Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, September 17, 2025
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29 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
The headline of the day- Popular restaurant at Disney shopping area robbed by suspect in scuba gear
Interview with Dr Peter Hotez
How a Texas vaccine expert tried — and failed — to get through to Kennedy
More Trump foreign policy successes
India joins Russia-Belarus drills amid nuclear weapons launch rehearsal
America First is becoming America Last
@Scott: Its a little broader than an attack on science, its an attack on expertise. It allows people on the right to believe whatever they want to believe, which means they believe the leaders and influencers of their party. Mind you it’s mostly limited to stuff their party has politicized. During covid I might have a family argue with me over care of their family with covid. If family ended up in my care in the ER or critical care for some other issue I was then a true expert. The families had no true medical expertise or knowledge. With covid they thought people with true expertise were wrong and they were experts because some rando on youtube told them what to believe, or some politician or their preacher.
Steve
Mitch McConnell squashed a similar investigation about the rise in right wing extremism back in 2009, too.
https://www.404media.co/doj-deletes-study-showing-domestic-terrorists-are-most-often-right-wing/
@Scott: In the early 2000s I played a little game. If I saw a climate skeptic “scientist” I’d see how many clicks it took to find a tie to oil or coal money. Seldom more than a few clicks. Often they’d have ties to the Heartland Institute which started as a tobacco industry funded organization and carried over a lot of the pro-tobacco people and methods. I think much of the anti-science movement goes back to big oil funding climate skepticism. The findings of science must not be believed because it would cost us money. A lot of people made a living off climate skepticism. And while skeptics were saying climate scientists were motivated by faculty salaries and those big, juicy research grants they never mentioned the hundreds of millions oil and coal were spending on denialism.
Years ago in an article about conflict in the Balkans I saw the term “ethnic entrepreneur”, implying that the individual was stirring up ethnic hatred as a business, his livelihood, not out of sincere conviction. I’ve taken to calling Charlie Kirk an ideology entrepreneur. He was one of many like Tucker Carlson or Trump who’ve found they can make a good living or succeed politically on pushing nonsense. Many found their trade in COVID skepticism where the payoff was clicks and political success more than money.
Much of this I think originated with AGW skepticism, even tobacco skepticism, because there was money in it. And it’s metastasized into a profitable industry, not entirely funded by affected industry, questioning the scientific consensus for fun and profit.
@gVOR10:
In this country everything ultimately comes down to money. It’s the only thing Americans actually believe in. I don’t exclude myself. I’m dealing with Portuguese people who will not read an email or text on a weekend or holiday, even though I’m trying to give them money for something.
As an American, it’s hard for me to get my head around: do you mean to tell me you are so devoted to time off that you’ll pass up . . .gasp. . .money? Do you primitives not understand: this is money we’re talking about? WTF are you going on about family and church and relaxation? I have money! Respond to my fucking text! No, not Monday, now, right now!
Just one of the reasons I need to GTFO of this sad, sick, fucked up country.
Sure, Tim, but money buys me the booze and the weed and the Amazon Prime that help me contain the rage and despair. So, that’s a pretty good system, right?
Monday it seemed I was coming down with something. I started sneezing often, and then I got a runny nose but only on the right nostril. The latter got so I had to blow my nose every few minutes, and a mountain of tissues started building in the wastebasket. Nothing else. No cough, no fever, no joint aches, no swollen lymph nodes, no feeling of something stuck between nose and throat (which is how cold symptoms first bug me).
Nearing bedtime I worried I might not be able to sleep. Aside from drinking fluids, I took two tylenol about an hour before my usual bedtime. Minutes after this, it stopped. it wasn’t the pills, as they’d had no time to be broken down and absorbed. I’ve no idea what it was. I slept well, and next day there was nothing.
On other things, I stumbled across vegetable glycerin as an additive for sugar free sorbet. The claim is that it prevents ice crystals from forming, meaning a sugar free concoction won’t freeze solid. I’m skeptical, but at $2 per 120 ml. bottle, I’m willing to try it.
Now, the recipes were I’ve seen it used put in some non-sugar sweetener, like allulose or monk fruit sweetener. these mimic sugar’s ability to keep ice crystals from forming. I tried using allulose on a sorbet last year. it worked, but the amount needed made it too sweet. not for the first few bites, but about halfway through a portion it was hard to go on.
So i intend to use some sweetener, but not one that can confound the issue. Likely splenda, unless I decide to use a sweet fruit as a base (for some reason, there are tangerines at the store right now).
@Michael Reynolds: yup. Americans are all about the money.
And it is exhausting. And soul killing.
@becca:
As recently as 11 years ago, I had to count my pennies. Did I use them to go for my cancer treatments or pay my electric bill or for my auto insurance? Drop dead or be homeless/without transport for me to the doctor or the wife to go to work. It was about money. Life and death. Soul killing if you want to call it that.
Fortunately for DW and I, parishioners of our church helped us out when needed. Eleanor, Dominic, and Mary mostly but others too. I started selling books eleven years ago but I didn’t begin earning enough royalties till Dec 2014 to come close to countering the medical bills I had every month. My health stabilized the next year and my book business began to build itself up into what it is today.
@Scott: Putin’s puppet strikes again.
Trump concedes privately he misjudged Putin with public patience ‘running out fast’ (MSN/Daily Mail)
Some people really are slow. Putin can’t stop warmongering because this war is about a) Putin’s imperalistic desire to swallow Ukraine and other former Soviet states, b) Putin’s anti-democratic regime retaining power through fear and scapegoating. Not about the nonexistent NATO threat to Russia, Ukrainian weapons labs, Nazis in Donbas, “Russia’s legitimate security concerns” or any other Russian propaganda swallowed whole by the MAGA-Rogan-Greenwald-Taibbi-Mearsheimer axis of useful idiots.
Meanwhile, the Republican congressional castrati, pretending to care:
Frustrated GOP senators blow steam on Russia: ‘Sick of’ Trump, Vance ‘love affair’ with Putin (The Hill)
Gee, seen such craven cowardice anywhere else, Senator MAGA Anonymous? Clownery.
@Michael Reynolds:
Us authors both spend our royalty checks on Amazon Prime. OK but no booze or weed here. Instead it pays for DW and I to travel or us financing the education of nieces and nephews. What we spend on my strat-o-matic baseball playing or my and DW’s diet sprite drinking is rather small.
@DK:
Just as he blames Joe Biden for everything that is wrong in America, Trump simply cannot resist blaming Zelenskyy for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and he can’t bring himself to do anything that might displease his “dear friend” Vlad. As to the spineless GOPers in Congress – Trump could set their homes on fire and they’d have to screw up all their courage just to say, “Gee, I wish he wouldn’t have done that.”
I’ve been hearing comments on Bluesky and elsewhere that several insurers will continue to pay for COVID boosters regardless of the recent antivaxx diktats.
This is good, but also a no-brain self-interested decision. Meaning, it’s far cheaper to pay for millions of boosters than for thousands of hospitalizations, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of treatments with Paxlovid.
But in many states you still need a doctor’s prescription.
I haven’t heard of any change in Mexico. My regular pharmacy still offers the Pfizer shots for about $50 each, no questions asked. Curiously, though, they now offer also a booster shot for whooping cough (pertussis). I don’t think it was on offer last year.
I looked it up. It’s a triple shot for pertussis, tetanus, and diphtheria. I think I’ll ask about it.
Short, snarky column in The Guardian
TL;DR:
On the topic of money driving anti-science, I present to you a recent video from Veritasium, a YouTube channel run by Derek Muller. I am a huge fan.
The video takes its time and goes through the evolution of herbicides, including Monsanto’s work on Agent Orange.
Monsanto no longer exists as a company. Threatened by multiple very large, and very successful lawsuits, they sold themselves to a German company, Bayer. Why Bayer would buy them is anyone’s guess.
The thing that stands out and is relevant to this conversation is the stuff about how Monsanto approached its PR campaign to protect Roundup. They ghost wrote what was a very influential paper stating that glyphosate (the actual herbicide chemical) was safe.
At about 38 minutes in, they discuss Monsanto’s Let Nothing Go strategy.
“If somebody tweets online Roundup causes cancer, you don’t let that go”
This was chilling to me. It seems so familiar. I have seen a wave of commentors dogpile onto a blog that takes up a specific topic.
As we always suspected this is organized. It has big money behind it. In the case of Monsanto, it didn’t work. But incentives are there, significantly in quack medicine.
This didn’t start with climate change, I don’t think. I think it started with tobacco companies. However, the internet changed everything.
I ran across, via Brad DeLong’s substack, Harriet Martineau, who traveled to America in the 1830s, met all the important people in the US government at the time, and wrote a book about it.
Here is what she wrote about John C. Calhoun. I am struck by just how much this description fits certain people today. People in the political business. Also relevant to the discussion we had on “debate”.
@gVOR10:
I think it’s that combined with the anti-science views common in evangelical circles. When the resolutely nonchurchgoing Reagan expressed doubts about evolution on the campaign trail in 1980, that represented the beginnings of this coalition between big money and religious fundamentalists, which would have baffled someone like William Jennings Bryan (who connected his opposition to evolution with his opposition to the Social Darwinist views of the robber barons).
@steve222:
My VA doc had one of these on his desk during my last check-up.
For next week I want to try tomato soup using canned tomatoes. I had good results using them in pizza sauce a few months ago. And I saw cans that claim to contain “roasted tomatoes.” I suppose it can’t hurt to try.
My base recipe is to cook fresh diced tomatoes (skinned and seeded) on a pan with some onions and garlic, until the tomatoes are very soft, then deglaze with any juice that remained from seeding them.
That’s not necessary with canned tomatoes, though. So I figure sauté the onions and garlic, transfer the aromatics to a blender with the tomatoes, some chicken stock and cottage cheese, then put everything in the pot to heat and reduce and season as needed.
Usually I reserve soup for colder weather (cloud and rains are easing up, so we’re getting late summer warm weather until autumn kicks in by October (yes, the equinox is next week), but this seems simple enough to be worth it. Even with the side of rice I always have with tomato soup. I may even make a lot and freeze half for use later on.
This will go with burger patties and fries, I’ll cook the patties in a pan, then brown them if needed in the air fryer, since I’m using the latter for fries anyway. and since the air fryer is already out, I may use it to make black bread croutons for the soup.
@dazedandconfused: Well, that’s first-rate. I love it.
@dazedandconfused:
The surgeon who did my hernia op had it on a ceramic mug on his desk.
Perhaps it needs updating to “your ChatGPT hallucination.”
@dazedandconfused: Funny! To be clear I never had problems with people who looked up stuff on Google and wanted to ask questions. I also eventually learned that bright people with truly unusual syndromes/diagnoses sometimes knew more about their problem than I did. The problem people are the ones who declare themselves experts based upon poor sources largely based upon their ideological beliefs. Also, a lot of people have poor understanding of data analysis and medicine/physiology/pharmacology in general.
Steve
@Kathy: Congratulations, you got an allergen or other irritant up your right nostril! A nasal rinse can help by washing it out.
@steve222: I have gone to a lot of trouble to gain credibility with my doctors, and I have been generally successful. I make careful observations, and I recognize scientific principles in how I talk to them.
For instance, shortly after my stent was installed, my doctor wanted to put me on a blood thinner, because there was “concern” that the stents might provoke clotting (despite having an anti-clot coating). I didn’t want to, because I still did martial arts and the bruising would be enormous. So I asked him, “Do you know that this will help?” He trusted me enough to say, “We don’t know”, and I declined. This was 20 years ago, and nothing bad happened.
Also, I took 3000mg of Niacin every night for most of those 20 years, until my cardiologist told me one day, “The long-term study is out and taking niacin doesn’t affect clinical outcomes at all, despite raising HDL So you can stop.”
That was a difficult moment for me. But I know how science works, and I didn’t think it impugned the good faith or knowledge of my doctor.
It’s just, now we know more.
I’m not sure everybody would have had that reaction, though.
Really, it’s kind of interesting how mad I was about it. I wanted to keep taking it anyway. Which another part of me knew was silly.
@Gustopher:
I cannot get liquid inside my nose. I panic when that happens.
On other things, Powell and the Fed board really stepped on it now. They lowered interest rates responsibly.
Powell then went on to defame and libel El Taco by saying “It is “reasonable” to expect Trump’s tariffs will lead to “a one-time shift” in prices.”
He must really be brave.
You don’t need heavy handed censorship when there’s self-censorhisp
ABC decided to take his who off the air for comments on Carlie Kirk’s murder. I haven’t watched the clip, but you can find it here.
Based on the recap in the piece, I fail to see anything objectionable.
I believe that there’s a profound pathological link between the ability to get angry at the idea of government interest in actual disinformation which affects human life (Covid vaccines, for example) and the inability to care when the government threatens a network because of a joke. It’s just a deep thing for judicious (mostly) white people. They love, to the nth degree, the freedom for terrible lies to take root. That’s their existence. But at the same time, any sort of mild mockery is too much for them.
This is the worst free speech crisis this country has had since Hoover was running the FBI and the CIA was doing MKUltra, and it’s going to degenerate into some sort of referendum on what the angry alienated white asshole believes when it comes to an annoying college kid vs the federal government, and how best to approach has pathetic white ass.
@Kathy:
There are other things to do with one’s time. I don’t see a need to spend my time watching ABC, ESPN, or Disney+.