Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, October 5, 2024
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40 comments
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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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A short Mozart piece to start off the weekend.
As long as there have been democracies, those who champion them have warned how much work it takes to keep them going. Aristotle, Rousseau, Jefferson, all told us that such a society required sacrifice and hard work to maintain it. As Franklin said, “A Republic, if you can keep it”. Those generations put in their work, now it’s our turn.
About fascism in America:
“SubStack”
From The.Ink:
Oklahoma’s school superintendent wants to purchase Trump bibles for classrooms.
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/10/04/donald-trump-supported-bible-one-of-few-that-meets-ryan-walters-criteria-for-ok-classrooms/75510021007/
@Kingdaddy: Not only is the whole bible in classroom thing objectionable, the particulars are even more objectionable with the requirement that the Bible be bound together with the Constitution, etc., but the outright laughable element is that it must be bound in leather or a leather-like cover. What possible scholastic purpose is there to this requirement other than to exclude any bible not the Trump bible?
@charontwo: @Kingdaddy: @Joe: I am seeing a pattern here…
@becca:
Fascism typically claims to support the locally dominant religion, to incorporate it, and the local clergy, or many of them, are happy to go along.
What is exceptional here in the U.S. is how vigorously the Catholic Integralists, The New Apostolic Reformation/Seven Mountains (i.e., “Dominionists”), and the Federalist Society are striving to achieve control of the GOP and seem to be gradually succeeding.
For example, J.D. Vance is a Catholic Integralists who is also tight with the NAR. Mike Johnson and Samuel Alito have been flying the NAR linked “Appeal to Heaven” flag. I could throw out the names of many other Republicans who are very into this sort of stuff. (Project 2025 is largely an NAR wishlist).
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CNN newsletter today mostly includes a conversation with James Carville about a documentary that will air today at 7 Eastern on CNN. I found it pretty interesting although I suppose I like Carville better than many of you.
https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/17280793423784a81a5b5e27b/raw
I have a house fly buzzing around my place.
I live on the fifth floor.
How did it get in here? It’s a converted office building / printing plant and none of the windows open. Like a Vegas hotel. Seriously, how tf did it get in here?
@de stijl:
Maybe it perched on you or something you were carrying.
@Kingdaddy:
To set this in scale, the cop cadging apples, pizza slices, and sodas on his beat makes more in graft than Trump is able to on supposedly detailed, elaborate, and targeted scams. The degree to which vice has deteriorated since Republicans have taken leadership in the field is truly embarrassing. SMH. 😐
@de stijl:
The same way the mosquitoes used to get to my 12th floor apartment–on the elevator.. DUH!
My best living in a high-rise story goes back to 1988. My roommates were gone for the day so I was dancing like fool, like no one was watching, to Mandinka by Sinnead O’Conner in my underwear.
Someone was watching – the window washer dude on a seat rig about 10 feet away from me. Scared me to death!
Dolly Parton has donated 1 million to hurricane relief.
@just nutha:
I love going up and down the elevator with dogs. I wonder what’s going on in their heads.
Like, how do they process an elevator? You go into a little room, push a button, wait twenty seconds, and the door opens to an entirely different room. The lobby. Your floor.
It must blow their tiny brains! How do they cope?
To them, it’s a sci-fi teleporter.
@CSK:
Dolly Parton is a total mensch / menschette. She’s good people.
@de stijl:
She’s wonderful. What an outstanding person.
According to ABC, Judge Matthew Barrett has received multiple threats after sentencing election denier Tina Peters to nine years in prison.
I just witnessed a genius, beautiful thing.
I was downstairs hanging out indulging my nicotine habit and looking at my phone.
A big SUV pulled up across the street to a paid parking spot near where I was sat. The driver pulled out a little brown envelope and a white receipt and tucked it in under 3g driver side windshield wiper. Exactly like the parking cops do.
Fucking brilliant! Bad person, ethically, but god damned smart. I kinda wanna let them get away with it.
@de stijl: Never work in my neighborhood*. It’d just be giving stuff to countless street people. (And they’d start looking on windshields, too. Just like they cruise the trash for bottles, cans, and scrap metal now. Foraging is a tough life–as I expect you already know.)
*And I’d be looking to put a big-time hurt on my dealer. 🙁
@CSK: I’m now picturing a fly perched on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot.
@Gustopher:
Like that one episode of Breaking Bad.
Tropical Storm Milton has formed in the Gulf and may reach Florida as a hurricane on Wednesday, with Tampa in the center of the forecast cone. Tampa-St. Pete has missed the worst effects of hurricanes for the past century, but even Helene caused damage and deaths in the bay area with the eye of the storm 100 miles offshore and only a 6- to 7-foot storm surge.
Recall the the Tampa area dodged a bullet just two years ago when hurricane Ian made a late turn to the right and devastated the Fort Myers area instead. Two days prior to landfall, St. Pete had been in the center of Ian’s forecast cone, and Fort Myers was in a tropical storm watch zone.
@de stijl:
I’ve lived higher. Once 11th floor, and earlier on 20th.
Bugs always get in somehow. In Minneapolis, 20th floor, we had little spiders recurring.
I kinda love it. Somewhere in the building, in a dark damp place, a nest overflows and insect momma says “go exlpore”, disperse my lovelies.
If you live in a high-rise you should never, ever drop a full beer can from several hundred feet up just to witness how it explodes when it lands. That would be very unethical and bad. No good person would do that extremely obvious thing.
(It’s freaking awesome. Do it!)
Another thing you shouldn’t do is try to fling 12″ LP records across the street to hopefully land on the roof of the main post office downtown. That’d be bad.
The success rate is only, like, 15%. Possibly higher if not really drunk. Wind is a factor.
And even if you can, what’s the upside? Sharing that you, eventually successfully chucked a record across the street onto the roof of the post office ain’t gonna get you laid.
It is fun to figure out how, though.
@de stijl: Are there no achievements more important to you than getting laid? Do you never climb mountains just because they are there? Never try something just to see if you can? Never ponder why the Joker didn’t just shoot Batman? Wonder why Charles Manson didn’t just go into business to satisfy his sociopathic inclinations?
Well, I officially survived my first year ranching without my Dad. There have been ups and downs. I hired a really great guy to work for me, we’ve gotten a lot of things accomplished that Dad had on a “wish list”, but at his age, his motivation was lacking.
Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the accident, and if there’s anything else I could’ve done to save him, but after much therapy, I realize (logically, at least) there’s nothing more I could’ve done. Even if I had been able to get the baler gate off of his neck right away, the damage was done. His injuries to his neck were not survivable (asphyxia by crushing neck injury was the official cause of death), especially with how long it took for the fire department to get here and pull that gate off him with the fire truck. Now when I actually see the image of him trapped in the baler in my head, it’s like it blurs and my mind skips past that part. I also realized a couple days ago that I have no memory of the rest of the day after the Coroner left with his body. It’s all blank. I know there were people who stayed with me until my brother and my daughter got here, but I have no memory of them, or of my brother and daughter even getting here.
There are so many things that Dad would’ve been pleased about this year, good things have happened, improvements on the ranch have been made that we talked about for YEARS, and they worked exactly like he explained them to me. Even some of my own improvements that I wanted to do have worked as I expected. I miss him terribly, but at the same time….I am glad that his knees and back and shoulders aren’t making him miserable anymore. My Mom is doing well and living her best life as a professional snowbird who leaves and goes to Arizona for the winter. She never would’ve been able to convince him of that.
Anyways…..RIP, Dad. I made it a whole year without you.
This song came out right around the time I picked up his ashes. I’m not sure time heals anything, really. It still hurts just as bad. You just learn to live with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH2oP0I0YAc
@Jax:
I lost my dad almost 12 years ago. The grief is like waves on the ocean. At first they’re whipped up by a frenzied gale, and when they wash over you it’s overwhelming and you feel you will drown.
Time makes the waves gentler and less frequent, but they will always come; sometimes when you expect them, and sometimes when you don’t.
I am happy for you that you are doing well a year on from the accident.
@Jax: Hugs.
@Jax:
Today being a nice sunny day (for change in our weather) I went to the Malvern Hills, walked up British Camp (which I swear they have steepened in the past dozen years) and had a half of bitter ale in the pub at the bottom the hill after.
It was about a month earlier, 12 years ago, that my mother, father, and I, had a walk around the hill, and a jolly meal on that pub.
And talked about his plans for their Golden Anniversary in a months time
A few weeks later he was in hospital.
Then…
The loss is not less, but on a day like today, the memories are good.
And up on British Camp the last swallows of the summer were flying.
It was a good day.
@just nutha:
I can attest most dumb, fun, stupid-ass things I did when bored and curious never got me laid. Opposite, in fact. Wouldn’t trade that for the world.
I once climbed on a statue because l was young and drunk and I could. I dropped three feet to the ground but the geometry had me fall obliquely and I shattered my right heel into five separate pieces. Three feet.
Yeah, maybe I deserved that. Karma.
My best advice is if dropping off a sculpture you drunkenly climbed after last call, is too fall straight.
Another, saner, soberer person would caution against doing dumb-ass things just because. Ignore that person! Climbing on sculptures on a drunk-ass Friday night is fun. It won’t hurt, I promise.
@Jax:
Dissociation can be a blessing at times. When my mom took my grandpa away I remember hugging him at the airport and the next thing I knew I was sitting at my desk at work a month later. I had no idea what happened in between.
Little bit is good, lots not so much.
@just nutha:
There was a small sandwich shop in Seattle that used to make French fries with duck fat. The owner would joke that it was how he planned to be a serial killer — a very slow serial killer.
Sadly, it closed.
I hope the owner found a new outlet. Perhaps he could have opened a gun store.
@Beth: It’s so weird. I didn’t even realize I didn’t remember the rest of the day. Or many of the days after that, honestly. I was so focused on staying busy so I didn’t see that image in my head. Getting the cows home, finishing the haying, trying to get my very sick mom home from Arizona, arranging the funeral….I know I did all that, but I have very few memories of the day to day of it.
@Mikey:
Grief is weird.
I definitely did not love my mother, but I mostly liked her. I enjoyed interacting with her after we established appropriate ground rules.
This woman, who was probably deeply bipolar during my raising was vital and damned interesting. And she kinda fucked me up. Not a good person, but really interesting as adult on adult talking.
She was never lovable, but always likable.
After her death, I would call her voice-mail just to hear her voice. Maybe that’s a cliche, but I did it.
One day a guy answered. Her number got re-assigned.
Hearing some random person say “Yeah? Hello?” when calling my mom’s number shocked me into moving on.
It’s on me to reckon the weight of it. You can’t put it off forever.
@Jax: Both my dad and mom were in dramatically failing health when they passed on, so I don’t have the sort of sorrow that you have.* Still, I hope that as you go on, the good memories will stay and the bad memories will keep getting dimmer.
*And there’s also the sociopathic/narcissistic thing that I have and the continual stress and strife between myself and my mom. Those things tamp down the sorrow, too. (I used to show my Korean students Seattle, Daegu, and Williamsburg, VA on the world map–where my parents, I, and my brother, respectively, lived–when students would ask “Is your family close?”)
@Jax:
And you did all those things with grace and without complaint.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I am not gonna lie, some of my thoughts bother me. All of last summer, my parents were pretty much intent on selling the ranch. They were just so tired of it, and they didn’t think I could do it on my own. Up until probably calving season (March), my Mom was still intent on selling it. I would’ve lost my home, my job, my cows, and probably my happiness. Now, after seeing me step up, she’s decided to let me run it, regardless of what my Dad thought of my “abilities”, as a cattlewoman.
If Dad hadn’t died, I might’ve been in a much different place right now. And that bothers me, because I’d give anything to have him back and be able to talk about things again.
@Jax: Be thankful for what you had/have. Don’t beat yourself up for not being perfect. Only I (and maybe Luddite, but only maybe) am. 😉
@Jax:
I strongly suspect you would land squarely on your feet no matter what the world throws at you.
You strike me as a thoughtful, resilient person. Strong.
You stay being cool and awesome. (Big hug)
A good friend of mine is going through end of life stuff. Bone cancer. A one way painful street.
I call him two or three times a week. We commiserate a bit and then I tell him stories, hopefully for a bit of a chuckle maybe a full laugh.
He’s on enough hard-core meds he doesn’t really know I called him on Tuesday. I can recycle anecdotes.
He’s rapidly dying. Man, he’s had a hard year. His wife died in February, his brother died in December, his cat just last week. Fuck me, how much pain and grief can a person stand?
Frankly, I call him up to see if he’s still alive. He’s always picked up. If he doesn’t I’d text after a few hours, then an e-mail later. Then a call to local PD for a wellness check.
Chances are great he dies at home. Surrounded by good memories.
I, soon, will walk that path. We all will.