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Google News, Censorship or Responsible Journalism?
MSTCrow5429 writes to mention an article published by WorldNetDaily attacking the policies and actions of Google News. The author takes issue with the practice of removing sites that offer very frank discussions about radical Islam and terrorism as "hate speech." Several sites have complained about removal including The Jawa Report, MichNews, and most recently The New Media Journal. In the termination email to The New Media Journal Google cited several stories as objectionable in order to further explain the action.
Mich News has appalling layout & a rather distasteful red, white, blue color scheme (why is he so obsessed with the french flag?)
In short, the blogs were not news sources, they were at best aggregators of chauvinistic news, at worst (like the first link), poorly written anti-moslem blogs, that just happen to tie in current events.
Frankly, I new google news was going to hit this sort of trouble as soon as they started indexing this blog.
Anyway, good on you google for not linking to hate as 'news' - the reaction of the moslem haters is as predictable as allways, crying about censorship, but frankly, everyone just thinks you're a bunch of whiners.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
At first I was shocked to read the /. blurb, but then I realised that all of these were mere blogs and thus had no place in a news aggregation site to begin with.
/. starts filtering entires tagged "blog".
Can't wait till
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You will be guilty of the crime of posting while conservative. Enjoy your downmods. Have a nice day.
Conservatism and Islamophobia have nothing in common.
The new media journal is not a conservative rag, it is an Islam-fear-spreading propaganda machine.
Sorry!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I don't think I've ever seen the Drudge Report in Google News, and he actually does get scoops now and then. True he's a bit out there, but he's way down the nutso scale compared to some of the other sites that Google News gives presence to.
Having taken time to read the "The New Media Journal" objectionable stories linked in the summary, I have to say the answer is clear, Google are being responsible. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and of course some will complain that Google have't drawn it in exactly the right place, but IMHO it's perfectly reasonable to take the position that those stories are out-and-out anti-Islamic hate material, with not a shred of responsible journalism.
Oh no... it's the future.
They are opinion pieces at it's best, and certainly contains heavy bashing, trolling and hate speach. I am against censorship as next liberal guy, but these guys don't deserve any kind of additional promotion, in my humble opinion.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Leave it to World Net Daily to assign a political agenda to the actions of Google. Reality really does seem to have a liberal bias.
The content of the articles aside, one has to wonder why an site that is unabashedly slanted towards political commentary can really be considered news in the first place. There is a big difference between political analysis of world events (i.e. what one party is doing, what is going on with legislation, etc.) and political commentary (diatribes about various organized groups, short fictions about the way the world works, etc.). WND comes down in the later camp, it always has, and the fact they were ever included in a 'News' aggregator is troublesome.
I mean, isn't there a line somewhere, where information stops being news and starts being propaganda? I always thought it had something to do with whether or not a story is a recitation of facts or someone's personal opinion. There seems to be some confusion between objectivity and fairness these days, where a plurality of viewpoints (slanted in one direction or the other) is considered a substitute for faithfulness to events in themselves.
M
of far-right self-pity over the media's refusal to abandon its last shreds of decency and publish bigotry as "balance".
I'd like to take a moment to coin a new "law" that I have observed in recent years. Maybe I'm just seeing something "new" where there is nothing. Maybe I'm just wrong. But let me propose that hyperbole has a profound effect on language. As actual occurences of some objectionable activity becomes less and less prevailent in society, the tempation to use hyperbole to imply that some lesser action is equivilent to that objectional activity becomes more common. The above "story" has two examples of it. First, there's Google who have used hyperbole to justify their self interested actions of rejecting some stories. They've claimed something is "hate speech" to make a point that it is not the content they want on their web site. In response, the sites being chucked have used hyperbole to suggest that Google is "censoring" them. Nevermind the fact that no actual hate speech has occured. Nevermind the fact that Google has not stopped these sites from delivering their content directly to interested parties. How does this affect language? If more people are refering to behaviour as "hate speech" when in fact a better description would be a "bitch session", doesn't that change the definition of the word? What if censorship were completely eliminated (as it is in most western societies, with the obvious exceptions to matters of national security) and the word were used to refer to other behaviour, like telling someone to shut the hell up because you're sick of hearing them blabber. "Can you two go argue in the lunch room, you're giving me a headache." "Hey man, you can't censor us!" What's annoying is that these are really important words. You can't talk about keeping the world safe from censorship with a straight face when every idiot is claiming they are being censored.
How we know is more important than what we know.
World Net Daily pushing for accurate and unsensational news reporting.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
This isn't censorship. This is a media outlet choosing not to publish opinion pieces which it thinks would be irresponsible, and possibly contrary to its editorial viewpoint. Should the Times (either of them) publish every editorial sent their way? If not, then why should Google?
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Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Here in the Netherlands there was a big uproar when Hirshi Ali basically said the same thing: Mohammed was a pedophile because he took a 9 year old for a wife. Yet she gets elected Woman of the Year by Times magazine.
What's the difference?
Anyway, I thought Americans were so big on freedom of speech. I'd said get ready for some real rucus, because Hirshi Ali (or Magan actually) is coming your way!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
we are rapidly turning into a nation of "freedom of politically correct speech" which is a sad state of affairs.
I discount most arguments used any side to any argument when they toss out the terms "hate speech" or "racist". Its the old "boy who cried wolf" syndrom. After awhile the people using the terms so compromise them that they no longer have any real effectiveness.
I think the issue with google news is that it is bending to pressure from outside groups to modify its content. Just as they caved into the Chinese they cave into groups who claim that any non-compliance is the same as supporting hate-speech or racism. It is no different than the blackmail some groups use against corporate interest. Either pay us or we will sully your name.
Discussion is only permitted if you agree with the PC stance. Any deviation from the PC stance and you will be villified. If you fight back you will have the extreme examples tossed at you as if they were the majority and not the minority they are. Favorite phrases will include "you don't like Nazis do you" while comparing the target you are defending to them. Along the lines of "its for the children" to thereby attempt to dissuade any potential objection.
If Google News is going to be unbiased then they need to list all views, even those the staff at Google does not agree with. Anything else reduces the value of their service.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There would seem to be an implicit contract between myself and Goggle that they do their best to find the information I am looking for and not that they are trying to manipulate me. I use Goggle and other search engines to find information not to be protected from it. When Google starts seeing itself in the business of deciding what sites I should or should not see based on their evaluation of the sites content, they become useless to me.
The "facts" are wrong and just strung together to "support" a heavily biased opinion.Really? Then which political party in the US supports a woman's right to her own body?And where, specifically, would that be?And Bush went to a community college? No?
Yet someone mod'ed your post "Insightful".You might want to look up the word "stereotype".
Someone I know met someone (political/race/gender/age/religion) who was (mean/stupid/arrogant/dirty/immoral).
Yes, the proud tradition of bigotry remains strong. And even gets mod'ed up at times as "Interesting".
Here are samples, from all three of the cited articles, of what Google didn't want appearing in news search results:
"Honestly, I cannot open a paper or turn on the television without seeing mobs of Muslim savages celebrating in front of burning embassies..."
"Is it really tacky of me to smile at the nightly scenes on TV showing Arab, Afghani and Pakistani Muslims bombing mosques and killing their Muslim brothers, sisters and children at a brisk pace because that's all they know how to do?"
"Islam is moving across the world like a dark, evil cloud."
"Worshiping a sex-maniac and a child molester? [...] Muslims are true victims of Islam. However, they fail to realize that Islam is a cult, and the prophet was a demon ..."
The funnier thing is watching WorldNetDaily stick up for The Jawa Report. Apparently nobody there has seen Star Wars or watched South Park. "Jawas?""You know, sand people."
These aren't news stories critical of Islam. They're "editorials" with as much credibility as content from Stormfront.org.
Khilafah.com Seems like a double standard to me. If a blog or opinion site is unsuitable, why are Islamist sites allowed to spue and call it "news"?
What you imply is that if a culture suppresses criticism from itself, it should be immune from all criticism. That is a double standard. Further, you imply that the validity of a critique depends not on what it says but on who says it. That's ad-hominem. It's standard leftist ideology, and it's amazing that any person can espouse it and claim to be educated; the cognitive dissonance required to hold it should break any functioning mind.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
In the USofA, the "Free Speech" is about saying the government is wrong and not being arrested for saying that.
There is still "libel" and other other categories where "speech" is not "Free".You seem to have problems with this "category" concept.
A "blog" may contain actual news items. In which case, it is news.
Or a "blog" may contain nothing more than someone's bigotted rantings. In which case it is not news.
So claiming that all "blogs" should be removed from a news site simply because one sub-category was is ignorant.The "discussion" is about the "blogs" and how they do not contain any news. Just some bigot's rantings.
Google is a company, not a government.
You can still find those site via Google's web index. They just aren't listed as news sites on Google's news index. And, again, that is because they don't have any news, just some bigot's rantings.
And if you don't agree that those are the rantings of bigots, then go back and read the article that says Islam is a "cult" and a "false" religion. Then look at the stats for followers of each religion.
Let us all remember that Freedom of Speech is a two way street. Just because you don't agree with someone, doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to say it publicly.
Not a Freedom of Speech issue.
1) They're still saying it.
2) Google search engine is still linking to them.
3) They've been kicked from a news site because they're not news sites, but hate sites.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I wish people would quit misusing termsfor inflammatory purposes: piracy for unauthorized copying is one example. Censorship for editorial selection is another. _True_ censorship is not failing to publish whole works, but publishing them with the naughty bits cut out. Usually fairly small cuts to preserve a greater part of the authors work, but to twist it's meaning. It _is_ reprehensible, because it's simply theft of ideas.
What if a muslim gay basher is beaten up in jail by skinheads? Would you cry for him?
Lots of left-wing people seem unable to fathom the idea that some muslims might just be right wingers who just happen to be muslim rather then protestant and have a slightly darker tan.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend is an old saying and is the way a lot of the world seems to think. Sadly it is also 100% wrong.
It led to a lot america's foreign problems. India was the friend of the soviet union, wich was america's enemy, pakistan was the enemy of india therefore america now finds itself the friend of a military dictatorship and on shaky terms with the world largest democracy.
It led to america being friends with Saddam because he was the enemy of Iran. That all worked out wonderfull didn't it?
Same with the support to Al Queda in their fight against the hated soviets. Another wonderfull case of the enemy of my enemy is my enemy as well.
If you are leftwing you are probably for gay rights. So how do you defend being pro-muslim then a religion that is very anti-gay rights? How come so many leftwingers defend right wing muslims when they would never ever defend a right wing christian?
It is not that all muslims are right wing offcourse. Far from it. In fact a lot of the real refugeee muslims came here precisly because they were left wing. but they tend to keep quiet. Just as in the west it is the right wingers that make the most noise.
But just because they are muslim doesn't mean they are not right wingers and oppose every politcial ideal of left wingers.
Hatred because of someone's religion is very bad, but so is loving someone because of his religion. Judge a person on his political believes. If they are not yours then act like it and don't led the fear of being called a racist stop you from calling them out on their ideas.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This comment represents a popular theme among conservatives at the moment - "EVERYONE's biased, so let's wear our bias on our sleeves!"
...OR, could it be that some of the people marching ARE legal immigrants? Or that they're concerned about the rights of legal immigrants, like these potential "guest workers," as much as they're concerned about the rights of illegal immigrants?
The thing is, it's not true. Mainstream, "liberal" media sources like the New York Times and NPR still strive for objectivity. The parent's example is typical: why didn't they say "illegal" immigrants? OMG bias!
Yeah, you can read this type of thing as a sign of subtle bias, if you're so inclined. But none of the linked articles are anywhere NEAR that subtle. Putting this kind of claptrap in the same category as real news and saying they're just opposite ends of a spectrum is intellectually dishonest.
Google is right to kick them out of their "news" feed, just like they'd be right to eschew the equivalent left-wing nonsense ("Zionist Amerikkka Enriches Jew Bankers!") But of course, they already DO filter out the left-wing wackos, while the right-wing wackos get their own contingent of defenders who have suddenly discovered the rhetorical utility of "open-mindedness."
Dutch policy seems to be to cover everything up and hope it goes away.
We hoped WW2 would pass us by too. That worked well.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What uninformed rubbish. Google does index a lot of sites that denegrate Christianity and "these people" are yet to launch a single "Boycott Google" campaign. Christians are by and large extraordinarily tolerant of disparaging comments.
In fact, lets use one that didn't just get reported on Google but on Slashdot as an example. Richard Dawkin's response to The Edge's annual question, in which he responded "An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as 'atonement' for 'sin'.". Any sign of that "Boycott Google" or "Boycott Slashdot" campaign? No. Christians let it drift by with a shrug of "Dawkins is off on a rant again".
Now try labelling anything about Islamic belief as "warped and disgusting", and see how many milliseconds elapse before you are accused of a hate crime.
People say "never wrestle with a pig, because people can't tell the difference, and the pig likes it". So good advice to the pig is to wrestle with the best human they can find.
WorldNet Daily is a rag. The Republican corporate media tactic for attacking well-regarded messengers is to find a Republican messenger, no matter how incomparable, with one obvious characteristic in common with the target, then set the two up in their corporate media as "opponents". Like setting up Hillary Clinton with Condoleeza Rice because they're both "women in politics". That competition immediately lowers the higher stature target, and often raises the lower stature target for a bonus.
In this case, they're pairing WND with Google. Fans of the trashy, rightwing WND will happily say that Google loses, and most people, who haven't formed an specific opinion of either, will associate them as peers - to Google's detriment. The few Google fans were lost to the Republicans anyway, especially with the independent reporting Google generally features, but at least they now will get branded as "worse than WND".
These comparisons have nothing to do with Google's actual quality. They have to do with "guilt by association", in the Karl Rove version so popular the past decade called "guilt by opposition".
--
make install -not war
Google news sold itself as being the first truely machine-based news aggregator. The whole idea was that they were unbiased because they just polled the sites and made their lists based on things like PageRank (and other super-secret factors).
Well, now we see that's not the case. There are actually editorial decisions being made as to what is and is not considered news. There is also some criticism that those decisions are not being applied in a uniform manner. Those may be unfair criticisms mainly because blogs definitely blur the line between news and opinion but many people have seen a lot of major news outlets also willfully blur those lines of late.
So, yes Google has the right to list whatever and whoever they want and it's not a First Ammendment issue as they're not the government. Just if they are going to start filtering then they need to acknowledge it and drop any claims to a pure unbiased machine created news source.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
In Europe, there are still some old social rules that you cannot patronize certain restaurants if a member of the lower class even if you can afford to go there.
Doesn't the U.S. also have private clubs which can more or less deny you access for whatever reason they like?
In the Middle East, the imans or Islamic Religious rulers dictate how you live your life even to the type of clothes you wear such as jeans not being acceptable.
The U.S. has no shortage of conservative church leaders who would be glad to tell you what type of clothes to wear, what activities you may engage in, who to associate with, and who to vote for. We even have some factions which would like to enforce their religious rules on all citizens.
In this country, it is the liberals that have disdain towards common people.
There is no shortage of conservatives who do all of the things you mention. Does that mean that conservatives have disdain toward the common people too? Elitism crosses political, religious, and economic lines. Egos are a part of human nature, and few/none are immune. Elites in the U.S. push policies from all sides. They do not show disdain towards the common people because they are "liberal" or "conservative", but because they view themselves as above the common people. Some of them simply have no understanding of what life as a common person is like. What you may perceive as "disdain" may simply be them looking out for their own interests.
Personally, I think one of the many unfortunate things about the current U.S. political scene is the demonization and redefinition of the word "liberal". In the U.S., we should all be liberals of one type or another. The set of beliefs we supposedly agree on (like the Constitution) are liberal. Conservatives should be opposed to radicals. All of us liberals should be opposed to authoritarians. If I were cynical, I might believe that the demonization of liberalism was done intentionally to widen the door for authoritarianism, which seems to cross political and economic boundaries as well.
If either the "liberals" or the "conservatives" not elitist, why are they discussing getting rid of the "death tax" (which only hits the elite) and not the self-employment tax?
From the first link to The New Media Journal, "Come to think of it, before 9/11, we never heard of words like Al Qaeda, Taliban, Jihad, Homeland Security..." With the exception of Homeland Security (which didn't actually exist at the time, except as a fictional deptartment in various fiction stories about dystopian, totalitarian futures) all these other things were in the news or elsewhere long before 9/11. Perhaps most glaring is Al Qaeda. It would have been hard to miss when they bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, or when they bombed the USS Cole in 2000, unless, of course, you paid no attention to the news. I even remember thinking after the bombing on the Cole how Al Qaeda kept coming up in the news. So, yeah, I wouldn't exactly trust this guy to report the news. Taking this site out of Google news was almost certainly the right decision.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
What do you think Google does? Both the search engine and the news service do nothing but FILTER results to be relevant to you. Notice how you say "find the information I am looking for" which means they must NOT find information you are NOT looking for.
Seeing as they are running a news service, one would expect the users of the service to be searching for NEWS. A few blogs that are slightly more read than the average bitchfest apparently do not count as news sites for google anymore.
I understand some people might agree with the drivel posted on those sites, but that doesn't make those sites news. The Google News service is nothing but a FILTER that only shows you sites on the internet that are news.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
I'm a left winger and a liberal, and I'm in the military.
What would you expect us to do, just go jump out and start busting heads? That got us stuck in iraq, and it is the mental process behind decades of bad American foreign policy. You do need to act sometimes. You also need to think before you act. If we can combine those, we're doing great.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Majority of Liberals = smart and educated
Liberals much like conservatives in America are a mix of both those educated and those not educated. If you didn't allow anyone to vote without having a high school diploma, do you think the democrats would win any more national elections?
Majority of Slashdot users = smart
Maybe.
and educated Perhaps.
The crossover there means that yeah, of course a lot of slashdot readers will be liberals.
Have you ever heard the saying:
If you are under 30 and a conservative you have no heart, if you are over 30 and a liberal you have no brain.
While I realize that might offend you, it makes an important point...many liberals are young people much like the slashdot crowd is.
Such as al-Manar, the official propaganda wing of Hezbollah, the terrorist group, and Khilafa.com, the site of Hizb ut-Tahrir (which is so radical that is has been banned in many countries, including Britain and Germany).
I'm generally suspicious of claims that Google has some sinister political bias, but there's no denying that it's displaying some fairly disturbing double standards here.
You have obviously never visited Europe let alone lived there. The reasons why Europeans and most people in the world hate America (i.e. the US administation and its military/industrial complex) is because of its attempt to unilaterally control the entire world. This has involved over the past century the US killing millions of innocent civilians putting, it on a par with Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia.
Europeans don't hate americans, in fact they even quite like individual americans. However europeans have a contempt and pity for a lot of americans as the widespread hypocrisy and double standards applied by the US administration is reflected in the views of a lot of americans. These americans are stupid enough to blame their own problems on "liberalism" rather than on US capitalism and imperialism.
Out in the rest of the world (the real world) a lot of people are out fighting the real evil "liberalism" that is the neoliberalism which is the ideology behind the global economic policies promoted by US capitalism.
So to sum up we don't really hate you we just pity you.
Google indexes WND too. We're talking about the Google News aggregator, which is more actively filtered, not what sites Google indexes.
Talk about "uninformed rubbish".
Educated and/or well-paid people tend to be more liberal than conservative.
I know this is a talking point, but it's absolutely false. In fact, the more educated and well-paid people are, the tendency is that they become more conservative.
Liberals have a long history of espousing that they'll help the poor, but in reality they either don't help at all or worse, give them no way out of being poor. Worse, the really radical liberals think that people in countries that support oppressive dictators aren't worth trying to help. I mean, how weird is that? They call conservatives in this country facists, yet they turn around and support facist dictatorships. Doesn't sound too "educated" to me.
Don't give me any lines about "what about universities, they're really educated, and they're liberal". The liberals there have a base camp from which they can't be extracted because they can't be fired. They grant this same status only to people who buy into the same "group think" they do; rarely do conservatives slip past this gauntlet. Look at that kook in Colorado who's been posing as a Native American and has been proven a plagurist. The guy is a complete wack job they STILL can't get rid of him.
Yeah, real "educated".
Can you point me to some news coverage, articles, essays, anything, or is this just your bias talking? Please, enlighten me on how liberals accept gay bashing from muslims.
This is what I love about arguing with conservatives, they will just make things up in order to discredit the other side, and they will never back down or admit they lied. And idiots will believe them and parrot back the lies as if they were truth.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Majority of Liberals = smart and educated
Majority of Slashdot users = smart and educated
When is this stupid myth going to die. The actual "curve" is U shaped. The majority of high-school dropouts are liberal, the majority of phds are liberal. High school graduates have a slight liberal edge, and masters degrees have a slight republican edge, and 4-year degree holders have a slight republican edge. I don't have to time to dig up the numbers and provide a source, but it's reasonably easy to find, if I remember.
Furthermore, the average slashdot reader is definitely not smart (ha ha). More seriously, he doesn't have a phd. It has nothing to do with education. If you want to find a correlation between slashdot audience and political spectrum, you should try age. I realize you want to believe the reason you are liberal is because you are smart and educated, however the real correlation to be found has to do with youth.
- Liberals don't give people a way out of being poor. I suppose you mean 'welfare'. Please describe the Conservative plans which would work better.
- Worse, the really radical liberals think that people in countries that support oppressive dictators aren't worth trying to help. Like where? What about all the Conservatives who love trade with China?
- hey call conservatives in this country facists, yet they turn around and support facist dictatorships. Like whom? What about all the Conservatives who love Saudi Arabia?
Replace 'universities' with 'churches' and for every 'kook in Colorado' (do you even know his name?) I'll give you a Jerry Falwel. Which one is worse?
Blar.
Hehe.. this is interesting, we say the same thing about conservatives. "If it wasn't for the tobacco-chewing, cousin-marrying, religous red states...
You realize, you are implying that 'religious' people (ie Christians) in those red states marry their cousins. That is as bad as the stuff google is censoring.
we wouldn't be in this mess." Is the kind of thing that's said in liberal circles. Of course, it's BS too. It's all about perspective ^_^
I don't think it is BS. If you subtracted certain interest groups from either party and they wouldn't win any national elections.
Of course, they would find new groups to pander to, since that is the nature of a two party beast.
As a sanity check on how a people under similar circumstances as Iraq today should behave: the USA invaded Germany and Japan in 1945, after reducing both countries to rubble by air bombing. How did the Japanese and Germans react? They said, OK, we had some horrible dictators, now that we got rid of them let's work to reconstruct our countries. Suicide bombing ended when Japan surrendered.
/. about Godwin and i wish i had the link to it. Needless to say it's a whimps way of getting out of an argument that makes them uncomfortable.
This doesn't really apply to the current situation. Those were cohesive countries who had working governments. Iraq is a country that has been ruled by whichever despot initiated the last coup for many years meaning that the entire nation is divided, none of them are willing to work with the other groups to surrender or make it better because they cannot imagine working with the other groups, they have been fighting and their lives have been on the line for so long that it no longer frightens them. Whereas the Germans and Japanese had seen peace in their country before world war II. Now granted some of the germans were alive during and after WWI as well and there have been occasional attacks on liberty by people who fancy themselves nazi's even up to this day which explains this small part of it. For the most part however the countries gave up and began to rebuild because they were a cohesive country who realized that they had been defeated and wanted to see things get back to normal. For the Iraqi's this IS normal, no one has been able to help them to have peace or make life better in the past so why should they trust us to be able to do so now, especially when we ravaged their country and then pulled out and left them to their own devices only about 15 years ago?
Oh yah, and HOW are you going to invoke Godwin and then go on to talk about the Germans in a way that REQUIRES someone to compare a current group of people to nazis in order to counter your argument. There was a really good rant about a week ago on
You realize, you are implying that 'religious' people (ie Christians) in those red states marry their cousins. That is as bad as the stuff google is censoring.
:P
Yes I do realize that. It was my point, in fact. That's why I said it was BS.
If you subtracted certain interest groups from either party and they wouldn't win any national elections.
Of course not, but if one interest group a) consists of a massive portion of your consituency and b) cuts into what would be your opposition, they sure help. Poor people generally are thought to be democrats, but that breaks down when you add in a specific religion. Here in the south, converting someone to Southern Babtist = converting someone to the Republican party.
A non-religious example (on the state level) would be the hispanic population in Florida. Usually Democrats think they have minorities in the bag, but the Cubans Floridans tend to vote Republican.
Of course, they would find new groups to pander to, since that is the nature of a two party beast.
Well, ideally. We Democrats have got to find someone else to pander to. College kids are not reliable voters
This is not cencorship. Google, as a private corporation, has the right to edit the information it presents. It has no obligation, whatsoever, to be balanced or fair. It can link to whatever it wants. Part of freedom of speech is exercising editorial control. Freedom of speech isn't just being able to say whatever you want, but to also not say what you don't want to say.
On the other hand, if it is true (I am not saying that it is true... I am not that familiar with Google News) that left wing bigotry and racism are tolerated while right wing bigotry and racism isn't, that would clearly be a double standard. While Google has the legal right to present any information they want, in any way they want, they do have an ethical obligation not to slant the news presented to be of any one viewpoint.
At the least, Google should publish an objective set of criteria that is used to evaluate if a news source is "acceptable" or "not", and keep the whole process transparent.
I've got two problems with Google's censorship here. The first is that people don't just use Google for "news", but for research of various kinds. That means that they need to find whatever is out there. If you want to understand political attitudes, for example, you certainly need to know the positions and arguments of those with whom you may disagree violently. As a left-wing secular Jew I have not the slightest sympathy for Nazism, but I have read Mein Kampf and think that it should be widely available, precisely so that people can understand the evil of Nazism and how the Nazis rose to power. Similarly, anyone trying to understand such topics as the relationship between the West and the Muslim world or American views on foreign policy needs to look at web sites offering the full range of views, even if some of them are considered by most people to be vile.
The second problem is that Google evidently has an overly broad notion of hate speech, as do many /-ers. True hate speech falsely vilifies a group of people and urges violence or discrimination against them. Criticism of a movement or ideology is not hate speech. Islam is an ideology with both religious and political elements, and it is also a movement (or if you like collection of movements), and it is legitimately subject to criticism just like any other religion or political movement. If it is legitimate to condemn Communism, Neo-Conservatism, Nazism, or right-wing Christian fundamentalism, why is not legitimate to condemn Islam?
One can argue about the accuracy of some of the material in the allegedly objectionable posts - I, for example, wonder about the accuracy of the claims that Mohammed slept with nine=year old girls and had 20 wives - but much of what they say is quite true. In its mainstream forms, Islam is an expansionist movement, it is intolerant of other religions and atheism, it is exclusive, it does advocate theocracy, it does consider the use of force to conquer territory for Islam justifiable, it is oppressive of women, etc. It is by no means the only religion with such properties (Christianity in the forms dominant in the 15th century, for example, had very similar faults), but it is not false and defamatory to raise these issues. We need to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Islam and other ideologies and movements, and deliberate or reckless demonization of particular ethnic groups or followers of an ideology and advocacy of violence against them.
But if you want to talk about strange attractions:
General Taguba's Non-Classified Part of his Abu Ghraib abuse report given to the Senate listed the following abuses, amongst many others:
Yet after this testimony had been given, Senator Inhofe (R-OK) stated on the Senate Floor, for the record:
This reprehensible piece of unAmericanism is still published on the Senate Republicans' Official Website.
So with the new marriage law vote set for June 6, contemplate this bit of republicanism; it is a horrible sin for two guys to fall in love and play each others butt bongos, but the Republican Senators are so down with the use of sodomy with a foreign object as a interrogatory methodology that they allow Inhofe's ugly remarks to be served from their collective website.
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Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
I know that Google censors certain results, usually to avoid lawsuits or because of DMCA takedown notices, but something interesting happened to me a couple of weeks ago.
... "- did not match any documents."
... "- did not match any documents."
I wanted to find a quote that I had heard years ago. It ran along the line of "Imagine a million screaming Mexicans running across the border with one thing on their minds: kill an American." (I know it sounds inflamitory. The quote was supposedly a threat made by an "Aztlan" type of activist.)
So I did the obvious - I googled it. I submitted the terms "screaming mexicans" and "kill an american" (or close variations on those phrases). I got around eight pages of results.
I scanned the first page and didn't see what I wanted. Go to the second page. Still not what I want. Click to the third page. "Your search -"
What? Back up using the browser "back" button. Yep, 8 pages of results.
So on a whim, I simply resubmit the search to start from the beginning (I figured maybe I hit it in the middle of a index update or something). "Your search -"
For the rest of the day, those two terms would not yield any result.
It made me wonder if Google is checking for inflamitory search arguments and flagging them for examination by an operator, who can simply disable results for given parameters.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
I've not heard such double-speak in a while, and so ineffective. No one is buying the bullshit, not Americans, not Google, not Rex Banner, not anyone.
Considering that Islam is one of the most popular and most fractured religions in the world, can you tell me how anyone can speak critically and frankly about the religion as whole? The only way it works is through stereotyping, assumptions, and straw men.
If you would like to speak critically about Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaida, the government of Saudi Arabia, the President of Iran, etc., be my guest. I will read happily. But that's not really about Islam is it? That is about specific people and groups. Once you try to extend your thoughts to encompass all of Islam as a whole--that's when the cross the line into hate speech. It would be like me being "critical and frank" about the religion of Christianity based on the predilection of certain Catholic priests for young boys. That's a foul ball and so is the crap that Google pulled.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.