Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, September 5, 2025
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30 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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BlueSky.
Was on Paramount + (courtesy of my niece) watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and realized that South Park was available. I hadn’t seen South Park for probably decades. Pulled it up and watched latest episode involving demonic dolls and Trump and Satan. I haven’t laugh so hard in a long time. Rude, crude, obscene.
I’m so ashamed.
A little bit of history.
Harlem Hellfighters ‘who faced the enemy head-on’ receive Congressional Gold Medal
@Scott: Watch the other episodes from this season. You will not be disappointed.
August jobs report shows US labor market continues dramatic summer slowdown
Seems the Supreme Court is worried:
Amy Coney Barrett: Reports of a constitutional crisis have been greatly exaggerated
Brett Kavanaugh on why Supreme Court rulings can be so cryptic
That report:
In rare interviews, federal judges criticize Supreme Court’s handling of Trump cases
As well they should be. Roger Taney went against the zeitgeist of a nation and look what happened there.
Project Veritas apparently outed the Trump DOJ and their intention to redact all conservative or GOP names and leave any dems or liberals in the Epstein files before releasing them. They caught this fellow with a dating app.
The DOJ gave credence to the story in their response, admitting the blabbermouth is, in fact, part of the dept.
When James O’Keefe, a well known right wing hack and fraudster, is aiding and abetting the resistance it’s just more proof this is the weirdest timeline ever.
So much for love letters.
How a Top Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission Into North Korea Fell Apart
Hoping this is the most obscene thing I’ll read today.
I can’t even bring myself to say what’s in it. I’m that angry and disgusted.
@Scott: The problem is fixable. These reports come from the Department of Labor. Labor is a Woke term invented by a Democrat. We will rename it the Department of Work! This will fix everything!
@Scott: I would recommend all of this current season.
It is the kind of satire and commentary we all need right now.
I completely forgot there was a game yesterday. A look at the stats indicates the Dallas Joneses put up a fierce defense, but stats are not that reliable for judging a game.
On the last Ancient Geeks podcast, the hosts joked derisively abut a TOS ep, The Alternative Factor. That was in the queue yesterday.
It was worse than bad. It was sooooooooooo bad I questioned my need to keep watching this show. Literally nothing about it worked. Not the villain, not the crew of the Enterprise, not how they worked out the solution, not the solution, not the premise, not one effing thing.
Next up should be The City on the Edge of Forever, which consistently ranks as one of the best Trek episodes of all time. Naturally, I’ll skip it.
Actually, I’ve watched it several times, most recently a few months ago. Seeing it again now it would feel repetitive.
Remember Amazon’s Kuiper Project? I know. It’s hard to remember something you’ve never even heard of. It’s Amazon’s attempt to offer satellite based internet access all over the world.
Turns out they’ve launched 100 satellites already, out of about 3,200 that will be necessary. Still, they say they’ll launch service commercially by the end of the year (narrator: almost certainly probably not). And yesterday JetBlue announced it will offer Kuiper internet on some of its fleet (currently they offer a different model of satellite based ISP on all their fleet, free of charge).
One odd thing is that about half the satellites were launched by their competitor, Xtarlink, via their launch company subsidiary XpaceS.
Anyway, Amazon expects to get the full satellite network up some time in the near to far future, as soon as Blue Origin manages to launch many more New Glenn heavy lift rockets (so far, they’ve managed one). I estimate between 2 and 200 years.
There’s no word on pricing yet, but Amazon implies they will sell it cheaper than Xtarlink. That’s pretty much a given at the start, as they will want to sign up new customers, and maybe strip away some from the established company. But that’s before the service is enshitified. No word at all on how that will go, especially if, like Xtarlink, it winds up subsidizing the launch company.
A little bit of comic relief where we can get it. Spinal Tap returns!
I’m in.
@Scott:
Can MAGA censorship attempts be far behind?
@Kathy:
Giving Bezos another income stream from our wallets with which to further dismantle our liberal democratic processes and boost the billionaire boys club.
@Rob1: Well, they have this disclaimer that should protect them?
I think they would relish an attempt.
@Scott: Fake news, fake numbers by a political hack! This BLS hoax created by Democrats. Need to fire the new BLS commissioner! Trump hire best people!
@Rob1:
I looked into Xtarlink before the chief nazi went bonkers and then nazi. It was too expensive for home use, provided there were alternatives. Pretty much if you live in an urban area, or in just about any area with cable TV and landline phone service, you should be able to get broadband at far, far, far lower prices.
It’s been a hit with airlines, as the price for them is reasonable and the service is usually available throughout most flights. I hear it’s a thing with rural users not covered with other existing service, too. past that, I’ve no clue (chief nazi’s fanboys of course). Maybe it makes sense for institutional settings with large bandwidth needs, assuming it delivers.
I assume Lex Bezos’ service will be only slightly cheaper, and maybe only at first.
On the other hand, Amazon is a huge conglomerate with lots of different services, not a glorified ISP with a space launch company. They may be able to consistently undercut Xtarlink, but only as long as the latter exists.
@Kathy: Something like 97% of the USA classifies as rural. About 20% of the population lives there. Wyoming for example has a population of under 600,000.
I know people who game on starlink and it seems pretty decent. A lot better than the older satellite options that existed. When your options are dial up or starlink….
@Scott:
So far, rules and regs (and norms) offer no restraint to this pathological administration. Sue! Sue! Sue!
@Kathy:
Great. A trillion dollar psychopath.
@Steven L. Taylor: Enjoy the respite while you can. This thin-skinned administration is bending entire networks to its will.
@Scott:
Pershing commanded the Buffalo Soldiers before the war and he knew that black men could and would fight. His problem? He could not deploy them in fighting units in WW1 alongside white US troops. The whites simply would not tolerate them. Had he kept them all, they could only be used in support roles and most were so designated, but the Hellfighters he recognized as quite capable of more…so he gave them to the French. Who, by their long colonial experience in Africa, were not driven to abject rage by the sight of a black man with a gun in his hands and were generally capable of viewing blacks as fully human.
We award them more than a century later, but the French handed out Croix de Guerres to them while they were still alive.
@dazedandconfused:
The American attitude to African-American soldiers really puzzled both the British and French in both World Wars.
That’s not to say that either Brits or French were “non racist”; they very often were, and are.
But they did not have the default view that the “blacks must be kept in their place”.
Both were entirely acustomed to non-white soldiers, who they regared as, trated as, and generally respected as soldiers in the cause.
Family anecdotage time:
An uncle of mine and a bunch of fellow Warwickshires were on leave from France in 1944, having a drink in a pub in Coventry with some African American soldiers who had been there before them. Some white Americans arrived and started getting unpleasant.
The Warwickshires sergeant advised said white Americans to depart before they got clobbered.
They departed.
Sensible of them; it was inadvisable to f@ck with the Warwickshires.
And probably not with said African-Americans, either.
Similarly the French: the French African units were known to be among the best fighting units in Italy, for instance.
The Germans in Italy feared them as opponents
Second only to the Poles?
Or perhaps the Gurkhas?
Or the Sikhs?
And the French generally had no problems with that.
The peculiar thing is that in the US Civil War, by its end, some Black American units were known to be formidaly effective.
It seems that post-Reconstruction American attitudes seem to have defaulted to accepting the “Southern perspective” on such things, in an attempt at reconciling the South to its defeat, perhaps?
Today at home the car started just fine, though an indicator labeled “maintenance required” turned on.
Around 11 am I had to go out. The parking lot attendants tend to shuffle the cars around, as the lot holds more cars than it should. Mine had been moved, which is common. Only it wouldn’t start, giving all the symptoms of dead battery. I noticed instead of Park, the gear was in the Reverse position.
Question, could this drain the battery?
We got it started with jumper cables, but I decided it was better not to take it where I had to go. A coworker loaned me his. If it starts later today when I go home, I’m confident it will get me there. If it starts tomorrow, I will drive it to a battery shop (there is one very close to home). There they can test the battery and let me know whether I should change it or not. If it doesn’t start, this same shop will deliver the new battery and swap it.
@JohnSF:
Centuries of indoctrination that the blacks were not really humans did a lot of damage. The attitudes of WW1 were such that “Birth Of A Nation” was viewed not as a fantasy but as a documentary. A private viewing of that film by Woodrow Wilson in the White House was given a standing ovation, it is said, led by Woodrow himself.
Not all the slave holders feared their slaves. Some, such as Jeff Davis, managed to create a family atmosphere, their slaves prospered in a limited way and they knew they had it good, comparatively. However, most of the owners ruled with cruelty, and for them fear of their slaves shaped them to the core.
The majority of whites weren’t slave owners, of course. For them, there is another aspect, best put by LBJ, the political utility of giving people someone to punch down on which did (and still does) a lot of the heavy lifting in keeping this crap going:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
@dazedandconfused:
Yes.
Wilson was an odd duck.
On the one hand, an internationalist liberal, on the other an utter racist a@hole.
My defualt is that that the Southerners were trying desperately to avoid the obvious conclusion that their forbears were utterly wrong, and therefore had to define African-Americans as inherently inferior, and somehow also dangerous.
This was not someting Europeans were so prone to, perhaps, both because of the much lower numbers of persons of African descent in most of Europe (excepting port cities, and urban Portugal)
And because Europeans often had, pragmatically, to deal with other “races” as they found them.
And often did not categorise them as Americans do.
I’ve remarked before, Americans often, and including “progressive liberal” types for some reason define persons from Middle East/North Africa as “non-white”.
To many Europeans, historically, that would be absurd.
Differentiating a bunch of identically clothed Turks, Greeks, Sicilians, Albanians, Andalucians, Syrians, Armenians etc would be rather difficult.
The thing is, even US progressives/liberals seem to default to racial categorization; it seems to be legacy of the entire attitude of the early US: “whites”, “blacks”, “red men”, “brown”.
And that diffrentiation is somehow natural and inevitable.
Latest from Ann Telnaes, Taco art at the Smithsonian
So, my car did start on the first try. I need to find out whether the battery got drained somehow but is otherwise ok, or whether it’s not holding its charge well enough.
@dazedandconfused:
Keep in mind that the majority of whites are women and children.
All of those claims than “only a tiny percentage of whites owned slaves” are eliding the fact that effectively it was families owning slaves, not individuals, and everyone in the family benefited.
Slaves were also rented out, and there were lots of people who didn’t own their own slaves employed in the slaving industry (slave breakers, etc)
@Gustopher:
iirc even just counting adult males, the slave owning precentage of the South was only about 25% of that population group, at most.
The most important social factor seems to have been that, for the Southern, and indeed larger American, white lower class, they could always identify as “non-slave”, or later “not Black”.
I suspect this may have been a significant factor in the differnces between American and European mass-party politics.
If you are pretty sure you are on the bottom of the pile, you may be inclined to different views to if you consider yourself to be inherently superior to, and yet threatened by, an obviously identifiable “other”.
A smililar dynamic now seems to be perhaps emerging in European and British politics re minorities.
But in the South there was also the issue of:
“They were slaves; that would have been wrong and un-Christian if they were not inferior; therfore they MUST have been inferior, and therefore still must be, or else our forefathers must have been un-Christian a@@holes, which cannot be, because grandpa can’t have been an a@@hole, and was surely Christian. And so anything that contradicts grndapa not being an a@@hole is obviously wrong and un-American. So there. “
QED