CSotD: Truth, or a reasonable facsimile thereof

We’ll start our search with Cathy Wilcox’s commentary on keeping young people off social media, in which she raises the question of how you would keep up with the world otherwise.

She’s obviously not a big fan of Xitter, which is getting a harsh reassessment from the folks Down Under.

Fiona Katauskas isn’t impressed with Musk’s efforts to support free speech, as he stuffs money into his pockets and rewards the world with a shower.

And Matt Golding, who specializes in small, iconic cartoons, offers this small, iconic evaluation.

This sudden attention to Xitter stems from a confrontation between Musk and the Australian government, which directed him to take down gratuitously violent videos of a terrorist attack in which an Assyrian bishop was repeatedly stabbed, an act that touched off riots.

The Sydney Morning Herald — Wilcox’s home paper — has a solid report on the back-and-forth between Musk and the government after Meta agreed to take down the videos but Xitter refused.

It may surprise Americans to see how the rest of the world views freedom of speech and of the press. The US — its bookburners aside — tends towards a libertarian anything-goes attitude that is far from universally shared, even in relatively open societies.

On the other hand, Musk, having grown up in South Africa, is no babe in the woods and should understand not only how the world views free speech but how most people view rich, arrogant twits.

The decision to build a global empire ought to include a parallel decision to trim your sails depending on local winds.

But neither rules nor common sense apply to Elon Musk.

Bringing things back home, Drew Sheneman points out that neither South Africa nor Australia have cornered the market on rich, arrogant twits, though you occasionally have to read between the lines to see just how bad things are.

Complaints about the younger generation go back to the dawn of history, but the gap between worker pay and CEO compensation gives them even less heft this time around.

There is, indeed, a management problem with Gen Z, whose experience in the Covid shutdown appears to have either made them question the system — they’re not alone in that — or never learn the ropes to begin with.

But a complaint about Gen Z workers by columnist Sophia Money-Couttes in London’s Telegraph provided a bit of comic relief. She went on at length about how hard she had worked in her 20s, and how tough it was to establish her place in the work-world, only to be unmasked on Reddit as a nepo baby:

A look at what else she’s written for Grandpa’s newspaper dulls the surprise, since she has also held forth about having to adjust to new luxury cars after growing up in Land Rovers, the first time she met Mohammed al-Fayed (Dodi’s daddy), and how she rather enjoyed the exclusive boarding school she attended.

Not a Studs Terkel approach to the working world.

More like diamond studs.

Meanwhile, the tattered remains of the Republican Party, as Clay Jones notes, are whining about the forgiveness of student loans while ignoring their own penchant for bellying up to the public trough.

I’m not sure where this chart comes from, but the Biden campaign has not been backwards in matching complainers about student loans with their own willingness to be forgiven from loans that were supposed to help pay staff during the pandemic, though (A) they were loans and (B) there’s some question about what private industries these folks were running.

It’s important to focus on whose student loans are being forgiven, because the students are being portrayed as 20-something slackers when many of those benefiting from the program are far older and have been working for decades while making the payments on their loans.

Instead of buying houses, f’rinstance.

If the PPL program was a stimulus, so is this, but acknowledging that would conflict with the ongoing program of alienating the faithful against education and the educated.

Not, mind you, that we should expect consistency in the overall attack. Here Fox’s Jesse Watters compares Donald Trump to a potted plant that requires sunshine and frequent watering, and points out that it is unfair to expect a budding President of the United States to put in a 32-hour work week.

Trump is, Watters adamantly points out, simply too old to work that hard, despite having trained by riding in a golf cart for hours, as well as shuffling down ramps and demonstrating his prowess as a two-fisted drinker.

I don’t mind the blatant, inconsistent, illogical lies so much as I mind how well they appear to be working.

I’ll confess that I didn’t understand Mike Beckom’s cartoon for Counterpoint, since I was pretty sure that Denmark, Sweden and Norway weren’t in a war at the moment, much less one in which the Democratic Party was advising them.

But apparently the Viking ship stands for NATO, a treaty organization of 31 nations, including those three Scandinavian countries and 28 non-Viking countries. None of those nations are currently at war with anyone, though several of them are making substantial contributions to Ukraine while the US has been hobbled until this past week not by Democrats but by Republicans.

And, just as the anti-student-loan-forgiveness people, against all evidence, promote college graduates as 20-something slackers, so, too, the right wing hangs on to Trump’s accusation that NATO members don’t pay the agreed-upon 2% of their GNP.

Which is not particularly accurate. And if you allow them to round-up to the nearest full percentage, it’s a damned lie with two-thirds of them in compliance. (Sweden only became a member this month so is not on the chart.)

Meanwhile, as Pedro X. Molina points out, the MAGAts continue to hew wood and carry water for their Russian masters.

Matt Golding denies that the Republican Party exists beyond its extremist fringe, and the only independent spirits within its ranks seem to all be retiring and have no fear of being primaried.

Though, in all fairness, this cartoon and Molina’s came out before the recent House vote.

Which means Molina does well to depict a MAGA hat rather than the full elephant. There are still a few months left to see who follows conscience and who follows orders.

And how voters feel about it.