Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, January 14, 2026
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34 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.
It seems that as many as 10-20,000 Iranians have been gunned down in the streets, with another 20,000 imprisoned, presumably hangings to follow in many cases.
Would ICE be able to pull off something similar in the US? Some police departments and some state National Guards would probably co-operate, as well as some right-wing militias. Would these forces gun down fellow Americans? IMHO, yes.
OTOH, liberals can buy guns, too. We are a much bigger population and much bigger geographically as well. And many police forces would resist, as well as some National Guards. The deciding factor would be the US Army. Some military units would comply, some would not.
Thoughts?
@Michael Reynolds: As a retired AF officer, I have no idea. Practiced with a gun maybe twice in 20 years.
I suspect people are people, in service or out. Most will go along with orders. Really depends on the people in charge. And nothing will change until they see the consequences and go: My God!, what have I done!
Apparently power can be an addiction, recent NYT piece about that. This can lead to a spiral of increasing displays of power, of dominance, just to get the addictive pleasure hit.
“NYT Gift” gift link:
After other examples,
It’s a long piece, lots more.
ETA: And the main dude is now so cognitively impaired he no longer respects limits or thinks rationally.
This is the ending of the NYT piece linked above:
“Gift“
Every time I get a system update on Mac I have to spend 20 minutes or more figuring out how to unfuck my desktop. Dear Apple: Stop coming up with pointless bullshit. It’s just busy work for your engineers. I don’t want your fucking widgets crowding my desktop. Just stop.
@charontwo and charontwo: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
@Michael Reynolds:
I shouldn’t criticize a company whose products I don’t use. Still, I had an iphone 4 some years ago. one thing that irritated me no end, was the feeling the OS wanted the phone and apps to work a certain way, which was not how I wanted them to work. I felt I kept fighting the phone most times I tried to use it.
I had that phone only because the company issued Android phone was a piece of junk (can you believe 512 MB total memory?). It was a relief when they switched us to a bargain-basement budget Samsung that didn’t come close to matching the iphone’s hardware specs, but worked and allowed a lot more customization.
Apple, IMO, is partly a cult. Or it used to be. a lot still gets said about design and materials, and a lot less about performance and utility, and this goes back to the day of the all-in-one imacs made in different translucent colors.
In the name of the Apple, the Woz, and the Holy Jobs.
@Kathy: The trouble with today’s technological devices is not that they are hard to use or don’t have the right capabilities but that they are designed for the power users. My iPhone has a lot a capability, 90% of which I don’t care about and don’t want to care about. So I spend time putting the buttons and icons I care about as front and center as I can. But, at the same time, it irritates me that I have to figure all that out and that I have to go watch You Tube videos to even figure out whether I care about a feature.
@Scott:
We get new work phones every two years. My big issue is this happens during Hell week, and I have to configure the phone how I like it, add apps, get rid of some apps (like all social media), and then log in to the new apps. It takes me days to do this.
A lot of new features are superfluous and others are plain junk. The latest phone I got, a Motorola G15, bragged about having 8 GB RAM with “RAM Boost(TM)”. What this means is it has 4 GB RAM, but can steal 4 GB from storage and use it as RAM. Storage memory is slower. The phone’s performance improved when I turned it off.
And then there’s AI integration. Some might be useful, for instance in photo editing. A lot is intrusive bloatware. I’ve read a bit that Google assistant now use Gemini. Since I gave up on it years ago as being of very limited usefulness, I’ve no idea if adding a chatbot to it helps or merely drains data off your monthly plan.
AFAIC youtube is a cesspool that may hold some pearls, but is uninviting and kinda sleazy. I have more fingers and toes than visits to the site. Amazon has a tacky look, too. Every time I go there, I come away unimpressed and a little deflated. Mr becca likes it ok, so we still have a prime account. I suppose I have a rigid set of aesthetics.
I also resent all the involuntary updates on Apple devices. Basically, I dislike phone culture. I use an iPad exclusively for browsing and puzzles. I never sign up for apps and have zero presence on social media.
I have even stronger feelings about ai. I liked tech a lot more when it didn’t intrude on every aspect of my life, driving up the cost of living whether you use it or not.
Rant over, I’m going to make some buckwheat pancakes and drown myself in maple syrup.
@becca: I can see why you think that about YouTube. I engage with it a lot. However, the way I engage is not random surfing. I have developed a set of channels – a set of people – who I trust, and who I watch. I will try new things, mostly from recommendations from The Algorithm, and sometimes I catch a new channel that I really like.
I subscribe to those channels, I hit the like button. It helps them survive, it helps The Algorithm know that I like that stuff. I also look through the subscription page to see if there are things I have missed.
I have spent a lot of time curating my YouTube experience, and I understand if someone doesn’t want to do that. My wife does not do this, but tends to just spiral more, and sometimes this will lead her into disinformation, which can come out in lunchtime conversations.
The concept is pretty simple, and applies basically to all social media. Trust people, not The Algorithm.
My trust is based not on “do you agree with me” so much as “do you present facts in good faith”. Which is why even though I share political affiliation and orientation with many political channels, I still ignore them.
Peace and love, and enjoy those pancakes.
@becca:
I kind of like Youtube. Maybe the trick is to find the stuff worth keeping track of. I follow a few aviation, tech, cooking, and science channels.
Of course, caution is warranted. All of these channels are revenue generators, meaning they make their own in-video ads for goods and services, and offer branded merch as well. Most of the advertised services are not as good or useful as they’re made out to be. Buyer beware (that should be the motto of capitalism*).
as to Amazon, there’s the one weird trick. Many sellers there import their stock from China, often from websites like Alibaba, which offer wholesale prices for large purchases. It’s likely you can find the exact same item on Alibaba, Temu, etc. at lower prices.
Of course there’s shipping, and now also tariffs that can’t stand still. So it may no longer work, but it’s sure worth looking into now and then.
*It sounds better in Latin: Caveat Emptor.
@becca:
@Jay L. Gischer:
Like Jay, I have a curated set of YT creators that I follow and I have a list of vids that I’ve bookmarked to go back to. Many of those were embedded at referral sites and if you watch there rather than YT you avoid the ads. For as long as Google and YT have existed, I’ve turned off my search and viewing history, so the algorithm only has the info from the current session to work with, so any suggestions are usually pertinent to what I’ve been viewing. Additionally when I close the browser, I’ve set it so that all cookies auto delete.
Right now, YT is struggling with the management of AI slop, which they acknowledge most users don’t want.
@Kathy: I just don’t think I’m suited for this modern world. I fantasize about living in England circa 1918 and making wine with the Bloomsbury group or being Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas’s housekeeper in Paris during the same timeframe.
Now I’m gonna take Sadie for a hike in the woods.
Inflation Alert!
Checking this weeks new Kroger ad I see that the 14.5 oz can of Kroger Brand French Style Sliced Green Beans are now ON SALE for $1.00! The regular price just yesterday and for the last year or so was 89¢/14.5 oz can. When they are available I by the 4 pack of the same product that has increased today from $3.49 to $3.79. Pennies cheaper than the single can cost.
I’m not a huge fan of the Grateful Dead, but I know some of their songs. For instance, Uncle John’s Band (here performed by the Indigo Girls. It was this recording that really made me fall in love with this song). I’ve been thinking about it since Bob Weir died.
Here’s a lyric from the song that for the longest time I didn’t understand:
(The Indigo Girls changed this lyric slightly from “God damn” to “Sister”, not that it changes much meaning.
These days I know exactly who this lyric is referring to.
Is Fatso, the make-believe Nobel Prize peacemaker, really going to attack Iran?
So where have Cracker, Mr. Bluster, and a host of others vanished to?
@CSK:
I’m still around, sorta. I’m heading back down into the depression mines, so hooray I guess. Not at the nadir yet either.
I also don’t really have anything worth saying and little to no interest with arguing with people.
In the good news dept I taught myself how to buy Bitcoin in order to teach myself how to buy drugs off the internet. That was complicated and stupid. I was pretty certain before, but now I’m 100% convinced that the only purpose of crypto is drugs, gambling, and exploiting idiots.
@CSK: I think Mr. Bluster is Gregory Lawrence Brown now, and Cracker is still lurking, but he refuses to make an account and sign in. de Stijl has been MIA since we all yelled at him for yelling at you. Drew/Guarneri/Jack is probably still lurking, but we had an issue with another guy that was a real dick, and Dr. Taylor kindly asked him to leave (but didn’t ban him), so I guess in solidarity Drew quit commenting, too. 😉
@becca:
I’m a committed technophile.
My problem is when tech advances seem to veer towards dystopia. Like generative AI seems intent to do just now.
One question I wonder about now and then is : how the hell did people in the past not get bored to death? I think I fist wondered about it at age five or so, when I learned my parents had grown up without television.
At least they had movies and radio and recorded music. But go farther back in time, and there were fewer options. People pretty much had to talk to each other to pass the time. That’s an introvert’s nightmare. 😀
@Jay L. Gischer: It is hard to have a favorite Grateful Dead song, but Uncle John’s Band is surely in the mix for me. And thanks for the link.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I’ve not been a massive Grateful Dead either; but recently came across their live album “Veneta” on Qobuz, and it really caused me to revise my opinion, and check some of their other stuff.
Quite a lot of it seems to me now a lot better than I thought back in the day.
@Jay L. Gischer:
@DAllenABQ:
@JohnSF:
I’m not a fan of the Dead either, but I’ve come to respect their music more and certainly some of the culture* around them. I suspect there’s a pretty direct line from the tapes of their shows to the DJ set recordings I listen to all the time. Here’s a pretty interesting take on their work from one of my favorite DJ’s, LP Giobbi. The camera work sorta sucks though. I’m also not sure of this version of her Dead House set.
I got to see her perform a version of her Dead House set in Chicago at Metro, right after Dead & Co., played at Wrigley. It was hilarious to watch CPD chase the balloon sellers around in little cop golf carts.
*I think my younger misgivings was based on the wild hypocrisy of people who held themselves out as hippies but were intensely shitty people; like my parents. I’ve come to realize that my mom really tried to make me a hippie, but it didn’t work on the time scale or the way she wanted. I’ve come to sort of embrace that part of me. Sorta like antagonism towards the shitty boomer hippies that are nothing more than giant assholes.
@Jax:..
@CSK:..
Confirmed.
When OTB transitioned to a registration platform including passwords I was confused about if we needed to use our real name to log in. So I used my real name. Dr. Joyner stated in a post that we did not have to comment using our real names. Since I am basically a lazy person I left my OTB registration as it shows today.
Incidentally, re Iran and possible US actions.
It seems there is a lot of concern in the Pentagon that with just the Eisenhower CSG in the Arabian Sea, the presence is a bit thin for a serious conflict.
Apparently the Ford was redirected from the Med to the Caribbean.
oopsie
Meanwhile, the Reagan and Roosevelt are in the Far East, Lincoln and Vinson in the east Pacific, and Washington and Truman stooging around in the north Atlantic.
Seems they would prefer to have two CSGs around, if not three, for combined strike capability, air defence, and anti-missile screens.
Obviously nobody expected to have Iran go sideways.
It seems in retrospect that using the Ford for largely symbolic purposes (?) re Venzuela was a mistake; and not shifting another group or two over a bigger one.
The de Gaulle is in SE Asia area iirc.
Maybe a call to Paris?
“Helas, mon ami, it is currently en route to Greenland. Regrets. Perhaps India might help, peut-etre? Au revoir!”
@JohnSF:
Isn’t this the time Skydance Paramount releases the strategic USS Enterprise reserve? 😀
I have an ok Grateful Dead story.
When I was in 8th grade we lived in San Rafael CA. 1969. My best friend, a beautiful tawny blonde of Lebanese parentage, went to a music festival at Golden Gate Park. There was no way my stepdad would let me go, being the hardass Chief of Military Police for the west coast and a big time hippie hater. Her parents were profs at Berkeley and allowed her to go with her older, equally gorgeous older brother.
Anyway, Sue got up close to the stage and Jerry Garcia spotted her and got her up on stage , put his arm around her shoulders and said “I love you, chick” and kissed her cheek. She was over the moon and I was green with envy when she told me all about it at school on Monday.
@Beth:
Actually, I didn’t think of you as one of the missing, since you pop up here pretty frequently. 🙂
@Jax:
Wow, you are a fount of info. My sincere thanks.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
I suspected as much.
@becca:
That is a great story.
@Scott: Ironically my group of friends complain that products have been dumbed down for the average user. That real power users have to dig through menus to get to options and functions that used to be easy to find. From my perspective common technology such as computers and phones haven’t been aimed at the power users for MANY years now. Hell options that existed prior have been outright removed because your average user can’t understand the use case scenarios.
So I guess manufacturers and application developers have failed completely?
I’ve been running into reviews of this ultrasonic knife online.
So many, in fact, that I suspect there’s some intense promotion activity, paid or not, or the thing is really as impressive as the reviews make it seem.
If the latter, well, it will generate imitators and knock-offs, which will 1) sell for far less money (eventually), and 2) develop better second and third generation versions of same.
I’ve seen vibrations used in cleaning equipment for small, delicate items. Vibrations can tear aircraft and structures apart. So I can see how they might improve the performance of a knife.
But I’ve tried an ultrasonic razor and saw no difference. I also wouldn’t dream of paying that much for a knife, no matter how much many cooking pros obsess over theirs.
I’ve two kitchen knives, one German and one Japanese. I forget what each cost, but less than US$ 50 each. I’m self-taught. I know I hold the knife “wrong”. I’m sure my knife skills could improve (what can’t improve?). And I’m also a a believer in Asimov’s Happiness Principle: Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.
At the end of a meal I cooked for myself, all I want is be able to say “That was good.”
@JohnSF:
Every few years I try to listen to the Grateful Dead — it just never seems to speak to me. They’re good, I can see there’s something there, but it’s not my thing. They always just bounce off, like water on a duck.
I guess it’s been a few years, might as well give them (yet) another shot. Venetia, OR, 8/27/72?
Eventually I will get so old that I like the Grateful Dead.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I’m fond of Scarlet Begonias. It’s the only sing I think of as ‘belonging’ to my first serious girlfriend, Jennifer. She was a rings on her fingers and bells on her shoes kind of hippie girl. She wasn’t actually into the Blues, that was more me, she was Deadhead. Not long ago I walked around Grosvenor Square with the song in my airpods.
Like my wife she had poor taste in men. A couple years ago I met up with her again and apologized for, you know, being me.