> The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company, which was founded by Seuss’ family, told AP
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-dr-...
eBay has an existing policy that removes racist materials. They're just applying it based on the Seuss info.
> Items with racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise demeaning portrayals, for example through caricatures or other exaggerated features, including figurines, cartoons, housewares, historical advertisements, and golliwogs
https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...
Given how frequently people reference historians and history in these discussions, I'm surprised that nobody ever seems to ask them their opinions.
I guess?
History is something that historians do, not study. There is a meaningful difference between an expert applying actual methods and an interested layperson reading primary sources for their own edification. Not to say that people should be prevented from doing that, but it does seem like a bait and switch to say "what about the historians" and then swap to "what about this entirely different set of people" when it becomes clear that historians aren't actually using ebay in the method you describe.
If you really care about laypeople having access to primary sources, a way bigger problem is the fact that most archives will not allow non-credentialed people to access their materials. There's way more "censorship" going on there than anything happening on ebay if that counts.
Consider an algorithms class in undergrad. You can read about all sorts of algorithms. But learning the Nth algorithm won't transform your work into original algorithms research. You are only consuming information, not producing it. Similarly, just reading other history research can teach you things but isn't what historians are doing. A lot of "history buffs" fall into this category and love to read pop history and consider themselves experts.
Now consider somebody who wants to develop an original algorithm. But they've never learned any analysis methods and they've never critically engaged with the literature. They don't know how to prove an algorithm's correctness or behavior rigorously. There are a ton of these people online. They often gravitate to trying to solve P=NP. This would be comparable to somebody who never learned historiography (the method of doing history) reading primary sources and trying to replicate what historians are doing. Like any field, history has methods. It isn't just ad-hoc decision making from people who happen to have a title next to their name.
In CS this is largely harmless. But for many fields within history, accessing the archive also damages it because people are touching one-of-a-kind objects. So archives are selective in who they choose to allow to access their materials.
While I don't mind cleaning up/modernizing certain things and not printing the originals anymore, not allowing the existing originals to be sold even by independent third-party sellers is just horrible.
We've got a lot of old books purchased second hand because historians tend to like old books, but none of them are primary sources used for research. All of the primary sources are coming directly from archives or inter-library-loans.
Yes, there are plenty of of options if you can't find a copy on eBay, especially these days, but nonetheless, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for historians and laypeople alike to want originals of old works.
https://babylonbee.com/news/skynet-is-a-private-company-they...
From one of the listed items:
> This item has been listed previously. eBay removed it with this reminder of the guidelines:
> "You listed the book Mein Kampf, but it is not a critically annotated edition. eBay only allows critically annotated versions of Mein Kampf to be listed on the site. While we appreciate that you chose to utilize our site, we must ask that you please not relist in this case."
> This is their policy and this edition is compliant with that policy.
This seems worse than an outright ban on all copies.
That's a good point. I didn't realize they were annotated by modern scholars.
This fine example is ok too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Protocols-of-the-Learned-Elders-of-...
But Mulberry street is the problem.
If one was actually banning books that did harm, those books ought to be at the top of the list.
But they are not banned (not should they be IMO). So books that've incited less violence then them ought not be either.
Once again: eBay’s policy is not to ban harmful ideas generally or anything that might be morally icky. They have a specific policy against racist items, in any form. That includes the blatant racism in some of Dr. Suess’s books. The policy is reasonable and not that complicated. If you want to buy something racist, there are other websites.
eBay is not trying to police everything, they just don’t want racist stuff on their website. That is their perogative as a business and is hardly a meaningful threat to free speech even considering eBay’s market share.
Part of the reason this preposterous “debate” keeps raging is that people keep inappropriately elevating the issues to abstractions, since the specifics of the case are really not controversial:
- Just as YouTube and Twitch do not allow pornography, eBay does not allow racism. That does not mean that porn and racism are banned under the 1st Amendment. Likewise there’s plenty of stuff on YouTube that’s more immoral than any legal pornography, but YouTube never claimed to ban everything bad. They just don’t want to be associated with porn. Likewise, eBay doesn’t want to be associated with racism.
- Some of Dr. Seuss’s children’s books have bigoted depictions of nonwhites, including cartoons black people that resemble “darky iconography,” which anyone in good faith would agree are deeply racist.
- Since eBay doesn’t allow racist items (and had good reason to be concerned about racists rushing to buy discontinued Dr. Seuss books), it banned the items from its store.
Nobody seriously thinks that YouTube is censoring the porn industry. It is true is that the “buy racist crap to own the libs” industry is much smaller than porn and probably can’t easily survive without eBay’s help. I fail to see how that’s eBay’s problem.
Edit: This comment doesn't deserve response, it deserves to be silenced.
E.g. the oft denounced 'On the Jewish Question' that is predictably cited in your link is a work arguing for the political emancipation of Jewish people.
It does so with language that is offensive to a modern reader by turning around and mocking the arguments used by Bruno Bauer who argued against political emancipation.
That [use of language] makes it problematic, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone without commentary on the polemical debate it was a part of.
But Marx is addressing and attacking the very kind of political oppression of Jewish people that forced his father to convert to Lutheranism - which the article of course mentioned without later citing its relevance to 'On the Jewish Question' -, making the point that Jewish people should have political rights without being forced to abandon their religion.
As evidence of Marx willingness to use now-unacceptable language, it works. As evidence that he hated Jews it's a massive own goal for the article writer to use an article that argued for expanding Jewish peoples rights.
There are many legitimate criticisms to level against Marx' language. But this article is dishonest or ignorant in it's presentation of a lot of it.
To address specifically the Communist Manifesto, suggesting it is talking of a conspiracy suggests you have not read it, or understood it. If anything one of the key aspects of Marxist thinking was to directly denounce the idea that the individual actions of a few have much - if any - impact on history, and to present a conception of the way society changes as one controlled by historical and economical necessity, inevitably developing based on market forces.
The idea of capitalism as a conspiracy runs directly counter to the Marxist idea of historical materialism, so it's bizarre to try to frame his work as promoting a conspiracy theory.
Furthermore, the whole first chapter is fan-boy level praise for capitalism as having brought humanity to a level of development not seen before, and for how the free market is the "battering ram" that over time forces even the worst bigots to drop xenophobia, driven by economic forces.
If he was promoting a conspiracy, he was speaking awfully well about the supposed conspirators, given the idea of the development of new modes of production as the wheel of progress is a central thesis of Marxist thought, and his insistence that socialism/communism is a necessary consequence of capitalism rests on the idea that economic progress is inevitable and detached from the actions of individuals.
The Communist Manifesto presents capitalism as a huge step forward, just still flawed and something that would eventually give way to another step forwards.
This idea of Marx as promoting a conspiracy is an inherent demonstration of a lack of understanding of Marx writing, because it lifts up the idea of great leaders where Marx consistently put that idea down and criticised it, by talking of whole movements in terms of forces and modes of production within which the individuals - even the capitalists themselves - are trapped and playing out a role they have little control over.
Incidentally this isn’t true:
> Books advocating for segregation.
Or, rather, if such books are available it is against eBay’s policy and they should be reported. eBay has a specific policy against items that glorify racism or endorse racist stereotypes: https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...
It does not have a policy against everything morally icky, but it’s quite clear about racism. Mulberry Street and If I Ran The Zoo are both racist and against eBay’s policy.
Even worse, hateful and racist content that is ideologically aligned is explicitly allowed. One would be hard-pressed to find anything more blatantly racist than White fragility or works of Dr Kendi, and yet you would not see eBay banning them, up until they fall out of favor.
(Edit: I'd really like to see some thought out defense on how censorship doesn't injure scholarship. Downvotes are just limp concessions.)
Sure we are. There has been discussion. Just because you weren't involved in it, which is natural since I doubt you work for Dr. Seuss Enterprises, doesn't mean it didn't take place. The onus is on them to protect Dr. Seuss' legacy and it is important to change with the times.
This is not the first time something like this has happened and it won't be the last. There are plenty of examples to be found online of popular family cartoons which depicted racial stereotypes.
Go check out the Anti-black imagery in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia and see if you think, by following the same logic you displayed in your comment, this stuff should still be allowed while keeping in mind it was mainstream acceptable during its time.
Accusation is a term of conflict. Terms of service changes are decisive outcomes of compassion.
While there is a grey area around general German WW2 artifacts, including those associated with the Nazi government, eBay explicitly disallows Nazi propaganda. It has a blanket ban on any item with a swastika that was made after 1933.
While some are going around to “point out” Mein Kampf can be bought on eBay, eBay only allows critically-annotated copies designed for scholars.
Why, exactly? I wouldn't buy any such a thing, but I know several institutions that have good reasons to.
People in general have some obsession with the Nazi and the last war. As if WWI never happened, and great wars before it. Because of this obsession, many people seem to think that the cause of a future war would be a kind of Nazism, completely disregarding the fact that it wasn't the cause of WWI and other earlier wars. Paradoxically, they also seem to forget what were the actual reasons of the rise of Nazism in post-WWI Germany (huge WWI retributions, enormous inflation and omnipresent poverty - basically people were very unhappy, and this very unhappiness was abused by Hitler; the ideology came afterwards).
But I was factually wrong ; It is not illegal to sell them, at least in the countries I had in mind (France & Germany).
However in France it is forbidden to exhibit them. So in order to be sold they must only be described but not shown.
Yahoo & eBay do ban the sell of such items, notably since being sued for that.
And in any case, it was not a sudden "canceling" or anything approaching that. Seuss's estate, managed by his family, made the decision after much deliberation to cease the publication of only six books due to the content. You could even see it as an anti-cancellation - Seuss's family wants to avoid him being associated with the obviously racist content of some of his work.
Or, is it possible there's an interpretation of the sentence (and a perfectly reasonable one) where they spent months deciding whether they should stop publishing a publication that they had decided was racist?
The decision matrix might have been more complicated than: "does the work contain racist content".
> Seuss actually grew to become more aware of his harmful images later in his life, and to regret them, eventually revising the Mulberry Street text and illustration. "I had a gentleman with a pigtail. I colored him yellow and called him a 'Chinaman,'" Seuss said. "That's the way things were 50 years ago. In later editions, I refer to him as a 'Chinese man.' I have taken the color out of the gentleman and removed the pigtail and now he looks like an Irishman."
[1] https://theweek.com/articles/969777/complicated-quagmire-dr-...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/04/air-pollutio...
I wanted to write in or call in, but it was too late.
This one is crazy, but I have my own causes and that ain't one of them! I find it peculiar and I'm aware "they are coming for the trade unionists next" but I think I can navigate this reality and stay out of the re-education camps.
How? I think they'll get to you next. As commenters above pointed out, there is a "long march" through institutions before it starts trickling down.
There were plenty of solutions to navigate before the .... last one. I think the parallels will hold pretty well this go-around, easily navigable options.
Call me crazy, but haven’t we seen social media being manipulated (bots) to push narratives?
These accusations or problems crop up fairly quick and then the media gets on it and then whoever/whatever is destroyed.
If social media can be manipulated to swing stock markets or elections, then isn’t it possible it can swing to push narratives or keep us constantly fighting ourselves?
Sorry, what ‘o’ word? I'm seriously asking.
“Okay” is now considered racist.
It’s super pernicious too, but effective bludgeon. Making “Okay” racist is obscure enough that most normal people (ie those not obsessed with wokeness) have never heard of it.
Consider that you’ve never heard until now that “okay” is racist and you did the okay symbol in front of a political commissar (I mean a woke person, can’t keep up) that doesn’t like you. You’re done.
> In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.
> In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.
> Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
> The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.
This can only happen in a toxic mono-culture or a corrupt dictatorship. This kind of thing is coming straight out of academia and there are little to no checks and balances on the kinds of insane cultural shifts are being made. The left and far left absolutely dominate that space and they have lost touch with reality, as anyone can clearly see when 99% of their accusations are unjust and hasty and simply ridiculous to anyone who isn't part of the cult.
I think they mean execution of a sentence/task, not of a person.
This is an "execution"?
Maybe try using language proportionate to the offence here.