The State of Google Trends
Addendum: I apologize for all of the Steve Kirsch typos which I am trying to work out. For reasons unknown to me, the Kindle Fire tablet autocorrects Kirsch to Kirsche. Word corrects it always to Kirsch. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but misspellings can sometimes be a good thing, if they add to the popular lexicon about a name. I don’t want to contemplate these results on Amy Sukwan, though.
I like to check google trends anymore for the same reason that I like to peruse facebook and twitter. Although they have banned a lot of people and there are better alternatives if you might be a purveyor of “misinformation,” they still hold command of a large and very diverse audience and can thus be best used to figure out what’s collectively popular in the minds of a lot of people. It’s hard for them to play whack a mole when too much is coming up in the collective consciousness.
Well over a decade ago I actually contracted out to be a google search moderator. Back then I sincerely believed the search engine was a force for good. I read through their training manual, which was quite agnostic at the time. I was supposed to mark websites as duplicates, try to attribute to the original website where content came from and mark things as porn. I was supposed to label common misspellings of words in hopes of finding the searcher’s true intent. Labelling of foreign language shuffled it off to a different department. There were red flags, but they were supposed to apply to some pretty grisly stuff like snuff films.
I never worked a job for google or their subcontractor in this case. I passed the training and logged into the moderator site and no jobs ever appeared for me to bid on. I wrote it off and moved on.
It is sometimes difficult to determine a web searcher’s true intent, which is what a great deal of the training revolved around. Many results are influenced by the news cycle. For example here are the results for the search term “abortion” on a 5 year cycle in the USA:
The spike in early May almost certainly relates to the leak of the Supreme Court Decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Let’s run those same metrics again for “abortion services.”
These are a little more jagged, but probably better reflect someone who genuinely is seeking to have an abortion prior to it perhaps being outlawed in her area. I’m sure some of these results were still news cycle driven, but not as much.
My opinion on abortion is that I’m not in a position to judge anyone on their personal choices, so I won’t. It’s up to you and God to come to terms with it. You’ll never see me quote Hillary Clinton again, but I agreed wholeheartedly when she said that the procedure should be “safe, legal and rare.” From a bigger picture perspective the “my body my choice” movement has destroyed itself with the whole mandatory vax thing, of course.
The democrats also seem to be destroying the movement in other ways. For one thing it is a little off putting to celebrate death and some vocal proponents seem to be engaging in a near Satanic debauchery level in their shrill championing of the cause. A 70 year old “woman,” hypothetically talking about how she is going to sleep with Donald Trump just so she can abort Trump’s baby on live TV, is not winning anyone over, for a wide variety of reasons. These are “women” who are not of an age, gender, or in many cases an attractiveness level where they will need to ever genuinely seek out abortion services. I’m just going to put that out there. Don’t even get me started on pregnant men.
Attempts by celebrities to talk about their abortions seem to lack the balls to really go there. One country star wrote about her abortion in 2020, but claimed that the reasons for terminating the pregnancy were private. Fair enough, I suppose, but you usually relinquish the right to privacy when you publicly post something, so I wasn’t sure why she went there at all. It turned out that she had an ectopic pregnancy. Are you effing kidding me? This bears absolutely zero resemblance to an elective abortion.
For those that don’t know, an ectopic pregnancy (it happens in about one in 50 pregnancies and the likelihood has risen substantially in the past few decades) is one where the fetus sadly implants somewhere where it can not grow to term. The baby in this case has a 0% chance of surviving. The mother, meanwhile, has 50% odds of dying if the pregnancy is not terminated medically (I’d assume to other 50% miscarry without help). I know I like 50/50 odds and all and I know they’re really trying to kill us. But this is one of a very narrow range of situations where I would be okay with terminating the pregnancy. I don’t believe we are yet at a point where doctors are like “yeah come back when you’re dead” on this issue. Nor would it be affected by the Supreme Court decision. #Celebrity Fail.
The big picture issue that few see here is the adoption lobby, and the idea that demographics is destiny. Whether abortion restrictions are loosened or tightened has a lot to do with how many babies are born. In country by country you can track it very accurately based on fertility rates. If there’s an overload of screaming brats all around (think early 1970’s America in the post baby boom era) then everybody is like something must be done about this. A lot of eugenicists also cemented their ideologies on population growth during that period, as a lot of those old AF bastards are still living in that outmoded idea and trying to rule us all with it.
But recent population surveys of women have consistently found that the number of children that a woman has is less than the number of children that she wants to have. This indicates that infertility is a problem. So what do some of these infertile people do?
Think about it. These are people that are in many cases well to do and politically connected. They want babies. If there’s a poor 18 year who is pregnant and facing hard choices, do they want that baby? I’m going to say yes. They want that baby to be born. They do not want that baby to be aborted.
So you have a disconnect here between a largely silent but very powerful group and a group of poor and desperate. How much is a baby worth?
I suppose it depends on what year they were born in…
Great article thank you
"a disconnect here between a largely silent but very powerful group and a group of poor and desperate," great point. the handmaid's tale come to life? or maybe a slippery slope where child protective services mine the data and determine that a poor child is "endangered" and then sent off to live with daddy warbucks? or to a state-sponsored enterprise somewhat less comfortable than daddy warbucks' mansion? i can think of a few.
you probably saw naomi wolf's great stack today https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/on-losing-roe