Why do I have to watch fake news shows to see actual reporting?

Being stuck in a motel for a few days does have some advantages. Among other things, we've been able to watch television when it's actually happening instead of dealing with the hassles of streaming stuff many days later. Last night we watched "Full Frontal" with Samantha Bee. It was. .  . enlightening.

One of the segments focused on Russia and Internet trolling. Russia is apparently the motherlode of Internet weirdness. Being an Internet troll is a civil service job there. People get paid by the state to go hang out on the Internet and push various memes and fake news and get comment threads going that in some way further Russia's interests.

At this point in time, those interests include disrupting the U.S. political process. It's pretty clear Wikileaks has been aided and abetted by the Russian government in releasing material detrimental to the Clinton campaign. Vladimir Putin would prefer that Donald Trump win the election next week, although he'll probably settle for enough crap being stirred up that a Clinton administration ends up being distracted by a gazillion bullshit investigations and faux controversies. Because let's face it -- Putin has no fear of Trump. Trump is so thin-skinned it's unreal, which would make him remarkably easy to manipulate. He freaks out when Saturday Night Live makes fun of him; I shudder to think of how he'd react if a foreign leader told him to shut up. Clinton, on the other hand, is a bitch with balls of steel. I disagree with a number of her positions on foreign policy -- she's much, much too hawkish (not a surprise considering she's taken advice from that toad in human form, Henry Kissinger) -- but for sure she's not likely to flinch in a crisis.

In any case, Samantha Bee's staff had done serious research on the subject of Russian meddling on the Internet. They even managed to track down a couple people who work as trolls. One fellow cheerfully admitted he's got something like 28 online identities, all supposedly American, that he uses while spreading various bits of propaganda and rumors. The woman Samantha Bee talked with poses as, among other identities, a housewife from Nebraska. From what the young man said and given his proficiency with English, I'm guessing the biggest hurdle he's had to jump in creating fake identities and getting involved in comment threads is dumbing down his vocabulary and ability to spell to match up with the typical American's lack of knowledge of standard English.

The big question I have (along with a lot of other people) is why are the fake news shows doing a better job of covering current events than the supposedly real ones? Time magazine ran a piece recently on some of the late night show hosts (Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert) and noted that the satirical shows like "Full Frontal" and "The Daily Show" are doing the in-depth investigative reporting we once assumed the straight news programs did. Instead, news networks like CNN, ABC, et al just serve as stenographers, breathlessly parroting whatever the latest rumors are and doing no fact-checking whatsoever -- it's apparently so much easier to speculate and toss out melodramatic headlines than it is to do a little background research. "Full Frontal" looking at who's actually putting what out on the Internet is a perfect example.

You know, I would hope that everyone who spends any time at all wandering around the Intertubes knows about sock puppets, the fake identities created to make it look like a site is generating more traffic than it actually is or to help gin up a controversy. A comment thread will look like there's a dozen or more people arguing back and forth when the reality it's maybe one real person and a whole lot of sock puppets. And sometimes it's 100% puppets. This is one of the many reasons why the best advice anyone can follow when it comes to the Intertubes is Never read the comments! It's just too easy to let yourself get sucked into a 100% faux argument. Then the next thing you know you're telling all your friends global warming is a conspiracy to make Al Gore rich and that Hillary Clinton personally ordered a hit on Antonin Scalia. Gullible people, Russian trolls. Definitely not a good combination.

The S.O. suggested that one reason the mainstream media, the straight news shows, do such a poor job of doing investigative reporting is they're owned by corporations that have a vested interest in keeping the sheeple ignorant. Well, so are the satirical news programs like "Full Frontal" and "John Oliver Last Week Tonight." Does tossing in some dark humor make the shows less threatening? Or do the corporate overlords just assume it doesn't matter because the target demographic for those shows (people in their 20s) are notoriously uninvolved in politics. Or they were. Bernie Sanders may have changed that.

Reading comprehension

The S.O. and I had a rather amusing experience on Facebook recently. We both have a tendency to clump -- to share en masse various memes, links to articles, cartoons, whatever. Like everyone else who clumps, we don't put huge amounts of thought into it. It's more like "That's a good Maddow quote. I'll share it," or "Those otters are cute." It's the type of stuff everyone passes on and almost no one pays any real attention to.

Anyway, as part of a clumping exercise the other morning, the S.O. shared a meme about every single Republican Senator voting against equal pay for women. The meme apparently referred to the Paycheck Fairness Act, a Senate bill which the Republicans have blocked debate on three times (at last count) since its original introduction. I repeat, the S.O. shared a meme, one of those e-cards with the vintage art work and a grand total of 19 words on it. Unless a meme contains an egregious error, like calling Donald Rumsfeld a draft dodger when the man is a U.S. Navy veteran, no one ever comments on them. Why bother? Was there an egregious error in the meme the S.O. shared? Well, you could quibble that voting as a bloc to prevent debate isn't exactly the same as voting against equal pay, which is the kind of hair-splitting I'd be inclined to do (I tend to obsess about precision in language). That type of quibble would also signal that you had been paying attention to the issue and had at least a minimal grasp of the facts.

That is not, however, what the troll who did decide to comment on that rather vacuous meme chose to do. Instead he started off with a thinly disguised insult -- "My father taught me the meaning of work" -- as a segue into how leftists expect people to get paid the same regardless of merit or willingness to do any work at all. This is a theme he's brought up in other threads (there's overlap between our groups of Facebook friends) and it is annoying as hell. It doesn't take a semiotics expert to interpret that particular sign. I know the meaning of work = you're a lazy bum. This was followed by a typical Obama is a hypocrite because the women in the White House earn less than the men do. The S.O. made the mistake of responding to the ad hominem attack, and I'll admit it bothered me, too, so I jumped into the discussion.

I opted to go after the hypocrisy statement as well as a rather glaring ignorance of basic American law the troll had displayed -- he said Obama could just write a law to increase wages for White House staffers. I did a careful explanation of the problems inherent in interpreting aggregate data, described how the civil service system works, acknowledged that women unfortunately are still over-represented in lower pay grades, and noted that when direct comparisons are made (every GS-7 with every other GS-7) civil service workers are paid the same regardless of gender. Being a sarcastic bitch, I also tossed out a snide comment about his High School apparently not offering Civics back in the '50s because Congress passes laws, the President signs them.

He came back with an outraged response about how dare I insult his beloved alma mater?! That's when I had to explain what sarcasm is. I wasn't insulting his school; I was insulting him. I should have known. The poor man is an engineer as well as an avowed Libertarian, two categories of human renowned for their poor sense of humor and inability to pick up on subtleties in language.

The S.O. had done another response, too, and the troll had also responded to that one. Each of his responses included an explanation of how he really hadn't meant what he'd said in his previous response, he'd actually meant something else. After about the third response, I got bored. Granted, we were forcing him to discard more and more generalities and memorized talking points and to actually get into the messy weeds of reality, but even when the troll you're arguing with is a troll you actually know in real life (as this guy is) after awhile it gets old. I told him feeding time was over and I was off to do more productive things with my time.

If I had any doubt whatsoever that at the core of every Libertarian male lies a misogynistic asshat, he removed all doubts. You could practically see the spittle on the keyboard from him ranting at the S.O. that "your wife can't read." Way to go, sexist jerk, instant dehumanization by turning me from a person to a possession.

I used to have a remarkable knack for getting people to show their true colors. It's nice to see that even in cyberspace, I've still got the touch.

While I'm on the subject of idiots

I was wandering around Facebook recently and made the mistake of dipping into the Comments thread under the graphic shown to the right. What the Maddow quote does is state the obvious: there are structural reasons why most poor people are poor. No one is poor because they want to be; they're poor because they're stuck somewhere that's hard to escape from. That's not to say it can't be done; there are exceptional people in every strata of society.

Naturally, the usual libertarian-free-market-people-are-poor-by-choice trolls came slithering out of the woodwork. We'd all be just fine if we just got rid of those pesky government regulations that are keeping us all from becoming entrepreneurs and making a fortune operating our own small businesses. And the proverbial pigs will fly. Does it ever occur to any of those people that starting a business takes money? If you're down and out to begin with, where do you get your start up funds? Doesn't matter if there's a ton of regulations or none whatsoever; if you don't have enough money to keep gas in your car or to buy a Happy Meal at McDonald's, you're not likely to have the cash to start any business other than one involving your own underpaid labor (house cleaning, childcare, detailing cars, house painting, etc.). Even there you run into the issue of working capital. The lowest upfront investment would probably be childcare, especially if you're doing it in someone else's home. Everything else you have to buy some basic equipment. Painters need ladders, a van or truck to haul them, good quality brushes, drop cloths, etc. House cleaners need vacuum cleaners, dusters, various cleaning solutions, buckets, rubber gloves. In every case, you need reliable transportation. So where is that money to get started going to come from? And who are your customers going to be?

Those quibbles aside, do these libertarian idiots actually believe that everyone in this country could actually be an independent entrepreneur? Have any of them stepped into a typical business lately? If they had, they might have noticed that there's the owner and/or manager and there are the employees who do the actual work. The people who can run a one-man operation of any sort are rather rare. If your entrepreneurial spirit cries out for you to be the next Paula Deen, you're going to need kitchen staff, wait staff, and cleaning staff -- unless, of course, you plan to be content with a neighborhood diner with an extremely limited menu and the staff consisting of yourself and maybe your spouse or kids. You have a wonderful idea for a new type of widget? If you set up any sort of manufacturing enterprise, if it takes off you're going to need employees. Where are they supposed to come from if everyone else is also being entrepreneurial and going into business for themselves?

Of course, if a person could do a little digging and find out what's going on in the lives of the trolls who are so keen on the idea of everyone pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and going into business for themselves, it would no doubt turn out that the most vocal trolls are cubicle rats working for an hourly wage in the bowels of some mega-corporation. The libertarian fantasists might exhort the poor to take personal responsibility and become entrepreneurs, but it's not a path they ever plan to explore themselves. Why should they? It's so much easier to sit back, collect a paycheck, and waste time on the company's computer.