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The 21st Century Version of Book Burning
It used to require an angry mob and a can of gasoline. Now a few smugly self-righteous billionaires can decide who gets to hear and see and read what.
I’ve just canceled my Amazon Prime membership.
Damn the censors.
Published in General
I have two months to run on what I already paid for so I took down my payment option for auto-renewal.
I can’t do it. I just can’t.
I’m tied into Amazon Music. I get audiobooks from Audible. We really need the delivery service of goods for various reasons.
I’m weak, just weak.
I read a book about Amazon a couple of years ago that scared the heck out of me.
What people do not realize is that Amazon and Facebook have all of their wealth in Big Data, which they own.
The wealth on Big Tech Mount Olympus is staggering. They are a country unto themselves. Nothing can touch them.
I also cancelled Prime this morning. It has a couple months to run, but it’s time to start building a base of vendors who won’t try to tell me how to live. (And for that matter, Amazon’s delivery service has been getting worse and worse the last couple of years.)
Ready to agree with me that we are fighting a losing battle yet?
Cause, I really don’t see how we win.
Amazon is a tough one for me. We live rurally and it is a godsend for running our business.
I try and order outside of their monolith whenever possible, but honestly it rarely works out as well.
I don’t like giving them money under these circumstances, but I don’t want to cut my nose off to spite my face either.
Winning will be tough. Holding our own is possible.
But they surely touch us and they are hard to shake off.
That reminds me, how did Elon Musk gain so much more wealth in the last year, anybody?
If there can be one of them why can’t there be three?
Bryan, there are no guarantees in life. We aren’t guaranteed health, security, or freedom: nothing. We certainly aren’t guaranteed victory.
If the best we can do is slow the loss, that also is worth doing. That’s how we live, after all: trying to hold on to health and life, knowing that we must inevitably lose both.
I encourage you to make choices that support both your spirit and the spirits of those with whom you communicate. There’s a point to rallying the troops for battle, even if ultimately the war may be lost.
As in, we get to come home from the camp after the second or third tenner?
I use Google for both email and remote access, and for a few technical things. I don’t use it for searching. I have an iPhone (hand-me-up from my kids), but will probably switch back to Android with my next phone (unless my kids have another old iPhone they want to discard).
So I get it. I needed Amazon Prime last year because I had a lot of electronics to order and it was far cheaper to pay for Prime shipping. Until I need that again, I’ll eschew the service.
We all have to make practical decisions. That’s not weakness, merely one of the compromises sometimes required for living.
I suppose that this could be considered an apostasy, but the “insurrection” of this week didn’t cause me to get my knickers in too big a twist. Especially, if it planted a seed in the minds of the leftist elite and the CEOs, “You know, if we p*ss these folks off enough, it might be my office that they break into next.” We Conservatives have the reputation of being solid, law-abiding people. That’s why the Left keeps pushing without the fear of retribution. At least, the events of last week gave them something to think about.
Apostasy… or perhaps a hate crime. I’m not sure anymore.
I agree that the event has been wildly overblown in terms of its severity and importance. This has to be turned into an epic, nation-shaking disaster, in part because folks on the right almost never misbehave this way, and so it’s important to exploit every example. But mostly because it’s a way to attack the demon Trump.
I continue to condemn lawbreaking, regardless of political persuasion. I condemn this one unlawful event in D.C. I condemn the 500+ unlawful events executed by and supported by folks on the left all summer long. It’s all wrong.
But not one of those 501+ events was an existential crisis, even if our opinion-shaping elite feel the need to identify precisely one of them as such.
I have Prime and Kindle Unlimited (I like it). I’m basically tied into it now. It is really tough situation because I’d like to express my displeasure at Amazon and “big tech” for their behavior in a way that could influence them but I have no real way to do so. I don’t know if collectively we do.
Amazon will not even notice if everyone who’s ever even posted on Ricochet abandons them completely and shops and Walmart. I don’t want to turn that into an excuse for big government but I don’t know what to do. I don’t think resistance is entirely futile. I started using Brave after the Fire Fox/gay marriage meltdown and Brave became a thing. Duck-Duck-Go is becoming a thing. But it doesn’t mean that Mozilla or Google cares, which was the initial point of all that.
I know. Sometimes it’s just a gesture. But gestures have value too, and are worth making if the cost isn’t too high.
Someone on Ricochet suggested at some point over the past six months–and I wish I could remember who it was because he or she has made me laugh to myself quite a few times lately and I’d like thank that person–if there were any justice in this world, when everyone has been vaccinated against the covid-19 virus, Amazon would have to shut down for 18 months just to level the playing field for the small businesses the government has buried in the past year. :-)
Another option is to file FTC antitrust complaints, for specific abuses of monopoly powers. Here is the form.
Not just a gesture. The technical world needs to regain diversity. Then no-platforming someone is not casting into outer darkness, it’s just sending them to the competition.
Wishcasting–seventy four million voted for Trump. What percentage of those would get Amazon’s attention? I’m guessing that the more this becomes an issue. the more people well beyond Ricochet will become aware of the problem. Enough? Who knows? I’m in the same position as you regarding Amazon.
@bryangstephens, I can’t blame you for your comment. When I left Atlanta 10 years ago, it was already a third world city but I had no idea that the political landscape was going to change so quickly. Just from a distance (actually, about 500 miles) it always seemed to me that Kemp and Raffensperger were a pair of Casper Milquetoasts who were thoroughly cowed by Stacy Abrams (an individual who I liken to some of those individuals who occupy an entire seat on a MARTA railcar. I can only hope that the Georgia GOP will find some candidates with full sets of cojones in the future. When only three counties (Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett) make up 57% of Georgia’s electorate there’s no margin for error.
As for Conservatives in general, I believe that we need to spend far less time studying the Federalist Papers and more time reading Rules for Radicals. We, rightfully, call out Obama for his insistance that his followers “get in their faces” and “bring a gun to a knife fight”. However, as the past election (and the last several) have shown, we’re in a street fight and the old rules no longer apply.
It still astounds me that I can be talking to other Conservatives about our schools and when I mention the name of Randi Weingarten, I get a blank stare. I can’t think of a greater enemy of public schools than Weingarten yet local school boards don’t know who she is. She is a prime example of a person who should be addressed by “Rule 13”. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
We can’t win a war (or even “slow the loss”) if we don’t start going on the offensive.
I just can’t do it, either. I use them too much for ordering products. Audible for books. Security services through Ring. Echo devices. It’s too difficult to switch to alternatives. Besides, what alternatives won’t be equally woke and left-wing.
I plan to consume less.
I don’t need amazon. Its a convenience. It also makes it to easy to impulse stuff.
I don’t need 3-4 streaming services. Going to reduce them too
I am going to cancel my pandora and qobuz. Pandora is nice but I only listen to it on my walks around the resevoir. Not worth it anymore. Qobuzs UI is terrible and I don’t use it.
I don’t need any of this stuff.
The rules don’t apply to the bad guys because there were never rules, just tactics.
No tree grows to the sky.
It feels like an empty gesture to me. Parler is not the cross I am prepared to die on.
I think the obvious, and probably correct, response is that there’s a principle involved that goes beyond Parler.
Yes, and we may be involved with much more than principles.
The “empty gesture” is in reference to my decision not delete my Prime Membership. Not anyone else who might choose this option. I just don’t find Parler user friendly truth be told. So I rarely visit it.
That’s fine. I hope you didn’t think that I was being snarky, which wasn’t meant. I have another comment up somewhere else where I pretty much say that I can’t give up Prime. And I’ve never used Twitter, and wouldn’t have used Parler.
But these tech giants are out of control, so what to do?