Amazon won't sell books framing LGBTQ+ identities as mental illness
wsj.com
wsj.com
Truly honestly curious. I can't admit to understanding the state of mind in this group of clearly marginalized people, but I can't wrap my mind around the decision to not allow others as well as these same people to freely discuss what is effectively open research.
Aren't there statistics that seem to indicate an even higher suicide attempt rate post-op? This seems like something that should be discussed, if it is true (and if its not, then even more so... to set the record straight).
As far as surgical “regret” is concerned, of all elective procedures, sexual reassignment surgery has the lowest regret rate of all.
That being said, how can you quantify your response regarding surgical regret in your answer formally?
And, 91% of all responding surgeons "would require a mental health evaluation prior to detransition."
So, once again, nasty politics seem to stem from the clash of totalizing vs nuanced beliefs. "Gender reassignment is a mental disorder" "There is no mental disorder associated with gender reassignment"
Section 4 is what you want (table 4.3)
One could not, because the concept of “mental illness” is not, as such, defined in terms such that any phenomenon can be empirically validated to be a manifestation of it. Particular named mental illnesses are more or less defined, but there is no underlying rubric by which those definitions can be validated as mental illness.
* Too many variables between bodies
* Humans don't follow protocols perfectly
* They take too long
* They fail too often, leaving sunk costs
* Experiments are hard to do ethically
And most importantly: you can't just sit and do nothing. When a person is dying or suffering, it's cold comfort to say, "Nobody has paid for a rigorous study, so we're not going to do anything at all".
Psychological problems are even harder. They're nearly impossible to quantify. You can certainly quantify people after they've killed themselves, but until then you've got little more than their self-report to go on. You can make up questionnaires, like they have for ADHD and depression, but what are they calibrated against? In the end, it's just "I feel like X", and they believe you or not.
A sibling comment answered your question pretty well: yes, we can tell that untreated trans people kill themselves at a higher rate. But even so, statistics are less useful than they might appear. They wouldn't have even begun to perform these surgeries unless somebody just took it on themselves to do it, and the first ones were pretty crude. They've become extraordinarily good, and based not on perfect scientific rigor, but just the anecdotal reports of people who say "I need this".
The science helps rule out quackery, which is absolutely critical. There are things that obviously don't work, and the people who sell it know that they don't (or are deliberately avoiding learning). But even a lot of real medicine is less simplistically scientific than we'd like to believe.
I can't defend this book, but from the 4 people I know who have hormonally changed their gender identifies, I do feel like the mental health aspects need more discussion.
The first can be done safely, the second is harmful.
https://www.amazon.com/You-Will-Not-Replace-Us/dp/B07KCFYDZL...
Probably to be chalked up to the difference between "I'll watch something that shocks me" and "I'll buy something that shocks me."
The word "illness" refers to a disease or disorder. When you have an illness, that means that there is something wrong with you, and you should try to fix it, or seek help to have it fixed. And if it's not a curable illness, it is still generally obvious to everyone, including the person with the illness, that it would be desirable for it to be cured.
Mental illnesses are a bit more complicated, but the same principle still mostly applies. For instance, I have diagnosed major depression. I accept that this is an illness, something wrong with me, that I want to get better, and have taken medication and therapy to help it get better. Some sorts of extreme mental illness that affect how a person interacts with the world (claiming to be Jesus Christ, for example) aside, mental illnesses tend to be much like other illnesses.
For this reason, even if you completely remove all stigma associated with mental illness, it would still be misguided and harmful to say that LGBTQ people have a mental illness. The reason is that this implies that something is wrong with them, and that they should want to change this. This is emphatically not the case for the overwhelming majority of LGBT people.
* LGBT people generally do not want to be cured (with a few exceptions, mostly religious people who believe their identity is "sinful"). The "solution" to discovering that one is LGBT is generally to accept that for what it is.
* Most psychiatric experts agree that LGBT people cannot be cured, but can only repress.
* LGBT identities are not generally harmful to the people who have them (outside of violence and bigotry they receive from others). Trans people often want to modify their bodies, but this comes from dysphoria (which is not the same concept as being transgender), which is arguably similar to an illness - but it's widely accepted that sex reassignment surgery is the best available solution.
In other words, the fact that mental illness currently carries with it a stigma is not the only reason why it's harmful and hurtful to refer to LGBT identities this way. It's also simply inaccurate.
I don't claim LGBTQ to be an illness, nor do I presume to speak for everyone, but it's disingenuous to claim people don't want to be cured, when there's no realistically available "cure".
What if in a near future a new drug becomes available that would allow people to change their gender identity? If people get offered a voluntary choice to either take a medicine and alter their mind to fit their body, or undergo a physical surgery and alter their body to fit their mind, or do neither - can you claim to know which percentage of people would pick which option?
I don't, and I won't assign a label on any of the groups, or declare them traitors to some abstract cause just because their decision won't fit my own mindset, or currently prevalent liberal ideology.
It's absolutely not.
Ironically, your sibling comment tried a similar "gotcha" with color blindness, but that is actually a perfect test case. Color blindness is the result of a physical imperfection that means that a person with color blindness is not able to do things that most people are born able to do. I take this to be obvious enough that I'm not even going to respond to that comment.
But the point is that it's (usually) not curable. And yet I guarantee you just about every person who's colorblind would elect to eliminate that if they could. It's much harder to see how being homosexual, for example, lessens one's life experience in anything like a similar way. It's a different experience of life, certainly, but not really one most people are going to want to "cure".
Your example is keyed only to the "T" of the "LGBTQ", which is unfortunate and unfair because they're the only one of the 5 which typically wants to modify their bodies. This, as I said in my comment, is body dysphoria, not the same thing as being transgender. Some transgender people don't experience much dysphoria, so your question wouldn't even apply to them. Dysphoria is illness-like, as I said in my comment, because it is a state of suffering that people really do want to stop. Sex reassignment surgery is often called a "gender affirming surgery" because it realigns their physical body with their gender. But it's recognized by most trans people that this is an imperfect solution to the problem.
What your question poses, essentially, is whether they would give up their trans identity (something many of them value greatly) in exchange for getting rid of dysphoria perfectly as opposed to imperfectly. Let's grant for the sake of argument that many of them would make this difficult choice in the way that you pose. In this case I still disagree that their transgender identity would be an illness, even to them. They would be choosing to change who they were as a person to get rid of great suffering.
In effect, it's like you asked me if I would choose to get rid of depression by taking a pill that would also make me aggressively outgoing to the point of being sexually adventurous, something I'm very much not now.
I think a far better question for trans people is whether they would take a pill to simply get rid of all genital dysphoria, full stop, no side effects, so that they wouldn't need SRS. A trans woman could continue to be a woman, dress as a woman, act as she perceives women to act, and so on, while remaining satisfied with her genitalia (for example). You might argue this is impossible for severe cases of dysphoria, but that's every bit as speculative as the "new drug" you suggested in your comment.
Do you also believe that classifying something as a corporeal illness is harmful?
I can't imagine the frustration felt by psychiatrists and other mental health specialists when they see that saying that a man is in need of help to improve his life, which they can give, is now considered harmful because men such as you consider that worthy of such scorn.
I happen to be mentally ill and have received treatment for that, I also happen to be physically ill and also have received treatment for that, it has definitely improved my life that treatment for my ailments exists and that I was classified as such, so that such treatment could be provided by the system of universal healthcare where I live.
People in the public with little knowledge about the area constantly insisting on it not being solved and that it needs discussion is a bit like arguing about if we should tell people with heart problems to hit the gym while the heart surgeon is recommending a transplant urgently.
That is to say very unhelpful and possible harmful.
Why?
How are they not living a delusion?
Do people with other physical dysphorias not live in delusion? Such as when you feel like your arm doesn’t belong to your body and you want it cut off?
The answer that is politically incorrect, but completely obvious to anyone, is that of course those situations are analogous, and if you can reasonably say that one of these groups is deluded, you can say the same about the other one, too.
Except in one situation we employ physical therapy, and in the other mental therapy.
I’ve yet to receive a single explanation as to why this is, other than “experts know better”. No, that’s not good enough.
That likely is because asking these questions of a general forum of people who are highly unlikely to be qualified to speak on the subject are highly unlikely to have an informed answer. But you’re conflating, confusing, and distorting two completely separate ideas here.
What you described is called Somatoparaphrenia, which is not a dysphoria at all, but classified explicitly as a delusion. And while we can certainly agree that physical intervention is not the right strategy, at the behest of the individual suffering from the disorder, they would also be physically impairing themselves were it to be carried out.
Transitioning does not produce such impairments, and in fact leads to a significantly improved quality of life, reduction or complete remission of depression, and overwhelmingly thus produces a better overall mental health in most cases.
And again, I’m speaking from _experience_ on that.
> Transitioning does not produce such impairments, and in fact leads to a significantly improved quality of life, reduction or complete remission of depression, and overwhelmingly thus produces a better overall mental health in most cases.
> And again, I’m speaking from _experience_ on that.
I’d argue that your personal experience is irrelevant, precisely because there’s no way to establish that it’s not delusional. Could you even tell the difference between a genuine improvement of the underlying condition, and simply feeding someone’s delusions to the point where we’ve changed both them (physically), and society (to make them feel less disparaged)?
Amputation often makes individuals with BID feel better too, yet it is extremely controversial, even among experts.
My belief that the only difference is politics has not yet been shaken.
Edit: since it seems like I’m unable to reply further, let me just add this. No, I don’t believe the above poster is delusional, I’m asking whether there is a way to even establish such a thing, and if not, where the ethical difference vis a vis treatment for BID lies. Again, the poster completely sidestepped these questions.
Note the figure above. 1 in 300 (while small) can be a lot more people in your life than you think, but if you are the type to share opinions like that in public rather than solely in pseudonymity, they know better than to mention it to you.
Not to mention that authorities are regularly wrong, e.g. lobotomies.
And yes, we as a society shall discuss precisely that, whether activists and elites with fashionable ideas like it or not. Which brings us back to the biggest bookstore on the planet...
I think trans people deserve safety and equal rights. But I am challenging the oft repeated claim that a “transwoman is a woman” or “transman is a man”. I can see the existence of a third gender, as has been the case in some cultures that have historically identified and acknowledged the existence of trans persons. But the push to reclassify existing genders as “cis”, or erase the existing genders, or conveniently switch between gender and sex when suitable, or erase female spaces like sports, all seem like forced views that are only being heard because of aggressive suppression of any dissenting thought.
I never understood how people are having that discussion. What gender a trans person is comes down to how you define gender and there's a clear divide between people defining it as more of a social thing and others defining it as a mostly biological thing.
Saying "trans women are women" is really just saying "I don't think chromosomes and genitals are the main thing that defines gender. So ultimately this comes down to a disagreement about a words definition, which is utterly pointless (unless you're specifically looking at it from a language perspective I guess, in which case it's probably quite an interesting debate).
One way or another, this has nothing to do with whether gender dysphoria is a delusion or not.
Gender dysphoria is a mental health issue, but gender dysphoria is being taken out of ICD 11 and the new classification - gender incongruence - will not be under mental disorders but under sexual health.
And no, that is not what creates tensions at all. What actually creates the tension is that the affected group just wants to have equal rights and then be left alone while the other side does not want to allow either.
The affected group already has equal rights. What it wants is additional rights. You're being very disingenuous on this point.
When a psychiatrist calls a man mentally ill, he seeks not to insult him any more than when a heart surgeon tells a man he is in need of heart surgery, but when the common man says “You're mentally.”, that is seldom earnest advice or concern, but rather a cheap insult, and consequently there is a cultural push to declassify many mental illnesses as such, all which would accomplish is that, say, health insurance coverage would no longer cover hormonal replacement therapy and genital confirmation surgeries, two effective treatments against the illness of gender dysphoria.
The psychiatric consensus is indeed that gender dysphoria, a dehabilitating condition which affect's a man's functioning in society is a mental illness, as well as having various treatments therefore, — but since “mental illness” has become an insult in common parlance, one must be quite careful as to how to phrase that nowadays.
I have a low opinion of the man who feels that “mental illness” is an insult, it speaks of his own views of the mentally ill and how he probably treats them as lepers and pariahs.
There is a very big difference: a homosexual person is not depressed and inhibited in functioning per sē, and this is why gender identity incongruence absent any gender dysphoria is not classified as an illness.
It is also why depression caused by homosexuality is classified as a mental illness, it simply has no special name in this respect.
> The gender dysphoria is a problem derived from what is effectively a birth defect. If someone had a malformed limb and because this has clear impediments in their life in social and physical terms, they experience depression with their physical condition. We don’t say “oh, your body dysmorphia is a mental illness, you just need therapy”, as not only is that a shit take, but now prosthetics are more viable and advanced.
What does that have to do with anything?
The recommended medical treatment for gender dysphoria is not based on mental therapies, but physical surgeries and hormonal therapies, so I'm not quite sure what you are attempting to imply here.
The simple empirical finding finding has been that genital confirmation surgeries and hormonal therapies have been far more effective at reducing the symptoms of gender dysphoria than any mental talk therapy has ever had, just as with many of depression that are caused by chemical abnormalities in the brain, drugs that remove that abnormality have been found far more effective than talk therapy.
Talk therapy is not a very common remedy that psychiatrists resort to. — it works only for a very select few conditions.
You would in fact be wrong, as therapy is absolutely a part of the comprehensive standard of care recommended by WPATH, and is required by practically every surgeon willing to perform any transgender related surgery.
> There is a very big difference: a homosexual person is not depressed and inhibited in functioning per sē, and this is why gender identity incongruence absent any gender dysphoria is not classified as an illness.
You’re quite close to recognizing the crucial distinction: gender dysphoria is a grouping of symptoms related to a gender incongruence, and thus itself is realistically just a poor evaluation of the condition of transgender individuals’ reality — of course they experience dysphoria, gender incongruence can do that. So we treat the problem, not a symptom. We realized that homosexuality wasn’t a mental illness because their suffering was a byproduct of society’s view of their innate sexuality, and reasonably removed the diagnosis. Likewise this will happen (and is happening) with gender dysphoria.
Only in regards for informing and making ready for the effects of surgery, not talk therapy to alleviate symptoms.
> You’re quite close to recognizing the crucial distinction: gender dysphoria is a grouping of symptoms related to a gender incongruence, and thus itself is realistically just a poor evaluation of the condition of transgender individuals’ reality — of course they experience dysphoria, gender incongruence can do that.
Actually a very large number of gender identity incongruents does not experience gender dysphoria.
It is obviously hard to find any certain numbers on this, since those that do not tend to remain more silent, but a big research on the matter in the Netherlands by Kuyper in 2006[1] concluded that as little as 30% of those with gender incongurence experienced gender dysphoria.
> So we treat the problem, not a symptom. We realized that homosexuality wasn’t a mental illness because their suffering was a byproduct of society’s view of their innate sexuality, and reasonably removed the diagnosis. Likewise this will happen (and is happening) with gender dysphoria.
That is quite a strange line of thought.
Gender dysphoria is not caused by social stigma, but by a physical mismatch of the body and would exist regardless of social stigma so long as the body not be made to conform to the mind's mental image.
[1]: table at page 4: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
In some cases, we do. It’s called Body integrity dysphoria, and although it is a slightly different situation than the one you presented, there are people who really, really wish to have limbs and other body parts amputated.
Guess what, most experts do not recommend going forward with it, despite it generally improving their mental condition.
Other such double standards are the severe hurdles one must go through to obtain puberty blockers, for their theoretical, possible adverse effects and the supposed idea that a child cannot give informed consent, ignoring that letting one's puberty progress naturally is also something one consents to, yet, children are given a variety of medicaments whose destructive, structural side effects are far less theoretical and far more severe every day to alleviate mental conditions that are fare less severe, and have a far lower risk of suicide than gender dysphoria.
The readiness by which specialists are willing to resort to various surgeries and treatments seems to have a very big cultural moral component to it, and is not purely determined by what is best for the patient by an objective measure.
Whether or not the claims are true is irrelevant. The fact that we’re now in a position where voicing the tiniest bit of dissent over this issue is enough to relegate you to the “clueless bigot” bin, or maybe even qualify as “hate speech”, is where the real problem lies. Imagine if we did that back when lobotomy was settled science and had expert consensus.
Nothing, no single human idea, is above criticism and pushback.
Ah yes, I see what you mean, I am definitely not one to agree with that.
For one to say that a science as vague and muddy as psychiatry can be so “solved” is quite an audacious statement, — much of it is indeed semantics, classification, and social perception changing over time and how much the psychiatrist likes the patient on a personal level will no doubt play a significant influence in how much he will recommend that the latter transition or not.
> Whether or not the claims are true is irrelevant. The fact that we’re now in a position where voicing the tiniest bit of dissent over this issue is enough to relegate you to the “clueless bigot” bin, or maybe even qualify as “hate speech”, is where the real problem lies. Imagine if we did that back when lobotomy was settled science and had expert consensus.
I have not seen any such responses in this particular train of discussion, however.
Amazon would perhaps be so inclined, yes.
> Nothing, no single human idea, is above criticism and pushback.
I find that formally verified mathematical proofs are rather hard to disprove in practice.
If a man claim he has found an error in one of them, I would dismiss it out of hand, unless it come with a show of a bug in the proof assistant or hardware.
> I have not seen any such responses in this particular train of discussion, however.
Thankfully, neither have I, but it’s a particularly sensitive issue for me as just today I found out that one of these “hate speech” laws was passed in the country I currently reside in, Scotland. I find this, and other recent attempts at authoritarianism, deeply troubling.
> formal proofs
In a way I agree, but in another, even mathematics isn’t on as sound footing as one might first imagine. For instance, we know of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which says that NO system of mathematics can be both consistent and complete), and then there is the fact that none of us can agree on what mathematics even is, from a philosophical point of view.
Truly, I’m often astonished at both how much, and how little, we actually truly know as a species.
What is the issue with that? From what I see, homosexuality doesn't harm anyone, so even if were scientifically an "illness", it's not worse than infertility. It is a private matter. Gender on the other hand is social. If gender dysphoria requires invasive medical treatments, constant hormonal therapy and extreme effort to not trigger bad reactions, then it seems like a real disability. So why not treat that then, and hope that people can accept themselves the way they are?
This seems like an absolutely reasonable and understanding position to me, but a lot of people are aggressively opposed to it. I guess that's what trans people feel like, when everyone thinks you are crazy for something that seems perfectly logical to oneself.
Dr Seuss Enterprises wanted to not distribute a book. Amazon Inc wants to not distribute a book. I don't see the difference?
I'm not sure why you think that's germane.
Amazon Inc owns the privilege of choosing what they offer for sale just like any other business. This is free enterprise, my friend. Should we also demand that vegan grocers sell meat? Are we to raise a ruckus if our local 7-11 doesn't also serve eggplant parm with its taquitos?
I bet they wouldn't have a problem with someone saying "I'm ok with my spit in my mouth but not your spit." I get to decide what goes in my mouth, and you get to decide what goes in your mouth, yeah? I don't care whether you want your spit to be in my mouth. We both get to decide for ourselves.
(this is the strangest HN comment thread I've taken part in)
Global shop which sells almost everything is expected to not decide to not sell something because they not like it for some odd reasons, because otherwise at this scale it's some kind of censorship?
At some scale we can't act like "it's just private business" because it's naive
No, the vegan shop HAS DECIDED to not sell meat. They could just as easily decide to sell parma ham to worthy customers and stop being an exclusively vegan shop.
Do you think that 7-11 is "expected" to not sell eggplant parm too? Why not? They already sell pizza and taquitos. But I don't get to make them sell eggplant parm if they don't want to even though eggplant parm would go great with taquitos.
> Global shop which sells almost everything is expected to not decide to not sell something because they not like it
Ok, so, 94 countries have no criminal legislation prohibiting slavery according to https://theconversation.com/slavery-is-not-a-crime-in-almost.... So should Amazon, the global seller of everything, also sell slaves in those countries? I mean if they're expected to not decide to not sell something because they don't like it, surely the answer must be yes.
There's giant gap between selling slaves and selling books that challenge some way of perceiving things.
One causes actual harm - both physically and mentally, the second at best triggers some people.
Was academically proven that this book is bullshit? if yes, then everything's fair, if not then...?
I'd rather avoid allowing corpos to decide what's the truth
I mean a lot of people on here hate socialism (I don't, though I dis-like authoritarian versions), it seems though a lot of the people crying foul about corps censoring are the same ones who are libertarian-leaning anti-regulation for everybody and every company and are very leery of "socialism".
I'd agree with Amazon having too much power over it's brand and what it sells, though I don't feel this is an issue. I'm more concerned with Amazon selling knock-off products of its vendors under it's own brand-name then removing their "competing" products. I'm also more concerned with google/apple's control over the app stores, especially Apple since you can't side-load apps.
While, I abhor parler, for example - I can see them doing this more and more with any social media app that could potentially disagree with their world view. I'd like to see more censorship resistant apps pop up just for the sake of freedom (even to be a jerk), I'm also a fan of decentralizing everything some-day and owning your identity and I think Google/Apple could hinder that if they see these de-centralized apps as extremist-enabling apps (even if they aren't really) and just blanket dis-allow them.
There's a fine-line that leftists (and I am one) are walking with censoring everything. I keep thinking of "thought police" in 1984, and it makes me think that even well-intentioned ideas can back-fire and create the very thing they're trying to avoid.
At the same time the terrorism at the capital was scary, we came very close to losing our entire country and installing a dictator for life. So we need to avoid that, but also retain freedoms and the internets "wild west" ability to bring marginalized voices to the fore-front but not if they're inciting violence. Kind of an autistic ramble, but I don't know what the best options are.
I think we need new social networks and news networks that grade everything around perceived "truthfulness" and you can also see who ranked what and what side they lean politically so you know if their ranking is biased, or something.
Somedays I think we'd all just be better if a solar flare hits and disabled electronics for the next 20 months.
There's difference between "this product is not selling, we're stopping it" or any other similar business related reasoning and "randomly" deciding "this book is not right, thus we censor this"
There's nothing wrong with Amazon stopping selling stuff due to business/legal reasons and so on
but if their reasoning is like "people shouldn't read this" or "we don't like this idea", then it's very bad.
It's not trivial problem, but I think it's important.
>Somedays I think we'd all just be better if a solar flare hits and disabled electronics for the next 20 months.
Maybe web 2.0 was a mistake, huh.
You think that 7-11 selling eggplant parm or a specialty food shop deciding to sell some other specialty food are extremes? I feel like you're strategically choosing to ignore half of what I say because it doesn't fit into your narrative.
> One causes actual harm - both physically and mentally
And is totally legal in those countries which clearly have different ideas about what is ok than you do and therefore may legitimately expect Amazon to operate with their ideals just like you expect Amazon to operate with yours.
> the second at best triggers some people.
Everyone who studies media, culture, psychology, and the relationship between trauma and lifelong suffering disagrees with your framing of this, so you're probably missing something.
> I'd rather avoid allowing corpos to decide what's the truth
They aren't. They're deciding what they sell.
Sidebar curiosity: Do you know what "trigger" actually means, and does your minimization of it mean that you don't believe that PTSD is real or serious?
No, I've been talking about slavery part.
>And is totally legal in those countries which clearly have different ideas about what is ok than you do and therefore may legitimately expect Amazon to operate with their ideals just like you expect Amazon to operate with yours.
Fortunely we have ethics, morality, international laws, human rights and many more and we're actually able to draw conclusions that slavery is bad.
>Everyone who studies media, culture, psychology, and the relationship between trauma and lifelong suffering disagrees with your framing of this, so you're probably missing something.
No doubt that I'm missing something.
>They aren't. They're deciding what they sell.
Limiting access can be form of it.
Google removing something from its search is really being close to some kind of censorship.
Google pushing one narration over other in its search index is very significant way of creating the "truth".
Some people says that a lie repeated thousand times becomes a truth and I definitely believe that it's true to significant extent.
>Sidebar curiosity: Do you know what "trigger" actually means, and does your minimization of it mean that you don't believe that PTSD is real or serious?
I do believe that PTSD is real, but I'm not talking about trigger as of flashbacks.
If it's so universally bad, why is it legal in all of those countries? And it wasn't always considered bad. Should Amazon in the 1820s have been abolitionists or slavers? Maybe one day we'll all conclude that calling different gender and sexuality mental illness is bad and Amazon will have been on the right side after all.
I don't know.
I guess because nobody in power wants to change it?
>And it wasn't always considered bad.
That's not solid, we live and try to measure this against _now_, we also learned form our mistakes and improved.
>Maybe one day we'll all conclude that calling different gender and sexuality mental illness is bad and Amazon will have been on the right side after all.
Both outcomes are possible, so they're either ahead of time or just yet another censors?
I'd rather not rely on corpos/people in power believing that they're "ahead of time".
The idea that not owning the copyright on a work obligates you to offer it for sale is as bizarre as the idea that the same obligates you to purchase it would be. (In fact, the former implies the latter.)
These big tech companies have way too much centralized power and influence. They should be regulated like utilities (required to uphold first amendment and provide equal service to everyone) or broken up or both.
They have more than half of US book sales, but I wouldn't say they control half of US book sales. There are other large retail stores, such as Walmart and Target, that have large collections of books for sale that include the books that make up the vast majority of what the public buys. Oh, and Barnes and Noble is still around and they have a huge selection, too.
Walmart's in-store selection is pretty limited, but they have a big online selection, and it is not just the popular books. They go pretty far into books of very limited general appeal. For example, Walmart's "Gravity Science Books" section [1] is just full of things I can't imagine more than a handful of people worldwide wanting, even if you filter it down to just books sold by Walmart and covered by Walmart+ free shipping, rather than sold by third-party resellers through Walmart's marketplace.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/browse/science-books/gravity-science...
If you want a book-seller who doesn’t censor your buying options, don’t go to Amazon. Plenty of other sources.
It is certainly not exact science, it is certainly not hard science, and one may in fact debate whether it can be called “science” at all, but it's certainly not any different from the standard of rigor generally employed in such fields.
It also isn't much different than many of the abstractions used in, say, linguistics, which are very much in want of any actual definition.
At what point do we, as a society, recognize this is a problem and start regulating those companies to force them to operate for the good of society instead of just for profit?
And I'm pretty sure more books were censored in the past.
In The Friends of Voltaire, [Beatrice] Hall wrote the phrase: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs. - bad ol' Wikipedia. If megaplatforms are allowed to pick and choose writing, they can and will censor anything.
Talking about a thing is always, always better than not taking about it. That should be the default stance, IMO.
I'm assuming of course that the underlying reason to remove them is to not display such ideas to the public.
Then again few neo-nazis actually read Mein Kampf because they well, don't read - especially something that's almost 400 pages long (or 700 in the non-abridged version).
If _the government_ stopped them from doing anything of the above, that would be a free speech hinderence. Now it's just business.
Do you think the bakers should have been forced to bake the gay couple a cake?
Christian book stores can't exclude Hindus from buying their books. One upon a time they could, but that's now illegal.
There is no law saying Christian book stores must stock the Bhagavad Gita.
There's also no law saying Amazon must stock certain books. But there are laws preventing Amazon from excluding certain classes of people as clients.
To your question, the Supreme Court has said that lack of religious neutrality by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was inappropriate, in such a way that the case should be overturned.
I'm pretty sure I did know that as checked the Supreme Court decision while working on my comment, and it says https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-111_j4el.pdf
> Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd., is a Colorado bakery owned and operated by Jack Phillips, an expert baker and devout Christian. In 2012 he told a same-sex couple that he would not create a cake for their wedding celebration because of his religious opposition to same-sex marriages—marriages that Colorado did not then recognize—but that he would sell them other baked goods, e.g., birthday cakes.
In my comment I removed text where I quoted from the decision, as there's no way that decision can be discussed in the sort of off-handed way that jpxw brought it up.
Also, I didn't realize there were multiple relevant cake maker lawsuits, so perhaps jpxw could be more specific, as the Supreme Court decision doesn't seems to have a direct bearing on the topic, leaving the underlying issue in confusion.
If we are talking about pretty generic wedding cakes, where say the baker just bakes N cylindrical cakes of decreasing radius, stacks them coaxially, covers them in icing, writes the couple's first names on top, adds a few frilly but pretty standard decorations, and shoves a couple little plastic figures on top to represent the couple, and the only thing that makes it a "gay" wedding cake is writing two male names or two female names instead of one of each, and shoving in two male or two female figures instead of one of each, then yes, the baker should have to serve gay couples.
If we are talking about the kind of wedding cake that you'd get by going to a place like Charm City Cakes in Baltimore (the cake shop that was the subject of Food Network's "Ace of Cakes" series) and asking for a custom cake, where you are hiring an artist whose medium happens to be cakes, who is going to make you a unique cake where the artist is going to express their own artistic vision and interpretation of the your marriage, where the cake is very much an act of speech by the artist, then I don't think the baker should have to serve gay couples. These cakes are necessarily acts of original speech by the artist, and that should not be forced (even if the person who wants the cake is in a protected class)--the artist should be free to only create works where the artist's feelings match what the buyer wants.
Amazon has not violated the first amendment, but they have violated free speech. It is not illegal to do so, but people often agree and disagree with actions on bases other than legality.
If they are going to start censoring which books they sell, they might as well start with the one that has caused the most deaths throughout human history...
/s
It is abominable that Amazom will not permit open discussions and diverse perspectives on controversial and highly debated issues like gender identity. The author of this now-banned book shared his perspective on the ban at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/02/when-amaz.... It‘s not just this book either. Experts like Debra Soh have seen repeated bans and reinstatements of her book “The End of Gender” (https://mobile.twitter.com/DrDebraSoh/status/136464687930529...). Abigail Shrier, whose book “Irreversible” has also been subject to bans, wrote about the dangerous rise of corporate censorship recently, highlighting Amazon’s use of a vague “hate speech” policy (https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/book-banning-in-an-age-...). Ironically, for a company that claims to be customer focused, these bans are not the right thing for customers either since these books have been Amazon best sellers (https://notthebee.com/article/amazon-and-target-have-been-qu...).
It’s a sad change for a company that once had a strong stance against censoring books, as is tradition among bookshops, but this change of heart isn’t limited to books. Amazon has been increasingly and silently curating content from everything they own - whether it is AWS (which deplatformed Parler) or Prime Video (blocking documentaries that go against BLM narrative), or other things (see https://www.foxnews.com/media/amazon-cancel-censor-content-c...).
If that were even remotely true, they would be supporting unions.
No it didn't. The people you're talking about are not far left.
| farm votes strategically.
If you think the far left would construct their entire strategy around electoralism, you are miseducated.
Well at least you dropped the laughably contradictory post-modern part.