Amazon doesn’t have a lock on online retailing. There’s a lot of online retailers to choose from. Amazon and eBay just happen to be the largest marketplaces.
I’m not particularly upset about Amazon and eBay deciding not to sell or allow sale of rebel flags through their platform.
If we’re considering such sales as speech, then we must also keep in mind that: While we all have a right to free speech, nobody has a right to use someone else’s platform to speak. If you want to speak on a platform, you have to follow the owner’s rules, or set up your own applebox to speak from.
i agree to a degree…i understand that they are also private companies, i just think this sets a pretty messed up president. monopoly isn’t the defining factor on what makes something a public marketplace or not, they don’t have to have a lock on the market to be acting as a public market under which millions of independent vendors sell their goods.
would you be okay if amazon started banning books containing certain unpopular religious or political ideas?
I’m all for people having the freedom to think things that i disagree with, and i hope the extend that same courtesy to me. That is how freedom works. This is why I personally don’t support this action even though it was against a symbol that I personally find offensive.
Do these places specify if they are banning all “confederate” material of any sort, or only that which references the Confederate States of America specifically? There have been and will be many other confederacies out there, and I sadly wonder if the reactionary crowd is aware that it as a general organizational form doesn’t inherently involve slavery, as it did with the CSA.
Amazon doesn’t sell a lot of things I want to buy. Things that I know exist and are sold in other places. Some of those things are books, others are movies. The reason I can’t find some of them, I’m pretty sure, is related to policies dealing with indecency and censorship.
The way I deal with it? “Oh, I can’t find that on Amazon. Well, it is a really fucking offensive book. Let’s see if the public library has a copy.”
While it strains credulity to think that you’d actually find the phrase “can you make more volume?” clearer than “can you turn the volume up?”, you’ve fallen in the exact same trap regardless. More volume? How can you literally have more volume? Volume is just the amplitude of atoms in the air — you’re not getting more of anything, you’re not getting more atoms.
Anyway. Conceptual metaphor is interesting, and I strongly agree with those who say that the fact that our brains seem to think naturally in metaphorical terms, cross-culturally and from a young age, is an important part of our greater ability to think in abstract terms, and use that to quickly reason about the real world.
Just as our perception of the world is not that of a camera, but is a series of processes that that uses our understanding of categories and relationships to build a model of the world we are seeing, so our use of language and thought fits useful abstract notions together, even if they don’t have a strict physical relationship with each other…
Books do seem more sacroscant, and it’s hard to imagine Amazon banning any, but what if a book contained, say, the secret codes to U.S. nuclear weapons? Ridiculous example, maybe, but surely something that could appear in a book merits banning.
Anyway, another issue I don’t see you addressing is the freedom of sellers to sell or not sell whatever they want. Why should sellers be forced to sell something they don’t want to sell? Something they find morally reprehensible to sell? And as @LDoBe pointed out, Amazon refusing to offer something doesn’t mean it’s not available anywhere else.
curious, do you think there is a difference between what they sell, and what is sold by independent vendors through their public marketplace platform? or it all the same to you? in my mind they are acting as public marketplaces and as such should be held to a different level of accountability then a private company.
even though they are a private company, do you encourage/support private companies banning things they disagree with? practicing censorship? or do you encourage a more open minded mindset?
if walmart banned anything rainbow because the waltons are anti-gay, would you say…meh…people can get rainbow stuff anywhere. or would that upset you?
if amazon banned the Koran, or Bible, or anything written by Karl Marx would that upset you?
trust me i get that people are cheering this because the symbol is offensive to so many, but again that sets a pretty scary precedent and a very anti freedom slippery slope of censorship.
(a number of years back there was a lot of debate around the ban of pentagrams…i’ll try and dig that up. again an unpopular symbol at the time, but also a religious freedom.)
They should change the password. 0123456789 hasn’t been a good password since spaceballs. banning the books wouldn’t put that secret back in the bottle. censorship is never the answer, imho.
omg. thanks autocorrect…well that is funny enough that i’ll leave it as is. embrace imperfection.
Censorship is something the government does. It’s not censorship for a private company to refuse selling something they don’t want to sell. I don’t encourage them to not sell certain things, but it’s within their right to forgo the profit on PR grounds.
I think Chik-Fil-A’s owner has a right to pay money out of his own pocket to anti-marriage-equality campaigns. But I also have the right to not do business with Chik-Fil-A.
Walmart can decide to stop selling products incorporating a rainbow motif, and I can choose not to shop there (although the barriers to competition for Walmart in many places borders on a legally actionable monopoly, but that’s a different consideration). I already don’t shop at Walmart because its practices are harmful to its employees and the greater economy.
Amazon may be like a public market. But I’d say it’s more like a mall. Malls aren’t public markets, they’re private enterprises and have the right to kick people off the premises, ban certain legal behaviors and run their little fiefdoms under management monarchy. Similarly Amazon is privately owned, and can pick and choose vendors as it sees fit. It owns “the building” so it gets to make the rules. If you don’t like the rules, then there’s numerous, very cheap alternatives for setting up your own shop on the web, all the way down to using Craigslist for private-party sales.
There was a world before the internet you know. And somehow civil war memorabilia collectors and bigots and collectors who were also bigots managed to acquire or make their own rebel flags just fine.
WRT the pentagram thing: I don’t infringe on your religious freedom by not selling a particular piece of regalia or symbol. But you do infringe on my right to freedom of/from religion if you try to bully me into selling such items I don’t really feel like selling.
Doesn’t Amazon do all the fulfillment and logistics? If so, I would think that it’s entirely within Amazon’s rights to say “we aren’t willing to move rebel flags and nazi propaganda through our warehouses, and we don’t feel like keeping track of the shipping for you.”
Amazon has stuff they sell directly. Stuff other people sell but they warehouse and fulfill. Stuff other people sell and other people warehouse and ship directly (many small book stores etc.). Stuff they warehouse for other companies and fulfill, you’d never know amazon was involved (for example you can order a candle from bob’s candle shop, and have it come to your door in a bob’s candle shop box, with a bob’s candle shop invoice, and never know that bob’s candle shop products are sent from amazon. they are one of the the largest third party warehouse and fulfillment company in the world.
I thought the definition was much broader then that? Many things are censored by private organizations/companies/schools, aren’t they? I make this argument because Amazon and Ebay aren’t just choosing not to sell X themselves, they are banning everyone else from selling X through the marketplaces they’ve set up (hundreds of thousands of independent vendors using their platform are having their freedoms limited due to this decision.
I get the mall analogy and I’ll have to think on that one, I’d argue that they are acting more in the roll of Visa or Mastercard in many cases then a mall per se. Speaking of which Visa and Mastercard are private companies…as are most banks, does that make it okay for them to say that people can’t sell X? Do they do that? I know the banks in WA and CO won’t take legal grower money but that is for a different reason…
but…in this case both companies are doing ~exactly~ that, bullying thousands of smaller vendors into not selling something they want to sell because they control the transaction platform.
Anyway, my main point is that I think this is a bad move on both companies parts, and this sets a very dangerous and negative precedent even if done for positive reasons.
I’d feel like a hypocrite if I cheered this sort of behavior every time it aligned with my personal opinions and booed it every time it went against my opinions. I’ll speak up against this sort of behavior even when it goes against things i agree with, because you really can’t have it both ways, imho.
Definitely a valid concern. I’m still pretty sanguine about popular retailers banning the sale of various items on their platforms. There’s so many things that I’ve wanted to buy from Amazon that turned out to not be available. So I personally just shrug and say to myself “time for a treasure hunt”.
You don’t use the .com version do you? Ah, the joys of not being on Amazon.com …Now that i’m using Amazon.ca I can sympathize.
Yeah. but .com users get spoiled, they can get almost anything under the sun, every other amazon is hit or miss. when i had to use amazon.co.uk it was the same way, prices and availability were shite.
I use the .com domain. I even live in Seattle and am cashing in on the sweet, free overnight shipping they’re offering now.
I just want certain objects and books that are controversial. Some would say they’re even transgressive, and run afoul of various ethical systems. It’s legal to own, buy and sell a pickled baboon fetus. But Amazon ain’t selling those.
have you checked the shop on the second floor of pikes place market (on the flying fish end)? they have real shrunken heads, or at least they did 10 years ago when i lived there. I lived on Vashon Island for 12 years and commuted via passenger ferry to downtown Seattle to work in the tech sector.
Do they stop other people from selling them though? (serious question…)
I dunno… They do sell fetal pig anatomy and dissection kits. There are probably laws and regulations in place that make shipping baboons (dead or alive, fetal or grown) into the US difficult. Although if it were classified as food rather than medical/scientific training materials, then they’d probably have an easier time of it.
I know for a fact that PayPal doesn’t allow you to use their services for hentai of any kind, and that’s made it difficult to support artists that I personally know and like. I guess our cyborg overlord Elon Musk thinks that porn is unnecessary and unfitting for the people of his brave new world. I should have bet all my marbles on Richard Branson. Now there’s a billionaire with an appreciation for smut
Yeah PayPal did something similar with file locker services. It was a huge stink, especially since file lockers have legitimate legal uses. I still use PayPal, but I wish they would refrain from that sort of behavior.
When you put more things together they tend to from a higher pile? That’s my guess as to the reason for the metaphor. As has been said, I think using symbols like this is just part of how the mind works (and I was wondering how I was going to make this relate to the topic of this thread).
The people I’ve known who would publicly display this flag have been mostly racist assholes. I don’t think we should stop anyone from having it who wants it, but I would like to see less of it, and the ideals I associate with it.
"But with the closing of most commercial outlets to Confederate-emblazoned merchandise, it was somewhat inevitable that the General Lee would meet a hurdle it couldn’t clear. "
