Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, August 12, 2024
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62 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).
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testing 1…2…3.. testing
Nope, still no edit button Dell laptop, firefox.
From, comes this little tidbit:
Oh yes, that 2008 Obama was sooooooo long ago.
@OzarkHillbilly: What is Trump supposed to do? Run on policy? Run on his record?
All he has is negativity and 3rd-grade-level insults. And he can’t figure out why that’s not working this time.
Yesterday’s big news quote was about how nobody knows VP Harris’ last name. Seriously. Also Fox News defending Tim Walz’ military service. Oh, and Vance’s drag queen photo.
Trump’s campaign is not disciplined with a well-conceived, targeted message for each day. They are not managing the media coverage at all, and the Harris/Walz campaign is taking advantage of it.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Fixed that for you
Previously I recommended David French’s column on being cancelled by his church. He’s very Conservative (i.e. a person who identifies as a capital “C” Conservative) and I’m not, but I have always appreciated his viewpoint as someone who honestly grapples with issues rather than responding as merely a tribalist. There was a follow up column (no subscription needed) today and I thought it offered additional insight. He read some reader mail that came in after the original column, and I want to give him credit for choosing two in particular that legitimately challenged him. Here’s the first (the second is essentially the same):
His answer is honest and revealing. First, he admits to fault in the matter.
Then it get’s interesting.
At first I just thought he was going on a tangent at the end, a diversion. Neither of the correspondents attacked his religion. But as I though about it more, they did. They challenged him on the church members treatment of ” people of color, L.G.B.T. folks and women “. And his answer essentially said, ‘My daughter is a person of color and so I now see how harmful bigotry against people of color is. But she’s not LGBTQ, nor am I, nor is anyone close to me, so I’m going to continue on in my beliefs about those “choices” as being an abomination’. I don’t think he has really understood the fundamental question, which is “What is it about self identified Conservatives such that they cannot see the harm they do until they themselves (or a close family member) become victims of that harm? And even after that, the revelation is only about that one issue, and they seem unable to extrapolate beyond it in any way. Why can’t they understand another person’s point of view unless they have personally had the same POV?”
Is there nothing that can’t be monetized?
A mass circumcision is marketed to tourists in a remote area of Uganda. Some are angrily objecting
@MarkedMan: I think a lot of it comes down to the belief in an inerrant Bible.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Does it though? The bible has a lot more to say about shellfish and the cloth you make your clothes from then it does about homosexuality or abortion. These same people who stretch and strain at interpreting a few obscure references to justify their bigotry feel perfectly saintly eating barbecued pork ribs and cajun fried shrimp, or wearing cotton-poly blends, things that are clearly marked as sinful in the bible.
They can say they are only following an inerrant bible all they want, but their actions show it is just bigotry.
@OzarkHillbilly: And just wait until Luntz hears who the weakest Republican nominee in terms of (experience/policy/anything) in a long time has been …
@MarkedMan: So sorry, this is a really stupid question, but I left the church a long, long time ago and didn’t keep up with any theological studies. All the shellfish and other strange rules are in the Old Testament, is that correct? I always got the impression that that was just background info for the New Testament, and one could kinda ignore it (unless you’re Jewish!). I’m 100% sure this is an over-simplification, but is there some truth to it?
On a related note, what I’m calling “strange” rules probably made at least some sense in the day. Preparing food in ways that are kosher, for example, improves safety and reduces contamination. While I’m sure there are many customs whose reasoning has been lost to time, I am under the impression that they developed out of lots of experience, so I’m hesitant about making fun of them.
That said, your main point was the bible cared about about those issues than the couple odd references to homosexuality. Definitely true, and I wonder why that is, if we believe that it is just as prevalent today as it was back then.
@Franklin: I’m no expert on anything other than my experience as a “failed” Roman Catholic, but I’m pretty sure the inerrant bible people are taking the old testament as seriously, or even more seriously, than the new. FWIW, there is nothing at all in the New Testament about abortion, and what is there for homosexuality is less than clear and not attributed to Jesus but rather to the Apostles. It’s probably worth noting that Matthew recommends men to whack off the ol’ willy, and not have children or get married because Jeebus is coming any day and those things are just distractions. He is pretty explicit about this and yet I don’t see fundie men lining up in front of the chopping block to receive the sacrament of the meat cleaver.
There are as many religions as people and if your religion calls you to bigotry it’s because you are a bigot, not because of your religion.
@MarkedMan:
Sorry, I was quite surprised the Bible recommended that, until I got to the meat cleaver bit and understood your usage.
Slightly more seriously, I’ve long thought of Evangelicals as essentially Jewish. Except for shouting “Jeeesuz” a lot they seem to largely ignore the New Testament.
And seriously, the question isn’t what they believe, the question is why they think they can and should force it on the rest of us.
@Scott:..circumcision…
A circumcision was part of an episode of Seinfeld.
I don’t have the numbers but it is safe to say that many viewers have seen The Bris when it ran the first time and in endless reruns.
Apparently Jason Alexander had reservations about the story.
Why one actor threatened to boycott the Seinfeld circumcision episode.
@Tony W:
When Luntz and other Republicans talk about running on the issues, what they mean is simply attacking Harris on issues where the polls suggest the Dems are vulnerable, such as inflation and the border–which is to say, just talking about the inflation and the border being out of control ad infinitum. They do not mean proposing any real solutions themselves. In fairness, this type of strategy has traditionally been effective as a model for running against the incumbent party, whether or not the candidate you’re running against is the sitting president–you try to turn it into a referendum on the incumbent party and exercise tactical vagueness on what you would do to address the problems you’re complaining about. That’s why Republicans for the past couple of generations try to act like it’s always 1980 and they’re always running against Jimmy Carter, the only Democratic president to be voted out of office since the 19th century. They did this against Bill Clinton, then Obama, then Biden. I think they’ve needed a course correction on this strategy for a long time, but even looked at more generically I don’t know that the old politics of making things a referendum on the incumbent works anymore, especially when the challenger is the former president who scares the living crap out of large segments of the population. Even if Trump going forward acted a little more disciplined and focused on the Biden-Harris “record” instead of calling her Kamabla a lot and asking whether she’s really black, it wouldn’t change the fact that Dems are genuinely fearful of a collapse of democracy and a loss of reproductive rights, making them engaged in a way that’s fundamentally different from their voter behavior when controlling the White House in the past. That was the big reason for why 2022 didn’t go the way a lot of people expected.
@gVOR10:
Christians have always shoved their beliefs down people’s throats. The religion was spread by conquest, war, torture and judicial murder. The symbol of Christianity is an instrument of torture and judicial murder. Their most sacred sacrament is a blood-drinking ritual. Most Christian denominations worship a god who inflicts eternal torture on non-believers. Eternal torture. Thats’s their god of love.
The core mythology is that god the father – you know, the omnipotent and omniscient one – could not manage to forgive the humans he created unless he could torture and kill his own son.
Oh, and the easy forgiveness. Did you rape and murder? No problem, just feel bad, say you’re sorry, and it’s all good, you’re on your way to heaven. Where you can look down and see your family and friends writhing in agony forever. Why are they in hell? Evil deeds? Nope, they just refused to believe in Jesus. And that’s what the god of love prescribes when you refuse to believe he’s a god of love.
@Franklin: @MarkedMan: To the degree that I understand a fair number of the “evangelical hypocrisies” y’all like to grind in “those people’s” faces, are intended to be physical real world reminders to the Israelites that they are called out by God to be unique unalloyed people. You don’t mix God and Baal, and you don’t mix wool and linen, you don’t eat animals that bottom feed or eat decaying things, you don’t mix different types of food, you don’t do things related to “gentile” behavior. It’s about purity. I wouldn’t have picked this type of rule, but I take that to explain why I’m not God.
I have more, but my students are coming so I’ll have to come back later
@Franklin:
I’m not up on religious doctrines, but early Christianity comes up a lot in late Roman history. What I recall is that many, or all, dietary restrictions were dropped by the early church fathers, because they were a turnoff for lots of potential converts. Especially the restriction on pork.
@Kylopod:
The opposition party defeating the incumbent one after the latter been in office 8 years was been a recurring trend of US politics for over over a half century
Eisenhower-JFK
Johnson-Nixon
Ford-Carter
Clinton-Bush
Bush-Obama
Obama-Trump
BTW I can edit this post
@Kathy:
No meat on Fridays restriction lasted well past Roman days.
While Jews are not supposed to eat pork, many do. That reminds me of scene from The Nanny where Fran Fine tells Niles the Butler eating pork at a restaurant
Niles -Pork, Ms Fine?’
Fran- ‘It doesn’t count if its Chinese Food’
@Kathy:
Needing to be circumcised could be a turnoff for a uncircumcised male to convert to Judaism.
There is a story, probably an urban legend, that some non-Jewish terrorist while in Israeli custody converted to Judaism and did or tried to do their own circumcision.
@Bill Jempty:
That isn’t a restriction from Judaism. In fact, it is a restriction to demonstrate opposition to Judaism. Jews would make a big meal on Friday nights to welcome the Shabbat that, if economically possible, included meat.
@Franklin: You are correct. The dietary stuff is in the first 5 books – what is sometimes called the Pentateuch. And yes, typical Christian theology is that the Old Law (the Pentateuch) was rendered void by Jesus. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from quoting the OT to condemn trans people.
In contrast, there is a bunch or negation of homosexuality in the New Testament – not in the Gospels, but in the Pauline writings. The book of Romans especially. It’s one of the reasons I do not pass theological muster with pretty much anyone any more. I read that as Paul venting about his hangups, and getting shocked by Greek bathhouse culture. Not really focused on core message.
Of course, that really runs me afoul of the inerrant crowd.
@just nutha:
I don’t think I do that. I’m not calling out their hypocrisy (glass houses, stones, etc), just calling BS on their pointing to the bible to justify their bigotry. I’m just noting that they are highly selective in which parts of their bible they decide is important. I also point out that there are as many different interpretations of religious dictate as there are people in the world. Saying, “I’m a bigot because the bible tells me I must be” is just BS.
@Bill Jempty: Political scientist Larry Bartels has a “fundamentals” model of presidential elections that’s worked well. It has only two variables, change in real per capita personal income in second and third quarters and years of party incumbency. It takes a booming economy to overcome two terms of party incumbency.
Third quarter data isn’t available by the election, so it’s more explanatory than predictive. And that horrible campaigner Hillary beat Bartels’ model by a couple points. I think of it as the rainbows and unicorns effect, Obama’s been prez as long as I can remember, but no unicorns and rainbows, throw the bums out. Generic GOP had a big advantage in 2016.
Harris inherits Biden’s incumbency and Trump has some sort of incumbency. I haven’t seen Bartels or anyone else comment on how that affects his model.
@gVOR10: ETA – no edit, iOS, Safari.
@Mister Bluster:
There was this episode of MASH where a S Korean Mom brought her son to the camp to have a bris done. The boy’s father was Jewish.
Slightly related, twice in my ebooks a shot in the dark hit a target. The first one was in my figure skating story where my main character a junior figure skater joked* with a friend whose parents would soon be visiting Bulgaria that she wouldn’t mind going there too. Where was the next junior figure skating championships to take place? Sofia Bulgaria. This totally unintentional joke hit a target.
The second time my shot in the dark wasn’t totally out of thin air. In a story where my main character is South Korean and after meeting and marrying her husband, chooses to convert to Judaism the faith her husband.
This story took place in the 70’s** when MASH was on the air. I knew about the bris episode and planned to use it.
My main characters, who married in South Korea, come to the US on Halloween 1974. His parents meet her for the first time that day. Before that they were watching MASH. One of the reasons they did so was because they had never known a Korean before.
What was the last episode of MASH on before Halloween 1974? It was the bris episode ‘Life with Father’. So once again a lucky shot of mine hit a target.
Shortly after settling in the US, the husband tells his wife about the MASH episode and his parents watching it. My main character says in reply-
“Tell Mom and Dad not to worry. If I have a baby boy next year*** I will have a rabbi not a priest do the bris.”
*- The South Korean born figure skater known for her sense of humor, says to her best female friend. “I wouldn’t mind a trip a trip to Bulgaria. Isn’t that country of vampires?”
**- Over a half dozen of the 30 plus ebooks I have written take place sometime in the past. All in some year of my lifetime.
***- She’s 5 and a half months pregnant when saying this.
A request @SKI if you see this:
Could you post again, even if it’s just to say “test.” I’ve tweaked the settings of our SPAM filter and I want to see if it will finally not send you to moderation.
In another thread, Dr. Joyner writes:
Pretty sure it should be “low-lifes.” Don’t ask me why, but it just feels correct. Like pluralizing a brand name.
The safe choice would have just been to make low-life an adjective and then pluralize the noun to avoid the entire question. “Low-life weenies”.
I figure people might want a gentle pedantic pluralization argument. People here like that thing, and I like to do what I can to make people happy.
@Matt Bernius: Test
Success!
But no editing 😉
@Matt Bernius: Actually fail 🙁
@Bill Jempty:
Bris are normally done by specialists called mohels, not rabbis.
@charontwo:
Oi Vei!
But that’s odd.
1 The Mash episode had the Korean woman specifically asking for a rabbi
2 A LA Law episode had Stuart Markowitz defending a rabbi who was being sued for doing a bad circumcision
Ok television is make believe but thirdly
3 My editor for that story Leeanne is Jewish. She is rather good and I’m surprised she wouldn’t correct me. Leeanne has more than a few times when I’m wrong about something or my story is going off track. BTW Leeanne is my favorite editor.
My story has no bris in it. She has a daughter after making the comment to her husband.
But of course my character was referring to MASH. Father Mulcahy officiated while Trapper and Hawkeye did the cutting.
@SKI:
SKI,
I was talking about Roman Catholics and Fridays, not Jews.
The RC tradition stems from Jesus being crucified on a Friday.
The NYT had an article about… concerns… about what not picking Shapiro for VP means for the perception of Democrats around antisemitism. Author Michael Chabon, who is Jewish, did a good takedown of the article on Threads yesterday. Link
@Gustopher:
If either of closed their eyes during their speech, we could say they were low level sleepers.
OK I read too many espionage novels.
@Bill Jempty:
Ah. I was responding to your comment based on it being a reply to Kathy’s comment about the Church dropping the food requirements from Judaism in the Torah.
Maybe but differentiation was a big driver of decisions in the early Church. Take a look at the hoops they went through to make sure that Easter never coincides with the Passover Seders.
@MarkedMan: I guess I take a more charitable view of his response. I think it’s definitely a fair critique to say that non-Christians or non-believers shouldn’t be expected to make a Biblical argument to convince Christians to stop being bigots (that criticism, I think, is better made by other Christians). However, I think he is saying that it shouldn’t matter whether the issue affects you personally for you to address bigotry. If you are truly trying to live out biblical teachings to be just and kind and humble, loving your neighbor as yourself, then that should apply to anyone you encounter, regardless of race, sexuality, gender identity, etc.
@Jay L Gischer: here’s the thing: there aren’t a bunch of passages in the Bible about homosexuality. There are three in the New Testament and a handful in the Old. And the three in the NT, including the one in Romans, are embedded in passages about a bunch of other acts or attitudes considered sinful. Even if you interpret the verses to mean same-sex relationships (which not all scholars do—some consider the passages to refer to temple prostitution or the use of slave children for sex), there’s nothing in these passages to suggest it’s worse than other actions committed by most Christians on the daily. And those 3 passages are dwarfed by dozens of instructions throughout the Bible on giving to the poor, loving your enemy, welcoming immigrants, not judging others, etc.
@Monala:
LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK ROW.
Additionally, the key thing to remember about the OT rules is they are superseded by the New Testament (and the New Covenant). That’s why Christians don’t have to keep kosher.
@MarkedMan:
I am so going to steal this line.
Another favorite: “Do you really believe that an omnipotent and omniscient God would be that obsessed with sex?”
@Mister Bluster:
I would tell him what my grand-pappy used to tell me: “If you can’t laugh at yourself you’ve lost the plot.”
There’s a paper out there somewhere I read once (but can’t find at the moment) which recounted the history of the Jewish community in ancient Rome. The Romans were rather intrigued by the religion, and it recounted a few contemporary accounts that it might well have gone main-stream in Rome had it not been for the membership requirement of penis mutilation. A problem the nascent Christian movement, when it came along, did not have.
Staggers the mind how deeply that one aspect may have affected Western history.
@Bill Jempty:
It also started well past Roman days.
In Acts 10, God sends Peter a series of visions whose core message is “the old rules about purity no longer apply — go start converting Gentiles (and no, they don’t have to be circumcised to join the club).” The metaphor in the visions is unclean food — but God says “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
Jesus said fairly explicitly that the rules you had to follow if you wanted to follow him are (1) love God and one another, (2) treat others the way you would like to be treated, and (3) stop worrying about other people’s sins and worry about your own. There are no instruments known to science that can detect those principles in modern Evangelical “Christianity”.
@Gustopher:
Bless you.
The plural of “low-life” (noun) is “low-lifes”. You’re welcome.
Now, let’s argue about the pronunciation of “long-lived”…
@Bill Jempty:
I always heard that it stemmed from a desire to prop up the fishing industry, so there would be plenty of trained sailors to draft into the navy the next time England, Spain or France went to war with one of the others, back in the 1600s or so.
@Bill Jempty:
So, no meat on Friday. Ritual cannibalism of their savior on Sunday.
These people are weird.
“Fish on Friday” in the Roman Catholic tradition started as fasting on Friday (because of Jesus), and that led to “no meat on Friday.”
“Meat” was defined as the flesh of warm-blooded creatures, so fish didn’t count (same with reptiles, however that never seemed to catch on).
NPR did a write up a number of years ago on the history.
@just nutha: @Franklin: @MarkedMan: Okay, I’m back. I left off with: ” It’s about purity. I wouldn’t have picked this type of rule, but I take that to explain why I’m not God.” To continue briefly on that thread, my take is that when evangelicals are pining for imposing “God’s Law” on the US, they’re aiming at the wrong target. They are freed from following the Mosaic law and called to follow a much simpler, but simultaneously more difficult to attain perfection at, law expressed in two statutes–1) Love THE LORD your God with all your heart and soul and strength and 2) love your neighbor [in the same manner that] you love yourself. The first of these is impossible and the second is even harder because we can’t do the first.
One of the difficulties evangelicals face today (and one that I would suggest that David French is trying to understand but struggles with because of how hard 1) and 2) above are to follow) is that they have too much of a stake in “the future of our [whoever “we” is] nation.” They simply are too invested in a game in which they are not supposed to have any skin at all. The call of the church is to “make disciples in all nations, teaching [these disciples] everything I have taught you.” Over the course of the 2000-year Telephone game we’ve been playing, that message has been blurred and miscommunicated into “make the world what you want it to be, for Jesus’ sake.” To the extent that evangelicals keep getting the message wrong, they will keep shooting at the wrong target and failing be the “little Christs” that the term “Christianity” implies. (And David French will continually find himself feeling excommunicated from the churches he attends. Been there. Done that. Have the souvenir tee, visor and can cozee–TWO SETS.)
Regarding his sense of being cast out, I can only paraphrase: When the Baptists hate you, remember they hated me first. I’ll leave it to the audience to figure out who said it but suggest that I am channeling The Parable of the Grand Inquisitor to some degree. I will also note that the Baptists don’t realize that some of their beliefs and actions show that they hate Jesus at times. Neither do I realize it when I’m that way, nor does David French–but the fact that he struggles to make sense of it all shows hope that he is trying rather than merely being trying.
Beyond that, MarkedMan, I am sorry if I mischaracterized what you believe. Clearly, I must have misunderstood what you meant when you said, “They can say they are only following an inerrant bible all they want, but their actions show it is just bigotry.”
@Jay L Gischer: I would suggest that you read further in Romans than Chapter One. Going down a paragraph or three we get to:
I’m not seeing a “hangup about Greek bathhouse culture, but I am seeing a core message. To be fair, I wish my brothers and sisters among the evangelicals would read Chapter 3 more, too. It would help them understand the core message: “There is no distinction, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” [emphasis added]
I sometimes rile people up by saying things like “No, we’re not “all basically good.” It’s not just Greeks and bathhouses and sodomy. It’s everyone and everything. By stopping at the end of Chapter one, we’re shortchanging ourselves on understanding the scope of the issue. For you, it makes a good cudgel when you want one. For others, it’s tragic shortsightedness that hurts people they should be loving, not hurting. Sadly, I can’t fix this. I can hardly fix me.
@Monala:
…and a bunch of other stuff for that matter)…
Still, it would help the cause if fundy types would quit shooting themselves in the foot being stupies. As it says in Second Opinions 13:13, “Cudgel not that ye be not cudgeled.” As I noted on another thread, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” is an aspiration and a threat. And sometimes it’s simply karmic (to mix metaphors).
@Kathy: Only to the extent that we believe in trans/consubstantiation. Most of us don’t anymore and can recognize a metaphor when we see one.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: does the Bible have anything explicitly about the Jubilee (forgiveness of all debts every N years)?
Yah, can see why that got dropped like a hot potato by the authorities. Sort of like Martin Luther breathing all that rebellion fire until the peasants started revolting, after which it was a definite backtrack.
@Grumpy Realist: A quick web search gives me Leviticus 25:10 and sets the time as the year following the seventh “sabbath year” (land lies fallow for one year to rest after 6 years in agriculture production). That’s all I could find.
And I do remember a couple of years back that there was a dispute within Israel because a sabbath year was coming and some group or another didn’t want to let land, orchards, vineyards, etc. lie fallow. It would be ironic if the ultra Orthodox were the complainers, but I don’t remember who it was. Maybe Kylopod or somebody else knows/remembers,
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I remember, vaguely, one other detail about Jubilee, that it would be illegal to refuse to loan a neighbor money because the Jubilee year was coming. I assume that passage would be nearby. Interesting economic system. Also, one of the prophets (maybe Jeremiah but I can’t remember) refers to some group of Israelites being taken out of their land as punishment for refusing to rest the land every 7th year.
Pod Save America had two political strategists on today with some interesting advice. First, they pointed out that negative ads backfire when people don’t believe them. That’s been one of the challenges with Project 25: it’s seems so far fetched to low information voters that they think you’re lying if you bring it up. Their advice: first, focus on a few areas from Project 25 that have already been implemented in Republican dominated states to emphasize that this is real and their plan for everywhere if they get more power. Second, empower the voters to take action: “But we can stop them if you blah blah blah!” Otherwise, you paralyze people because it feels overwhelming and inevitable.
Next, they talked about Harris and Walz reclaiming the word freedom. They think that’s great, because democracy* is too abstract for most people, whereas people have a clear picture of what it means if their freedom is threatened.
* They posit that threats to democracy are abstract to most Americans because we’ve always had it. In contrast, various French political parties were able to unify against the right wing in their recent elections by reminding people that they don’t want to return to fascism. Relevant: they’ve found that there is one group of American voters who have no trouble believing American democracy is under threat: African Americans.
Well, it seems Xlon’s misinformation data mining app doesn’t work so well with so many of its employees gone.
They claim a DDOS, which sounds too convenient. IMO, they’re just mad they will delay giving the Felon an online blow job.
Apparently the Musk interview of Trump on X scheduled for 8pm edt tonight (8/12/2024) has been slammed by “a massive DDOS attack” according to Musk.
Reuters
Stay Tuned
@Mister Bluster:
It’s really, really bad. Trump is noticably slurring for some reason and Elon is desperately trying to keep Trump on topic. Also he is really thirsty to get Trump’s approval on ideas.
Also when Trump goes off his preferred talking points Elon doesn’t know what to do.
@Matt Bernius:..It’s really, really bad…
Thank you for the report.
If it wasn’t these two. I might feel sorry for someone.
But it is these two so I’ll just be disgusted.
@Matt Bernius:..
This note on the CNN web page:
So when was the last time you had your hearing tested Matt Bernius?
After many futile attempts I have been able to access Gravatar and change my avatar. At least one of them. The Gravatar site recognizes my primary eMail address and a second eMail address. However I can’t figure out how to change the avatar linked to my second eMail address.
First world problems.