Monday Morning Tabs
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, December 8, 2025
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5 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Boy howdy, you and Reynolds, on the Open Forum, are just spreading joy. Happy Monday to you too. My wife and I are vacationing, from being retired, in the Keys with our son and DIL, to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. Yesterday we took a glass bottom boat tour to the Florida Reef, the third longest coral reef system in the world. It’s dying.
We’ve had eight decades of relative peace and prosperity after WWII. Maybe that’s all we get.
Re the CDC vaccine vote, the following day they voted to reduce the Hep B recommendation to only babies whose mothers were known to have Hep B, or whose Hep B status was unknown. Do hospitals routinely test pregnant women for Hep B? It’s got to be cheap and easy, it’s one of the viruses they test every blood donation for.
I find that piece about Reddit to be incredibly sad. It’s the tech version of something I have experienced multiple times on the internet. Some person, or persons, decides they need to completely disrupt/destroy an online community and do it with shitposting. They come in and they smear shit on the walls, bait people, and just generally make the site useless.
They are the 21st century equivalent of highwaymen, making it hard to travel and to meet people. While posing as dashing figures, of course.
I think there are only two places this can go – smaller communities that have strong capabilities for excluding people (there’s a scaling problem here. With bigger communities, it can get very hard to keep up.)
Or, we create some way to make highly authenticated identities on the internet and count on them. Especially if there’s some friction to it. I’m thinking something like a driver’s license.
That doesn’t seem like a good solution, to be sure, but it *would* make sure we could hold the person responsible accountable for what they do online.
@gVOR10:
After the new National Security Strategy document came out, I was thinking that for most of US history, there was always at least a sizeable minority that was opposed to fighting, or even putting troops in position to fight, battles in far places. And that it’s really rather amazing that for the 80 years after WWII, Washington managed to keep us involved in a series of hot wars (Korea, Vietnam, twice in Iraq, Afghanistan) and global deployments (11 carrier strike groups, 70 nuclear submarines, and something over 100,000 troops in Europe, Korea, and Japan). Many trillions of dollars.
I have regularly thought that eventually one party or the other would succeed in arousing that minority and pulling the US out of its global military hegemon role.
Re: Atlantic article on Hegseth
Congress quietly slips into the defense bill something special for Petey. I suspect the thing Don Trump dreads most might be Congress growing a spine.