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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Now this part is getting a little too carried away. It is one thing for libraries and bookstores to decide not to offer for borrowing or sale things that they disagree with.

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.

View on HN

Yep. I err on the side of not censoring. However, if they're gonna stop printing a couple of books because of severe racist overtones then whatever.

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.

> severe racist overtones

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.

>> severe racist overtones

> 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.

traditional racist caricatures of Chinese people

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.

Am chinese, am not offended by this. I think it's cute in fact. Yes, N=1 but in general there's a valid point here. It is insane how often people are getting offended on behalf of others nowadays.

> Am chinese, am not offended by this. I think it's cute in fact. Yes, N=1 but in general there's a valid point here. It is insane how often people are getting offended on behalf of others nowadays.

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.

> Chinese-born or American-born? My guess is that American-born Chinese would be more likely to be offended

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.

This is what happens when sheltered white people on Twitter get bored.

I've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and also for the trollish username. We've asked you many times to stop the former, and you seem to have ignored my question about the latter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25362566).

I am tempted to find these books, since it is many years since I've seen them, just to figure out what the actual offensive images are. It's irritating to think that my disposable income should be used that way, because otherwise I would not be able to see what is under discussion.

The Canadian paper, National Post, seems to have a discussion:

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.

> We are therefore rapidly finding ourselves in a situation where the most easily offended person wields immense power

It all started with the gluten intolerant choosing the lunch location

Nassim Taleb calls this phenomenon the Dictatorship of the Small Minority

Before that it was the vegetarian ordering the team's pizzas.

I get what you're trying to say, but would you rather make them sit there and watch everyone else eat? There's a big difference between being easily offended and having a very literal gut reaction.

Setting aside that out of the 25 acquaintances that claimed gluten intolerance, 1 had diagnoses ceiliac, 1 had self diagnosed ceiliac, and 3 had an alternative medicine diagnosis.

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.

Gluten intolerance is a medical condition. Maybe not the best example to use here, nobody decides to be gluten intolerant.

Before that it was the peanut allergy and the widespread banning of PB&J in schools everywhere.

Wikipedia has it:

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.

FWIW, this twitter thread is a has a more explicit summary of the objectionable images and text https://twitter.com/consciouskidlib/status/96965743301761433...

It did provide a lot more insight for me than the superficial coverage I found in most places.

I was reading my old Dr. Seuss books to my son a few months ago and came across those depictions, so the announcement to stop publishing the book made sense to me. I had been debating about censoring my copy to skip the worst pages.

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.

Related: loved the Narnia books when I was a kid. Had a hard time not being put off by "A Horse And His Boy" when I re-read it as an adult (one of my favorites as a kid, BTW).

Perhaps that is why they sloughed off making the films.

Out of curioisity, do you allow your son to watch Disney movies?

We don't, but that's another conversation altogether. We've been trying to avoid screen time because he's only nine months old.

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.

>It's depressing to me that some people think that we should keep teaching this stuff to kids.

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.

Wikipedia wasn't of much use. It was secondary details and not primary details. I personally wasn't able to see the controversial content and able to make up my own mind and without primary material to judge, I can't in good conscience judge the content. To do otherwise is prejudicial.

> It's depressing to me that some people think that we should keep teaching this stuff to kids.

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?

Moreover, consider the appalling anti-Japanese political cartoons that Dr. Seuss made during WWII. Is there no merit in seeing the flaws of someone we otherwise hold in such high regard? And to understand that maybe something broke in the minds of otherwise nice people when a little incident at Pearl Harbor happened? We're worried about the traumas that words might inflict, but we seem to be discarding the trauma of war and history to do it. These are important discussions we need to have, but people are too scared to have them. It's easier to ban books.

I would urge you to reconsider this stance since it would likely result in bans of classical work by Seneca( https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/01/28/seneca-on-the-trea... ) when taken to its logical conclusion.

For the record I don't think any old works should be censored or banned at all.

and from a platform that still allows Mein Kampf to be listed it seems especially idiotic...

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's the next step of corporate virtue signaling. Just repeating slogans on twitter or changing the bio and profile of a company account will not be enough anymore, instead pick a ridiculous hot topic from the news cycle and use this as an opportunity to implement an even more ridiculous policy change in your company to show that your company is down with the cause. I bet we will see even more of that.

I love the term virtue signalling, but I'd much prefer the stronger word come back into the regular lexicon: "sanctimonious". It feels more impactful, as in "we didn't need a new word to describe your tendency to shout about your moral superiority"

In the 70s and 80s, a common complaint about American Republicans was that they were sanctimonious moralizers. Now another party has adopted that mantle, but a lot of people have yet to catch up with that fact.

Virtue signaling is such a great descriptive term for a lot of behavior. It's such a shame that it got politicized.

social grandstanding is another good one

“Oh we would never burn book... oh wait.”

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.

I've occasionally observed parallels between the 4chan-esque mob and the woke mob.

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.

It's doublethink, there's no other way to really summarize the effect from things like this.

Mein Kampf isn't a children book though. In addition to the be fact that the books are annotated, those who are going to read it will be of enough to get the context surrounding this book

Only annotated editions apparently.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26350364

Interesting! I have only ever read the original - does the annotated edition actually remove all the rampant racism and anti-semitism? Both are rather prevalent topics in the book...

Your bio says you're an attorney. I think you know how annotation works.

I most certainly do! I was referring to this specific annotated version, which also indicates that it was edited... having read the book I just don’t see how annotations would change anything about how racist and anti-Semitic the book is. EBay’s police indicates that they remove racist and offensive items... there’s nothing about leaving those listings up so long as there is a stern disclaimer that the item is, in fact, quite offensive. I perhaps incorrectly assumed some of the more virulent nonsense was edited out.

The only specific version they mentioned was pulled because it wasn't annotated. I don't know what specific version you mean.

Most people wouldn't call a version with just a disclaimer annotated. I assume annotated versions of Mein Kampf refute Hitler's claims.

especially because the Dr Seuss books are superior literary specimens (how ironic!)

> Edit, to add: as a comment below notes eBay only allows annotated versions of the book.

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.

The most disturbing thing about this phenomenon is its encouragement to essentially attempt to destroy and rewrite history. I am more offended by that than anything else. The past may not have been very nice to certain groups, but it is what it is --- a historical artifact to learn from and remember. The other comments here comparing it to the Cultural Revolution are very relevant.

> It is one thing for libraries and bookstores to decide not to offer for borrowing or sale things that they disagree with.

Private libraries can do whatever they like. Public ones should be required to carry even the most offensive book.

You realize that libraries are not infinite in space or capacity, right? Every book in a library necessarily pushes out some other book that could have been in there but didn't make the cut.

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?

I am happy to pay to acquire any of these banned books for the Internet Archive to scan, store, and serve them in perpetuity.

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.

And what if the Internet Archive falls victim to this disease and decide to self-censor? What next?

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).

I’d also upload to Library Genesis, who previously were the storage backend for SciHub. To your point, distributed storage provides durability against censorship.

P2P decentralized protocol will work.

and you can. From what I've seen, particularly at University libraries, they'll do sales of super old worn out books, or long since outdated academic material.

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.

Libraries have always been squarely against book banning however. Dr. Seuss is an immensely popular and historic children's author. No reason his books should not be in any library children's section.

No one is saying, "Stop all Seuss books from entering libraries". The publisher stopped printing a small subset of books. Oh the places you go will still have plenty of shelf space and be given to every graduating senior for quite a while I'm sure.

Does the publisher have additional rights on books that have already gone out the door?

they can surely stop publishing additional copies, but existing copies should not be burned.

No the publisher can't do anything but likely the books in circulation will quickly be stolen. Most libraries don't even charge fines for non-returned materials anymore.

> for what their local users want to read

were their local readers asked if these books were offensive? Or was this pushed over them?

No more than a rounding error thought some of these books were offensive. Even if it was a decent size of the population, just don’t read the books to your kids.

Obviously, you can't carry every book ever forever. I just meant that the general public should have timely access to books deemed too controversial by the elites, so that the plebs may make up their own mind.

The elites, in this case, being the people who own the rights and publish the books? Are you suggesting that libraries should increase the space they devote work going out of print? Books stop being published all the time.

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.

Yes, publishers being part of the elite but also the academic and media class. And I don't really care if they're left-wing or right-wing, whatever that means. I just want the general public to have access to books they're curious about, and especially so if they're deemed controversial. Yes, books go out of print all the time, but public libraries still mange to circulate them around to where they're requested.

Im going to picket my library until it lends me a copy on mein kampf /s

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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.

>It is one thing for libraries and bookstores to decide not to offer for borrowing or sale things that they disagree with.

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.

This private / publix split is idiotic and gets you nowhere. Either you are censored or you are not.

"Oh sorry, the ISP is private, so they are allowed to disconnect you if they dont like what you wrote on twitter"

Amazon have been doing this for a couple of years now. They removed all of Greg Johnson's books for example. VISA and Mastercard have also blacklisted him meaning he can't use any payment processor to sell his books on his counter currents website. He can only accept money orders or cheques. There is nothing illegal in his books.

He can always blog his ... views

He does that too.

And you get downvoted on HN for even mentioning “slippery slope”.

Didn't you get the memo? They cancelled it. They don't want you thinking that now.

i wish we could keep “comments about downvotes” out of HN. Reddit is a better place to dramatize these things.

Every time someone comments about downvotes, there has to be that one person to contribute a completely useless comment about comments about downvotes. It wouldn't be HN without you.

I get flagged all the time on HN these days... For pointing out facts typically. But even as you suggested “slippery slopes” etc.

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.

I think Blind overtook HN as the front page of the tech industry during the pandemic.

The quality of HN has decreased considerably over the last 4 years or so, much like the rest of society sadly. Posts like this, to me, should just be removed. There is little valid discussion, it's drowned out by nonsense and political pandering. Posts like these are no better than r/politics or r/conservative.

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.

I’m happy to flag posts, but HN (back in 2008 when I joined) was always about the “hacker spirit” as well.

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

I agree that the discussion in this thread does not lead anywhere, and I regret scrolling down all the way down here.

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.

I don't know these books, but I was wondering that given they are for children, couldn't they instead serve to initiate critical thinking about race bias?

Reasonable minds lost this battle already. Cancel everything, burn all the books, this is the new way.

Yeah this doesn't even make sense to me. No one asked eBay to do this. I cringe at racial stereotypes as much as the next guy, but eBay is the flee market of the internet. The whole point is that you can buy/sell anything there as long as it's legal.

three words: corporate virtue signalling

Meanwhile…

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mein-Kampf-Annotated-Book-criticall...

The only thing that truly bothers me is the lying and hypocrisy. I don't care what ebay does and doesn't allow. I do care about the ongoing lie that their removals have anything at all to do with offensive or discriminatory material. The Seuss books are being disallowed because eBay decided allowing them would cost more profit than it generated. End of story. They don't give a damn about racism and offensive depictions. If they did they'd ban the Bible, Quran, along with probably 75% of literature written before 1980. The Seuss books are now a public liability so they're gone. Whatever becomes a public liability next will find a ready justification for its own banishment.

Whatever way eBay's PR/Marketing team may spin it, they are a business and want to protect their bottom line. I don't agree with the depictions in these books, and I think it was the right choice to stop publishing them (also to protect the publisher's bottom line), but also I don't agree with scrubbing existing copies from existence. But eBay is a business and has a right to deny whatever they want on their platform. That's capitalism, baby!

Eh, I feel eBay has more of a right to ban books than a library. Both are bad, and it’s terrible that society is in a place where book banning is virtuous.

I don't necessarily think eBay should be forced with legal might to sell these books -- but it's a terribly bad look for their company. Book banning has always felt scummy to me, and I always think back to being a child when many in my community participated in Harry Potter book burning events. Book burning, witch burning, it's all mob mentality and it's terrifying.

This provided helpful context. https://adayinourshoes.com/was-dr-seuss-a-racist/ https://twitter.com/consciouskidlib/status/96965743301761433...

> This falls into the category of taste / political opinions and has gone too far too quickly.

Welcome to America.

> Will they apply the logic here to all categories of goods for sale?

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.

But it does violate their own practical policies:

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.

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.

This is a ridiculous over-reaction by eBay.

Ebay restricts many categories of goods that are otherwise legal to sell, and this is in line with their longstanding policies.

Jewelry and monetary equivalents are sold on Ebay, and they get lower transaction fees than most categories.

But what should we all do?

That way is going to have reverse effect. Same like Mein Kampf in Europe. It was banned for a long time but any teenager had access to it. This is how a cult grows.

The family which manages the author's estate pulled the books.

> 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?

I tend to agree. They haven’t even taken the books out of the treasury apps.

Lets be fair, "If I ran the zoo" is pretty blatantly racist.

Let's be fair, this is just an opinion, and very subjective at that

"helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant" is subjective to you?

I read it and see nothing in this sentence. I am starting to think that this is really much ado about nothing. Woke crowd should start picking their battles/victims more carefully since this may be the last straw for regular people ( HN crowd is not exactly a representative of general population ).

It’s a comedy children’s book from an author who liberally applies absurdism. And he and the book are products of the prevailing views of society of the time. Also with nontrivially different demographics.

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.

My Chinese wife thinks this is hilarious - so yes, it is very subjective.

My eyes are straight, and I'm keeping myself proud on being helpful to others.

> It is one thing for libraries and bookstores to decide not to offer for borrowing or sale things that they disagree with.

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.

The "private company" argument, while fully and technically correct, is such a ridiculous canard to trot out at a time when we slide rapidly into public-private authoritarianism.

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?

I don't consider internet company cancellation authoritarian because they're just following the will of the market. It's a symptom, not the cause. If it were solely up to Ebay execs, they would rather people not be overly sensitive because they can make more money that way.

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.

But market doesn't care about this, it's just some tiny group of insanely vocal people

The insanely vocal people will twist the narrative to convince the regular people to go on a morale crusade. The Youtube adpocalypse started because a journalist kept watching Isis videos before they got removed, until they found one with a Coca cola ad.

> The "private company" argument, while fully and technically correct, is such a ridiculous canard to trot out at a time when we slide rapidly into public-private authoritarianism

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.

How will you make your business when your banks are cancelling you ?

If you make a website selling used Seuss books and your bank cancels you I'll support you.

If you make a social media site that organizes domestic terror and your bank cancels you then that's your problem.

"If you make a social media site that organises domestic terror"

You do realise that most of the organisation of the "domestic terror" was done on Facebook right ?

How about making a website selling banned, unpopular or borderline racist literature? And then payment providers cancel services to it. Can I then take orders using cash via letters? Seems like it can work. Hopefully the post office, Fedex and UPS and other mail carriers don't notice and cancel it for some obscure money-laundering law/regulation about mailing money! Must I maybe resort to selling that literature on the street corner, back alley maybe?

What you describe occurs in China with books that might criticize their government, only they can't even sell them in back alleys. I've never heard of it happening with any material in the US short of things that encourage acts of terror. And I think that is the right place to draw the line.

> Ebay is a private merchant

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.

I respond with this because the people who just stormed the capitol were egged on by those claiming disenfranchisement in public and private sectors. I feel it's important to make the distinction, just as it was to point out there was not widespread voter fraud.

Maybe a year or two ago I would have completely agreed with the public vs private argument, but the pace of change has clearly accelerated, and when private institutions can easily have just as much impact with their decisions as public institutions, the lines blur.

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).

Comcast is a private company, they can choose what sites to allow. Maybe this is a problem with HN.

Colorado Power is a private company, they can choose who to sell power to. Maybe this is a problem with that data center.

They can't choose based on current FCC policy. Private companies have choice within regulations, and that's a good thing for consumers. Everyone needs to play by the same rules and the big players don't get to take advantage of their positions as much.

No one fails to make this "hey, it's a private company" point in these discussions. It's always brought up when someone is criticizing a tech behemoth for censorship of some kind, and it's nearly always a non-sequitur.

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!!!"?

Insert that picture of a person being stepped on with the text "At least its not the government"

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.

I agree there are monopolies that need antitrust attention. Wish we'd focus on the ISP infrastructure. Regional broadband ISP monopolies are the problem underlying the big tech social media and advertising companies. Yelling at eBay for banning Dr Seuss books is a distraction from that and I believe that may be the intent. We haven't been able to discuss net neutrality for a few years because of this tabloid style of news. Let's get back to business.

These companies don't have the legal means to put your body in a cage, end your life or take you into custody by force until you answer to their accusations like a government does. That's why comparing this to government jackboots is a very weak argument.

They also don’t have the legal means to bar black people from service - because we changed the laws to prevent them from acting evily. “At least they can’t kill you” isn’t a good argument.

It does feel a bit analogous to criticizing religion, as though somehow a group of people or set of ideas can be exempt from disagreement.

More analogous to saying if you don't like one religion you're free to try another.

I don't expect eBay to cater to my banned Dr Seuss book needs.

I guess, maybe, but that's untrue for a tremendous amount of people, and is that a sentiment that you'd expect me to get behind?

You think it's untrue that a lot of people want freedom of religion? I don't follow.

I feel like we're both reading each other's comments in a completely different way than intended. I think it's not unreasonable to suggest that many people globally don't want freedom of religion, but I was saying that many people currently don't have the freedom to leave theirs, whether legally or for other reasons.

> many people globally don't want freedom of religion

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.