Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, May 8, 2026
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20 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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The Saudis think Trump is a confused, weak-minded, weak-willed pussy who was bullied into war by Bibi Netanyahu and now doesn’t have the stones or the political support to win. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the reality. And this despite the Sauds letting Trump stroke their magic orb.
Poor old Mohammed Bonesaw Salman has fallen on hard times. His ludicrous NEOM project appears to be dead in the water, along with the rest of his trillion dollar effort to turn Saudi Arabia into a real country where normal people would want to visit and sunbathe in the sweltering humidity, and perhaps attend a public stoning or hanging. (The collateral damage includes the destruction of Bill Burr’s career). MBS, the ever-so-smooth, arrogant, entitled nepo baby and murderer, is beginning to understand that the United States he relied on for protection, no longer exists. And the Trump hole MBS now finds himself in, is a hole he helped to dig.
Hello? Chairman Xi? Hi, my name is Mohammed and I need a new superpower to protect my oil. Because, I mean, my air force of princeling pilots and my army of. . . well, okay, I don’t actually have an army. . . can’t do the job. And I had to fire my previous bodyguard because he was a fucking idiot obsessed with building a ballroom.
No, I doubt your paraphrasing. Except for saying it in Farsi, I expect that’s exactly what they’re saying.
It always smelled like NEOM and the rest of Saudi Vision 2030 is a con. Tell the populace, the minor princes, there is a plan for after the oil runs out while grafting as much as possible and stashing it overseas.
https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/polkcounty/jan-6-rioter-maga-influencer-arrested-prostitution-florida-craig-long-ryan-yates/67-2e7d16f2-f076-4d5a-926f-767096ba241d
The level of idolatry of Trump in this release (you got to read the whole thing) just makes one want to barf.
Department of War Releases Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files in Historic Transparency Effort
Plus, it is another attempt to distract from the mess of this administration and it is another pander to conspiracists.
@gVOR10:
Saudis, I believe, speak Arabic. Iranians speak Farsi.
@Jen: Oops. Of course. Thanks. Looking back, I see I mistakenly read Reynolds’ comment as “paraphrasing” Iranian opinion
@gVOR10: One of the side effects of going to international schools! 😀
On a completely unrelated note, the fall of the new VA redistricting map is just one more thing that will motivate Democrats. It’s almost impossible to overstate how enraged people are becoming, I think. Hopefully this fury gets channeled into the voting booth.
I’m currently reading “What Went Wrong” by Omer Bartov.
I think the lead at the link captures the gist of it:
The two salient facts about Bartov in connection to this book are: 1) he’s a genocide scholar, and 2) he was born in Israel and served in the IDF (most Israelis do).
Highly recommended.
I’m more worried about the Andes variant hantavirus than I was yesterday.
While few people are infected, the thing has touched three continents. South America, where it originates, Europe and Africa.
The upside is that it still seems the contagion window is short, and there doesn’t seem to be pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic transmission. There also seems to be ongoing research for a vaccine, but reports about it are unclear.
On the downside, see how badly the world handled COVID.
@Jen: Exactly what I’ve been thinking. It’s nice to be validated by someone with your political experience.
On the one hand, like Socrates, LLMs know nothing.
On the other hand, unlike Socrates, the LLMS don’t know they know nothing.
@Michael Reynolds:
Neither the Suadi’s nor the Emiratis are very happy with the US right now.
My guess is that the GCC were expecting “limited coercive strikes”, and were extremely pissed off when Netanyahu bounced Trump into a “regime kill” attempt.
And are still more that Trump’s half-witted and abortive “Operation Freedom” led to Iran hammering the UAE, and Trump going “Meh! No biggie.”
Thus leaving them with zero deterrence unless they go all-in; and the risk that if they did so, Trump hangs them out to dry.
Hence the Saudi shut-down of base/airspace use.
Trump is quite remarkably consistent in his ability to damage and annoy US allies through his combination of incompetence and unreliability.
Speaking of which, the US is now refusing to follow up on the agreed NATO policy of deploying conventional deep-strike missiles to Europe. It appears to be due to Trump’s rage at Merz pointing out the obvious failure of the US war with Iran.
The US has become an unreliable ally for almost every partner.
(Including, ironically, Israel. But Bibi is calculating enough to bite his tongue on the matter.)
Meanwhile in the UK local elections, as per latest results:
Reform up 1,426 seats
Labour down 1,380
Conservatives down 551
Greens up 367
Liberal Democrats up 152 (very muted cheer)
On the whole, not good.
Not good at all.
@Kathy:
I’ve said before, given they are trained on scraping the internet, it’s a minor miracle LLM’s answers to everthing are not “porn”.
With a small addition of “cats”.
AFAIK no current LLM’s have access to the bulk of human knowledge as stored in books and academic journals.
This is a non-trivial limitation.
Even more important, of course, is the utter inability for actual reasoning and weighing of evidence or argument.
I still recall my despair last year at trying to convince a student that no, the US was NOT trading at scale with Nazi germany post-1939, let alone post-1941.
And that the AI retrieved refrences were not persuasive, because if you looked a bit closer:
a) the author concerned was a nutcase who thought Errol Flynn was a key Nazi agent, and
b) that the Royal Navy was in a bad mood, and unlikely to permit US corporations, however nefarious, to run the blockade.
*sigh*
@JohnSF:
I have to wonder about all the lawsuits regarding the LLM companies using published books, mostly fiction, without permission or compensation, to train their models.
I take most of what they say with a half ton of salt, unless it’s not very relevant. I also check sources when needed, which is often.
BTW, Richard Dawkins says Claude LLM is conscious. It’s good for a laugh. You’d think people would know by now the Turing test has nothing to do with consciousness. Not to mention that a test devised decades ago, and never systematized nor quantified, may not be the best guide to judge LLM output.
Under the heading of: my life gets weird sometimes, today I emailed back and forth with one Marvel lead actor, then took a surprise Face Time call with the producer of an Oscar-winning movie and another Marvel star who credits me indirectly with helping to launch his career.
Because, sure, that all makes sense.
Then my realtor wanted to show our condo so I hid the weed and the booze and the sex toys and fucked off to my neighboring casino, Fontainebleau, to drink beer.
@Kathy:
It’s no more concious than the old “Chinese room” model.
And it fails even a rather basic Turing Test if you try to get coherent reasoning from bases outside of priors.
I suspect Dawkins, who is nobodies fool, is trying to provoke an argument on the subject.
Though it’s worth considering: how conscious are a lot of people, a lot of the time?
lol
The LLM model generators might always consider the option of not cheaping out, and actually PAYING for their source data?
“Oh noes! Multi-billions for umpteen data cenres is fine! Paying par for the knowlege base? What a silly idea! Let’s just scrape it off Facebook and Wikipedia!”
It’s quite farcical cheaping out, never mind the utter inability of the LLM’s to evaluate sources, compare data, or perform even basic reasoning tasks.
@JohnSF:
Anthropic is, thanks to a lawsuit. There’s a bulk amount that is to be divided equally between various authors. Supposedly 3,000 a book, give or take. We put in for 300K.
@Michael Reynolds:
Yes, but there is the huge amount of extant but non-digitised books not covered; not to mention academic journals.
It really is a mjor problem for LLM: I recently saw some stats the only 1% of the British Library estimated data was available for LLM use.
Combine that with total reasoning incomptence, and you have a massive failure mode waiting to bite you in the arse.
Me, I’m just buying more Bordeaux wine, weeding my garden, and praying for rain
lol
@Michael Reynolds:
Also, 300k?
$?
Remind me to mug you some time.
lolz
😉