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Comment by naringas | Hacker News Reader

There's also an ongoing 'cultural revolution' in which older artistic creations are being reassesed by modern political correctness. (see the recent ebay and Dr. Seuss news for a most recent example)

I find this "revisionism" frightening. I fear it'll continue to get worse. I hope it does not.

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There's even a movement to replace the term "Blacklist" with a less problematic words such as denylist or blocklist. Of course, "Whitelist" is just as problematic - if not moreso! - and should be replaced with allowlist or safelist.

Edit: The etymology of these words have nothing to do with skincolor, Blackness or Whiteness.

Although I agree with the thrust of your edit, I’d actually be okay with making the swap if a black person from an underprivileged background told me that terms made him uncomfortable. But somehow it’s always a white woman from a privileged background that’s insisting we say allowlist or Latinx.

No joke. I had a very Caucasian woman tell me why she was too “exhausted” to explain to me why America’s treatment of Muslims was abhorrent and damaging. I, an immigrant from a Muslim country who went to college in the south after 9/11, had possessed the temerity to say America had handled 9/11 with far more grace towards its Muslim population than Muslim countries would have done had the shoe been on the other foot, and praised George W. Bush’s handling of the issue. That was the wrong answer apparently.

Saying Y would be worse than X doesn't justify X.

Are you Muslim or just from a mostly Muslim country?

Many Muslims have said America's treatment of Muslims is abhorrent and damaging. Why should she listen to you over them?

The white savior industrial complex is an important brand influencer segment. This is significant emotional labor they perform for “the is it Poles?”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47245/the-cambridge-l...

But somehow it’s always a white woman from a privileged background

It's a pattern in part because of the way white women get socialized and the role they get assigned.

I'm not excusing it or saying it's okay. I'm just saying widespread patterns tend to be driven by larger forces.

I'm not going to say more than that because it tends to be a shit show to try to say anything about the whys and wherefores.

Yes, it needs to stop. Helping white women escape the role society assigns them would be a more effective means to address this than just pointing fingers and being blamey.

People talking about this want both terms to be replaced at the same time.

To believe otherwise is a willful victimhood fantasy.

Yet they will support an extreme swing of the pendulum. We need more than one simultaneous thought to guide us.

My company actually got into doing this. The only reason it eventually stopped is because it cost actual money to complete that change in one of the systems. All of a sudden, it was harder to justify that change. So it didn't happen. I get it though. We recently got inclusivity executive something or other. You gotta show you are doing something. Incidentally, how do you even get those types of jobs?

I wholly support “blacklist” being replaced with ”blocklist”, “denylist”, “exclusion list”, or anything else that is both more direct about the function and isn't a lazy use of a metaphorical reference to a centuries-long history of elite political and anti-labor (often both simultaneously) repression. (Ditto with “whitelist” which is itself a second-order reference to blacklisting.)

Just because something isn't specifically connected to race doesn't mean it is innocuous.

>Just because something isn't specifically connected to race doesn't mean it is innocuous.

No one said otherwise. Luckily, "blacklist" is innocuous, and the only ones calling for its replacement and removal are neurotic leftists.

Dragons breathe fire, and my family burned to death. For my safety, please change your username to something that won't trigger me, your username is not innocuous. I see your username and all I can think about is my family burning.

Just because something isn't specifically connected to race doesn't mean it is innocuous.

The Dr. Seuss estate decided not to publish some of his works anymore because they believed they were no longer appropriate. I stand by the right of a work's owner to say, "you know, I wish this hadn't been released and I've decided not to sell it."

It's closer to "you know, I wish this hadn't been released and I've decided that no one should be able to sell their copies of it."

According to wsj:

> Online marketplace eBay Inc. said it is working to prevent the resale of six Dr. Seuss books that were pulled earlier this week by the company in charge of the late author’s works because they contain offensive imagery.

eBay decided themselves they didn't want to be associated with it; the author's estate didn't dictate to them that nobody is allowed to trade in it. They're still on Amazon, of course, as are a bunch of racist bumper stickers and a billion other SKUs.

Of course, you're right, I should've phrased that differently.

That's weird, I don't remember the book burning. I guess I must have missed it. I am sure it is totally impossible to get a copy of any of those books now that the publisher has decided to stop publishing them after 80 years.

Who said anything about book burnings? Claiming that it's just the owner of the work who decided not to sell it is not giving the full story, if it's not a lie by omission.

Listings for them on Amazon are $800+ a pop now for used copies

Except the author did no such thing. A corporate entity IP owner did. Those entities are subject to a myriad of whims, much the same as Nike or Apple.

It's laughably hypocritical in an era where pop culture is full of all kinds of 'offensive' material.

Go here, right now [1] to the Billboard Hot 100 and cruise down that list.

Over 50% of those songs are chock full of brutal misogyny, racism, sexism, violence, and all of the most vile and derelict behaviours we wold ever want to see in any person.

To think that EBay is 'banning' Dr. Seuss, but happily selling music that literally glorifies young men for murdering random people for looking at them the wrong way is a definite sign of social decline.

The author of this post is effectively correct.

The OP is correct to use Dr. Seuss as a point of concern eve if the owners of the IP have every right to stop publishing.

[1] https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100

> Except the author did no such thing. A corporate entity IP owner did.

The author is dead, so couldn't. The IP is owned by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which was founded by his wife. It's not some random corporation who swooped up the copyrights at an auction, but literally the organization created to manage them.

> Go here, right now [1] to the Billboard Hot 100 and cruise down that list.

Presumably those IP holders have decided to continue selling their stuff, which is also their right.

> To think that EBay is 'banning' Dr. Seuss

They're doing no such thing. They've decided to stop selling the specific books that are being pulled from publication.

Every last bit of this stuff is garden variety free market capitalism: an IP holder decided to stop publishing certain works, and a market decided to stop selling them. Because I support capitalism, I have to support their rights to make these kinda of business decisions.

There are plenty of books that are no longer being published, but you are not prevented from buying them on eBay. The issue is more than active publication, it's access.

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