Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, July 30, 2024
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85 comments
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
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BlueSky.
Trump told Laura Ingraham that Melania’s reaction to the shooting means she either likes him or loves him.
@CSK: He’d say that even if they found a cancelled down payment check from her to the shooter.
Texas megachurch pastor quits over ‘inappropriate’ behavior
Translation: He’s gay, but never did anything* more than hang out in gay bars or patronize several gay porn sites. He’s admitted he has a “problem” and will undergo “appropriate” therapy to “cure” himself. So no, the poor guy isn’t coming out of the closet and may well commit suicide in the next 2 years, because you just can’t pray the gay away.
*probably isn’t true but he’s not about to admit to more.
I missed the “White Dudes for Harris” call as I had unexpected house guests for the night. Those type of things aren’t usually my bag, but I wanted to do my part to drive up the numbers. I wasn’t needed. 193,000+ attendees, $4.2 million raised. Not bad at all.
@Neil Hudelson: I don’t do Zoom calls so I was never going to participate.
@CSK: See, this is why “weird” works. That’s just a strange comment. It’s weird. Not creepy, not unhinged, not political. Just really feckin’ weird.
I’m glad to hear Trump clarified his comments about being a dictator. He stated at a rally that he’s interested in being dictator for life — not just “for one day.”
If you, reading this, ever thought “being a dictator for just 24 hours” was a thing… oh, you sweet summer child. Republicans are authoritarian, full stop — have always been, and will always be. Yes, a “daddy figure” can be one of the bad ones.
Of course Republicans want to use the power of the State to oppress&suppress. They are a minority, they aren’t interested in democracy because they know they’re going to lose any fair election [because they’re a minority], and they have always arrogated Eternal Rule to themselves.. so the only option is to mouth-breath the word democracy while doing wholly undemocratic things.
@Jen:
I know. To use one of my favorite words, it’s bizarre. She either likes him or loves him???? Weird is right. I haven’t seen any MAGA reaction to this comment. They can’t say it’s fake news, because he’s on the record saying it.
@Gavin:
Early on, when we were still in the Soviet/NATO Cold War, I realized how so many conservatives would be frothing over the mouth and say things like “You know you would never even be allowed to protest in the Soviet Union!”, but it was obvious from their tone that they thought it showed we were weak because we did allow such things. Like I said above, the louder the patriot, the more phony they are.
@CSK:
That comment is so 2015 🙂
@Kathy:
How so?
@CSK:
Both Convicted Felon and his legions of ass kissers have denied as fake news lots of things he’s said on the record and there’s video or audio of.
@Kathy:
Oh, yeah. I wonder if they think it’s AI? A deep fake?
Apropos of nothing, I hit an interesting snag yesterday with AI.
I was idly asking questions about land use and ownership in ancient Greece and Rome. What Copilot said about ancient Greece sounded rather modern. So I asked for more info specifically on land leased by the rich to poor farmers.
The reply went on and on about terms, contracts, interest rates, and the names of bureaucracies involved. This felt more like modern Greece, or just about any modern country. Sure enough, the sources were all EU sites, legal firms, and a Greek government site. But the chatbot kept couching this all as ancient Greek practice. It even concluded by saying things have changed substantially over the past 2500 years…
I’ve this very vivid picture of a kid using AI to write a paper, and handing in AI hallucinations instead. Of course, there are documented instances of just such a thing happening in court, complete with fictional cases. Nothing in my case was fictional, just off spatiotemporal phase by a few millennia.
Francine Pascal has died. So her feelings won’t be hurt when I say the following is largely bullshit:
Pascal wrote, IIRC, fewer than a dozen of the books, ghosts (like us) wrote the rest. All of the younger spin-off was ghost-written – she never wrote a word. (Her first ghost was Ann Martin who went on the create the much better Babysitter’s Club.) Also her series bible was crap, and indeed such crap, it pushed us to get serious about creating our own hyper-detailed series bibles. Her outlines were a joke, and one of the reasons we ended up doing 17 books in the series was that after the first book we largely ignored her outlines. And eventually the packager stopped bothering and would just ask for, ‘a scary one,’ or, ‘a Christmas one.’
That said, we learned our job, and developed speed and discipline doing Sweet Valleys. And learned a valuable technique for ignoring the fresh-outta-college editors. Built confidence as well because even when we were starting out we were better at plot than Pascal or the packager’s minions.
@Neil Hudelson: My wife and I watched most of it (it went past 10:00 and we need our beauty sleep…well, I do, anyway lol). It was pretty good, lots of notable guests (starting out with “The Dude” himself, Jeff Bridges, was cool). Tim Walz made a pretty good case to be the VP without even mentioning it, just by being himself.
@OzarkHillbilly: It wasn’t actually a Zoom call, it streamed on YouTube. It might still be available for viewing, I haven’t checked. If you do find it, keep in mind it ran over two hours, but you could fast-forward as necessary.
@Jen: Re weird, Thomas Friedman has a column at NYT decrying Ds exploiting weird rather than being pure and running solely on policy. That’s probably not a gift link, they offer only one link option. But that’s OK because it’s not worth reading. They also don’t allow comments. From their, and Friedman’s, point of view, probably wise. One would think anyone who’s been writing on politics as long as Friedman would realize policy is only a small part of what people actually vote on.
@gVOR10: A lesser entry in the Republicans are weird genre:
https://x.com/briantylercohen/status/1818316036871246096
I think the artwork is really well done, compared to the usual level of Trump Fan Art, but the subject is bizarre. Maybe it’s Easter related.
@Jen: The other thing that is powerful about the “weird” line of attack is it is largely non-emotional. It’s not susceptible to the “OH YOU’RE SO EASILY TRIGGERED BECAUSE YOU’RE WEAK!” counter nonsense the right loves to trot out. There is an inherent dismissiveness to it… like “What’s wrong with you? Whatever… doesn’t bother me… you’re just… weird… that’s all.”
The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Calling someone weird doesn’t communicate hate or anger or upset… just a negative indifference. That’s why it’s so cutting.
@gVOR10:
Not to mention that people can do more than one thing at a time, and certainly over the three or so months of campaign. Or that multiple lines of attack, as long as they don’t contradict each other, can be more effective than a single one.
IMO, pundits who have the one right brilliant idea, be it to win an election or fix the deficit or solve a major an recalcitrant crisis, should perhaps write a novel about it.
Watched a bit of he congressional inquiry relative to the SS and the assassination attempt. What caught my attention was that golf range finders may be henceforth prohibited. What the speakers don’t seem to realize is that many (higher end) digital cameras have range finding capabilities. What??? So maybe cameras will have to be prohibited.
(I sincerely wish that our congress critters would be more informed before shooting off their mouth.)
@gVOR10: I read that piece by Friedman, and I disagree (edited to clarify, I disagree with Friedman).
Campaigning is about a lot of things, policy is one of them. But so is strategically understanding your opponent. Trump doesn’t like to be laughed at or mocked–let’s remember that a large reason he ran in 2016 was because Obama made fun of him at the press dinner. Mocking Trump is strategic. If it’s done correctly and well (I’d recommend backing off of the “weird” now, and then start using it again in a couple of weeks), it will get under Trump’s skin.
That, along with headlines about how much money is being raised, is absolutely effective campaigning.
@Kathy:
It’s only interesting until you accept that AI is just another silicon valley scam. AI helps zero with actual research — because you know more about your specific details than any AI ever will. AI is basically an order of magnitude more energy intensive than just doing a search or pulling out the calculator sitting in your pocket — or the TI-84 app on your phone — for basic math. AI cannot write a paper requiring any degree of specificity… because AI is not actually intelligent, and will continually disappoint.
All AI is analogous to amazon’s “AI whole foods stores” which were actually indian workers on a closed-circuit camera manually inputting the items picked. The work of manually training any and every bot are underpaid day laborers in a foreign country.. and thus “an AI” is simply an attempt to undercut US labor.
I recommend the podcast “Tech Will Not Save Us” if anyone is interested in more.
@Kazzy:
I think it’s also freaking them out because they (MAGA, Republicans, Conservatives in general) have made their whole being about being the “Normal ones”. Trans people are weird, Gay people are weird, Furries weird, anyone that’s not them is weird. Now they are getting their faces shoved in just how forking weird they are. Like, absolutely gonzo weird. My partner showed me a picture of a bunch of diaper wearing MAGAs. Not because they had an issue that required them, just because they’ve decided that Trump does and that’s how they support them.
Could you imagine just how freaking insane they would have gone if a bunch of lefties wore diapers for Obama?
So I was at LGM before I came here and ran across this:
I though LBJ was like 70-80ish when he dropped out. He certainly looked like it. This is absolutely blowing my mind today.
@OzarkHillbilly: Still, it does show that Laura does her show live and unedited. No producer would have left that inane of a comment in an interview.
@Gavin:
I’d need a much lower opinion of human intelligence to believe actual people are behind some of the whopers Copilot and others have come up with.
I find it useful for search because it summarizes various sources. What’s important is to follow up the sources and see what they actually say.
@Beth:
I see others wearing nappies, or bandaging their ears, as mocking rather than supportive.
There’s an urban legend regarding King Christian X of Denmark. It claims that after the nazis invaded and ordered that Jews wear a yellow Star of David to distinguish them, that the King wore one, and so did the rest of the population. That would have been supportive, had it happened.
Truth is the good king refused to cooperate in rounding up his Jewish subjects, and instead managed to help the effort to transport them to neutral Sweden for the duration. An endeavor that involved many other Danes, including Niels Bohr.
@CSK: That won’t stop them if they decide it’s a problem. They’ve done “who ya gonna believe, me or some deep fake videotape?” before.
LBJ was a 60-cigarettes-a-day smoker for the majority of his adult life while Kamala does some combination of running / swimming / walking every day.
LBJ suffered his first heart attack at age 46, had another heart attack the day Kennedy was assassinated, and when he died he was determined to have also needed bypass surgery on 2 coronary arteries – and would have assuredly died on the table if that was attempted.
Kamala takes care of herself.. In LBJ’s own words regarding going back to smoking after seeing Nixon sworn in, “Now it’s my time!” I’ll never understand why people choose to die young when lifting&running is both fun and healthy, but he did.
@Beth:
Yeah, Johnson was 64 when he died. Young by today’s standards. Even by then standards.
@just nutha:
They’ll just ignore it if it doesn’t comport with their image of Trump.
@Gustopher: totally unrelated, but have you seen the Cthulhu/Kincade art mashups? They’re a hoot.
(Now of course with AI, I suspect that these are even easier to generate)
@Michael Reynolds: Wow! I’d have never even realized any of this–or cared–without you. I passingly remember Sweet Valley from middle school teaching about 30 years ago and vaguely recall a Sweet Valley High ad campaign. 100% of all I’ve ever known or cared to know.
Was that post about you being insecure about how you’ll be remembered or were you just overtaken by your arrogance?
@gVOR10: Wait… Friedman writes things worth reading? [mind blown emoji]
@Gustopher: What’s that picture an allusion to? I haven’t the slightest idea.
@Gavin:
I’ll never understand why anyone thinks running or lifting are fun.
Particularly lifting. It seems like hard work to no effect. Those weights are coming right back down. At least with running you get to see the neighborhood, and can stop off for a coffee and donut.
I will acknowledge that I would be healthier if I was under the delusion that it was fun.
@just nutha: I also have no idea. For the moment, I like it for the sheer absurdity of it.
If there was some meaningful context, it would only diminish it. If someone explains that “hugging a rabbit” in German is a pun for some Nazi thing, I will not like it as much.
@Mikey: Thanx but I think I can skip it altogether. 2 hours of politicians bloviating would probably be enough for me to commit ritual seppuku, even if I agreed with them 90-95% of the time.
@Gavin: Back in the 50s and 60s not living to 70 wasn’t all that uncommon. Medicare was an absolute game changer in geriatric health.
Please do me a favor and take a couple minutes to read this article about youth trans care in Finland. They are absolutely torturing those kids and that’s what Republicans want to do here.
You can’t make cis kids trans. You can’t make trans kids cis. But you can torture the fuck out of us to make yourselves comfortable. That’s what’s going on in Finland and Florida.
ETA: Link is a few comments down. Sorry.
@Kazzy: I think weird works well as an insult. On the other hand, it seems like the “Vance fucked a couch” comments are dying down, and I for one am glad. I hated that line of attack. Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog did too, and wrote a post about it. He wrote that even if true, teens masturbate, often in creative ways, and we need to stay out of people’s sex lives just like we want Republicans to do. He added that the jokes make him think that a lot of Democrats would make sexual comments similar to the ones Republicans are saying about Harris had Trump chosen Kristi Noem to be his VP, and he doesn’t want us to be that kind of party.
@CSK: When you have a Trump, it can always be bizarre. To lift a phrase, it’s like there’s a horse loose in the hospital. This was so prescient:
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=horse+in+the+hospital&mid=AD423AB874E64F8F45F0AD423AB874E64F8F45F0&FORM=VIRE
@Gustopher: Yeah, I did plenty of both in my 35 year construction career, took the shine off it pretty quick.
Paging Dr. DaveT…You were wondering if Mark Kelly is a good pick. Here’s Timothy Noah’s take. TL/DR: Bad idea.
@Beth: do you have a link?
@just nutha:
Remembered? Not that, the other thing.
@Monala:
That would help wouldn’t it.
https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/transgender-youth-speak-about-finland-transpoli
It really hurt reading that and I’m still kinda shaken.
@Mikey: @OzarkHillbilly: I gave the non-melanin dudes $50 and quit watching soon after Jeff Bridges, it reminded me of the old local PBS fundraisers and Jerry Lewis’s Labor Day marathon, especially the chyron running on the bottom
@Mr. Prosser: I gave Kamala a 50 spot the morning after Joe stepped aside. Plan to do 25 a month until the election. I wish I could do more but it tis what it tis.
@Monala: The couch thing is funny because it is so patently untrue — there is no way he could have put that in the book and not have that passage come up thousands of times before now. (He may have formed an illicit congress with a couch, I don’t know, but the publishing it in his best-selling book is clearly untrue)
It has more in common with saying “Santorum is a frothy mixture of…” than any sexualized attack on a woman candidate. JD Vance The Sofa King is gleefully false with no one taking it seriously and no one would really care if it was true. The sexualized attacks on woman candidates are rooted in a belief that this is how women really behave and that this is what defines them.
And that may say worlds about how men and women candidates are treated differently.
Also, Kristi Noem would far more likely be attacked for taking the family puppy to a gravel pit and shooting it to death, then deciding the killing wasn’t done and getting a goat.
@Monala: No, no, no. We have to hit Trump with exactly the same types of attacks that he uses. It’s a race to the bottom, we won’t win unless we’re worse than Trump. Fwk that “they go low, we go high” sh!t.
One of the more angering parts of being queer is being aware that most of your “allies” don’t actually accept you; they accommodate you and even that is purely conditional on how useful they consider you.
I say this as a prelude to pointing that the problem with JD Vance isn’t that he’s weird, it’s that he’s a nazi.
Weird is good. Indeed, I’m generally suspicious of people who are too normal, either because it suggests they’re misrepresenting themselves, or worse they’re untested, brittle metal that’s likely to shatter the first time they experience being The Other.
So go ahead and make fun of Vance for wearing eyeliner. But just be aware you’re also telling all your queer eyeliner wearing acquaintances what you really think of them.
@OzarkHillbilly: I make my monthlies to agencies dealing with homelessness but acknowledge that someone has to give to politicians.
@Stormy Dragon:
It’s a valid concern, but thankfully most queer people understand that when JD Vance is made fun of for wearing eyeliner, he’s not being made fun of for wearing eyeliner. He’s being made fun of for being the type of guy who makes fun of queer men for wearing eyeliner while wearing eyeliner himself.
No liberal actually cares that JD Vance wears eyeliner and bangs couches. They care that he’s a phony — like other creepy rightwing hypocrites who’ve set themselves up as the gatekeepers of normalcy, smearing gays and policing women’s private lives. Turnabout is poetic justice.
Yes, there are queer people who are humorless, pedantic, and (understandably) defensive — way too serious to be anything but wrapped up in themselves 100% of the time. But most queer people do not need to make everything about us. An attack on JD Vance is about JD Vance, not about us.
Most queer people are not made of glass. We are fully capable of understanding nuance and subtlety. There’s no need to infantilize us by pretending queer people can’t tell the difference between good weird and creepy weird.
@Gustopher:
Lol, before clicking on the link, having read your “Easter related” I thought “Hmm. Trump as the Easter Bunny?”
Well, almost right.
Good job I wasn’t drinking when I clicked through.
Talk about “down the rabbit hole”. LMAO.
@Gustopher:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Seeing as LBJ has appeared earlier in todays forum, the infamous, and possibly apocryphal Johnson anecdote spring to mind:
On which topic, David Cameron never did entirely live down the Lord Ashcroft’s rather malicious “tale of the pigs head.”
*snigger*
@Stormy Dragon: I initially had the same thought, but there’s good weird and bad weird.
There’s a bit of “Libs Of TikTok” energy to it, but directed at terrible people. It neuters the argument that the pink haired art teacher in Minnesota is weird, by showing what bad weird really is.
I’m queer. I know that straight support for queer rights is as much of a political badge or virtue signaling as an honest belief that our rights are meaningful enough to be fought for. But pointing out that JD Vance puts on eyeliner before going out to complain about traditional gender roles being undermined isn’t harming the straight lefty virtue signaling that makes my rights a priority (it’s not a high priority, but it is a priority).
Meanwhile, a tall, lanky boy comfortable in his ambiguous sexuality putting on what he calls “guyliner” is good weird. And hot.
Of course, I’m also often mistaken for straight unless I go out of my way to let people know, so my experience may be different than yours. Also, I am an antisocial person who generally does not want to be perceived, so I have to go against my nature to go out of my way to let people know…
(I am also six and a half feet tall, so my desire to not be perceived is an absolutely futile effort)
Yesterday in the Gender Wars thread there was a good discussion of economic concerns underlying the dissatisfaction in the world, specifically the loss of good “blue collar” jobs., started, I think, by Kurtz . I’ll add to that discussion that in the 80s I twice bailed out of companies just before they went under because of Reagan/Volker and Japanese competition. The second company had third generation employees. I wanted to talk about Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia, but it was getting late in the day and I didn’t have the time to put together any kind of fair synopsis. Utopia is a long (his editor made him cut it to 600 pages) but very readable economic history of what he calls “the long 20th century”. The era of rapid economic growth from roughly 1870 to 2010,
Serendipity. Later in the evening I read DeLong’s substack (free trial subscription required) and found he’d written exactly what I wanted. He structures the book around the contrast between Fredrich Hayek, who everybody (OK most people reading OTB) knows about, and an obscure Austro-Hungarian economic historian and philosopher, Karl Polanyi.
Which is reflected in capital v labor or Republicans, who pay lip service to Polanyi’s view, v Democrats, who also service capital, but make some effort toward a better, more equitable, society.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I give $20-40 directly to the homeless around here every month, as much because there is precious little help for them around here as any other reason. Most of them are just passing thru anyway. (tho I have heard of an encampment in the Nat Forest)
@Beth:
Reading conservative sources, especially comments, it strikes me their real problem is that they think they epitomize mainstream American culture and they’re outraged by being reminded now and again that they don’t. It’s culture, not politics, but they have no idea how to respond except politics, so they insist Demoncrats did it. It’s a doomed rear guard action. But they can do a lot of damage.
@DK:
@Gustopher:
My experience is more in line with what @Stormy Dragon: was talking about. I’m quite used to cis hets making fun of someone famous for their perceived gender incongruity* and then turning to me and going “but not you and your full face of makeup, you’re one of the good ones.” Good one, no motherfucker, I am a nighttime demon thank you.
For example, I’m generally uncomfortable with most jokes related to Trump’s makeup use. I’d say about 1/3 of the jokes aren’t about quality, quantity, skill or style; they are making fun of a man because he’s being a woman wearing makeup. “HAHAHAH MAN WEAR MAKEUP LIKE WOMAN, yuk yuk yuk.” Then I get to relive the terror of the first time I bought makeup from Walgreens and hid that giant pack of cheap makeup like it was stolen dragon gold.
The other aspect of this is making fun of cis people for needing to take steps to affirm their own gender allows cis people to think that they live free and clear of gender. Trump obviously things that to be manly he needs to be tall and stand up straight and be imposing and look healthy. That’s what he thinks men do and he’s a man so he’s going to get there one way or another. I’m on a board that helps a hospital with it’s gender program. I was in a meeting where their was one cis man and I asked him why the data wasn’t presented to cis people like it was presented to trans people. I pointed out that cis people have a gender too. You would have thought I called the guy a racial slur (he was white). He got BIG MAD and he even called himself an ally. But make him think of his own gender and gender presentation and he flipped out.
Another greatest hit is to have a friend tell me how strong and beautiful I am and then have them turn around and make fun of some trans person for looking too manish. Or tell me all that and then say they hope their kids don’t turn out like me.
Or how’s about “no fats, no femmes, no asians”. Conform to a very specific ideal of masculine queerness or be mocked and excluded.
I’m at the point in my transition where I’m leaning in to liberation. I got two beautifully manicured acrylic nails (chromed out watermelons) in the air for anyone who comes at me. But the cost of my liberation has been enormous and no one should have to pay that cost. I’m going to go out and mow my backyard in a bikini, cause I can and because fuckem.
P.S. @Gustopher:
I was telling some friends that I wish I was taller. I wanna be like 6’8″ and have a body like Charli XCX in her latest Boiler Room. I wanna be a giant and hot and terrify everyone that perceives me. I want to be a giant shiny rainbow colored half naked nightmare. A girl can dream.
The Boiler Room in question if anyone is interested, it’s amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3gcbYL2VMg
*not that said famous person is actually gender diverse, just the perception of a gender incongruity.
@gVOR10: I’m curious, does (free trial subscription required) refer to DeLong insisting that people read it for free for some fixed period before subscribing or that you advocate taking a trial subscription regardless of whether one intends to subscribe or something else altogether?
@OzarkHillbilly: My apologies. I wasn’t intending to criticize people giving to politicians, merely noting that grassroots efforts to solve intractable problems need money as much as politicians do. The amount of money we spend on a periodic basis to sway a handful of low-interest voters is breathtaking to me. And year on year, the cost grows. Sometimes exponentially. Indeed, we are caught between a rock and a hard place.
@Beth: I saw a lot of what you are talking about while I lived in Korea, where significant numbers of young men wore make up and many boy band members go for an androgynous look to this day. It finally got to the point that the foreign administration of the college I taught at simply said (to the male faculty mostly, I must admit) “you are not to comment on the physical appearance of male students at all in any way.”
Early on, I taught myself not to notice these types of details at all, but I understand the importance of not being rude when one is a guest in someone else’s country in ways my peers may not have been familiar with. (And I’m on the Autism spectrum, though apparently not deeply.)
@Michael Reynolds:
I wonder how much James Patterson writes of all those books which he has a co-author.
On a un-related note, Michael, that one book of mine is still going nutty at Japan. Yesterday it was ranked #2 in a category between a Harry novel and one written by Alice Hoffman. Hoffman is YA writer like yourself, do you know her?
@Gavin:
Dr Michael Debakey, renowned heart surgeon, worked out of Houston. If LBJ had gone to him, the outcome wouldn’t necessarily been negative.
In the fall of 1978, when I was a senior in HS, it was learned my father needed bypass surgery. Dad had it done by Debakey and my father lived till 1997.
@OzarkHillbilly:
OH,
Don’t you mean Zelle transfer? Who writes checks today…..
@Beth:
I couldn’t get through it. It sounds more like denial of care place than a proper clinic. The game seems to be not just to deny care, but to hold on to patients past any reasonable point in order to keep denying them care.
It might even be better to ban gender care for minors entirely. That way, a family may chose to move elsewhere to get their children the care they need. And definitely adults wouldn’t be trapped in the denial game at all.
@Beth:
This is on dating/hookup profiles, right? Not terms of service for a restaurant or anything.
If someone wants to out themselves as a racist, fatphobic, homophobic judgmental shithead, I say go for it. Saves a lot of people a lot of trouble with dealing with him.
When shitheads self-segregate, everyone wins.
I’m firmly in the “with all of his money, why does he accept looking like a clown?” camp. But you’re absolutely right that a large chunk of the comments do cross into the “he is unmanly” territory.
Maybe I’m more in the “who does he think he’s fooling?” camp. If it ever came up that he knew he looked like a clown with his terrible combover and weird orange face, but he did it anyway because he liked the power of making people lie and pretend it looked good… I might be on board with that.
If we were a society that accepted fat, pasty, balding men more, think about how liberated Trump would be! (And with that, I think I just endorsed Tim Walz for VP)
I have a low opinion of straight people in general. I’m more interested in their direct actions against my community than I am in their unevolved beliefs. I’m not here to save the world, I just want to live my life and have equal rights. If they need a little homophobia on the side, whatever. (I draw a distinction between homophobia and bigotry — homophobes make little jokes, bigots try to hurt people either through legal channels or illegal channels)
I’m fully aware that my passing-privilege/tragic-lack-of-swish makes that a lot easier of a belief system though.
Basically, I agree with you, but just don’t think straight people can get much better.
People in general struggle with things that are outside their direct experience. On a scale of goodness from 1-10, people top out at about a 7. An 8 on a good day, but usually a solid C-. Mother Theresa was about a 2, maybe a 3.
Is there some long German word for someone who genuinely thinks the best of people but doesn’t think that best is particularly high and is sort of resigned to it? Because that’s me.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Substack policy as I understand it.
However , if asked, I highly recommend both his book and his Substack.
Paul Dans, head of the Project 25 at Heritage steps down.
When you begin press conferences with, essentially: “We’re not authoritarians, we’re nice!” and end them with “This will not end well for you” it’s gonna get a bit sticky.
@Gustopher:
Weltschmerz
Which of course pivots into a favorite quote of mine:
— Goethe
Although it applies to humanity in general, not just the Germans…
@Just nutha ignint cracker: This reminds me of a discussion on another forum about the Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and its star, Simu Liu. It was very interesting how many Asian folks in the discussion were angry because of Marvel “not casting a hot guy” as the lead in the first Asian-led Marvel movie. The non-Asians in the discussion were confused, both because most of us consider Simu Liu to be hot, and because many of the non-Asian Marvel leads are attractive but not drop-dead gorgeous (e.g., Robert Downey Jr, Benjamin Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo). Several of the Asian commenters responded by sharing photos of actors considered hot in East Asian countries—and every single one of them had that androgynous, boy band appearance. When pressed about why hotness is limited to that look, one person responded that it goes back to the era of Mongol conquests. Since tough, masculine looks were associated with the Mongols, the preferred appearance in the countries they conquered became the opposite. I have no idea how valid this theory is.
@CSK:
That certainly didn’t stop them with respect to the Zelensky call…
@Kathy:
You are absolutely correct, the whole point of that clinic is to deny care and try and torture people out of being trans. It’s torture period. The prevailing model in the US, UK, and much of the rest of the world was to determine that trans people were freaks and to torture us until we “stopped”. Drs and the government used to do the exact same thing here in the US. But yet we persisted.
It’s really only been in the last 20 odd years that things started to change in the US and barely in the UK. And that took massive work by trans people to get as far as we have.
@Monala:
That’s an interesting idea. I have a similar one about the Russians and their response to their Mongol invasions. Basically that a huge chunk of Russian culture is one massive generational trauma response to the Mongols.
Things are about to get even worse in Venezuela, hard as it may be to believe.
I think it’s very likely Maduro lost the election. In part because a lot of people in Chavista strongholds claim to have voted for the opposition. And because the whole thing looks as fraudulent as the elections the PRI used to run. Minimal oversight, intimidation, a mess of polling places, etc.
The army seems to still be backing Maduro. If so, no amount of protests will change anything. But it may lead to violent repression.
Speaking of the PRI, I’m amazed in retrospect the jig lasted as long as it did. It was a peculiar one party state, one with a peaceful transfer of power every term, and relatively little in the way of social unrest. Had they been able to handle the economy better in the late 70s and 80s, and had two presidents not gotten too greedy in their corruption (they know who they are), they’d still hold power today.
@Monala: Don’t know either, but I can see how it might fit with a country where people describe their history as 5000 years of protecting themselves from being overrun.
@Bill Jempty:
I do not. TBH I always avoid entanglement with colleagues.
For the record, I don’t make fun of Trump because he wears women’s makeup. I never even thought about it being women’s makeup, honestly. I judge him because it’s orange in tone. As a woman who rarely wears makeup but is often deeply tanned in my face area from being outside so much, even I do a better job of matching my skin tone than he does.
Deadline reports that Kamala publicly called out Trump for going wobbly on agreeing to debate her in September. She has that youthful vigor going for her while Trump…well, he does not.
The GOP needs to get their shit together, and their guy doubling down on declaring he will be a dictator from day one is not helping matters.
Even Trump’s base is probably quietly admitting to themselves that turning America into Hungary or Russia 2.0 is not what the majority of Americans want to see happen. Jack and JKB seem to be whistling past the graveyard by not acknowledging this fact.
There is still time for the GOP to sell an optimistic vision of the future with them in charge, but for God’s sake, they need to stop trying to run the same playbook against Kamala declaring her to be even worse a candidate than Biden, lol.
Move on GOP, I am seeing enough stories and news online that America seems to be preparing themselves for a future where Kamala is our next President.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: At this point, “weak on labor” is not nearly enough to counterbalance “appeals to manly men and jingoists in the fascist camp”. Once we’ve won the election, we can debate the subtleties of right-to-work and related issues.
@Bill Jempty: “I wonder how much James Patterson writes of all those books which he has a co-author.”
Almost as little as the “co-author.”
When the people involved are honest, you can generally find the name of the real author somewhere in the book, if only in the acknowledgments. Don’t know if Patterson plays that way…
@Michael Reynolds: Not sure if you’re being facetious considering your collaboration with your wife!
The Alice Hoffman author I’m aware of isn’t specifically *just* a YA author…she’s the one who wrote Practical Magic, which was made into a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock (and a bunch of other books that branch off of those characters). She’s also written a number of critically acclaimed novels, like The Dovekeepers, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and A Marriage of Opposites.
@Jax: This is pretty much my issue. I don’t understand that with all of this man’s wealth and television experience, he cannot find someone who is better at hair and makeup. It’s the extreme vanity and poor execution, combined with his obnoxious criticism of other people’s looks, that irritates me.