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Comment by Number157 | Hacker News Reader

The weapon is censorship. Dictatorial governments supported by control over information have killed far more people than H-bombs.

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But there was no government action here. Dr Seuss's estate made a decision, and EBay reacted to it. A dictatorial government would either prohibit or demand publishing the books. The US government has rightly done nothing.

True, it's a private, spontaneous witch burning. So much more civilised than places where the witch burning is done by the state.

Yes, this, in earnest. On Beyond Zebra! was a joy of mine growing up. EBay's 'witch burning' have surely breathed new life into these books. Go read it, it's great, its PDF can be found in a few seconds on google.

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."

“Witch burning”?

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.

Preventing transactions between two third parties (i.e. ebay) is economically similar to refusing to do business with another party. Except that if your in position to do the latter, you're obviously a platform for others, and thus you have a lot more unilateral power to prevent transactions between arbitrary third parties. Which is probably a lot more economic transactions than the number of transactions you engage in yourself. It's like leverage.

So the harm seems proportional to the harm done by refusing to bake that wedding cake for the gay couple.

Haven't seen a burned witch. I have seen people who have killed minorities because these minorities "might start burning witches and thereby destroy western free speech and civilisation".

It was removed from the recommended reading list by Biden's administration for the "Read Across America" Day [1]. That's not directly related to eBay, unless you've seen the pattern before where "woke twitter mobs and politicians signal distate in X, tech megacorps subsequently take supporting action."

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9318259/White-House...

Removing something from a recommendation list is about as far from censorship as I can possibly imagine.

Nobody claimed otherwise.

The distinction is barely relevant. Megacorporations govern us these days.

Maybe that’s the problem that needs to be addressed here. Because what I’m seeing should be something a libertarian would approve of. The free market at work, eBay is a private company making a decision of how they want to do business. Libertarians should love this.

There is a difference between libertarians who support liberty and "libertarians" who mostly just want there to be less government spending on anything besides military weapons.

Megacorps are starting to think about creating their own currencies (FB diem).

We stumbled into accepting dictatorships in the emerging virtual realms without even realizing it.

What information in these children's books is undermining dictatorial governments? The government isn't censoring e.g. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago - these are literally just picture books with racist caricatures in them. You have no right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, and you have no right to denigrate your fellow man.

You’re actually wrong about rights in the United States. You have every right to do all of the things you claim you don’t: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

The laws in the United States are pretty convoluted, and I don't think they align with human rights all that well, especially given the treatment of imprisoned folks or asylum seekers. However, I do think that causing mass hysteria for kicks (shouting fire...) is wrong and you should not do it.

I'm curious: do you believe that there is anything that one does not have the right to say?

Nope. And every other country in the world is available for someone to move to if they don’t like the US free speech laws.

So you believe that there is absolutely no form of speech whatsoever that should be protected as free speech?

> you have no right to denigrate your fellow man

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.

There's a difference between "you shouldn't do hate speech" and some sort of 1984/V-for-Vendetta mechanism to ensure that nobody ever does hate speech. Laws and ethics are not the same thing.

Defamation is illegal in plenty of non-dystopian countries.

There's a difference between defamation and denigration.

You're allowed to criticize anything, but if you knowingly publish lies, especially maliciously, then it crosses the line.

There is a difference, but there are countries where it is illegal despite it being true. Sweden is an example of this.

I don't see a government censoring this book. Is it illegal to have this book? Should I now force barnes and noble to sell my radical insurrectionist anarchist zines? They are gagging my right to free speech!

You seem to have responded to the wrong comment. Either that or you decided my comment was a good opportunity to spew some irrelevant gibberish.

Would be?

> "You have no right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater"

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.

In particular, this was an analogy used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Schenck vs United States. The act which he compared to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" was passing out leaflets opposing the draft, ie the government's power to force people to go to a war by which the American people were not threatened.

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