Jump right in and grab the money.

This blog post tells a little about my frustration with the all-fives reading for self-support culture.

First I should introduce my main political weblog, where I rant against Trump but also expound on a number of subjects I know about, like language change, technology in language education, etc. I've had this site for years and use it for serious topics. You may be surprised by how radical I actually am, though it's the real me every time. It's in opposition to my more personal one, out there; both have been around for decades.

The post kind of touches the all-five author-mutual-support culture, and it's possible I kind of just snapped when I was reading one more get-your-teen-into-the-stock-market book. My teens will never get into the stock market and I'm not sure I even like the culture where families encourage their kids to put hard-earned cash into American imperialism worldwide and at home. As for the all-five culture, I'm getting better at at least recognizing the books I'll like and want to give a five to, thus making the process more honest, at least for me. For me that process is partly about finding books I can give less than five too so they don't think I'm just being part of an enormous mutual aid system (which, actually, I am). I can say that I can well understand Amazo n's desire to crack down on such things but at the same time I have a right to read whatever I want and rate it at whatever I want according to whatever standards I choose to apply. True, sometimes I'll say to myself, you're scraping pretty low to give a book like this a five - but, probably, some of my five reviewers are doing the same for me.

Such is life in the mutual-aid caverns of indie book publishing.