Evil Space Mormons…From Outer Space

I’m typing this post while attempting to brush my teeth. It’s not as impossible as it sounds, I simply brush while I’m trying to think of the next thing to type. You get more thoughtful sentences (maybe) and I get cleaner teeth (ish) so it’s a win-win.

First, Amazon.com recently came under fire for removing reviews, delisting, and generally mucking about with any book or media with gay/bisexual themes or tags. The blogo-twitter-face-sphere called all sorts of fouls. Articles were written! Groups were made! Twitter trends…were trendized! All for what may amount to be a hack consisting of 10 lines of code (I would link but the page is locked down.) Amazon’s initial responses were varied but apparantly they’ve come out saying it was a “ham-fisted” mistake.

“This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

“It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

“Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.”
Via - Edrants

It’s great to feel consternation once in a while, it gets the blood moving. In fact I’m so pissed at any given time I don’t even need a heart anymore. That said, I’m surprised people wasted any serious thought on this.
Amazon is the largest online retailer in the U.S., if not the world and it just dumped its LGBTXYZ collection just…because? Because all of a sudden Bezos is uncomfortable with homosexuality? Because they thought no one would notice and it would be fun to be jerks? What then?

It’s fun and easy to attribute actions like these to the machinations of some evil plot strung together by a celebete Orthodox-Mormon priest with a metal arm and a voice like Harvey Fierstein. But I don’t think that image really holds up in this case. Either it was a outright blunder or it was shoddy programming that was exploited.

(I think) Napoleon said it best, “Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.”