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Sometime during the summer of 2023, I posted a review of Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy on Amazon. I take words seriously, even the words that constitute Amazon reviews. Language can convey truth; language can empower lies. The difference between truth and lies is the difference between life and death. In my faith, Satan is the father of lies. God is the logos, the Word; God is truth and the truth sets us free.
Elliot Page’s Pageboy is a poorly written book. I said so in my review. I said this because bad writing matters. “Writing clearly is thinking clearly.” Writing poorly underwrites destructive behavior. Identifying bad writing is a worthwhile use of time.
I’m thinking of a novelist who earned his PhD writing about theater. This short, physically handicapped novelist didn’t deal in bullets or fisticuffs, but he was Hitler’s right-hand. Without Joseph Goebbels’ speeches, movies, school curricula, and book burnings, Nazism would have found it more difficult to achieve its diabolical ends. On the other end of the ethical spectrum, we have the words of the Ten Commandments; we have the Beatitudes; we have crusading novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe who helped end slavery. Yes, words and how we use them matter a great deal.
In my review of Pageboy, mindful of current speech codes, I did not refer to Elliot Page as “she.” Rather, I focused on, as I said in the review, “sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow, and coherence.” I received a cheerfully-worded email telling me that my review was up, thanking me for the review, and providing a link that allowed me to visit the review. I did so. I saw the review on Amazon.
A few days later I thought of the review again, clicked on the link Amazon provided, and saw an error message. “That page does not exist,” the message said, or words to that effect. I had received no notification from Amazon that the review would be removed. I received no explanation as to why it was removed. I received no warning telling me that if I posted another honest review of a poorly written book, I would be banished from Amazon forever. I received no instruction on how to write reviews that Amazon would not delete.
Perhaps a month after that, I again attempted to review a book on Amazon, Christian Cooper’s Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Again, I received a cheery notification from Amazon telling me that my review was posted. I clicked on the link Amazon sent and I saw the review. Again, a few days later, I clicked on that same link and got the same message. “This page does not exist.” Again, I received no notification, and no explanation.
I shrugged. I was resigned. I moved on with my life.
On September 7, 2023, weeks after the above events, my inbox was flooded with approximately one hundred emails from Amazon. The emails that I read before deleting them all said the same thing. “Thank you for reporting a fake review,” or words to that effect. This made no sense. I hadn’t been reporting fake reviews at Amazon. At the end of this avalanche of spam from Amazon came the final email. That final email informed me that all of my reviews, reviews going back almost thirty years, had been removed. I would never again be allowed to post reviews on Amazon, not for books or for anything else. If I bought a spatula that was a really good spatula, I could never say that on Amazon.
I was offered a link to click. I clicked on the link and was sent to the main Amazon page. There was I invited to click on another link. Computer expert friends warned me not to click on the link Amazon sent me. It was a scam link to malware. Someone at Amazon had used my account to generate a series of false reports of fake reviews, and then to ensnare me into clicking on a malware link.
I panicked. I called my bank and checked for suspicious activity. I changed all my passwords. I contacted my computer’s anti-virus provider and ran multiple scans. I contacted Amazon and chatted with one robotic, ill-informed, and powerless customer service representative after another. This activity took hours out of my work day.
An Amazon customer service representative named Lorraine investigated the source of the spam and the malware. This is a direct cut and paste from her chat in reply to me, “I can confirm that it came from Amazon.” So, yes. Someone at Amazon used Amazon’s mighty powers to spam, harass, and threaten to infect the computer of someone who broke some Amazon rule, a rule that was never articulated.
Amazon has my credit card numbers. Amazon has my address and phone number. If some unnamed troll at Amazon hated me so much because of two book reviews that that person would attempt to infect my computer with malware, that person could use my home address to wreak who knows what damage. Amazon knows my tastes. Someone had sent me an Amazon gift card that still had money on it, money that Amazon could now swallow. I purchased a computer from Amazon and I also purchased a warranty from Amazon and Amazon owes me computer repair, repairs I may never receive. Amazon sells my books and can make my books easier or harder or even impossible for customers to find. And, of course, Amazon is the storehouse of my reviews written over the course of almost thirty years.
Lorraine kept reassuring me. “Rest assured that your account is safe and secured.” Lorraine told me that I’d shortly be receiving more formal notification from Amazon certifying what she had told me, that is, “your account is safe and secured.” Subsequent customer service representatives similarly assured me. A costumer service representative named Shalom said “Please be assured” that your reviews are not lost.
What Lorraine, Shalom, and others promised did not occur. As a test, I tried to post a review. I received this message, written in red, no less. “We apologize” – I’ll bet they do; I love the fake humble tone – “but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon.”
On Saturday, September 16, I received an email from “Florencia” at Amazon. “We encourage customer content on the Amazon.com website, both positive and negative. However, your recent contribution on Pageboy: A Memoir and Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World did not comply with our Community Guidelines.” The rest of the email was the text of my reviews of Pageboy and Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. “Florencia” did not offer any explanation as to how my reviews of Pageboy and Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World did not comply with Amazon guidelines.
I’m guessing that I posted my first Amazon review over a quarter of a century ago, because I remember reviewing a book published back then. John Guzlowski had just self-published Language of Mules. The book was a hard sell, as are all self-published books, and all poetry books, and all books on tough topics. John wrote about his father’s years as a prisoner in Buchenwald, and about his mother’s having been a slave laborer for the Nazis. In writing and posting a positive Amazon review of Guzlowski’s book, I was helping jump start the career of a man who has gone on to be twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Amazon was a godsend for me. I have spent a lifetime trying to find books about my parents’ natal countries, Poland and Slovakia. There were no such books in the libraries I had access to as a child. Suddenly, an affordable copy of Jozef Mak, a novel about Slovak peasants like my mother, a rarity I’d never find in any book store anywhere near me, and certainly not at a price I could afford, was within reach.
I devoted much energy to reviewing worthy books, often by small publishers, about the Holocaust and World War II. These were books that lacked marketing campaigns and that might otherwise go unnoticed. These included reviews of:
* Wladyslaw Bartoszewski’s Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust documents Poles who rescued Jews;
* Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 describes survival tactics of Jews who survived Nazi occupation;
* The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery; Witold Pilecki was a Polish underground fighter who volunteered to be smuggled into Auschwitz to record atrocities and to attempt to lead a resistance;
* The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War a grim but necessary focus on how World War II played out in Poland;
* In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen recounts the unbelievable, but true tale of one Jew’s survival in wartime Poland;
* The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt: War Through a Woman’s Eyes: 1939-1940 a brutally graphic eye-witness history of Warsaw under Nazi occupation.
* Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust by Michael C. Steinlauf
* Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross.
I also strove to provide, in my Amazon reviews, a counter to New Atheism, reviewing books like The Moral Arc, by Michael Shermer, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. My review of The God Delusion was the most popular critical review. When Amazon still allowed comments under reviews, a lively debate ensued under my review. It was one of the most stimulating discussions of believers and non-believers I’ve yet seen.
I also occasionally reviewed books about Islam, including Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer. And A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan.
And every now and then I’d review a popular novel. It was a point of pride when my review of The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett became the most popular critical review of that book.
These reviews had been up for years, until suddenly, in September, 2023, I posted a review of Elliot Page, and Christian Cooper, and was, afterward, harassed, accused, and erased. These reviews are now all gone.
Amazon reviews have real-world impact. I met one of my most important friends on Amazon. She and I are both bookish women. She lives in Israel; I in the US. Her Jewish loved ones were murdered by Nazis. My Catholic loved ones were murdered by Nazis. Without my now erased-presence on Amazon, we two bookish women with roots in a common ancestral homeland would never have met.
Recently, I paid a lot of money for a necessary household item. The item was good, but it broke in an unexpected way. I contacted the seller and the seller implied that a positive Amazon review from me would increase the chances that they’d replace the item. I liked the item, was happy to provide a positive review, and received a replacement.
Robert Ellsberg, author of All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time used a quote from my Amazon review of his excellent book to market a new, revised edition. I have also used quotes from positive Amazon reviews to market my own books.
Amazon reviews matter so much that there is much discussion – does Amazon manipulate reviews? Amazon itself has fended off accusations. It has an “anti-manipulation policy.” Even the New York Times has commented on allegations of review manipulation at Amazon. By deleting negative reviews of protected books written by powerful, celebrity authors, Amazon gives the public a false image of those protected books. Amazon creates a false image of books and authors it does not protect. Several books and chapters within books by me appear on Amazon. Amazon protects none of my works – nor do I want it to. Reviewers have called me crazy and much worse, and called my writing “nauseating.” Amazon did not delete any of these attacks on an author who is not a celebrity marketing a Woke brand of identity politics. In manipulating reviews, Amazon is not just protecting some authors and some books. Amazon is protecting some ideas. Amazon is an ideological player, dictating right and wrong, creating an elite and a class of outcasts.
I lived, for a time, in the Soviet Empire. My mother kept up a regular correspondence with her family in what was then Czechoslovakia. We knew that totalitarianism limited what we could say to our loved ones, and how our loved ones could respond. Artist Rafal Olbinski created a powerful poster for the 1981 film Man of Iron. It shows a blue-collar man’s head encased in a hardware nut. The steel nut encircles the man’s eyes and ears so he cannot see, hear, or speak. You can see the poster here.
I always felt, when interacting with my friends and family in Eastern Europe, the noblesse oblige of a wealthy woman interacting with the impoverished. I was an American. That word – American – seemed as if it should be written in neon, in all caps, in letters that flashed red, white, and blue, and played “Stars and Stripes Forever” performed by John Philip Sousa himself. Unlike that Polish worker in Olbinski’s poster, I could see. I could hear. I could speak. I could write. My loved ones, living under Soviet Communism, could not.
I posted about the Amazon canceling on Facebook. A Polish friend said he couldn’t believe it. He knows I’m an honest person and would not make this up. He just couldn’t believe it. Another Polish friend said, “I’m so glad I’m not an American.” He believes he has greater freedom of speech in Poland than I have in the US.
Yes, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites are private entities and they can dictate whatever terms they want. But there’s more to the story than that simplistic analysis. Activists often sneer at any mention of the harassment and threats that JK Rowling has endured ever since she posted that women should not be fired for saying that “sex is real.” Some sniff that Rowling has Midas money and can hire all the security she needs. That’s true, but it misses the point. Most people are not JK Rowling. Most people observe the vitriol and death threats inundating JK Rowling and say to themselves, “I can’t afford to risk that. I’d never find another job. My kids’ safety is paramount. I need to keep my mouth shut.” Just so, when Amazon makes a decision about what can and cannot be said, it has far-reaching consequences.
Many people have sent me private messages on social media. “I agree with you. I can’t say so publicly. I can’t risk it.” My leftist, Atheist, and Christophobic social media contacts love to cite my church, the Catholic Church, as the epitome of the suppression of free speech and freedom of conscience. I ask them, are you aware of those who have had to go into hiding, who have lost jobs, who have lost access to their own children, because of something they said? It’s not conservatives squelching free speech. It is the Left.
Of course I support limits on free speech on social media. The kinds of speech that should be deleted include threats or fomenting of violence, child pornography, or stereotyping of the “all ___ are ___” variety. Of course Amazon violates these criteria. Amazon sells, for example, The Official Polish Joke Book, a genuinely disgusting compilation of hate speech. Amazon has a history of selling Nazi memorabilia and anti-Semitic material. Amazon sells a notorious book that includes bomb-making instructions.
I do not post porn, violence, threats, or racism. But according to social media’s speech censors, I do. I was once severely punished on Facebook for, allegedly, posting a violent threat and hate speech. What was the violent threat and hate speech? It was a photograph of Lee Rigby in his full dress uniform, cradling his toddler son in the crook of his left arm. I posted that photo with no accompanying text. It was 2013, and Lee Rigby had just been murdered by jihadis on a London street in broad daylight. For posting that photo, I was sent to Facebook jail for a week. My account was put under a watch and I was warned that any further hate speech or incitement to violence would result in a permanent ban. I was told that my posts would appear further down in feeds; this is part of “shadow banning,” where social media uses its ability to highlight or bury posts to make them more or less visible. Ten years later, when Facebook doesn’t like something I post – and this is always because Facebook’s robots have misunderstood my post – I am reminded that I have a history of hate speech and violence and could lose my account at any time.
No, we Americans are not living under what my friends and relatives lived under in Soviet times. We are not, like a priest in my mother’s natal village, being tortured by Communists past the breaking point. But what does it do to a society, long term, when the hammer comes down, not in a Soviet style blow to the head, but in drip after drip of acid rain? A teacher uses an unapproved pronoun, and is fired. A cop “likes” a joke on Facebook, and is fired. A baker refuses a commission to design a cake for two entitled men and spends the rest of his life in court. An Amazon review disappears with no explanation. What do we become when we try, in our daily lives, to step over this minefield of small, non-lethal explosions; when we try to avoid entanglement in this invisible and incomprehensible spider web of ever changing denunciations manipulated by the Left? We become afraid, like those otherwise stalwart friends who can only speak their minds to me if they know that no one else will hear, and only after I have promised them that I will forget ever having heard them, and never to mention their words again.
I just took a break from writing this essay to check my email inbox. A friend just wrote to tell me that he just finished a book on early Soviet Russia – and he he is now afraid to review it on Amazon.
And what does it say about the mindset of whoever it was who carried out the campaign against me? The spamming of my email inbox, which was confirmed by Amazon to be from them. Sending me a link that would damage my computer, again, confirmed by Amazon to be from them. The erasure of all of my reviews going back decades, with no explanation, no recourse. Whoever did this is no Stalin, but this person is surely a totalitarian. What does it say about America that people who cannot debate, but who can only destroy, wield any power at all? What is this anonymous and unreachable Amazon saboteur like as a spouse, as a citizen, as a friend? When corporations train their employees to be little Robespierres, they undermine society.
One of the thrusts of Tom Holland’s excellent book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is that Catholicism offered humanity a mechanism for addressing an inescapable human problem. Humans screw up. There has to be an avenue from “human screwing up” to “human can function again.” Christianity offered sin, repentance, confession, penance, forgiveness, and reintegration. Christianity offered a narrative that lubricated the ritual. In Genesis, we are all made in the image and likeness of God. In the New Testament, Jesus, dying on the cross, prayed for the forgiveness of his tormentors. Holland is an atheist but he and other atheists bemoan, or perhaps fear, what will become of a culture that has rejected the Christian concept of forgiveness and all it offered the individual and society. The Left’s rejection of rehabilitation is evident in many more forms than Amazon reviews.
Amazon’s decision not to make explicit why it removed my reviews reflects similar policies on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. If you actually tell users why their content was removed, users can understand the playing field, and gain power and confidence thereby. “Okay,” one might think. “If they don’t want me to use the pronoun ‘she’ to refer to Elliot Page, then I won’t use that pronoun, and I’ll be in the clear.” In my review of Pageboy, I struggled to adhere to the rules; I did not refer to Page as “she.” That was apparently not enough. What did I do? I have no idea. I have asked Amazon over and over to tell me what rule I broke. All the customer service representatives do in reply is send me the link to the guidelines, with no indication of which guideline I broke.
The refusal to spell out any rules is a totalitarian move depicted in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. That black box approach is a petty form of terrorism. This morning Katherine, a social media contact, suggested that perhaps I had said something racist. That’s why they had to remove your review. You said something racist. If I had, Amazon could have highlighted the racist statement and said, “See? This here is where you violated our guidelines.” But there is no such clarity. In the murkiness of vague allegations, the accused cannot absolve herself. You can’t redeem yourself of innuendo, of an unnamed, but only implied, crime.
There’s another reason Amazon might be avoiding naming exactly what it deems unacceptable. Amazon, in its profitable marketing of racist, Nazi, violent, and anti-Semitic material, would violate its own rules.
Social media contact Otto Gross, himself a “tech guy,” sent a protest post to Amazon. Gross wrote, “If you want to solve the problem of unintended violations, since you’re a tech company, write an AI that points out words that violate policy and underline the offensive material before someone can post a review. Put the review in, hit check, and if it passes the post button un-greys. Underline words or paragraphs that are problematic. It’s frustrating to put the effort in only to be met with silent bureaucracy.” Of course Amazon will not do this. To have to say, publicly, “This is racist; this is not,” would put Amazon in a position of needing to defend its policies. That would be risky. We mere mortals take on risk. A money-spinning behemoth will not risk one dollar of profit to defend what it purports to believe.
Did I save my reviews? Most of the reviews Amazon deleted are forever lost. Even if I could post them someplace else, they would never be seen by the audience that Amazon delivers.
I did save a copy of my review of Wladyslaw Bartoszewski’s Samaritans. That review is directly below. Because Amazon removed this review by me, this priceless classic now has no Amazon reviews. Amazon sent me a copy of my review of Pageboy. That review is below the review of Samaritans.
***
Samaritans, my review erased by Amazon.
THRILLING. MOVING. PROFOUND. ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS YOU WILL EVER READ
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski’s and Zofia Lewin’s “The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust” is one of the most thrilling, moving, and profound books you will ever read. It is one of the top ten books I’ve read in my entire life. I hope never to forget the lessons it teaches.
In a sense, the stories “Samaritans” contains are simple; their details are the details of concrete choices made in face-to-face human encounters. No one here commands a battleship, great armies, or the attention of the masses. Average people, very much like you and me — children, blue collar laborers, office workers, a gang of drunks out on a spree — simply decide to exercise the limited powers they have to make a positive difference in one human life. In doing simple, common things, the real people in these pages display a heroism that is overwhelming in its purity.
On a dirt road, an imprisoned Jew begs Maria Kobierska, a small Polish Catholic girl, for water as, nearby, Nazis guard the transport . . . a Warsaw man must determine a way to dispose of the bodily waste of the many Jews he has hidden in the attic of his apartment building, unbeknownst to his fellow apartment dwellers . . . Dominican Mother Superior Anna Borkowska instructs Jewish resistance fighter and her “right hand,” Abba Kovner, in the use of the grenades she brings him . . . carriage maker Staszek Jackowski continually extends an underground bunker in which he eventually hides 32 Jews just two blocks away from Gestapo headquarters . . . secret agent Stefan Korbonski cannot understand why the BBC will not publish the war news he has been sending, at great risk, from occupied Poland . . . finally he is told . . . The Brits refuse to believe Korbonski’s report of the Nazi genocide of Jews.
“Samaritans” is an anthology of short accounts of Poles who saved Jews during World War Two. The accounts range from one to several pages. Some are told by the rescued; some by rescuers; a few are told by third parties.
Because they are first-person accounts, some written shortly after the war, some written during the war, reading them requires attention and patience. It’s as if you are reading the private diaries of dozens of separate people. You may be a paragraph or two into an account before you are fully oriented — before you know exactly what town you’re in, how old the main characters are, or even their gender. Be patient. These accounts, unmediated and unedited as they are, display raw power. These accounts convey an immediacy and an urgency that more carefully edited versions of the Holocaust do not.
It’s exactly because the stories involve average, obscure people in everyday settings in which you can imagine yourself that they have so much power. This book isn’t about Hitler or Eisenhower or Roosevelt. It’s about a drunk stumbling home across a short-cut, and stumbling onto an escaping family in need of help. The drunk could ignore the people he’s stumbled across; he could turn them in and make a tidy fortune for himself; or he could help them.
You can imagine yourself in these scenes. When was the last time you saw someone in need on the shoulder of a highway? Did you stop? Or did you just ignore the needy person, hoping someone else would take care of it? In short, these stories, about an epochal event in a country far away, are also about our everyday lives, and our everyday choices. Are we the kind that looks away and assumes that someone else will take care of it? Are we the kind that profits from someone else’s misfortune? Are we the kind that risks, and that helps? When we are offered the opportunity to be heroes, what do we do?
“Samaritans” is an invitation. It proclaims: the only thing separating a hero from you or me is simple human choice. Experts insist that we are all selfish Darwinian wind-up toys, that ideals are silly fantasy only a fool believes in, that focus on pleasuring the self is the only good. The selfless heroism of these Samaritans incinerates cynicism. Driven by faith — “Because I was a Catholic” — by political ideals — “as a Socialist” — by loyalty — “He was my friend” — by personal integrity — “I knew I could never live with myself otherwise” — these Samaritans risked torture and death. With people like this in the world, we have to acknowledge that there is such a thing as goodness, and that we can exercise it whenever we so choose.
No one featured in “Samaritans” was solely responsible for the salvation of an individual Jew or a group of Jews. As historians point out, it took only one traitor to betray a Jew to the Nazis, but it took several people, perhaps even an entire village, to protect one Jew. Again and again, Jews on the run encounter person after person who can’t take responsibility for their entire safety, but who can give shelter for the night, a new suit of clothes, counterfeit documents, or even just a glass of water.
As small as these gestures were, Poles were tortured and killed for them. Maria, the Polish girl who provided water to a thirsty Jew, was arrested and damaged for life. Other Poles featured here were beaten to death, put in concentration camps, and burned alive. Children as young as three were shot to death.
It is a sin and a crime that this book is so little known. While other, important books detail the crimes we committed during World War Two, a book that proves the reality of human goodness is out of print. By letting this book go out of print, we have let humanity down. Buy it, read it, stock libraries with it: the least we can do.
***
Pageboy My review
A MESS. DISHONEST. NARCISSISTIC. BORING. PUBLISHING THIS WAS ETHICALLY WRONG
The publishers should not have published this book. They exploited the ramblings of a distressed person in order to capitalize on celebrity and hot gossip. “Pageboy” rejects sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow, and coherence. It reads like the diary of a troubled teenage girl who is not doing well in English class. The poor writing is reflective of deeper problems. “Writing clearly is thinking clearly.” The author of this book is not thinking clearly. This book doesn’t come anywhere close to making a coherent case for surgery or lifelong drug dependency. Much of the book consists of hyperbolic accounts of crushes followed by sex. There is sex in a school bathroom, after a pick-up in a bar, with a woman involved with a man she loves and has no intention of leaving. These accounts begin more or less like this. “This person was so amazing. I was amazed. I was hypnotized. It was all so wonderful.” This is a paraphrase, not a direct quote. These accounts end with the author feeling sad. There are also brief sketches of films. There are a few paragraphs dedicated to a wispy sensation that ends with a double mastectomy. Again, this is not a coherent passage. The author is not thinking or communicating clearly. The book includes a gratuitous account that humiliates the author’s father for no discernible reason. Everything relates to the author’s narrow vision, which is focused mainly on the self. The author backpacks through Eastern Europe and appears to see or learn or be moved by nothing. It’s all me, me, me. It’s rather astounding that anyone could backpack through the part of the world that includes Auschwitz, a monument to the nadir of human evil, and Prague, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and see, and hear, and be moved by, and learn, absolutely nothing. This book struck this reader as profoundly dishonest, lacking insight, and doing a disservice to society. I did pity the author, who, as a tiny, vulnerable young person with a dysfunctional relationship to parents, was thrust into international stardom, without the interior scaffolding necessary to traverse that terrain safely. But the author is saying and doing things that are not helping the self, or the wider society, and the author lost my sympathy for that reason.
***
I attempted to contact Amazon repeatedly to ask if they’d like to offer a comment on this article. I received only robotic replies that suggested that I might not be talking to a human being, or, in any case, a human being with any cognition or volition.
If you’d like to voice an opinion to Amazon about their behavior, you can click on the “help” icon on the Amazon homepage or try this email address: community-help@amazon.com.
Various Amazon employees with whom I have chatted over the past ten days have promised me that my reviews will reappear. The email I received contradicted that positive message. Amazon’s stance could change at any time.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
YouTube manipulates comments too, if they don’t like the political views of the video, the comments appear to be posted, but do not actually get posted, if you log out of Goolag and look at the same comment it disappears.
Boycott Amazon is my advice, lots of companies sell their products on amazon, but if you look at the name of the suppliers, find their own website and buy direct you get lower prices and better service almost always. You will also discover that lots of the sellers are Chinese companies lying about their origins, they will use a local name but be from China.
Side note: I’ve shopped at small retailers trying to “spread the wealth” and not always use Amazon. At this point, with the amount of cybercrime happening, the more online retailers you patronize, the more your information is exposed. The layers involved in online retail buying is more than most people know. It was definitely more than I knew.
You’re not just dealing with the online retailer but also any retail shopping platform [like Shopify] they partner with as well as your bank and the retailer’s bank. All are targets of cybercriminals that may steal customer data and hold it for ransom, sell it on the dark web. or use it to commit identity fraud.
What’s the solution? I don’t know. It’s the Wild West online. Even cybersecurity experts who sell their services to protect their clients have been penetrated by hackers. Think Kroll, who was hacked earlier this year. I’ve tried tech solutions like a VPN and anti-malware. In the end, I think identity theft insurance is the only real protection.
For a published author, who hopefully will publish more in the future (collected essays?), boycotting Amazon does not seem realistic.
That I understand, but if your book says something political they don’t agree with, then what?
What a genuinely scary story and very salutary warning about posting reviews on what is the one of the largest retailers in the world.
This is a very scary story because, no disrespect intended, the author isn’t more famous or well know.
I was banned TWICE from Pamela Geller’s website for promoting Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism by a moderator who called himself “Esteban”. And Pamela Geller is a big fan of Ayn Rand, she quotes her in her articles and website quite often. Her website began as a blog she named “Atlas Shrugs”.
What reason did “Esteban” offer me for the bans? Because, he said, I was provoking the wrath of two Christian conservatives who went by the monikers “Felix 199” and “Intrepid”. I was trolling, I was making the Christians angry with atheist Ayn Rand and atheistic Objectivism.
I’m no longer banned at the Geller Report, but this “Intrepid” creep has followed me here to FPM and keeps incessantly attacking me and encouraging all the other Christians to do the same in the hopes of getting me banned here. The thing is NOT ONCE, not once, has this “Intrepid” tried to intellectually, philosophically refute
a single idea of Rand’s. It’s all insults, smears, misrepresentations.
And I’ve been banned or shadow banned on other conservative websites and Facebook and shadow banned at newspaper websites for the same reason.
People of all religions and philosophies get angry when you don’t agree with them.
“We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F703f23b4-fb8b-47c0-a79d-1cb2f94a8be6_596x398.png
The answer to your predicament – do not respond to anyone disputing your comments. You’ve made your opinions known, now move on.
Esteban sounds like an extremely intelligent fellow.
I didn’t follow you here. I found you here. And I am under no obligation to refute Rand’s crackpot ideas. This isn’t a university that practices The Marquess of Queensberry Rules.
Can’t take it? Leave. You seem to get unhinged when no one agrees with you. Your whole act is trolling us with your wallpaper spam posts.
As long as you persist in revising history to suit your narrative, and crapping on Judeo-Christianity because Ayn Rand is your God, I will persist in crapping all over you and your warped nonsense. You are no better or smarter than the tenure-less Nikole Hannah-Jones who authored the discredited 1619 Project.
Dear THX. No follower of Christ will attack you, even if we disagree with you. Surely the Golden Rule tells us to treat everyone with the kindness and respect we would want for ourselves?
I am no fan of Ayn Rand by the way, but to be fair pretty much all I know about her is the book written by Barbara Branden, one of her acolytes. The book left me with the feeling that Ayn Rand led some depressingly Stalinist-style cult. I did try to read Atlas Shrugged (for balance), but didn’t find it inspiring, or even that interesting. I truly do not believe you will find a better guide anywhere than God’s inspired word. It has one consistent message from Genesis to Revelation – a wonderful one – and truly is a light shining in a very dark place. But I was nearly forty before I found out what it actually says, as opposed to what we are told it says.
For example, I believe this is an Ayn Rand quote: “The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and to die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
If so I agree with her. The Bible tells us that our Creator is offering each one of us back the life and happiness that our first parents to tragically lost. It says there is more happiness ahead for us right here on the earth than we can now imagine. And maybe one day Ayn Rand will be one of the many who are awoken from the dreamless sleep of death to find themselves in the restored earthly paradise. Who know? Only the Creator, the God of Abraham.
“Dear THX. No follower of Christ will attack you, even if we disagree with you. Surely the Golden Rule tells us to treat everyone with the kindness and respect we would want for ourselves?”
Tell that to the Lutheran “Intrepid”. Maybe the Lutherans have a different interpretation of Christianity than you do Sue? Or maybe “Intrepid” is just one nasty individual. Today in modern Christianity there are different interpretations of Christianity Sue, Quakerism is different from Lutheranism. And each individual Quaker or Lutheran, I’m sure, has their own personal interpretation of how to be a Quaker or a Lutheran.
I’ve met plenty of nasty, mean, angry, intolerant, Christians. And I’ve met plenty of kind, nice, gentle, Christians. Every Christian is an individual and I treat them as individuals according to their individual character, personality, and disposition. Don’t lump all Christians into the same nice, sweet, tolerant, and noble category Sue, that’s prejudiced stereotyping. Each Christian is an individual.
Most Lutherans in Hitler’s Germany were staunch supporters of Hitler and there was a smaller number who opposed him. Different interpretations not only of Lutheranism and Christianity but of what it means to be an OBJECTIVELY decent human being regardless of religion, ideology, or philosophy.
Objectivists are the same way, some are nice, some are a-holes, some are both at different times.
The crucial issue in any situation, at any given time and place, at every moment, in any person, is reason versus unreason. Rationality versus irrationality. And reason is a choice at every single moment and every step of the way.
I don’t follow Ayn Rand the person, the personality, I follow her ideas and advice of being loyal to the facts of reality and reason. If there was a cultish atmosphere around her in the 1960s, and by that time she became a nasty bitch, and the Brandens CHOSE to stay loyal to her, there were also many others who walked away from her bullshit. But those who walked away did not throw out the baby with the Randian bathwater. Rand taught them to have an abiding respect for their own reasoning minds and to follow, not Ayn Rand, but reason and reality.
Thants THX A comment I have made below does address the point you raise here in a way. The comment is awaiting moderation though. Actually, are there many different interpretations of Christianity, or does the Bible have one consistent message, from Genesis to Revelation?
Dear Sue, the crucial and dangerous issue contained in religion, in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc., is not the content of any specific scripture, but faith versus reason. Supernatural claims that are beyond reason to understand versus the facts of reality established by reason.
Christianity by its philosophical fundamentals is WEAPONIZED for theocracy, just like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism.
Modern Christianity is a diluted version of Christianity. Modern Christianity has been leashed and tamed by the ascendancy of reason over faith. The overwhelming majority of Christians today in America, on most issues, most of the time, when confronted by a clash between Holy Scripture and the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason, will choose to follow reality and the conclusions of reason over Holy Scripture. They will ignore the full context of Holy Scripture (Cafeteria Christianity) or more often than not interpret Holy Scripture in a way that at least is neutral or in a truce with reason and the facts of reality.
But what happens when faith has ascendancy over reason? When reason is considered inferior to faith? When reason becomes the mere handmaiden of faith? As it was during the Middle Ages? Then what inevitably happens is that when the conclusions of reason contradict the claims of faith reason will be rejected and silenced. Any dissension from orthodoxy will be punished and persecuted as heresy and blasphemy.
Notice how the concepts of heresy and blasphemy hardly exist in modern Christianity? How almost no Christians take heresy or blasphemy seriously in the political sense of physical persecution? That’s because reason has ascendancy over faith. Reason is so implicitly respected by most Christians that they respect the right of other Christians to interpret Holy Scripture their own personal way.
No Christian theocracy is possible, for now, in America. If a Christian grows to disagree with the orthodoxy of his particular church he is free to find another or start his own church or join no church at all.
Dear THX I am having to reply here to your comment below and rather quickly. It deserves more than I can write at the moment. But I just want you to know that Christianity has a built in safeguard. Christians are to be “no part of the world” – they are to take no part in the political or military life of the nations. We can never force our views on anyone, we can only beg you to listen. I wish we could talk about this – but maybe you are quite relieved we can’t!
Po’ little THX. Looks like you have a severe case of “Lutheran Intrepid Derangement Syndrome.” Excellent.
From the way you consistently talk about Christianity and Christians I seriously doubt if you have ever met any Christians at all, nasty, mean, angry, or kind, nice, gentle, Christians. Your new found tolerance for Christians is as fraudulent as the rest of your persona. Trying to look balanced, all of a sudden, about Ayn Rand? Really? After years of mindless devotion to the worlds most angry woman.
And I see you are still spreading the revised history lie about Lutherans during the 1930s and 40s in Germany.
You could always try responding to me directly instead of using me as a stalking horse. In case you haven’t noticed, no one cares what I think or write about you.
But I guess that is how cowards roll, isn’t it.
Postscript.
From what I’ve read the wrath of Ayn Rand in her later years was volcanic and monumental for any of her followers who disagreed with her, and I find that supremely reprehensible.
There were many excommunications and banishments. She had a wrathful personality at the end. As so many do. But the problem was her not the ideas of her philosophy.
Communists say the same thing about their brutal failed leaders after the fact. The philosophy is validated, but the supreme leader was flawed.
And the first Christians were certain that their great leader would be coming back for them within their lifetimes, he never did, did he? It is now 2,000 years and still no Second Coming, no Armageddon, no Apocalypse.
I would call that, the failure of a leader on an epic scale, and the true believers are still believing in that failed leader even after 2,000 years.
Christianity prepared the ground for Marxism, Marxism being just another form of magical thinking mysticism pretending to be secular science.
And I would call you an arrogant, spoiled little brat who is starting to realize that his message can’t get out of starting gate. You are running out of time.
And tacking on the usual insulting Peikoff quote isn’t going to change a thing
Hello again THX. It is of course entirely up to you whether you accept the
Christian message or not. But please, please would you consider finding out what it actually is, as opposed to what we are told it is, before you make up your mind?
Only you say that “the first Christians were certain that their great leader would be coming back for them within their lifetime.” I have heard this before, and it was clearly an idea promulgated by some at the time, as it was an idea that Paul had to correct specifically, and his words have been preserved for us down to this day.
Speaking under inspiration, Paul wrote: “However, brothers, concerning the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you not to be quickly shaken from your reason nor to be alarmed either by an inspired statement a spoken message or by a letter appearing to be from us, to the effect that the day of Jehovah is here. Let no one lead you astray in any way, because it will not come unless the apostasy comes first and the man of lawlessness gets revealed, the son of destruction.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-3
So all these things had to happen before Jesus would return as the King of Jehovah’s Kingdom – the heavenly government – and put an end to the present wicked system of things on the earth. And don’t some of Jesus’ parables give us the same warning?
Her problem was she had no meaning in life as she grew old. She had no family and no faith. They are the primary source of meaning.
If there is no afterlife or no grandchild to love, what is there?
Question, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, do you hope you are right?
What would be the best way to answer your questions?
First, there are no guarantees in life, even Christian parents and Jewish parents can end up with ungrateful and awful children. There are Christian parents and Jewish parents that are awful people and awful parents that should never have had any children at all. There are many unhappy Christian and Jewish families. There are atheist parents who are wonderful, loving parents and have wonderful, loving children. Judeo-Christianity is no guarantee of a happy life, or a happy family, and neither is Objectivism. To reiterate, there are no guarantees in life.
Objectivism is not a dogma, there is no claim in Objectivism to omniscience of infallibility. If there is an after-life, Objectivism does not concern itself with it, because there is no solid evidence for it. Objectivism is a philosophy for living on earth in this reality, a philosophy that uses the evidence of the senses to reason about the actual facts of reality we see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Objectivism concerns itself with the issue of what kind of creature is man and what is his relation to existence? Since man is here on earth as a biological, fragile, mortal, rational animal, how can he survive and flourish here on earth as he is? How can he achieve happiness and prosperity here on earth as he is?
Let me put it to you this way, let us for the sake of argument say that there is absolutely an after-life and it has been proven without a doubt. It still would not change, BECAUSE IT HAS NEVER CHANGED, the requirements for man’s survival, prosperity, abundance, peace, happiness, and flourishing here on earth.
If and when we die our consciousness survives, leaves the body, and enters another dimension, then I say wonderful, beautiful, glorious! But we still have to live this life, her and now, I don’t want to starve to death, I don’t want anybody to starve to death. Heaven can wait. The question is how do we achieve happiness, flourishing, peace, and prosperity here on earth? Objectivism offers the answer for living on earth.
‘Objectivism offers the answer for living on earth.’
Gee thanks God. Here’s an idea. How about your live your pathetic life the way you want and leave the rest of us alone.
If you want to call it consciousness, fine. The rest of us call it the ‘soul’ Unfortunately for you Objectivism offers no avenue for an afterlife, especially with the way you live and treat others. Your philosophy does not offer an avenue to “happiness, flourishing, peace, and prosperity.” If it did heaven would be filled with malcontents like you, and it would resemble hell.
Christianity offers up an avenue to eternal happiness, and we don’t have to worry about running into losers like you………ever.
The question needed a yes or no answer, and you haven’t answered.
Do you hope that you are right, yes or no?
I gave you the answer. Objectivism is not a dogma but a philosophy dedicated to the discovery of reality by using reason, logic, and the evidence of the senses. If an after-life exists and is proven to exist by reason and logic then Objectivism would have to be very much revised to incorporate and integrate that reality.
Is your Christian after-life a reality? Then prove it. Is the Resurrection a reality? Then prove it. Is the Parting of the Red Sea a reality? Then prove it.
“In accordance with the principles of America and of capitalism, I recognize your right to hold any beliefs you choose — and, on the same grounds, you have to recognize my right to hold any convictions I choose. I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion — I am fighting for reason. When faith and reason clash, it is up to the religious people to decide how they choose to reconcile the conflict. As far as I am concerned, I have no terms of communication and no means to deal with people, except through reason.” – Ayn Rand
“The ‘Ayn Rand vs. Jesus Christ’ Campaign” – Harry Binswanger
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/07/the_ayn_rand_vs_jesus_christ_campaign.html
Your response kinda proves that you’re not really genuine, you don’t want to debate you only want to push your dogma.
To Mo de Profit,
What is a dogma?
“A dogma is a set of beliefs accepted on faith; that is, without rational justification or against rational evidence. A dogma is a matter of blind faith.” – Ayn Rand
The supernatural claims of Christianity and Islam are dogmas. What is there to debate about Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden, Virgin Birth, the Parting of the Red Sea, the Resurrection, or 72 Virgins In Paradise?
Those claims have to be taken on faith. There’s nothing to debate, You either believe them on faith or you don’t.
Must be tough having to get up everyday and spout the same dogmatic nonsense and get zero support from anyone.
Objectivism is most certainly a collection of dogma (or is it really doggerel?) in that you repeat the same Objectivist rules for living every day, as if they are subscribed in some form of sacred text. And woe unto those who do not subscribe.
Here is some “dogma” fer ya. No one has to prove anything to you regarding tenets of faith. Jews and Christians take things on faith. That’s why it is called faith and belief. And that is what makes up a religion.
If we didn’t have Christianity think of all the works of art (music, art literature) that would never have come into being. Objectivism is as dry and lifeless as Communism. Think of all the black and white pictures of post war Berlin. That is your world. People want nothing to do with it.
It is no wonder you reject 99% of western art. You reject the “beautiful” in life. You are pretty much dead inside.
“The supernatural claims of Christianity and Islam are dogmas. What is there to debate about Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden, Virgin Birth, the Parting of the Red Sea, the Resurrection, or 72 Virgins In Paradise?
Those claims have to be taken on faith. There’s nothing to debate, You either believe them on faith or you don’t.”
Ah yes, your list of biblical horribles once again.
Great, so you don’t believe them. No one cares if you do or don’t.
Here’s a novel idea. Drop your dead-end annoying messiah complex. Stop trying to change the world. Stop trying to save us. Live and let live. We don’t need/want your help. You aren’t a teacher. We don’t care what you think.
At some point in your life, you will be a second rate Ayn Rand asking no one but the shadows on your wall, “what was it all for?”
You seem to be picking up where the wrathful Randian left off The difference is she had the discipline to write long boring books while cheating on her husband. Your job seems to be doing copy/paste jobs on comment boards.
Oh yeah….she still won’t date you.
You cant fight city hall, writ large.
Shall we “ build our own ‘amazon’ for reviews?” Some are trying on various platforms. Or just go low-tech? IDK.
Yesterday, a friend sent me a letter in the paper mail. What a thrill.
We have a reflex to say these are private companies, and they can do what they want. I don’t believe that is true. We enter into contracts with companies with whom we do business. If a manufacturer sells me a defective product, I have legal recourse. Amazon offers product reviews as an integral part of its service. I buy from them based on the trust that reviews accurately reflect user experience. If Amazon manipulates the reviews, whether that is to increase sales or push an agenda, it engages in false advertising. Without explaining why it removed a review, or why it prejudices certain reviewers, it is deceiving customers.
In addition, all of the large platforms became dominant by serving all customers. But once they created monopolies (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) they systematically disfavored conservatives, independents, Christians, and anyone who would not go along with the established narrative. Clarence Thomas intimated that people could go after these companies from that direction, but no one has taken him up on that suggestion.
The release of the Twitter files reveals a corrupt link between government agencies and these companies. It would be nice to have some lawsuits where discovery would reveal to the world what these companies are up to.
If Amazon was an oil company, and it was suspected an employee infected a costumers computer, we would never hear the end of that.
Something occurred to me while reading this. In “censorship” as we know it, a person is forbidden from saying or writing certain things (or if already written, they’re erased.)
This whole regime is a bit different. Instead of the offending text being erased, it’s the author. Say a bad thing here, see a pancake recipe disappear over there. It’s not censorship in the slightest, but erasure in the Orwellian sense of making someone an unperson and eliminating all their past communication.
We sometimes call this cancellation, but “cancellation” has an air of pettiness, of fiddling little spats. At it’s core, this is a much more Stalinist move. It’s not about free speech per se, but it’s about being stripped entirely of one’s rights. Granted, it’s in a particular venue. But I don’t know of a good way to distinguish between being kicked off an internet chat group and being shut out of pubic discourse altogether.
The cancellation of a person is not limited to the “violation.” The whole person goes down a memory hole along with previously praised accomplishments. A person newly labeled bad is treated as never having been any good, but rather as always being the enemy.
This is interesting timing for me, because four days ago I was suspended from twitter/X for the first time. My crime was expressing genuine concern for the life of a woman suffering from extreme anorexia. It was just one sentence without any ridicule, threats, name-calling, or malice, but I stand accused of “violent speech”. I have appealed the suspension and asked for them to be specific about what I wrote that was identified as violent. So far, I’ve received no response.
They are all doing it now because the EU has introduced a hate speech law. The tech companies will either have to develop two systems or apply the idiotic laws to everyone.
Surely not even the EU insists that we pretend that anorexia is not a threat to one’s health. Or do they?
I’m suspicious that Twitter/X employees have software program set up that’s collecting names of people who tend to post conservative political comments and are suspending them in mass for no good reason as the primaries approach. I had noticed that a couple of popular conservatives (possibly James Wood and/or Jordon Peterson) had complained that they had suddenly lost hundreds of followers either the same day or the day before I was suspended.
They are terrified of the huge fines that they will face in the EU so anything and everything contentious with leftist ideology gets censored, even things that might be considered controversial are censored.
Goska’s experience at Amazon’s hands is horrifying. It does remind me that the internet is still called the world wide web. We get snared in the web by the spiders like the Amazon employee because we believe the First Amendment protects us. Instead, we’re reminded that, in real life, the First Amendment requires the consent of all Americans to work. The rogue Amazon employee doesn’t buy in. Rights are only for the left; anyone who disagrees with them faces social and financial damages. Leftists regard our Constitutional rights as privileges reserved for whomever they think deserve them.
There is also the grey area argument: are Amazon’s reviews part of the public square and all speech is protected or are they the property of a corporation?
I also remember that while we have always had the First Amendment here, in reality there were very few venues for exercising that right prior to the internet and social media. If you, as an average person, had an opinion, you could tell your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers in person/on the phone/by letter. You might write a letter to a newspaper editor and get it published if you were lucky. A reporter might interview you if your story was likely to garner readers/viewers. Later, you could call in to talk radio and have your say. If you hoped for a remedy or a change to laws, you could call or write local and federal legislators. You did not have an audience that could include millions of people with an accompanying exponential increase of anonymous, vindictive bad actors who can literally ruin you because they don’t like your opinion.
Professor,
Thank you. You document vividly and with eloquence an experience of being cancelled. Some random thoughts and suggestions that bubble up:
1. Sue Amazon. As an account holder and reviewer, whose reviews are solicited, you have some contractual rights and reasonable expectations about how they handle and preserve your reviews. For counsel you might check out David French, organizations like Institute for Justice, Alliance Defending Freedom, the attorneys who sued for defamation on behalf of the Covington kid, the attorneys who sued Oberlin for defaming the local bakery, etc., etc.
2. Try ‘X’ , i.e. twitter. X affords a great deal of freedom of expression and will let you get your messages out.
3. Several X/twitter posters specialize in anti-wokeness, and would spread your message if they hear of it.
4. Consider getting someone like Jordan Peterson, or people on dailywire.com like Ben Shapiro, to host you on a podcast. Your books and articles have so much of interest to a broad audience.
5. Being cancelled can be a liberating experience. Cartoonist, author Scott Adams has experienced this, as have many other. It has risks, however. Someone with your expressed views, and position as an adjunct professor in a woke university universe risks employment cancellation.
Those are some thoughts. I may well have others.
This is another outstanding essay. Thanks again.
I suspect it wouldn’t be too difficult to find much nastier, indeed truly vile, reviews that remain on Amazon. I’ve already contacted Amazon to protest their treatment of Goska, and I hope other readers of this column will do the same.
“Christianity offered a narrative that lubricated the ritual. In Genesis, we are all made in the image and likeness of God. In the New Testament, Jesus, dying on the cross, prayed for the forgiveness of his tormentors. Holland is an atheist but he and other atheists bemoan, or perhaps fear, what will become of a culture that has rejected the Christian concept of forgiveness and all it offered the individual and society.”
And Islam is a religion of “peace” and “forgiveness” too, if you submit to Allah, obey Allah, and become a Muslim.
Dr. Goska, with all due respect, you are selectively cherry-picking benevolent ideas in Christianity thoroughly OUT OF CONTEXT. In serious, consistent, and fully contextual Christianity, forgiveness is offered only to those who become Christians. First and foremost, forgiveness for Original Sin.
In serious, consistent, and fully contextual, Christianity the concept of freedom is not defined in secular and objective terms but in religious terms. In other words, in Christianity Yahweh gives freedom to man, but that freedom is the freedom to submit to and obey Yahweh or be sent to Eternal Hell for not accepting and obeying Yahweh, no different than in Islam.
Secular forgiveness, objectively defined, is an EARNED forgiveness between individuals in cases where forgiveness is possible and — EARNED. It is NOT an unearned whim or an unearned indulgence. Objectively speaking, here on earth, there do exist evils and transgressions that are simply not possible to forgive, there is no reparation possible, for example murder.
Secular freedom and liberty defined objectively mean you have the freedom and liberty for the pursuit of your personal happiness here on earth for no other reason than the achievement of your happiness for your own rational self-interest, for your own sake. Not because you are submitting to and obeying any God, Yahweh or Allah.
With all due respect to you, and I have zero respect for you, you have been offering up the same Objectivist pablum for a couple of years now and she doesn’t seem to be biting.
And, of course, why would she? Goska is a successful, published author with a readership following. You are aren’t successful and all you have are commenters, most of whom don’t take you remotely seriously and don’t read your longwinded garbage.
Unrequited love is a sad thing, and you don’t seem to realize she won’t date you.
Anything I’m interested in buying online, I buy directly from the source. Never through 3rd party sellers or platforms. If there is no option to buy directly from the seller’s company I don’t by it.
Danusha, this is a travesty, and I am sick that it has happened to you. I wonder what age group dominates the area of the demographic curve at Amazon? I have seen estimates that range from 20yr to 30yr of age. Do you suppose that the workers in that demographic feel the same way about discourse that you or I do? Do you even think that their idea of discourse is even on the same map our age group uses? Forgive the overgeneralization, but I think this younger age group responds more to the numerical quantity of a ‘likes’ icon than a reasoned discussion. Reasoned discussions take time, and moving the social media needle is measured in seconds and maybe minutes. Thiers is a postmodern shorthand decoder ring that tells them what is right and wrong, and worngthink is wrong.
This has been brewing for a long time. I remember the last big wakeup call I got, and that was when Mozilla’s co-founder Brendan Eich was forced to step down in 2014. He was not some CEO who was a hired gun, but a co-founder, someone directly responsible for Mozilla’s success. He was tossed because of a $1000 dollar donation to Prop 8, passed in the 2008 that was a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Now, a $1000 is a lot of money to some, and not a lot to others. By some accounts, there was $83 million dollars spent pro and con over prop 8. That $1000 represented ~0.0012% of what was spent. Loose your job and be publically vilified over $1000, I wonder what $100 does for you. Say what you want about the proposition, or Eich, in fact, don’t say anything unless its rightthink.
I am not comparing the merits of the cause of over happened to you and Eich, only that at 30000 feet two people lost a big chunk of their work for expressing an opinion. It is your creative output, something unique and precious. Erased because some postmodern zealot who could not string a sentence together much less an essay gets to lead the pitchforks and torch brigade. I wonder if these ‘influencers’ and guardians of the sacred truth™ remember what happened to Robespierre and Trotsky?
Walmart has it’s own E-Commerce web site that is in direct, head-to-head, competition with Amazon. I use the Walmart E-Commerce site instead of Amazon as often as I can. Try that instead of Amazon.
Buy cards like Vanilla Visa to limit your exposure.
You can buy $500 for a $6 fee. Makes refunds difficult.
Also, there is risk of fraud by Vanilla Visa, but at worst you will be out $500.
the community standards you violated was criticizing a tranny and a black person for something. anything. they are perfect, dont you know that?
This is what I was attempting to say to you Danusha, certainly not that I thought you actually said something racist!
I posted this article on Lucianne,com yesterday and got several comments that might interest you. Apparently Amazon has become as woke and punitive as Facebook. I have not written reviews for a long time, so I had no idea this was happening.
They just don’t get it, and they never will. Revelation 7 says John is reminded of a vital fact that almost every person on the planet disregards……God is the one in control of the weather. The Psalmist reminded man that, “He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; He makes lightning for the rain; He brings the wind out of His treasures.’ Psalm 135:7 And, again, “Fire and Hail, snow and clouds, stormy wind, fulfilling His word. Psalm 148:8.
Man-made global warming? Nonsense! Climate Change? Not our doing! Rather, the cries of sensationalist climatologists accusing mankind of being the cause of our weather going topsy-turvy, whether they are aware of this or not, plays into the “strong delusion” the Apostle Paul warned would be embraced by the people of the post Rapture World. 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12.
Oh the weather is definitely changing, but it is God who is doing the changing. Jesus informed His disciples in His Olivet Discourse that he would in part use weather disasters increasing frequency and intensity to warn the world of His soon coming. Matthew 24; Luke 21. Satan doesn’t want us to recognize the signs of the times and know that Jesus is returning to end him….So the Devil masks God’s in-you-face weather warnings with lies, such as the deception of man-made-climate change. We are seeing God’s natural disaster wake up call. (Companies or media who censure the truth are also covering up for the Signs of the Times.)
I am struggling to recognize the world we now live in and what is happening. As you know, I contacted Amazon and supposedly had a “live chat” with what I believed was a real person. I expressed my dismay that your reviews had been removed; that you had not violated any of the “rules” and their actions was censorship. This person assured me they were going to restore your reviews. Of course this didn’t happen.
The people who understand what is happening and what freedom is and the importance of free speech will have to create alternative ways to continue to communicate and fight what is happening.
On some level I am beginning to believe we are living in “End Times”. It is the only explanation for the level of evil that is taking over the entire earth.