Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, August 21, 2023
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65 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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The headline of the day- Spain down England to win Women’s World Cup for first time
@Bill Jempty: My daughter and her girlfriend were there. They said the crowds at all the games were incredible.
I’m a sucker for this stuff.
West Point to open nearly 200-year-old time capsule found at Kosciuszko monument
https://twitter.com/tripgabriel/status/1693602228030865619
https://twitter.com/SteveKornacki/status/1693598176819769551
Noone critical of TFG does well.
In other polling, DeSantis still picks up Trump’s voters if somehow Trump gets taken out.
(The only way I can see Trump as not the nominee is if the Grim Reaper intervenes, or maybe a major health catastrophe).
More from that polling…
The MAGA base trusts Trump more than their family or friends, and more than their clergy.
https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1693267774313759209/photo/1
Does anyone still think it’s not a cult?
“Bulwark”
Polling shown as graphics.
snip
@charontwo:
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Our Dr T supports ranked choice voting. WAPO has a column this morning by a Dr. Adam Grant with a radically different solution, no elections. He proposes a throwback to ancient Athenian democracy, “sortation”. Establish a pool of volunteers for a government position, do some sort of test for basic competence, like maybe the naturalization citizenship test, and pick someone from the qualified pool at random. As he makes his argument it makes more sense than it does at first blush.
Upthread people are wondering how an obviously narcissistic sociopath like Trump can have a dedicated, trusting, following.
Trump isn’t trusted despite his sociopathy, but because of it. Dr. Grant quotes Bill Buckley’s line that he’d rather be governed by the first 535 names in a phone book. Sortation might cost us the cream of our Congress, but it would also cut out the far more numerous scum. Interesting thought.
@charontwo:
From that same Bulwark link above:
snip
@Joe:..Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
If it is a digital clock and it has no source of electricity it has no display and it is never right.
@charontwo:
More from Bulwark re: trial date:
snip
@charontwo:
Yesterday Steven was giving some of us grief because we weren’t properly answering a question he didn’t ask. It turns out what he really meant was, “Who among the current Repub candidates would do best against Biden in the general election, assuming Trump never existed?” That question has one answer. “…assuming Trump keeled over dead?”, has another. “…assuming Trump was too sick to run, but talking?”, has yet another. And finally, “…assuming Trump dropped out?”, has at least a couple of answers depending on why he dropped out. At various times, one or more of us had a go at each question.
@charontwo:
And yet some RWNJ on the radio today will undoubtedly tell the MAGAts that this move by Trump is brilliant because it will give the defense grounds to seek reversal of any conviction on the grounds of prejudice on the part of the judge or some other nonsense. Awareness of who the audience is changes the effect of the message.
@gVOR10:
Specifically in multi-seat districts as an alternative to what we have–I am less of a fan in single-seat districts. I would prefer open-list PR or MMP.
And as much as random selection sounds better than what we get, I would prefer trying actual democracy via proportional representation before I go all in on government by randos.
@MarkedMan: No, that wasn’t the question.
The question, which included Trump as a option was: which GOP candidate is most likely to win in 2024?
Reread the post. I never excluded Trump.
I have not even had time to read the entire discussion, but will hopefully return to my point soon, as time permits.
And yes, in full professorial mode, a lot of folks would have gotten bad grades for ignoring the questions that was asked 😉
@MarkedMan:
Exactly.
Does T drop dead before the primaries so they all campaign in that situation?
After Trump has beaucoup delegates but before the convention, they would have campaigned differently.
I am not able to picture Trump just dropping out or being forced out without a health emergency as cause, he is just too obsessed with his current path.
@charontwo:
With NATO wrecked, not only would Ukraine have been easy pickings, but so would the Baltic states and Moldova.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Given my well known lack of tact, what I say is this:
The merits and demerits of Trump as a candidate have already been discussed voluminously. Just throwing out a name is pointless unless you also give reasons for your choice. So, unless you see some point to even more Trump discussion, the question as asked is a bit pointless, thus a slightly different question was answered.
ETA: Also, given Trump seems to have the nomination already locked up, pretending that there are other possibilities seems a far-fetched hypothetical if Trump is not excluded.
I found this interesting and engagingly written.
The author uses Tesla as a stand-in for all innovation that ain’t really, and goes off into the larger topic of capital vs. wealth, which is interesting, but for me the most gratifying bit was seeing someone say that Emperor Elon is naked. (Sorry to put that image in your head.)
My techie daughter and I have two very different approaches to tech. She sees something new and even if it doesn’t work very well she wants to find ways that it could work better. She’s patient with technology. I am not patient with technology. It works or it doesn’t work, not at some distant point in the future, but right now. Tesla’s big touchscreens are stupid. Maybe cool, but definitely stupid in that they work less well than buttons on the steering wheel. I don’t care about the cool, I just want the function, and it either works right now or it goes in the trash.
I found this interesting and engagingly written.
The author uses Tesla as a stand-in for all innovation that ain’t really, and goes off into the larger topic of capital vs. wealth, which is interesting, but for me the most gratifying bit was seeing someone say that Emperor Elon is naked. (Sorry to put that image in your head.)
My techie daughter and I have two very different approaches to tech. She sees something new and even if it doesn’t work very well she wants to find ways that it could work better. She’s patient with technology. I am not patient with technology. It works or it doesn’t work, not at some distant point in the future, but right now. Tesla’s big touchscreens are stupid. Maybe cool, but definitely stupid in that they work less well than buttons on the steering wheel. I don’t care about the cool, I just want the function, and it either works right now or it goes in the trash.
Another day, another eXTwitter glitch. This time posts and pictures from before 2014 appear to have vanished.
More likely, the links to those data vanished. Like when you erase a file on a hard drive, the data is still there, but you can’t access it through normal processes.
My question is: how long before the Cisgender Mars God Emperor of Phobos is no longer seen as reliable, as regards companies like SpaceX and Tesla?
I like Adam Grant quite a bit. He has influenced my management decisions and style. He has done a number of talks on givers, takers and matchers. His longer ones are best but this shorter TED talk gives you a good sample. In short, some people (especially among Republicans) think the harass, chainsaw Harry is the type most likely to succeed in business and everything else. They are wrong. People committed to the idea of helping others are most likely to succeed.
https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_are_you_a_giver_or_a_taker?language=en
Steve
@Michael Reynolds:
Going by the experience of trying to use a phone touchscreen in a moving car (with someone else driving) I wouldn’t buy a car controlled entirely by touchscreen. Maybe I can ignore a phone call, but not the rain splattering the windshield and reducing visibility.
Even if the screen is more stably mounted (near certainty), and has larger virtual buttons (idem), I’d have to look and find the control. That versus flicking the wiper lever on the steering column down.
I would test drive one, but I’m skeptical.
As to elevators, there’s an office building I visit several times each month. The elevators have no floor buttons in the cab. Instead there’s a keypad outside. You enter the floor number, and a screen displays which elevator you should take to get you there (A through F in this case). It works rather well.
@charontwo: You quote The Bulwark,
Talking about what Trump believes is a category error. His mind just doesn’t work that way. I had a definite impression that early on Putin played Trump like a fiddle. But later he seemed to lose interest. I figured he realized he could con Trump into anything, but Trump couldn’t hold a thought long enough to stay conned.
@Michael Reynolds: I found your description of your daughter recognizable and adorable. Without question, she is an engineer, even if her job title doesn’t say that. “How could this be made better?” is a fundamental, a way of life, for us.
I wonder, not being a writer, if writers approach books written by others in that way.
You’re free not to like it, but there’s a deep strategy behind how the Tesla interior is designed. They deliberately did not want it to look like “normal high-end car with electric motor”. No, they wanted pretty much everything to be different, because that would generate more attention. They were right about that.
Furthermore, the strategy was to introduce EVs at the high end to make them seem anything but plebian, stuffy, boring. Because that would be better for adoption of EVs. Musk was right about that, too.
And now we are on a track where EVs will continue their growth in most, if not all categories of vehicles. Musk did this. He did it to address global warning.
Now, with Twitter, he’s veered right and kind of gone crazy. Nobody is left to tell him something is a bad idea. It’s awful, its indefensible.
In addition, Tesla is probably going to struggle some as an ongoing business. Because Elon will find that boring, and it will take some time for him to hand it off to someone who knows what they are doing and can undo some of his dumber management policies.
But I resist the left-motivated revisionist history that says, “Musk was always terrible”. No.
@charontwo:
Yes, that was my problem as well. Barring death or debilitating illness, Trump is going to be the GOP nominee. Period. It seems, shall we say, academic to speculate about what’s never, ever going to happen.
If DeSantis or Pence or Rice or Haley were within striking distance of Trump, that would be
different. But as it is, Trump is well over 40 points ahead of his nearest competitor.
@Kathy:
There’s no question that it is much harder and more dangerous to visually search for, and attempt to touch, a tiny icon while the car is bouncing along, than it is to simply flick a thumb on the steering wheel. I was baffled the first time I saw this feature. And then I was turned off by the Motel 6 interior. Over-engineered. Similar issue with the oven in my new place. It’s a Gaggenau and I don’t know WTF the engineers thought they were doing but the net result is that the oven is ridiculously complicated. Eventually I’ll have it torn out and a simpler oven installed.
@Jay L Gischer:
Usually within a page I know whether I’m going to enjoy it or learn from it. I started an audiobook on a topic (pre-Columbian history) I find fascinating, but gave up after a few chapters because I couldn’t stand the author’s heavy-handed and redundant message-peddling. I started a mystery novel and stopped when I saw the author shoehorning in an older guy/younger chick subplot. Often I stop reading when I reach the, ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it already,” point. But yeah, I’m impatient with books, movies, TV as well as technology. I have a low completion rate.
@Jay L Gischer:
Looking back, he’s been heading that way for a while. At least, his notions of population collapse, or replacement, or whatever, have led him to have nine children. that’s not something he did over the past two years.
I like SpaceX, and they’ve been doing great with the Falcon 9. I appreciate the work Tesla’s done making EVs “cool.” Even when St. Elon Mars Cisgender God, etc. was focused on that, there were plenty of faults to find. He’s always over promised, like with the not-really an autopilot. And the Starship gamble remains unresolved.
Me, I began to write him off when he tried to get involved in the rescue of the boys trapped in a cave due to flooding. he notion he could sweep in and rescue them in a submarine was too ridiculous to be even a joke. then there was the forcible reopening of his tesla plant while the pandemic raged on. then letting Benito and other riffraff back on eXTwitter, was just beyond the pale.
https://twitter.com/AnnaBower/status/1693665911541055948
Biden is not defending the border…again.
Was that The Onion or FOX?
You had to check…didntcha?!
@Kathy: I don’t know about “Musk was always terrible” but I heard complaints about the allegedly poor builds of Tesla interiors (and especially of the Model 3), about insufferable Musk fanboys, and about how terrible billionaires are in general well before Musk publicly veered MAGA.
The type of liberal that thinks billionaires usually suck thought Musk was awful long before he lost the plot politically.
Do we know yet how long Tesla has been deliberately overestimating range and dodging range complaints from Tesla owners?
Jonathan Haidt on the coffeeshop/gun store proxy indicator for ideological divide in recent years. More salient as people moving is up these days the self-segregation proceeds apace.
@JKB:
It’s an indicator of fear and cowardice. See, I can go to a coffeeshop without so much as a pistol, and be fine. Others – Republicans – can’t go anywhere without a gun.
I lived this choice, long ago. Some guy wanted to kill me. (Really. Literally.) So I bought a gun. It took me just a few weeks to recognize that I was becoming fearful when I was not armed. So I traded the gun (.45 Colt Commander) for a camera. The gun was making a coward of me.
This may go some way to explaining why Republicans are such spineless reptiles. Just as Sauron transferred his power into a ring, Republicans replace their balls with a gun.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/laura-carleton-shooting-pride-flag-b2396393.html
Laura Carleton shooting – latest: Mag.Pi store owner and ‘true LGBTQ ally’ killed in row over Pride flag
@Michael Reynolds:
My oldest friend stopped speaking to me when I questioned his need to carry a gun whenever he left the house. We had not seen each other often since he had moved to rural Wyoming some years earlier, and he commented how he now “hated coming to California” because carrying a gun here is problematic. During the conversation, I pointed out that I had been shooting since I was nine and owned several pistols – I’m certainly not a knee-jerk “gun hater.”
When I asked him if he had ever been in a situation where the need to shoot his way to safety was even a remote possibility, his response was, “It only takes one time.” In a sense, I suppose that’s true, but I managed to work in nightclubs and bars, where the possibility of violence is always lurking as drinkers’ judgment evaporates for many years without the thought that I might need a gun to stay safe ever entering my head.
I thought the discussion ended amicably, but he has not spoken to me since.
@gVOR10:
Putin recognized Trump as an easy mark, an insecure narcissist, all one has to do is praise him. For an ex-KBG guy, child’s play. However, it would also became apparent Trump is stupid, and a loser.
I doubt Putin ever liked the guy. IMO the goal in 2016 was “anyone but Hilary” who he assessed had unleashed the neocon Kagans (Nuland) in Ukraine. He initially supported Bernie in the primaries.
@Michael Reynolds: @Michael Reynolds:
I refuse to upvote both identical posts. Sorry, I don’t offer BOGO on dopamine hits.
@dazedandconfused:
I hink Putin’s attitude toward Trump has always been one of amused contempt.
@Kathy: I would think the primary argument against touchscreen technology in autos is that you have to take your eyes off the road to activate the controls. But that only shows how little I know, probably.
@charontwo:
The MAGA small fry donors need to send Benito their money instead, because he deserves it more. Soon they’ll be out another $200,000
@Kurtz:
I left the ‘m’ off .com, so it went to the filter. But I still charge the same for both copies.
@anjin-san:
Gun nuts always assume you’ve never fired a gun. And aside from .22, .32, .38 and .45 pistols, and 30.06 and 270 rifles, and shotguns from 410 to 12 gauge, and the M1 Garand, the M1 carbine, the Thompson submachine gun and the BAR, I’ve scarcely indulged.
Basically the equivalent of guys going, “Do a couple lines and you’ll be as helpless as I am to resist.” No, I did coke, thought, ‘meh.’ Pretty much the same way I felt about shooting.
https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1693712231165223116
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23921620/23sc188947-consent-order.pdf
@Steven L. Taylor:
That’s usually a sign that the professor has written the question poorly… 😉
I think it’s similar to poor UX on computers that leads to people doing the wrong thing, and that encourage “user errors.”
Random aside: Legend has it that, long ago*, in an effort to better understand their customers, Amazon would put up a random pop up asking people what they were doing. Just an empty text box where they could put anything, and they recorded where you were on the site.
The answers were heartbreaking. “Trying to save my marriage” was as common as “buying socks.” “Struggling with the death of my parent/spouse/child/pet”. Variations on “ignoring my husband” came up a lot. “Waiting for laundry” was innocuous, but common, along with “watching tv”.
The 14 words got typed in a lot, either copied and pasted, or slightly reworded to be what they were doing (“securing the existence of our people and a future for white children” — only 12 words at that point)
They got no useful information.
I guess they learned that people were alternately sad, bored, horrible and buying socks, but they never figured out what to do with that.
——
*: This was regarded as long time ago the first time I worked for Amazon, back in 2004 or so.
@Michael Reynolds:
Ideally the controls of any appliance or car, would be intuitive and not require an instruction manual for basic operations. This is not impossible. I’ve been using my oven for years without a manual. Though I’ve experimented with it. For instance, I just found out if I want convection after preheating, I need to turn it off, and select “convection bake.”
@just nutha:
People take their eyes off the road all the time, but for short periods. to glance at the speedometer, to turn on the A/C, etc. Not all controls are on the steering wheel or column.
What worries me is how fixed are the controls on a touch screen. If they change and you need to cycle modes, you’ll be taking your eyes off the road a lot more, and a lot longer.
@Steven L. Taylor: All due respect Steven, but I answered that question: Scott, under specific conditions. Which implies not Trump, under any other conditions. If you don’t want us to include conditions, then you are begging the question: how could anyone but Trump have gotten to the general? And of course, if they got there, then how they got there has a huge effect on their viability.
So I get that you were trying to make a point, but I’m at a loss to what it is. What’s your answer to the question?
@Kathy: As I said earlier, my thinking probably only shows how little I know. Still, I come from an era where, in driver’s training class, the first task that needed to be mastered before we could start driving was that each of us had to be able to operate the headlights, windshield wipers and washer button, and the fan switch without looking the dashboard. (And we never drove the training car with the radio on–driving while listening to the radio is an advanced skill and too much of a distraction for student drivers.* 😉 )
*And strangely enough, all three times I was in a collision and every time I got a ticket, the radio in the car was turned on, and I was listening to it. 😛
@charontwo:
I wonder how successful Trump will be at not making veiled threats to the witnesses and prosecutors.
https://twitter.com/lesleyabravanel/status/1692946328576209052
https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1693651131346321798
“Mediaite”
snip
@just nutha:
No, you nailed it. I know a few human factors engineers, and they all live in a constant state of low-grade rage about the current state of automobile control panels.
I’ve posted this link before, but things have gotten even worse since last time. This year is (literally) off the charts historically, in terms of global sea surface temperatures. If this chart doesn’t scare you, you are on some seriously good meds.
(Note that this is for the area between 60 degrees north and 60 degrees south latitude. Different weird havoc is happening in the polar waters.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I took maybe 3 or 5 hours of driving lessons, all inside an old Dodge with a manual transmission (I think I’ve driven a manual transmission twice since then). I don’t recall much about it.
https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1693730089266287064
This is a thread:
@Mi******************@gm***.com:
I got a bargain!
@Jay L Gischer:
I’m an engineer, but I have a very different approach to consumer tech. If it doesn’t work give or take immediately, I chuck it.
Being a system administrator for my phone, tv, or thermostat is not my idea of fun. It means they are producing half a product, and I don’t need that shit in my life. They should hire the UX experts and the QA people to get their act together or just go out of business and leave me alone.
@Michael Reynolds:
Same. I’m almost grateful when they just stink out of the gate. I’m not very particular, but it has to have something early to string me along.
Possibly related, I never watched Independence Day until very recently when I watched the first half hour or so. When the aliens strike and blow up the White House and wipe out various cities… that just seemed like a much more conclusive and satisfying ending than whatever else might have happened, so I turned it off. It really works as a short film about various people encountering unexpected, inexplicable destruction. All their little foreshadowed lives cut short.
Will Will Smith marry his girlfriend? No, they’re both dead. Maybe they should have done that earlier if they really wanted to.
That guy from Taxi and Jeff Goldblum who were trying to alert people? Dead. Sometimes your best just isn’t good enough.
President Whatshisface worried about re-election? He can stop worrying.
You can sketch out every character arc, and I’m sure the rest of the movie probably delivers in the exact expected manner for each and every one of them after their many varied daring escapes, but assuming they are all dead is just a better story.
@anjin-san:
Anyone who needs to have the ability to kill me at a moments notice conveniently at hand is not someone I want to spend any time with.
Whether they are a coward, or demonstrating their rights or whatever… it’s just fucking rude.
@just nutha: yup. Just a further example of tech-bros thinking something is wiz-bang-great, but in reality is really hot garbage.
@Gustopher:
The most recent time I was in grad school I was somewhere between dismayed and annoyed that none of the other students studied the professors as well as the material. During a review group a couple of days before one of the finals, the other students were bemoaning the volume of information they were trying to cram. “What?” I asked. “Have you not been paying attention all quarter? Here’s the four-part layout of the final. The last long-essay part will determine your grade, and will be one of two questions. He’s made his preferences on both topics clear. I’ve already got outlines for my answer to either of them.”
@Gustopher:
This life long engineer sympathizes, but has a slightly different viewpoint. If a technology doesn’t solve a personal problem or make my life better at this point in time, I abandon it. Life is too short. But I monitor it and see where it’s going.
@anjin-san:
Gun fetishists can only look at one side of the equation: “What if I need a gun” and never the other side, “What if there is a something bad to me having this gun and I have it?” Suicide, family member suicide, drunken misjudgment, road rage, rage in general, kids getting curious, the list is, unfortunately, endless. But gun fetishists are incapable of parsing that equation dispassionately. It’s all testosterone or fear.
@DrDaveT:
Might be the oldest trick in the book: Convince the sucker….ahem…customer…that cost-cutting measure is actually something cool. Getting rid of all those switches, particularly in the steering column, lowers production costs.
@charontwo:
These two stand out and makes me laugh:
Arguably they are the two most ‘evangelical’ politicians in that candidacy cohort.
Basically it’s totally transactional: Trump might be lower than maggot vomit, but … he gave them the Supreme Court that 86’ed Roe. Pence and Hutchinson dared to hint at some mild criticism of Trump? How dare they!
@al Ameda:
Thou shalt have no other god before me, Donald Trump, your savior. They’re not polytheists, you know, and Trump is much more entertaining than Jesus.
An Alaska 737 touched down so hard, the landing gear punctured the wind.
Video at the link about halfway down.
New poll of South Carolina Republicans gives their hometown boy, Tim Scott, 14%. Tell me again how Tom, er, Tim is going to beat Trump. You know how easy it is to destroy Scott? “Trump then said to Senator Scott, so you’ve never been married, Tim? I mean 57 years old and you’ve never found a woman? Not even one?”
For Ramaswamy Trump just has to find a way to put him in the frame with Ganesha. That’d be the blue elephant god with extra hands.
The only guy in the race who worries Trump is Christie. The rest of them are invertebrates. Trump on a debate stage can annihilate any of them, but not Christie. He won’t attend any debate where Christie is present.