Slashdot Mirror
MS Targets Google With Another Smear Campaign
walterbyrd writes with news that Microsoft's PR department has started a campaign to convince Gmail users that Google reads your personal emails, referring to Google's automated method of scanning emails for keywords to generate supposedly relevant advertising.
"The gist of the scare campaign is that Google is a scary, scary company that reads your private emails in order to send you targeted ads. 'Even if you don't use Gmail, if you send email to someone who does, Google goes through those emails to generate advertising revenue too,' Microsoft warns in material sent to reporters. Oh, and Microsoft points out that six class-action lawsuits have been filed against Google over this issue, and asks people to sign a petition 'to tell Google to stop going through your personal email messages.'"
They had the tagline of 'Don't get scroogled' then directed the viewer to go to outlook.com The production values were atrocious.
Is it a "Smear Campaign" if it's true?
Pretty "slanted" summary, but I guess this is Slashdot and the story is about Microsoft.
Now, who's more evil? Google or Microsoft? Hard to tell around here sometimes...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Google does scan your emails for keywords. That information may be stored or revealed in any number of ways.
What I'd like from MSFT: a guarantee (legal contract) that MSFT will not do the same on the new Outlook.com.
Futurist Traditionalism
The best kind of propaganda is true, and that's what this is. Obviously Microsoft neglects to tell you about all of their invasions of your privacy, but that doesn't make Google's any less true.
Simple --- sign up with Microsoft's email service so that Microsoft can rummage through your emails instead of google.
Can everybody please start now?
Unlike Microsoft which produces an Operating System that reads all of the data on your hard drive.
Google does scan your emails for keywords. That information may be stored or revealed in any number of ways.
I think it's more than a bit disingenuous because the video has this person's eyes superimposed over your e-mail while mischievous music plays in the background. We all know that it's not a person reading the e-mails, it's software doing latent semantic indexing or some such algorithm.
They might not be lying but they are deceiving. Tell me how my Hotmail knows how to classify incoming e-mails as spam again? OH! You're running a Bayesian classification algorithm and building word statistics out of my e-mail?! They're reading my e-mails! Cue judging eyeballs over my e-mail with corny music.
Note: I'm not defending Google but I'm pretty sure that some type of software runs some sort of algorithm on your e-mails if you go through any reputable major e-mail provider. Hell, my debian postfix server is attached to a bunch of algorithmic open source programs to do just that!
My work here is dung.
If I did, though, I would of course assume that everything sent via those services was pretty much public (not that anyone would care). But then, unencrypted email is never confidential anyway.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Whenever I use an e-mail service I don't fully own, I assume someone else will eventually read my messages. Frankly, nothing I send out is sensitive or important, or something that can't indirectly be obtained through third party sources.
Maybe I'm weird, but I listen to my gut feeling that tells me Google is more trustworthy than Microsoft.
So. My work e-mail can be read by my employer (I know that for a fact) and is automatically scanned for sensitive words, especially if I send e-mails to external addresses. My personal e-mail is automatically scanned by Google. I say, let them do it, I'm trying hard to determine if there was any message I sent or received that would piss me off when read. And yes, I'm a very light message sender, my Google account activity report for last month shows 7 sent messages, up 40% compared to previous month. One was a reply to a virus link sent by a contact, telling him he has a virus. Two were responses to career opportunities, telling them "I reject your proposal". Three were responses in a conversation with my son's doctor, about his treatment, and one was a cancellation of an online order. Big deal.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
"Microsoft's PR department has started a campaign to convince Gmail users that Google reads your personal emails, referring to Google's automated method of scanning emails for keywords to generate supposedly relevant advertising".
...
Exactly the same way that Windows Live Hotmail does it
"We use your information to inform you of other products or services offered by Microsoft and its affiliates, and to send you relevant survey invitations related to Microsoft services." link
AccountKiller
I have recently seen both quotes + and - ignored by google. Seriously WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? Google google cheat sheet. If their own operators are no longer working the end is definitely fucking neigh for google as my search engine. I was deeply annoyed when this was happening in froogle (sic) but when MBA bullshit propagates into the search window I am looking else where.
So does anyone have any other options?
Is there a website that tracks google misbehaving?
What would happen if I opened an email account with gmail, and sent all ads to an outlook.com account, and viceversa... Would they reach equilibrium, or would the chaos ensue?
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Is it a "Smear Campaign" if it's true?
Well, it's not entirely true. I think most people consider the definition of reading to mean "looked" at and that it is implicitly a human that is reading your e-mail in this case. The eyes superimposed in the first video imply this. What's actually happening is that your e-mail is being loaded into memory and parsed to build an index associated with some key that is associated with you and that is being stored. This data is then used to serve targeted ads. Do you really think that a person is involved at any point so far? Do you really think there's a Google employee looking over raw table data and rubbing one out when he sees that "ky jelly" is associated with user 57234765235 at a rate of 0.0054% of the time with a high precision value? Really? Show me a mail service provider that neither loads your e-mail into memory (alias "reads" it) nor stores it in a database and I'll show you extraterrestrial beings.
Pretty "slanted" summary, but I guess this is Slashdot and the story is about Microsoft.
Really? Where are Google's commercials of equal proportions? I guarantee you they would make for a story just like this.
Now, who's more evil? Google or Microsoft? Hard to tell around here sometimes...
Just because one evil is smearing another evil of less, equal or greater proportions doesn't make it not a smear campaign! This is exactly what it is! Disingenuous advertising meant to unduly spread uncertainty and deceit! How does Microsoft detect spam? The same damn way!
My work here is dung.
Why doesn't google just come back saying Hotmail, because you love hackers stealing your account!
But who says that a government won't call MS two minutes after they get off the phone with Google?
Are we meant to believe Bing isn't crawling Hotmail?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Don't forget that.
Anyone who believes Google hired enough people to read the millions of email it handles per day deserves Microsoft.
Don't stop where the ink does.
If you want to keep something secret, don't write it down, and best of all, don't email it to someone. Nothing is private on the internet, and if you don't treat the internet like that, then you have only yourself to blame.
If you think otherwise, then you are a fool.
Be seeing you...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/02/08/1516238/ms-targets-google-with-another-smear-campaign
Its surprising that we have now entered a world were scum like this get hired instead or competing on innovation and quality. How much further can Microsoft Sink.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/technology/microsoft-battles-google-by-hiring-political-brawler-mark-penn.html?_r=1&
If you want to know more details about Microsoft's Head of the pleasant "Strategic and special projects"
Now I feel safe.
It IS a smear campaign. Tech Crunch and Read Write are trying to smear Microsoft for pointing out the truth.
Well with the combined power of the Echelon partnership rummaging through all my communications, what's a little Google added for flavour?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Gmail does have two-factor authentication. You can even do it with an app and not have to purchase a dongle.
Pot meet Kettle. Kettle, this is Pot:
http://www.infoworld.com/t/internet-privacy/microsoft-attacking-gmail-tactics-it-uses-itself-212455
Yes, it's creepy. But I guarantee that Microsoft are parsing your Hotmail - if only to spam filter it.
And Google explicitly admit they are doing it - have always told you they are doing it, since the early days of GMail. And I've always been OK with it because my mail isn't exactly thrilling.
What's even creepier is that email is no more secure than a postcode - and you don't even know who your mailmen are. Anyone can read it, at any of the SMTP relays it passes through. Google have made inroads into this by making encrypted connections to their server the default - so at least if you email another GMail account, you can be sure that ONLY Google and it's intended recipient are reading it.
You want privacy, you use encryption. Email is not private - it never has been. If people are getting creeped out by that - good, maybe they'll take some responsibility. But blaming Google for this isn't productive, getting off your butt and downloading Enigmail is.
duh, I meant postCARD not postCODE. I just type the latter a lot more.
The inevitable next step by Kim Dotcom's Mega.co.nz's completely encrypted file sharing is completely encrypted messaging. When that takes off, Google's evil practice of not encrypting mail will be left for dust. They're going to lose a lot of customers unless they decide to jump first. Which, as you can see, will lose them more revenue.
But who isn't doing that? These companies all collect information about users in order to judge which ads to show them.
You've used scary words, like 'dossier', and tried to give human meaning to the activity with words like 'conversation', but you are still just describing the business of the ads on the Internet.
Pot calls Kettle black, hear all about it and other useless but true facts.
Hmm, hotmail offers spam filtering and also targeted ads. How does Microsoft do that if they aren't "reading" emails the same way Gmail does?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Has anyone looked at the Privacy link at the bottom of the login screen for outlook.com?
http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/default.mspx
Quoting here: "Uses of Information: Additional Details
We use the information we collect to provide the services you request. Our services may include the display of personalized content and advertising.
We use your information to inform you of other products or services offered by Microsoft and its affiliates, and to send you relevant survey invitations related to Microsoft services.
We do not sell, rent, or lease our customer lists to third parties. In order to help provide our services, we occasionally provide information to other companies that work on our behalf."
So they can personalize content and advertising, send you offers, and provide it to other companies.
s/Google Mail/outlook.com/ and the claims appear to be the same.
I think M$ biggest grief with Google, is that an "Ad" company write better software than a "Software" company. ;-)
looks more like microsoft projecting their corporate culture and business practices on others than anything else.
Oh well, at least we still have startpage and DDG.
"Three may keep Counsel, if two be away."-- Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732)
"Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead." -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1735)
"Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." -- T.S. Elliot
"Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright." -- Aaron Sorkin
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Both companies are privacy invading for profit entities whose products are you. MS also has some other products.
I don't pay for GMail. If I'm not the customer, I'm the product being sold.
Come to grips with that statement and all of this outcry over "free" services doing other stuff goes away. It's a fact of life.
"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue. It's the Business Way!"
--Paraphrased and mangled from "Jim Malone" from "The Untouchables"
Point is, all them are evil in one way or another. I don't trust Google any more, or less, than Apple, Microsoft, GM, Ford, etc.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Smear has the connotation that what is being said is either not true, or exaggerated beyond the point. That is not the case. Fucking /. I realize you have to hate MS because you just have to, but do you have to deliver biased reporting? What good is it for you to call MS out for being reckless with the truth when your own treatment of MS is guilty of the same invalid scrutiny? Is this a news site or isn't it?
You are assuming that MS doesn't do that with hotmail? To me this is a disingenuous and dishonest as MS complaining that Apple has a walled garden when it comes to mobile devices. MS has the same thing with WP7/WP8 and WinRT.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As a member of the local hackerspace, I receive a ton of emails via their mailing list. There was recently a lot of discussion about acquiring some liquid nitrogen for some experiments. Fast-forward a couple days, now I get banner ads on Youtube for sementanks.com which isn't embarrassing at all.
In fact, we had it right here on Slashdot the day Gmail was announced. We panicked about Google reading our email. Then, if you follow to the bottom of that thread you will see the same conclusion we reached here today. No one is reading your email. An algorithm is parsing it the same way all spam filters do.
That was 2004. We probably moved on after that, but about 4 years later Steve Ballmer himself started to use this misunderstanding to generate fear, uncertainty and doubt. A year after that, Google was sued over it.
The people behind this new campaign at Microsoft either don't remember all of this, or they're smart enough to see that it's been long enough to sound like a new issue. Let's not treat it as one. This issue should not be news to anyone reading this site. The only news here is that Microsoft is trying to use this misunderstanding again, ie. that a person is reading your mail, not an algorithm.
MS and Google are really in the same business, but I would submit this to you;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/18/did-microsoft-change-the-architecture-of-skype-to-make-it-easier-to-snoop/
If you don't see the problem here, you're not thinking hard enough.
Microsoft is experiencing the first stages of a death spiral now that their entry into mobile and tablet markets is a dismal failure and they have done nothing to boost PC enthusiasm. All Microsoft can rely on know is their services, however Bing is now in 5th place for search engines. Hotmail is largely used by people that wanted a second email for stuff they know will spam them, and just converting it to Outlook doesn't make it any less likely people will use it for their primary email.
I really don't care what Google does with a collection of keywords collected in my email. Nobody at Google is personally reading my email, and even so, what of it? Had there been even one single case of a Google employee abusing the information gained from scanning emails to relate to advertising then I could fully back Microsoft's campaign, but its just not the case.
Personally all Microsoft is going to have for customers is a bunch of conspiracy theory nuts and people significant paranoia issues. If this is the kind of user base you want to cultivate by this kind of smear campaign, go right ahead, but I doubt it will save Microsoft in the long run.
The only thing Google should do about this is ignore it. I would rather have a user base of smart rational individuals any day, so let Microsoft bleed the crazies away from Google.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Microsoft has been doing this for some time. Anyone remember Microsofts infamous "Gmail Man" spot?
I for one would welcome our Bayesian filtering Overlords.
They shall spill forth from Artesian wells.
The invasion had begun with the introduction of the foul and mysterious word 'mesian' into our language ... a word none can define --- yet somehow by dark design has become acceptable for use in Scrabble.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Oh, no. We're gonna mod you down for being dumb.
Just how, exactly, do you think that "spam" folder in every hosted email provider works? It does it by "reading" your email. Including Microsoft's own Hotmail.
Google might even change it's policy and let humans read your e-mails.
So might Microsoft in their cloud hosting service! ...Your point?
You gave them permission. How do do you know what google will do int he next ten years?
Once again you gave the same permission to Microsoft, specifically the clause that lets them change TOS at will with your only recourse being to stop using the service.
Maybe some credit agency will pay them $100 per user account to see all your e-mails.
Mean while microsoft is actually promising in their user agreement that they will never ever do that to you. There's thus a big difference.
Of course, that same user agreement also give Microsoft the option of changing those rules at their convenience, and the burden is on you to discover the change, not on them to reveal it.
Who did what now?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Microsoft's case, that is. I find the sexual connotations of the word "scroogled" to be far more offensive than the rather unimpressive right nipple of Janet Jackson.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
All of these companies are competing for your dollars directly and information that they can sell about you to other companies. instead of mining minerals, they're mining our data. You see it with things like so called anonymous data collection and researchers who have found that they can identify people just based on that same information. Any data collection about you, your e-mails, your e-mail habits, your web browsing habits, where you have lunch, what credit cards you use, what toll roads you traverse, what street speed cameras you pass it's all potential sources for data mining and taking a little more of your freedom and privacy. If you use a credit card, trust me they are selling your information, your preferences and tracking your habits so that if a strange charge shows up, they can detect fraud. At least that's what they say to you. Where you buy something also locates you as well, so if you shop locally, guess what, people can find out where you are. It's paranoia, it's the new reality so when you get that nice free Facebook account or the free GMAIL account it does come with some Terms of Service and they can change at any time to suit their needs, not yours. Google's business just isn't on search, it's on you. Facebook isn't about social networking, it's about social data collection so for all those people who think they have privacy and use these services, guess again.
So while you may not be plugged in as a battery to supply power to an alien civilization, you are a source of rich mineral data and you're being mined daily. If you're okay with that, just take the right colored pill and go back to sleep.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I am a bit confused when a crowd that regularly complains about privacy issues also complains about privacy features (or lack thereof) being discussed openly with consumers.
Of course, as with all discussions, the quality of arguments (tone, innuendo, etc) may vary. But this specific ad is hardly smear and Google is not a weakling. Google can certainly reply back if Microsoft actually lied and it would backfire on Microsoft.
So bring it on!
May consumers choose what features they prefer, hopefully with some more information.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
LOL I honestly can't tell if you are serious or joking by spouting that off.... Joking, I really hope.
Google scans my emails for keywords to target advertising and Microsoft says that is bad. Microsoft, on the other hand, scans what applications I web pages I visit with IE and updates their search engine(even if I don't use their search engine) to which they sell advertising but that is good.
Google openly tells people they do this for the free version of their programs to cover the cost so they can remain free - but Microsoft still says that is bad. Microsoft, on the other hand, denied the search engine data harvesting and claimed entrapment, but again, their approach is good.
If Microsoft were so certain they were morally correct in all of this, then why would they design a David vs Goliath commercial to tell everybody about it instead of just coming out to let you know the ad is sponsored by Microsoft?
Maybe Microsoft should check the color of their kettle before commenting on the color Google's pot.
A noble sentiment. Problem is, the current US Supreme Court in riddled with partisan ideologues that have no problem with corporations having human rights, the non-judicial killing of citizens, and especially police state surveillance systems.
This grand experiment in representative democracy is over. All we can hope for is bureaucratic incompentence to temper the increasingly ubiquitous tyranny.
${DEITY}, I wish that were true.
Where I live, the fundies (want to outlaw anything their brand of religious morals disapproves of) largely own the "conservative" label, and have no interest in letting true Libertarians into their club.
No, it's negative publicity what's illegal. If you want people to buy your stuff, promote it. Don't put the others down.
Dude, have you ever seen one of our political campaigns? Any law like that has exactly zero chance of ever getting passed here. Or the politicians would need to actually campaign on their own values and accomplishments and not by trying to manipulate the truth and facts so that no one has any idea of who said what or went where. Plus it would put all the super pacs out of business and also it wou-* ... oh....
err, Sorry ....
...got carried away
Please carry on with the topic at hand
Cheers to the fanboi who modded me down. I had a bet going that I would be modded down within 15 minutes for posting something critical of Google. Without your help, I could have never won.
"Oh Kettle (Google), thou are BLACK!" - Pot (Microsoft)
Wrong. I am the supplier of the inputs for the product that is being packaged by Google and sold to advertisers, and Gmail is (one of many parts of) the payment Google provides to me in return for providing those inputs.
If I am not satisfied that the payment is sufficient value for what Google is asking in exchange, I stop providing the inputs and reject the payment.
Yes, it is usually used when someone is trying to deceive you.
Personally, I briefly held a Hotmail address. While I hadn't been using it, my non-obvious, hard to guess address still received a significant amount of spam. It's pretty much a smoking gun that they're sharing things they shouldn't, whether they do something similar with content or not.
The story is directly about Microsoft running a scare campaign about Google's ToS, which is largely the same as Microsoft's ToS except easier to read. If it was a story about e-mail privacy in general, then no, two wrongs don't make a right. Even three wrongs would fail to do it. Four? Doubtful. But it's not a story about multiple wrongs making a right. It's a story about Microsoft doing what Microsoft evidently does best: cribbing other company's innovations and then convincing customers into jumping ship over to their product.
for crowd sourcing cash to create anti commercials to fight BS.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Doesn't everyone use AdBlock?
I don't care that they scan my email. If I wanted privacy, I'd revert back to pen and paper and manually deliver my precious content to someone else. The paper would combust within a few minutes of opening.
...is like undressing in front of your cat. There's no comprehension going on there at all. If you're embarrassed, you're just being a moron.
The sig is mainly aimed at leftists who frequently call libertarians conservative in spite of the fact that they want to end the drug war, promote equal protection under the law including marriage equality, end interventionary foreign policy, reform immigration, etc. etc.
There's really nothing conservative about libertarians at all, they hate almost everything about the status quo.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Even simpler: sign up with fastmail.fm for only $4.95/year, and nobody will rummage through your emails. If you are not willing to spare this miniscule amount, have you any right to be incensed that Google tries to extract some value from you through ads on their totally free service?
And Microsoft always keep their promise!
In ten year semantic analysis of text will be approaching human comprehension.
People said that ten years ago. Then tens years before that. They'll be saying it in ten years' time.
Weird paranoia about "humans reading emails"! Why would Google ever make this a policy?! That is the stupidest suggestion I've ever heard.
That the computers parse your email and use the information for both ads and better services. Its not only for ads, although generally targeted ads are better in my opinion.
If you tried Google Now on Android it will give you notifications about stuff the servers parsed from your email, like flight notifications for the flight booking notifications you received in your email etc.
Recently I have given up on my illusion of "privacy" (running ADBlock, Ghostery and WOT I am still pretty sure I am being tracked by ad networks). So I decided to stop fighting the battle I have lost long time ago. I have uploaded my whole email archive to GMail so Google can index it and start being my electronic nanny. And it is by far the best electronic nanny there is.
And I am pretty sure that both Yahoo and Microsoft are doing targeted ads based on email content, and Yahoo used to append their ads to emails.
And if you don't want your emails to be ready by anyone but the intended recipient and NSA, there is a tool called PGP.
Of course they're "reading your emails". They're analyzed and graphed, completely and totally. Google knows what you say, where you are and when, where you live, what you read, your sexual preferences, your interests, probably what you eat, and has a satellite photo of your house.
There are no humans to read through it all, there's no need for that. It's just a big pile of data, but as soon as you go read up on what can be done with big piles of data, suddenly you stop worrying about privacy : it's completely dead. Or rather, it's stored on Google. And facebook. And twitter. And whatever Microsoft calls Hotmail this week. And partly shared with the rest of the Internet.
And who goes see what published part of all that data is monitored by various federal agencies using deep packet inspection and other methods. So, yeah, the concept of privacy is dead. It's just a matter of who can go read what, and to what extent they're accountable. (Official agencies just pick up the phone and companies bend over backwards to get deep-probed, companies pretend not to share with one another, but really it's just unless you pony up more than what it's worth Right Now, and people who simply use the information systems are all criminals by default one way or another.)
You don't have accounts, on google/fb/whatever? Okay, they're still tracking you. When a site uses the Google API, of Facebook API, your computer sends a request to those servers. Those requests are logged, and they can track what you watch/read/see. It doesn't matter if your name doesn't appear in the data they have, they don't need it. They have one more person about whom they know most everything, so whose name it pertains to is irrelevant. And there are techniques to uniquely identify people even if they're trying to not be identified. Five ways to store flash cookies lol, anyone? Tracking a stream of Facebook App_IDs from server-side? It's enough to keep one key/value pair between a page and the next, then a key/value from that one to the next, and you can reconstruct the whole clickstream. Not even beginning to talk about reading the whole browser history and other server->client attacks.
You may use extreme techniques to not be tracked, but then you're in such a small fraction of their market that it doesn't matter : they track everyone else with enough success.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
computationally speaking, Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign it utter garbage.
Here's why (from a high-level technically stand-point):
Privacy is only truly violated when there exists some form of device IO of private information, in clear-text. For gmail to have code that performs in-memory comparisons of email text and advertisement content, to be considered a breach of privacy is complete crap. Yes, you can start nit-picking with issues such as whether buffers of data are not being left hanging around memory, or if gmail's method of requesting data from ad-servers can some how provide clues in logging files somewhere that could allow Googler #247 to infer that Johnny is sending emails about ant-farms. But, it all comes down to whether or not personal information is being written out somewhere for humans to read (whether indirectly or directly).
Having worked at software companies that jump through all kind of hoops to ensure that data is sanitized ad naseum: I highly doubt that Google is allowing their employees, let alone third-parties to freely spy on users.
That's the whole privacy-concerns-flavored cherry on top.
Maybe some credit agency will pay them $100 per user account to see all your e-mails.
and MAYBE they will start going out at night to users' home and wrecking them up.
but seriously, you know why that would never, ever happen? all google has is it's user base. that's the pile of f****** diamonds they are sitting on. they will never do anything to obvious to drive away users ... especially not for a one-time payout.
that's the thing. you have to apply a little common sense in your life. it makes your decisions much easier.
Conservatives can want revolution, but it matters who the revolution is for. For Conservatives and especially Libertarians is is change to favor an elite, An elite that thinks it deserves the benefits of civilization more than many other groups in society, an elite that imagines itself as more productive and more worthy than groups its labels as unproductive or as not contributing enough.
What distinguishes Conservatives from other persuasions is that they see inclusiveness and universality, you know, the idea that most people are more or less alike and have the same st of needs and urges, as a threat, and that they want to dictate the rules for who can be included.
This is a point of view predicated on scarcity, of money, of the benefits of life, or specie. So groups who worship gold or business, view themselves as special and entitled. Elites can come from many sources. they can come from religion, wealth, race, education, profession, and ideology. There are Communist elites, for example, but regardless of the political classification, it is the them vs. us mentality that is diagnostic.
The sig is mainly aimed at leftists who frequently call libertarians conservative in spite of the fact that they want to end the drug war, promote equal protection under the law including marriage equality, end interventionary foreign policy, reform immigration, etc. etc.
There's really nothing conservative about libertarians at all, they hate almost everything about the status quo.
What is conservative about Libertarians is their economics. Giving more freedom to capital entrenches the status quo.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
That's what it sounds like to me.
I believe Govt, not Google is reading your emails.
Casteism
This is why I run my own email server, I maintain 100% privacy on my emails and I don't have to worry about all these scar tactics. It may be a "post privacy society" but me for one, still keep privacy when ever I can.....