This cartoon gets it exactly right. Fox News and the other members of the nutty right wing echo chamber go on and on about the estate of Dr. Seuss withdrawing six of his earlier books because they have offensive images but they never show the images they are defending. If you want, you can find these images on the internet, like here.
This is so obviously offensive by today’s standards that even the whitest Fox News viewer would cringe at seeing it. And that would ruin the whole schtick. If Fox viewers realized that the images in question actually were offensive, and not just the fever dreams of some lefty social justice warriors, they’d realize that Fox was duping them.
So no pictures for Fox! Much better to rail endlessly and let their audience assume that this is just some ridiculous liberal freakout over nothing. That’s much better for ratings.
From the link:
Well, yes, it’s a racist caricature. And yes, that’s probably why they didn’t show them (I presume that’s a true claim).
But I can’t say it makes me cringe — it’s a work of its time, after all.
Anyway, apparently sales of Dr Seuss other books are currently soaring due to this “controversy”, so it’s all good. New sales won’t include the deprecated titles, so the existing copies will over time accrue value for collectors due to relative rarity.
Related: https://slate.com/culture/2021/03/space-jam-2-lola-bunny-redesign-reddit-pepe-le-pew.html
Love Tom Tomorrow. He always gets it right.
In Germany, publisher Carlsen has apologized and retracted a German-language book for children about the Corona virus because of Chinese complaining that saying that the virus originated in China was racist.
https://spectator.com.au/2021/03/covid-kids-book-pulped-after-china-complains/
https://img.welt.de/img/politik/ausland/mobile227903093/5221621967-ci23x11-w1136/DWO-Teaser-China-Kinderbuch-fb.jpg
Jen Sorensen thinks the Dr Seuss controversy is to distract from new voter suppression laws:
http://jensorensen.com/2021/03/09/more-voter-suppression-funnies-georgia-edition/
The guy who wrote that is just wrong.
I think this massively overestimates the sensitivity of the average white Fox News viewer. I think a double-digit percentage of the viewership would laugh out loud and express irritated refusal to see any problem with those images.
That line is part of a common human problem: the tendency to over-estimate how much like you other people are. “Oh that image is so racist even a Trump-voting MAGA-hat wearing gun-totin’ good ole boy would cringe.” No, they wouldn’t. They’d print the image out and put it on a t-shirt and wear it to the mall to trigger a snowflake.
What’s depressing is that the right have absolutely no problem understanding that people on the left are absolutely not like them, don’t think like them, have very little in common with them and so on. A LOT of people on the left persist in the futile fantasy that if you just explained things to a racist/homophobe/sexist/whatever, then they’d come around because of fundamental human decency or something.
The estate of Dr Seuss is foolish.
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There are already many 100K’s of copies of said 6 books throughout the planet. Talking about locking the barn after the horses ran away.
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The estate of Dr Seuss doing a lot of vanity preening and virtue signaling.
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To say that the woke is the new puritan is insulting puritans for puritans of the 17th century were much more joyful than today’s wokesters.
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Very rare are comedies -- and children books -- which age well for comedies depend on then-local aspects of contemporary culture.
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Conservatives are not outraged; Conservatives are amused by the wokesters’ bans which will be failures at the end. In this time of global electronic communications and crypto-technologies, Samizdat is flourishing.
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There is this continous stream of snowflaky outrages by wokesters for conservatives stubbornly keep being happy warriors.
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The american left are outraged when conservatives keep mocking and lampooning them.
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The american left has the same temperament as Robespierre (most humorless); one knows what happened to Robespierre.
Hey fishpie, you’ve gone dotty.