How ironic will it be if the Seuss holding corporation discovers the Streisand effect this way. I am sure that the late Seuss would find it droll.
Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
481–490 of 1001 posts
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#482Now 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…
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.
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 contro…
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"
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...
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#484Dr 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 auth…
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. https://twitter.com/daBookdragon/status/1366572785015943169?...
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.
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#485Earlier 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.
> master
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.
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is one thing for libraries and bookstores to decide not to offer for borrowing or sale things that they disagree with. Ebay is a private merchant. They can choose what to list too. Maybe this presents a copyright problem with clones, we don't know. I found the books by googling the title and PDF because I was curious about why they were removed. Curiosity satisifed and I still love Dr. Seuss.
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…
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.
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 to…
> 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 tr…
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.
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#488My 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.
Do you have one kind of problem with calling people what they prefer to be called?
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 to…
> 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 tr…
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.
Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
#490I 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 misi…
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 written by the victors in all cases.
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.