Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Friday, February 11, 2022
·
86 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).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Russian painting vandalised by ‘bored’ gallery guard who drew eyes on it
Too much vodka, no doubt. Or maybe not enough.
It’s never too late to do the right thing.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, the executive director of the gallery no doubt instructed the security guard to keep his eyes on the painting.
@CSK: A truly horrible joke. Well done. Dads everywhere would be proud.
@MarkedMan:
Thank you. I’m overflowing with bad jokes.
We, the comment contingent of this blog, are highly political and sometimes it is easier to focus on the battle rather than the cause. But last night I was again reminded that there IS a cause, that whatever the flaws Democrats have as politicians (i.e. many, many flaws) there are enough of them trying to move us forward that they can occasionally make a change that is a fundamental good to a great deal of people.
Over the past month my mother, who will be 94 in three days if she is still with us, has gone from a frail but sweet and mentally sharp little old lady carefully picking her way through her daily routine and making sure she knows what all the children, grand children, and great grandchildren are up to, to a hospitalized ball of agony as her spine started cracking, impinging on the nerves in multiple vertebrae. She is not going to get better and, given her sound heart, this could go on for a long time. So my brother and I talked to this wonderful lady from the hospice system and by late evening she had been moved to a state the hospice center where they could finally give her the powerful drugs necessary to ease the pain. I haven’t been there yet but my brother described it as a beautiful place with every room private and having a kitchenette and a fold out couch bed so family can stay as long as they wanted. This is available to everyone in the state, rich or poor, and costs nothing for anything, including meds, until the end.
This is a clause in Obamacare, which you may remember Republicans campaigning against and raising money from. They called it “death panels”. Not a single Republican Senator voted for Obamacare, and the one Republican house member who did only voted after it was clear he wouldn’t be the tie-breaker in favor. In the times the Republicans have held power since then they have tried repeatedly to repeal it but have offered no alternative.
@CSK: Ouch. You’re gonna pay for that. If not in this life, than the next one.
@MarkedMan: Sorry to hear about your mother. May her suffering end soon.
Yes, the ACA is a worthwhile accomplishment that all benefit from in ways both large and small.
@MarkedMan:
Small clarification–one Republican House member (Joseph Cao, who held a very Democratic-leaning seat in Louisiana) voted for the initial version of Obamacare in the House, called the Affordable Health Care for America Act, passed in late 2009. When it reached the Senate, they basically threw this version out and started from scratch, creating what came to be called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA for short. When the ACA was sent back to the House in March 2010, Cao voted against it, meaning the ACA (what “Obamacare” usually refers to) indeed didn’t get a single Republican vote in either chamber.
It took over 24 hours for the Soup Nazi to get involved in the Gazpacho Secret Police kerfuffle.
I can’t recall when the news cycle was this slow.
When thinking about evolution and natural selection, it’s always seemed clear to me that intelligence plus the ability to manipulate the physical world make up the winning strategy. After all, if the end game is to reproduce, no large animal has ever been as successful as H. sapiens.
And yet, we haven’t come this far all alone. We developed relationships with animals and plants we found useful, and they proliferate as much as we do. Cattle, pigs, dogs, wheat, rice, apples, etc.
We’ve also brought along plants and animals that subsist incidentally from our efforts, such as weeds, rats, flies, and other pests and vermin. These may do even better than our domesticates and cultivars, even though we fight them incessantly.
Still lower down the size scale, we’ve been a boon to infectious pathogens. consider SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the trump disease. It has to be the most successful virus in recent years, having reproduced in hundreds of millions of human hosts all over the world. Between it and masking, some varieties of common cold virus may go extinct.
Think of how history would read if viruses could write it.
To circle back to the Rogan post a few days ago, more and more repugnant information is coming out to prove that why yes, he’s in fact conservative and yes, he’s aware he’s a pig and people will put up with it.
‘But what if that’s what they sound like?’: Clips of Joe Rogan mocking Asian accents add to controversy
From Oct of last year, he was bluntly stating that the platform would let him do as he pleased no matter how offensive, inaccurate or just plain dangers. He knows if he does a little lip service and shuffle, people will let it go rather than give up Spotify and the company knows it as well. He feels free to spread deadly lies & misinformation and be an utter ass while doing it….. because it’s not bad enough for most folks to give up a minor convenience.
@Kathy: This reminds me of an article I read a decade or so ago, arguing that impatiens had manipulated humans into helping them thrive outside of a small native area in Central America into a dominant plant species all over the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere.
@Joe:
Kind of how dogs are the ultimate tool users, as they use the toolmakers as tools 🙂
Not me. I’ve never made a tool in my entire life.
@Kathy:
There’s some sci-fi story about aliens who visit earth. The village idiot among them is able to communicate with dogs, and discovers that they’re the dominant species on earth, because they get humans to do everything for them.
@KM:
He may or may not be a conservative. He is definitely a bigot and a source of vaccine and health misinformation, who should have no place in society.
@CSK:
So these aliens were blind to cats?
@Kathy: Reminds me of the ancient cartoon.
@Kathy: Chef Andres went on Twitter to confess he founded the Gazpacho Police because he’s tired of people adding tobacco sauce or jalapeños to his soup. This has all been great fun, which the MAGAts will take as evidence of how we despise them. But I wish the press would address the underlying craziness of whatever it is she meant by Pelosi’s police.
I wanted to continue this discussion from yesterday about Dave Chappelle and the affordable housing issue. I completely disagree that Chappelle’s private views are not relevant. He is a private citizen, and the town council literally changed public policy to accommodate him because of his threat to pull his business. If this were the council acting independently the residents could vote them out if they decide to. Not so with Chappelle.
If a businessperson did the same as Chappelle did and they were racist or anti-semitic it would usually be a non-starter, they would dismiss him or her. His character and views does matter when a person’s influence changes public policy. I happen to think that based on his interactions with the trans community that he is anti-trans, and holds bigoted views towards trans people. He had numerous opportunities to at least sit down with people and talk, and it seemed like all he did was dig his heels in further. He’s a very smart man and he knew he was doing this at the same time it was open season on the trans community in half the states in the country.
@Kathy:
I think the point was that dogs had learned to con humans by acting cute and cuddly and loving and worshipful. Show me a cat who’s ever worshiped a human. Cats demand to be worshiped by their humans.
@Kathy: Indeed. This Rogan thing reminds me of Limbaugh. He swore he wasn’t racist, but he sure seemed obsessed by race. How often does anyone, even someone who talks for a living, have occasion to mention the N word? Sure seems like Rogan wants to find occasions.
@gVOR08:
Didn’t Rush Limbaugh often describe himself as “a harmless, lovable little fuzzball”?
@CSK:
That’s the point. Cats get the same benefits as dogs, but without even 1% of the effort.
@Kathy:
Well, clearly whoever wrote the story was a dog lover.
@gVOR08: Why does/should Jose Andres get to decide how people should season their food?
@gVOR08:
Many have a problem with racism being defined as racist. They’d rather it were not.
@just nutha:
Andres invented a cocktail that features pork consomme and two kinds of sherry topped with egg foam.
I’ll stick to vodka martinis, thank you.
@Kathy: The only thing worse than being racist is being called a racist.
@senyordave:
One interesting thing that I saw pointed out is that if you look back to “Chapelle Show”, middle class suburban black contempt toward poor urban black culture was a frequent subtext of many of the segments that was overlooked at the time, but is somewhat more obvious in light of his later evolution.
@just nutha: It’s a high-end chef thing. Fancy restaurants typically don’t have salt and pepper at the table, with the idea being that the food is seasoned appropriately by the chef–he or she is expected to have signed off on the preparation of every dish and therefore it’s delivered as it’s meant to be enjoyed.
Some chefs are weirder about this than others. Most seem to get that everyone’s taste buds are different and don’t get too wound up about it. Others are way touchier about it (especially in France).
@Jen:
There’s a similar thing with sushi: in the US it’s common for people to make a big pool of soy sauce and wasabi and then dunk each piece in before consuming it. In Japan this would be considered almost an insult toward the chef as it implies they didn’t prepare the rice properly
Regarding the cute/likeability of both dogs and cats… This is something quite new in the long history of the relationship. For thousands of years, both were expected to work for their keep.
@Stormy Dragon:
Same thing with Chris Rock’s old HBO show.
@Jen:
The first time I noticed the absence of a slat shaker was at a pretentious (and no-longer-extant) restaurant in Harvard Square. I asked for salt for my potatoes and was informed by the waiter that the chef had already seen to the salting and knew exactly how much was required.
No. He didn’t.
@OzarkHillbilly: The defacing (or refacing) of the art was indeed bad. However, the headlines about the amounts involved were a bit off. The paintings were worth what they said, but it turned out the damage was relatively minor and completely curable, for a couple thousand euros worth of restoration.
@Kathy:
It should be noted that at any given moment, domesticated chickens outnumber humans on this planet 6 to 1. =)
As a chef I wouldn’t mind too much if people used salt or pepper. But I’d be a bit POed if they did it before tasting. Something I got from my dad.
@CSK:
I believe he did. He lied about other things too.
Rudy Giuliani Is (Probably) Screwed
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving fella.
A lot more at the link.
@gVOR08: I swear that said tabasco, not tobacco, when I typed it.
I almost always add salt or pepper without tasting the dish, but that’s because I generally don’t season with salt and pepper while I’m cooking. But mostly I don’t add salt or pepper.
@Pylon: I’d have used a donald trump signature sharpie myself.
@OzarkHillbilly:
As someone once observed, if Giuliani had died in 2004, there would be statues of him all over New York. And now…he’s a disbarred laughingstock.
I have never understood how anyone with even a gram of sense could allow him or herself to be conned by such an egregiously malevolent churl as Donald Trump.
I would have thought, among all the FG sycophants, that Giuliani would have been the one most likely to know that FG had neither the inclination or the funds to “help someone out financially.” Shows how little I know, I guess.
@Jen:
@Stormy Dragon:
I don’t think I’ve added salt to cooked food since the 90s. I might not even notice a missing salt shaker. Pepper, though, is a different matter. In mexico one usually has to ask for it, as few restaurants have pepper shakers on the table for some reason (Italian restaurants bring over a pepper mill with just abut every dish).
Tastes vary, though. And assuming a chef has a more sensitive palate, what’s perfect for them may be bland for others.
I wonder if snotty chefs ran airlines, whether they’d ordered the stick shakers removed.
@CSK:
One time at a fast food joint, a friend asked for unsalted fries. The manager gave him a long spiel on why that was not possible. Before he was finished, a deep fryer dinged, and an employee scooped some fresh fries, unsalted, and gave them to my friend.
The manger then asked “Do you want some salt for your potatoes?”
@just nutha: There’s an old trope in movies about con artists that a character thinks they’re doing a con, then it turns out all along they were being conned by someone else.
There’s an element of that in Trumpworld, except these folks are nothing like the romanticized image of con artists in the movies, such as the suave card players in films like The Sting. They’re just a bunch of Nigerian Prince types aiming for the absolute lowest common denominator.
@CSK: I’ve always assumed that some unknown but fixed percentage of people abused by malevolent churls such as FG are fairly churlish people themselves and, in essence, the malevolent are engaging in preditations of each other (predominantly, I would hope).
@CSK: I love this:
He’s aghast that the act of taking up residence on the tracks has made a train wreck of his life.
@CSK: I briefly thought of Giuliani as a hero but it didn’t last. My neighbors who were NYC cops and firemen despised him, and this was soon after 9/11. They had a very different view of his behavior on that day and the days following then the general public.
@just nutha:
In keeping with the restaurant motif, you know when a waiter grabs the plates with a cloth napkin and warns they’re hot, then some idiot at the table inevitably touches one, and then they look surprised and hurt the plate was too hot to touch?
That’s Rudy with Benito.
@Stormy Dragon:
It’s not contempt, Dave is simply aware that blacks of the subculture you describe are mostly capable and quite ready to laugh at themselves. Assuming another oppressed community was just as capable and ready was his mistake.
@just nutha:
Well, that would be a good assumption, given the kind of people with whom Trump surrounds himself. It’s also true that anyone halfway decent keeps far away from him, and always has.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yeah. He never thought the leopard would eat his face.
@MarkedMan:
Interesting. Going by the press coverage, you’d have thought he was the Second Coming. He has saved civilization” was one of the more overwrought encomia.
@CSK: You say of Giuliani
Looked to me like Giuliani plunged in eagerly. He thought he could tie his own grifts to TFG’s name.
In his latest (today) Trumper Tantrum, TFG has accused Mitch McConnell of giving legitimacy to the “Marxist” January 6 Committee.
They’re overlooking, he claims the “massive evidence of Voter Fraud, which continues to come out daily.” It does?
@gVOR08:
Oh, probably he did. It’s just hard to comprehend the depths of depravity.
I wanted to follow up on a different thread from yesterday.
I wasn’t always as trans positive as I am now. I changed my mind. My change came through getting to know trans people, watching a documentary about some trans people, and reading a few books. It did not involve people shaming me on social media for dumb things I might have said about trans people. I’m pretty sure that had that happened, it would not have accelerated my personal transition.
Yes, I will advocate on behalf of greater trans acceptance, which I understand will come via contact with and understanding of trans people. I’ve talked to a lot of people face-to-face about it, and I’ve generally had some success.
So while, no, I don’t agree with certain statements, I’m not going to debate them in media. I believe in relational evangelism, and I don’t have relationships with the people in question.
@CSK:
To be fair, he didn’t specify whose voter fraud we’re getting massive evidence of daily and there’s been all kinds of incriminating evidence about his administration coming out.
@Stormy Dragon:
The self-delusion (if that’s what it is, and not just an attempt to keep the MAGAs riled up) is staggering.
@CSK:
But many people are saying that!
The only explanation for Giuliani is that that TFG had something on Giuliani that would send him to prison and held it over him. So Giuliani got in deeper and deeper. Giuliani’s doppelganger is Christy, who signed on but never drank the cool-aid. After be excommunicated from the church of TFG, Christy had the good sense to keep his distance.
@gVOR08:
Part of it is likely that it is ridiculous to treat n-clang! like some mythical totem that cannot be uttered without somehow invoking the Eldrich Gods or something. It’s a word — an ugly word, but a word — and we give it a lot more power by skittishly avoiding using it.
I don’t use it often because 1) I don’t make a habit of using racial slurs, and 2) even when quoting racists being racist, if you use it people come out of the woodwork to get offended and it is just tiresome.
Toss in a bit of “you aren’t the boss of me” and some people will make sure to use it just to show they can. It’s a bit of ironic racism to be transgressive.
When mentioning Mel Gibson’s antisemetic rant, we don’t skip over him saying “kike” by referring to “the k-word”. He said an ugly word, for ugly reasons, because he is an ugly person, and that’s that.
And, when Rogan is referring to Black neighborhoods being like the Planet of the Apes because of all the niggers — that ugly word isn’t the ugliest part of that statement. That’s just good, old-fashioned, non-ironic racism. An ugly word, used for ugly reasons, by an ugly person.
Combine the desire to poke at the line created by making “the n-word” unspeakable with some genuine casual racism, and it’s going to come out a lot, and even the speaker isn’t going to really know the intent behind any usage because they can hide behind “I’m just using the word to point out how dumb it is to hold it up as the one word we can never say.”
I mean, toss in “Planet of the Apes” and it should be pretty clear, but people can delude themselves.
@Sleeping Dog: Giuliani is easily explained — this has always been Giuliani.
– He married his own cousin, and then got an annulment because she was his cousin.
– He announced that he was filing for divorce before telling his wife.
– He helped provoke a racist police riot against NYC’s first black mayor.
– He rants about ferret owners as “diseased people who love weasels”.
There’s more. There’s so much more.
The shock isn’t that he’s a self-serving and semi-delusional scumbag now, it’s that for a brief moment it wasn’t completely obvious.
@Gustopher: Remember the Central Park lady who told a black man she was arguing with, “I’m going to call the police and tell them an African American man is threatening my life”? I got the strange sense she believed using the PC term “African American” magically made her remark not racist.
Back in the ’90s Robert Novak was interviewing Jesse Helms, and a caller told Helms he should get the Nobel Peace Prize for “everything you’ve done to keep down the N*****s.” The two laughed nervously then immediately got bogged down in a discussion over the caller having used a “politically incorrect” word. Helms talked about how his daddy once gave him a big spanking for using the word as a kid, but then he added that “Mark Twain used it.” They were treating the word like it was profanity, and seemed oblivious to the fact that the caller’s sentiments would have been pretty much just as deplorable had he praised Helms for “keeping down the blacks.”
@Gustopher:
Cohen’s assertion Rudy is “drunk all the time” may be accurate.
@CSK:
It does, but you don’t want to know where from.
Although you can probably figure it out without difficulty.
@Kathy:
June 15, 2015.
@Dude Kembro:
Well, it was the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. And the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup.
@Sleeping Dog:
I don’t think it requires that kind of scenario at all. Giuliani is an attention-seeker who doesn’t want to do real work. And, no doubt, he believes the legend of being “America’s Mayor” and thought he wouldn’t get stung by Trump.
As per @dazedandconfused, this, too:
@MarkedMan: Drove straight from the airport to the hospice center and she has brief moments of clarity so I’m very happy I didn’t delay. The hospice center is just beautiful and astoundingly well staffed. I feel like I’m in Sweden or the Netherlands where, as my nephew put it, they actually give a F about people.
@MarkedMan: I am sorry to hear about your mother, but happy for all of you that she is in such a wonderful place. I hope it makes this incredibly difficult situation a bit easier for you to bear.
@MarkedMan:
I’m so glad the hospice is a beautiful place. My mother spent her last week in a similar one. We were all–except for my brother, who couldn’t get there in time–with her when she died. That evening we went back to my parents’ house and toasted my mother at dinner.
This will be hard for you. Remember, when she goes, that your mother had a fine long life. My thoughts are with you, MM.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think that legend died publicly in 2008, when he withdrew rather ignominiously from the primaries.
@Kathy: It may have died for the rest of us, but I wouldn’t underestimate the degree to which it lives on in his own mind.
Trump is now referring to Maggie Haberman as “Maggot Haberman.”
@MarkedMan:
It is wonderful that there are places that care. When my mother was dying, one of the LNA’s came in on her day off to say hello and check on her. I’ll never forget that level of caring.
May your mother’s passing be serene.
@Kathy:
Rudy Giuliani after 9/11 kind of reminds me of Andrew Cuomo during COVID19: a widely unpopular pol catapulted into the spotlight by a crisis experiences a momentary surge in popularity before crashing back to earth after reminding everyone why they disliked them so much before the crisis.
@CSK:
Haberman should have a coffee cup made with that written on it.
@CSK:
Damn. I hate it when he says something I agree with. Not that she’s particularly bad, but this he-said-she-said, bothsides, horse race, access journalism is killing us. This is presumably the flushing papers thing, but what else are she, and the rest of them, keeping back that we should know about?
@MarkedMan: It’s tough, I’ve been there and there is no dressing it up. I’m glad it’s a positive atmosphere. We all go, it’s nice to be able to do it in peace.
@gVOR08:
I don’t know what, or if anything, the press is withholding. It seems to me that Trump’s public reputation is already rancid. It’s possible there are things about him the press doesn’t know.
The man is despised by everyone except for the pathetic assortment of crackpot bloggers who try to pass themselves off as legitimate news outlets. Even Fox isn’t sufficiently pro-Trump for the MAGAs.
What two years of the trump pandemic have shown, is that the most profound assessment of the American character, and to be fair of large parts of the world as well, was made by James Carville in 1992: It’s the economy, stupid.
And 47% or so of the American electorate.
Still no Photos for Friday.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Sure, but we were talking about the press, and what they might be withholding about Trump.
@CSK: OK, but I still want to see what Steven is willing to be criticized for. I almost feel cheated if I can’t take cheap shots at his photographer’s eye.