April Fool’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, April 1, 2023
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30 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a 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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Wow, I feel really special now. A whole forum in my honor. I did NOT have that on my Bingo card.
That is the first step.
And in yet another courtroom:
Freedom of speech always seemed the obvious attack against this law to me, but IANAL.
If he was guilty the negligent use of a deadly weapon in this case, what are Republicans (and a few DEMs, thinking of Manchinema) guilty of in the cases of daily slaughter this country is subjected to?
Drought or no drought? California left pondering after record winter deluge
@OzarkHillbilly:
Are you an April Fool?
@CSK: I’m a fool (just ask my wife) and it’s April so I must be! I can say that I am happy to no longer be a March Fool.
@OzarkHillbilly:
That report is out of date. Actually, I’m happy to report, zero percent is currently in either exceptional or extreme, severe drought is at 2%, moderate is 28% and abnormally dry is down to 45%. Also, all the reservoirs but one are at historical levels though only a few are at capacity.
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s a travesty. But well played to Mr. Hall. He covered his ass before anyone knew what was going on.
HE, along with the Amourer and Key Grip, need to be the ONLY ones on trial.
I can’t get across to most how egregious the charging of Baldwin is/was. Travesty.
I thought it was BS from the gitgo.
@EddieInCA: How do you not charge the guy who held, pointed, and fired the gun?
@Michael Reynolds: Right, and that’s all good news. I think the hard part for the people responsible for California’s water is not knowing if this year is going to be an anomaly, and one or two bad years later they’ll be in exactly the same terrible position, or whether the multi-year drought is finally over.
And of course the really hard part will be convincing Californians not to immediately rush out and replant the lawns they tore up and quit all their drought-inspired habits.
@gVOR08: “How do you not charge the guy who held, pointed, and fired the gun?”
Because he was told, and had every reason to believe, that what he was holding, pointing and firing was not a weapon but a prop, and a harmless one at that.
One can make the argument that he should have been a better steward of the gun, even believing it was a harmless prop, and I’d probably agree with that.
But if I pour someone a glass of wine not having any reason to suspect that someone put poison in it, I might feel bad about the death but I’d hardly be responsible for it.
@OzarkHillbilly:
“April is the foolest month” 😉
@EddieInCA: “I can’t get across to most how egregious the charging of Baldwin is/was. Travesty.”
But you don’t get elected to Congress on a platform of “I convicted a UPM and an associate producer.”
@wr:
My understanding is they didn’t charge Alex Baldwin the actor for holding the gun, they charged Alex Baldwin the producer for failing to properly oversee the people who handed that gun to Alex Baldwin the actor.
@EddieInCA:
I see multiple contributing factors in the Rust tragedy. But the main one, IMO, is who the hell brought live, lethal ammunition to the set to begin with.
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@Stormy Dragon: “My understanding is they didn’t charge Alex Baldwin the actor for holding the gun, they charged Alex Baldwin the producer for failing to properly oversee the people who handed that gun to Alex Baldwin the actor.”
To be generous to these hicks, they might not have understood what the title “producer” actually meant in a situation like this. But once it had been explained to them — that it’s basically an honorific used to get Baldwin to work for less than his full quote — the decision to prosecute was nothing more than the Real Ammurrican prosecutor showing them fancy Hollywood folks what’s right, and hopefully riding that to a nomination.
Some light music for the weekend:
Khatia Buniatishvili: Tchaikovsky – Piano Concerto No. 1
@wr: The Santa Fe prosecutors are not hicks. It is more accurate to call them left liberal lesbians.
@wr:
One, that obviates all the rules on firearms handling? Two, was he? I’ve not been following this so I may have this wrong, but I recall reading this wasn’t a scheduled rehearsal, that Baldwin decided to go practice his draw for the upcoming scene on his own. Was he handed the gun and told it was safe following whatever their normal procedure was or did he pick it up himself?
I’m not rushing to assume the prosecutor doesn’t know what he’s doing.
@DAllenABQ:
Prosecutors are a sort of politicians-in-training. Ass Covering is a significant part of the syllabus. Charging Baldwin settles the yahoos down. Baldwin mocked their Dear Leader on SNL, it’s an unforgivable offense.
@gVOR08:
Because this isn’t real life. It’s a movie set. And he wasn’t holding a “gun”. He was holding a movie prop he was told was safe.
Let me put it into two other scenarios:
Let’s assume a driver was put behind the wheel of a car and told to drive it to a certain point. Someone has cut the brake lines of the car, so when the actor goes to stop, it careens into people, killing one. Would the actor be charged? No.
Let’s assume an actor has been given a knife he’s been told, multiple times, is a prop blade with a retractable blade to use in a scene. If he were to then use it as intended and literally stab someone, killing them, would he be charged? No?
I knew John Erik Hexum very well, as he was dating a good friend of mine at the time of his death, and met Brandon Lee a few months before his death. John’s death was his own fault sadly, with the use of a blank. But Brandon Lee’s death was very similar to Halyna’s death in that it was pure negligence that caused the death.
I’ve been doing this a long, long time, and the facts of the case aren’t hard. Baldwin is the least responsible. By far.
There was certainly negligence, but not on the part of Alec Baldwin.
I want to say that airlines charging seat selection fees to premium passengers, is the overreach straw that might break the camel’s back. Alas, British Airways has been doing this for a while.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few years from now, business class passengers will be offered buy on board food. It would start with drinks. Cheaper house wine and beer would be complimentary, but champagne and spirits would cost extra. Then maybe they’ll get cute with the entres, or maybe charge a fee to guarantee your choice of meal.
@Stormy Dragon:
@wr:
What wr said. While Baldwin has a “Producer” credit, I guarantee you had had no say on hiring other than the Director, Production Designer, Director of Photography, Editor and Costume Designer.. Every single other person on the crew would have been hired by the Line Producer or UPM. Baldwin had zero oversight on these people. Again, this was a case where people with zero knowledge of how sets work decided to go after the “big fish” even though that fish wasn’t part of the chain of control of the prop gun.
@gVOR08:
He was doing what the director asked him to do. Literally. So, yes.
Bullshit. This was the full rehearsal immediately before they were going to shoot the setup. He was following the director’s instructions. I know several people on the movie, and it was a normal rehearsal, and he was doing what the director asked, and suddenly, “Boom”.
It was handed to him before the rehearsal directly by David Hall, the 1st AD, who loudly called “Cold Gun!” before handing it to Baldwin. That has been confirmed in several news reports. David Hall did not check the gun, as was HIS JOB before handing it to Baldwin.
I am. I can say for a fact that the prosecutor doesn’t know what they’re doing because he/she made a plea deal with David Hall, the 1st AD, whose job it is to be the ultimate safety arbiter on set.
@dazedandconfused: The prosecutors are not Trump fanboys in the slightest. Santa Fe is about as blue as it gets. I personally know the prosecutor who handled the case in which the crew member pled guilty to negligent handling of a firearm (Kari Morrissey); I can assure she is not a Trumper.
@DAllenABQ:
Doesn’t matter if they are Trumpers or not. The key is they were, bet the farm, taking heat from the Trumpers. This settles them down.
I was reading about a great April Fool’s joke from the English newspaper The Guardian back in 1977:
On April 1st 1977, The Guardian ran a special report on the islands of San Serriffe, a semicolon-shaped paradise near the Seychelle Islands. The existence of this oasis was, of course, a myth- believable at first glance but suspicious on closer inspection.
Under the layer of satire, The Guardian tested its journalistic boundaries and its readership’s ability to separate fact from fiction.¹ San Serriffe is a play on San Serif, which is the name for a particular typeface; examples of it include Arial, Comic Sans and Gill Sands (the latter being a cove featured on the western coast of the Lower Caisse island of Sans Serriffe). Many readers praised the paper and, in some cases, played along with the joke; others were fooled and angered by it.² What was the thinking behind the creation of San Serriffe? What can a report of a faraway land tell us about the Western view of the ‘other’? How do we view this joke now when the threat of fake news is growing and constant?
The joke was helped by actual companies advertising in the supplement, including Guinness, Texaco and Kodak.
The article I saw had a few of the original pages, and there was a map where almost every town was a variation of a font.