Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, November 19, 2021
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58 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 has endorsed Paul Gosar, calling him “a loyal supporter of our America First agenda, and even more importantly, the USA.”
Today is the day for the last vaccine holdout in our company to either get the jab or lose his job. It’s unfortunate, as he’s a decent guy and a real asset to the company. But his mind has been poisoned by Fox and such and he sees himself as a hero fighting repression.
@CSK:
Fixed.
@MarkedMan: Somebody should remind him that most “heroes” die.
@Kylopod:
Trump would endorse Jack the Ripper if Jack supported him.
This is a follow up to a comment from gVOR08 in yesterdays comments on the Republican Party.
Definitely agree re. the faux populism.
However, the UK does not appear, going by the data, to be exceptionally unequal.
This is a difficult area to get consistent data; the way income and wealth distributions are measured vary quite a bit.
Depending on measures and dates it is more unequal than the EU average in income disparity, but not by much.
In wealth, UK is perhaps surprisingly less unequal than Scandinavians.
British top 10% has c. 55% of national wealth; in Norway, Denmark and Sweden the top 10% have over 65% of wealth.
British top 1% has 23% ; not far off EU norm and the same as France.
And guess the least wealthy 1% in the EU?
Hungary where they have 17.5% of national wealth.
Compare the USA: 1% has 37%; 10% has 74%.
And Russia: 1% has 75% ! 10% hold 87%.
Russia really is the capitalist oligarchy.
Also, the European Union has little influence on the things with the most impact on income and wealth: direct tax policy (income, wealth, inheritance), minimum wage levels, inheritance law, etc remain under the control of the states.
There are parallels between Brexit and Trumpified Republicanism, but differences too.
IMHO the Leave elite was driven far more by political and even psychological factors than economic interest.
The Terrifying Future of the American Right
What I saw at the National Conservatism Conference
Question, how can 80% of the populace be Christians, when perhaps half deny the existence of a god?
There’s more, but you get the drift. Yes it is David Brooks reporting, but it is still worth reading.
What The Daily Beast is billing as a “$230 picture book to fleece dumbasses in time for Christmas” will be available in December.
Yes! You too can purchase an autographed copy of “Our Journey Together,” a pictorial history enabling you to “relive the unforgettable moments” of the Trump regime. For only $229.99.
Donny Jr. told Axios that his father wrote all the captions by himself, even some by hand. And…he himself selected the pix!
Minus the autograph, the book retails for only $74.99! Such a deal.
@CSK:
Oh, Lawd. One of the captions reads–and I am not kidding: “Attempting to listen to crazy Nancy Pelosi in the Oval Office.”
The book is produced by Winning Team Publishing, a company formed by…Donald Trump Junior. I guess no reputable or semi-reputable house would touch it.
Trump bills this as “a must-have for all Patriots.”
Maybe the company should be called “Whining Team Publishing.”
@CSK:
Yes, both of them! No matter how hard you try to forget them too!
@OzarkHillbilly:
I wonder how many fools will fork over even 75 bucks for this crap?
Well, looks like I’ll be searching for flights to Tijuana for a booster across the border.
I figure a flight to Tijuana is cheaper than one to LA or San Antonio or Houston, and then it’s just a matter of crossing the Cross Border Express and hopping on a cab. All done in one day.
Meantime, my replacement TV is in Limbo. The website says it will be delivered last Sunday, and shows no updated moves since Last Monday. I got in touch with Walmart’s support, and was given a choice between sending a report to logistics (six days response), or cancelling for a refund (8 days response). I opted for the former. So far, nothing has changed.
I think next time I’ll try to set for pickup in the store. I’ve three Walmarts near enough to home and office.
Sigh, I got a call late yesterday evening from my mother, which is never good as she does not like to call us too late in the day (we call her, I do so at least once a week), and my dad’s biopsy results are in and confirm what the doctor saw but did not want to bring up until his suspicions were validated first. My dad has cancer.
Other than the fine folks on this blog, the only other person I brought this up with is my boss at work. I said that I will continue to do my best for the company, but soon I will need to check my calendar and book a stretch of time-off to visit my family and coordinate what the future holds for my dad (who is in his mid-70s, and an ex smoker) and mom (has her own health issues, but not the C word, mid-70s and does not drive).
Anyway, believe it or not life is still good for me and with the weekend upon us and super short week next week, work will not be as much of a distraction so that is good. For those that believe feel free to send the cliché thoughts and prayers towards me and my family, yes..that includes you Michael R., even if you are a heathen and do not believe (I say this humorously) you can send good vibes/waves my way, I will take what I can get.
@CSK:
We could easily compile a similar book with unflattering pictures and captions. Think along the lines of:
Have you drunk your bleach yet?
Why do things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
Sure, everything I do looks bad if you remember it.
@CSK: Considering how many of them fork out $75 or more just to get to and attend one of his rallies, a lot more than I am comfortable with. The sad part is so many of them will think of the tomes as family heirlooms.
@Kathy: We could have a picture of trump getting a light bulb shoved up his ass. On 2nd thought, let’s not.
@inhumans99: You’ve got mine!
@MarkedMan:
My company basically gave everyone who asked a religious exemption which turned the vaccine mandate into a farce.
Of course, they’re now all complaining that they have to get weekly testing, saying it should be up to them whether they think they need to be tested or not.
@inhumans99: Keep strong.
@inhumans99: I’m sending all the best wishes I can your way
@Stormy Dragon: We are not the type of company that would grant farcical religious exemptions and so our process is quite rigorous. At the 11th hour he asked for one, but it’s fairly obvious it’s just a last ditch effort, as religion never came up before now.
According to the head of HR, by trivializing the exemption process your company could be opening themselves up for liability if Covid spreads from someone in your facility. It is hard to prove you did everything reasonable if you handed out exemptions to anyone who asked.
@inhumans99: The very warmest and most possibly non-cliched best wishes! To you and your family and everyone who loves you.
@inhumans99:
My best to you in waves of vibes.
Thanks for all the well wishes fellow members of the OTB on-line family.
So Kathy mentioned a light bulb in her post and I immediately thought about a very funny Scrubs episode involving a light bulb. If you google: De-bulbing A Patient’s Keister!
Part 1 will show up to play, but do not worry, part 2 auto-plays when you are done with P1. The first segment is around 5 minutes of your time, and the 2nd is less than 2 minutes of your time.
Trust me, it is worth 6 minutes of your day to watch.
I’ve been mulling over the Russian destruction of their satellite earlier in the week and am puzzled as to the motivation. The only two possibilities are sheer dickish-ness and as a thuggish method of moving along some sort of negotiations aimed at keeping them in the space business.
From what I could gather, the entirety of their space program funding in recent years came from charging exorbitant prices for bringing supplies and crew to the space station and now that Space X is handling that, they have been reduced to stunts, like shooting a movie at the ISS. So I wonder if this is kind of a Mafia message – “If we don’t get a piece we can make sure no-one gets a piece.”
Apparently the jury has reached a verdict in the Rittenhouse case.
@inhumans99:
All my best to you and your family.
@inhumans99:
Be good, be well, be strong, my friend.
@CSK:
NOT GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS.
@Sleeping Dog:
Because it’s Christian culture. They count you and I as Christian, whether we want them to or not, because we were born here. In fairness, my parents were religious, well my mother anyway. And then there’s my brother, Reverend Bruce. I may even put up some (secular) Christmas lights.
@CSK: F**k. Being a dweeb and carrying a gun to a protest, or anywhere else, is now officially sanctioned behavior.
@inhumans99: Will certainly keep thinking of you and your family.
@gVOR08: Worse, the victim’s right to self defense is of no value. Same argument being used in the Ahmaud Arbery trial and was basically used after George Zimmerman stalked and killed Trayvon Martin.
@MarkedMan:
My impression is that my employer simply doesn’t care beyond minimizing liability. They’re unlikely to get sued for allowing the exemption, so what do they care beyond that?
@MarkedMan:
There’s enough COVID19 floating around in the community that it would be nearly impossible to prove I got infected at work and not, say, getting groceries.
@Sleeping Dog: At the National Conservative Convention Brooks reported a strong anti-monopoly, anti-corporate strain not captured in your excerpts. I’ve been seeing similar stuff at TAC. And VOX has an article on it from The Federalist Society convention.
I might dismiss the National Conservatives (do they not know how that name resonates, or is it deliberate?) and TAC as fringe, but the FS? Singling out the C of C? And what I see says corporate money has shifted heavily from R to D. Part of it is backing winners, but part of it may be the R cultural craziness and abandonment of governance. And now Rs seem to be forcing business out.
There’s weird shit going on with Republicans. The marriage of big money and populism, even faux populism, had to chafe, and maybe, as long speculated, the inmates are taking over the asylum. If business shifts D we’ll end up with a far right R party, a la Orban, a centrist D party, and no liberal party.
I’d love to know what Koch and the rest of the libertarian Billionaire Boys Club are putting their money. Who paid for this Nat’l Conservative convention? Are Koch and the boys still backing the FS?
Rs have been a Conservative party of business since when? Grant? But I feel tectonic plates shifting and I don’t know where we’re going.
@MarkedMan:
As I said in another thread: the politics of performative trollery.
“One of these days Moscow may just troll-lol-a-lol its merry way into something really, really unpleasant for all concerned. For DEFCON values of unpleasant.”
The thing is, the Kremlin never seems to consider the possibility of getting repaid in their own coin of “implausibly deniable” actions: that the West will just sit there and get slapped repeatedly, and confine itself to impotent legalisms in response.
In fact they have already had one sharp lesson on the limits of “deniable” operations in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, when the Russian sponsored (and reportedly part Russian operated) Armenian forces got ripped to shreds by Azerbaijanis using Israeli weapon systems and Turkish logistic support.
Photos of today’s Lunar eclipse.
@gVOR08:
Well, there’s always the National Country Party of Australia.
According to one Aussie I met: “Not fascist, not socialist, just bloody embarrassing.”
Actually, IMO, old style agrarian populists, a bit similar to the Mid Western populists of the late 19th century US
Now that I’m home, comfy at my antique desk, a glass of scotch gently melting the single ice cube, I can talk about my day.
For any of you from the south: I number of “bless her heart”s that have been uttered this morning is legion. 🙂
I rent out my two spare bedrooms on a month-to-month basis. The last one was a young black woman who–while high-energy–was really friendly and loved my little old house. And then…. she got weird. And then she gave her notice. And then… she knocked on the front door (note: she was still living here and had a key)… with a police officer (Hi, Jeff. How’s it going?) to say she’d be that night, not at the end of the week.
{shrug} okay.
After she left, I vacuumed and shampooed the carpet (it still stinks of some sort of perfume or something she used), charged her $25 for the cleaning and the plant she let die, and sent off the rest of her deposit.
Fast forward to this morning.
At 05:00 I get a five and a half page text message where she goes off on me for misspelling her name (Chelsea instead of Chelsae)–because she’s sure the bank won’t cash it now–and how dare I charge her for cleaning the room?! And… and… She wants the (non-refundable) re-keying fee back, too! Because I didn’t change the locks the day the other tenant moved out (K moved out on Saturday, Chelsea gave her notice the following Friday–the night before I was going into the city to get new locks).
And then! She went off on a bender about me being an effeminate passive-aggressive man with a frail ego (I’m 225, with a shaved head and a beard). Insisted I was “insulting her intelligence” by intentionally misspelling her name. Then… (yes, it gets “better”–bless her heart) accused me of following her around the house, saying inappropriate things to her (nope), “constantlyt” accosting her (asking an innocuous question every few weeks) and “staring blatantly at her body” (a… ummm, no. b… the only times I saw her was when she ran from her room to the back door).
And… other stuff. Five and a half pages worth.
I replied that with an apology for failing to see the non-standard spelling of her name (I honestly never noticed it), assure her that the bank would accept the check, and offered to send her a corrected one if she’d like to return the current one.
The response was another two and a half pages stating she was “not interested in bantering with me” (she says in a two and a half page reply) and that if she was she “would do so with an entitled woman. Not a man.”
My lack of response to everything else she said was “an admission of guilt on my part”. Obvious evidence of my “fragile ego”.
The bank has “been kind enough to overlook the misspelling of her name”, and she has “decided to deposit the amount I sent”. But I’m a terrible person for trying to swindle her–just like everyone else she’s met in Wisconsin. So she’s leaving the state!
After a healthy dose of WTF??!!, I’ve spent the rest of the day laughing and joking about it (“I’m just going to passively-aggressively take an orange Life Saver from the candy dish–and don’t say anything about it because you’ll shatter my frail ego!” “I’m going to be effeminate, and take a green apple Life Saver.”)
Hey: WR or Michael Reynolds… Want to go halfsies on writing a Netflix series based on the past 4 years of my renters? This stuff is soap-opera gold. I mean… one guy left the notebook with his “budget” in it.
Line 1: Weed from Carlos, $80
Line 4: Court fees
😀
@inhumans99:
My very heart-felt sympathies. If you ever want to talk, let me know.
My dad died of cancer 13 years ago. He was given 6 months, and lived 14–making it to his 50th wedding anniversary. We were very fortunate that–for the most part–he was “okay” until the last week, when he went from “kinda weak, but all there” to dead in about 5 days.
With the exception of his first son (from his first marriage)–who was on tour at the time–the entire family was with him when he died. In his house. He would say that the only way he was leaving that house was “feet first”.
We failed him: because of how we had to wheel the gurney, he went out head first (Sorry, Dad!)
You need an ear, you get a hold of me: ks******@gm***.com
@Kathy:
I was out last night.
It was pretty glorious. We had no clouds but a light low haze. Plus the expected urban light pollution.
22F / – 6C
Is there a color halfway between red and orange? I bundled up last night late and went to a local park. Sat down and watched. Eventually, I laid down. Easier on my neck. Watched. Very cool. I enjoyed it immensely.
@de stijl:
A vast array. But the most common is ocher.
@de stijl:
I think orange is a color between red and yellow 🙂
I first saw a Lunar eclipse at a very young age, 5 or 6 at a guess. We were driving home in the evening, and there was the Moon looking very red not very high in the sky. I’d no idea what was going on, but I recall that moment.
I wonder what such an eclipse looks like from the surface of the Moon. You’d see the Earth covering the Sun completely (or almost completely as in today’s case), and it should get very dark as there’s no atmosphere to scatter light. On the other hand, sunlight passing through the Earth’s atmosphere looks reddish and makes it to the Moon (why the Moon looks red at totality, reflected sunlight scattered by our atmosphere). I wonder if it gets dark enough with all that earthlight to see the stars.
@Mu Yixiao: “I’m 225, with a shaved head and a beard)”
Got to say, not at all how I’ve always pictured you. You come across tall, thin, and hirsute!
@de stijl:
@Mu Yixiao:
@Kathy:
I enjoyed that intensely.
I wish I had done more. It was an event I underserved. I half-assed it.
It deserved more.
Next big celestial event I am going up to the Boundary Waters and get a proper view. A vast almost unimaginably huge sky that zaps your brain hard.
I am kicking myself. That would have been epic. I let myself down last night.
@de stijl:
Next Lunar eclipse is May 16th.
Here’s a schedule
Planetary transits are far less common, and I think you need a telescope (with a solar filter) to see them.
I’m not sure how to look up when Venus will be occluded by the Moon next.
I like winter camping a lot. It focuses the brain. Unless we nail the basics we might freeze to death. It puts a hard edge on it.
Generally I prefer to be within walking distance to a vehicle we have the key for just for safety’s sake. Somewhere we could pile into, enjoy the benefits of an internal combustion engine, and bask in the warmth of a car’s heater can provide if push comes to shove.
I am a plan A, plan B, sometimes a plan C person. Winter camping up north requires planning and execution. The margin gets small.
Any asshole can camp in August. That’s easy.
@wr:
Oh! You’ve seen photos of me in college? 5′-10″, 135 (125 in HS), 28″ waist, hair past my shoulders.
Now? This is me
And… just for fun: Here’s the featured photo I use on Tinder[1].
So totally the image of a passive-aggressive, effeminate man with a fragile ego who insults women by misspelling their name.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go selectively wax my legs so the hair that’s left looks like an AR-15.
{Swoosh & exit stage left}
=============
[1] Yes. I’m on Tinder. I’m a homebody in a small town. I can’t rely on the perfect woman walking into the wine bar on a Thursday night between 5 and 6 pm and sweeping me off my feet. Plus… “find the real person” on Tinder is almost as fun as it was on the Shanghai Craiglist personals.
@Mu Yixiao:
Yo man, you are a pretty good looking person! Dudettes would be lucky to snag you.
I am single myself. My relationship went busto earlier this year. I’m too gun-shy to rejoin the the pool right now. Still licking my wounds, doing some self-evaluation.
Tinder right now is not my thing personally, but go for it! Be you.
You are a good catch and somebody lucky is going to find you.
Be well! Good luck in the dating scene!
@de stijl:
[southern_bell]Why, sir. You are most kind to say so. I do think I am blushing.[/southern_bell]
An old Cat Stevens lyric sums it up: If I could meet ’em, I could get ’em. As yet I haven’t met ’em. That’s how I’m in the state I’m in.
Realistically: I’m 53. Anyone close to my age is either married, or single for a very good reason. And I want kids. There aren’t that many women over 30 who want kids and haven’t already had them. Add in the D/s factor and the dating options are, shall we say, “limited”.
I’ve still got my line in the water, but… I’ve got no taste for catfish, and the bass just ain’t bitin’.
@Mu Yixiao: You look a lot like a guy that I worked with in Korea. I know you’re not him because he’s a touch younger and hasn’t started losing his hair or shaving his head, but you have an amazing likeness to him. Last I heard, he’s teaching in Japan and had finished his doctorate in seminary.
@Mu Yixiao: Sam Cooke. Cat Stevens is almost a generation later.
@Mu Yixiao:
There are awesome single people out there.
You are a catch. A smart, accomplished person.
Keep the chin up. People like positivity.
Dating is fun. (Ignore the fact that dating is super effing stressful. Ignore that. Pretend it away.)
Be single and mingle.
Hard won advice: be yourself even on the first date. This isn’t a job interview. Be you. Don’t be not you. Bad things will follow if you do.
Have fun, godamnit! Dates should have at least these 3 elements: fun, food, talk.
It is the perfect excuse to do stuff you’ve thought about but never did for whatever reason. “I’ve never skydived. Have you? Wanna give it a go?”
Go for it! Be stupid.
(Heads up. Your first skydiving adventure will absolutely require you and your date to be physically strapped to pros. It’s worth it. The free-falling bit is super intense. You will have a lot to share later after.)
@de stijl:
And again I defer to Cat Stevens:
“If I could meet ’em, I could get ’em”
The ven diagram of “situations I’m in” and “situations I might meet a potential wife” is… let’s say… closer to the Jeep logo than the MasterCard logo.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m putting myself out there. I’m just being realistic about the ROI.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It wasn’t me!
I wasn’t there!
I have an alibi!
She swore she was 18!