I tend to agree with triviality. But I’m white and can’t vocalize that opinion IRL. However I do feel like people of my pigment also do these things as risk mitigation. Eg. Most of the world was caught off guard by the Dr Seuss thing. It seems quite obvious to me the family proactively took the books out of print because the fallout from being targeted by SJW or whoever would be huge. People are out there looking for things to be offended by, brands to attack, etc and if you’re a big company you don’t want to be caught in those crosshairs.
That said, I do recall getting “pat us on the back” vibes from GitHub but just wanted to throw this alternate justification out into the discussion.
Can I just briefly highlight that this wasn't "a thing" per se? This was a company privately deciding to pull some poorly selling publications from active publishing and adding a positive PR spin by calling out some questionable decisions in the art.
This was made into "an issue" by some pretty rabid media outlets rebranding it as government censorship while the decision was entirely privately made. That's a pretty terrible mis-categorization.
These sorts of controversies, from both the right and the left, sell news papers and that's the reason why media latches onto them so aggressively.
It sort of was a thing, but it was never new. Geisel spent decades in discourse with people regarding racism and sexism in his works. He earnestly made many changes over the years, for example changing the look of the Chinese character in Mulberry St. Outside the Dr. Suess books, he even sometimes flipped some of his earlier racist tropes to make progressive, anti-racist statements. But he adamantly refused to make some other changes, such using more gender neutral pronouns beyond the substitutions he already made. This latest round of changes and exclusions were the ones he adamantly refused to make. Much worse, he's now portrayed in the media as being blithely or even stubbornly ignorant of his own prejudices, when nothing could be further from the truth. Whether you agree or disagree with him, he engaged with these issues and admitted to many faults.
I don't disagree - and that's part of the reason (other than generally disliking the act of whitewashing our history) that I'm happy that this take down wasn't activist driven - but it certainly is portrayed in some media outlets as being an attack by the left.
I've seen some of his WW2 propaganda and saw a lot of the contemporary artwork from other artists while I was in school - buck-toothed squinty asians in rice hats abound - and he very rightfully walked that back and acted in a reasonable manner. I don't think this has particularly tarnished his image but I also avoid twitter and facebook zealously so I tend to be outside of most of the outrage bubbles.
I do hope that his image continues to do well since he was ahead of the curve on a number of issues near and dear to my heart.
They jumped on it. Ebay and Amazon jumped on the misinterpretation and that is squarely their mistake.
The Dr Seuss estate wasn't afraid of SJW's randomly cancelling them. And neither was Ebay or Amazon, which were instead signalling support for a society retcon that nobody - not even Dr Seuss' estate - asked for. Those latter companies are staffed by people experiencing the same cognitive dissonance in this comment thread.
For whatever hysterical reason those books are now selling for ridiculous prices.
Media made a big deal out of "canceling" Dr. Seuss and those books weirdly became an icon of free speech for some folks and now we've arrived at a place where secondary markets are being forced to take a stance on the issue.
Books get pulled from publication all the time - books even get pulled from publication for really extremist content (or are refused by publishers in the first place). This is only a circus now because some media outlets stirred it up. It is occasionally the case that some folks on the internet find something offensive and try and get it canceled with a petition - I loathe this process for a number of reasons - but this isn't what happened here, some media outlets took a nothingburger and turned it into a four course meal.
If you hike in the woods you'll pass by bee-hives all the time, that doesn't mean you always go out in heavy clothing - but if someone ahead of you on the trail kicked a hive repeatedly then you'll put on the clothing if you've got it. All the "thing" here is just reactionary to there being so much arbitrary attention directed at it in the first place.
ebay have been randomly censoring stuff for stupid reasons for a while (e.g. they (approximately, details best double checked) won't sell historical records involving slavery much to the annoyance of historians).
I'm minimally troubled by the discontinuation of what I'm fairly sure actually -were- underperforming titles while also extremely pissed with ebay.
> media outlets rebranding it as government censorship
I must have missed that. All the criticism I've seen about the action was just that -- criticism of the private action, basically criticizing the editorial decision.
I haven't seen anyone confuse it with government regulation.
Bunch of republican politicians tried to claim it was "Biden's fault" and Ted Cruz is now selling autographed copies of Green Eggs and Ham ... which continued to sell just fine and there's no reason to think will be discontinued any time in the forseeable future.
No, a straw man is taking a deliberately weak version of an argument and then attacking it.
I pointed out that Ted Cruz had made such attacks and was also trying to make money off it.
Googling for "cruz tweet seuss" will provide you with plenty of first hand information about Cruz' actions; McCarthy also beclowned himself over the issue. If you prefer to disbelieve 'a bunch' that's up to you.
what consequences do you think you would encounter IRL, compared to a non-white person vocalizing that opinion IRL?
there is another comment talking about a black engineer not prioritizing this in their team and being told by the rainbow haired PMs that they were internalizing systemic racism.
do you think you would get unceremoniously cancelled instead instead of simply silenced like the black person thats assumed to be "the poor victim with no independent agency"? are you sure that is a valid fear?
That said, I do recall getting “pat us on the back” vibes from GitHub but just wanted to throw this alternate justification out into the discussion.