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I see how it was a pain for some good people to not have the use of Nazi-associated symbols.
There were good and decent people before Hitler who used a little moustache (famously Chaplin, but also unfamously good people). There were families named Hitler who didn’t do anything historical who had to renounce their names.
When people set aside some things in the service of “Don’t forget the Nazis and the evil they did.”, it’s a sacrifice that can seem reasonable. If people get mad at the Nazis whenever this subject comes up, then the sacrifice of the symbol is working as intended.
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Do you hold the people putting on a flea market (one of those giant, giant ones with hundreds and hundreds of vendors) responsible for every last item being sold by everyone with a table? That could hardly be maintained, so how it could be done on the internet at both vastly wider scale, and no means of physical inspection? Ebay would be in hot water if this was our criteria for online auctions.
I think at some point one of my relatives discovered that and got all excited, thinking that someone was making shirts with their actual name on them. I tried to explain that shirts get auto-generated from search results, but not before we all got auto-generated shirts for Christmas. Anyway… 
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It was Walmart that decided to make the person who bought the pillow think they were buying it from Walmart.
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The article suggested no such thing – it said:
A Walmart spokeswoman provided the following statement: “This pillow was listed by a third-party seller on our online marketplace and is in violation of our policy. We regularly scan our marketplace for these types of items, but, unfortunately, the offensive image wasn’t visible on the pillow’s photo and we were not aware of it until the customer reached out. We removed the item immediately and are reviewing the seller’s assortment.”
I just went onto their site and listings pretty clearly show whether the item is sold and shipped by Wal•Mart, or a third-party seller. Just like Amazon.
The reason Newman called and wrote to Walmart to complain was because he thought that Walmart was responsible for selling him the item. I’ve looked at Walmart’s site and I think that’s reasonable. You put things you want people to see in big font and things you don’t want them to see in little font. Sold and shipped by is in medium font with full contrast and it’s a searchable term, so I’m not accusing them of trying to hide it, but they aren’t trying to get your attention with it either.
I also don’t expect people to know what that means. The Walmart logo is on the top of the page. You are buying from Walmart. If I went to a Walmart store everything in the store would be made by someone other than Walmart. If a person walks into a flea market they know they are in a flea market. If a person walks into a Walmart and there is a little area at the back that has its own cash register and products, they probably still think they can complain to the manager of the Walmart about what is going on in that little corner since it is still in the Walmart. Online challenges people’s concepts of what is in what because these kinds of analogies don’t really work.
Walmart has made a deal with sellers on it’s site. The buyers get the assurance that they are buying from a something they can trust (in a particular sense of the word) as part of that deal. If Walmart doesn’t know they are selling that service, or if they don’t mean to, they could take steps to be clearer. I suspect they know exactly what service they are selling to marketplace sellers but they don’t actually want to take responsibility for it. It strikes me as deceptive.
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I’m pretty sure Chaplin chose his mustache to lampoon Hitler.
Edit: guess not after all
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That is an easy misunderstanding, since he DID lampoon him in The Dictator.
I’d say that little mustache was also ruined by Hitler, but really, it looks pretty silly even with out that association.
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He’s practically this rev:
Yeah, if a dictator with giant hair and sweat bands had arisen out of the 80s we might blame them for ruining the style…
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MIGHT. Though really it was doing a good job of being awful all by itself.
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Apparently Ron Mael was aiming for a Chaplinesque naive charm, back in the 1970’s; but I think he, maybe, missed the mark.
I’m perfectly happy to hold the third party sales platform accountable for everything they sell, whether it is Amazon or Walmart. They are happy to cash the checks for their share of the sale. They can take their share of the blame.
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100 hairs make the man
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were they moldy? not clear why this person complained.
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Do you include ebay in that list? Etsy? How would you propose they review every item listed by third parties, especially when descriptions and imagery offer no clue as to, say, an offending Nazi Germany stamp motif?
Yes I do. How to solve it is their problem, they are the ones making money from the sale. If their reputations are on the line, then maybe they’ll actually work to stop sellers from doing such things.
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