Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay • Hacker News Board

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#341

Post by throwaway0a5e » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

djoldman wrote: post #327

slibhb wrote: post #301

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…

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.

It's not about the impact. It's about what's socially acceptable behavior.

It's the same reason we get angry at people for saying racist crap even though we believe in freedom of speech.

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#342

Post by SilverRed » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #282

SilverRed wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#343

Post by Kaze404 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

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.

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#344

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

offby37years wrote: post #7

tim333 wrote: post #6

The thing seems a bit silly. 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 an…

Yes. When only whites can be racist, only whites can be caricatured.

[deleted]

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#345

Post by neartheplain » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

tired-dev wrote: post #264

refurb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. The adults in the room should have nipped this crap in the bud but instead they entertained it. Now it’s a much bigger problem to solve. Check out SFUSD renaming racists schools like “Lincoln High”. Eventually parents had start a recall effort to end 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:

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/06/24/madison-prote...

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#346

Post by kenneth » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:23 AM UTC

Step one of Farenheit 451?

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

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#347

Post by hintymad » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:23 AM UTC

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?

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#348

Post by brailsafe » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

xsmasher wrote: post #279

brailsafe wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually those people graduate

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."

I meant the former, but I suppose both are true.

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#349

Post by mbg721 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

chroem- wrote: post #75

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.

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.

Re: Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

#350

Post by brailsafe » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 2:25 AM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #216

brailsafe wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually those people graduate

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.)

I feel like I'm out of the loop on this. Could you elaborate?