MUSIC TO TEABAG YOUR GOVT BY

Now that teabagging has its own holiday, and Corporate America is celebrating with teabagging parties across the nation today (brought to you by Fox News: We Report, You Party), I thought I’d help with this handy playlist. Because what’s a party without music?

PROGRAM NOTES: The Funkadelic song is louder than the others songs, and the Cheap Trick song seems to be missing a guitar track. But you get the general idea. And it’s not costing you a dime, so why not?

Happy teabagging,

This is dF

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT AMAZON

Okay.

If you’ve been following the #AmazonFail train wreck, you know by now that Amazon’s official explanation is human error (i.e. some employee in France filled in a tagging field wrong). You also know that a lot of people aren’t buying that line. And then there’s this Weev character claiming he did the whole thing just to make the Internet mad (and to show that Amazon’s inappropriate content flagging system can be abused).

Some tech-heads have supposedly debunked his methods, but the one most widely quoted as saying the hack didn’t work has clarified his remarks, saying that he doubts Weev himself did the attack but that it would in fact work. That said, I’ve just spent some time on Amazon (in the erotica section, even) and I can’t find anything that allows you to flag an actual book as “inappropriate”. It only seems to work for user-generated content like customer reviews.

So ... who to believe?

Personally, I think the evidence so far indicates that whether the cause was external or internal, it probably WAS some kind of catalogue problem. As I said before, I found it extremely difficult to believe that Amazon just arbitrarily decided to stop promoting LGBT books. So on the matter of active LGBT bias, I consider the matter closed.

HOWEVER ...

There’s still the matter of Amazon’s initial response to Mark Probst about their “adult” classification policy. And the “error” as described here indicates that Amazon does in fact have such a policy in place. And that is a much larger issue, because if that is in fact the case, Amazon has yet to explain why it’s there, or how it works, or what would qualify as “adult”.

( Bloggety bloggety bloggety ... )

That said, I don’t think the debate should focus on just LGBT books. The much bigger issue is whether Amazon has, or ought to have (or needs to have) a policy that discriminates against certain categories of books based on their sexual content, be it gay, straight, bi, asexual or whatever.

But then I hope to make a living writing bisexual sci-fi porn, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Anyway, the Def Amazon Boycott is hereby rescinded. But the #AmazonFail tag still applies.

Business as usual,

This is dF

YOU ASKED FOR THIS

My hero,

This is dF