Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, March 23, 2025
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32 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
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
@Gustopher:
That gets the great lawyer answer: it depends.
If the boss strokes out they are all going to war with each other. I think the Triumvirate (Trump, Musk, Vought) only works because Trump is the only one that can cow anyone else into loyalty and they all balance each other. He gets less coherent fast, has a fatal medical issue or is otherwise publicly incapacitated the GOP factions go to war on each other. I think that’s the best case scenario.
I also think that if something happens to Trump, Musk is going to declare himself president because something something. Yes, it’s stupid, but they are fanatics and are high on their own farts.
Other scenarios are Trump actually starts an invasion of Canada or Mexico and sparks a Second Civil War.
Or they break something hard and fast and someone with nothing to lose starts shooting. Shooting in a nation awash in guns and a culture of using them to solve problems.
I think you’re absolutely right about the first transfer of power.
@Beth:
That would be…something. You’d have Vance one side of that, pointing out that Musk isn’t a natural born American. On the other, you’d have the money-worshipers who would be willing to ignore that part of the Constitution. Yikes x 1000.
You’ve given me something new to worry about! 😀
From NBC News:
Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek is backing down on a threat to cease operations at the agency after a federal judge blocked staffers at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive data housed at the agency.
Dudek’s reversal comes after U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander on Thursday granted a request by several union groups seeking to stop “DOGE affiliates” from accessing the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers, medical records, birth and marriage certificates, bank and credit card information and tax information.
Hollander said DOGE was engaged in a “fishing expedition” for fraud based on “little more than suspicion” and said the temporary organization “never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney
My heart is a muscle and it pumps blood. It keeps me alive. That is it’s sole purpose. That is basic human anatomy. I don’t want it changed. I don’t want it to be doing anything else.
Besides I don’t want a first century CE Galilean carpenter messing around with my vital organs.
Was Jesus really a carpenter?
For years I’ve been following a case involving a Guatemalan woman, Isabel Bueso, diagnosed with a rare genetic disease (Mucopolysaccharidosis, or MPS) that took the life of one of my brothers. As a child she was invited to live in the US to participate in a study, but in 2019 just after graduating college, she was threatened with immediate deportation despite the fact that her life depended on regular treatment only available in the US. The case got so much negative media attention that the Trump Admin relented and allowed her to stay, and eventually she was given permanent residency status that I hope the current admin respects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Bueso
My brother died in 1995 at the age of 17 from an unusually debilitating case of MPS, which left him bedridden and without the ability to speak for most of his short life, though (like Bueso) he lived a lot longer than the doctors had expected. I like to think that the research done on him may have contributed to the development of the life-saving treatment given to Bueso, though I have no idea if that’s the case.
Found this via Adam Silverman at BJ:
“L’Expresse (Fr.)”
Synopsis:
https://bsky.app/profile/popovaprof.bsky.social/post/3lkv7r6r4tc2a
Silverman BJ post includes a long excerpt from the French interview:
In addition to the interview excerpt, Silveman says:
“Silverman”
Bear in mind Putin is a big fan of Ivan Ilyin and Aleksander Dugin, great thinkers who think the natural ultimate state of things is Russian dominance “from Lisbon to Vladisvostok” (alternately “Dublin to Vladisvostok”).
I know there are some writers here. Cohen had a piece on the lack of male writers now. I was sort of vaguely aware of this but I went to the best sellers list, fiction, and found that for 2023 24 of the top 25 writers were women. That surprised me. It looks like the total number of books, with some variation, has stayed pretty steady. My initial thought was that men have taken a lot of their reading time and devoted it to video games. That means they go into video games when they might have been writers and it also means the reading audience has changed. There were a number of claims that the publishers have all gone woke and I am sure that is true for some but when I walk into a bookstore I still see Hannity, Ingraham, Coulter books as bestsellers in that section of the store. If there was a demand for books with a male/non-woke/non-PC POV I have a hard time believing that they wouldn’t publish them, after all they want to make money.
Steve
Administrative question! It looks like the RSS feed is stuck and hasn’t updated in a week or so? Since I am an old this is still the way I find out about OTB posts. Would be lovely if someone could whack it on the side or restart it.
@steve: an interesting and now that you’ve pointed it out, obvious, observation. I can easily go through 2-3 audio books per week, and looking at my history, it’s about 80-20 for female and femme writers. Anecdotally, when I start something I randomly chose, there is often a moment within the first chapter where I think, oh! must be a male author, I’ll cut it some slack.
@steve:
Publishing struggled to achieve some level of diversity and somehow left out the 50% of the population that’s male. It starts down in kidlit where male-oriented stories are routinely rejected as being, well, male. 70-80% of editors are women. 100% are college grads, always from liberal arts programs of various types.
Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) gave a very good speech on the topic when we were on a panel together. But nothing changed. Female lit majors from Brown University simply dislike male-oriented – action-driven – stories.
I was told flat-out, from my publisher, when I wrote GONE and objected to the absurdly feminized cover that, ‘we don’t sell books to boys.’ And indeed it is hard to sell books to boys when you refuse to try.
@Michael Reynolds:
I mean, it’s pretty clear that men don’t read as much as women, or at all. Blaming Brown-educated women editors for this situation is fairly misogynistic, if you ask me. They would love for boys and men to read. It just is not happening.
One thing I’ve noticed is that men melt down when criticized. They just melt down. You can talk about women ruining things because they’ve feminized publishing or high fashion or bowling or taxidermy, and women just roll their eyes and go on with their lives. Write something about how men who read are reading bro-modernism or whatever, and dumb or not, men melt down about this and carry it around as another grievance.
Look at toxic masculinity, which you hate so much–every women’s magazine in the world talks about toxic femininity and how to deal with expectations regarding beauty and health, and your average woman gets it. Men, though, flip out, and act like babies if they’re told that being a real man is not all its cracked up to be.
I don’t think it was like this. Men have become more fragile and isolated, and it has nothing to do with the feminizing of culture. With reading, you need object permanence and some sort of existential coolness to make your way through a book, and that won’t happen if you cry about everything. Look at Donald Trump: he can’t even read two pages of any of the books he’s allegedly written. There’s your man being failed by Brown-educated editors, Michael.
@Modulo Myself:
All due respect I know what I am talking about and you’re offering generic talking points. This is my world. And when you offer boys the kinds of books they want to read, they read. The proof is in my bank account and my fan mail and in many appearances in schools.
If you replaced the word ‘male’ with gay or Black or Latino I suspect you’d be in support of diversity and agree that diverse editors reach audiences which, in some cases, have lower rates of reading than do males per se. But the instant anyone suggests we are failing boys or men it’s automatically dismissed.
This is outdated thinking, and wrong-headed.
It is also so politically dumb I can’t believe I’m still hearing this knee-jerk man hatred. You do realize 50% of voters are men, right?
@Modulo Myself:
As an aside I am a man and I am not remotely fragile or toxic. What would possess you to generalize that way about half the human race?
@Michael Reynolds:
!
Fun tidbit of Gus lore: way back when, I had just graduated from college, there was a Bush recession, and I was in NYC doing temp work while looking for a job in my field. I ended up working for a few months at one of the publishing houses, in the —ahem— “women’s fiction” department, as “Romance” didn’t sound classy enough. (The real classy ones probably still called themselves Romance)
It was fiction written by women, for women. Except that about a quarter of the authors were men, who sent out their wives (or ex-wives) for any promotional events.
So, take that as you will.
@Michael Reynolds:
As an aside I am a man and I am not remotely fragile or toxic. What would possess you to generalize that way about half the human race?
Come on, have some self-awareness here.
I agree that boys are being let down (as opposed to all other forms of children, who are also being let down but in a different non-special boy way) but it’s not by Brown-educated editors, many of whom have children who happen to be boys. Toxic masculinity is a somewhat-dumb term but weirdly as a man (white, just for the record) it doesn’t get me riled up. Guess it’s because I hate men or something, and that’s why I read real books rather than play video games and dose myself with Joe Rogan-approved supplements. Maybe the self-hatred is why I have a novel in the pipeline, though there are problems because I did write about privileged drugged-out white people. Or not, because I do think characters who learn nothing and can’t change are going to be trending again. Granted, it’s literary fiction so the advance will cover a new surfboard and a trip to Central America.
It looks like I am a couple of days late, but here’s a belated “Welcome Back!” to OTB! So glad to see the place back up and running.
@Kingdaddy:
“They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” -Kafka
@Gustopher:
Irritated is not the same as fragile. I’d submit that my life is ample proof that I’m not fragile. And often irritated.
@Modulo Myself:
Best of luck on the novel. But bear in mind that we are at different places in our relationship with the industry. You’re still filled with hope, and sadly I’ve been watching the sausage being made since 1989. And it’s not just me saying publishing has abandoned boys, it’s widely acknowledged. But people throw up their hands and say, ‘what can we do?’ The answer’s easy: write books boys will like. Duh.
But just as it was hard to get Black authors picked up when the entire staff is White, same thing with an all-female staff. Editors acquire what they personally like. You’d think it’d be about profit but nope, at least not at HC where I did a lot of my stuff. Editors are literally given a number of books to produce, regardless of likely viability. It’s the spaghetti against the wall method.
Of 150 books exactly two were edited by a man. Any of the three main female editors I’ve worked with at Scholastic, HC or what is now UK HC, would agree (have in fact agreed) that they are failing boys. Just as everyone acknowledged that we were failing minorities. That’s been addressed in kidlit, the boy problem has not. We need to try harder and pretending it’s not a problem, or belittling boys for having boy tastes, is a mistake.
Anyone remember the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaigns with the Hugo awards? Just some perfectly normal not-at-all fragile or toxic white men bitter and angry that the Hugos were being dominated by politically correctness.
Just a bunch of people making a commentary on the male loneliness epidemic or whatever, like the fine folks in GamerGate and it’s sad twin ComicsGate before them.
Men, particularly white men, are fragile and often toxic. They were not emotionally prepared to not be the absolute center of attention — whether it is in media or politics. And we’ve been living with the results of that freak out ever since.
From women in Star Wars to a Black man in the White House, anything that decenters straight white men in “their” territory results in a shitload of whining. There’s a whole industry of rage farmers, building up that backlash, but they’re riding that backlash as much as creating it.
Aside: I don’t think Alien with Sigourney Weaver would have been nearly as successful without the underwear scene. It says “see, men, this really is for you.” (Other than that, the whole movie is “men don’t listen to woman, they all die. She saves the cat though.”)
And that attitude goes forward to the present with all the women in the Trump administration having a very specific look, catering to men. Spokesmodels for cruelty.
There’s nothing to be gained by pretending that white men aren’t fragile. We have countless examples. Not every individual man, but as a group, absolutely.
It’s weird to not be the default after a lifetime of it. It’s uncomfortable. It feels like something is wrong. I get it. “This isn’t for me” is a shocking thing when you’ve been directly catered to. “This isn’t just for me” is just as shocking and often hard to distinguish from “this isn’t for me.”
If you ignore the fragility, you get a backlash. If you cater to the fragility, you get segregation*. We need a secret third option that gets men to laugh at themselves a little with that discomfort rather than getting defensive.
I do not know what that secret third option is. But I’m pretty sure it’s not scolding, if that helps.
When they cast a woman in the role of the 13th Doctor, and she was as much of an arrogant know-it-all as any of the recent previous Doctors… she came across as a “bitch.” And that’s funny. (It was toned way down in most of her episodes, but there are a couple in her first season where it was only toned down a bit).
A dark, awkward funny. A funny that requires being able separate your sense of self from your initial reaction and laugh at that initial reaction. A very nuanced and self-aware funny.
Is it as funny as “As an aside I am a man and I am not remotely fragile or toxic.”? No. Obviously not. That is unintentional brilliance in comedy writing. Bravo, Michael, bravo. (ETA: is this scolding? Well… look, I’m inviting Michael to laugh at himself the same way I laugh at him.)
*: either in society at large, or just in media targeted at entirely different groups. (When I went to see Django Unchained I clearly remember the previews — there was a trailer for a haunted house movie with while people, and then another trailer for a haunted house movie with black people. Worlds collided as a a Quentin Tarantino movie starring Jamie Foxx brings in both black and white viewers)
I would submit that anger is very frequently, and for both genders, the second emotion one feels in response to some stimulus.
The first one, whatever it is, can go by very quickly. And if you have been raised in male culture with all its taboos, you may not be able to recognize emotions like fear and hurt.
And this is a problem, not just for other people, but for the person themselves. They get stuck because they don’t know what the actual issue is. The endless crowing about “warrior culture” in my view, comes from people who can’t admit that they are afraid. (The kinds of fears they might have, I add, are very reasonable.)
So, no I don’t really have much patience for “fragile” as a descriptor. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t point to the way forward. Instead it tends to entrench these people further in their denial of their own fears and sense of hurt.
My take, and I’ve a not many, but a few chances to move on it, is instead to welcome, in private, peoples fears and hurt. I know a man my age who just lost a son in a car accident, with a horrifying night of people not telling him what had actually happened to boot. I told him that I couldn’t think of much of any thing more worthy of crying about. It seemed to help him.
This is not in contradiction to strength and resilience, which I endorse as a positive quality and one I wish for every person. I think that these skills enhance strength and resilience.
@Modulo Myself:
It’s almost as if rich and powerful men hold other men down and tell them that if it wasn’t for the women and the fags they’d be powerful too!
@Michael Reynolds:
Hands down, by far and away this is the absolute funniest fucking thing you’ve ever written.
I might agree with you that you’re not toxic. I’ll give you that. But you are one of the most fragile men here. And for as hard a life as you’ve had you are unbelievably soft.
Look, Daddy, I’ve seen both sides of this. One thing that transition just absolutely chainsaws you with is: 1. How absolutely terribly women are treated, and 2. How much they just keep it away from men. I thought I was very observant of women. I had an innate drive to be included in women’s spaces and there is so much you miss until you’re actually let in. It’s tough to describe. But when men you’ve know for years in a professional setting start disregarding you and what you have to say, when men you’ve know who politely consider you a “man in a dress” dump the children on you while they go to the bar*, when men walk through you like you’re a six foot tall ghost**, you start to really and full understand. I can guarantee you that every woman in this space has put up with that and worse every fucking day.
Early on I couldn’t understand why women put up with it. For a while I thought it was a safety thing. But it’s not that. You just give up. You either spend every waking minute getting more and more pissed off at these fragile ass men who expect you to be their mother (but also fuckable?) and to wipe their little sensitive butts, as they tell you that “only women are emotional” as they have their little emotional meltdowns.
There is absolutely a discussion to be had about how to help boys, but that discussion starts with teaching boys that women are actually human.
So yes, daddy, you are like a little glass ballerina in a satin lined box.
*I was like did any of you fine gentlemen think to get me a drink as you dumped all these fucking children on me? They looked at me like my six heads had heads and then I had to go get my own drink while they ignored the children.
**I realized I went from being a potential threat to being beneath notice.
I really only recently found my way back to visiting this site on a regular basis.
I think Beth was a good addition.
@Beth:
It’s a variation on the political cartoon I saw a few years ago with a rich guy character carrying away a buffet plate piled high with desserts leaning over to tell another obviously less well-off man “I’d watch out for that Mexican, if I were you; he’s after your piece of pie.” ETA: (And there’s no “as if” about it.)
“And the beat goes on (yeah, the beat goes on)…”
@Jay L Gischer:
And for many men it’s the only emotion they are allowed. It curdles so many into something so awful.
What would you use as a descriptor/how would you describe this?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Reminds me of another, similar, one.
Joe six pack on the left saying,
And Daddy Warbucks looking guy on the right saying,
@Beth: I’d call it toxic masculinity. It’s toxic to everyone, including the man.
I get @Jay L Gischer’s objection to it — fragile men do not want to hear that they are fragile. They’re too fragile to face their fragility.
We really do need to workshop something that does not offend their delicate sensibilities.
It’s like “white privilege” — a perfect description of the situation that utterly destroys your ability to discuss the situation. (For that I wish we settled on “Black Tax” or something, but there’s bound to be an Olympic level effort to include everyone and “a series of independent, overlapping and combining non-male, non-white, non-straight taxes” just fails. But “extra penalty” should be the focus, rather than “look how good white people have it” or “you know, it’s white people like you holding them down”)
(Also, MR’s claim to not be fragile reminds me of the time I referred to a coworker as “Señor Smug” and everyone laughed at me because I am way more smug than anyone else… that guy was clearly in second place)
@Daryl: I was hoping for an influx of catboys, but she will do.
@Gustopher:
Some people say dragons are just big scaley cats
Why are all of the editors women? Why dont men want to do the job or are publishers refusing to hire them? How would we know? Maybe biggest question of all in my mind there are clearly lots of publishers willing to publish pro-men stuff. Jordan Peterson writes books after all. Why arent those same publishers willing to publish fiction by men? Studies I see claim boys spend about 10.7 hours/week playing video games, girls 4.7 hours. It’s little closer for adults with 63% of women spending less than 5 hours a week gaming and 51% for men With 16% of men and 10% of women gaming more than 16 hours per week. Certainly seems like boys and have less time available to read. Of note, this doesnt appear to be just a US thing with women reading more than men across the world.
Steve
@Daryl: Yeah. I’ve heard that one, too. Love it.