Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, March 11, 2022
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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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I have absolutely nothing to say…. other than I’m wide awake at 1:30am PST.
Oh, and we wrapped principal photography on Season 1 tonight. Woot. Woot.
Mummified body found inside wall of Oakland convention center
I’ve found a lot of shit in walls over the years, some of it was even kind of cool. Mostly it was just WTF? Never found a body tho, unless you want to count the innumerable mummified mice, birds, and bats I found. And a cat, almost forgot the cat.
It turns out you can actually be TOO Trumpy and assholian, even for the deep red Wyoming Senate. 😛
https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/politics-government/2022-03-10/senate-strips-anthony-bouchard-of-committee-assignments?fbclid=IwAR3JDtwEMlPzDz-mgwRFxdvVmyVtgvkdOa3uX4wKjY1QvxGwFxtTBnWMulE
Likelihood of criminal charges against Trump rising, experts say
Don’t hold your breath, but maybe cross your fingers.
@OzarkHillbilly: Having grown up in New York, the rumors surrounding the construction in the 60s of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting Staten Island and Brooklyn are legendary. The anchorages and caissons contain millions of tons of concrete and, if legends are true, quite a few bodies.
Yesterday we saw the Israeli Knesset bow to the far right orthodox and banning naturalization of Palestinian spouses in order to preserve a “Jewish State”.
In India:
In Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church strongly supports Putin and the Ukraine invasion because both the Church and Putin are revolted by the West’s secular values.
In the US, the Christian Nationalists have taken over the Republican Party and are attacking at all levels of government to create laws enforcing their far right vision of American.
This trend is happening all over the globe. I expect soon, there will be commentary saying that Osama Bin Laden and his Wahhabists were right.
I grew up Christian and still practice but my family history always stiff armed the more fundamentalist trends even to the extent of believing that, in words of my Dad, that religion was the cause of more wars and strife than any other factor. I think we are seeing that now.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Enough doom and gloom for a Friday.
@Scott: I’m currently reading Mississippi Solo. Just the other day I was reading a bit where the author Eddy Harris took a left turn in his soliloquy and mused on the building of the Eads Bridge, and wondered atthe cost in human lives it took to build it:
@OzarkHillbilly: I’ve always been fascinated by urban infrastructure whether it is roads and bridges, water and sewage, or electricity. We take those things for granted until some disaster happens (like the Big Freeze last February here in Texas). Then we learn about massive water pumps freezing up, how the power grid and circuits work and so forth.
You see the fighting and bombing in Ukraine and someone, somewhere is fighting to keep the power on and water running. Hidden heroism there.
@Scott:
Nick Fuentes has praised the Taliban.
Tell me you’ve never driven on the DC beltway before without telling me you’ve never driven on the DC beltway before:
@Stormy Dragon: What a bunch of snowflakes.
We can label this as “woke”… right?
@OzarkHillbilly:
The best part is they think this is because the other beltway drivers are conspiring against them, when it’s probably just the normal traffic on one of the nation’s most notoriously shitty highways.
@Stormy Dragon:
I remember one particularly bad trip 10-15 years ago, when it took me 3.5 hours to get through the 33 miles around DC.
@Stormy Dragon: Absolutely. DC traffic doesn’t like anyone. These chuds are certainly not special.
@Stormy Dragon:
Far out!
Of course the truckers think there is a conspiracy to destroy their conspiracy to disrupt DC traffic.
@Kylopod: Yeah, I had a bad trip once when somebody passed me a dipper. Never again!
@Mu Yixiao: “We can label this as “woke”… right?”
You can call anything whatever you want… but why would you want to? What’s the point? Oh, I guess then you can connect this set of individuals with anyone else your feel superior to and claim they’re all exactly the same. That was the specific purpose of the Right using the phrase “critical race theory” to describe any attempt to treat minorities as human beings and it seems to have succeeded in making a lot of truly horrible people even more openly racist than they were. So if that’s what you’re looking to do, go for it.
But I still ask why you’d want to.
@Mikey: “DC traffic doesn’t like anyone. These chuds are certainly not special.”
But they are, though. Everyone else in traffic is there to get somewhere. These losers are deliberately screwing up traffic to make some inane political point. That’s why everyone hates them.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Count no one happy until Benito wears the orange jumpsuit.
The Ukrainians report the third Russian General has been killed on Friday. If this is true, this is an amazing statistic for an operation of this size and length of time. By Field Marshall Slim’s thinking the morale of the troops must be sky high.
@wr:
Who pissed in your Wheaties this morning?
@Mu Yixiao:
@wr is all-in on the Hollywood woke agenda. I don’t think he’s noticed that train is running out of steam.
@Stormy Dragon:
Some of the truckers are upset because everyone’s giving them the finger. One guy was really put out when three young girls gave him the finger. Had to bail for the rest of the day.
@Mu Yixiao:
“The group created the Vulva Spaceship concept to challenge the convention of, ahem, phallic spacecraft design.”
Maybe they can have a duel with Flesh Gordon’s ship.
@wr:
Pointing out a silly rocket design means Mu can pretend the GOP isn’t trying to recriminalize LGBT people
@sam:
Now that’s what you call “rocket porn” 😀
@Stormy Dragon:
Not sure what you’re smoking, but you might want to put it away for a while.
Hmmm… can we label this “MAGA cult nonsense” then?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Mocks ‘Woke’ Disney Amid Uproar Over ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law
Man, Chapek just can’t please anybody can he? He gives the most lukewarm lipservice to the concerns of his employees, shareholders and paying customers about a ludicrous and problematic bill (while still fully funding all the GOP schmucks who passed it) and DeSantis *still* gives him public sh^t about it. Because Disney tried to CYA with the barest fig leaf they could find, the sitting FL Gov doubles down on it. Wonder if he’ll accuse Chapek of “grooming” like they have everyone else who’s questioned the bill…..
(psstt @Mu – the reason they jumped on you was the snide “woke” opening. I’d get the same with my opener on any conservative friendly site. It’s a good news story and definitely ridiculous to make something so aerodynamic fail just because rocket look phallic. However it felt like you were using “woke” as a slur rather then pointing out rocket design has little to do with feminism.)
@KM:
If the story was presented by itself as a funny news story, it would have been amusing.
But it wasn’t. It was presented using explicitly alt-right terminology as part of a larger effort to discredit liberalism in general.
@Mu Yixiao: Mu, sorry, I gotta ask – you do get that this was just an exercise to get screen space?
@sam:
I would pay to see that movie…
@Mu Yixiao: Just getting tired of the constant attacks on anyone who tries to see the world from a slightly different perspective. The smug status-quo worship embedded in the sneering use of “woke” is the worst of middle-class entitlement.
@Michael Reynolds: “@wr is all-in on the Hollywood woke agenda.”
Oh, Michael. You’re so blinded by hatred of anyone even slightly to your left. You have no idea what I’m “all in” on, except for exhaustion with the smugness of those who have no answers and despise anyone who tries to find one.
@Michael Reynolds:
A sincere question: do you realize how much you sound like FNC/run of the mill Republicans?
(Not snark, honestly–but is that how you want/intend to sound?).
@Mu Yixiao: I like it. There’s something very appealing about it.
(I assume your “woke” comment is a joke, because it would otherwise be overly tedious… not sure why everyone is taking it seriously)
@Gustopher:
There’s too many alt-righters who will use alt-right terminology to identify others in spaces and then fall back on the “it’s just a joke” excuse when called out on. So when you see someone using alt-right terminology, the BEST case is they’re just a useful idiot who is helpfully providing the tall grass for actual alt-righters to hide in.
@Gustopher:
In the interests of fairness, we can’t complain when the right uses “j/k” as rationale and not point it out among ourselves. If we call out @JKB for using “woke” in a insulting sense, everyone else should be held accountable as well.
Again, I don’t @Mu was trying to be derogatory but that is what the connotation of “look at what these dumbasses’ ideology lead them to create” came across as. Supposed stupid idea is supposedly stupid on it’s own but deliberately using the word in connection with it means that you’re linking the two together. That’s the sort of intentional etymological tainting that causes people to automatically have negative thoughts about something regardless of whether it deserves it.
I wonder whether some of the folks who frequent OTB would have considered MLK some sort of woke SJW, and posted about him in derisive terms.
When I see that artists have “created” a vulva-shaped spaceship, I ask myself several questions:
1. Do they want more women to be involved in space exploration? Is that the goal? I mean, I do. Space Ex and in general STEM does not have good representation balance. AND, from the early days, even the 60’s, there have been women involved, even doing things that were quite important. Things like software development and trajectory calculation. I don’t think stuff like this helps, though.
2. Do they actually think rockets look like this because they look like phalluses? That’s definitely some ignorance showing. I mean, skyscrapers look like phalluses, that must be the only reason we build them, right? It can’t possibly have anything to do with real estate values and density.
3. Do they think space exploration is a waste of time? This is plausible. This is a position some people hold. Framing your protest in this way is, well, not a good look, and likley to discourage women from entering STEM, frankly.
4. Are they not aware of the multitude of fanciful spaceships designed by artists and effects people over the decades that already look like vulvas? Take most any flying saucer and look at it edge on, rotate 90 degrees and there you are. And they “take men abaord” too. They go into the <emmothership. The men get lost, “abducted” and lose track of themselves often returning years later.
…
Ahem.
5. I wonder why I’m hearing about it. Yes, it seems misguided and kind of dumb to me. It makes me wonder just who is obsessed by phalluses, too. It seems a fine entry in the “somewhere someone is doing something dumb” category of news. I’m not a fan of that. Unless the person being dumb invites me to look at how dumb they were.
By the way, this isn’t “woke” at all. The fact that rockets are phallic is not a new idea. Nor is the sort of complaint that this art project makes. In fact, I bet you could find, if you knew where to look, someone doing basically the same thing 50 years ago. I’m not a fan of the word “woke”, I mostly ignore it. But the concept isn’t new to me. It’s basically what “conscious” has morphed into. We had lots of “consciousness raising” activities in the 70’s. That seemed to work, but I guess some folks like to separate themselves from the past, and think “woke” is better. And of course, folks love to mock even the use of the phrase. Even people who themselves deeply resent being framed as hicks or hillbillies (which I am decidedly not doing at this moment, by the way).
@Stormy Dragon: I don’t think Mu Yixiao is a useful idiot…
Seriously, it just marks him as someone who watches Fox or travels in the circles of those who do.
@wr: anti-anti-racism is a slippery slope, and a lot of the people complaining about “wokeness” are really just complaining that they cannot use the n-word in casual conversation — not even when referring to Arabs as sand n-clang-s.
(Isn’t that literally part of Michael Reynold’s backstory here? He had to use a toned-down, historically inaccurate word in one of his books? “Nigra”[*] if I am not mistaken? Different motivations from my brothers who are also disappointed that they can’t use the word as often as they would like, but a variation on the same complaint)
When people start acting like people complaining about a problem are a bigger problem than the problem itself, I start to wonder where those people will be in five years time, and what horrible things they will be embracing.
(Just for the record, I do not think Mr. Reynolds will be embracing the full Republican performative cruelty agenda… I just think he needs a big ol’ buttplug because he’s letting his asshole show)
Hippie punching is a time honored tradition in America, but some people want to use brass knuckles when a love tap is more appropriate, or a light slap. I’m sure the “LatinX” enthusiasts mean well, I suppose — they should be mocked, but not rejected outright.
—-
[*] I think the purity parade can go a little overboard at times, and there are entirely appropriate times to use the n-word, for instance when there is a historical context or you are quoting someone, but it’s not a big thing not to.
@Jay L Gischer: It should be a vulva shaped launching mechanism that catapults baby-shaped satellites into low-Earth orbit.
@Steven L. Taylor: I’ve observed this before, but significant numbers of people who post regularly at this site are probably not as liberal as they imagine they are.
@KM: “Again, I don’t @Mu was trying to be derogatory…”
Hmmm… I thought he WAS trying to be derogatory and that you are just more disposed to think the best of people than I am.
@Jay L Gischer:
I’m unaware of any person, or animals, who has a phallus with a square cross section. I imagine sex would be a tad difficult.
@Gustopher:
Indeed. Remind me to be a little more serious about any humor I try to inject here. I’d hate to get cancelled over a joke.
This seems a little unusual:
Grimes has reportedly moved on from Elon Musk to military whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
“They’re getting serious. They U-Hauled it,” a source told Page Six regarding their fast-paced relationship. “They’ve been living together in Austin.”
Going from Elon Musk to Chelsea Manning
My youngest wants to try making bagels this weekend. Specifically, poppy seed bagel dough that we can wrap around cheese hot dogs, because Schwan’s has these “Bagel Dogs” that she’s always loved, but she’s suddenly turned “thrifty” and thinks that $17 for 6 bagel dogs is a load of bullshit and we should just learn to make them ourselves. 😛
Any of the foodies around here have any recipes, tips or tricks for bagel dough?
@Kathy: Duck phalluses are the things of nightmares, especially for female ducks.
Echidna phalluses have multiple glans. I offer you this link that you don’t really have to click.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/11/australian-researchers-discover-why-only-two-heads-of-echidna-penis-become-erect-at-one-time
Square cross section just seems pedestrian. On a unrelated note, wombats have square poo.
@Gustopher:
@Gustopher:
there’s a long, drawn out, series of alternate history books by Harry Turtledove featuring a winning CSA in the Civil War, later involving itself in WWI, an interwar period, and WWII against mostly the USA. The n-word is sprinkled all over all the time. Everyone uses it, on both sides.
The best book in the series is the prequel/setup, “How Few Remain,” set later in the XIX Century. It features Frederick Douglas and Abe Lincoln (who wasn’t murdered after losing the war), as well as one Mr. Clemens in San Francisco.
@Kathy:
Is Emperor Joshua Norton I in it?
@Stormy Dragon:
Alas, no.
But thanks for bringing him up. I spent ten minutes reading his Wikipedia entry. Fascinating character, and mostly nice.
@Jax:
Nobody who lived long enough to tell anyone about it, anyway.
@Gustopher:
(I assume your “woke” comment is a joke, because it would otherwise be overly tedious… not sure why everyone is taking it seriously)
Yep. 90% joke, 10% “dear gods, someone is going to take this seriously”. I didn’t think that 10% would include the OTB Commentariat.
@Gustopher:
Wow.
I’ve had a lot of issues with your bias in the past, but you’ve just crossed over into the “anyone I think is different than me must be the enemy” territory.
You’re entirely wrong in your assumptions, and I’m finally putting you in the “ignore what he says, he’s an intractable partisan” category.
Happy Saturday!