Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
·
54 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.
Knocking on keyboard…
Wake up! Wake up!
Hello? Anybody?
The Epstein Affair is connecting a lot of dots. I don’t know a lot about this site, but the Pedocon Theory goes right along with “every accusation is a confession” with 47 and the GOP in general.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-talk-about-pedocon-theory/
Progressives as 21st Century Stalinists —- quite the narrative.
[checks notes on masked ICE activities, Tucker Carlson’s sympathy for Putin’s violent invasion of Ukraine, MAGA approval of the Gaza ethnic cleansing, assassinations of Minnesota Democrat legislators, MAGA President’s growing unitary powers]
I think we know where actual “brainrot” is taking hold.
@Rob1:
Alligator Alcatraz is a concentration camp. Quite the narrative too.
It is taking place on both sides of the political perspective. See above.
While I find some new daily watch, I decided to rewatch all Star Trek TV shows (maybe some of the movies). I’m going by series order: TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Lower Decks, Prodigy (Strange New Worlds is current Trek). In Mexico it’s all on Netflix except Lower Decks.
There are a few eps in each series I didn’t get to watch, or not in their entirety, or so long ago I’ve no memory of them. What surprised me is that TOS begins with the pilot, The Cage, with Capt. Pike, Una*, and Spock. That’s one I haven’t seen (only the pieces recycled in The Menagerie, aka the beeping chair ep.)
I expect I’ll stream one new Foundation ep each week, too.
*She’s called “Number One” by everyone, including Spock. She was played by Majel Barret, who later would play Nurse Chapel and Lwaxana Troi.
The Jubilee verbal cage match featuring Mehdi Hasan confronting 20 young people on the far right is definitely worth watching, even if you just see snippets. This country spent a lot of time dancing around the question whether a big slice of the contemporary right was fascist and authoritarian. In this video, you can see many participants happily admit that yes, they want to tear up the Constitution, install a dictator, throw out immigrants (legal or illegal), and impose their brand of Christianity as the political order.
https://youtu.be/2S-WJN3L5eo?si=OEe9UPWP7xXJaZRz
This video doesn’t provide a scientific sampling of the far right, so you won’t be able to tell from watching it how big a percentage of the population this represents. It’s a big country, there will always be people who want to destroy the Constitution and the rule of law for whatever ugly impulses drive them. Maybe this is the political version of the Jerry Springer show, encouraging people to free rein their worst impulses.
But what this video does show is that there are people who are racists, fascists, authoritarians, and theocrats who will proclaim their beliefs openly and gleefully. Goose-stepping in the basement is passé. Among many circles now, goose-stepping in public is not only allowable, but from many powerful and influential quarters, encouraged. Maybe they’re still a small fraction of the American electorate, but they’re loud and proud.
Mehdi Hasan isn’t perfect in this video. There are occasions when he talks over and dismisses people with whom he might actually have a discussion. But he got into the arena with them and mostly did an impressive job. Unfortunately, he changed not one mind among the people who clapped when their peers talked about how great it would be to have an autocrat like Franco, or have ICE goons eject immigrants to God knows where.
@Kathy: I’m currently plowing through DS9. I last watched them in the 90s as they were broadcast. So there are quite a few I haven’t seen. At 26/ season there are a number of filler episodes featuring predictable plots, a few comedic interludes, etc. I remember the later seasons as having straight forward story arcs with less filler. Will see if my memory holds up.
Migrants at Ice jail in Miami made to kneel to eat ‘like dogs’, report alleges (The Guardian)
The Chaotic Early Days Inside Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Center (New York Times)
So the fascistic, Hitlerian, corrupt Pedo Trump regime — which was supposed to be focused on lowering prices and ending wars on day one — is instead torturing people who’ve convicted of no crimes at Florida prison camps. Vile. I suppose it’s a small step up from sending them to El Salvador to be tortured?
Unlike so many in 1930s Germany with plausible deniability, 2020s Americans cannot later pretend we didn’t know.
@Bill Jempty:
In the sense that a basal cell carcinoma is the same as stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Almost never fatal vs. almost always fatal. I’m sorry, but as much as I am often annoyed by progressive speech monitors there is no equivalency to – for just one example – masked government agents who refuse to show a badge still less a warrant, yanking people off the streets and sticking them in concentration camps.
@Scott:
I missed a lot of eps in the latter seasons of DS9 for reasons too tedious to go into. I’ve only a vague notion on how they ended the Shadow War (what?)
Lawyers and Families Report Squalid Conditions and Lack of Legal Access at Alligator Alcatraz (Reason)
We treat people who’ve actually been convicted of crimes better. Bryan Kohberger is being locked up in more sanitary conditions than those targeted by the Epstein-bestie rapist’s masked ICE goons. Heck, the first Trump admin housed Epstein in more humane conditions — until the three minutes of surveillance video disappeared, at least.
And for what? The trains are not running on time. The failed Trump regime blocks high-speed rail and clean energy, ripping affordable healthcare from millions, while increasing debt by trillions via corporate socialism and tax cuts for billionaires. Tariffs are worsening inflation and crippling businesses. GDP growth has faltered. And rightwing climate change denial stymies efforts to mitigate worsening fires and flood. Yikes.
@Bill Jempty:
Bothsider brainrot? — eh, not so much. Point by point, the policy misfires on the right, swamp those on the left. I mean really? Blow up the economy because DEI and transgender somethingsomething?
@Kathy: In DS9, it is the Dominion War which really doesn’t get rolling until Seasons 6 and 7. The Shadow War is part and parcel of Babylon 5.
@Scott:
Fans of both shows, whom regarded each other as anathema, dispute the claim DS9 ripped off B5 because allegedly Straczynski pitched B5 to Paramount before WB.
I’ve no idea is that’s true, though the settings are similar, though B5 didn’t pay for the reset button upgrade. I pretend it’s true now and then to tease both sides. It’s even implicit in both my B5/DS9 crossover jokes.
@Kathy: I’m a little slow. I also like both.
@Kingdaddy:
The one kid, who admitted to being a fascist, has lost his job!!!
Recently, while looking for a different quotation, I ran across this passage from Return of the King:
And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for
A thought for our times.
@Kathy: As much as I loved JMS’ rejection of “going nowhere at Warp Factor 9′ in favor of telling a serialized story that has a beginning, middle and end, I think there were other sources for that idea floating around at the time. To wit, “Dallas” had done some things in a similar vein, and also “Hill Street Blues” and perhaps “LA Law”. None of that is sci-fi of course. And JMS’ wanted to tell a story that lasted over several seasons, as opposed to how Buffy the Vampire Slayer stuck to one-season-long stories.
But I don’t hold a grudge against DS9, which I also watched quite a bit of. I found that sort of story-telling quite engaging.
Fun story: I have a friend that attended some “summer camp” sort of sessions for aspiring sci-fi writers. Damon Knight supervised them. JMS attended one of these with my friend (who did not end up being a writer, per se) Even then JMS had his giant binder(s) with his story in it. My friend found him tiresome in his obsession with that story in that binder. I did not find his story tiresome, though.
@Daryl: Which can only free up his time to monetize his new notoriety in the far right social media fever swamps.
@Scott:
Me, too. That’s why I sometimes take my time replying or posting here.
And while IMO B5 was the better show, DS9 is the best trek overall.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I find loyalty too valuable to waste on entertainment.
Besides, just about everything’s been done before. In large part, B5 is the Cold War writ interstellar with the principals operating behind the scenes rather than in the open.
BTW, the more I think about the story I’m trying to write, the more it seems it should be a novel (albeit a short one), if only to fit in all the background and world building. It’s not very new or revolutionary, but quite involved. Too much too handle on a short story without a massive exposition dump at some point.
So I’m going to set it aside and think it over. Meantime, I think I can do another one, The Third Necropolis, inside a week.
@Kathy: My primary referent for B5 is more that it rejects a Manichean world view, a view of Light vs. Dark, which sort of pollutes the air everyone breathes.
But that’s ok. It doesn’t have to mean exactly the same thing to each of it. Fighting over it is a sport many enjoy, but doesn’t often add value.
@Bill Jempty: I think you object, not to the name “Alligator Alcatraz” but to calling it a “concentration” camp. The administration itself calls it “Alligator Alcatraz” and it certainly is a camp – it is not meant to be a permanent residence for anyone there.
Or don’t you agree with that?
Furthermore, the following things seem to me to be pretty well established:
Government agents wearing masks and showing no official badges are grabbing people off the street.
Sometimes they are mistaken in their identification.
Sometimes they do not possess any warrant or paperwork justifying said seizure.
They appear to be concentrating on aliens who have Hispanic and/or Asian identities, while ignoring illegal aliens who are white.
They are moving many of these people to Alligator Alcatraz.
All of this seems like a big problem to me.
The rule of law suggests that government agents identify themselves as such, and produce court orders for detention and access to attorneys, and to some extent families, to those detained.
I’m curious about how much or little of the above you accept as reasonable accurate. Is there a sticking point? What might it be?
I found this Substack by Paul Krugman interesting. Primarily because it is a subject I don’t understand, especially cryptocurrency and the debates around it.
Secondarily, I’ve come to believe there is no reality to money except for the collective understanding of its use for mediating our economic lives.
Has Brazil Invented the Future of Money?
@Scott:
Season 6 DS9 began with the Dominion war arc, but the show’s writers must have listened to Weyoun’s message ‘time to start packing’, and wrote episodes that had very little or nothing to do with the war. Time’s Orphan, The Magnificent Ferengi, Who Mourns for Morn, Honor Among Thieves, His Way, and a couple of others. There were a few exceptions, but for the most part episodes 7 to 24 aka season finale seemed to been written by people who had amnesia when it came to the Dominion.
@Rob1:
Calling out the stupidity of people both on the left and the right is something I’m not going to stop doing no matter how many barbs get thrown my way by both sides. Saying I have brain rot shows how intolerant many forum members here are of anyone who has a contrarian opinion.
Back in my blogging days, I was referred to as a moonbat by Michelle Malkin, a right wing extremist by somebody at Daily Kos, and middle of the road by Florida political blogger James Johnson. My blog proudly acknowledged this on its front page and asked readers to say how they viewed me. I have read both The National Review and New Republic for years. Do you know who else at this forum acknowledged reading both those publications? Our host, James Joyner.
If our opinions are the only right ones, why did the American voting public vote different last year? Because we are flawed as are our political opponents.
The groveling never ends.
Republicans want to rename Kennedy Center’s opera house after Melania Trump
No comment.
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael,
You are smarter than the last comment. Nobody is being put in concentration camps.
I’ve been to a real concentration camp. 55 years after it stopped operating but as I’ve said or written multiple times after seeing Auschwitz in 2000, death still hangs in the air there. That’s how a place where almost a million people were put to death feels. Tell me where such a place exists in the United States right now? I’d ask my sister’s mother-in-law for her opinion if she was still alive. Mrs. Feigen was a concentration camp survivor. My former podiatrist David Feierman, who had many family members killed in concentration camps, is still alive. He’d consider the comparison ridiculous. Ridiculous is probably too mild a word for how he would view it.
Comparing an Ice detention facility to Auschwitz is idiotic. Michael, you’re smarter than that.
PS- I have David’s home phone number. Would you like to hear from the horse’s mouth what he’d think of your comparison? I don’t think you would.
@Michael Reynolds:
If you substitute stage 4 malignant melanoma for pancreatic, you’d be describing me. I’ve had the first and having been living with the latter since 2009.
Stage IV Malignant melanoma survival rate at 10 years is 10-15%*. I’m not a record breaker. Kimberly Wheeler lived over 25 years with it and I know a Stage IV survivor coming up on their 20th anniversary of diagnosis.
*- Prior to 2005, I believe I read the rate was about 2%. There have been many breakthroughs in treating Stage IV over the last 32 years aka when I had my first melanoma diagnosed. I’ve had 8 of them.
@Bill Jempty:
There is a matter of degree when we compare the stupidity of rightward policy vs leftward policy.
It seems fairly “objective” to say that adding $3T to our debt to give tax breaks to billionaires is kinda dumb relative to adding $1.4T to our debt to give working class people affordable healthcare.
There is a “quality” factor as well: generally speaking leftward policies tend to seek humanitarian outcomes. Rightward policies tend not. For example: repealing Roe v Wade and subsequently forcing women to carry full term failed pregnancies.
We could generate a long list with side by side comparisons, and rightward policies would come out, well, stupider. And injurious.
I did not do that. My statement was specifically a counter to that very “brainrot” charge made by the young NYYRC wag, and I provided context to challenge their “Stalinist” nonsense. Unless of course, you were the NYYRC attendee who made that comment?
@Bill Jempty:
The description of Everglades Alcatraz is pretty brutal. Of course it’s not Auschwitz. Yet.
Should we wait until it is?
@Bill Jempty: You are confusing a death camp with a concentration camp. Not helped by the US generally shying away from calling Auschwitz what it was — a death camp.
This isn’t hair splitting. They are different things, even if the path from concentration camp to death camp is often a short path.
I am glad that our last set of concentration camps, for Japanese Americans in WW2, did not go down that short path.
Given the rhetoric on the right these days, I suspect these new ones are far more likely to go down that path.
Even in Nazi Germany, the concentration camps weren’t death camps for quite some time. They were “detainment centers” for people being deported after being stripped of German citizenship. It’s just that no one wanted a bunch of Jews and Romani, etc., and space had to be made.
@Gustopher:
Indeed, there were different kinds of camps in Elon’s Germany.
Ugh, books by the meter, of the same color!
The teaser below the headline asks “Is this necessarily a bad thing?” I suppose it’s harmless, but it’s definitely not a good thing.
Here’s what Mike Duncan said about books on Bluesky: “If you bring me a mint condition book to sign I will happily do it and chat with you and we’ll have a very nice time. If you bring me a jacked up copy with coffee stains, water damage, and dogeared pages I will embrace you like family cause that mean that book was a companion in your life.”
A book you don’t read is wasted. And this includes some books I bought but never read.
@Kathy:
Unless it was Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
Following Trump’s truthing out claims of an agreement that they have never heard of, Coca-Cola will be releasing a cane sugar version of their soda pop in the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/22/coke-cane-sugar-trump
I hope Trump switches from his Diet Coke to this fancy new Cane Sugar Coke, for health reasons. Whatever problems artificial sweeteners cause likely take longer to manifest than just adding 2,000 calories of sugar to your diet each day.
ETA: if I ever say “no one should take medical advice from RFKJr or his brainworms,” I obviously don’t mean it literally.
@Gustopher:
I think of him and Malcolm Gladwell as brain candy.
@Bill Jempty:
Because Trump promised a lot of freebies.
I wade into this just to use the word freebies, and note that I have seen closed captioning transcribe it as “free bees” once. It was lovely.
And, if you are in need of a pollinator, you might want a freebie of free bees.
Also, we should free the bees. They’re stuck in an exploitative monarchy.
@Kingdaddy: “Which can only free up his time to monetize his new notoriety in the far right social media fever swamps.”
Okay, made me look. And he’s doing exactly as you say. It’s all happening so perfectly that I think maybe his social media statement, “I was subsequently released from my job,” wasn’t on the level. It looked like Connor was on his way to meeting his $15,000 fundraising goal as of this morning, so things are going to plan.
@Bill Jempty: “I’ve been to a real concentration camp. 55 years after it stopped operating but as I’ve said or written multiple times after seeing Auschwitz in 2000, death still hangs in the air there. That’s how a place where almost a million people were put to death feels. ”
Right. Because Auschwitz was a death camp (or extermination camp if you prefer).
The actual concentration camps were places of mass, indefinite imprisonment.
The extermination camps were part of the “final solution” and used to murder millions of people.
You keep saying that MR is “smarter than” his calling Alligator Alcatraz a concentration camp, but that’s because you don’t actually know the difference between the two types of camp, and you insist he’s comparing to an extermination camp.
Ain’t no both sides here. He’s right, you’re wrong, shake hands and move on.
@Kingdaddy:
The Dear Leader loves those swamps.
Fantasizing about arresting Obama now.
@Gustopher:
They should call it Mexican Coca-Cola, and charge 25% more for it in lieu of tariffs.
@DK: This paragraph from the linked article bears repeating:
There are other accounts of inadequate food in the article and in other reports. Whether by design or due in incompetence, it’s a problem that could be solved if DHS wanted it to be.
As for the electricity frequently shutting off, and taking with it the air conditioning and water, that was a totally predictable problem for this kind of off-grid camp. As I commented a few weeks ago, a temporary facility such as this can be set up relatively quickly, but is expensive to operate and prone to system failures.
@Kathy:
I’ve considered buying Mexican soda for the sugar cane, but never do because of the price. Around here, Mexican Coca-Cola costs about $1.50 per 12-ounce bottle, and I haven’t seen it on sale. The 12-ounce cans of regular HFCS Coca-Cola are often on sale and then cost about $.50 per can when buying a couple of 12 packs. If Mexican/sugar cane soda were the norm here, of course it would be cheaper than it is.
@Bill Jempty:
Well, if one side does the ‘brain rot’ thing 97 times, and the other side does it 3 times, then ‘yes’ it is technically true to say ‘both sides do it.’ However it is an empty calories observation that may well have little value.
@Eusebio:
I haven’t had a sugar soda more than five times since the late 80s.
@Jay L. Gischer: I thought the Vorlon/Shadow dichotomy was more of a Law/Chaos opposition, a la Michael Moorcock’s books.
This feels so close to a revival of the unequal treaties, writ small.
Now, El Taco might blandish letters he sent and pass them as “trade deals”, and he may engage in PR stunts like today, but serious countries require laws, formal international agreements, and treaties, signed by a president or PM, and ratified by a legislature.
So they are unequal, but not treaties.
@Bill Jempty: @Bill Jempty: Auschwitz was a death camp that began its life as a detention camp.
No serious person is comparing Alligator Alcatraz to Auschwitz.
But it also is helpful to have some historical perspective.
Auschwitz I, the main camp, was established in April 1940 as a detention center for Polish political prisoners.
It later evolved into a complex network of concentration, extermination, and forced-labor camps.
Andrea Pitzer wrote what is considered one of the definitive books on concentration camps, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, and is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on concentration camp.
Here’ what she has to say:
Worth putting it on the record here, though you probably already know it: “Alligator Alcatraz” is a concentration camp.
Hmm, let’s see… mass detention of civilians without trial or traditional legal protections on the basis of identity (race, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation) rather than any criminal act, often for an indefinite period and done principally to expand political power. Check.
She also posted this:
People want to substitute “Auschwitz” for “Alcatraz” to emphasize how bad this is. But this crisis in Florida is far from the universe of Auschwitz, where more than a million were murdered. Instead of equating them, I’d say we should act now to stop the future from getting any closer to the past. End quotes
Auschwitz is certainly in the running for the worst single crime against humanity of all time. It doesn’t mean that everything else doesn’t matter because it isn’t as bad. This is almost the old saying “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. Except in this case “don’t let horrendous be the enemy of awful”.
@Scott: Naming rights are valuable. How much money is she willing to put up? Andrew Carnegie donated a million dollars in 1891 to the hall that bears his name. A mega dollar was serious money in that time. We need to get a good price for public assets.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, and presumably inventor of the keyboard without a space bar, is embracing hubris at an accelerating rate.
Seriously, you want an LLM to hallucinate your medical diagnosis?
I wonder if Bill has considered what comes next after the camps? Maybe he thinks he’s rich enough it won’t happen to his immigrant wife? Stephen Miller has made his position pretty clear.
Feels like 1937’ish, when it was all just a Nazi dream.
And then they made it happen. Your wife is not safe under Stephen Miller, Bill. Regardless of your ..checks notes….books about trans stuff.
@Bill Jempty:
As others have noted, concentration camps are not death camps. Manzanar was a concentration camp. The Brits in the Boer War pioneered concentration camps. And Alligator Alcatraz is absolutely a concentration camp.
Armed men in masks refusing to identify themselves are definitely snatching gardeners and roofers and nannies and sticking them in concentration camps.
My irritation with progs is not primarily that they’re insufferable sophomores – although, they often are – but that they are so politically inept they doomed their own goals, goals with which I agree. But the worst that can be said about them is that they can be humorless, intolerant prigs who aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are.
And on the other side: a fucking personality cult built around an absolute pig of a man, a wannabe dictator, a thug, a traitor, a crook, a rapist and a goddammed pedophile.
Shoplifting and murder are not degrees of difference, they are differences of kind. That’s the gap between Left and Right in the US.
@Lucys Football:
Not to end-state Auschwitz but to early-onset Auschwitz, yes, I will make the comparison. Now I have been known to play the class clown, so I won’t cop to being a serious person. But those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The Nazi atrocities began with similar examples of dehumanizing, extralegal abuse and torture, like that now occurring at Trump’s concentration camps. Shackled detainees denied healthcare and make to kneel and eat from plates/bowls on the floor like dogs? It is unacceptable and indefensible. Count me among the patriotic Americans intolerant of anyone attempting to downplay this madness. No decent person can tolerate this twisted, evil MAGA regime.
Serious and unserious alike need to point out the parallels and rage against this disgraceful moment in US history now, before the worm turns to gas chambers, medical experiments, human-skin furniture, mass graves, and ovens.
@wr: This has been explained to Bill before.
He’s just right dontch know. He has read both the National Review AND the New Republic.
So there!