Just to provide a datapoint, I talked w/ my kid the kids’ librarian. She said, “Publishers decide to stop publishing books all the time. And Seuss wrote a shit-ton of books, so it isn’t as though there won’t be plenty of options.”
Pretty sharp kid. She musta got it from her mom.
Online retailer eBay has announced it is working to remove sales of some books from Dr. Seuss over offensive imagery.
A spokesperson for the company told The Wall Street Journal that it is currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items.
The spokesperson further told the newspaper that it would take time to review seller listings, and the company was monitoring new listings…
This surprises me. I thought he had a strong enough reputation that eBay would allow the sale of anything he illustrated.
Man, that manages to be funny and sad at the same time!
You guys are too much. Such concern; much pearl clutching.
I am only chiming in to say that I live in Oklahoma and there’s this t-shirt hawker restaurateur merchant who claims to have the second best selling shirt brand next to Hard Rock Cafe and that is Stan, owner of Eskimo Joe’s. I know Stan personally and have worked with him on a few projects–he’s an out-and-out good guy just trying to make a living.
Last summer during the apex of the BLM movement, someone confronted him about the term Eskimo. Stan is a savvy businessman, so being an Oklahoman, he put it to a vote and let the rednecks who frequent his establishments Red-Hat all over it and overwhelmingly voted to demand they retain the name. “Never met no Eskimo anyway so why does it matter!” He gets to keep his brand SEO and just shrug and said “well I asked the people…”
Now that crosses the line into Orwellian.
Actually Seuss was way ahead of his time in being a anti racist, he fought hard against racism.
Yes, it is non racist in that context. Today, of course some of those images are not all all acceptable. I am not arguing all those books need to be in wide publication. Now some of them could be Ok give a explanatory note, a warning sticker, a extra book slip explaining the context. But others are just not Ok today.
Context is important. That doesnt mean we have to say that all those illustrations are OK for today’s world, they are not.
What does? Ebay’s decision or PastTense’s remark? Not quite seeing how either one of them qualifies as “Orwellian”, tbh.
Ebay’s decision. It goes far beyond just deciding to no longer publish the book. Are they going to start vetting and policing the contents of all media that they allow people to sell?
? AFAICT, eBay is delisting copies of these Dr. Seuss books that sellers are trying to scam people into buying for thousands of dollars under the false pretense that they’re about to become valuable rarities because they’ve been “banned” or “canceled”. Since the books haven’t in any way been “banned” and there are still many, many copies of them in existence, such claims are simply a marketing scam.
eBay has policies against all kinds of seller scams and misrepresentation of items for sale. I don’t think you can infer from this that they’re trying to censor or “vet and police” the content of sellers’ listed items on moral grounds.
And given that you can readily buy on eBay vintage copies of Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo or Gold Dust Twins cleanser containers or antique lawn jockey statues, I very much doubt that eBay is trying to impose any kind of “woke” antiracism standards on its sellers here.
Thank you for this.
Enslavement of Black humans was completely legal for the first seventy-plus years of the existence of the United States of America. The context of slavery is that it was enshrined in the Constitution, the highest law in the land, and was widely accepted as normal practice throughout the country.
Therefore, by your logic, it was not racist to own a Black person as property at that time. It’s racist now, but it wasn’t racist then.
Yes?
Actually, that’s not what your Marketwatch link says at all. MarketWatch is the one that mentions the high prices for books that aren’t technically canceled. Ebay pulled them because they’re considered offensive, according to the link inside that article. They didn’t pull them because the poor deluded buyers are supposedly being scammed. All MarketWatch says is that “canceled” is a misnomer - nothing about fraud. Inflated bidding is what eBay is all about and it’s the buyer who determines the value of a product, such as intrinsically worthless beanie babies.
Could you please quote the exact text from the specific link that you think is making that claim?
Because nowhere in my link or in any of the links it contained did I spot a statement matching your description. The closest I got was this opening sentence from a partially paywalled WSJ article:
That doesn’t say that eBay is delisting the books because eBay considered them offensive. That says that eBay is delisting books that the copyright holder stopped publishing because they considered them offensive.
Like I said, the ready availability on eBay of immense quantities of all sorts of historical merchandise absolutely steeped in racist imagery makes me pretty skeptical that eBay is really trying to censor racism on their site. Still, I’m prepared to be persuaded otherwise on sufficient evidence, but it’ll require some better evidence than you’ve come up with so far.
You’re the one who put in a link to back up your claim that eBay pulled them for fear of defrauding buyers.The link does not say that at all. The closest it comes is an inside link where eBay said it was delisting ads for those books.
If those items were in the news today, then it’s quite possible they’d make a big show of pulling those, too.
Here’s an example of the better evidence I mean:
So yes, you’re right, eBay is censoring this material from sellers on its site. But nothing you’ve posted so far actually contained persuasive evidence for that claim.
Moreover, eBay does have a standing policy against “offensive material”, so if that’s “Orwellian”, it’s been “Orwellian” for quite a while.
Isn’t that what they’ve been doing for the last 25 years?
Wow. The price of some of those books from secondary sellers on Amazon has skyrocketed too.
I’ve got a Seuss boxset with several of the affected books in it. I didn’t realize it was going to become an investment.
Not the least bit surprising.
This is one of the more ridiculous things I’ve seen on the Dope. This sort of statement ignores that one acting in a racist society can perpetuate racism without actively thinking racist thoughts. It also leads to people acting overly aggrieved when people point out societal racism, because they feel it is as attack on them rather than the society, which shuts down any attempt to fix it.
Seuss lived in a racist society and through his drawings perpetuated racism. They were racist. I don’t give a shit what his intent was.