A new coalition against Amazon plans to criticize the company heavily during the holiday selling season, but apparently not call (as i do) for refusing to buy from Amazon.

This doesn't reference a web site for the coalition, only a Twitter URL. I would like to see a list of the injustices they criticize, because I worry that the fundamental injustice Amazon does to its customers, making them identify themselves, is missing. Here's my list of the injustices of Amazon.

Senate Democrats have introduced a data privacy bill which begins, though just barely, to limit collection of some data.

But it has obvious loopholes. It won't require companies to reveal the conclusions they have deduced from the personal data they have access to — because they argue that those are not "the client's data." It won't, as far as I can see, limit the targeted ads that are the basis for surveillance capitalism.

And it won't even try to make it possible to buy something over the internet anonymously. We have the technology for this.

The most sensitive personal data about you are where you go during the day, what you do there, who you talk with, and what what you and they say. It should be illegal to set up or operate a system which systematically collects any of those data, except when authorized by a court order targeted at specific people.

I propose a law requiring stores to offer the service of bringing an item to the store for you to buy later, in exchange for an ordering fee paid in advance.

Micah Sample, a student at Indiana Wesleyan University, was harshly punished for publishing a statement rejecting the idea that "cultural appropriation" is something to be condemned.

One of the comments pointed out that the article errs in describing his statement as "trollish". He stated his sincere views, not a phony provocation.

I've stated similar views and I stand by them. Culture exists for everyone to appropriate, because that is how culture develops. It is as harmful for an ethnic group to own a cultural practice as it is for Disney to own one.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as an offensive statement. Obviously, a statement or gesture can mock or insult people, and it is normal for the targets to take offense at this. Harsh mockery and insults are unkind, and can get to the point of being nasty.

However, the issue at hand is the claim that incorporating elements from some other cultural group into your statement or gesture is not merely unkind but a violation of their rights, and that this is regardless of the intended meaning.

There is an inherent risk in borrowing or "appropriating" elements from a culture you don't know well: that of displaying your ignorance or looking like a fool. (The same things can happen with other microsubcultures in your own culture.) Don't blame anyone else if you make such a mistake. But we should let people live those mistakes down.

Many US governors never pardon a human being, only turkeys.

It Was Revealing Who Joe Biden Saw — and Who He Didn't See — in California.