Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, August 2, 2025
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24 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.
Looks like Tennessee is enticing lots of shady, greasy characters. Kegseth wants to run for governor. Musk is busy screwing Memphis and northern Mississippi, destroying air quality and water resources. He’s starting to piss Nashville residents off royally, too, with a sweetheart deal for his Boring Company.
Some white nationalist nut job developers in Texas are trying to occupy Gainesboro TN to the dismay of many locals.
We may have to make a move before the kids are ready. I do not want to live my last years in the armpit of the New Confederacy.
Their families fled the Nazis. Facing Trump, US Jews are making Germany ‘Plan B’
The headline is sensationalist and the article a bit thin on sourcing, but it will be interesting to see if this indeed becomes a trend.
Today in history:
August 2, 1964
Gulf of Tonkin
Extra credit if you recognize these names:
Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening
@Sleeping Dog: Article seems kind of weak and I am always leery of Nazi references. That said, the BLS firing reminded me of the claim that “he cannot fail, he can only be failed”. The he being obvious, in both cases.
Steve
A long piece worth reading if only for the awareness of what goes on in darker corners of this nation.
The Online Right’s Favorite Nativist Slogan Is Gaining Traction in the Real World
There’s a lot more. I should point out that Donald Trump and his spawn don’t qualify to be Heritage Americans.
I do, for what it is worth. My Anabaptist ancestors first showed up in the late 1600s.
Meanwhile, White Supremacists are setting up White-Only communities in the Ozarks (they want to expand to Missouri too!)
https://arkansasadvocate.com/briefs/arkansas-democrats-call-for-investigation-into-whites-only-community/
While I’m opposed to segregation in theory, if the worst people in the world want to separate themselves from society, that just sounds good for everyone.
And when enough are in one place, maybe we can give them a house-warming present. They’re pretty far away from trauma centers, so… lawn-darts? Smallpox blankets?
It also fits into my belief that a lot of Eastern Washington would be happier if they were part of Idaho.
Trump thrives on the chaos he creates. The economy not so much.
Decades of bootstrapped business ownership plus 4 recessions, taught the significance of predictability and forecasting in the business world. But Donald is a businessman, right? Or a vulture leading a “wake” of vultures?
Another thing I sometimes do with AI is to feed it an idea to see if it’s understandable. Yesterday I tried the following: An engineered sentient biological organism programmed like a machine to carry out a specific function.
Besides the point, the gatekeeper didn’t let it answer. To the point, stated like this it sounds criminal, doesn’t it? Creating a sentient mind to be enslaved.
This is for an old idea of mine for long term observation of sentient species: make a synthetic, organic, sentient probes that can accumulate data, while passing as the locals, for centuries or even millennia. Later you can collect it and analyze it for some more centuries. The probes would also need to eat, drink, breathe, and eliminate waste. they can even have sex, though they cannot get pregnant.
It still sounds like a crime. Which actually works great for a story.
@Kathy: what if the species it is monitoring isn’t sentient, or is not as sentient? Sentient biological machine is the only duck capable of complex thought, living in duck society, recording everything, and only able to express itself with surprisingly beautiful songs created from quacks, and patterns in mud sculpted from duck footprints or digging with its bill.
Might raise orphaned ducklings. Or nudging other ducks towards each other to try to selectively breed a better duck. Creating an entire duck army for when the scientists return.
Late thought from yesterday…
@Steven L. Taylor:
THIS is what will screw up anyone trying to look up an answer about anything henceforth. The narrower the beam of light you wave around, the less background you see. The fact that I happily wandered through the minotaur’s maze, getting sidetracked on new discoveries, was both the blessing and curse of my life since I stopped chewing on cloth picture books.
@Gustopher:
They wouldn’t need the very sophisticated organic machine probes. They’d use less expensive ones.
Gees, you let an unqualified teen handle air traffic control for an hour, and you get suspended for it?
From the link:
But they let Wesley fly the Enterprise!
@Flat Earth Luddite:
I’ve tended to find browsing the shelves around a subject often turns up fascinating stuff.
When reseraching my dissertation (US nuclear weapons and diplomacy 1945/48, since you ask 😉 ) I learnt a lot from browsing through the volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States.
And other stuff.
Not least that John von Neumann turns up everywhere in 1940’s science.
I was studying IT and other stuff as well as history, and Johnny Von had an amusing tendency to pop in some connection to almost every course, somehow or other.
Computing theory, game theory, mathematical economics, cellular automata, climatology, nuclear physics.
A quite astounding mind.
@Kathy:
Echoes of Vernor Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep”
One of the human protagonists turns out to be a “reconstructed” persona and body that conceals a physics-bending weapons system designed to destroy a superintelligent “blight”.
With unfortunate consequences for said persona.
@Kathy:
At that level of technology, why bother with a “probe organism”?
Passive surveillance should get you everything you want; especially if such “passive” means include the ability to insert micro-scale brain monitoring devices.
Which you’d need in the first place, surely, to create a simulacra of such fidelity as to be able to “pass”?
Here’s a thought, though for a fiction scenario:
Some imperfect simulacra become either “heroes” or “prophets”, with imperfect apprehension of knowledge or powers outside the human norm.
And perhaps the periodic status review by the (somewhat inattentive, lol) “observors” eventually catches up with them
A overwrite of the Epic of Gilagamesh, perhaps?
Or the Ramayana?
@Gustopher:
Eastern Oregon too, dear Gus. However, the rub is twofold. First, Idaho is unlikely to welcome these “foreigners” as it would require a major tax burden to existing Idahoans, and second, these upstanding freedom loving proto-libertarians wouldn’t pay the taxes their public services (for education , roads, police, fire, etc.) that their liberal brethren west of the Cascades contribute to their current lifestyle.
But then again, I am but a sociopathic Luddite who grew up with people like this, and I hold no sympathy for their “plight.”
@Scott:
Lollery, waspery.
“It’s the knight, the cavalier and then the cowboy,”
The “cavalier” being what rather a lot of the (white) “Heritage Americans” were rather unhappy with.
Either the English variety or the Ulstermen (aka “Scots Irish”)
Why not just renounce rebellion, swear allegiance to King Charles III, and return to the loving embrace of Britain? (Feudatory fees, and compensation for damaged tea, negotiable. 😉 )
It’s utterly absurd; not least on the basis that, iirc, the largest percentages of the US “white” population of pre-1860’s origin is of either German or Irish descent.
@Gustopher:
Can we call it the “Retard Reservation”?
Apologies all, but these people do task me somewhat.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
They will be happy with no roads, education, police or fire departments. It’s called Freedom.
And I’m sure the Idahooligans* could be convinced to take the Real America part of Blue States to show up those liberals.
(Also, I want to advance an initiative in Washington to require 85% of state tax revenue to be spent in the county it was collected in. I think we could get the East Washington folks to vote for it so they don’t have to subsidize Seattle. Or they will have to acknowledge that they are the ones being subsidized, but that would hurt their pride.
*: I have no idea what they call themselves.
A professor had a $2.4m grant to study Black maternal health. Then Trump was elected (Guardian)
They really should be studying why White maternal health is so superior. It’s really just a matter of wording in the proposal, to address the new audience.
Maybe include a question about genetics, which will have “inconclusive” results that require “further study.”
@Gustopher:
Here in California, in the far northern reaches of the State, from around Redding up to the Oregon border, there’s long been a secessionist movement to create a new State of Jefferson. This proposed state would include an area from far northern California across the border into southeastern Oregon.
Some of secessionist movement is loosely aligned with the Sagebrush Rebellion. You’all might remember the extended 2014 standoff between Clive Bundy and others over use and lease of federal lands
in Oregon.
But I digress. I definitely don’t want another small population Red State with 2 senators.
I’m willing to let them go, and annex to Idaho (if Idaho would take them.)
@JohnSF:
I read that book last year. My idea is older than that.
It’s different, too. Pham was taken over and revived. I’m thinking more of mass production from scratch.
This touches on someone you mentioned, too: John von Neuman. Yeah, he’s still everywhere*. He came up with a notion of self-replicating machines. There’s this notion that an advanced civilization is bound to build self replicating probes and launch them to explore the galaxy remotely (some take their absence as proof no other technological civilizations exist or have existed).
Me, I think a machine that can extract and refine resources, and manufacture everything, would be as large as a civilization. On the other hand, living beings do such things to self replicate as a matter of course, so….
The reason to make them sentient, from their makers’ perspective, is so they can blend in with the locals and observe them at all times and closely. My reason is so they can malfunction and begin to believe they are like the locals they observe (though maybe they don’t even know what they do or why or who made them or what for).
*Mathematicians are to science what aromatics are to cooking: the base of everything.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
@al Ameda:
@Gustopher:
From what the ones I know tell me, they don’t want to move to Idaho, not do they want to pay anything to support the society they live in. They want the rest of us to support them because they deserve it.
But they get cranky when I remind them that taxes are the price one pays to live in a world where you have food, water, and shelter without the fear that your neighbors will kill you for what you have. Roads and streets are a bonus.
And when I point out that taxes are the price paid by the wealthy to keep the rabble from stringing them up from lampposts, I’m accused of being a commie-loving bleep.
Nah, just a Luddite who’s wondering why we left the Vandals in charge of the city watch.
@Kathy:
As per my “heroes” or “prophets” scenario, perhaps?
With nasty demons as the “observors” trying to avert their instruments going native?
It’s a good basis for a story; but in a possible “reality” (for arbitrary values of such) , why bother with a “bioprobe” if you can observe down to the basis of the lifeforms, and back up again, which would be required to create an interactive capable bioprobe in the first place?
While experimentalists insist the proof of the pudding is in the eating?
Fermi was, of course, one of the experimentalist genius’s of that rather remarkable cohort.
Question for a story scenario: would a billions of years old culture still require mass scale mechanisms?
How small can the encoding get?
Perhaps trillions of molecular scale sensor “spores” drifting across vast volumes of time and space, waking up to generate local sensors when they encounter something interesting?
iirc Greg Egan had some thoughts along these lines.