There's a difference between "you shouldn't do hate speech" and some sort of 1984/V-for-Vendetta mechanism to ensure that nobody ever does hate speech. Laws and ethics are not the same thing.
> No, it's predominantly white-driven top-down (upper 20% income bracket) classism run amok, proping up specialist careers and pretending to be about "caring" and "wokeness".
I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that racist caricatures are bad.
> Yeah, no "power structure", just the mainstream media, the corporate world, ad agencies, governments, government agencies, web-mobs, FAANG - the biggest tech companies in the world plus Clouldflare and others, payment processors, the "good society" class wise and so on, with an increasing number of BS laws on their side too...
My wording could have been better, but my meaning was that this "cancellation" (which is really just people acknowledging that something is bad) is not applied by some power structure, and is certainly not a weapon that can be aimed at arbitrary concepts at will. I agree that free speech is important, but hate speech is not.
The laws in the United States are pretty convoluted, and I don't think they align with human rights all that well, especially given the treatment of imprisoned folks or asylum seekers. However, I do think that causing mass hysteria for kicks (shouting fire...) is wrong and you should not do it.
I'm curious: do you believe that there is anything that one does not have the right to say?
I agree. I think both the elected government and these monopolies are actively harming people. However, eBay's refusal to sell children's books with racist caricatures is not the vanguard of some effort by those power structures to consolidate power; after all, racist imagery has been used for centuries to consolidate power in America.
These companies don't operate on the same kind of logic as the courts do - this sets no precedent. Amazon and eBay could block the sale of any book tomorrow if they wanted to; they could have done it yesterday, as well. The real power these structures espouse is to get us bickering over children's books, rather than devoting our energies towards things that actually matter.
What information in these children's books is undermining dictatorial governments? The government isn't censoring e.g. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago - these are literally just picture books with racist caricatures in them. You have no right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, and you have no right to denigrate your fellow man.
The line is rather stark. eBay choosing not to facilitate the sale of books containing racist caricatures is not in the same ballpark as a government suppressing ideas. It’s not even the same sport.
The “weapon” here is just basic conscientiousness. A publisher decided to stop publishing some books because they denigrate people, and eBay decided that they did not want to be facilitating the sale of books that denigrate people. We are not talking about an H-bomb - there is no power structure wielding a “cancel button” here.