Amazon goes after fake reviewers

Amanda at Mad Genius Club alerts us to a major change in policy at Amazon:

Since Amazon first opened its virtual doors, there have been concerns about reviews. Not just for books but for all the products sold through its site. It is no secret that authors have paid for reviews — and some still do. Or that there have been fake accounts set up to give sock puppet reviews. There have been stories about sellers and manufacturers planting fake reviews as well, all in the hopes of bolstering their product rankings and ratings. From time to time, Amazon has taken steps to combat this trend. One of the last times they did it, they brought in a weighted review system. This one differentiates between “verified purchasers” and those who did not buy the product viz Amazon. Now there is a new policy in place, once that should help — at least until a new way around it is found.

Simply put, Amazon now requires you to purchase a minimum of $50 worth of books or other products before you can leave a review or answer questions about a product. These purchases, and it looks like it is a cumulative amount, must be purchased via credit card or debit card — gift cards won’t count. This means someone can’t set up a fake account, buy themselves a gift card and use it to get around the policy.

Eligibility
To contribute to Customer Reviews or Customer Answers, Spark, or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card. Prime subscriptions and promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $50 minimum. In addition, to contribute to Spark you must also have a paid Prime subscription (free trials do no qualify). You do not need to meet this requirement to read content posted by other contributors or post Customer Questions, create or modify Profile pages, Lists, or Registries

Whether this change will work in the long run, I don’t know. But, for now, I welcome it.

As a frequent target of fake reviewers, I think this is fantastic. It should work brilliantly, because fake reviewers almost invariably try to hide their identities. Now that reviews will be tied to actual Amazon accounts, it’s very easy for Amazon to see whether the reviewer has a pattern of reviewing books that he has actually bought or not as well as giving Amazon the ability to deny the fake reviewer future access to Amazon’s retail channel if he makes a habit of regularly posting fake reviews or is the recipient of a large number of complaints about abusive reviews.

It was pretty clear that Amazon was already beginning to target fake reviews earlier this year. One SJW who left a fake review of SJWAL back in June even complained about his previous fake review being removed by Amazon.

Interesting that VD presents himself as an enemy of the “thought police”–he has already had my review taken down once, simply because it was negative. SAD!

First, I did not take the review down, Amazon did. And they did so, not because it was negative, but because it was obviously fake. Demonstrating, once more, that SJWs always lie. And given that SJWADD, published in October, has no fake reviews while the most recent fake reviews for SJWAL and ATOB are both from October 2017, I conclude that it was Amazon’s more aggressive policing of fake reviews this fall that led to this new policy. I also think Amanda’s wish for Kindle Unlimited subscribers to be permitted to post reviews is unwise because in my experience, I have already seen how some KU subscribers will download a book they have no intention of reading in order to be able to post a fake review that is marked as a Verified Purchase.

Since Amazon can see exactly how many pages a KU subscriber has read of the book he nominally reviewed, I have no doubt that they saw enough reviews being posted by KU non-readers to decide that KU subscribers cannot be trusted to post honest reviews. Amazon also appears to understand how permitting KU subscribers to post reviews creates a disincentive for authors to put their books in Kindle Select.

Amazon’s decision is an excellent application of Taleb’s “skin in the game” and I expect it will significantly improve the quality of Amazon’s reviews.

Speaking of Amazon, now that I’m able to return to finishing a certain extended edition, I’ve decided to celebrate by making A THRONE OF BONES free on Amazon tomorrow and the rest of this weekend. And if you’ve already read it, then perhaps you should consider getting the hardcover for your bookshelves.

Global Justice needs heroes!

The first Alt★Hero shirt is here! This one features a design that is very similar to the poster previously featured on Dangerous.

This one says, “The Struggle for Human EQUALITY and PROGRESS Needs Heroes Who Fight For GLOBAL JUSTICE”

Hey, we want to bring over all those Marvel and DC readers, right? Can’t hook them without bait.

More cracks in the EU

The Eastern European countries are not backing down now that they know the costs of the EU are higher than the promised benefits:

Last week, the EU moved to punish Poland over its refusal to accept refugees by taking away its voting powers in the European Council. But if the row escalates much further it could push Poland out of the bloc, according to Renata Mienkowska, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw.

Ms Mienkowska explained the EU is unlikely to be able to punish Poland, which has refused to accept refugees into the country since the refugee crisis began in 2015. It will need a unanimous vote by all other EU members to ban Poland from voting on the European Council. But the bloc is unlikely to achieve this, given the EU has also moved to punish Hungary and the Czech Republic for the same transgression, and the three nations are likely to back once another.

Ms Mienkowska told Die Zeit: “The EU has tried to intervene on several occasions, but too little and too late. Unanimity is needed for the withdrawal of the right to vote in the European Council – it does not exist because Hungary is on the side of Poland.”

‘Warszawo, walcz!’

Surrender, he cucked, cucklishly

Rod Dreher advises Christians to stop fighting the culture war, surrender, and hope that Democrats will be nice:

If we don’t stop it now, the Trumpist politics of “let’s tick off the liberals” is going to be devastating to religious liberty. The country as a whole is narrowly divided. As we saw last night in Alabama, it is possible to lose even safe Republican seats if what the party offers to voters is an embarrassing, bomb-throwing clown who only depresses Republican turnout and juices Democratic turnout. You simply cannot rely on the instincts of Republican voters to pull the lever for any yellow dog the party puts up. (And note well that it wasn’t the DC party that ran Roy Moore, but a plurality of Alabama Republican voters that put him in the race.) And you can’t live in such a bubble that you don’t pay attention to the effect your candidates have on incentivizing Democrats and Independents to vote against the GOP.

To repeat Lance Kinzer’s advice: Religious conservatives must be realistic about the fact that we are a minority in this country now, and that we face a very difficult political environment.

Almost makes you want to cheer for the lions, doesn’t it. No wonder young men want nothing to do with Churchianity and the Gospel of Judeo-Christ. I certainly don’t either.

Americans are a minority in the USA now too. But that doesn’t mean they are going to stay that way.

THE LAST CLOSET

Marion Zimmer Bradley was a bestselling science fiction author, a feminist icon, and was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. She was best known for the Arthurian fiction novel THE MISTS OF AVALON and for her very popular Darkover series.

She was also a monster.

THE LAST CLOSET: The Dark Side of Avalon is a brutal tale of a harrowing childhood. It is the true story of predatory adults preying on the innocence of children without shame, guilt, or remorse. It is an eyewitness account of how high-minded utopian intellectuals, unchecked by law, tradition, religion, or morality, can create a literal Hell on Earth.

THE LAST CLOSET is also an inspiring story of survival. It is a powerful testimony to courage, to hope, and to faith. It is the story of Moira Greyland, the only daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and convicted child molester Walter Breen, told in her own words.

In case you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been doing Darkstreams, finishing the extended edition of A Sea of Skulls, or wrapping up the first Voxiversity, well, this is why. To paraphrase the author, this is a difficult book to read, it was almost impossible to write, and it wasn’t exactly easy to edit or proofread either, which is why I am very grateful to the assistant editor and the two proofreaders for their invaluable assistance in this regard.

Moira asked me to write the foreword to The Last Closet. I will have more to add later, but for now, it will suffice as my public comment on the subject.

FOREWORD

I read four or five of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books in high school. I started with The Heritage of Hastur, then read two or three more Darkover novels that caught my eye in the Arden Hills library. While I didn’t find them sufficiently entertaining to continue with the series, they were just interesting enough to inspire me to pick up a trade paperback of The Mists of Avalon not long after it was published by Del Rey in 1984. As it happens, I still have that much-ballyhooed monstrosity, its long-untouched pages now yellowing on a dusty bookshelf in the attic.

The Mists of Avalon was a massive 876-page bestseller heavily marketed as a feminist take on Camelot and the legends of King Arthur, and was critically hailed for being very different than the usual retellings of the classic tale. It was different, and in some ways, with its grim darkness and overt sexuality, The Mists of Avalon might even be considered a predecessor of sorts to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I found it to be too much of a soap opera myself, and certainly not a patch on Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas Malory, or even T.H. White, although there were a few salacious sections that did serve to liven up the book considerably.

But even as a red-blooded young man, some of those sections struck me as perhaps a little too salacious. While I can’t say that I had any inkling of what the author’s habits or home life were at the time, I did detect a slight sense of what I can only describe as a wrongness from the book. Arthur didn’t love Guinevere, but was pining away for his half-sister? Sir Lancelot was not only Galahad, but also Arthur’s bisexual cousin? Instead of being a tragic love triangle, Arthur, Launcelot, and Guinevere were a swinging threesome? And Mordred was not only Arthur’s son, but the product of incest knowingly orchestrated by Merlin for pagan purposes to boot?

Yeah, that’s not hot. That’s just weird and more than a little grotesque.

I don’t recall if I ever actually finished the novel or not, but I know I didn’t bother reading any of its many sequels. I felt that I had given this vaunted feminist author a fair shake and delved as deeply into Ms. Bradley’s strange psyche as I wished to go, little knowing that what I dismissed as freakish feminist literary antics were merely scratching the surface on what was actually an intergenerational psychosexual horror show.

Three decades later, despite being a science fiction author and editor myself, I found myself increasingly at odds with the creepy little community known as SF fandom, which can best be described as the cantina crowd from Star Wars, only depressed, overweight, and sexually confused. At the same time, I was also becoming increasingly aware of a wrongness that emanated from that community like a faint, but unmistakably foul odor.

There were rumors about the real reason behind science fiction grandmaster Arthur C. Clarke’s bizarre relocation from southern California to Sri Lanka. There was the arrest of David Asimov, son of science fiction legend Isaac Asimov, for the possession of the largest stash of child pornography the police had ever seen. There were the public defenses offered by many science fiction authors on behalf of the SFWA member and convicted child molester Ed Kramer. There was the naming of NAMBLA enthusiast and homo-horrorporn author Samuel Delaney as SFWA’s 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.

And then, of course, there was the historical Breendoggle, a fifty-year-old debate among science-fiction fandom concerning whether a child molester, Walter Breen, should have been permitted to attend the science-fiction convention known as Pacificon II or not. Believe it or not, the greater part of fandom at the time was outraged by the committee’s sensible decision to deny Breen permission to attend the 1964 convention; science-fiction fandom continued to cover for the notorious pedophile even after his death in 1993. In “Conspiracy of silence: fandom and Marion Zimmer Bradley”, Martin Wisse wrote:

Why indeed did it take until MZB was dead for her covering for convicted abuser Walter Breen to become public knowledge and not just whispered amongst in the know fans. Why in fact was Breen allowed to remain in fandom, being able to groom new victims? Breen after all was first convicted in 1954, yet could carry out his grooming almost unhindered at sf cons until the late nineties. And when the 1964 Worldcon did ban him, a large part of fandom got very upset at them for doing so.

The fact that fandom had been covering for pedophiles for decades was deeply troubling. And yet, we would soon learn that this wrongness in science fiction ran even deeper than the most cynical critics suspected.

On June 3, 2014, a writer named Deirdre Saorse Moen put up a post protesting the decision of Tor Books to posthumously honor Tor author and World Fantasy Award-winner Marion Zimmer Bradley, on the basis of Bradley’s 1998 testimony given in a legal deposition about her late husband. When Moen was called out by Bradley fans for supposedly misrepresenting Bradley, she reached out to someone she correctly felt would know the truth about the feminist icon: Moira Greyland, the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen.

Little did Moen know how dark the truth about the famous award-winning feminist was. For when Moira responded a few days later, she confirmed Moen’s statement about Marion Zimmer Bradley knowing all about her pedophile husband’s behavior. However, Moira also added that her famous mother had been a child molester as well, and that in fact, Bradley had been far more violently abusive to both her and her brother than Breen!

I will not say more about the harrowing subject of this book because it is the author’s story to tell, not mine. But I will take this opportunity to say something about the author, whom I have come to admire for her courage, for her faith, and most of all, for her ability to survive an unthinkably brutal upbringing with both her sanity and her sense of humor intact.

Moira does not wallow in her victimhood. Nor does she paint her victimizers as soulless devils, indeed, her empathy for those who wronged her so deeply is more than astonishing, it is humbling. Her strength of character, her integrity, and her faith in a God she was raised to believe did not exist are almost inexplicable, particularly in an age where adult college students cannot face unintended microaggressions without the support of their university administrations, the campus police, and physician-prescribed pharmaceuticals.

Her story is more than a triumph of the human spirit, more than a tale of survival, and more than a devastating indictment of a seriously depraved community. It is an inspiration to everyone, particularly for anyone who has ever been subjected to abuse or ill-treatment as a child.

Moira’s message is clear: they can hurt you, they can harm you, and they can leave you with scars that last a lifetime, but they cannot touch your soul. Their sins are not your sins and their shame is not your shame. And there is a light that is always waiting to heal those who summon the strength to walk out of the last closet and turn their back on the darkness inside it.

UPDATE: Thank you for your strong support for the author.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #392 Paid in Kindle Store
#1 in Books > Self-Help > Abuse
#1 in Kindle Store > Counseling & Psychology > Mental Health > Sexual Abuse
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Women

Republicans never learn

The cucks are eager to bury Steve Bannon in light of Roy Moore’s apparent defeat in the Alabama special election:

The big loser in Tuesday’s Alabama’s special Senate election was not the Republican Party. They had already lost weeks ago, the moment the Washington Post wrote their (carefully vetted, in this instance) exposé of the thirty-year-old sexual proclivities of Judge Roy Moore.

It was checkmate from the start.  In this #MeToo era with politicians flying out the window as fast as you can say Conyers and Franken, the Republicans were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t — support Moore, that is.  And Moore didn’t do himself any favors with an execrable performance during an interview with Sean Hannity shortly after the allegations. He was, to put it mildly, not ready for prime time. To be honest, Moore sounded pretty dopey, even if he was innocent, which he didn’t come close to proving.

In many ways, the Republicans are lucky not to have Moore to deal with in Congress.  They can face obvious White House aspirant Kirsten Gillibrand and her merry band of hypocrites with a straight face.

No, the big loser Tuesday is Steve Bannon, the sometime movie producer cum finance expert cum political strategist that some claim put Donald Trump in office and then left the White House to better support the president from without, or so he said. In this instance — purportedly to do that, I guess — he went against Trump, who originally backed the more establishment candidate Luther Strange, to back one of Bannon’s own, Judge Moore.

Moore would have won if the cucks and the Republican establishment hadn’t joined forces with the Democrats to bury him. Now the cucks are crowing, cuckishly, in the belief that they have managed to turn back the nationalist, populist tide. After all, a defeat in the reddest of so-called “Red States” means that America is back to business as usual, right?

Wrong. All this new Tripartite Alliance accomplished was to alert millions of Americans that the Republicans and the Democrats are a single bi-factional ruling party whose interests are diametrically opposed to American interests. It also underlined the obvious fact that there will be no political solution to the identity politics that divide the American nation from the various other nations now striving for control of the imperial capital.

We are now one small step closer to the dissolution of the US empire. Not because Roy Moore was going to prevent, or even delay, that, but because the complete charade of representative democracy is that much more apparent to average Americans. We can safely anticipate more women, boys, and animals coming forward, decades later, in every election that the Democrats feel they have to win. The ever-forgetful media will be exultant over its restored electoral veto, unaware that there are now investigative reporters and information channels that are entirely outside its control.

Steve Bannon isn’t going anywhere. Neither is the God-Emperor. And neither of them has even seriously begun to fight. And then, there is the fact that the special election is not actually over.

Alabama special election

Roy Moore leads by 6 percentage points over Doug Jones with 37 percent of precincts fully reporting. 

52.3{1a6f90088d4f05ef35a4e876162d75ba3441d01e0adc6587c6637d9d7dba228b} Moore
46.3{1a6f90088d4f05ef35a4e876162d75ba3441d01e0adc6587c6637d9d7dba228b} Jones

The fact that Moore is winning despite the fact that the entire national media and half the Republican Party has been mercilessly attacking him demonstrates how much the media’s influence has faded in recent years.

The odds are not as bad as they look

At Alpha Game, Lee Jackson explains why the odds are seldom as bad as they appear mathematically:

My brother once applied for a job out-of-state.

There were over 250 applicants for the position. His odds were 1/250, mathematically speaking.

I talked to him on the phone when he decided to go through the application process. He said “Lee, people keep telling me I don’t have a chance because there are so many people trying to get this job.”

“Yeah, I imagine,” I said.

“But the thing is, I’m really not going against all those guys. I’m better than most of them already.”

Arrogant? No. It was objectively true.

When we were young, our dad and both of our grandads told us to “have a firm handshake,” “show up on time,” etc. The kind of basic stuff every man was supposed to know.

In Current Year, these things aren’t common among the uptalking soyboy set.

He makes a good point. For example, we often hear that “half of all marriages fail.” But does this mean that your marriage has a 50 percent of failure? Not at all. Because “all marriages” includes low-percentage marriages such as second and third marriages, interracial marriages, interreligious marriages, and marriages to women with 15+ sex partners.

I’ve never run the odds, but I would estimate that if you’re on a first marriage to a woman of the same race and religion with an average number of sex partners, your odds of marital success are probably on the order of 85 percent. And certainly, the anecdotal experience of all the married couples I know would tend to support that, as over the course of 20 years, not even one in ten of them have divorced.

He’s getting there

Kurt Schlichter illustrates Point 12 of the 16 Points:

The liberal elite and their toadies screech, “If you don’t give us a critical Senate seat while we tread water on dealing with Dem icons like Al “Get Around To Resigning Someday Wink Wink” Franken and Bob “Brotherhood of the Traveling Pervs” Menendez, you totally support pedophiles!” Except we don’t support pedophiles – when’s the last time we gave one a primetime standing O? We just don’t think shaky claims from 40 years ago that include admitted fraud being pushed by our enemies morally mandates our ritual senatorial suicide.

The liberal elite and their toadies screech, “You’re racist because you don’t want to give away American citizenship to anyone who can manage to avoid being caught wading across the Rio Grande!” Except we love immigrants who respect our laws and come here legally and want to be Americans. We just don’t want to keep paying, in money and in blood, for uninvited freeloaders who want to turn our country into the same kind of Third World dump these illegals crawled out of.

The liberal elite and their toadies screech, “Because you NRA people won’t disarm, you have the blood of children on your hands!” every time some militant atheist, BLM jerk, or angry Obama fan goes on a killing spree at a gun free zone. Except we don’t have blood on our hands. We’re the ones who carry guns to protect people, or send off family members to do so – not a lot of cops or infantrymen come out of Beverly Hills and Georgetown. We just don’t think that we are morally obligated to make it easier for criminals to murder us in order to please a bunch of snooty libs who don’t like us having a last ditch veto over their goal of Venezuelaizing America.

Wokeness to elite lies is now central to who conservatives are, and the True Conservatives™ are furious that we’ve stopped caring. They hate that the primary principle of conservatism is no longer losing like well-behaved little wusses – that was their only real talent and if we don’t intend to lose anymore, we don’t need that crew of smarmy losers anymore. The 2016 primary was a battle between the Jeb!-loving “Oh noes, we needs to get the approval of the people who hate us” clique, and the “Oh, I got your approval right here” contingent that elected Donald Trump. That whole trying to please the people who will always hate us thing? That’s not a conservative thing anymore, except for a few suck-ups like Ben Sasse and other the tiresome members of Team Sanctimony.

They fuss, “We’re better than that!” and now we just laugh.

“Yeah, I think we’ll stop trying to please you and do what’s in our interests instead. Why the sad face? You mad, bro?”

Here’s the bottom line.

We.

Don’t.

Care.

What.

You.

Say.

Anymore.

Kurt almost, but not quite, there Here is where he goes off the rails: we love immigrants who respect our laws and come here legally and want to be Americans. It’s the hapless old Dems are the Real Racists/It’s not the Immigration, it’s the Illegality routine.

Immigrants may want to be Americans born abroad, but they can’t be and they will never be. And more importantly, after having been invaded by four generations of 80 million+ immigrants who have literally degraded the culture, the society, the economy, and the average intelligence, Americans neither love nor want any more.

All your hashtag are belong to us

The Guardian whines as GamerGate continues to resonate:

That was fast. In this #MeToo moment, feminism has been coopted by both people who don’t understand it and by people who oppose it. Worse: it’s now being used against people who are feminists and allies.

The most recent example comes from Mike Cernovich, the alt-right conspiracy theorist who led the way on the Pizzagate hoax that claimed senior Democrats were involved in a child abuse ring in the basement of a Washington DC restaurant. That whole ruckus should’ve given MSNBC pause when he went after one of their regulars.

Cernovich recently orchestrated a campaign to pressure MSNBC to fire contributor Sam Seder over a joke he made in a 2009 tweet. The network did fire him – only to then rehire him after a backlash against their decision.

If you have ever been exposed to jokes before, you’d know the tweet was sarcastic. It mocked people whose defense of Roman Polanski from child rape accusations rested on the fact that he was a ‘great artist’. It was an anti-rapist rape joke, like the kind that Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer and even Jay Leno later told about Bill Cosby.

We’re now at the point where people are being canned for jokes, by people who don’t get the jokes, don’t get feminism, don’t get that maybe there should be some proportion in this thing, and don’t get that right-wing men with a public record of misogyny might not be your best guides through all this.

Even if Seder’s joke was bad and made in the wrong spirit (which, just to be clear, it wasn’t), if we’re going to fire everyone who has made a non-feminist remark we’re pretty much going to clear all the offices everywhere of almost every man and quite a few women.

That’s why people who’ve been thinking about gender politics and women’s rights should be in charge of this moment. We need to be led through this by people who’ve experienced harassment and denigration and discrediting. People who’ve spent years listening to others and who have been thinking about the dynamics, ethics and consequences of these things before.

Yeah, so, about that… SJWs have never been able to learn that anything that cuts their opponents can, and will, be turned around and weaponized against them.