CSotD: Good For What Ails You

Non Sequitur (AMS) manages to strike an appropriate note through serendipity, given Wiley’s lead time.

Indeed, things could have gone worse and, also indeed, fate is recalculating.

In any case, the second day of political cartoons about the attempted assassination have mostly indicated that we should give cartoonists a little more time, so we’ll back off and let them do some recalculating of their own.

Though I note that F Minus (AMS) also offered an optimistic idea Saturday and I wish the proposed innovation had truly been in place, because social media isn’t any more pleasant this morning than it was yesterday and I will repeat that scrolling through Facebook, Threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon and X remains very much like touring a 19th century madhouse.

I did have a somewhat encouraging conversation at the dog park yesterday with the youngest member of our regular group, who just finished his junior year of high school. I played a bit of “when I was your age” with him, saying that back then, young fella, we didn’t have social media and we had to go find delusional cranks all on our own.

But he responded with a discussion of the impossibility of disabusing such people of ridiculous, illogical beliefs through logic and I found it very encouraging to hear the term “confirmation bias” coming from someone so young.

Perhaps our future isn’t so dark after all.

I still found yesterday’s Deflocked (AMS) funny, but I am more willing to believe that not all is lost, and I’m reminded that, when I was a young man despairing of the world around me, it was easier to talk to people in my grandparents’ generation than in my parents’ demographic.

I don’t know if that’s a universal truth, but I realize that we hold up the Mamets of the world as comic figures, but that Cobb’s wrong to think he represents an entire generation.

The fact is, the cartoons accusing kids of being in the house glued to their phones all day are belied by the kids I see walking down the road together, laughing and goofing around and “doing things we used to do they think are new.”

My optimism is tempered by knowing that we haven’t presented the next generations with a perfect world, but as long as we’ve got people like First Dog in the Moon to reassure them that things genuinely are that dismal, they’ll figure out ways to cope.

In fact, not only did First Dog lay things out, but then his readers responded, which doesn’t actually solve all the problems but at least indicates that others are aware of what’s going on and are determined to respond with cream pies and seltzer while they figure out more practical solutions.

It is a gift to be furious and funny at the same time.

Jen Sorensen, for example, is not as laugh-aloud funny as First Dog, but she shares his ability to express despair in a way that elicits a nod of agreement, though she evokes more of a grim smile than actual laughter.

It’s important to note that she posted this in the wake of the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity rather than after Saturday’s shooting, and that, while it seems more relevant this morning, that’s evidence of the value of her analysis.

Meanwhile, if you need additional reasons to laugh amid the horror:

Rhymes With Orange (KFS) jumps on a trend I’ve certainly noticed, which is that the ongoing attempts to thwart hackers are becoming a major hassle for users, and Price and Piccolo manage to not only hit the impossibly long password concept in their main illustration but then pick up on the “we’ll send you a code” idea on their title panel.

I’m sympathetic to the need to find a balance point between dealing with the ingenuity of the bad guys and making it so hard for users that they give up.

When the regional med center keeps insisting I get a code to enter their website, I’m annoyed but, then again, I realize that the dangers of ransomware attacks are very real and not just something they’ve decided to fret over.

Joy of Tech gets a laugh over what seems like a hack for which there is no excuse, the break-in and theft of AT&T’s database. My first response was “Thank god I’m not an AT&T customer,” but, then again, if they didn’t get you this time, they’ll get you the next time.

Unlike having my hospital’s system shut down while I’m being treated, the AT&T hack seems to come under my general category of being a needle in a haystack, the same philosophy I had back when the feds were tapping our phones and opening mail in the 60s: The more information they gather, the less they can process.

One of the reasons I greatly prefer “Animal Farm” to “1984” is that much of the sense of threat in Big Brother comes from Winston Smith being directly targeted, while the pigs have a system that oppresses and exploits all the other animals.

1984 seems illogical, and the solution is to not be Winston Smith. Don’t be the nail that sticks up.

By contrast, in “Animal Farm,” we see that the nails that stick up do get hammered: Snowball is exiled and demonized for his disloyalty, and when Boxer begins to wise up, the pigs send him off to a rendering plant.

But the system at the Manor Farm is based on rarely having to do that. It is designed to oppress everyone rather than attempting to identify and control potential troublemakers.

And another thing …

A little marketing insight from Reply All (Counterpoint). I’m so old that I remember when yoghurt was good for you. We either made our own or bought it at a health food store.

Now it takes up a whole section of the dairy case and most of it is so full of sugar and jelly that you might as well just buy ice cream and let it melt.

And don’t get me started on babies and Go Gurt and junk food in plastic tubes.

Dagnabbit, back in the old days, we raised kids right. We fed’em healthy food and taught them to play musical instruments.

We called it “Project 1925.”