Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, January 28, 2025
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64 comments
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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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No one:
JB32 reading a 19th century slang dictionary at 3am:
‘Strumpet: a whore, used throughout the century.’
They knew all along—
Jan. 6 defendant accused of soliciting minor released despite Harris County request for hold
Someday the real world will return to our consciousness.
Sweden seizes vessel suspected of ‘sabotage’ after undersea data cable rupture in Baltic Sea
It seems as though the Chinese are on the edge of kicking our butt technologically.
I view this as the result of several decades of favoring financial engineering over real engineering.
Trump:
Just to state the obvious, this has no connection with the actual world. Trump has disconnected completely from reality
@MarkedMan: it doesn’t matter. The media organs will quote these ramblings with nary any pushback (if any at all); magas will drop the thesis of the statement to their low information friends and relatives repeatedly until it becomes, in short order, conventional wisdom.
@Thomm: The US came in on a Mad King, and it looks like we may be going out with one
@MarkedMan:
Some clown in the Washington Post opinion section wrote this yesterday:
Carryover from yesterday
@DrDaveT: This is the recipe I use for piroshki’s. The bread itself is pretty amazing, I’ve made cinnamon rolls with it, as well.
https://natashaskitchen.com/baked-piroshki-recipe-2-filling-options-sweet-or-savory/
@charontwo:
You need to consider the source, Bezo’s WaPo, where the journalists have left the building.
Jax- Thanks! I like doing filled brads and pastries. I made about 100 rugelach for our church business meeting on Sunday and they all disappeared quickly, except for one. No one ever wants to eat the last one. How long do these keep? These soft, enriched breads seem, to me, really should be eaten the first day or two.
Steve
@steve: I know the ones my Polish grandmother made took to freezing well, either baked or unbaked.
“Dan Nexon on Bluesky”
I tried the hyped Chinese generative AI tool, briefly. I couldn’t think of anything specific to test it with, so I just asked random questions. It answered in pretty much the same way and with the same kind of info I’ve come to expect from Copilot or Gemini or others, it took about the same time to do so.
this doesn’t let you know whether it uses less computing power and energy than the rest. I assume it does, otherwise various techbros would be $1 collective trillion richer than they are today.
Spectacle became our form of public discourse. Taking a cue from the American advertising industry — selling the sizzle not the steak.
From an email from Bernie Sanders:
Bernie’s right, and he’s right at the right time.
@MarkedMan: Even Fox News is treating his claim with skepticism. Everything about his claim is absurd, and the appropriate reaction is relentless ridicule.
@Scott: This has been out for two days, yet no troll has come around chastising us for not caring “when SF, LA, or Portland” does the same thing through illegal sanctuary programs.
Falling down on the job, trolls. Be Best!
@Jax:
Thanks.
The controversy over names reminds me of the Jinnan Tonyx bit in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
@steve: I usually make a double batch of them, and freeze half. They hold up well for freezing. Super easy for a quick lunch! The ones I don’t freeze are usually eaten within a couple days, my kid loves them.
I changed her recipe for the filling a bit, I like Italian sausage instead of hamburger. You can cut your own cabbage, or use that bagged coleslaw mix. Onions, garlic, peppers, and I put swiss cheese in it. Cook it down til it’s really dry, if there’s too much liquid it gets messy when you’re forming them and falls out the ends in the oven. Sometimes I end up having to strain the last half of the filling to get it dry enough.
@charontwo: A politician can’t be an aberration, too? News to me!
@Kathy:
China is claiming that it does use less by a very large magnitude. People I know in the AI space are very skeptical and believe that the amount of chips being claimed is minimized to avoid signaling that sanctions were broken.
It also, I’m told, isn’t revolutionary but very much derivative of the existing models out there.
@Jax: WA! The type you make are really small, but if you think the bread is overwhelming, you could try dividing the dough six ways instead of 5 (or use a larger scoop of filling and risk leakage*).
*I always save the “defective” ones for myself.
@SKI!:
It’s not as though the market can’t or hasn’t overreacted to spurious claims before.
Still, how much savings in cost constitute substantial savings? If there are billions of AI queries each day, and one model uses up 2% less power, that’s pretty substantial. If it’s 25%, that’s huge.
In light of his recent death at the hands of law enforcement, I propose Congress immediately pass the “Matthew Huttle Act” which does the following:
1) Specifically states that all participants in the January 6th insurrection, and specifically Donald Trump, were traitors to the United States and are thus ineligible to be elected office.
2) Impeaches Trump.
@MarkedMan:
What I need to know is:
Do we still need to rake our forests, and fire our lesbian firefighters?
Keeping in mind, of course, that 60% of forest lands in CA are federally-owned
@Eusebio:
I guess my point isn’t that it’s absurd, or rather that’s not the significant thing. We can no longer imagine he’s just trolling or juicing his base. He’s completely lost it, either from senility, mental illness, decades of prescription drug abuse, or some other issue we don’t know about yet.
What’s in a name? Sometimes, misunderstanding, or even outright misinformation.
Take “tariff.” This is an odd word not in common, everyday use. I assume most here know what it means, but a lot of people elsewhere don’t, not really. So they swallow the fetid bs lie that foreign governments pay them.
Let’s see what the lie overlooks:
1) A country’s government has control only over the country it governs. A law passed in, say, the UK forbidding imports from France, does not compel the French government to stop exports to the UK. It is enforced in the UK by retaining shipments from France, or that contain French goods (or sending them back).
So a tariff on Chinese goods won’t compel the Chinese government to pay the tariff, or even to force the exporting companies to do so. The tariff will be collected from the importer in America upon entry to the country.
2) Money is money. Even if the Chinese government paid the tariff, it would raise taxes on exporters to recoup their losses. exporters would raise their prices to recoup their losses. Importers would raise prices, well, you can see the progression along as many links int he supply chain as there may be. The end consumer or buyer can’t pass his higher cost along to anyone, so they’re stuck with the cost of the tariff, regardless of who paid it to begin with.
So, why not simplify things and call the rapist felon’s tariffs what they really are? Consumer taxes.
Common words in every day use that everyone understands.
An interesting note from Digby.
https://digbysblog.net/2025/01/27/elons-family-techno-fascism/
@MarkedMan:
Yes, and my main point is that sensible people who have voices should use this opportunity* to ridicule him over it.
*Evidence of it being an opportunity is it’s so ridiculous that even some maga/gop-friendly media aren’t backing him up.
@MarkedMan:
I’m not sure he ever had it.
@Michael Reynolds:
The oligarchs are finally getting full attention, but they’ve been making their presence felt upon our political process for sometime. Billionaires like the Kochs, Singer, Mercers, et. al. have been deforming this democracy for sometime. Ailes and Murdoch built a public media platform for their aspirations.
@MarkedMan: @Eusebio:
Democrats are still licking their wounds, too enfeebled to do much of anything but moan over each new Trump idiocy. I knew this would happen, told my wife there’d be no resistance for quite a while, but it’s still frustrating.
I am seeing remarkably little forward thinking from Democrats. I’ve tried several times to get a conversation going here about, okay, what now, what next? What lessons have we learned and how are we going to implement them? I’m bored by the outrage-du-jour, all this was priced in, none of it is surprising.
We need to stay on the attack on specific issues, but more importantly we need a message and a vision. A majoritarian message. We have a perfect opportunity to get back to being the party of the little guy, the party of working people. It’s a big pivot from where we’ve been for the last decade, but insofar as our previous message has been buried with a stake through its heart, it’s an opportunity.
A very simple messaging change we can make: when Trump’s imbecility hurts MAGAs do not, FFS, start with, ‘It will disproportionally impact this or that minority.’ When that’s the message it translates to White people as, ‘not our problem.’ But it is their problem and we need to not step on that message. Big guy vs. little guy. Billionaires vs. regular people. Them vs. Us, and ‘us’ is everyone who still has to pay bills.
@Rob1:
Crucially we cannot draw a line between ‘our’ billionaires and ‘their’ billionaires. Too much money and too much power in too few hands. Even Mark Cuban’s hands. It can’t be about right and wrong so much as the theft of democracy by the oligarchs.
@Michael Reynolds: Yeah, I am in general agreement.
Instead of being outraged at the Greenland stuff, it’s much better to roll our eyes and say, “What do we want Greenland for?” It’s a stupid waste of money.
Why do we want to send more expensive military aircraft to Colombia instead of cheap charter flights? The same purpose is achieved, for less money, which means lower taxes, right?
If you are selling something, you have to use talking points that work for the person you are selling to. Preaching to the choir doesn’t do much.
I was just interviewed by a Wellesley grad student on the topic of morality in kidlit. I am always amused to find myself being cast as a moral teacher, but it seems quite a few people learned philosophy from me and the wife.
@Michael Reynolds:
Of note: in the last decade Hillary, Biden, and Harris all won the poorest income groups over Trump — per exit polling.
Democratic candidates will settle on some message for 2026 and 2028 — likely in response to Trump’s overreach — but grounded in what’s actually happening, not in overreactions to Trump winning 1.5% more votes than a black woman who had a few months to mount a campaign.
More on Deep Seek. It appears to censor itself on what the Chinese Republiqan Party regards as sensitive subjects.
there are workarounds, which open up some interesting epistemological and metaphysical questions. Does the AI know the info on Tiananmen Square but lies about it? Does it know that it knows? etcetera.
Warnings about the evil Chinese Republiqans being able to freely access your data are also starting to circulate.
I don’t think AI bots are data mining in the way that fakebook and Xitter are. Instead they use your input for “training.” It’s likely such inputs are not shared or sold between different AI developers, which would be where they differ from traditional data mining companies. So this is slightly more credible and/or concerning.
On other things, the case I got for my phone came with a couple of screen protectors. I’m unclear on why two are needed. Do they degrade over time? Do they break more easily than the screen? In any case, I’m not inclined to use them. For one thing, they don’t seem to match the screen exactly.
@Michael Reynolds: Too bad “oligarchy” the word, has no suction to latch its way into pop culture. It’s an academic word and concept that evokes no feeling in anyone not interested in politics or poly sci.
That’s why the $Strumpets labeled left-leaning Oligarchs as ‘pedo’s’. Democrats must abandon the language of academia to create get some traction on the margins
Of course Jamie Dimon said yesterday on CNBC that we should “get over inflation.” Because didn’t you know Republicans had their fingers crossed when they said words before the election?
Jamie gets his tax cuts, just like every Republican platform ever, and sold to you if you believed anything out of the mouth of a Republican regarding anything else. Republicans have an ideology to implement, and if they had to lie, cheat, and steal to get your vote, that’s a sacrifice they were willing to make.
@Jim Brown 32:
So was CRT.
There’s no shortage of Americans who cannot be manipulated into viewing any word as dangerous and scary, academic or no. It’s just not at all clear there’s some super special *Democratic* message that can rescue such people from their rightwing mental prisons.
As with alcoholics and druggies, you can message to them all you want, but they won’t change until they want to. The high is more compelling than anything you say. Liberals are not ever going to consistently win the “undecideds” who infantilize themselves as incapable of choosing unless Hillary pitches them the perfect message while wearing a cheesehead in Wisconsin.
Some people are not going to be open to a Dem message until they’ve first burned themselves from touching the fascist stove. But most will figure it out on their own once burnt, an internal decision that won’t have much to do with Democrats’ messages (see, 2018 election). You can’t message your way out of global anti-incumbent wave that’s just not swinging in your favor.
All of this hand-wringing is great, but the biggest lesson is this: Don’t nominate a woman to the presidency. We are not ready, as a country, for that.
We need to find a solid white guy with good ethics and excellent communication skills – particularly a guy who can land shots on the Trumpy fellow – whoever that ends up being.
Gavin Newsom comes to mind, but there are others.
@Jim Brown 32:
Hence “blow your own strumpet”
Possibly.
@DK:
You don’t win the future without an idea what that future is meant to be. This is not about MAGAs or about undecideds in past elections, it’s primarily about rising generations of voters. Every year 4 million Americans turn 18. That’s who we want and we need to offer them something other than ‘Trump is evil.’
And, while those 4 million are becoming eligible to vote, 3 million old people are dying. Nothing is set in stone, we have plenty of room to win if we can explain what winning will do for people.
@Jim Brown 32:
The word billionaire does. I hate billionaires and I’m not a working man, or even middle class. Elon is showing us a vulnerable backside, time to kick it.
@JohnSF: I’ve worked with many a Brit in the OIF/OEF days and your sense of humor never gets old! Cheers!
@Michael Reynolds:
@Rob1:
Interesting thing about the “tech-bros” as oligarchs: they are rather feeble ones, in certain respects.
Certainly, they command massive wealth in terms of nominal asset values (albeit a bit less today than they did on Sunday ) The estimated net worth of the people at Trump’s inauguration was about $1.3 trillion.
Which ain’t chopped liver.
But much of that is due to massive financial over-performance of “tech-stocks”
For instance, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk have a joint net wealth of c. $900 billion.; the value of Amazon, Meta, and Tesla combined is about 10% of the value of total US stocks.
BUT: the same three only represent about 1.8% of total value added to GDP.
Even if you add in Apple, Alphabet (ie Google/Android) whose CEO’s were also at the circus, you only come to about 3.1% GDP.
Compare that to Russia: there data from 2004 indicated a about 24 oligarchs controlled 77% of output in mining/manufacturing, which in turn was about two-thirds of the Russian economy.
And they employed about 20% of all workers.
Or Hungary, where the “Orban network” controls about a fifth to a quarter of GDP.
In other words, the US is economical entirely capable of cutting the “tech-brogachs ” off at the knees, and pursuing anti-monopoly suits etc. It’s merely a question of political motivation.
That, imho, is the one key reason for their fawning upon Trump (apart from Musk, perhaps).
Insurance against the MAGA-populists turning on them.
The second main reason, I suspect, being a hope that having Trump in their corner can fend off regulatory threats from the European Union.
@DK: CRT (and most 3 syllable acronyms) has a good meter to it—which is why RBJ, LBJ, JFK, FBI, CIA etc latch on so easily in people’s minds.
They started with the full name and started pouring alternate meaning into while shortening it to CRT for this exact reason. They have very high-end linguist in their stable.
The democrats will make no headway with their own pitch(es) until they undermine the right wing pitch—that’s a different set of messaging. Of course an angel won’t believe the Devil—but they would certainly consider the opinion of another angel.
@Michael Reynolds:
There is the matter of “intent,” but
agreed.
@Gavin:
Inflation! National debt! Tariffs! Windmill bird deaths! Benghazi!
The MAGA base is now just reflexively twitching to the programmed memes.
Meanwhile, in Africa:
Rwandan backed M23 rebels (and possibly some Rwandan army support) have taken the city of Goma in n.e. Congo (population c. 2 million). That means they now control most of North Kivu Province.
The Congolese Army has been humiliated; and the South African peacekeeping force swept aside.
Perhaps the former Conservative government’s bright idea about Rwanda as stable and peaceful destination to transfer asylum seekers was not, in fact, all that clever?
(Quite a few people, including me, suspect a major motivator for Rwanda was to obtain diplomatic cover for its ambitions in Kivu)
@Jim Brown 32: Perhaps people who have thoughts about how to go about this should start going to places where Democrats congregate and make concrete rather than abstract suggestions. As an academic (and one criticized among peers for being too abstruse at that) I have no suggestions.
ETA: “It’s just not at all clear there’s some super special *Democratic* message that can rescue such people from their rightwing mental prisons.”
And that’s the other catch.
@JohnSF:
I wouldn’t be counting on this succeeding, tbh.
Here’s the CNC source of Jami Dimon’s ‘get over it’ referenced here in this thread.
You know, this is just Trump’s opening gambit to get people to the table.
I was just idling through the news when I came upon this article:
Georgia Republican Says Kids in School Lunch Programs ‘Sponge Off The Government
The article is not worth reading but it did quote Rich McCormick (R-GA). So I wikipediaed his name. The first sentence read:
On that laugh, I think I’ll quit for the day.
Speaking of billionaires, Bill Gates’s biggest regret, according to NBC via the London Times, is divorcing Melinda.
An Air Busan Airbus A320 caught fire on the runway. reports are of no fatalities, and some minor injuries.
There are missing details in reports so far, like whether the Airbus was in motion or holding.
@JohnSF:
Assuming they are roughly like American Conservatives, what happens in Rwanda, or to asylum seekers, is not a serious consideration. So, it was clever.
@Scott: They have fixed the Wikipedia article.
@Rob1:
Birds are a renewable resource. If the windmills have to be lubricated with the blood of birds, so be it.
Thirty-nine years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift off.
@CSK:
You’re making me feel old.
Like the other day. I met a coworker in a different division with an uncommon last name which sounded familiar. After a while it hit me, a classmate back in elementary school had that last name. I mentioned her name to him, and he said “She’s my dad’s cousin.”
I heard a joke today from my 19 year old c0-worker. It goes like this.
A group of scientist want to do some experiments on the human brain. A death row inmate volunteers on the condition that if he survives he will be allowed to live.
First they remove the left half of his brain and ask him to count to 10. He says 2 4 6 8 10. The scientist say “Well, that’s interesting. Let’s see what happens if we put the left half back in and remove the right half”.
They do so and ask him to count to 10. He says 1 3 5 7 9. The scientists decide to see what happens with both halves of the brain removed. Then they ask him to count to 10 once more.
This time he says “I am a very powerful counter. Nobody knows more about counting than me. Grown men come up to me with tears in their eyes saying thank you sir for counting so beautifully”.
@CSK: I was on page 363 of my math book when it happened. My teacher didn’t know what to do. It was all supposed to be so happy….and then it wasn’t.