The right-wing freakout over Dr Seuss is amusing. The get everything wrong, but there is such wild-eyed outrage over his publisher not publishing books containing offensive illustrations.

Yes. That’s how it works. The people who own his works are exercising their right to not publish them. It’s not censorship, and it’s not driven by some imaginary leftist cancel culture.

I’ve been reading Seuss for most of my life, we read his books to our kids, and there are some that are popular with my granddaughter right now. They’re great books! No one is taking the Cat in the Hat out behind the chemical sheds. But there are definite examples of crude stereotyping of Asian and black people in some of them, and they taint the good.

I knew that Theodore Geisel had worked as a propagandist during WWII, as did some of the great cartoonists associated with the Warner Brothers label. If he were still alive, he’d probably be relieved to see that his racist works were being removed from the shelves of children’s libraries. We shouldn’t forget that Geisel approved of the internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry, or that he used crude steretoypes of African people, but it’s for the best that that stuff isn’t used in humorous primers intended to help children learn to read.

My grandfather fought in the Pacific during WWII, and came back filled with a lot of hatred and bigotry (which he did not outgrow, unlike Theodore Geisel). While I would like my grandkids to know something about their great grandparents at some point, I’m not going to start by sitting down and teaching them all the slurs Grandpa used for Asian people. That would be taking the wrong message from the experience.

Not Rowan Atkinson, too?

In an interview with the Radio Times, the multi-hyphenated British star blamed social media platforms for increased levels of polarization, which he said makes him fearful for the future of freedom of speech.

“The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be ‘cancelled’,” Atkinson said.

“It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion, but what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn. So it is scary for anyone who’s a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future.”

Tell me, who has been cancelled? It seems to me that what this paranoia is all about is that some people who are dependent entirely on their personal popularity with the citizenry are pleased to have a label to tag on the phenomenon of losing that popularity. It’s not their fault — whether it’s just that their 15 minutes are up, or that their creepiness is publicly exposed, or that someone finds out they are a racist or a pedophile — no, none of that. It’s entirely due to a wicked external force, “Cancel Culture”, that is targeting them for destruction for arbitrary and unfair reasons. So Louis CK might have been exposing himself and masturbating in front of women, but nobody would have known that if Cancel Culture hadn’t revealed that. Milo Yiannopoulos might have been frolicking with Nazis and babbling about how molesting children is OK, but the only way you knew that was because Cancel Culture was picking on him.

It’s as if they’re only now noticing that popular opinion is fickle, and yes, people will decide whether they like you on your personal opinions and behavior. This is the human condition. And if your entire career rests completely on your popularity, there will be ups and downs, and you can thoroughly trash your own reputation without any external agent doing any conspiratorial work against you.

It’s also nothing new. Was Fatty Arbuckle a victim of Cancel Culture? I’ll concede that Julius Caesar definitely was, but if you haven’t been stabbed, you can stop complaining. Critics can be obnoxious, but they’re not Culture Assassins.

It’s a ridiculous invention, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Go ahead, tell me that Louis CK and Milo were victims of “Cancel Culture” — it won’t make a bit of difference in my opinion of them. I don’t like what they did or said, and I can choose not to support them. The fact that I might not like you does not mean that I have a “simplistic, binary view of society” — I can be looking at you with all kinds of nuance, recognizing that you’ve done some good work, that you’re kind to dogs, that your mother loves you, but if you’re also a misogynist I can still decide that, on balance, I’d rather not associate with you. I’ve enjoyed Rowan Atkinson’s comedy, but at the same time I can think he’s being a bit of a dumbass right now. Do these whiners about an imaginary Cancel Culture hiding under their bed want to take my choice away from me?

Nathan Robinson cuts right to the bone here on why it’s perfectly legitimate for employees of Penguin Random House to protest any contract with Jordan Peterson.

It’s not reasonable to claim that employees who object to publishing Peterson are “censorious”. A publisher is not a Kinkos. Penguin Random House rejects far more books than it accepts, and it does not treat all points of view equally. It does not publish works of Holocaust denial or phrenology. It has standards, and it’s reasonable for employees to argue that Peterson does not meet those standards. After all, he has suggested that gay marriage might be a plot by cultural Marxists, that women wearing makeup in the workplace is “sexually provocative”, that trans women aren’t women because they’re not “capable of having babies”, that women cannot handle truth, and that transgender activists are comparable to mass-murdering Maoists. He peddles debunked scientific theories and dangerously dodgy diets. I have gone through his work myself and shown that he is a crackpot, whose writing is devoid of basic reasoning and full of wild unsubstantiated claims. When Pankaj Mishra wrote a critical review of Peterson’s work in the New York Review of Books, Peterson called Mishra a “prick” and said he’d “slap [Mishra] happily”. The things he says are often false, prejudiced and dangerous. What possible obligation does a publisher have to publish the ravings of bigots?

Unfortunately, there’s also a reason Peterson’s new book should have publishers lining up to take it on: there is a legion of gullible fans willing to pay good money for it.

That is a short-term excuse, though. In the long run, you’d think a publisher would want to be able to maintain some level of prestige and some quality control over the books released under its imprint. I think the employees of Penguin Random House are seeing an imminent degradation of the value of their work, while management just has dollar signs in their eyes.

Jordan Peterson really is just one step toward Holocaust denial and phrenology; a publisher shouldn’t aspire to be Quillette, either.

I was in the boy scouts, briefly, long long ago, but that’s such a reactionary organization.

I couldn’t give up Twitter, there are so many candid self-owns on there. Like this “totally crap analysis” from James Lindsay, who explains to us his interpretation of feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory.

All three really deserve a spit take. Feminism sees men as the ideal… we can just stop right there. It’s projection, through and through. Only a heterosexual white man would look at people protesting oppression by a heterosexual white male establishment and think, “Oh, they’re just jealous and want to be heterosexual white men”. He’s making the superficial smooth brained interpretation of everything. Please do have fun eviscerating his words.

But then, just when I thought I’d found the dumbest tweet of the week, along comes Dean Browning, former Lehigh County Commissioner and Christian conservative.

He seems to have forgotten that he had to log in to his sock puppet account.

That’s a very Christian conservative thing to do.

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Oh man, that last story just gets twistier by the minute.