a suggestion that perhaps one might want to think about what could happen should the "cancellation" shoe suddenly be on the other foot, as it well might. These things can change, sometimes faster than people expect them to.
Robespierre was pretty surprised when the mob showed up at his door, you can bet.
Personally, I think the cancel culture stuff will hit a tipping point and go the other way toward some mean. That sort of pendulum swing happens with culture all the time. Just like our society and laws survived the Hollywood Blacklist (and many worse societal upheavals), it'll survive this.
Colorado Power is a private company, they can choose who to sell power to. Maybe this is a problem with that data center.
That doesn't mean their choices are somehow immune from public criticism.
I realize that clarity is in short supply in online discussions, but mostly I think people that are reacting negatively are just asserting that they disagree with the decision and not that a law has been broken or that the government should step in and force the decision to be reversed.
From first principles, the public vs private division is about preserving freedom. When a private company can exercise its freedom to infringe on the freedom of others to such an extent, we act. Private businesses can’t do a lot of things because they harm freedoms (civil rights act and its additions among others).
But if they're banning the sale, which then leads to ownership, that's too far.
We have to draw a line somewhere. As a heavily left leaning person who feels unnerved about the state of politics at the moment, this decision is extremely discomforting.
I haven't seen a good summary of what parts of the withdrawn books were considered inappropriate, but my understanding is that the stronger objection has been to political cartoons that Theodor Seuss Geisel created.
I've not seen any assertions (never mind evidence) that the children's books contained "severe racist overtones". To be clear, I'm pushing back on the "severe" adjective. There clearly have been assertions about racist overtones in the children's books, just not "severe" racist overtones -- at least that is my understanding.
Unfortunately I guess it would be inappropriate to actually post the objectionable material for discussion since it has been made clear lately that there is no "use-mention" distinction permitted on these matters.
We are therefore rapidly finding ourselves in a situation where the most easily offended person wields immense power to shutdown speech and commerce by simply asserting that something offends them and there is no recourse to challenge their opinion, it must be accepted without discussion.
I find this situation appalling and rapidly approaching frightening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Ran_the_Zoo#Criticism
I've owned copies with these pages. It's depressing to me that some people think that we should keep teaching this stuff to kids.
It did provide a lot more insight for me than the superficial coverage I found in most places.
I'm not sure if we'll ever come back to that book (it's part of an anthology) but if we do it'll be when he's old enough to understand a conversation about why it's not okay. And then we'll skip the pages, because the book is better off without them anyway.
Perhaps that is why they sloughed off making the films.
When he does get old enough to watch movies, I can't reasonably expect to keep him from watching or reading things. If he doesn't see them with us, he'll see it at friends' or grandparents' houses, but either way we'll have to talk with him about what he's seeing.
Disney movies are a great example of something a lot of people seem to remember as harmless and fun, but they pretty much all contain at least some problematic and/or scary elements to varying degrees.
How do you teach a child what's wrong if you can't show them examples and articulate to them why it's wrong?
Do you just not teach them and hope that one of them doesn't grow up to be the next Hitler instead?
The concern is not that people want to continue using I ran the Zoo as a educational tool.
The concern is ebay is weighing in to say they know better than parents how to educate their children. OR that eBay is weighing in that they know better than collectors what books are suitable for purchase.
Some people find it presumptuous, patronizing, and concerning that eBay wants to make these decisions for individuals.
https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/here-are-the-wr...
However, I have seen some disagreement among different news sources about what exactly led to the bans.
It all started with the gluten intolerant choosing the lunch location
So while literal gut reaction is serious and exists, people claiming gluten intolerance are much more likely to be confusing something else.
But no, I don’t expect them to sit there and watch. Most restaurants have some gluten-free items so there is something to eat.
But I would expect there to be some fair rotation where every once in a while we go to a special gluten restaurant, and also the bbq guy’s favorite, etc etc
What happened was the veto power of allowing a single person who thinks they are gluten intolerant to have an undue power in selecting the restaurant.
It seems similar here as it’s really someone’s feeling but the response is not proportional. The response to some people feeling gluten intolerant shouldn’t be to never eat at pizza restaurants. Similar to some people feeling sad from reading a Dr Seuss book shouldn’t result in banning Dr Seuss books from ever being bought or sold.
The argument is “well it’s not that bad to avoid gluten” and that’s true. Skipping gluten isn’t the end of the world. It’s not a major problem. Just like missing out on a few Dr Seuss books doesn’t directly ruin ones life.
But it lessons it a little bit and the act of accommodating all these little changes puts culture in a downward spiral where very small groups limit experiences.
The challenge I have is that there are serious social justice needs that must be fought and worked on to make society better. Systemic racism, bias against the poor, systemic poverty, etc.
These kinds of things are thematically similar to this Dr Seuss stuff, but while Dr Seuss isn’t important, systemic injustice is important.
It’s like how health inspections for restaurants are important, but unrelated to gluten in the restaurant. I can be for restaurant hygiene but against banning gluten.
> I haven't seen a good summary of what parts of the withdrawn books were considered inappropriate, but my understanding is that the stronger objection has been to political cartoons that Theodor Seuss Geisel created.
This is the first link I could find, but I've seen the same content elsewhere: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/here-are-the-wr...
Two of the books have traditional racist caricatures of Chinese people, and another one has something that seems like a caricature of an Arabian.
However, the other three are kind of a stretch, IMHO. One has "Eskimo fish" with parka-like manes. Another has a group of people in a boat at the North pole, which are being interpreted as being Inuit, but the text doesn't say so and they just look like people in parkas to me. And the last just has a Japanese person in traditional garb next to the nonsense question "How old do you have to be a Japanese?." I guess the sin is just referencing any non-Western ethnicity in any context, which is kinda nuts.
Is it racist to depict a citizen of a country in that country’s traditional national garb? Simplified to cartoon form for children?
I guarantee no actual Chinese are offended by this.
Chinese-born or American-born? My guess is that American-born Chinese would be more likely to be offended, because they've been acculturated to the American culture around this kind of offense, and a lot of it is reasoning by analogy to the black experience (e.g. if similar caricatures of blacks are offensive to them due to centuries of pervasive racism, then other groups should be able to claim offense at caricatures of them)
I remember reading something years ago about an Asian-American frat (I think some pledge died during a hazing ritual). Part of the pledge process was to read a bunch of stuff about anti-Asian racism in order to build a shared identity.
Born in Europe actually, so I don't know where I fall on that spectrum, haha. But probably closer to the US than to China.
>Listings that promote, perpetuate or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination, including on the grounds of race, ethnicity, color, religion, gender or sexual orientation, aren't allowed. This includes but is not limited to the following:
...
>Items with racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise demeaning portrayals, for example through caricatures or other exaggerated features, including figurines, cartoons, housewares, historical advertisements, and golliwogs
I doubt the books would be banned under this policy alone, but the public uproar about them means they are going to be popular tokens among people who want them specifically because they are now deemed problematic and that group is going to include a lot of racists.
[1] - http://ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-items/of...
EDIT: Anyone want to explain any downvotes that don't amount to "I don't like eBay's policy"? OP was basically saying that eBay was opening a can of worms and all I did was point to an official eBay policy saying the can was already open.
Also let's not pretend that these moderation policies are foolproof. There are always going to be examples that slip through the cracks. If you want eBay to remove them for sake of consistency, you are free to report those items.
I don't think so: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=%22Mein+Kampf%22
As of this writing, I see three listings, and one appears to have been by someone hired by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry to do an English translation:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Unexpurgated-Edition-of-Hitlers-Mei...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf_in_English#Murphy_t...
Also, all the copies for sale appear to be from just before or just after the start of WWII, which means they'd likely have annotations of little modern scholarly value.
I'm not sure what distinction you are trying to show here. All three listing on eBay are annotated versions. That includes the one you mention that was originally commissioned by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry but the Wikipedia link says wasn't actually endorsed by anyone in the German government.
>Also, all the copies for sale appear to be from just before or just after the start of WWII, which means they'd likely have annotations of little modern scholarly value.
I'm not sure their age makes the annotations worthless. One can even argue that contemporaneous annotations are more valuable as they serve as their own historical documents.
Either way, like I said before you can always reach out to eBay support if you feel like these should also be banned.
For example yesterday I pointed out everything from the COVID numbers on the CDC website (showing death rates are not as bad as they seem) or that covid vaccines are 100x more dangerous than standard vaccines lol
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D8/D124F787
Frankly, it’s become exhausting posting here. I don’t even want to participate.
HN used to be above this drivel, and actually had thoughtful replies. I hope dang and company push for a less politics focused approach because it's degrading here, rapidly. I have flagged this post, but I doubt it will do much.
Generally, major invasion of freedoms were permitted and discussions were thorough and thoughtful. you can look at the average length of post back then, then compare to this thread, to get a gist of what I mean.
There also wasn’t downvoting analysis of data, there were retorts. Downvoting was typically reserved for poor manners.
All my time here I’ve analyzed points of view from a data perspective and shared my data / results. Only the past year it’s been flagged to oblivion (often not even downvoted). I personally disagree and don’t think this post deserves a flag just because you don’t want to read it. Others do, it’s relevant to all our lives and the “hacker” ethos. On the same token, I do think general politics should be limited and probably off topic here (book burnings are a bit of an extreme breach of freedom).
Personally @dang if you’re listening, we should probably remove flag abusers. This is getting ridiculous
But being an "information libertarian" was part of the hacker spirit for me, to borrow a word from the sibling poster. I find it useful to see these headlines on HN to keep track of where tech companies stand. A recruiter tried to get me into an eBay subsidiary just a month ago! Glad I didn't have time.
Jewelry and monetary equivalents are sold on Ebay, and they get lower transaction fees than most categories.
If the library is publicly funded, then I don't really think this is OK. They might decide to not purchase additional copies of some books they disagree with, but I certainly don't want them to limit lending of what they have.
If the library takes no public money then they can obviously do whatever they want.
"Oh sorry, the ISP is private, so they are allowed to disconnect you if they dont like what you wrote on twitter"
Welcome to America.
> After the announcement, one woman said she listed two titles, “On Beyond Zebra!” and “McElligot’s Pool,” for sale on eBay on Wednesday. Later that day, she said, she received an email from eBay explaining that “On Beyond Zebra!” had been removed from sale because it violated eBay’s “offensive material policy.” The second title was pulled Thursday morning, she said.
As in, the usual über vague policies that give the interpreter of the rules carte blanche to deem whatever he will a violation of the “rules”, — the typical prætence of rule of law, for what is really rule of men.
> Will they apply the logic here to all categories of goods for sale? T-shirts? Political buttons? Historical political pamphlets? Current political pamphlets or campaign material? How about baseball team merchandise that has racist mascots? (Why haven’t they?) Merchandise of companies where the CEO may have bigoted views?
Logic? If ever there will be a consistent thought process, it will be based on analysing profits and on nothing more, not on the actual qualities of the work removed, and most often it is not even about profit, but about gut feeling and arbitrary bandwagons and standards of being offended.
> How about books that have words in them that discuss race, or in any way describe an unflattering picture of a certain group? Or scientific studies that may come to race-based findings?
If ever they become notorious enough that they end up on advertiser's networks blacklists, and thus hurt their profits, then yes.
Consider the situation with TVTropes that implemented it's “content policy” to ban certain content in 2012 for advertisement reasons. The policy itself speaks of content, but in implementation, only matter notorious enough to end up on advertiser's blacklists was removed. So Kodomono Zikan, a work infamous, but actually quite mild when one takes the time to read it, is banned from being mentioned there, but less infamous works such as Prisma Ilya which go far further in serializing minors can freely be featured there, as they never became popular enough to be featured on advertiser's blacklists.
If ever a company have any rational thought process, it shall be in the pursuit of profit; morality is never a rational objective.
I don't disagree. One thing that I think worth considering is that the seller is clearly making an attempt at a form of profiteering. I don't pretend to know if eBay intends to continue to restrict sales of these titles for all time. I certainly find it in poor taste that the seller wanted to use the moment to make a quick buck.
I just searched 'ebay nazi memorabilia' and found an iron cross. No swastikas. Not sure the extent of their ToS cause I don't use eBay so I'm not reading them.
From the article:
> After the announcement, one woman said she listed two titles, “On Beyond Zebra!” and “McElligot’s Pool,” for sale on eBay on Wednesday. Later that day, she said, she received an email from eBay explaining that “On Beyond Zebra!” had been removed from sale because it violated eBay’s “offensive material policy.” The second title was pulled Thursday morning, she said.
Sure, some sports fans were very opposed to changing team names. Childhood memories and nostalgia are even more effective knee-jerk reactionary topics.
Had eBay said that they were temporarily banning the sale of these titles, I think they could have prevented sellers from profiting off a big news story about racism without much negative publicity. They could then quietly lift the ban after the next big thing had refocused everyone's attention and this was forgot.
That said, I'm divided. I'm anti-racist. I prefer free speech and free expression. I believe POS Klansman have a right to say ignorant garbage. But I also support "no shirt, no shoes, no service." Put another way, my business has a right not to peddle your wares.
Is it profiteering? It's still legal to sell the book in other markets, for the time being.
You're also talking about an item that:
1. Is effective immediately, no longer in production
2. Being censored and banned
3. Probably being destroyed, just not in literal book burnings
4. Has clear literal and historical value
If I were a rare book collector I'd be all over these. Even if I were a speculative investor I would consider buying some and waiting a couple of decades for society to regain its wits or burn down.
Among those different views, are included different attitudes about emotional safety(ism), propriety, politeness and so on.
Yes, it’s quite subjective and context-bound. Being intellectually reactionary, being uncharitable, applying stipulative 2020 norms to 1950s work... these are all analytic missteps.
Consider that the copyright owner, the Dr Seuss Foundation, has made the decision to cease publishing these six works. That is not the case for the other materials you mention.
> The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company, which was founded by Seuss’ family, told AP.
Also, should eBay really be forced to carry books? Should the Seuss family really be forced to publish? When does the right to speech translate into someone else's obligation to publish?
It's about what kind of society we want to live in. I want to live in an open society. I want to be able to watch movies and read books that offend people. I want to be my own censor and I want everybody to be their own censor. We're grown-ups, we can make decisions like this for ourselves.
I'm confused as to how eBay banning the listing of these books materially impacts people from getting them.
It's the same reason we get angry at people for saying racist crap even though we believe in freedom of speech.
I wish more folks understood it's the companies themselves who are overreacting. Trying to fix people on the Internet is an unsolvable problem. Demonstrating to companies that outrage is almost always temporary and not business-impacting seems achievable.
People are free to be mad at eBay for removing the books from their platform and eBay will take some hit for it. I suspect that they think the pros outweigh the cons with this decision, however it was calculated. This is just business as usual.
This is the "just make your own ${thing}" repeated in the past where ${thing} has progressively moved from: forum, messaging system, website, cloud service, internet platform, ISP provider, ICANN membership etc.
Because it's okay, approved and society thinks its good for one store to stop doing it means that it's okay for other stores, services, provider etc to also do it. It will and does happen as we have seen on Hacker News every week.
The line is still where it was the entire time: private individuals and entities are allowed to decide for themselves with whom they want to associate. You seem to have made a huge leap from "eBay decides to stop selling a book on their platform" to "Big Tech is deciding which books we're allowed to read to our children". That simply isn't what is happening here. As always you are free to read whatever you want to your children, and you're free to listen to Alex Jones all day every day. eBay is free to decide what they want to host on their platform. Everyone is free to exercise their own individual freedoms.
This is the marketplace of ideas at work. In the marketplace of ideas, some ideas float to the top, others sink to the bottom. The sinkers and swimmers change over time as the buyers and sellers in the marketplace change. These books had their time, now they are sinking. The same goes for Alex Jones. He got his shot in the marketplace, and his ideas found a home, but they aren't for everyone and that's the choice of individuals in the marketplace.
Don't you think that the owners of websites should have the right to control what content is on the website?
It works pretty well, since there is quite a limited vocabulary. And it's pretty magical! I can have someone reading aloud from the book quite fluently, with extremely limited english skills, after only a few hours.
The other part is, because of the superior illustration skills of the author, people quickly understand the difference between things like "here" and "there".
Because of the repetition of words, they quickly memorize them permanently.
We take those things for granted, and I'm not sure if that was the Doctor's intent, but gosh-darned it, it is so effective for teaching adults to read English.
I wish there were more books like that.
Next try Fox in Socks - that is some next-level elucidation.
Edit: Go anywhere in the Middle East, stay there for two weeks. Then have a look at the 'Alladin' Disney cartoon and you will see, undoubtedly that it's buffoonishly caricatured, Orientalist pastiche of ME culture. I don't think most people in the ME are going to be straight up offended, but it's undoubtedly a clownish and reductive depiction. Not racist ... but definitely stereotypically caricatured.
I agree they're probably not perfectly suitable for kids, that's fine, and publishers have to make decisions based on fear as much as anything, but the EBay ban is ridiculous, and a sign of American cultural decline consistent with the rise of Trumpism. It's not progress.
We are adults, we know roughly what's nice and not, and within the margins we can make up our own minds. A sticker on the book indicating that some might be offended would be appropriate, just as they do for a lot of pop music (incidentally targeted at young teens) which contains brutally misogynist and violent content.
If you’ve seen both Alladin and the cartoons in question, it’s hard to believe you’re commenting in good faith.
The real racism in that movie was portraying the king and his daughter as too stupid to realize that they could each get wishes from the lamp prior to Aladdin freeing the genie.
The parent makes a point that needs to be heard and considered. It is reasonable part of this discussion.
You probably know this already, but that was due to a bet!
> The vocabulary of the text consists of just 50 words and was the result of a bet between Seuss and Bennett Cerf, Dr. Seuss's publisher, that Seuss (after completing The Cat in the Hat using 236 words) could not complete an entire book without exceeding that limit. The 50 words are a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.
There were no words for crypto, but both had words for kitchen utensils and art history!
Curious what was offensive I found the books are on youtube and I'm guessing it's drawing Chinese https://youtu.be/Vl6wD6EGOVk?t=228 and tribal Africans https://youtu.be/Vl6wD6EGOVk?t=519 looking like cartoon versions of those. Does this means cartoon caricatures are only acceptable if they are of white westerners?
I mean I can understand the publishers thinking they may get in trouble and it's easier to drop those lines but the thing seems to be getting a bit out of hand.
So does this mean that if an asian man murders a black man, specifically because he is black, that this is not racism?
I honestly don't get it.
In a time and place where a local hegemonic group has a history of bigotry towards and/or oppression of a local minority or disempowered group, it could be argued that the hegemonic group has a greater moral authority to be sensitive to the oppressed/disempowered group.
I believe that's a big part of the moral reasoning that is applied in these cases. There is a logic to it that goes further and has more integrity than than "people just want to take other people down".
People in group 2 think people in group 1 mean it's impossible to discriminate against someone in the majority. But they don't.
People in group 1 think people in group 2 mean systemic discrimination doesn't exist. But not all of them do.
Some people in group 2 say people in group 1 should come up with a new word for systemic discrimination. But people in group 1 don't bother because it wouldn't change what people believe.
So when a black women walks up at you and punches you in the face because you're white and she hates white people that's not racist?
"Today, some scholars of racism prefer to use the concept in the plural racisms, in order to emphasize its many different forms that do not easily fall under a single definition. They also argue that different forms of racism have characterized different historical periods and geographical areas.[24] Garner (2009: p. 11) summarizes different existing definitions of racism and identifies three common elements contained in those definitions of racism. First, a historical, hierarchical power relationship between groups; second, a set of ideas (an ideology) about racial differences; and, third, discriminatory actions (practices).[13]"
This is exactly what the OP is talking about -- they are pointing out that some forms of racism are worse than others, and one thing that makes one form of racism worse than other forms is when there's a power imbalance that historically has resulted in the oppression of one group. Two individuals in a marginalized group getting into a scuff over an issue of race is one kind of racism, yes, but the damage is localized between themselves. One group of people, from a position of power an authority, subjugating and oppressing another group of people over an issue of race is a completely different matter.
> Today, some scholars
Okay. Some scholars also think we should get rid of any and all market restrictions. The wide consensus as understood by literally everyone except those few very special scholars is still different.
From my point of view, your point of view is the one that is the minority view. But I recognize it as valid point of view rather than characterizing you as "absolutely insane" and out of touch with "literally everyone except those few very special scholars".
Can you even prove that the view you espouse is the majority view? You've stated this multiple times as a reason for discounting the other poster's (and by extension my own) point of view, but you haven't made any effort to back up your assertion.
Here's what I'm getting at. There is a difference between what you and I believe, and it doesn't come down to "absolute insanity". We can each make a logical, principled case for our positions. I implore you to open your self up to the other side instead of dismissing it with the vitriol you have exhibited.
>Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance and can be divided based on the *superiority* of one race over another.
in your hypothetical about being assaulted by a black woman did you really mean that she believed herself to be of a *superior* race? or did you mean something else?
Here's the definition of racism according to Google:
> prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
When most people say racism, they mean the dictionary (also, the colloquial and correct) definition, not the definition that sociology textbooks have tried to propagate.
>against a person ... typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
this clearly implies white people cannot be the victims of racism (at least not in america)
It's hilarious to me that the reactionary position on this (wherein people are quoting dictionary definitions and wiki articles) manifestly hinges on trivialities.
"We take an evidence-based approach to language content creation, looking at real examples of the ways words are used in context to provide an accurate picture of a language.
To gather this evidence, our corpora – massive collections of spoken and written language data – track and record the very latest language developments across an enormous variety of publications, covering everything from specialist journals to newspapers to social media posts."
https://languages.oup.com/about-us/how-we-create-language-co...
So let me get this straight: Oxford comes up with their definitions by consulting people who have the power and agency to write and publish media. Wouldn't this exclude marginalized people? Incarcerated people? People who are not rich enough, educated enough, or connected enough to be able to afford the ability to publish in the mediums Oxford adds to their corpus?
If the definition comes from books, journals, newspapers, and social media posts, then its going to reflect the thoughts and opinions of authors, journalists, and people rich enough to afford a computer and internet connection.
All this is saying is that the definition changes depending who you ask. So when we want the definition of a word that has a clear power component involved, it behooves us to ask both sides of that divide as to their definition of the term.
It's not that the publishers were afraid of getting in trouble. It's that they were ashamed of their own book -- with good reason.
So if someone makes caricatures to demean the irish should we ban those? Seems pretty ridiculous...
https://www.gaiafoundation.org/app/uploads/2019/05/DSC_0150....
The book is explicitly depicting people from abroad, not African-Americans. As Dr. Seuss’s surviving family has attested to his character and wordliness, and his other books like “Horton Hears a Who” promote tolerance and the acceptance of minorities, I’m inclined to go with a simpler, more innocent explanation for these images.
They cancelled Apu from the Simpson’s without understanding that his presence on the show demonstrated a mainstreaming of Indian immigrants, in a similar way that the uncanceled Groundskeeper Willie, Mayor Quimby, and McBain demonstrate the mainstream acceptance of Scottish, Irish, and Austrian immigrants.
The documentary also explicitly discusses the "mainstreaming of Indian immigrants". It isn't something that is just ignored or missed.
The guy who voiced Apu, Hank Azaria, decided to stop doing it. Nobody "cancelled" him. He is an articulate guy and describes why he reached the decision in this interview:
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/29/962031274/hank-azaria-on-broc...
The whole interview, not just the Apu-related stuff, is quite interesting.
But they dropped whole books. If they had changed a line in one of the books and cut out or changed a few illustrations, I'm sure fewer people would bother. Taking whole books off the market because (at least in one case) a single illustration could be deemed offensive seems a bit over the top.
99% of Seuss readers have never read Oh Beyond Zebra, and nobody will miss the Cat's Quizzer.
In fact they could even automate this. They already have a report item button. Whenever someone clicks that and marks the item offensive they could remove that whole class of items.
Really? Very racist? You don’t think you’re exaggerating with the “very”?
If “what I saw on Mulberry street” counts as “very racist” where do you put “Huckleberry Finn” or “To kill a Mockingbird” with their colorful language?
I mean you have two great American classics unapologetically using the n-word vs a cartoon of a Chinese kid dressed as he did a few decades before the book was written.
N-word vs. kid dressed as he dressed.
Don’t you think “mildly discomforting depiction of a foreigner?” is more proportional?
I don’t get the problem with the Asian depiction (apparently the eyes are problematic). But looking at block prints (and other art) from East Asia, many use the same representation[1]
By the way, this seems like a kind of DRM but without the encryption part. Instead of encryption DRM is being enforced by cultural zeitgeist. Who would have thought that as a possibility?
[1] https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://mymodernmet.com...
Is that reasonable?
Science fiction has been quite good about warning us of the dangers of authoritarianism, censorship, and the thought police. One thing it didn't imagine is that we'd do it to ourselves without a central power to push the changes. It's often used as an argument by the left that it's not a problem because it's private citizen and companies doing the censorship and enforcement, and in a free market that's a good thing. I actually find that extra worrying
But now we also can’t even have a secondary market for what already exists.
People have severely underestimated the influence these woke people have.
In my company, we receive forms from clients asking us to survey our employees for their sexual preferences and racial categories, essentially based on the same nomenclature used in nazi Germany.
It is completely bizarre and abhorrent.
At least this particular piece of poison is thus far resisted in Sweden.
All of this is connected and needs to stop. It starts with each and everyone of us no longer “just going along” with each new book burning and each new forbidden word they introduce.
The history still exists, for when it's appropriate to study the history of race relations, but if you're teaching pre-school & primary school children to read you don't need to do so with images of black people dressed as tribesmen which normalise racist depictions of those people.
Wait, what? Is this legal?
[0] https://www.diversitylab.com/knowledge-sharing/clients-push-...
- Particular illustrations have not aged well
- The content itself nor Dr. Seuss can be accused of malice
- The offending content is not really a high risk of perpetrating future malice
- It's completely within the right of the publisher to not want to profit from these books anymore
But at no point did it seem like anyone made the point that you can't read or enjoy the book with your kids!
I think the mistake was the publisher should have just slapped a statement in the beginning, or better yet, just released them all into the public domain. Instead, it seems like they unwittingly triggered an unwritten social infrastructure we have created called "cancellation".
I don't agree with this. Dr. Seuss's books are read by children when their minds are most malleable and least able to recognize context. Leaving these problematic images on library shelves for them to discover means that some of those children will grow up believing it's okay to think about other people that way. I know by my own experience how difficult it is to unlearn something I saw as a child. I wouldn't want to expose my children to the same things that will burden them with those stereotypes. Or worse, that they wouldn't think of the stereotypes as a burden.
Certainly we can't and shouldn't erase the past and these books are an important part of our history. But they should be left alone there, solely for historians and researchers and not for children.
I've seen a ton of people disagree with this in the last several hours.
2. Publications should automatically enter the public domain when the publisher looses interest in re-printing them.
I’ve thought of this for a long time when i had to fork out $200 for a thermo text long out of print that my professor preferred. Most research groups had a copy they’d pass onto the next batch of grad students, but I joined a new group.
This just reinforces my belief. (Also I despise Disney’s abusive copyright prolonging tactics)
So they just need to stop printing copies. They have absolutely zero rights to stop reselling of those copies already on market. And if they do, they should be punished by removal of all of their copyright rights.
https://www.ebay.com.au/help/account/changing-account-settin...
It should not be up to them what is and isn't offensive.
I did the same to Netflix last year. Money talks at the end of the day.
Throwing these books away isn't cancel culture. Telling other people they can't sell or buy the book is cancel culture.
Don't want to be a mouth piece for a 50 year old children writer? Canceled! It's basically just virtue signaling, but the effects are huge.
Going to any Christian owned businesses? Are they canceled too because they burned Galio's books? Rank hypocrisy. Go my tribe I guess.
Big tech really needs to get the memo that they need to be a neutral party.
So the real line in the sand being drawn here isn't about the principle of moderation but what is being moderated. In this case, the idea it was offensive wasn't even original to eBay: the publisher decided it was inappropriate to sell and eBay followed.
So a flurry of account cancellations isn't going to signal opposition to the principle of moderation so much as angry denial that images like this[1] could be deemed racist. That's a point of view of course, but all eBay get out of it is "wow, the other side of the culture war is even more obsessive"
“Do you have data to support your stated preference for chocolate ice cream?”
It's really off-putting.
The euphemism treadmill strikes again.
I'd not heard that "mentally ill" crossed into that territory. What term do they say should be used instead? I'm guessing "neurodiverse."
https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/media-centre/responsible-r...
"Neurodiverse" is code du jour for autism, and HR will be contacting you shortly for the offensive ableism of labeling neurodiversity as mental illness, instead of celebrating it.
The 70s or 60s kid might be raised in a context of peace and love, anti-war sentiment, then be just as shocked to see Ronald Reagan, low taxes, spending cuts for social programs, the religious right, wars of choice, higher wealth disparity, outsourcing in manufacturing and other industries, privatization, young fascists going on tiki marches in favor of the confederacy, on and on ...
If somebody sent me racist emails at work I would file a complaint.
The only way this poison is going to be defeated is through the law. In fact, the journalist Chris Rufo argues that much of what's pushed by the CRT activists is likely already illegal under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. This needs to be affirmed in the courts.
"the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time"
In this case, the conflicting belief that these words are okay in the course you are taking, but that these words are not okay if you are discussing the course material.
Most of Orwell is misunderstood in an aesthetic or superficial way unfortunately.
This is highly problematic for children and adults who identify as children who may be struggling with their gender identity; as well as those who chose to reproduce through non-sexual or non-heterosexual mechanisms.
Please refer to them as per-offspring potato heads instead.
Here’s a critical piece of the “evidence” presented:
“In this context, it is worth examining the origins of the term “blacklist” from the Douglas Harper Etymology Dictionary, which states that its origin and history is:
n.
also black-list, black list, “list of persons who have incurred suspicion,” 1610s, from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (attested from 1590s, in black book) + list (n.). Specifically of employers’ list of workers considered troublesome (usually for union activity) is from 1888. As a verb, from 1718. Related: Blacklisted; blacklisting. [32]
It is notable that the first recorded use of the term occurs at the time of mass enslavement and forced deportation of Africans to work in European-held colonies in the Americas.”
Seriously? We clearly need to rethink the whole academic publishing process.
Do you think we should ban the terms blackout, blackbody radiation, black holes, black ice, black ops, and black markets? Not everything is about race.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/common-words-phrases-racist-o... :
> The symbolism of white as positive and black as negative is pervasive in our culture. Watts-Jones has highlighted many terms with negative meanings that reference blackness. In the English language, she wrote in 2004, color is “related to extortion (blackmail), disrepute (black mark), rejection (blackball), banishment (blacklist), impurity (‘not the driven snow’) and illicitness (black market).”
> > black ops
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101110054644A... :
> Consequently, it becomes apparent that 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' really means - Call to Arms against the Black People
You thought you were joking, weren't you? The latter link might be sarcasm, but at this point, it's actually hard to tell.
How do you think it came about?
> In Old English, the adjective could mean “very evil or wicked; iniquitous; foul, hateful,” according to the dictionary. The earliest Oxford citation is from a scientific and theological treatise written by a Benedictine cleric in the late 10th century.
Not only that, but those colors have similar associations all over the world, for example in India and Japan. It has to do with nighttime/darkness having foreboding/negative implications.
> Berne notes that the ideas of light=goodness and dark=badness existed in ancient cultures (including Egyptian and Greek), and can be found in Asia and around the globe.
> Joseph Campbell, writing in the journal Daedalus in 1959, says it was the Persian philosopher Zoroaster (circa 600 BC) who put the seal on the concept of darkness being evil.
English just seems to have a strong preference towards approximating everything with the most basic colors.
Europeans also called native Americans red and Asians yellow, and it probably wasn't because they associated those colors with evil.
All people are shades of brown. White people can be pinkish, but are usually light brown or reddish light brown. When you look at this white man's [2] skin color next to the light brown wood he's working with, he's clearly a darker brown than the wood. But I imagine Europeans didn't want to label races as light brown, medium brown and dark brown.
[1] https://www.almanac.com/sites/default/files/image_nodes/all_... [2] https://c.stocksy.com/a/0m5500/z9/1213836.jpg
Like three times I've had to figure out what is wrong with my git repo because Xcode switched the default branch from 'master' -> 'main'. Tutorials everywhere no longer work, etc.
We've managed to add even more pointless but required knowledge to programming. Ironically it's the newbies who suffer the most.
------------
A few days ago in the AsciiDoc mailing list – there was an effort to try to find a new word for "whitespace" (obviously the "white" comes from paper, how you even think of race in this context baffles me).
We all want off this crazy ride.
It's so weird for me to see people complaining about hypersensitivity get so up in arms about a pun.
I just find it so hilariously hypocritical for the crowds that constantly complain about the over-policing of speech to find a light-hearted pun to be so dastardly offensive.
To each their own I guess, but a simple pun doesn't feel like the biggest threat we face...
Perhaps you're not such a person, and are not speaking on behalf of such people, but I think that saying "It was a joke." doesn't really address the issue that some people's offensive speech is being silenced, while others' is being celebrated.
I think people are well within their rights to tell jokes, and I think others are well within their rights to criticize jokes that they find offensive.
I think if people want to play in the marketplace of ideas, they should wear a helmet because nothing says the marketplace of ideas has to be welcome to any given idea. If you tell a joke, then don't be surprised when people react to your joke.
I also didn't see _any_ criticism that the pastor's joke was offensive. I didn't see any public figures indicating that they were offended by the joke. I just saw people calling him insane, a moron, and an idiot for not knowing that "amen" didn't refer to a singular male person.
As the article[0] that you linked in another comment made clear in its title: "Some were offended". (Strangely the headline of the article is different from the title, but I think the title is still accurate).
[0] https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the...
There's not a single quote or statement in that article from a person saying that they found it offensive.
I need a source slightly stronger than the title element of an article that is entirely unsupported to be convinced that there were people offended.
All that being said, I would take more seriously the concerns of someone who was deeply religious that said they found it offensive to make a flippant joke during a prayer than I would the concerns of people who called him a moron for not getting the joke. I still haven't seen anyone say they were offended by the joke, though.
"The idea of throwing in a pun, though not a federal crime, is poor form at best and can be viewed as flippant and insulting."[0]
"He has singularly demonstrated the ability to offend everyone possible while reciting what he deemed to be a politically correct prayer calling for unity."[1]
"many are offended on behalf of their politics. ... Instead, let’s be offended and furious on behalf of our God."[2]
I personally think that undermining religious language and activities like prayer, by deliberately misinterpreting and butchering words, is offensive in the same way that burning a flag is (even though I don't think that should be illegal either).
[0] https://www.dailyregister.com/lifestyle/20210113/david-otten...
[1] https://standard-democrat.com/story/2858446.html
[2] https://onwardinthefaith.com/amen-and-a-woman-a-biblical-per...
First, I didn't say the journalist made up their conclusion. I stated I hadn't seen evidence of it.
Second, I don't really believe a journalist is in control of the headline and I *certainly* don't think the journalist is in control of the title element of the web version of their article. If it's not in the body of the article, I don't ascribe it to the journalist, but rather an editor.
> by deliberately misinterpreting and butchering words, Third, I don't think puns are a deliberate misinterpretation of a word at all. It's a play on words that relies on similar sounds of words, but a pun doesn't "interpret" a word. If I say: "What does the fish say when it hits a wall? Dam!" I haven't "misinterpreted" the word "dam" to be an exclamation of surprise. I have made a pun based on the fact that the words "damn" and "dam" sound alike.
> I personally think that undermining religious language and activities like prayer
That's fair. Like I said, I take more seriously the concerns of people who are offended by the concept of making a joke during prayer. I'm willing to hear out those that say that prayer is not an appropriate place for jokes. I do, however, essentially discard and disregard the opinion of anyone that says that the pastor is a moron, or an idiot for not understanding the word "amen".
Basically, it boils down to this: if someone understands it is a joke, and think a joke in that place is offensive, I'm willing to hear you out. If someone doesn't understand that it's a joke, and are mad about the "politically correct" nature of his words, then I don't think they understand the situation properly and ignore their concerns.
> "many are offended on behalf of their politics. ... Instead, let’s be offended and furious on behalf of our God."[2]
This quote seems taken out of context from the onwardinthefaith article. The outrage that they are expressing is expressly not at the joke. Rather, the thing they find offensive and enraging is this contained in this quote:
"We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God and Brahma and God known by many names by many different faiths."
Yes, they note the flippancy of the "amen and awomen" joke, but only really find it offensive in light of his prior comments. They are offended and enraged at the nod toward universalism, and the pun at the end of the prayer confirms that in their opinion he lacks the appreciation for the Lord's majesty.
Thank you, I think we agree then.
> Yes, they note the flippancy of the "amen and awomen" joke, but only really find it offensive in light of his prior comments.
Yes, unfortunately it is difficult to isolate one's feeling of being offended from the context in which the words are spoken, which means if someone says multiple potentially offensive things it can be difficult to decide how much offence each word caused.
- https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the...
- https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2021/jan/10/growing-old-ungrace...
> “I concluded with a lighthearted pun in recognition of the record number of women who will be representing the American people in Congress during this term as well as in recognition of the first female Chaplain of the House of Representatives whose service commenced this week,” said Cleaver, who led the search committee that selected Grun Kibben, the former chief chaplain of the Navy, for the role.
> “I personally find these historic occasions to be blessings from God for which I am grateful.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/553001-it-s-a-beautiful-thi...
Blacklist and whitelist, when looking at the etymology these terms are obviously problematic, and I happily use block/ban list and allow list. Easy. Even "Green list" and "Red list" would work fine, traffic lights won't mind.
Sanity check, never thought about that one. "Sense check" may have similar connotations, but the word sense, itself, has multiple meanings, so that's got a backdoor. Congruity check? I don't want to have to explain the word every time I ask for someone to "congruity check" a set of data.
Plausibility check is a good replacement for sanity check. Or something like quick check to communicate it isn't extensive.
Am I missing something? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_te...
Isn’t that a little Bigoted?
"wife" is one of the new ones. Not inclusive
The wild thing about the term "master" and the people that want to censor it is how English-language centric it is. It really only has the sensitive connotations it has in English. In Italian for example, maestro is teacher.
My fear is that what today is "we should move away from that term" will in a few short years become "we can't hire them because they typed 'git checkout master' in their live coding interview" and at that point it discriminates against those for whom English is their second language.
This happened to a friend of mine with the word "lynch". In English it is a highly racializes term but in his native tongue, Portuguese, the connotation largely revolves around mob violence committed against rapists and adulterers (just go search for the verb "linchar" and you'll find youtube videos of mob violence against people suspected of rape and adultery).
Well he used that term in a discussion on github back when discussing the changes to a popular open source project's code of conduct about 7-8 years ago and a bunch of cancel culture folks jumped on him and it culminated in them trying to get him fired from his current job. He was lucky that it was long enough ago that his boss brushed it off, but in today's environment he's certain he would have lost his job over using a term in his native tongue that is fully divorced from how people feel about the word in English.
Another common example related to yours: in countries with latin languages like spanish or Portuguese, the word for both the color black and black people in a completely generic non-racist way is negro. It literally just means black. A Spanish speaker having said it in the wrong context in an english language setting could easily invite criticism born of the silliness I mentioned above.
Americans sadly are now indiscriminately exporting their particularly toxic understanding of race and race relationships to other parts of the world and damaging the social fabric of these other countries. It's like introducing a new species of plant that ends up being invasive and destructive like kudzu.
It has absolutely nothing to do with slavery.
Sorry if this offends someone but I think a lot of these newly verboten words nonsense stems from poor education and ignorance in the US.
Lots of this is very English and even US-centric. The lack of awareness and what is effectively an attempt to dominate other cultures in the name of inclusiveness is kinda interesting.
It's a religion without forgiveness or redemption. And the high priests of this religion will never allow the language to sit they will always find new words to change and replace and shame us with.
Check out SFUSD renaming racists schools like “Lincoln High”. Eventually parents had start a recall effort to end it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_(parliamentary_procedure...
As far as I can tell, historically leaving oppressive places has a better track record of success for individuals than fighting or trying to talk and understand.
(Eg think of the people fleeing North Korea, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Nazi Germany, etc.
Similar, you are better of quitting a bad company, than trying to reform.
Or just quitting twitter instead of 'talking' to people there.)
The bad places can just quietly whither away when no one goes there anymore.
All this "privilege checking" makes it difficult to speak out. The least privileged people have existential concerns more significant than our culture war so they don't speak out either. The Woke movement has been hijacked by narcissists. There is no resistance so this will only accelerate in the near term.
Ban second hand sales of out-of-print, arguably sort of racist children’s books, or keep that man out of the white house.
Pick one.
Yes, this is how Trump, or someone similar, gets elected.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/01/us/nyc-illegal-alien-discrimi...
Perhaps the stories at the time conflated discrimination with mere use of the phrase if that is what you meant by good/not true.
whenever something sounds this absurd, read past the headline and you usually find whats actually going on is a lot more reasonable
> New York City has banned the term "illegal alien" when used "with intent to demean, humiliate or harass a person," the city said.
That sounds like an important qualification, but I suspect in praxis intent is hard to (dis)prove so it would probably depend on the judge and precedents?
If you read German, https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentalisten-diskutiert-ohne-Vers... is interesting. The title translates to "How to discuss with fundamentalists without going insane".
(The author cleverly and deliberately picks up examples from obsolete Christian schisms to avoid derailing the core of the book with any present-day inflammatory topics.)
What does this entail, do you mind giving an example?
"I value language and am thoughtful with my communication. If I can do that why can't others?"
Maybe how I should have responded?: "So you always ask someone's pronouns prior to initiating conversation. You agree to those and should be obliged by law to not error ever?"
Or doing that may have backfired ? Now I am a self-hating Latino and transphobic ? Not a reputation I want and I have no power to change things. So why bother is the natural conclusion.
What is the problem that needs to be solved?
The fact that this bears mentioning points to the general historical ignorance affecting many of these misguided activists, such as those who tore down the statue of Hans Christian Heg in Madison, WI. Heg was a Union soldier and abolitionist who led an anti-slavecatcher militia. He was also a white man, which is presumably why his statue got dragged through the street and beheaded during the height of last summer’s protest violence:
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/06/24/madison-prote...
Given the number of people who make precisely the same complaints that appear in this thread when high schools change their name from "Lee", that difference seems to be lost to many "free speech absolutists".
1 of those is a high school named after a president that freed slaves, 1 is a high school with a seriously questionable recent past, and 1 is a high school actively perpetuating racist dogma. We shouldn’t be treating them all like what their doing is equally bad
I think social media has a lot to do with it. We created a global communication medium and then programmed it to prioritize the most "engaging" content, which is of course the most triggering and controversial content. I'm wondering how long it will be before people are literally setting themselves on fire for likes and views.
Oh wait...
https://www.the-sun.com/news/1903978/youtuber-kills-pregnant...
Nope, we're basically there already.
Seriously, the amount of “this” that I see online is 100x what I see in real-life (per interaction). Outrage engagement drives it and if you have found yourself tired of arguing with people you’ve never shared a meal with, just close the tab. Let them be outraged without you.
As often happens, Randall has nailed it: https://xkcd.com/386/
Me? I was told by a genderqueer woman at a sister college of Smith during a job interview that she does not get along with older men.
My wife? She is a faculty member at another Amherst area college and was told by a colleague that she is held in high regard because she is BIPOC. That is shit so tasteless that you can't make it up, so it must be true.
The atmosphere at colleges in the Northeast is fucked up beyond description, and playing ostrich is just that, hiding from reality. Unfortunately, reality won't change anytime soon.
Unfortunately it bleeds into real life, work, and family/friend connections. You can't close work, or your siblings.
Also, I've been on the receiving end of a mob before; "you can only get cancelled once" wasn't exactly true for me. Sure, the public figures who initially called you out will stop eventually -- they know when they've won the battle. But their followers? They're like that annoying kid at school who kept making the same joke long after it was ever considered funny. They'll happily continue harassing you until the end of time (or until you're able to make yourself disappear).
Well, WOPR did say that
> "The only winning move is not to play."
Either I have to agree with obviously stupid stuff from "my side" or I'm with the nazis? That only empowers the stupid at the end of the day.
Of course maybe I am succumbing to the "the nuts are always the loudest" effect.
Edit: I don't think the Internet per se is at fault. I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the "algorithmic timeline." Social media isn't neutral. It's programmed to "engage" us, which usually means either offending us or luring us into some kind of cult.
Chan culture isn't algorithmic in this way, but it's organized primarily around influencing algorithmic social media from outside and as such operates within the same algorithmic attention-maximization game paradigm.
TL;DR: this is not discourse. It's a video game.
I'm not convinced that's helpful.
As a more moderate, I would suggest perhaps writing a blog, or commenting on something well moderated like HN or EconLog, or even certain subreddits?
No need to log off completely. Just avoid twitter, tumblr, most of reddit and other outrage platforms.
[1] https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship...
I’ve been thinking this kind of thing since the 2008 bank bailouts. I’ve also wondered if that was when America collapsed and we are just living through a slow unwinding period.
The problem wasn’t the crash. Crashes happen. The problem was that banks were bailed out and the we pretended there was a recovery. There wasn’t. It was a largely paper recovery, basically fake. Yes unemployment went down but the quality of the jobs were poor, housing inflation ate any gains, and inequality exploded.
Trumpism was just a superficial symptom. If things don’t improve we will get someone much much worse.
One can see that same dynamic when the printing press was invented. Suddenly, the old power structure did not control the narrative. Within 100 years of the invention of the printing press in 1450, and its spread by 1500, there was a major conflict all over Europe over very minor religious dogma differences of opinion (wars of religion).
We are about 2/3rds into that cycle with the internet, which was borne around 1960 and came into true widespread use around 2005 (Facebook, etc).
Lets hope we have learned our lessons.
There is a third option. Most people are stuck with this. It is staying quiet and saying nothing. Because there is unity in extreme right. And there is unity in extreme left. And there is no unity in the center so these extremes can pick off each individual center person who says something.
I really believe that Republicans can elect some of the craziest Qanon believers precisely because the Democrats refuse to forcefully denounce the craziest whims of their radical base, and are tainted by association, even though almost none of the national-level Democrats are nearly so extreme.
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-center...
I haven't finished reading it, but it doesn't seem all that encouraging as a source of ideas for building a center if the article's protagonist never succeeded.
A focus on symbolisms like statues and children books and language on Twitter or git repos is being embraced by the powerful corporate interests. Something that actually does an enormous positive for racial justice, universal healthcare, takes a back seat.
Can we agree this is a feature, not a bug?
100% of people who say Latinx support universal health care in my experience. But they have more control over what they say than what their government does.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
Occupy, as derision-worthy as it was, saw a broad coalition of Americans--blacks, whites, latino, straight, gay, trans--all get together to push back against Team Elite.
Then the entirely tiny group of people who control the media (and hate us, apparently) got together and pushed endless identity bullshit on us.
Note that basically everything done by white people is a "far right" "white supremacist" plot. E.g., AOC refers to the (hilarious) "insurrection" (the unarmed, leaderless one that waltzed into some of the most protected space on earth with nary a problem) as a "white supremacist" plot.
If you buy that, you're an instrument, played like a fiddle.
Oh the places we'll go.
I’m pretty sure my HN account will be next. I’m not going to solve this, but I won’t drown in it either.
Why does every corporation feel the need to play out these stunts? More free press and discussions on social media. A part in the news cycle. They do it, Because it gets them more in return. If it didn't they would remain neutral.
And after all this, if one of the books did contain something truly bad, why not do something like Disney and add a disclaimer or edit the content? The material in question in these books is less than 1% and isn't core to the story or images.
As for the second question, that's a question for Dr. Seuss Enterprises; they made this decision about the works in their custody.
...or maybe you won't
Those places aren't safe!
You should stay right at home!
A space that is safe
is all that you need!
With only safe books
safety-guaranteed to read!
No insensitive cartoons
Kids can't handle those
No Chinese men
in Chinese hats
and Chinese clothes!
Those books are problematic
Those books should be banned
Besides they're unpopular
There's no market demand!
Let's have them cancelled!
Let's have them delisted!
Let's burn them, unlearn them
and deny they existed!
It's the impact that matters
not the author's intentions
We'd better change the past--fast, fast!
before someone today gets offended
Seuss won't be the last beloved cultural icon they come for. At what point are we going to stand up to these lunatics?
It suffices for an intransigent minority – a certain type of intransigent minorities – to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
edit: or would you prefer "that's what a free market does"? Either way, this is a remarkably incendiary, and frankly absurd, attempt to recast voting with one's wallet as "dictatorship".
Just think of it as a weird entertainment show that doesn’t have to be rational. There are crazies in all historical eras; the various social justice people are ours :)
[citation needed]. While ebay banning them may be a bit much, I don't know anyone IRL who is upset that Dr. Seuss's B-list books with offensive stereotypes are no longer being sold.
(I've only spoken to one person I've met irl about the topic. It is likely that others other people I know would have a variety of different opinions on it, if it were brought up, but the topic didn't come up when we spoke recently.)
Do our anecdotes cancel out?
We've been sanitising kids books for decades now.
What version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory do you own? The original with actual African slaves and the colonialist rescue narrative, or the later version with Oompa Loompas and the colonialist rescue narrative? What version of Edward's Sneeze from the Thomas the Tank Engine series do you own? The one that uses the N word and has a black face joke, or the one that replaced the N word but kept the black face gag?
There are like a million kids books published each year. We're not going to miss the few that have lazy, racist, stereotypes.
Yes, I own McElligot's Pool and I particularly remember borrowing On Beyond Zebra from the library for its imaginary alphabet.
The offensive material in Pool appears to be the "Eskimo fish" (the word "Eskimo" apparently being derogatory), and in Zebra, somewhat obscurely, a "Nazzim of Bazzim" riding a camel called a "Spazzim".
> We've been sanitising kids books for decades now.
I don't really have a problem with that, but they aren't being sanitized are they? They're just not being sold at all.
Um, yes, of course. Have you not?
They weren't slaves in the original story - they were Africans but were offered payment to come work at his factory and went voluntarily.
There's strength in numbers. We must speak up.
if history is any guide, they are just getting started. Buckle your seatbelts up and brace for the [multiple] impacts.
Nobody on Hacker News compares that policy with Nazi book burning though.
The Suess estate has all the right to denounce their own book or whatever. The real issue is that copyrights have been extended to last so damn long that something which ought to be in the public realm by now will be copyrighted for god knows how long (see: copyright term extension act).
Ebay has all the right to delist whatever they want in a free market. The problem is that we don't have a particularly free online marketplace. Unlike meatspace, the vast majority of 2nd hand internet transactions happen in a handful of marketplaces (amazon, ebay, etsy, Facebook, etc). These handful of mega marketplaces have become an oligopoly, effectively. I don't know the solution here (regulations? antitrust action? government-run open source marketplaces that would therefore only ban actually-illegal listings?), but the problem is that a few companies have way too much power.
In conclusion: Copyright has too much power. A handful of tech companies have too much power. Making this about cancel culture is, in my opinion, an absolute distraction of the real issues.
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=If+I+Ran+the+Zoo&open=0&res...
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=On+Beyond+Zebra%21&open=0&r...
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Scrambled+Eggs+Super%21&ope...
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=McElligot%E2%80%99s+Pool&op...
The Cat’s Quizzer
Not that we can't already find these books online, but it'd be nice to have a centralized repo with just those.
But seriously, that's pretty heavy handed IMO to tell you that you can't use "you guys". Encourage? Sure! But not allowed seems a bit far to me.
Nevermind that "y'all" is common among white Southerners (where do you think African Americans picked it up from?). Why let facts get in the way of your attempts to control people?
How should you call them now?
I kinda distrust people/institutions who/which use it? (not when they say "folks" though. That's fine.)
Folks can be used in a way that is seen as demeaning to certain groups.
Is smiling at people still ok?
That makes sense to you? Help me out here, because I feel like I'm going crazy trying to understand this.
"Folk", is just an English word for "people". Isn't it just going to get translated into a totally different word in Spanish anyhow? Why would altering the plural spelling of an English word affect the translation of that word to another language? The meaning wasn't altered by changing spelling. It was gender-neutral to begin with.
I guess folx just doesn't have any translation to Spanish because it's a recently made up word?
> Of concern with the term “folks,” for example, is that its translation in some languages is gendered, such as “la gente” in Spanish, which is gendered feminine (see also, phallogocentrism, Derrdiean, and deconstruction).
Also, it's ridiculous to imply that the English language, which already lacks grammatical gender, needs to modified so that a translator working with gendered language knows that a noun lacks gender. It's English - they already know that! Besides, the translators choose which word to use when translating anyhow. There's not like there's a strict 1-1 mapping of "folks" to "la gente". In some contexts, you would translate it differently.
It's just such an absurd claim, and it doesn't pass the sniff test at all.
[0] There's a joke in Florida that the further north you go, the more south you are. The further south you go, the more north you are. It's 100% true too.
Are women in finance degraded by this extremely common linguistic quirk? Women in medicine?
Maybe it's because you're asserting your anecdotal experience as truth, when it's not at all representative of most other people's experience.
It's hard for you to wrap your mind around people telling you guys is gendered in their dialect?
It's easy for me to understand that some people use "guys" in a gendered way, but I don't see what that has to do with people like me who don't. The argument seems to be that their dialect is "normal" and everyone else has to learn to speak like them, which sounds terribly exclusionary.
To me it feels likeanti-colonialist rhetoric perversely applied to gender relations. When you comment on colonialism it makes sense, I'm using a f'ton of resources from say Africa that saps that live there aren't allowed to. But for gender relations, it's not a zero sum game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...
As “colonist” as that term is it’s been adopted by almost all progressives, and not many actual Latinos. I hear it on NPR all the time
Latine seems to be more popular than Latinx outside North America.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
The term doesn't even have a broadly accepted spanish pronunciation yet!
I think the term exemplifies the issues that occur when (especially white) "diversity professionals" are given institutional power to speak on behalf of racial groups they are not a part of.
I'm happy to refer to individuals who identify as latinx as such, but I think it is wildly presumptive and slightly offensive to assume this form should be preferred in general when the Latino community has not yet accepted it. Something about the academic/professional class in America defining the term for a diverse group of people spread over multiple continents rubs me as off-putting and ironically colonialist. (But I'm a white dude, so my opinion doesn't even matter and we should all happily use whatever term becomes accepted by the Latino community)
Latine seems to be gaining some steam as well, and makes a lot more sense: -e is the gender neutral suffix in spanish. However, it is still not broadly accepted (as can be seen in this comment section)
You could also use "Latin American", which may also work, but historically Latino/a have been preferred, possibly since "Latino" is a lot easier to say than "Latinoamericano".
I did some quick searching and couldn't find parallels for adoption rates among other groups for new terminology. For example, the Black community has gone through several different self identifying nomenclature changes over the years. Were any of those changes immediately and universally accepted within a handful of years? My guess is probably not.
From a data science perspective, I'd argue that "a (sub)demographic exists where >50% of people who have heard of the term use it to self identify" could be a good indication of when society should interpret a term as "meaningfully prominent". It looks like there is no demographic which exceeds a 30% proportion of heard to using Latinx.
I wonder if the term reaches this proposed 50% threshold within the college-educated LGBT 18-29y/o Latino/x/e population.
I'm Latino myself and I find that almost no one that actually speaks either Spanish or Portuguese (or another language commonly spoken in Latin America) as their first language adopts it. The few I've seen adopt it at those that are born and raised in the US and have relatively literal cultural connection to the country of their ancestors.
If Spanish or Portuguese are truly your native tongue, Latinx feels incredibly awkward. Personally, I'm uninterested in the opinions of those who aren't native speakers of one of these two languages when it comes to using the term Latinx or not.
I don't know how you got that from my comment. I am not advocating for Latinx as the one and only descriptor. I am simply pointing out that it is being adopted quickly considering how recently it entered the lexicon.
>I'm Latino myself and I find that almost no one that actually speaks either Spanish or Portuguese (or another language commonly spoken in Latin America) as their first language adopts it. The few I've seen adopt it at those that are born and raised in the US and have relatively literal cultural connection to the country of their ancestors.
>If Spanish or Portuguese are truly your native tongue, Latinx feels incredibly awkward.
I can't deny your experience, but I will simply say the numbers from that survey do not agree with your conclusions. The percentage of people who adopt Latinx actually grows for people who use Spanish more. The rough adoption rates are 10% for English dominant speakers, 14% for bilingual speakers, and 29% for Spanish dominant speakers.
>Personally, I'm uninterested in the opinions of those who aren't native speakers of one of these two languages when it comes to using the term Latinx or not.
I don't think this type of gatekeeping is productive. It is meant to be a ethnic identity. Anyone of that identities as part of the group should have an equal input on the naming conventions. I'm not aware of any other ethnic group in the US that is defined by different names depending on their native language.
Aren't we grafting what's, at its roots, a germanic construction onto a latin-based word? It makes absolutely no sense to me.
It started among LGBT Hispanic people. Probably influenced by folx.
Latine seems to be more popular outside North America. Probably it will replace Latinx eventually.
In Spanish? I’m having a hard time imagining how a word in Spanish would sound with an “X” at the end. “Latine” seems easily pronounceable but I’m not sure what the point of adding the “e” is. It’s not like that vowel signals gender neutrality in any consistent manner in Romance languages.
Nothing signals gender neutrality. That's why people made something up. e is a simple replacement for a and o and sounds more natural than i or u.
Also in Latin(American) includes Portuguese and French speakers. Limit it to Spanish language/culture/heritage would be Hispanicx, which is also nonsensical, especially because I just made it up.
But I'm just a person who speaks Spanish, French and Portuguese, so take my word with a grain of salt.
As far as she is concerned, Latinx is just another instance of white colonizers trying to impose their will on the indigenous population.
Is there a gender neutral term your wife likes?
A few Hispanic that were also LGBT started Latinx. LGBT Hispanic are not some hivemind borg and when people state "LGBT Hispanic people did X" it eliminates the agency of all the individuals who are both LGBT and Hispanic.
Some people use e for a gender neutral ending. Elles instead ellos or ellas for example.
A much more ridiculous one is to change the word endings to reflect gender neutrality. You're supposed to write both endings separated with dots.
"Chers lecteurs", a group plural, so like in all latin languages you default to neutral (ie masculine), becomes "Cher·e·s lecteur·rice·s".
It makes text nearly unreadable.
Spanish equivalent would be : "Querid·o·a·s lector·e·a·s"
*Spanish Academy, royal or otherwise.
It really feels sometimes that this is a sort of soft English imperialism, forcing other languages to the margins by making their use "impolite" to the global audience.
I can tell you as a gay man I appreciate when people ask about my partner (gender neutral) versus default to wife. Am I offended by it? Not really, it's right 90% of the time. But it's nice that people are considerate of other options when they don't know themselves. And you don't know that I'm gay by looking at me. Many women you do know they're not a man, so you would already know that you're using the male pronoun as default for all people when you could be more contextual to the situation (and avoid pulling the entire history of male-dominated societies and language with it).
I've seen "partner" being used in reference to hetero relationships more frequently in the last decade, and think that's probably a good development. "Boyfriend" and "Girlfriend" sounds a bit infantilizing to me when used in reference to adults.
One argument in favor of using partner is that boyfriend/girlfriend is ambiguous. My wife often refers to her close female friends as "my girlfriend", even though they are clearly not dating each other. It occasionally causes some confusion with people a generation older than us who aren't familiar with that usage.
that's ridiculous, honestly. it's just an example of how people can always find a reason to play the victim. you don't have to play along and reinforce victim mentality.
Y'all is usually positive, but can be negative "What on earth did y'all do now?!?", and "you lot" leans negative, but can be used positively "Alright you lot, lets get it done".
Tone of voice is extremely important in both examples.
Y’all isn’t what makes that negative. It would be just as negative if you swapped in any other pronoun (you, he, she, I, it, etc).
Please use y'all. Y'all who don't use it don't know what y'all are missing.
shouldn't this be "don't know what y'all is missing"?
Also acceptable is "what y'all're" or "what-y'all're".
Edit" also "t'y'all're". Note that many of these sound much better said then they look written.
I'm not sure this is the hill I want to die on, but where is the line? How few or many people have to feel a certain way to effect change?
I'm not going to argue right vs wrong or with you directly, I'm just explaining my comment and thought process.
and fwiw the first definition for guys/guy in most dictionaries is "a man".
I assure you the “woke left” polices their own —- it’s a constant source of tension between unity of political power and unity of beliefs.
Coke? Why not? It does me no harm at all.
Yes, and they completely miss the fact that when other people make them feel uncomfortable, they don't respond by falling in line with the majority way of thinking, but instead react by becoming more radical or even violent.
There probably are cases where making people feel uncomfortable does lead to them changing their minds and accepting the position of the person making them uncomfortable, but I think the assumption should be that supporters of the status quo will just become more entrenched if they see people trying to make them uncomfortable, just as those working against injustice can become more committed to their cause when they face opposition.
Humans, on the whole, succumb to pressure to conform. And rightly so, the alternative is antisocial; sociopathy.
The utopian ideal of everyone feeling comfortable will not be reached by prioritizing the comfort of the oppressors over the oppressed.
The OED defines "guys" as a word used to refer to a group of people (male, female, or mixed). So if you ask me to not use a word because you refuse to accept its definition, that's very different to asking me to not use a word that is purely an identifier.
The first definition of "guy" in most dictionaries is "A Man", including the oxford english dictionary so while common use is that guys is genderless consider maybe it's not as clear cut and dry as you would like? And there is a reason why it's becoming an issue (the women and non binary folk who don't like it finally feel like they can speak out against it?)
google: define guys -> https://i.imgur.com/b6PJRsa.png
“people of either sex.”
Maybe it helps that although I'm very socially liberal, my stereotype of "people who say y'all" is "subtle and witty"?
Give it a try. Let us know how it goes.
Imagine you took a job somewhere where in their region your field was overwhelmingly female dominated and “hey girls” was considered gender neutral. And you already felt pretty excluded being the only guy on the team and one of less than 10 guys in the whole company. And they’re not purposely excluding you but they didn’t even think that having outside of work team bonding of getting mani-pedis might be uncomfortable for you. Or the fact that all their reaction gifs and references in Slack are of girly shows you’re never seen. And so the fact that at every Zoom call, every company wide meeting it’s “hey girls” just reminds you of how excluded you already feel. So you being it up and ask them to maybe use a different phrase that is a little more gender neutral to you and they brush you off, say that “girls” IS gender neutral and that it’s not their problem.
You know what does feel super awkward though? When someone says "hey guys" in the chat, and then immediately trips over themselves to "correct" themselves, because they're afraid they've hurt my feelings or that they will be called out for uttering "wrongspeak". It's absurd to assign ill-intent to someone for simply using a slightly different dialect of American English than yourself. I'm from the south, so I say "y'all", and nobody gives me a hard time over it.
Also - who cares if your coworkers have different tastes in things than you do? You're not at work to talk about TV shows or trade gifs. The whole "you should bond with your coworkers like they're your friends" thing is a toxic myth that companies promote for purely selfish reasons.
And It doesn’t really bother me that I don’t have many boyish interests and so my entirely male rest of my team don’t talk to me very much about TV and movies or their hobbies but I still make an effort to be their friends because like we’re a small team and spend all day together. Being friends with my coworkers is honestly good for my mental health, the company be damned.
The team I'm currently working with are exclusively of Indian heritage, I'm white. They often talk about Bollywood films, what they did for Diwali, etc. Should this make me feel awkward or excluded?
I don't really care if the company I work for is overwhelmingly anything. I usually manage to find some common ground with any person on an individual level. I don't really consider what the identify as, or what social grouping they've been deemed to belong to, as having any significance.
You can try to homogenize language and culture to suit your own sensibilities. Since I view "guy" as a gendered term, then that's clearly the only acceptable definition and interpretation of the term. Other people's usage is obviously problematic and I want to compel them to change their language to meet my requirements and sense of acceptable terminology.
Alternatively you can embrace the fact that people's language is their own and acknowledge that the person's intent here does indeed matter. You don't need to adapt the same language that they use, but you could be mindful that people speak differently than you and that your discomfort with terminology is sometimes maligned.
Likewise, there's not a chance in hell I can pull off "hey y'all", well maybe if I was wearing a cowboy hat... :)
In any case, I use "Hey peeps..." (peeps -> people), which doesn't offend people (afaik).
Someone can also choose to be offended or not. Apparently this has been forgotten in modern times.
I thought of the same thing, but there are these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peeps
The idea that it's sexist or problematic to address a mixed group as "guys" doesn't quite seem to have crossed the Atlantic yet, but I'm sure it's coming. The U.K. is never too far behind American cultural trends, especially the insane ones.
Probably, I've been in the US for ~20 years.
I think it's really hard to understand gender dysphoria if you haven't been through it. I haven't, but if I can prevent reminding them that some people don't see them as the gender they see themselves, I should make the small effort.
I wish I were making this up.
One of my favorite quotes, because it was so eye opening to me, was along the lines of "we judge ourselves by our intentions, but others by their actions."
I realized how true and unfair that is, and tried since to understand intentions before making judgment.
Frankly, anyone who tells me that is wrong will never convince me. Maybe I don't fit in this world anymore.
I guess at least not grammatically. But informally people might use 'pronoun' in a way that includes this meaning?
homo- same
hetero- different
trans- on the other side
cis - on the same side
trans- is a prefix that means on the “opposite side of.” And so that’s where transgender came from. But then people wanted a term for people who aren’t trans and “not transgender” is awkward. So people looked and found that cis- is a prefix that means “on the same side of” and just went with that. Kinda clever honestly.
I refuse to allow a DDoS on my memory space to recall everyone's preferred form of being addressed; I have a hard enough time remembering names.
Sensitive people are on the lookout for being disrespected
Bailey: I’m avoiding using someone’s preferred pronouns because I don’t respect their gender identity.
Motte: “What so using someone’s name is offensive now?”
From what they did say I think it’s reasonably safe to assume that the person they we’re talking about was non-binary, agender, and went by they/them but it really doesn’t matter.
A very common experience that trans people face is people unnaturally avoiding the use of their pronouns and either structuring sentences awkwardly or by using their name all the time. The literal act of using someone’s name isn’t offensive but when it’s done because you’re avoiding using their pronouns then it’s rude. And it’s super obvious when people do it which makes everyone feel uncomfortable.
Now because trans people deal with this all the time it’s possible that they were more sensitive to it than normal and overreacted but given the parent took offense to being called out and they used dismissive scare quotes to describe the person’s gender identity rather than it being a two second “oh my bad” thing I think suggests not.
> Kerrick's wife called; he isn't going to make it today because he's sick. We're with him in spirit.
Here's an example of unnaturally replacing all pronouns with somebody's name, which reads quite awkwardly:
> Kerrick's wife called; Kerrick isn't going to make it today because Kerrick is sick. We're with Kerrick in spirit.
But I’m not the one trying to redefine reality.
Using someone’s name instead of their pronouns isn’t offensive and vice versa. The thing that’s invalidating [1] is when someone goes out of their way to not use your preferred name or pronouns when that someone would have called you by your name or used your pronouns if you were cis. That kind of thing is noticed by people who are trans and feels supper shitty.
So yeah anyone who tries to make a rule saying “you must always use pronouns after using their name in a sentence” or something like that is being ridiculous and also missing the point.
[1] I don’t think offended really makes sense in this situation because that’s not really the emotion at play.
The other issue, I've had preferred pronouns change. I'm not sure if that has settled down, but there was a lot of new language / wording constantly churning. There was a him that was a her, but then I found out they preferred they instead of her - so I'd been mis-pronouning them even though I wasn't misgendering them.
Given the amount of risk involved in getting this stuff wrong, it really is safer just to use names.
If you use names, you need to use them for everyone. This can get complicated for some folks because names like Ted, Bob, Sue, Joe etc may be more familiar from a pronunciation standpoint for a white person for example, but then that person avoids pronouncing Khamala or Nkosazana because they are uneasy with how to pronounce the name. That becomes obvious pretty quickly.
Managers also have had some awkward situations correcting minority employees use of terms if the manager is of a different background, ie, someone saying latino community (who is themselves latino), and manager has to correct them that it is latinx not latino.
there is no middle ground here, you cannot debate anything, as they consider no moral higher than what they profess.
this is some serious Soviet Union type stuff being done to rewrite the world, no limits on how back one can go for an accusation, and then erasing people from the public for a transgression.
Fake news isn't the main threat of social media, intimidation, degradation, and even threats, is.
Current China owes probably more to Deng Xiaoping than to Mao anyway.
The struggle sessions are the most visible part. In the American cultural revolution they are mainly online (for now). What's a struggle session? Think of all those fake apologies after someone did something perfectly ok but the mob goes after them.
> In the struggle sessions the accused, often teachers suspected of lacking proletarian feeling, were paraded through streets and campuses, sometimes stadiums. It was important always to have a jeering crowd; it was important that the electric feeling that comes with the possibility of murder be present. Dunce caps, sometimes wastebaskets, were placed on the victims’ heads, and placards stipulating their crimes hung from their necks. The victims were accused, berated, assaulted. Many falsely confessed in the vain hope of mercy. Were any “guilty”? It hardly mattered. Fear and terror were the point. A destroyed society is more easily dominated.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/get-ready-for-the-struggle-sess...
Edit: The goal is to replace enlightenment values with critical race theory.
> Critical Race Theory presents a radically different view of our society and of us than most of us recognize or accept. They begin with the assumption of racism and look to find it. They say everyone who doesn’t do this is complicit in the problem, including just for disagreeing with Critical Race Theory. And they reject the fundamental liberal, reasonable, legal, and scientific principles upon which liberal societies operate. https://newdiscourses.com/2021/01/what-is-critical-race-theo...
An example of critical race theory in action: https://twitter.com/DrKarlynB/status/1362774562769879044?s=2...
Or this page from the African-American History Museum: https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/926/d5f/a334baf0d43cd480b3ea...
Is this a crime in itself? Do we really need to cancel academics over rejecting something because they find it logically or practically wrong? Isn't it a bit of a word-game to to identify liberalism with 'reasonable'?
The whole statement seems to start from the presumption that liberalism is reasonable. I can think of many arguments stipulating that it's not. As it turns out, describing your ideology (in this case liberalism) as inherently and unquestionably 'reasonable' isn't a particularly strong way to go about defending that ideology. A Communist or a Nazi could easily say the same thing about their own ideology.
The problem isn't "these academics aren't being canceled for their ideas"; nowhere did GP say such a thing. The problem is "these academics, and people animated by the ideas they expound, have gotten power and are using it to implement their ideas, which is eroding fundamental principles of liberalism (like tolerance of dissent) and this seems really terrible".
This seems so ironic to me. Liberals, then, out of all people, should at least tolerate the dissent of people who don't agree with it. Further, in the interest of argumentation and creating a better society (in whatever metric that may be), we should listen to the arguments and criticisms against liberalism. That's not 'really terrible' by any stretch. If your ideology can't stand up to such criticism, it's likely deficient in some way.
We've rejected fundamental principles of societies in the past, whether slave societies or patriarchal societies or theocratic societies. The mere fact of rejecting a fundamental principle with reasoned argument is not a negative, it can be a great positive.
The problem is that a subset of the people that were so tolerated (let's call them Visigoths) have now taken control of the academies and other institutions (to varying but increasing degrees), and are establishing their own new principles—which are incompatible with the liberal principles, so they're getting rid of the latter, and also pushing out the liberals themselves. The Visigoths do not tolerate dissent, so while the Visigoths were allowed to thrive in liberal academia, liberals are not allowed to thrive in Visigoth academia.
The Visigoths didn't get there by reasoned argument, nor by democratic majority. It seems to have been a combination of (1) mendacious argumentative tactics (e.g. dismissing one's opponent as "privileged" or even as an oppressor, essentially an ad hominem; falsely smearing one's opponents as "racist" [if pressed, they claim to have redefined "racism"] and similar terms; using guilt by association and other tactics to smear one's opponents as Nazis or other villains; responding to objections by saying "Look at these horribly oppressed victims; your concerns are invalid" [optional followup: "the fact that you have the luxury of caring about that concern shows your privilege"]); (2) shaming, intimidation, and bullying tactics (some of which are closely related to the smearing); (3) claiming to represent genuinely good causes that came before them (i.e. those for equal rights and equality before the law), and using that to win the support of the naively well-intentioned and to malign opponents as being opposed to the genuinely good stuff; (4) using university classes for recruitment and training, in which some of them (as professors) teach their views while suppressing dissent (finding various excuses for doing this in a nominally liberal institution); (5) despite being a minority, aiming to sound like a majority by being loud and suppressing dissent via bullying and mob targeting.
It's a pretty interesting accomplishment. Some of it was consciously arranged; much of it is probably not, and is out of control of those who laid the groundwork. The animating mindset seems to involve always looking for oppressor-victim dynamics: always looking for someone to hate, and someone in whose name to hate. The ideology is inconsistent enough to almost always give a way to find words to condemn one's chosen target (one example: roughly speaking, a work of media can be condemned as "exclusionary" if it doesn't have certain minorities, as "tokenism" if it has them but portrays them the same as everyone else, and as "stereotyping" or "cultural appropriation" if it has them and tries to portray anything specific to that minority); probably as a result, different branches of the Visigoths fight each other a lot, which may partly explain how they get good at fighting. I suspect the sense of how to choose targets is dictated primarily by primate-dominance-contest social instincts, which likely work pretty well or else there would be a lot more chaos than there is.
Is there hope? Ideally, we could get an "everyone knows that everyone knows" moment where the well-meaning majority recognize that the Visigoths are fundamentally just destroying things and not seriously helping those whom they claim to protect (e.g. policy recommendations like affirmative action and mandatory sensitivity training are counterproductive; telling people not to aspire to "colorblindness", because it demonstrates privilege and probably racism, is counterproductive). But I doubt that shooting down particular proposals is going to work, nor would firing everyone who seems like a Visigoth be good or feasible. One interesting proposal is to get the Visigoth ideology classified as a religion, and therefore forbidden to be taught uncritically in public schools. That would be appropriate, but on a few levels I'm not sure if it's feasible. Perhaps because I'm in an immunizing mood, I wonder if it would work to get people to recognize the underlying Visigoth mindset—the "always searching for someone to hate, and someone in whose name to hate", the acceptance of logical inconsistency and ad hominem and redirection and everything else—so that, when exposed to Visigoth teachings, their reaction is to attack the logical weaknesses and eventually to perceive the destructive mindset that generates them.
They think that aspects of "white culture" include "following rigid time schedules", "rational linear thinking" and "being polite"!!! What is the implication of this? That black culture doesn't bother with such trivialities as good timekeeping, rationality and being polite? Is this from an "anti-racist" document or a Klan pamphlet?
(Also, anyone who thinks there's anything inherently "white" about following rigid time schedules has obviously never spent much time in southern Europe.)
Highly recommend the film "The Blue Kite" concerning the period (can't speak to the accuracy but at least the creator says its true).
We should be very worried, and we need to take action.
Until yah, someone decided to throw in some doublespeak.
- Everyone had to list what pronouns they wanted people to use. In slack / our email footers everything. This was not optional. We were also told that referring to people by their names instead of pronouns can be offensive.
- Words such as "master", "owner", among some other ones were deemed problematic and needed to be changed. Ironically they also said use of "CRUD" was inappropriate because it was slang for poop.
- We have a bunch of things where we have an owner of users/reports/etc, and we have a bunch of code with stuff like "listUsersOwnedByUser", which apparently could be construed as offensive by certain groups of people.
- A bunch of verbs such as "see", or "visible" could be ablest, etc.
- Our company had a completely optional get out/get exercising type of thing since everyone is WFH, and apparently exercise could be considered offensive to people.
- Our company of 300 people does not have some sort of LGBTQIA+ outreach program.
Some of it made sense, but a lot of it was frankly so nitpicky and difficult to even understand. Pretty much everything we were told/taught went out the window almost immediately.
This is slippery slope happening right before your eyes. For those who claimed that slippery slope is just a fallacy and never ever can be true.
When did Github change the default branch name from "master" to "main"? Few months ago? Now it's "owner" too, and using this word probably could get you in some real trouble.
I'm not even going to comment on "see" and "visible".
I remember asking what did they suggest instead of owner, and they basically gave a list of synonyms that frankly did not really work the same way, or are insanely long e.g. "Primary Account Holder".
And of all things, I would think a financial context, which is completely based on the ownership of property, would be OK with the word owner.
It's a shame we can't stand up against bullshits like that because there's too much to lose.
It’s a fine line between a slippery slope and progress.
I remember in the 80s and 90s when older generations would complain that they couldn’t gay bash anymore. They thought it was a slippery slope that if they were forced to respect homosexuals, they’d be forced to respect other types of behavior they deemed immoral. Turns out it was just progress.
Recently, I noticed that I would refer to adult females as “girls” and adult males as “men”. I want to be careful with that in the future and try to change because I’ve been called out a few times and I can see how it’s disrespectful. And I don’t want to be those adults from the 80s I saw so resistant to change.
I guess I try to view it as each year brings new ways of communicating and interacting. It’s OK that I wrote master/slave years ago and it’s OK that I’d never allow that in my code base now.
We’re all trying to be better and that means change.
I’m glad folks are sounding the alarm because we don’t want to be complacent, but not every new social norm is suppressive either.
So, whenever I think some "new standard" is ridiculous, I try to think on that for a moment and err towards not wasting too much time worrying about it.
Does using the new term hurt me in anyway? Does it help someone else? Alright, then. I might not get it, and it might feel ridiculous to me in the moment, but I don't want to be the guy yelling about how calling something "gay" isn't homophobic.
Again, I go back to my example.
Were LGBT activists "forcing me" to change the way I used the word "gay"? Sort of. Did doing so hurt me? No. Did it benefit them? They say it did. Was it for "nothing"? They say it wasn't.
Language changes. I'm not going to waste a lot of energy worrying about it.
1. I'm not comfortable with the analogy.
2. Going back to my example, the whole "if we let them do X, where does it stop?" was a big part of 90s discourse regarding LGB rights. So far, the slope hasn't slipped into any of the scenarios people brought up. Language changed a bit. Some people felt more included by society. I suffered no injury beyond letting go of the notion I was entitled to use certain words to mean certain things.
I found other ways to convey those things. It turned out fine.
I'm not sure why you need an analogy to get your point across.
As for why I used an analogy, I don't know what reason will satisfy you. People use analogies to help other people get an intuitive sense of an idea which might otherwise be hard to explain. If you understood my point without needing the analogy then that's great, but I don't want to assume that analogies are never helpful.
At the time, I thought the change was ridiculous. It took me a few years to realize I was just being petulant.
By the same logic, shouldn't it be offensive to refer to the "owner" of a house? Or the "torturous" path up the mountain? Can we also not "kill" a process? Or run a "headless" browser? Or talk about a project being a "death march"?
Because there are other words that convey the same programming intent that don’t also personify slavery. I can think of dozens of oppressive human relationships that could also be used to describe a subordinate database architecture, but why? What do we gain by personifying our DBs with terms like “slave”?
They’re short words of convenience rather than some malicious intent, I get it, but it’s not hard to name it something just as relevant like “primary/secondary” or “source/replica” and move on to bigger and better things.
The other words you mentioned don’t have the same painful historical connotations for a large minority of the population.
> I'm sure if it becomes politically advantageous to remove the kill command, a community organiser or developer advocate somewhere will immediately start lobbying for it.
Politically advantageous? I’m not sure why social change is assumed to have ulterior motives. If one of my employees said a violent personification of a programming process was distracting or disturbing to them and made their job harder, why not change it? It’s not like these are technical terms. These are words that relate to human interaction that we’ve embedded into a non-human field.
There are tons of words throughout history that were accepted by previous generations that aren’t accepted by subsequent ones and vice versa. Language and social norms are always changing.
If you can’t speak the truth freely, that’s a huge problem. If you can’t program with others using your preferred personified analogy for a variable name when another variable name will communicate the intent just as well, that doesn’t strike me as quite the same existential threat to society and public discourse.
It's my impression that there are a lot of people looking for things to cancel, justified by their political beliefs, but motivated by social approval and career-building.
If this is the case, it's obvious why we shouldn't change our language to suit those demands: the demands are motivated by a positive feedback loop where cancelling is rewarded, and rewards enable cancellation, and so whether a term is a real problem is irrelevant so long as outrage about it can generate enough income or likes.
As the programming field becomes more diverse, isn’t it reasonable that some might have a legitimate emotional reaction to the word “slave” especially in the context of a “master/slave” relationship?
Or is it more realistic to assume that it’s people on power trips manufacturing outrage for social or physical currency? And that no African American would ever have had a problem with that word pair until a social justice warrior came along and told them to be outraged?
The latter is pretty insensitive, but not an uncommon view.
> we shouldn't change our language to suit those demands
Programmers used an analogy that attempted to change the meaning of the word pair “master/slave”. People are advocating not to change the meaning of our language but to respect the original meaning that is still taught in every school. “Master/slave” has an important historical meaning and isn’t something we should casually co-opt.
If someone wrote a script to “genocide” a DB instead of “wiping” it, I’d hope that we could see that co-opting a word that already has important historical meaning doesn’t help anyone, but surely hurts some.
"Owner" is fine because the generic, base meaning is not inherently wrong. Claiming to a person as a slave is one application of that generic meaning (which is ofc very wrong). Owning a record in a database or owning some land is another, distinct case (which is perfectly fine).
"Death march" and explicitly militaristic terms are not ideal, although many people do believe in some kind of just war, so theoretically words themselves are not fundamentally immoral, the whole topic is understandably not going to result in any positive feelings so it would be best to avoid it.
Likewise, "headless" if we really want to stretch it to a human analogy, would not refer to cutting off someone's head, but rather to a type of creature that doesn't have one in the first place.
If we’re really thorough about this stuff, we’ll probably end up with hundreds of words and phrases that we can’t say because they could remind people of something dark or unjust in our history. Everyone will have to think about it constantly to avoid slipping up.
It strikes me as a lot of sound and fury for something that ultimately isn’t going to make a single oppressed person any better off, and that will lead to a lot of conflict and resentment when people feel that innocent patterns of speech are being policed.
It’s not meant to make them better off, it’s meant to not make someone feel worse.
> completely innocent patterns of speech are now being policed
No one is perfect but if someone’s telling you that a word pair like “master/slave” sucks for them to have to type, why is our response anger and resentment at the “word police” rather than compassion and understanding?
If we consider the worst fates for a race or ethnicity we often think about genocide or slavery.
Just like we could “genocide” a DB by deleting everything, it would probably suck for many to see that word normalized in a new context. It’s probably good for some words to maintain their strong visceral reactions. I’d say the fact that “slave” feels like an innocent speech pattern is actually a good reason why we should want to move away from using it outside of it’s original historical context. The word “slave” should hopefully elicit fear, sadness and contemplation. Instead it seems it generates confusion as to why anyone would feel negative emotions in response to that word. Just like swear words, they carry weight largely because they’re seldom used and are often attached to emotions. To dilute their potency seems like a mistake to me.
In any event you’re not a bad person by any stretch if you use those words innocently. But I personally would rather use a different, less charged word to describe a DB if others were so inclined to indulge me.
It's of course very different when the intention is to offend, as with racial slurs, but when it comes to things like master/slave db, git master, 'sanity check', the masculine/feminine in Spanish, and others that have been mentioned in this thread, you're really talking about a project to 'reform' everyday speech, with no clear boundary on when this project would ever be complete. And really, there can be no clear boundary since 'unintentional offensiveness' is a purely subjective determination that anyone can claim in response to almost any word or phrase, no matter how benign others may find it.
However progressive someone's politics might be (mine are fairly progressive fwiw), this seems like a highly questionable undertaking. There are clear echoes to measures that have been taken by totalitarian regimes in the past, like asking citizens to call out and report each other for ideological transgressions.
Considering this danger and how much it aggravates people to feel that they must walk on eggshells with their words, there seems to be very little practical benefit toward advancing any concrete progressive goals. People not feeling bad seems like kind of a wash since it also feels bad to have your character questioned based on using common/widely accepted terms.
“Master/slave” is a recent manufactured idiom. No one is hunting through dusty books trying to find things to be offended about. As more African Americans enter the field of programming the more apparent it has become how unnecessary it is to use this idiom. It certainly wasn’t coined in a programming context by an African American. It would be inherently obvious to them that it’s not even a good idiom from a semantic view. It’s only because African Americans were absent from those naming decisions that it ever gained traction.
No one is censoring facts or opinions here. They’re simply saying: “hey, now that African Americans are participating more in our programming community it’s become apparent how uncomfortable it is for African Americans to have to use this master/slave idiom that is barely even semantically appropriate. No one is blaming anybody but can we agree to use a term that’s both more semantically accurate and one that all of us including our African American colleagues feel more comfortable with?”.
It’s like if we’re in a public park and I ask you to take turns on the swing. There’s no rule about it and you could say I’m on a power trip trying to get you to give up the swing, or that I’m blaming you for not having noticed that I was getting annoyed waiting. Or we could just take turns and be friends. I want you to stop using the swing so I can use it. You being on the swing isn’t a problem, but acting like I’m oppressing you by asking you to change positions is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. No ones character is being questioned and no one is wrong. But if you say no to sharing the swing because you’re afraid of a slippery slope of me expecting you to share your house, your car, etc. then you’re operating out of fear rather than responding to my actual request. Or, you could trust that when my requests actually inconvenience you, you’ll say no.
> it also feels bad to have your character questioned based on using common/widely accepted terms
I’m know it does. But insisting you’re not offending anyone or have never offended anyone isn’t the goal. No one is perfect. No one can go through life without being a jerk or offending people. The real test is how we respond after we have done so.
If you used an idiom that made some people uncomfortable, just apologize and move on. Don’t be afraid to give up the swing worrying about everything else that might happen later. It’s just a swing and this is just an idiom. Offering understanding and compassion and even an apology costs you nothing but your ego.
But regardless, it's not that I'm so stuck on using this specific term. I don't care that much, and primary/secondary is fine, as you say. My point is that many people and groups will have more-or-less equally valid complaints about countless other words and terms, and I don't think attempting to excise all of them from our language is a helpful or productive path to go down. As many anecdotes in this thread have demonstrated, it's not "just a swing" or just a single idiom. It's already starting to snowball into a pretty long list.
> Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
You saw this with Trump's anti-CRT executive order, widely misreported as "banning diversity training" or "banning federal employees and contractors from being taught about racism". People who claim that this is what the EO said either haven't read it or they're deliberately lying; section 10 of the order explicitly says that diversity training is still allowed.
What the EO actually banned was "diversity" or other training which teaches any of nine specific things, all of which are perfectly reasonable ideas to not want in government, for example that "one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex" or "an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex." Look it up yourself; read the full list of nine points and tell me which ones you would want to see taught to government employees (or anyone else).
Wokeists went nuts at this EO, and Biden reversed it on his first day. Why? Because they want to discriminate, scapegoat and spread stereotypes based on race and sex. What other possible explanation could there be? Wake up.
“Master” has both a non-racist and racist definition. After seeing it used in the context of a “slave” DB, I can see why the innocence of the word was lost for many in the programming community.
I’m pretty sure actual masters and slaves were the origins of the words and predate your SCSI example.
> The master/slave relationship predated the American continent and across the broad swath of human history has been a pretty color-blind enterprise
But it’s never been healthy or admirable, wether based on racism, class, tribalism, religion, etc.
So we’re upset that we can’t personify inanimate objects and describe mechanical processes using words that were originally used to describe horrible human behavior? Is this really the hill to fight on? Does renaming a DB pair primary/secondary really mark the downfall of our society? No one is trying to make you “acquiesce”. If personifying an application with the words master/slave is super important to you, go for it.
It just seems more odd to me those that insist on using it rather than the multitude of words that aren’t associated with generational pain and suffering.
Obviously, where did you read me saying otherwise?
> [bunch of hyperbole about downfall of civilization]
The idiocy of attempting to change language like this and the rationale given is certainly making society dumber, to say nothing of the insulting nature of people pretending this buffoonery is perfectly natural.
> no one is trying to make you acquiesce
The comments on this thread contain many examples and testimonies to the contrary - corporate training programs, censorship.
> seems odd to me
Perhaps it’s odd to you because you see it as a small and limited change; it’s ridiculous to me because there’s no limiting principle to what’s offensive. This word pair is actually one of the less ridiculous attempts at linguistic overhaul (somewhat less ridiculous than trying to ban whitelist/blacklist, e.g.).
> where their origin was never anything of the sort
It sounded like you were trying to use the SCSI example or the programming example to show that “master/slave” is an innocuous word pair commonly used in ways that don’t apply to the slave trade. But their semantic origin is the slave trade. It’s like if we started referring to DB wipes as “genocides”. The origin of “genocide” and emotional impact of the word doesn’t change when the word is co-opted (poorly and for no ideal reason) down the road.
It sounds likes silly argument to argue that the origin of the word pair and it’s emotional/historical context should be secondary (or even ignored) because it was used innocently in a niche domain like hardware or software far later down the line. I guess I’m arguing the reverse that the original meaning matters the most and the latter applications of the word matter the least, simply because the original meaning is still taught in school and used as a reminder of the horrors of human behavior while the overhauled use of the word pair is a poor analogy that directly attempts to reference that original meaning.
> This word pair is actually one of the less ridiculous attempts at linguistic overhaul
Yet there’s huge resistance and debate about it. I don’t understand why one would want to draw a line in the sand here and insist on overhauling the original meaning of an emotionally charged word like “slave” to poorly personify an inanimate process. Even if I was going to personify a replica DB, I’d call it a “clone” or “twin”. I don’t think renaming “master/slave” is the social oppression / thought police we’re all worried about.
I don't mean to exaggerate... it's just words and we use all kinds of expressions that have roots in something objectionable.
Unfortunately people twist something from "mildly/moderately inappropriate" into "racist", which I agree is ridiculous.
Slavs, as in, the white European ethnic group.
Edit: wow, downvotes for factual info[0][1]. Go back to reddit.
In the US a swastika evokes memories of Nazis and the word pair “master/slave” evokes memories of white masters and black slaves.
It's a current religious symbol. It's everywhere in Asia. Lots of media get swastikas edited out when sent for consumption in the West. Nobody cares.
> The most recent interpretation is often the most relevant.
You mean the almost exclusively US interpretation is the most relevant.
> In the US...
See?
As far as I'm considered, the worst part about this is that because of American propaganda in the mass media and popculture, people from outside the States are projecting American history and problems onto themselves, because that's a hip and cool thing to do now.
However in January the entire sales team removed them after apparently a customer reacted negatively to the inclusion. Which lead to other external facing teams removing it to prevent the same issue. Most people have removed it from emails, and honestly many people just don't seem to care, and HR doesn't seem to be enforcing it.
Mandatory pronouns are a pure shibboleth in the culture war. Trans activists don't want it. Anti-trans activists don't want it. The only people who want mandatory pronouns are the folks wanting a cheap signal for how much of an ally they are and an easy way to identify and ostracize people who aren't in-line with their politics.
If someone is really okay with all of them and wasn't just saying it to be disrespectful, then it's fine. If they said it just to devalue someone else who did care (but really cared themselves all along and in no way would actually be okay with it), then it is wrong.
I also don't buy the "see is ableist" thing. Entire languages would be unacceptable if that were true. For example Japanese appends -て見る (see) to verbs for the meaning "try to <verb> and see (how it goes). That notion of "seeing" is a fundamental part of the linguistic concept of "see" in most languages and it is in no way a reference to blind people. When you say someone is "blinded by the sunlight" or describe a "deafening roar" you are obviously not saying anything about blind or deaf/Deaf people, those words clearly have included a wide variety of definitions including temporary ones which were then the basis for metaphorical ones. That's different than "master/slave" which is a metaphor for a word/concept that was inherently racist and violent from the beginning.
On the other hand, I don't think pronouns in email signature is a bad rule. Even if the pronouns you use are the same ones you have used your entire life, you do have a preference nonetheless, so I don't think there's anything inherently unfair about making people specify them. It's not like you don't want people to use any pronouns or you don't feel that they should exist at all, so it's not really harming your rights. It does help trans people feel more accepted in sharing their pronouns, and it doesn't really cost other people anything to do it.
The stuff about CRUD is just absurd. As is creating ultra-expensive outreach (that make money for the people writing these reports) for companies to small to support it. If HR was concerned about inclusion, they could add a tasteful note on their website about how their workplace was affirming/welcoming space and that they welcomed those applicants. Of course, employees should certainly be free to create such a group if there is actually interest in it.
I’ll be glad to demonstrate my knowledge of Unicode, Sumerian and Chữ Nôm in my signature and be OFFENDED by any "woke" idiot who get it wrong. Bonus point if the fault lies in fact in software the company uses.
Folks are renaming git branches, but not these honorifics, and I’m curious about the logic.
A majority of developed democracies have laws that restrict hate speech, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
That said, I disagree with what eBay is doing.
This won't end well.
As a separate point, Canada's hate speech laws have been working quite well. They're used rarely, and only in extreme cases, like a case where a promoter of the Rwandan genocide wanted to immigrate to Canada. Judges understand that "speech I hate" isn't the legal standard for hate speech.
They do for now. But if you'd been paying attention lately, you'd know that the dominant ideology among our elite universities and a growing number of our institutions is no longer liberalism, under which free speech is valued. Liberalism has been replaced in the univeristy by critical theory, and its offshoots like critical race theory, under which it is absolutely 100% taught that hate speech is precisely equivalent to "speech I hate", or more accurately, speech the left hates. Argue back and you'll probably get sent that meme about Popper's paradox of tolerance, but it's actually based in the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse's theory of "repressive tolerance", which basically states that far-left radicalism should be tolerated and nothing else.
Critical race theory (which could best be summarised as "anti-scholarship racism masquerading as anti-racist scholarship") was born in law schools and is now being taught as unquestioned fact throughout the education system, to children at an increasingly young age (which is the whole point of cancelling Dr. Seuss - so they can shoehorn in pro-CRT books to children instead.) Lest you think I'm being paranoid, here's none other than the American Bar Assocation propping up CRT: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
Where do you think the next generation of judges is going to come from? Don't say you weren't warned.
This is what people call "virtue signaling". The article says that only 7000 copies were sold of the highest selling such Dr. Seuss book. This has no practical effects besides publicity. If they are going to seriously take this view, then they should have started with Mein Kampf.
Now, if they were to release a press-release with a long list of banned products, or classes of products, that isn't to say I'd necessarily agree that it was a good thing. But at least it would be consistent.
I'm with you, that is a huge worry.
https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/here-are-the-wr...
On this same topic, I recently rewatched Aladdin, on Disney plus and was surprised that it was prefaced with a ‘social justice’ disclaimer. They said they wouldn’t take it down, but warned it might be offensive.
Ok, so we prepared to ourselves be offended, and yet I wasn’t. The movie holds up, and was really enjoyable! I’m not really sure what the issue was? I guess the depiction of Arab people is the issue, but I couldn’t find anything particularly egregious.
Yeah I found a picture of the Africans question. This might be the worst one. I see why folks would take it the wrong way.
They are potbellied, dressed in ‘tribal’ garb. Stereotypical I suppose, but I don’t see why that’s necessarily a racist ‘statement’ of all black people. Within the context of the text, it’s about going to an African island and bringing back an exotic bird.
And I found one of the ‘oriental’ pictures, and honesty it is pretty benign. Maybe the other is worse I don’t know didn’t find it.
Also, there is a very benign picture of an Arab gentleman riding a camel. Very innocent, nothing in particular offensive in my opinion.
Ebay, Amazon, etc are all private companies. So I appreciate the point of view that they can operate as they like. But they really shouldn't be prejudiced as to what they sell on their platform, unless there's some form of law-breaking going on (for example the Anarchist's Cookbook).
I'd prefer something at least like how WB handled older Looney Tunes or Disney handled the Muppets - add a disclaimer before relevant episodes explaining objectionable parts. But outright delisting from sale is wrong.
Ultimately these types of moves are bandaids on the real problems we need to solve, like police reform, the schools-to-prison pipeline, the war on drugs, etc.
So if you listened to Voice of America, you would be convicted. If you questioned scientists for telling you that an acre of rice fields could easily produce 30,000 KGs of grains, you would be punished. If you lived in East Germany during cold war, of course your neighbor was so evil that it was your duty to spy on them and to report them. Oh and yes, many people were executed for questioning the ideology of Pol Pot. Guess how many people during the Pol Pot era believed that their neighbors deserved the death?
But of course, the US is the lighthouse of righteousness and justice and democracy, right? Our government didn't do anything wrong, right? It's just a few congressmen asking companies to be responsible for the evil disinformation and misinformation, right? The 1619 Project won Pulitzer because its narrative was for our own conscience, right? We teach kids critical race theory so they can hate an entire race but it's for our own good, right? We did all these for our moral high ground, what's wrong with it, right?
America's won too much, even when we're wrong or stupid, and our historical frame has suffered.
All economic products cost energy to generate and all energy is limited in totality by the available energy on earth.
When someone uses this energy, another person cannot use it.
This holds true even for the most abstract product. Say the economic product of poetry produced/sung by a poet.
The poet needs energy to sustain himself and the time needed to produce the poem. When he uses that energy, entropy increases and someone else now cannot use it.
That is zero sum.
The transaction you are describing is the equivalent of two people taking gold from limited reserves and trading that gold. The fact of the matter is, the gold is still missing from the shared reserve regardless of how fair the trade was.
The sun hitting the planet at a given moment is on the order of 100 petawatts. Human energy utilization is on the order of 15 terawatts. It's a really good thing that it isn't zero sum.
We use a fraction of the energy hitting the earth because we can only extract a fraction of it. In this case rate of replenishment functions as a limit. If our rate of usage exceeds the rate in which we can viably extract useful energy from the sun then that means not everyone can have access to this energy. This is a limit. Zero Sum.
If Energy truly was unlimited nobody would be paying for it.
Trees don't pay for energy.
Trees compete for light. The taller trees win, the shorter trees are deprived of sunlight and therefore are the losers.
Any economic model of society that doesn't involve the zero sum nature of reality is highly highly inaccurate.
Are your comments meant to be some kind of elaborate satire?
Simply by obtaining these resources others are deprived. The people who are deprived are the losers, the people who aren't are the winners.
It doesn't matter if you need things at different times. When you the trace the source of everything you that "need" you will find that at the root of it all is a limited resource.
A product is either limited by an actual concrete supply or if the product is abstract it is limited by energy.
When you trace the origin of everything back all the way to inception you will find a limit.
You pay for energy. So just how high is the limit practically speaking? Think about it. It'd be pedantry if I argued with you over oxygen, but Energy is nowhere near as seemingly limitless as oxygen.
Keep in mind this conversation began because someone said "America has won too much".
The origin of energy in the universe is not known and the beauty of the universe is your opinion and not relevant to this conversation.
There are several things about energy that are always true as far as we know:
1. We cannot created or destroy it.
2. There seems to be a fixed amount of energy in the universe.
3. As energy rises in entropy either through inevitably or usage it becomes unusable to us. You can heat your room with a heater but you can never recapture that heat to reheat your room again. Therefore “available energy” is limited.
All of my statements can be derived from the “axioms” above. Concepts like beauty or the origin of energy is not derivable from anything we currently know.
Context is relevant.
"The universe is a zero-sum system" is a true statement, but utterly useless - a tautology that has no relevance to the discussion.
The entire culture of the United States from all the art, to all the technology, to all the food to all the music is sustained by this same energy.
It is not sustainable for everyone in the world to use the same amount of energy that is used by the United States. This is literally the definition of zero sum.
In fact it is well known that entire civilizations have fallen because they've used up all available energy reservoirs. The most famous example is the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island. Easter Island collapsed because the situation was not only zero sum but even negative as high entropy energy is not useful to any participant in the game.
What people don't realize is that the economy is limited by physical actuality. It is not simply supply, demand and your limitless "imagination" on what you can potentially deem as "valuable". Supply and demand alone is a short sighted measure. The better metric for intrinsic value must include energy/entropy in the equation.
There is a limit and that limit practically effects everything around you.
We are not really energy constrained and simply using the available energy more efficiently can leave all parties better off on all but maybe billion year timelines.
What available energy means is energy "available" for extraction. Not total energy that exists in the earth.
>Some have failed because their use of energy outpaced their ability to extract available energy.
This is just word play. You know what I mean. But we can still play the game if you want.
Basically if the civilization can't extract energy then the energy isn't "available." That's what the word available means.
> The entire planet could run for 100 years on just the toxic waste from a single US nuclear plant.
Uh no. If we replaced all current world power with copies nuclear plants running in the US we'd be out of nuclear resources in a year.
With breeder reactors and ocean water we have about 60,000 years available. A far cry from "millions of years"
If nuclear power becomes this common and available in our lifetimes then yes energy can be in a practical sense unlimited and negligible foot note in the economic equation.
However this power is not yet "available" (keyword) so until then energy is a huge part of the economic equation.
>We are not really energy constrained and simply using the available energy more efficiently can leave all parties better off on all but maybe billion year timelines.
You're talking about potential and things that are currently unavailable. I'm talking about history, the status quo and "available energy."
So we're not at odds here, just talking about different things.
Why would governments and scientists spend so much money on Fusion if Nuclear was the definitive answer? It doesn't matter. Whatever your stance is on the topic you can't change the fact that there exists huge political opposition against Nuclear power. The political opposition if anything makes the line of reasoning completely relevant.
We could argue whether fusion is nuclear or not, but I'm wondering where all this is headed.
The main point for this specific thread is that the economy is zero sum because everything relies on energy and energy is limited. Nuclear energy as it currently exists and what it potentially could or could not be does not change the equation.
The root post is another topic, I was simply responding to someone who said the economy was not zero sum and telling him that, that statement is categorically wrong. Then it spawned an avalanche of replies from people who disagree. What was just a small tangential reply is now a giant sub thread.
It's worth pointing out that the energy consumption of the US (and other developed economies) per capita has been decreasing for decades[0], and, moreover, the World Energy Council predicted that global demand for energy will peak in 2030.[1]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-Primary-Energy-con...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/10/global-dema...
The loser here is other person who could've potentially used that limited resource for his own gain.
It seems simpler to consider that those who give are more likely to receive. Even a primordial entity in nature understands that the act of helping others helps itself.
Sure there's locally optimal resource distribution that results in a less optimal global distribution.
Sure you're right that entropy wins in the end and the total energy of the universe is fixed.
But there are plenty of transactions and projects we can engage in that result in more value for all participants across the entire lifecycle.
As long as the rate of extraction of energy is lower than the rate of replenishment of energy then that net transaction seemingly produces a net gain.
However the minute Rate of extraction of energy exceeds the rate of replenishment someone loses because the energy you use cannot be used by someone else. For example the entire population of the world using as much energy as the people in the United States is unsustainable.
In short the participants in the transaction didn't lose. Someone else outside of the transaction lost.
Energy is therefore limited and, as illustrated above, a highly practical concept.
You are correct that the about of energy available for human consumption is finite in a given moment in time. Every choice for how energy is distributed collapses other possibilities. Yet, the ability of humans to capture and direct energy ever grows with the passage of time.
Up until about 3-4 generations ago, our species depended on beating other creatures to move us around, and burning trees for warmth. Now the same planet with the same or less resources is able to provide ~250 times more usable energy.
Technological growth is luck and also likely limited. The zero sum nature of the economy comes from the context of a transaction.
Transactions and exchanges are zero sum, technological growth is not. But increasing technology is both a combination of luck and arguably limited.
The easiest observable way to see that the economy is not zero sum once you take into account delta T (time) is that the economy grows and can grow both faster or slower than population growth. If it was truly zero-sum in aggregate, the size of the economy and wealth would always be strictly proportional to population.
You need to model energy alongside an economy and population.
Logically, If you limit energy, you limit the size of the economy. Therefore, energy is an important variable in any economic model.
To not include such a factor in your model means your model is inaccurate.
2) What you are espousing here really isn’t all that useful other than as a way of playing “ooh gotcha” in arguments with others
3) Energy is only zero sum in closed systems and the earth is not a closed system. The overwhelming majority of our energy comes from a source outside our ecosystem and a non-zero amount also escapes from our planet. Ergo, it’s not a closed system and your zero sum notions do not necessarily always apply.
2. No it is useful and highly practical. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26352352
3. Energy is limited in the amount that arrives from the sun per day and the amount we have the ability to extract from the earth and the sun and the wind per day. The limit is evident by the fact you have to pay for it. If it were unlimited, your energy bill would be zero.
There does exist products on earth that while not technically unlimited can be practically considered unlimited. One such example is the air you breath. Energy is NOT an example of this.
One of the most interesting proofs of this is the measurable change in the Earth’s albedo due to climate change (and the downward spiral that creates). If we can demonstrate notable changes in how much energy is retained or lost, globally, that destroys the notion of this being a closed system. Similarly, the sun itself is known to be variable in its total energy output so there is no reasonable assurance of a constant amount of energy into or out of our global system. We can’t really control how much energy is produced but it is false to assert that all energy is used as well - there is notable margin for good or for bad here - and because of that, the zero-sum claim is just silly.
Ephemeral supply and wasted energy only limits supply even further. Here’s a very simple way to think about it that gets rid of the associated complexities :
The fact that you pay for energy and the fact that energy outages can occur when usage exceeds supply means that energy is limited and therefore zero sum. In fact the attempt to try to reason your way to another conclusion is the silly endeavor.
The economy is zero sum because the actual key measurement of all economic goods is the lowering of entropy which is directly done by energy utilization which is directly limited.
The earth receives energy from the sun at a limited rate. The limit on the rate and limits on our technology in order to extract this energy functions as a practical limit.
Zero sum games are used colloquially in the context of transactional games. When a resource is limited in this context the game is zero sum. Someone loses during the creation and exchange of an economic product.
The context of increasing technology or resource discovery is separate from this topic and not what people mean when they say the economy is “not zero sum”. People are referring to the transaction and creation of said economic product and the economic actors in the economy at the current point in time. What they mean is a “transaction” in the game where I trade you an extra pizza for your extra shoe results in both of us receiving a net gain. My claim is that this transaction does not result in a net gain because both products are tied to a limited resource whether it be material or energy. You took a piece of the energy pie now someone else has no pie.
You like you use language reminiscent of thermodynamics but you seem to suffer significant misapprehension of the laws of thermodynamics.
Energy is never lost in a universal sense or within a closed system. So, for you to say energy is lost if not used is either a violation of the laws of thermodynamics or admission that the earth’s ecosystem and all human endeavors therein are not a closed system. Just as energy can be lost from that system, it can be added from external sources (primarily the sun). So for any resource/bit of energy, unlike your previous statements, either I use it, you or anyone else not me uses it, or it’s lost to waste/eventually leaked from the system or it’s stored and used later (or likely some combination of all four of those). If it were zero-sum, it would be 1&2 only and no energy would ever be added to the system. That’s not the case for earth and human endeavors.
I’m using entropy in terms of statistical mechanics. Probability is the more viable explanation for entropy, not some random thermodynamic law. Those laws are archaic explanations of what entropy is.
I’m also not talking about just energy. I’m talking about available energy. Energy can’t be created or destroyed but it can increase in entropy and become unusable and unavailable.
The limit I’m referring to here is rate of available energy. Energy on the earth is constantly being rendered unusable through entropy increasing naturally or through the transfer of low entropy from energy to low entropy economic products. Energy is also being replenished by the sun at a fixed rate.
The usage rate and replenishment rate form an effective limit on aggregate available energy as a limited rate, making its rate of usage in an economic transaction effectively capped and therefore zero sum by definition.
There’s no time cube antics here that’s just rude. The real antic here is how you can think that people can just play the economic game and continuously benefit from repeated transactions to infinite without any actual physical price that was paid. Physical limits exist and that is not wackiness... that is common sense. Although, your reply that will follow this statement will be 100% wackiness if you want any chance at vindicating yourself.
Nope, it doesn't. You're not wrong. You're just being pedantic. For all intents and purposes for the discussion we're having here this continuous decay into higher entropy states is a non-issue. Within the sphere of the humans involved in free exchange, it's not zero sum even if it is zero sum when you take into account the entirety of the physical world.
I think it's reasonable to involve all humans effected by an exchange.
If a corporation purchases water rights in an area from the government and suddenly deprives the poor farmers in the area from using the water to grow their food does this make the farmers a negligible part of the equation? In my opinion: No.
You can create your box so that it only fits the participants of the transaction but that would be a fantasy. There are great real world zero sum costs to almost everything in an economy.
My claim is that all economic activity is tied to energy and that energy is limited and usage of said limited energy in one place prevents usage elsewhere. Try to find an example that falsifies my claim. You can’t.
>> Given an initial situation, a Pareto improvement is a new situation where some agents will gain, and no agents will lose. [0]
Neonological seems to believe that pareto improvements are not possible because of negative externalities. Maybe they are right but positive externalities also need to be accounted for.
Just replace all available energy with a free triple A battery gifted to you by the government per day. That battery can’t even push your car 100 meters. If you can’t drive then the suburban layout of US cities can’t even function. Every aspect of the economy will grind to a near standstill.
Energy is the primary resource that drives everything in an economy, everything. Because energy is limited the game in every economy is in actuality overall zero sum.
Because energy is relatively abundant right now, certain models of the economy sort of do work for certain scenarios when they don’t account for energy. But I think these models are still bad because, practically, even differences in energy utilization correlate with how technically advanced an economy is.
Once energy is used up, then all economies are basically dead. There is no positive externality here. Every economic transaction involves energy and is thus zero sum. If the United States uses up all the oil in the world to build its advanced economy then other countries and people in the future and past cannot build that same economy because there is no oil. Zero sum.
The game is basically zero sum but occasionally you roll some dice and if it lands on a 6 you can increase the total sum. However the game in between the dice rolls is zero sum. To frame it in a real world example: you still pay for energy as if it was limited even though nuclear fusion has the potential to make it unlimited.
Growth in terms of resource discovery and better technology is not zero sum. But exchanges and transactions in terms of current available resources and technology is zero sum.
That should help setup a dichotomy and clarify things.
The Sahara radiates more energy into space every night than the human race utilized that day.
Why am I still paying for energy if it's unlimited?
Because energy is still limited.
The energy radiated by the Sahara is not "available" therefore not part of what I meant when I said "available energy on earth."
So I have 5 fish. I put a fish flake in the tank. The game the fish play with the flakes is zero sum. Only one fish can get the flake. Next time, I put two flakes in the fish tank. The economy has increased by 2x! But only two fish get a flake so the game is still zero sum.
What if I put 30 flakes into the tank? The biggest fish beats up all the other fish and eats all 30 flakes. The game is still zero sum.
Increasing the size of the economy does not change the nature of the zero sum game.
I can triple the size and value of the fish tank economy just like how Reddit can increase the value of GameStop. The fact of the matter is it’s all still a zero sum game.
The amount of satisfaction you have is arbitrary and your own personal opinion. It's valid to you but not a valid part of the discussion because it's so arbitrary.
It could be that in reality the satisfaction I gain from art is worth 999 trillion dollars. If it's true then it's true but is it worth discussing? No.
The critical point here is that even things of value that people believe to be seemingly abstract are connected to a physical and limited resource.
This is not just pedantry. Art such as Opera or symphonies or blockbuster movies require a huge energy hungry economy to produce.
You can't get most of the art you "enjoy" from human powered economies like tribals still living in the Amazon rain forest. None of the "art" mentioned above can ever come out of economies like that. You can't even get children's drawings (art) like you do from modern economies because tribal economies can't even produce crayons or paper.
There is a huge correlation between the quality of the abstract things you enjoy and the energy required to produce it. It's just a general correlation but it's a correlation nonetheless.
So rather then call it strange. Take it as new insight. You once considered "art" to some abstract concept that you "enjoy". Now you know that art is also a low entropy configuration of paint. Lowering entropy costs energy therefore most abstract things are always related to energy. You can still enjoy a painting, but now you are armed with additional knowledge.
Greater knowledge means things that were previously mysterious can now be viewed in a more technical light. You can call it strange or you can call it learning something new. It's up to you.
Either way you are still free to enjoy your art as if it was worth 999 trillion dollars.
I do agree that the quality of art is roughly proportional to the size of the economy that "spins it off" so to speak. Obviously hunter gatherers are not going to produce great art without surplus goods or division of labor.
At base I think we can't just write off human pleasure because some of it varies based on the individual. Economists estimate things like this all the time. I enjoy my favorite music albums very much, much more than say a $10 album cost, but if it cost instead $300 and my choice was between an album or a bicycle you can bet I would buy fewer albums no matter how much I liked them, so we can at least bound my enjoyment at $10 - $300 and realistically much narrower.
I do admit most of my favorite poetry and literature was produced by great imperial powers, even if by relatively impoverished or humble members of that society. There is something to this- whether Rome, Song China or Colonial Britain lots of good art and luxury is created by conquest.
If I'm moving from the UK to the US, and someone else is moving from the US to the UK, then I really need USD and that person really needs GBP.
We can then trade USD for GBP and both be better off as a result.
The transaction was demonstrably positive sum in utility terms.
Who care about the conqueror and winners of wars if they aren't literate?
Winning is what mattered in that case. There's gotta be a Mao quote for that, barrels of guns or something.
The U.S.A. celebrates one Christopher Columbus with his very own holiday.
Both men did rather similar things, with the one exception of course that the latter won his genocide campaigns and racial superiority wars, and the former lost them.
The total death toll of W.W.2. is 75 million on all sides, for comparison.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europe...
I have no idea what your currency is and who is on it.
My currency is American and every single one of them has more native bodies on them than Columbus. President's day has zero people protesting against it.
Like I said, history is written by the winners.
On American currency, Washington, Jefferson and Jackson (!) are most relevant although they're obviously not the only authority figures that were all about taking land.
The first ~12 presidents or so are each responsible for more atrocities against natives than Columbus could ever have done on the one crappy island he occupied for a few years. You don't go from 13 coastal colonies to "sea to shining sea" without breaking a few eggs.
What do you base the idea upon that it was mostly disease and not warfare?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
This source suggests that the estimate is that 25–50% of members of most tribes were felled by disease. Given that 90% of the population was felled overall, it seems unlikely that most were felled due to disease.
Sources of death, wider timeframe:
* Disease
* Columbus on one tiny island
* Spaniards in general who are not Columbus (who was italian but sponsored by Spain)
* British/Americans
It claims that 55 million of the population of 60 million was killed by “violence and disease”.
> Following Christopher Columbus' arrival in North America in 1492, violence and disease killed 90% of the indigenous population — nearly 55 million people — according to a study published this year.
Given that the other source claims that 25-50% of most tribes was lost to disease, I find the idea that disease caused almost all of the deaths to be unsupported unless you have something else than “general knowledge” which is contradicted by sources, which, admittedly, are estimates as they always are.
Columbus did his share of wrongs, but he wasn't responsible for a genocide.
I'm not being facetious in giving you a let-me-Google-that-for-you link (normally when one does that it's to sort of hint at someone they are too lazy to look up a technical question).
But in this case it's an honest invitation to do some basic research yourself. If I gave you specific links it could be cherry-picked links to highly skewed content to people with ideological axes to grind.
History (outside of government-sponsored and civic-minded textbooks) tends to be pretty grim and filled with bloodshed and injustice and this is no exception.
Your original comment doesn't state it's position clearly. I'm parsing it as a kind of exasperated disbelief in someone perceived to be making a ridiculous claim.
If instead this is a debate about the exact meaning and semantics of the use of the word 'genocide' feel free to ignore this.
Edit: updated link
If I recall, that book's source was the writings of a Columbus critic of the time (a monk I think?)
Are there any other sources that discuss Columbus and his interactions with native populations?
A big counter-example is Sima Qian, who was given the choice of being executed or castrated by the Han Emperor. Because he made a promise to his father to write a history of China, he chose castration, and is now considered the father of Chinese history.
That's utter nonsense, and actually echos one of the propaganda lines that an actual totalitarian regime uses to deflect criticism of its actual oppressive polices. You're also forgetting that lots of people buy into totalitarian government propaganda, and push it voluntarily (from stuff like this https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/business/china-internet-c... to nationalist internet trolls to Red Guards).
Real totalitarian regimes do stuff like this (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/business/china-online-cen...) and worse. Your so-called "worse" regime just occasionally has bosses fire employees for saying something impolitic and business that refuse to carry certain items (with the effect of only making them slightly harder to buy).
This moralizing aspect runs very deep in the US, and religious, righteous fervor is more widespread than one might think, covering much of non-church-going population. Human imperfection is still seen as a degeneration or a disease; it's just being Catholic, or Black, or gender-queer is not seen as an imperfection any more. But breastfeeding a baby in public still is :(
While I get your point, intentional misinformation and disinformation is evil.
OTOH for the most part, when my neighbors spread disinformation, they are not doing it intentionally, so my neighbors aren't evil. It's often by glossing over subtleties like this that those in power divide those they would rule; there are some communists who would like to overthrow the government; all communists are socialists; therefore anyone who ever professes a socialist view wants to overthrow the government.
> an authoritarian regime always started with moralizing everything, always started with telling its citizens to hate their neighbors
Authoritarian regimes start with telling citizens to hate their neighbors; moralizing is just one of the more convenient ways to to accomplish this. The anti-Jewish rhetoric in Nazi Germany definitely had a moralizing component (particularly ascribing the vice of greed), but it also spared no opportunity to portray them as inferior while simultaneously playing on envy.
Actually HUAC and Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda point to another important commonality: those to be attacked were "Un-American" or "Un-German." I'm more concerned with the degree to which both the right and left attempt to de-legitimize the other side than I am about ebay choosing which books they stock.
Joking of course, but if all you've seen of Seuss is the kids books, take a look at his other artwork: https://www.drseussart.com/secretandarchive
The very first one is "The Abduction of the Sabine Women"!!! By Dr. Seuss!!!!
It was SOOOOOOO worth wading through all the sturm und drang in here just to find your comment. You have enriched my life rufus_foreman. Thank you!
- books containing literal child porn
- books with troop locations and movement during an ongoing war
- books with current nuclear launch codes
I am not sure how many of those have any historical precedence though.
When used to judge others, morality almost always leads to self-righteousness, and contempt for people that don't live up to your standards. Usually the "standards" also change rapidly in a cycle to feed one's own self-worth by judging others more and more harshly.
The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, and the Red Scare are all examples of morality going awry. And we are in one of these cycles now... there is no doubt in my mind.
Taken to the logical conclusion, anyone or anything that’s offended anyone should be canceled. Which is everyone and everything.
But, eBay is doing a really shit job at this in a way that ensures almost everyone will be mad at them.
- They have delisted many copies of this book
- They still have dozens of copies available still listed
Literally the first search I did - the name of one of these books - found many still-listed ones.
If you're going to enact a policy, at least do it consistently.
Because racial justice will be solved by policing language and imagery, even in the past, and not via economic means, class power dynamics being examined, analyzing the political system, or anything else a postmodernist approach embraced by corporate America would find uncomfortable.
https://twitter.com/daBookdragon/status/1366572785015943169?...
seeing that cartoon, i realised that the good Doctor wasn't quite the lovely man that comes through in his books.
Cat's Quizzer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yeNj1akz30
Which contains the question "How old do you have to be to be a Japanese?"
Meanwhile https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/books-nix-boo... lists reasons:
> In “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," an Asian person is portrayed wearing a conical hat, holding chopsticks, and eating from a bowl. “If I Ran the Zoo” includes a drawing of two bare-footed African men wearing what appear to be grass skirts with their hair tied above their heads.
https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/here-are-the-wr...
Goes over all 6
(And I won't even mention what is in the "similar items" on the page..)
I personally feel as though it would be better to do something like this with Dr. Seuss' books rather than ceasing their publication.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_oEOdIBOpU
Edit - Whoopi Goldberg also did something similar for the third volume of the collection as well --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCT1clqci3I
https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/136751012770473984...
Just think of how much money they would make from everyone buying correct versions of the books.
Societal norms and values changes and what was acceptable in 1950 is no longer in 2021.
Those cultural artifacts reflecting those times are still available and preserved but for good reason publishers don't want them to be in the mass market.
I personally think its a replacement of classic american culture with which most of new population ( immigrants, minorities ect) cannot identify with, something that "others" them. I talked to my extended circle of 'new comers' and no one cares about Dr. Suess and would prefer for it to be gone, so we don't have to be outsiders.
I think this is just the start. Classic americanism would be relegated to museums in next 20 yrs.
I remember only 10-20 yrs ago 'assimilation' was thing for immigrants. Assimilation meant learning about things like Dr. Suess. Now assimilation is not a thing anymore, might actually be considered offensive.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...
What would it take for you to say that the Woke movement has gone too far?
Think about it for a second. Remember what you decided on. Perhaps, in a few weeks or months from now, you will understand the people lambasting this decision from eBay.
The concept is explained here in more detail: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/woke-breaking-point/
As much as I disagree with book-burning and support not only free speech, but also the healthy debate around what it constitutes, I think all of that is rather unrelated to this specific article.
Children don't have the same context or critical capacity to decide if a view is good or not. If a child encounters some sexist commentary, the child will absorb and imitate it.
There's already a lot of institutionalized control over what children consume for this reason— from toys designed to stimulate their development and TV designed around safety and positive lessons, to school, where the curriculum is designed not only to develop mental ability but also healthy social skills. These are decisions institutions make, be it PBS, Hasbro, Scholastic, some bureau of education, etc.
Let's make sure we don't end up in a Fahrenheit 451 situation, sure. These books are still going to exist, nobody is burning them or punishing whomever reads them— let's keep it that way. But when it comes to content that's widely available for children, I think the already established approach of constantly revising and improving what is easy to consume is a good one, and we should keep doing it.
"If a child encounters some sexist commentary, the child will absorb and imitate it."
This therefore means that the millions in America and around the world that have read these childrens books as children, or who had these books read to them by their parents are racist and sexist now, right? Or do you believe that children do not really absorb and imitate things they read but in general they might?
Are these books responsible for the shape of society now therefore? Where does your logic take us?
Protecting children is more important than free speech is what I get from your comment. Is that correct?
No, in the same way that not everyone who has been exposed to a potentially lethal environmental hazard is dead.
Do you agree with this? Would absorbing and imitating this make them sexist or give them sexist views?
If someone who was exposed to a hazard damaged in some way, even if most would not be dead?
Not necessarily, just as absorbing virus particles of a potential deadly sort doesn't necessarily make you dead, even if you express symptoms.
Kids, especially at the age Dr. Seuss content primarily targets, absorb and imitate lots of stuff without any initial understanding or with what would be, to adults, very bizarre understandings, it tends to take multiple exposures to different content with a given message before a pattern is recognized, and even more for that to be firmly internalized.
Each additional exposure increases the risk, but exposure = durable racism or even exposure = necessary transitory impact on racial views is far too simplistic.
In none of those books the actual story is racist. In nearly all cases there's not even a single racist line in the text. Just the illustrations are.
Lest our children be exposed to the horrors of Dr. Seuss.
Then I think about those old European drawing(in the age of colonialism) of Asian country around 1600s. So outrageous when you see it today. That is not how my country and people looks like! Should we ostracize those too?
Point is, I don't think everything is intentionally racist. Ok, sometimes it is, but many time it's just the limited understanding of different culture(and the rush of deadline that you need to produce some imagery NOW)
What a strange time we live in.
Edit: Also, you know there are Americans out there actually burning books like the Quran, right? No need to be outraged over slippery slope fallacious "book burning" when you could spend that energy on cases where real actual book burning has taken place.
And the best part is that it worked perfectly. In this very thread you can see people saying this is the fault of "woke Twitter mobs" when literally nobody asked for this. Great PR move by them, and as always outrage is the best way to sell.
Statement from Dr. Seuss Enterprises March 2, 2021
Today, on Dr. Seuss’s Birthday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises celebrates reading and also our mission of supporting all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.
We are committed to action. To that end, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, working with a panel of experts, including educators, reviewed our catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following titles: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families.
The Dr. Seuss Experience – A wondrous world awaits!
Cultures have been bowlderizing kids books for as long as there have been kids books. Early versions of classic fairy tales had characters meet gristly ends -- skinned alive, forced to wear red-hot iron shoes, decapitated, eyes plucked out, etc. You can still find the original versions (including on eBay) but the kids section of the library generally carries the revised versions and no one was shocked that Disney decided not to animate the part of the story where the little mermaid had to choose between murdering the prince in his sleep and bathing her feet in his blood or committing suicide in the ocean.
Though when kids are old enough to think critically about this sort of thing I generally agree with Philip Nel [2] that reading books and talking about them is a much better approach to problematic books, so I also hope they ultimately decide to release annotated versions as well. I just wouldn't stock those in the kids section of the library.
[1] https://www.upworthy.com/8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-class...
I'm not going to rail against this particular action any further, because I do not believe in vice signalling and do not care for these books. I can already see people lining up to misinterpret Martin Niemöller and blow some dog-whistles, and I do not want to pitch my tent in their ideological camp. However, I could totally see Disney or Nintendo getting bright ideas to try and shut down legal resale markets for "vaulted" works in the name of profit.
I don't think this will actually happen. I'm optimistic that enough people here, who obviously work at the companies that would be in charge of the said delisting, would stand up and say that this kind of action is lame. It's anti-history, it's a total waste of resources.
It's also just really boring. We have a lot of other problems to work on. Can we focus on those please?
I don't mean to be rude, but this mostly just sounds like you're not knowledgeable on the topic.
"Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP, which oversees Dr. Seuss’s publishing interests and ancillary areas, Tuesday said it had decided that six of the famed author’s books would no longer be published because they 'portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.'"
Since the publisher themselves made this decision to brand their books deemed offensive.
Whenever or not books should be sold, if mein kampf can be sold then books should too.
> The six discontinued Dr. Seuss books aren’t among the late author’s best-known works.
Wikipedia has more information about the most popular of these books and its criticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Ran_the_Zoo#Criticism
I don't understand why they don't just hire an illustrator to fix some of the racist features depicted there. As far as I can tell, only "If I ran the Zoo" has an offensive line, all others are just about a minority of the illustrations.
We tweetle beetles may battle with paddles in puddles in bottles on poodles that partake of noodles, but when noodle-eating poodles talk politics in limericks it ticks off their ticks who stick sticks in their backs to start building shacks in which to investigate facts... then our battles are shackled to meanings and leanings and motions of oceans an ocean away from the childish motivations become tired contrivations for sad populations.
I think this has been misinterpreted by everyone else, including Amazon and now Ebay, as well as everybody trying to extrapolate "what comes next, here is this unrelated hyperbolic example to let everyone know cancel culture has gone too farrrr"
They really were dated. Some of the drawings made me wince.
I'll bet, too, they didn't sell very well. If the publisher and the author's estate wants to stop selling them, that's their right, of course. No problems whatsoever.
But eBay stopping the secondary market is just silly. People have a legitimate reason to buy and sell used books, even ones that go against modern sensibilities.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
For example - what about the major universities, like Harvard and Berkeley that are basically exporting this stuff. Are you going to cancel them?
I agree though that individuals need a way to take action to show that we are opposed to this woke nonsense.
How we can do that...I am not sure
---------Then they came for the Socialists. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me. And there was no one left. To speak out for me.
---------
One of the key concepts of the idea of freedom of speech is that, in order to protect it, you have to protect that with which you do not agree, you find abhorrent or distasteful.
Cancel culture is a culture that exacts punishment, destroys lives, careers and businesses for ideological motive. Once again, having gone down this pay, people should dread the day the opposite ideology gains control.
Most Latin American nations have gone through this kind of thing repeatedly. When government B is in power, they disgrace, jail, kill, exile and fire those directly and peripherally involved with government B. When B regains power, they return the favor. This descends into industry, contracts and some areas of society.
The US, going down this path, is becoming Latin America. Be very careful what you wish for. I have seen it with my own eyes and it isn't anything Americans will enjoy. If you don't want this to happen you have to go out of your way to protect the speech, freedom and rights of those with whom you might not agree. Do that and there's a future. Take advantage of the moment in time to remain quiet (because you align with the cancellation) or be cruel to the other side and the outcome is most-assuredly something you will not enjoy at some point in your life.
I am not religious, but this rings true: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Consider the following:
The gov. has discriminatory hiring practices.
The private sector has discriminatory hiring practices.
Yes, the state's monopoly role is an important distinction, but it does not mean that we cannot object to a culture of intolerance or the normalization of intolerance.
If eBay was already a place clean and free of racism and bigotry, then fine. But it isn’t; not by a long shot. And you don’t start cleaning house by dusting the Knick-knacks…
> “books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
And this is it.
I've stayed away from all of this non-sense, but I'm sure if I go back to my family old dentist office from the 90s they likely have all the Dr. Suess' books in the mini play room area where I must have read them all like 10 times each.
Honestly, I think digitizing these books and putting them on a epub file with a royalty IP based model paid to his estate would be a cool DeFi project. You could spin this up in a matter of hours with a small team, too.
It's sad, cancel culture needs to die already... people need to stop bitching on social media and try and live their lives in reality if we're ever going to get over this non-sense.
I recently watched The Maxx, and I seriously forgot how amazing it was visually after having seen it in the 90s, but I also realized that something like this could never be made today in the US. It dealt with dark themes: rape, murder, abuse, social anxiety, school shootings etc...
And a part of makes me think that these last 2 decades have been a horrible time to be a kid, everything is so subdued and watered down that raging over Dr. Suess seems almost predictable. This era as a teenager/young adult was kind of cool as the Internet proved to be a useful venue to escape that horrid reality, but these as formative years will be a total drain on their psyche and re-enforces a stunted sense of maturity: the extremes on both ends got far wider and social media amplified the worst of both with dire consequences.
I.e. the books exist with their internal information/code, but are deemed to challenging to be allowed to exist.
If he did the drawings and those are deemed racist enough to cancel his work why are the company still ok with profiting off the rest of his work? He was either racist or he wasn’t and if he’s racist and that’s enough for cancellation then stop the circulation of all his work and stop profiting off it.
Like be consistent with your logic, think if it came down to stop profiting off Seuss at all and removing him from children’s culture entirely people might approach this more rationally but instead it’s “yeah he’s racist but we’re still going to profit off the work where he didn’t draw racist caricatures.”
Just find it interesting the cancellation becomes granular once the property is profitable enough. If the company really cared they’d stop selling all his work entirely.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
~ Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Because...
... "Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me"
~ Martin Niemöller
I suppose they can do whatever they want on their platform but that just seems a bit arbitrary to me.
I would argue that this isn't really censorship, although it is muddied by the original author being dead, and this being a company set up to manage his IP by his wife.
(I would also argue that ebay removing them in general isn't something to scream about, private companies should be allowed to curate their systems however they want. But that's a different argument)
Don't like miners profiting? stop making bitcoin so valuable.
If you had told me then that in 2021, it would be secular liberal democrats pushing to ban books, I would have laughed in your face, but here we are, and I'm not laughing.
What might we be distracted from?
Maybe the FBI's present shenanigans over encryption.
I understand why certain material can be deemed dangerous or wrong to have in public. There might be information that is intended, or has very high likeliness to be used, for harmful use. It can be filtered out - although I believe it will most often just keep it in the dark. Think "how to cook meth at home" or "how to make a bomb". Thats another talk for another day.
But this case is driven by fear of public opinion, people being offended (too easily) and trying to erase events from history.
If you see a negative or wrong stereotype used in literature, use the chance to talk to the kids. That will break down stereotypes and teach kids about the time that they are born in.
Also. Hitler happened. It's a thing. Reading "Mein Kampf" does not make you a nazi or dangerous. It makes you informed. Censoring it out does not change the fact that it happened. And we need all generations, current and future to understand the horrible that has happened. Not just the beautiful things.
Ebay and Amazon (and I'm sure many other companies) should show some character and have a bit more backbone!
- The hacker new community, if it wasn't a hypocritical bunch
But no, apparently the hive mind that cheered the private company actions when they suited their political belief, now are suddenly in full doublespeak figuring out a way to condemn this while supporting the former.
Not too long ago, Diary of A Young Girl (Anne Frank) was removed from our national school curriculum as well as some more local war-time texts, and it seems that every vaguely-objectionable author is getting defacto banned from every place a person could reasonably be expected to look for them.
Socialism is being equated with Fascism, literally anything you do or don't do is considered active opression... I know the horseshoe theory iw a bit of a meme, but this isn't even a horseshoe anymore, it's a fucking möbius strip!
Is exclusion even a remedy? And if it is, aren't there almost always better ones? I grew up pretty conservative, but the liberals I knew were always very welcoming. And I have a much more balanced outlook now. How will that kind of personal growth happen if our first reaction is to exclude?
Oh you thought Biden did this by edict? You’ve just swallowed some KBG propaganda. You think that classic literature is being burned at the stake? Go look at those titles and decide for yourself.
From where I stand, the comments in this threat represents the worst of fear-mongering, retrograde thought. Ought we resurrect Briar Rabbit, because it was unfairly cancelled?
I’ll be laying atop the pile of books when the Firemen come to burn them. That isn’t this, and that isn’t now. Rush Limbaugh was out crying about apocalypse of Political Correctness since the early 90’s. It was a messaging strategy to defend the power of his demographic against moral pressures. I can’t believe this pervades the HN ethos. Rush was Wrong.
For the record I am black, and I don’t particularly care for being depicted as a zoo animal in children’s books. I’m not demanding those books be ‘disappeared’, but I appreciate the Seuss estate’s choice to retire these titles, and defend eBay’s ability to choose which products they distribute on their marketplace. How did a movement who’s message was ‘stop police from killing unarmed black people with impunity’ unleash this farce?
Stay sane people, this is exactly the distraction they want
If he were still president, he would have never let it get this far, but he restrains himself because he doesn't want to undermine the Presidency or dilute his legacy. But he needs to lay some ground rules: liberalism is the vision of the Left, and book burning, race obsession, antipatriotism, and cancel culture won't get there.
Nobody on the right has any credibility on the left, so they can shout all they want and it won't make a difference. Biden doesn't have much credibility either. It needs to be the strongest person on the Left to define its destiny, so it must be Obama.
From one of the listed items:
> This item has been listed previously. eBay removed it with this reminder of the guidelines:
> "You listed the book Mein Kampf, but it is not a critically annotated edition. eBay only allows critically annotated versions of Mein Kampf to be listed on the site. While we appreciate that you chose to utilize our site, we must ask that you please not relist in this case."
> This is their policy and this edition is compliant with that policy.
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Der-Giftpilz-by-Ernst-Hiemer-English...
I can buy a children’s book written by literal Nazis that was created to teach kids why Jews are bad and how to recognize them.
I can’t buy a Dr. Seuss book about the zoo because there’s a mildly offensive picture of a Chinese person.
Really?
> there’s a mildly offensive picture of a Chinese person.
a) Fuck off with “mildly offensive,” it’s flagrantly racist and doesn’t belong in a children’s book or on eBay’s marketplace (in accordance with eBay’a policy)
b) I see you didn’t mention the cartoon of the Africans in the exact same book, which is straight out of the Klan and makes your argument much weaker.
To quote Donald Trump Jr, this is a Nothing Burger.
It's just crazy to me. Electing Trump was pretty crazy, too, but the idea that "liberals" would be on the side of burning books and militarizing the capital would have been unimaginable mere months ago.
The exception is when free speech is being used as a wedge to destroy the old regime, in which case free speech exercises power, because it is being used to commit lese majeste and revolution.
Truth wins in the long run, when everyone is dead. Power wins in the short run, while the relevant actors are still alive. That's why it's called power.
On the libertarian left-hand side of the scales of state, one has the virtuous population's dedication to truth. On the authoritarian right-hand side of the scales, one has the ambitious population's attraction to power. Add leaden lies to the left-hand side until the two balance, and one discovers how much the regime rejects reality.
See Curtis Yarvin for further details.
“If I Ran the Zoo”
“McElligot’s Pool”
“On Beyond Zebra!”
“Scrambled Eggs Super!”
“The Cat’s Quizzer”
because the books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
We have truly entered the age of infinite bullshit.
Personally, I wouldn't necessarily care too much. But these people's opinions are just as valid as the other two participants' to that transaction.
The author has been dead for decades, and yet these books are still under copyright for decades more — to an organization that refuses to print them!
IMO a copyright holder that REFUSES TO PUBLISH books they hold monopoly rights over should lose that copyright immediately. Anything else is ridiculous.
Removing them from public spaces is a good first step - eventually we'll need to give thought to rummage sales and private libraries (parents often try to pass their erroneous ideas on without the consent of society, of course, and accidents happen).
Given the volume of literature in modern society and the workforce needed to police physical (not just virtual) material, cooperation between all involved interests, public and private, might perhaps be warranted.
https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...
They already banned nazi memorabilia, confederate flags, "minstrel" type memorabilia, etc.
[edit: You will note this comment contains no editorializing or opinion whatsoever, it is supplying some context with a link. It doesn't say if I think it's a good idea or not to have that policy, just the fact that ebay already had a policy on offensie materials, under which already things like nazi memorabilia were banned, which to me seems relevant. That this comment is getting downvoted shows... something?]
Somebody interestingly said that working class latinos or immigrants in general do not care much or primarily about this kind of speech or imagery. Nothing could be further from the truth, they have human feelings and perceptions as well and the economical dependency makes people pretend to not care. Of course the people are offended, often for a very long time.
Every step towards eradicating racists and bigots from society should be applauded. They have never brought anything good to society and their freedom to express themselves and edgy comments were never funny.
Will not happen in my lifetime but every little step towards that is welcome.
The author is most welcome to change the title pictures to something deemed less offensive. You cannot expect your freedom of expression being enforced on something like eBay to promote the broadcasting and emission of your crap. It is not just the c level who do not like it, maybe some other employees do feel offended by beeing part of such a company.
Perhaps you would like to ask authors of books from earlier centuries to modify them so as to not be offensive.
Are you serious?
Like how exposure to pictures of demons and pretending to be wizards turns young D&D players into satanists? And exposure to violent rap lyrics turns them into murderers?
I have looked at the pictures, some make me cringe a bit, others don't seem like a big deal to me. And ultimately the Seuss copyright holders can do what they want, it's their property. I'm not sure why eBay feels the need to get involved. But I found the "think of the children" arguments for banning media equally unconvincing when they were conservative talking points thirty years ago.
Edit: Also, almost all kids will be exposed to these books with a parent present, having it read to them. The parent can contextualize the images however they like, reducing any risk of bad 'impressions'.
Most purchasers of Seuss books are not looking to start a dialog with their toddler about racism.
edit: I believe you had originally written "procure". Maybe I misread, but that's why my comment is phrased as such.
The answer depends on what standard you're using.
In my opinion, yes they do have that responsibility. Once you attain a level of social and economic power on par with eBay, you have the responsibility to ensure that your actions do not limit free access to information.
If we were talking about a company that does 10k in sales a year -- they do not have that responsibility. But since we're talking about a company that does 4B in sales a year -- yes, according to my moral foundation, they do have that responsibility.
I value free speech and the freedom of expression pretty high on my list of important things though, while it seems like you value the ability of a billion dollar corporation to profit and maintain their brand image much higher than that.
Like I said, different moral foundations.
But in USA, they don't really have to list anything they don't like.
> I think the publisher and now eBay are making the right call - children are impressionable, and presenting racial caricatures like these to them is not good.
The point is that the publisher and ebay choosing not to participate in commerce related to these books isn't telling you to do anything, and they don't have any obligation to participate in that commerce.
If the publisher was calling for the government to supervise the books that you read to your children, well then you'd have a point.
It's a pretty dumb conversation if all comments have to follow a wrong premise in an initial comment.
Step 2: censorship now doesn't exist anymore since "muh private entities, what are you, a commie?"
Brilliant. What a beautiful and free society we have created for ourselves.
...until banks and merchant processors cut off financial access to these "dangerous" entities and their service providers.
Wikileaks was a victim of this year's ago, and served as a great example of why cryptocurrencies are important.
All 6 books have issues? But only two images have been described.
The company just hit a home run in global PR the whole world has run this story. Honestly this is very smart for the company it gives them attention, they get to remove low volume books and it makes cancel cultural look bad to normal people
https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/books/b...