Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, May 2, 2025
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84 comments
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).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
If you’re in the mood for a show that is light and fluffy, doesn’t require too much attention but delivers laughs, I would recommend “The Residence” on Netflix. It’s a comedy murder-mystery that takes place in the White House. Premise: the Chief Usher (Giancarlo Esposito) is found dead during a state dinner for the Australian PM. The “World’s Greatest Detective” (Uzo Adubo) is brought in to determine murder or suicide. She is also a birder. Lots of suspects. Nods to Murder On The Orient Express. Makes fun of Australians. Kylie Minogue sings. Downside (like a lot of shows these days) it is about 2 episodes too long. Not prestige TV but that is a relief sometimes.
Trump to rename Veterans Day as ‘Victory Day for World War I’
I’m pretty sure this will ultimately go nowhere but the Trump clapping seals will make some noise.
@Scott: “President Donald Trump on Thursday announced he would rename Veterans Day as “Victory Day for World War I””
Just rolls off the tongue, don’t it?
Personally I wouldn’t object to reverting to “Armistice Day,” but for any politician — let alone a nominally Republican one — to feel so free to tell veterans how little he cares about them is pretty astonishing.
RIP, Jill Sobule. God damn it.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to lead Trump’s commission on religious liberty
Anybody see the contradiction?
@Scott: Over in Wingnuttia, religious liberty means the right to ram your Christianity down everyone else’s throat. I guess Trump “forgot” to name any Jews, Muslims or Wiccans to the commission.
Fascinating stuff. The wisdom of life’s trial and error mechanism driving cellular evolution, acquired over millennia, also delineating analogous social (behavior) systems.
—– the analogous redundancy of life systems’ fondness for sustainability. All of humanity as an integrated “organism.”
@Scott: Power trumps moral congruence. Christians have lost the plot of their own faith.
@Scott:
And June 14 will be Trump Day,
Johg Fetterman is being accused by his former staff of being off his anti-psychotic meds and essentially being manic. At the end, the reporter comes off as upset about an interview and Fetterman’s behavior. If the story is true, he should step down.
Politically—without tying mental illness to Fetterman’s actual positions–the way his positions come to be articulated fits perfectly into the worldview of someone who is going through a manic episode. The fact that mainstream Democrats are embracing mania as a counter to progressivism is a) funny and b) a disaster.
And it doesn’t sound like this story is a surprise to anyone in DC. It has the same vibe as Biden’s mental health.
Some fun recommends for tv escapism…
Resident Alien because Alan Tudyk and some wonderful character actors.
Reservation Dogs. The story follows young Native Americans living on a rez in Oklahoma. Written and produced by Native Americans.
Bad Monkey is shot in the Keys (sigh) and Vince Vaughn is enjoying himself.
Bad Sisters, especially the first season.
We just finished watching The Good Place. I figured if Kathy liked it, maybe it would be worth trying. It was. Now I’m looking up “moral particularism” (I think that might be me) and wanting to read Kant. I liked the way the show poked fun at crunchy liberals and well meaning but namby pamby democrats, even though that meant they were laughing at themselves. We do seem to own our foibles.
@CSK:
I don’t know. History likes to repeat itself.
Yesterday was a holiday and we had the day off. Today is Friday and it feels like Monday. That seems sacrilegious.
Some years back it was decreed holidays would be celebrated on Monday. Both to have three day weekends, and to minimize workplace disruptions. The exceptions are Xmas, New Year’s Day. Independence Day (Sept. 16), and International Labor Day.
Move them all to the nearest Monday, I say. Or make mandatory two days off is they fall on Tuesday or Thursday.
On news that others might find shocking, President Sheinbaum urged congress, unions, and business leaders to move forward on establishing a 40-hour week.
@becca:
Michael Schur is an amazing writer. When I watched the first couple eps of Good Place I thought there was no way they can thread that needle over the long haul. It was a piece of work that needed to maintain a perfect balance. But Schur pulled it off.
He also wrote/produced Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Not sure how deeply he’s involved but he’s also a producer on Hacks. The man can write.
@Charley in Cleveland: I don’t know about Muslims or Wiccans, but Rabbi Meir Soloveichik is on the commission.
@Fortune: It’s been true for a long time that there are token Jews who apparently embrace the agenda of the Christian Right. In many cases it’s less because they’re comfortable with that entire agenda than that they feel they need allies who support the State of Israel. Either way, it’s important to emphasize that these individuals do not in any way whatsoever represent the views of the vast majority of American Jews, even American Orthodox Jews.
@becca:
I’ve re-watched The Good Place twice after seeing the first run. I like it that much. Another indication is that I’ve never argued about the lack of a backstory explaining why things such as the good place and the bad place, and accounting, even exist.
I really recommend Severance if you haven’t seen it.
Currently I’m watching Foundation season 2, A Man on the Inside*, and am rewatching seasons 1 and 2 of Blood of Zeus in anticipation of Season 3 (also the last season).
Foundation’s gone off the rails, IMO. Let alone it has only a passing resemblance to the Asimov stories, it feels now a bit like Seldon on s shoe-string budget, plus the man who sees the future failing to adequately plan ahead. And that’s before the Spacers and mentallic magic…
*Also by Schur, but far less interesting than The Good Place.
@Kylopod: Oh good, someone’s going to tell us who counts as a real Jew, this always ends well.
RFK Jr. has promised to investigate and put an end to…chemtrails.
@Kylopod:
The Hasidim in Brooklyn and Rockland county are very MAGA, following the lead of their rebbes. Also antivax and subject to measles epidemics. Big fans of the Israeli right.
*Also, there are people who call themselves *”jews” (“messianic” jews), but are actually Christian converts.
*ETA see Fortune right above. I have a “messianic” MAGA sibling, so I am pretty familiar with that phenomenon.
@Michael Reynolds: I want to start Hacks. Jean Smart is killing it in her later career. Mare of East Town and her Fargo role are amazing.
My daughter has been trying to turn me on to Parks and Recreation for years. Gonna have to add that now, too.
The Pitt is thoroughly engrossing. I just wanted to mention that, too.
@CSK:
I’m not sure. Is it hard or easy to eliminate something that doesn’t exist?
@charontwo: This is interesting but if my memory is correct (and it may not be) the Hasidim and Orthodox Jews were not Zionists but the more liberal Reformed Jews were especially in the 20th century. I am not steep in that history so I may be wrong.
@Fortune:
Do you have a reading comprehension problem? When did I say anything about who was a “real Jew”? In fact, the people who talk like that are right-wing Jews who suck up to right-wing Christians. For example, Ben Shapiro called Jews who supported Obama “JINOs”–Jews in Name Only. That kind of talk is pervasive among those folks, not Jewish liberals.
@charontwo:
After the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Mike Pence hired a “rabbi” to eulogize the victims. It turned out that this “rabbi” was not only messianic, but one who had been defrocked by his own group!
@Scott:
You might be right about secular and socialist Zionism in the 20th century. But the Hasidic are pretty strong supporters of the current version of Israel. For example, a Chabad synagogue had Ben-Gvir as a speaker this week in Brooklyn, and a mob of Chabad guys ended up attacking a random woman in the aftermath of protests.
Can a Christian Be a Democrat?
@CSK: Oh gawd, I was just thinking about that the other day, wondering if we could hope for less damage on “real” stuff by diverting attention to chemtrails and alien visits.
JFC. Every day is like an Onion article.
@Kathy: Severance is fascinating. I haven’t watched season two yet. I wanted to wait for the full season to be released.
I couldn’t get into Foundation. I respect Asimov and read the books eons ago, but I am more Heinlein than Clark and Asimov. A lighter intellectual lift, but more my speed when it comes to sci-fi.
@Scott:
Not totally off the mark, but the devil is in the details. Most of the original Zionists were indeed secular Jews, while most Orthodox Jews were against the creation of the state of Israel. Note that I said secular Jews, not Reform, which initially also opposed Zionism, believing it went against one of their core tenets, the belief that Jews were not a nation. And there were Orthodox who supported Zionism. Moreover, after the State of Israel was created, most adapted to the reality of it, and even many of those who don’t accept the label of “Zionist” are still in practice stalwart defenders of the State. (This includes much of Chabad.) There are a few exceptions, including Satmar, and the tiny Neturei Karta sect, who are often seen at pro-Palestinian rallies.
@wr: But that would require people pulling out the dictionary. Can’t have that!
@Fortune:
Who? You?
@Michael Reynolds: Schur had become one of the guys whose name is enough to get me interested in a property, regardless of any other information about it.
@Scott: I guess this means I’ll no longer get a free breakfast at Denny’s on the 11th.
Ruth Buzzi, 88, has died after a series of strokes. RIP.
@CSK:
I can care less that Trump wants to create a national Holiday called Trump day, but the biggest issue for me is the date of this proposed Holiday. There is a 3 month gap between Presidents Day and Memorial Day that is just way too long a stretch with no paid time off Holiday to break up the time.
If he wants to create a new Holiday in his name please set the time for something like the 2nd or 3rd Monday in April, that would work. Setting just a few weeks before the 4th of July is just much too close to the 4th of July.
If you were kidding about the Trump Day Holiday proposal please ignore this post, lol!
@inhumans99:
I was joking, but given Trump’s penchant for renaming things, particularly after himself, who knows?
In his speech to the graduating class of the University of Alabama Trump told his audience that all the people who hated him during his first term are now “kissing my ass.”
Class. The guy is pure class.
@CSK: Trump told his audience that all the people who hated him during his first term are now “kissing my ass.”
It is classless, but it is also one of those rare occasions when Trump is actually telling the truth. Bezos and Zuckerberg made no attempt to hide their contempt for Trump. Now they have their heads so far up his ass they could almost qualify as POC. But like any good quisling they know where their bread is buttered.
Did he say “all”? He has weak beta male billionaire sellouts here and there. But broadly, what’s happening is Trump just beat his own first term record for lowest 100-day approval ever in history.
Between this and his incoherent rambling about Harvard and Harlem, it seems Trump is rapidly deteriorating, under job stress. His babbling tangents and erratic decisions are demonstrably worse than ever.
Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Collapses With Rural Americans (Newsweek)
Or maybe Trump was confused again, and meant to say that people who loved him are increasingly sick of his ass?
@Lucysfootball:
I just got a vivid mental image of a piece of buttered bread up Trump’s ass.
Thanks, pal. 😀
@becca: Parks and Rec is wonderful. It also was massively reworked between Season 1 and Season 2. So if you are finding that Season 1 is just not hitting the way you expected based on the hype, please know that Season 1 is tonally more “The Office (US)” while from Season 2 onward it becomes more tonally similar to Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
@becca:
Bad Monkey was way better than it had any right to be. My partner and I sat down to watch it figuring we’d take a couple edibles and be one and done on episodes. We binged to whole thing in a week.
At one point my partner asked me why I was crying and I was like “Vince Vaughn made me feel things.” I was shocked. I mean, I cry a lot to begin with, but I was still surprised.
@becca:
The whole second season of Severance is already out.
Now we wait between one and 3 years for the third one…
I got into Heinlein in the 80s and 90s for some reason. If someone were to adapt Friday, I might see it. That would be hard to botch as badly as Starship Troopers*.
The Foundation series, as noted, has little to do with Asimov’s work. Asimov, though, is really hard to adapt to visual media. there’s very little action in his stories, and a lot of the plot hinges on dialogue. So for the TV show they pretty much kept the gist of the premise, the names of several characters, and made up everything else.
MODERATORS / SITE OPERATORS – Did you mean to reintroduce the time stamps on comments?
@Lucysfootball:
Blackface is never a good look no matter where the darkening agent comes from, but this would be among the worst.
Hmm. Why aren’t Republicans using amazing amounts of bronzer to look more like their hero?
@Gustopher:
Orange is the new black?
@Kylopod: I read what you wrote about “token Jews”.
@Fortune: What do you think the word token means? I’m curious.
@Kathy:
I thought that the Foundation novels would be unfilmable, and I am somewhat heartened that the people behind this show agree with me.
I saw season 2 a while back, and I kind of liked it. It’s very, very far from the source material of the original three books (aside: what monster thought “Second Foundation” was a good title for the third book? Every cover should have a large warning) and is pulling in themes from other books in the series and related series. And new stuff. Asimov-inspired largely-original work.
It’s like how “O, Brother, Where Art Thou?” is based on “The Odyssey”.
@Kathy: I remember when Stranger in a Strange Land came out and suddenly everyone knew Heinlein. Farnham’s Freehold was my favorite. Have Space Suit Will Travel, too.
Think I will start Severance 2 this dark and stormy weekend.
@Kylopod: You’re denigrating the quality of their Jewishness, kind of like saying black people who don’t vote for Biden ain’t black.
@Fortune: Answer my question. What does the word “token” mean historically when it comes to minorities?
@Kylopod:
Good luck with that request.
@Gustopher:
The brief story of the Foundation stories is as follows:
Asimov wrote them as short stories in the 1940s to sell to john Campbell JR. at Astounding magazine. These kept getting longer as Terminus gained influence in the periphery. By the time he was not quite half through the 1,000 year intermediate period, he grew tired of them and moved on to something else.
In the 50s when science fiction hard cover books began to be printed and sold, a sketchy outfit known as Gnome Press, run by a sketchier character called Martin Greenberg, acquired the rights to publish the Foundation stories in three tomes. Greenberg probably named the books. this publication entailed Asimov writing a set up story to serve as an introduction.
This story is the first in the books. It features one Hari Seldon and a young mathematician known as Gaal Dornick. Yes, as originally written, Seldon and Dornick did not appear in the Foundation stories (though recordings of Seldon did).
Anyway, Gnome Press was not in the habit of paying royalties, even as they solicited more titles from established writers. At some point, Doubleday forwarded an inquiry about Foundation from some European publisher to Asimov. The latter replied he wasn’t interested, because he got no royalties from those books. As Doubleday was Asimov’s publisher for most of his works, they set about wrestling the titles away from Gnome Press, and published them under their brand in the late 50s or early 60s. they’ve been in print ever since.
Asimov returned to the Foundation universe in 1982, under pressure from Doubleday to finish the series. This yielded two sequels: Foundation’s Edge, and Foundation and Earth. Also two prequels: Prelude to Foundation, and Forward the Foundation.
I think later on, after Asimov’s death in 1992, some more titles by other authors were published. I’ve never read those.
@becca:
I liked The Door Into Summer.
I can’t quite figure out why I kept reading Heinlein after Stranger… I never read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Long story in New York Magazine about John Fetterman and mental health, apparently he has issues that have his staff, others alarmed.
I can’t find a way to gift link it, but Balloon Juice has an archive link.
https://balloon-juice.com/2025/05/02/he-said-kill-them-all/
Find the rest at BJ, or https://archive.is/7fGvy
@Kylopod: I recognize the historical context of the word. I equally recognize you used it in a response to me identifying Soloveichik as a Jew. Charley in Cleveland said there were no Jews, I named one, and you replied essentially “Soloveichik doesn’t count”.
@charontwo: The man was mentally ill when Democrats voted for him. Democrats pretended not to notice until he was polite to Trump.
Remember our AI discussion a few days ago?
And i was all Willy Wonka “Wait, stop, don’t” because America is bot ready for a displaced workforce?
Well, here’s 10 or 20,000 on the chopping block:
A DOGE Recruiter Is Staffing a Project to Deploy AI Agents Across the US Government
A startup founder told a Palantir alumni Slack group that AI agents could do the work of tens of thousands of government employees.
Breaking:
Trump just signed an EO renaming the San Andreas Fault to “Biden’s Fault”
@Fortune:
Let’s look at the dictionary definition of tokenism, using Google (from the OED): “the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce. (example) ‘the use of gay supporting characters is mere tokenism'”
If, say, a country club is discriminating against black people, but has one black member, my calling that member a “token” isn’t implying the person isn’t black or is a lesser black. It is simply a commentary on how the club is using the person to gloss over its representation problems.
I’m sure you’d have a similar reaction if there was a group consisting of eight Democrats and one Republican, and the group claimed to be nonpartisan and ideologically neutral. Maybe you’d call the one Republican a RINO, but the point is that calling the person a token Republican isn’t the same thing.
By calling Rabbi Soloveichik a token Jew in a group that promotes the agenda of right-wing Christians, I wasn’t saying he’s any less of a Jew than I am, but that his views are unrepresentative of those of the vast majority of American Jews, and so his membership is no contradiction with the general assertion that the group is promoting a right-wing Christian agenda. As I said, there are Jews out there who support that agenda. The issue is not with their Jewishness but with their being much more the exception than the rule.
When Ben Shapiro refers to Jewish Dems as JINOs, or when Trump proclaims that Chuck Schumer is no longer a Jew but a Palestinian, or when Meir Soloveichik suggests Reform and Conservative Judaism aren’t authentic branches of Judaism, you are silent. I have not said anything equivalent about Soloveichik’s Jewishness, but you are forced to twist what the term “token” means in order to pretend I am saying something that you entirely give a pass to when it is done explicitly by the other side.
I said I wasn’t disputing the historical use of the term. Maybe you thought I initially said Rabbi Soloveichik represented mainstream Judaism and you wanted to rebut it by calling him a token. I actually said Rabbi Soloveichik was a Jew and on the committee and you rebutted that by calling him a token.
@Kylopod:
Every accusation is a confession.
In case anyone care, the local elections in England could have gone better, imho.
Reform did annoyingly well.
(Reform = former Brexit party = former UKIP. The party led by Nigel Farage.)
Including my local council, Worcestershire; the local incumbent ward rep Sam Ammar (Lib Dem) who I voted for, got beaten by the Reform candidate, dammit.
She came in second, though it was close: 967 votes to 878.
The country council now has Reform as the largest single party, though short of a majority.
Also, Reform beat Labour in the Runcorn parliamentary by-election.
By just six votes after recounts.
otoh, now Reform controls ten county councils, they will start to have the pains of being in office, rather than just being insurgents.
@Kathy: So you’re a felon? Or only “every accusation” against your side, that you can’t rebut, “is a confession” by your opponents, that you’re not going to bother to prove?
@Scott: Thanks for the tip. Sounds a bit like “Knives Out” , which is quite enjoyable. Well written and they managed to assemble a wonderful cast.
@Kathy:
There were some rather good ones as the writers involved (Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin) are all first-rankers in their own right.
otoh, as such they tended to spin the the Asimov”universe” in their own ways.
As with some Arthur C. Clarke *follow on” stories, such as Benford in “Beyond the Fall of Night”
@becca:
One thing in particular about Foundation that makes it hard for visual media, is that few characters appear in more than one story or novel. Hardin was in the second and third stories, the Mule was in two. It’s only with the sequels and prequels that characters appear in several novels (but come to think of ir, it’s just two each…)
That’s why I thought the genetic dynasty was a stroke of genius. Though the characters are not the same, they are kind of the same. Ditto Salvor and Gaal going into cold sleep into a different century. And Seldon being a downloaded personality is more believable than holographic recordings about the story’s present and minimal info about the future.
All that said, I think The Gods Themselves could be easily adapted into a movie, even though it suffers the same lack of character continuity.
@wr:
In the UK November 11 is Remembrance Day, since the First World War.
And it’s never really been a celebration of victory.
Yes, the victory was seen as good thing, and those who achieved it worthy of honour.
But above all, it’s always been about mourning.
It’s hard to “celebrate” something that involved almost a million dead.
6% of the adult male population.
Even after the Second World War, when people in Britain spoke of the “Great War” it had only one meaning: 1914-18.
@JohnSF:
I’ve resisted that one.
I did read Silverberg’s take on Nightfall. As Asimov tells it, Silverberg wrote the novel, but Asimov had the final say about everything. It was an improvement of the original short story in three ways: 1) there are female characters, 2) it expanded the backstory and the discovery of Nightfall, 3) it dealt with the aftermath.
On the other hand I also read The Positronic Man, written the same way as above. I didn’t care for it. I thought it added nothing to the base novella, The Bicentennial Man.
@Kylopod: By all means correct me if I am wrong, but my reading on the history of the creation of Israel, such as it is, left me with the strong impression it had little to no basis in theology.
It was, seems to me, a way to get the Jews away from Europe. The brutal history of antisemitism stretches across centuries in Europe, and before Adolf gave it a bad name it was very much main-stream thinking there. Balfour openly expressed antisemitism in his explanation for his famous declaration. The selection of the Levant does have a significant historical logic to it, but as much as that it was the ancient Jewish communities throughout MENA which had never suffered anything remotely like the pogroms of Europe.
TE Lawrence provided a brief description of the Jews of the Levant (then considered Syria) which is enlightening. Seems those communities were very careful never to take as side in the regional conflicts so they were never viewed as a threat. Nobody really liked them but nobody really hated them either. The reason for Feisal teaming up with Wasserman to encourage European Jewish immigration was the Mufti of Jerusalem was very hostile towards Feisal and the sudden in rush of desert Arabs. Feisal’s goal, besides diluting that Mufti’s power, was Feisal, highly educated in Turkey during his youth, very much wanted to see some deeper connections with the Western civilizations.
Secular Jews led the way. Assisted, oddly enough, by antisemites like Balfour I guess is my bottom line here.
@wr:
@Scott:
Trump is determined to, like a dog, mark or try to mark his territory, which happens to be anything that crosses his mind – Veterans Day, the White House, Gulf of Mexico, Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal, Gaza … whatever. It’s a compulsion; he wants to ‘brand’ everything.
@dazedandconfused:
Balfour was antisemitic in a limited way: he in fact fought against social restrictions on British Jews.
But also thought a large influx of Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe would be a disaster, as he considered they would be impossible to assimilate due to their inclination for communal separatism.
Possibly that was antisemitic, but it does not seem to have been a general “judeophobia” but what he regarded as s specific problem regarding the massive, and quite reasonable, impulse of the “Jews of the Pale” to escape the oppression of Russian rule and the likely consequences of Polish ethnic nationalism.
Interesting article by Brian Klug on this topic, which fits with other stuff I’ve read re Balfour on this.
Basically, Zionism and a “Jewish National Home” seemed to serve a lot of purposes at the same time.
The British mistake was in the delusion that a “Jewish National Home” would not necessarily imply the Zionist objective of a Jewish state, and therefore be unacceptable to the Arabs.
As rapidly turned out to be the case.
@Scott:
It’s just the megalomania talking. The world must be remade. Anything it didn’t create must be changed.
@JohnSF: Thanks for linking that article. I had read much about the linking of Bolshevism and the Jews, but had thought it a project of Adolf’s. So many accounts of the Germans who fought in Russia show how deeply that idea had been instilled in them, but it clearly pre-dates Adolf. He merely amplified it.
@JohnSF:
Incidentally, “967 votes to 878” is not a misprint.
Turnout was only 34.38%, ftlog.
Anyone who moans to me about Reform acts in the Council, then turns out not to have voted is in for some unpleasant words.
Vote, you fools.
Chartists went to jail fighting for your right to do so, dammit.
And what worse is Bromsgrove ( Dodford village to be precise) was the site of one of the “Chartist settlements”.
Sometimes I doubt we deserve our ancestors.
In an editorial on Canada’s national mythology, this bit is striking:
BTW, all countries have a national mythology of sorts. Not all make it a foundational myth. By this I mean not that it serves as an origin story, though it might, but as the imagined foundation upon which the nation and the national character rest.
@dazedandconfused:
If you look into the history of the oppositional groups in Russia and Russian Poland, it’s interesting. There was a massive tension in Jewish “left” political groups between the Bolsheviks and the Bund. Many Bundists became Zionists, hence the radical socialist strain in Zionism.
(Kibbutzes and etc.)
iirc the Socialist Revolutionary Party (which was the main “left” group before the Bolsheviks crushed them (as well as the Mensheviks) had a Russian nationalist strain which inclined non-Bundist Jews towards others, including the Bolsheviks.
Therefore, the early Bolsheviks did have a rather higher than norm percentage of Jewish members. But they were never dominant.
@Fortune: Nope, he had a stroke. There was no indication of mental illness. I live in PA so this put us in a tough position. Vote for an otherwise decent human being who just had a stroke or vote for a quack who sells miracle pills on TV. We know you can recover from a stroke but OZ had been a practicing quack for over 10 years and it’s not clear if anyone ever recovers from that.
Steve
@Fortune: This is why we hate you. You suck.
@Kathy:
The repeating problem of “Hollywood genius” types always thinking they are so much better at stories than the actual original authors of said stories.
“Hey, bro! Of course we are! Look how much we get paid compared to those losers!”
How can any mere author, like Shakespeare, or Tolkien, or Asimov, or whoever, compare to a Hollywood producer bro?
Not possible dude!
And then they wonder why the series flops.
“Can’t be us, dude. We be geniuses. Gimme the money, and on to the next project!”
@Jax: Brilliantly and eloquently stated.
I expect he will steadfastly not understand the word “we” or “suck” and try to drag out a long, tedious interaction, but your concise writing really leaves no room for interpretation by any good faith actors.
@Fortune: “@Kathy: So you’re a felon? Or only “every accusation” against your side, that you can’t rebut, “is a confession” by your opponents, that you’re not going to bother to prove?”
And this, my fellow OTBers, is where there’s no point in ever responding to Fortune. All he wants is an opportunity to play his childish word games and prove to himself that he’s smarter than everyone else. There is no chance of getting a real argument from him, or that he will ever make any kind of an interesting point.
If you want this kind of conversation, please buy a parrot. And let him wither away unsatisfied.