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

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

#761

Post by major505 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:17 AM UTC

wirrbel wrote: post #573

major505 wrote: post #96

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 w…

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.

it isnt like not reading the book prevented those kids to be skinheads. Is more like bad company and shit parenting.

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

#762

Post by Melting_Harps » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:18 AM UTC

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.

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

#763

Post by tim333 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:21 AM UTC

RaceWon wrote: post #733

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.

There's also Shakespeare and The Bible. Neither really that PC.

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

#764

Post by tibbydudeza » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #665

YuccaGloriosa wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody if importance is going to stand up. Ask J.K.Rowling

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.

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

#765

Post by thih9 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:25 AM UTC

The title seems click bait. At first I thought all books are being delisted, turns out this affects six less popular titles.

> The six discontinued Dr. Seuss books aren’t among the late author’s best-known works.

Wikipedia has more information about the most popular of these books and its criticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Ran_the_Zoo#Criticism

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

#766

Post by RaceWon » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:31 AM UTC

Closi wrote: post #634

illirik wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

>> 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.

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

#767

Post by Melting_Harps » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:33 AM UTC

newacct583 wrote: post #758

h0l0cube wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://archive.org/details/texts?and%5B%5D=dr+seuss&sin=

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'…

> 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.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ddM-FpiMg

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

#768

Post by mcv » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:34 AM UTC

Shish2k wrote: post #685

lgleason wrote: post #562

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 everyone…

> as we are seeing with all of the woke craziness 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 c…

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.

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

#769

Post by dx034 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:35 AM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #765

The title seems click bait. At first I thought all books are being delisted, turns out this affects six less popular titles. > The six discontinued Dr. Seuss books aren’t among the late author’s best-known works. Wikipedia has more information about the most popular of these books and its criticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Ran_the_Zoo#Criticism

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.

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

#770

Post by dx034 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 11:37 AM UTC

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…

> 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.