CSotD: Modern Times
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Joy of Tech takes on the Cambridge Analytica case, and, because it's a multi-panel cartoon, it's possible to agree with parts of their take and disagree with others.
First of all, here's a complete takedown on what happened and why, (it's long; read it later) and it ought to both scare and infuriate you.
It should scare you because the racists and fascists are moving into cyberwarfare faster than their opposition is reacting, and it should infuriate you because your idiot friends on Facebook are giving up your data through the stupid clickbait quizzes and shares they can't seem to resist.
The good news is, most of what you surrender is likely being harvested by advertisers, not thieves and fascisti. The bad news is that some of it is being harvested by thieves and fascisti.
The other good news is — from a personal POV — so what?
You are still not obligated to provide your account numbers to Nigerian princes or people who are holding your winnings in a lottery you never entered.
And as I've said many times, the more information they gather, the more your privacy is protected; there is a huge, critical difference in the relative value of sharply targeted vs wholesale information collection.
Cambridge Analytica has compiled profiles on 230 million Americans?
First of all, bullshit. There are only 324 million Americans in the first place.
But if they have, I wish they'd hurry up and profile the other 94 million of us, because the more the merrier.
I may have an FBI file somewhere, if it wasn't discarded after the Church Committee caused a purge, but, if so, it is probably a single sheet of paper with cross-references to people I knew and things I participated in that were of a whole lot more interest to the feds than I ever was.
And if they even went to that extent, we should be furious not over the intrusion but over the waste of money.
As for Cambridge Analytica and its fascist friends, if they raided Facebook and found out that I'm a liberal, well, gee golly willikers, I guess my secret's out.
Here's the part that matters: They compiled a sucker list, a collection of mooncalves who would take a "quiz" to find out what character on "The Titticut Follies" they are, and breeze right past the part that says "this website wants access to your profile" only staying on that page long enough to give permission. Which includes tapping their friends' list.
These are the same nitwits who eagerly "like" a page confirming that they love their sisters, or that schools should require the Pledge, or that they can name a word that contains a vowel. They are Snopes-proof and infinitely gullible
And then the villains feed these useful idiots hate-filled lies and biased messages that, yes, very likely impacted our presidential election.
And that's a problem, and it's a problem for all of us and, yes, without Facebook allowing vendors to access our data, it wouldn't have happened.
But Mark Zuckerberg isn't the only person who could have come up with the idea.
It's a New World. Adapt or perish, but don't worry about your private data because, while this is more efficient than tapping phones and opening mail, so what?
The bigger the pile, the better I like it.
Why can't they be like we were — Perfect in every way?
Pajama Diaries doesn't pull a lot of punches, and when you've got a pair of high school students in the cast, well, why not portray their lives as if you'd met high school students in the past half century or so?
It's a good gag, not about kids making out but about kids keeping their parents blissfully clueless, and this goes into that bin of stories that will be told around the Thanksgiving table in a dozen years, with the two girls — now women — laughing uproariously while their parents say, "Wait a minute, you mean …?"
Kudos to Terri Libenson — and more to her understanding daughters — for finding humor in a more gritty reality than those daring cartoonists who gleefully tell once-forbidden fart jokes.
Not like the old days, as seen in today's Vintage Radio Patrol from February, 1948, when kids just drove without licenses and killed gangsters.
Pinky, who seems to be about 12, is one of the heroes in this strip, and regularly leaps into the middle of things, helping the cops a little more actively than perhaps most 12-year-olds actually did in those days.
Though in this scene, he's not the one driving the stolen car, just the one firing the tommy gun out the window. The driver is a girl his age named Freckles.
And I'm sure she'll keep her shirt on. Pinky never even gets to first base, nor thinks of it.
Real Kids, Real World
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I'm not making this a Juxtaposition, because they're basically in agreement, but I wanted to feature them both because I admire the dignity with which the kids at the center of this movement are conducting themselves.
They really are schooling us all, and they really do know that the country belongs to them as much as to anyone and more than it does to lobbyists, no matter how well they're financed.
The pushback from the rightwing is that the kids are being secretly set up by leftwing organizers to be politically mislead, just as they used to charge the antiwar movement with taking orders from Moscow.
(Note to younger readers: This was before Putin got to third base with the rightwing.)
In fact, apparently Parkland does teach not only civics but debate, which figures into the intelligent way they have kept their movement on topic, rather than rising to the bait of people like the former candidate for the Maine statehouse, who called Emma Gonzalez a "skinhead lesbian."
She's not. She's bisexual.
She's also still in the game, pal, and you're out.
As the athletes say, "Father Time is undefeated."
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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