If You Google Hypocrisy, You Get Google

Ah, don’t you just love when the truly self-righteous turn out to be just as hypocritical as everyone else. I know I’m no exception. I catch myself being a hypocrite at times and vow to do better, but my blunders don’t quite reach up to the scale of Google’s.

See, I’ve never collaborated with a totalitarian regime before to restrict information flow and the free speech of its citizens. Google’s done that. I’ve never taken money from a totalitarian communist regime in order to facilitate said infringements on the country’s own citizens’ basic freedoms (not that they had them to begin with). Google did that. And I’ve never self-righteously claimed to poke a sharp stick in the eye of my own government when it asked for my help in counterterrorism operations while knowingly cooperating with a hostile and most certainly totalitarian regime. You guessed it. Google did that.

If the hypocrisy were anymore thick, you could use it as insulation in your home this winter. Noel Sheppard on Newsbusters details a short piece from the Associated Press, Google co-founder Sergey Brin fessed up that the megainfo company had “compromised its principles to accommodate Chinese censorship demands”.

The article also had this to say about some of the particulars of the arrangement.

“Google's China-approved Web service omits politically sensitive information that might be retrieved during Internet searches, such as details about the 1989 suppression of political unrest in Tiananmen Square. Its agreement with China has provoked considerable criticism from human rights groups.”

Wouldn’t want any nasty facts about how oppressive the government of China is to its own citizens, now would we? The beautiful part of this is, most of the population of China probably has this seared into their collective conscious than any in the Western world. Google must be technospeak for Pravda.

Even better, this goes against the vaunted Google principles, the “Ten things Google has found to be true”, most specifically, “You can make money without doing evil”. But in all fairness, I’d imagine Brin and company don’t see China as truly evil. They only see its citizens as misguided, I’m sure. It’s obvious by their heavy-handed stance against cooperating with the United States government and their “take it up the tailpipe” stance with China, they’re following the traditional Marxist-Leninist formula of communist totalitarians = good, free republic = bad. So, I suppose in the literal sense, they likely don’t believe they’ve violated their sacred tenets of faith.

Sheppard does us the service of covering Brin's response to see if we can verify that hypothesis.

“’Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense,’ Brin said.”… “‘It's perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, 'Look, we're going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won't actually operate there.' That's an alternate path,’ Brin said. ‘It's not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing.’"

And, really, it does depend on what the definition of “is” is. Clinton would be proud, but so would Mao. When caught in their own hypocrisy, they get tangled up in their own words and trip over themselves saying…nothing. They can’t explain themselves because there is no explanation. They got caught with their hands in the yuan jar and now they can reap the whirlwind, which admittedly won't be much. But at least now they can have the indignity of every little phrase they utter in the name of “free speech” and against government “censorship” ringing hollow and sounding like the worthless rhetoric it is. Well done, guys. You’re as vapid and vacuous as the rest of the self-righteous holier-than-thou elitists you hang with.

And On a Personal Note…

Burn in Hell, Zarqawi. In the end, what you got wasn’t in the least as much as what you deserved. Hope you like Mesquite flavoring...