Taking a Stand Against Oppression

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

~ Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident

In my opinion, for what it is worth, at Jimmy Carter's memorial service, and with President Donald Trump in attendance, Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of Washington DC, gently and fairly, but firmly spoke truth to power; promoting unity in the face of a regime hell bent on fostering division, and promoting compassion, empathy and mercy in the face of a regime hell bent on cruelty. In doing so, she distinguished her more genuine form of Christianity from the deranged brand of Christian Nationalism / worship of Mammon that is behind Project 2025 and Felonious Trump's vile and unholy regime.

Is this the end for peer review at Amazon?

I see that the Amazon UK reviews for J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy have already been utterly hijacked, within hours of publication. Most of the 1-star reviews are complaining about pricing, making no attempt to actually review the contents, and the book is also being tagged with terms like "kindle swindle".

Across at the Amazon page for John Locke's How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!, one of the critical 1-star reviews entitled The Secret He Left Out, about how he paid for 300 fake reviews, has been ticked as helpful by no fewer than 531 of 563 people, after the review was repeatedly tweeted and retweeted at the social networking site, Twitter.

Authors tempted to fake reviews and pimp their bios

There's been quite a hoo-hah recently about authors faking reviews at Amazon and on-line forums. Little has been said as yet, at least publicly, but I predict that the talk will sooner or later turn to the same kind of fakery and pimping going on at the on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

In an article entitled The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy in the New York Times, the author John Locke admitted that he'd bought 300 fake reviews, even getting the reviewers to purchase the books directly from Amazon so that their reviews would show up as verified purchases. Elsewhere, it's noted that such reviewers received only half of their fee from the agency involved if they felt that they could not deliver a five star review. Ironically, this unethical and debatably fraudulent big secret is something that John Locke left out of his book How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!

The Telegraph and other newspapers also ran the story of author R.J. Ellory who was caught out using sock puppets (pseudonymous on-line personas) to create fake reviews lauding his own work and criticizing rivals. Some commentators suggest that this is just the tip of the iceberg.