311–320 of 1001 posts
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 dif…
Hop on Pop is also a good one, great for learning phonemes.
I think nearly every reasonable person agrees: - Particular illustrations have not aged well - 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…
I've seen a ton of people disagree with this in the last several hours.
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.
If you want to send a clear message to eBay you can close your account here. https://www.ebay.com.au/help/account/changing-account-settin... It should not be up to them what is and isn't offensive. I did the same to Netflix last year. Money talks at the end of the day.
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"
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.
- 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.
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 cate…
And you get downvoted on HN for even mentioning “slippery slope”.
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
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D8/D124F787
Frankly, it’s become exhausting posting here. I don’t even want to participate.
Am I not alone in thinking this Neo-puritanism is going too far?
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 Tan…
Um, yes, of course. Have you not?
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".
While I think ebay bans are ridiculous most of this furor is about old, very racist books that Seuss himself apologized for later in life. 99% of Seuss readers have never read Oh Beyond Zebra, and nobody will miss the Cat's Quizzer.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
