JUST ASKIN'

Looking for reflection about network news shows, esp. on Sunday morning, I went to YouTube and ran into FOREIGN news shows meant for the diasporas from other countries who are living in America.  Keeping the language and culture is obvious -- dancing!  But only people with that language can really follow the news and commentary.

This is not so different from stumbling into a sub-culture of America, either of those on both edges of the political spectrum, each with its own jargon which can be slanted to make opponents look bad, and each with its own assumptions about what is good or bad in a larger sense about where we are trying to go.  If you're trying to go WEIRD, that will be easy, though sources like FOX are sort of midstream scatter -- basically old men trying to catch up.  PBS is quasi-academic and so careful to be "fair" that a person can get the impression that the most extreme people are worth listening to.  IMHO they are not.

That little acronym IMHO was one of the earliest acronym jargons.  By now there are so many forces with long names that are commonly reduced to acronym letters that I, for one, must resort to Google to get guidance to who they are.  It was a while before I realized the DNC was the "Democratic National Committee" and I still don't quite understand how it keys into the party and its program.  Not that the program is very intelligible.  When things get really fast, I make a little 3x5 cheater guide to keep by the screen.

Black, teen, trendy, "wicked" categories all develop jargon that is often clever and funny -- metaphors and shortcuts -- so that cop shows in Australia talk about "crims" and "bikies."  (Would you think of Hell's Angels as "bikies"?)  Much of it is sexual or violent or both, like accusations of being wimpy/feminine: in Aussie talk "softcock."  Some of this is so extreme that it becomes unintelligible, but it never quite replaces "fuck," which is probably too bad, except that the explosive little expletive becomes a form of punctuation.  It is so common it has no kick.

The furor over Trump and his tolerant rich Republican buddies, who acquired him when he began switching parties in the late '80's while looking for sycophants (five times he swapped !), has kicked up many new insults.  I remember reading an article about the Arab culture's affection for the art of insults, something like a mule-skinner's attitude except with camels.  I was teaching high school in Heart Butte at the time and since the kids often insulted each other repetitiously, I thought I could get some interest in the idea.  I was startled that they were offended.  "We were taught never to offend people," they said.  Which was true only when they were in the presence of authority figures.  (Left-over missionary consequences IMHO.) The call-downs were less about sex and more about fitting into the group.  "You think you're so good!")

Since I consider Facebook a force I would have to use bad words to describe, I left it long ago and never regretted leaving, except that I don't "get" how churches and businesses can still use it, knowing what FB does with the info.  Now that the big time media forces are trying to figure out how to "play nice" on their sites, they are having little success.  Twitter is as obscene and off-point as it has ever been, but there are much fewer posts.  I'm assuming that the thinly disguised offenders have been removed, which is not reassuring when you realize it's a move so that government, corporations, and other countries can know who everyone really is so they can keep a file on how to punish or control them.  That's how they operate.  There are fancy Russian names for the strategies.  To learn those names you will need to read high-end long-form liberal essays.  I do.

At the same time many celebrities have been demonized to make them more powerful and strangely more attractive.  Data scraping is not just a databank preoccupation.  Doxing is not about dachshunds.  The general idea of heedless people seems to be to make sure your name is out there, even when it's pretty hard to spell for a white bread middle-American.  English is crazy enough without introducing a lot of names that sound like sci-fi characters.

The alert but deranged cyber-trawlers who sort messages and censor all the ones you really like, the kind of strategy that keeps sending me advice about how to make my penis grow and harden, are impossible to just forbid, so I try to crowd them out by "liking" nicer topics.  I'm learning a lot about man-made jewels and ridiculous shoes.  Quite often I investigate medical matters so as to write about them, which means that I get a lot of unasked-for information about things like leprosy.  Also, since much pharmacy business is done on line, I get a lot of advice about what to take for rosacea or constipation.  Some of it is more helpful than doctors.

But my real beef is with the quality of the applications I must use.  I bought a copy of Scrivener, which is supposed to help a writer of pop genre stories develop structure and then attach content to it.  I found it complicated and not particularly suited for the kind of writing I do, which is sometimes a matter of free-association and unconsciously produced.  That is, the categories come from the thought, not the predetermined other way around.  Naturally there was soon an upgrade, which I assumed was free, since many of them are.  It cost money, which is what the developers were counting on since the craze for the original version had passed.  When I complained, the answer was arrogant -- very WEIRD at the Ph.D. level.

The worst offender is Epson, which produces printers that need more toner weekly in my case, and constantly demand that I upgrade which means a total rethink learning how to make a simple JPG.  The same applies to photo-handling programs that assume I'm a teen or a grannie who wants to produce albums of my own life and play solitaire with the results.  To them there's no value for a simple archive where I can quickly find specific images.  

Techie heads are shaped by gaming, where much is deliberately hidden for the fun of players finding it.  Also, they keep their jobs by thinking of clever little tweaks.  The most obnoxious recent example is that if your fingers slip, everything stops until you take a photo of the screen.  My old pickup has a similar feature: if you confuse the internal computer, it will freeze the vehicle for thirty seconds regardless of where you are or what you are doing.  It took me a long time to find this information, though it was in small print in the owners' manual.  I have no way to understand why it's a feature since it's potentially deadly.

The Master Gamers, we would all agree, are politicians.  But why are so many of them funny looking?  Vampires with big ears, turtle faces, no-neck grinners?  Are they from the age of radio?  Certainly their thinking is.