Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, May 14, 2025
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60 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
The
that ruins all the funEntertainment headline of the day- Cannes makes it official: No nudity on the red carpetThis was a good explanation of the Air Traffic Control problem at Newark and around the country. Aging tech is one issue but a big choke point is the training regimen that the air traffic controllers have to go through. You just can’t hire Joe Blow off the street. And the training regimen involves moving around the country from market to market. Impacts families, personal interests, etc. It won’t be solved soon.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-frightening-moment-to-fly/id1200361736?i=1000706787492
Though I linked to Apple podcasts this is available from variety of sources.
He Became the Face of Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement. Now He’s Fed Up With It.
This was an digitally savvy person who still got kicked off the system. The whole scam about work requirements is to make navigating the system so onerous that people can’t sign up or just get kicked off.
Dear wife was invited to a house blessing yesterday. After it was finished, she got tons of food. Other than breakfast, we won’t be cooking for the rest of the week.
When DW gets home from church, she is going to start preparing for our Alaska cruise next week. The 9-day cruise with NCL don’t start till a week from today but we’re flying to Seattle on Saturday. From Sunday to Tuesday we’ll meet a former classmate of DW and go to attractions in and around Seattle. Neither of us have been there before.
DW has been on a cruise once* but it was 25 or so years ago. I haven’t but I was on board ships in the Navy.
I’m looking forward to the cruise. DW would like us to do a Greek island cruise sometime next year. Like I did with the Alaska cruise, I will probably book us early. Which is risky because my health can suddenly turn but I can look into refundable options.
I’m almost done writing my outer space set novel.
Should Pete Rose be elected to the baseball hall of fame? He was a great hitter**, if one who also played at least 4 years too long in his pursuit of breaking Ty Cobb’s record, but Rose was also a scumbag. I don’t think I will live long enough to see baseball writers forgive Rose’s transgressions.
*- Her youngest brother was a cruise ship musician and she sailed with him. I do not recall why I didn’t also go.
**- Rose hitting .335 in 1968 was like somebody hitting .400. 1968 was the year of the pitcher and National League batting average was about 100 points less than what Rose hit that year.
The persistence of “globalism” in an inextricably interconnected, interdependent world
File under: We’re all globalist now.
@Rob1: Rand Paul as the voice of reason. Either the rest of the Pary has really gone off the deep end or Hell is freezing over.
@Bill Jempty: We did an Alaska cruise 2 years ago (June) for our 30th anniversary. Really enjoyed it. We go for the shore excursions so we did a lot of walking and hiking, a little canoeing, whale watching. We had a stop in Victoria, B.C where we electric biked around. Such a gorgeous city.
On the front end, we spent 2 days/nights in the old lodge in Rainier NP. On the back end, spent a day in Seattle on the backend which was fun. Went the to Space Needle (my wife hates heights so that wasn’t so good) and the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum was stunning. Seattle was easy to get around.
Have a great time!
@Bill Jempty: We did an Alaska cruise 2 years ago (June) for our 30th anniversary. Really enjoyed it. We go for the shore excursions so we did a lot of walking and hiking, a little canoeing, whale watching. We had a stop in Victoria, B.C where we electric biked around. Such a gorgeous city.
On the front end, we spent 2 days/nights in the old lodge in Rainier NP. On the back end, spent a day in Seattle on the backend which was fun. Went the to Space Needle (my wife hates heights so that wasn’t so good) and the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum was stunning. Seattle was easy to get around.
Have a great time!
@Bill Jempty: We did an Alaska cruise 2 years ago (June) for our 30th anniversary. Really enjoyed it. We go for the shore excursions so we did a lot of walking and hiking, a little canoeing, whale watching. We had a stop in Victoria, B.C where we electric biked around. Such a gorgeous city.
On the front end, we spent 2 days/nights in the old lodge in Rainier NP. On the back end, spent a day in Seattle on the backend which was fun. Went the to Space Needle (my wife hates heights so that wasn’t so good) and the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum was stunning. Seattle was easy to get around.
Have a great time!
@Bill Jempty:
Rose bet on his own team. He should be rotting in hell, right now, if such a thing exists.
I just finished watching all episodes of The F.B.I. What’s next? I was thinking of The Sopranos*. My luck with 2000 or later television hasn’t been any good. What is everyone’s opinion of the Sopranos.
*- Our HOA has a internet and television deal with Xfinity which includes a HBO subscription which comes with access to MAX. All Sopranos episodes are at MAX.
@Scott:
Dear Wife and I will be away for our 37th ‘How tall are you?’ anniversary on May 18th and 36th civil wedding anniversary or May 30th. How tall are you were DW’s famous first words to me after we were introduced to one another.
I will try scheduling our Greek island cruise for DW’s 65th birthday which will be Sep 18 next year.
Here’s a longish, but worthwhile read. I don’t know the writer and just kinda stumbled across this because I’m depressed and barely functional without my ADHD meds.
I don’t even know how to properly excerpt it and have it make any sense. But that’s kinda the gist of it, we have all the form of everything, but the function is gone. The old world is dead (or dying) and the new one hasn’t been born yet.
I think this is a decent framework for what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Both in terms of the US and UK. For example, there’s all these problems that cost money to fix. Ok, makes sense. But instead of actually raising money to fix anything, the idea of raising taxes has become entirely verboten. Why don’t we raise taxes on rich people and the companies they own? Why don’t we force them to raise wages and actually pay people enough to live?
In the US why is the GOP allowed to blatantly talk about destroying the government, people’s healthcare and food for poor people just so they can give the richest a huge tax cut. One that is impossible to do without both exploding the deficit AND forcing bond holders to pay for it. Why aren’t there riots over this? What’s going to happen if that bill passes and no one buys the bonds?
Here in the UK, Labour seems to look at Brexit and Austerity and has decided that maybe more Austerity with a side dish of beating immigrants and trans people with hammers will fix the problem. I don’t see how that’s going to make things better. Starmer is going to lose the country to Reform and he’s going to be the most confused idiot on the street. The absolute funniest bit about that though is then Farage and Reform will actually have to govern and no one thinks they can actually do that.
@Rob1:
@gVOR10:
Rand Paul just needs to get his ass kicked in again and go the fuck away.
The Episcopalians won’t help re-settle white South African “refugees.”
s@Daryl:
Daryl,
I don’t disagree with you. As I wrote last night ‘A manager with bets placed on his team can take actions detrimental to the franchise that employs him. Using a pitcher who isn’t totally healthy. The manager may win his bet but the actions he takes have an adverse effect on a player and his team.’
Rose’s pursuit of Cobb’s record was both selfish and detrimental to the teams he played for. The last 5 years of his career, Rose more closely resembled Ozzie Smith offensively than your typical ML Leftfielder, Rightfielder, or first baseman, the three positions he was playing. Rose managed the Reds in 85, and gave himself over 500 plate appearances in which he hit 2 home runs* and had a slugging percentage around .320. Horrible numbers for someone playing first base and oh the Reds finished in second place 5.5 games behind the LA Dodgers. A good hitting first baseman may have put the Reds on top.
*- The only two home runs Rose hit after the 1981 season. He was never a home run hitter but his .300 plus batting averages compensated. Unfortunately by 1982 Rose wasn’t hitting .300 anymore.
Hottest of Takes:
The EU could end the war in Ukraine in 3 weeks. Week 1 would be telling the Russians that they are coming and that other than blockading Kalingrad they aren’t coming across the Russian border.
Week two move assets to the Polish-Ukraine border. Tell the Hungarians to shut the fuck up, get with the program or get out. The Germans and the Baltics blockade Kalingrad.
Week three, cross and start kicking ass. When the Russians threaten nukes, tell them to fuck off and ask them if any of their nukes even work.
At no point actually “Declare War”. Fuck that, just go in and shoot faces off. Call it a “special military action”
@Kingdaddy:..
From the item that you linked:
What a joker she is. Why does she even have to say this?
Donald Trump would never try to deport people from this country to appeal to the racist, Christian Nationalist feelings of his MAGA base.
I think that these white refugees from the Republic of South Africa should be closely monitored to ensure that they do not vote in United States elections before they attain US Citizenship.
ETA: None of those white South Africans in the picture who are demonstrating in front of the United States Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, Feb. 15, 2025 look like they have been missing any meals. What are they whining about?
@Bill Jempty: @Daryl:
The evidence that he bet on baseball is pretty weak. The evidence that he was not doing much to help his teams win, as Bill points out, is strong. It is one thing when a player holds on “too long” and quite another when he is his own manager and keeps playing himself. This should keep him out of the hall of fame. The steroid guys were trying harder to help their teams win than Pete Rose was.
As to the rotting in hell thing, sleeping with a very young girl and laughing it off as “nobody cares about something that long ago” and not expressing any regrets for statutory rape should take care of that.
The Republicans are pressing ahead on no tax on tips. Is everyone ready for everyone’s hand out wanting tips? Your plumber or A/C guy? Auto mechanic? Or receive a bill with a bargain price but a mandatory 50% tip? I’m not.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me…. you can’t fool again, I gotta put food on my family.
When people show you who they are, plan accordingly. Put food on your family.
The Afrikaners getting refugee status reminds of the important paper at the link. Apartheid ended in 1990. Jim Crow sort of ended in the 60s in the US. At least the official laws ended it but if you are aware of actual enforcement and behavioral changes it wasn’t until well into the 80s it was gone as a matter of law. However, as the paper notes, black wealth as a share of white wealth is 5% in South Africa and 6% in the US. The paper looks at the many reasons given for this but finds that what it comes down to is that the group with economic superiority finds ways to maintain that superiority.
So you have a bunch of South Afrikaners who believe they are being killed at a higher rate than blacks, without any proof for that belief. You have them claiming they are afraid of black people. Where have we heard that before? That they are facing racial discrimination since some laws favor black people in employment. Still, what its notable to me is that it appears that the time limit whites in both the US and SA have decided upon is in the neighborhood of 30 years.
After 300 hundred years of slavery and apartheid you just declare everyone is equal and you make some half hearted attempts at redress for 30 years. During those 30 years you find ways to maintain superiority and after 30 years you decide those attempts are racism. In South Africa after official and unofficial aprtheid of roughly 100 years it looks like 30 years was all many of them have been able to tolerate.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09538259.2024.2318962#abstract
@Kingdaddy: It’s interesting. From what I can tell, the blacks are killing each other at higher rates, but killing the whites because they’re white. Does it count as targeting when they’re killing everyone else faster?
@Kingdaddy: Here’s betting the white Afrikaners don’t end up in resettlement camps like, well, non-white refugees.
File under: performative white anti-racist racism.
I suggest we hold the trolls as we did yesterday. Talk about the 400 million dollar jet or be ignored.
I suggest we hold the trolls as we did yesterday. Talk about the 400 million dollar jet or be ignored.
@Beth:
I don’t think any of the great powers have declared war since the 1940s. Lately they just escalate or authorize war.
The real way to tell the Russians to eff off on nukes, is to let them know the French nukes are locked onto Moscow and St. Petersburg. No idea how that would work.
@Mister Bluster:
It’s possible the white S. Africans imported by MAGA are pro-apartheid extremists, like Nazi-saluting oligarch Musk. Seems they were too mediocre to succeed in S. African society. Despite the existence of white privilege in the US, I doubt they’ll fare much better here — especially after Trump is no longer around to assist.
They should have the opportunity to try tho, just like other migrants. I doubt they’ll last long, why stay in Florida when the Netherlands is a 9-hour flight away?
They need to be monitored to make sure they don’t start murdering native-born black American citizens, as apartheid clydes are wont to do.
@Fortune: The propaganda is hard to sort out. How many are killed because they are white and how many because they are rich people living on isolated farms surrounded by poor people living in shacks? (Note that in the killings the black employees on the farms are usually also killed.) Still, the numbers are low and there is no organized effort, especially on the part of the government, to kill them. That means there is no evidence of genocide and I think persecution. What you appear to have is an occasional black person deciding to kill someone not just for being white, but for being perceived of as the cause for his being poor and/or the cause of his family members dying from the results of that poverty.
Steve
And now, AI to read and translate audiobooks.
The piece has many objections. Best summed up thus:
I’ve done some translation professionally. That is, I got paid for doing the translations. it was from English to Spanish for a gambling website. It’s not that simple (few things are). First I wanted to convey the meaning, then the style, and then the feel. In that order, and with clarity as the top criterion. Phrase for phrase literal translations don’t work well*. The meaning might be conveyed, but little else.
As to reading, there’s a great deal of variation. Fiction, naturally, is different from nonfiction. It matters whether a voice actor or the author does the reading**, how pleasant one finds the voice (highly subjective). Now and then some books can feel grating because of the reading style. And there’s more. I don’t think synthetic AI voices would improve things.
*Word for word literal translations tend to produce gibberish. quick example: “Cuanto cuesta el sueter cafe en el aparador?” “Much cost the sweater brown in the display?”
** Most audiobooks are read by actors, but quite a few by the authors. I would never again read a Bill Bryson book read by Bill Bryson. On the other hand, Kara Cooney and Jill Lepore are rather good at it.
Elon Musk as demiurge (malevolent minor god)
“Link“
Blaine, WA is my home town. It is on the Canadian border. I do mean “on”. I had one friend whose family residence had the international border as one if its property lines.
There is a monument known as the Peace Arch in Blaine, maintained jointly by the US and Canada. It was built in 1921 to commemorate 100 years of peace along the entire US/Canadian border.
We still have peace. AND we have Candian citizens returning to Canada being searched by Customs and Border Protection (known in my youth as Customs and Immigration). This has had a big, big impact on border crossings. Along with everything else, border crossings at Blaine (there are two different stations in Blaine, which is one of the busiest crossings in the country, up there with Tijuana, Detroit/Windsor and El Paso) are down by 50 percent.
Blaine has always had a lot of commercial traffic from Canada, but not right now. To many Canadians it isn’t worth the trouble. Or they are mad at Trump.
I recall crossing the border as a local resident really wasn’t much trouble. Not now. I might need a passport. I never needed a passport.
This is unquestionably hurting my home town. They may have budget shortfalls. There may be other issues. Just another way that Trump is hurting things I care about.
CBP is unresponsive to queries from local government officials, who are told to file a FOIA request.
WTF?
@Beth: Interesting thesis, but it can serve as a defense of doing nothing because there’s nothing to do. I’m not sure that’s a viewpoint either you or the author should–or even want to– promote. I’m not sure there’s anything to do, either, but that’s just an additional dimension of the problem.
ETA: @Beth: I see that you’re yet another of those people, like cracker and Luddite, who should not be running for political office or setting policy. Personally, I think it’s a great idea, but I don’t have any kids I hope will still be alive and thriving in the future, either.
@Fortune: To be clear, are you saying that the White South African landowners and continued beneficiaries of past colonialism and apartheid shouldn’t be killed?
I think the South Africans have shown remarkable restraint. They haven’t even implemented significant land reform.
Anyway, culturally, the White Afrikaners are descendants of the Dutch, and I don’t think they will really integrate well into our unique and exceptional American culture. They should probably go back to their ancestral homeland, wherever the Dutch come from. Dutchsylvania?
@Jay L Gischer:
I had to read three times that ICE thugs are searching Canadians returning to Canada. It makes no sense at all. Having read the link, it still makes no sense. It seems like harassment.
@Kathy: I’m honestly a little surprised that they would just translate English to Spanish for a gambling website, rather than have a whole separate product team that understands the countries they are expanding into, and who would take the English site as a rough guideline and build out a new interface.
Not that translation cannot work, but because the site is meant to be a destination rather than just a tool. It should feel special and welcoming rather than just a foreign site in their language.
What appeals to a Mexican or Peruvian gambler? I have no idea. But it’s probably not a digital slot machine modeled after the license plate of a pickup truck with a confederate flag bumper sticker where you rub the truck nuts for luck before tugging on them to set it all spinning.
(I also have no idea what appeals to an American gambler. Or why anyone would trust online gambling to cheat like mad.)
@Kathy: one of the hallmarks of a abuser is they trying to to cut off the person they are abusing from their friends. I assume that the Trump administration’s War On Tourists is a similar plan to isolate Americans.
@Kathy: Well, it isn’t ICE, it’s CBP. I know, and have long known people who work for CBP, and I would not care to characterize them as thugs. These are different agencies, with different missions. They probably have got orders from someone somewhere to do this, but nobody knows who or why.
Nothing has ever happened like that at the border as long as I can remember.
@Gustopher:
It was for a website run by one person, who for some reason decided he wanted his site in Spanish as well. The site was very popular for a long time. In particular the game guides and strategy tables for a lot of games, all with precise mathematical rigor.
Last I heard he sold the site for a large sum. I haven’t visited it in over a decade. Along the way the Spanish section fell by the wayside.
Ezra Klein for the win.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHXvMKjoQRH/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
@Kathy:
Both the French and UK SLBM’s are pretty certainly already thus targeted.
@Beth:
An idea that appeals somewhat, but not practicable.
The European (including UK) rely upon NATO as a “war enabling” system due to 75 years of integration in the SHAPE/SACEUR command structure.
Untangling that from the US in practice re key assets in logistics, command/control, sensor intelligence, and air operations is not something that can be done overnight.
Even if Europe could stop be so damn “grandmothers footsteps” about everything.
See the summit the other day when the European first threatened “immediate severe sanctions” if Russia didn’t stop playing silly buggers about cease-fire.
Now “we may do something by the end of June”
ftlog.
Plus, nuclear risk is nuclear risk.
“A sufficient number of nukes would work” is always going to be the rational calculation.
@Beth:
Starmer’s problem is he’s boxed in on taxation: if he breaks his pledges on that, the polling indicates Labour loses the votes needed to hold off Reform.
Going for a wealth tax has appeal, but whether it would raise enough in practice is questionable.
And there might well be implications for economic growth.
And if you are constrained on taxes, there is (as Liz Truss discovered) very little headroom for increased deficits re current spending.
UK bond rates are already among the highest in the OECD, because of market scepticism about the sustainability.
One option would be a big trade deal with the EU: but that also runs into possible problems with the key Lab/Con/Reform “winnable votes” in the key marginals.
And Labour’s related paralysis in the face of the right-wing media.
If it was up to me, I’d go for a big speech on the need to adequately fund local government, policing, defence etc, and therefore we must combine some sort of assets tax with a percentage on income tax and VAT.
Then make damn sure the councils spent the extra allocation in highly visible ways re local infrastructure and services.
The peculiar thing about politics in the UK at the moment, is everybody is fixated on Farage and Reform
When in reality, there is a high probability of Conservatives losing their “southern heartland” seats to the LibDems.
And LibDems and Greens winning seats from Labour.
Gabbard firing people for being smarter than Dear Leader…
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/05/14/politics/gabbard-fires-senior-intelligence-officials
@just nutha:
Probably would, imho, and that of quite a few evolutionary biologists (Dawkins, Gould, etc).
And therefore mistaken.
But it was a long-standing assumption, and still seems to be common, that there was a driver to increased sentience, than sapience, then tool-using and technology.
I just think that given how long life on Earth got along without us smart-aleck apes, its a mistake due to skewed perspective.
“We are here” therefore “we were MEANT to be here” therefore “something sorta like us is likely everywhere”.
Life being merrily mono-cellular for about 4 billion years indicates otherwise to me.
Then 500 million years of sponges and algae and invertebrates
It’s “only” 500 m-year ago you get vertebrates.
Land life is just the very last, and relatively short, chapter.
Mammals an appendix, humans an addendum to the appendix, and agriculture/civilisation a footnote to that of a mere 10,000 years.
The obvious statistical inference is that where life exists, it’s generally going to be just prokaryotes doing their rather monotonous thing.
We obviously can’t know that life might stay mono-cellular almost indefinitely; but we can’t know it don’t, either, without evidence to the contrary.
Similarly, even “advanced” land life appears to have managed quite well without sapients for almost its entire duration.
But then the Fermi question is: even ONE like us should be enough to get everywhere, if they wanted to.
My tentative opinion, fwiw, is: by the time they are ABLE to do so, they no longer have much inclination to, on the basis of “why bother?”
Because civilizations driven to bother are unlikely to be civilizations that survive long enough to be able to implement their desires.
@JohnSF:
Oh yeah, you’re absolutely right on this. That’s partially why it’s the hottest take.
On the other hand, and related to below, this sort of dithering, both the rational/understandable bit and the cowardly bit is going to lead to something worse. The worse is hear already and it wants more.
@JohnSF:
I would be willing to bet that and intelligently dumping money into the NHS would probably save Labour and the country.
To that I would add hammering that chart showing how bad Brexit harmed the UK and another chart showing how fucked the U.S. is right now. Money needs to be spent on actual people and actual services. That’s how you actually stave off Farage. Those assholes can claim all sorts of shit and get away with it cause they don’t actually control much. Shove money at the councils that Reform actually controls and watch them fuck it up. Make that the story.
People need to actually start fighting the Cancer. Fight the right wing media. Fucking fight period. But the actual enemy, not immigrants. Not trans people. Like Klein says in that video above, their vision sucks.
@just nutha:
I think my personal over arching problem is that I’ve become radicalized. I’ve lived how good it can be. That goodness existed in my body. I got to experience the joy of being whole and it was taken away from me by constipated losers. I can’t accept getting shoved back into a closet. So, yeah, I shouldn’t be let near power, cause I’ll let my mouth run.
@JohnSF:
Also, just one data point for you. The UK’s upcoming experiment in Separate but Equal is going to push a lot of LGBT people and allies to the Greens or not voting at all. Maybe not a lot of people in absolute terms, but it could be enough in places.
That’s on top of making Labour look like cowardly Right-wingers.
@Jay L Gischer:
My bad.
It still feels like harassment, and it’s still very unusual.
@JohnSF: I like to think that if it didn’t have Fermi’s name attached to it, it would be universally dismissed as moronic – which it is. So arrogant and silly…. It’s something Don Trump might say, actually.
@Gustopher:
I’m actually on the record other places as passionately ambivalent on this issue (it’s another of those cracker not making decisions things), but it wouldn’t surprise me any if he were anti-revenge killing. It seems to be a popular moral stance.
I guess investment in the US and tariff revenues is uninteresting. Not that it effects the economic future of the US or anything.
Being whiny little bitches rules here.
@Jay L Gischer:
Jay –
I’ve had several jobs in Vancouver over the years. In Vancouver, as you know, even back in the day, there were certain US Items that weren’t available in Canada, which included Marlboro cigarettes, which most of our cast smoked. So, every other Saturday, I would cross the border – most of the times at the Peach Arch Crossing, but sometimes at the Pacific Highway Port of Entry = to purchase said Marlboro cigarettes, and other assorted US items. I’d return with 14 cartons of Marlboros, some US Burbon, and different foods. All very much against the law to bring into the country.
After about 7 trips without ever being stopped, I got spooked during the 8th trip. So I didn’t buy anything. Just went on a hike, then went to cross the border back into Canada. I got pulled from the line and searched. Two hours. They almost tore the car apart. Didn’t have anything in the car. They acted as though they knew I had something hidden, but I didn’t. Never did it again. The cast learned to smoke Canadian cigarettes.
I would urge that we refuse to engage trolls unless they are willing to discuss the 400 million dollar plane. And each time they re-emerge we should use the same tactic with other issues. They can either be ignored, or they can sack up and start engaging in honest dialog.
I believe this tactic keeps the door open, should they decide to at least pretend to be honest. But it stymies their usual craven tactic. This puts them in a bind: grow up or be ignored.
Own the trolls.
@EddieInCA:
You were given up, Fast Eddie, yes you were. There was a rat in your organization, see? A dirty rat. And you know what we do with rats. Let’s just say we cut off their. . . cheese. You need to find this rat and give him the deep six.
@Michael Reynolds:
That’s more Dashiel than Raymond, and Chandler is one of my secular gods. The man could load a fucking paragraph. It’s a very common example, but, fuck it. From The Big Sleep:
Answering the question, can you establish an entirely original literary voice in one paragraph?
Someone else who can origami plot and character and world-building like that is Lisa McGee, the showrunner of Derry Girls. Maybe 20 completely indelible characters, not a weak or unoriginal one in the bunch, and do it in an hour of TV. It’s like watching close-up magic.
@EddieInCA:
I spent formative years with my grandmother’s bachelor brothers on a dairy farm near the border in @Jay’s turf. We used to watch the cars loaded to the windows with American contraband headed north, and return south loaded with Canadian contraband (IIRC Cuban cigars were high on the list in the early-mid 60s). At that time the border east of Blaine had a crossing that was watched maybe twice a month. Even though I don’t miss milking 200-300 Holsteins twice daily, I miss the idea of the “open-ish” border.
Of course, Bellingham and Vancouver were both closed up tight on Sundays.
ETA, 20 years ago, my late BIL convinced me to go to BC with him. His ill-timed jokes about guns got us searched going north, and his jokes about Cuban cigars got similar treatment coming home. I feel your pain, but least you weren’t guilty that last time!
@dazedandconfused:
Really?
I thing it’s quite a perceptive question, as it actually sometimes makes people stop and think about the possible implications of absence.
Incidentally, I’d slightly caveat my previous:
“civilizations driven to bother are unlikely to be civilizations that survive long enough to be able to implement their desires.”
A stabilised civilisation is unlikely to have an continuing urge to unlimited expansion.
They might well remain curious, if patient, so exploration of some sort might go on.
But also might be below any threshold for detectability by us.
I feel the need to note the following for the general good.
First, this comment engages in a typical racist trope., that blacks kill each other at high rates, but they kill whites on purpose. It perpetuates the notion that blacks are threats, and maybe even borderline animals. In the US, it is normally used by people who like to talk about “black on black” crime.
Second, this comment demonstrates a severe lack of basic mathematical and statistical understanding. For example, in a country with almost 82% of the population being black, it stands to reason, from a purely probabilistic point of view, that most homicides would be blacks killing blacks.
The comment is both racist and innumerate.
Fortune:
Another PSA.
This comment is a combination of a non-sequitur (as it is unclear what the commenter is referencing) and simply being generally rude.
As a general matter, I would prefer comments make some specific amount of sense and not be rude.
Thanks.
@Connor:
@Michael Reynolds: I 100% agree that at this point it should be clear that certain commenters couldn’t answer a direct question to save their lives. I would note that, in particular, Fortune has demonstrated a tantalizing ability to seem to be on the verge of having a conversation but to always fail to provide evidence or even an argument. I would suggest everyone note this. I, myself, have been tempted, even after being burned, to try and get answers. I would point out to all, it isn’t going to happen.
As one of the hosts of this little electronic soiree, I reserve the right to do as I did above and provide corrective commentary as I see fit, because some things really ought not be allowed to stand unchallenged, but would underscore trying to engage in direct questioning is fruitless.
@JohnSF:
It’s moronic because it dismisses the vastness of the universe and ignores that this planet has only had a complex species capable of industrialized for a relative split-second of its history. It reflects the mindset of the earth being central to all existence, not a single grain of sand in the Sahara.