Pun Salad

That's one of my takeaways from Reason's latest entry in its continuing series:

Also of note:

• "Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant." George Will speculates on What gladiatorial politics will bury in the midterms. Bottom line, after pointing out that Trump won't be on the ballot to motivate his multitudionous fanbase: that

  Now, never underestimate the Democrats’ ability to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. As an Israeli diplomat once said of the Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If many Democratic candidates try to pump up deflated hysterias — democracy is dying, the planet is frying — they can make themselves resemble a (to recycle a phrase) basket of deplorables. Failure is a choice.

• Just asking questions. Katherine Mangu-Ward mashups George Orwell's 1984 and a 29-year-old movie in her (print) headline: Will our future be A Tail Wagging a Dog, Forever?

  William Shakespeare might have invoked letting slip the dogs of war to describe the unleashing of violence, but these days we just "wag the dog." Popularized by Our American Cousin—the play being performed at Ford's Theatre when President Abraham Lincoln was shot—the phrase took on an explicitly political meaning after the ripped-from-the-headlines 1997 film Wag the Dog. In that otherwise pretty awful movie, a fabricated military conflict was used to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. Since then, the term has become shorthand for the idea that leaders sometimes use military action to divert attention from problems at home.

  A wag-the-dog allegation need not mean the reasons for war are made up from whole cloth. Real geopolitical tensions, real strategic dilemmas, and real threats obviously exist. But the utility of a foreign conflict as a tool for domestic political positioning—especially when electoral outcomes are looking shaky—is a recurring theme in American history.

  Trump's approval ratings are notably terrible. National polling aggregates suggest his job approval stands somewhere near 40 percent. A president facing a highly competitive election year and significant scrutiny on issues ranging from the economy to the ongoing incredulity and disappointment about the release of the Epstein files might well cast about for a distraction.

  I'm pretty much a fan of blowing up Iranian bad guys, but KMW deserves your attention.

• Argumentum ad … You Know Whomium. Granite Grok's Steve MacDonald goes there in his examination of The Googleoligarchy.

  People have gotten used to the idea that Google’s metrics are the alpha and omega of everything related to web traffic. This is an institutional lie accepted after years of a monopoly on search. Google’s search algorithms serve one purpose. To optimize ad revenue for Google. Actual traffic results may vary, but our previous hosting company based its billing model on actual visits and the bandwidth required.

  The result was that our real traffic was about two to four times what Google declared the word of the Alphabet gods and still is.

  Google has also used its prominence for other forms of evil. Copyright holders have been after it for decades as it scoops up content and makes it available, which is an interesting contrast to what happens on YouTube if you record at an event and it hears music in the background that you don’t have permission to “use.”

  Well, Steve goes on, building on his personal pique, to…

  It’s how you end up with Hitler, or the supposed organ vans in China. People disappearing in the night, and no one dares question why, so they won’t be next. Systemic cultural suppression of speech and manipulation of thought.

  Google would love that, and so would the proglodytes as long as it answered to them. They could control more than speech. They could control online reality, which, in the increasingly connected world, is maddeningly the same as the real world to far too many people.

  Trump’s DOJ, (btw) is actively suing Google for “antitrust violations, specifically targeting its monopolization of the search engine and digital advertising markets.” Is there enough time to prove the case or break it up before an actual king sits in the Oval Office?

  Yes, he went there:

  

  For the record: I use Google Chrome, Gmail, their calendar, and their search engine. They provide fantastic, useful software, all free-to-me. I'm pretty sure that I've said this in the past: There's nothing wrong with Google that the government can't make worse.

  (But N.B.: DuckDuckGo is Pun Salad's choice in the right-hand column for site-searching.)

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