Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, December 4, 2025
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29 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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I am not au courant. I am not in the know. So, a phenomenon I just became aware of has been noticed by people more up to date than me: it seems GenZ has stopped posting to social media. One of the theories is that this is a recognition (finally) that it’s all rather pointless and narcissistic. Another is that social media is infested by bots and no one likes bots.
Something I have noticed is human push-back on YouTube. More and more content creators are showing their faces in thumbnails and in the video itself. I routinely hit ‘do not recommend’ when I come across AI sites.
Advantage homo sapiens.
I’ll be interested to see whether AI porn succeeds. (Not that I have any, ahem. . .) I predict it will not. And I think we might want to think about a day when AI does achieve consciousness, and what its opinion might be of the uses we’ve put it to. It will have the receipts.
Despite not being in-the-know about anything trendy, I am pleased with myself for recognizing the hollowness of the social media game and erasing my presence from Facebook and Twitter. It all just smelled of bullshit to me. So at least my b.s. detector still works.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think Kash Patel looks like a deer caught in the headlights in every single photo?
Kash Patel is, like Kristi Noem, a costume aficionado. He not only wears the FBI emblazoned windbreaker when cameras are present, he has a badge ostentatiously clipped to his belt. When did anyone EVER see Chris Wray or James Comey wearing a badge? Seems Patel feels the need to remind everyone – including himself – that’s he’s the Bureau’s top dog. That said, I saw a clip of Laura Ingraham’s pained look as a Fox reporter detailed how when Patel arrived at the Charlie Kirk memorial, he refused to come off the FBI jet until someone got him an FBI windbreaker to wear. When the jacket was obtained, he complained that certain velcro arm patches were missing, and he demanded they be located and attached to the jacket before he would leave the plane. Icing the cake – it was a female agent who lent her jacket to Patel so he could cosplay at the memorial. Nothing finishes the “deer in the headlights” look like FBI swag.
This just makes me effing depressed.
War Department Welcomes New Pentagon Press Corps
This is not news. It is propaganda.
This NYT article about Speaker Johnson contains some real humdingers.
LOL. Really, Nancy? Okay….
Gosh, ladies…you mean you put into a position of power someone who hid his Biblical-driven views, and you are now surprised? Or did you KNOW THIS ABOUT HIM AND CHOOSE HIM ANYWAY?
Oh. There it is. You knew. Okay then.
JFC.
@Scott: One of the new members of the Pentagon “press pool” is rightwing gadfly and Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer. Her report on the IG assessment that Hegseth revealed classified info and endangered the Houthi mission and its personnel in the course of his Signal chatting was blunt and to the point: The report completely exonerated Pete Hegseth. There ya have it – War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Slavery is Freedom….
Every morning while I walk the dogs I listen to NPR Upfirst and the NYT The Daily. I don’t know if it is my imagination but the good folks at NPR seem to be a lot sharper in their language reporting the news. Is it because they know they are losing funding and don’t have to soften their news coverage anymore?
Donald Trump to pardon Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar
The corruption of our politics continues. I don’t give a crap if he is a Democrat.
The government has apparently made an arrest in connection with the Jan. 6 pipe bomb case.
Good lord. This is a US citizen.
https://bsky.app/profile/premthakker.bsky.social/post/3m73xre6vuc24
Yesterday it looked like I’d be staying really late, as the managers started reviewing the economic proposal around 5 pm. Remarkably it went relatively fast. I was able to correct it and to derive the technical proposal from it by around 8 pm.
The manager in charge told me they should be done by 10 pm, if that late. I left around 9:30 (I had other things to do).
Today I noticed the email from the government purchases platform acknowledging receipt of our proposal, at 23:57…
I don’t know if it always costs more, but it definitely always takes longer.
On other things, I want to make small breaded chicken pieces to mix with a creamy pasta. Usually I make milanesas and cut them up before mixing. This time I want to get flattened chicken breast strips, and cut them before breading and air frying. I really liked how the stuffed milanesas came off the air fryer a couple of weeks ago.
I’m not sure about the sauce. I think cooked chopped mushrooms, garlic, and onions, with some cream, then blended to a smoother consistency.
@Jen:
That gave the shivers.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m with you as regards Facebook and X. The reasoning for me is different. The first swing at FB had them sending me messages of “X wants to be your friend (Yes/No)?” Maybe the “no” was “No I don’t want to be friends”?
That just struck me as so damn manipulative. I wanted no part of it. I felt that they had to pay for things by selling advertisements, which would be wedged in between messages from relatives and old friends. Yuck. I didn’t even know then about The Algorithm, which might decide that I didn’t have to see messages from my wife. What could go wrong with that?
Meanwhile, I participate here. I read several subreddits and post in a few. I have a Discord server and post on few others. These are also “social media” and Gen Z uses them a lot. I assure you.
The difference is that they are fragmented. It is not a thing where everybody is in one giant pot all talking to each other at the same time. This does not work well.
Instead, we have smaller groups, each of which has its own set of behavior standards, and a person/persons who is empowered to enforce it.
I think this is what works and what lies in our future. FB is a behemoth, and they take a long time to die. Perhaps they will shift around and adapt to this, or perhaps they will resist it. I don’t know.
@Kathy: Patel looks like he suddenly realized he didn’t just fart.
It’s common to say that what some rightist has said or done isn’t “conservative”. I often reply that the dictionary definition doesn’t work in politics. I usually say that in our two-party system for all practical purposes conservative = Republican. Over at LGM Paul Campos looks at this and concludes that the entire spectrum of anti-Trump, from Bill Kristol to AOC, are “in a sense now a conservative, because what all these people are trying to conserve is the liberal democratic political order, which is under attack by radical revolutionaries”.
Being a law prof he goes on to say,
The Trump DOJ would strongly disagree.
@CSK:..
I stumbled on this video on FB and thought of you.
This was made a few years ago.
A recent BBC item states that she is 14 in 2025.
Be well.
The DoD seemed very proud to declassify the first missle attack of the smuggler’s boat.
Let’s see if they are equally proud to declassify the second missle strike.
BTW, I have no problem with accepting that (most) these boats are transporting drugs that many Americans demand. I have more of an issue with the extrapolation that they (smugglers) are killers. Sadly drug users, like my beloved and late nephew) are responsible for being both the killer and the victim.
The other day I ran across a Reese Witherspoon movie that seems to have spawned a large number of Hallmark movies similars. It was Sweet Home Alabama that showed a highly successful big city woman returning to her small town family home to discover that the flannel shirt wearing first love still lights her fire, and she forsakes the big city to return to her roots and the down to earth stud that rings her bells like no effete urbanite ever could. I have lived this scenario in real life. I’m a overly sophisticated professional guy with a good career. My wife is a very pretty thing who I remember making jaws drop in the Oak Room at the Plaza when she returned from a shopping expedition and sat down next to me in my booth. We went to her hometown one Christmas and went into the local diner where several guys from her high school class were ensconced. She returned their greetings with genuine warmth, but I soon realized that I had no concerns. They were bigger than me especially in the waistline. Hanging around in a small town drinking eight to ten beers a day diminishes your studliness by the time you’re 28 years old. Establishing a upward career, going running, and drinking wines from St. Estephe gives you a glow by age 28 that women recognize from far away. Hallmark should make movies showing the smug elitist urban guy getting the girl; it would be aspirational for geeky high school boys with good SAT scores.
@Slugger: Those movies are always a bit twee. The only real bullet she dodged in that film was being the Candace Bergen character’s daughter in law…as a MIL, she seemed like she would be a handful. 😉
There’s a whole meme culture that springs up around this time of year “warning” city boyfriends/fiances about trips home to the country… 😀
@Jen: I actually enjoyed that movie. We have a family meme about the line “ a baby!? In a bar!?”
@becca: Oh, don’t get me wrong, I liked that one too. I like most of Witherspoon’s stuff, from Election to Legally Blond to Walk the Line.
For me, films like Sweet Home Alabama allow me to do other things while I am watching them because, um, it’s not hard to keep up with the plot! (And, yeah, the scene in Tiffany’s was fun…!)
Trump has apparently hired a new architect for that hideous ballroom, having either fired or driven the first one to quit.
A quick note that one of the squabbles the two of them got into was that Trump wants the ballroom to be so massive that it will dwarf the existing White House.
@Jen: I am reminded of some historians comment about Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. Speer took over from an older, well established architect. The historian said that the older guy and Hitler might discuss a wing on a proposed building and Hitler would say something like the wing should be a hundred meters long. The old guy would say that for various aesthetic and practical reasons it should be ninety-five meters. In the same circumstances Speer would respond, “No, Mein Fuhrer, a hundred and ten!!”
@Jen:
You can get a sense of El Taco’s tiny ego and massive inferiority complex. He lives now in an 18th century palace, and it’s not grand enough for him.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Thank you for posting. She’s a powerhouse, isn’t she.
@Jen:
That’s not all. According to The New Republic, he wants to rename the Kennedy Center after himself.
I think this means the Fixer court has killed the Voting Rights Act.
@Kathy: From your link,
No matter how many Texans vote D.
This is consistent with Roberts’ Originalist enforcement of the secret codicil in the Constitution that says racism ended when GOPs passed the Civil Rights Act.
@gVOR10:
I wonder how they will fix it to Texas can do whatever it wants, but California cannot.