Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, January 24, 2026
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25 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).
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BlueSky.
It’s sleet on top of snow. We forgot to take a sun canopy down and now the metal supports are bent. Still have power, but who knows how long.
Excuse my salty words, but fuck ice and fuck ICE.
Just west of Nashville the snow began at 8:15.
I put the heat on in the car on the way to work at 7 am every day. After parking it out in the sunlight for hours, I have to put the AC on for the drive home. Outside the car it’s rather cold.
Cars are perfect greenhouses.
So beef is atop the new food pyramid recently published.
“ProPublica”
Grazing on public lands:
Down here in Harris County (Houston), it is a balmy 45 degrees. The real cold weather is expected this evening. Down in the teens Monday and Tuesday.
Taking in the plants, covering the shrubs. All the usual. Hopefully we won’t get what really does us in: ice taking down power lines.
The growing concern is the 13 warming centers Houston opened up for people. Will ICE show up? And what will be the response.
@Kathy:
“Map“
Mor reasons to be wary of LLMs, ChatGPT and other bots are sourcing info form Adolf Muxk’s propaganda venture Grokipedia.
If that were not enough, look at this link. TL;DR: researcher loses all data and work after turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option.
The researcher committed two mistakes:
1) In his own words: “Within a couple of years of ChatGPT coming out, I had come to rely on the artificial-intelligence tool, for my work as a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany. Having signed up for OpenAI’s subscription plan, ChatGPT Plus, I used it as an assistant every day — to write e-mails, draft course descriptions, structure grant applications, revise publications, prepare lectures, create exams and analyze student responses, and even as an interactive tool as part of my teaching.”
2) Not backing up his data independent of the AI company’s cloud or whatever.
I don’t know which I find more concerning. Using a propaganda site as a reliable information source, or trusting the bots at all, never mind too much.
the felon’s gestapo held down and murdered a person this am in mpls.
https://www.startribune.com/ice-raids-minnesota/601546426
@Sleeping Dog:
The video is horrifying. Six agents wrestling a man to the ground, punching him multiple times in the head, then multiple shots ring out, AS THE MAN IS LYING ON THE GROUND SURROUNDED BY ICE AGENTS. Everyone scatters, leaving the man dying on the ground.
It’s an execution.
Who will be the first to defend this?
They’re detaining and jailing 2 year olds now, because five year olds were not enough.
Seriously, can’t Walz mobilize the Minnesota National Guard to repel this invasion?
@EddieInCA:
Are you asking us to guess? J D Vance, maybe, or Kristi Noem. Karoline Leavitt?, Stephen Cheung?
I recently came across a site called American Greatness, my guess they will be totally OK with this.
@EddieInCA:
I think they are already preparing a “he was going for his gun” defense.
It will be Good all over again.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yes, but the feds won’t need a defense in the normal legal sense, since their investigation will have the purpose of smearing the dead man while keeping details that may show fed agent wrongdoing away from Minnesota investigators and DA.
The killing of Good, on the other hand, has a reasonable chance of resulting in charges and a trial, based on reading between the lines of comments made by the Hennepin County DA.
cross posted from Dr T’s post on the murder
Apparently in addition to testing the Orion crew capsule past the Moon’s orbit, NASA also wants to determine whether astronauts are flammable.
Yeah, the odds are long against cooking the astronauts on reentry. But I’ll remind everyone NASA also had lots of warnings about the O-ring seals on the shuttle’s solid boosters, and on insulating foam coming loose off the external tank.
@EddieInCA:
DHS claims the man was a dangerous illegal alien criminal who was brandishing a Sig Sauer.
@Kathy:
What would the mission of the National Guard be? Keep in mind that the guardsmen are likely to be divided as to whether to support ICE, and that they (hopefully) would be reluctant to fire on Americans.
I don’t think there is a “get ICE out” mission that doesn’t result in a whole lot of dead Americans after it gets out of control, and that will likely lead to more federal troops (with a similar divided loyalty, but largely drawn from outside MN).
There’s no good option.
If measured in least deaths of decent people (ICE removed from body counts), it’s very possible that best scenario may be continuous opposition, and waiting for ICE to commit enough atrocities that the political will to keep them there breaks.
J. D. Vance compared the U.S. economy to the Titanic. Obviously a Freudian ship
I’ll show myself out.
@Gustopher:
I’m aware of all that. One likely result would be civil war, maybe a coup.
But,
And this includes allowing the brownshirts to run rampant intimidating and terrorizing the population.
When there are no good options, one must choose the least bad of the bad options.
Can you defeat fascists in the courts or at the polls? Has anyone ever managed this?
@Gustopher:
There’s a very good option, which is to listen to black voters when we say “You need to join us in voting for Democrats, consistently in every election, and then hold them accountable after they win, pushing them from a position of power rather than settling for 0% — because withholding your vote does not punish Democratic politics or increase progress, it moves the country backwards and punishes the people you claim to want to help.”
Black people have said this over and over and over and over again till we’re blue in the face, and yet white people left and right (and in 2024, nearly half of Latinos, inexplicably) still refuse to listen insisting they know better when they don’t.
“Genocide Joe! Fuck Joe Biden! Uncommitted!”
Black people: “Don’t do that. You are building a permission structure for people to not vote for
Democrats, which will elect fascists and lead to disaster. Save that for non-election years.”
“I live in safe blue state, so I’m not going to vote for Democrats.”
Black people: “Don’t do that. You are still building permission structure for people in swing states to not vote for Democrats, which is going to elect Rethuglikkklan white supremacy and make things much worse.”
“Mamdani was right not to endorse Harris. She did things that demoralized me.”
Black people: “No he was not, and demoralized? Please grow upVery few can claim to have been more demoralized and consistently disappointed by both Democrats and Republicans than black americans, but we still vote for Democrats at an 85% clip because that is very obviously the best way to move the country forward. We don’t have time to sit around being demoralized when Nazis are at the gates.”
But this country full of racist, stupid, and arrogant people left and right will do any and everything except admit black voters are right politically and they are wrong. And that’s why we are where they are.
Black Americans are for sure not gonna participate in any revolution. Why should we, on behalf of a country of dummies who couldn’t be bothered to vote with us on Election Day (like 70-90% of Europeans would’ve per polling, because white Europeans aren’t delusional lunatics)? Hell naw. We’ve survived worse than Trump. Get somebody else to do it.
@Kathy: I would counter that the bulk of America’s people are not on the pro-revolution side yet, and any coup or civil war would go badly as far too many would favor order over chaos as the least bad option, stand back, and let the federal government crush any form of uprising, while shaking their heads and being opposed.
A failed coup or civil war is probably the worst bad.
Consider our hosts: which of them is going to support a violent insurrection at this time? They’re not particularly representative Americans, by virtue of education, but there are a lot of middle-of-the-road small-c conservative types out there.
Barring a massacre, or the discovery of ICE death camps, I don’t see that section of America turning. Particularly not against a cult of personality focused on an unhealthy 80 year old man.
China’s top general under investigation (France 24)
He’s going to invade Taiwan, isn’t he?
@Gustopher:
No people ever are, until the war gets started.
Yes.
give it time. the many who were disappeared, imprisoned, and murdered in Chile and Argentina were not illegal immigrants or part of a disfavored minority. They were dissidents. Political opponents of the fascist regimes.
@EddieInCA:
I’m venturing a guess that at a significant percentage of MAGA supporters would defend this.
This administration is waging war against half of America.
I believe that many in this administration, and as above, a significant percentage of MAGA voters would probably welcome bringing more force to bear on Blue State voters. Many of those people probably want a new civil war.
@Kathy:
But wait! There’s Less!
Google’s AI overviews on health matters cites Youtube more than other sources.
Now more than ever, don’t confuse a Google search with a physician’s medical degree.