No one is "cancelling" Dr. Seuss. No one is saying that his books should not be read to children. They (on their on volition) removed a handful of books because the images were racially offensive.... something we try to avoid when it comes to children. If you want to exaggerate something to get yourself knock yourself out.
how did liberals and other folks on the left become advocates and cheerleaders for book banning? doesn't make sense
Now you are straight up trying to bait people, I did give you credit for being under the radar, now you are like Roc Paint, anything for a reaction. How sad it must be to go through life like that. Do better guy.
What are you reffering to? I guess I'm not liberal anymore because I'm confused what you are referring to. Am I supposed to be outraged by something. The right wing libertarians in this country are really good at telling me that I'm outraged about something so what books need to be burned?
Most liberals aren't at all for banning books including Dr. Seuss. The practice of taking extreme examples and acting like it is the beliefs of all liberals or Democrats is purposefully dishonest.
And when is not making something an official day canceling? If I authored book and my book isn't recognized as a national day, does that mean it's cancelled? Are Dr. Seuss books banned from public schools? Are they banned for sale at retail stores? Wtf does "cancelled" even mean?
So what this thread has shown. 1. Liberals aren't outraged at Dr. Seuss. 2. Dr. Seuss wasn't cancelled.
yeah, but clearly Dr. Seuss SHOULD be cancelled, and here's why: https://200proofliberals.blogspot.com/2021/03/why-we-should-cancel-dr-seuss-how.html 5 hours ago Why We Should Cancel Dr. Seuss: How the Sneetches Perpetuates Racism by Jason Brennan Dr. Seuss may have been progressive and significantly more anti-racist than the people around him, and have had a strong hand in reducing the overall degree of racism from his readers. However, people are not to be judged or measured by how much progress they make against their background conditions, but instead whether they conform to the dictates of White Fragility. Consider Seuss's most clearly "anti-racist" story, The Sneetches. Here, we are introduced to two types of humanoid birds, sneetches whose bellies have stars and those who have none upon thars. The star-bellied sneetches look down on the starless sneetches and won't let them play ball or cavort on their beaches. But along comes Sylvester McMonkey McBean, who sells admission to two of his inventions. One removes stars while the other implants them. The starless sneetches pay to have stars implanted, so they will look like the more elite sneetches, but then the elite starred sneetches pay to have their stars removed so as to retain the difference. If this reminds you of how upper-middle-class college-educated white people purposefully avoid consuming cultural materials the uneducated white people consume, well, that's a total coincidence. Anyways, this star-switching continues haphazardly until the end, when no one can remember who started with stars and who didn't. The Sneetches then discover that, really, they are all the same. They decide to be friends based on genuine personal characteristics and individual virtues instead of the presence of star-bellies. Dr. Seuss makes it clear that he believes the categorization of star-bellied vs. starless is a destructive social construct. He presents the eradication of this social construct at the end of the story as a positive thing, rather than as something to be mourned. Obviously, this is a horrible, racist idea. First, notice what Dr. Seuss is in effect saying: Skin color doesn't matter. We should stop judging people based upon their skin. Since the starred vs. unstarred social construct turns out to be socially destructive, in the end, the Sneetches overcome and dispense with this social construct. But today we know better. On the contrary, to be anti-racist means forming snap judgments about people based upon their race, to ignore individual merit and demerit and instead impugn everyone with a collective identity. Seeing individual people as individual people rather as token members of their racial categories is the epitome of contemporary racism. Our individual identities are tertiary matters. Just as Christians hold that all humans are guilty of original sin despite not having personally eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, so today we realize that anti-racism means assigning white people whatever sins their ancestors committed. Of course, this concept of original racial sin applies to white people only. Anti-racism means we are to regard non-white people as largely passive, helpless agents; non-white peoples' own histories of colonialism and imperialism count for nothing. History teaches us again and again that the way to reduce conflict and improve cooperation is to encourage people to divide the world quickly into "good people" and "bad people" based on visual categories. As we know, every time people have done this in the past, it stopped oppression. In contrast, when people avoid segregating people into in-groups and out-groups, oppression always and everywhere persists. Indeed, discussions of "eliminating socially destructive social constructs" are usually driven by the desire to perpetuate these very constructs. Further, The Sneetches is clearly a swipe at people like DiAngelo. After all, DiAngelo, like McMonkey McBean, makes lots of money by offering partial but incomplete solutions to people's racism. By portraying McMonkey McBean as an absurdly opportunistic sociopath, Seuss is in effect describing DiAngelo as an absurdly opportunistic sociopath. But that's not fair. After all, DiAngelo strongly encourages us to continue to categorize people by race, while McMonkey McBean's actions eliminate the possibility of racism by destroying people's capacity to think in terms of race. There's nothing more racist than that! Finally, notice that McMonkey McBean has an Irish-sounding name. As a non-white, Irish person, I've notice that Seuss frequently uses the "Mc" prefix in his cartoon names when he wants to make a character seem silly or ridiculous. This reveals Seuss's own anti-Irish racism--a form of racism which continues to pervade universities to this day, and from which even the high priest of anti-racism DiAngelo suffers. (DiAngelo regards Irish people as white, which means she endorses and perpetuates British imperialism and erasure of Irish identity. It is thus morally imperative that she be cancelled, and if you buy her new book, you are a racist.) Could you imagine if Seuss used, say, Swahili-sounding names like this in the effort to make someone seem silly or ridiculous? But of course in the United States, a remnant of the British empire, anti-Irish racism is not only permitted, but routinely condoned. Cancel Dr. Seuss. A world in which no one pays attention to whether sneetches have stars or none upon thars is nothing to celebrate. To dream of a world in which all people sing together "free at last" is a KKK fantasy.
Not sure I have Dr Seuss but I do have the infamous Curious George book, I wonder how much that's worth?
The books aren't banned. The publisher decided that they would stop making a handful of books. As far as I know people can still buy them on e-bay and places like that. Did anyone in the government say that the publisher had to stop producing those books? Those particular books are not being used at a number of schools, but I believe that is a school or district choice. I personally do not support banning books...... hell I recently finished The Turner Diaries
Not sure why the Sneetches are included personally. I have never considered the story to be racist at all. Maybe I am missing something. Is this the same author that actually made the controversial argument that upstanding people should NOT vote?
if you have to explain the joke it isn't funny Spoiler satire. it's a parody in the vein of A Modest Proposal pretty sure that was Chris Freiman
"How the Woke Stole Childhood": https://www.city-journal.org/cancel-culture-comes-for-dr-seuss How the Woke Stole Childhood The campaign against Theodor Geisel takes cancel culture to new lows. Steven Malanga March 3, 2021 Theodor Geisel’s Dr. Seuss books are so popular, and printed and reprinted in so many editions, that you can find used copies of classics like The Cat in the Hat on eBay.com for under $5—shipping included. You can typically even snap up a first edition of something like Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! for just $4.99, plus $3.45 shipping. Yet on Tuesday, sellers suddenly inundated eBay.com with new, pricey Seuss listings. A 1964 edition of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street went onto the site at an astonishing $400! Though that sounded expensive, within an hour some 140 would-be sellers had examined the listing. A newer, less prestigious Grolier Book Club edition of the same book was offered for a more modest $80. By 11:30 Tuesday morning, someone had already snapped it up. The buyer must have considered himself fortunate, because by noon a similar edition of the book had already received 17 offers, in the process getting bid up to $127, with four days left to go in the auction. Potentially the biggest jackpot of the day, however, would go to the person listing an edition of 13 stories of Dr. Seuss, all packaged together. Several hours and 20 bids later, the price had hit $162, with six days of bidding left. Book collectors are an enterprising lot. The sudden online Seuss surge was the result of news that Geisel’s descendants, who have controlled the rights to his books since his death in 1991, had decided to stop publishing six of his titles (Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer) because critics allege that they contain racist or insensitive imagery. An academic journal, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, has even accused Geisel of white supremacy for a “preponderant influence or authority demonstrated by White characters over others” in his books and for Orientalism, defined as distorting “differences between Middle Eastern, Southeast Asians, South Asians, and East Asians” and portraying these “cultures as exotic, backward, uncivilized.” It’s hard to know what was more shocking: that the beloved Seuss and his seemingly innocent narratives had become the subject of the cancellation cult, or that there was a journal apparently devoted to ferreting out racist imagery in children’s books. The books haven’t exactly been hiding somewhere, unread. Publishers have sold an estimated 600 million copies of Seuss, many of them presumably read by parents, teachers, librarians, and assorted other educated and tolerant people over many decades and lauded by prominent politicians, including Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. It took a peer-reviewed academic journal to persuade us—or at least to persuade Geisel’s family—that the children’s book master was in fact a bad influence. (Not missing a beat, the Biden administration subsequently declined to mention the author’s books on Read Across America Day, held annually on Geisel’s birthday.) One irony of this latest cancel-culture episode is that Geisel himself was a man of the Left, a progressive who opposed fascism, decried “red baiting” in the 1950s, and devoted an entire book to educating kids about the budding environmental movement of the early 1970s, as described in a 2011 article, “Dr. Seuss’s Progressive Politics.” With the outbreak of World War II, Geisel even put aside writing children’s books and worked as an editorial cartoonist for PM, a liberal New York newspaper published during the war and noteworthy for refusing to accept advertising so as not to compromise its values. Geisel’s cartoons from that era revealed a man who vigorously opposed fascism, steadfastly supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s prosecution of the war, and lambasted the president’s congressional opponents, especially Republicans. When Geisel resumed writing children’s books after the war, it was with an eye toward shaping young minds. As entertaining as the Seuss books are, you don’t need to be a literary critic to see the messages in many of them. Horton Hears a Who!, a book about an elephant who persuades his neighbors to protect a small, vulnerable group of people known as the Whos, is seen as a “parable about protecting minority rights,” a plausible reading of a book by a man who, in a 1947 university lecture, urged writers to avoid racist stereotypes. In Yertle the Turtle, an arrogant king of his local pond is indifferent to the suffering of his subjects, who complain, “I know up on top / You are seeing great sights / But down at the bottom / We, too, should have rights.” The Lorax, adapted by Hollywood as both a TV series and a movie, tells the story of the Once-ler, a creature who finds and cuts down a precious tree to sell and is warned by the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees,” of the consequences of a business built on using up natural resources. Geisel himself called the book, published in 1971 in the wake of the first Earth Day, “propaganda.” Not surprisingly, social media became a battleground over the family’s decision to cancel the six Seuss books. One defender of the move said that it was time for critics to “evolve.” But Geisel has hardly had that opportunity himself. The academic attack on him in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature includes a section on cartoons he published during his college years in the 1920s deemed anti-Semitic and anti-black. It apparently counts for nothing that, for the rest of his life, he pursued progressive causes, decried the targeting of Jews in Germany, criticized the segregationist policies of the U.S. armed forces during World War II, and became an early supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. The Geisel episode is further evidence that, these days, anything remotely suggesting an unacceptable opinion by twenty-first-century standards, issued at any point in an artist’s life, is sufficient cause for cancellation. In a sensible world, Geisel’s heirs would leave it to parents, educators, and librarians to determine whether Dr. Seuss books should remain available to kids. After all, it’s not as if five-year-olds are logging onto eBay and ordering copies of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street on their own—especially not at today’s prices. Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal, the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer.
An icon that fostered the boomer generation doesn't sound like the best example of a "literary classic" for raising our children, whose future that they continue to destroy... Seriously though, this outrage not outrage, is boomer catnip to shake their fists at the empty air.
