Jesus Christ, free speech doesn’t mean everyone on earth has to lose their ability to exercise judgment. Neither the (alleged) child abusers nor the principle of free speech will suffer the slightest bit of restriction if Amazon chose not to sell the book anymore.
Free speech does not mean that Amazon is compelled to sell anything in book format – and that ain’t censorship, either.
I’ll preface the following by saying I know nothing about this book and I think it’s probably a bad idea for Amazon to pull it.
Normally I’d agree with you, but I think “the parenting advice in this book might kill your child” is less agenda-pushing and more helpful information.
Amazon is a private entity. This issue has exactly zero to with free speech. Nobody is asking the government to make them stop selling this shitty book.
ETA: ninja’d.
I just have no idea why anyone would want to lick a kid. Those things taste terrible.
I could have sworn that I wrote a sentence in my previous post that read, “Amazon can choose to sell the book or not. That’s their right as a private (as opposed to government) seller.”
I support their right to sell it if they want to, or not carry it if they don’t want to. Neither should they be forced to sell it nor not sell it at all.
Amazon should continue to do whatever it thinks will make them the most money.
Two points with this: First, you are right, Amazon is not a public library. This of course means that everyone making a free speech argument is wrong until someone advocates for the goverment to force Amazon to pull the book. Amazon can pull any book it wants for any reason and should if doing so is in its best interest as corporate entity or if a majority of stockholders support the decision.
Second point: Seriously? Point out the number children who have died because of Twilight, and I will support asking booksellers to remove it.
On preview I see others have already addressed point one.
I’m not sure that’s completely accurate. I’ll accept that the availability of such books is the price we pay for a society where people are free to make such books available. I’m not sure it follows that a society which prevents such books becoming available is necessarily not free, in any substantive sense.
But in this case, that’s all irrelevant anyway, since this book is literally someone being stupid on the internet. And allowing people to be stupid on the internet is definitely the price we pay for a society where we can all express ourselves freely online.
It’s number 9,669 in Amazon’s bestseller list, so unlikely to be even in the top 100 of offensively stupid ideas being circulated today. I admit I laughed out loud to learn that it is number 43 in the Christian Living bestseller list.
I don’t actually expect Amazon to vet every book they sell, the industrial processing of information without human intervention is what they do. If anyone complained, and if Amazon chose to withdraw this book from sale, I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t care if they don’t.
I was responding to madmonk28.
The Amazon listing did have this gem of a review:
Typical slacktivist.
Coffee just went all over my keyboard via my nose.
Well, for one thing, they tend to get ice cream smeared all over their faces when working with a cone. I think that was the big draw for my dog.
I’ve seen this book mentioned in several articles about children dying from abuse, most recently this one:
It’s a horrible book and the authors should be ashamed for putting it out there. I think the publisher should be on the hook for this. I wonder what would happen if a child who was abused because of this book sued the publisher or the authors.
I never mentioned the government in my post, and limiting access to a book has a lot to do with free speech. If we’re going to pull books just because they are full of bad ideas, then I vote we start with the Bible and any cookbook written by Guy Fieri
You have to at least sear it first, so the skin is crispy.
I see the publishing date was 1994 and it was the 17th edition. So is that about the time the authors ran out of kids to beat?
Nobody is suggesting that the authors of the book be denied access to a printing press. “We” are saying that Amazon should exercise some judgment and not sell a book that tries to convince people that activities that some people go to prison for (i.e., beating children with objects) is not a helpful childhood development strategy.
Again, freedom of speech does not mean that businesses cannot exercise any judgment whatsoever in what products they sell.
Forget Dr. Spock. Our new hero is Dr. Spank.
I don’t see calls for banning this any different than asking not to link to racist, anti-vax or pro-ana websites. Google exercises this kind of judgment all the time. Whenever you do a search, most people click on the first three websites that show up. Google has a great deal of control over exactly what those websites are. They’ve changed the rules multiple times in an effort to weed out content farms and MFA sites.
The publisher is listed as “No Greater Joy Ministries”. Sounds like the Pearls themselves published it, or their church did.
Spare the quarter-inch plumbing hose, spoil the infant.