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    I don't buy it. People don't criticize a king at all. You don't criticize the
    communist party in Stalinist Russia, tactfully or otherwise. Doing that gets you
    sent to the gulag

That's not true. Even during the Stalinist period in Russia or the Maoist period in China, there was still criticism of the government. It's just that criticism was phrased in language that was politically acceptable to the leaders. Individual cases of corruption and mismanagement could and were exposed and castigated, but as long as one was careful to emphasize that they were exposing and castigating the individual case of corruption (as opposed to the system as a whole), one could obliquely criticize the system.

That's exactly what I'm seeing here. Small businesses are afraid of Google. They're afraid to directly criticize the general principles behind Google AdWords program. But they can highlight individual failures of the Google AdWords program, and, as long as they emphasize that they're talking about this specific business or that specific account, they can obliquely criticize the general principles.

As a person coming from a country that used to be a Soviet republic for almost half a decade, I can only partially agree.

There was no place for criticism of the entire system. Doing that would get you a very brief visit from the local KGB department, followed by your swift disappearance, and seeing your family again was not-guaranteed beyond that point. And yes, you could criticise individual members of the government, and you could point out corruption. But there were two problems with this approach - everybody(and I mean everybody) were corrupt one way or another, you had to bribe officials to get anything done, and it wasn't frowned upon, it was just how things were. And the other problem was, that that particular person whom you are reporting for corruption might be a close friend of a local communist party member, in which case, it's you who is going to Siberia, not them. So yes, theoretically you could criticise. But it was very unsafe to do so. Authors especially had to find new ways to write books which contained symbolic criticism of the government,but not too obvious, so it would go through the censorship.

Are you seriously defending the comparison between Google and Mao?

A comparison about a specific aspect doesn't mean equating the two. So if that's all you have to criticize, it's probably valid.

>>>> They have an obligation to the shareholders. Turning down paying customers because of some moral objection to pointy objects is a little bit crazy.

Happens all the time. For example, Groupon recently dropped all firearms-related deals on the wave of the craziness that is going on. I, personally, cancelled my account with them the next day and would never buy from them anymore. I am completely certain them and the shareholders don't care too much. Same Google - losing couple of ad dollars from some independent shop is nothing to them. If their deals with Amazon would be under threat that'd probably be different business. And the government probably has absolutely nothing to do with it - if it were government-enforced, it would apply to Amazon too.

>Happens all the time. For example, Groupon recently dropped all firearms-related deals on the wave of the craziness that is going on.

That's something else entirely. There is an argument to be made that doing things like that could actually be good for the shareholders, if you assume that a majority of customers are pro- gun control and doing that could get you accolades from them instead of boycotts. Maybe the opposite is true in reality, but at least there is a plausible argument to be made that it could be profitable to take a stance on a political issue.

That doesn't seem to apply in this case. There is no huge anti-knife lobby to pander to. Refusing to sell knives or to associate with knife sellers doesn't get your company published in the liberal press in a positive way. It just gets everybody dumping on you for being an imperfect bureaucracy.

>And the government probably has absolutely nothing to do with it - if it were government-enforced, it would apply to Amazon too.

If the mortgage crisis has taught us anything it's that big companies can get a pass for things that smaller companies wouldn't.

>>>> There is no huge anti-knife lobby to pander to.

Apparently, Google disagrees - otherwise why would they have restrictions on it? It is as political as the gun case.

>>>> If the mortgage crisis has taught us anything it's that big companies can get a pass for things that smaller companies wouldn't.

Bailing out a failing bank because it is (supposedly) better for the economy is not exactly the same as suspending advertisement rules or any other trade regulations.

Maybe it's the agency problem. The mid level manager making the decisions is not a shareholder.

>The mid level manager making the decisions is not a shareholder.

They almost certainly are.

I think what makes this Google case different from the Groupon case is that Groupon applied its rule UNIFORMLY whereas Google in this instance behaved inexcusably: applying one policy to one retailer, and a different policy to everybody else.

I know, I'm just saying turning away customers for political reasons is not as uncommon as the comment above claims.

> I don't buy it. People don't criticize a king at all. You don't criticize the communist party in Stalinist Russia, tactfully or otherwise. Doing that gets you sent to the gulag.

Uh, yes they did. Kingdoms of the beforetime were not all Stalinist Russias. Kings had to gather and maintain support; some of them did this through shutting down dissenters hard, but many of them never did, or did so with the full support of "the people".

You reminded me of a sort-of relevant part from Richard III that I enjoyed:

BUCKINGHAM:

And when mine oratory grew to an end

I bid them that did love their country's good

Cry 'God save Richard, England's royal king!'

RICHARD:

Ah! and did they so?

BUCKINGHAM:

No, so God help me, they spake not a word;

But, like dumb statues or breathing stones,

Gazed each on other, and look'd deadly pale.

>Kings had to gather and maintain support; some of them did this through shutting down dissenters hard, but many of them never did, or did so with the full support of "the people".

If the king has to do what the subjects and lesser lords want or he'll be overthrown, he's really serving at the consent of the people. That pretty well breaks the analogy: If the only sort of king people can criticize is the sort who doesn't actually have unchecked power then using "people are polite when criticizing" as a heuristic for unchecked power has the relationship inverted.

    If the king has to do what the subjects and lesser lords want or he'll be
    overthrown, he's really serving at the consent of the people.

That sounds an awful lot like the "mandate of Heaven" principle they have in China. The government can do whatever it wants, as long as it has the mandate of Heaven. How does the government know that it has the mandate of Heaven? By successfully surviving an attempted revolution or coup. How does a government lose the mandate of Heaven? By falling to a revolution or coup.

It's wonderfully circular logic that highlights the flaw in your argument. By your logic, every government that manages to survive is serving with the "consent of the governed". By your logic, even Kim Jong-Un is serving with the "consent" of his people, simply because they have not risen up and cast him down.

>By your logic, every government that manages to survive is serving with the "consent of the governed".

Nope, only the ones whose people could in practice overthrow the government but choose not to. Governments with loyal soldiers and modern military hardware, or even just a local monopoly on WWII-era military hardware, are not going to be seriously threatened by citizens who are prohibited from owning weapons. No surprise that those are the ones that oppress their people the most.

They're not especially threatened by citizens permitted to own firearms either. Do you really think that the average gun-owning homeowner can go toe to toe with a soldier who has armor support, air superiority, years of training, and, most importantly, modern military logistics backing him up?

And before you bring up insurgencies, let me remind you that successful insurgencies are marked by two features: 1. the occupying army does not speak the same language as the locals, so intimidating translators is an easy and effective way to deny the occupier situational awareness. 2. There is a bordering country willing to support the insurgency with either arms, safe haven, or both. Neither point applies to the US homeland.

Arguably, the last time an insurgency tried to take on the US Army was during the Civil War. Even though both sides had similar quality armament (and the South had higher quality leadership), the North won, thanks to its much stronger industrial base and better developed logistical system (i.e. railroads). The situation is even worse today. The average homeowner does not have easy access to any armament substantially note powerful than an AR-15, and the chances of any branch of the federal military defecting to support a civilian revolution are vanishingly small. In addition, the military speaks the same English that we do, and I'm pretty sure that neither Canada nor Mexico is willing to furnish you with arms and/or IEDs. So, with all that in mind, would you care to explain how, exactly, the Second Amendment protects me from the US government becoming a tyranny?

People often talk about the impossibility of armed revolt in a modern nuclear state. "You'd be killed on the first day," they tell me (not that I'm advocating armed revolt here, just to be clear). What they forget is that an armed revolt in the United States would still be chiefly a political act. America would have the eyes of the world on it, and there would be propaganda from both sides. America of today would be hesitant to bring the full force of its military down on a militant group if the group could successfully paint themselves as freedom fighters.

This would only work if the revs were in response to a truly tyrannical act, say if a president were to declare a state of emergency and indefinitely suspend elections. Think of the Arab Spring, Waco Texas, or the negative response to police brutality on the OWS protestors. Think of the imagery (and it would of course be filmed) of a hardy group of patriots facing off against tanks and bombers. These are powerful political images and could bring in diplomatic pressure, outside military aid, etc.

I'm not saying a revolt is likely likely to succeed, I'm just saying it more complicated than a cut and dry, "they have bigger guns, so the revolutionaries lose."

That's true. I was making the point (contra OP) that your owning a gun has little to no impact on the government ability to oppress you. Widespread gun ownership is not some magic pixie dust that will keep the federal government from oppressing us, and strict gun regulation is not some kind emasculation that will prevent the citizenry from rising up against a tyrannical government (c.f. Egypt, Libya).

I think you've shifted the meaning of king in the parent comment to tyrant. After that you go on to give Google the benefit of the doubt. Google isn't a tyrant, but we are all beholden to Google. Due to cognitive dissonance, we have the tendency to minimize or excuse any instances of abuse on the part of our benevolent data custodian.

I think you're just making a different argument. The parent seemed to be implying that people are afraid to criticize Google aggressively because Google have too much power and may retaliate. I don't think that's true -- in particular, if they did start retaliating, it would invoke a backlash and push people to start actively seeking out competitors or advocating new regulations.

Maybe there is something to the cognitive dissonance argument, but that's a very different dynamic. Resigning yourself to having to deal with someone in the future and then convincing yourself that you like them because they're the option you've chosen for yourself is not at all the same thing as that party having some kind of sovereign power over you. Look at what people do with their local sports teams -- people love the local team because it's "their team," that doesn't prove anything about whether the Mets have any excess of economic power over the citizens of New York.

I agree. I have no fear of criticizing Google because they are algorithmic. I don't think they're going to dig through my history and find my AdWords account and stick it to me just because I wrote a nasty diatribe about their bullshit. My fear with Google will be that I do the wrong thing accidentally that gets me flagged and there will be no way to rectify it because there is no human behind the controls and I have no back-channel or following to get Matt Cutts to pay attention to me.

Algorithmic? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/27/google_raters_manual... ("Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web")

No, the Stalinist party was criticized plenty. Not in an effective way, clearly Stalin was good at running a dictatorship, but still.

Wearing an Anti-Flag shirt is kinda 2002, and Congress is certainly not passing laws against it.

This is just beautiful. I don't know the facts to this case, and neither do you, and yet you assume that what could bery much be a political action by a non-democratic corporation is either a mistake or a result of government intervention. But get this: large corporations can do whatever the hell they feel like. If they want to advertise abortion clinics but not come-back-to-Jesus ads because that's their political view, that's exactly what they'll do. And while they do have some incentive to take a customer's money, they have other incentives, too, like enforcing their political views without answering to anyone. True, they do have obligations to their shareholders, but no one will yell too loudly if they're turning a $1B profit rather than the $1.1B that they could have, and there's a lot of political influence forgoing that $0.1B could get you. And they don't even have to pass laws that you say Congress is so fond of passing.

Some people feel that the free market ensures fair behavior in spite of being shown the opposite again and again. Free market gives rise to monopolies or non-monopolies with too much power, and those companies don't have to operate by the same rules anymore. This is where the invisible hand hypothesis fails: To the powerful players, a dollar is not the same as a dollar to you because they have enough power to change the market. Set the rules of the game, if you like.

That's why I'll always take government red tape over corporate red tape. That's why I'll take government corruption over corporate corruption. True, even in a democracy money buys influence, but at least the players are often required to give a good explanation. But a corporation, as long as it's very profitable, can behave like a dictator -- benevolent or otherwise.

It strikes me as very unlikely that Google is getting government pressure to restrict the advertising of assisted opening knives. These knives are exceedingly popular; Walmart and Amazon sell them.

I can't actually think of any reason that passes a basic sanity check that Google would have an issue with them at all. This situation seems a little bizarre.

Turning down paying customers because of some moral objection to pointy objects

Are you suggesting the US government asked google to stop runnings ads for knives?

In the same country where I can pick up a semi automatic assault rifle at WalMart?

If it's semi-auto only, it's not an assault rifle. Litmus test: would military personnel use it to assault a target?

Actually? Probably yes. Every member of the military I've spoken with emphasizes that their training explicitly discourages the use of fully automatic fire. Real life isn't like Call of Duty. Special Forces operators don't go in flinging grenades left and right, blazing away with full auto fire from the hip. Doing so is both a waste of ammunition and a danger to one's allies.

That said, though, I find the distinction between "assault" and "regular" rifles to be quite silly. In practice, "assault" tends to mean "it has a rail for attachments and looks scary", just like "sniper rifle" tends to mean "rifle with a scope". In both cases, the essential portion of the definition is does not have anything to do with the gun, but more to do with the person carrying it. A sniper rifle is a rifle carried by a sniper. Even a relatively weak .22LR can be a sniper rifle in sufficiently skilled hands. Similarly, an assault rifle is a rifle carried by someone with assault training.

That's not right, or at least not nearly the whole story. Of course use of automatic fire is discouraged for situations where it's not effective, such as engaging point targets with aimed accurate fire. For other tasks, the most obvious being suppression, automatic fire can be very effective. Capability of automatic fire was and always has been a requirement driven by the military. For a recent example, look at the U.S. Army requirements for the individual carbine program - selective fire is a requirement for submitted designs.

Anyways, none of this impacts the fact that the term "assault rifle", as introduced with the German Sturmgewehrs and now subverted by the U.S. media to mean "scary looking gun", has a specific military meaning that distinguishes it from other small arms like the battle rifle. Let's use Wikipedia's definition: An assault rifle is a selective fire ... rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine.

The distinguishing features of the assault rifle, compared to the contemporary battle rifles at the time it was popularized (like the M1 Garand), is that it is chambered for a lower powered non-pistol cartridge (which translates into lighter weight), has a detachable magazine and is capable of burst or fully automatic fire.

I'm not aware of any military or paramilitary organization that uses a definition substantially different from this, or anything like the one you've suggested.

While you're right in that the person doing the shooting is far more important than the weapon, it's pretty clear that some weapons, like fully-automatic shotguns, are designed for specific use cases. You wouldn't use a .50 Barret to hunt deer, and you wouldn't take a micro Uzi to the practical range.

Drawing a line between civilian and military use suitability is difficult, but that doesn't mean there is no difference. That's why there is no assault rifle law in the US, but rather some features of weapons have been banned from private use.

To be accurate, there are no weapons features that have been banned from private ownership and use in the U.S. at the federal level. Certain weapons fall under regulation of the National Firearms Act and require payment of a tax before transfer. Examples are machine guns, suppressors, destructive devices and short barreled rifles/shotguns. These are all legal to own by individuals at the federal level.

A few states do outlaw or ban some specific NFA weapons however - for instance 5 states outlaw individuals from possesing machine guns.

You are right, I guess, but that's nitpicking.

The gist was that I don't believe the government bothers with banning knife-ads while semi-automatic rifles (under whichever label) are sold freely.

An assault rifle is a step down from a battle rifle. A battle rifle fires full sized .30 caliber rounds, an M-16 would be an assault rifle. Smaller cartridges than a battle rifle.

You might try googling^H^H^H^H^H duckducking the phrase "If only Stalin knew!"

Historically, people DID criticize the kings, often at their own peril. France and England executed one each.

-- I don't buy it. People don't criticize a king at all. You don't criticize the communist party in Stalinist Russia, tactfully or otherwise. Doing that gets you sent to the gulag.

You missed his point: you praise the King and leader by saying that certain underlings that do the bad acts are giving the wonderful King /Stalin a bad name. You might have missed the show trials where someone was always being blamed for x and y. People have complaints about life, someone has to be responsible. At Google someone is doing bad things but it can't be the wonderful and "open and free" loving founders, just some bad apples. They money is going to Google's bank, of course.

-- They're a publicly traded company. They have an obligation to the shareholders. Turning down paying customers because of some moral objection to pointy objects is a little bit crazy.

The obligation is not like you seem to put it. They have an obligation to make money over the course of years, not this quarter. If I wanted to spend $1 mil on "Abort your baby just for the hell of it" Google, even if 'it' agreed with the message might see this as alienating their other customers and decline. Likewise, using search to drum up Adwords business, in addition to being possibly illegal (not disclosed to users) can make Google lose credibility and that's all they have /had.