The “weapon” here is just basic conscientiousness. A publisher decided to stop publishing some books because they denigrate people, and eBay decided that they did not want to be facilitating the sale of books that denigrate people. We are not talking about an H-bomb - there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here.
>The “weapon” here is just basic conscientiousness
No, it's predominantly white-driven top-down (upper 20% income bracket) classism run amok, proping up specialist careers and pretending to be about "caring" and "wokeness".
>there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here.
Yeah, no "power structure", just the mainstream media, the corporate world, ad agencies, governments, government agencies, web-mobs, FAANG - the biggest tech companies in the world plus Clouldflare and others, payment processors, the "good society" class wise and so on, with an increasing number of BS laws on their side too...
> No, it's predominantly white-driven top-down (upper 20% income bracket) classism run amok, proping up specialist careers and pretending to be about "caring" and "wokeness".
I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that racist caricatures are bad.
> Yeah, no "power structure", just the mainstream media, the corporate world, ad agencies, governments, government agencies, web-mobs, FAANG - the biggest tech companies in the world plus Clouldflare and others, payment processors, the "good society" class wise and so on, with an increasing number of BS laws on their side too...
My wording could have been better, but my meaning was that this "cancellation" (which is really just people acknowledging that something is bad) is not applied by some power structure, and is certainly not a weapon that can be aimed at arbitrary concepts at will. I agree that free speech is important, but hate speech is not.
> I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that racist caricatures are bad.
I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that wiping out history and culture is bad.
The question is what is the appropriate tradeoff. Should new editions of these books be published, targeted to children? Probably not. Should they be effectively banned from being sold (used)? At least not without due consideration to the alternatives, like marking them.
The discussion is not about whether racism occured, but how did it manifest. Unless something is specifically anti-racist, it is bad. Therefore all culture is bad. QED.
We're having difficulties getting consensus around the idea that past racism reflected in some cultural artifacts (same as they reflect countless other things of the times) means they should be thrown out.
Else, few, and only fringe usually crazy people would not agree that e.g. slavery, seggregation, jim crow, redlining, etc, were and are bad.
But a certain modern "anti-racism" is not used against the establishment or the white privileged class, and is not even driven by blacks themselves demanding justice.
It's driven by upper middle class whites and their wanabees in-preparation (e.g. higher end college students), against lower class whites.
And as such, it's not just classist, but also blind to the injustices working class whites and "white trash", blacks, latinos, etc, face because of poverty and inequality - it serves as a class signal to perpetuate 'woke white supremacy' (and as a career to some).
Then again, what I know? I'm not American, and we have been actual slaves ourselves in my country...
The issue specifically with casually reinforcing negative stereotypes, especially in childrens books, is that it seems at least plausible that will influence readers' perceptions later on. I'm not entirely convinced by this argument with respect to these specific books so long as they're only a small part of a child's reading experience, but the argument is at least reasonable, right?
This is kind of like: should you be advertising cigarettes to minors? (Should you be advertising those at all?)
I do think it's quite painful to be cutting out culturally important artifacts like this, but I also understand the argument to do so, and it has pretty much nothing to do with upper-class vs. lower-class.
Most of the issues with these books seems fairly minor; it sounds like it should be feasible to release a new edition avoiding the negative stereotypes while retaining pretty much all of the cultural value. Not sure why the publisher didn't try to do that... or maybe they are, and this is just the way they're doing that so as to also hype up the new edition for sales. Who knows. (Yes, I realize eBay's decision is technically distinct from the publishers, but clearly they're trying to avoid negative PR here, i.e. being risk-averse by just following somebody else's lead - I doubt any of these dominos would have fallen without the publishers choices).
It’s their store. They can decide what they want to sell in their store. I bet there is a marketplace for people who like boring uninteresting and outdated children’s books. Maybe try a used book store.
A thousand times this. Neoliberal capitalism has hollowed out the middle class over the past 30+ years. The working class knows that the ruling class doesn’t address their interests. They have been voting for the change candidate since 2008. The election of Trump, despite all of his flaws, was a rejection of the ruling class. This ’woke’ movement is a reaction by the upper/ruling class to reassert their authority. As Dr. King said, the rich white plantation owner used slavery to keep the poor white man down.
edit:
I wonder if the post-WW2 expansion of the middle class was an anomaly, and that we are now just reverting to the mean.
Changing the definition of a word without consensus will have the effect of the consensus around the underlying concepts changing. This appears obvious to me, and intentional.
A tolerant liberal society is built on the foundational principle that people are allowed to read bad books, think bad thoughts and say bad things. And I'm allowed to denounce these bad things as bad, but I'm not allowed to dictate my moral beliefs on you.
For the record. This post on Dr. Seuss has no place on HN. If it is allowed on HN but dissent ideas are not, then fuck off together with your woke HN points. I'm sick of idiots turned social warriors. Fuck off
Using the word "denigrate" would be a reason to cancel you for some very conscientious minds. It sounds too similar to, ya know. And you aren't even talking Chinese [1]
No stretch needed, this poster could definitely be cancelled for using that word.
"If you "denigrate" someone, you attempt to blacken their reputation. It makes sense, therefore, that "denigrate" can be traced back to the Latin verb denigrare, meaning "to blacken.""
Oh, yes, I was just citing the OP, it wouldn't be my choice.
I wonder if Illirik is brave enough to make a selfie with one of the yesterday-OK, today-awful Dr. Seuss books and publish it on the social networks. Just to test how many conscientious minds will try to get him fired.
This one was weird as it's saying that English has ownership over sounds. If it sounds similar to a bad English word then it's also bad, even if context is given.
Magical thinking at its best. The Middle Ages are back. You are not allowed to pronounce anything similar to the powerful incantation, lest the demons emerge. Regardless of context.
Of course, in practice, the demons are regular people with stones in their hands ...
Or, and this might be something to consider: this restructuring of of culture into groups of "good and bad culture" is something that happens each generation. Like the hippies against the old ideals, the 80 kids/punkers against the hippies, the smooth millennials against the 80-kids. Every generation did their own thing. We are getting old and do not subscribe to the new future. We are losing our childhood loves. They will disappear into the fold of history. Just like we will.
Historically, culture wasn't so quick to change. Typically, parents would be able to pass down their culture and traditions to children, instead of having society foist an entirely new culture onto their kids that's incompatible with what the parent grew up with.
I am surprised Jeff Bezos hasn't been canceled. He was attempting to cut deals with Muhammed bin Salman. There is photographic evidence of Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Jeff Bezos cozying up to a regime that is anti-LGBT.
Bezos was chatting with MBS on WhatsApp before MBS allegedly hacked him. It seems more likely he wasn't hacked by MBS and the culprit was his girlfriend's brother. Maybe Jeff and MBS are due to mend their friendship?
I believe you don't have that archive because it doesn't exist. Ultimately people who are "supporters of cancel culture" most likely aren't explicitly that, they just don't agree with your definition of cancel culture [1]
Those people then receiving retribution for some action (whether they deem it reasonable or not) doesn't necessarily imply that they've come to see things your way.
Hey, can I come look through your house to make sure there are no books there that offend me? It would be incredibly rude of you to consume any content that random strangers might object to. I'll be over in an hour.
This has nothing to do with conscientiousness. Buying a book to read at home by yourself is not the business of anyone else and neither eBay nor anyone else should be dictating what you're allowed to read.
Actually you have the property rights angle all wrong: People who control the publishing rights and the intellectual property behind an ecommerce platform to distribute things have both decided they don't want to sell certain works for whatever reason. A stupid one IMO. But it's within their rights as we currently understand corporate power. Perhaps we shouldn't be so willing to indulge liberal market freedoms as they can be a double-edged sword - property owners can "censor" cultural touchstones thanks to powerful intellectual property laws.
To fix your analogy: Someone comes to YOUR house and demands you release a "problematic" work of fiction to the public from your private collection because people are censoring it and people need to see its no big deal. You refuse, because it's yours and you don't feel like it... maybe you agree with the rabble? Either way... you know your rights.
If you want to defeat cancel culture you should advocate for LESS property rights, less market "freedom", and strong labor protections. This whole idea that you can somehow defeat a moral panic with some sort of counter moral panic (or backlash) has been tried for over 40 years - it's not working.
> Someone comes to YOUR house and demands you release a "problematic" work of fiction to the public from your private collection because people are censoring it and people need to see its no big deal. You refuse, because it's yours and you don't feel like it... maybe you agree with the rabble? Either way... you know your rights.
Not really. It's more like Person A wants to sell a book. Person B wants to buy a book. Persons C through Z, who are not involved, haven't read the book, have no intention of ever having anything to do with the book, but saw a tweet that said it was bad, interject themselves and decide that persons A and B are not allowed to conduct their transaction.
Person C operates a marketplace platform. They are very much involved in what is sold in their marketplace. They do not want to be associated with material deemed objectionable. They don't need you to agree it is objectionable. Do you think they should be forced to list anything someone might want to sell that isn't illegal? What kind of freedom is that?
If you don’t want to be associated with material that might be “objectionable” then don’t position yourself as a platform where arbitrary people can sign up and list whatever they want for sale.
Instead hire buyers to vet the merchandise you’re selling and stand behind it and take responsibility for it. You don’t get to have it both ways.
Where have they positioned themselves as such? They have always had control over what can be listed, they have never said you can sell "whatever you want". No marketplace has ever been what you are describing. Do you have any references that explain this ideology in more depth because I do not understand it.
Persons A and B are allowed to conduct their transaction, just not on a particular platform. Put an ad in “dumb racist old books” magazine and find someone to buy your book.
How about instead you restrict your book buying to a specialty “woke only” bookstore that carefully curates a selection guaranteed not to offend your delicate sensibilities?
If you want to live a life of restrictions you are more than free to do so. What you may not do is impose them on others.
Not a good analogy either. In this case, the publisher is perfectly within their rights to not offer these works for sale anymore. However, under the First-sale doctrine, they have no right to control resale of the physical copies of the works already out there. eBay delisting them means they are choosing to side with the publisher over the rights of the sellers.
Yes, just like we can dictate that eBay can't make a rule that only white people are allowed to sell on it. Operating a business involves being a part of society and society is justified in imposing rules on your business to ensure that your business is not harmful to the general welfare of the public.
So you are advocating for some standard according to which marketplaces should be required to sell anything the public brings to them to sell?
Is there a line, in your conception, between what eBay should be forced to sell, and what they are allowed to prohibit? For instance, explicit pornography is legal. Should eBay be forced to sell explicit pornography? If so, is there anything in your mind that they should not be forced to sell on their website?
Yes! We have this standard. It's called "laws". We elect these people called "representatives" and if we want people to not be able to buy or sell certain things like a kilo of heroin or a machine gun, we have them make a law that prohibits it. This way the public has input on the process and it is not left up to the arbitrary prejudices of any particular corporate drone.
eBay is not selling anything. The users on eBay are selling things and they can choose what to sell or not sell. If Wal-Mart wants to decide not to sell the book, fine. If you purport to offer a marketplace where other people can sell and buy things, you should not be involving yourself in the customers' transactions unless they are illegal.
What horrendous, world-ending catastrophe do you think would occur if someone sold pornography at the farmers market?
If the public doesn’t want to buy porn there, they won’t and the stand will go out of business.
If they do want to buy porn there, why do you think the farmers market owners should be allowed to dictate what adults are and are not allowed to buy?
What if you wanted to set up a stand that sold books exclusively by African-American authors and they told you you weren’t allowed to do that. Is that ok?
Ok, so “racially insensitive” material and explicit pornography are both legal currently. Are you saying that eBay should be forced to allow their users to sell both, or are you saying that we enact a new law that says that eBay should be forced to allow their users to sell “racially insensitive” material, but not explicit pornography?
I'm saying that if you position your business as a platform or conduit through which people exchange things, whether those are physical goods, IP packets, fragments of text and images, whatever, you should be a "dumb pipe". Such businesses should not be permitted to abuse their privileged position to impose their own will on the general public. Remember Net Neutrality? Same thing. If you want to sell a stack of old Hustlers or a copy of Song of the South it should not be eBay's place to tell you that you can't.
eBay is not the government. They are not arbiters of what we are and are not allowed to do. Many people have sacrificed their lives to ensure that we are not governed by arbitrary tyrants that we have no say in, and it's frankly shocking that people are now like "Well, they paid a lawyer to set up a C-Corp in Delaware so I guess it's fine that they decide what we're allowed to read now".
It’s not just old Huslters. If eBay were not allowed to prevent explicit pornography from being sold on its website, it would have a much less valuable business, and fewer people would get value from it. Just as an example, it would end up being blocked by “family friendly” web filters that are popular with businesses, schools, and families.
Unless you think that businesses, schools, and families should also be prohibited from blocking pornography, or should otherwise be forced to facilitate access to eBay, your suggestion is untenable from a business perspective.
eBay is undoubtedly blocked by numerous work filters because it is not really relevant for doing most jobs. They manage just fine.
Besides this is a ridiculous strawman. "If you allow people to sell Dr. Suess books, you must therefore also plaster the front page in explicit pornography." Obviously not.
The Internet is increasingly winner-take-all and is controlled by fewer and fewer larger and larger companies. Allowing a handful of corporations unrestricted reign to dictate what we are allowed to say to each other is antithetical to a free society. Reductio ad absurdum arguments are not going to help you when cabal of corporate censors with no accountability decide to eject you from society for daring to question the intellectual fashion of the moment.
I have not made a straw-man argument. Laws must be written precisely, and it’s entirely appropriate to test proposed changes to law by applying them to specific cases of fact.
You may have identified a real problem in society, but you have not proposed a viable solution.
There is a difference between those things, but that doesn’t mean we should automatically support all discrimination that isn’t based on immutable qualities.
If eBay decided to delist all copies of White Fragility we should oppose that too. Ideas need to be freely exchanged and debated not forcibly censored by whoever happens to have power at the moment.
In a free society with free markets, you are free to oppose antyhing that a business does that you don't agree with.
You have many existing mechanisms for expressing that disagreement, including protest, and starting your own business and competing. If people agree with your values, you will succeed.
eBay choosing to delist all copies of a book is eBay exercising their own freedom of expression. Having the government coming along and censoring that freedom seems counter to the idea that "Ideas need to be freely exchanged ... not forcibly censored".
Delisting a book is not an expression. eBay is (should be) a neutral party through which other people are expressing things by buying and selling things. The person offering the book for sale is speaking for themselves, not for eBay. If people decide they don't want to buy the book, that's fine, but it is not eBay's speech.
Do you think a bookshop should be free to choose to sell books written in German or not? If they have that freedom, what's that freedom called?
> eBay is (should be) a neutral party
There's no such thing as "neutral". People, organisations etc. have values which they try and reflect through their actions and practices.
> The person offering the book for sale is speaking for themselves, not for eBay. If people decide they don't want to buy the book, that's fine, but it is not eBay's speech
Are advocating that eBay should be forced to pay to do business that the shareholders, board and employees disagree with? Forced by the government?
> Are advocating that eBay should be forced to pay to do business that the shareholders, board and employees disagree with? Forced by the government?
Yes, exactly like if the shareholders, board, and employees didn't want to do business with Black people, the government forces them to do so anyway. It absolutely boggles the mind that the justification comes down to "well, some people don't want to do that". Tough shit! If you don't want to deal with all kinds of people from all walks of life with all kinds of backgrounds and opinions, don't run a public-facing business.
So if you were in charge of the government, how would you propose regulating these companies? By forcing them to act as a "utility" that has to list every kind of product?
Do I disagree with the Dr. Seuss delisting? Yes. Do I think government regulations would be more harmful than helpful in this case? Yes.
If eBay was a monopoly, I'd be much more concerned (all the more reason for robust anti-trust legislation). But in practice, if you want to sell a Dr. Seuss book, take your business elsewhere.
And 60-70 years ago there was no such thing as protected groups. Businesses could and did deny service to anyone for any reason. Collectively, we as a society looked at that situation and said "Hey this isn't great that businesses can deny service to whole groups of people based on their religion or skin color, we shouldn't let them do that", and we stopped letting them do that.
Similarly, today we can look at what's happening and say "Hey this isn't great that businesses are allowed to restrict our speech and narrow down the realm of ideas to the least common denominator. It is destructive to the public discourse that a small group of people can claim outrage and shut down whoever they want", so we can decide not to let businesses do that, just like we decided not to let them refuse service to protected groups.
Is public discourse being wittled down? I can buy books from across the political spectrum within seconds. Consider Jim Crow versus not being able to buy a physical copy of an obscure book that can still easily be found online for free
I doubt the same people would oppose it though. Rights of downtrodden groups are constantly shit on without a peep from the “free speech absolutist” crowd.
Neither. It depends on the specifics. Should you be allowed to not serve someone who has anger issues? Does it matter if this anger issues are caused by genetic hormonal imbalance?
> there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here
There absolutely is. Ebay is nipping in the bud a potential social media lynching.
One misstep nowadays and the CEO spends weeks grovelling about how they're still learning and are determined to do better and thank you Twitter mob for pointing this out.
You can't buy Doctor Seuss, but you can buy "The Anarchist Arsenal", hydrogen peroxide, acetone and a few pounds of screws in the same cart.
I hope the irony isn’t lost on you that you are using the word “lynching”—which in its literal, non-metaphorical usage refers to the terroristic murder of racial minorities in the United States—to refer to the non-violent use of cultural power by members of those same minority groups to demand respect from institutions and powerful individuals.
You may think that some of these demands have gone too far, and you may believe that some institutions have been too obsequious in adhering to these demands, but surely you must admit that the use of the word “lynching” in this context is offensive, no?
There’s a Spanish idiom that describes your reply here really well, I think. It doesn’t occur to me what the comparable phrase in English would be. Es una cachetada con guante blanco.
I disagree with you, but I have to say, well done. Point made.
No, because it's not the same context. That's the point. These extreme reaches are the same as banning "master" as the name of a branch in git repos as if it has anything to do with social history.
To the contrary. The context here is the same, as I explained in my original comment. The connection between the literal and metaphorical use of the word here is too close, which is what makes it rude and offensive.
This is different than using the word “master” to describe the trunk branch of a repository, because when we are talking about a “master branch” it is not in the context of a discussion of offensive racial caricatures being removed from eBay’s website.
No, I disagree, along with many others. Nothing is rude and offensive on its own, nor do you know what everyone else thinks. What you really mean is it's offensive to you, in which case you should exercise your personal freedoms and rights by reading something else instead of worrying about the rest of us.
As a member of a "minority group* myself, there's no connection to "minority groups demanding respect" here, just the typical outrage over the wildest reaches by those who feel they represent everyone else. By the way, treating people as monolithic groups is where bigotry comes from in the first place so why don't we just stop doing that all together?
If I were trying to win any popularity contests, I wouldn't be discussing this topic on HN. It's risky business!
> Nothing is rude and offensive on its own, nor do you know what everyone else thinks.
I'm not purporting to know what everyone else thinks, only that given the context, the usage of this particular word in this particular situation is offensive.
It's a strange thing for you to insinuate that I feel that I "represent everyone else." Is it not enough for me to be speaking for myself? And what's wrong with users of this website speaking up to negotiate the standards of discourse we all follow here? As I've commented elsewhere, there is a standard of civility, respect and politeness that we all expect from interactions on HN. What that standard comprises should be discussed from time to time.
> As a member of a "minority group myself, there's no connection to "minority groups demanding respect" here..*
If you are going to quote me, then please quote me accurately. I didn't equate OP's "social media lynching" with "minority groups demanding respect". The language I used referred to specific (albeit hypothetical) individuals doing a specific thing. I wrote that "members of those same minority groups" were using "cultural power...to demand respect". It is you who are talking about monolithic groups here—I'm talking about individuals.
If you are a member of one of the minority groups in the US that were historically terrorized by lynch mobs, or were ridiculed in the popular press by the kinds of caricatures that are referenced by the article, then absolutely your opinions on this matter are salient.
It shouldn't require membership in any particular group to view the juxtaposition within OP's metaphor as offensive, however.
The "potential social media lynching" that OP accused eBay of kowtowing to must by its nature be perpetrated by individuals who don't want denigrating, racist caricatures to be promoted and popularized. This is a straw-man in OP's argument, so we don't know precisely who OP would be referring to, but it's not too big a stretch to interpret OP's comment as referring to individuals whose ethnicities are being ridiculed in these books, including African, Native American, Chinese and Arab ethnicities. In fact, a brief search of media reports regarding this controversy would reveal that many prominent commentators on the subject have been African-American and Hispanic educators. Most of this actual commentary has been well-reasoned and civilized, however, and is not at all mob-like.
In contrast, "lynching" in the United States primarily existed as a tool by which white mobs terrorized non-white communities into social, economic and political subservience, by murdering people. Take a look at some of the pictures, and read some of the history:
Lynching is not just some better-forgotten historical grievance. It was a tool for genocide and white supremacy—a tool used to rob Mexican and indigenous landowners of their property, and to keep black people subjugated and to deprive them of political power and economic independence. The last known lynching in the United States took place less than 40 years ago—within my own lifetime. The downstream effects of this violence persist today.
Lynching was also part of a continuum of white supremacist culture that included ethnic caricatures that were intended to ridicule subjugated people, and which had the effect of dehumanizing those people. Dehumanization is a necessary precursor to mob violence, and lynchings would not have been possible without the cruel, dehumanizing propaganda that promoted white-supremacy in the United States for more than 100 years after the civil war.
OP's metaphorical lynch mob would include individuals whose ancestors were terrorized by actual lynch mobs. To convert metaphor to simile, OP was saying that these individuals whose ancestors were terrorized by lynch mobs are themselves like a lynch mob when they complain about the on-going, present-day publication of imagery that was originally created to promote the persecution of those same ancestors.
Is this not offensive on its face? Even if you disagree with these people, how can you not see OP's metaphor as demeaning towards them? And even if you don't care about offending people in the wider world, what about those of us on this website who also fit the same description? Is it not rude to us?
Look, I don't want anyone to be shamed, punished, penalized or "canceled" here. That would be ridiculous. I wasn't even looking for any kind of apology. I'm just hoping that the standards of civility and respect followed by members of the HN community can incorporate an awareness of what this kind of language really means to some of us.
There are some things that no civilized person will say in polite society—that idea, I think, is not controversial. Let this particular use of the word "lynching" be one of those things.
"the usage of this particular word in this particular situation is offensive"
Again, it's offensive to you.
I disagree, as I understand that the metaphor is about mob justice without evidence or due process; a concept that is well understood and easily separated from social history. If you truly think it's about individuals then I'm not sure what there is to discuss on such a subjective matter.
I can’t help but point out the incredible situation where you are engaging in precisely the kind of behavior that the person you’re replying to seems to have issue against : )
Pointing out that certain usage of language can be offensive? That we shouldn’t be unintentional when causing offense? That if we cause offense intentionally, we shouldn’t be surprised by the reaction of the party we have purposely insulted?
Perhaps I was offended and was trying to point that out politely.
I wasn’t badly offended. I was offended enough to take the time to write these comments.
Keep in mind that on HN, rude and offensive comments are down-voted all the time. There is a politeness standard on this website, and perhaps that standard should incorporate the use of language like this!
What is politeness but acting in a manner that is respectful of the sensitivities of our peers?
Perhaps the heart of the issue here is that when the sensitivities of certain people are not deemed to be worthy of polite respect, we are implicitly deciding that those people are not worthy of being our peers.
> What is politeness but acting in a manner that is respectful of the sensitivities of our peers?
Reciprocation. Politeness goes both ways. Giving your peer the respect in understanding that clearly s/he was not invoking a term for its racial connotations is part of that.
> Perhaps the heart of the issue here is that when the sensitivities of certain people are not deemed to be worthy of polite respect, we are implicitly deciding that those people are not worthy of being our peers.
Yep. That's the "woke" movement in a nutshell.
The rest of us will just treat each other like adults capable of understanding nuance.
I want to point out that legutierr and stef25 had a respectful back and forth here. legutierr pointed out the connotations of lynching and stef25 recognized they could've used better language. I don't see the harm here, just a little reminder of American history.
I don't think it was intended to be disrespectful, but stef25's response was clearly in irony, given his original post. The idea that s/he was genuinely unaware and appreciative of the response seems unlikely.
Please point out to me where I myself was impolite, or where I accused OP of intentionally invoking the term for its negative connotations.
Is some behavior only rude if the person knows that it will be offensive? I think if a 16 year old picks his nose in a job interview, you’d still think he was rude, even if you knew his parents didn’t raise him right.
When I was growing up, we used the word “gyp” as a synonym for “cheat”. As in “Don’t g** me out of what you owe me!” Earlier generations would use the word “jew” as a verb in a similar way.
As kids, we were ignorant of the origin of these words. Does that fact make our use of them them less offensive and rude? What would you tell your kid if you heard him say to a friend, “You better not j** me out of what you owe me!” Personally, I would be mortified, even if I knew it came from a place of ignorance.
I didn't previously claim you were impolite, although I do think you were.
If this were a peer you knew and respected personally, calling them out in front of other peers and suggesting others might think he meant it in a racist way when it doesn't relate to the issue at hand would be impolite. It implies you might think the speaker intended to invoke racist connotations, which derails the conversation and raises questions about the potential racism of the speaker in the minds of other participants.
> As kids, were ignorant of the origin of these words. Does that fact make our use of them them less offensive and rude?
The issue here isn't ignorance. Your examples are racial slurs. "Lynch" is not a racial term, nor is "firehose" or "bus". There are potentially offensive connotations to all of those words based on prior history, yet somehow we are able to grasp the nuance when used in a different context. At least today.
> What’s the difference here?
The meanings of the words.
Being able to make a theoretical case as to how something could be offensive (if framed in a way it was not framed) is not the same as usage of a racial slur. Dropping the n-word casually is not equivalent to using a branch named "master" in your git repo. We're way past "politeness" and well into viewpoint enforcement, and I think you know this.
Can some be ignored or do all have to be taken equally serious?
Because otherwise I'm sure you'll agree there's no end in sight. You're offended by my insensitivities, I am by yours, people start making things up just to silence people they don't like etc
In this context the word lynching clearly has nothing to do with hanging people from trees. Taking those words literally and then screaming intolerance will only lead to more misery.
I agree with you that the idea of living your life cowering in fear of offending everyone you meet is ridiculous on its face. It's equally ridiculous to expect that you can impose your standards on everyone around you, and to think you are justified in becoming outraged at every offense.
Do you really think that's what's going on here? I see it differently.
Being polite is often about self-imposed constraints. We constrain our actions and our language as a sign of respect. Do we do it for everyone? No. But we do it for people we care to show respect to.
In the United States, after the Civil War, lynching primarily existed as a tool by which white mobs terrorized non-white communities into social and political subservience, by murdering people. By one measure, three-quarters of lynching victims were black, when only 12% of the population was black. In parts of the old south-west, lynching was part of a successful ethnic-cleansing effort to expel Mexican landowners from lands that white settlers wanted for themselves. Take a look at some of the pictures, read some of the history:
This violent history hits hard when you identify with the victims, when those victims resemble your grandparents and great-grandparents, when you know that your grandparents and great-grandparents were also subject to painful repression within the same cultural and historical context. The word has a different energy.
I didn't take your use of thee word literally. I used the word "non-metaphorical" in my original comment because I wanted to flag that I understood you used the term metaphorically. There are some words, in some contexts that are offensive when used metaphorically.
Just to be clear, I'm not offended by you, nor do I think you are intolerant. I just thought that the word you used in the way you used it was offensive enough given the context to say something about it.
If you didn't have a sense before of how the word might be taken as offensive in the way that you used it, now you do. Do what you will with that information.
While Black people were disproportionately victims of lynching, lynching was not in itself a racial phenomenon, even if racists frequently employed it. People of all races were commonly lynched by people of all races. It's a legacy from a time when mob justice was common, in part because of the limitations of the legal system.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic hell on top of the ideological hell we are all enduring with topics like this. If you want to make a point about international variations in language, that's fine, but turning it into a whole separate flamewar is not cool.
> there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here
This is hardly an isolated occurrance, as you well know.
So we have all of Big Tech acting in concert to ban what they deem wrongthink -- but, oh no, that's definitely not a power structure! Nothing to see here, folks!
Yes, because it’s certainly plausible that the leadership of Big Tech that are always at each other’s throats to dominate their corner of the digital market would want to put aside any such differences in direction, and decide that this is the one issue that they could show a United front on because this after all is what affects their goals of market dominance.
It’s this that dominates the meeting of their leadership, who are always just hanging out with each other, combing through a list of things to cancel, put together a coordinated plan to cancel the thing, and then — in secret, nobody should know! - execute on that. Because what else could they possibly be bothered with?
Ah yes, mein kampf is ok [1], but dr suess is a bridge too far.
[Before anyone makes assumptions about my political views, i'm fine with publishers no longer publishing if tastes change, but i can't abide banning the sale of books in general. I don't really care what the content is]
Nobody banned the sale of these books. The only argument any of the people who are crying their eyes out could make here is: we need open source decentralized bookselling to ensure that people who don't care about the bad feelings people have about these books can still buy these books. Every other argument is just weak and quite frankly, herdmentality of the right wing political sphere.
Monopolies are de-facto government bodies. It isn't that Ebay is administered by USG (although I'm sure Ebay has an NSA/DHS detachment); it's that it makes no difference to the user whether a government bans the sale of books on online flea markets or the only practical online flea market does.
If the only store within a 2-hour drive is walmart, walmart is your equivalent of the soviet centrally-planned economy.
Sure. i wouldn't suggest stocking it in the children's literature section (although i think you would be shocked how racist some books aimed at children can be once you start looking for it, including many written not just long ago but in the last 30ish years).
However children aren't the only people who read books like this. Dr Suess is one of the most influential children's authors. All of his books are certainly worthy of study from an academic perspective due to their long lasting influence.
I have literally just had the experience of stumbling on one of these racist dr Seuss books while reading with my kids, and I can tell you that I would have at least wanted a warning. It’s just not what I expected, and not something I would have wanted to expose my kids to. Which is kind of a shame, because scrambled eggs super is (aside from the overt racism) an awesome example of seussian prose.
And yet, eBay does sell a crap load of Mein Kampf editions and gollywogs. The motivation seems to be corporate virtue signalling rather than any commitment to a principle.
Yep no doubt due to recent CPAC conference and too early for a "War on Xmas " so they needed to focus on the nemesis of "cancel" culture rather than the disaster of Covid-19 deaths.
Don't worry, they'll focus on that disaster soon enough. They'll want to blame Biden for the 650k who will die of covid this year, just like they didn't want to blame Trump for the 350k who died of covid last year.
This argument seems really silly to me, have you thought this through? It appears to be a “talking point” as a few other right wing sites seem to be making the exact same argument.
The flaw in the argument is that Mein Kampf is not a children’s book. If hitler wrote a popular racist book series for kids, eBay would likely delist that too.
>eBay decided that they did not want to be facilitating the sale of books that denigrate people
Objectively false. eBay responded to a headline and will continue to permit the sale of many works of similar nature because it is ultimately apathetic
eBay has no problem facilitating the sale of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", or "Mein Kampf", or "laddie magazines", or cartoons of Muhammad, or any of a variety of other things that "denigrate people". So let's not pretend like this is a principled stand of some sort by eBay.
Leaving aside the question of whether the books in question actually denigrate people, what makes this case so special that eBay takes action? eBay is losing money by not allowing sales of the books; presumably they either feel like they would lose even more money if they did allow it or feel that the books are morally repugnant enough to be worth the loss. Any other options?
The second option does not seem to hold water given all the other things eBay allows. The first option leaves the question of why they would lose money. Digging into that is where you find the power structure you are refusing to see.
But there was no government action here. Dr Seuss's estate made a decision, and EBay reacted to it. A dictatorial government would either prohibit or demand publishing the books. The US government has rightly done nothing.
Maybe that’s the problem that needs to be addressed here. Because what I’m seeing should be something a libertarian would approve of. The free market at work, eBay is a private company making a decision of how they want to do business. Libertarians should love this.
There is a difference between libertarians who support liberty and "libertarians" who mostly just want there to be less government spending on anything besides military weapons.
It was removed from the recommended reading list by Biden's administration for the "Read Across America" Day [1]. That's not directly related to eBay, unless you've seen the pattern before where "woke twitter mobs and politicians signal distate in X, tech megacorps subsequently take supporting action."
Doesn’t this phrase imply that someone is being harmed? Who is being harmed in this case?
The estate that controls the publication rights is deciding not to publish these books, and eBay is deciding not to list the books on its own platform. No one is being penalized or punished, and these entities are acting fully within their rights.
Preventing transactions between two third parties (i.e. ebay) is economically similar to refusing to do business with another party. Except that if your in position to do the latter, you're obviously a platform for others, and thus you have a lot more unilateral power to prevent transactions between arbitrary third parties. Which is probably a lot more economic transactions than the number of transactions you engage in yourself. It's like leverage.
So the harm seems proportional to the harm done by refusing to bake that wedding cake for the gay couple.
Yes, this, in earnest. On Beyond Zebra! was a joy of mine growing up. EBay's 'witch burning' have surely breathed new life into these books. Go read it, it's great, its PDF can be found in a few seconds on google.
Market economies allow for stupid mistakes. It really is civilized when the blast radius of such mistakes is "people who get all their books from ebay" instead of "everyone in the country."
Haven't seen a burned witch. I have seen people who have killed minorities because these minorities "might start burning witches and thereby destroy western free speech and civilisation".
What information in these children's books is undermining dictatorial governments? The government isn't censoring e.g. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago - these are literally just picture books with racist caricatures in them. You have no right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, and you have no right to denigrate your fellow man.
Of course you do. Can you imagine what the world would be like if the government gave itself the power and created the bureaucratic machinery to stop people denigrating their fellow man? It would be a dystopian nightmare.
I don't see a government censoring this book. Is it illegal to have this book? Should I now force barnes and noble to sell my radical insurrectionist anarchist zines? They are gagging my right to free speech!
There's a difference between "you shouldn't do hate speech" and some sort of 1984/V-for-Vendetta mechanism to ensure that nobody ever does hate speech. Laws and ethics are not the same thing.
The laws in the United States are pretty convoluted, and I don't think they align with human rights all that well, especially given the treatment of imprisoned folks or asylum seekers. However, I do think that causing mass hysteria for kicks (shouting fire...) is wrong and you should not do it.
I'm curious: do you believe that there is anything that one does not have the right to say?
> "You have no right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater"
This is completely false. It's nothing more than a mis-quoted opinion of a justice in a very old case which was eventually overturned and allowed exactly this kind of speech.
Please inform yourself of the laws you're claiming exist before you try to make arguments about them.
In particular, this was an analogy used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Schenck vs United States. The act which he compared to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" was passing out leaflets opposing the draft, ie the government's power to force people to go to a war by which the American people were not threatened.
I mean if a message goes across a distributed network and all the different nodes of the network independently decide to change their operation then there is no centralized power structure saying do this, even though it is effectively the same.
