Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, October 17, 2025
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33 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
Happy 10th Birthday to this classic:
Adrian Bott
@Cavalorn
‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
3:18 AM 16 Oct 15
No doubt in my mind that this is Abbott inciting a riot. His own Reichstag Fire.
Gov. Abbott activates Texas National Guard to assist state troopers at planned Austin protest
They can learn.
Here are the colleges rejecting Trump’s funding compact
I bet UT Austin will accept the terms.
Oh, barf.
Air Force Academy alumni board to vote on honoring Charlie Kirk
Yes, let’s get involved in another Middle East war.
Trump threatens US military force in Gaza amid fragile ceasefire
@Scott:
Kirk went to the Air Force Academy???
@Daryl: No, in March 2025 Trump appointed Kirk to the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors. He had no previous association with the AFA, Air Force, or DoD.
@Scott:
If Hamas continues killing people. If. Of course they’re killing people, that’s what they do. They kill people. I can’t believe that shark ate that mackerel!
Now, as Hamas is reasserting its control over Gaza, the next step is what again? Jordan and Egypt march in and. . .? Will they be welcomed by Hamas? I’m going to go out on a limb here, just stay with me, I mean I know this is a hot take, but I suspect Hamas will kill those Jordanians and Egyptians. And then the ‘peacekeepers’ will start killing back.
Then the Israelis will roll their eyes and say, ‘why don’t all of you just fuck off and let us do this.’
And speaking of: three Qatari officials involved in the negotiations had a car accident that caused all three to fall from a window in Moscow, which was quite a trick since they were in Sharm el Sheikh at the time.
@Michael Reynolds: Which is why this past week’s hoopla was the equivalent of Trump spiking the ball at the 10 yard line.
@Daryl:
According to Wiki, Kirk applied to West Point but was rejected.
In fact, reading Kirk’s published bio, he didn’t do anything with his talents except hop onboard the rightwing outrage/hate gravy train in high school, riding it into adulthood, grabbing the support of a righwing sugardaddy along his way to joining the religious Right cashflow cycle profiting off manufactured angst and distortion, while driving a wedge in American society for fun and profit. No righteousness in any of that. People lionize him out of mis-perception and coersion.
@Charley in Cleveland:
I love that Trump is threatening military action against Hamas. As opposed to what they’ve had going on for the last two years? Hey, I have an idea, we could ask our good friends the Israelis for help in striking Hamas. I mean, if we asked them really nicely and offered them some more F35s. Peace in our time.
@Rob1: the wingnuts have their own economy. The avenues for grift to travel are endless.
I wonder how much of the our whole economy is eaten by grift, scams and swindles. Bad money chasing out good money.
Banana fana fo fana fe fi fo Banana! Republic!
Band member [dressed as a BANANA] accused of interfering with arrest of another during Portland ICE protest, feds allege
Trump and Miller’s slush fund —
ICE offered Dallas $25M to work with city police — and the police chief turned them down
@becca:
Tangential, but J. K. Galbraith talked about the then common belief that embezzlement was a cause of the ’29 crash. He talked about a case of a dozen or more employees forming a gang to embezzle one bank. They started out as individuals, but found each others muddy tracks in the books and had to gang up together for mutual protection. But the level of embezzlement in the late ’20s didn’t seem high, just that scrutiny increased as banks weakened. He talked about the size of the “bezzle”, the money on the banks books, but not actually in the banks.
Puppy update…
Turns out our next door neighbor took in Al (as in Al Greene) to be best friends with Chris Brown, our neighbor’s very sweet pit mix. They hit it off big time. Everybody wins!
btw: not the maga-gaga neighbors on the other side.
I think Trump may have overplayed his hand indicting John Bolton.
Bolton has no morals, he is a Republican after all, and you need look no further than him saving his tidbits for his book instead of saving the country from Trump — but you can always count on Republicans like Bolton to be self-interested.
Trump thinks he can bully Bolton into pleading it out, but Bolton has access to resources and may well take this case into full-on discovery.
On the Trek re watch, there are an astonishing number of TOS eps where the antagonist of the week wants to kidnap either the senior officers or the entire crew of the Enterprise. At some point, it begins to feel like the show is parodying itself.
I must explain I saw very few TOS eps before the movies came out, and the one show I watched regularly was TNG. So, to me, TNG is Trek.
BTW, Roddenberry wanted new aliens in TNG, rather than the same ones from TOS. That’s why there are few or no Orions, Andorians, or even Vulcans in much of TNG. There’d be no Klingons, either, I’m sure, had he not thought to place one on the bridge of the Enterprise D.
I think I ought to give it a rest, at least on weekends. I’m getting cynical. When Kirk’s enterprise gets hit and there’s a damage report, I want to call out “All bridge cameras tilted out of position! And we still have no seatbelts or surge protectors!”
Yesterday I watched the much maligned “Spock’s Brain.” consensus on the Trek message boards I frequented on BBSes and the early internet in the 90s, widely considered it Trek’s worst ep ever. I think that dishonor belongs to other eps, like The Alternative Factor.
I nearly skipped it because of that. It was pretty bad, don’t get me wrong, but a few tweaks would have made it a rather good ep. For instance, had Spock been kidnapped rather than just his brain (which would have spared us McCoy controlling Spock’s body with a primitive looking RC remote), and had they delved deeper on the odd civilization that kidnapped him, and had it looked remotely like a super technologically advanced civilization run by child like simpletons.
BTW, had they stolen Ensign Redshirt’s brain, would Kirk had been determined to retrieve it, or would they have just done a memorial service and moved on?
@Scott: Second barf of the day:
Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation by Eric Trump
Sidney Reid, was just found “not guilty” of a misdemeanor charge stemming from her insistence on filming ICE officers in operations. Three times the prosecution brought her case to a grand jury, and three times the GJ said “no bill”. Thus a misdemeanor charge, not a felony.
Below are Ms. Reids and her attorneys statements. I don’t have a good link for this, I found it through this, way, way down the page.
And her attorneys:
Side note: Should the public defender above ever start his own law practice, it definitely needs to be named Ohm’s Law #nerdhumor
@Jay L. Gischer:
Attorney Ohm was pleased with the jury’s exercise of power in this case, which is the product of a potential difference between witness accounts and current eagerness for charging crimes in the absence of evidence.
#tryingtoohard
@Eusebio: Ahem. You need to italicize “charging”. Above all else, though, keep things positive.
And no death leaves everyone open to become AI slop.
Regulation is clearly needed. Forget Section 230, and the whole act it’s a part of, and write new laws that deal with things as they are. Stop trying to adapt new models that don’t fit the old models.
For starters, make it a requirement that no one’s image may be used unless the estate of the deceased either grants permission when asked, or opts in to be used. And have a mechanism to charge misuse without requiring those affected to file suit.
we got some more demos of AI in the new acquisitions law course we’re taking (we’ve pretty much covered the whole of the new law’s provisions). I’m still very, very skeptical.
Yesterday they demoed using the LLM to fill some forms that need to be presented. It did a fair job, and I see that as a problem. One, it didn’t fill out a formatted Word document. Two, there were some minor errors readily apparent.
The first means one needs to format the whole thing. the second that one needs to carefully check the whole thing. So we may wind up doing more work than filling them out ourselves.
I’m not involved in any of that. I doubt it can take a table with 250 products and turn that into an Excel sheet with the right formulas and proper formatting. Much less that it can correlate to the master price list and put in the right brands and prices.
It would be great if it could do that, especially for one recurring project that requires about 20 such spreadsheets. But I keep reminding myself we live in the real world.
@Tony W:
Bolton’s moustache exudes more strength just sitting on his upper lip, than a warbling Trump sitting behind his desk, with snarling yappy dog Miller standing by his side, both hiding behind 250 years of this country’s symbolism, which they neither understand nor appreciate.
White House Anti-Terror Order Targets ‘Anti-Capitalist’ and ‘Anti-American’ Views. Here’s What To Know
No, actually Trump, Miller and cohort are weaponizing the full weight of the federal government to extract retribution, to eliminate political opposition (thereby ending democracy) and to terrorize our entire population. Trump, Miller and company are more like “terrorists” than the rag-tag gaggle of antifa street urchins whose impact has never amounted to anything more than a news media sideshow filler.
And Trump’s mission statement is convoluted: capitalism itself is anti-Christ, at its core. And with these actions, Trump demonstrates that he himself is anti-American.
Today’s Big Idea hypothesis:
Republics are set up by the wealthy elites in order to preserve their wealth and privilege without the need to kiss a monarch’s ass to do so. See the Roman Republic or the USA.
They need popular support, so they couch their regime and constitution (if any) and laws in terms of being “for the people” or representing the people. Eventually the low-life commoners (the great majority) takes it seriously and demands the lofty ideals be applied to all.
This last does happen, but it also generates reaction from the top. Rome becomes an empire preserving the increasingly ornamental trappings of republican times, the US turns to minority rule fascism.
Of course, there are plenty of other republics, and not all have gone this way. Sometimes it’s other elites that take over and may care more for power than wealth. Sometimes it’s a rollercoaster like France between the reign of Louis XVI and Napoleon III. Some manage to remain fairly democratic for a long time. So, like just about everything else, it’s complicated.
Trump says he has commuted sentence of former US Rep. George Santos in fraud case
AP
(so is Ghislaine Maxwell next on Trump’s get a pervert out of jail card?)
@Michael Reynolds:
As I said before:
A Gaza solution requires a “big hitter” to be willing to take on the role of enforcer.
Likely candidates: Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, (maybe Algeria?)
The issue being: what the f@ck is the upside for them in sticking their d!cks in the mincer?
Nobody made any such commitment at Sharm el Sheikh, and are not likely to unless Israel, the US, and the Saudis/Gulfies provide mucho money, and guarantees of support if things turn shitty.
Which they will.
You might ask the UK for a role.
After a brief interlude of laughter, the answer will be something like:
“We got out of that sh!t, with little praise, and considerable blood and pain and cost, in 1948. If you think we are getting involved again, you are sadly mistaken. Go ask the Germans.”
Germans:
“Wer? Wir?“
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
So, speaking of immigrants who’ve committed crimes…
@Kathy:
Does not have to be a republic.
The British post-1688 (arguably post 1650) system was of a limited “parliamentary monarchy” that secured the position of the aristocracy and gentry both against absolute monarchy and puritan/popular upheaval.
The landowners, often under pressure, subsequently realised it was sensible to not predate too extortionately upon the middle class, and to extend franchises and religous toleration.
And to eventually extend that to the “commoners”.
I’d argue that the Roman situation was very diffrent, beacuse the Romans had never developed a system of representational government.
Therefore the “Republic” was essentially a Senatorial oligarchy, against which the populares struggled in vain.
And therefore its supercession by imperial autocracy was of no matter to the people in general.
Whereas in England, the people in general seem to have thought that a law-bound state, even if dominated by the aristocracy, was preferable to the alternative of monarchic absolutism
France is also interesting:
Napoleon III was only able to institute the Second Empire because both the bourgeois and the peasantry thought that preferable to either the continued chaotic incapacity of the “upper middle class” Second Republic, or to a revival of Jacobinism.
Democracy as such was not necessarily the preference of the people.
Refreshing. Blowing up enemy infrastructure is not against the law in wartime!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8drmzv98jzo
At some point I became aware of the Texas a capella group, Pentatonix. Anyway, back in the news as the lead (gay) is having a child (surrogate mother). Idiots are posting hate stuff.
This rendition is amazing (old gospel music) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRP8d7hhpoQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI3-G16d7K0