Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, January 19, 2025
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43 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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For some reason, I completely forgot about the playoff games yesterday. By the time I remembered them, the earlier game had already ended. So, I need to ask: was Taylor Swift at the game against Houston?
@Kathy: Yes
My wife uses Tik Tok. She received this on her phone:
That second paragraph just pissed her off. She deleted the app. Quote: “I like Tik Tok. But I don’t like it that much.”
I went to mass this morning. The gospel reading was about the wedding feast at Cana when Jesus turned 5 20-30 gallon jugs of water into wine.
Cana was a small town and they had all that wine. As the late Fr. Martin Collins* said- it must have been quite a bash.
*- One of the priests at our church when Dear wife first began working there. Fr. Collins once said to me- ‘You’re married to a saint.”
@Scott:
Curious about the concept of trump’s intervention. As I understand it, the law required Bytedance to divest of tiktok by yesterday or shut it down, I don’t see where the felon has an opening to give a 90 day reprieve. He may try, but someone likely will go to court to see that the law is enforced.
@Scott:
A youtuber I watch posted this today with an image of that Tik Tok message.
It will be interesting to see how the numbers work out on those devastated, those who move one easily and those like Casey who find it removed a scam being done in their name.
@Sleeping Dog:
The 90-day reprieve wasn’t dreamed up by his people. From NPR,
What would Jesus reset?
Do these people even listen to themselves? They want the mantle of Jesus Christ and they want the absolute power to oppress.
Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary provide a succinct explanation for the present:
MANICHEISM
-n.
The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.
Democrats: Start Loudly Blaming Trump and the Right For Everything (TNR)
We’ll see how that goes. Me and mine were already planning to do that anyway.
Hoping Beth is back on track today…
@MarkedMan:
Well, she went out to dance the bad stuff away, so that should help. Hemingway said that what is moral is what you feel good after doing. *
* Hemingway was absolutely wrong about guys like Trump, of course, who delight in crushing other people.
Why do you need to know? Can’t Taylor Swift have some privacy?
@Bill Jempty: It probably was. Older students I taught in Korea who grew up in small towns reported that when a family of significant wealth (the Cana marriage had a “governor” [caterer?]) threw a marriage they usually invited everyone in the region. Americans don’t have that kind of sense of community.
Per CNBC, TikTok is restoring its service to U.S. users.
@DK: “…a potential housing crisis…”
Potential?!?? WTF??? Are you riffing off the old saw that a recession is when you’re out of work? It’s not a housing “crisis” until “I” can’t afford housing?
So, Neil Gaiman. Is there a whiff of schadenfreude in my cigar smoke, yes there is. The lit community idolized this guy. Loved, loved, loved him. And to be clear, he is a brilliant writer. But evidently also a creep. It is interesting to have been the bad boy of kidlit for the crime of demanding the right to write non-White characters, and then to discover that two of the saints of kidlit are, respectively, an anti-trans demagogue and a sexual predator. Another peer was exiled for using his prominence to hit on younger (but legal) women at conferences.
Once I started doing public events I laid down a rule: I would never, at any time, not even for five seconds, be alone with a young fan. (Or an adult fan, either.)
@Sleeping Dog: it’s not like there’s a legal way to do a shakedown, so what choice do they have but to break the law?
This is another reason why I think it is dangerous for the government to be able to ban a media platform with an assertion of national security, while providing no evidence publicly. I think the Supreme Court got this entirely wrong ruling the law, which Trump plans to violate, constitutional.
It’s just legal Calvinball.
No, he’s not badass. He’s just another surly churl:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-official-inaugural-portrait-hailed-as-supervillain-pic-of-the-year/
Musk is apparently set to buy a D.C. hotel, the Line, at auction and turn it into his own Mar-a-Lago North.
I suppose it will be a private social club plus headquarters, maybe for DOGE.
@CSK:
Does Putin really need another D.C. embassy?
@Gustopher:
While I agree with you completely when it comes to companies under American jurisprudence (Facebook, X, etc), ByteDance is a Chinese Government controlled entity, who will comply with any American investigation only insofar as the Chinese government will let them and coverup when they are told too. The US can gather evidence on Facebook and X and then would be compelled to disclose during the court cases. This does not apply to ByteDance’s Tik Tok. Any evidence we gathered against them would almost certainly have been via intelligence assets. This is why the alternative ByteDance has to shutting Tik Tok down is to sell it to someone that is within the US justice system. The fact that they refuse to do that is… interesting.
It is suicidal to apply the same protections applying to companies and people who are within our justice system to those outside it. It is not unusual to discover that a company is acting as a cover for unfriendly governments. Homeland security identifies them all the time and shuts them down from operating in the US. And they do not, and should not, need to reveal their intelligence assets in order to do so. There’s nothing different here, except a lot of people like what this company is selling and so they feel put out.
@Michael Reynolds: When I first heard of Mike Pence’s rule of never being alone with a woman who wasn’t his wife, I thought it was as creepy as him calling his wife mother. But I’ve since come to realize that it’s the men who are creepy — or at least a large number of them.
(And, since so many men are creepy, it makes the relatively rare false accusation sound believable in nearly every case)
If priest followed the same rule, adapted to children, the churches wouldn’t be massive pedophile rings.
Rowling is her own special awful, but Gaiman is just depressingly familiar.
@DK:
I think Putin will have the Lincoln Bedroom in the WH, plus sitting room and office space.
@Gustopher:
It was definitely about false accusation. I watched McMartin Pre-school play out. But also, it’s just weird an old man hanging around with kids not his own. Easy enough to avoid.
I’ve always believed that in addition to failure at several other levels, it was an aesthetic failure to see yourself (61 year-old Gaiman in this case) naked on top of some beautiful young woman and not know that’s an ugly picture. How is an artist of any kind going to want to paint that scene?
@CSK: Something’s up with Beth? (checks yesterday’s threads) Oof.
I hope the dancing helps. She’s good folk, and I wish she wasn’t in this state. (And that our government wasn’t going after trans folks in general, of course).
And on the respectability-politics/throwing-people-under-the-bus discussion — if respectability politics worked on its own, I think it would be an interesting discussion.
But MLK needed Malcolm X as an alternative, and without ACT-UP research into AIDS would have taken much, much longer. Will and Gracemade gay folks more acceptable, but we needed the loud queer folk first.
People vote based on feelings more than anything, and racking to the center doesn’t inspire any feelings. Having values, stating them boldly and proudly, and fighting for them — that’s what makes people vote.
Democrats running away from trans folks just says that Republicans are right that trans folks are icky.
@MarkedMan: And without disclosing anything, we have a situation where Trump can just demand a cut of the action for himself or his friends. If they are a threat, this is bad.
The timing of the calls to ban are dubious, from Trump calling for it after TikTok kids got all the tickets to his Tulsa rally and didn’t show up so he spoke to an empty stadium, to Zuckerberg lobbying like mad for a ban, to a panic when footage from Gaza was shown on it.
I have zero confidence in any government actions on this, since there is no accountability.
If there is a unique threat, show it. If there is a more general threat — foreign ownership, data privacy — address those in a general manner.
And there’s also the first amendment concerns of everyone on TikTok — allegedly 170M Americans, but let’s assume most are abandoned accounts, spam, or whatever and cut that down to 60M. That’s a lot of free speech being abridged with no accountability.
@MarkedMan: A couple of days ago I asked about TikTok because I am not knowledgeable about social media in general. Is this just another company in the social media business, or is it a Trojan horse for the ChiCom government? The law shutting them down had bipartisan support. In 2020 Trump favored forcing the sale. Possibilities:
1. TikTok is bad
2. TikTok is not bad, and the laws impeding it are misguided
Further:
A. Trump believes #2
B. There is a deal for Trump to profit
B can be true with either 1 or 2.
Well, there’s an important thing to bring into this mix. I have been in favor of diversity and inclusion since I was sixteen. I will never give up on this. More diversity, equity and inclusion in any space has meant more fun, more talent, and more progress. Always.
AND, DEI programs in Silicon Valley companies have had little to no effect. They didn’t accomplish much of anything at all. I resist easy and glib explanations of this. If you feel like describing all engineers as bigots, keep in mind you are defaming me. Getting more women in computing has always been something I’ve wanted and we have made little, if any, progress since I started out.
Here’s a fun part: Companies with more women on staff do better in the markeplace by several metrics. When I point this out to conservatives, they bob and weave and say that’s just because women find it easier to get hired and go to the good companies.
We have racial diversity in tech, in the form of Chinese and Indians. Not so many African Americans. I know very little about those details, though, so I won’t weigh in.
So the political stance is important. I’m not saying it isn’t. But the practical value of what Zuckerberg is giving up is maybe not as big as we thought?
Also there’s this: Billionaire Sheryl Sandberg Leaving Meta’s Board Of Directors
@Gustopher:
Perhaps Beth will check in here this evening. I hope so.
@Gustopher:
Exactly! If liberalism is going to stand with subgroups of any kind, it has to do so every day and every time. Even if they will lose sometimes. I get that this type of consistency is easier for fundies and evangelicals. All they have to do is hate.* And they don’t care as much about winning as being vindicated on “Judgement Day.” Way less steep of a pull.
*I wonder what magical sky daddy thinks about that approach to the Golden Rule (original, not contemporary)?
According to CNN. Ramaswamy has informed the Trump team that he won’t be working for DOGE in order to concentrate on running for gov of Ohio.
@just nutha:
Trans sports bills legally establish that trans people are really still the gender they were assigned at birth and that allowing them to be treated as their actual genders is creates a safety issue
Once you make that concession in one context, even a “trivial” one, what is the basis for refusing the same concession in other contexts?
No jurisdiction that has banned trans participation in sports has stopped there. It ALWAYS quickly leads to further restrictions
@CSK: One small step backwards for Ohio. One giant leap for America. (Well, “giant leap” is probably exaggerating some, but since I’m only trolling the Trumpies…)
@Stormy Dragon: I don’t see anything in my complaint about liberalism that argues against your point. The center is still where progress goes to die, and the person who says “I support X, but let’s be reasonable” doesn’t support X.
Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen was interviewed by Ross Douthat for The NY Times, and some diligent folks listened to the interview as well as read the transcript published in the Times. They noticed something interesting—that in one place in particular, the transcript didn’t match the audio. Andreessen was complaining about government attacks in the years 2017-2020, saying, “The government radicalized hard under Hillary Clinton,” which led him to turn toward the Republicans. Douthat asked, “But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump in this period, right?” And Andreessen replied, “Not really.” This portion of the interview was omitted from the transcript.
When challenged about this, the Times said that Andreessen clearly misspoke, so they edited the transcript to reflect what he actually meant. This ignores the fact that Douthat asked him to clarify, and he confirmed that he meant what he said.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
A reply can be a continuation of a point rather than a contradiction…
Headline of the day:
Trump boasts about saving TikTok at DC rally day before inauguration: ‘We’re going to make a lot of money
This is the royal we, as in we are not pleased. Because the we who are going to make a lot of money are Trump, his family, and his cadre of billionaires.
@Stormy Dragon: Indeed. I sometimes start a supportive comment with “Indeed’ or “Completely agree” or some such. Comes from having a few times bristled at a reply to one of my comments only to realize on a second reading that it was supportive. Being the intertubes, one sort of expects kickback, bad assumption.
@Stormy Dragon: My apologies, then. I have low experience with being agreed with.
@Jay L Gischer: I recently hired an African American engineer to a key position where I’ve made it clear (and he is enthused about it) that it’s a leadership position with a potential for more, but I recognize it doesn’t “count” because his parents actually immigrated here form West Africa when he was young. I didn’t have a single other African American applicant who was remotely qualified. I have rarely had the luxury of being able to give preference to anyone. I’ve gone many months without filling a position and have always given it to the first person who meets all the criteria. I think people who don’t hire have an unrealistic view of the process.
@Gustopher:
It’s about timing. Stonewall was effective in 1969, a very particular moment in time. In another year it could have been a literal massacre. The Tulsa massacre was in 1921, the Edmund Pettus Bridge wasn’t a picnic, but it wasn’t the bloodbath it would have been in 1921. I love Anthony Jeselnik, but his act in say, 1961? He’d be in jail. Timing is important.
When you’re telling a story – and that is what we’re doing – a great deal depends on the sequence of events in the story, the timing, where to place which scene. You have to feel the moment. Pick the wrong moment, you set yourself back. Anyone who could read the room knew we were powering a backlash and could sense that the power of that backlash would be too much to withstand.
What issue hobby horse am I riding right now? Fuck The Billionaires. Have I always felt that way? Nope. Would it have worked two years ago? Nope. But Trump and Elon have opened a doorway. We have an opportunity. Now is the time to start laying groundwork with a launch in six to 18 months, depending on events. There’s an exposed throat, and it’s right there.
We need to subvert the Calvinist/Republican money=virtue idea, and demand a degree of civic virtue. We need to shame the super rich, not just as amoral greed monsters but as psychologically troubled people. Then, we need to go after them in the midterms. And when they say, ‘class warfare,’ we don’t hide from it, we embrace it. Damn right it’s class warfare. It’s the 99% vs. the 1%.
I’m in the top 2%, (whew) so I’m not against people making money, but we have a right as a society to say, okay, that’s enough, the rest goes to people who need it. You hold a million shares of Company X? Now you own half a million shares, the rest goes into a professionally managed trust in the name of the American people. The people who made it possible for you to become rich.
@Michael Reynolds:
Yep. It’s a class war and they started it.