[Worldwalker]

I'm seeing two positions here:

1) Books should not be interfered with unless they're really disgusting.

2) Books should not be interfered with, because rights are more important than disgust.

Strip away all the emotional baggage, and that's really what the positions come down to. The fact that children are involved increases the disgust level; it doesn't move it from non-disgusting to disgusting).

There is the fundamental problem: how disgusting does a book have to be before people move from category 2 (not for me) to category 1 (not for anyone)?

Some people have tried to load the people advocating category 2 with highly negative images: those people (me included) favor pedophilia, don't care if children are raped, have no empathy, etc. I believe that's highly untrue. I don't think the people who think that are any less disgusted by the book. From where I sit, it seems some people are thinking that the book is so awful that it fits into a special category, and even free-speech advocates should understand that.

The problem is, from our point of view, it doesn't. It's on a continuum of undesirable things. I haven't seen anyone here deny that it's a horrible book. What concerns the free-speech advocates is who gets to choose what is too horrible. It doesn't help, I suppose, that the emotional "this is awful" arguments are all on the other side. Freedom of speech isn't a position that can easily be expressed with emotion, and that is even more the case when the work testing that freedom is something we wouldn't touch with a barge pole. Again, despite the more fervent attacks, remember please that this is not a book that anyone here thinks is a good thing, or would want to read. It's not a good book, and the author is not a good person. But the advocates of free speech agree with John Stuart Mill: "If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."

It's not a comfortable position. I realize that a large percentage of the readers of this thread now believe that I personally advocate, or at least have no problems with, men raping babies. That could not be further from the truth. The book disgusts me. Its author disgusts me. The concepts discussed disgust me. The whole concept disgusts me. I wish the book had never been written. But it was written, and thereby hangs a problem.

The problem with "we decided the book is bad" is defining the we. The people who wrote the most letters? The people who shouted the loudest? The people who expressed the most emotion? People making their feelings heard have also opposed rights for gay people. Before that, rights for black people. Before that, rights for women. Before that, rights for certain sects of their own religion. There was a lot of emotion there. There was a lot of public outcry. There might, even, have been a solid majority believing believing that things should be that way; that views they disagreed with were just too horrible to permit. The problem is not that pedophilia will ever, even in some future world, be permitted, but that allowing the voice of the mob to say that writing on some subject should be prohibited allows that voice to say that writing on any subject they find revolting should be prohibited, and history has shown us that many subjects have been found revolting. That's where my comment about "the authority that can prohibit other people from reading things you find disgusting can prohibit you from reading things other people find disgusting" comes from.

Most of the people in MobileRead, being a self-selecting group, and certainly most of the people in this discussion, are very reasonable people. While it's not true elsewhere, it's true here that people who favor gay rights, for instance, don't wish to have the opposition silenced, and likewise those who oppose gay rights don't think the supporters should be unable to present their opinions. That isn't true everywhere, however. Elsewhere in the world, there are some people strongly holding one position or the other who want their voice to be the only one. On one side we have the religious fundamentalists, and on the other side the politically correct. I fear them both, and equally. Either one, if given control over the Amazon catalog, would leave it full of holes. They'd be different holes, but they'd be holes just the same. That's true of any contentious position.

It is not, in other words, that I give a tinker's damn about that book or its author. But it's not that simple, and it's not limited to that book. Look up a list of banned books sometime. Aside from the teacher who teaches her students to docilely obey the authorities and not read banned books, most of us would be shocked at some of what that list contains. If it's one that goes into the past, with dates, look at how many of the classics you were taught in school were at some point in their history banned because they outraged public morals. Had there been an Amazon in their day, there very well may have been an outcry against it selling their books.

I think we all believe that this book is horrible. The problem, however, is that there are people who believe other books are horrible, too -- books like Harry Potter, for instance. It's very, very hard to draw a line between "Amazon should react to an outcry over this book" and "Amazon shouldn't react to an outcry over that book." And it's not likely that we, the rational ones (and I mean nearly everyone in this discussion, not just those who agree with me), are going to be the ones to draw that line. Rationality whispers and emotionality screams, and the "Harry Potter teaches witchcraft!!!!" people have a lot more emotions, and a lot more drive.

In short, I think we, the population of MobileRead, could probably decide very well which books are too horrible to sell. But if we agree that it should be decided by public outrage, we won't be the ones doing the deciding. And the people who would be doing that deciding scare the living crap out of me.