Candidate Insists Google Blocking His Website; He Requested It Not Be Indexed
techdirt.com
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Any rational person would first try and understand the root cause of the issue rather than jumping to something as outlandish as "deep state" as the first conclusion.
These people jump to stupid conclusions because it somehow validates their ignorant perspective of the world.
There's no aptitude test for Congress. People vote for people who represent their views. Being as positive about it as possible, the idea is the representative sets direction and then civil servants, who are tested for aptitude, implement it. People don’t need to be smart to have a valid point of view worth representing.
In the UK people mock ministers who don't have health experience running the NHS, or in Belgium an obese person running their health service, for two examples, but the point isn't that they represent the health service, the point is that they represent the users of the health service. (Sometimes that means representing the needs of the health service to the rest of the Government.)
The cultural history of valuing individual freedom above everything, so much so as to start a war rather than pay "unjust" taxes, also seems relevant to me. Society is all about giving up individual freedoms for the group's benefit, and the US's founding mythology is kind of the opposite.
Practically, I think representation wouldn't have changed the outcome that much.
I'm no historian, but my impression is that the taxes were in large part England trying to cover the bill from the French and Indian War, which was mostly incurred on behalf of the colonists.
So, procedurally unfair? Yeah. Actually unjust? I dunno about that.
Even if I'm wrong about the facts and the taxes were genuinely egregious abuse, I don't think that's good grounds for killing a bunch of people.
That England took unacceptable actions in no way justifies the Americans taking unacceptable actions.
If you’re blaming the colonists for this, you have selective memory when it comes to the history.
In my view, neither was a good course of action.
I have room for the concept of just wars, but I don't think the American Revolution was one for either side.
Exactly, and the reason these people stand by unapologetically to their false accusations and lies and hypocrisy is because the real message they are sending to their “tribe” is that they are willing to screw others, no matter the truth, for the benefit of their tribe. And as long as you can believe you are part of their tribe, and hence you might receive their support, you might be willing to forego caring about the truth or what is right.
He's not. He's a candidate. And not for Congress, for the position of Secretary of State of Arizona.
More to the root of the problem: People are elected by other people by popular vote, not by an intelligence or ability test. Democracy is — at its heart — a popularity contest.
The theory is that the populace should be smart enough to recognize the unqualified and not vote for them. But that doesn't work as often as it should due to a number of reasons:
- The influence of advertising
- Political parties/political tribalism
- Fear-mongering in various forms.
None of these are new, and have been part of the nation's political life since its inception. But now we have new things:
- People who think that education is not important
- An entire industry trying to convince people that aspiring to higher education is a bad idea
- The removal of foundational subjects like civics, geography, and social studies from schools
The result is that the general population gets dumbed down, and is no longer able to discern who is a statesman and who is a court jester.
skilled wrote that Mark Finchem is a member of “congress”, which does not have to mean the US’s federal congress. Arizona state has its own congress, which Finchem is a member of in the Arizona House of Representatives.
A gathering of seven-year-olds to eat ice cream is also a lower-case "c" congress.
In the context of politics, which this article is, "congress" has specific meaning. If he had meant the generalized lower-case "c" congress, he would have written "what is a person like this doing in a congress."
So many ideas about improvement. I'll share one uncommon one:
Simply reading books older than 100 years will reveal the depth of understanding lacking in modern society. I would trade any modern curriculum if students were made to read books from hundreds of years ago (they cover all subjects anyway). Even silly children's books like Pinocchio (1883) are incredibility apt at teaching proper communication and reason.
Media these days is very shallow and lacking in character and understanding of the world.
Correction: the media you’re exposing yourself to is lacking in character and understanding of the world. There is plenty of media being made now with depth and clarity that 1883 would be stunned by.
I think you might be confusing information with depth of character and understanding.
Yes, we have new and better information now, but the ways in which it is expresses is notably inferior to the writings I've been exposed to from the past.
Parable of the sower by octavia butler
All about love by bell hooks
Neither of those were written in the last decade - but that’s a product of me not being very aware of the literary scene - it takes a long time for works to reach me, but by the time they do it’s only good stuff. I wonder if that’s maybe some of what you’re experiencing as well - older works that stuck around have stood the test of time, while the crap got forgotten.
There's also the fact that if we are still talking about a story from 1883, it says more about the quality of that specific work than the average of the era.
Yes, exactly!
Old things that are still remembered have passed a lot of filters, significantly raising the probability that they're worth attending to.
It's not going to be true for everything, but it's a helpful role of thumb.
Conspiratorial thinking is now so widespread that virtually any act of incompetence, mere accident or random fluke is attributed to malice and collusion by 'deep' this or 'big' that or some shadowy foreign entity.
Including here by the way, every thread on some Google ranking, de-platformed Facebook winemom or what have you is full of comments on how it's either some Machiavellian business move or some other grand plan.
Every time a leader or respected person says one thing and is trivially proven to have been lying puts a dent in societal trust.
Off the top of my head just in my lifetime, Snowden’s revelations, cops lying and suffering no consequences (over and over and over), politicians espousing views directly in contradiction with their actions, the myriad sexual abuse scandals, even tech leaders emailing each other to hold down pay for engineers who might have looked up to them and so on and so forth.
And then, of course, the whiplash from mob justice where certain thing get taken out of context or are difficult to understand without experience, and the consequences of that on those who are watching and understand.
If you believe the only reason Donald Trump was banned was due to a conspiracy of political censorship, or refuse to at least recognize the relevance of the date and context under which that ban was issued, then it would be a waste of time to convince you otherwise.
[0]https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
I'm not including the two tweets they actually banned him for because it's quite clear their interpretation of those tweets is highly subjective (I'm not ignoring the context there, context always matters, but even with context the idea that his tweets were "glorifying violence" seems to be some heavy extrapolation of what was said). Their decision to ban him then is obviously because of public and internal pressure mounting with the capital riot. So I'm more interested in what they essentially 'bent over backwards for'.
That's the sort of patently false misinformation being propagated through the internet and social media these days that makes it difficult for us as a society to properly assess and deal with our problems.
President Camacho believed in listening to the best experts he could lay his hands on to advise him. He was not at all anti-intellectual. He's nothing like many of the people in congress.
He was better.
Fake news, bots and manipulation by foreign governments are things I see all sides complain about on a daily basis.
"I believe Bill Gates is chipping everyone", therefore an article that ties him to an electronics company "proves" its true and his links to "Coronavirus" companies is the icing on the cake.
The worrying thing is that this is taking over so many areas including intelligent normal people. I guess the only way to make it go away is for our Leaders and Betters to have slightly better ability and morals so there is less reason to accuse them of corruption. Apologies to Bill Gates who is surely intelligent - not sure how he became the poster boy for Conspiracies.
But it's awfully hard to generate outrage on either side of the aisle with such a boring explanation.
It's about that the result of what probably was an innocent mistake is a deep-state conspiracy theory being pushed as a huge censorship narrative.
The situation itself seems stupidly simple to me and I would concur the likeliest explanation is someone just made a mistake.
But the questions I have are:
1. How did the candidate notice that their site was not being indexed/shown?
2. What did they check once they realized it? Did they ask the team behind the site or anyone how this might happen?
3. If the candidate did, what did the team respond? What investigation was done?
4. What specific elements led to the conclusion of "Deep State Algorithm"? What specifically brought about this as a conclusion to publicly post about?
It's possible the candidate was misled and told "everything was fine" from the site side, but I guess for me it's still a huge leap to go from "Everything with the site is fine but it's not showing in searches" to "there is a conspiracy to censor what I am saying".
It's not about what technology _might_ exist to accomplish such a thing, it's about what was actually checked and done before this conclusion was reached. That a conspiracy theory was the only promoted conclusion from the candidate is the frustrating part for me, as checking their other tweets and publications, there's no indication anything else was considered. The article itself is being catty and while it's funny to think it's just a case of a politician staging outrage, the core problem I have still exists even if I assume completely benign actors leading up to the tweet.
A normal person, on discovering this, would have contacted whoever is administering the website and asked them what's going on before simply assuming any particular cause.
"Blocked" or "hired people who blocked" is the same thing in relation to a guy who wants to be elected to run things.
Google Search Console is pretty good on digging into this, we discovered that a portion of our website was unsearchable because a plug-in was adding a meta tag to those posts.
Nah, we’d have smarter politicians. Maybe with a bit less charisma, but clearing out the blow hards would bring them to the top.
And that would be bad how?
Well that sounds like option #2 with extra steps.
With that said, this guy was either screwed by his technical team, or is quick to stir the pot without checking-- and is equally guilty of the same pathetic attempts at emotional manipulation used in the article. Maybe both.
[0] Or, option two is that the guy who might soon be in charge of Arizona state elections is so incompetent and so stupid that he accidentally blocked Google from searching his website:
The HTML shows he uses All In One SEO, so chances are there's a "ask search engines not to index this page/site" setting in the extension. I haven't actually checked, though.
Agreed, and what's worse to me is that it's all entirely speculative. The author didn't do any original research to, I dunno, email the guy's campaign about his website and ask if he made it? Having not done any research that didn't involve reading Twitter, he decided it was okay to write an article about it, and just pad that article out with wild-ass guesses and invective.
Especially when later on the candidate was checking for SEO.
Politics seems to attract the type of people who speak first and think later.
I scanned Finchem's Twitter feed and all I see are more lies about the election having been stolen. Did he post a retraction or anything?
edit: looks like he still has the disinformation up https://twitter.com/RealMarkFinchem/status/15780723461491507...
(/s, hopefully obvious)
1. set noindex tag, don't get indexed 2. cry "conspiracy" 3. get elected
Knee-jerk mockery is maybe a complacent response here from those of us on the liberal side.
Google should now refuse to index the site for the reason that he's unqualified, not the reason that his own website told indexing robots to go away.
edit: It's going to be a problem for a lot of conservatives this cycle. A lot of candidates in general. Claiming to be for free speech and free expression, with long lists of books to be burnt.