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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
How are Amazon's business practices and/or political affiliations more "right wing" than those of B&N or Sony, and what does lacking a "political or social conscience" have to do with buying a Kindle? Are you talking about DRM-wrapped mobipocket and Amazon's recent R&D toward making it impossible to strip, or, say, anti-labor machinations on the level of Walmart's Walton brothers? If so, links, please.
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Your right, no links. But I assumed people on here are informed enough not to require an executive report for common knowledge, without it falling to the level of rumor and innuendo. You certainly seem to have an idea.
Buy a kindle, means to support amazon. If you don't their cut throat bargain basement pricing and all the things you mentioned (although the labor machinations I'm not aware of...yet), not to mention others like the whole cutting wikileaks from their server service (not that anyone is obliged to take one side or another on that matter but whatever side they take would be a "political preference"). yada-yada-yada.
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Sony Reader users in other countries might take exception to that idea. So might PocketBook and Bookeen owners.
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Well, you know, that's really too bad. Although I recognize those brands for the unique and powerful built-in internationalization they offer as soon as you power them on, amazon appears to be even better in that you can load mobipocket dictionaries on amazon and they will work as in-book lookups. Amazon also sells dictionaries from publishers which will likewise work as apps on the kindle, not mere ebooks. In more languages than those devices you named offer.
Further, I did mention that the higher level encryption on kindle both of wifi and of storage hdd device itself gives people more choices for access points to the net (say, on university campuses and at businesses that require the max authentication for wifi) as well as protecting user's document security should you lose your device or have it stolen.
This is an arguable valuation of amazon as "more personally empowering" as the openness to other formats and the ease of working without drm has until very recently been awful on kindle compared to other devices. I was, in fact, trying to be generous to amazon, for the sake of self moderation. A wildly overpraised virtue these days.
The sense of people who buy amazon as being right wing is a logical consequence, not a conscious decision on their part, who may identify as absolutely anything in the political spectrum (some of my best friends are liberals who buy on amazon):
support a "corporatist" organization, means you either love it and its corporatism or don't really care because you have more in your life to look after than petty "vote with your dollars" politics but you are also an apolitical consumerist sucker, who wants what you want and be damned everyone else. A typically "right wing" attitude.
I could just as easily describe myself as "right wing/neoliberal" by those very standards. We all are, these days, to some extent. It was a stretch for the purpose of humor, which seems to have passed you by in your quest for the truth and journalistic-integrity-in-forum-posting.
More power to you, however! If you care enough to worry then there's hope even on tech forums. Which is more than I can say for myself.