The Difficulty Of Saying You Were Wrong

The book blogosphere is still teed off about Amazon Fail, Amazon's apparently unintentional de-listing of LGBT books. Here's Kassia Krozser and here's Scott Esposito. Clay Shirky takes a different stance:

We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened.

We shouldn’t let that happen here; conservation of outrage is the wrong answer. We can apologize to Amazon while not losing sight of the fact that homophobic bias is wrong and we have to fight it everywhere it exists. What we can’t do, can’t afford to do if we want to think of ourselves as people who care about injustice, is to fight it in places it doesn’t exist.