Easter Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, April 20, 2025
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51 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor 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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I’m first!
Do I get a car?
Went to a club last night. Asked what toilet I should use and got looked at like I have six heads (I don’t think I’m passable at all, but no one can fucking tell I’m not “a biological woman”). Say I’m trans and don’t want to get in trouble. Get told to use the men’s toilet.
Hold it in as long as I can and when I finally can’t take it anymore discover that the men have flooded all the stalls in the toilet leaving only urinals that I can’t use. I mean, I theoretically could, but I’d get more piss on my leg/the floor/the freaked out guy next to me than I’d get in the urinal. I’ve been in some gross women’s toilets, but never like the hellmouths men’s toilets are.
So I gave in and instead of asking permission I just used the women’s toilet. Guess what? No one can tell I’m fucking trans. I’m just another invisible woman over the age of 40. However, while in said toilet, I was serenaded by the dulcet tones of two separate “biological women” just absolutely painting their stalls with what can only be described as a voluminous amount of barf. While their friends chanted “you’re doing great sweety. Huuuuurrrraaahhhhhuughhhhhhhh!” One of the friends was pounding on one of the barfing girl’s backs like she was beating a demon outta her. Anyway, men are all delicate and shit when they barf. It’s all just meep meep spew. Women sound like a horde of Viking women storming Hell.
So, like I just put my head down, pissed, washed my hands and left. Basically none of the “biological women” even knew I was there.
I think my wife and I are officially in senior citizen land. This is the first Easter where we are not hosting dinner but going to one of the adult children’s house for Easter dinner with them and the grandkids. It is the first Easter where the Easter egg hunt is not in our yard (our hunts progressed over the years from eggs to eggs hiding candy, to eggs hiding candy and money, to eggs hiding money and miniatures). All we are doing is preparing a dish to bring over. I think this is the definition of bittersweet.
Welcome back, Jesus.
How was your dirt nap?
Oh yeah, it’s Easter. Totally forgot. The original zombie uprising.
@Barry:
Would you settle for some Rice a Roni?
No appearances of a resurrected Jesus in our earliest gospel
@Bill Jempty: Turtle Wax or GTFO.
Easter greetings from Izmir to everyone.
@Scott:
While I’m not 100% sure, I think this is the first Easter away from home for me since the 1970’s. My family would travel to Florida at Easter time. Back then I was living in Suffolk County New York.
What great news everyone! Gas is $1.92 per gallon. Cancel my plan to buy an electric.
@Beth:
Not wanting to sound like Chico Marx, but what do you need a toilet for when you have six heads?
@Bill Jempty: I don’t know if I ever mentioned it but I grew up in Northport. So we were neighbors of a sort.
@Scott:
Centereach was my home town. My father owned two hotels in or around Smithtown.
@Scott: This is our first Easter dinner with two official daughters-in-law, so that’s the stage we are are at.
@Barry: No car. You get on a DHS watch list.
@Steven L. Taylor: I like that phrasing. We are also waiting for a daughter in law to become “official”.
This is the first Easter in quite a while where we haven’t had an informal gathering of friends. Son-in-law is still in the hospital from last week’s “???” after falling at work. His INR numbers have been bouncing back and forth between 1.2 and 1.6, which is not great when you’re on coumadin. However, after having exhausted every test known to humankind, they’re going to release him back to the wild at some point today. Maybe we’ll take @Bill up on his offer of Rice-A-Roni if we actually get him out of hock today
I’m busy looking at dozens of bankers boxes of old attorney records to make sure everything can be destroyed. This has been a trip down memory lane for me. Seriously people, you don’t need to keep you’re canceled checks and bank statements from 1978 to 2016. Really, you don’t.
Anyway hope everybody out there is doing great. Beth, I’m sorry you discovered what I learned years ago in custodial work, that the women’s restroom usually seems to be the most disgusting. Although I have long suspected that many men think their penises are much longer than they are. Either that or they’re afraid the drain monster is going to reach up out of the urinal and rip it off.
@Mister Bluster:
That’s hardly surprising. he was neither mummified, nor mourned for the prescribed time, nor was his Ka preserved, he wasn’t even buried in the Red Land in Egypt.
Seriously, Isis is a powerful deity, but there’s only so much She can do when mortals don’t follow any of the rules and protocols.
@Flat Earth Luddite: I was a janitor back in the 70s while in college. I was responsible for 16 men’s and women’s bathroom in a corporate headquarters. Worst men’s room issue was cigarette butts in the urinals and worst women’s bathroom issue was countless pieces of tissues all over the floor.
@Beth:
The irony is that because trans people are such a small percentage of the population, any attempt to police bathrooms is going to end up impacting far more cis women than trans women, because there’s far more non-passing cis women than there are non-passing trans women.
@Scott:..janitor…
I don’t remember the job title. I had a student work job cleaning the common areas of dormitories at Southern Illinois University 1969-70. All the buildings were sexually segregated. No co-ed dorms. Had to yell “Man on the floor” when we entered the common areas of the women’s dorms. All the students rooms which we were prohibited from entering had their own bathrooms so I never had to deal with cleaning them.
In general the common areas of the men’s dorms were trashed all the time. Worse on Monday morning. The common areas of the women’s dorms were a cakewalk.
The dorms I worked in ’69-’70 were built 1957-’62. In the summer when they were not occupied we had occasion to move furniture in and out of the basements of the buildings. At one time the basements were designated Air Raid Shelters and contained large barrels marked Water and Saltine Crackers. There were dozens of these barrels in each basement. We were told not to touch them as they had been there for several years and it was feared that they would rupture if disturbed.
@Bill Jempty:
Well, it is the San Francisco treat.
@Scott:
It was wild watching the generational transfer of power happen in my partner’s family. One minute it was mom & dad unquestionably in charge and the next they were just shunted aside cause they were unwilling to compromise or even make a fucking decision. Absolute paralysis (likely Fox News aided) and the learned helplessness of their son lead to their daughters taking over and then moving far far away.
@Bill Jempty:
Glorious, no notes.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Having experienced both, I find women’s toilets to be much less aggressively disgusting. Women’s restrooms seem to get bad slowly like a build up of mistakes. Men’s restrooms seem like men were taught that someone else will clean up their mess so why not make it awful for them.
@Stormy Dragon:
Felt like that should be amplified. I figure that one day I’m going to be in the toilet when someone is going to start screaming about a man being in there and the screamer will be pointing at a “biological woman”.
I spent some time long ago cleaning bathrooms. I thought I’d weigh in. The day-to-day mess was bigger on the men’s side. Dirt on the floor, and puddles. It’s a wet climate, so not all those puddles would necessarily be what you think. Still…
AND, the biggest messes, the nastiest messes, the ones that took more than a broom and/or a mop job, were almost universally on the women’s side.
There is a group Democrats could do a better job of reaching out to: defense and foreign policy minded folks. I’ve been watching a trend I find interesting in the comments on defense and especially Ukraine-related videos, and in comments at places like the WSJ: defense minded people don’t like Trump. They aren’t rationalizing his statements or actions, rather they seem to be seeing right through them.
We could, and we should, be making more of Trump’s obvious subservience to Putin, his blustering ignorance of every international issue, his attacks on military professionals, his welcoming of corruption, his utter indifference to intelligence – in both senses of the word. I am one of those people more interested in FP than in domestic policy, and I think while our first line of attack should be on class, a second attack should be focused on the damage Trump is doing to our national defense.
Since the end of WW2 the Soviet Union and its sequel, Russia, has been trying to drive a wedge between the US and its allies. They had occasional successes, but overall not enough to shift the balance of power. We have kept our strong ties to NATO, Japan, South Korea, Philippines and ANZ. Trump has done more damage to those alliances in three months than the Soviets/Russians ever dreamed of. As a consequence we are now militarily much weaker than we were under Biden or Obama and we are closing doors we had been trying to open. In particular Vietnam, which could and should be an ally in opposing Chinese bullying in the South China Sea.
I mentioned a while back the idea of establishing a sort of shadow cabinet. We need something like that on defense, a few select experts, preferably ex-military, to push back, and to bring defense-minded people to our side. One big obstacle is Democrats’ foolish cultural hostility to the military. This developed during Vietnam and it was a mistake then because we failed to differentiate clearly enough between some of the generals taking orders from LBJ and Nixon on the one hand, and soldiers on the other. Even in the upper ranks there were officers who knew full well that the Vietnam war was a catastrophic error. We would have been wise to make a safe place for them, not just in the halls of power, but in the minds and hearts of liberals. They were never the enemy.
@Beth:
That happens to tall cis women as well, as I know from personal experience.
I am surprised and pleased to see that I am not the only former toilet cleaner here. Of course it wasn’t a school-age thing for me, I was in my 30’s. Because I am a late, very late, so late bloomer.
But I cleaned corporate bathrooms where both sexes were relatively well-behaved. I still have a Polaroid of me cleaning out the used tampon bin. And a Polaroid of the wife swabbing out a toilet. And she also has an indelible memory of cleaning a urinal and having a man take the adjacent urinal and whip it out.
Those memories, along with table-waiting nightmares are why you’ll never see me bitch about my current occupation.
@Michael Reynolds:
Yeah, funny how writing for a living beats cleaning toilets for a living hands down, every time.
All I want for Easter is…..for somebody to make a copy of that DHS letter telling people to self-deport and send it to Elon Musk.
Mister Bluster – Are you implying the resurrection was a later addition to Christian thought? Mark ends with an angel telling the women Jesus was risen. Also, Mark describes Jesus commanding Peter, James, and John “not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead”.
1 Corinthians was written about 20 years before Mark: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”
An Easter moment of Trump insanity, this shows how Jesus is on his mind:
“Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country,” the President shared. “Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America.
He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing — But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!”
My wife has a person who is a close acquaintance, and she was thinking they could end up being good friends. She went out to lunch last week with her and found out she isa Trumpie, complete with Trump tchotckes in the car. It has really changed her thinking about this person, she says she can’t imagine becoming good friends with someone who is all in on Trump.
There are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus in the New Testament
@Mister Bluster:
He’s dodging the issue of Paul’s letters, which are not part of the NT but contemporaneous writing of the resurrection.
@dazedandconfused:
Mythology has lots of dudes who die and get resurrected, Dionysus, Mithras, many more.
It’s not clear the Jesus that Paul writes about is a real person and not a mythical divine being such as, for example, Hercules, who many Romans thought of as historical.
@charontwo:
Paul is later than the resurrection, not contemporaneous.
@charontwo:
Close enough to be called a contemporary of Jesus. The legend of the resurrection is presented in that vid of Busters to have been created more than a century later. Nope. It was there right at the beginning of the religion.
@charontwo: Links to ancient Mithras resurrection stories?
Paul was the Ray Kroc of Christianity. He took someone else’s idea and turned it into a worldwide franchise. I suspect the sound effect of the Damascene conversion was, ka ching!
Evidently there’s a great deal of uncertainty as to how and when he died, but the prevalent notion is that Nero had Paul beheaded. Which was a merciful death in those days. Although in the absence of actual evidence I prefer to imagine that Paul skipped away and got himself nicely set up, maybe on a Greek island, getting regular payments from all his franchisees. Plus he’d have had the exclusive on Body of Christ burger patties. Billions served.
I’m sorry, no blood shakes today, the shake machine is down.
Ray Kroc died at 81 of congestive heart failure. On the one hand, Mr. Cheeseburger dies of heart disease? A bit on the nose? On the other hand, 81? Would you rather make it to 82 without cheeseburgers?
@Michael Reynolds: If Paul was a fiction writer, he’s a thousand times more successful than you. If he was a non-fiction writer, your soul is in peril. Happy Easter!
@Fortune:
Ah, Christianity. Always served with a side order of threat.
@Jay L Gischer: Worked at a Woolworth’s and a fast food place. That was exactly my experience. The really awful women’s bathrooms were so bad I wasn’t quite sure how they did it and no idea why they would throw so much toilet paper on the floor.
Steve
@Jay L Gischer: Worked at a Woolworth’s and a fast food place. That was exactly my experience. The really awful women’s bathrooms were so bad I wasn’t quite sure how they did it and no idea why they would throw so much toilet paper on the floor.
Steve
@steve:..The really awful women’s bathrooms were so bad I wasn’t quite sure how they did it…
This is how some men do it.
I have recently found used adult male diapers on the floor behind the toilets in the rest rooms of two retail establishments.
The trash can is just five feet away.
@Fortune:
As also were Mohammed, Siddhatha Gautama, Zoroaster, etc, etc.
But how do you determine in which of the above (and loads more) the position of belief vs unbelief imperials the hypothetical immortal soul?
Not to mention, if you look carefully at the history of the early Christians, it seems to a lot of scholars, there was a rather significant group, the original “apostolic Judaic Christians” based in Jerusalem, who considered Paul to be fundamentally wrong.
The traditional Christian response is something like
“But St. Paul’s version prevailed, thus proving he was correct, for the Will of God and the Operation of the Holy Ghost would not have it otherwise.”
Which is a very convenient, if somewhat circular, argument, that seems to leave out a lot of other possible questions regarding the operations of said Will and said Ghost in other times and places.
@charontwo:
@dazedandconfused:
The information we have on Paul indicates he was not present at the Crucifixion, and his first encounters with Christians was as a Jewish religious lawyer enforcing Judaic law in the context of Roman imperial policy: ie that non-Roman groups were entitled to enforce their own laws upon non-Romans.
He subsequently converted to Christian belief, but, rather ironically, at the same time dumped the whole Judaic assumption base under which most of the earliest Christians seem to have operated.
That made his variant far more attractive to gentiles; and the “Jewish Christian” line was quite rapidly eclipsed.
And therefore, the prevailing Christians also took up Paul’s teachings in general, which are arguably not always obviously derived from the original doctrines.
And then the whole thing got rather “retconned” by the Fathers of the Church (almost all Paulican) and the winnowing of the gospels, and the selection of which Judaic traditions applied, and the massive cross-over from Hellenic philosophy.
Not to mention the whole sequence of adaptations of Christianity first to being a Roman minority religion, than a Roman majority religion, then to the post-Roman world.
It’s quite remarkable how different conventional Christianity was c. 500 to c 1000 to c 1500.
@Michael Reynolds:
Did same, briefly.
Worked for an “industrial engineering support” firm at Austin-Rover Longbridge car plant.
Among the various things we did, mostly relating to actual production, was also cleaning the lavs.
Got stuck on that for a fortnight just after starting; partly I suspect a bit of a test, partly because they were short of staff.
Fortunately, it was in a part of the plant where they were on days only, at that point, and we were doing maintenance on night shift.
So apart from the odd fitter crew, it was not Sisyphean.
And compared to changing the floor grid plates in the paint-spray booths, was pretty light work.
Or digging out an entire casting sand feed hopper that had got wet.
Such are the good reasons why I first decided to become a fork-lift driver.
And subsequently to apply for a university place, and so on.
@JohnSF: It’s certainly problematical. It’ll be interesting to see how God sorts it all out. I’ve often said to friends that the most interesting thing about the afterlife will be who we meet on the other side.
And who we don’t.
New day now, futures markets open, took a peek at DXY.
This seems bad:
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-DXY/
Dollar off 1.4%
https://www.investing.com/indices/indices-futures
U.S. stocks not doing too great either.
@charontwo:
“Reuters”