Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, November 17, 2023
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67 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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‘Astounding’: Alabama woman with two uteruses is pregnant in both wombs
Ugh.
Double Ugh.
IBM has suspended advertising on Xitter, because their ads showed next to pro-nazi posts.
Rehaced for comment, the Head Xitter said: “X’x xxxxx! XXX xx xxxxx xxxxx, xxxxxx xxxx. Xxxx? Xxxx’x xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx; xxxx!”
On other related news, XpaxeX is set to attempt to blow up another Starship tomorrow.
I’m beginning to find Head Xitter Xuxk so toxic, I’m even losing interest over his space ventures. It helps a little to think of it as Gwynn Shotwell’s show, but overall it feels more like when the USSR launched a space station or landed probes on Venus.
I’m even beginning to root for Lex Bezos. I also follow Rocket Lab, but they’re making slow progress moving past small satellite launches. truth is Xuxk is well ahead of everyone, including long established companies like the ULA or Arianespace.
Today I learned that the diner in the Suzanne Vega song “Tom’s Diner” is the Seinfeld restaurant.
@Neil Hudelson: Gonna need the receipts on that one.
Can we all admit that Osama Bin Laden was a bad dude? Or is that now a controversial take?
Hard to believe what the utes are saying on Xwitter and Tik Tok about him. WTF?
It’s gotten so bad that Tik Tok is banning the search for the Osama lwtter because the utes are praising it, and rethinking his terrorism as “justified.”
Are we really at a point in our society where Osama Bin Laden is being held up as just another political actor?
What the actual fuck?
Some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden
TikTok to prohibit videos promoting bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’
We are so screwed. So glad I’m 63 and not 23.
You can also find people praising Hitler, Stalin and number of other history’s villains. That has been going on for years. In a country of over 300 million I dont get upset when a couple dozen people say stuff on social media. Odds are a number of them are kids doing it just to get a rise from people.
Steve
@OzarkHillbilly: At .3% that would be about 500,000 women in the US alone that would have that condition.
@EddieInCA: FWIW, this feels like a “Streisand Effect” (an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing awareness of that information) situation, where the initial action is quite small, and the outrage over it has driven far more attention to it than it deserved.
I don’t have time to blog it today but this article does a great job of showing how the TicTok videos were not particularly popular (at least in TicTok terms) under they got called out by a Twitter News influencer:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2023/11/16/guardian-osama-bin-laden-letter-to-america/
Excerpt:
This is really a prime example of a “kids today” moral panic.
@EddieInCA: This is exactly why I say that extremism, political violence, etc should not be seen as a right wing thing simply because of the nature of right wing beliefs . When I was young, there were as many or more extremists on the left, and some of the most toxic actors and groups were solidly on the left – The Red Brigade, Symbionese Liberation Army, Weather Underground (not the weather app!). The list is actually pretty long.
@Neil Hudelson:
Not if they don’t sell the Big Salad.
@Matt Bernius:
It seems as though for “social” media, one of Newton’s laws should read, “For every action there is a massively unequal and panicked reaction.”
@steve:
I commented a few days ago that even as a news junkie I feel I’m having trouble maintaining a grasp of reality. Much of that is that our heavily social media engaged press amplify online stuff that may be a trend or, as you say, just a few kids doing it for the lulz.
@Joe:
I hereby present to you The Receipts.
@steve:
I agree that some it is shitposting. But it’s important to realize that there are a lot of people who genuinely hold these beliefs, even if we don’t regularly encounter them in our own lives. I’d never heard of tankies until I went online, and it turns out there are personalities with fairly decent-sized platforms who post hours-long videos where they argue with a straight face that the People’s Republic of China is a flourishing democracy and the USA is a repressive dictatorship. I’m not sure it’s any more absurd than the claims we regularly hear from the MAGA crowd. It’s just a type of absurdity I’m deeply not used to, and it’s especially weird hearing it from white American dudes.
Yet it’s easy to forget, for those of us who live in the American, Western bubble, that these are real ideologies accepted by millions of people across the globe, and they can and do suck people in who weren’t necessarily raised in an environment that fostered those ideologies and quashed dissent. Part of it is reflected in that phrase you use, “history’s villains.” The labeling of certain historical figures as villains is based on narratives we’re fed, and the narratives aren’t airtight. A lot of people accept them because it’s what they’ve been taught, they’ve never thought deeply about them, they’re ignorant of the specifics, and they know there’s a social stigma connected to challenging them. That makes the people vulnerable to those who do challenge these narratives, who may seem to be talking sense simply because they’re the only people who’ve bothered to spend any significant time addressing the topics at all. In the online world, there’s shitposting, but there’s also real radicalization going on, with the latter sometimes coming cloaked in the former. It’s important to be aware of it, because it has real-world consequences.
@Scott: Wow, hadn’t done the math but, wow. As a man, I can’t help feeling for them.
Hidden landlords: renters’ woes soar as property owners hide their identities
Worth a read.
@Neil Hudelson: Receipts accepted.
@MarkedMan: I remember the Weather Underground. I was a senior in high school the year they formed. During my high school years, I attended SDS and Black Panther Party informational meetings held at my school several times. Interesting times. A classmate and I reminisced about Vietnam War debates we had in our civics class at our last class reunion. In some ways, we were lucky to have been able to go to school before the schools needed everyone to graduate–and very lucky to have been among the students who “mattered” so that we got the educational experiences we got.
Why is everyone in the press or social media acting like George Santos’ pledge to not run again is some kind of capitulation? Did anyone think he had a snowballs chance in hell of getting re-elected?
Kylopod- I would largely agree with you and you have done a better job of expounding on my brief comment. In a country of over 300 million it’s not that unusual to find out that hundreds of thousands adhere to some odd belief. Lots of people believe in the lizard people/shapechanger conspiracy, but as a percentage of the population it’s actually very small. So I am pretty leery of these stories that report a few people saying stuff. If it’s stuff no one I know is saying and not something i am seeing in my reading I assume it’s probably not a widespread issue. That approach is very occasionally wrong but by a huge margin ends up being correct. For example, it turns out that most democrats really arent having sex with babies.
Steve
Making my way through Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority. It’s fascinating comparing their assessment of the creation of the Constitution (a kludge, a compromise, least bad of all options) to that of the right’s view of it being a divinely-inspired work of genius. I suppose a campaign of deifying the FF and elevating the Constitution to holy writ makes sense if one is committed to maintaining the inequities in the document.
@EddieInCA:
Easy to believe “the olds” can’t distinguish social media trolls and real life.
I was just in England, and an old friend who lives there told me a story of driving on the London Orbital one time and having traffic come to a complete dead stop. After waiting a bit, he got out of the car and walked ahead to see what was happening.
As it happened, a gentlemen was threatening to jump off an overpass onto the highway, so the police had blocked the highway with large vans and were trying to talk him down.
Satisfied, my friend started walking back to his cars. Many other drivers along the way asked what he had found and he told them. The response, he said, was universal (and he noted this was two days before Christmas) – “Give him a shove!”
At the same time, I very much doubt that any of these fellow human beings had been put face to face with the jumper, that they WOULD have given him a shove.
Yes, Bin-Laden was a political actor. Who killed thousands of our citizens, and we killed him back for it. Any questions?
Adventures in Substitute Teaching–Today is “Advisory Day,” the day dedicated to pitching the students over the barricades they need to jump to demonstrate that they will leave high school “career ready.” Today the 10th graders have a Career Opportunities Exploration slide show to watch an Exit Ticket interview to prove that I showed and they pretended to pay attention to the slide show, and an additional website for their perusal in their copious free time. All three of these items are located on a proprietary district-network website for which substitute teachers don’t have credentials.
We used to have credentials. Early in the season of
choleraCovid, many of us took training to use the district distance education resources and were given user IDs and passwords–which were cancelled after the district discovered that we hadn’t needed training at all because virtually none of us ever taught in situations where the regular teachers hadn’t prepared free-standing Google Classroom lessons for students to d0 independently online.Fun times!
@just nutha: Bahahaha.
@DK:
Sure. Millions of reposts and retweets about Bin Laden being a sympathetic figure is just “trolls”.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
@steve: @DK: Yeah… I dunno…
Even back when I was a yutes, there were hairballs who believed unreasonable things. “The Rosenbergs were framed” was still a thing even when I graduated high school in 1970, for example, and we debated whether the US was an imperialist nation, whether native Americans were victims of genocide, who were the “bad guys” in Vietnam as part of the curriculum in social studies class (called “socialist studies” by detractors on the right). Maybe growing up on the Left Coast made my upbringing unique, but I wouldn’t think so. Seattle was the home town of one of the nation’s largest defense contractors at the time (Boeing) and we had 5 first strike locations IIRC inside the Seattle city limits.
@just nutha: Yeah there’s lots of Americans who have — or say they have — insane beliefs. I’m not sure why this is supposed to be some new cause for panic.
Holocaust denial trolling on social media isn’t some new phenomenon, for example. And those prone to freaking out about such things should never look up polling on what Americans think about slavery.
ABC News video:
@just nutha:
Oh, yeah. Remember “Logic & Propaganda” as a class title in Social Studies. And I was (briefly) a member of both the Young Republicans and the SDS (before both kicked me out). YP made more sense to my pre-draft teenage brain, but the SDS kids knew how to party!
@just nutha:
Bwa haha hahahaha hahahahahaha.
@Kathy: Elongated Muskrat also praised a antisemitic tweet directly. Jews controlling the world shit. (It’s so fucking stupid: They can’t even control Gaza, how are they going to control the world?)
Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is the plan for SpaceX: Iron Sky Trailer
Also, his fondness for the X? I think he prefers it with little flags sticking off each spoke. Like a pinwheel.
@DK: @Flat Earth Luddite: I remember another funny story from early on in the mostly remote education period of Covid. I’d been called to substitute for a teacher but when I arrived was told that the assignment had been a mistake–he had no live attendance students for any of his classes, so the students usually checked in on his email for attendance. All his instructional materials were online, so his “job” consisted of being available to take zoom meetings and IMs from students with questions.
@EddieInCA: removing the letter from a lot of online sources (The Guardian removed their copy) makes it more enticing. It’s what “they” don’t want you to read.
The top few links to it all lead to “document removed” messages of one form or another, which makes it easier for someone to characterize it as a much more reasonable thing than it is.
Meanwhile, it starts (after a bit of preamble) like this:
Here’s a link to the whole thing,
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ubl2016/english/To%20the%20American%20people.pdf
There are things in there that echo the anticapitalism, anti-colonialism and pro-Palestine view of a lot of the youth today, but marinated in antisemitic conspiracy theories and sprinkled with bigotry.
Aside from the batshit insane stuff, a lot of the letter makes sense. (I would posit that it’s as likely as not that the stuff that makes the most sense was added for the American audience, and that he really only believed that batshit insane parts — it’s propaganda)
Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks has fueled a lot of antisemitism in the west, and that was probably one of Hamas’ goals. They wanted to force Israel into a ground war. They wanted atrocities. They wanted to be able to portray Israel and all Jews as the bad guys. (I think the state of Israel is one of the bad guys…)
And it makes me wonder where the kids found this letter. It’s been sitting around for years, mostly unnoticed, until someone began pushing it. Conspiracy? Almost certainly! Not necessarily planned from the start, but some sympathetic antisemites realizing that the events on the ground in Gaza make this a great time to push the letter.
The letter shouldn’t be hidden. It shouldn’t be banned on TikTok. Not because of some noble Free Speech reasons*, but just because it’s so full of batshit insane things that it’s easier to criticize when it’s out there publicly than as a weird ghost document that is hard to find and that can be depicted as reasonable repeatedly until someone finally finds it and is primed to approach it as if it is reasonable.
The Guardian and other news outlets shouldn’t be scrubbing it from their sites — they should be adding enough annotations running down the side to put it in perspective. Make it very easily available, but not in the way the antisemites and terrorists want.
——
*: Free Speech too, if you believe in that sort of stuff. But then you have the paradox of being tolerant to intolerance.
@just nutha:
Isn’t there some sort of Internet Rule, something to the effect that if something exists, no matter how bizarre, there will be a website for it, a group for or against it, and a porn fetish version of it.
@Chip Daniels: Goes back to before the internet–think The Daily Stormer, The Liberty Letter (from the Liberty Lobby), and some iterations of The Nation among other things.
@just nutha:
The internet certainly facilitated a lot of crack pot stuff.
@Gustopher: Speaking of which, we got our long awaited defense of the Jewish Space Laser theory:
Okay, I must amend that. She provides no defense whatsoever of her comments, just a lot of the usual nonsensical get-out-of-bigotry-free cards.
@steve:
Given how easily social contagions can sway human beings, I think this is the right approach. I also wonder if this would have even gotten this level of intention if not for the broader context of how different groups are taking sides around the Gaza conflict. We are in a moment where we are primed to expect the worst of young people on the left (I mean even more than usual).
That’s why I think its so important to look into the facts around what is happening rather than the feelings. Especially in the case of social media, where it’s so easy to hyper-amplify things.
Also, it’s worth remembering that views never equal unique individuals. Between bots, multiple accounts, and other network/browsing-related things, view numbers are really easy to amplify.
@Paine:
It’s on my to-read list. They did a Lawfare podcast a while ago and piqued my interest. I also been thinking about it in the context of the ongoing “political dysfunction” discussion.
Here’s a link to the podcast:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-lawfare-podcast-the-tyranny-of-the-minority-with-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt
Water Girl at Balloon Juice quotes the best succinct commentary I’ve seen on the economy and the election. Basically the economy was good under Trump and not so good under Biden. Particularly the price of gasoline, houses, and mortgage payments which are highly visible and up considerably.
Roosevelt was lucky that the Great Depression started early in Hoover’s first term. It was intimately connected with Hoover and Republicans by the time FDR was elected. Obama, on the other hand, was stuck with a crisis that was starting during his first campaign. He overcame it and got reelected, but a lot of people associated Obama with the bad times. Same with Biden. By the end of Obama’s second term the economy was pretty good, and Trump inherited it. Biden inherited the fallout of COVID. But the electorate are pretty much focused on how they feel now, not the cause and effect of how we got here. Have I mentioned before that the electorate are a box of rocks?
Fringe groups with nonsense, bizarre ideas, violent or not, exist all across the politicla spectrum.
But currently they’re going mainstream only on the right. That’s why I call today’s Republiqans wingnuts. I didn’t call them that in the W. Bush years. they were massively wrong and supported someone unequal (and them some) to the task he faced. but they were not insane.
@gVOR10:
No and that’s why Trump will probably end up winning next year.
My second sleep study will be tomorrow. It is going be for the task of finding out how for me to have cpap.
This sounds like I’m going to have a fun night. NOT! Too bad I can’t get a note from my mother and watch Barnaby Jones, Keeping Up Appearances, Mannix, or LA Law instead.
Can’t work on my Hong Kong set book as much as I would like to. Damn after putting in references to The World of Suzie Wong, Columbo, and Speedy Gonzalez in it, how will my mind deal with being driven to a higher level insanity thanks to sleep deprivation.
The wife is almost home, there is laundry needing to be done, and I have 9 of my 10 pages written goal for the day done.
@Matt Bernius:
I dont know what the sentence means, so I am going to just assume that it is a statement of support for my Jewish Homeland of Spare Dakota plan, and say that I thank you for your support.
Or you are saying something awful, and I condemn it.
One of the two.
Honestly, I would have just skimmed over it and ignored it if I hadn’t accidentally copied and pasted too much. Sometimes sentences just have no meaning for some readers.
They’re naive, but their hearts are in the right place. I would rather have a country ruled by a bunch of silly Zoomers than the current crop of cynical Boomers (and Silents, but that doesn’t rhyme)
Sure, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the alternative seems to be a better paved road to hell, so I’ll enthusiastically take the former.
For instance, kids love socialized medicine! Socialized medicine might be a disaster with long waits for death panels, but at least everyone will get in to see the death panel (if they don’t die first).
The kids are our future, for better or worse, and I doubt it will be that much worse. Maybe better!
(It’s statements like that which make people question my claims to be an optimist)
@Bill Jempty: You can embrace the CPAP with fashion accessories.
For instance, do you like the movie Alien?
https://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/alien-facehugger-cpap-ventilator-mask/
@Bill Jempty: I hope CPAP works for you. I’ve probably had sleep apnea for about 30 or 40 years before I started using a CPAP machine 20 years ago. It made significant changes in my health-physical and mental, both. Good luck!
@Gustopher: Not to my taste from an aesthetic standpoint and that particular mask style didn’t work for me, but I can see the appeal for some people. It also wouldn’t be a good choice because I’m a side sleeper, so it would always be pulling in undesirable directions.
@gVOR10:
The insidious aspect is how such narratives present POTUSes as beings with absolute power who can control everything. Considering how common this political horses%*t is, is it any wonder some people are looking for someone who acts like a dictator for the office?
@dazedandconfused: Growing up among religious fundamentalists, I’ve found that most people I knew felt ambivalent at worst about an authoritarian state–provided that authority coincided with their world view. And I suspect that there are people who would not shed tear one about an authoritarian state directed against “religious nuts.” It always comes down to whose ox is being gored and how close my ox is to being next.
The founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was fired for lying to the board.
First thing that came to mind when I saw the headline, was “did he lie, or did he have ChatGPT prepare his reports and/or remarks to the board?”
Buh bye, Joe!
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) suggested Wednesday that he is “considering” leaving the Democratic party, in comments made just a week after he announced he would not seek reelection to the Senate.
During an interview on CNN, anchor Kaitlan Collins pressed the West Virginia senator on whether he was thinking about leaving the party after expressing disdain for what he called the “business of politics.”
(For the record, you may have to rinse off your shoes if you wade all the way through the article.)
So, if you believe that Biden has the power to fix the economy but doesn’t do it, don’t you also have to believe that Trump had the power to fix the economy, but didn’t?
@DrDaveT:
He was thwarted by the globalist woke elites!
(As was Liz Truss. LOL.)
@Neil Hudelson:
OK, their first album was great, but they never lived up to their promise…
@Kylopod:
Never heard of tankies?
The term, I believe, originated in the UK in the 1950’s: the “fellow travelers” and believers in “real existing socialism”who continued to Soviet-symp even after the invasion of Hungary.
It was familiar to me as a youngster, from Labour activists family/family friends.
There were good reasons why the Labour Party mainstream loathed and despised the Bolsheviks, and purged Leninist entryists.
“No enemies on the left” my arse.
@DK:
Most unreasonable mooses!
I’d always assumed moose were devotees of Socratic argument about the inviolability of property rights.
So, work was proceeding rather well, which is always a plus heading into a three day weekend.
And then, the boss asks me whether we’d sent Very Big Customer the market study they asked for. I very reasonably replied “what market study?”
Long story short, I spent the next half hour frantically searching for it in the federal government’s acquisitions portal. It wasn’t there. Then another half hour scouring my email, and asking four others to scour their emails. It wasn’t there, either.
The boss asked me to get it done anyway. “Sure,” I said. But with what? We don’t have their product requirements.” So he told me to use last year’s proposal. The rest of the morning was taken up with that.
One of the managers got through to Very Big Customer, and they told him they’d emailed the request last week. I believe them. but we didn’t get it. They said they’d send it again.
We never got it.
Turns out they have some email sever issue.
Oh, these things happen. But it’s till due today, and how soon can we have it? So I spent the rest of the day on that. The product list was rather different.
Plus side, the weekend still lies ahead.
@Gustopher:
@Matt Bernius:
Free speech is my default.
However, I also get nervous.
Germany in the 1920’s was a highly educated society, full of rational people.
And a plurality of it went bug-fuck nuts.
And dragged the world into a nightmare of horror and destruction.
Which could have easily turned out far, far worse than it did.
I’ve been reviewing some histories of the 1930’s and early WW2 recently, and it still has the ability to terrify me how close we came to the abyss.
Toleration and dialogue has much to be said for it; but there is a also a case for slaughtering the enemies of humanity while they are still to weak to seize power.
Some of my relatives might have lived past 1941 had that been done.
@gVOR10:
I was recently re-reading some US history re. 1930’s and it’s worrying how close the 1937 second wave of recession came to wrecking the Roosevelt recovery. Largely because of a desire to return to “normalcy” in monetary policy, bank loans, and federal deficits. Plus the ongoing refusal of D.C. to stabilise international trade and currencies.
If the war in Europe had not been a factor (politically and economically), there is a good chance FDR would have lost in 1940.
Then gods help us all, had Hitler stuck to his original inclination for general war in c.1941/2.
CNN
@Mister Bluster:
I’m sure the honorable judge knows far, far more about the legal issues involve than I ever will. Just the same, I call b*lls*it on that ruling. I mean, WTF?
I figure the reasoning is the officers of the US who betrayed their country in the 1860s were governors, other state officials, and military officer, not presidents.
As I said, bull!
BTW, I spoke too soon in my previous post. A new project dropped today, and for reasons we have to get a lot of questions together today. Damn fine way to start the long weekend, staying late on Friday…
Related to my earlier post today, Apple, Disney, and others, are also withdrawing ad buys from Xitter.
Hey, the more the merrier.
And if this makes Head Xitter Xuxk miserable, the merrier the more will be. Win-win-loxe!
@Kathy:..reasoning…
As Tommy Smothers once said: “Words are just a plaything to me!”
SpaceX: BOOM!
@Mister Bluster:
I’ll say.