Criticize Google, get fired: Spotlight spins on ad giant's use of soft money The firing of a high-profile academic has spun a spotlight onto one of the public policy world's best-known dirty secrets: Google's use of donations to stymie criticism of its business. Barry Lynn has been a persistent critic of the ad giant, particularly its growing monopoly over much of our digital lives. "It's becoming …
What's the definition of "draining the swamp"? There is more than one type of "insider". You have your political insiders (i.e. someone who used to work on some congressional staff or a former lobbyist) you have your corporate insiders (someone who used to work for a big company like Google or Exxon and former lobbyists count here too) you have your military insiders (former officers who worked in the Pentagon or filled non-combat roles like procurement or logistics) your intelligence insiders (former CIA/NSA/DIA etc. employees) and your media insiders (former journalists, cable news talking heads and so forth) There are probably other categories I'm leaving out.
Obviously you can't say NONE of these are acceptable, or who can you appoint? Some might call for an administration to avoid appointing anyone with strong business ties, to prevent corporations from calling the shots (like Google is here) or if you have a fear of the "deep state" you might avoid appointing people with an intelligence background. But you gotta pick someone, unless you're going to appoint plumbers and programmers to roles they are completely unqualified for in the CIA, EPA, DoD and so forth.
That's the problem with Trump's whole charade about draining the swamp. He's appointing just as many swamp creatures as every other president, just a different type than Obama was, who appointed a different type than Bush and so forth. Since there's no way to measure the level of the swamp he can claim he's draining it and there's not really any way for anyone to prove otherwise. Now of course he can't prove he's doing it either, but Trump doesn't think he needs to prove anything because he just assumes whatever happens to come out of his mouth is automatically true because he's president...
Yet more Republican rhetoric which means nothing yet sounds so good. Let's break down this metaphor. Draining the swamp - infers we have three components: Swamp, water, and residents of the swamp. So... I get that the residents of the swamp are the Democrats. Why is it a swamp? A swamp or marsh or wetland is a valuable ecosystem. In the United States wetlands are often protected from "draining" which would kill all the wildlife. Why are swamps undesirable? Why are the residents of swamp undesirable they deserve to die?
What does the water represent, exactly? If we're removing the water from the swamp, perhaps the water is the undesirable component? Why would water be undesirable? I guess the residents are the undesirable component then and removing the water is meant to kill them off? And, the justification for killing off all the wildlife is because we don't like the word "swamp?" If we were to say, destroy the wetlands the whole thing takes on an opposite meaning of something horrible.
If the water were the Democrats, and the swamp was Washington, removing the Democrats from Washington would cause the wetlands to become dysfunctional and unable to support a balanced environment.
You really believe people who aren't "white" have no power to effect change? Tell that to MLK. Or Gandhi. Or Barack Obama.
Also, if blacks in the US didn't automatically vote Democrat every single time, they might (as a group) have very significant clout. But as it is, their votes are taken for granted by the same party that held them down for so very many years.
Google, using pressure to stop dissent? How about a Democrat-front single-issue group threatening so much damage that Google instantly fired a guy who wrote an internal memo?
Can you imagine a group so strong they can get State Legislators to reverse a law they had just written? North Carolina representatives caved to a group more powerful than the whole State Government.
Google is a wimp next to our Activist / Protest groups.
The NRA threatens with votes. It's called democracy.
Is that terrorism too? Nah, it's the (far-)right alternative world, it's called "free speech".
Dude, did you even read that article you linked to? It shows leftist reporters freaking out, insisting that the word "fisk" was actually the word "fist" and then smearing people with the lie.
And when was metaphorical language made an actionable offense? Did a single person in the US actually believe that "We're coming for you" meant a violent attack from the NRA was imminent? Aren't you criminalizing the speech of your opponents? Is that all you have?!
I'm sorry, but your response to me was a bit pathetic. I take no joy in showing you up, but it needed to be done.
I'm reading up on this and, well, it looks like Lynn kinda pissed off his boss while she was busy trying to milk Google for more.
And was building a separate powerbase within her organisation.
And may have countermanded her web takedown.
And if, during this mounting disagreement, he treated her "like a woman"..
> "And if, during this mounting disagreement, he treated her "like a woman..."
That mounting disagreement you refer to is just Google's purchased influence at work, as we have all been discussing here on this thread. It's more or less what Google paid to have happen, for what it's worth.
But that "like a woman" bit is just you alone making up a scurrilous charge out of thin air simply to cast Lynn (and his boss too) in a bad light, apparently. I guess you don't like some people very much.
Have I described your statement accurately?
"Have I described your statement accurately?"
Not really, no. I'm just factoring in how women are treated in tech, by men, subconsciously, on average.
Then I cross referenced with the male mind type likely demonstrated by the strategies in the previous points, and added in the known fact that they are also strongly opinionated, and may be leading a pack.
The "Google are evil, therefore stop thinking" end of the probability spectrum is well covered. I'm just going to explore the rest, just in case, y'know, large crowds of angry people aren't reliable evaluators of unclear events.
> "Not really, no. I'm just factoring in how women are treated in tech, by men, subconsciously, on average."
It's cute how you stick in that word, "subconsciously." You cast white guys as the villains, and they are villains even without their own knowledge. There is nothing I could say that you could not counter with such a dirty tactic. Just give it up.
"You cast white guys as the villains, and they are villains even without their own knowledge."
"Villains" is your word not mine. I'm just using this as an extra bit of probabilistic weighting. I notice you are attacking me instead of denying it though, possibly because it's accepted knowledge?
If over-reading negative connotation into single words in my multi-component opinion is causing you offence, maybe you should stop doing that?
"There is nothing I could say that you could not counter with such a dirty tactic. Just give it up."
Uhuh. Meanwhile, you "just know" that "Google are evil", and are accusing others of unjust auto-villainisation. I don't think "dirty tactics" are the reason you are having difficulty with my opinion.
It's not like Google is the only one doing this in various forms.
We've all seen the anti-global warming stuff written by "researchers" paid by the Koch brothers.
There is also the odd movement of senior staff between the Treasury Department (and various other US Government departments) and Goldman Sachs.
I'm sure commentards are capable of finding all sorts of links between the ruling class of the US and the governing class of corporate America.
The bloke who wrote the book on how this whole system is put together ran Italy in the 1920's and '30's.
The elites in all countries have been making sure they have their fingers in the pie in all the right places. Usually they prefer less visible rolls and migrating between government, think tanks, and select industries as the political winds shift back and forth. They have been doing this for centuries if not millennia.
We've all seen the anti-global warming stuff written by "researchers" paid by the Koch brothers.
Does that mean that the pro-global warming stuff is written by "researchers" paid by George Soros?
For the instant downvoters: do you really not see how stupid the hyperbole is in both statements?
"the odd movement of senior staff between the Treasury Department (and various other US Government departments) and Goldman Sachs."
In Europe they seem to go from Goldman Sachs into government. Mind you, maybe Goldman Sachs are government.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/what-price-the-new-democracy-goldman-sachs-conquers-europe-6264091.html (Nov 2011)
That's a pretty thin piece here and even the original in the NYT - a headline and article long on innuendo and insinuation missing relevant evidence beyond he-said-she-said, an articulation of well-established public positions from a range of people or groups wrt Google et al, and bulked out with a rehashing of articles from last year and the year before. Even the NYT equivocates on what was actually in the Slaughter-Lynn email with some selective quoting.
This has only come up because Lynn is annoyed at being bounced along and went to the NYT with a cause and an email - Schmidt/Google have been funding the New America group for a couple of decades nearly so any undue influence would have come to the fore well before now.
More meat required.
Is this really surprising? Even if what he claims happened did, in fact, happen... who knows if it did or not. When someone pays you to advocate on their behalf or for their causes, you can't attack them instead and expect to keep getting paid. It is not censorship to decide not to continue to write checks to a group who has decided to attack you or your company or the causes you originally thought they supported. It is one thing if someone stops you from expressing your opinions. It is another to expect to be paid by the groups or people you want to express negative opinions about.
"Those of us reading the "research" were not aware (until now) that it's really Google PR, not research"
You thought that the Washington think tanks were completely unbiased organizations. Who do you think pays their salaries? The "research" firms are lobbying firms, all of them... no organization is completely unbiased, it is always biased in favor of whoever is paying the bills.
Kind of like in the IT world... Gartner, for instance, isn't an unbiased research firm. They support who pays them. They are never going to put some small start up in the upper right of the magic quads. They are going to put some large firm who has been paying for their conferences and papers in the upper right. If you correlate payments to Gartner with placement in the upper right on the magic quads, there will be a high direct correlation.
Money being the main motivator of Capitalism and so few in charge of the engines of capitalism and this attitude of crushing dissent and criticism so as not to hurt a individual corporations bottom line is a recipe for disaster.
To few have to much power with no safeguards. Democracy works because someone is always in my face pointing out what doesn't work. Take that away and see how long the system lasts.
My favorite example is Mao Tse Tung who decided being the genius that he thought he was that the birds were eating all the grain. Because no one could point out his error the great famine killed 40 million.
Now we have climate change and we won't let a little thing like that get in way of profit will we.
The problem is for any organization which needs private money to work. Therefore it cannot be truly independent, it depends on the good will of the people who pay for these organizations to exist.
In that context, biting the hand that feed you can only turn ugly.
That's why we need public research, with laws protecting researchers independence, for instance by protecting them from being harassed by their hierarchy, or having independent control bodies in the loop. Not perfect, but mandatory because "the law of the richest" does not insure the plurality of opinions.
So much for Google's original good resolution. They are just as evil as the rest of the giant corporations.
"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them".
- Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XX
People love to focus on Google for this sort of behaviour, but there really isn't anything new or unusual going on here. How exactly do people think groups like the NRA, oil industry, pharmaceutical industry, tobacco, cars, Boeing, the cable and mobile monopolies, and so on ad infinitum, gain and keep their influence? And that's just a few of the more obvious ones in the USA, which, despite how ridiculous it may sound, is actually one of the less corrupt countries around. That doesn't make it any better when Google join the game, but they're very much the new kids on the block when it comes to this kind of buying influence.
I willing to listen to criticism of Google, except from Yelp. Yelp plays dirty in its earlier days by blackmailing merchants to buy into their sponsorship and hide community critical reviews of their paying sponsors. If Yelp is as heavy weight as Google, they would be behaving much worse than Google.
In defense of Google, they have not done anything that is outrageously unethical. In fact, one of the most important reasons that Google was able to beat Yahoo, Microsoft, and many other search engines in the early days of Internet was precisely Google was trustworthy in the search results. Most other major search engines put their advertisers links in the first few pages of search outcome, while Google carefully delineated what the user was looking for and what the advertisements were. The user rarely clicked into a site under a false pretense. This made both the users and advertisers happy.
Google has grown so big because it is good. Unlike operating systems which users can't easily switch from one to another, search engines have no hook on users. If they don't like Google, they can simply change the URL to another with no legacy baggage. There is no easier way to jump out of Google's ship. You can't punish a winner just because the losers are not good enough. It is unfair either to complain about the winner for being self interest. After all, in a competition, there is no rule that the winner has to help out competitors. The only time when the government should get involved in a free market is when the consumer's interest is hurt by a monopoly. I see no sign that it is the case with Google.
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