I saw this announcement from Indigo Books on a Twitter feed. Indigo is a big book store in Canada. Here’s a recent store announcement:
Indigo is a private company and they can do whatever they want, of course.
I have long been concerned about religions, though, and the Land of the Woke appears to be the birthplace of a new religion, at the same time as many traditional religions are losing members.
Here is the big clue that we are dealing with a religious cult: the phrase “without question or judgement.” I don’t accept anything without question or judgement. It’s not like I understand everything, of course. There are many things about which I am an ignoramus and where my questioning and judgment hit dead ends. But I would never make an announcement that I am willing to accept anything, especially anything complex and potential harmful to young people, without at least trying to question it. Whenever an organization tells me that I cannot question something, that’s the smell of religion.
Back to math (basics). Do you accept “2 + 2 = 4” without question or judgment? I do. Because that is how mathematics defines the values of “2” and “4”.
At one time I questioned whether 2 + 2 = 4, as a child. Since then I’ve seen thousands of examples of 2 + 2 = 4. To the extent that it is an empirical conclusion, it is wonderfully well-established, even if one gives the nod to Karl Popper’s suggestion that all knowledge is provisional–so I’m willing to put a mental asterisk on 2 = 2 to the extent that it might be seen as an empirical truth. It’s also baked into the logical system of math, so it’s not entirely empirical-to the extent you’d like to use math to send rockets to the moon (which works well), this is a fruitful foundation. It also has a metaphorical basis and consistency. See Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being, by Lakoff and Nunez (2001). So yes, I did question even this simple equation, but not anymore, because it seems about as stable as the gravity that caused my sandwich to fall to the ground when I accidentally dropped it!
Left Bank books made a similar comment. They were very disappointed with JK Rowling as well. They said that they would not carry her books any longer on their shelves, but if you want to order them they would do that.