Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, January 17, 2025
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80 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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Someone at work refilled the ground cumin jar with ground cinnamon.
My avocado toast, with onion, chili crisp, and a heavy dose of cinnamon, is not doing it for me this morning.
@Neil Hudelson: Didn’t the dark brown, almost coffee color, of the cinnamon tip you off?
@Neil Hudelson: Oof. I’ve almost grabbed one or the other just in my own spice drawer, so I can see how that could happen but YUCK.
@just nutha: Sure dude, blame the victim 🙂
@just nutha:
The label that said “cumin” did more to throw me off.
@Neil Hudelson: Wait, you have a spice rack at work?
Actress Joan Plowright, 95. RIP.
It never seems to end for them. Per NBC, a fire has erupted in a giant lithium battery storage facility in northern California. At least 1500 people have been ordered to evacuate.
“The Don” makes Hollywood an offer it can’t refuse….
Not sure sending three “troubled” actors is an effective plan, but perhaps Trump is signaling interest in addressing another “mountain of Dominionism.”
Hollywood probably Hollywon’t, but might be a good idea to provide some security for any horses in the area.
@CSK: Great. There are already protests in Texas against lithium battery storage facilities which are desperately needed to store the huge amounts of wind and solar power being generated.
Gas line explosions, refinery fires, earthquakes, well failures. No problem. But the evil renewables business….
@MarkedMan:
More of a basket of random accoutrements, refilled periodically when someone remembers.
Life in the nonprofit world is pretty glamorous.
@Rob1:
Doesn’t Stallone have a semi-hit of a show right now, and Gibson seems to be doing just fine as a director and actor? Just more of the sad victimhood mentality of conservatives.
@Neil Hudelson:
It sounds more like you used avocado to ruin some perfectly good toast, onions, chili crisp, and cinnamon. I can’t see how cumin could have avoided the same fate.
On other things, President Xlon’s latest attempt to blow up a Xtarship was successful.
A cold day in Hell.
Inauguration Day weather: Sunny. High 25, Low 9
I wonder what legal liability SpaceX has WRT to losses by the commercial airlines.
@Kathy:
For DK’s reading pleasure:
This Storm-Battered Town Voted for Trump. He Has Vowed to Overturn the Law That Could Fix Its Homes.
@Scott:
None. the Crow & Leo Court has ruled the president is immune for all liability resulting from official acts. the fact that he hasn’t been inaugurated or even elected is irrelevant.
While Americans are gazing at their own navels, what is going on in Ukraine and Syria?
Ukraine:
Syria:
Apparently, the Turks and Kurds are still duking it out in Northern Syria and Israel is still cleaning out the border near the Golan Heights.
Anyone in the gamer community who can take the temperature in the Asmon-Elon grudge match?
Looks like musk is doing the heavy lifting for Steve Bannon’s vendetta against him.
Fingers crossed.
@becca: My son is a gamer and he was explaining this to me. He plays the game in question and has watched some of Musk’s streamer and he says that it is painfully obvious from the beginner level play (my son is quite advanced, so “beginner” may encompass quite a range here) that Musk couldn’t have possibly gotten his character to that level. My son was quite scathing in just how lame Musk was being for claiming otherwise, and said that the whole gamer community was filled with scorn. Nothing to do with politics or technology, but I find it interesting that he may be losing gamers.
To me, this is just another sign that Musk is becoming disconnected from reality. He appears to truly “believe” (in the weird Trumpian sense of “belief”) that he is actually a truly great gamer and he should share his expertise with the world, when in fact he is a man in his fifties who plays video games at a respectable level for a man in his fifties. From what my son says, this is equivalent to someone who can do a not-awful but also not-good version of “My Way” at the Karaoke bar renting out Carnegie Hall to share his talents with the masses.
@MarkedMan: Wish you’d said this before I laid down the venue deposit.
@Neil Hudelson: I have allergies. Never believe what a refillable container says.
@MarkedMan: Elon’s doubling down on on what appears to be an obvious lie to the gamer community. The story is leaking outside the niche.
Also, falling debris from the starship explosion caused serious flight problems over the Caribbean. Do these guys not coordinate with the FAA?
All in all, sucks to be Elon today.
@MarkedMan:
“Qualis artifex pereo! (What an artist the world is losing!)” Nero, near the end of his life.
@Scott:
Also from the Propublica piece:
I’m adding Propublica to my donation list. They’re still “minding the store” even if sources like Washington Post have gone on “smoke break” with the Trump clique.
@becca:
I’m pretty sure it sucks to be Elon EVERY day.
@Rob1:
Wait, what? Scott Baio was too busy washing his hair, he had a headache?
What about Cherly Hines or Randy Quaid? They always leave the best ones behind.
@Rob1:
and in this sentence construction, we’re sure that Gibson, Bought, and Stallone aren’t the problem because…?
(I think this is going to be another trolling the wrong people day. 🙁 )
@becca:
It’s hard to coordinate a multiple engine failure leading to a spacecraft’s breakup on reentry.
The president might want to take a look at the heat shield tiles on his Xtarship, too.
I’m spending either too much or too little time at OTB. Why do I ask?
Michael Reynolds was in one of my dreams Wednesday night.
Old guy who is not media savvy here. What are the nefarious things that Tik Tok does that deserve banning? Other mega media companies do the same thing, don’t they?
@Slugger:
Other data mining companies don’t give their mined data to the Chinese government. They sell it instead.
That’s a lot of gambling – on many levels. I’ll stick to my semi-annual lottery ticket and NCAA office bracket pool. No duffle bags of cash but…
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/scotusblog-founder-faces-tax-evasion-charges
@Kathy: I loved the SpaceX statement that it suffered “rapid unscheduled disassembly”. I suppose it does sound better than, “It went boom.”
@Mike:
On certain birthdays or anniversaries, I buy a lotto ticket. My track record with these purchases has been pretty good.
Like last Sunday, my 64th birthday, I bought a $10 scratch off. It won me a $100.
I won’t buy another ticket till May 30 at least. That’s when Dear wife and I celebrate 36 years of marriage.
@Slugger: This is JVL’s pretty good explanation over at The Bulwark of what TikTok is doing.
@Joe: This is John Cole at Balloon Juice with a somewhat…different take:
@Kathy: Other social networks also don’t let the Chinese influence American opinions by selecting what views to promote. They let rich Americans do that.
What’s funny is that people are signing up for accounts on a similar video sharing app, literally run by the Chinese Communist Party and called Red Note, after the little red book of Mao. 700,000 new users as of a few days ago.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/tech/rednote-china-popularity-us-tiktok-ban-intl-hnk/index.html
@Bill Jempty:
The cast of OTB prances through my dreams on a fairly regular basis.
From an article in The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/17/supreme-court-tiktok-ban
I assume there is some missing context that makes Sotomayor’s statement not insane.
The ban was quickly added to Ukraine/Israel aid funding legislation at a time when people in Gaza were showing the world the effects of Israel’s bombing campaign. Previously, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been lobbying to get TikTok banned, while trying to create similar functionality in Instagram.
The government has shown no evidence of TikTok actually being used by the Chinese government to influence anything. Their only public statements are about ‘potential.’
The whole thing smells. A mixture of suppressing speech because of the content, a social media giant using the government to attack its competition, and a xenophobic China scare.
@Bill Jempty: He’s OTB’s Freddy Krueger. Watch out
@Joe: This is the main summation of the Bullwarks argument:
It’s basically witch trials. If they sell, then they were not an op, and were fine doing business in the US. If they don’t sell, then they were an arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
Or they simply don’t want to sell since they believe they will make more money in the world outside the US and don’t want to lose control of the video-selection/personalization algorithm they have, as that is what distinguishes them from any potential competitor.
Anyone can put together something to share short videos. That’s been around since Vine and YouTube. The interface can be easily copied, and doesn’t really differ from instagram. The way that the algorithm quickly connects people with what they are interested in is something that the other platforms haven’t been able to match.
And if they sell it to a competitor, that competitor will then compete with them globally (with an advantage, as they have US content)
@CSK:
We’re sorry for contributing to your nightmares.
@Slugger:
The reality is that Tik Tok uses an algorithm that, like all large social media companies, is a closely guarded secret. That algorithm is used to suppress or promote content to their users on a person by person basis. This is a concern for any social media company but in Tik Tok’s case it is totally under the dominion of a government who is actively seeking to harm the US and has been caught engaging in all kinds of manipulation of the US public through social media on multiple occasions, for instance, spreading lies about presidential candidates, government programs and activities, and stoking division between various groups in the US. They have been one of the biggest, if not the biggest, sower of misinformation targeting the US on the internet. If you add in North Korea (who they are no doubt coordinating with) they are running the biggest malicious propaganda campaign against us in the entire history of the US. Tik Tok’s protestations that they are somehow immune to orders given to them by the Chinese government, that they don’t provide access to the data stream, or that they sequester all information about US users in servers that the Chinese government can’t reach are just a joke.
So to me, Congress did the right thing, in banning Tik Tok, On top of that, when this proves insufficient they should continue creating new legislation to address emerging threats.
@gVOR10:
That cutesy phrase was, well, cute, the first few dozen times. It’s beginning to sound like self mockery by now.
NASA contracted with Xpacex to use their starship to land on the Moon. they must be ecstatic seeing so many unscheduled blow ups.
Meantime, it appears Lex Bezos intends to send his lunar lander, Blue Moon in a fit of obsessive originality, up this year. I’m unclear whether it will go into earth orbit or lunar orbit. Either way, it would seem the turtle has a lander for flight testing, while the president doesn’t.
I’d give the probability for a crewed landing on the Moon over the next four years as 15%. But I’m an incorregible optimist.
@Gustopher:
“Innocent until proven guilty” in the US works because the US has the power to investigate crimes. If the government has reason to believe someone is committing a crime it can subpoena records and compel testimony. Since none of this applies to Tik Tok and most certainly doesn’t apply to the Chinese government, that standard doesn’t, and shouldn’t, apply.
For crying out loud, we know that a good portion of the false stories fed to the MAGA’s about “Urbans” rioting and killing everyone in sight after Freddie Gray’s death originated with a Chinese propaganda push. Over the past decade the FBI and other investigatory agencies have identified huge Chinese government operations to plant lies in order to fracture US society.
It’s not just social media. You are more likely than not to own or have owned a TP-Link router (sometimes sold under other names) that was recently revealed to contain malware sending your unencrypted information to Chinese government sites. The fact that TP-Link was a private company meant nothing, because that doesn’t mean the same thing in China as it does here. In the case of the router, investigators could get physical possession of them and reverse engineer the code and monitor the transmissions. That’s just not possible with Tik Tok.
The gathering of the tribes:
@Sleeping Dog:
Actually the dreams are mostly funny ones. Entertaining, anyway.
@Kathy:
My thoughts exactly upon hearing it. “Barney Miller” had an episode where one character said to another, “Can you just stop promoting the stereotype for a minute?” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. When SpaceX command first used that they were taking on and winning challenges at a pace never before seen in a space program, and their stereotype at the time was a positive one, focused on their take charge, never stop moving forward attitude, and that phrase promoted that stereotype.
Now, however, the stereotype of anything associated with Musk is that of a rampaging man boy who thinks he is much, much smarter than he actually is and is too lazy to take time to understand things before shooting his mouth off or charging ahead, and is dismissive of the risks to other peoples lives in pursuit of his imagined glory. Interestingly, that phrase now promotes the new stereotype.
@Scott:
The inauguration’s been moved indoors because of the cold.
@MarkedMan:
I would put Facebook/Instagram and Twitter above it. Maybe YouTube as well. And probably Joe Rogan.
TikTok has never been shown to be a unique threat that requires unique treatment. (Unless encouraging a generation of Americans to be dog boys on the internet is a unique threat.)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/10/us-supreme-court-tiktok-ban-sale-bill
If the government has evidence, they should show it.
@Scott:
Inauguration to move indoors amid dangerously cold temperatures
Aww, pobrecito.
@Scott:
Well, now Trump has a built-in excuse for why no one shows up for it.
@MarkedMan: You’re making a better case for restricting all business with China, and prohibiting all social networks operating in the United States from also operating in China than you are for anything singling out TikTok.
TikTok also empowers free speech, and free association, of its users. I think there needs to be a modestly high bar reached before shutting that down. Or shutting down Facebook.
Facebook, by the way, has been used to literally orchestrate genocide against the Rohingya. I think they may have met that bar.
@CSK: What a wimp. Hiding from the weather.
Would William Henry Harrison have done that? No. That’s because Harrison was more of a man than Trump.
We need a new Teddy Roosevelt. (Minus the jingoism.) Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google are the new ‘trusts’ and should be broken up. The oligarchs like Musk and Thiel, but also George Soros to be fair, should be publicly and repeatedly shamed and their wealth should be limited by confiscatory taxation. Beyond, say, 100 million, there should be a heavy wealth tax. Don’t want to be taxed? OK, house homeless people, pay for drug rehab clinics, or build out a better electrical grid. Do something useful with your money, or we take it and give it where it will some good.
If there is a single issue that could unite Americans across the spectrum, it’s, ‘Fuck The Billionaires.”
FTB. Trump’s obsession with buying Greenland* fits that approach perfectly. Our message should be that yet again, some billionaire asshole thinks he owns people.
1) Wealth tax with robust enforcement.
2) End Citizens United and place limits on political spending
3) Bust the trusts, or in this case, the monopolies.
*Incidentally, Greenland would be very useful, Trump’s not wrong about that. He’s just an idiot not to see that we can get 100% of what we want by leasing, and leave Denmark to pick up the bills associated with the people of the island.
@Bill Jempty:
I either don’t dream or don’t remember my dreams. However, I do astrally project. I was tryna figure out what you know about self-publishing.
@Scott: I can feel for the guy. He’s an old, old man and really not up to cold weather like a young and strong Obama was. Can you imagine how he would feel an hour or two into the ceremony, sitting there in his high heel lifts, his corset and his crap filled diaper?
@MarkedMan:
Apropos the subject of old age, Trump’s Hollywood ambassadors – Jon Voight (86), Sylvester Stallone (78) and Mel Gibson (69) have an average age of 77.6 years. Damn near as old as Grampa Donny.
@Michael Reynolds: Their age struck me too. I think Donny boy thinks they still present that virile machismo they had in the 70’s. Instead, anyone 45 and under are thinking, “Why did Trump send these nursing home guys to California?”
Biden just ratified an amendment??
@Gustopher: If I were dictator for a day, I would have the Supreme Court rule that Section 230 protection was clearly only meant to apply to things like computer bulletin boards, where the company had no direct affect on what the user saw, and that any filtering, searching and selection was based on user actions. It is completely absurd to me that this was somehow extended to companies like Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, etc that actively promote content (and not just ads) to individual users. If what they promote causes harm, than they should have some form of liability.
Note that losing this protection doesn’t stop them from promoting ads into a users account (provided those ads adhere to minimal standards). There are two major parts to their algorithms, and pushing ads to targeted users is only half of it. The other part is identifying, through machine learning algorithms, content that will have you clicking again and again and again. That’s the part that is problematic, and that would see big changes if they were held liable for harm.
New constitutional amendment just dropped.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/17/politics/joe-biden-equal-right-amendment/index.html
If this has been ratified his whole term, it’s weird for Biden to talk about it 3 years and 363 days later.
@Gustopher:
And if they sell but leave a backdoor the CCP can use at will, and pay kickbacks to the new owners so they’ll never be able to notice the backdoor, what are they then?
@MarkedMan:
Yeah. It’s one thing to have multiple failures when trying something completely new, like landing a nearly spent first stage on a ship. Heavy lift boosters, even if record breaking, are not new.
It could be some trivial matter that was overlooked for some reason. there are plenty of those in a rocket. One could almost set up a nonfiction genre of rockets that failed because of a small, cheap part malfunctioned. But the impression in the long series of Xtarship tests is one more like carelessness or incompetence. Coincidentally, one also attached to Texla’s “self-driving” tech.
@Gustopher:
I commented on that this week.
Maybe the felon meant a firewall back in 2016?
As to your other points, I agree data mining companies should be far more strictly regulated worldwide, regardless of where they are based.
@MarkedMan: We are in complete agreement on 230, as far as you go.
I would go a few steps further and require that any company that is using a user’s profile and actions to make recommendations must retain records of the recommendations for the user, and whether the user engaged with that was recommended. For use in suing the shit out of the company.
Note that this is not an increased privacy risk, as this is the data that would be kept to make future recommendations anyway. (Probably also kept to make sure the user doesn’t keep seeing the same content many times.)
I think this would have a chilling effect on the social media companies, but in a good way. Less rage bait.
@Kathy: If Trump was as smart and devious as we sometimes imagine it to be–alternating with the times we assert that they can’t boil water in a tea kettle–he’d probably announce a program to do another moon landing and make it the most transparent government project ever. It would
attractdistract the attention of the space mission fanboiz away from the other elements of what he was attempting to do. Fortunately, neither Trump nor his minions have enough wits available to be either smart or devious. Unfortunately, most Americans have the intellect of dryer lint, so such distractions are unnecessary.@Just nutha ignint cracker:
They can so boil water in a tea kettle. It’s not their fault the cord burns and makes a toxic mess every time they try it.
President Xlon says he can put the first people on Mars by 2028. I estimate the odds of that at 0.0000000001% and I think that’s too optimistic.
If the felon gets too enthusiastically behind the president’s promise, he will look bad when he nears the end of his term and there’s no one even close to Mars. On the other hand, he can blame it on President Xlon.
@Kathy:
The space craft will have full self-driving mode.
@Michael Reynolds:
That’s actually much easier out in space. It’s not like you have to consider other vehicles, there are no traffic signs, and far fewer children one can run over*.
On the other hand, even far away craft like New Horizons have their course corrections checked by mission control, before any are undertaken. I can fully see the president doing away with that.
*Although given how rich president Xlon is, children for Xtarship to run over might be provided.
Tidbit about the Jeju Air crash.
The plane was made in 2009. The FAA mandated new planes to have permanent backup power to the black boxes only in 2010.
@Michael Reynolds:
It tends to puzzle me why a billionaire would NOT want to spend all their money on cool projects.
Were I in that position, I’d be planning a sinking trust fund for educational scholarships, technical schools, a mega-telescope or two, the human proteome project, a neutron burner for radioactive waste, a whole shedload of libraries, nature conservation, and sodding giant cathedral to be named St John’s.
Leave few million for assorted relatives, and spend the rest on fine wines, fast cars and faster women. 😉
(All of which comes down to a mere million or so in walking out money.)
(No yachts: I get seasick on a pedalo.)
If I’m haunting anyones’s dreams, sorry, but vampirism has its obligations.
🙂
@Kathy:
“Do you want the good news or the bad news, Elon?”
“Give me the good news.”
“We’re going to put a man on Mars! Using your rocket!”
“Yay! And the bad news?”
“It’s you.”
@JohnSF:
The Romans used to understand that if you’re rich and powerful, you build a temple and a public bath, at the very least. If you were really rich you financed a whole army – which did not always work out well, admittedly. How sad is it to recognize that the Romans were actually far more concerned with civic virtue than we are? There were. . . ahem. . . lapses, but they did at least have beliefs to lapse from.
@MarkedMan:
This is the big problem social media companies are running into in Europe.
The First Amendment does not apply; Section 230 doe not apply.
The wheels of European judicial enforcement grind exceeding slow, but they sometimes grind companies into an icky paste.
I have a little theory Musk, Zuckerberg etc are currently cuddling up to Trump at least in part because they want US state level backing to force the EU to back off.
They may be miscalculating that.
We shall see.
@Rob1:
Another Musky miscalculation, imho.
He’s building up a massive head of steam of resentment in European power circles, both Left and (normal) Right about his interventions.
I absolutely guarantee that Sir Kier Starmer as a former prosecutor is unamused about Musk saying he has “been complicit in the rape of Britain,”.
And I suspect Friedrich Merz, the likely next Chancellor of Germany is not much more happy.
Come the day, at the outside 4 years from now (and quite possibly sooner) when Musk no longer has Trump in his corner, the knives will come out.
Also, if anyone in the US has ever looked into AfD, they might realise that they have a massive anti-American tendency among their ranks.
The American Right is often a bit naive about European far-right nationalists.
The clue is in “nationalists”.
Word of advice to the MAGAts: “They are not your friends, you bunch of dimwits.”
(Same applies, but turned up to 11, to Russian nationalists)
@Michael Reynolds:
iirc, Andrew Carnegie, who was in many respects as double-dipped bastard, ended up disbursing most of his fortune. And quite a few other “robber baron” magnates did similarly, if not to the same extent.
The ones most inclined to hoard wealth tended to be monarchs, for obvious reasons: if your wealth was both and inheritance, and is key to the functioning of the state, as it often was, you can’t responsibly dispose of the lot.
And aristocrats have sometimes had similar ideas: English law re “strict settlement” and “entail” actually often forbade disposal of estates, on the basis of generational trusts.
But even in medieval and Renaissance times money accrued by enterprise during a lifetime was often expected to be largely disposed of charitably.
The recent pattern of mega-accumulation is actually historically rather unusual.
@JohnSF:
Sooner than 4 years if the President begins to act bigger than the felon. he’s almost certainly bound to.
@JohnSF:
Look at Bill Gates today. He’s MIA in the felon ass kissing parade, as far as I know. that’s good. He’s giving away tons of money, too. That’s great. His wealth keeps increasing anyway. That’s the problem of our day.
@Kathy:
iirc Gates has indicated that most of his wealth increase is earmarked for the Gates Foundation in any case.
But I suspect the thing is, once you have wealth on that scale, simple compound interest keeps it cumulating perhaps faster than you can arrange to spend it on ways you choose, as opposed to just giving away the whole pile almost at random.
But that probably seems sub-optimal to someone who wants to maximise effect; and is probably, given the personality types involved, a bit of a control-freak.
Or else handing it over wholesale to a system that is geared to spend on that scale: ie the state.
But if you think the state is not spending as you might wish, what then?
I mean, were you Bill Gates, would handing the lot over to a Republican Congress seem an attractive idea?
Hey, that gives me another idea for the disbursement of my imaginary billions: the nuclear attack submarine HMS JohnSF 🙂
A little dab of latenight OTB. Saddest song no one has ever heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV4ZtGmQhlI