Inappropriate Advertising

Far from being intrusive, I've actually found that I enjoy Google Mail's targeted ads. (And yeah, I know they're evil. A company who's first motto is "don't be evil" virtually had to turn out that way, didn't it?)

I've written about the spam, for example, and it's sort of interesting trying to figure out what the targets in this so-called targeted advertising is. But now Gmail has presented this ad for the Baader-Meinhoff movie with the tag, "The revolution is reborn!" Er, maybe it was "reignited". (I don't know what caused Gmail to put that ad up, but it changed and I can't get it back now.)

Wait, what? Nooooo. I hope the point of that movie was that revolutionaries were dumb thugs using political ideology as an excuse for bad behavior.

I mean, even if you're an ideological fellow traveler, I would hope this movie served more as an embarrassment than a rallying cry.

"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." -V.I. Lenin

I tend to agree of late that the very term "Capitalism" is Marx's socialist framing of what is, in essence, freedom, and that we're poorer for using the term to describe free markets.

By the way, it was Marx who infected economics—by all rights a hard science with immutable laws—with politics and turned it into the morass it is today.

Jerky jerk-face.