Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, January 9, 2025
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51 comments
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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Just to be more explicit about my “Trump is actually insane” comment yesterday: Trump sees himself as the new Hitler, which is where the talk about annexing adjacent lands and lands we are “owed” comes from. He is nominating a literal nazi as defense secretary and authoritarians in other key positions. It is why he so admires ruthless dictators like Putin and Kim.
Well, all of this nonsense about annexing/going to war with Greenland and Panama has succeeded in taking the focus off of Trump’s utterly unqualified nominees for cabinet posts.
The guy sure knows how to play the media, even with dementia.
Yay, it’s Thursday!!
@MarkedMan: It’s more Putin Envy.
Trump looks at the presidency as a TV role. He likes the trappings – all the salutes and being called “sir”- but he has no interest in policy, substance or actually governing. And he loves being the country’s assignment editor. He got reporters to google Greenland to see where it is. Once again, the “elite” political reporters are showing they have no clue how to cover a demented clown president. The gaggle should have laughed at his annexation talk, instead they asked if he’d use military force, and elicited an even dumber statement from Trump that he wouldn’t rule it out, and THAT became the headline from his stream of consciousness session at Mar-a-Loco. Jen is spot on – Trump desperately wants the focus away from his cabinet choices AND away from Jimmy Carter.
@Jen: Republicans were caving on Trump’s unqualified DEI-for-MAGA hires well before Christmas.
Funny, I didn’t think I shared so much of this country’s Trump amnesia. I thought I remember just how horrible it was to live under his “leadership.” But until his comments on the LA fires — where many friends have lost everything and many more are evacuated and still under threat — I had managed to black out the visceral, all-consuming loathing I felt towards this man.
It’s going to be a long four years.
Episode #20178 in “Why the uses of ChatGPT and other LLM’s are much more constrained than the hype is promoting”: (From an ArsTechnica article)
So if 1 piece of information out of 100,000 is at a Robert Kennedy Jr. level of nonsense, the LLM is no longer reliable. And the best the trainers can do is point to what they hope are sources of reliable information and play boy-with-a-finger-in-the-dyke to keep the nonsense out.
@wr: I find myself increasingly envious of Eddie and HarvardLaw92 that they escaped this fucking circus.
@Jax:
Or as I like to call it, Friday Eve!
@Jen:
I too, am of the opinion that Trump put out this stuff – Canada 51st state, Greenland 52nd state, re-seize Panama Canal, and Gulf of Mexico naming rights stuff – exactly as you suggest, to give him complete ownership of the news cycle.
He couldn’t let The Media’ have ownership of the Pacific Palisades Wildfire story. Nope, couldn’t let it go without blaming ‘Gavin Newscum’ for not raking the forests.
He’s already dragging America back into his cesspool.
Iran Miltary:
Everybody’s trolling these days.
@MarkedMan:
I think this makes misinformation a more potent poison than botulinum toxin.
A good friend evacuated his elderly mom from an assisted living facility in LA County. The video of him rescuing her is horrific. The building was already on fire, and there were flames outside her window. Emergency lights strobing, alarms blaring…Horrific. After taking her home, he and his family, his mom, and dogs had to evacuate from their home to a hotel. A living nightmare.
But what’s obscene is, of course, Trump screeching like a turd-throwing baboon about the Governor of California, non-existent water mandates, and forest-raking in the midst of all this. There are thousands of people in my friend’s tragic situation, right now. And the person who will be assuming the mantle of President, the office that should serve all of us, is acting like all that matters in our public life is vomiting hate against your manufactured enemies. While people’s homes burn. While they flee for their lives. While their possessions, including irreplaceable, treasured items, go up in smoke. While the most populous county in America suffers unimaginable damage now, and then has to spend years rebuilding.
As always, in the Trump era, this is not surprising, but still shocking.
@Flat Earth Luddite: My youngest went back to public school this week, and they’ve switched to a four day week, so TECHNICALLY….it’s already Friday! 😉
@al Ameda: I think an equally plausible motivation is busting up NATO and alienating the United States from its allies.
When I and others pointed out that Trump seemed to be actively planning a coup in the lame duck period between the 2020 election and January 6th, a lot of people responded that it was just Trump trying to get attention, owning the news cycle, etc. I’m astounded that people are now making the same reassurances about his current plans. He can be attempting to own the news cycle and also actively planning to install himself as dictator. And while in years past I would have thought it impossible, I am keenly aware that all other branches of government are in the hands of almost unbelievable weak and compliant Vichy-Officials-to-be.
@Kingdaddy: alienating the United States from its allies.
Once Trump is president the US will have no allies, just strategic partners, where the main strategy will be the maximization of profits for Trump and his friends.
@Jax: “I find myself increasingly envious of Eddie and HarvardLaw92 that they escaped this fucking circus.”
I’ve got a year and a half left on my lease, then we’ll see…
@Kingdaddy: I think an equally plausible motivation is busting up NATO and alienating the United States from its allies.
Could actually have the opposite effect if the allies see it not as being opposed to America but opposed personally to Trump.
@Lucysfootball:
If it’s only profits, it will suck.
If ti’s something less tangible like prestige, “respect,” and so on, we’ll be screwed once the nukes start flying.
Re: Grenland, Canada, Panama
Imo it’s the normal Trump approach to almost everything:
“It’s all kayfabe, baby!”
Strike a pose, troll the libz, look for a profit.
And his complete inability to understand that lobbing a turd in the punch-bowl when dealing with international relations, alliances, and territorial rights of sovereign states is not a clever ploy.
It may may the MAGA-troll have lulz, but tends to leave the international audience distinctly unamused.
@Jax: Four-day week? How so? Is this a budget cutting measure, make the school day/year longer, administration brain fart? Wazzup?
@Jen:
I find myself going back and forth on the issue of Trump’s dementia. Granted, he’s cruel, ignorant, stupid, churlish, gullible–but he always has been. He’s often said that he likes chaos, and believes in keeping people off-balance as a matter of personal and business policy. If this is indeed senile dementia, he’s suffered it his entire adult life.
@just nutha: Our school district is so small, from Middle School onwards, almost 70% of the student body will be gone almost every Friday for sports and other activities. It was basically a wasted day, so they did a bunch of community polling and everybody got on board with a four day week. They added an additional 20 minutes to the beginning and the end of the day, and did away with most teacher in-service days, cuz that stuff can be handled on Fridays now for the teachers.
So far, everybody seems to love it!
@Jax: Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.
I used to live in Arcadia, southeast corner of Grandview Ave and Oak View Lane. IOW, within a few blocks of the San Gabriel Mountains. Compare to the Eaton fire location.
“Link”
“Link2“
@charontwo: Yeah, I was on a little street called Mira Vista Terrace, right above Linda Vista where Seco goes down into the Rose Bowl. It’s all evacuation zone.
@charontwo: @wr: My wife’s niece and fiancee had to flee the Eaton fire. Just got word that they returned to their house and they have both power and water. But they are filling up the tubs and anything that can hold water, apparently because the water system in nearby Pasadena is contaminated. Plus winds are supposed to pick up again. It is not good and it is not over.
Good morning from Los Angeles. I flew back to LA last night/this morning and approaching LAX, looking out the window, I saw what can only be described as something out of post apocalyptic movie.
The media hasn’t done justice to the sheer devastation that is taking place. I’m fine where I live in the SF Valley, but our home was refuge last night for several friends who were forced to evacuate from Studio City, THE FLATS OF STUDIO CITY, to those of you who know LA. Fryman Canyon, burned. Runyon Canyon, burned. Mandeville Canyon, burned. Historical places like The Will Rodgers Ranch House, The Reef Inn, Moonshadows, Topanga Ranch Motel, Fox’s Restaurant, Pasadena Jewish and Cultural Center, Masjid Al Taqwa Mosque, Theatre Palisades, and many others, are gone.
This is just the latest of historical events (California Fires, Florida Hurricanes, North Caolina Flooding, Texas Heat Waves, Plains Tornados) that are now much worse than historical norms. The fact that national (and Local) politicians are politicizing it as if Newsom or Bass could have done anything about this insane. And the fact that the right wing media is doing nothing but blaming Dems is infuriating.
Has DK checked in?
@CSK: I think he’s losing what little filter he had, which is not uncommon as people age, and different from senility. It’s going to be a long 4 years.
Anyway, this is what people voted for.
@EddieInCA: DK sighting in the Imperialism thread.
@CSK:
¿Porque no los dos?
Senile dementia that exacerbates personality tendencies that already exist, no?
He is visibly becoming more extreme, more stupid/cognitively impaired.
@charontwo:
As I said, I go back and forth on the senile dementia. The more outrageous he acts, the more the MAGAs seem to love it and him, so that might spur him on to be even wilder.
@Jen:
@wr:
@Jax:
This is basically reason number 3 on our list of why we are moving to London. The morning after the election we looked at each other and were like “remember waking up every morning and wondering (fearfully) what terrible shit the President got up to the night before.” Remember how you could go whole stretches of weeks without thinking of what Biden was doing cause he was just quietly doing his job? My partner’s coworkers over there already say that Trump’s noise is much lower over there. Maybe JohnSF can comment on that.
As to whether Trump actually believes the nonsense he spouts; I think it’s actually irrelevant. He clearly believes some of it and it’s a fools errand to figure out what cause it’s all mercurial and stupid. Worse than that is he has surrounded himself with at least two kinds of true believers: MAGA fundamentalists and religious zealots. Like, we’re at the point where the open criminals are preferable to MAGA and the Zealots.
Anyway, when it comes to Trump, I think about this scene a lot:
https://youtu.be/MRUER6ArtoQ?si=n8eig7VA_JM2juBs
Has anyone come across a good map of what is actually burning/burnt? The NYT feed only shows evacuaction orders/warnings and that’s only partially useful in understanding the scope. For me at least.
L.A. is kinda hard for me to understand geographically. It’s a large vast sprawl, and if I’m not mistaken, L.A. the city is rather small, but the whole area gets lumped together. I wonder if it’s a Chicago thing. Chicago gobbled up a whole bunch of small independent communities for several decades. Those became neighborhoods and it was kinda erased that they were ever independent. the City was basically stopped by Evanston in the North, Oak Park in the west and impoverished, historically Black towns in the South. Chicago is defined in a way that L.A. and NYC aren’t.
Sorry if I’m rambling, therapy was oddly intense today.
Yesterday, I bought a bottle of real maple syrup from a place in Wisconsin up north I’d visited when I was a wee pup. Wanish Sugar Bush.
The odd thing was that an eight once bottle was $8.99 and the sixteen ounce bottle was $9.99. Next to each other on the shelf. Odd pricing choice and shelf placement, Hyvee. I took advantage.
My very first paid job was as a supermarket stockboy. It was gender segregated – girls did checkout and boys either stocked or bagged. To this day, when shopping, if I take an item off the shelf, I pull up the next behind to front and face it properly. Ingrained behavior.
@de stijl: “To this day, when shopping, if I take an item off the shelf, I pull up the next behind to front and face it properly.”
Thank you for your service!
@Beth:
It’s very much like Mexico City in that sense. The bulk of the population lives outside the city in what’s called the metropolitan area. This was ok when the city meant the whole metro area, and the “city” proper was the Federal District. Then they changed the latter’s name to Mexico City, so now it’s more confusing.
I still claim to live in Mexico City, even if I’m about 9 kilometers past the city limits. Besides, I do work within city limits.
@Kathy: One of the things about US city boundaries that is so very strange, and that took me traveling overseas to really see, was that we set our city boundaries long ago, often centuries ago, and then have never changed them since, regardless of how big the city actually gets. This may be true in other places, but it doesn’t seem to matter as much, as there are entities that can manage the whole metropolitan area, whereas in the US all too often the outlying areas despise the city and try to starve it, while pushing all their expensive problems to it. Which is a long way of saying that it seems to me if you live in the vicinity of a city it’s perfectly legitimate to say, “I’m from the city”.
Which city is bigger, NYC or Shanghai? Well, NYC’s population is just south of 10M and Shanghai’s is north of 25M. But if you took the borders of Shanghai and dropped it in the right orientation around NYC, it would encompass more than 25M residents.
@Beth: Seattle is the same phenomenon as well, only on a much smaller population scale than LA, Mexico City, or even Chicago (probably). City population is just under 800,000, whereas the metro covers over 6000 square miles, envelopes 3 counties and contains a dozen or so entities that call themselves cities by their own rights. Total population: 4 million or so–roughly half the population of the state.
@Beth:
In general, Trump does not make the BBC headlines, or newspaper front pages.
His latest Greenland nonsense has made people sit up and take notice; was on the Six o’clock News this evening, about a third of the way through.
Though the main news was the Los Angeles fires, and the human tragedy of that.
Second item sterling currency wobbles; third UK cold weather; fourth the flu and UK hospital emergencies; fifth the gang related killing in London. Then Trump being an arse.
Most are still just shrugging it of as Trump being full of crap, as per usual.
@MarkedMan:
Mexico City exists cine colonial times, and probably before by another name, Tenochtitlan, under the Aztec Empire. The city limits probably go back to 1821, when the federal district was carved out off the State of Mexico.
There is no one entity that manages things both in the city and the State of Mexico, but there is close cooperation. Lots of streets begin in one political division and keep going through the other. I use one of those every day on the way to work.
Public transportation from one is limited in how far it can travel in the other. Taxis from the state can’t pick up passengers in the city, and vice versa, so they charge double for the portion out of state. Things like that. Most notably, the Mexico City subway never was extended to the metro area in the State of Mexico. I think that was a major failure.
@wr:
Sometimes, I do it because it annoys me. For product I didn’t even buy. Random shelf left abandoned for days making the store look bad. I know that retail businesses run quite lean on overhead these days, but, ffs, if you are a supermarket at least maintain the standards. Keep the shelves fronted and faced. That is fundamental.
It’s really obvious when no one is paying attention to aisle maintenance. Fronting and facing is supermarket 101.
I do several minutes of volunteer work every shopping trip. Old habits die hard.
@de stijl: When I was a kid, many of our grocery shopping trips ground to a halt as my mother tried to find my sister. In what we now recognize was related to her later diagnosed OCD tendencies, she would find items in the wrong spots, or items not facing forward, and wander off to replace/correct things. She started doing this at around 4 or 5 years old.
Only got the lost child found announcement over the intercom once that I can remember.
@de stijl:
During the trump pandemic I got to the stores early, before too many people showed up. I did run into a lot of employees stocking shelves. Every last one, with the exception of the bakery, meat counter, and deli counter, were employed by the suppliers, not by the store.
On other things, today I finalized the sale of my trusty old Corolla. Not a single breakdown in almost 14 years. It was a bit hard to see someone else drive off with it…
On other, other things, I got such good results with the chicken and white beans stew, that I’m doing a similar version with beef. To that end, I’ve got a question: should I get a dry red wine for cooking the beef, or can I use the remaining dry white one from last weekend?
@Beth:
City of Los Angeles: 3.9M people
County of Los Angeles: 9.7M people
Los Angeles Metro Area: 18.41M people. 11th Largest Economy in the World
So when Trump says he’s going to withold funds from California, Newsom should say, “Go ahead. We’ll hold back our Federal Tazes to just cover what we get back, given that we pay $5.03 in taxes for every dollar we get back from the Federal Government.. Put another way, we fund way too many red states.
So bring it, Donald. Bring it.
As for the areas currently burning:
These are the major ones. None are under control, or even close to being under control.
Palisades Fire.
Eaton Fire.
Kenneth Fire
Hurst Fire
Lidia Fire
Creek Fire
These smaller fires are out and/or under conrol.
Studio City/Fryman Canyon Fire (Sunswept Fire)
Fryman Canyon (Sunset Fire)
This site has them all in one place… https://app.watchduty.org/
Their app is great!!!
@EddieInCA:
Thank you that map helps a lot.
I would love it if Blue states could stop subsidizing red states. That would rule. I love how they all think “we’re low tax so we’re better.” Let’s turn that spigot off.
Oh, someone forgot to tip the justices.
Given he’s not getting even a slap on the wrist, such extreme measures to avoid that make him look just like what he is: a crybaby.
@EddieInCA: @Beth: I’d like an explanation of how states go about avoiding paying federal taxes. Sounds interesting.
@,just nutha: States don’t pay federal taxes. It’s just that the red states tend to be poorer and send less money per capita to Washington AND receive more money per capita from Washington. Some of that is welfare benefits but a lot of it is that’s disproportionately where our military bases are.