Slashdot Mirror
Was the Amazon De-Listing Situation a Glitch Or a Hack?
Miracle Jones writes "As Amazon struggles to re-list and re-rank gay, lesbian, and adult books on their website after massive public outcry against the secretive partitioning process, they are claiming that the entire situation was not the result of an intentional policy at all, are not apologizing, and are instead insisting that the situation was the result of 'a glitch' that they are now trying to fix. While some hackers are claiming credit for 'amazonfail,' and it is indeed possible that an outside party is responsible, most claims have already been debunked. How likely is it that Amazon was hacked versus the likelihood of an internal Easter weekend glitch? Or is the most obvious and likely scenario true, and Amazon simply got caught implementing a wildly-unpopular new policy without telling anyone?"
Because without Macs, there wouldn't be any homosexuals shopping on Amazon at all, and this whole fiasco would've never been discovered.
To GLBTs, it is as if society asked, "Is being blue-eyed a choice" as a precursor to determining whether or not blue-eyed individuals should be held to a lower social and legal status than non-blue-eyed individuals.
Interesting. What if the more analogous question were instead, say, the choice to join a cult full of and/or run by abusive nutjobs and its relation to the social/legal status of the individual and their "rights" in regard to affairs and civil constructs such as marriage, divorce and child custody?
Your statement above is misleading, because we have three categories to contend with. We have things that cannot (absent GREAT medical intervention or not at all in most cases) be changed about people. These include things like inherent eye color, tendency toward baldness, height, and medical conditions like diabetes. We have things that can be changed to a certain degree, either with intervention or practice - mode of dress, posture, speech patterns, hair/skin/eye coloration (with makeup or dyes or colored contact lenses). We then have things that people have, inasmuch as their mental state allows, complete control over - what religion to follow, how observant they are, whether they obey traffic laws, and on.
The question under debate (which we do not have an answer on, unlike the eye color question) is actually two questions in sequence:
- Whether homosexuality falls into the first, second, or third category from above.
- Whether, dependent somewhat on the answer to the previous question, society has an interest (based on there being more good than harm, overall, to society) in the promotion of homosexual pairings.
You insist that the answer to the primary question is "first cagetory", as evidenced by your (faulty) analogy prior. However, the question is not yet settled scientifically, nor is the rest of society yet convinced. Until that happens, answering the second question is going to remain very difficult.
The problem is that underaged sex and bestiality would also be legal under legal regimes based on your principles. Trying to shuffle homosexuality under genetics is an attempt to get it more akin to racial discrimination than anything else.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/