The front page is dominated by “Russian Trolls Helped Fracture the Women’s March.” Yes, there’s also the threat of cruise ships on Lake Superior — blogged in the previous post — and something about James Cameron and Kanye West — as if they needed some man stuff to balance the sea of pussy hats.

Why take us back to the Women’s March? Did they actually learn something new about Russian troll farms? I’m very skeptical of alarmism about Russian troll farms. If we — we individual Americans — can’t handle random snark from varied unknown sources, how can we live with the internet? Who cares if some foreigners are writing crap intended to deceive us into feeling more roiled up and divided than we’re able to do damned well on our own, often with the nudging of the New York Times?

Okay, let’s read this thing and see if there’s anything new in it or if it’s just the NYT’s latest effort to get its readers fired up to vote for Democrats in the coming election …

There’s so much speech that the part that’s from Russian troll farms doesn’t matter. Some of it isn’t that different from home-grown speech, and some of it is overwhelmed by better quality speech. I can see that the author Ellen Barry wants to characterize the Russian speech as adding a new or different element that catches on and changes the discourse, but she’s identified nothing they’ve added that’s different from the low-level bullshit we make on our own. Is some distinct Russian strain growing here? That sounds more like Cold War Era paranoia than anything happening now. We should wake up and take responsibility for how degraded and divided we’ve become in America. That Russians are watching, cheering it on, enjoying the chaos, and throwing in little barbs is a distraction. I don’t see how it helps to get irked at them.