Amazon Won’t ‘Sell Books That Frame LGBTQ+ Identity as a Mental Illness’
If you won’t allow offensive content then why do you sell books by Hitler, Che, Mao, and others?
Amazon explained to Republican senators it won’t sell any books framing transgender and sexual identities as mental illnesses because of company policy.
The uproar started when Amazon removed When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment in 2018.
Republican Sens. Mike Braun, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, and Marco Rubio demanded an explanation.
Amazon responded with a typical public relations, bragging about its diverse book catalog.
The company finally answered the main question: “That said, we reserve the right now to sell certain content. All retailers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer, as do we.”
Amazon was semi-smart in its letter because it said it has a right to choose the material sold on the website. It stopped people from calling out its hypocrisy.
Or did it?
Amazon buried in the letter that it reviews its Content Guidelines for Books, but did not go in-depth about those contents. Luckily, The Wall Street Journal published the letter and linked the contents page.
What did I find? Oh:
Offensive Content
We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.
Yes, Amazon can choose to not sell items. The consumers, not the government, should apply the pressure. We should ask these questions and point out Amazon’s obvious hypocrisy:
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Comments
They’re not even good liars. And the precedent has been set to ban more and more.
The power Big Tech has now is scary as hell.
I have not bought anything from Amazon since last year, I hope others are doing the same.
I’m curious – Has there ever been a time when a political movement* that banned and burned books turned out to be the good guys?
(And that is what’s in effect here.)
Big Brother Censorship. Imagine what the world will look like in 20 years. As this rate, our children will be effectively enslaved by The Woke / Big Tech industrial complex (aka thought police)..
Power is becoming concentrated at nearly an exponential rate. That is inverse to your degree of Liberty.
Because some ideas need to be censored.
Is it coincidence you can get anything written by Stalin, Mao, or Hitler? I wonder.
I’m sure that Amazon also sells the writings of black racists and supremacists.
If we can get most conservatives to stop doing business with these arrogant companies, that is power which could really hurt them.
So they’re not going to sell any older versions of the DSM?
I dont see a way for us to even tell Amazon that we are not going to tolerate this…
Bye, bye you, Amazon!
How about a book framing Jeff Bezos as having a mental illness?
(BTW: the new blog is ‘buggy’ – the loading squares are getting tiresome, the ‘top of page’ sticky icon is in the way, BUT: scrolling has become ‘normal’.)
How about a line of practice targets with their likeness?
“the loading squares are getting tiresome”
I agree, but think of them as a tradeoff for the old behavior of the screen jumping around all over the place for 10 seconds before settling down, during which time any mouse click you might attempt to make was liable to fall exactly where you didn’t want it… plus you could never be sure when it was finally done jumping unless you waited twice as long. I would rather have the current surety of knowing that when the page finally does display, it’s going to stay rock solid.
Yes, before we could start reading the pages while the rest was loading. By the time we finished reading the article, comments had finished loading.
He does have a mental illness. As does the entire totalitarian left.
But first, what are the alternatives to Amazon? If you’re a hunter you know a deer in control of itself doesn’t run too far from danger. Because the deer knows when it’s running from one predator, it could be running into another predator that’s as bad or worse. Are sites like goodreads.com any less leftist and subversive?
Now back to the Bezos’ mental illness, and the pathologies of the left.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/
“Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and his important 1970 essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” for the term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as ideological pseudo-realities.
Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in sociopolitical calamities—up to and including war, genocide, and even civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant…”
It’s no accident that Amazon sells books written by Hitler, Mao, Che, et al. They all constructed pseudo-realities and forced millions to live, and die, in them. Bezos would do the same.
Of course Amazon still sells books that rightfully call gender dysphoria a mental disorder. I don’t recall which edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the “bible” of the psychiatric “profession,” stopped calling gender dysphoria by the term “gender identity DISORDER,’ but it wasn’t that long ago and I’m sure you can still get the older versions of the DSM through Amazon. I know, because I just checked, that Amazon sells textbooks on psychiatric nursing published as recently as 2015 that cover gender dysphoria as a disorder of the mind, and include it as one of several types of dysphoria; body integrity dysphoria, species identity dysphoria, etc., in the same chapters that cover addiction. Fortunately there are positive aspects of our dumbed down indoctrination system that is our education system. The wokestapo that is the various social media platforms “trust and safety” teams can’t comprehend something if it’s too long to fit into a tweet. So the textbooks will remain.
All these disorders involve creating pseudo-realities. When you don’t like who you were born as, and can’t deal with the world as it is, you create pseudo-realities.
It’s an oversimplification of Freud to say he posited that insanity is due to childhood trauma, but it will do as shorthand or otherwise I’d have to write a book. Dysphoria and addiction can be traced to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). We all had them. In fact, childhood trauma is so common that it isn’t insanity that needs to be explained, but sanity.
The totalitarian left who have completed their Gramscian “long-march” through the institutions and particularly the education system believes that there isn’t enough childhood trauma and so they’ve inflicted a system of child abuse on kids to produce a damaged product, snowflakes, that will perpetually depend on their Dear Leaders, fuhrers, and stalins and pol pots to keep them “safe” from all the imaginary threats they see.
If you have enough ACEs, you see, it damages fragile egos and the person develops poor coping skills. This as I’ve already pointed out is useful to the people whose pathologies drive them to be dictatorial. The problem with transgenders isn’t that they have an identity disorder. It’s that we don’t AFFIRM their disorder.
Just like the totalitarian left demands we AFFIRM their disordered pseudo-reality. Joe Biden won FAIR AND SQUARE and NOT BECAUSE OF FRAUD. Anybody who can see the evidence (the Georgia election commission referred 35 cases of fraud, many on a wide scale; Biden won Georgia by approximately 12k votes yet Georgia election officials still can’t provide a chain of custody for over 400k votes; Rosemarie Hartle voted in the 2020 election in Clark county NV despite being dead since 2017, and whoever forged her signature had access to the county election board database because it matched and are we supposed to believe whoever went to all that trouble to violate the law only did it once; a judge just through out the election results in a ward in Mississippi because 78 percent of the mail-in ballots were fraudulent, which of course they were nation wide as the only reason to have universal mail-in voting is to facilitate fraud; and so on) is automatically classified as a white supremacist (just as two plus two equals four “reeks of white supremacism,” getting the right answer and asking people show their work is racist and patriarchal in all things) and is a threat to “our democracy” (democracy is a threat to our republic, which is why you only find the word republic in the Constitution and the founders wrote in the Federalist Papers that democracy was the worst form of government since it was a mob rule that always committed suicide) and must be drummed out of Congress for questioning the one true faith.
Of course, writing gender identity disorder out of the DSM doesn’t mean it’s no longer a disorder. It’s just that it’s a useful disorder. The forced march to leftist dictatorship requires us to proceed step by step. First we have to live in one pseudo-reality because the transgendered commit suicide at a high rate. Whether we “affirm” them or not has nothing to do with it. They simply can’t cope with reality and eventually they’re run into something that they can’t deal with (the children who are committing suicide because they’re locked down are in fact a success for the system that is designed to produce defective people dependent on government authorities). Whether we are forced to use their pronouns or not. But the psychopaths of the left will tell us that if we don’t “affirm” their delusions and use their language (read the entire article I cited, or Orwell’s essay on political speech codes; abuse of power first requires abuse of language) then we are LITERALLY KILLING THEM! Just like if we didn’t wear the sacred masks we are LITERALLY KILLING THE MARGINALIZED!
Next up, if you don’t go vegan and quit driving and heating or cooling your homes you are LITERALLY KILLING THE PLANET! As the by-design mentally and emotionally damaged spokesmodel for the wokestapo would put it, “HOW DARE YOU!” I hope everybody is looking forward to their crisis catastrophe lockdowns, because the pandemic hysteria worked so well. Your wannabe Hitler neighbors can report you for having people over for a BBQ on those same snitch hotlines your Cuomos have set up. Then, “transphobia” lockdowns or “white supremacy” lockdowns.
The psychopaths like Bezos and Gavin Newsom are convinced once we can be forced to live in world that must conform to a few mentally ill people’s delusions in the names of “inclusivity” or “diversity” we can be forced to live in their insane all-encompassing delusional world in the name of “equity” or “social justice.”
Sex: male and female. Gender is sex-correlated physical and mental (e.g. sexual orientation) attributes: masculine and feminine, respectively.
The transgender spectrum disorder may not be an illness, but is a divergence from normal with several known and speculated causes.
So, normalize, tolerate, or reject?
Oh, and the next pride parade should feature lions, lionesses, and their cubs playing in gay abandon as their father and mothers watch.
Gender is sex-correlated physical and mental
Nope, you’ve already allowed them to set the terms of the debate. Gender is a grammatical construct that applies only to language; the notion of “gender” as a thing distinct from biological sex is a fabrication popularized by the pedophile psychologist John Money. It has no basis in any research; it’s simply taken as a given.
Thanks for getting the scrolling fixed. I’m a happy camper again.
Amazon hasn’t banned the Bible… yet.
If that happens, they’ll have to ban the Quran too. And then the Scheisse will really hit the fan.
No they won’t. You can’t and shouldn’t expect intellectual rigor from the cognitively dissident. They’ll ban the Bible because it is they’ll say that it’s “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “racist,” “sexist,” “hateful,” and “harmful.” Even though it isn’t; it just preaches a morality the left can’t abide. They won’t ban the Quran because anybody who has a problem with what’s actually in it is “Islamophoc.”
Ideologically defined phobias and -isms; is there anything they can’t do?
I am expecting blacks to write their own Koran like bible, probably by plagiarizing mostly from the Koran. They will probably use a likeness of Floyd as their savior. It will declare that they are better than others and that they are entitled to rule and smite anyone hurts their feelings.
They will never ban the bible – it’s useful to them as a propaganda tool. They will rewrite it and reissue the “modern version” just as they have tried to rewrite the constitution and history in general.
LOL.
When, exactly, did that become company policy? Before that, I guess it was fine with Amazon to frame an obvious mental illness as a mental illness.
Well … I have to say that this is pretty consistent with psychology, in general, which is really not much of a science but more of the “fashion of personality” for the moment, not unlike those crazy outfits you see models strutting up and down catwalks in that no sane person would ever be caught dead in. Which also fits, since mental illnesses are, so often, fashions, themselves. I really miss the days when hysterical paralysis was the hot lunacy among damaged women. At least, then, we got some peace and quiet … But I have hope that it could become popular again! Even crazy people like to feel as though they are “with it” in the lunatic world.
This is an alarming development.
What would hinder Amazon once they have been allowed to eliminate competition through government stooges either tricked or bribed into doing their bidding to decide they only want to sell to Aryans?
” All retailers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer, as do we.”
This is not true. In the days when brick-and-mortar bookstores were still common, they had to limit what they could display, yet just about all of them would order any book in print for you; all you had to do was ask.
I don’t really know of any bookseller who was so arrogant that they would refuse to get any in-print book for you that you might want.
Although I do remember record-store clerks often being somewhat snotty if you displayed your poor taste by ordering a recording they did not think much of I don’t recall their ever refusing to do so.
What Amazon is doing is not “what every retailer does,” and certainly not what, historically, most bookstores in America have done.
Amazon announced they are embracing a barbaric treatment for the mentally ill.
A barbaric treatment that is irreversable and causes permanent damage to those falsely diagnosed with the current fad in the long sordid history of the mental health profession.
Guys at the end of the day Amazon is a book store, a humongous one, but still a book store. They can choose what to sell or not sell.
Now argument about whether they are a monopoly is a different animal. IMO they are. That is a different question separate from the freedom of a retailer to make choices about their product lines.
The real issue is us. We made Amazon by using it’s convenience v going to the small mom and pop bookstore. Maybe we should be spending our money with the independent small book stores while they still exist.
Convenience? Well, *I* started using Amazon because it carried conservative books that local bookstores did not carry. Amazon marketed itself as a bookseller that would not censor.
PST314,
Ok and companies change over time. Amazon certainly did. Google didn’t start off with a business model of explicitly mining your data in searches or emails to sell data to advertisers but they most certainly do now.
Coke and their quest to ‘be less white’. Examples abound. The point is to follow through and stop using their services if one feels that strongly.
It’s easy for all of us to simply ‘let it go’ and refuse to change our consumer behavior. It’s almost as easy as writing some screed or pithy comment bemoaning the behavior of a company but never having the fortitude to stop using that company.
All of are guilty of this in some degree.
I stopped shopping at Amazon last year, a little before they reached peak obnoxious wokeness and peak censorship of books and films that diverge from Leftist orthodoxies. Canceled my Prime membership, too.
Alternatives such as Target, Wal-Mart and eBay aren’t ideologically perfect, either, but, it’s about choosing the lesser evil — Amazon is becoming too damn powerful and too slavishly devotional to Dhimmi-crat totalitarianism.
I don’t miss them, at all.