Thursday, December 02, 2010

Please Don't Feed the Amazon

Amazon.com has apparently booted Wikileaks off of its hosting services. Antiwar.com is calling for a boycott of Amazon.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a long-time Amazon customer (pretty much since they started) and an affiliate. I'm not a big customer, but I've been pretty loyal. I'm not a big affiliate, but since I've made a little money from them, they've presumably made a little money on me.

Earlier this morning I:

- Notified Amazon that until I see an explanation from them, I'm taking my shopping elsewhere (hint: It's Christmas shopping season, which probably accounts for the bulk of my Amazon purchases each year); and that unless that explanation is damn good and pretty quick in arriving, I'll permanently dissociate myself from them as both a customer and an affiliate.

- Donated €3,50 (a little under US$5) to Wikileaks in lieu of a $3.99 Kindle purchase I'd been planning to make (I recently downloaded the Kindle app to the kids' Windoze machine, have downloaded some free books and purchased a couple, and was about to give it a favorable review).

On the off chance that Amazon will come back with a believable "wait a minute guys, it's not like that at all," I'm not going to start the arduous task of combing through a hundred thousand posts or so (close to 1,700 here at KN@PPSTER, 90,000+ at Rational Review, etc.) and removing Amazon links just yet. But please, don't click on Amazon links here, and don't buy from Amazon, at least for now.

Speaking of all this, my latest piece at C4SS is about the Wikileaks "diplomatic cables" saga. Check it out.

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