7 ms·
The fact that anyone was actually outraged in the first place is the real failure here. I would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would be stup
by tdavis 18y ago
The fact that anyone was actually outraged in the first place is the real failure here. I would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would be stupid enough to think that Amazon would maliciously, openly, and unapologetically de-list all material pertaining to homosexuality (or categorize it as "adult").
Okay, fine, Amazon screwed up and there was a glitch or a security hole or whatever it really was. Their bad, they should fix that and people have a right to be upset that their books lost sales or whatever was the case. But moral outrage? Protest logos? Petitions? People either need to lighten up or get lives that lack the required free time to get that worked up over a conspiracy that was obviously irrational.
- gojomo 18y agoTaking offense has become entertainment.
- tdavis 18y agoThat seems depressingly accurate.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoI would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would be stupid enough to think that Amazon would maliciously, openly, and unapologetically de-list all material pertaining to homosexuality (or categorize it as "adult"). I'm not going to say that you're wrong. You're not wrong: That was a crazy conclusion for people to come to, because it is something that Amazon would never do. But I am going to take a wild guess: are you significantly older than thirty? I'm guessing the answer is no. Those of us who came of age before the Internet were raised in a world where it was intuitively obvious that GLBT literature would be openly, unapologetically classed as "adult" and kept hidden away from the general public. That's the way the world worked. It's easy to retrain the front of the brain. It's a lot harder to retrain the instincts that you learned as a kid. Especially if those instincts were forged under stress. And gay people and their friends, especially those over a certain age, are intuitively aware that it is (or, at least, was) entirely possible for big, public entities to wake up one day and decide to screw LGBT people over. That used to be the norm. I sincerely hope that we reach the state where open maliciousness towards gay people becomes unthinkably weird, but it's going to take at least a few more years.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- dejb 18y agoI haven't seen solid enough evidence to convince me that this wasn't the result of an action by an Amazon employee for whom it was 'intuitively obvious that GLBT literature would be openly, unapologetically classed as "adult" and kept hidden away from the general public'. It would seem pretty easy for them to classify this as a 'glitch'. Without complete transparency you can only really judge an organisation by it's actions.
- GHFigs 18y ago"There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom." -- Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, a 1951 book which I find to be extremely relevant in the era of so-called "smart mobs".
- JulianMorrison 18y agoWell, they already do have an "adult" toggle that makes the book intangible and invisible. Given that, it's a lot easier to believe their prudishness extends to what they classify as adult. If they were going to make a moral stand, they ought to have made it at "we won't vanish books".