Wednesday, December 28, 2005
by Nicholas Stix
In this holiday season, you are being deluged by scam artists seeking to fleece you for what they claim are "charities." Have you gotten your yearly call, for instance, from the guy who claims to be collecting donations to give to the widows and orphans of policemen murdered in the line of duty? Ha! The guy on the phone is a low-paid flunky; over 90 percent of the money you donate goes to his boss, who is a crook and a creep who should be hunted down by real policemen and put out of business. (Our state and federal legislators are so busy passing pork barrel legislation, that it has not occurred to them to pass laws criminalizing phony charities. And so, crooks like the above-mentioned type continue to fleece the big-hearted.)
But one legitimate, truly worthy organization that desperately needs your support is VDARE. This Web site, founded six years ago by the brilliant social critic, Peter Brimelow (author of, among other works, Alien Nation on immigration and The Worm in the Apple on the teachers' unions), is the site par excellence for news, analysis, and commentary on immigration into these United States. And it ain't too shabby on race, either.
Why should you support VDARE? Glad you asked. for several years, VDARE was alone among major Web sites in banging the drum for immigration restriction. And it is still the best source for information on the attempt by President Bush and America's elites of the Right and the Left, to smuggle into law a stealth amnesty (aka "guest worker plan"). And it is the best source for information about the immigration bureacracy and the many de facto amnesty programs already in existence.
VDARE is also one of the only sites on the Internet whose publisher actually pays his writers. And one of those writers is yours truly. so, if you think that my work is deserving of support, please hit this link to give to VDARE. Thanks in advance.
One of the reasons why most of the material you read on the Internet is so godawful is that almost no one pays for material. And so, the typical Web "pundit" sits down in front of his pc and pounds out his "insights" in about ten mintues -- even less, if he's a fast typist. And who needs spell-check? (That begs the question: Why is most of the material one reads in newspapers and magazines that pay writers so bad?)
But work that demands to be read takes time to research and write. Hours, days, weeks, even months. It takes Web searches; it requires buying and poring over sometimes expensive, out-of-print books; sometimes it takes costly Lexis-Nexis searches; and it may take calls to lawyers, flacks, politicians and victims.
Very few people can afford to devote that sort of time and money to writing, and those who are independently wealthy generally demand, and get payment. (They're the ones writing the drivel published in newspapers and magazines.) And very few "professional writers" are willing to buck the conventional wisdom, Left or Right. Thus are we saddled with the likes of Tamar Jacoby and Jonah Goldberg from the Republican side, and Ellen Goodman and Frank Rich from the socialist side. None of the aforementioned writers will give you the truth about ... anything. Jacoby, in particular, has been lying about immigration and the possibility of immigration enforcement for years, in order to prevent Americans from doing anything to reassert American sovereignty and American law. Her goal in life is apparently to ensure that every upper-middle-class American family's "civil right" to illegal immigrant nannies, gardeners, and cooks; and every American corporation's "right" to low-wage Indian computer programmers remains inviolate.
Some formerly orthodox neoconservative writers such as Heather MacDonald have in recent years come around to understand that illegal immigration is destroying America, but they might never have, had it not been for VDARE alone banging the drum for immigration restriction lo these many years.
Peter Brimelow has published two of my articles since May, 2004, and they were two of my most important exposes on policing and multiculturalism ("'Disappearing' Crime" and
"Diversity is Strength! It's Also ... Police Corruption."
In his current fundraising appeal, Brimelow writes, "help feed starving young writers in fiscal 2005!"
"It is amazing how little money it takes to get young people to take this risk—not a risk at all, really, but certain professional suicide, unless we can build VDARE.COM up as an alternative institution fast enough."
[How nice to be referred to as "young" -- that hasn't happened in years!]
"At various times this year, I’ve had to go slow paying writers—and also to turn aside the many new writers who want to appear on VDARE.COM. It’s deeply distressing, because just a little money means so much to them—and to their country.
"Tonight, we post Tom Piatak’s summary of the War Against Christmas, Michelle Malkin, plus, of course, the blog.
"Scroll down to the end, past Ms. Bevens’ picture—and when you pass the donate link, remember my starving young writers."
There are only three business days left, and as Brimelow and the gang at VDARE point out, this year, due to the Katrina Bonus legislation, you get to deduct 100% of all charitable donations from your taxes. I thank you, and your nation will thank you -- sometime down the road.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
by Nicholas Stix
The following house editorial appeared in the August 3, 2004 New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/opinion/03tue4.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The Review of Reviews
he beginning of the end came last February, when anonymous book reviews on Amazon.com's Canadian site were posted with reviewers' real names. For some, it was an embarrassing unmasking. Several authors had raved about their own books. A number of reviewers had tried to skew the Amazon system, supporting friends or attacking enemies with anonymous or pseudonymous reviews. What kept this from being merely laughable is the scale of Amazon's business and the role customers' reviews play in its social and financial economy. Like eBay, Amazon.com is a community, and trust is one of its most important commodities. Just visit Amazon's discussion boards if you don't believe it.
That's why Amazon recently stopped accepting anonymous customer reviews, replacing them with a program called Real Names. Reviewers who use their own names will have a Real Name badge posted next to their reviews. (Pen Names are permitted, but they're less acceptable.) According to its Web site, Amazon believes that "a community in which people use their Real Names will ultimately have higher-quality content."
That is certainly possible. The problem is proving your identity. To get a Real Name, you must have a credit card on file or "a reasonable purchase history." What "reasonable" means is up to the company. If you use a credit card, your identity becomes synonymous with its number, which is not made public, of course. That may be a mordant comment on the state of modern identity, but, as some Amazon reviewers have noted, it's hardly an ironclad guarantee against reviewer fraud.
Real Names is as much about adding subtlety to Amazon's internal ranking system as it is about outing cheaters. In fact, there's something eerily recursive about the entire situation. Customers review Amazon's products. Customers also review other customers' reviews. Your "reputation" depends upon the reviews of your reviews, and your reviews get more weight with a "Real Name" badge, which prevents you from reviewing yourself. But in the discussion boards - which only true zealots see - reviewers often discuss reviews of their reviews. In the end, it's probably easier just to go to the library and browse.
____________________________________________________________________
That same day, I sent the following letter to the Times. As with all of my 100 or so letters to the Spin Cycle since 1997, the Times' censors, er, editors, consigned it to the "circular file."
To the Editor:
In “The Review of Reviews” (editorial, August 3), you write that amazon.com’s customer review system “is as much about adding subtlety to Amazon's internal ranking system as it is about outing cheaters.” But the biggest cheaters are some of amazon’s own employees, who for years have rigged the rankings.
In early 2000, I responded to an amazon solicitation (‘get free publicity through writing reviews’). Although an early review won me a $50 gift certificate, the process was fraught with mischief. While staffers claim that all reviews are posted in the order in which they are submitted, in fact, they immediately post their favorite reviewers’ work, and deal with reviewers they dislike by: 1. “Sitting” on reviews for weeks; 2. Never posting them; 3. Purging previously posted reviews and subtracting their votes, thereby dropping a highly ranked reviewer to the nether regions; and 4. Forcing a rising reviewer to start from scratch, by posting his new reviews to a separate customer page.
Sincerely,
Nicholas Stix
Thursday, May 27, 2004
A Different Drummer
Waking the Dead (2000)
by Nicholas Stix
Two-and-a-half stars
May 28, 2004
Waking the Dead is perfectly mediocre: 50 percent wonderful, and 50
percent dreadful. It tells of a man’s reaction to the mid-1970s political murder of the love of his life, a love whom he cannot bid farewell. Set during the early 1980s, we see flashbacks to his love affair, as in the present, while campaigning for political office, he either imagines that his lover’s ghost has come back from the dead to visit with him, her ghost really does visit him, or she never died. He almost goes mad.
"Sarah Williams" was a leftwing activist in the sanctuary movement, trying to protect Chilean refugees seeking asylum in America from South American dictator Augusto Pinochet. "Fielding Pierce" was an idealistic coast guard officer from a working class, union family. Fielding planned on entering politics, but was of a more liberal, reformist bent, in a sense no longer recognizable in an age in which “liberal” is a euphemism for socialist, or worse.
First, the bad news.
The movie should have been thirty minutes shorter; although it lists as only 105 minutes, it seems interminable. And in a picture with little action, and many quiet, talky scenes, the dialogue is mostly poor. Instead of cutting slow scenes, director Keith Gordon plays with the editing, with blink-like pauses within a scene. And the constant back-and-forth in time confuses some viewers (e.g., my wife). That screenwriter Robert Dillon was nominated for an “Independent Sprit Award” tells you all you need to know about that award.
Now, to the good news.
Jennifer Connelly and Billy Crudup are attractive as the lovers, have excellent chemistry, play likeable characters, and give vivid performances. You hurt for them. The cast includes some talented players whose faces (Stanley Anderson, as Fielding’s father, Broadway’s Janet McTeer as his sister, and Hal Holbrook as his political mentor) you might recognize, but who are not, or in Holbrook’s case, are no longer name “brands.” (Ed Harris is listed in the credits, but I must have blinked when he appeared.) And there are two scenes that jump out from the rest.
One is of a campaign stop during Pierce’s campaign for the House. It is filmed as if by a Madison Avenue ad director, with jump cuts to accentuate activity, and now in black and white, now in color.
The other scene is a flashback to the sanctuary church group. The lovers are eating with the smug, Marxist pastor, and a smug, forty-something, Chilean refugee couple. The self-righteous refugees are mercilessly attacking America, and Fielding for wanting to enter the “corrupt” world of American politics. The wife then announces, triumphantly, “Everything is politics,” blissfully unaware that she has just refuted her own argument. (If everything is corrupt, politics is then no worse than anything else, and there’s no reason NOT to go into politics.) Fielding laces into her:
Uh, I'm sorry, but do you believe that I'm going into politics so I can become a corrupt son of a b---h who sells electrodes to the Chilean secret police?... I am so sick of having to apologize for being an American.
Pastor: North American.
Fielding: Uh, God, I'm so sorry. Yes, North American. But I can't help noticing that when people run to freedom they tend to wash up on North American shores. This country is still the best that we've been able to do in the whole f-----g history of the planet.
Sarah: You’re arguing by yourself.
Fielding: I'm in this whole f-----g room by myself, and I'm choking on the collective sense of superiority.
That scene had perfect pitch. I have heard “educated,” foreign “aristocrats” say the same thing, practically word for word, and the anti-Americanism of the American pastor, who refuses to grant the very existence of the country which rescues the refugees he champions, has since been institutionalized. (Every time someone refers to America as “North America,” he is insulting America in the most pathetically petty way he can.)
Waking the Dead is based on a novel by Scott Spencer (Endless Love), who specializes in obsessive love. Initially, I assumed that the story was influenced by Ghost (1990) and To Jillian on Her 37th Birthday (1996), but then discovered that Spencer’s novel was published in 1986. Director Keith Gordon had previously made one very good movie, A Midnight Clear (1992), and the near-masterpiece, Mother Night (1996). A Midnight Clear is about a momentary cease-fire, in the last days of World War II, between some isolated American and German troops. It is a poignant, tragic, flawed movie that works better for those who, like Gordon, have a post-Vietnam sensibility. Mother Night is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s 1966 masterpiece (no, not Slaughterhouse-Five), in which American-born playwright "Howard Campbell" (Nick Nolte), who lives in Germany during the Nazi Era, is engaged by U.S. intelligence to become an apparent traitor. Campbell makes Ezra Pound-style radio broadcasts in support of Hitler, which are used to send coded messages to the Allies. Campbell’s cover is so deep, however, that even after the war, the Allies will never admit that he worked for them.
The underlying theme tying Mother Night to Waking the Dead, is that our sorry lives can only be redeemed by one great love, and even that redemption is bound to be crushed beneath the jackboots of totalitarian politics. Keith Gordon is, at heart, a German romantic.
If Waking the Dead is on TV, give it a try. It might also be worth a rental, as a date-at-home movie.
(I first submitted this on May 20. When it hadn't been posted by May 27, I submitted it, cut by a couple of words, again. Apparently, I've run into one of those Amazon staffers who does not dig my sensibility. For terms of comparison, note that submissions by most top-ranked Amazon reviewers (e.g., #1 Harriet Klausner) are posted the next day, and even I have occasionally experienced the thrill of seeing an Amazon staffer post a review only minutes after I'd submitted it. And so, when Amazon sits on a review for a week or more, it means some staffer is suppressing it.)
Thursday, April 08, 2004
A Personal Odyssey
by Thomas Sowell
N.Y.: Free Press, 2000.
320 pp.
$25.00/hardcover; $15.00/paperback.
by Nicholas Stix
3 stars
(I submitted this review, cut down from the original 1,450-word version that has been perused by tens of thousands of readers at A Different Drummer, Toogood Reports, and various education Web sites, to amazon on April 2. Almost immediately thereafter, when I punched in the work’s title to go to its web page, amazon would inform me that “your rating 3 stars,” even though my review had not been posted. Five days later, seeing that they still hadn’t posted it, I cut 16 words for length, and re-submitted the review. Amazon’s politburo chiefs still haven’t seen fit to post it.) Imagine you're a five-year-old Negro orphan without so much as a pot to pee in, growing up in segregated North Carolina in 1935. What can you hope to do when you grow up? Become a farm laborer? Join the Great Migration, to work in northern factories? Or how about, become America's most brilliant social scientist, aka Thomas Sowell?
Economist Thomas Sowell may have graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and have a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, but the most important "degree" he ever earned surely came from "UCLA" -- "the University at the Corner of Lenox Ave." -- as the old Harlem saying would have it.
Sowell has written on economic theory, race and ethnicity, education, political philosophy, cultural history, even late-talking children, in relatively simple and unpretentious prose. Readers of his curmudgeonly newspaper column know that he was born in the South, grew up in Harlem, dropped out of high school, and served in the United States Marine Corps. Here he fills out that picture. This book is a self-portrait of a man who since childhood has always gone his own way, and spoken his piece, petty tyrants be damned, even if that meant having to back up his words with his fists.
By the time Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina in 1930, his father, Henry, had died. His mother, "Willie," overwhelmed with four older children to feed on her salary as a domestic, turned to her aunt, Molly Sowell. Molly, already some sixty years old, and her husband (whose name we are never told), adopted the child, Buddy, whom they renamed Thomas Sowell, and raised as their own.
Under the pretext of visiting her aunt, Willie would frequently visit Buddy. But a few years later, she died in childbirth, and Sowell was not to know of his true siblings until he was an adult. As a child, he knew of his aunt and uncle only as "Mama" and "Daddy."
In North Carolina, young Thomas had so few dealings with white folks, that when he saw "yellow-haired" characters in a comic strip, he did not believe that such people existed. When he was nine, "Mama," by now separated from her husband, took him and her grown-up daughters, Ruth and "Birdie," north to Harlem. In New York, the youngster discovered that yellow-haired people really did exist.
Despite his humble beginnings, Sowell considers himself lucky: Lucky that he was spared the worst of southern racism and the destruction of New York City's public schools, and lucky that he was able to establish himself professionally prior to the age of affirmative action, which has since cast a cloud over all blacks' achievements.
Not that Sowell romanticizes his school days. For though he depicts his teachers in New York City as vastly superior to their semi-literate successors, he indicts them as having been consumed with wielding power over, and inflicting their personal prejudices on children. In young Sowell, who depicts himself as having been an incorrigible smart-ass, more than a few met their match.
Unfortunately, it was not only in institutional settings that Sowell clashed with those who would abuse authority.
As she grew older, "Mama" increasingly became "Mama Dearest," lying and bullying, and even manipulating the police and courts, in seeking to force the teenager to submit to her, and give up any hopes he had of making something of himself. The conflict resulted in Sowell's dropping out of New York's elite, Stuyvesant High School.
Leaving home at the tender age of 17, Sowell subsisted on low-paying, dangerous, unreliable jobs as a messenger and in machine shops. Eventually, he earned his high school equivalency diploma, and after military service attended night school at black Howard University in Washington, D.C., a dismal experience, before being accepted by Harvard.
Sowell shows that already in the early 1970s, students (aided by opportunistic administrators) were telling professors what to do -- including what grades to give them. Such pathologies hastened his departure from academia. I can think of no more damning indictment of academia than that it can welcome with open arms the Andrew Hackers and Leonard Jeffrieses of the world, but has no room for Thomas Sowell.
Noting that he is not even registered to vote, Sowell mocks the notion of his being a Republican operative as a myth spun out of whole cloth by journalistic antagonists such as the recently deceased Carl Rowan. While he has little to say about politicians -- virtually none of it complimentary -- he fondly recalls the two brief encounters he had with President Ronald Reagan.
Sowell thought that Reagan had much to offer black Americans, but lamented that The Great Communicator was lost, when it came to connecting with them.
Sowell briefly makes it clear that he occasionally suffered from racial discrimination. He has three points to make about such matters. 1. Determine that a situation is actually characterized by racial discrimination, rather than some other reason. 2. It is often better to confront racism directly, whether verbally or through a punch in the nose, than through lawsuits and legislation. 3. Perhaps most important, whites who have been caught discriminating against qualified blacks, have tended to compound their misdeed, by then hiring unqualified blacks, based solely on the color of their skin.
Sowell's main shortcoming is in failing to portray his own intellectual development, from his youthful Marxism, to becoming Marx' most trenchant American critic. A secondary weakness is his botching of the rare chronicling of his adult personal life. At one point, Sowell mentions the entry of a new woman into his life, but the next time he mentions a name, it is of a different woman entirely, without explaining what happened to the previous one.
As readable as this book is, Sowell is unable or unwilling to meet the standard he set with his earlier works.
In a world of hype, whole herds of writers may claim -- through their press agents -- to be iconoclasts. A Personal Odyssey shows what really goes into leading such a life, and the price it exacts -- a price few are willing to pay.
Originally published in A Different Drummer, January 3, 2001.
Saturday, July 19, 2003
Who'll Stop the Rain?
Making Ends Meet:
How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
by Kathryn Edin, Laura Lein
Russell Sage Foundation, March 1997
$22.00, ISBN: 087154234X
3 1/2 stars
During the early 1980s, social scientists noticed that welfare mothers were spending three to six times their official incomes. In his exquisitely written foreword, Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks argues persuasively that in a "conspiracy of silence," conservatives didn't want to admit that mothers could not survive on welfare checks alone, while "liberals" didn't want to admit that clients had unreported resources. Jencks and his colleagues asked where the additional money was coming from. Making Ends Meet provides some answers.
Aided by over thirty research associates, sociologist Kathryn Edin and anthropologist Laura Lein interviewed 379 single welfare AND poor working mothers in Chicago, Boston, San Antonio, Charleston and rural Minnesota. The authors compared the groups, with the purpose of undermining welfare reform.
Virtually all of the mothers studied derived income from their children's fathers, from boyfriends, relatives, off-the-books jobs (e.g., babysitting), selling stolen goods, prostitution or dealing drugs. Despite unreported income, uneducated, unskilled women working at "dead-end" jobs were barely treading water.
The authors report that single, working mothers have more cash, yet suffer greater hardships than their non-working counterparts. Working mothers must pay for additional transportation, and for services such as medical and child care that welfare mothers get free. Edin and Lein thus conclude that poor women are usually worse off working than being on welfare.
The authors tend to exaggerate the difficulty of finding affordable child care. Although a respondent told of getting babysitting services from a welfare mother for a bag or two of groceries per month, the authors speak of "market-rate" (read: exorbitant, state-licensed) child care. As NYU political scientist Lawrence Mead noted in The New Politics of Poverty (1992), as Jencks corroborates, and as I know from direct experience, poor working mothers are able to negotiate affordable, unlicensed child care without "service-providers" from inflationary, government programs. The supposed lack of child care is a rehearsed response that welfare mothers know to give to credulous, "Suzy the social worker" (a term a foster-care caseworker colleague taught me) types and socialist/radical multicultural academic researchers: "I really want to work, but ..."
Edin and Lein alternate between the role of "Suzies" and that of dogged interviewers. They re-interview respondents who initially gave unrealistic budgets, or ambiguous or misleading answers on whether they were receiving child support, or engaging in casual prostitution. The pervasiveness of casual prostitution matched my own observations in New York's slums; that of informal child support surprised me. However, when it comes to the mothers' rationalizations for not working, it's "Suzy time" again. The conflicted authors emphasize mothers' concern with avoiding criminal activity, despite chronicling their involvement in prostitution, and in contracting with shoplifters to steal clothing for their children.
Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and the Democrats' ensuing Northern Strategy's revolutionary anti-morality put dunce caps on millennia-old moral teachings prohibiting premarital sex. Armies of sexual "educators" and "helping" professionals and their university and media apologists told girls they had a right to "non-marital births," and demanded that hardworking, married folks support those children. Implicitly re-defining a family as an unwed mother and child(ren), the authors are shocked, shocked, that this results in a poor, unskilled girl raising her fatherless child(ren) in poverty.
(As liberal Democratic historian Fred Siegel (The Future Once Happened Here) has chronicled, the Marxist National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) sought to bankrupt New York City, and precipitate a revolution. From 1966-73, liberal Republican Mayor John V. Lindsay's social services commissioner, Mitchell "Come and Get It" Ginsberg, more than doubled the welfare rolls, from 538,000 to 1.165 million. At the same time, the NWRO pursued a politics of racial polarization, a politics it later attributed to Republicans. Instead of a revolution, the NWRO precipitated the moral collapse of urban black society.)
In seeing life in "some of the country's most dangerous neighborhoods" as driving concerned mothers onto the dole, rather than leave their children unsupervised while they work, the authors confuse cause and effect. It is the spread of illegitimacy and welfare, and their accompanying vices, that has made such areas so dangerous.
In Why Nothing Works (1987), "liberal" anthropologist Marvin Harris "explained" that welfare clients raised their sons to be violent, the better to protect the mothers (from other women's sons). Hence, to the degree that poor young blacks and Hispanics embrace crime, they do so not in response to (white) racism, or lack of opportunity, but to their rearing.
Millions of American couples avoid poverty through pooling modest paychecks, one spouse working extra hours, sharing responsibilities, relying on relatives for child care and limiting their wants. The authors have unwittingly made a compelling case for demolishing the welfare state and its "alternative" family models. The solution is marriage.
When I was a foster-care caseworker, one of my clients almost always missed agency visits to see her seven children. "I didn't want to leave the house, 'cause it was rainin,'" gradually became "It looked like it MIGHT rain." Edin and Lein deny the morality of work and responsible living, yet portray welfare clients as always a government program away from employability. But government will never be able to stop the rain, just as it will never be able to guarantee uneducated, unskilled women "good jobs."
I doubt that Making Ends Meet will cause an uncommitted reader to suddenly empathize with welfare clients. In a New York Times puff piece, Edin inadvertently clarified the book's (for me) peculiar sensibility. Reporter Jason DeParle related that while Edin, who is white, found black children beautiful, "white children at times began to look 'homely'" to her. Rather than caring about ALL poor kids, Kathryn Edin apparently feels a blind loyalty to poor black women and their children, and a corresponding obligation to be repelled by children of her own race. How sad.
Originally published in the February, 1998 Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
If you go to my Amazon About You Area, you'll see two instances of this review. But if you hit the links to the book, Making Ends Meet, you will not find the review. Thus has an Amazon employee hidden my review, so that other customers will not be able to read or vote on it. (Note too, that as one's rank is determined based on the ratio of reviews to votes, having reviews that no one votes on, will cause one's ranking to fall.) Upon seeing this once, I resubmitted the review, and Amazon (presumably a different employee) posted both reviews first on the book's page. But then they were hidden yet again.
I originally sent this review to Amazon on September 27, 2000, and it was posted some time in early October of that year. At the time, I would have to send in reviews as many as six times, including sending them to the office of CEO Jeff Bezos, before they would be posted. An Amazon politburo employee clearly didn't like what I was saying. In spite of the sandbagging, I had risen to #4469 in the rankings, based on customer's votes. When I wrote letters of complaint to Amazon, its flunkies insisted that all reviews were posted in the order in which they came. I actually went to the trouble of determining that Amazon's favorite reviewers, such as Harriet Klausner (#1), would send dozens of reviews in at the same time, all of which would often be posted the next day. Obviously, this would cause the house favorites to get many more votes than someone who had to spend up to two months sending and re-sending the same, bloody review.
(Note that some Amazon employees liked my reviews. One of my earliest Amazon reviews, of Ruth and Neil Cowan's Our Parents' Lives, won a prize and a $50 gift certificate.)
My letters grew more sarcastic, and Amazon's response more aggressive. In late October, 2000, an employee moved most of my reviews, including the one above, to a "private section," where only Amazon employees and I could read them. In late November, the "private" reviews were all purged, their votes subtracted, and my ranking sent into Amazon oblivion.
A handful of my 2000 reviews are inexplicably still available at Amazon: My old "About You" Area. Note, however, that an Amazon staffer illegally deleted my note at the end of my review of Ted Pappas' book, Plagiarism and the Culture Wars, acknowledging that it had originally been published in The American Enterprise, which owns the copyright.
Note that racist, black reviewers operate with impunity, even when they fill their "reviews" with lies, as a New Jersey reviewer has done in a series of posts in which he lies about the O.J. Simpson case, in order to make Simpson appear innocent of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
Why do I bother sending reviews to a clearly corrupt organization? The short answert is, I'm clearly nuts.
The longer answer is, Amazon asked me to. "Me" means that the firm solicited customer reviews, with the come-on that it could help make obscure writers famous. And what writer was more obscure than yours truly? Hence, any ideas I had about reviewing came from Amazon, not my own fevered imagination.
After Amazon started moving and purging my reviews, I stopped sending in reviews, except for an experiment I performed, writing a brief, lame review of So I Married an Axe Murderer. It was posted without any problems. So, I was permitted to write short, puff pieces, but forbidden from writing any serious pieces that might actually have some value.
This past spring, I broke my rule against doing business with Amazon, in using them to buy a very cheap, used book from a third party, a la half.com.
Since I'd forgotten my password, I had to get a new one. That gave me the notion of sending in reviews again. The first few were posted without problem, but then Amazon's staffers were up to their old tricks again. I guess I'll be getting purged again, any day now.
A "reasonable" person would say, 'Forget about it; move on.' Aside from the fact that "reasonable" people don't touch the topics I routinely tackle, when you've been censored as many times as I have, by socialists and Republicans alike, "moving on" is not an option. You'd end up without anyone ever reading your work. And so, if I'm going to be a "nut," anyway, I might as well get some publicity for myself, and embarrass Amazon and Jeff Bezos, in the bargain. If Bezos is going to let his employees censor reviewers who don't toe the pc line politically, then let him say so officially, and end his little charade.
