Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Sunday, July 20, 2025
·
27 comments
OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.
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.
The idiocy will continue until moral improves.
Among the provisions in the abominable act, there’s a $250 “visa integrity fee” to be charged to all visitors to the US who require a visa.
The gist is: “The idea is that the fee is essentially a “deposit,” of sorts, to make sure you behave while you’re in the United States. Visa holders who are subject to the fee may later be reimbursed, as long as they comply with their visa’s restrictions, like leaving the United States before the visa expires, and not working without authorization.”
TL;DR: one more reason not to visit the U.S.
Paging Mr. Einstein: It’s very relative.
For someone looking to overstay their visa, or to work, or more likely both, $250 isn’t much of a deterrent. For a family of four, paying $250 each, $1,000 all told, is a lot of money. Sure, you’re supposed to get reimbursed, but we’ll see how that goes and how long it takes. Rule of Acquisition 1: once you have their money, you never give it back.
BTW, obtaining a visa, or even renewing it, already costs money, and requires a substantial amount of paperwork and filling out forms, and may take more than one visit to the embassy or consulate.
I think I am officially registered.
It worked!
Thanks, Matt!
Solid piece by Ezra Klein in the Times today about support for Israel by Jewish Americans. He pulls a few punches, but leaves the utter disconnect between supporters of Israel in its current state and reality.
In my experience, conversations are no longer possible. The few people I know who support Israel make zero sense, and they seem to know this because they’ve stopped talking about it to anybody who isn’t drinking the kool-aid. The media can’t really cover things. How can you cover the Israeli government and its demands for a cease-fire where the conditions are release the hostages and then the assault continues? What’s the protocol for handling day after day of people lining up for food and then being exterminated by the IDF or some mercenaries? What non-senile audience going to accept some bland spin or generic blather about how tragic the whole situation is? That’s why, I think, everyone has given up on even looking at what’s happening.
Fifty six years ago today, Neil Armstrong took a one small step on the Moon.
Speaking of Ezra Klein, in a video about Epstein from a couple of days ago, he began with the following joke, which I think is priceless:
@Modulo Myself:
Everyone has given up because, as one sees in Klein’s excellent piece, there is no solution. Or at least no morally acceptable solution. This is a slow-motion train wreck and no one, including me certainly, sees a way to stop it. No, cutting off American weapons won’t do it. No, a West Bank state won’t do it. The West has given up, the Arabs have given up, the Iranians and their proxies have been crushed, even the Russians don’t seem interested in meddling. FUBAR – Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
Which does not excuse Israeli brutality and flat-out murder. Or Hamas brutality and murder. Or the PA’s embrace of corruption as an end in itself. Or Egyptian cynicism.
Most likely outcome? Gaza and the WB as reservations, with a threadbare pretense of self-government. That was the American solution.
What I’m fascinated by intellectually, is how well certain mathematical concepts capture the situation we are in right now. The concepts are Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Ultimatum Game.
The maxim, “Don’t obey in advance” to me, encapsulates the point that most human cultures will say “No” in an ultimatum game where the split is too big. They will reject the offer of an unfair deal, even if taking the deal would leave them with more (money, resources, etc).
And Prisoner’s Dilemma, due to some recent mathematical results, has deep connections to the Ultimatum Game.
The point is that if one studies emergent behavior by studying colonies of actors that evolve their behavior to improve their score, colonies of cooperators eventually take over. In our life, this has disturbed the rat-fuckers, I mean betrayers, greatly, and they want to stamp us out.
It’s time for the game face. We have both history and mathematics on our side, but we are going to need to dig in and be stubborn. Make them work for every inch.
I reject “silver bullet” ideas. Maybe Court reform will be valuable, I’m not rejecting that, but it’s not some “One Great Trick” to fix everything. I like the ideas that Steven has about proportional representation, too, though I think they are a long shot. And probably not the solution to every problem.
The solution is us. It is our every day determination to treat people fairly, and advance our communities in health and welfare. I am not giving up on that, I am not giving up on America.
@Jay L. Gischer:
On another thread I stated my opinion that we are seeing the moral collapse of the American people. Can it be reversed? I’m not optimistic, at least in the near term.
@Michael Reynolds: I know you said that. I don’t necessarily agree. This is the country that gave us Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal. This is the country that perpetrated Wounded Knee. This is the country that gave us Matawan. This is the country where white people went on a two-day rampage in Tulsa in 1921. This is the country where the duly elected government of Wilmington, NC was overthrown by violence in 1898. It took us 750,000 or so casualties to settle the issue of whether it was proper for one person to own another.
So no, I don’t think of this as decay. I think of it as a challenge – a periodic challenge – that we have to meet. The challenge to this for my father came from the Nazis. For us, it is more within us. Humans will always face these sorts of challenges from time to time, I think.
I also don’t care to frame it in moral terms – I do understand that in doing this, I am swimming against the American norm. We love to frame everything in moral terms, so you are being far more American than I am. I just feel that moral terminology clouds the issues that are interesting to me. And for this one the issue that is at stake is reciprocity and cooperation. Also “live and let live” – which is an aspect of “freedom” that has been a core part of America for a long, long time.
Thing is, in bygone times, you could easily ignore what was happening a couple of towns over, because there wasn’t any cable news or internet media organizations trying to harvest clicks by advancing stories that are designed to outrage you.
That’s not to say I don’t find many of Trump’s actions immoral, I do. I just want to understand more, and clarify. I want to be more specific. There are a lot of behaviors I find immoral and would not do, but I generally ignore them because they have little impact on public life and the health of the community or the country. I’m not going to enumerate them, some would be controversial, some are very personal choices, and people would end up feeling judged, which is not my intention.
Cancellation of cooperation is bad for us. Very bad. It will ruin our prosperity. It isn’t just an individual moral failing. It has wide-spread consequences. It reminds me of a saying that a friend who once lived in Tunisia reported to me from that region: “Algeria is the lion. Morroco is the Jackal. Tunisia is the woman.” Of course, Tunisia was also the most prosperous of the three.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Absolutely. The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. I don’t think hope is lost forever, I just don’t expect to see it improve in my lifetime. It’s why I am trying to spend as much of my time as possible out of the United States. I don’t want to live in a corrupt, fascistic oligarchy. I don’t want to live in a place where men in masks who refuse to identify themselves can snatch people off the street and stick them in concentration camps. I don’t choose to live in Venezuela or Iran or Myanmar. I don’t believe in blood and soil, I believe in liberty, and insofar as it is possible, I’ll live where I am free.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Is there anybody actively and realistically agitating for any such reform? All I’m aware of is the National Popular Voter Interstate Compact on the Electoral College.
@Michael Reynolds: I don’t see it as a moral collapse — in a lot of cases, the worst parts of American life are a desperate longing for moral consequences.
There are a lot of people who think that everyone who’s anyone cheats, and those who don’t are just being chumps. And they aren’t entirely wrong. As the middle class is being eroded, “Playing by the rules” gets you just further and further behind, while the wealthy just do horrible things for profit (health insurance companies routinely denying coverage, etc) and it’s either legal or not prosecuted.
I think a lot of the hatred of immigrant, people on food stamps and other “undeserving” folks is a byproduct of this. If you can’t demand justice against the people above you, you can at least go after the people below you who are getting everything for free. And this impulse is encouraged by the wealthy.
It’s not the collapse of morality, it’s the weaponization of morality.
QAnon, at its heart, is an appeal for moral consequences (wrapped in a cloak of gently reworked antisemitism). It’s an acknowledgment that the people at the top are doing awful things, twisted into a belief in an elite globalist conspiracy of pedophiles harvesting adrenochrome from the children they rape. And, to be fair to the complete lunatics who believe this shit, is this really that far off from Peter Thiel getting blood transfusions from young people to combat aging? (Thiel denies this, but is recorded as expressing interest in it, and has invested in a company that offers it as a service, so…)
I would connect the trans panic to this. If you can’t punish the people above you for their corruption, you can at least punish the people below you for violating social norms.
And I think it all turns on a dime if the people at the top start facing consequences. Our justice system, Luigi Mangione, The Hague, whatever, so long as it is consistent.
Why do we not have folk songs about Luigi Mangione, the way we have folk songs about Jesse James?
@Jay L. Gischer: @Michael Reynolds: I’m not very good at expressing myself so I hope this comes out the way I want it to. I disagree with what is happening to my fellow humans in this country but what to do? I can’t leave for other shores, I don’t have the resources and I’m pushing eighty yoa. Community and cooperation are the obvious answer but does that make me a “Good German” in the sense of non-nazi Germans in pre-war and WWII Germany. I won’t cooperate by informing on my neighbors but I can’t/won’t give up the benefits I, for the moment, get from the government. I’m not content but I won’t renounce completely the life I have. So what is the compromise, or is there one?
The latest ICE horror story:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/20/ice-secretly-deported-grandfather
@becca:
My pleasure!
@Jay L. Gischer:
That’s a very insightful statement.
It seems to apply to both, what seems to an external observer, an increasing refusal of some MAGA to see America as a single polity or “moral community”.
Albeit this is a tendency that seems to have deep roots in some aspects of US history re race etc. The tension between a concept of a “propositional nation” and a common expectation of the exclusion of certain categories of person from that propostion.
Also, to co-operation as an international stance: instead of alliances and a “rules based” order, reversion to zero-sum assumptions and machtpolitik.
That was not a pattern that ended well for 19th Century Europe.
It seems unlikely that even the modern US has the capacity to impose its will upon the world; even the British Empire at its height was never so foolish as to assume it could do so.
@Mr. Prosser: If it helps, I don’t think 80 year old retirees are what people are referring to when they talk about the Good Germans.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I have no idea what that means, but I have not heard of lions or jackals with pocket books, so I am inclined to agree that a woman is more likely to be prosperous.
@Michael Reynolds:
We haven’t tried, and it’s not like they are particularly restrained by a desire to keep getting our military aid, so there’s no reason to assist them in their sparkling ethnic cleansing operation.
@Gustopher: Concern about living with moral compromise should be part of any adult’s world view at any age.
@Michael Reynolds: @Gustopher:
I still think the real constraint on Israel may end up being Europe, and (associated, sort of) Turkey.
Because there is lot of political pressure building about events in Gaza (and Syria, for that matter) and also various important European political interests.
The economy of Israel is intimately connected to Europe.
About 30% of the Israeli GDP is linked to imports and exports.
Of which in turn about 30% are with the EU, and iirc 40% with Europe more widely.
A breakdown in relations with Europe is far more significant for the economy of Israel than the US weapons supply subsidies.
The bedrock of that has been German support for Israel.
If Netanyahu keeps pushing “damn the casualties” operations in Gaza and Syria, that could break.
It’s certainly close to breaking point in the UK, imo.
As for Turkey, it’s entirely happy to see Israel cut the legs from underneath the Iranian pasdarani.
But I suspect less so regarding Netanyahus’s inclination to intervene in Syria.
Both Turkey and Europe seriously desire a stabilised Syria, if only because of the refugee issues.
Netanyahu is, imho, is overlooking a serious potential “out-of-context-problem.”
He’s always tended to focus on a combination of realtions with the US Right, plus the application of IDF power to enable Isreali regional local dominance.
Which is all very well, but overlooks that there are other players at the table, albeit generally rather passive ones.
Being stupid enough to make those players turn active would be massive possible error.
Bibi’s assumption seems to be that the Jerusalem/Washington alignment (or perhaps more the Likud/Repupiblican one ?) will always be a backstop.
That may not always apply.
Video where a lawyer takes a look at the legal questions in Severance.
@JohnSF:
It’s the paradox of the assumptions Trumpian base: both”isolationist”, or at least ” limited commitment”, insofar as they assume they US can, at will, abdicate from any and all international engagements.
Yet also that the US can impose it’s will almost without constraint.
And pick and choose when and where it may engage, and then expect immediate deference to their desires.
It rather recalls the assumptions of some Germans at some points.
@JohnSF:
I am really interested in what Turkey may do. They’re a real country, with real power, both economic and military. They would not be the usual Arab army walk-over, Turks fight. They are the unknown factor in the ME. The whole mess used to belong to them.
@Michael Reynolds:
Grandfather Farren encountered the Turks at Megiddo.
(“Armageddon? Been there, done that.”)
We won, but it was a damned hard fight.
Fighting Turks is no easy walk.
Turkey has obvious reasons for desiring a stable Syria (and Iraq, and Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, for that matter), and Europe obvious reasons for considering their interests, and ours, in that.
Turkey is likely not unhappy to see Iran curbed.
(Same applies to Pakistan, another important nearby actor.)
But there are limits on what it can accept regarding Israeli policy, especially in Syria, for a variety of reasons.
If Netnyahu is sensible, he’d take the wins and try for a deal re both Gaza and Syria.
If he is not, the contingency tree looks a bit iify.
But we also need to know, and absent all the bullshittery, what is the real current state of the damage to and status of, the Iranian nukes project?
That’s the problem with Trump as President: what he says ain’t worth shit.
@JohnSF:
@Michael Reynolds:
An amusing side note: a lot of Europeans are currently sniggering at the Turkish rather silly decision to buy Russia S-400 SAM systems, on the basis that “this gives us strategic options”
Well, yes, it would, if only Russian systems weren’t a pile of shite.
Amusingly, the Ukrainians have have actually managed to make the S-300 rather effective.
But that’s Ukrainians being Ukrainians: it seems they have rather effectively messed about with the entire system software and hardware interfaces to the point that their S-300s actually work.
lol
@Kathy:..one small step…
I followed all the astronauts starting with Alan Shepard. When I saw the “giant leap for mankind” and then 2001: A Space Odyssey later that year I had hopes that I would spend my 30th birthday in 1978 at a resort on the moon.
In 1983 I rode Space Mountain in Disneyland in California. I suspect that’s the closest to the stars that I will ever get.