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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>The “weapon” here is just basic conscientiousness

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...

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> 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".

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.

> I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that racist caricatures are bad.

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 racist caricatures are bad.

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.

The discussion is not about whether racism occured, but how did it manifest. Unless something is specifically anti-racist, it is bad. Therefore all culture is bad. QED.

We're having difficulties getting consensus around the idea that racism is bad, which is a prerequisite for discussion

We're having difficulties getting consensus around the idea that past racism reflected in some cultural artifacts (same as they reflect countless other things of the times) means they should be thrown out.

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...

The issue specifically with casually reinforcing negative stereotypes, especially in childrens books, is that it seems at least plausible that will influence readers' perceptions later on. I'm not entirely convinced by this argument with respect to these specific books so long as they're only a small part of a child's reading experience, but the argument is at least reasonable, right?

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).

Preach

No one is saying you need to throw out books, only that certain people decided not to sell them.

ebay isn't selling the books, they decided not to sell on sellers behalf.

It’s their store. They can decide what they want to sell in their store. I bet there is a marketplace for people who like boring uninteresting and outdated children’s books. Maybe try a used book store.

A thousand times this. Neoliberal capitalism has hollowed out the middle class over the past 30+ years. The working class knows that the ruling class doesn’t address their interests. They have been voting for the change candidate since 2008. The election of Trump, despite all of his flaws, was a rejection of the ruling class. This ’woke’ movement is a reaction by the upper/ruling class to reassert their authority. As Dr. King said, the rich white plantation owner used slavery to keep the poor white man down. edit: I wonder if the post-WW2 expansion of the middle class was an anomaly, and that we are now just reverting to the mean.

Changing the definition of a word without consensus will have the effect of the consensus around the underlying concepts changing. This appears obvious to me, and intentional.

Just like we couldn't get consensus around "patriotism is good" to get continued support for wars after 9/11.

Either that or caricatures like "my opponents don't think racism is bad" are unhelpful straw-man arguments.

A tolerant liberal society is built on the foundational principle that people are allowed to read bad books, think bad thoughts and say bad things. And I'm allowed to denounce these bad things as bad, but I'm not allowed to dictate my moral beliefs on you.

That's exactly what's happening...

> I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that racist caricatures are bad.

I would love to believe that, but there's been too much evidence lately that some people love racist caricatures.

I'm on a fuck off spree lately. So fuck off with what you think is important and not.

To those that find my comments offensive - fuck off

And to those that are offended by fucks; fuck off as well.

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 woke? Fuck off.

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

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