Half Our Political System Has Chosen to Live in a Vortex of Spoon-Fed Paranoia
Dear Iowa:
Please stop electing morons to Congress.
Devotedly yours in Christ,
America
(Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post)
On Tuesday, Sundar Pichai had the misfortune of meeting the House Judiciary Committee, which, at the moment, still has the misfortune of having a Republican majority made up of some of the dimmer lights in the conservative holiday display. And if you think that the Republican president* had a bad time of it with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the Republicans on that committee fashioned an ensemble performance piece of pure Dumbass that should be playing in dinner theaters and high school drama clubs for the next 45 years.
We already had Stupid Watergate at the White House. Now, in Congress, we had Stupid McCarthy Hearings. First up: Steve King, Republican of Iowa. From Business Insider:
King said his 7-year-old granddaughter was playing a game on her phone before an election-most likely King's November 2018 reelection bid-and was shown a picture of the congressman that included some not-so-flattering language. "I'm not going to say into the record what kind of language was used around that picture of her grandfather," he said. Then, holding up his Apple device, King asked Pichai, "How does that show up on a 7-year-old's iPhone who's playing a kids game?" The Google CEO answered the question by saying, "Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company."
Bear in mind-these morons believe in their souls that, because they keep doing moronic things that morons do, and that, as a result, Google searches for their names often lead off with a litany of moronic things that these morons do as morons, that the Google search algorithms have been jiggered with so as to produce a liberal bias.
(King eventually demanded that Pichai release the social-media histories of every Google employee so that his paranoia will be well-fed through the next election cycle. Really, Iowans? This guy?)
One of these is Steve Chabot, Republican of Ohio, who told Pichai that he believed Google was rigging things against conservatives, and whose primary basis for that belief is that some of his fellow citizens were as dumb as he is.
There are a lot of people who think what I’m saying is happening, and I think it’s happening.
Case closed. Lunchtime. Where's the paste-pot?
Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, argued that Google is a liberal plot based on a survey done by fever-swamp denizens PJ Media. Matt Gaetz (R-Breathalyzer) from Florida and Jim Jordan (R-Accessory) also chimed in with spook stories of their own. But no public performance of pure Dumbass can be complete without the contributions of Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas and Padishah Emperor for Life of the Crazy People. On Tuesday, Gohmert ran up a freak flag the size of one of those American flags you see in front of large auto dealers in his home state.
First, he yammered that Pichai should do something about Wikipedia's "liberal editors around the world" who edit his page at night when he's not looking. In addition, Gohmert took the opportunity to throw a can of Meathead in the general direction of YouTube for bestowing upon the Southern Poverty Law Center a Trusted Flagger designation.
"The Southern Poverty Law Center has really stirred up more hate than any other group that I've known."
Finally, this festival of public self-ownership reached its climax when Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, asked the following, brilliantly leading, question:
"Right now, if you google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that. How would that happen?”
Let a thousand punchlines bloom. Pichai explained how and why that happened.
Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of [websites’] pages in our index. And we take the keyword and match it against their pages and rank them based on over 200 signals - things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query. And then we evaluate them with external raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines. And that’s how we make sure the process is working.
And thus did Google-bombing enter the congressional record.
Or, as Congressman Ted Lieu, god bless him, put it to his Republican colleagues on Tuesday-again, from Business Insider:
"I'm going to change one word. So I'm going to search for 'Congressman Steve King,' I'm going to hit the 'News' tab. First article that pops up is from ABC News. It says 'Steve King's racist immigration talk prompts calls for congressional censure.' That's a negative article. But you don't have a group of people at Google sitting there thinking and trying to modify search results - every time Steve King comes up, a negative article appears. That's not what's happening, right?...
"So let me just conclude here by stating the obvious. If you want positive search results, do positive things. If you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things. And to some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you're getting bad press articles and bad search results, don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter - consider blaming yourself."
The hell of it all is that there are serious issues involving how Google does business-from privacy concerns, to the company's relationship with China, to Google/YouTube's ongoing problem with hate-speech videos and propaganda. But these very real concerns were drowned out by the paranoid nonsense pouring out of the committee's more conservative members, and thus do we see yet another problem for our politics going forward.
The conservative media ecosystem in this country now has existed for long enough that Republicans are nominating and electing people who were completely formed, in their political knowledge, within that impenetrable bubble. When Clarence Thomas cites a James O'Keefe video in a Supreme Court dissent, or when congresscritters cite PJ Media as though it were a serious media enterprise, or when the president* himself draws his knowledge from whatever random bit of rancid thought drifted out from between Sean Hannity's ears, we have reached a dreadful state of affairs in our ability to govern ourselves.
Fully half of our political system has chosen to live in a dark cloud-cuckooland of spoon-fed paranoia, and it has brought that world into the institutions that belong to all of us. This isn't politics as usual. It's a locked ward.
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