Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, April 17, 2026
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18 comments
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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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Here’s your ‘man of the people’:
“Corner store” is as baffling to the senile, mentally ill billionaire as the word “groceries” is.
Mideast follies:
“Wajeeh Lion”
Above followed by a variety of examples. Not just the Trump boys, Kushner too of course.
@charontwo:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-admin-hands-20b-contract-to-weapons-group-backed-by-jared-kushners-little-brother/
@Charley in Cleveland:
Manypeoplesaythat it’s a store that sells corners. That’s where a cornerback goes to get his corner, and then heads to the back store.
“png”
“Prevail”
https://x.com/araghchi/status/2045121573124759713
Hormuz open
@charontwo:
And El Taco will crow about it nonstop until the end of time.
Of course, Iran had agreed to reopen Hormuz in the ceasefire announcement, which the Pakistani PM said included Lebanon. Iran also claimed it included Lebanon. When El Taco and Bibi claimed it didn’t, and attacks on Lebanon did not stop, Iran refused to reopen the strait.
It’s important to remember these ancient history facts from a few days ago.
It’s also important to note one thing: Iran does not represent that good guys in this conflict. I see it more as a simile to Elon’s Germany going to war with Stalin’s USSR. May they both lose. In war, as opposed to sport, this is a possibility*.
They simply are not the aggressor. They’ve also been acting more rationally. So, there’s a natural tendency to trust them more, and to take their side more often. but one should remember they engaged in mass murder of their own citizens to quell protests just days before the war started.
*A very remote one
@Kathy:
Oh, I think it’s entirely possible, even likely, everyone loses, coming out of this worse than they went in.
@gVOR10:
That can fairly be described as the outcome of WWI and WWII. Except in both cases, the US wound up either no worse off or better off, if we overlook hundreds of thousands of casualties in both conflicts.
Arguably, too, the post 1945 reconstruction of Western Europe, emphatically including the Marshall Plan, left that part of Europe better off than it was in 1939. I’m not even overlooking the millions of casualties here. The reconstruction period ended in a continent largely at peace, in a balance of power situation, emphatically stressing NATO, which made a conflict like the two world wars very unlikely in the future.
You know, the thing El Taco and Mad Vlad are trying to tear apart.
Karma…it’s pronounced, “HA!!!”
https://x.com/SundaeDivine/status/2045104697443266999?s=20
Newly unsealed records, part of a lawsuit filed by California against Amazon, confirm that Amazon has been doing what everyone already knew Amazon has been doing.
I won’t say it’s common knowledge, but such allegations against Amazon have been out there in the news, in Youtube channels, in social media, blog posts, etc., for years. Along with other uncompetitive, monopolistic practices.
@Charley in Cleveland: It’s genuinely impressive that one can live in NYC and not recognize a corner store.
I’m almost willing to give the benefit of the doubt on this one and just assume it is the type of normal day-today misfire that can happen when you parse something wrong or grab the wrong definition, rather than senility — I think senility leaves you remembering things from 30 years ago instead of today for the most part.
Like when you read “therapist” as “the rapist” and then completely blank on what a therapist does. Or when you see the word “farfel” and know that either “falafel” or “farfale” has momentarily left your vocabulary.
Huh, I wonder why I immediately think of “the rapist” when I think of our esteemed President?
Ezra Klein interviewed Ray Madoff, a professor of tax law, Our Tax System Should Make You Furious (gift link). Very long, but well worth a read. Basically, the very, very rich have the tax system they paid for. A few bits and pieces (bold is Klein):
As I said, long. But a very understandable explanation of how the uber rich have managed to pay little or nothing back into the society that made them uber.
After finishing the Technomage trilogy, I re-read the novel, by the same author, Jeanne Cavelos, that’s advertised as a prequel, The Shadow Within.
The story moves along two tracks. One is about Anna Sheridan trying to figure out what seems to be a biomechanical artifact from, she thinks, a dead civilization. This eventually leads to the ill-fated last voyage of the Icarus.
The other track is about John Sheridan, anna’s husband, in his early days in command of the Earth Alliance cruiser Agamemnon.
It’s the first time I re-read the book. Waaaay back when I first read it, I recall posting a rather acerbic, short review of it in a message board. I don’t remember what I said, but I called the post: A Shadow of a Novel.
I think my issue is that the novel is supposed to fill Anna’s and John’s backstories, and doesn’t. We never see them together, not once. They talk directly to each other in one scene, and that’s it. There are no flashbacks of their relationship, either.
We do know more about who Anna was, as compared to the show. That’s good, but not enough. We still don’t get any sense of who they were as a married couple.
Otherwise it’s an easy read. Anna does archaeology, John deals with insubordinate, disgruntled crew. Morden is in it, as part of the Icarus archeology crew.
Next will be the last re-read of a B5 novel. This one is much better, and I’ve re-read it a few times before. It’s about what Sinclair did in between arriving on Minbar to serve as ambassador, and the event of Babylon Squared on the show. The title is “To Dream in the City of Sorrows,” by Kathryn M. Drennan.
She was married to JMS, and also wrote one of the better endings for a non-arc B5 ep: By Any Means Necessary
Re on my comment on chatbots giving bad medical advice, I tested Copilot by asking about the fake disease Bixonimania.
It told me it’s fake (!) and that LLMs had previously answered it was a real disease, then it related some of what I linked to the other day. I assume this means the bots have been updated, or the internet buzz on chatbots treating fake disease Bixonimania as real has grown larger in their data-scraping.
Now, I know the answers you get from a bot are not in any way what the bot thinks or knows, as it neither thinks nor knows. I know they are programmed to be agreeable and sycophantic, and to drive engagement* (be it for data mining or further training, makes no difference to me). Nevertheless, I asked it some more questions on the lack of judgment and confident hallucinations chatbots have grown notorious for.
It agreed a lot with me, with caveats. It also tried to make the case that LLM chatbots are useful, really*. I then asked whether a specialized small language model, one trained only in a certain area of knowledge, might be more effective in, say, drafting legal documents, proofreading science papers, etc.
It kind of agreed, but then proceeded to talk down SLMs, with links to sources from disinterested entities like OpenAI and Anthropic. Funny how that works.
*I’ve found the agreeable, sycophantic part of the model useful for one minor diversion I’d rather not get into, and even then I do 90% of the creative work. It’s a fine timewaster when I’m too tired to spend my time productively.
@charontwo:
Or not.
Iran, like the US, is attempting to play games with the details.
As might be expected.
But eventually, the patience of others is going to run out.
@charontwo:
If you pay attention to Iranian propaganda, it’s quite interesting.
Similar to Russian, but also not.
The whole idolatory thing is something that plays to Muslims, both Shia and Sunni, and also to “conservative” Christians outside the (rather odd) political context of the US.
The whole “Trump as Messiah”and “Trump vs Pope” thing is really , seriously, damaging to the perception of Trump in many countries where the general public have generally not given a damn.
@Kathy:
From the pov of the US, perhaps.
But both the Second and Third Reichs were intolerable to the UK (and France).
The British decisions to fight both to the death were not frivolous.
The Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II was less appalling than that of Hitler; but still rather nasty.
In both cases, at enormous cost, an unacceptable outcome was averted.
And now we have MAGA chanting “Ethno-nationalist agression? Hell yeah!”
Europe is arguably far more potentially dangerous than either China or Russia could ever hope to be.
And here’s MAGA, merrily pissing off a Europe including the UK for the shitz and giggles.
Foolish.