Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, October 8, 2021
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62 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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There have been movies I truly, wholly enjoyed that critics thought were meh or blah or bad or bad adjacent or full on trash.
Peter Weir’s 1993 Fearless was one for me. Except for the last minute. Jeff Bridges should have died. That last second reversal severely pissed me off. I went a second time with friends and walked out when I knew a bad story development would happen. Thankfully, it is about a minute before the movie ends.
In my head, Jeff Bridges dies as he should. Fuck the the movie ending. He died as he was destined to. His entire post-crash journey was that of acceptance.
It is a stunningly great movie. The use of sound and the drop suddenly to no sound is so masterful. The behavior and affect of Bridges’ performance.
The Gypsy Kings bit while driving. Truly stunning. Stick your head out of the window like a dog.
Rosie Perez of all people is incredibly emotionally effective. Gorecki’s #3.
Just ignore the last minute or two. That is fucking bullshit. Bridges dies at the end because he already should have died. He got a bonus week to set things aright. That is the canon in my head.
I love 99.5% of Fearless. I fucking cannot stand the last 1 minute. Unearned and cheap. False.
AT&T funds rightwing channel One America News, Reuters reveals
Nothing would surprise me less.
Sounds a bit weaselly to me.
So, now much ado about nothing? (shrug)
@OzarkHillbilly: “AT&T has never had a financial interest in OAN’s success,”
I believe him. OAN is a cost center, and a profit is not necessary.
The game the GOP is playing with the debt is terrifying and it’s not over. Frankly nearly everything they do is terrifying, be it elections, reproductive rights, “Lost Cause” efforts in education and school board meetings or the debt. They seem hell bent on destroying our democratic norms by engaging in conspiracy theories and lies. Take for example the recent exchange between Rep Raskin of Maryland and Rep Biggs of Arizona, where Biggs states “…we don’t know who won Arizona.” If you say something over and over it becomes truth, right? Because in today’s world, your opinion is fact – Kellyanne Conway defined it for us at the very beginning of TFG’s administration as ‘alternate facts” (side note: it may have been the only time Chuck Todd challenged somebody on air and even then it was weak).
The continual undermining of the 2020 election which affects all future elections is the key to their destructive efforts. Poll after poll shows that most Republicans still believe the election was stolen and laden with fraud that feeds state legislatures to pass laws to “stop fraud.” The bigger worries for me is them granting themselves the power to override the electorate if they don’t get their way and gerrymandering. I am not so much worried about voter access laws, Democrats and Independents that lean Democratic have been able to register and motivate folks to the polls despite the GOP’s best efforts.
Yes, TFG was THE motivating factor in 2020. If Democrats want to keep the majority in 2022, they must continually demonstrate the sheer craziness of Trumpism and that it is still on the ballot. Poor and undereducated people do not vote in the number they should and if they do, they vote they vote against their best interests.
The question becomes: will Biden’s BBB plans improve their lives enough to change that track? Is that enough to move the needle?
@Barry: Yeah, profit has never been the reason for OAN’s existence.
According to The Daily Beast, Michael Flynn is now having to defend himself against the belief of some QAnoners that he’s a Satanist.
@CSK: Karma is a beach.
Deadly bomb attack hits Shia mosque in Afghan city of Kunduz
Waiting to see how this is all Joe Biden’s fault.
@CSK:
They’re doing the revolution wrong. First it overthrows the government, then it seizes power, then it crushes the opposition, and only after all that does it devour its children.
@CSK: Did anyone follow the recent dust-up between Mike Lindell and Rick Wiles? Well, to quote the summary on Wiles’ site:
@Kathy:
Apparently Flynn, this past September, led a Nebraska congregation in prayer, and used the phrases “sevenfold rays” and “legions.” This seems to have set off alarm bells in some of the faithful.
Also, Oklahoma senate candidate (and QAnoner) Jackson Lahmeyer is being accused of Satanic child-trafficking now because he posted a picture of his daughter wearing red shoes.
This revolution may eat its own.
@Kylopod:
Sounds similar to the attempt to blame the Jan. 6 insurrection on Antifa and BLM.
@CSK:
Well, no–not exactly. That was primarily an attempt by the right to evade responsibility for the Capitol attack and cast the blame onto the other side. The Lindell/Wiles dust-up was a case of a lunatic right-winger accusing a fellow lunatic right-winger of being an impostor. It was the right eating its own.
Jobs up 194,000 in September.
August revised up 131,000 from 235,000 to 366,000.
Unemployment dropped .4 to 4.8%
For reference, in the 35 months of the Trump Presidency before the pandemic (the greatest economy in history) job creation averaged 191,5000…which was down significantly from the last 35 months of the Obama Presidency.
@Kylopod:
In the sense of attempting to find a scapegoat.
California passed a law that limits the scope of non-disclosure agreements, NDAs, in things like discrimination of various kinds.
This is something I’ve been thinking about, as whistleblowers in both industry and government are often prevented from speaking out due to such types of agreements (BTW, if one side imposes restrictive conditions on the other, is that really an agreement?)
I see nothing wrong with the notion of NDAs to protect trade secrets. Not just in tech companies, but many others, even some that don’t depend on intellectual property. But they’re also used to suppress reports of wrongdoing, not limited to the discrimination the CA law addresses.
Take the matter of Theranos. NDAs were used to silence any and all revelations of the fraud the company was perpetrating. The threats of lawsuits for disclosing malfeasance was enough to keep people not only form talking to the press, but even from reporting wrongdoing to the FDA.
IMO; there should be a federal law limiting NDAs to trade secrets and strategies, and not one thing more. And there should be a protection for disclosing wrongdoing of any kind regardless.
@CSK:
I can see the similarities, but I think there’s a difference of motivation and what they are trying to express. The Capitol attack argument is basically the Holocaust-denier playbook–the event didn’t happen, it’s a false-flag, it was actually committed by the Jooz (or whichever boogeyman you want)–and, oh, it was entirely justified.
Lindell-Wiles, in contrast, was good old-fashioned gatekeeping, but the conspiracy-theorist version. People all across the political spectrum do gatekeeping to a degree (DINO and RINO), but it’s in the conspiracy world that it reaches truly absurd heights, since it’s by people who are programmed to view everyone they see with suspicion, even those who agree with them.
The Guardian notes it’s the 25th anniversary of the founding of FOX “News”. A day that will live in infamy. They say Jimmy Kimmel cracked that they’ve been celebrating all day at Mordor.
You can’t solve a problem until you recognize the problem. Everyone, even us plebes, should take every opportunity to point out that FOX is a major threat to the Republic, the root cause of our division.
We are taking a trip in my wife’s Volvo Recharge. Day 1 LA to Paso Robles – there’s a hotel here I like. Day 2 today will be Paso Robles to Monterey because: otters. The car is great – very quick, handles well, has the usual Volvo weirdness about controls, including a shift lever that goes forward for reverse, and FFS how are climate controls on a fucking touch screen better than on the steering wheel?
However. Anyone who tells you EVs are just as easy as internal combustion engines is lying. It’s a goddamned pain in the ass. The charging infrastructure just isn’t there, and if it’s not there on I5 in SoCal, where is it? I stopped to recharge at one place where the charging stations were at the ass end of the worst segment of a highway fast food cluster. Then, having arrived on the electrical equivalent of fumes, I ended up parking the damn thing a quarter mile away at a completely different hotel.
The essential difference is that if you run out of gas AAA brings you a can and you’re on your way. Run the battery down and it’s a tow-job to the nearest charger, and then an hour camping out in some run-down greasy spoon while the slow charge trickles.
EV’s for home use – around town, grocery runs. But I wish to God I’d faced down the eco-criticism from wife and daughter and brought my Merc. I acknowledge that EV’s are the future, they just aren’t quite the present.
@Kathy:..if one side imposes restrictive conditions on the other, is that really an agreement?
The only non disclosure agreement I ever had to sign working in the land line telephone industry was that I would not reveal the contents of any conversations that I heard while I was monitoring customer’s circuits. I willingly agreed to that condition since I wanted the job. Not like I ever heard anyone plan a bank heist or a murder but I likely would have brought something like that to the attention of my dispatcher.
@Michael Reynolds:..It’s a goddamned pain in the ass. The charging infrastructure just isn’t there,..
Just think if we had Atomic Powered cars by now you could have refueled at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear plant.
@Michael Reynolds:
Otters ate fascinating.
One sunny afternoon up in northern Wisconsin we happened upon a family of otters. We stopped fishing and just watched them play and sport about for an hour or so.
In that ecosystem they are the apex predator and are really efficient so about 80 to 90% of their day is digesting their last meal. Big African cats evolved to sleep or doze thru that. Inland NA otters play during their downtime. Chase each other around, play fight, just generally sport about.
That was a good day.
@de stijl:
I used to take my niece and nephew to watch the river otters cavort in the pond down the street. As an extra added attraction, there was a great blue heron, which my niece called “the great blue herring.” Her grandfather told her to keep an eye out for the big smoked whitefish.
@Michael Reynolds:
My next car is going to be electric I think. Most months I drive 50 miles or less. If it’s less than 5 miles to and back I usually walk. Unless I need to haul something. I have come to really enjoy and cherish walking.
If I need to drive out of town I will rent. At least until EV infrastructure gets built out better.
@Kathy:
I was once asked to sign an NDA by an employer. I called a lawyer help line about it. He asked what they were giving me in return. When I said nothing, I just keep my job, he said go ahead and sign it, it’s unenforceable without a quid pro quo. One, IANAL. Two, that was Ohio specific. Three, that was then. Four, had it been a condition of employment when I first got the job it would be valid, as getting the job was compensation.
Reading this just made me furious and angry.
Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.
It’s long. And it gets worse.
@gVOR09:
I did contract work for years. Usually on new projects. Every gig an NDA was a flat-out requirement.
I had picked up tricks through the years. Methodologies. Many I stole some I invented.
If I wasn’t sharing best practices into my new gig they were not getting their moneys’ worth out of me.
I would coyly suggest “Have you thought about doing x? It seems like a good idea and something your competitors are likely doing.”
Too often it was “Have you thought about not doing y? It’s pointless and you’re wasting money?” tho stated more subtly and diplomatically.
I found you could go from gig to gig and share a whole hell a lot of stuff without coming close to breaking a NDA. Just don’t futz with true IP or granular strategy; then you can get sued legit.
Methodologies and best practices, though – bring those along to the next job and share all you want. It’s why they hired me.
@CSK:
“cavort” is a good word too rarely used.
The Great Blue Herring bit cracked me up.
@de stijl:
Thank you. You’ll enjoy this: The people who owned the pond put a wooden platform in the middle of it so the otters could disport (another nice word) themselves there. I really think they enjoyed putting on a show for the humans, but that may be anthropomorphism on my part.
@Michael Reynolds:
Agreed, 1,000 %.
I can’t wait to get an electric motorcycle. Except…range, and infrastructure.
Won’t be long.
@Mister Bluster:
@gVOR09:
@de stijl:
There are legitimate reason for NDAs, and the law should limit their scope to such reasons.
Suppose your employer calibrated their machinery so they pack 3% less product than advertised on the label. Now, norms in many countries allow a variance about that big in packaged products, so this may go unnoticed. When there’s an inspections, the machines are recalíbrated to dispense the correct amount.
This is fraud and it’s illegal.
Suppose you stumble onto this because you did a quality control check and found packages missing 3% on average. Well, you take it to your superiors, naturally. If they don’t act, tell you not to act on it, etc. what do you do?
You can talk to the press, say, but that violates your NDA. You can report it to an oversight agency, but your employers has ways of getting around an inspection. The point is an NDA should not preclude you from reporting fraud, either to the authorites, the press, or every person you come across.
@CSK:
Otters are clearly having fun. They are cavorting for pleasure. The thought that they are performing to amuse us is pretty deep.
Cats and dogs do this all the time. They cavort to get our attention. Pet me. Cuddle me. Tell me I am a cutie and that you love me. Give me a kiss. Give me a treat. I am going to rub on you and twist around your ankles until you feed me.
One time awhile back I was hanging out reading and my cat purposefully came up to me and gave me a head boop. A long one. Then fell asleep on my lap.
Anthropomorphism be damned. She was clearly saying “We’re in this together. We are a team.”
I was so touched by that. Cats are often bastards.
@de stijl:
If my dog thought I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to her, she’d try to butt the book out of my hands with her muzzle.
According to Business Insider, Trump told Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist that he was “up so high,” he’d have beaten Washington and Lincoln pre-pandemic.
About what polls is he speaking? The guy never cracked, or even approached, 50% approval. He left office with a 34% approval rating. Worst since Harry Truman.
And is he admitting he botched the pandemic?
@CSK:
No, just that he was unlucky enough to be president when it hit, and that he did everything right but it didn’t matter. It fits with the now-infamous Woodward conversation from Feb. 2020 in which he admitted wanting to downplay the pandemic. He thought the key to his political survival was convincing people the problem didn’t exist. That’s just the way he operates. He built his entire career out of trying to manipulate people into believing a completely fabricated image of himself. The concept of actually doing his job and confronting a problem for real is totally alien to his way of thinking.
@Kylopod:
Oh, I agree. But the man–and this is far from being an original observation on my part–has no idea of how to express himself properly.
@CSK:
My theory for a while has been that he seems to believe in something like a Jedi Mind Trick with superlatives. He thinks if he simply declares something to be true, and puts it in the most extreme terms imaginable, he can make people believe it through sheer force of will. Instead of saying these aren’t the droids you’re looking for, he’d say these are the greatest droids in the world, nobody’s seen greater droids. If a cop stopped him for a traffic violation, instead of trying to defend himself in a conventional way, he’d tell the cop, “I’m the greatest driver you’ve ever met.” So it isn’t just that he’s an absurd braggart, it’s that he uses it as a defense mechanism as if by resorting to the superlative he has the best chance of warding off the criticism.
@Kylopod:
So, he’s like a lame version of Stuart Smalley.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’ve said several times that the big thing holding back EV’s is some sort of battery breakthrough that lets them charge in 15 minutes or so, because even if people without garages were willing to sit around for hours every week waiting for their car to charge at the EV equivalent of a gas station, there’s not going to be enough charging stations to handle the volume (imagine what the lines at gas stations would be like if everyone refueling was tying up their pump for an hour).
@Kylopod:
That’s a very interesting way of interpreting it. Again, I agree. I’d only add that it’s not just criticism he wants to ward off, but consequences as well. I wonder what it’s like to be so entirely self-deluded.
@Stormy Dragon:
Let EVs have their space. City driving. Errands. Daily short commute. They truly excel at that. All things being equal, that type of stuff is 99% of what “normal” driving is for most people.
For long trips rent a gas car.
@Stormy Dragon:
I do have to admit that I’m not real comfortable with the idea of standing next to the cable carrying 400VDC at 500 amps (50 kWh charge in 15 minutes).
Still, once the integrated circuit supply catches up and the car market gets more reasonable, our two aging Hondas will get replaced with something electric.
@CSK:
But how deluded is it really? He’s proven again and again that he’s exceptional at escaping consequences. He suffered bankruptcies and lawsuits but was able to maintain his fame and lifestyle. He lost the presidency and attempted a violent coup, but I’ll be very surprised if he ever gets criminally prosecuted let alone convicted of anything.
@Kylopod:
It’s deluded in the sense that he consistently denies reality. But yes, he has always been able to avoid consequences. He’d tell you that that happens because he’s never done anything wrong, which is yet another denial of culpability.
For almost two years I lived in Minneapolis and worked in Des Moines.
250 miles door to door. 4 hours give or take. I drove down on Sunday and back on Friday afternoon.
I always rented a car. Part of my contract. I wasn’t going to put those miles on my vehicle, no sir.
If you fly MSP to DSM it is roughly 55 minutes. But if you factor in getting to the airport, then waiting, the flight time, then getting to where you need to get to – it is usually 5 hours all told.
Plus I get to drive myself and choose my own music. Set the speed and keep enough attention to stay in my lane and not hit anybody. Listen to music and kinda space out. I have agency when I drive. Whereas, flying means you lose all agency.
Take a taxi, get in line, get in another line, get scanned, board, sit, disembark, get in another line, rent a car / get a taxi. It’s a lot of processes many of which annoy me.
Nah, man. I’ll drive, but thanks for the offer. If it’s less than six hours drive time I’ll drive. Driving was just the one process.
I got used to it. Actually started looking forward to it. I could name every exit. I am approximately 7.2 mile to the Mason City exit. About 6 minutes at my current speed. There is a Happy Chef there and I kinda dig their burgers.
It became my routine. Hit the Royal Mile Sunday night and have a pint or three.
@CSK:
He denies reality to others. He isn’t necessarily in denial himself. This is a debate we’ve all had for a long time, and as far as I can tell there is no consensus. I’ve increasingly leaned toward thinking he has a lot more awareness than he lets out. The Woodward conversation points in that direction. More recent revelations (maybe from the latest Woodward book, maybe the I Alone Can Fix It one–I’m not sure) suggest he also knew perfectly well he lost the election (I think he strongly hinted at it in his call to Raffensberger).
@Kylopod:
Oh, he knows he lost the election. He said as much to Mollie Hemingway when he blamed the pandemic, although he didn’t acknowledge that he handled it badly.
I didn’t say that he denies reality to himself, all the time. He certainly denies it to his fan club.
He once said, long ago, that he didn’t care to look deeply inside himself, because he was afraid of what he might see. On some level, he probably knows he’s a fraud and–dare I say it–a loser. He’s forever the poor kid with his nose pressed up against the restaurant window, watching the elite frolic without him. He’s forever barred from that golden circle, and that will gnaw at him till he dies.
@CSK:
Classic narcissistic personality.
@Stormy Dragon:
If battery packs were small and accessible, you could just swap them instead of charging them. Of course, this generates problems if you get a defective battery pack and wind up stranded in the middle of nowhere…
Perhaps for long distance driving part of the pack could be easy to swap, and the rest could be charged overnight, or while you’re having lunch.
Look at it this way. When horses and donkeys were the main mode of motive power, they were fed (fueled) throughout the day. We don’t add a little gas to the tank several times a day, because we don’t fuel cars like we did horses. So, for electric cars we’ll need a different model, not just a copy of the gas model.
@CSK:
If Benito El Cheeto lies to himself, he clearly doesn’t believe the lies he tells himself. Otherwise he wouldn’t be so angry so much of the time.
@Kathy:
I think he also gets enraged when other people don’t believe them, particularly the NY Times, the WaPo, and ABC, NBC, and CBS. Trump would kill for favorable press coverage in those outlets. All that’s left to him is OANN, which he knows is crap for losers.
@de stijl:
And there’s one of the big ironies: the place where EVs work best (cities) is also the place people are least likely to be able to charge overnight because most of them are street parking in a different spot every night.
@Scott: Infuriating!!!
@Monala:
It’s sickening to read.
There is nothing like an empty hotel room or an an empty corporate leased apartment in the middle of the night to give you extreme existential chills.
I am utterly alone. I am no where and everywhere simultaneously. I am in Des Moines I am in Phoenix I am in San Francisco I am looking at a nearly empty parking lot at 3 AM I am everything I am nothing. I am a tiny speck of nothingness in a inconceivably vast universe and the whole of the universe is just a skin cell on my palm.
Empty hotel rooms freak me the fuck out regularly.
The Dead South dropped a new song off an upcoming album today, and I am forever changed. I used to sing this to my kids, I’ve never actually listened to the other verses!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MevYCdn5S8
Still pissed I didn’t get to see them play in a cave because of Covid, but at least they’ve got more albums and tours coming out.
@Michael Reynolds:
I just ordered my Tesla Model 3. Was all set for the Bolt until the stories about them blowing up came out, plus the whole recall thing.
But I’m keeping the Cayenne for those trips to Mammoth, Phoenix, Monterey, and San Francisco.
@de stijl: Are you still moving north? I might have to be in Iowa City in middle January if you’re around. I’d love to have a beer with the real de Stijl. 😛
The Goddamn Gallows are probably my second favorite band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxjeFV7Up3E
@gVOR08:
@gVOR09:
Are you evolving?
@Jax:
Would love to. You are my bae here. Hit me up. I love beer and chatting.
@Jax:
I am still running the July Talk Guns + Ammunition song a couple times every week btw. That was a super sweet steer. Thanks!