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Remember when dissent was a patriotic duty?

funny pictures of cats with captions

If you want to dismiss any sort of protest, you do the following:

  • First off, play down the numbers. Both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population. The participants never ever hold a majority popular opinion.
  • Find the wing-nuts in the crowd, and give them the most attention, misspelled protest signs a plus.
  • Make sure that you point out any involvement of any organized group or prominent individual to imply a shadowy conspiracy directing the activity; call it “AstroTurf” as opposed to “grass-roots.”
  • And of course, dismiss the participants as ignorant fools who have no idea what they’re actually protesting.

Works for anything, really, from a Million Man march to a WTO protest.

Seen the above a lot today, especially with Mr. Marc Cooper of the LA Times who makes himself look like a desperately frightened little twit shoving his fingers in his ears going “LALALALALALALA.”

Shall we talk of Mr. Cooper? (more…)

By S Andrew Swann, ago

Amazon wants to protect your fragile little brains.

ADDENDUM #4: Amazon has officially owned the cock up, still insisting it’s a glitch, but their poor customer relations has insured that about 75% of the public believe it’s all BS and they intended to do it. IMO is was a glitch, but a glitch in a nasty and troubling system that Amazon uses to suppress titles it doesn’t like. So this may be a good thing, as the PR backlash might encourage people to demand they remove all the de-ranking logic from their site. (After all, what’s the point when you cannot purchase anything w/o asserting you’re over eighteen anyway, unless it’s to protect the women and the servants.)

ADDENDUM #3: Amazon seems to be trying to fix this on the down low.  No press comments, nothing on their site, but a little experimentation shows that rankings are re-appearing.  MZB’s book from below has its rank back, as does Heather has Two Mommies. The History of Sexuality by Foucault is still SOL.

ADDENDUM #2: And Dear Author points out something that very strongly implies that whatever is happening at Amazon is happening on their own servers.

ADDENDUM: A very interesting theory brought to my attention by a tweet from Toby.  Brings up other possibilities.  Could Amazon have been the target of a botnet?

Again, we have an example why is it a really bad thing to have centralized distribution channels, either state or corporate.  I pointed this out earlier with some e-book censoring going on with Apple’s iPhone application store. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, but Amazon has decided to follow suit, and in a much more egregious fashion. They’ve decided that if your book is “adult” enough, well, they’ll just nuke the Amazon Rank for the title and make it impossible to find via search. Quoth one amazonian asshat:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. (more…)

By S Andrew Swann, ago