decay raged 2 years ago ——
I found a damn humorous although be it a damn creepy bit of news over on fark.com about an ongoing situation with Amazon selling a pedo book titled “The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct”. It seems there has been a rather large internet uproar with people boycotting and raging at amazon about them selling this book on their website.
According to the author the book doesn’t promote pedophiles to have sex (rape) children, but how the child rapist should handle their raping situations and also how the children (we will call them the rapies) should also handle being raped by an adult. The author refers to this as “non-injurious” for both parties involved which I am guessing involves how to not get caught raping a child and how to manipulate a child into thinking that getting rapes by an adult was ok (and fun!).
The author (Philip R. Greaves) had this to say about his book:
"I wrote the book to establish guidelines so that people would behave in a manner that is non-injurious to each other, for one, and, for two, to communicate the fact that these people who are so different in maturation, etc., that when they develop relationships, they use certain principles that regular people, adults, would be well to attend."
Amazon at first had this to say:
"Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable. Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions,"
This was almost a respectable decision by Amazon. We don’t want to sell this book but we don’t want to censor people who sell though our website no mater had bad or creepy the book is. That was pretty awesome of Amazon. Yes it sucks that someone wrote this book, and that some creepy ass people will buy the book but we will stand by the first amendment and allow the book to be sold. I could almost hear the star spangled banner in the background. I think I even heard the cry of an eagle not to far in the distance.
Well Amazons decision didn’t last long at all. After only a few short days (and over 3000 negative reviews on the book) amazon pulled the book from their website and destroyed any creditability they had or will now ever have when it comes to censorship or 1st amendment rights. If these assholes would have just stuck with it I think in the long run it could have really shown that even a company as large as Amazon would not only stand up against censorship but also not back down from their previous statements. I guess if the book had sold more than 1 copy they might have been more inclined to defend their right too sell it.
You can check out a cached version of the amazon page here
You can also read more about this story here