Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, January 4, 2025
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27 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
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BlueSky.
Former Florida Governor Buddy Mackay has died. He was 91. Mackay’s governorship was a brief one. He was Lt Governor to Lawton Chiles when Chiles died of a heart attack in December 1998 in between the Nov 98 general election where Jeb Bush defeated Mackay to be the next governor and the January inauguration. So MacKay was governor for 23 days.
Before serving as Lt Governor, Mackay was a congressman. He also ran twice unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 1980 and 1988. I voted for Mackay in 80, 88, and 98 and supported Lawton Chiles in 90 and 94. RIP.
Isn’t this just lovely-
A stolen weedeater, a class b misdemeanor in Kentucky, leads to a search warrant, a raid on the wrong home, and somebody innocent getting killed.
I have said the following many times- What is wrong with this world?
This morning I’m laughing at the concept of an “oath of office” for Trump – why bother?
Ann Telnaes, who had been an editorial cartoonist at the Washington Post since 2008, has quit because the paper killed her cartoon criticizing the tech billionaires for sucking up and shoveling money to Trump.
Why I’m quitting the Washington Post
@Mikey:
Yeah, she hurt Bezo’s fee fees
Here’s my prediction on Trump’s latest diatribe about the flag being at half-staff to honor President Jimmy Carter:
After taking the oath of office, at the ceremony, Trump will order the flags to be extended to full staff – he’ll love the symbolism of it all – watching them rise to the top of the poles, and he cares nothing about honoring a dead president who was an actual leader both as president and afterward.
@Tony W:
MAGA’s will applaud.
I’m taking my first weekend off in three weeks.
Squeaker of the House Mike Johnson delivers a fake prayer falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
House Republicans may be down 1 vote for a while after an 81 year old representative falls down the stairs on the first day of the new congress:
Republican congresswoman, 81, falls down marble stairs at the Capitol
@Kingdaddy:
Mike Johnson has flown the “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his office, which flag has been adopted as branding by the Christian Nationalist New Apostolic Reformation. In light of the CN claim that the U.S. was founded on Christian Principles, falsely characterizing an important founding father like Jefferson as “God Fearing” would be helpful.
@Stormy Dragon: I read that link and I immediately thought “I hope it’s Virginia Fox” and sure as shooting it was she.
Now I feel almost bad.
@Bill Jempty: Seems to me the officers should be charged with a B&E, and probably negligent homicide. Is there any reason why they shouldn’t be?
@Franklin:
The town mayor is saying criticism is a political vendetta and town officials say there is no bodycam footage. So I except this is another of cops getting away with murder.
@Bill Jempty: The weed eater is worth $200 tops. The only logical reason for a major police force to engage in a search for it is that it was taken from the residence of an important county official. If a $200 item is swiped from an ordinary citizen, the cops take a report and tell you to file a claim with your insurance company. Some people are more important than others, and if we have to mistakenly kill some innocent guy, it just drives the point home better.
@Stormy Dragon:
Thoughts and prayers
Trump is sporting a new red cap. The legend on it reads: TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.
This is pretty inside baseball wrt text messaging on mobile phones, so I think most will probably want to skip. I was in a discussion with someone and ended up googling a fair bit to make sure I was remembering right, and just am putting it here to get it out of my system 😉
The basic history of text messaging:
– A universal texting format emerges among mobile carriers (not phone manufacturers) called SMS. Limited to 160 characters, it was text only and the carriers charged per text. (To this day you will often see an alert when you sign up for text messages from, say, Amazon that “Message rates apply”)
– When smart phones came along, apps were developed that people could use instead of SMS. Around the world, this category is most represented by WeChat and WhatsApp, the two heavy hitters, but also to a much smaller extent by Facebook Messenger, and DMs on any number of social media platforms. These took over to such an extent that outside of the United States SMS is a thing of the past, and you must be on the same app to communicate with anyone. For example, those of us with friends overseas must have WhatsApp or WeChat installed if we want to text them. These two apps, and most others, don’t support SMS.
– Some phone manufactures, such as Apple, Blackberry, Samsung, etc, also started making their own texting apps. Because they were deeply integrated into the phone, they, unlike WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, also had access to SMS text messages, and it became an option that you could use these apps instead of the phone carriers tools to send and receive SMS text messages. If you communicate with someone also using the same app the message goes via that, but if they don’t it is sent via SMS.
– Meanwhile, the standalone text apps (WhatsApp) and the cell phone manufactures (Apple, Samsung, etc) started competing on all the other things their apps could do. Send pictures and videos. Let you know when your text had been read. Emojis. It’s a long list. But it remained within the same app. However, the ones that had always allowed SMS messages continued to allow them, although obviously it could not support any of these new formats.
– So the status quo is that as far as I know, no messaging app of any size has opened it up for others to use for free. For most of the world, that means most of the world uses WhatsApp. China and some other parts of Asia, use WeChat. For some odd reason, though, in the United States we generally continue to use the apps that come with our phone (Apple Messages or Google Messages), and there is no Apple Messages app you can install on your Android phone, and the same goes for Google Messages on iOS. If you want to talk with someone other than those on your phone’s app, you need to agree on an third app you can both install. There is one exception: Apple Messages and Google Messages (and a few other US based ones) still support interchange by SMS, albeit without any of the fancy enhancements. So you can use Apple Messages and Google Messages cross platform, but only in a limited way.
– So what does it mean when Google demands Apple Messages be “compatible” with their app? Well, some years ago, in a effort to keep their revenue stream alive, the phone carriers developed something to replace SMS, called RCS, which allowed pictures, videos, emojis and a few other things, but not everything that was special to all the proprietary messaging apps. (Most carriers have subsequently given up on the per-message model and simply base everything on your data plan.) Google has been after Apple to implement RCS message standard as a way to keep down Apple Messages popularity. An alternative strategy would have been for Google to promote WhatsApp to everyone and preinstall it on their phones. One reason they might have remained so committed to their proprietary Google Messages, is that when you sign up you agree to allow them to mine your messages for advertising and other purposes so, just like GMail, they have a revenue stream they don’t want to give up.
– In the latest version of Apple’s operating systems, they have made the messaging app compatible with RCS and most things for most people will work well between the two apps. There is one caveat. SMS and RCS are carrier based portocols and your carrier must implement it as well as the app. At first only AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile had, but now there are about a dozen others.
And that’s the state of play in 2025
(Those who know the details realize I’ve left stuff out, such as improvements to the SMS format, but I think this gets the gist right. If not, let me know)
If Merchan isn’t going to imprison or fine Trump, perhaps he can sentence the obese churl to (White) House confinement and an ankle bracelet.
@Bill Jempty: Yep. Florida has taken a huge step down between the days of Reuben Askew, Bob Graham, and Lawton Chiles and the days of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis.
@MarkedMan: A little more than a year ago, I was in Korea for 1o days. I had no trouble communicating with my friends using the text message system on my rented Korean phone, so I suspect that traditional text messaging has not become obsolete in the way you seem to be thinking of*. I was leaving Korea just as Kakao Talk was becoming popular there, so I have some familiarity with the “proprietary” texting systems (and have one friend who sends texts by WhatsApp that I never receive because my phone doesn’t signal them and I never check), but I never added one while I was there because I was never a Naver** user (too complicated for foreigners to join). Eventually, so of my teacher friends started using KakaoTalk because their students did, but I never encouraged my students to phone chat with me in the first place.
*Or my experience may be an outlier.
**To the degree that I can recall accurately (so all cautions apply), KakaoTalk was a new generation of Naver Chat, so it’s possible that private chat/text message systems have a pretty long history in Asia. Naver’s platform was already well established and quite diverse when I came to Korea in 2007 (? I think).
Returning to an earlier discussion of the challenges facing boys and young men today, Cheryl Rofer wrote an article for LGM that referenced this article: Why Boys Don’t Go to College.
The article makes some good points, IMO, and addresses a disagreement I often have about one of the main reasons some claim that boys have trouble in school: schools being designed for girls’ success and not boys. The reality is, the expectations that help a student to succeed, such as being able to sit still and follow directions, are not that different from what they have always been for hundreds of years, long before education was something that girls commonly had access to. In fact, I’d argue that teachers today have a better understanding than teachers 50 or 100 years ago did about the importance of hands-on and collaborative learning, as opposed to simply sitting in a lecture. The one factor that I would agree may affect boys more negatively than girls is the reduction in time spent for recess.
So if not the structure of K-12 education, what changed? The article’s author makes a good case, across educational environments and occupational industries, that what has changed is the larger presence of women and girls. She calls it “male flight,” and likens it to white flight from neighborhoods and cities. Whether a specific profession, career field, or an educational institution like college, once something gets coded as “female,” then men start fleeing. The author argues that until we acknowledge this, we can’t begin to address it. She offers one suggestion: a return of all-male schools and colleges. (She offers it as a footnote, so whether she favors it as a solution, or merely as a realistic accommodation, is uncertain).
Brandenburg v. Ohio “Your Body My Choice” are Fighting Words.
I’m currently stuck in an airport hotel in SLC again because I-80 got shut down, and even though I’m bored off my ASS, I am still not googling what that guy is talking about.
@Jax: Do you have a favorite board game?
@Monala: Well, that was interesting. It seems like studying in certain fields may be regarded as a kind of gender performance.
The impulse to engage in gender performance in some way is nearly universal. It is specific to any person, though, exactly which performances to engage in. Women appear to be a bit more flexible about this, and yet they have their own set of gender performances.
@Slugger: A good weed eater can cost a whole lot more than $200. My “entry level” echo was over $200 almost a decade ago and it’s still going strong.
Having said that even a $500 theft is going to be barely investigated by police in most areas. They’ll maybe show up give you a report number and forget about you. Solving petty theft doesn’t get them state or federal money. It’s just not worth putting forth the effort to solve.