As dis-heartening as this story is, compared to a couple of years ago, it is encouraging to see lots of comments from people beginning to wake up to what is going on with this craziness and not being modded here.
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.
There's two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to.
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.
These are market-dominating book distributors like Amazon and eBay effectively deciding what people can and cannot read.
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 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.
Isn't this more of a matter of copyright and, specifically, the moral rights of authors and copyright holders to control their work? It's not that ebay is so offended—it's that Dr Seuss Enterprises doesn't want to lose billions due to a tarnished legacy. (Oops!) To me, this is just like a mature author that wants to stop the sale of an embarrassing early book because it was poorly written. In this case, the rightsholder thinks the early books are in poor taste and no longer wants them associated with the brand.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I am so comforted to hear that the marketplaces are “just following orders.” I know that no one following orders should ever be held accountable for the actions of their superiors. Really, things are good when people just follow orders.
>The result is that these massive copyright holders can decide which ideas are allowed, and which ideas will be banned.
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.
The entire purpose of copyright is to encourage people to publish their works. It may be reasonable for a rights-holder to restrict access to a work under certain circumstances - for example refusing to let neo-nazis play your music at a rally - because people might refuse to publish their works if they believed they couldn't stop that. Even a hiatus to distribution may be permissible if the rights-holder needs to be confident they can walk away from a distributor if they don't like the current distribution situation. However permanently and completely stopping distribution of a work breaks the social contract - society no longer gets what it payed for. The Seuss estate could put a big label on the front cover saying not for children, and a forward in every copy explaining why the content of the books is potentially problematic, but if they refuse to make the work available their right to exclusively control the work's availability should be rescinded.
The purpose of copyright in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is from the provision of the US Constitution that authorizes Congress to pass intellectual property legislation. Allowing for copyrighted works to be withdrawn from the public and made effectively unavailable to anybody for the remainder of a 95 year term does not promote scientific progress or useful arts as that effectively erases the work for the remainder of a lifetime. Nobody is entitled to use copyright laws against the constitutional purpose of copyright laws.
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.
"Exclusive Right" means exclusive. Period. If I don't have the power to distribute my work how I see fit, including not at all, then I don't have exclusive control over my work, and that's going to make me think twice about publishing it. How does taking control away from authors promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
You're reading it the other way around. Copyright is an abridgement of the first amendment right to publish anything you want, and it is only permitted as long as it exists to further science and the useful arts. Thus, it could be argued that copyright itself should not extend to the right of completely banning a work from being published, as it is hard to claim that promotes the progress of science.
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.
I just don't see how one could argue that "exclusive Right" means anything other than exclusive. The intent behind the copyright clause is that when authors have exclusive control over their work, they will be incentivized to produce more. When you start carving out exceptions to their exclusive right, well then it's open season on what control they have, as "exclusive" can no longer be interpreted as to mean the plain understanding of the word.
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".
Bank robberies produce an order of magnitude more art than a strange contract that happens to contain stipulations relating to exclusive distribution. That doesn’t mean we should perpetuate them.
I'm getting at your support for the claim that copyright fosters the creation of new art with a novelty contract that has a provision in it supposedly allowing for stealing the work back spawning content on it because of its notoriety, mostly because it has nothing to do with copyright.
The only reason the contract can exist is copyright. There are others arguing on this thread that if a rights holder restricts the distribution of their work they should effectively forfeit all control over their work. They have justified their position by saying restricting distribution fails to promote the creation of art. I’ve argued the opposite case and brought examples, and it all comes down to the phrase “exclusive rights” in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution.
Your use of the word “banned” here is telling, especially with your reference to the Soviets. The actual bottom line here is that this was a decision by capitalists under a capitalist system. This is the free market at work. People who own the intellectual rights to these books decided for themselves using their own free will to stop selling them. That’s just capitalism.
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.
I see your point, but the confounding factor for me is that the government granted a monopoly on these books through copyright. That's an artificial construct designed to promote science and the useful arts, but in this situation it's being used to suppress art. In this case, I would advocate for terminating the copyright and letting it be distributed by whoever is willing to.
>>That's an artificial construct designed to promote science and the useful arts, but in this situation it's being used to suppress 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.
It's designed to promote science and the useful arts by giving artists control over their art. If I decide to create art, but I lose control over it once I decide I don't want to show it to anyone anymore, then that's not really control, is it?
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.
> the same whitewashing (wokewashing?) happened to the Richard Scarry books which are all "abridged"
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.
Banned books of the week were also not banned. They actually often remained in print. The bs Ning was being done by busybodies who knew what was right for young children.
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.
It's a normal argument for the time, but it is far from reasonable. The person who wrote the original response to me failed to respond to any of the logical arguments I was making, just spouted some outrage and moved on. So, normal yes, reasonable, no. The word "ban" in this context applies to legal or cultural actions where you make owning, acquiring, or reading a book disallowed. All that has been done is a company decided to stop selling it. You can still get the book elsewhere, still keep it if you own it, and still read it in any library that has it (which I'm sure many, many do). They are just spouting outraged nonsense.
No, it's you who failed to engage with the other commenter's arguments, or failed to understand them. They made the correct point that the famous "banned books week" also typically celebrated, and continues to celebrate, books that were not literally banned according to your definition. Thus this rhetorical extension of "banning books" to cases where books are not literally made illegal to read has a long history, and both detractors and defenders; reading the wikipedia page on Banned Books week is a good way to educate yourself on that history.
In the case of Dr. Seuss books, the near-simultaneous decision of the copyright owner to stop publishing them and of the largest online reselling market, eBay, to forbid selling and buying them, makes them, if not literally banned, vastly more inaccessible than many many other books that have been covered under the Banned Books Weeks event, written about in the media, celebrated by liberal readers (in those prior ages where liberal readers thought that right to read was more important than right to forbid) and so on. Your narrow-minded insistence on literalism is just a way of displaying your ignorance and unwillingness to engage with these difficult questions.
You're approximately the first comment I've seen on this entire thread that actually noted the difference without hyperbole about banning books and censorship, thank you.
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.
> In this case, the rightsholder thinks the early books are in poor taste and no longer wants them associated with the brand.
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.”
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.
If the publisher shutdown and the IP on the books went into legal limbo, then the exact same thing would happen - has happened - to numerous works. For example try to get the Sid Meier Alpha Centauri novelizations - they're almost impossible to find, they're out of print (they're expensive as hell on ebay).
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.
> If the publisher shutdown and the IP on the books went into legal limbo, then the exact same thing would happen - has happened - to numerous works.
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:
> “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.
The books are not being banned. You can still give money in exchange with anyone who has copy they're willing to sell. It's just that the Seuss estate and eBay have both decided they don't want to be involved in the transaction.
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.
> 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.
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:
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."
By my count, there are somewhere in the range of ~70 Dr. Seuss books (I'm too lazy to count, and that's more than enough for my point). They've stopped publishing six of them. That's less than 10%. 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, both versions (there might be a third now, who can keep track).
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.
"What's the problem banning a few controversial books? We still publish thousands of books we deem acceptable!"
> 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".
Free speech is not the right to force others to repeat your speech. It is also not the right to a loudspeaker or megaphone. Free speech gets you the right to say it, but makes no promises about others being forced to listen, forced to spread it for you or forced to repeat it for you. Don't impinge their freedom in the name of your own.
How is the existence of a book, "... the right to force others to repeat your speech"?
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.
Again, everything you're saying is legitimate, but it completely ignores the elephant in the room, the big elephant, the monopoly power, the concentrated distribution and unprecedented centralization over the flow of information and broadcast media. Whether it's YouTube, Google search results and playstore access, Facebook, and many more, we are all concerned when a new one is added, such as Ebay.
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.
I wish to see just once someone who makes that argument try to turn it around and apply to something else they don't like to see censored. I'm yet to see it.
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 do defend their right to do that, so let me fulfill your wish, friend. I see a massive distinction between "things I don't like" and "things that should be legally compelled."
I worry about the authoritarian leanings of anyone who doesn't draw this distinction.
The point is the terrible ease of applying a double standard in how you approach an issue.
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.
That feels like a personal attack, which is disallowed. In any case, I think you didn't read the article above:
"“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."
Who is doing the banning? ebay can't can books, and hasn't. The publisher can't ban books, and hasn't. The rights holder can't ban books, and hasn't. Who is doing the banning?
> Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.
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.
Do you have any evidence for that at all, or is this standard counterfactual leftist revisionism?
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?
TLDR: The past accepting something is not indication that the future must or should accept.
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.
> it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.
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.
> The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.
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.
> The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.
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.
The free market gets distorted under monopoly conditions.
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.
I don't know why you are blurring the lines between "single publisher decides to stop publishing book", "mega conglomerate decides to stop publishing media", and "authoritarian government vets all books before publication".
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.
> the slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're imagining
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_.
>The Dr. Seuss books were banned not just by eBay but also by their publisher
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?
Disney is a great example. It's a huge copyright owners which owns the rights to numerous important cultural works. They can, very effectively, decide what ideas the American public will have access to.
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.
This is not how totalitarian regimes are created at all. Commissars in the USSR having the power to ban books meant repercussions from the state for reading or distributing those books, and was a clear signal that similar works would meet a similar fate.
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.
This is not how totalitarian regimes were created in the past.
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's a poor decision on the company's part, and we are criticizing the decision. No one (reasonable) is asking the government to regulate this. We're merely criticizing the decisions of two private companies, and the social movements which pressured them to do so.
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.)
Can you expand on how not continuing to distribute materials with racial representations from a time when skin color determined humanity / slavery is a poor decision?
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.
Caricature and racism are not identical. I think that would be my primary counterpoint. Just because it's fallen out of fashion to draw people in such caricatured ways, does not necessarily mean that there was any negative or racist intent by the artist. I think this matters quite a bit. Dr. Seuss is not evil because he could not predict where the moral zeitgeist would lead us.
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.
>Let's take the example of "If I Ran the Zoo", since it's one of the only images [0][1] I can find.
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.
> You don't even know the context of the image which offends you
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.
We should probably tone down the temperature here. I don't think we're getting anywhere productive, and it's not looking like we're going to see eye to eye.
For the record, I don't watch Fox news, and I dislike it quite a bit.
I agree, I do not see eye-to-eye with those who, never having commented on how a book publisher manages their inventory and resource allocations, decide that a private corporation ceasing publication of select books with racial epithets they consider dehumanizing is analogous to "banning" of the material in any way.
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.
You and a large number of people feel those views repugnant. That said, there are likely certain views you have, that you feel you should have the right to express freely that a large group of people feel are equally repugnant and offensive. Freedom of speech provides a natural check and balance by letting the best ideas thrive via an open market of ideas, not a large un-elected ministry acceptability. History shows that wielding the weapon of censorship tends to have a boomerang effect long term and can have other consequence, such as radicalizing people.
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.
> Freedom of speech provides a natural check and balance by letting the best ideas thrive via an open market of ideas, not a large un-elected ministry acceptability.
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?
"These books were created and published in an open market." Sorry, but this is utterly false. The extraordinarily extended periods of copyright-terms enforced by the government make this the very opposite of the open market.
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.
You are confusing the particular expression of an idea with the idea itself. There are an infinite number of ways to express the ideas contained within the books that Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided not to publish. The expression of those ideas has not been banned at all, by anyone. Not eBay, not Amazon, not Dr. Seuss Enterprises, not even the government.
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?
Please don't change the goalposts to "general ideas". The works of Dr Seuss can NO longer be published by other actors without violating the terms of copyright and inviting the full force of law and government and punishment on those who would attempt to do so. Besides, ideas can only be expressed through mediums and when those mediums are banned, so is the expression of ideas.
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.
Woooah hang on. Don’t blame the left for the problems of copyright. As a Marxist, I am on board 100% with you that copyright as an idea should be removed from our daily lives. Copyright has no place in leftist ideology, so I have no idea how you are making the connection. As I’ve stated many times we live in a capitalist society, and it’s under the rules of capitalism, at the desire of capitalists, that copyright exists. Capitalism absolutely comes into the picture because capitalism is the system under which all of this is happening. We don’t live in a socialist system so how are you blaming leftist ideology?
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.
> That said, there are likely certain views you have, that you feel you should have the right to express freely that a large group of people feel are equally repugnant and offensive
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?
This newfound moral outrage is hilarious. President Obama praised and recommended Dr. Seuss books in an official press release as recently as 2015, his last year as president. Now they are suddenly "outrageous and unacceptable".
One of the books they banned, "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street", was Dr. Seuss's breakthrough work, and certainly not "obscure". Another, "If I Ran the Zoo", is widely considered among his best.
thats just revisionism, i dont remember either of them, and ive never seen anyone reference them until these past few days. after the controversy is over, nobody will miss them
How are you acting as if a publisher ceasing to generate material that it wishes to ethically distance itself from, executed as a perfectly legal maneuver by a private corporation, is in any way analogous to the USSR's centralized government banning books?
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.
They were important to dr seuss as a person and his development as an author, but culturally theyve been eclipsed by his more famous work.
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
You are not arguing honestly here. You are just defending this decision by any means you have, honest or dishonest.
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.
You’ve devolved completely into Fox News - which is legally not news btw - talking points, and you’ll say others are arguing dishonestly?
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.
Whoa. I just bought a new copy of Mulberry Street a couple of years ago. It was on some end cap display at Barnes and Noble. I have read it to my daughter a dozen times. I hadn’t actually looked at the list of Dr. Seuss books, and assumed they were obscure like people said, but Mulberry Street definitely isn’t obscure.
if you associate Black people with literal monkeys you are the one that is racist.
All the book is explicitly saying is that it would be a good idea to hire a person of African origin to work at the zoo.
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.
> If you associate Black people with literal monkeys you are the one that is racist
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:
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
The monkeys in that picture were the picture representation of the "Africans" in that book.
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?
Did you read the book? I just did and did not find the page where it refer to an African Man. I might be wrong or it already got modified in recent copy of the book.
Song of the South is a good movie especially for its time (Black representation in film) that Disney destroyed because of its aversion to controversy. Since actual Black people are unpopular in racist America, honest portrayals of Black people are considered offensive, effectively removing Black people and characters from mainstream culture unless they "act white".
Slavery is terrible, and since black people were enslaved, literature about Black American's lives from before 1865 is not acceptable. This is bad.
But what actually is happening?
Thousands of books go out of print every week. There are over 50 or so Dr Zeus books. If the heirs of the author and publisher no longer want to sell a handful of them will the vast majority of future American readers care?
I would guess that eventually (if these books are popular enough) they will be edited and brought up to date like Richard Scary books:
These are all arguments that would support book banning in the Soviet union and all similar totalitarian regimes.
"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":
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.
So if our lives are effectively controlled by huge corporations, then we should accept that simply because they are technically companies and not the government?
No, and we should criticize how companies allow access to their platforms, but just because something was denied access to a platform doesnt inherently make it a free speech issue
This is not fighting corporations, this is getting bogged down in culture wars
We know. But you also know, if there are monopolies, even if they are private, they can meaningfully limit the flow of ideas in a way that is highly problematic.
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?
A cohort and I were just ballparking what it would take to corner some neglected yet vaguely nostalgic market and then seed alarmist copy to manufacture a rush on sales.
We decided it'd be a lark, but the return probably wouldn't beat printing Bibles.
Can these people you are talking about still sell their book, legally? Could they give the book to another person in exchange for money, right in front of a cop, and face no legal recourse? You're confusing the word "banning" with the word "inconvenience".
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.
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.
What does IQT have to do with any of this? I get where you are coming from and to a certain extent agree with the principal. The problem is that the us government is a giant beast of an organization and can't be thought of as a single entity.
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.
The utilization of government assistance is the utilization of force and violence. If a small number of players do this, it is not a free market, was my main point. If there is a way to utilize government, it should come with the strings attached by which the government itself is nominally controlled (granted, the government itself ignores those strings, but it would be a step in the right direction, imo).
To be fair these books ought to live on Archive.org, because they are basically 'classics' at this point. Plenty of problematic and dated books live there. While it has some Dr. Seuss books, it doesn't have the problematic ones, but for at least historical reasons, it should.
There's likely plenty of things today that I'm sure that centuries or even decades from now will be considered morally repugnant. Animal cruelty, particularly in the context of factory farming, might be frowned upon today, but may one day be seen as unspeakably horrific.
I hope so too. What becomes taboo or morally repugnant in the future is hard to speculate, so I guess the better examples are yet to manifest. But to elaborate further, maybe eating meat might be verboten in entertainment for kids? Of course this would include re-runs/re-prints/etc. of old media.
To be genuinely fair, the six books we're actually talking about are minor works that no one reads to kids anymore. We're not talking about Green Eggs or the Lorax here.
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?
In the East Asian country where my family came from and many of my family still live, and in the neighboring East Asian countries where I've lived for so many years, drawing their own eyes as "slanted lines!" is commonplace. (gasp! look at me! Can everyone see how much this offends me? Oh, the humanity! I'm having the vapors! can all you fashionable westerners whose opinions are actually the only ones that matter to me see how sensitive I am?) East Asians don't have any problem presenting themselves to their own children this way, nor do they shy away from drawing big, exaggerated noses on westerners. Western cartoonists often caricature western noses likewise, which doesn't seem to trigger these sensitive westerners at all. It's almost as if they're not actually bothered by it--just like their East Asian counterparts. It's almost as if their outrage depends less on actual hurt feelings and more on how much of a payoff they calculate they might earn from Those in Charge Whose Opinions Actually Matter.
> In the East Asian country where my family came from and many of my family still live, and in the neighboring East Asian countries where I've lived for so many years, drawing their own eyes as "slanted lines!" is commonplace.
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.
I think what he's saying is that context matters. Nobody is saying that you need to hire an asian artist to draw the eyes and suddenly that makes it okay.
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!
How do you feel about blackface? It's not a thing you can do anymore in theater or movies. It's not like no one is allowed to ever wear black paint on their face or anything, it's a matter of portraying a specific kind of person in an offensively stereotypical manner.
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?
When Robert Downey Jr. did it, the context mattered a lot. It was a commentary race. There was an actual black actor along side him that was basically spelling it all out for the audience.
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.
I found it hilarious, but then am I "black enough"? Do I "act white"? I'm not sure I care what people on either side think about it.
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.
One important point to me is that culture changes. We should accept it without banishing where we came from.
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?
Context might matter here. Seuss made lots of propaganda for the us military during wwii, specifically with the intent to dehumanize Japanese people. Which, if you’ll recall, eventually led to an environment where the us government thought it was a good idea to murder hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in nuclear holocaust. So when he was drawing these slant eyes, he was drawing on that experience and mindset. I don’t believe it was as innocent as you imply.
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.
There were German internments[1] (true not to the same degree and extent) and while Seuss may not have contributed to anti-German propaganda himself (imagine the converse situation of a person of Japanese descent volunteering anti-Japanese caricatures), I assure you we had very good anti-German propaganda as well[2].
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.
The program that led to a very small percentage of German nationals in the US and an even smaller percentage of German Americans in the internment camps was for German nationals that were considered to be pro-Axis. They did not mass intern German nationals, let alone German Americans. German Americans that ended up in these camps generally went voluntarily to avoid family separation. There were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in the US at the time and it's not surprising that a small percentage of German nationals may have been supportive of the Nazis in ways that were considered problematic.
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?
It kind of does undermine your position. It shows that you don't really care about the process of dehumanization for purposes of encouraging warlike action, but rather the inherent offensiveness of specific types of images.
>It's almost as if their outrage depends less on actual hurt feelings and more on how much of a payoff they calculate they might earn from Those in Charge Whose Opinions Actually Matter
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.
It's also common for East Asianers to get plastic surgery to "westernize" their eyes, as generations of Western imperialism has warped their idea of beauty about their own eye shape. They may not be notably offended by such slit eye drawings, but they are still damaging.
That line of thinking is incredibly patronizing and paternalistic. When white people do something because they think it looks good, it’s free choice. When non-white people do something because they think it looks good, it’s the “damaging” consequence of “western imperialism.”
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.)
It’s interesting that you mention colorism in India. The British were not the first group of people to rule India. There has been a history of thousands of years of migration from Central Asia to both India and Europe. These people had light skin. They became part of the ruling class of the places they migrated to.
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.
> 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.
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?
It doesn’t make sense. Whites can tan or not tan at will to their detriment (melanoma).
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.
>When white people do something because they think it looks good, it’s free choice. When non-white people do something because they think it looks good, it’s the “damaging” consequence of “western imperialism.
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.
I don’t see Seuss making them into evil characters.
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.
Evil, maybe not explicitly... but over-emphasizing asian-ness in order to portray them as a one-dimensional "other" is not a culturally sensitive way to handle it. I don't even think there's anything wrong with them being asian, it's the caricature aspect of it where it emphasizes race above all else.
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.
I disagree here. I don’t see him putting people in there as one dimensional characters.
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.
> I respect your difference in opinion. I'm interested in how asian / black people feel about these Dr. Seuss books.
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.
> I don’t see him putting people in there as one dimensional characters.
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.
Isn't that what war propaganda is about? To highlight differences and paint an enemy in the worst possible light as a way to rally against a fanatical enemy who doesn't consider you human.
Though I find issue with how you view dehumanizing the enemy as acceptable as you say they don't consider us human, and I'd argue that such dehumanization always causes more harm then benefit, neither of those points matter here.
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.
This is a slippery-slope and it's already played out in other contexts e.g. black-sploitation.
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?
Can you support this claim about imperialism (also, "common" is a rather huge exaggeration)? I hear it made all the time in a hand wavy way with no substantive demonstration. Frankly, it sounds rather condescending, as in: East Asians couldn't possibly find the kinds of eye shapes more common among European stock more beautiful unless they were conditioned into believing that in some way! Seems rather dismissive.
Western imperialism is an obvious factor in the East Asian countries this is popular in, such as South Korea and Taiwan. There's no concrete proof this is a result of imperialism, but the differences between the counterparts North Korea and China provide limited evidence it's the cause.
As for common, the estimates I can find show between 1/5th and 1/3rd of South Korean woman receive double eyelid surgery.
I'm going to challenge this. Anecdata may be what it is, but I've never seen any popular artwork from any east asian culture that embraces the slanted eye representation. It just doesn't happen. Asian cultures draw asian people as... people.
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.
> 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?
> I'm going to challenge this. Anecdata may be what it is, but I've never seen any popular artwork from any east asian culture that embraces the slanted eye representation. It just doesn't happen. Asian cultures draw asian people as... people
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.
The news is full of articles about which libraries might be doing what with these books.
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?
I don't see what the problem is here? If I open a book store I'm sure as hell not going to sell Mien Kampf or white supremacist manifestos. Am I being unreasonable by standing by my values and not stocking these books? I don't think they should be banned but I also don't think I should be required to sell them.
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.
Why would a christian bakery sell gay wedding cakes?
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.
> Why would a christian bakery sell gay wedding cakes?
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.
This specific thread is about public libraries. I definitely don’t want public librarians to see their job as an avenue for expressing their views.
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.
> I definitely don’t want public librarians to see their job as an avenue for expressing their views.
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 somebody out there truly thinks Green Eggs & Ham shouldn't be stocked because it glorifies exploiting animals for their meat and eggs.”
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.
>We're not talking about Green Eggs or the Lorax here.
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!
> 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".
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.
Maybe adults can rationalize this stuff, but a child absolutely cannot. Children are sponges and mirrors at the same time, they do not have the ability to think critically about the world they experience in the way you are suggesting. So in the context of a children’s book, this makes a difference
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.
That depends on the child. I'm having deep and engaging conversations nightly about these recent events with my 13 and 9 year old who bring it up during dinner, my 4 year old follows along in her own way and keeps up with the understanding.
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.
13 and 9 (to a lesser extent) sure, they can start to understand some of this. But 4? The 4 year old isn’t at the same level at all.
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.
Sure, we are careful to keep her included in all conversations regardless. Also there isn't much going over her head and she loves to change the subject with a joke which amuses me the most.
That's what you, the adult, is there for. They absolutely can critically think; they just need guidance and practice getting thete.
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.
> People need to realize that the World is messy, and racism and prejudice exits in all walks of life
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.
‘ Plenty of controversial items—including Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and “The Turner Diaries,” a novel popular with white-supremacist groups—were available on eBay as of Wednesday evening. When asked, the spokeswoman said these two books also fell in the “offensive material” category and would be removed. On Thursday afternoon it appeared that “The Turner Diaries” was no longer available on eBay.’
From the article at least, it appears eBay will also remove those books.
Ebay has had an "offensive material" policy since at latest 2018 -- that's the earliest that Wayback Machine has a capture of the URL that the present "offensive material" policy is at.
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.
Is Mein Kampf sold as a children's book? I meant it in the context of children's books. Would you think "Marquis de Sade" would be a good book to sell as a children's book?
I recently read "They Thought They Were Free (Germans 1930-1945)" where he mentions that after the war the Germans were amazed to hear that you could still buy Mein Kampf in the United States throughout the entirety of World War II. The US used to be a bastion of free speech and classical liberal values. Oh how things have changed.
While many other bans, especially on social media, seem to me to be quite nuanced, banning the re-sale of an old book is insane. Who does it hurt of this book is still sold? There are good reasons not to publish it for children anymore. There are good reasons not to stock it in a book shop. There are good reasons not to lend it to children in a library. But why would you prevent two people from selling it between themselves at a (digital) marketplace?
The re-sale of the book is NOT banned. You're free (at least in some cities) to sell that awful book on a filthy blanket on the sidewalk if you want. You're free to put an ad in the newspaper. Just because a single company doesn't want to be associated with something that is hurtful does not mean you are prevented from trading in whatever book you desire.
It IS banned on eBay. Who does this protect? Who is hurt if A sells a Seuss book with hurtful stereotype pictures to B on eBay?
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.
Ebay should be forced to allow buyers and sellers to trade anything that is not illegal. They should not be forced to promote items they do not want to promote, but they should not have the final say on whether I can sell or buy an item on their platform.
Why should they not have the final say? It’s their platform. By the way, in eBay’s seller terms & condx, I guarantee there’s a clause where sellers give up any recourse if eBay decides for any reason to delist your items.
Of course, that wouldn’t work. Any platform that is “X, but with slightly relaxed rules” becomes a magnet for people who really really care about those particular rules not being enforced.
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.
I am not saying it is. I wasn't aware that ebay still sold Mein Kampf, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. I read Mein Kampf it's really not that special. But I meant selling Mein Kampf as children's books. And I don't think Dr. seuss is hitler. On the contrary, I think they are miles apart.
I am just tired of all the pro-capitalist, pro-freedom people who are telling some company that they aren't allowed not to sell a book. Just start your own platform then and sell the things that ebay doesn't. Nobody will care. I certainly won't. That being said, I think it is good that old books, traditions and stories are held against the light of racism and discrimination.
> I wasn't aware that ebay still sold Mein Kampf, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing.
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.
This. And also: if they don't exist. Open a new one! There is no law against it. And we would stand shoulders to shoulder if and when the government would ever propose such a law. But until that time, stop whining.
Yes, I am implying that a typical bookstore shouldn't have Mein Kampf for sale. And as a matter of fact, I think a typical bookstore doesn't have it. Are you implying that they should have it?
I am suggesting that Dr. Seuss is comparable to hitler in this context: they shouldn't be in the children's section. Just like I think Marquis de Sade shouldn't be in the children's section.Do you think that bookstores should be forced to sell books that contain racist charicatures?
There is a difference in a bookstore choosing not to offer select children's books because their content violates the owners sensibilities, and a mall preventing a bookstore to sell a children's book because the mall owner finds the book offensive.
Both are quite normal. What if the bookstore owner decided to only sell porn? The mall van decide to force the bookstore to stop that. That's just how it works. The bookstore is a client of the mall. So the mall decides.
> Yes, I am implying that a typical bookstore shouldn't have Mein Kampf for sale. And as a matter of fact, I think a typical bookstore doesn't have it.
I never found this a very useful analytical framework, especially once you define “the freedom to interfere with third parties” as a “freedom from.” It’s too easy to move things from category to category by describing them differently. And I just don’t see what you get out of it anyway. It doesn’t affect the importance of the relevant interests.
I understand the publisher deciding not to publish these books as children's books anymore (it could make sense to publish a special edition as 'Racially insensitive Seuss books', but that's another matter). However, why would eBay prevent sellers from selling them? I view eBay as a second hand book market, would I not be allowed to sell a copy of Mein Kampf there?
> they no longer want to be associated with and sell to children
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 the fcuk is a rare out of print book on ebay targeting children? You mean like if I kid sees it he might pick it up because of the friendly art on the cover?
Seems strange that eBay would delist these though, given they still list items like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/Antique-Cast-Iron-Jolly-African-Man...
as well as books like "Little Black Sambo". Seems like they are more interested in following the latest trends than purging their platform of objectionable content.
Compare to Charlie Hebdo. Suppose, after the massacre, retailers "chose" not offer it in stores (because if they didn't there may be fatal consequences). Should that really be celebrated as "freedom to"?
Isn't Ebay acting here similarly over a preemptive concern of blowback from a small group of determined activists?
Everything is offensive one way or another. It's a personal opinion and there are way too many people in the world. Even Good Morning can be seen as sarcastic or any text in English can be see as colonialist.
> 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 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:
Indeed. Giant technology companies are effectively part of government now. They make and enforce the rules about public discourse.
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.
That's a good point. Not to mention that mobile providers and tech companies can, and do, volunteer private data to police and authorities without a warrant. I believe Apple was one that pushed back on this.
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.
Ebay isn't forcing people to read the books, and ebay isn't forcing people to sell the books, so you're making a fairly fallacious argument, in my humble opinion.
I have never understood why people add sentences like: "probably a minority" to their arguments. This is something that weakens your stand. Let me explain:
If a minority (nerds/D&D-players,etc) gets bullied in school. Is them being a minority:
A) a fact that aggrieves the bullying
B) a non-relevant fact
C) a fact that absolves the bullies from their wrong-doing?
Because it seems like you are implying that it's option C by making this comment.
There's a bit of a discussion here, you can promote either option depending on how you frame your hypothetical which means this particular framing doesn't add to the conversation. Take "medicine" and "side effects on a minority". Suddenly you can consider option C) as a perfectly reasonable one.
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".
I am not making a point I am asking why he adds the "minority" remark in passing. I think this is not very relevant. But adding such a remark in passing tells me that the OP does think it is important. This triggers me into investigating why it matters
I objected just to the framing of the example. The question "why would minority change anything in the case of books?" is a good one. And I believe it makes a hell of a difference in this particular case (while it did not in the bullying example). The reason is simple: if a minority being offended is a good enough reason to ban a book then you can see how it could very easily be used to arbitrarily ban any book. Books on global warming, round Earth, on evolution, on religion, or any controversial topic could easily be targeted as there are already large established groups ready to object. Someone will always be offended rightfully or not.
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.
Australia has a case where this is very relevant: most of the aboriginal people of Australia consider the direct mention or depiction of dead people in photographs and videos very disrespectful[1]. Because of that, it's common in Australian TV for almost any program to include warning for native Australian viewers about that.
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.
You went from someone claiming to find something "utterly repugnant" to a minority "being bullied". There's no necessary relation between the two. Because you don't know if the bullying is real, and if the minorities match. The relationship can easily go the other way around, for example a minority can claim to find gay marriage "utterly repugnant".
Semantics. The real question is: does it matter that it is a minority that "finds gay marriage utterly repugnant"? Because I think it DOESN'T matter. It could have been said by a minority or a majority, you are the one that is implying that it's important that a minority said this. That means that you think that's important. Tell me, how is that important?
Whether it's only a minority that takes a certain view is not just important: it's fundamental to a society's set of morals, which is what the question really is about.
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.
I don't care what society thinks I have my own moral compass that is partly my own and partly shaped by society. I do my best to shape society to my truth and don't care what "the majority" or "the minority" thinks. You make many claims about "society" and what would work or wouldn't. But these are just assumptions. I like experiments. My question remains why is it relevant that a minority asks for the removal of something. 100 years ago slave owners said society would collapse without slaves and that black people were too stupid to do more that physical work. A minority of people from "society" objected to this at first. And slowly the old truths were replaced by new ones. This is happening now as well. You presume many things but you are not talking about the justness or inherent truths. I ask you: Why shouldn't we let books that are implicitly discriminatory fade into obscurity?
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.
Freedom of speech is the most essential negative freedom (freedom from), it means you are not bound and limited by something external, while positive freedom is a right to something, like education or similar institutions.
The freedom of a publisher to control what happens to sold books isn't at all part of negative freedom (freedom from).
I'm basing my understanding on the Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin.
U.S. law does provide interesting examples of the intersection of positive and negative liberty, I don't personally agree with all of the decisions and some of the examples listed on that page are much, much more nuanced than they appear at face value including subsequent cases that clarified the meaning of those decisions. If we stay on topic with the relation of the two concepts of liberty to the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP to no longer publish 6 books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong." and the subsequent decision by Ebay, Amazon, et al. to prevent resale of existing copies of those books then we get a really good example of another topic covered by Isaiah Berlin which is the abuse of positive liberty. Specifically, the demand for freedom from these entities to control the purchasing decisions of their customers with regard to materials that some supposedly rational authority has determined to be detrimental to some group of people (there are echoes of Roth v. United States here). The factors that make this a difficult problem are the near monopoly that Ebay and Amazon enjoy over online sellers and resellers and the fact that they act as intermediaries between those sellers and their customers.
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.
I'm not talking about anything US related, I'm talking about the concept of negative/positive freedom in philosophy. And no, there isn't anything intrinsically wrong with this concept, freedom of speech if essentially a negative freedom if your constitution has some exceptions that doesn't change that...
The reason is that postmodernist philosophy has lead to a lot of mental gymnastics that have either been proven wrong.... for example the fallacy of the slipper slope, which has indeed happened and continues to happen and has been proven to not be a fallacy and the paradox of tolerance which has been used to rationalize censorship among other things. Thus many people are understandably skeptical of arguments that use it as it's basis.
I understand the main problem with the book is the "China man" Caricature.
Can someone (ideally Chinese) explain why it's offensive?
Is it more offensive or racist than a painting like this https://imgur.com/a/4k0IFDG ?
If so could you explain why?
How is my 6 years old son supposed to draw an ancient Chinese villager without being racist ?
To be clear the "freedom from" I'm referring to here is the freedom for innocent bystanders - children in this case - not to see lazy racial stereotypes surreptitiously in what should be a funny book that either offends them or gives them a false/bad impression of those races.
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.
> To be clear the "freedom from" I'm referring to here is the freedom for innocent bystanders - children in this case - not to see lazy racial stereotypes surreptitiously in what should be a funny book that either offends them or gives them a false/bad impression of those races.
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.
>You do realize your comment perverts the very meaning of the word "freedom" to mean the opposite of its actual meaning, right?
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.
Yes, there are views of "freedom" that are paradoxical. In fact, that's precisely the view that 1984 presents, with the party's second motto: "Freedom is Slavery".
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.
>Yes, there are views of "freedom" that are paradoxical.
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.
> All views of freedom are paradoxical other than the most basic view, which is that everyone has the freedom to do anything to anyone.
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:
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.
>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.
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.
The point is that the left is expanding the concept of "freedom from harm" to such an extreme and paradoxical degree, that it eliminates all freedoms.
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.
You have blamed Marxists and leftists for the topic at hand many times in this thread, and have likened what's happening to "Soviet" book banning and the USSR.
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.
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.
>"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"
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.
Ideas have generally been considered protected ground and the 'positive' freedom of ideas is the basis of scientific progression (tenure for example is a freedom to be contrarian, not a shackle toward rational self mastery). The fact that these books are oriented toward children is irrelevant, it is still an attack on the 'idea' that parents/teachers can use offensive works to a productive end. I would love to be a fly on the wall in Ebay or Amazon during their discussions on these bannings, because it seems their attempts to pacify certain audiences is so hopelessly naive it's hard for me to understand their motivation.
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.
>The fact that these books are oriented toward children is irrelevant, it is still an attack on the 'idea' that parents/teachers can use offensive works to a productive end.
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.
Thank you for your response. It's funny, I think I agree with you on these points. We can agree that it is of critical importance that this is a private policy decision, not mandated by the state. That doesn't make it right.
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.
Well, it looks like soon we'll have many more freedoms like that.
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!
Every time I see people espouse "freedom from", I have to point out you're making a claim on everyone else to keep you safe from something you don't like.
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.
The “weapon” here is just basic conscientiousness. A publisher decided to stop publishing some books because they denigrate people, and eBay decided that they did not want to be facilitating the sale of books that denigrate people. We are not talking about an H-bomb - there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here.
>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...
> 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'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 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).
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.
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.
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
Using the word "denigrate" would be a reason to cancel you for some very conscientious minds. It sounds too similar to, ya know. And you aren't even talking Chinese [1]
No stretch needed, this poster could definitely be cancelled for using that word.
"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.""
Oh, yes, I was just citing the OP, it wouldn't be my choice.
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.
This one was weird as it's saying that English has ownership over sounds. If it sounds similar to a bad English word then it's also bad, even if context is given.
Magical thinking at its best. The Middle Ages are back. You are not allowed to pronounce anything similar to the powerful incantation, lest the demons emerge. Regardless of context.
Of course, in practice, the demons are regular people with stones in their hands ...
Or, and this might be something to consider: this restructuring of of culture into groups of "good and bad culture" is something that happens each generation. Like the hippies against the old ideals, the 80 kids/punkers against the hippies, the smooth millennials against the 80-kids. Every generation did their own thing. We are getting old and do not subscribe to the new future. We are losing our childhood loves. They will disappear into the fold of history. Just like we will.
Historically, culture wasn't so quick to change. Typically, parents would be able to pass down their culture and traditions to children, instead of having society foist an entirely new culture onto their kids that's incompatible with what the parent grew up with.
I am surprised Jeff Bezos hasn't been canceled. He was attempting to cut deals with Muhammed bin Salman. There is photographic evidence of Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Jeff Bezos cozying up to a regime that is anti-LGBT.
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 believe you don't have that archive because it doesn't exist. Ultimately people who are "supporters of cancel culture" most likely aren't explicitly that, they just don't agree with your definition of cancel culture [1]
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.
Hey, can I come look through your house to make sure there are no books there that offend me? It would be incredibly rude of you to consume any content that random strangers might object to. I'll be over in an hour.
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.
Actually you have the property rights angle all wrong: People who control the publishing rights and the intellectual property behind an ecommerce platform to distribute things have both decided they don't want to sell certain works for whatever reason. A stupid one IMO. But it's within their rights as we currently understand corporate power. Perhaps we shouldn't be so willing to indulge liberal market freedoms as they can be a double-edged sword - property owners can "censor" cultural touchstones thanks to powerful intellectual property laws.
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.
> 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.
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.
Person C operates a marketplace platform. They are very much involved in what is sold in their marketplace. They do not want to be associated with material deemed objectionable. They don't need you to agree it is objectionable. Do you think they should be forced to list anything someone might want to sell that isn't illegal? What kind of freedom is that?
If you don’t want to be associated with material that might be “objectionable” then don’t position yourself as a platform where arbitrary people can sign up and list whatever they want for sale.
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.
Where have they positioned themselves as such? They have always had control over what can be listed, they have never said you can sell "whatever you want". No marketplace has ever been what you are describing. Do you have any references that explain this ideology in more depth because I do not understand it.
Persons A and B are allowed to conduct their transaction, just not on a particular platform. Put an ad in “dumb racist old books” magazine and find someone to buy your book.
How about instead you restrict your book buying to a specialty “woke only” bookstore that carefully curates a selection guaranteed not to offend your delicate sensibilities?
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.
Not a good analogy either. In this case, the publisher is perfectly within their rights to not offer these works for sale anymore. However, under the First-sale doctrine, they have no right to control resale of the physical copies of the works already out there. eBay delisting them means they are choosing to side with the publisher over the rights of the sellers.
Yes, just like we can dictate that eBay can't make a rule that only white people are allowed to sell on it. Operating a business involves being a part of society and society is justified in imposing rules on your business to ensure that your business is not harmful to the general welfare of the public.
So you are advocating for some standard according to which marketplaces should be required to sell anything the public brings to them to sell?
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?
Yes! We have this standard. It's called "laws". We elect these people called "representatives" and if we want people to not be able to buy or sell certain things like a kilo of heroin or a machine gun, we have them make a law that prohibits it. This way the public has input on the process and it is not left up to the arbitrary prejudices of any particular corporate drone.
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.
What horrendous, world-ending catastrophe do you think would occur if someone sold pornography at the farmers market?
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?
Ok, so “racially insensitive” material and explicit pornography are both legal currently. Are you saying that eBay should be forced to allow their users to sell both, or are you saying that we enact a new law that says that eBay should be forced to allow their users to sell “racially insensitive” material, but not explicit pornography?
I'm saying that if you position your business as a platform or conduit through which people exchange things, whether those are physical goods, IP packets, fragments of text and images, whatever, you should be a "dumb pipe". Such businesses should not be permitted to abuse their privileged position to impose their own will on the general public. Remember Net Neutrality? Same thing. If you want to sell a stack of old Hustlers or a copy of Song of the South it should not be eBay's place to tell you that you can't.
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".
It’s not just old Huslters. If eBay were not allowed to prevent explicit pornography from being sold on its website, it would have a much less valuable business, and fewer people would get value from it. Just as an example, it would end up being blocked by “family friendly” web filters that are popular with businesses, schools, and families.
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.
eBay is undoubtedly blocked by numerous work filters because it is not really relevant for doing most jobs. They manage just fine.
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.
I have not made a straw-man argument. Laws must be written precisely, and it’s entirely appropriate to test proposed changes to law by applying them to specific cases of fact.
You may have identified a real problem in society, but you have not proposed a viable solution.
There is a difference between those things, but that doesn’t mean we should automatically support all discrimination that isn’t based on immutable qualities.
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.
In a free society with free markets, you are free to oppose antyhing that a business does that you don't agree with.
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".
Delisting a book is not an expression. eBay is (should be) a neutral party through which other people are expressing things by buying and selling things. 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.
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?
> 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.
So if you were in charge of the government, how would you propose regulating these companies? By forcing them to act as a "utility" that has to list every kind of product?
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.
And 60-70 years ago there was no such thing as protected groups. Businesses could and did deny service to anyone for any reason. Collectively, we as a society looked at that situation and said "Hey this isn't great that businesses can deny service to whole groups of people based on their religion or skin color, we shouldn't let them do that", and we stopped letting them do that.
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.
Is public discourse being wittled down? I can buy books from across the political spectrum within seconds. Consider Jim Crow versus not being able to buy a physical copy of an obscure book that can still easily be found online for free
I doubt the same people would oppose it though. Rights of downtrodden groups are constantly shit on without a peep from the “free speech absolutist” crowd.
Neither. It depends on the specifics. Should you be allowed to not serve someone who has anger issues? Does it matter if this anger issues are caused by genetic hormonal imbalance?
> there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here
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.
I hope the irony isn’t lost on you that you are using the word “lynching”—which in its literal, non-metaphorical usage refers to the terroristic murder of racial minorities in the United States—to refer to the non-violent use of cultural power by members of those same minority groups to demand respect from institutions and powerful individuals.
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?
There’s a Spanish idiom that describes your reply here really well, I think. It doesn’t occur to me what the comparable phrase in English would be. Es una cachetada con guante blanco.
I disagree with you, but I have to say, well done. Point made.
No, because it's not the same context. That's the point. These extreme reaches are the same as banning "master" as the name of a branch in git repos as if it has anything to do with social history.
To the contrary. The context here is the same, as I explained in my original comment. The connection between the literal and metaphorical use of the word here is too close, which is what makes it rude and offensive.
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.
No, I disagree, along with many others. Nothing is rude and offensive on its own, nor do you know what everyone else thinks. What you really mean is it's offensive to you, in which case you should exercise your personal freedoms and rights by reading something else instead of worrying about the rest of us.
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:
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.
"the usage of this particular word in this particular situation is offensive"
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.
I can’t help but point out the incredible situation where you are engaging in precisely the kind of behavior that the person you’re replying to seems to have issue against : )
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?
Perhaps I was offended and was trying to point that out politely.
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!
What is politeness but acting in a manner that is respectful of the sensitivities of our peers?
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.
> What is politeness but acting in a manner that is respectful of the sensitivities of 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.
I want to point out that legutierr and stef25 had a respectful back and forth here. legutierr pointed out the connotations of lynching and stef25 recognized they could've used better language. I don't see the harm here, just a little reminder of American history.
I don't think it was intended to be disrespectful, but stef25's response was clearly in irony, given his original post. The idea that s/he was genuinely unaware and appreciative of the response seems unlikely.
Please point out to me where I myself was impolite, or where I accused OP of intentionally invoking the term for its negative connotations.
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.
I didn't previously claim you were impolite, although I do think you were.
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.
I agree with you that the idea of living your life cowering in fear of offending everyone you meet is ridiculous on its face. It's equally ridiculous to expect that you can impose your standards on everyone around you, and to think you are justified in becoming outraged at every offense.
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:
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.
While Black people were disproportionately victims of lynching, lynching was not in itself a racial phenomenon, even if racists frequently employed it. People of all races were commonly lynched by people of all races. It's a legacy from a time when mob justice was common, in part because of the limitations of the legal system.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic hell on top of the ideological hell we are all enduring with topics like this. If you want to make a point about international variations in language, that's fine, but turning it into a whole separate flamewar is not cool.
> there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here
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!
Yes, because it’s certainly plausible that the leadership of Big Tech that are always at each other’s throats to dominate their corner of the digital market would want to put aside any such differences in direction, and decide that this is the one issue that they could show a United front on because this after all is what affects their goals of market dominance.
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?
Ah yes, mein kampf is ok [1], but dr suess is a bridge too far.
[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]
Nobody banned the sale of these books. The only argument any of the people who are crying their eyes out could make here is: we need open source decentralized bookselling to ensure that people who don't care about the bad feelings people have about these books can still buy these books. Every other argument is just weak and quite frankly, herdmentality of the right wing political sphere.
Monopolies are de-facto government bodies. It isn't that Ebay is administered by USG (although I'm sure Ebay has an NSA/DHS detachment); it's that it makes no difference to the user whether a government bans the sale of books on online flea markets or the only practical online flea market does.
If the only store within a 2-hour drive is walmart, walmart is your equivalent of the soviet centrally-planned economy.
Sure. i wouldn't suggest stocking it in the children's literature section (although i think you would be shocked how racist some books aimed at children can be once you start looking for it, including many written not just long ago but in the last 30ish years).
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.
I have literally just had the experience of stumbling on one of these racist dr Seuss books while reading with my kids, and I can tell you that I would have at least wanted a warning. It’s just not what I expected, and not something I would have wanted to expose my kids to. Which is kind of a shame, because scrambled eggs super is (aside from the overt racism) an awesome example of seussian prose.
And yet, eBay does sell a crap load of Mein Kampf editions and gollywogs. The motivation seems to be corporate virtue signalling rather than any commitment to a principle.
Yep no doubt due to recent CPAC conference and too early for a "War on Xmas " so they needed to focus on the nemesis of "cancel" culture rather than the disaster of Covid-19 deaths.
Don't worry, they'll focus on that disaster soon enough. They'll want to blame Biden for the 650k who will die of covid this year, just like they didn't want to blame Trump for the 350k who died of covid last year.
This argument seems really silly to me, have you thought this through? It appears to be a “talking point” as a few other right wing sites seem to be making the exact same argument.
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.
>eBay decided that they did not want to be facilitating the sale of books that denigrate people
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
eBay has no problem facilitating the sale of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", or "Mein Kampf", or "laddie magazines", or cartoons of Muhammad, or any of a variety of other things that "denigrate people". So let's not pretend like this is a principled stand of some sort by eBay.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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".
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
> "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.
I mean if a message goes across a distributed network and all the different nodes of the network independently decide to change their operation then there is no centralized power structure saying do this, even though it is effectively the same.
If you believe in liberty as a principle don't you have to support ebay's decision to decide whether or not they want to sell a particular book?
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.
Nobody is suggesting that eBay should be forced to facilitate the sale of a patticular book.
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.
Indeed, the arbitrariness of the leftist standards, and how easily and frequently they are liable to change, is in fact the point.
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:
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.
"Racism" has come to mean something more like "unclean thoughts" or "original sin" where everyone has it even if you didn't do anything. Every media cycle we get mad and burn a witch who didn't try hard enough to atone for these unclean thoughts.
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.
And the definition of "promoting" includes someone else digging up something obscure that's tied to you and sounds vaguely racist. In other words, someone else promoting your unclean thoughts counts as you promoting them.
> 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.
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.
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.
I'd say while that's true, it's a reaction the 'liberals' essentially having won. Biden one, one of the most right-wing of Democrats, instead of Bernie. Most of the 'left' seems very deflated, based on articles and podcasts I've listened to. They've all but given up.
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.
To answer directly, it's not eBay's decision because eBay is not a single person. I guess it's the CEOs, or someone under them, or maybe the board, or the shareholders.
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.
What scares me is the implication here that someone should be dictating social policy to companies and people.
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?*
Social policy should be dictated by a government that is "by the people, for the people". We the People should be able to make these decisions, by a vote, on our own behalf. That was the plan.
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.
Boy do I miss the days when SV was a libertarian paradise. I’d love to read a book or essay describing how we went from cypherpunks to left-wing moral crusaders in less than a generation.
> If you believe in liberty as a principle don't you have to support ebay's decision to decide whether or not they want to sell a particular book?
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.
> 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.
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.
You can support the right to be a Nazi while strongly criticising it.
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 can support the right to be a Nazi while strongly criticising it.
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.
It's easy to talk in platitudes that Nazis' free speech should be silenced when you've never lived somewhere with no free speech or been accused of being a Nazi.
>Woke crazies try to impose their ideology on others by complaining and shaming on the Internet.
>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.
> Woke crazies try to impose their ideology on others by complaining and shaming on the Internet.
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.
At this point I'm hoping for the Balkanisation of the internet, so that we Europeans wouldn't have to put up with American opinions on the web anymore.
Yet it is inevitably Europeans who complain about the widely-predicted effects of GDPR, a regulation designed to bring about the world for which you hope... Perhaps Europe is also not in complete agreement?
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.
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.
The big platforms desperately want to be anodyne. They don't want to censor, they just want you to see a funny cat photo, click Like, and come back in ten seconds for the next one.
Deplatforming is an extreme measure when they perceive an existential threat like "abetting an insurrection."
Well, building a massive internet forum to sell ads on is not really a recipe to be anodyne, right?
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.
Yeah, agreed. It's hard to draw the line between a normal political discourse and a dangerous one, and harder at scale, and even worse if your engagement metrics are at stake. So mostly they do nothing until it's too late.
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.
I think the problem is also that people don't push back individually, even within their own minds. There's too much receptiveness to morality, and not enough of the stubborn "don't preach at me" attitude.
> 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
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.
It's not just about it being eventually turned on you. Someone else's freedom of speech is also your freedom to hear what they have to say. Otherwise you accept that someone else is deciding what you can and can't read.
There is a long history in the United States of independent book publishers printing content that the mainstream press wouldn’t touch. It has never been the case in the US that truly controversial material could expect to have access to the biggest platforms.
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?
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from responsibility when your speech offends someone.
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.
limiting free speech, censoring people and media, is regressive and authoritarian to the core. don't kid yourself.
> 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."
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.
I plan to make my children toxic towards people denying other peoples basic human rights, directly and indirectly (e.g. by limiting access {e.g. by banning or burning} to books).
who's "basic human rights" are being denied here? Are you saying that the publisher of Dr.Seuss is committing human rights abuses by choosing not to publish some of the books THEY own the rights to?
Also, maybe teaching your children to be toxic towards anything won't really improve the world they will have to live in?
are you saying that private entities don't get to choose what products to cease production of? Once you start producing a product, you are obligated to continue indefinitely?
No, I'm saying the opposite: the private owner should lose exclusive production rights if they cease production permanently; i.e others should be able to freely produce this book, now it is out of production, without fear of being sued over copyright.
Surpressing information is wrong. The publisher not publishing is a minor case here, the Karens and SJWs who make existing work disappear by having it banned from libraries and/or public marketplaces are the main enemy here.
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.
There aren't any. The legion of SJWs and progressive use of government bans are totally made-up things.
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.
yea that was the reason why I asked for examples as I figured they were just parroting reactionary talking points without any evidence to back it up. I thought I'd give them the benefit of the doubt, but I'm still waiting on those examples...
that's not an example of "Karens and SJWs who make existing work disappear by having it banned from libraries and/or public marketplaces". That's just vague gesturing at lists of controversial books all of which are readily available.
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.
"""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.
The line is rather stark. eBay choosing not to facilitate the sale of books containing racist caricatures is not in the same ballpark as a government suppressing ideas. It’s not even the same sport.
> eBay choosing not to facilitate the sale of books containing racist caricatures is not in the same ballpark as a government suppressing ideas.
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.
>> The problem is that over time companies are consolidating into a few monopolies which are entirely out of public control,(...)
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.
I agree. I think both the elected government and these monopolies are actively harming people. However, eBay's refusal to sell children's books with racist caricatures is not the vanguard of some effort by those power structures to consolidate power; after all, racist imagery has been used for centuries to consolidate power in America.
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.
"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."
Took a while to find a comment that sees to the heart of the issue.
They are exactly the same because you can use the racism blanket to suppress criticism of real issues. Speaking out against the actions of the Chinese government? Racist! Speaking out against the actions of the VP? Racist!
This. I wouldn't even call it sport. What ebay does is sport: it's pretty inconsequential, but many people are mad about it. If the government would do it, it would be the opposite: very consequential, but probably not a lot of people who'd be mad.
It might be a thinner line than you think: At the end of the day, governments and private companies are both just big entities with strong influence, specially in monopoly situations. Consider this: If ebay and amazon simultaneously ban one specific book, author, genre, etc.; how much would that decrease their reach?
There's two different aspects to be considered here: What you seem to be mostly worried about is direct legal consequences to speech, like being imprisoned for saying the wrong thing. Protecting people from that is important, but freedom of opinion and expression is more than just that.
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.
Admittedly this is going to be a really shitty analogy, but in some cases your reach is so decreased that it's effectively gone.
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.
In my opinion, changing offensive parts in new edition would've been moderation. Unpublishing them and banning the sale of the books on the largest used book platform is much closer to censorship.
Free speech doesnt mean an obligation for people to provide you a platform, nobody is obligated to carry my book or let me on tv. You may criticize how that is carried out, but its not anti free speech to say racist cartoons dont need to be published
Being able to speak without interference from the government. I also think there is a spirit of free speech where the consequences for your speech should not exceed the speech itself, though that is obviously less precise and kinda up to individual judgement
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?
These viewpoints only exist because those who hold them are never held responsible for explaining why the last popularly held view they had is no longer valid and why they didn’t figure it out before it became unpopular.
You realize this was a publishing company deciding, completely unprompted and out of their own volition, that they don't want to publish these books, right? Whose freedom of speech is being violated here?
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.
It was prompted by a school district threatening to boycott the publisher because of these books. Why would you make a claim about it not being prompted when you didn't do the research first?
Yes people need to pushback against the overly politically-correct.
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.
Forcing someone to publish a book or to list a book for sale on their website is a violation of their free speech. This place is too authoritarian to discuss such nuances.
While I agree that it's remarkable and likely not very helpful to so actively move to suppress these books, I think the argument that this matters for free speech is a poor one, deserving debunking.
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).
“Everyone has the right to a night’s sleep, but homeless sleeping on the doorstep of a bank is not part of that.” This attitude falls apart at scale because the big picture is made entirely of smaller pictures.
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)
Not sure why your comment got downvoted; the hypocrisy and misinformation at the core of this issue absolutely needs to be addressed. There's a lot of pretense that this "censorship" or "deplatforming" is a new and mostly left-wing thing, but it has been around for ages, and the people crying the loudest about "cancel culture" are the same people calling for boycotts of Target, Colin Kaepernick, or the Dixie Chicks. Legal sex workers can get their bank accounts blocked or denied, athletes and artists receive backlash for speaking out. There's at least as much regressive craziness as there is "woke craziness".
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.
If a TV station broadcast a daytime TV show containing violence, racism, and a female nipple - which aspect would they get in the most legal trouble for?
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...)
- 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.
I don't get it. All her books are still in print and being sold. All the films from her books are still being sold. There's work happening right now to create games from her IP. She could have an interview published in any UK media of her choice tomorrow. How is she cancelled?
She still get's those sweet royalty cheques and her Harry Potter universe is alive, well and expanding but she was smart that she owns 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.
There is being "cancelled" (funny enough, most cancelled people really have every opportunity to complain afterwards), and getting headwind for ones statements and controversial opinions.
Freedom speech as defined in the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
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.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
And the first amendment is not a definition of freedom of speech. Read it again.
I still don't see how stopping the sale of an item on a private company's platform equates to denying freedom of speech. If we were talking about a government banning the sale of a specific book, author, or topic, then I absolutely agree. If we are talking about that same government banning specific books from schools, then I absolutely agree. But I don't agree that eBay's move here is denying freedom of speech. They're just deciding what they do and don't want on their platform.
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.
You are correct in terms about application of current laws. The issue is more complex though. We tend to associate books with ideas and exchange thereof. Explicit ban of an idea raises all sorts of issues regardless of any other issues that may have been related to it.
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 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?
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.
It is a good counter-argument. I will admit that I still marvel at the way it is structured. I do not think I can match that. It is a compliment.
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.
> 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.
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.
I am assuming good faith question and I will respond that way.
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'.
It is not outright ban, rather banishment to a very inhospitable place, a Siberia of ideas, so to say. (Russia often sent dissenters to live in Siberia.)
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.
Can you name any time in history where the side burning books was in the right?
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.
No-one's burning any books. A company has decided to stop printing and selling a few books. This is the exact same commercial decision they make every day for thousands of books.
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.
You may need to re-read the article. This eBay deciding that these books should no longer be distributed. The publisher's decision to stop priting it is irrelevant to the discussion.
Nobody is burning these books, it is the estate that doesn't want to publish certain books anymore. So the party holding the rights doesn't want new books out.
What does a publisher's reversal about their wants have to do with selling books they already printed?
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.
I have a DVD of old Tom and Jerry, growing up I only saw the newer clips as I learned by seeing the recsit crap the old ones were. Same for some of the older Tintin, I have them as part of a collection, but my dear are the early ones set in Africa racist. Good as historical pop culture references, but by no means something to read, or watch, for fun or without some context.
Assuming good faith here, you may need to read the original article again. eBay is delisting 2nd hand copies of the books. That extends far beyond a publisher deciding not to continue printing their books.
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).
That also is not burning books. eBay is a private business choosing not to be involved in the sale of something against their policy. That doesn’t do anything to damage your copy or prevent you from using any of the many options available to sell it – you can probably even get a better deal now that these books are getting more publicity than they have had for half a century.
If the pandemic showed us anything, it's that goods that can't be bought online might as well not exist for the majority of people when you can't / won't leave the house. Fast forward another decade or two and this trend will probably only accelerate and we may no longer see brick-and-mortar stores that cater for niche items like books outside the top100 best sellers.
This is wrong on two levels: while many people have been buying more online, local stores certainly didn’t disappear (for that matter, the books we bought online last year came exclusively from two local bookstores), and buying online doesn’t only mean eBay.
How long do you think it will be before Amazon follows suit?
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.
People can complain that something is bad without calling for the government to ban it.
They can even explicitly say that the government shouldn’t ban it, while also saying that the people doing it should stop.
I know your comment wasn't meant to spin off another thread, but I do believe you're touching at something quite significant. We as a society have become way too comfortable with using the government to stop behaviour we don't like, to the point that people automatically jump to that conclusion during political arguments.
This situation quite literally is not using the government. So y’all are complaining about the non-government system working in the way you’d expect it to?
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?
Bringing people to our side of the argument. Improving the culture so we're not erasing the past. There's no way around winning the hearts of the people.
Caught on a technicality yet again. I should have said "new type of self regulating market".
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.
There's a good chance you will never know the books exist in the first place if they are not allowed to be sold on the largest platforms. Surely you are not denying that availability is a factor in exposure?
Free speech is also an ideal that some people find value in outside of a legal context. People obviously care about being told what they can say and think, indepenant of the law.
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.
"No surprise that so many non-white people report problems in tech circles given the moral grandstanding on behalf of some caricatures going on here."
That is a massive non-sequitur. How do you even know what are the skin colors of individual people who defend the books? Are people of certain colors obliged to have the same values?
Lets not pretend there are hordes of people on Twitter ready to doxx, harass, publicly shame and do god knows what other things if you’re against the woke mob.
Censorship is censorship is censorship. The distinction of whether it is done by Ebay, government, bank, w/e is a distinction without meaning to the individual. US is maybe few steps away from China's social credit ( right now mildly distributed, but still with ridiculously big players able to effectively ban you from the market ).
So is it also censorship that certain posts are flagged and moderated on HN? It's a hard-line stance, anything goes?
Dr. Seuss Enterprises stopped printing these books because they decided the books were insensitive and offensive. Should we force them to print more of these books?
Yes, moderation is censorship, but given the size of HN, it has no effect on broader freedom on the Internet. It is similar to having a drop of water leaking onto your floor.
If a dominant player (Amazon, Apple) blacklists you, it is not a drop of water, it is a devastating tsunami.
It is rational to concentrate on tsunamis and ignore mere drops.
It is censorship. We give it a different name as we recognize its value from keeping low value posts at bay. Posts, however, are not books. Different rules apply.
They can stop printing. But it is hard for me to defend Amazon, Ebay, et al with 'they can do what they want on their platform'.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that owning these books should be made illegal though. I am most certainly against that. But if eBay doesn't want their marketplace to be associated with transactions of content they deem inappropriate to their brand, I don't see any reason to force them to do so.
If your argument is that eBay and Amazon are so critical to the fabric of the internet that special rules must apply to them, I wholeheartedly disagree.
They aren't critical to the fabric of the Internet, but they are critical to the online retail sector, which is arguably as important today as railways were in 1900. Its weight has only grown during the pandemic which shuttered their real-world competitors.
I don't have a real proposal in mind and like you I do not think Amazon or Ebay are critical to the stability of the internet.
I do think, however, that the current situation is no longer acceptable. I don't know whether as a society we should consider some sort of limit on influence a given company has, but that is actually what is needed. If Ebay was a corner store, I would not give half a shit that it stopped carrying Seuss. When a publicly traded company does it, it quickly becomes problematic.
They're a publically traded monopoly marketplace with special legal protection from being sued. I would be fine with them being forced to act like what they pretend to be- a commons, a market.
The freedom of a giant, monopolistic company is not aligned with the freedom of humans.
We already have precedents for conpanies being forced to impartiality- utilities. Ebay's a utility, the modern large-scale version of the ground a flea market sits on.
>So is it also censorship that certain posts are flagged and moderated on HN?
Yes, it is a form of censorship. It is completely legal. people can still have an opinion if HN should engage in censorship, and if the criteria are appropriate.
>Should we force them to print more of these books?
My opinion that they should, and the guidelines used to censor posts are reasonable. All the censorship I have seen has been to stop flamebait. I have had comments removed and in hindsight, respect the reason. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future.
Similarly, I think that eBay's actions are paternalistic, heavy handed, and part of a trend I do not support. I would encourage others who feel this way to let ebay know.
A store, yes. But when a store is as big as eBay they should only interfere very sparingly, preferably only to remove illegal products. Do you trust eBay to judge what is right and what is wrong for you? I sure as hell don't.
The question above can be modified to make it reflect the current argument more accurately to: should HN censor all earlier posts and comments, based on the most recent changes in sensitivities?
After Charlottesville, the AHA put out a statement making it clear that removing confederate statues from public view was absolutely not “erasing history”. Nobody listened to them. People just kept going on about the left erasing the past. This made it clear that this was just a culture war rather than honest concern.
If you are worried about erasing the past, get the opinion of some historians.
Erasing the past is not the main concern here. We all know history is written by the victors.
What worries me is the voluntary whitewashing and consequent suppression of alternative media by companies whose judgement is solely based on PR.
A publisher choosing not to reprint works that contain questionable content is completely understandable and well within their right. Nobody is arguing they have to print these books. But when the biggest open marketplaces begin to decide what is allowed for resale, that is something else entirely.
It's a slippery slope to let public outcry determine what is easily available and what is not.
Ah, yes, "freedom of speech", the concept invented in the USA that only has one authoritative definition in the US Constitution. /s
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.
You sound like an old minister in the sixties. So afraid your life and traditions will change. "It's good that people are waking up" and "If enough people push back against this craziness it would stop". But the fact of life is: nothing is stable and everything moves. Panta Rei my friend.
I don't know any culture that banned books independent of their content that people didn't regret in the future.
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.
I've read a few older books with my kids that contained mildly questionable things, like a boy saying that girls can't do certain things, but I much prefer having that awkward conversation about how things used to be, over tossing it all out and pretending things were never any different.
So true. I enjoy discussing parenting articles with our 8 year old.
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.
Not to mention we were all raised that way. It’s always a part of parenting and passing on culture. Pretending otherwise is abdicating necessary responsibility.
As someone once said about the controversy surrounding Mark Twain's books: "so there weren't any n** back then?"
Meaning that reprinting his books and replacing the n word with the more neutral "slave" risks whitewashing the terrible suffering that black slaves endured.
I agree with certain phrases and words. Sometimes I can replace them on the fly with alternatives. At the end, there is only so much you can explain and when I read a bedtime story I seriously don't want to start explaining about colonialism.
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.
The problem is not all parents have that discussion with their kids. But those explanations can also be added to a story so that kids can understand them. I don't think it would've destroyed Seuss' legacy to change a handful of illustrations in some of his books.
Germany here, we banned Mein Kampf from being sold (used copyright law to do that). I once stood in a book shop (teenager, time to look at books but not enough money to buy them) and some skindheads wanted to buy it, it wasn't available. They went away.
Providing context is good, but frankly also really difficult and why not just provide newer childrens books that are more inclusive.
Upvoted you to counter the downvotes since this actually does add to the discussion.
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.
Lots of non-preachers read the Bible. Less people read mein Kampf but I know of some (some friends at school, some teachers at uni, some people on YouTube). I think Dr. Seuss was a bit of a symbol before, but now is definitely a symbol. I don't think your distinction here is very clean and your comment is elitist.
How is Dr. Seuss a symbol comparable to this? The stories themselves aren't even offensive (apart from one line in "If I ran the Zoo"). Are the illustrations alone enough to be a symbol?
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.
> There were different reactions to WWII. The most helpful one is "Never again."
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.
I don't quite think that's the lesson intended here.
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.
I thought your comment was elitist for a few reasons. The most important is the way you portray "people" (the common man or woman is my inference of what you are talking about). You say "People remember only simple things, and like simple reasoning and solutions, which is what made him popular in the first place." I also object to your comment because I don't think this is a valid way to use hyperbole, if that is what you want to call it, since you aren't so much exaggerating as just saying things without a basis in fact. The Bible is probably the most read book in the world, or at least close. In vast swathes of the US, a large percentage or even most people read it consistently and even structure their lives around discussing it. Worldwide, there are over 2 billion Christians (focusing on just one religion) and a lot of these people are reading the bible, not just using it as posturing, signaling or ornamentation as you seem to imply. Mein Kampf has been widely read, and was a bestseller as recently as 2017 (in Germany!). While some no doubt use this as a symbol or ornament, it would be striking to me if a lot of people weren't reading at least part of it in all parts of the world, including the US. Still, despite being completely confused by your first paragraph, I mostly agree with your conclusion that coming after this book will just have the opposite effect and that it would be better to focus on actual crimes/other problems. I would want the poster from Germany to know that millions of Americans read the Bible and probably Mein Kampf, that this mostly goes fine, and that while some Americans might like a more German approach, a very large number probably don't want hardly any books banned or even made difficult to get and that this concept of free speech is very deeply held. If you're American, I think free speech is especially important right now because we all need to be talking with each other. The first paragraph in your comment also gave me the impression you might be out of touch with a very large portion of Americans, but I may be overstepping there.
My comment about "people" actually wasn't the hyperbole part; The "nobody" statements were the hyperbole.
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.
> My comment about "people" actually wasn't the hyperbole part; The "nobody" statements were the hyperbole.
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.
> nobody actually reads the Bible unless they're actual preachers
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.
Orwell read Mein Kampf, he took it to Spain too. I've met people who have read the Bible, because it is the book of their religion. And I've met people who read the Bible and concluded that Christianity is hogwash because they read it.
>(just like nobody actually reads the Bible unless they're actual preachers)
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.
> Nobody actually reads Mein Kampf ... 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.
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.
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.
you know, my great aunt found the book in her attic (it was a gift for her wedding at the time and then it got stowed away quickly when the allies took control).
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.
> just like nobody actually reads the Bible unless they're actual preachers
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.
The entire history of Western literature and culture has been shaped by the Bible. Legal systems, literature, ethics, on and on. For nearly two thousand years. Plenty of people that aren't preachers read and study it intensely. It was the impetus for developing the printing press and for literacy in general. Most modern European languages are based on initial translations of the Bible. Its influence is so pervasive that it's virtually impossible to imagine the modern world without it.
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.
Germany, the country, never banned the book. Instead the right owner, the state of Bavaria, decided to stop its distribution (until 2016 when the copyright expired and a commented version has been published).
> Germany here, we banned Mein Kampf from being sold (used copyright law to do that).
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.
I really wanna buy that to see what exactly Mister A.H. had in his mind. I just wonder if me ordering it puts me on some sort of blacklist... (half /s)
It's really not worth your time and effort, he was a terrible writer. It's 700+ pages of a mix of boring memories and complains about everything, with plain racism and antisemitism throughout.
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).
I definitely wanted to read it because of the "rebellious, banned book too dangerous for people to read" aura, and to get a bit of insight.
Not trying to be too kind to him, but I assume A.H. was in some ways smart, so I wanted to get a glimpse of this side. But if it's just plain racism and antisemitism I guess I can skip it or read a summarization.
I'm probably already on some list for trying to order psychedelic mushrooms online and getting caught by customs. Who would've thought that ordering drugs over the clearnet, paying with my personal bank account and sending it to my real address is a bad idea.
That's true. I looked it up after writing my comment and saw that it's described as a book with critical commments. Don't think an actual nazi would like to read criticism about great daddy Hitler.
Who are you delegating the responsibility to for deciding what you should and should not be allowed to read?
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.
I am not sure that banning of Mein Kampf has a long-term benefit. If it has not been banned it would likely fade into obscurity instead of becoming a symbol.
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.
Nazi and hardcore communist propaganda have appeal to lost people, who have no place in the world, and usually are surrounded by other sources of bad influence. Is the same with people who are attracted to be part of street gangs, and other stuff like that. They are already part of a broken family, and community to end up with this kind of behaviour.
I remember thru hiking on the AT and finding tracts distributed by a local quasi-cult. It was astonishing to see how they seemed to know exactly what I was thinking about the shallowness and consumerism of society, things like that.
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.
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.
Germany here, we banned Mein Kampf from being sold
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.
It was not on sale until 2016 because Bavaria refused to publish it. When the copyright expired, they published a commented version. And as far as I know, that version is in free circulation. Using it to preach would be a potential crime so.
I'm a Turkish immigrant in Germany. I've read that book in a country it wasn't banned and I didn't turn out to be a neonazi (Yeah, Turkish "neonazis" who don't like Kurds and Syrians is a thing, unfortunately). It actually helped me fortify my arguments against them. That's why I also used to read many extreme right-wing sites, before they were all erased from the surface of the internet (and I refuse to go "deep").
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.
I replied to a comment that said that all book-bans are would be evaluated to be harmful/negative in retrospect. I don't think that this general statement is true and brought up the ban of Mein Kampf as a counterexample.
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.
I mean, we still have it with AfD, no? I think it's a given that some portion of the population will support fascist parties. IMHO, how much total support they achieve has little to do with the books people can read, but much to do with socioeconomic balances (global and national).
Banning one book is of course not a guarantee and parties like the AfD do become popular not for a monocausal event...
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.
I think people really need to realise that this isn't some kind of paradox or contradiction, it's actually consistent. These are the same people who are trying to repeal anti-discrimination legislation because it stands in the way of their agendas. They're undoing decades of actual progress.
I don't agree; I think this is basically a case of different people trying to do different things. There's one longstanding and well-organized interest group promoting the idea that blacks shouldn't be treated badly just because they're black. That group's goals are advanced by making people read To Kill a Mockingbird.
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.
I agree with benlumen. I think there is a group which is trying very hard to redefine what racism means, in order to advance a different ideology. It seems to be working, at least in America.
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.
MLK’s philosophy was not color blindness. This is just what people hear if they listen to one line from one speech from his entire career.
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”.
Sure, but that's not important to the point I'm making. If you asked almost everybody even two years ago what "racism" or "anti-racism" meant, and what Atticus Finch stood for, you would have gotten some version of "colour blindness" and probably some reference to MLK, because that one speech is what they consider the best expression of the view. Whatever else MLK said is irrelevant - it's about the specific idea that most people associated with anti-racism.
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.
Of course it is important. Because it is moral justification for why "color blindness" is morally superior to alternatives pushed by a subset of anti-racists. By referencing MLK, a figure often revered as a moral compass, your post presents anti-racists as a corrupted extension of the valid work done in the 60s.
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.
The point was not that modern anti-racists are wrong because they disagreed with MLK on some topics, it was that they are wrong because they completely reject colour blindness, of which MLK’s famous statements are one well-known example. Perhaps I should have picked a different person or just not mentioned him.
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.
No, it was already very well accepted that you shouldn’t throw white people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. It was not well accepted if the accused was black. The challenge was to persuade people (many of whom were racists) to see the accused man as equal to a white man before the law, and deserving of the same treatment as a white man would have received. In other words, to persuade people to be blind to his colour in their assessment of the case.
There are plenty of novels about defending people against crimes they didn’t commit. This one is about much more than that.
> it was already very well accepted that you shouldn’t throw white people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit.
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.
The whole point of the story is that he is black and gets treated unfairly (accused of a crime) because of that. It’s fundamentally about the racial discrimination that was rife at the time.
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.
> 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 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.
I think there is a good reason why people who consider themselves anti-racists think we should see race in many places, and why they think 'color-blindness' is not enough.
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.
Is an Asian child who is born poor less deserving of help than a black child who is born poor? If so, why? If not, why not?
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?
I believe that society remains biased against black people and as such, if we have limited resources to help people escape poverty then they should disproportionately be used to support poor black people.
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 is that fair to the child of Cambodian refugees whose entire families were murdered, and who started from less than nothing in America? “Sorry, your skin isn’t as dark as Oprah’s so she’s more deserving”?
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.
The difference between colour blindness (equality before the law) and your examples is that your examples are not mutually exclusive. You can save the rainforest and the arctic at the same time. You cannot give the final scholarship place to both the Cambodian and the African American. Whatever you give to one is taken from the other, and it cannot be any other way.
Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that you should not take action to help one disadvantaged group if that action excludes a different disadvantaged group. Is that a fair summary of your point?
Do you think this applies to all disadvantaged groups, or just when discussing issues of race?
> 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.
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.
Mild point of clarification here. In most recent times, To Kill a Mockingbird wasnt “banned” so much as removed from classroom curricula. Many places that removed it didn’t pull it from the library. Likewise, many public schools have bibles and other non-required reading in the library.
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.
The word you are referring to is nigger. It’s a bad word that can be very offensive. It’s horrible to use it in a derogatory way, but I feel that it’s ridiculous in at least halfway intelligent conversation no one white even dare ever write it, let alone say it.
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.
There are two things I can't quite comprehend as someone who's not from the US.
* 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.
As far as I can tell, the only case where "cultural appropriation" is legitimately bad, is when people turn another culture's symbols of accomplishment into a fashion accessory. This is the case with the Native American headdress, where every feather represents a milestone or accomplishment, and Maori life tattoos, where every tattoo represents an event out of that person's own life. Turning that into your own fashion statement without any respect for the cultural meaning, is like wearing a Purple Heart you didn't earn, except that that purple heart doesn't have the same spiritual/cultural meaning.
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.
Exactly, I just noticed that the line of what's right and what's wrong is pretty fluid on Twitter. See some people get called out even just for eating food which isn't from their culture. Or a girl wearing an oriental dress to prom while being white. Just all things which seem to be Pro-[Insert Culture].
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....
Dreadlocks are quite interesting in this regard. If you were to consider them as having specific religious/cultural value, then they'd be specific not so much to black people, but either to Rastafarians, or to any adherent of an Abrahamic religion who has taken the Nazarite Vow, which is associated with the biblical figure Samson, and means you don't cut your hair, and abstain from alcohol and contact with corpses, and possibly a few other things.
But knotting into dreadlocks is also something that hair just does naturally if you don't comb it.
That's also a good point. Some just look at specific times in history when something was exclusive to a culture, ignoring that earlier or at the same time other cultures had the same things.
Same boat as you. I would call myself a socialist, or at least on the very left spectrum. Put an LGBTQI+ flag on my balcony to show support, try to talk to people about BLM issues in my country etc.
But cultural appropriation is really something I don't understand/can't get behind...
> 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?
I think cultural appropriation contains two elements. One is the concern about Western colonailism, which I can't address because it gets into critical race theory and that's a huge subject I don't completely follow.
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.
I don’t need to go point by point, but just know that you get it exactly. It’s exactly here what it seems there. It only “makes sense” to a specific subgroup of people with a specific intention.
> Why exactly the n-word is exclusive to black people.
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 :)
Want to bet that scene would be entirely different today with Chan taking a sensitivity class instead of smashing up a black business and beating the crap out of black people who attacked him for his innocent but now “problematic” cultural mistake?
“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”
In the U.S. "Banned Books Week" has existed since 1982 to commemorate books that someone tried to prevent the public, or students, from accessing in a particular place.
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.
I think, the social mechanics of this process is very simple. Ability to tell others what to do is called power. Some people are more power-hungry than others, so they seek ways to assert themselves over others. That's a perfectly normal human thing to do. What matters is the way you would achieve power in a society. Getting power through building up your name as a notable researcher or author is one thing. Playing favor games with others in power is another one.
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...
> Entire fucking history of USSR is littered with different power-hungry people using noble goals to chop their competitors' heads off.
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.
>Maybe it'll all fade away? I hope so. Previous washes of political correctness have come and gone.
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.
One of the authors of the "academic" papers which sparked this cancellation is on the board of a nonprofit that makes political children's books.
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.
What is this random use of German? In any case, an Aufhebung has strong philosophical connotation that implies the process of synthesis -- so you're in luck, negation never fully destroys the thing it negates, it simply supersedes it.
> a power-hungry person can have the pleasure of telling 1000 other people what to say, and financially obliterate those who don't comply
> 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.
In reality, if you try doing that, the movement will get spearheaded by a small group of cronies that will use it as an excuse to get rid of competition. I bet you can't be very power-hungry in North Korea unless you are a part of the ruling family.
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.
>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."
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:
[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.
Conjugal visits. Reproduce before going to prison. Reproduce after prison. Reproduce while on parole.
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.
I would add that "politics" is all about seizing and exerting power over other people's lives. And a small minority of people can seize the power if they are smart enough, even in a democracy, because the majority of people are apathetic with respect to politics and do not envision the stakes, so it is possible to win them over through propaganda and misinformation.
What bothers me is the speed with which this process - "accused -> convinced -> executed" happens. We are not discussing things anymore. Today, you could tweet any accusations, and, no matter how ridiculous they look at first, it will lead to a race of who is taking them most seriously. Something definitely is broken. Look at what happened to the "okay". 4chan forced that meme 5 years ago in what they thought is a mischievous parody of ridiculousness of the cancel culture, and recently I watched CNL where the audience gasped in disbelief when one of the sketches included "o"-word. 5 years only, and most common (almost used "o"-word, sorry) sign became a synonym of hatred and racism. And now, Dr. Seuss. What's next, someone will tweet the act of breathing is racist? Do you really think it's impossible?
That's not what happened. This decision has actually been in the works for a while and involved a lot of discussion.
> 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
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
This is ridiculous. Historians should be allowed to freely read original, non-critically annotated, historical documents. Otherwise they cannot do their job.
There's no special "historian card" that you need to show to access sources. Everybody has the right to study history on their own, and I guess the world would be a much better place if many of us did.
> Everybody has the right to study history on their own, and I guess the world would be a much better place if many of us did.
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.
Doing history is original analysis and narrative. The point here is to meaningfully explain the difference between what a history undergrad is doing and what a professional historian is doing.
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.
N=1, but yes, surprisingly often. The one I know buys a lot of old books from people online to keep in their home library and has on occasion actually found some very rare items that people selling them simply don't know the rarity of. I've heard of at least one such find end up on display in a museum (incidentally, also a children's book, but probably not Seuss). And it's not just historians who have a use for unaltered source material.
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.
Fair enough, but if you're a historian wiring a book about Hitler, you'll probably want a copy of Mein Kampf that you can take home either way, even if you'll still refer to the archive to double-check direct citations. And if their only option are the archived version because no unaltered copies exist on the 2nd-hand market, that's a pretty high barrier to entry.
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 would be pretty surprised if it becomes impossible for a historian using these six books as primary sources to get long-term access to the original material. This can be a little more difficult with family archives since family archives do tend to paper over the colorful stuff in their history, but if people are truly concerned here about family archives limiting access to unsavory parts of their history for historians (which I don't believe is the reason for this outrage) then there's centuries of other examples to complain about.
My wife is a historian. We've got hundreds and hundreds of books at home. Exactly zero ebay purchases. Among her colleagues, I'd bet that none of them have ever purchased a primary source on ebay.
And they're welcome to read those at the library or other sources - eBay, as a company, is under no obligation to facilitate dissemination of historical documents.
I thought that ebay was just a website where people could sell their historical documents to each other. Ebay does not "disseminate" the things that people send to each other. Heck, it doesn't even deal with the delivery! It just processes the payments. Why are they willing to engage in editorializing stuff that they don't even see? It makes no sense.
Ebay is a company, not a website, and company policies specify which products can be listed by their users. It's not neutral, you're being deliberately obtuse here.
This is misleading and approaching a lie. eBay only allows critically-annotated copies of Mein Kampf which are designed for scholars. I am sure that a copy of “If I Ran The Zoo” with a sociologist critically annotating the abhorrent racism would be permitted on eBay.
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.
> eBay only allows critically-annotated copies of Mein Kampf which are designed for scholars. I am sure that a copy of “If I Ran The Zoo” with a sociologist critically annotating the abhorrent racism would be permitted on eBay.
This seems worse than an outright ban on all copies.
Communist Manifesto and Lenin's books are allowed without any comments though. There are books by actual terrorists too, like Bill Ayers. Books advocating for segregation. One can go on.
Exactly. Why do those books get a pass? They encourage readers to do abhorrent things such as keep slaves and behead nonbelievers. If we're going to censor books because they cause people to hate others, then major religious texts should be first in line. The fact that censors don't go after these books is evidence that their actual goals differ from their claimed goals.
Despite HN regulations I am aware that you are arguing in bad faith and don’t care at all about the facts of the case. But I think it’s important to get the facts out there for other people.
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.
It would probably trigger more debate if the link you referred to actually explained this thesis more convincingly rather than focus on the often deplorable language.
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.
Ok if you think eBay should ban more books then go tell them that!
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.
The issue is that they are not just removing racist or hateful content according to some kind of standard. They are going after hot topics of the day, whatever it happens to be.
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.
Nobody's arguing that, so I'm not sure why anyone would need to defend a position they don't have. "I can't buy an uncommented copy of Mein Kampf from eBay" isn't the same thing as "I'm not allowed to read an uncommented copy of Mein Kampf", the latter isn't true.
There is absolute no chance that these radicals will not come for Shakespeare eventually. Their aim is to destroy the Western canon so they can replace it with their own propaganda: Shakespeare is too high-value a target for them to ignore.
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.
We're not talking about Dr. Seuss Enterprises though. We're talking about eBay (and soon booksellers and libraries) banning books. Also a few schools outright disavowing Dr. Seuss all together. eBay is currently selling hundreds of other items with more shocking imagery than this, so there is also some weird signaling going on here. Oh I get it, this time around the book bans are probably justified. But you don't need to be an alarmist or conspiracy theorist to want to be just a little more cautious with this kind of stuff. You can also support removing racist images and still worry about setting a dangerous precedent.
Consensus on HN questions commenters' accusation that accusations have been made. I have been corrected. Marketplaces follow creators' wishes to destroy secondary sales of materials deemed hateful. Society allows this via centuries of discussion.
Accusation is a term of conflict. Terms of service changes are decisive outcomes of compassion.
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.
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).
It's 6 of Dr. Seuss's books, and ones that most people haven't heard of. If you actually look at the content of the books, they are clearly racist and demeaning to those they make caricatures of.
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.
The problem is that you call it "clearly racist". If that is so clear why it took months to decide? In reality it's not that clear and you know it. You just moved a goalpost a little to include something that yesterday nobody complained about to become "clearly racist". And tomorrow will be something else.
Do you think they spent months deciding whether the works were racist?
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".
I quickly read through Mulberry Street a few minutes ago, and there is a depiction of a Chinese man "eating with sticks." He is wearing sandals, a straw hat, a robe, and holding chop sticks. His facial features are not exaggerated or like a caricature in any way. To me, it's clearly a mistake.
According to this article [1] you may have read the updated version.
> 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."
Look at the pictures in the relevant books and ask yourself if you would want a Black child to see themselves in those images. Ask yourself if Dr Seuss would. No one is outraged, the world just moves on.
If there is no outrage, then you wouldn’t mind if those books continue to be bought and read to children and stocked in libraries. A reasonable outward rhetorical demeanor is not what is in question.
Idk, you're the one deciding to be outraged by an authors children following through on a decision they made last year to stop printing a selection of their father's work. Are you tired of it yet?
Are you all misinterpreting my comment? Yes I think it's silly people are getting outraged over them deciding to stop printing the books. Seems like people can't stop being outraged about pointless issues. This is on par with Starbucks Christmas cups drama
Does Seuss state own ebay?Do they have a constitutional mandate to stop selling of private copies to be sold between 2 private individuals? Are you going to order Fanta, Volkswagen,Bayern,BASF, Ford and Hugo Boss products to be delisted because they were literally associated with the Nazis?
The speed is part of the point. What better way to signal that you're part of the woke agenda than to be one of the first movers only a few days after the publisher made their announcement? It's like all the sycophants tripping over themselves to be the first to compliment their dear leader.
Yeah I was sad about that guy at a theme park that got fired for making an OK sign in a family's photo. Its like everyone forgot about the circle game, "the game", and went straight for white supremacy racist.
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.
> 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.
a lot of people took the transfer agreement instead of tying their identity to their birth country. don't be like the ones that were married to their country, they got vanned and banned.
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.
You just said it right there. It’s the speed of social media that does this.
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?
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.
It's particularly irksome. There was never any history of "racism" behind the okay gesture and it was a very widely used gesture for decades. It was also a very versatile one - it could mean "everything's okay" in the traditional sense, "yeah, ok, whatever" in a dismissive sense, or turned upside down became the Circle Game where if you were tricked into looking at it you had to immediately break the circle with your index finger or accept a punch to the arm. Then some neckbeards on 4Chan decided to prank people by claiming it was a "white power symbol". Unfortunately, some alt right edgelords then started actually using it as such. Now we find ourselves in the situation you just described where not everyone is aware of this history and people who grew up with it as an innocent symbol use it and find themselves on the wrong end of a Twitter mob.
In a way, it's absolutely hilarious. The fact that people were so outraged by this (which was a bait attempt at a meme a rational person could see a mile away) shows they're willing to be controlled by the very people they hate.
> 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.
>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.
"Overnight". Swastikas and salutes become appropriated by the Nazis, and suddenly the pledge of allegiance in America became a hand over heart, instead of the Bellamy salute. Do you think that was wrong too?
There have been no accusations, no one has been executed, and if you see which books have been pulled and why, you'll see that the matter is pretty reasonable, far from ridiculous and almost obvious. It is you who are taking things out of proportion with this War on Christmas nonsense.
Your language seems needlessly hyperbolic to me. A handful of fairly obscure Dr. Seuss books are going to be harder to buy. It's not like Cat in the Hat is #cancelled or anything.
This is an "execution"?
Maybe try using language proportionate to the offence here.
It's weird that these books got pulled from circulation in the first place; the offensiveness is relatively mild (especially for the time), and quite a few of these have historical and literary significance (including the very first children's book published under the "Dr. Seuss" pen name).
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?
I really miss the anti-copyright radicalism that used to suffuse hacker culture in the early naughts. The Seuss estate should have the same power to limit publication of these books as Shakespeare’s heirs would have to stop publication of the Merchant of Venice.
And if that sounds like it’s going to far can they at least have no say in the right to resale?
> eBay deciding unilaterally that people can't buy or sell already-printed copies
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
I agree with you that it's a little weird that eBay has decided to draw the line there, but you might give a second thought to what constitutes "relatively mild offensiveness".
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?
As someone with an Asian background, it's not offensive at all, and I can't think of an Asian person who would find it offensive.
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.
I care. Nearly every kid in middle school watched simpsons except me (my parents said it was bad, I had no idea why at the time), and every day I would have to deal with the same Apu jokes and stale imitated accents. At the time, I didn't even know what it was a reference to, and I just took it as kids being kids. But when I grew up, I realized that all that bullshit was pretty much just because of this one character. And I don't want any Indian-American kid to ever have to deal with that stuff again. Its about education and making sure there are real depictions of Indians on screen (not played by other races), not just outright banning media.
> 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.
I know dang likes to tell us that Hacker News turning into Reddit is an illusion, but sometimes it really does turn into Reddit. Like this comment, right now.
In the interest of good HN commenting spirit I'll assume good faith on GP and elaborate on my snarky post. I'm sure that many people are tired of comedian's incessant refrain of the importance of "punching up." It's pretentious and tired, but before that the tired phrases were "I just want to make people laugh" and "I make fun of everyone equally." GP's first ethnic group cited were the Scots, so let's go there in the context of North America. Depending on your view, Scottish people are either part of or closely related to the dominant ethnic and racial group. They are not recent immigrants and share language, accent and given names with the majority of the population. By contrast (and especially in the 90s when the Simpsons enjoyed its prime) South Asian immigrants are a visibly different recent minority ethnic group. They have distinct languages, accents and generally don't use western given names for their children. So the Groundskeeper Willie/Scottsman argument is creating a false sense of fairness. To make a tired youth reference, making fun of the grunge kid with the long hair and the weird pale kid with the sweatpants and long fingernails aren't the same thing.
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.
I don’t support hank azaria voicing the character, and i believe an indian writer should be deciding what apu says. I’m not saying things should be cancelled, we just want representation. You can make fun of cultures and people, but just recognize when jokes are having a negative impact on their targets in the real world. it’s incredibly disheartening that so many other problematic representations and things like yellowface are being addressed, but apparently nobody cares about this.
> and i believe an indian writer should be deciding what apu says
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?
I understand Hank as saying there that there ought to be south Asian voices in the writers room, not that they should have complete control over what Apu says.
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.
Because many prominent Indian-Americans share a similar opinion. Vivek Murthy (previous/future surgeon general), Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, were all in the film and have had similar experiences to mine. Most famous Indian Americans have in fact spoken out about it, and we do care, unlike 'the indians you know' who you implied had the opinion of most of us.
The problem wasn’t Apu or if he was played by a white actor or not, if he didn’t exist the kids would have made fun of you for anything that made you stand out. Skin, what shoes you wore, what you brought home for lunch, do you like a girl, or heaven forbid a boy (back in the day). Kids are vicious.
adults have done it too, including some teachers. people think it’s cool to do because they heard it on the Simpsons. not much stood out, we had uniforms. you get made fun of for the most fundamental and unchanging identity, your race. It absolutely destroyed my self worth at the time, and made me embarrassed of my skin color, and I know that others experienced the same thing.
I had a similar experience in middle school (many “thank you come again” comments), but the conclusion I’ve drawn was that it was due to Apu being the only Indian-American character middle schoolers saw on TV at the time. If there were others (and there are now), the Apu/color-of-my-skin association wouldn’t have been so strong.
I think that's something many people miss in these discussions. Bad/negative/stereotyped portrayals are one thing - those being the only ones is another.
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.
As someone with an Asian background, you should go read some of Seuss' newspaper comics where he argues for Japanese internment, and then look at that picture again in that context
That seems like confirmation bias. The book was published before WW2, and the white people in that picture look just as ridiculous and caricatured as the Asian, with dots for eyes and absurd costumes and postures.
It’s clear as an Asian person you need the insights of white people to determine what you should/shouldn’t be offended about in the depiction of your own race.
I'm of Chinese descent. I'm much, more more offended by progressives clamoring to take away educational and job opportunities away from Asians because we're "overrepresented minorities" (as if we hadn't earned our place through hard work and education) and then making a mountain out of a molehill like this to pretend that they are actually concerned about Asians as minorities. Compared to two-facedness of that degree, Dr. Seuss's little cartoon doesn't register at all.
None of the white people are presented in exaggerated, outdated costumes. It exaggerates the slanted eyes, the queue, and (in some editions) the bright yellow color.
Compare it to some of the deliberately-racist cartoons that Giesel drew during World War II:
But it's all white people getting offended at it, and specifically it's white people who never give a shit about Chinese in any of their other culture wars.
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.
And you know the depicted individual is wearing a queue... how, exactly? There's no hair depicted at all from what I can tell.
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.
How out of date was the outfit in the 1930s when the picture was drawn? I don't really know what terms to look up to research that myself so any suggestions would be appreciated.
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.
> "How out of date was the outfit in the 1930s when the picture was drawn?"
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".)
> It's kind of a stereotype of rural farmers in China.
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.
And honestly, it's not about that. It's about how Americans present the Chinese to each other. We have a history of abusing minorities, and one of the ways we do that is through presenting demeaning images of them.
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.
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.
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.
Because most people disagree this is racist, but the opinion of the plebs is ignored and the deplatformings happen anyway without having a conversation first. Of course this was going to happen.
> eBay deciding unilaterally that people can't buy or sell already-printed copies
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.
My parent's objection was that eBay was a monopoly, and as the only place to buy or sell used books they should face higher scrutiny. I pointed out that Amazon is a serious competitor of theirs; eBay is far from the only place for used book selling.
> Well I guess I’ll just go and buy my copy at the other well known online auction site…
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.)
I just bought a bunch of Dr. Seuss books because honestly I’ve never seen them before, never read them as a child, but now I’m deeply curious to find out what is in them
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> Conservatives wouldn't complain if private companies were censoring and cancelling left-leaning content. They'd be out there defending private property rights and corporate freedom to act. It's transparently political.
I think you are confusing two very different things.
Criticizing Ebay for banning particular books, or AWS for dropping Parlor, or Twitter for banning various conservatives is not in contradiction with the libertarian/conservative idea that private entities should have the freedom to manage their business as they see fit.
Arguing for limited government oversight/power in these situations is orthogonal to criticizing the decisions on their own merits.
It's not in contradiction provided you don't encourage people to storm government buildings on the basis of private entities making their own choices. Which did happen.
Simply that Don Jr criticizing Dr Seuss or eBay for canning books is contradictory to lib/con views on free speech when his base uses such arguments to violently rebel against the government.
Bill Maher made this point, that Republicans have lately tried to appropriate "cancel culture" for being correctly rebuked, while what happens to people with his views is insane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmXTUSP9a9M
I always go into Maher from these recommendations thinking maybe I'll like his point here. Then halfway through I realize I've been duped again. In this case he laments republicans appropriating the term cancel culture, which he insists is a big deal for other reasons. Then at 4:15 he laughs while sarcastically saying "it's always okay when Trump's the nazi" and I'm like, oh okay. I remember how you like to draw people farther to the right while appearing as if you're anti-alt-right.
Yes of course the show is politically biased I just think his supposed thesis does not match the conclusions he draws. It is misleading that he presents himself as a centrist while laughing at those who would criticize the alt right.
Perhaps his thing is he just wants to criticize everyone and get away with it and if that's the case then I don't get what he stands for. Might be how I feel about conservatism in general which increasingly seems to be just anti-everything that would impose rules on the wealthy.
> 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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
...Yes? It seems like the head of a private company should be able to decide how to spend money based on whatever reasoning they want, within the limits of the law. Are you suggesting there should be a law that would have prohibited this behavior somehow? Or just that it was morally wrong?
I'm saying that the Hollywood Blacklist is pretty much universally considered to have been a Bad Thing nowadays, even though, yes, it was perfectly legal.
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.
On re-reading the parent comment above yours, I see they were referring to criticizing things done by private companies that are technically lawful, so that's my bad for not seeing the full context. Legality and morality often get conflated in these sorts of threads so I just wanted to clarify. Although I don't really agree with either the choices behind the Hollywood Blacklist or this current Ebay banning, I believe they should both be able to happen in a free(ish) market.
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.
People just stormed the capitol. It seems appropriate to remind the difference between public and private censorship given those who incited it are amplifying this idea that we're being disenfranchised in both the public and private sectors.
Maybe you are not familiar with eBay's existing policies, but this seems to fall well in line with their prior behavior. From their official policy [1]:
>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.
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.
As others have pointed out in this thread and is seemingly confirmed with a simple search of listings, eBay appears to only allows annotated versions of Mein Kampf which are meant for scholarly work. There is a historic value to those that doesn't exist for a Dr. Seuss book. And as the article points out, books that have a lower degree of historical significance like The Turner Diaries are removed.
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.
That logic just leads to a circular loop in which nothing can ever be banned because meriting a ban immediately makes something worthy of not being banned.
> As others have pointed out in this thread and is seemingly confirmed with a simple search of listings, eBay appears to only allows annotated versions of Mein Kampf which are meant for scholarly work.
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.
>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:
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.
It has to be made clear that this isn't about legality. It's also not about whether this "technically qualifies" as "banning" or "censorship".
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.
Not trying to be snarky but there are I believe more than enough stores happy to sell you whatever you want, even though eBay won't allow these books to be listed.
I'm confused as to how eBay banning the listing of these books materially impacts people from getting them.
I hope this helps the confusion about why people are concerned: It's not about having temporary obstacles right now that are easy to get around, it's about the roadblocks that will be constructed in the future.
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.
I might get angry but I'm fine with the laws that allow them to say it. I'm also fine with the laws that say that eBay can ban whatever products they want from their platform.
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.
I think it's good you're correctly identifying the group actually making the decision, rather than vaguely blaming "Twitter" or even more broad, "cancel culture".
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.
How much further down this path do we have to go before people understand that it's about the principle, not the specific case at hand? It only took two years to go from "it's okay for Big Tech to boot Alex Jones off all their platforms" from "it's okay for Big Tech to decide which books we're allowed to read to our children". How much more power are we going to let these private enterprises accumulate? Where is this leading?
> It only took two years to go from "it's okay for Big Tech to boot Alex Jones off all their platforms" from "it's okay for Big Tech to decide which books we're allowed to read to our children". How much more power are we going to let these private enterprises accumulate?
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.
Why are you OK with one of the world's largest marketplaces banning children's books while also allowing the sale of stuff like the Anarchist's Cookbook and all the ingredients to make a nail bomb?
A bit off-topic, but I use Green Eggs and Ham to help teach my friends English here in Asia.
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.
> It works pretty well, since there is quite a limited vocabulary.
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.
Children's literature is undervalued by second-language learners. It will expose you to common language and vocabulary items that are, in a formal academic context, those you would be the least likely to encounter. (I can read an article in French usually without needing the dictionary on topics as diverse as cryptography and art history, but I don't know the words for some common kitchen utensils.)
They're not racist - they're books with caricatures of any number of cultures, including Western cultures. It's possible people could be offended, but they're not any more offensive than any creative depiction of anything (Edit: poor choice of words there - they are more offensive than 'anything' but not more so than many things). All of Disney's films, even the most modern one's are caricatured articulations of cultures. If Alladin is not racist, neither is Dr. Seuss.
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.
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.
I don't understand your point. Aladdin is mildly offensive, so it's ok that Dr. Seuss was really offensive? I have those books, and the drawings in them are straight up offensive, for all individuals that are not white.
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.
They're not just cartoons. They're caricatures associated with racist tropes, which have been used in conjunction with discrimination and even violence. The African pictures in particular look like minstrel shows, which were deliberately intended to demean black people in America.
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.
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.
Nitpicking and a pet-peeve but Elon Musk is an African-American.
You probably mean "black". They are not from Africa simply because they are black and for clarity we should stop being politically correct (especially when critical-race theory is so keen on language defining reality)
Sure, anyone can read the books. Just buy them. You just have to open your own bookstore, your own rental operation for the building its in and your own payment processor. Also your own supplier, publisher and hosting provider for the company website residing in your own datacenter wired up by your own isp. Noone can claim he's being censored, it's not the government after all ;)
> Does this means cartoon caricatures are only acceptable if they are of white westerners?
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.
> 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 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:
I watched The Simpsons religiously growing up and I never realised Mayor Quimby is supposed to be an Irish immigrant. Where is that established? He doesn't have an Irish accent.
Not only whites can be racist. Any race in power, anywhere, becomes the new "white man" when powers are tipped. There is nothing fundamental to your skin color: all of us bear the seeds of our future cruelty. And until we address desire and deconstitute it atom by atom, none of us will ever be free.
I don't understand the need for the "in power" qualification. It specifically is saying that discrimination based on race is not racist unless they are the majority.
So does this mean that if an asian man murders a black man, specifically because he is black, that this is not racism?
Some people call any discrimination discrimination and systemic discrimination racism. Some people call any discrimination racism and don't talk much about systemic discrimination.
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.
I don't understand the need for the "in power" qualification. It specifically is saying that discrimination based on race is not racist unless they are the majority.
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".
Why do people always get tripped up on this. Racism is institutional and prejudice is personal. No one is saying an arbitrary person can't be prejudiced - ask the right people and you'll get an earful about how prejudiced x ethnicity is against y ethnicity. But a powerless group can't be racist because they don't control any institutions; for example there's no coordinated group of black landlords that don't rent to Asians. Would there exist such a thing if there were enough black landlords? Maybe. No one is denying that anyone can be cruel and hateful. What people do deny is that certain ethnicities have the same means to enact that cruelty. Again I don't see how this isn't manifestly obviously true.
Yes, I'm asking you to repeat it because what you're saying is absolutely insane and completely detached from the rest of the world. You might check the definition other people around you are using, I'll even give you a handy link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
"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.
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.
You characterized the position of the other poster as "absolutely insane and completely detached from the rest of the world". Yet their view is at least supported by some scholars in academia and I'll also add is the majority viewpoint in my social circles and most of the academics and authors I read.
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.
Well, I can say for sure that the classical interpretation is the official corriculum in school in germany, finland, france, england, russia , austria, switzerland, poland, slovakia and denmark. Those are all countries I know people in to discuss such matters. Since the whole population of those countries (and probably a lot more) has learned the regular meaning of the word, I'd say they are probably more than some group of scholars who really like their theory.
But you still haven't made a case for "the regular meaning" of racism, such that it makes what the other poster said "absolutely insane". To me, "absolutely insane" is a very extreme thing to say. The absolute insanity I've experienced in the past is on the level of believing your cats are microchipped by the CIA to spy on you. So when you characterize someone as "absolutely insane", and it's shown that there is credible scholarly research that supports their claim, I think you are under a burden to state your case at a higher level than pointing out you have friends in other countries who believe the same as you. You've made an appeal to popularity by pointing to your friends and making a leap to say everyone thinks like you and them. I also have friends in the above countries who do not think the same as you and your friends. Now where does that leave us? Nowhere.
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.
I'm from one of those countries and while, on one hand, it seems perfectly logical to argue "racism is racism is racism", I think there's a widespread recognition here that it's not as simple as that. If you consider racism as part of the human condition, something that is exhibited by people regardless of their own race, then you must also realise that its impact is far more significant when the majority exhibits it than when the minority does. In that sense there's, if you like, two 'sides' to racism: 'motive' (or 'intent') and effect. The first may be broadly equal across groups of different sizes, but the latter certainly isn't.
>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?
Incorrect. Systemic and institutional racism are systemic, and racism is personal.
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.
Given that qualifier it is atypical that marginalized or minority aren't operative. Does that really pass the threshold in your mind necessary for me to be incorrect in what I'm claiming?
It's hilarious to me that the reactionary position on this (wherein people are quoting dictionary definitions and wiki articles) manifestly hinges on trivialities.
It's also amazing to me when people point to a dictionary definition, they don't seem to consider where that definition comes from. In this case, Google's definitions come from Oxford Languages, which describe their process:
"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."
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.
> 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.
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.
Thank God I have ebay to protect me from reading Doctor Seuss! Now please excuse me while I go bid on a vintage copy of "Charles Manson In His Own Words".
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?
On Beyond Zebra was one of my favorites as a child, one of the first I bought for my own children, and its message makes banning it very sadly ironic. make no mistake - this is a massive loss of american culture.
IDK I think it's quite cowardly if ebay is not willing to be consistent in what they are willing to sell. For example, if they can find a few people that are offended by violent video games, then all violent video games should be taken down from eBay. If I'm offended by the Communist Manifesto then it's time to take all copies of it off the site.
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.
I don't fully understand this move by eBay. They let people sell the books without problem. Then the rights holder withdrew the IP from circulation (their right) and then SUDDENLY and simultaneously eBay arrived at the same conclusion as the rights holder? Like overnight they came to the same realization?
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?
Imagine if Kanye or the estate of Biggie Smalls or Pat Benatar, Springsteen or whoever said, eh, you know I denounce my music. I take it back. Stop playing it. Take it off the radio, internet, boot sales, flea markets, used music stores...
This isn’t even that theoretical. Born again Christian Kanye has expressed regret for some of his older secular music. A lot of Kanye fans live in fear of him suddenly deleting his back catalogue from the streaming services. If the major resellers of physical media start respecting the wishes of rights holders then we’ve really swung the pendulum too far away from open culture and the public domain.
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
It’s bad enough that the company self-cancels the books.
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.
I sat in class while we learnt a carol which included the lines 'even if he's black sir'. It sucked. Not just offensive. To kill a mockingbird is a great book but not suitable for kids in it's current form but I don't think it should be rewritten. This isn't woke, it's decency and kindness.
You can't just go out there and delete history, no matter how bad it was, because you know what happens when you do that? You will end up repeating the past mistakes. The book shows how society was back then, you can't just all of a sudden decide that it didn't exist and somehow put kids in a bubble and hide our past from them.
It isn't about deleting history, it's about not teaching the same thing as was taught in the past. Normalisation of the depiction of racist serotypes in books & media normalises racism. It's subtle but in conversations I've had with PoC, they point out all these subtlies that they notice but were an invisible part of my conditioning growing up.
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.
- 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".
1. I can’t read to my kids what I cannot buy (libraries are closed and my younger kid rips books)
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)
I love reading the Zoo and McElligot's Pool to my kids. I'd love it even more without the offensive illustrations as they don't add anything to the stories. If they'd publish a version with some updated illustrations, I'd buy it immediately. Taking them off the market means I can either use the questionable version or none at all. Not sure this is the desired solution.
> - It's completely within the right of the publisher to not want to profit from these books anymore
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.
The point is to taint Dr Seuss so that he's no longer acceptable as a common cultural reference point, so that ideologues can shoehorn in their own propaganda to children at the youngest possible age. Listen to the latest episode of the New Discoures podcast if you want a full explanation.
Keep in mind that Seuss's early career involved drawing racist WWII propaganda. While he largely reformed in later years, it would be inaccurate to say that some of the content has merely "not aged well"
> The offending content is not really a high risk of perpetrating future malice
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.
eBay has been determining what's too offensive for its platform since the very beginning, as has more or less every other website on the internet, including this one.
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"
I'm just so offended that you would economically harm all the good people working at EBay due to political stances they might not even agree with. People are so reactionary these days. This is the real cancel culture.
No I'm dead serious, you are actually doing the thing you are claiming to prevent. There's a new Red Scare going around and it's costing people their livelihoods. First Ebay canceled, then all American companies, then all of America.
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.
Dude, if US companies want to engage in this woke nonsense, then I quite frankly think they deserve to be cancelled. This country is honestly so pathetic, IMO, in the way that we pretend to be a "free speech" nation and yet in reality live under a woke thought police that has taken over through Twitter. I will eagerly and gladly take my business to Chinese companies, as not only do they stand for more traditional values that I tend to align with, but they are also innovating more rapidly (probably because they just focus on the tech and don't have to worry about every little thing they say).
The same argument was used to stop embargoes against apartheid South Africa...that was somewhat explicable given the poverty of South Africa, using it for a multi-billion tech company. Interesting take.
About 5 years ago a friend of mine was saying, "yeah, it's bad at the universities but it doesn't affect the real world." Pretty funny how quickly things accelerated. I'd like to get off this ride.
This hypersensitivity all started at universities. Eventually those bubble-wrapped students will enter the workforce and eventually will end up in higher positions in HR or PR departments driving those decisions. No surprise there.
Too late. HR has been moving to make us to stop using: blacklist, whitelist, sanity check, and master. It's a frighteningly difficult exercise in doublethink to take a required security course (produced by a third party) that refers to blacklist and whitelist and then having to self censor your own peer discussions about it.
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).
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...
It's weird for me to imagine people who would be outraged about a joke that played on, for example, a racial stereotype, using "It was a joke." as a defence.
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 some jokes can be offensive and other jokes can be not offensive at all. I think that's a subjective call that we all make on a case by case basis.
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.
> I also didn't see _any_ criticism that the pastor's joke was offensive.
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).
While the article's HTML title does claim some were "offended", neither the headline nor the body of the article included the word "offended", or "offense".
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.
I don't know why you think the journalist just made up their conclusion, but here are a few examples of people finding it insulting / offensive:
"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).
> I don't know why you think the journalist just made up their conclusion
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.
> 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.
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.
> “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.”
The AsciiDoc example is an interesting one as I've not seen really any discussion about "whitespace" as offensive and cannot really find anything. Add onto the fact that stuff like wikipedia also still refers to it as whitespace as so it does seem like they're going to define their own term for AsciiDoc that'll be at odds with broader community and just begs for newbie confusion.
“In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
The fact that main is 33% shorter and more descriptive should be argument enough for it to be the new default, regardless of any issues surrounding sensitivity. You should be able to still set the default to whatever you want if xcode is at all sensible.
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.
Your point really underscored how idiotically narrow minded and self absorbed these inquisition-like crusades against racial offense sometimes are. The people conducting them in the English-speaking western world seem to not even realize that their entire framing of "inclusiveness" is based on an amusingly simplistic and even unconsciously hypocritical presumption of all linguistic connotations being beholden to English definitions of things. Especially amusing to see this coming from people who otherwise fixate to an insane degree on signalling their embrace for non-western, non-"privileged" cultural values.
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.
The example you brought up is an interesting one because in English the work Black is the accepted term but in Portuguese the word for the color itself (preto) is the pejorative if used to describe people. So essentially the exact opposite of in English. The Portuguese pejorative is the accepted term in English and the English pejorative is the accepted term in Portuguese.
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.
We had an extensive and wasteful discussion about this at my last company over the summer. It was absurd. The proponents of replacing every word that could potentially be offensive have this superstitious view of language as having inherent power that continues from generation to generation. They really believe that a word can carry traces of evil with it over time. Naturally there's zero science behind this.
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.
I remember a couple decades ago, an "enlightened" fellow college student called one of our British collaborators on a project "African American". Because people around that time started thinking calling someone "black" was offensive.
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.
I understand it's not a very common one and can be kind of confusing. Here's a pretty good definition:
"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.
The etymology of the word has nothing to do with race.[1] There are many uses in the English language where colors are used as descriptors in ways that have nothing to do with race.
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.
> 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).”
The point isn't to proof that these words are bad, the point is that people have already called for banning these words. 5-10 years ago you would have had similarly "bad" sources for banning blacklist et al., and yet here we are.
> 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.
Yes, black vs white is a very old concept. Why do you think europeans started referring to people from africa as black and themselves as white, when they are really more like pink and brown?
Ever notice that purple foods tend to be called either red or blue (or sometimes black if they're dark purple)? Like red cabbage, red onions, red grapes, blue potatoes[1]. Or for that matter how white grapes are green and black walnuts are brown? How black eyes are usually purple?
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.
This is interesting. I plugged them into Google ngram viewer. Whitelist was almost unused until 2000. Blacklist came into use right after the Reconstruction era (may or may not mean anything), but it has two peaks in use: WWI and WWII. I was expecting McCarthyism, but it wasn't as popular as during major wars.
Blacklists's first known usage in English comes from England in the 1600's, specifically referring to a list of people who were involved in the execution of Charles I. Its origin literally has nothing to do with race.
I personally like using “blocklist” instead of “blacklist” but that paper is pretty terrible. It seems more like an opinion piece with a bunch of references to give it authority.
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.
Excuse me but "person" contains "son" in it which is indicative of gendered childhood, and heteronormative reproduction.
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.
What's a terminology to replace 'master' in the case of a 'master list'. I've used 'primary' and 'main', but they both imply the existence of a secondary or other acceptable replacement, which is rarely the case. "Single source of truth" is too cumbersome and often the incorrect context. 'Prime' looks like the best candidate going by synonyms. 'Authoritative' has too many syllables, although gets the point across.
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.
This is why you should support New Hampshire's bill HB 544, currently working its way through the NH legislature, and support similar bills that are nascent in other states (off the top of my head: Oklahoma, Iowa, West Virginia, maybe some others I've missed) and, if you're not in those states, contact your elected representatives and push for a similar bill.
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.
As someone who grew up in the 90's. I do feel a bit "older" and more conservative even though I never considered myself that way. It makes me take a step back and realize that our belief systems tend to stagnate and I can only imagine how radical my college or high school beliefs may have seemed to older folk.
One of many fun things is that most of the politically correct terms at the time ("retarded", "transvestite", "mentally ill" etc) have now become unspeakably offensive.
> One of many fun things is that most of the politically correct terms at the time ("retarded", "transvestite", "mentally ill" etc) have now become unspeakably offensive.
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."
"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.
You're acting like social attitudes have only progressed in one direction in that time.
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 ...
Those that were involved in birthing the current brands of radicalism grew up in the 70s and 60s. They are merely reaping the consequences of those beliefs.
It’s dangerous to complain about this stuff. Was at one place that routinely trashed white males, of which I happened to be. Caught hell when I tried to push back. Sadly this seems like it’s becoming the norm.
"It’s dangerous to complain about this stuff." Yep, I'm Latino but when NYC's law was going to make it a crime to call someone an "illegal immigrant" with a $250K fine I didn't even feel safe speaking out against this bad idea. Because I am in tech and high-income so "what do I know". Despite being slurred this way many years ago by a cop and despite assisting some cousins enter the country illegally and being held by a border agent.
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.
In these situations, malicious and over the top affirmation is the safest and most effective form of critique. See Laibach and NSK on how it’s done. Woke hyperliberalism With all it’s terrible contradiction should be an easier target than The authoritarian Socialism of the 80s.
(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.)
We are on a serious tangent but I'll make a go at it. At the time a friend of mine felt that it should be a crime for anyone to use the hateful words "illegal alien" but the fine should be small "like $100". His comment which ended the conversation:
"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.
It's not the only reason people voted for him, but it certainly strengthens his position and chances for 2024....not to mention, the first thing the authoritarian left did after CPAC was to ban his speech from Youtube.
My 70 year old Democrat immigrant Muslim mom is forwarding me Bill Maher segments and complaining about cancel culture of Facebook. She texted me approvingly when Trump banned critical race theory in the federal government.
Yes, this is how Trump, or someone similar, gets elected.
> 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?
this only applies in workplaces, to landlords, or providers of public accommodations, and this only applies to harassment, its like saying hate crime legislation makes it illegal to be bigoted
whenever something sounds this absurd, read past the headline and you usually find whats actually going on is a lot more reasonable
Sue. That’s creating a hostile work environment. Civil rights laws are still based on actual equality and not critical theory, and racism against white people is a cognizable violation.
All progress we’ve made so far was by talking and understanding one another. Leaving would amount to silencing since the people who left are afraid to make their thoughts public for fear of backlash.
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.)
On a personal level I agree but it's not a moving forward solution to withdraw and stay quiet. I'm talking about the general sense of progress, the one where people are more in balance with other people and that involves understanding eachother and eventually it comes down to talking or some form of communication. Yes, clearly what we're doing at the moment (social media and it's ills) is not only not right but very divisive but that does not meat it's going to be like that forever.
If people move from places that have bad social norms (or bad norms of discussion), like say Twitter, to place that have good norms, like say the Slatestarcodex comments section, the experience of the average person will improve.
The bad places can just quietly whither away when no one goes there anymore.
From an English background, I imagine we are sitting at a meeting. Something that is tabled is between us and under discussion. Something shelved has been removed from the table. What things are Americans visualising here when they say table?
It comes from picking something up to discuss and setting it down when discussion is over. I don't know how many people visualize anything when they say it.
Counterpoint: I graduated from a university still named after the confederacy that held "slave auction" fundraisers all the way into the 80s. I think it's easy to downplay how pervasive racism still is in America, and to imagine that hypersensitivity is the result of "fragility" instead of "constant exposure".
There’s a difference between schools named after the Confederacy and schools named after Abraham Lincoln.
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:
> There’s a difference between schools named after the Confederacy and schools named after Abraham Lincoln.
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".
This is a great argument for why we shouldn’t work in generalities. “Systematic racism” isn’t practically actionable, so it results in Lincoln High getting the same treatment as yours, which apparently held “slave auction” fundraisers relatively recently, and another school which may teach the “Happy Slave” narrative.
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
Was your university doing something kind of like Halloween, where people dress as demons to show the demons have no power over them, or was it more enamored with the past?
I can't tell if you mean "eventually they graduate and carry the new ideas into the world" or if you mean "eventually they graduate and buy into into the system and turn into drones like the greasers, hippies, and punks all did."
And it's not like we haven't seen the same pattern before with the Weather Underground. (I do feel obligated to acknowledge that I was one of those people on the "just in the universities" train 5 years ago, so I'm not accusing anyone of a mistake I haven't made myself.)
The Weather Underground was founded by students from the University of Michigan, who spent their college years arguing that people should violently resist the government. When they graduated, they didn't moderate out of these ideas; they doubled down, started an organized bombing campaign, and successfully hit targets including Capitol Hill and the Pentagon.
Unfortunately your only choices today are this or overt neo-Naziism. You have to stake out the most extreme, divisive, fanatical position possible. If you try to be nuanced and rational you get attacked by both sides.
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.
The saddest part is boring but popular ideas like universal healthcare continually get thrown to the wayside by loud idiots who want to demand nonsense like "latinx"
Good observation, I've felt the same since I encountered this new generation of humans who demand changing speech, and use esoteric terminology and demand other people say and not say things. I don't care if someone believes in social constructivism, that we're born blank slates, that words influence perception more than biology, so on and so forth, but I care very much when people who believe these things believe that anyone who questions - who dares question - them is a villain and an enemy who must be stopped.
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.
Identity politics type news stories shot up right at the end of the Great Recession, around the occupy wall Street time, when people were the most infuriated that moneyed interests bailed themselves out at the taxpayers expense. Really makes you think...
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.
That's a figment of the media. The "far right" and the huge collection of "white supremacists" that have been drummed up as some huge evil plot in America has, as far as I can tell, zero basis in reality.
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.
I see some people say they'd like to be called Latinx. I see no one demand it. I see many more people complain it's used at all.
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.
Only 30% of Latinos have even heard the term Latinx. Using the term is a problem because it’s alienating for someone to use a term for you that you’ve never heard before. Out of the 30% who have heard it, 2/3 think it shouldn’t be used to describe Latinos. Be respectful of people and don’t call them some weird thing some professor made up that the vast majority of affected people either don’t recognize or actively don’t want used to refer to them.
I don't think that way, but that's the wider dynamic I've seen in play for years. On one hand you have 4chan /pol, and on the other hand you have "woke" Twitter mobs. The whole thing seems gamified and the participants all seem to be playing a video game where getting attention or scoring a kill (trolling, offending someone, getting someone cancelled, etc.) is the objective. Gamified social media seems to be increasingly pulling the whole culture along for a ride.
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.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it ramped up during COVID and it’s worse in western countries (actually would like to know if wokeness is affecting non-western locked down countries).
Far left and far right identity politics both started ramping up around 2010. There are quantitative measurements based on word counts of some of this. See elsewhere in this thread.
You can leave Twitter and social media alone, but that's no guarantee that Twitter and social media will leave you alone. That's why I think it's so important for everyone who can speak out against this to do so before it metastasizes to the point where you can't say anything anymore.
I think you're right and you're not succumbing to any effects. The nuts are the loudest and wiser people stay quiet, which gets worse when it causes the young and impressionable to think that the nuts have buy-in.
yeah i am afraid of another Robespierre just as much as i am of another Mussolini. and at this point i am not sure which side is closer to taking over.
I’ve been saying for years that if inequality keeps growing then whether we get a far left or a far right totalitarian will depend on which side fields the most compelling demagogue first. The ideology won’t matter as long as pitchforks are being handed out.
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.
the wider dynamic at play is the loss of trust in institutions due to the internet and the massive information unleashed thru the web.
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).
Joining a group that's willing to scream "oppression!" at every convenient target is also living a life of pain. At least if you're sincere, they can only cancel you once.
There's a third option that is neither "publicly align myself with extremists" nor "publicly align myself with the grey area in between", and that is not to participate in the game at all.
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).
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.
Have you seen the recent article in the NY Times about labour relations at Smith College, where a black woman who graduated from an elite Connecticut prep school managed to get four local employees fired over allegations of racism and sicced her Twitter army on them? There was an external investigation that found no fault with the fired employees and no systemic racism, yet the solution was to implement sensitivity training for the staff.
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.
Good for you that you can close tabs, unfortunately that article is an account of daily life for many academics and university staff. Read it, you cannot discuss labour relations at colleges in the Northeast (and I guess many Silicon Valley companies) without taking this article into account.
There might be some interesting macro-scale effects if Cancel Culture causes conservative Democrat voters to move to purple counties/states and turns them slightly but consistently blue.
Or we could be have like sane rational people and not indulge either sides insane society destroying extremes. you don't defeat extremism by adding to polarizing the situation even more.
The irony of downvotes on this above comment above mine comment.
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.
> A fiercely independent thinker, Viereck (who died in 2006 at age 89) was mostly without a political home.
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.
I’ve been wondering if a radical, dare I say even Trumpian, centrist politician who is willing to pick vitriolic fights with both extremes is just what our times demand.
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.
What data did your friend use to come to that conclusion? Would you be willing to share so we can come to our own conclusions based on the evidence presented?
Can you participate in one (1) conversation without asking for data or studies? Obviously he doesn't have a list of articles his friend used to make an offhand comment.
I wouldn't call it "obvious" that someone would accept another's opinion without any info to back it up and then extol it, though it's very interesting to me that you did.
I didn't accept or reject his opinion. I pointed out that you're acting like an unsocialized ass when you say shit like "Wow, got a source for what some other guy based his comment on 5 years ago?"
I don’t understand GP’s comments. It’s like they are so obstinate or cargo cult fixated on a good idea and messed it up so badly to think that asking for evidence is appropriate everywhere.
“Do you have data to support your stated preference for chocolate ice cream?”
A lot of people have cottoned on to how important hard evidence is for forming informed opinions. Unfortunately, many of them have yet to learn that you can judge a conclusion on its own merit without a bibliography of every idea that led to it.
Are kids actually learning racism is ok from these books or are they enjoying the art and simplistic ideas of the story? Do adults read these books and enthusiastically think.. This author gets it. No, thats just ridiculous.
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.
I had a flick through one of the banned books I have and I was unable to fault anything in it. I had to look up what the problem was and then check back and I felt it was a really big stretch to call it offensive.
It makes me wonder: I've seen several people here comment that they didn't think the content was "that offensive" or that it's a "stretch" to call it so. Perhaps the takeaway is not that these things are, therefore, not offensive, but that children exposed to these things internalize them as normal and struggle to acknowledge their offensiveness later in life.
The stuff I found in the books were stereotypes, but they weren't negative stereotypes and they weren't untrue either. One book had a picture of a man in traditional Chinese clothing but the text and context was not mocking or insulting. At what point does simply representing an image of someone from another culture become offensive?
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.
Also on the page: a man with a 10 foot beard, a magician, and a Chinese man. Only one is identified with his race, and is dressed up as a stereotype that was already out of date in 1950. It's also not the only racial stereotype in the book. We'll sidestep for now Seuss's use of racial caricatures during wartime propaganda. Listen, I'm not Chinese, and I can't tell you to be offended, but I can certainly look at it and empathize with the people who do find it offensive.
As for the second question, that's a question for Dr. Seuss Enterprises; they made this decision about the works in their custody.
You may think you are helping by supporting these moves and empathizing with those who are offended, but I truly believe it has the opposite effect. Is it really worth saving some thin skinned people from offense if it pisses off enough people that the entire system becomes destabilized? Because that's exactly what's happening.
Exactly! Children are very vulnerable to unsound ideas - this thread is full of proof of that fact. Allowing them to be exposed to just any content while they're still developing their own perspective is simply inhumane.
Many otherwise intelligent people have been convinced that the mere sight of things that could be interpreted as offensive are somehow etched into your subconscious permanently and will inevitably accumulate, resulting in some kind of indirect expression or even permanent state of hatred or bigotry.
As much as I'm against banning them, for kids who grow up without much contact to black people, showing the depictions in Seuss' books can create wrong associations (my opinion). I believe a change of some illustrations was overdue, I just don't get why they had to unpublish it.
Had you ever heard of these six books before today? Have you ever read them? How many were sold?
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.
You just proved the point that things have gone too far. Instead of quietly editing out a drawing or word or two it now must be banned in every store, from ever platform, and even the word "Mulberry", for example, must be purged from theme parks. I wish there weren't old racist things it books too, but the weird censorship and book banning creeps me out.
> Had you ever heard of these six books before today? Have you ever read them?
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.
I bought a used version of an early edition of the original Where's Waldo on eBay. I later picked up a modern reprinting of all of them. My son and I were inspecting side-by-side and noticed some differences. Made the books more fun in a way (although if there had been something outrageously offensive in the original that would be a different matter).
The the typical answer to many of your questions is yes, and where the answers are no, the mission should be to preserve as the impact from selling them is apparently minimal.
No, you are not. A substantial majority of people consider this foolish
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 :)
> A substantial majority of people consider this foolish
[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.
And I haven't heard anyone I've met in person argue in favor of the banning, and earlier (before the ebay thing) someone I know irl (well, haven't seen them in person in a while, but I still talk to them frequently) complained about the unpublication, and I warned against overreacting about it (now, hearing the ebay thing, I do think the ebay thing is indicative of something which is a somewhat larger concern).
(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.)
No. Seems a minority gained too much influence. No idea why they are perceived as influential in the first place? They exhibit horrible behaviour. Letting go of Seuss seems like a small price to pay to get rid of them. But the sum total is censorship.
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
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.
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".
You're not the only one. People are started to organise against this poison - in fact I read just yesterday about the launch of one new organisation to push back: https://www.fairforall.org/
It hasn't even gone as far as the actual Puritanism. Most mainstream web properties do not allow any pornography to be distributed via their service and will remove anything perceived as vaguely pornographic (ironically eBay is a rare exception, but it's walled off). Sometimes even innocuous nudity falls into that category.
Nobody on Hacker News compares that policy with Nazi book burning though.
I think this particular issue is less about speech or cancel culture. This wasn't even populism (the usual force behind cancel culture), this was power structures that exist above us acting in our "self interest".
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.
Yeah someone should compile a list of all the cultural elements of western society (books, movies, music, etc.) that include racist symbolism that should be banned in order to appease these people. Then they will actually have to justify the mass book burning as a whole instead of slowly picking off these dangerous offenders like Dr. Seuss one by one.
Curiously, the delisted book "If I Ran the Zoo" contains the first use of the word "nerd" in print. (Just something I found out a couple of decades ago and thought might be interesting to HN.)
My work sent out a memo today regarding what pronouns I'm allowed to use. We're in the middle of a cultural revolution, and the current trend seems to be for rapid acceleration rather than moderation.
The company I work for did something similar at the end of last year. We had consultants who went over everything, and made a massive document of all sorts of things they deemed "problematic". Along with a week long of seminars/training/workshops on sensitivity/inclusion/etc.
- 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.
> Words such as "master", "owner", among some other ones were deemed problematic and needed to be changed.
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".
Every time I see a project on GitHub being pressured to change a term because of PC a little of me die inside. I still remember the PR where someone changed the term master to primary in Swift and Chris Lattner wrote a comment to object, only to delete it shortly after likely due to pressure.
It's a shame we can't stand up against bullshits like that because there's too much to lose.
What drives me crazy about the "master" vs "main" branch name is that before this started the branch name "master" was in my mind a completely un-racist definition. Now the debate has changed my the link in my mind to the point where I feel like a branch name has racist history and I feel dirty typing it.
That is where this movement is being counterproductive -- it's injecting racial division into places where there was none (neither systemic, nor overt, nor covert) before.
You give them too much credit. Injecting racial division is the entire point. Critical race theorists want to divide everyone up by their immutable characteristics, discriminate on the basis of race, and make everyone as hyper-conscious about skin colour as possible. They explicitly say that they want to undermine the American liberal order and do away with such concepts as legal neutrality and equality under the law; here's a quote from page 3 of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, one of the leading textbooks:
> 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.
I think the discussion about “master” started within the context of “master/slave” DBs.
“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.
How can the definition of a word be racist? Making people slaves based on race was, obviously, horribly racist. But the words "master" and "slave" are not inherently racist.
> You mean the almost exclusively US interpretation is the most relevant.
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.
Sorry, I mean “master” can be used to describe a racist slaveowner or a non-racist skilled worker among many other definitions. But using the words master and slave together is to my knowledge primarily used in the context of describing a racist relationship, especially in America. The word pair has been co-opted by the programming community but I’m not sure why originally.
I was familiar with it in the hardware world before I was ever exposed to it in software, as in master and slave devices in SCSI, then later in context of data replication. People opposed to these words are making them racist (or acquiescing to those that want us to think that way) where their origin was never anything of the sort. The master/slave relationship predated the American continent and across the broad swath of human history has been a pretty color-blind enterprise. This accommodation to absurd American sensitivities is an embarrassing insult to basic intelligence that’s only getting worse. People need to grow the F up.
> People opposed to these words are making them racist (or acquiescing to those that want us to think that way) where their origin was never anything of the sort
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.
It is already difficult enough to come up with naming things that makes sense. I kind of get "master" when used in the context, however things like "owner" i struggle extremely hard with. Especially since major companies like Microsoft use it.
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".
I'm surprised I haven't seen "trunk" be suggested more as it works well with the branching analogy. It's used by SVN but I don't think that should matter.
DBs used to be master/slave. Should we keep that naming so as not to participate in a slippery slope?
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.
Personally, I don't see what the issue is with master/slave for databases. Of course it's a terrible and immoral relationship to have between two humans, but that doesn't render the words themselves immoral when used descriptively in a completely different context.
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"?
Counterpoint--the word "slave" does inherently refer to a relationship between humans (i.e. animals or inanimate objects cannot be slaves, as that word is defined). When it is used as a CS analogy, the analogy does refer back to that relationship between humans as its source of meaning.
"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.
I understand that these and other terms have historical baggage, but that seems like a property of language in general.
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 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
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.
I think the broader question is whether it's a good idea in general to go through terminology or common idioms with a fine-tooth comb looking for unintentional offense or the potential to offend.
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.
I hear what you’re saying about history. I studied abroad in Germany and those lessons are painfully obvious there. But for me the line is drawn at facts and opinion and words in their original historical context. No one is rewriting the definition of “slave”, they’re actually trying to preserve it.
“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.
I also hear what you're saying, and I agree with your point that a black person wouldn't have come up with master/slave. That said, I've also worked closely with black developers and while I don't want to make assumptions, it's really hard for me imagine them being offended by something like this. It's more like a parody of what a white person who has never spent any time with black people thinks a black person would be offended by.
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.
> Personally, I don't see what the issue is with master/slave for databases.
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.
Killing child processes could certainly have painful historical connotations for anyone who's miscarried, had a forced abortion, or is distressed by the historical existence of those events. 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.
> 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.
I don't believe that most of the cancelled terms were distracting or disturbing anyone who wasn't a political activist to any significant degree prior to being cancelled. Staking them out as unacceptable terms has brought into existence a battlefield where there didn't need to be one, and caused people to be offended by terms that hadn't offended them before. When I look for reasons why this might have been done, I find a lot of people making careers out of their advocacy, and getting a lot of dopamine hits from social media.
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.
I often think about how every generation I can think of had a fight over what was OK. The younger generation would set down some new standards, and everyone who grew up with the old "normal" thought it was ridiculous that the standard was changing.
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.
Maybe it doesn't "hurt" you in a direct way, but forcing people to change their behavior for a power trip is not something you should willingly bend over for. If change is for good, you should be willing to change. If it's for nothing, it's okay to resist.
I think the idea a change is "for nothing" is subjective, and that the people most likely to say a given a change is "for nothing" are the people who don't benefit from it.
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.
Those are examples where you examined the choices and decided that a change makes sense. That may not always be the case. Again, you are capable of deciding. "For nothing" is subjective, and, as such, you get to use your best judgement. Good luck.
My point is that because "For nothing" is subjective, my own bias will lead me towards discounting the benefit of a given change. So, I err towards being accommodating when the request requires something so small from me.
At the time, I thought the change was ridiculous. It took me a few years to realize I was just being petulant.
Isn't there a risk that, like feeding pigeons, you end up encouraging minority groups to become over-sensitive, because they become addicted to the power of controlling what other people say?
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 apologise if my analogy made you feel uncomfortable, and I'd be happy to learn a different analogy which expresses the same idea just as clearly. If there isn't an effective alternative analogy, though, then it might appear as if you are using claims of discomfort to limit legitimate criticism of your ideas, which I trust isn't the intention.
I appreciate you responding to my criticism despite my analogy, but I was concerned you might try to discourage or prevent people using such an analogy in future, without offering an alternative (and despite me having no ill intent behind it).
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.
It's possible to recognize some changes as warranted and some changes as being misguided or based on entirely false premises. You are capable of examining your thoughts and listening to other people's explainations for determine which is which.
I often like to imagine that if I were in that situation I announce that I sexually identify as military attack helicopters and insist my pronouns are apache/apachim, but I know the irony would be lost on them and really would just result in me getting fired for thought crimes.
Honestly the person running the seminars was very very strict. Several people said "I don't really care what people call me by", or can I just leave it blank to be what people want. The person explained how that attitude is disrespectful to people who do care about these things, and how it can foster an environment of hostility towards people who put them. Which in turn marginalizes those people etc.
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.
The funniest thing of the whole "thou shalt list your pronouns" thing is that the actual trans folks I've talked to tend to be opposed to those policies. It paints them into a corner - either state that you want to be misgendered, or out yourself as trans.
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.
"It paints them into a corner - either state that you want to be misgendered, or out yourself as trans."
Huh? What do you mean? How would not listing pronouns help?
That's awfully strange they would have a problem with that, because there are some non-binary people who do welcome the use of all pronouns and even discourage people from using only one, or only the one they were initially using.
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.
That's the whole point. It's a billion-dollar industry created by useless people with no real economic value. They need to inject racism and sexism and division into every situation so they can claim credit for opposing it. How else are they going to justify their bloated paycheques?
> Everyone had to list what pronouns they wanted people to use
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.
In my opinion, its definitely worth getting rid of "master/slave" since after all it does directly refer to a violent and wrongful historical relationship. It may be only a metaphor, but it does clearly refer to that and I can understand how that makes some people feel unwelcome. But ownership is a little different. One object owning another doesn't make any reference to the "ownership" of people in slavery, it just as well references the ownership of literally anything else which is perfectly legal.
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.
Here in Flyover Country, these debates sound entirely bizarre. I was going to say "It sounds like everyone's lost their minds", and I noticed I didn't say "his mind", so clearly there's a lag.
That's fair. I don't think that anybody who says that is thinking much about it, but isn't that the point? To establish the default that nobody thinks about?
These conversations always crack me up. Its just so comical. An empire with the largest military presence around the world, outspending the rest of the world to buy weapons that can decimate the world population multiple times over, but, somehow that is not "offensive"..
Doublespeak is used to hide the truth, not to express the truth. The renaming happened in the late 1940s, in a United States that was reluctant to join WWII in the first place, and as the entire world got behind the idea that aggressive war was a violation of the law of nations.
"express the truth"? This is not subjective you know, USA got had more wars in the last 100 years than any other industrialised nation. No matter your political views, the truth is 'department of war'
You're right. It isn't subjective. You're wrong as a matter of numbers, as a matter of legal analysis, and as a matter of history. Stop pushing a political narrative.
Wars over, the ultra-left won via social network and Internet. They will ban more stuff. You ever heard of good people banning books and banning words? It is mostly dictators doing that.
Legitimate question for liberals of the freedom-and-mild-socialism variety: what do you think about this? Do you find that the current leftists in control of government and media are liberal like you?
> You ever heard of good people banning books and banning words?
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.
The point I made isn't that we should ban hate speech; it's that looking at which countries/companies ban hate speech is a bad litmus test for determining which countries/companies are bad. The parent comment asked if we "ever heard of good people banning books and banning words?". Yes, I have. The majority of democracies have done so. The U.S. is in the minority. Lack of hate speech laws doesn't correlate with any of the major freedom indices or human rights indices.
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.
> 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.
its not a cultural revolution, its a cultural intimidation, where groups have come to realize the real power of social media is to name, shame, and blame.
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.
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.
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...
I've seen that infographic about "white culture" before (hello to my fellow New Discourses fan) and it's such a great illustration of how this movement is not only insane, but absurdly racist.
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.)
>And they reject the fundamental liberal, reasonable, legal, and scientific principles upon which liberal societies operate.
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.
> Is this a crime in itself? Do we really need to cancel academics over rejecting something because they find it logically or practically wrong?
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".
>"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.
Liberals do tolerate, and have tolerated, the dissent of people who have disagreed with liberalism. (By "liberalism" I mean Enlightenment philosophies, not "the left wing of the U.S.".) (In this post, I'm speaking in generalities and making some assumptions...)
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.
Period of time when communities and organizations had to turn in their colleagues for not supporting the party. Kids reporting on their parents, coworkers reporting to each other, that sort of thing. It was a period marked by a lot of 'virtue signalling' support for the party.
Highly recommend the film "The Blue Kite" concerning the period (can't speak to the accuracy but at least the creator says its true).
I've heard reports from Chinese immigrants who lived through the Cultural Revolution and are saying the same thing - maybe not that what's happening is "exactly" the same but that we're very much heading that way.
We should be very worried, and we need to take action.
I've referred to entirely-female groups of people as "you guys". It seemed like a better bet than "hey ladies", and I'm not southern enough to pull off "y'all".
I'm not southern either, I'm from Central Florida [0] and we use Y'all often. I believe in your ability to use Y'all too! Embrace Y'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.
It is only once I hear y'all from woke people that I start to understand why people dislike so-called "cultural appropriation". It is cringey and weird-sounding to me. And also if you were to speak to these same people saying "y'all" in any southern accent you would be seen as uneducated.
referring to a group of females as "you guys" has been the best way to express non-sexism through the 2000s in my view. It's like brazenly saying, "I refuse to make anything of your gender, nor would I think your gender means I should hold a door for you, because again I'm not even thinking about the existence of gender." If we lose that usage, I'll be culturally lost and disoriented.
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.
And you’d be surprised at the number of people who (validly) don’t like this but won’t speak up about it. I know women in tech who tell me this exact behavior feels constantly degrading and makes them want to leave tech. There are alternatives in English other than y’all, such as “team” or “everyone” or “all”.
I've been wondering what would happen if the same political correctness ever came to Spanish. Every noun is gendered, usually according to whether it is associated with males or female roles.
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)
Latin would be ungendered, but it's been said for years by all sorts of people so it doesn't serve the cultural signalling purposes to show that you're enlightened. Gotta use that x to demonstrate your tribal allegiance.
Latin also doesn't imply "of south or central America" in the way latino/latina/latinx/latiné (which is the other approach that's gender neutral and easier to pronounce that I've seen) do. Latin implies, at least to me central European, old and vaguely Italian, as opposed to Latino.
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".
The question is, preferred by whom? Most Hispanic people use "Hispanic", and almost all of the remainder use "Latino". The other terms are fashion statements to show that the speaker keeps up with new intellectual trends, so they lose preference whenever they become too well known; you can date groups like fossil records by seeing whether their name uses "Latinx", "Latina/o", "Latin@", or "Latin".
I think phrasing it as 3% is a little misleading. Another way to view that same study is roughly 15% of Hispanics (and 21% of Hispanic women) who have heard the word have almost immediately adopted using it to describe themselves. That gives a slightly different picture on its adoption.
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.
And what about the remainder that hear it and reject it? Are they not considered?
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.
>And what about the remainder that hear it and reject it? Are they not considered?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Spanish speaker here. X after N is basically non existing in Spanish. Most people who don't speak other languages will struggle pronouncing that. Spanish speaking woke-alikes use "e" or "@", or unnecessarily repeat the words in both genders.
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.
Latinx is pronounced the same in English and Spanish. It being unusual for Spanish is why Latine is more popular in countries with less English influence.
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.
Way more Latino Democrats watch Fox News than listen to NPR: https://images.app.goo.gl/kpSgBJpsvVGTqPNC6. I suspect the third of Latinos who voted for Trump listen to NPR at even lower rates.
The point is that typical Latino people aren’t in the NYT’s and NPR’s target audience. That’s why those outlets use terms like “Latinx” that polling shows are unfamiliar to most Latinos. (I’m using the example of Fox News just as the banana for scale, so to speak. If you have a preconceived view that people of color who watch Fox News are relatively rare, ones who read the New York Times are rarer still by a large margin: https://images.app.goo.gl/vgyXCnAoS8TdPYU3A)
I had the opportunity to ask a very social-justice-minded friend of mine how custom pronouns and genders could possibly work in Arabic, which has many deeply integrated rules on gender modification of words. Adjectives, verbs, and pronouns all change depending on the gender of the object. Her response was that the language must be changed to suit the preferences of people with nonstandard genders.
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 find it hilarious (and sad) that I'm being downvoted because women have told me that they don't like being referred to as a guy when they're not one, and its one of the many ways that the 'default male' attributes of tech take a toll on them.
Another personal anecdote, but not only do I consider "guys" gender neutral, but I found it kind of alienating when a few people clearly stopped saying "guys" shortly after I joined the team. I was the only woman on the team that summer (internship), and I think they were just trying to be nice, but I don't like when attention is called to gender in the workplace. The more (actively) aware I am of being "different", the more it impacts interactions.
I don't doubt that some people think the way you're describing, but it just seems to me that complaining about gender-inclusive "guys" is the exact mirror of complaining about AAVE. It's extraordinarily exclusive to say that you can't be comfortable unless everyone talks the same way you do.
Not at all -- you're using a very specific word to refer to someone that they could consider inaccurate. If in AAVL there's some word that would refer to me as a woman or straight or a diff identity than I have, I wouldn't like that very much.
The problem is that "you guys" simply does not contain an assumption of anyone's identity in my dialect. Both women and men in my circles use it freely regardless of the group's gender balance. So when I hear someone say that "you guys" doesn't respect their identity, it sounds to me like saying "y'all" or "everyone" doesn't respect their identity - it's hard to wrap my mind around what such a claim could mean.
I don't know that I've ever heard someone say "guys and gals" outside of TV.
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.
I'm pretty confident they would not. I've often asked for such courtesy with regards to terms like "male privilege", and the most courteous responses I've ever gotten are attempts to educate me on why the term is not meant to be offensive, much like the response I've offered here. (The most common responses are along the lines that my discomfort is the whole point of using the term, so I'm sure you can see why it's hard to believe there's any symmetry here.)
How does the definition of male privilege differ in your respective dialects? What is your dialect's inoffensive term for what they mean by male privilege? Or is it the concept that offends you?
I have no objection to claims like "Men have gender-based advantages in many things" or "Women face many problems which are hard to understand when not experienced daily". The problem with the term "male privilege" is that it comes across to many people (including me) as a sort of attack - it seems to suggest men should feel embarrassed or ashamed about their gender. (And this isn't just some crazy scenario I made up - I've heard mainstream figures say they're embarassed to be men as many words.)
What I dislike about things like male privilege is it points the spotlight away from women and ways they are unfairly treated to men.
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.
I don't feel like I've ever satisfactorily understood why it feeling degrading to them is of greater weight than the degrading feeling of being told that your natural pattern of speech is forbidden.
leave tech because of a gender neutral saying and no ill intent whatsoever?
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.
But "guys" is not the plural of "guy" in many regional dialects of US English. It is specifically gender neutral, and used by women to speak to a group of women -- e.g. a girls' soccer coach saying to her team, "Let's go guys!"
Can you expand on why y’all makes them feel degraded? Y’all is often used to convey a feeling of warmth towards the addressee or express familiarity, which seems the opposite of degrading.
I'm not saying y'all does, I'm saying 'hey guys' does when they're, in fact, not a guy. Or a least for some. I also know women who aren't offended by it and we've had explicit discussions surrounding it. But being more thoughtful doesn't seem to hurt anyone when there are more inclusive terms you can use.
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).
The problem I have with the word "partner" is that it is ambiguous -- it could mean life partner, sexual partner, or business partner. Honestly I wish there were another commonly accepted word I could use to avoid the ambiguity. "Spouse" comes close (if the couple is married) but there isn't a in well-accepted gender-neutral term for the other member in an unmarried pair. "SO" (significant other) comes close, but often I have to explain what that means, so I can't consider it well-accepted. And people seem to associate "partner" with sex, so if the couple is remaining chaste until marriage, using "partner" can be offensive. Sigh - English is hard.
"Partner" is a mostly term used with gays. straights many feel strange to apply this term to husband, also wife. Can someone not simply ask about "spouse"? There previously exists term without gender for such persons.
"Spouse" implies marriage. "Significant Other" is a common safe bet, but is a bit too much of a mouthful IMO.
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.
My wife and I still call each other boyfriend/girlfriend, but we are old fashioned. We like it because we are an dating (each other), even though we are married.
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.
Partner/spouse/significant other... doesn't make a difference which one to me. I just picked that one at random. The fact that people create space for me not to have a wife is what I appreciate.
So as a married man, I use partner: it fits with my understanding of marriage, we’re partners, we both have a hand in managing a household. It feels good to say.
The correct form is "folx". Spelling words with an "x" is more inclusive toward marginalized groups, particularly LGBTQIA+, despite there not being an "x" in there. See also womxn, Latinx, etc.
Twitch received quite a lot of backlash two days ago for using the term womxn. The sentiment was that it isn't inclusive and is instead transphobic, because it separates trans/non-binary women from other women.
There are plenty of other alternatives (folk, team, mates, friends, pals) - please realize there are a lot of women who are bothered by it and don't feel they can speak up about it.
You really are pushing the idea that all conversations should be altered so that no one is offended, for any reason however silly, ever. Because if they say it's offensive and attributes it to their identity, one cannot argue back.
why is it so hard to respect what people want to be called and referred to as? It's no different than someone with the name William wants to be referred to as Will, but you stubbornly keep referring to them as William because its their legal name and i can damnit!!!! Just acknowledge it and move on with your life.
When I was a kid, I couldn't pronounce R's and used to be teased endlessly. Should I demand words with r be banished because they made me uncomfortable? I didn't even know that was an option.
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 sure how this is the same as asking "please call me x", "please refer to me as his/her/them" compared to "i'm not going to say your name because i can't pronounce it" ?
This is under a thread of using "guys", which is what i'm specifically referring to, nothing else. Its common use, and dictionary definition even, is a nonderogatory nongendered word. So I personally feel taking it as gendered or as disrespect is disregarding the meaning of the word, and asking me to accept whatever yours is. Just as me asking nobody to use r words is asking the world to comply with my preferences.
I'm not going to argue right vs wrong or with you directly, I'm just explaining my comment and thought process.
It's the same argument thou - when you refer to a person/group of people you imply a lot about them with the word you use, men/children/kids/elders/americans/whites/ect - guys is no different to a lot of people as its so easily taken as gendered, and if said people don't want to be referred to by guys why not use a different one?
and fwiw the first definition for guys/guy in most dictionaries is "a man".
Because it is exhausting, and constant, and I believe rife with the chance at abuse in bad faith by those who want to feel constantly relevant and woke by redefining the lexicon.
your comment comes off as very condescending - you could have left out everything after "bad faith" and made a better argument - ever think how exhausting it is for people on the other side day in and out? and your complaining about having to not say a couple words? it's literally the least you can do and one step removed from doing nothing.
The name William has no commonly accepted or used meaning apart from as an identifier. I have no problem calling anyone by whatever identifier they choose, so long as they aren't asking me to apply an incorrect definition to that word.
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?)
And if you do a dictionary search for "You Guys" you get:
"used in speech and informal writing to refer to or address two or more people"[1]
which seems to imply that it is a gender neutral phrase, despite what the definition for "guys" is. Words can have wildly different definitions depending on the context in which they are used.
I can't say I agree with your reasoning of why some people think this type of thing is an issue. Also, your screenshot—I’ll assume unintentionally—has the plural definition hidden.
I'd really encourage you to take a step back here and think about how you'd react if it was your speech being policed. Imagine someone sent you an email declaring that the words "pop" and "soda" are exclusionary to Southerners, and from now on you need to refer to carbonated soft drinks only as "coke". It's an easy one-word substitution - would you do it?
What makes you think their speech isn’t policed as well? Is your victimhood that ingrained that you believe the other side doesn’t play by the rules, they’re only out to get you?
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.
I'm sure the groups you're calling the "woke left" have intramural disputes about what's right to say. But I'm also quite confident that they have no general interest in making people comfortable. Indeed, most argue that people who don't think like them should be uncomfortable, because that discomfort will help enact social changes they'd like to see.
> because that discomfort will help enact social changes they'd like to see.
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.
I don't dispute the logic of people wanting to change an unjust status quo, I'm just trying to see the bigger picture, that the side supporting the status quo is worried that certain changes would cause society to degrade or become unstable.
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.
I would prefer to identify as male. I don't want to be trans, I don't want to be cis. I just want to be a male, and _ANYONE_ who wants to join me is welcome.
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 am agreeing with you in this problem. I have a large dislike for this term. The gays pick so many words on how to say about them. And we then get word placed on us. Also word that I heard only in derogatory contexts as to this day.
Even if I loved the company, this would probably be a tipping point of some kind. Hypothetically, if I didn't quit in a comparable situation, I'd gradually resent the company to the point where I'd become sufficiently unproductive enough to be fired. How are you thinking about it?
Yikes. It's a bold move to compare a colloquial casual term to literally the most foul term in American history.
It's absolutely a matter of principle, which I don't think is a surprise to you. I find that it's common to conflate refusal to oblige what amounts to policing my ability to communicate, with refusal to oblige someone's request to be addressed a certain way. One is just a matter of retaining my right to decide for myself how I communicate, but I've never had the right to say anything I want and have it not be capable of being interpreted as rude.
The thing is, you don't get to decide objectively what is wrong and right, or what I find difficult to fluently introduce into my vocabulary. A business kind of does, in so much as they can keep employees, but generally we've accepted a high bar for that, largely relying on subjectivity rather than them deciding to legislate bad words for adults.
You can't just decide that a term is objectively sexist or a personal attack, and "I really doubt" arguments aren't convincing, evidenced in part by you already implying it's anti-woman.
edit: I'd add that I'm not particularly attached to specific phrases like this, it all depends on circumstances and context, and a matter of what would make me start thinking about a change. Generally, I do think about how I'd address a group of people, because some opt not to use this or that, and it's best to find that comfortable common ground, and if you're speaking with customers I could probably more easily grasp a business wanting to pick the safest option, especially if it's likely to make it's way onto Twitter when my barista commits a faux-pas. If I worked at Reddit when they implemented their new policies for example, I'd probably start looking elsewhere. Pick your battles, and not every fight is worth your job. But if my company decides for me that this isn't an interpersonal issue, and I don't get to make these choices for myself, but that it's by definition hate speech, then maybe I'll go work on a farm or whatever you'd have me do. One that butches animals for mass human consumption; I hope that's ok ;)
In a thread full of bad takes you are right at the top. Comparing someone throwing out a completely friendly "hey guys" to a group that has both males and females is no where close to the same fucking galaxy as using a racial slur.
If it’s not that hard as you say, then it’s not that hard to accept that these are just sounds coming out of a bag of flesh trying to get your attention, instead of inconveniencing the entire world of English speakers to keep a fragile ego and identity placated.
This feels pretty extreme. I was raised in the Midwest where everyone calls everyone 'guys.' Even if I could successfully stop saying it...why? It's very obviously meant with no ill intention.
The modern far left understanding is that intention doesn't matter one whit. Only outcome does. And if the outcome is that someone was offended, the only valid reason is that you are a bad person and should be made to feel bad -- ideally, as publicly as possible. Of course, this is only true if the offended party falls into one of a number of sanctioned buckets.
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.
It's the purest of narcissism. When you say "intent doesn't matter", what you're actually saying is "you don't matter. The only thing that matters is how I feel about it". It's a manipulative trick used to invalidate everyone's feelings except your own. I'd expect it from a child, and it astonishes me that grown adults can't see through it.
I came to the US at 20 and was surprised girls used guys to refer to other a group of girls. I stored it like that and sparingly used it and nobody ever got visibly offended but now I can’t be certain. Now i have to erase it from my informal repertoire lest I offend someone or even worse get sued or something. As I i got older I find it hard to change these autopilot things. Again, I am not wishing to degrade anyone but am afraid someone will punish me for it. There are other examples that I could probably have a hard time unlearning as well and this only gives me more anxiety everytime I open my mouth in public. Im lucky Im somewhat a goofy person and blunders are forgiven easier but in these times one never know. Some anxiety is unavoidable these times and frankly I think this is a force that will drive groups of people apart
I've been trying to stop saying "you guys" to refer to groups of people because while I don't mean any harm, it's really not a big deal to prevent some potential discomfort to someone.
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.
Having one of my direct reports mention that they are trans and that using "guys" to refer to the team made them feel left out was really all it took... you have to take people at their word at some level and "consider alternatives to 'guys'" is a pretty minor ask.
I've heard people say it's racist for white people to say "y'all" too, since black people say "y'all" therefore it's cultural appropriation.
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?
Lot a job over it. Did everything I could to be polite, but was not going to use weird terms. Never mind they were biggest bunch of bigots I’ve ever seen.
Most here seem to disagree with you, and rigidly believe that "you guys" should be the way to address girls. They're not willing to be flexible and accommodating of "others".
Being from the UK (living in the US now), I've never used the term 'hey guys', with my English accent it would sound like I'm being a fake or trying to hard to be hip.
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).
Really? I'm from the UK and I find "hey guys" and "you guys" to be quite common there. Maybe it's a generational thing - I'm sure it's something we picked up from the U.S..
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.
That's the beauty of language. We can choose our phrases and words, influenced by the people of our geography. You are free to choose peeps, and I am free to choose guys, until there are laws against it (coming soon, I'm sure).
Someone can also choose to be offended or not. Apparently this has been forgotten in modern times.
Well, we’re not allowed to use “hey guys” anymore or anything which refers to the gender of someone in whole or individually. So..to keep my job: “Good Evening, Colleagues!”
ya'll, folks, people, team, everyone, friends, pals, peeps, chums, gang, squad, crew, mates, peers - i mean c'mon, there are just so many non-gendered ones out there to pick from (and inb4 "but guys is not gendered!!" - how do you explain the phrase "guys and gals" then?)
"guys and gals" explain in way same as "cow" refer in technical for woman bovine but in usual term to any bovine. Either woman or man bovine is "cow" in group. Unless archaic "kine" I have not ever heard used in speech. Also "duck" is refer for man and both woman water fowl. Drake correct word for man in the species.
USA in itself has many microcosms of culture, it's not one homogeneous clump. The fact that your company is USA based offers no indication of the cultural backgrounds of people working there.
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.
Yeah it’s region dependent. In the Midwest it’s super gender neutral to the point where people will “hey guys” or “hey man” to refer to women. Really really jarring.
So a because a term in one language doesn't have one to one translation with the exact same connotations in another we have to make up a new term? Seems more like a this would simply make the case for folks to become a loan word rather than creating a new term altogether. there are many words in other languages that don't have a direct translation to a English term we don't make up a new word in those cases.
> 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).
I'm guessing it's because that explanation still makes no sense at all. Of course "la gente" has a gender - it's a noun in a language where every noun has a grammatical gender. Any noun that you would translate into in Spanish would have a gender after being translated. This is something someone would learn about in the first day of class for any language with grammatical gender...
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.
> “folks” can’t be gender-neutrally translated in some languages (e.g. spanish) so folx is considered more inclusive
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.
This is why so many people just can't take this stuff anymore. It never ends. Someone is always going to be offended. That's the world we live in. I know of people who are offended by my mere existence. Shall I submit to their preferences as well? :)
Probably women feeling excluded by the use of the inherently gendered term "guys" and the refusal of men to stop using it/brushing off their concerns/not feeling comfortable bringing it up.
I don't know where you're from but where I live "guys" is a completely neutral term for any group of humans. My wife used it today on a call to three other females.
It’s really region dependent. But since “girls” definitely isn’t gender neutral to you all you have to do is reverse it to understand the potential awkwardness.
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.
I don't need to reverse it to imagine it - I'm a woman who has worked on teams that were otherwise all men, and I've never once felt excluded by a "hey guys", or even "hey dudes".
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.
I’m in the same boat being form the Midwest so I just think it’s funny at this point — “good morning guys… uhh and lady.” But I empathize with my out of town coworkers for whom it’s really jarring so I picked up folks or peeps. I’ve never thought anyone using guys was being malicious just that some people feel more included with a different word. Like it was basically no effort for me to switch and made someone else feel just a little bit better I hope.
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.
If "girls" was defined in the dictionary as "a group of people", then no, I wouldn't care, not in the slightest. I wouldn't try to convince others that the dictionary was wrong, or that some definition I subscribe to is somehow more accurate.
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.
Wait until smiling or even looking at someone will be deemed offensive if you don’t do it the only right way. Cameras will be everywhere and and wrong look will be penalized harshly
And yet it keeps coming up at the american based global company i work at as a term many women do not like or consider gender neutral, consider maybe that there are people outside your limited social circle who view it differently and in large companies spanning the globe they need to take into account other cultures and people who are not in america?
It’s not. The parent is leaving out basically all the context so that this kind of thing sounds inherently unreasonable.
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.
In my case - the downside to misgendering someone is extremely high. If my work day was to skip work and go hiking, or go into work and misgender someone, the latter has much higher downside consequences in some areas.
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.
I think you’re thinking about this too mechanically. Context and intent matter here. It’s not at all about the literal act.
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.
So you singled out this person by using a different speech pattern than you would normally use so that you wouldn't have to accommodate a request to use a different set of pronouns in your normal speech while referring to that person?
I don't know, but it just feels like it could be. It can certainly be illegal in some places if you intentionally misgender someone, so if the bar is that low, anything more reasonable isn't that fanciful.
I respect eBay's ability to decide what is for sale on their platform, but I agree with the reporter: It's incredibly silly to ban a Dr. Seuss book when Mein Kampf is available.
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.
All these outlets say the books are "offensive" but they don't say why. Has anyone actually looked at these books? I have. Nothing in there is even remotely offensive. It would help to explain what is offensive, so we don't just take their word for it.
It sucks that there are over 100 news sites, including the big ones reporting it but none will actually show the offensive images for fear of being offensive themselves or even describe the images.
Canada’s National Post delivered on this front, but generally speaking the media have been significantly more absurd than when they were all afraid to publish the Mohammed cartoons.
I haven’t seen these books since I was a kid. Does anyone know of, or where I can find the specific examples from each book, and what people find offensive? I’m really curious to the specifics here.
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.
Sorry I don’t follow, is the e-word ‘evolution’? :)
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.
I would probably be considered far to the left of most HN commentators, but I still find moves like this to be pointless.
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.
I was wondering if Americans learned history of other countries in school. HN users or Americans in general probably think China is a totalitarian country, but even Chinese students are taught in both elementary and high schools, repeatedly, that an authoritarian regime always started with moralizing everything, always started with telling its citizens to hate their neighbors, and always told their citizens that misinformation and disinformation was evil.
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?
History is written by the victors in all cases. If Hua and Deng didn't win against the Gang of Four, you'd have a different history of the cultural revolution. Fortunately, they won.
America's won too much, even when we're wrong or stupid, and our historical frame has suffered.
History is a lot more complicated and varied than the victors writing histories. Actually, it's people who know how to write that write history that writes history. Even then, they are not the final words on the subject.
Who care about the conqueror and winners of wars if they aren't literate?
Everyone involved in the late-70s intra-Party disputes in China not only knew how to write, but was a skilled propagandist and had learned from one of the best to ever do it.
Winning is what mattered in that case. There's gotta be a Mao quote for that, barrels of guns or something.
Economies are zero sum. Your statement is a fallacy I see touted everywhere.
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.
Just because the transaction balances doesn’t mean there wasn’t ‘winners’. If I stroll down the beach and purchase a frozen treat for $4, I am sated and the merchant gets to make a profit, pay their taxes, and sustain their supply chain. Who loses? The other sellers lose a potential customer, I gain some weight, and probably generate waste and carbon in the act. As we plod ever towards our future as dust, we’ll transact a stream of everything, making and taking and leaving our wake along the way. As it goes, it’s hard to ascribe goodness or badness or winners or losers without omission of some part of the transaction. Yet in that moment when my lips meet their first chilly bite, the universe might reveal a shimmer of its majesty, and I’ll call that good.
The point I am making is that the people making the transaction are not the losers in the game. You have to trace the origin of the product back to how it was produced and what limited resource was used to produce it.
The loser here is other person who could've potentially used that limited resource for his own gain.
No. Net gain is extracted from a pool of limited energy. All participants in such an exchange must lower the entropy of the universe to produce either a concrete or abstract product. This costs energy.
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.
It's true that entropy eventually wins and in a hundred billion billion billion billion years the universe will run out, but in the meantime there's an incredible amount of energy all around us and we get more efficient at extracting it all the time. What does this viewpoint mean in a practical sense?
You talk as if the incredible amount of energy around us is unlimited. We pay for energy and we spend an inordinate amount of consideration towards thinking on how to "save energy"
Energy is therefore limited and, as illustrated above, a highly practical concept.
Energy on the earth isn’t limited. There is tremendous energy entering and leaving our sphere at all times. There are forms of energy stored in ways that we don’t understand how to harvest and distribute, yet lay latent. You could theorize that the total energy in the universe is fixed, yet incomprehensible vast and largely inaccessible.
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.
But none of that energy is available to use. The only metric that matters is available energy. If all the energy you’re describing was available for use nobody would be paying for energy and we’d never have huge power outages.
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.
You’re assuming all energy will have a productive use though and nothing is wasted. If 2 people decide to carpool they can save money on gas, and that’s not a zero sum transaction even if one party pays the other. Just because energy is expended doesn’t mean there was a productive use, after all the universe will burn up one day no matter how well or poorly humans treat it, entropy can only increase.
Are the stars' gases foolish to burn and radiate energy to the universe because they could have used that limited resource for their 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.
That degree of pedantry doesn't lead to useful analysis, though, especially since most of those factors don't end up weighing in to the human consequences, which are what are being considered.
"The universe is a zero-sum system" is a true statement, but utterly useless - a tautology that has no relevance to the discussion.
I highly disagree with this. It may seem to you what I'm saying is pedantic but it is not.
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.
No civilization has fallen because they depleted the available energy. Some have failed because their use of energy outpaced their ability to extract available energy. The amount of energy available on just our planet is unfathomably large (e=mc2). The entire planet could run for 100 years on just the toxic waste from a single US nuclear plant. We could run the entire world for millions of years just on nuclear material filtered from sea water. And that is just using current nuclear technology.
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.
>No civilization has fallen because they depleted the available energy.
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.
Nuclear power becoming common is a choice though, it's not that we don't know how. Isn't in that sense it's already available if needed, so we've already reached the tipping point where this line of reasoning is no longer relevant?
Nuclear power has a bunch of controversy and politics behind it. It's not clear whether it will be the future. The existence of nuclear power doesn't make the energy variable negligble. Energy is still a huge limited resource in our world because of this.
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.
I've sort of lost track of the point of these different subthreads, you seem to be taking on everyone individually to debate various semantic elements, but how does all this debate about sunburns, nuclear energy, and everything else in all these replies tie back to history being written by the victors? I'm not sure how to make sense or your argument.
We could argue whether fusion is nuclear or not, but I'm wondering where all this is headed.
Yeah it’s ok if you’re confused and don’t have the ability to keep track. I have a firm grasp on the main point in all sub threads. I’ll center the topic for you. Ignore the other threads if it’s confusing you.
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.
Usually HN is much more collaborative but you seem to have taken a combative approach to interacting with everyone, and I'd assume thats why you are finding yourself in a situation where you are arguing with everyone when that isn't what typically happens here.
> 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.
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]
This is a strangely mechanistic view of the economy not allowing for human joy (which economists would lump in as utility.) I get a great amount of satisfaction from great food or art far beyond the costs required to produce them. I don't see how that isn't creating value beyond the simple energy equation.
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.
Sorry for the late reply, I don't entirely agree but thank you for laying out your argument point by point, it has certainly given me a different way to look at things.
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.
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.
Nah this is still zero sum. It's limited by the amount of watts we can reasonably extract from the 100 petawatts per day.
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.
It's a complex equation when you involve the discovery of new resources and increases in technology. Let me illustrate to you what's going on with pet fish example:
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.
Sure but in the fish tank is fish vs. resources and given that nothing else exists in the “fish tank universe” the flakes therefore function as the total amount of resources and also the entire economy at the same time.
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.
It’s ok if you’re not convinced. The fact of the matter is I showed you an example of how a growing economy still constitutes as a zero sum game. You haven’t shown otherwise.
How do you think GDP grows? If you have land and money and I have water, I can sell you water to grow crops while using the money for expanding my business. Do you really not see winners on either side of any trade?
You have to go deeper and trace the products to the source of creation. Land, Water and Sun is limited if not by total supply then by rate of availability.
Simply by obtaining these resources others are deprived. The people who are deprived are the losers, the people who aren't are the winners.
We need different things at different times. Left foot right foot moves you forward at a sustainable pace. Night and day, and on and on. Things have different value at different times, it's too narrow to only regard energy as a source of development. We need rest too. You're not "losing" when you sleep.
Even sleep costs energy. You need to build a shelter and be alive in order to sleep. Both the shelter and being alive costs energy.
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.
You miss my point. Darkness does not cost energy. You can't stand in sunlight 24/7, neither can a tree. Everyone puts a different personalized value on things. You are able to sleep at night because the light is not there.
The air you breath is limited but the limit is so insanely high you don't have to pay a dime for it.
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.
I didn’t read that. I was simply responding to the someone saying the economy was not zero sum and saying that, that specific statement is categorically wrong.
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.
some transactions are zero some (pareto optimal) and some are not (nash equilibria).
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.
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.
1. Except your model is missing an extremely important figure. Modern economies thrive off of the energy variable. This is not some missing detail, it is critical.
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.
I want to chip in here and say that accouting for limited resources in an economic model is definitely useful, because the negate ( not accounting for limited resources ) has led to the environmental disaster that we find ourselves in right now.
That’s an eminently reasonable proposition but that is far far from insisting on dogmatic application of a zero-sum rule where it demonstrably does not apply.
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.
What confuses people is the fact that for many things if energy isn’t used it is actually completely lost, hence people believe that this “lost” energy constitutes a possible unlimited potential supply. Sure it can constitute such a thing if you can find a way to utilize this lost energy. Currently there’s no way to utilize hence it’s not a factor.
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 economy is a concept that exists strictly on Earth (until someone like Musk colonizes Mars). A huge portion of our energy comes from the Sun both in the form of plant matter from agriculture and from solar power as we increasingly build solar panels to harvest the Sun's energy. The simple fact that we can take this exogenous source of energy and feed it into our economy to grow it means that yes, it's zero sum if you consider the Universe, but from the perspective of the economy here on Planet Earth, that economy getting energy for free and grow in excess of your zero sum thinking.
No. First off net useable energy is constantly decreasing in the universe. Entropy will always increase until all energy available for use in the universe is zero. The universe is not a zero sum game. It is negative and in the end everyone loses.
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.
This is some time cube level self rationalizing wackiness. Seriously - If energy is lost, that contradicts your previous claims.
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.
Your first sentence is a rude insult. There’s no need for that on HN.
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.
> Does this model include energy that continuously decays into higher entropy states?
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.
No. That’s just one example in response to your attempted boxing of all economic consequences into the “participants” of a transaction. The example falsifies your claim from ever being true.
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.
Pareto improvements are theoretical concept. neonological argues here, that those are impossible in reality. I think this is pretty hard to argue one or other way, because side effects of our activities aren't always obvious. Things like tumbleweed in northern america or any accidentally imported plant/animal is good example about costs, that arrive later and for other people.
Though I think there is possible to construct some clear Pareto improvement cases, like early improvements of internal combustion engine, where I don't see possibility of negative effects, only additional power out of same amount of fuel.
From certain perspectives increasing available energy or increasing energy efficiency is a net positive. But the modus operandi of humans is to pay for goods because of limited supply.
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.
My understanding is that pareto improvements are positive sum by definition.
>> 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.
One way to see that the externality is overall negative is to make a small model of the economy with even tighter limits on the energy resource. You can literally hold this model in your head. We both agree that energy is a limited resource and that usage of a limited resource prevents others from using that resource and is thus zero sum.
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.
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.
History refers to what actually happened, victors might write history books, but at least in modern era everyone can write their own version and have it out there. The point is I think Americans have little to no World History knowledge because education has been steadily deteriorating and seems to now be culminating in what we can observe as an attack on STEM. Not knowing World History has led to this, but now let's see what happens when Math undergoes a similar change of focus.
Germany vilifies one Adolf Hitler, and treats him as the personification of Satan.
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.
Obviously the amount of deaths due to Columbus is very hard to calculate, as well as the amount of deaths in general around that area, but the total number of indigenous deaths due to European settlers in the Americas around that time has been estimated at 50 million[1]. — how many were directly due to Columbus is of course difficult to calculate.
The total death toll of W.W.2. is 75 million on all sides, for comparison.
> 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.
Well who's on it then? Since the source I cited comes with an estimate that 90% of the indigenous population was killed off before the U.S.A. even broke off from the British Empire.
You're mostly talking about disease in that case, which was "nobody's fault", with a side-helping of 7 years war.
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.
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.
General knowledge, but I checked your link in your previous comment, and that article put 55M of the 60M on disease in the (early, pre-british) timeframe they're discussing.
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
Disease sounds like #1 from what I can tell. Spaniards might edge out Americans, or maybe we're worse, I don't know. We left fewer survivors but they were in a larger area. Columbus for a few years on one island is clearly last place.
Nothing in that link puts 55 million of the 60 on disease.
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.
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.
Ah the typical authoritative propaganda “they are all the same, at least we have order”. No we don’t have in the US a non elected politburo making nationwide decisions on speech issues.
You miss the point. The point is the US in a way is worse than a totalitarian regime like China: in a totalitarian regime it is the government the pushes censorship and hatred in the disguise of morality. In the US it is the elites and ordinary people who do that voluntarily for the so-called narratives. The US is building its own highway to tyranny.
> You miss the point. The point is the US in a way is worse than a totalitarian regime like China: in a totalitarian regime it is the government the pushes censorship and hatred in the disguise of morality. In the US it is the elites and ordinary people who do that voluntarily for the so-called narratives. The US is building its own highway to tyranny.
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).
Of course for now the US's political system is much better. Of course China's political system is worse. But my focus is on the US: A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. So, yeah, the culture war in the US is worse in a sense that the US is destroying itself from bottom-up, while elites try to ride the wave. A Berlin Wall will be torn down. A nation that believes the necessity of Berlin Wall? Well, they will make wall taller. And if you're against building up the wall? You're a racist.
Why is it better for the government to restrict speech than for elites to restrict speech? The government has a monopoly on force so in countries where the government also controls speech, you can face criminal penalties for not complying. No company can do that.
Here we have unelected eBay management (and earlier this year - Twitter, Google, Facebook, Amazon etc) making nationwide decisions on speech. We are getting there.
You can select a different vendor with a single click. You cannot select a different supreme leader without a bloodbath. That is the difference. Remember 1989?
This is a wildly inaccurate, simplistic, agenda driven take. I was going to give some additional perspective, but you've covered about 40 topics, and all of them poorly.
But the US have started as a strict official theocracy of Massachusetts, and also highly religious other states, like Pennsylvania (even though Quakers were not as oppressively moralizing).
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 :(
> ...always told their citizens that misinformation and disinformation was evil.
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.
The book is predicated in characterizing people based on their race, which is racism. The author is also a racist who says things like how she “tries to be a little less white every day.”
You are not using the same definition of "racism" that they are. "Prejudice + institutional power" is another framing where "racism against white people" is somewhat nonsensical. Why does that quote mean she's racist?
First, the book is a hilarious Kafka trap. It's explicit basis is this: All whites are racist, and any white that denies this is demonstrating "fragility", and therefore is even MORE racist than whites that admit they're racist.
See the trap? If you deny you're racist, it's proof that you're actually even more racist.
The second part I want to point out, as someone who actually read this absolute rubbish, is that D'Angelo is absolutely hardcore racist. She, for example, spends an intro to a chapter explaining how she was invited to some event at a public park, and upon arrival, she saw two large groups of people, one black, the other white. For a brief moment, she describes, she was stricken with anxiety, worried that the group she was meeting might be the black group.
She extrapolates her own internal racism to the default state of all white people.
Seriously, read the book. She's out of her tree. Anybody recommending this book either hasn't read it and is virtue signalling, or has read it and is so deep into the magisterium of the Church of Woke that they're not worth trying to save.
She’s taken negative characteristics, ascribed them to a group of people based on skin color, and implied that it’s a good thing to try and be “less white.” Its bigotry plain and simple and I’m actually taken aback that I have to explain it to you.
Well seems their working from a premise of ‘prejudice + institutional power’... so in that sense, ‘white’ could be seen as shorthand for that in some countries. So being less prejudice and more aware of institutional power is a virtue/good thing.
> I don’t think any one is harmed by that shorthand.
Of course they are. Why play this game of pretend?
And in what world is it "harmful" to "pretend" something true, namely that "white" is no shorthand (let alone an "effective" one) for "prejudice + institutional power"?
Some responses to the logic you followed in this thread.
1. There's no good reason to assign the sweeping and inherently-fuzzy category "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power". Even given your (oversimplified) observation about colonialism, that's neither a necessary nor sufficient reason to apply a label that will be inherently over-generalized. It is simple historic fact that many "white" (per current definition) peoples had no role in colonialism and enjoyed no (local or global) institutional power. If this claim is mystifying to you, you may need to learn about white people outside of America or western Europe. So, the proposed semantic shortcut is inherently unjust to a portion of humanity.
To the degree that this (arbitrary aesthetic) choice does harm... it is, in itself, racist.
2. To make the argument above, does not require "pretending colonialism wasn't a thing." Those are separate debates.
3. But even setting aside #1 & #2, it is, of course, far more debatable how current elites got their status. What frame are you using? The US? "The west"? The world? I would say that even the presumption that "current elites" can reasonably be described as "white" would be quite wrong in all three cases (escalatingly so, in order). But the notion that dominance was wholly established by extractive colonialism is something that could only pass for true in a deeply incestuous echo chamber. By the time colonialism even started there were already wide gaps in technological and economic development of various societies, and given how development has unfolded, it's likely the gaps we see today would exist even without colonial interference. Differential development since colonialism ended also attests to the fact that colonialism and hard force are only factors in development, not determinants.
Finally, all this ignores the broad strokes of human history: across all geographies and times, human societies have discriminated against and dominated each other. Maybe occasionally, maybe perpetually, but it's basically always there. At a certain point, it became possible to do so at longer distances, at larger scale and across larger cultural experience gaps -- but human awfulness didn't start 15th century.
So again, making motivated aesthetic choices about naming descriptions of social systems and types of interpersonal behavior after an identity group that does not actually map to them is aptly described as racist. Not under the new, stipulative definition, which runs afoul of all these issues, but under the older and more useful definition that could be summarized as "harming or hating people on the basis of their race/skin color".
1. Which white people are you referring to that don’t have a hand in colonialism? You think it’s too fuzzy? Who specifically is unjustly included in that term?
2. How the current elites got there is very relevant for why institutions are the way they are.
3. Frame is: the world. More specifically the English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Belgium, Russian empires that colonised the world, and invented the idea of “white supremacy” (named by them!) and only recently (last 50-60 years) been removed as an “official hurdle” to non white races. Civil rights act (because people of colour were not considered “a man” under the constitution) in the US, the abolition of “White Australia Policy” (Of note given Australia was a black nation in near Asia), end of Apartheid in South Africa . But that was official definitions, not cultural which still linger today, as can be seen in the economic disparity between “whites” and everyone else in post colonial nations unless they’ve worked super hard to undo it...
1. The most direct answer is most of the people of Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. Draw a circle from Estonia, to Czechia, down the east Adriatic coast, around Greece and Georgia. That's a lot of people and a lot of peoples. Many have immigrated to the US or western Europe and have established lives in the multicultural societies where they (today but not always historically) get counted as "white".
The more complicated answer would also include some peoples from Central and South America. Many peoples there who consider themselves "white", through evolution of cultural identities after colonialism. It's not as simple as "Oh, well there were white colonizers and everyone else" -- the "mestizo" identity has grown and changed but it's very much it's own thing.
Finally, even among the obviously-colonist nations, there have always been underclasses who had no say in managing their societies or what those societies did overseas. This observation is anathema to those who want to draw neat circles around societies and label them colonizers, racists, etc... but as a simple matter of fact, there plenty of super "white" British/French/Dutch/etc people who lived at the height of colonialism and still had nothing to do with it, whether they would have wanted to or not.
2. Sure, it's relevant. But, again, the discussions of how accurate it is to make sweeping claims about "white" people or countries do not necessitate any kind of colonialism denial. This was in response to your comment upthread which implied that discussing the harms of "white = prejudice + institutional power" necessitates ignoring colonialism. It doesn't.
3. Helpful clarifications, but you didn't respond to the arguments.
A) "Current elites" are diverse, both within multicultural societies like the US and around the globe. Maybe that distribution isn't "perfect" (begging what that would mean...) but it's factually wrong to call those elites, as a category, white.
B) 15th-19th century colonialism was a continuation of the prior state of the world (across cultures, societies, geographies). The unusual thing was the technology that propelled it to a larger scale, as well as the subsequent phase change in civilization (caused by industrialization and globalization) which ended those norms of dominance and conquest.
C) It's an extraordinary claim (though extraordinarily popular in the canonical liberal-progressive worldview) that extractive colonialism was the sole (or even primary) driver of current inequalities. Those gaps were already huge when colonialism started (and hence why it worked so effectively). Culture (at various level of 'zoom' with respect to that concept), education, technology, social values... tons of things play a role in differential development. To group all current disparities and wave your hands while mumbling "something something colonialism" does not establish a rigorous model of what causes differential development.
To sum it all up:
It's a simple fact that lots of "white" people had nothing to do with colonialism, nor even had an opportunity to design or perpetrate any colonialism. That alone makes demonizing the category with moralizing labels a harmful decision.
Add the much more complicated subject of determining what drives or has driven disparities in various cases, and it becomes extremely questionable to claim that "white = prejudice+power" is a necessary or even useful tool for analyzing social relations and designing solutions.
Love your rhetoric! Move the meaning of the words White until it bares no resemblance to the original intention and then point out it has no resemblance.
Your imaginary line encompasses a tiny proportion of “white”.
So, please comment on what the civil rights act was doing, or the “White Australia Policy” without making any racial reference? What did Australia even mean by “White”!? Last I checked both those countries were democracies and those policies (or lack there of) were voted on... so which people couldn’t participate? Oh yeah the people of colour! Because they were excluded.
The elite in all of the colonialist countries are still White... in America, they are White, in Australia they are White, despite both countries having an exclusively non-White population before colonisation. Until recently it was the case in places like Hk and Singapore... White isn’t my term, it’s theirs. Go to China where there are signs like “whites only, no yellow!” On the old colonial buildings. Or South Africa or Australia with specific reference to whites and “non-whites”. Or Jim Crow in the US... like which make believe world are you talking about?
> There's no good reason to assign the sweeping and inherently-fuzzy category "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power".
“White” is the name established by those with institutional power for the group their prejudice favored, other racial identifiers were ascribed to (and, through shared experience of racism from the White group, became identities for) various groups that their prejudice operated against, whereas White became an identity for those whose shared experience was being the beneficiaries of that institutionalized prejudice.
Yes for various periods of time there were various efforts to construct such an identity, to serve various ends of the people doing so. This kind of process has taken place all over the world, throughout history, in various societies as well.
In the case of "white", "black", "brown" and so on, those definitions also changed considerably over time. Then, at some point, the efforts to intentionally draw hard lines around petered off and lost support.
Those labels are still used because they do have some kind of descriptive capacity, even if solely because of momentum from old habits.
Crucially: none of this is responsive to my point. There's no good reason, today, to assign "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power" in a general sense. It's not necessary to do so. Doing so is not sufficient to address and unpack all the dimensions of prejudice and institutional inequality as they take place today. But doing so does incur all the imprecision-based racist harms that I described in my post.
> Yes for various periods of time there were various efforts to construct such an identity, to serve various ends of the people doing so.
No, I'm not talking about some vague various-periods-of-time generality.
Every concrete identity current in American society, including “White”, is a product of White supremacy, and currently reflects identification with shared experience under White supremacy, which, for those the White, is being on the side of prejudiced institutional power.
Whiteness as a racial identity (not as an ancestry, not as description of skin color, but as a racial identity) is, entirely, about prej5 plus institutional power.
You're repeating yourself and ignoring arguments already made.
"White" has changed in definition over time. English expanded to include French, expanded to include Irish/Scottish, expanded to include Germanic/Nordic, expanded to include Slavic, expanded to include (some) Hispanics... it's pretty much always been changing.
And for a good 50 years, it's just devolved into a term of convenience. We haven't had concerted "racial construction" for decades.
You paint a totalizing picture that's dusty, faded and old. It's not a relevant stance in today's America, except insofar as it enables these totalizing activist narratives (for political and economic purposes, every time).
You answered your own question. There’s been a stipulative, activist semantic expansion (or outright replacement) of the word “racism”. It really blew up fast but most prople haven’t consciously learned and internalized this, so a lot of (un)intentional equivocation takes place. Lots of miscommunication, misunderstanding and talking past each other. Classic human stuff.
My opinion: putting aside the discussion of the new definitions merits and shortcomings, we can still easily call DiAngelo presumptuous, essentialist and nontrivially bigoted.
> "Prejudice + institutional power" is another framing where "racism against white people" is somewhat nonsensical.
Nonsense.
A white student is four times less likely to be admitted to a top university than a black student with the same grades and test scores.
A white student is significantly less likely to be admitted to medical school than a comparable black student.
There are literally hundreds of race-based scholarships exclusively for nonwhite students, and none exclusively for white students.
That's to say nothing of the thousands of special programs, events, job fairs, awards, and career opportunities that exist exclusively for nonwhite students and workers.
Note that the handful of scholarships listed under "Caucasian" do not appear to be actually exclusive. For example, for Journalism Institute for Media Diversity Scholarships:
> Members of racial, ethnic and other underrepresented groups are particularly urged to apply as are those interested in studying the importance of diversity in the nation's media to this country's future well being.
From No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life by Espenshade and Radford:
> The black preference at public schools is equivalent on average to 3.8 ACT points. In other words, a black applicant who receives a score of 27 on the ACT test would have the same chance of admission to a public NSCE institution as a white candidate with an ACT score of 30.8, other things in model 2 the same... The second column of Table 3.5 indicates the size of admission preferences at private NSCE institutions. Once again, black applicants receive the largest admission bonus—equivalent to 310 SAT points. A black candidate with an SAT score of 1250 could be expected to have the same chance of being admitted as a white student whose SAT score is 1560, all other things equal in model 5.
A theme in the book is that you're a racist if you're born white. If you deny that you're racist, then you just prove that you're indeed a racist -- hence the white fragility.
Let's look at China between 1949 and 1978. You would be Chinese version of Dalits if your parents or grandparents were landlords, farmers who owned property, counter-revolutionaries (whatever that is), bad influencers, rightist, or an intellectual. You would need to accept that you were born evil. If you denied that you were a bad guy, well, then you just proved that you were a worse person as you wouldn't even accept that you needed "transformation". Tens of thousands of people were exile to Gulag-like places and died there. Students in elementary schools could beat their principals to death for they were counter revolutionary. Millions people were striped their properties and basic rights. It was a scar cutting deep into generations of Chinese people. Oh by the way, you can attack anyone for being a "rightist", and you automatically became morally superior.
Now, how is bullshit like white fragility different China's Five Black Categories in those dark years? Just replace "rightist" with "racist", and I can't tell the difference.
It's the best review of the book I've read. It's not conspiratorial to acknowledge the over-representation of Jewish authors listed in the bibliography.
Maybe not in a vacuum but when the author is giddy with excitement at confirming what he "already knew going into this"... it raises questions and detracts from the subject.
I'm far from woke but this is pretty littered with dog whistles and paranoid exaggerations. And, more to the point, it's no more rigorous than DiAngelo's work.
The entire idea that you must be anti-racist is borrowed from Marxism- a totalizing ethos that sees everything through the lense of race (instead of class). Its not enough to say I am a neutral person who treats individuals the same regardless of the color of their skin- if you are white that is seen as a subtle way of preserving your race (class) interest. Only by actively joining in the struggle can you convince the successor class that you are sufficiently anti racist (formerly anti bourgeois).
Morality has a dark side. When used to judge yourself, it's a powerful way to cut through the rationalizations for bad behavior, and hopefully lead to better behavior.
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.
I think this falls into the “if you aren’t anti-racist, you’re racist” category of cancel culture. On the one hand, it sounds like a great idea that everyone should be against racism. However, it quickly becomes a slippery slope as it cascades. These books are racist, thus if you have/sell/buy them, that makes you racist too. And if you don’t do something about it, you should get canceled to. Someone put one of the offensive images on Twitter or Google scraped a site with one? Cancel them too. And if you don’t support canceling all of these things, that means you support these things and should be canceled too.
Taken to the logical conclusion, anyone or anything that’s offended anyone should be canceled. Which is everyone and everything.
Burning books, the next evolution of our enlightened approach to the past.
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.
I wouldn't if I had any. They're going to become collectibles eventually and could fetch you a decent amount. My totally true conspiracy-theory is, the dr-seus-industrial-complex is at it again, manipulating the collectible editions market to make bank.
Dr Suess was undeniably a racist, but i think at this stage people are looking to find stuff that may be offensive to someone, somewhere and then ban it. What next? Mr Potato Head has gone gender neutral. i think we are overestimating children.I doubt the next Suess free generation will be less racist as a result. What they will have is no appreciation of one of the most talented childrens writers ever. The only author who has managed to make poetry interesting to children, who can spark their imagination with genuine wit. For what reason? Roald Dahl was genuinely anti-semitic. I still enjoy his books, but they don't come close to the Doctor. The purge of childrens toys seem to be that they are poisoned with outdated and racist notions and they are poisoning the minds of children who grow up as racist. But its absurd, intentional conditioning of childrens minds by a social convention is acceptable. How can this possibly be the reality. Only totalitarian regimes put such effort into brainwashing children. I'm not doing justice to the issue. If someone can word my points better, i shall be grateful.
He was actively campaigning against racism well before he adopted the name Dr Seuss, even if he occasionally fetishized foreign cultures along with caricatures of local cultures.
i remember seeing a ww2 cartoon caricaturising japanese americans as a 5th column. You can argue that that was the spirit of the times and he isn't to blame, but it does feel wrong to me. (granted Japan were fearsome opponents)
seeing that cartoon, i realised that the good Doctor wasn't quite the lovely man that comes through in his books.
I understand that eBay has existing policies about what they will allow to be sold, but doesn't going to this length basically mean that a lot of media will eventually be banned? Something we say today may(probably will) be considered offensive in the future. Maybe this is the inevitable model for the future; mass "software updates" to our culture ushered in by Silicon Valley. Is this good?
> 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.
This makes me think of Whoopi Goldberg's introduction to the second volume of the "Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection" published in 2005 [0]. Warner Bros faced the same kind question that we see these companies grappling with now and decided it was best to keep a majority of the offensive content in the collection. Most importantly, the collection was prefaced by Whoopi Goldberg and she explained why the offensive clips were included. I highly recommend anyone who reads this comment to watch the video below.
I personally feel as though it would be better to do something like this with Dr. Seuss' books rather than ceasing their publication.
Prices are skyrocketing now for these books. I suspect The Berenstain Bears collection are next, along with whatever else cancel/woke-culture deems unacceptable for society.
It's hard to tell from eBay's limited comment whether this is because eBay is super upset about the content of the books, or because they're worried these books will lead to fraudulent activity in the short term because of the hoopla surrounding them. It seems weird for it to be the former, considering eBay allows sale of much more offensive books.
This makes me sad. The Mulberry street one was always my favorite. Why don't they just find an illustrator to fix the illustrations and find a poet to fix any problematic text? Surely that wouldn't be too difficult.
Just think of how much money they would make from everyone buying correct versions of the books.
Earlier this week when the story from the publisher broke, I had a look on ebay to see if these books were available. The ones I found were already listed for over $100.
I keep thinking I can just keep my head down and ignore all this stupidity. But then I remember that this is the world my children will have to live in. Sigh.
It is not Fahrenheit 451 scenario we are talking here.
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 am not sure this is about free speech even though it looks like it on the surface.
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.
To everyone defending eBays actions in this thread, I have a humble request. Please ask yourself this:
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.
There's some interesting threads here. I do understand the conversation around free speech and censorship has been top of mind lately, but IMO a lot of the comments here are getting carried away and missing a point that is crucial in this instance: these are children's books.
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.
Ironically, the books originally targeted for destruction in the novel Fahrenheit 451 were those that society universally found abhorrent to children - bigotry, pornography, racism, sexism etc. (The book then deals with the fallout from that in the years afterwards as any book gets targeted)
"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?
> 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.
No, in the same way that not everyone who has been exposed to a potentially lethal environmental hazard is dead.
User aylmao wrote: "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."
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?
> Would absorbing and imitating this make them sexist or give them sexist views?
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.
I absolutely agree that showing certain racist depictions to children can create biases. But is the solution really to ban the whole story? I said it in other comments but with similar cases, publishers just changed illustrations or words in a text instead of unpublishing it. Dr Seuss Enterprise holds the copyright and has every right to just update the books.
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.
A part of me gets happy when I see this. If you are going to be insane, at least be consistently insane, and force everyone to reconcile with the insanity.
Lest our children be exposed to the horrors of Dr. Seuss.
Someone in the comment mention they care about how Chinese illustration portrayed in Dr. Seuss book.
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 hyperbole. The publisher decided to stop publishing a book. Ebay decided to enforce their TOS that has been in place all over. It's hardly book burning.
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.
Perhaps - but at what point do we stand up and say "no"? One day something you agree with or love will be taken down because it's found to be "offensive".
It's hilarious to me that a publishing company decided to cancel themselves, simultaneously painting the picture that they're the villain and the victim depending on which side of the political spectrum you are.
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!
A few of these books are only incidentally racist so I hope Dr. Seuss Enterprises sees fit to tweak and re-release them similarly to the Richard Scarry classics[1] others have mentioned.
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.
As someone who just wrote a very long comment about a week ago explaining why you can't call a publisher deciding not to publish something "censorship" (and I stand by it), I feel a lot more uneasy about curtailing third-party resale than I do a publisher deciding not to publish things. Third-party resale is one of the few checks on the otherwise unlimited market powers that copyright holders have; and this could wind up being precedential if applied beyond weird exception cases like racist books.
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.
Also should we ban all book with picture of African tribes in case children are not smart enough to understand not all. Lack people live like this?
Ex: https://imgur.com/gallery/6QwwrFb
That’s actually an interesting challenge. It’s just good manners not to offend someone you are communicating with. Makes sense, keeps the society going and has done so for millennia. Til now the number of people you might be communicating with has been geographically limited and therefore avoiding offense was doable. But now the interweb not only expands the number of counterparts, but makes it very difficult to know, what might be offensive. Two ways this can go, I think. One, people learn not to consume things they find offensive and be less offended by things. Two, this communication challenge will serve as an balancing loop for globalization and shrink the world back down to where we can still manage. I’m afraid, it’s going to be the latter.
I'm a 60 year old fan of Rap and Hip Hop... is Ebay going to delist Wiz Khalifa songs to name one artist. I won't quote the lyrics here, but his tunes often denigrate the ladies, and refer to them as paid sex workers. Let's talk about that.
I'm want to make a slippery slope argument, that a year or two from now Dr. Seuss books will be banned all together. "He wrote some racist books before, don't you know?" It's really easy to imagine this, given other machinations in the broader cultural complex in the US.
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 much prefer a solution, that is not favored in US, which is to add description to the offending work explaining why it is considered inappropriate, instead of banning it, like it never existed. I consider it a reinforcement learning.
RE books not suitable for kids. My 4 year old asked me to reed him a new book he got from who knows where; It was Noah's Ark picture book, looking like this https://www.google.com/search?q=noah%27s+ark+child+book. Right on the third page "God killed all people because they were wicked". My son was upset and demanded an explanation, which I struggled to provide. I have realised how strange it is that we tolerate child books describing mass murder in the name of religion.
Note that at least eBay is not making up the rules on the fly; their "offensive material policy" has existed since at least 2018 and it includes "we don't allow items that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance". http://web.archive.org/web/20180705090957/https://www.ebay.c...
This is just crazy. As crazy as banning Apu on Simpsons. I am an Indian and despite being one of easily provoked people -- especially on social media -- I found the whole Apu episode to be a knee jerk reaction.
I just checked out "If I ran the Zoo", and there's a page with an illustration of African people depicted like monkeys. How do people feel about this-- an overreaction or completely justified?
Is this the African island of Yerka page? If so, that prob hasn't aged well for 2021 but... Eh, just looks more like a stylized/caricature more than anything.
I don't see this being a free speech issue when you read this:
"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.
I have no problem with books retiring to respect the original vision instead of revise it to be more palatable to the zeitgeist. Modern society should move away from those things that actively made people feel less human and indoctrinate their children with those ideas. You will still have access to the materials. And Dr. Seuss estate is free to do what they want to highlight the positive while reduce the tarnish of Dr. Seuss commercially published racist works.
Most news websites also use "If I ran the zoo" as this one is the most clear cut. I had to search around a lot to find the example for McElligot's Pool. There it's just one illustration that could be viewed as offensive and it's much less obvious than some of the others.
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.
Okay I was all for the Dr. Seuss estate deciding to no longer publish their own works, for whatever reason they wanted. W H A T E V E R reason, including using their platform to make a statement about society.
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"
I took a look at those books (you can find them on many book piracy sites.)
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.
I'm thinking about making some kind of "Cancel Cancel Culture" browser extension that would automatically block sites that are known to engage in this kind of totalitarian behavior. I would make it open source and try to raise money with donations. It's not exactly the ideal solution, but I see no way to stop this madness unless we "fight fire with fire" so to speak.
This will restore Dr. Seuss to the New York Times best seller list. Every brand now needs to consider new methods to attract hostility - sales will go up.
This is getting bad, really bad. It reminds me of this poem by Martin Niemöller:
---------
First they came for the Communists. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a Communist.
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.
---------
We are destroying a culture whose solid footing used to be tolerance. People need to understand that once you go far enough in this direction there is no going back. One day a different ideology will have control. At that moment in time they will remember what you did to them. The result will be a vindictive response in the opposite direction.
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.
If the ideology that produced these books survives to take power, we will have failed as a society. But I'm not worried - we're better positioned than ever to hunt error to the farthest corners of the world, if need be.
The thread is lost if we narrowly focus on the distinction between public and private censorship. Yes, the distinction is important, but it is not the entirety of the issue.
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.
The fact that you can buy Mein Kampf on eBay (along with thousands of things far more objectionable than a few children’s books) is what makes eBay’s actions that much more hypocritical and reprehensible.
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…
defining the offense is counteractive as it also defines the parameters for the discussion around it. Better instead to leave it vague so discussion is almost impossible. It also allows the offense to change over time.
So, are you people still not seeing what Bitcoin's MVP is yet?
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 support eBay's right to decide what is sold on their platform, and this is not a first amendment issue, but I feel like eBay should have a more hands-off policy, like "if you are legally allowed to buy/sell this product in your jurisdiction then we will list it". eBay should be a neutral platform.
Possibly worth pointing out that you can pick up a paid copy of Mein Kampf online. I think like Mein Kampf, Dr Seuss has historical value and we should hold off on the book burning. Very few books will hold up to modern scrutiny - we need to stop before there's nothing left of our past.
As someone without a star on his belly, I feel like harm is being done to me every time I read the story about the star bellied sneetches. I do not think that children nor adults need to be reminded about how inadequate they are in a world of star bellied sneetches.
Does anybody know what was the content that was the reason for the ban? The article only quotes: “Dr. Seuss Enterprises has stopped publication of this book due to its negative portrayal of some ethnicities,” - but I am curious what was it exactly.
This is stupid - of the things you can still buy on eBay are Huck Finn, Gone with the Wind, Birth of a Nation and some of the original versions of Tintin in the Congo just to name a few. I'm pretty liberal but this is eye rolling.
I'm curious if this was at the request of Seuss's family. Yes, it seems to be overreaching, but I can see why that family might want to limit the spread of materials that don't present themselves in the best manner.
What I don’t really get is the cancelling of a subset of his work.
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.
If you're a fan of the free market and want to see these books continue to be available go ahead and contact the rights owners and offer to purchase them.
Sounds like one of what will likely become many stupid decisions creating opportunity for an ebay competitors to gain market share in the online auction space.
I think a lot of commenters are missing a crucial piece of information about this. These books are being removed from publishing by the owner of the IP, don't blame ebay for this.
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)
Ceasing to publish new copies is different than disallowing the exchange of existing copies. The owner of the IP chose to do the former, eBay chose to do the latter.
I remember being in school decades ago and our very left-wing English teacher telling us about the Catholic Church's index of banned books, which included things like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. At the same time, you also had a big push by Evangelical groups in the U.S. to ban books like Deliverance from school due to their graphic sexual content.
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.
Just wanted to say that the books were not banned; Dr Seuss’ family decided to pull the books because yeah, the dude made some racist books. “Canceling” him would mean banning his entire catalog, which I haven’t heard anyone suggest. But this wasn’t the publisher; this was the copyright holder deciding they no longer wanted this speech in the world.
I find this very disturbing and wrong. This is exactly when moderation turns into censorship.
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.
It's time for secession. Rational, un-woke areas of countries need to declare independence from their failing woke governments. If you want to live in woke hell, choose a woke country. Rational people can live in rational countries. Talk of melting pots is quaint, and unworkable.
I saw a previous comment mention why not ban all his books if you are going to ban a subset. I dont know if they were trying to force the argument down the slippery slope to its logical conclusion to illucidate its irrationality, but this is exactly how we end up in Farenheit 451.
what happens if the publishers find that Harry Potter Volume 3 is racist because the escaped murderer is called Black. (yes, I've read it. No spoiler alerts, please)
As usual with ebay they'll do it for about a couple months till no one cares then it will easily be gotten around and they won't care. Knowing this from the cancelled items in other hobbies I follow.
What is it with all this history-erasing lately? And it seems to be happening on all sides of the political spectrum!
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!
Why is it the only remedy that we seem capable of considering is exclusion? Pushing people and ideas away is a punishment that hurts both sides and offers little chance of redemption or learning.
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?
This is a foul collection of dire comments. I find it pretty asinine that the the personal choice of private individuals about how to distribute IP has brought out this vitriol. That is their choice, and I’m gobsmacked at the moral panic here. Don’t you Milton Freidman conservatives believe in the Right to Choose?
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?
There is one person with enough credibility to tell the Left to be liberal again: Barack Obama.
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.
As I pointed out elsewhere, this is misleading and approaching a lie. eBay only allows critically-annotated copies of Mein Kampf which are designed for scholars. I am sure that a copy of “If I Ran The Zoo” with a sociologist critically annotating the abhorrent racism would be permitted on eBay.
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.
What do you want me to say? I don’t work for eBay! It looks like that book is against eBay’s policy and should probably be flagged. They are not the only online marketplace where people sometimes break the rules.
> 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.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
gentle reminder that in China currently if you want to create audiovisual fiction you cannot portrait an extramarital affair that ends well. There are about a bazillion such rules.
Also I'm unsure what that has to do with the American Empire, does Darpa and the military run on Dr Seuss comics?
Are there any examples in history or literary fiction (including sci-fi) where the ones that ban books and punish thoughts are the good guys?
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.
Free speech regimes fail and are replaced by those that censor, because censoring exercises power, whereas free speech exercises none. Thus people attracted to power will find some way to censor, and then to increase censorship.
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.
In the past, population-wide rhetorical power was reserved for politicians and artists. Now the stupid mob has it too. And boy are they stupid. Humorless, tasteless and shallow too. Who needs fascists when you've got twitter? More censoring to come.
Not sure if I'd want to carry an 80 year old children's book talking about people with "slants for eyes" from 'countries you can't pronounce' myself, personally. ebay is, of course, free to carry what they'd like.
Why should eBay override the wants of buyers in this way? How many people think the continued sale of Dr. Seuss books is doing harm? I think there are opportunities for less woke companies to gain share.
On top of all the censorship concerns, refusing to continue publication of these books actually is a damning indictment of the copyright system.
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.
Once upon a time there was a big social movement of the 99% against the 1% called Occupy Wall Street. Now there is a strange coincidence where every major multi-national mega-corp is pushing wokeness. All our attention is being spent on whose lives matter most, who is wearing a mask, what books are banned, and if Coca Cola thinks you should be "less white." It's best we not be too concerned about the Trillions of dollars in wealth transfer that have been going on the last few years with the bailouts and monetary policy.
We mustn't forget the history that resulted in these racist books. At the same time, it's important to ensure that children aren't exposed to such material.
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.
Will we be required to submit our private book collection to the government agency of your choosing? Also, how dare parents pass their ideas onto their own children without the school’s consent.
When are we going to admit that black supremacy is just as damaging as white supremacy? I’m not saying we should all become white supremacists because the science obviously doesn’t check out but surely it’s time to call racial superiority groups out for the trash they’ve become. It’s no longer about “racial equality” and I’m not sure it ever was. They’re just out to squash other races at this point.
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?]
It is so hard to decide whether racism or racist hints (in the UK it is more discreet, disguised as classist but all the same) should be banned because racism is not compatible with todays civilized society or if it should be allowed so the stupid racists can expose their bigoted selves.
EBay has all the rights to do this, private platform and all that. Having Such books in the product portfolio is contaminating the brand.
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.
Surprised by the majority of comments here. How many of you have actually looked at these pictures? A private entity decided to stop publishing certain things. Another private entity is declining to sell old copies of said things. This is not “cancel culture” like conservative commentators want to make it out to be - and 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.
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'.
I saw some of the images. eBay's actions seem a bit heavy handed, but I think its entirely appropriate that the Seuss estate wishes to stop producing new copies. If I was a parent and I randomly bought a Seuss book and got the racist caricature I saw, I'd be disappointed in the brand.
Most purchasers of Seuss books are not looking to start a dialog with their toddler about racism.
A handful of companies influencing the overton window of the entire nation in response to easily upset Twitter mobs is precisely what I consider to be part of cancel culture.
> 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.
According to what? A social contract? The written law? Some ethical/moral foundation?
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.
I think you might be correct, I tend to see copyright itself as censorious, but copyright on something you have no intent allowing access to seems downright unacceptable.
There will always be alternative marketplaces hosted by alternative web hosts that are willing to continue doing business with companies that are deemed dangerous to society...
...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.
I'm surprised people don't understand public relations. These books were likely not good sellers. I have many of their books but never heard if these titles.
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
I was thinking something similar. Now it seems eBay is jumping in, trying to ride the wave of viral publicity. I haven't thought about Dr. Seuss or ebay in ages but suddenly my wife is buying Dr. Seuss books in case they ban more. Maybe I am just cynical, but it seems like a few people are getting promotions over this ordeal.
