STRAUBINICAL NEWS DIGEST Four.

STRAUBINICAL NEWS DIGEST Four


  Normally you don't want your most difficult challenge of the day hitting you right square between the eyes as you're shambling around like a sightless baby marsupial, in search of functioning coffee. As my vision began to return, adjusting to the light, it became apparent that I would have to explain to my son, without laughing, that the "Karl Marx" he was writing about for a homework assignment was not one of the Marx Brothers.
  Many people see their children as raw dough to be molded, or as an opportunity to keep their own ideas and beliefs alive unto the next generation. To me, that is short sighted, and doesn't really reflect an awareness of a child's real potential.
  I use my son as a kind of middle school mole, reporting back to me about sociological trends in that bizarre cauldron of aggressive conformity, credulous worship of pop culture, and hormones. He tells me that in his little gang of junior bros, they often kid around with other in a playful manner. When I started to pontificate about this over the morning's scrapple, he was quick to reassure me that the only things they would ever "roast" each other about were as follows:

1. A guy's lack of ability in a specific sport, or sports generally
2. A guy's lack of success in convincing girls to talk to him without running away
3. The size of a guy's genitalia

  So, they're careful to confine their witty remarks to the question of a guy's manhood, rather than something that might be hurtful.
Interestingly, because they are eternally concerned about each other's feelings, they actually have developed a safe word to use in cases where the harsh burns are coming too fast over the plate for a guy to realize how much fun he's having.
  In fact, they have two safe words, because of the possibility of a guy forgetting the longer one. The backup safe word, available to any who suffer from Rick Perry-esque compromised information retrieval, is "Stop." I'm not going to tell you the longer and more creative one, partly out of respect for their privacy, and partly because I've forgotten it.
  (I add, parenthetically--  should any of you encounter my son after reading this, please do not mention anything I'm talking about here. I don't want to blow his cover.)

  Yesterday I was reading online comments following the Washington Post story about Russian efforts to influence our election by spreading propaganda. Steve Coffee mentioned that the comments seemed to bear out my thesis, that this information about Russians monkeying around with American democracy was so awful in its implications that it would be impossible to spin, and would thus need to be discredited. Sure enough, the discrediting was proceeding apace in The Glorious People's Comments Section. Commenting on this article about Russians spreading propaganda, one citizen observed sagely, Isn't this article propaganda? Others also expressed skepticism about the notion that reporters had actually investigated this story. More of the Washington Post lie factory, they cheerfully asserted. One person offered several satirical alternative names for the paper. "We should change its name to the Washington Lost, or maybe the Washington Boast, in order to indicate our disdain for its lack of veracity and nakedly obvious dedication to un-American left wing goals!"

  My first thought, also my stupidest one, was that I should engage with some of these jolly partisans. But then a little investigation on my part (the kind that a reporter, or a regular person with two free minutes, might do) revealed something fascinating. I'm not sure if it made me feel worse or better, but several of the commenters had Facebook pages where they had managed to accumulate zero friends, and had posted virtually nothing since 2015. A more zealous investigator would be reluctant to jump to conclusions about this, no doubt. It did seem to point me toward a hypothesis about why so many people who consider the Post to be the American Pravda are nonetheless hanging around its website every day, like 1950s juvenile delinquents hoping to talk an adult into buying them some Night Train. I can't imagine installing myself in the Breitbart online community, heckling all the people who go there to find the truth, but perhaps there are people who do just that. And perhaps there are left wing operatives creating fake Facebook characters for the purpose of trolling right wing sites. Could be. I don't really have time to gather data on this, but it sounds like an ideal task to hand off to my long-suffering intern, karlstraub'sintern RhondaMarvell. I suspect she'll be as appalled as I am at the idea of phony Facebook accounts being used for Soviet style disinformation campaigns.