Book Banning in an Age of Amazon
abigailshrier.substack.com
abigailshrier.substack.com
This is entirely false. The books can still be put up as an .epub at a URL on any of thousands of servers that can be accessed by the entirety of the internet-connected Earth. Such hosting service can be obtained in 5 minutes for a pittance, and will easily serve tens of millions. For slightly less than a pittance you can serve the file to billions.
If Facebook starts censoring posts or private person-to-person DMs with your URL in it, we have another discussion to have, but until that time this is just the normal freedom-of-association choices associated with being unpopular. Amazon sucks for doing this, to be sure, but the TFA is committing a worse offense: claiming inaccurately to have been banned.
There has never been a time where it has been easier or cheaper to publish to literally billions-with-a-b.
Apple made it so you can't even type a Taiwanese flag emoji if you are using an iPhone in the PRC.
...then I got diagnosed with adult ADHD, which, boy howdy, explains a lot about my life, and I'm only somewhat resentful of my parents for pursuing an alternative medicine approach when I was diagnosed as a kid. But anyway, that's just setting the scene.
Then I went to my local library to get some books on adult ADHD, to help my wife understand it better, and they only had one book on adult ADHD (quite a few more on child ADHD, natch), but in the same section, had two books stating unequivocally that ADHD was a made-up condition.
These ones:
Debunking ADHD: 10 Reasons to Stop Drugging Kids for Acting Like Kids - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475827377/
ADHD Does Not Exist: The Truth About Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder - https://www.amazon.com/ADHD-Does-Not-Exist-Hyperactivity/dp/...
And I guess, now that I had a strong personal stake, I felt rather offended by these books.
I don't want to ban them, but I'd very much prefer that the library filed them under "alternative medicine" rather than under "mental illness > ADHD". Not so much for myself, but for any kids who get diagnosed and have a parent or parents similar to mine looking for a reason to deny the diagnosis.
By the way. If I'm a young adult and think that I might have a mild case of ADHD, do you think it's worth it to try get diagnosed?
It's definitely worth looking into. In hindsight, I think it severely hampered my life in that I never graduated high school, I failed hard at university, and I did poorly at all my jobs that involved doing routine tasks.
However, the ability to "hyperfocus" is how I taught myself to code - albeit at some cost, staying up until 4am coding has some costs when you have a day job.
And then I lucked into a coding company where there were lots of interesting challenges I could hyperfocus into, even though I was failing at the necessary routines, it was overlooked because I could make the big leaps that transformed things.
If I'd be hired by a "Write the CRUD app using JSF templates and Hibernate for a slightly different client" company, I would've failed hard.
But the biggest issue that the medication has resolved for me is my impulsiveness around drugs and alcohol. Now, I can have two beers and then say "Nah, I don't need another".
Previously, that wasn't possible. With the obvious life impacts that followed.
So if you think it might be present, definitely worth confirming if it is, or if it isn't.
Looking back over the past few decades, that has gotten me in a lot of unnecessary trouble (also now adult-diagnosed)
I've been diagnosed with adhd several times as an adult and every time I scored average/slightly above average on the attention+working memory metrics but scored so high on the other metrics that the ADHD ones were considered out of place!
Personally I don't necessarily believe that ADHD "exists" but am willing to say that I do, in order to take advantage of a prescription for dexedrine which I enjoy. I would of course, in practice, attack anyone claiming it doesn't "exist" because it is counter to my own self interest in maintaining a convenient supply of speedy pills.
But yeah, I think a good metaphor is that people with ADHD are starting at -1, people without are starting at 0, and then the pills add a +1 to both.
What had you seek out a diagnosis as an adult? What country were these diagnoses? How old are you?
And then, of course, there is the internet, where anyone can put an .epub up at a public URL.
The author of this piece tips her hand when she veers off into discussion of the content of the book Amazon dropped and engages with its position directly.
This is just another case of someone who believes in ideas that are becoming less popular and less acceptable complaining about nonexistent unfairness.
I become less and less surprised to find (seemingly undercover) right-wing talking points on Substack these days, especially after its founder decided to donate free content to a leading alt-right website/publication by appearing on their podcast. Seeing stuff published on subdomains of substack.com immediately has me default-hyper-critical, which is something that usually only happens to me on OANN, Gab, Parler, msnbc.com, et c.
I don't know, it's not a good look when you censor someone and say "oh, you're just unpopular".
Depends on your definition of monopoly. Monopolistic practices and effects can begin to appear long before 100% domination of a market. I think it's fair to say that Amazon is well within such a range since they have over 80% of the book selling market in the US.
> This is just another case of someone who believes in ideas that are becoming less popular and less acceptable complaining about nonexistent unfairness.
So you think Amazon does nothing unfair? It's good to hear such full throated support for all their decisions.
But perhaps standing up for free speech when seeing it eroded is actually an honourable and decent thing to do. Speech isn't curtailed in one dramatic swoop, it's thousands of little decisions where we fail to stand up and say, this isn't fair, and it isn't the way to treat people we disagree with. If nobody wants to read the book, it will fail of its own accord -- nobody is forced to order it or read it.
There are many gradations between “all companies allow X” and “the government will send men with guns to your home if you do X”. If only the last threshold counts as censorship, then we need a word for when people want to read what you wrote, but every major company decides to block that transaction. I think “censorship” is fine for that, but if you have a better term I’m all ears.
If anyone could open a bank and provide banking services, this would be true, but the ability to grant a customer access to banking is heavily regulated.
No such corresponding thing exists when it comes to "selling stuff on a website".
You'd have done better by pointing out the time Visa and Mastercard both started denying donations to a publisher (simply on request of the state) long before any criminal charges against that publisher were filed or made public.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...
(Note that the website of said publisher is still up and still publishing.)
Again, however, the issue is that not anyone can just start a bank on a whim. Websites and publishing are not similarly restricted.
> If only the last threshold counts as censorship, then we need a word for when people want to read what you wrote, but every major company decides to block that transaction. I think “censorship” is fine for that, but if you have a better term I’m all ears.
That is indeed censorship. The article is claiming "banned", though, which is inaccurate. I am extremely critical of private organizations engaging in censorship, and think we should engage in activism regarding it, because we actually can.
Once something is actually banned though, activism for it is explicit promotion of illegal activity, which is often itself illegal. It's like calling every protest or riot "terrorism": it begins to mean nothing.
You shouldn't buy it though, not if you want a real look at the experiences of the majority of transgender people, the views of the majority of the medical community, or the science that disrupts traditional western views about gender and biology.
Nobody chooses to be a transgender person. It just happens sometimes, like being born with 6 fingers on your hands. It might be difficult to fit in, but it's not bad or harmful intrinsically. Some people are different, and sometimes other people treat those who are different as a threat to them, instead of a chance to question their assumptions about what it means to be human and the diversity of human experience.
Unlike a person being transgender, that type of judgment of others is a choice. And sometimes people who make that choice then choose to write books about transgender folks to promote a political agenda, finding anecdotal situations to to justify their views.
Instead of assessing the experiences or actions of the majority of a group, they treat something deeply personal and difficult and subject to discrimination as an intellectual debate and look for ways to justify harmful policies, ignoring the demonstrated psychological benefits of gender affirming treatment for transgender people¹, or the differences in the brains of transgender people².
Sometimes people make a choice not to carry those kind of books. Amazon being huge and the effects of that is an entirely separate issue from their choice not to carry a particular book.
1. https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/study-find... 2. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgend...
Does that explain the existence of people who regretted it and detransitioned?
Not really, because they are different groups.
This is a problem throughout medicine: some treatments work, some don't, and we don't always know why. The vast majority of people who transition are helped by it, in part because of the extensive screening. Despite the hysterical tone of books like this, it's not something people do on a whim.
That doesn't mean it will help everybody, and those are unfortunate. But it's irrational to withhold a treatment that helps most patients because of a tiny number of negative outcomes -- especially when those outcomes are artificially given outsized influence by ideologues who have entirely un-medical reasons for opposing them.
It would be another matter if trans people simply have an alternative concept of gender.
And those are not even mentioning the far more subtle things like disapproving looks when females do or say certain things.
Like if I had to pick a metaphor, as I understand things, for HN, think of it an imperfect binary classification for assigned gender at birth API, a leaky abstraction on top of society understandings that are themselves constructed the messy analog physicality of people's "biological sex" which is not as simple as two options male and female, not even just in terms of chromosomal sex. Add in hormones levels, hormone sensitivity, genetic differences, brain structures, body hair etc, and even what people think of as basic "biological sex" is actually multifaceted and variable.
So in talking about gender as a construct, rather than something innate and natural and binary, it becomes possible to talk about how the API was developed, and maybe say, hey this API is a little simplistic.
My question is specifically how do we diagnose gender dysphoria. Is it just based on the fact that a person might express himself in a way that society associated with one gender or another?
That would make sense to me. For what it's worth, from my observations of this community it appears to me that at the very least a significant part of self-{identified,diagnosed} transgender population seems to have an unrealistic, hypersexualized portrayal of what being a woman means, most likely influenced by pornography.
But why obscure and attack the concept of biological sex then? Doesn't that only reaffirm that what we've been doing this entire time is a right thing to do? Imposing the correct gender role (or as you called it, assigning gender at birth), seems exactly like the way to go, as it lowers the chance of child developing gender dysphoria and having all the problems associated with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
As for diagnostic criteria, they vary from country to country. Here's whats in the DSM 5
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphori...
The second link basically confirms what I suspected.
I don't see how your appeal to tradition is sufficient to justify your view.
Science generally accepts that the identities it discusses are nominalist and conditional. We humans create boundaries and classifications by grouping elements, but no such group or organization is objectively correct, some are just subjectively useful for particular purposes.
I'm not appealing to tradition, I'm arguing for it based on what I've understood about gender dysphoria or the concept of gender in general so far. To reiterate, gender dysphoria comes with all sorts of potential problems, like medication, surgeries, depression, discrimination etc. And that makes me believe that the best way to go about it for parents is to make sure (to a reasonable degree) that the child will not develop gender dysphoria and that the biological sex of the child will match the gender (a social construct, so we can influence it by controlling the environment). Unless you want to argue that what we've been doing up to this point actually makes gender dysphoria more common and the 'new way' suppresses it, or that I'm missing something important, I don't see any gaps in my reasoning.
Is there an equivalent to Godwin’s Law for the literary world?