Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, February 23, 2024
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80 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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Trump is losing donors, according to the Financial Times:
“Republicans are getting worried about Trump’s fundraising machine — it is propelled by those small donors — because fewer from the Maga horde are ponying up. Trump’s campaign and affiliated Super Pacs (groups that can receive unlimited contributions) went into the election year with 224,000 fewer donors than four years ago, according to a Financial Times analysis of the latest data (free to read).”
https://www.ft.com/content/3a1db8dd-78b6-419f-bb18-89ea1afe4082
It is early voting in Texas for primaries. Since Texas is basically a one party state, the metaphorical political violence is all being perpetrated by the Republicans. This primary is being called a Republican civil war. Texts are coming in fast and furious and I’m constantly typing STOP in a vain hope they actually stop. Political postcards are filling the mailbox. I’ve cut the cord so most ads on TV don’t get to me except on the local news streams where they are incessant.
As for money, here is an example courtesy of our local paper. In Texas House District 121 which is my district, the two main Republican contenders have spent or can spend $401,000 and $204K, respectively. The two Democratic contenders are at $15K and $10K, respectively.
It is an open primary and I will be voting in the Republican primary where the difference is between rational conservatives and far right whack jobs. I’ll go with rational actors any day.
FTFY.
Up here in Misery, we have no rational Repubs. Irrationality is a GOP job requirement for the state lege.
via commenter Another Scott over at BJ comes this little gem: Catodon
Some people have too much time on their hands. Gawd bless ’em.
@OzarkHillbilly: It is so depressing to me that there used to be a fair number of reasonable Republicans there. Betty Sims, Irene Treppler, Jack Danforth…I could go on but won’t.
Ceasefire Now!
Free Palestine!
Slava Ukraini!
Ukraine is now in a position to take Avdiivka and start their advancement towards Moscow.
The Democrats should campaign on repealing the 2nd amendment and put forward a common sense law requiring all registered Democrats to register and allow confiscation of their guns as 99% of Democrats fully support full gun registration and confiscation.
Tommy Tinkerbelle is SUCH a relentless jackass.
http://www.rawstory.com/tommy-tuberville-ivf/
@Paul L.:
You feeling okay, bro? Incoherence is a classic symptom of the onset of stroke. Maybe lie down for a while.
@Not the IT Dept.: Can we just not with him today?
@Not the IT Dept.:
Thanks for the well wishes, thoughts and prayers.
Just a list of current progressive topics for discussion.
Good grief.
@CSK: Dumb as a fence post. Sharp as a cotton ball. Or, as Wanda said, “I’ve worn dresses with higher IQs.”
@Joe:
Good on you for trying. Never works.
@Jen:
It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? Even for non–Alabamans.
To any of the morons still calling for Biden to step down, please take 30 mins and watch this video focusing on the actual data regarding Biden being replaced by another Democrat.
To those of you who feel this way, but won’t watch the video, here’s the cliff notes:
Trump easily beats Harris, Newsom, Phillips, and every other Dem mentioned.
To those of you still believing Biden must be replaced, who then will be the “magical Democrat”?
@Not the IT Dept.: A (the?) problem with small donors: way more ways to use disposable income than income to dispose of. Charity, of all kinds but political charity particularly, seems to go earlier than, say, treating one’s self.
@Jen: Those days are way back there in the rear view mirror. Hopefully the day will come when something sane can take their place. Maybe a few years after trump makes his long overdue trip to Hades.
@Jen: As I was going to respond to Paul L.
@CSK: He probably has no idea of what the Alabama Supreme Court is. Expecting him to get IVF is a reach under the best of circumstances, let alone an a.m. TV interview.
@OzarkHillbilly:..Catodon…
War and Fleas…
@CSK: Doesn’t trouble me at all. Alabamans have the right to have the government of their choice just like everyone else.
Looks like the Rightwing phony outrage machine got some edited video.
Christopher Murphy, the Senator from Connecticut: “… the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”
@Not the IT Dept.: Only the most hardcore MAGA extremists will give away money to pay an orange rapist’s legal bills.
Since the Republican Party is now a fully-owned subsidiary of the Kremlin, maybe Putin pay for his puppet.
@just nutha:
It’s embarrassing in the sense that other countries must be aghast.
I was told Trump would have died of a heart attack by now from being fat and eating crap.
@Joe: The deplorables are getting more and more unhinged and desperate. Probably due to Trump’s worsening legal problems and the predictable implosion of House Republicans’ Russia hoax impeachment.
Smells like fear tbh.
@EddieInCA: That’s a lovely Porsche 911 posted on BAT (I think you may have added the wrong link?) 😉
@Paul L.: Dude, check the link to CSK’s comment. I was talking about Sen. Tuberville.
Damn, I called it.
Lardass A. Drumpf is arguing the boxes of classified documents he absconded with were personal records.
As the piece notes: “Classified information is material owned by the United States and cannot, by definition, be personal.”
The relevant statute does let the president, or Lardass, decide what is a personal record*. It also defines what can be designated as such. Her’es the relevant portion in the definitions section of the act:
This is crystal clear: there’s no way stacks of classified materials originating from various government agencies, can even remotely constitute a “personal record.”
*No. The number of hamberder and ketchup stains on the White House sheets is a world record, not a personal one.
@Paul L.:
I believe Jen was name-calling Tommy Tuberville, who is in fact all those things.
@Jen: You’re welcome to buy it. :-). I’m downsizing.
🙂
@Jen:
Damn! Correct link. All other Dems lose against Trump.
@EddieInCA: Ha, we are actually in the process of selling my husband’s Cayman right now, also on BAT. 😉
@Jen:
My bad.
@CSK:
He knows the shoe fits, so he told on himself. A hit dog will holler lol
A rant on doing the right thing, stupidly.
The Annennberg Center says DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) in film is actually regressing. I am not surprised. Indeed, I predicted it. Is this an inevitable result of the patriarchy? No. Is it racist? No. The cause, as is so often the case in this world, is stupidity. Doing good, but doing it so poorly you subvert your own cause.
Challenged to have more female-led stories, Hollywood’s reaction was to simply gender-swap characters in genres that had never, and will never, attract large numbers of women. Stupid. In order to big-up their new female leads they belittled male co-leads. Stupid. Racial diversity was handled a bit better, IMO, for the excellent reason that Black men tend to like the same stuff as White men. Women do not like the same stuff as men of any color.
A very interesting case in point was Bros, which came out a year or so ago. It is a gay rom-com. Which no one watched, including gay men. 100% predictable, because gay men are men and men don’t watch rom-coms unless dragged there by a woman, just as women don’t go to superhero movies unless dragged there by a guy.
Is there a solution? Yes. Stop gender-swapping, it does not work. If you want a female-led action/adventure movie, take a look at Atomic Blonde. Or Mad Max Fury Road. Or Aliens. In each case you have a well-defined, grounded-in-reality female character who does not need to belittle male characters, but rather exists in her own space as a legit character with actual human characteristics to include: making mistakes, sometimes losing, re-training, learning and improving. You know, just like a male character might. Or a character, period.
Instead Hollywood did the easy and stupid thing: the ‘girl boss’, the ‘Mary Sue’, who has ALL the virtues, NONE of the weaknesses, CANNOT lose a fight against a male character, is NEVER wrong, and certainly never NEEDS anything from a male. This is not how stories work. This is stupidity that anyone with any grasp of story-telling could have told them, was not gonna work. And boy, did it not work.
Hunger Games, which for reasons of professional jealousy I have to pretend not to respect, did not have Katniss show up on Day One able to punch out Mike Tyson and invent entirely new technologies in her dorm room. She had a pre-existing skill with archery, and an in-world reason for having that skill. Her male co-leads were not simps, they were her equals. At times she was (gasp!) helped my male characters. At times male characters (horror!) outperformed her. It’s not that hard to figure out how to do it, Suzanne Collins used to be in Hollywood, before she started writing books. She probably could have explained the basics of story-telling, for the slow kids in the executive suites.
Katniss is not the only example. Buffy in,Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Xena, in Xena: Warrior Princess. The Bride in Kill Bill. Ripley in Alien(s). Sarah Conner in Terminator movies. Tris in Divergent. Or our girl Rachel, in Animorphs.. Or my girls Dekka and Lana and Brianna in Gone. None of the creators above were geniuses. Nor were they all women. What they all have in common is competent story-telling that serves the cause of DEI while also making money. Which is the relevant metric.
I don’t know whether it’s a dearth of writing talent, or the larger system crushing writing talent under the mouse shoe of oppression, but Jesus H., Hollywood has pissed away hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars, pursuing this utterly stupid approach, and is now in full retreat on DEI. Good cause, poorly executed, subverts good cause. It’s not enough to have your heart in the right place, you still have to do the work.
At other sites I have seen it repeated several times that as a result of DEI efforts all surgeons are black. So as part of my medical education effort link goes to the actual percentages. Just the highlights.
About 14% of the US population is black. 5.7% of all doctors are black. For general surgeons, 6.1% are black. Still low compared to the general population but a larger percentage among doctors. But, and it’s probably not too surprising that there is a but, all of the higher paying surgical specialties, plastics, orthopedics, vascular, thoracic, neurosurgery run between 3%-4%. So if and when you run into this argument, you are forearmed.
https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/data/active-physicians-black-african-american-2021
Steve
@steve:
Soooooo were you lurking on Stormfront, MAGA Twitter, and 8kun for the lulz or for reconnaissance purposes?
All surgeons black…Like wtf lol
@DK:
I doubt the deplorables even know about that.
@Michael Reynolds: I deeply appreciate the extra detail in this comment as opposed to some of your toss offs on this, which really didn’t capture the subtlety of the argument. Generally I think you’re on to something. I especially like your list of action movies with female leads that worked.
By the way, I like rom-coms. AND I like superhero movies, as does my wife. I understand that I’m unusual, but I do exist.
I know we were all taught in school to say things in a very strong, simple way, but would “men tend to like superhero movies more than women” be so terrible?
@Kathy: I believe part of Biden’s defense is that he had a handwritten memo (I assume a draft) on Afghanistan that he good faith believed counted as a personal record. It looks like Trump’s lawyers heard that and went, “Ah, personal record, that’s the ticket. All those printed documents with NSA, DOD, and NSC cover sheets, with classified markings on each page, in classified document binders, are personal records.”
@Michael Reynolds:
Other examples well done: “Old Guard”, “Gunpowder Milkshake”, both on Netflix, and “Columbiana”.
@Michael Reynolds: there’s also the emo-teenager types who give the impression of running around social media looking for things to be outraged about. (definitely not just left or just right. Seem to be at the extremes of both)
I just spent the last day driving through the South Carolina backwoods. Hardly any Trump signs AT ALL. Florida, by comparison, has a bumper crop of Trump signs and billboards.
I find it even stranger, since, over about 80 miles of road I passed a sizeable Trump store that had all manner of yard merch displayed– yet not a smidgin of merch in actual yards.
Driving through rural SC you would not know Nicky Haley existed–
@Paul L.:
I’ve heard that many, over 90% of, Republicans would voluntarily submit to slavery in order that they can learn job skills, through slavery apprenticeship programs of course.
@Jim Brown 32:
If it’s the backwoods, maybe the inhabitants don’t bother to vote.
@Jen: Jack Danforth was the last Republican I voted for, with the exception of a protest vote for Bob Dole in ’96 because of what I thought was Bill Clinton’s addiction to mendacity. I argued for years that Danforth was the kind of principled conservative we needed to keep a balance between the two parties. Now, looking back at the damage that Danforth’s protege, Clarence Thomas, has inflicted on the country I think that voting for Danforth may be one of the worst political decisions I ever made.
@CSK: I perhaps should have mentioned that these same roads were littered with Trump yard signs in 2020.
They are a virtual signal to the rest of the Maga herd
@al Ameda:
Joining the Military?
@gVOR10:
Lardass has been hinting about it for a while. the request to have a special master review the documents, the loud demands that his documents be returned to him, the claim before that eh can designate anything a personal record (which I brought up months ago).
But there are also other past statements that point to his dysfunction and pathologies. Like when he claimed Article 2 of the constitution lets him do whatever he wants. Earlier, when he refused to divest from his private businesses, he claimed the president can’t have a conflict of interest.
The pattern’s clear.
What Lardass should do is learn another word. He’s worn immunity out, and it doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. I would suggest he learn a word that will be of much use to him in the near futre: incarceration.
@OzarkHillbilly: Cry havoc and let slip the kitties of war!
@Michael Reynolds:
Ripley in Alien is a rather famous case of casting a woman in a role written for a man, in a genre that had never and will never attract large numbers of women (sci-fi/horror is not known for a large female audience). They presumably added the underwear scene after casting.
It amuses me that one of your examples undermines your claims of the right way to do things.
Also, there are lots of really shitty movies that are filled with white dudes and very conventional casting. You are just cherry picking.
Anyway, carry on with your tired rant, but remember that not including women and brown people is as much of a political decision as including them, and in either case it’s forcing that decision down the audience’s throat.
——
“You have a horror movie named Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder you keep getting invaded…” — 12th Doctor
@steve: Florida’s DEI surgeon general is now pro-measles
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/02/22/florida-measles-outbreak-ladapo/
I would like to state that while I generally support increased diversity in movies (I’m a bit face blind, and Modern Hollywood White is basically three distinct faces across many, many people, so being able to identify someone as “the black guy” is great), and while I have no particular issue with African-American surgeons, generals or surgeon generals, I do think that DEI is going to far when we are trying to increase the representation of Measle-Americans in public schools.
@DK: “The deplorables are getting more and more unhinged and desperate. ”
Oddly, the was the next message posted after Paul L.’s fourteenth or fifteenth attempt to get anyone to pay attention to him.
@Gustopher:
Dumb response.
1) Obviously I know about Ripley, but it does not undercut my point, it makes it. The character was written well because they thought they were writing a guy. Here’s the big reveal: when you write female characters don’t write them as women, write them as characters. Race and gender do not replace character development.
2) My tired rant long ago anticipated exactly what has now happened in the real world. If you follow entertainment media at you’ll see the DEI retreat. So we will get less DEI, going forward, because it looks like a money loser. See: The Marvels etc…
3)
Um, what? Gus, Hollywood exists to make MONEY. Money, money, money. If political goals make money, they stay. If they don’t make money, they get thrown out the window. That is precisely why I’m pissed off, or are you just not capable of accepting that a White male could actually be in favor of DEI? Is that what it is? You’re a bigot? Surely not.
@Michael Reynolds: “Her male co-leads were not simps, they were her equals.”
I’ve got to think you’re talking about the book The Hunger Games, because the two guys in the movies were totally lame…
@wr:
I’d say one guy was lame but allegedly hot, the other was not lame but also allegedly hot. That’s not shrinking the male down to size to big-up Katniss, it’s facing the reality that teenage girls have unsophisticated notions of romance. And it is a romance.
Don’t make me defend HG any more than I have. It causes physical pain.
Would it be a problem if all surgeons were Black? In my hometown they were all White males, and no one thought that was a problem. I once had a near fainting spell due an atrial arrhythmia in a restaurant full of doctors who were there for some meeting. The first one at my side was a small (5’2”) Black woman, and I’m still grateful for her help.
MeidasTouch Texas Paul Ukraine will be a world superpower in the next century.
@steve: @Slugger: I spent half my day at our local small town hospital* getting tests done yesterday. At one point I had some time to kill and did so walking the hallways where I once again came upon the wall of honor to the Docs who practice medicine in that fine bastion of sanity out here among the great unwashed. I’ve never counted but I think they are 16 or 18 strong (not counting the specialists who make the drive from STL or further* once a week) Looking at the pictures it is hard not to notice the fact that most of them are probably from overseas. Only 2 appeared to be Americans while the rest were of Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian, Pakistani, and one Pole. Applying all the caveats of possibly being first gen Americans or naturalized citizens, I’ve had dealing with 5 or 6 of them and they all had accents. (the Pole is the resident surgeon, he’s cut on me a couple of times, his accent is very strong)(and he’s very good)
If it wasn’t for these people coming here from a far away land, we’d have to make the 80 mile drive to BJC or one of the Mercy in STL.
*the psychiatrist who makes the long drive out to here has to come from Granite City, on the far side of the Mississippi. I can say right now that he could seriously use some help. He gets slammed with patients every Monday.
@Michael Reynolds:
Marvel got more diverse as time went on, while the formula was getting more tired (as tired as your rant). Early MCU was fresh and interesting, late MCU is just trying to drag the formula along while adding more connections between everything because Avengers made lots of money. Late MCU is going to have more flops, whatever characters and people they put in. Your claim has no control group.
MCU also shifted pretty heavily to TV during that time.
A diverse case for the last trilogy of Star Wars made a crap ton on money, despite Rey being a Mary Sue, etc. It does less well as TV shows.
You could make a better claim that reducing big spectacles to weekly tv shows hurts the franchise than that it has anything to do with DEI.
Meanwhile, DC and other potential franchises would love to have the level of success that the late, disappointing MCU and Star Wars has.
The most recent Transformers movie was a disappointment not because of a diverse cast, but because it was just a disappointing movie, and even it made money (eventually)
Formulaic movies and tv shows run their course to diminishing returns. They also tend to get more diverse as time goes on because a) everything is getting more diverse over time and b) they are trying to bring in a new audience to replace the people bored with it. This creates an appearance that diverse movies and shows underperform because they are diverse.
If the MCU were to shift to entirely white male leads, with women as eye candy backdrop, it would almost certainly continue to decline, and then we could erroneously point to it and say “see, retreating from DEI is a loss maker”
The reality is 90% of everything is regurgitated formulaic shit as people try to make lightning strike again “with a twist”
@CSK: I’ve given up on worrying about what Americans and America’s political representatives do to shoot ourselves in the foot. As I’ve said too many times before, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” (And Walt Kelly had Pogo characters saying that in the 50s.)
@Paul L.: And when you get to be his age, you, too, will be able to thank Medicare for the changes in senior health and life expectancy that have made heart disease a mere shadow of what it was a generation or two ago.
@Jen: Indeed! And good luck selling it Eddie!
Well, it looks like the GQP, even those in Alabama, have discovered IVF is very profitable.
@Jim Brown 32: What makes anyone think that most of the MAGA herd cares about being virtuous?
@Jim Brown 32:
That is indeed interesting to know. And a hopeful sign.
@Jim Brown 32: South Carolina GOP voters vote for whomever their leaders tell them to vote for. Virtually all leaders are firmly in Trump’s corner.
@Gustopher:
This. Movies that hit aren’t necessarilly done well, those that lose money aren’t automatically bad. No one knows for certain why some movies tank and others connect. If anyone did, they’d already be Hollywood’s most sought-after consultant and one of the world’s richest persons.
The list of classic film/TV that bombed on first run is endless: The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Shawshank Redemption, Office Space, It’s A Wonderful Life, The Big Lebowski, Family Guy, many others. Were they poorly done? No. Sometimes good movies flop for no particular reason, taking years (or decades) to catch. Bros is hilarious, heartwarming, well-written. It may end up on this list.
Many times, mediocre movies do huge numbers. Few now think Independence Day is a masterpiece. But it was a smash.
The best thing about Barbie is its feminist wokeness. Otherwise, it’s pedantic, preachy, and absurdly scripted. Maybe it won’t will age so well. But in 2023, it met a post-Dobbs grrrl power moment typified by massive Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Janet Jackson tours. Does Barbie’s better box office make it better-done than Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, or American Fiction? Or The Little Mermaid — a fine film that faced backlash for casting a (hypertalented, beautiful) black lead, then quietly raked in $600 million to become the 5th highest grossing remake?
You could change Margot Robbie’s skin from white to brown, keep everything else about Barbie the exact same, observe whether it made more or less money…and this exercise would tell you nothing about the film’s merits or demerits.
Its not always that deep. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes lighting strikes, sometimes it doesn’t.
@Gustopher: That crapton of money fell off a cliff from movie to movie. That’s a TON of money that they lost out on because of poor writing. Then there’s the long term damage to the franchise which depresses viewers of other SW related media. It’s hard to tell how much of the damage was done by the crappy writing in the movie or the crappy writing in the vast majority of shows. Ahsoka was astoundingly badly conceived/written. They outright flipped the middle finger to her past actions and turned her into something completely different. Ahsoka’s version of Thrall is just dumb simply dumb. The character has already been ruined by stupidity and they have barely shown him. Then there were those atrocious “fight” scenes and ugh… I really wanted that show to be good but nothing about it was good.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I dunno bro the bar near where I live has MAGA virtue signalling galore. From “fck Joe Biden and lets go brandon stickers and posters galore to the vehicles of the people who go there. The virtue signalling is to their fellow white racists that they are one of the good ol boys. God help you if you point out how stupid their obsession is or show up in an EV (or insufficiently “manly” vehicle). Then it’s an attack on the whole which must be responded in numbers.
@Michael Reynolds: “Don’t make me defend HG any more than I have.”
Accept it, it’s brilliant. There’s just no way around it.
@Gustopher: ” late MCU is just trying to drag the formula along while adding more connections between everything because Avengers made lots of money. Late MCU is going to have more flops, whatever characters and people they put in. ”
In this, it really parallels the history of Marvel Comics. When they started out, they were new and fresh and different, but after a while they started getting stale. Then some new artist or writer would come in and do things differently — say, like Chris Claremont and the X-Men — and there would be vast new interest. Then the whole line would get pulled in that one direction, and it would be fine until that approach started to feel old and tired. Then a Frank Miller would come along…
I think the MCU is looking for that new thing that’s going to get them back on top. I have no idea and am glad it’s not my job, but I think even they know they can’t keep hitting the same beats, even with a more diverse cast.
@Paul L.:
I doubt it, Republicans seem to be averse to that – widespread bonespurs problem.
Plus some former Republican presidents are constantly mocking those who serve – like John McCain, or Nikki Haley’s husband.
Nope. Volutary (or involuntary) commitment to Slavery would seem to solve Republican employment problems.
@Matt: Racism as a virtue is an interesting, though convoluted idea. I’m not sure I’m seeing the connection to what Jim Brown 32 was talking about and I was commenting on.
And your neighborhood sounds like mine–which is why I don’t go to the bar and am looking to move.
@wr: I’ve shown HG to 3 or 4 different classes of high school lit/language arts students. It’s an okay but predictable movie that conforms to standard tropes for unlikely hero stories. Brilliant? Meh… but to each his own.
ETA: If I were still doing this type of stuff and a student, I might write a paper investigating the idea that Katniss Everdeen is a Horatio Alger-type protagonist–i.e. a perceived “self-made” character who is actually sponsored quite agressively.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Speaking of idiots who’ve misplaced their village…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-23/house-republicans-place-barriers-on-ukraine-spending-for-speaker-johnson?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=copy
As I recall, the old Will Rogers’ joke went “I belong to no organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” How times change, and yet stay strangely the same.
“Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss,” indeed!
@Jim Brown 32: My suspicion has long been that the rural whites would not abandon him because they were finally convinced he is either wrong or amoral, but when they begin to view him as a loser.
@Paul L.:
Well, seeing as I’m not very progressive at all, can I take a moment to ask what the f@ck you are burbling on about?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: “Brilliant? Meh… but to each his own.”
Not saying it’s Finnegan’s Wake — or even Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — but in the field of dystopian YA it does a masterful job of taking the standard genre requirements and spinning them into something that transcends the genre.