What Not to Read

Best bartering deal ever.

As a former Amazonian, I was actually deeply offended that they pulled the book. I hate having to be in the position of defending pedophiles, but the problem isn’t the book, it’s acting on pedophillic desires–ie, abusing children.

I’m curious first of all what “sundry” law Amazon is violating? The fact that said pedophile author got arrested for shipping his book to a district that deems it that offensive is kind of troubling for all kinds of free speech reasons–in the era of the Internet, it sets the bar alarmingly low if you can be censored–arrested even–because someone in a particular community can demonstrate your ideas are deeply offensive to them.

The truth is, like it or not, that free speech exists as a concept precisely to protect the right of individuals to say, publish, and maintain ideas that are offensive to the larger community; what else would it be for? It’s only in totalitarian states that you have a situation in which the government is suppressing the majority opinion. America is not, nor has it ever been, the Soviet Union. Free speech also protects the rights of a minority to maintain their views in opposition to the majority, and it’s very, very tricky, and courts traditionally–at least since the mid-20th century–have been very, very careful in narrowly defining what sorts of speech can be legally limited.

Application matters a lot in cases like this; should it be illegal to possess such a book, or just to write it? (If so, I’m guilty–I did an article for The Seattle Sinner several years ago when the exact same issue came up over a similar book. Or do I get special treatment as press. Or am I press?) If Amazon had shipped the book, would they be as culpable as the author is accused of being? And how do you define what’s actually a criminal act? Are naked baby pictures child pornography? What if they’re used a child pornography (e.g., a pedophile steals them from a house)? Should we ban the sort of pictures of newborn babies that all our parents have of us because they might be used as child pornography? And conversely, if we don’t, that means we’ve created a means for reasonable doubt that would permit an actual pedophile from taking naked pictures of baby explicitly for auto-erotic purposes. And what sense does that make? Your and my right to take baby pictures means a pedophile might legally produce pornography at the expense and victimization of a child, but literature about pedophilia is bannable?

If someone can provide a good argument for why it should be illegal to publish or sell books like this, I’d love to hear it. I’m not in favor of pedophiles, obviously. But that’s not a good enough reason to censor. The law has to be applied equally: yes, pedophilia is a terrible, terrible thing, and so people tend to look at a book like this, and say: hey–this encourages you to commit crimes! It should be bannable! But by that logic, every book and magazine on growing pot should be bannable, too. Socially, and for good reason, we’re a lot harder on pedophilia than pot smoking, but seriously, what kind of definable standard is that?

Thanks! But please review the definition of censorship. Amazon ain’t the federal gov. A company may choose to sell or distribute, or to not. Not selling a product isn’t censorship. Bed, Bath, & Beyond isn’t “censoring” your access to contraception because they don’t sell IUDs.

In this case, Amazon would have done better to not respond, rather than to respond poorly.

As for laws various and sundry http://lmgtfy.com/.

Other people can “censor” besides the feds…such as the county government that has issued a warrant leading to the arrest in another jurisdiction of the author in question…which you point and explain in your first paragraph. We can debate whether “censorship” or not, I suppose, but if you’re going to be arrested for writing materials, I’m pretty we can agree on some level that that’s the government–not a private business–involving itself in preventing the free distribution of information.

As for the argument that Amazon is a private company and not obligated to carry things…you’re completely correct. They are and I don’t suggest they have to. My point, I guess, is that people tend to be outraged at a private company’s action depending on their political views on the particular topic. If Amazon is attacked, publicly criticized, and pressured not to make certain content available through channels they control, well, people may feel one way if it’s, say, hosting Wikileaks, and another way if it’s selling a pedophilia book.

However, valuing free speech in and of itself sort of requires defending them continuing to provide both. Plenty of people are enraged all the time by content companies like Amazon make available: I’d suggest that most of the incoming Republicans would be more than happy to help limit a company like Amazon’s ability to provide gay and lesbian content in many parts of the country. A bookseller providing books regardless of its agreement or disagreement with the content of the books is generally the sort of thing people who believe in free speech value.

I am going to continue to argue with you. It is possible to value free speech, while not defending certain kinds of speech, among them slander, defamation, and hate speech.

Mr. Greaves was not hauled off to a secret tribunal, his books have not been outlawed and burned, and he has not been denied any of his legal rights. He has been arrested on charges which may or may not be upheld by a jury of his peers. His case might end up tossed, if a local judge decides Polk County has no standing.

I defend the right of booksellers to sell books and to make choices regarding what they want to sell. No bookselller sells all books. There are entire categories of bookstores who sell books whose content is completely and totally offensive to me, and whose proprietors think I am Satan’s handmaid. That’s fine.

But failure to use judgment or exercise discretion, and then to cite a concept that does not apply to excuse that lack misses the point of freedom of speech. An oft cited adage is “your freedom ends where the other guy’s nose begins.” In this case, the other guys might be children, a protected class in our society. Discretion, I argue, is the better part of valor in cases in which the weakest and most at risk members of society are placed in jeopardy.

In general, I agree with you–what I’m asking for is a sensible definition of when certain content can and should be prevented from being distributed. I don’t see how your argument differs substantively from that put forward by the people who argued that Wikileaks should not be hosted or by the people who argued that David Wojnarowicz’s art should be removed from the National Portrait Gallery. Everybody knows pornography when they see it; the problem is that people have different perspectives based on their beliefs, opinions, etc. And as a general rule, I tend to think that the best way to ensure that the things I believe in aren’t censored, suppressed, or not carried because other people might disagree with it, is to defend other people having access to content that I disagree with. I agree that protecting children is important and shouldn’t be short-cut. But I fail to see how any of this protects children from harm. Does anyone really believe that preventing the sale of this book will stop any pedophiles, or that any useful information in it isn’t widely available otherwise? Or that quite likely, the text is online already?

So what’s gained? A bookseller has caved to pressure and stopped making available a book it had previously, because the book was not in violation of its policies when it was submitted. Amazon seeks to be the main vehicle for selling and buying on the Internet; it’s wrong to think an Amazon book buyer went out and decided to wholesale purchase copies of this book: it was either being sold through a seller account–in which Amazon serves as the middleman–or through a consignment program in which the publisher paid to have shippable from Amazon’s warehouses. It’s not quite the same as what you choose to stock at a physical bookstore.

So look: the book is not child porn; the man who wrote and published has not yet been accused of molesting children. What he did was write a book, which is probably ridiculously to boot, and which any sensible person disagrees with and finds reprehensible. The outrage at it has given it far more attention than it deserved; it’s led to a major bookseller to reverse longstanding policies and caving to public pressure (they haven’t before, and this specific issue has come up numerous times); and finally, you’re defending police in one district having a man arrested in another district because he’s said things they can credibly argue would be offensive to the majority of people in their community and made it available to people in their community, which applies to essentially anything available on the Internet. This was the original concern with Utah’s porn czar.

All of this would be deeply troubling for the precedent it threatens to set, if it wasn’t all about a how-to pedophilia guide. Again, there’s plenty of content out there that provides information about breaking the law. I don’t think we would be having the same conversation if this was about High Times though. And there are of course plenty of people who object to the availability of that magazine, and plenty more who believe that homosexuals are all child abusers. Just because you and I know that that latter idea has no basis in reality doesn’t mean they’re going to give up, nor constantly push to restrict access to content they find objectionable. That’s the problem with making arguments like this: they’re inherently a slippery slope, because the only real standard you’re applying is, “I and most everyone I know finds this reprehensible, therefore it’s okay that’s not more widely available.” That’s a basis for making decisions, and to argue that this isn’t a case of censorship (censoring things under “fighting words” doctrine is legally fine, but it is still censorship) by defining censorship as occurring only with secret tribunals and whatnot is like comparing something to Hitler or the Nazis. It’s so extreme nothing could ever meet that definition. Even when censorship was practiced in the US under the Comstock Laws, the way it which it was enforced wouldn’t have met your description. That was my point about the Soviet Union: it’ll never be that bad here, but that doesn’t mean our own local, democratic version is okay.

I’m afraid you have an error of fact in your reply – Amazon has removed content on both a case by case, as well as a wholesale basis, based on criteria that I’m not privy to. Two examples are the removal of LGBT fiction, amounting to hundreds of titles, an event that got it’s own amazon-fail hash-tag, and the removal of fiction that had characters under the age of 18 engaged in consensual sexual activity. Both of these examples affected hundreds of authors, thousands of books, and could arguably be considered censorship, in the sense in which you seem to be applying the term, before the titles were restored to Amazon’s catalog.

With that in mind, Amazon’s defense of this particular title, which explicitly advocates an activity which U.S. law considers a severe crime against a protected class remains, well, silly. As does yours, I’m afraid.

Whether Mr. Greaves will be prosecuted is still to be determined. Whether the book in question is harmful is also still to be determined. The Comstock Law allows Polk County to issue a warrant, but that is not a violation of his civil rights. Nor is any particular choice by Amazon a violation of his civil rights. This is why we have laws, so that issues like this play out in the public square, and the rights of people, including Mr. Greaves, as well as those who might feel he is doing harm, are protected.

Censorship, by definition, is suppression of speech by a controlling body. This case doesn’t set any precedent in that regard; you seem to be conflating Mr. Greaves’ book with WikiLeaks documentation, but the cases are not analagous. Law is predicated on three things: determination of guilt, with the presumption of innocence; protection of society as a whole, and of the members thereof; and the presumption of harm.

You seem to think that by not helping Mr. Greaves distribute his book, that Amazon is therefore suppressing his freedom of speech. I don’t agree. Just because someone wants to/has the right to do something, does not mean it is in any particular person, company, or organization’s best interest to help them. And society, through protest, including letters and boycotts, have the right to make their views known. This is how we got Coca-Cola out of S. Africa in the 80s and 90s. Protest is also not censorship, and choosing to discontinue an activity that people are protesting is the desired result, whether or not you agree with it.

To take your example of the Hide/Seek exhibit: the NPG is a public institution, part of the Smithsonian. The exhibit in question was paid for by in part by Federal money, as well as non-governmental arts organizations. As I pointed out in my letter to the NPG, protesting their choice to remove the piece in question (Fire in My Belly), part of the Smithsonian’s mission is to inform the public, and removing challenging material is not in line with that mission. The Secretary of Smithsonian respectfully disagrees, feeling that the furor distracted from the exhibition’s function. Amazon is *not* a publicly funded institution with a charter to inform and educate the American public, and share and preserve American art, so again, the cases are not analagous.

Your argument would be stronger and more relevant, in fact, if you were defending the presentation of Fire in My Belly. That’s a much better case for your “slippery slope” theory than Mr. Greaves’ book.

You make comments you don’t flesh out: how is the removal of the book from Amazon different from Wikileaks? And in what way is it important that the Smithsonian receives federal funds?

As for the topic at hand, there are two issues: Amazon’s decision not to carry the book, and the legal action taken against the author. To begin with the first, you actually are inaccurate about a couple of Amazon’s actions: in the issue of the gay and lesbian literature, they never stopped carrying those books. They were removed from search results unless specifically sought out because terms relating to LGBT content were added to the search filter. This was apparently because the changes were made by a non-English speaking employee in Europe, and were completely accidental. Amazon reversed course. As for fiction with minors engaged in consensual sexual activity, I have no idea what you’re referring to. Everything from Lolita to Gossip Girl is still available, so I assume you’re referring to some smaller subset.

Look, I’m not arguing that Amazon has to sell books like this; obviously they don’t. But in general, they do sell a lot of marginal, fringe content, everything from “The Turner Diaries” (which helped inspire the OK city bombing) to “The Pink Triangle,” which suggests that the Holocaust was caused by homosexuals. The point? Amazon’s a private company, they don’t owe anyone anything and aren’t obligated to have any consistent standards other than what they feel like. But in general, booksellers have traditionally positioned themselves as a defender of free speech rights by making available content that others would find offensive. If Amazon begins responding to angry letters and protests by limiting the availability of content that some people find offensive, that can very well lead to a slippery slope. Because there are plenty of books, and ideas, that you and I believe in rather strongly that a lot of other people hate and want suppressed. I’m saying I don’t want to see that start happening.

As for the arrest of the author, regardless of whether it meets your definition of censorship, I think there’s plenty of reason to find it alarming. Obscenity is a very tricky concept because it relates to the idea of what a local community finds objectionable; while I’m also a big fan of the legal process, I don’t assume you’d be happy with an outcome like this if you found the author and the ideas less objectionable. Surely you don’t want to live in a country, nor support a legal system, in which the police chief of Kalamazoo can have the NYPD arrest a publisher of a book of Mapplethorpe prints because people in Kalamazoo would be offending by his portrait of a naked boy.

In the end, your argument doesn’t make sense because you’re looking at it from the wrong direction: you’re saying that reasonable people can all agree that this guy and his book are disgusting, possibly a front for something worse he’s done personally, and advocating for a disgusting violation of the law that we all hate. All of which is fine. But if you look at it from the other side, I think the pertinent that needs to be asked (which you haven’t) is what he did that’s illegal. Child pornography is illegal because its creation violates the rights of the child subject; this book, by all accounts, does not feature child pornography–it’s just information and an argument. Typically in the US, we’re pretty radically civil libertarian about defending the right of people not to be punished–or legally harassed, which is at best what’s happening here–because of ideas.

And there is good reason for to be concerned about this, because in the end, what’s happening to the author has nothing to do with pedophilia; the mechanisms that have been used against this author are not related in any meaningful way to what is about. The same tactic could–and occasionally is–used against everyone from pornographers to pro-legalization activists to medical marijuana activists. So in general–and pretty much across the board–I have a problem with people being able to order the arrest of an author for providing information and information alone, regardless of the topic. (With the caveat that there are some firmly established guidelines for limiting and suppressing some information, which are strongly established in legal precedent, and you haven’t argued.)

Actually, you’ve missed my point entirely. It’s not that I don’t think Amazon should sell this book, it’s that their response to not doing so was indefensible, on two counts of fact:
1. Amazon is not an over-riding authority, and therefore cannot be a censor. Nor do I ever want them to be large enough or powerful to be the arbiter of what is available in the marketplace. I want no organization, gov’t, social, or corporate to have that sort of authority. If their statement (which is slightly ambiguous) claims that withdrawing book would be censorship on Amazon’s part, then they are wrong, and I am glad. No matter what Amazon’s ambitions, they are not the only outlet for media and/or books, and therefore cannot censor public access to works.
2. If Amazon meant to apply that responding to public comments is censorship, then they are also wrong on that count. The public can and should protest, loudly and vigorously, any action by any body for any reason. That is free speech.
A response that would have been defensible is “Amazon is a corporation, and we carry materials at our sole discretion. The views of authors or retailers do not reflect the views of Amazon, it’s employees, or shareholders. (So there, pbbbbbtht!)”. THAT I would lay down on the tracks for. The claim of censorship, however, is factually incorrect from either direction, and imo, morally wrong.

I was thinking about this last night, and what it comes down to, I believe, is that I have a much narrower view of censorship, and a much wider view of free speech, than you do. The good citizens of Polk County, and any other municipality, exercise theirs (or ours) en masse via laws and codes which reflect local standards. Amazon exercises theirs through choosing what products to endorse (and yes, legally a business owner endorses a product they sell by definition, however inconvenient it might be when someone is harmed.). Mr. Greaves exercised his freedoms by writing and publishing. The protesters exercised theirs by writing letters and threatening to boycott.

Part of the responsibilities inherent in exercising one’s freedom, however, is that there may be consequences, and those consequences might include legal hazard. Activists go to jail for obstructing public roadways; a company can get hauled into civil court for selling a product that a party maintains causes harm; and if harm is caused to a minor, a protected class, an alleged “harm” could be a criminal offense–courts take a much stricter view of harm when the victim is a child.
Frankly, imo, limiting any of these processes is a much slipperier (is that a word?) slope than a decision by a retailer to carry or not carry a book. Ever been to sex shop in Canada? THAT’s censorship, and it’s depressing. Amazon’s decision is not, and by claiming that it was, they were not only *wrong,* but were using the term to not only take on an authority that they do not and should not have (or granting the public an authority that does not exist, whichever way you wish to interpret their statement), they were also trying to deny responsibility for outcomes, which they do have, as much so as if a vendor on their site was selling a bag of broken glass.

Businesses do in fact have a responsibility to the public–or at least, accountablilty–and that responsibility may be enforced in civil or criminal court, in front of a jury of one’s peers. Either man up to it, or get out of the game, but don’t hide behind the first amendment if you are not willing to defend your decision to all comers. For reasons legal, social, or economic (I’m not privy to these decisions) Amazon decided that they were not willing to do this. Their choice. The fact that Amazon made that choice is the very epitome of free speech.

In re: WikiLeaks: Julian Assange is not a protected class, and the fact that the documents are out there (and I was just listening to their content on NPR), means that censorship (again) does not apply. Nor does it apply in the Hide/Seek case, although one would have a slightly better argument, because the NPG receives federal funding and several of the “protesters” were U.S. Congressmen using their position to get Fire In My Belly removed. In neither case has access to the material been significantly infringed by any overriding body, as much as an overriding body might like to do so. As far as I am aware, no warrants for Assange have been issued by a U.S. body, whatever one might think about the Swedish warrant. Really, I don’t want to get into the WikiLeaks thing: at this precise moment Bradley Manning is in a far more tenuous position than Assange, and *that* worries me.

Censorship is far too important and dangerous a concept to be thrown around lightly. Just because I am not happy with a decision or an action does not mean that the test applies. If Amazon chose to stop carrying LGBT lit, I would take my dollars elsewhere. Amazon wants those dollars, so does not give in to the constant pressure to remove LGBT materials. If they did remove all LGBT materials, *for any reason other than fiat by an overriding authority*, it would still not be censorship. The test *is* strict and I am glad for it. Protest and dissent are just as valid when I don’t like or agree with the outcomes, as when I do.

I did not argue that all reasonable people think the book was disgusting, btw–that was you :-). My argument is that the author’s arrest is as much an exercise of free speech as the writing thereof. Just because you and I don’t live in Polk County, doesn’t mean that the citizens thereof don’t get to have their say, too. Whether the charges stick is an entirely different issue. Who knows? The case could end up at SCOTUS. Wouldn’t that be something?!

There is a tendency among certain groups, that I’ve noticed and which I frankly find deeply disturbing, to abdicate responsibility for law and government; however, we the people are the body of law and government, in the U.S. I may not like certain laws, and I may work to change them, through voting, direct action, or running for office, but laws are a direct expression and consequence of the will of the public, not handed down by fiat from on high. WE make those laws; WE pay the civic authorities to carry them out; WE are the responsible parties. There is no “they”, and assigning absolute power to “them” is very, very, very dangerous.

As society changes, the standards of that society change. The mechanism of that change is our legal system. The hope is that everyone answers to it, individually and collectively, and is therefore also protected by it, and that enforcement and protection are applied equally to all. I don’t want any body exempt from that process: not myself, not Mr. Greaves, not Amazon, not the Aryan Nations, not Judy Blume, no one. With freedom comes responsibility, the price is constant vigilance, yadda yadda, blah blah blah.

And, finally, I believe in my first response I addressed the sorts of speech that are commonly limited, including slander, defamation, and hate speech–I’m not sure what your last point is, actually, I apologize.

I’ve pretty much beaten this horse to death, on my end, Jeremy, sorry. I hope you won’t take offense if I beg off, and go make fudge. I’ve really enjoyed debating this with you, though I feel that your position is short-sighted and kind of actually dangerous to the freedoms that you and I both cherish. I hope that you do (please) give some thought to my reasoning; I have to admit, 20 years ago, my chain of logic would have stopped in the same place as yours does, and I would have been firmly in your corner.