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Amazon Censorship Expands
Nom du Keyboard writes "Recently word leaked out about Amazon removing titles containing fictional incest. Surprisingly that ban didn't extend to the 10 titles of Science Fiction Grand Master Robert A. Heinlein that incorporate various themes of incest and pedophilia. Now, it seems that the censorship is expanding to m/m gay fiction if it contains the magic word 'rape' in the title. Just how far is this going to be allowed to proceed in relative silence, and who is pushing these sudden decisions on Amazon's part?"
A fairly large part of Amazon's business practice, aside from efficient JIT inventory/shipping, is customer profiling and recommendation(an extension of the classic retail upsell, only every recommendation isn't for a magazine or service plan, and beaten over your head!). Given their fair expertise in this area, and generally commanding lead in online bookselling, it seems unlikely that this is a case of "poor, poor, Amazon, haunted by the lawsuits of angry parents whose offspring's attempt to search for sparkle-ponies dumped them into the M/M Rape BDSM section". Surely they can trivially keep team pathologically sensitive from finding anything they don't search for, and wave the free speech flag to cover the rest.
Thus, one is inclined to suspect that(since books about incest, rape, or whatever are presumably sold for a profit just like any other book) somebody inside or outside the company is being pushy for reasons ideological rather than financial, and that they are being surprisingly quiet about it(unlike say, the tremulous morons at the Parent's Television Council, who are explicitly ideological; but ontologically incapable of being quiet). Who exactly that might be is rather puzzling...
Well, actually first they came for George Orwell.
And lots of people spoke up, so they promised not to do it again.
I guess this time they decided to pick on an easier target.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Heck, not only that, but a good portion of the classical Greek literature goes away too. Homer and Hesiod? Gone, because of the sibling incest between Zeus and Hera. Sophocles and Aeschelus? Gone, because of the 2 most famous instances of parent-child incest (Oedipus and Electra) in all of literature.
I am officially gone from
When the Uhura-Kirk kiss came on, CBS waited for a firestorm of protest calls. They received just one. A redneck-ish man who called and said something like "I don't approve of white folks and black folks kissing, but if it's Kirk, then it's OK."