> If the publisher shutdown and the IP on the books went into legal limbo, then the exact same thing would happen - has happened - to numerous works.
You are talking about works that became incidentally unavailable for commercial reasons (not that many people are interested in 22 year-old strategy video games). The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.
Their publisher also didn't "shut down": they delibrately decided to stop publishing these books because they deemed them Politically Incorrect:
> “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author and illustrator’s birthday.
And now eBay has decided that if you legally own a copy, you can't sell it to another reader, because it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.
The books are not being banned. You can still give money in exchange with anyone who has copy they're willing to sell. It's just that the Seuss estate and eBay have both decided they don't want to be involved in the transaction.
And "Politically Incorrect" is sure a gentle way of describing the content. Maybe you should quote the line from the article you linked which describes some of the "politically incorrect" bits? Or do you recognize that they're actually pretty offensive. I sure wouldn't want to use my printing equipment to print copies of that "Politically Incorrect" book either, and I'd have a problem with the suggestion that someone should be able to force me to.
> And "Politically Incorrect" is sure a gentle way of describing the content. Maybe you should quote the line from the article you linked which describes some of the "politically incorrect" bits? Or do you recognize that they're actually pretty offensive.
President Obama praised, quoted, and recommended Dr. Seuss's books in official press releases throughout his presidency, all the way to his last year as president - 2015:
But now the Woke Mob has come for Dr. Seuss, and we're all instructed to recite that Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.
To quote Orwell: "The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."
By my count, there are somewhere in the range of ~70 Dr. Seuss books (I'm too lazy to count, and that's more than enough for my point). They've stopped publishing six of them. That's less than 10%. He hasn't been cancelled, it's just that a few of the more egregious books are being discontinued. Horton Hears a Who? Still a great message. The Grinch? Still great, both versions (there might be a third now, who can keep track).
People making a big deal out of the cancelling are blowing it into a far bigger thing than it is. He's not being cancelled, those works are just being recognized as offensive. There's no gotcha to Obama having praised some of his books, because those books are still worthy of praise.
"What's the problem banning a few controversial books? We still publish thousands of books we deem acceptable!"
> He hasn't been cancelled, it's just that a few of the more egregious books are being discontinued. Horton Hears a Who? Still a great message. The Grinch? Still great
You are clearly in favor of banning ideas you disagree with. Nice to see you are fine with the publication of books when you approve of their "message".
Free speech is not the right to force others to repeat your speech. It is also not the right to a loudspeaker or megaphone. Free speech gets you the right to say it, but makes no promises about others being forced to listen, forced to spread it for you or forced to repeat it for you. Don't impinge their freedom in the name of your own.
How is the existence of a book, "... the right to force others to repeat your speech"?
People want the book removed because it exists, someplace - not because someone has a metaphorical megaphone. Let's stop with the metaphors, by the way. This isn't literary critique, or English Literature 301. It's a discussion of censorship. Stopping someone-who-isn't-you from reading a work that has nothing to do with you, is censorship.
Wait, sorry, is someone confiscating the book? Burning it? Requiring it be burned? Arresting people who have it? Arresting the people who wrote it? Legally compelling the publisher to edit it? Legally compelling distributors not to distribute it?
As far as I can tell, everyone complaining is upset that distributors don't want to tarnish their brand with certain content, and authors and stakeholders have decided that certain content doesn't match their modern brands. None of these are censorship!
As an author, you are free to write dumb things. As a bookstore, I am free to not sell the the dumb things you wrote. That's not censorship.
As a publisher, I am free not to publish the dumb stuff you wrote for you. That's the metaphorical megaphone, in case that is unclear, and no one can force a publisher to give you one.
Again, everything you're saying is legitimate, but it completely ignores the elephant in the room, the big elephant, the monopoly power, the concentrated distribution and unprecedented centralization over the flow of information and broadcast media. Whether it's YouTube, Google search results and playstore access, Facebook, and many more, we are all concerned when a new one is added, such as Ebay.
Yes, we won't be sending people with the naughty Dr. Seuss books to the gulag. No one is saying that. We're concerned about monopoly power combined with wokist ideology.
I wish to see just once someone who makes that argument try to turn it around and apply to something else they don't like to see censored. I'm yet to see it.
The Hollywood Blacklist was completely voluntary on the part of the movie studios which enforced it, a decision of certain private companies not to -- how did you phrase it? -- "tarnish their brand" by collaborating with people suspected of Communist tendencies. It is held to be morally repugnant today, and somehow I doubt you would defend it with the same argument you use in the Dr. Seuss case.
I do defend their right to do that, so let me fulfill your wish, friend. I see a massive distinction between "things I don't like" and "things that should be legally compelled."
I worry about the authoritarian leanings of anyone who doesn't draw this distinction.
The point is the terrible ease of applying a double standard in how you approach an issue.
Some private actor X performs an action Y which other people Z find reprehensible. The action Y is within X's legal rights to perform.
You can focus on how reprehensible Y is and how Z are right to condemn it. Or you could focus on how X should be totally free to do Y if X so desires, even if we don't like Y.
What usually happens is that if you feel Z are right or you wish to support Z or you wish to not be seen as supporting "enemies" of Z, you will focus on condemning Y. It won't even occur to you to emphasize that doing Y is legal; if pressed you'll freely admit it is, but to you focusing on how Y is legal will look like hypocritical attempts to evade the real issue, which is the terribleness of Y.
On the other hand, if you dislike Z or like the "enemies" of Z, you will focus on how Y is legal and how Z's dangerous rhetoric about Y poses a real danger of conflating Y with actually illegal acts. You might or might not agree that Y is terrible, but to you it will seem a decidedly minor concern compared to the dangerous rhetoric issuing from Z.
That feels like a personal attack, which is disallowed. In any case, I think you didn't read the article above:
"“EBay is currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items,” a spokeswoman for the company said in an email. New copies of the six books were no longer for sale online at major retailers such as Barnes & Noble on Thursday afternoon, which put eBay among the most prominent platforms for the books to be sold."
Who is doing the banning? ebay can't can books, and hasn't. The publisher can't ban books, and hasn't. The rights holder can't ban books, and hasn't. Who is doing the banning?
> Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.
This is a true statement. His behavior always showed this regardless of what obama said. Unlike your orwellian quote, we're not rewriting history, just changing our tolerances.
Do you have any evidence for that at all, or is this standard counterfactual leftist revisionism?
Also, if Dr. Seuss was always so racist, how come the left embraced him until very very recently?
Are you seriously claiming that all the many people on the left, including Obama, were embracing a clear and known racist as recently as a few months ago?
TLDR: The past accepting something is not indication that the future must or should accept.
I don't really think this is a good-faith argument based on the language of the first sentence, but i'll reply anyways...
Yes the evidence is his clearly documented body of work. He used many racial stereotypes and derogatory imagery. He has images of Japanese Americans, Africans, East Asians, and they all use stereotypes and caricatures that are negative.
I can't speak for "the left" but he was embraced by most people because he was popular and many of his stories and books were benign. Lots of bad behavior was embraced by both left and right Americans throughout history. Past acceptance is not indication that the future must accept.
Yes. I am making the claim that people, including Obama (who is not the only image of the left, and not particularly important figure in a literary sense) were embracing Dr. Seuss. A lot of his more objectionable work is rather unpopular, so its not crazy to think that his supporters did not audit his behavior.
There is no doubt that people were embracing him. There is no doubt that much of his behavior is racist. There is no contraction here. People have embraced bad people before and that is (somewhat) ok as look as society learns and grows and corrects their behavior. This is the learning and growing. A book that sold 7k copies over the last few years is no longer in print because it portrayed people in bad ways.
> it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.
Have you actually seen the imagery? This is not a good-faith characterization of what is happening. The images are just rude racist imagery (saying a chinese person has "slanted eyes" for example) that the IP owners were embarrassed by.
> The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.
No, it really isn't. When a book edition goes out of print that does not mean it's banned. If the editor decides not to invest in a re-edit ion that does not mean it's banned. If you go to a book store and it doesn't have a book that does not mean it's banned. If you go to a library and it doesn't have a book in its inventory that does not mean it's banned.
If you lack arguments, please don't fabricate lies and misrepresentations like that. That only makes you look dishonest and desperate to grasp to an argument that even yourself acknowledge has no basis nor merit.
> The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.
As always, the only dynamic considered here by the publisher is money. They have made a calculation that doing this will benefit their bottom line in the long run. That's the free market and the way the system is designed to work. You may not like their decision, but it's their decision to make. That's the freedom they enjoy under our system. You have the freedom to complain about it and no one will stop you, but everyone is free to act however they best they see fit.
> And now eBay has decided that if you legally own a copy, you can't sell it to another reader, because it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.
eBay has not decided this. They have no power to decide this for you in our free market capitalist system. They have decided they don't want to facilitate the transaction, which is their right as a free enterprise. If you own the book you are still free to sell it to anyone you want. eBay is not going to help you though, and forcing them to do so would be against free market principles.
The free market gets distorted under monopoly conditions.
If I'm Disney, and I own millions of works, I can start banning some of them on a whim. My bottom line won't be meaningfully affected.
> They have decided they don't want to facilitate the transaction, which is their right as a free enterprise.
It was the legal right (duty, in fact) of Soviet commissars to vet any book before publication. The net effect was book-banning.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it won't lead to catastrophic consequences.
Standard Oil's complete monopolistic takeover of the US oil market was also legal at its time. Then we decided we can't live with these results and made laws against them.
I don't know why you are blurring the lines between "single publisher decides to stop publishing book", "mega conglomerate decides to stop publishing media", and "authoritarian government vets all books before publication".
The topic of discussion is a single publisher making a decision for themselves. You are all the way over in Soviet land talking about book banning and government censorship. None of that is happening, and the slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're imagining. Anyone in this country is free to write, publish, and sell works with content identical to those in the books Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to stop publishing, as long as they don't have images and words similar enough to violate their copyright. The ideas contained within are not banned by any government or monopoly.
> the slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're imagining
I had a great chuckle at this.
The issue that is being tossed into a big pile of other issues is simple. Ebay, a private company, has taken the path of banning the sale of those now-discontinued books. This action is totally within their rights and is fully legal for them to do. You can, rightly, talk about the content of _this specific book_ as much as you want, but that's not the broader issue here. What is riling up some people is the idea that in the US we are, ostensibly, a country founded on freedom and they feel like that freedom is being encroach upon. You seem to feel like them banning the sale of the book is no big deal, but they are in a large market position and them preventing the secondary market sale has a large impact.
The even bigger issue is that what we are seeing are very vocal groups that push the idea that we have to prevent these kinds of thoughts from being in our society at all. They force these ideas onto the greater community as a whole by attacking any entity they deem as non-compliant. As a result you have companies preempt that attack and voluntarily comply. To use the theme from the previous poster, they are voluntarily banning or self-censoring. This _is_ an attack on freedom though. You cannot have freedom of speech if you make it so only the speech you _like_ is effectively allowed. And I purposefully said effectively and not legally.
This obviously doesn't get into the broader topics of corporate censorship. I have many thoughts, some of them conflicting, about that as a whole. The simplest distillation would be that as long as your free speech is not encroaching into illegal territory then I don't feel like you should be excluded from society, even if your communications are repugnant.
So, back to where this started. You claim the 'slope isn't nearly as slippery' as they were imagining. Perhaps today that is the case. Maybe it's the same next week or next year. At some point the thoughts being attacked may very well align with your personal beliefs and _then_ the shape of the slope will be drastically different _for you_.
You are talking about works that became incidentally unavailable for commercial reasons (not that many people are interested in 22 year-old strategy video games). The Dr. Seuss books are an example of intentional book banning on political grounds.
Their publisher also didn't "shut down": they delibrately decided to stop publishing these books because they deemed them Politically Incorrect:
https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed...
> “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author and illustrator’s birthday.
And now eBay has decided that if you legally own a copy, you can't sell it to another reader, because it contains Dangerous Ideas from which the American mind must be protected.