EPTamericans love rule breakers.
Al Davis' orders to his team : "at some time in the 1st 10 defensive plays the other team's QB must go down.. and he must go down hard...."
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Political Book Review: What Happened - Page 2
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada18017 Posts
americans love rule breakers. Al Davis' orders to his team : "at some time in the 1st 10 defensive plays the other team's QB must go down.. and he must go down hard...." + Show Spoiler + | ||
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Deleuze
United Kingdom2102 Posts
On September 20 2017 03:32 LegalLord wrote: It really should just be thrown out. Hillary evidently felt she needed to reference Orwell, otherwise why make such a poorly thought out comparison? Was evidently: "We need to trust our leaders, experts, and media" Plus "Let's reference an Orwellian dystopia" = "Orwell is about turning people against their leaders and media" (awkward, inappropriate wording). Her point is certainly contrived: She's equating Orwell's assertion that reality is distorted by the force of authoritarianism with our own 'post-truth' age (which I think is a fair comparison). However, as you say, she sneakily mixes establishment leaders and the media into the pot, opposing them to the reality distorting authoritarians (which certainly wouldn't be in the spirit of Orwell's work). This is not poorly thought out though, it's very calculated. Isn't the first time and won't be the last time that Orwell is abused in this way... | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
On September 18 2017 23:30 Chef wrote: Please take a step back and think about how paranoid that statement is. Repost for convenience is fine, but man... Very unlikely Amazon would do something like that. For one thing controversial means more attention and sales, so they would be unlikely to stymie it. For another thing, Amazon values their brand and being painted as corrupt would hurt them. Even if neither of those things were true, that statement reeks of conspiracy theory, which I think in 2017 we have to avoid like the plague now that conspiracy journalism has shown itself to be a powerful political force. You do not want to be within a country mile of anything like that, lest it become even more mainstream and legitimized than it already is. Someone doing that would get fired, and no one in Amazon would want to pay someone to do it. That is just crazy talk. At worst a user might be reporting reviews they don't like. I only wrote such an excessive amount because I hope you will think about whether you really want to associate yourself with that. As unlikely as it sounds, Amazon did mass-delete reviews. I, however, do not believe Amazon was acting nefariously, but was closely monitoring the reviews for the book because it was likely to be flooded en masse with 1-star reviews by "trolls". The statement I heard from Amazon is that they wanted to confine the reviews to people who purchased the book through Amazon's online store, so they are not denying deletions took place. They state that the system is 'automated'. Once it became clear that reviews were being deleted, however, people began screen-capping the 1-star reviews, and none that I've seen yet contained any vulgarity, but I'm certain there are some exceptions to this that I have yet to see. | ||
FlaShFTW
United States10607 Posts
Still, ive seen enough passages from the book to basically make a semi-informed review. But its amazons choice, i wont stop them. | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
On September 22 2017 04:50 LegalLord wrote: Amazon is a corporation that does what is best for business. Let's not try to complicate it any with faux moral arguments or anything of the sort. I think corporations do what their executives believe to be the best decisions. This can be severely misguided, however, in cases where there are incompetence or corruption. The incompetence doesn't need to be massive; just enough to get the dominoes falling. | ||
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Chef
10810 Posts
On September 21 2017 10:38 ninazerg wrote: As unlikely as it sounds, Amazon did mass-delete reviews. I, however, do not believe Amazon was acting nefariously, but was closely monitoring the reviews for the book because it was likely to be flooded en masse with 1-star reviews by "trolls". The statement I heard from Amazon is that they wanted to confine the reviews to people who purchased the book through Amazon's online store, so they are not denying deletions took place. They state that the system is 'automated'. Once it became clear that reviews were being deleted, however, people began screen-capping the 1-star reviews, and none that I've seen yet contained any vulgarity, but I'm certain there are some exceptions to this that I have yet to see. Well, looking at it, 6 pages of all 1-star reviews on a 4.8 average rating for all views, it's pretty hard not to say those look planned. After that the reviews look more normal, as you would expect a book written for her supports to lean positive. Several of those 6 pages have reviews that even admit they just used Audibile's 1-free book on sign up deal. I can believe Amazon mass deleted unverified purchases to try and weed out trolls, lost a bunch of legitimate reviews at the same time but overall improved the accuracy of the rating. LegalLord's quoted post is still there. What are you going to do? I've seen Amazon clean up fake reviews on fountain pens by losers who think they're hilarious to talk about selling their house and losing their wife to buy the pen. That's all pretty by the book so far. Like you said, I don't think it's nefarious either. I think it's covered by my "or something." Sometimes you have to clean up data when you're getting attacked :/ I feel sorry for the person who had to try and figure out how to weed out the fake reviews. All I meant to say was they're not trying to control ratings to force the book to look positive. They so clearly got attacked here that accusing them is pretty nasty. I would want them to clean up fake reviews on any product I was interested in too. I would guess they'll probably leave verified purchase reviews alone, as at least they earn money on those. If it were simple they might reject reviews from free downloads like audible, but I'm guessing it's a pain to implement. In general you should always expect reviews to skew positive because people don't buy things they aren't interested in. And always get a few 1 stars sprinkled for defective products or people who mistakenly rate seller instead of item. So I could see myself being the poor guy at Amazon being asked why the rating is suspiciously negative on a book and being asked to look into it, especially if most of the accounts have only ever made one purchase or have not made a purchase at all. There are plenty of things you would want to look at to try and guess validity of a review. Not to mention if I were to review something and have my review deleted, no way in hell would have I have the time to 1: realise it even happened 2: try to repost it. You can look at negative reviews in those 6 pages with hundreds or thousands of upvotes, and then look at more normal reviews after that with like 10-20 votes which is way more normal. That gives another vector to remove probably fake reviews by just deleting ones with unfathomably high upvotes. | ||
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