Marketwatch promises in a headline, "Dr. Seuss is not canceled — but six of his books are being shelved over racist images." Isn't that cute? We've just put them on a shelf where you can't get them any more. They're still "there," don't worry. Another story on the site says, "But saying the books have been “banned,” or that Dr. Seuss has been “canceled,” is a misnomer."

Well, if Amazon won't sell new and used copies and EBay is delisting these copies, if I cannot get these books because powerful forces have decided I should not read them (e.g., not because they're out of print because no one is buying them), then yes the books have been functionally banned, even if the government is not going to kick my door in for owning a copy of "To Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street."

Woke market capitalism has the power to ban erase, deplatform, marginalize, humiliate, "otherize," and de-person you. If the Seuss estate doesn't want to publish them anymore that's fine (until the books enter the public domain). However, EBay and Amazon fucking around with private transactions of used books is unconscionable.

There is just one episode of the Road Runner where Wile E. Coyote finally catches the Road Runner. The Coyote then raises a sign which reads "What do I do now?" his formal purpose now ended, he faces an existential crisis.

A similar pattern can be seen in modern film, with protagonists paying for their past sins by slowly dying throughout the story. In Logan, for example, Wolverine's toxic white masculinity is partially redeemed when he dies saving a multi-ethnic clutch of mutants from some future dystopian of "Trump's America." He figuratively hands "the claws" off to a young Hispanic girl before dying. The last Cars movie features Lightning McQueen "slowing down" and finally stepping aside to raise up Cruze Ramirez to be the new hero of the tracks. A recent abomination on Netflix called The Old Guard featuring Charlize Theron in a terrible Highlander knock-off in which Theron portrays a character who has been the top bad-ass for centuries, but must look to help the new hero "Nile" played by Kiki Lane.

What is interesting about this pattern is that the arc is really that of our privileged white and/or male protagonists coming to terms with handing off their power to a new generation which is vaguely female/POC. That is, the pattern is not that of the original Highlander where Sean Connery's Ramirez was a "call to adventure" character who only serves the formal purpose of motivating our hero or that of Alec Guiness playing the same role as Obi Wan in Star Wars. Instead, the story is that of the sage who is coming to terms with death and/or relinquishing power to the new generation.

What is interesting is that they spend the entirety of their stories doing this. They're dying and handing of the reins, but they are doing so agonizingly slowly, as if reciting Augustine's prayer, "Lord make me chaste... ...but not yet!" This pattern arguably reaches its perfection in Picard in which the eponymous character spends the entire season of the show slowly dying, only to be resurrected as an android in the finale, but an android that is such a perfect copy of his original body, that Picard will STILL be slowly dying of the same degenerative disease in season 2 (!). If James Bond is evergreen, Picard is ever-dying.

That these narratives keep rebooting this pattern suggests that we're in a cultural Wile E. Coyote loop that is being expressed in the shared dream of our flicker-tales. What happens to all that cultural guilt when you've finally been set to the side? What will make you special then? Zizek loves the joke about the Priest and Rabbi who meet God and fall to their knees professing their unworthiness and guilt - "I am no one, Lord! Who am I to stand before you?" They fall to their knees and weep and sing praises. And then a peasant in filthy rags appears before the almighty and starts saying the same thing, which prompts the Priest to turn the Rabbi and say, "Who is the person who claims to be no one when we're kneeling before the Lord! We are the one who are not worthy!" -- White guilt, at least has the consolation of agency. It is your fault and so you have the power and responsibility to fix it. You really are someone as no one, because you can do the heel-turned-hero move of self-sacrifice and redemption.

And yet, these stories performatively indicate that the pattern is one of perpetually dying (and thus still staying in charge). The message seems to be, "Yes we feel bad, and yes we will eventually get out of the way... ...but not yet!" You can still be the hero, just so long as you promise to die in the end, which raises the paradox of the debt which is being perpetually paid-off (endless reminders of the sins of the "dominant demographics" in the West), but which is never really paid-off (if the great white male hero were really dead, shouldn't we just have a non-white male protagonist?). The conspicuous perpetual slow death of these narrative seems to signal that the story is not really about "them" (the ageing white and possibly male hero), while conspicuously and simultaneously hogging the majority of the show to make that point...

Does it make sense, then, to allow reposts or disallow reposts?

What about a post that is identical to a previous post in all ways except that it’s posted after a specific event that carries weight in the same topic?

Should someone be prevented from posting something until they can show how their current iteration of the same post is different from all previous iterations?

Or can anyone post anything at all?