Stupidity

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. -- Abraham Lincoln

For some reason, I have a huge surge of energy that's keeping me up tonight, so I was cruising through amazon.com. I decided I'd look for another good book on pit bulls, especially one that deals with their health issues. When I came to the reviews for Pit Bulls for Dummies, I was disgusted by what I found there. Several miscellaneous fools had used the review site as a forum for their prejudiced and, in most cases, sadly misinformed diatribes about pit bulls.

Now, I'm not even going to dignify the "big bad scary evil dog" argument with a rebuttal. Throughout the past 20 or 30 years, there has been a dog breed that, for whatever reason, has been the "killer dog" du jour. It was Dobermans (Dobermen?) for awhile, then Rotties were on the hot seat. Now, pit bulls are the hunted ones. For more on the truth of these dogs, what they are and why they are what they are, please see a reputable site like The Real Pit Bull or expert trainer Diane Jessup's site. If you've read any of my previous postings, you know I am the proud owner of a beautiful red nose pitty princess, and I love this courageous, loyal, and exuberant breed.

What hacked me off about amazon wasn't just the rank and file stupidity of the "reviews", but more that they weren't reviews at all. None of those people then owned, had owned, or were planning to own either a pit bull or the book. My question is this: How in blue blazes did they get to be a published "review" at all? Is it a review if nobody is talking about the book?

There are forums for expressing personal opinion, for grandstanding, and for soapbox lecturing. I just don't think the review section of amazon.com is the place. If you read the book in question, great. Tell me what you thought. If you have no idea what the book is about, don't display your overwhelming vacuity to the entire e-universe. Get yourself a blog or a personal website and type yourself blue in the face. After all, that's what the polite rest of us do.