Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, December 11, 2023
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59 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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Giuliani faces the piper this week. FA and now about to find out. We’ll see how much he has to pay, probably early next week..
Corporate America is testing the limits of its pricing power.
Of course they are.
Over the weekend a few people brought up the “if Israel wanted to take over Gaza, why did they withdraw in the first place” argument. Well, if you listen to the last couple of decades of what the settlers and/or religious fanatics are saying, it is that the Gazans should move to Egypt and then the settlers can take over. So, if this was the policy of the Israelis, albeit one that cannot be spoken aloud, what would be a reasonable (tactically, not morally) strategy to accomplish this? One way would be to start bombing northern Gaza and tell everyone to evacuate to the south, then continue advancing the bombing southward, forcing everyone up against the Egyptian border. Don’t allow food or medical supplies in, creating a starving desperate population. Eventually they will make a break to cross the border, giving the Egyptians the choice to either let them come in or machine gun them as they come across. Either way, it will result in a marked reduction of the number of Palestinians left in Gaza when the shooting stops. Israel will set up against the southern border and never let the Palestinians return.
And of course, this would answer the question of why the Israelis withdrew in the first place. It wouldn’t work if they had significant numbers of settlers mixed in. This isn’t theoretical, the settlers and the fanatics have openly discussed this for decades. The only question is who controls the Israeli government. The answer is growing increasingly obvious.
This really disturbs me in ways I can’t yet articulate:
Republicans to meet allies of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on ending Ukraine aid
Here we have the Heritage Foundation and a foreign country undermining US foreign policy on US territory. We also have an ostensible NATO ally and partner actively undermining our major political and military alliance in support of an authoritarian enemy. That authoritarian enemy, Russia, is in military alliance with Iran which is trying to destroy our ally Israel Supposedly, the far right, Christian Nationalist Heritage Foundation is supporting Israel. None of it computes.
Seems to me the Republican right wing is undermining, in overtly treasonous way, our country. And I suspect the culture wars are at the base of this.
Help me out.
@Scott:
Treasonous. Corrupt. Stupid. Pick two.
I think Trump will double down and pick Bernie Kerik, former NYPD commissioner as his VP.
Kerik actually would appeal to the law enforcement vote, but wont help him win any states…
He actually did try to forge a bond with Black New Yorkers when he was police chief…
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/21/nyregion/kerik-reaches-out-to-minority-residents.html
@MarkedMan:
I think the emphasis has to be on stupid. Doesn’t most of the Ukraine aid really flow to US defense contractors? Is that really the group US Republicans and Heritage Foundation want to oppose?
@Scott:
The American conservatives don’t have any coherent policy on much of anything. They are animated almost entirely by resentment and grudges which leads to things which seem on the surface to be inconsistent.
They hate liberals, so they support Orban and Putin against Ukraine and the West.
They hate Muslims so they support Israel against Hamas and Iran.
They hate liberals so they welcome Nazis and white supremacists against Jews and nonwhite people.
They hate liberals so they support corporations against minimum wage workers.
They hate queer and nonwhite people so they support government actions against corporates that are “woke”.
There isn’t a coherent principle at work, its more matter of weighing side they hate the most.
@Scott: Republican candidates have increasingly been selected for their malleability and lack of shame. Things really went into overdrive after Citizens United. The political campaign cash economy has brought out the worst of the worst. Think tanks and “non-profits “ backed by weirdo billionaires set the agenda now. It’s obscene and gross.
So why are Republicans so willing to sell out America to the likes of Putin and his stable? Money, money, money.
@Chip Daniels: I don’t think Republicans actually hate anything that much. They just fan the flames of hate for profit. Their desire for personal wealth or power outweighs everything. So much of what they say or do is scripted performance, aimed to please or attract deep pockets.
@MarkedMan:
I’ll take Treasonous, Corrupt AND Stupid for $800.00, Alex.
This is positively nauseating. I guarantee no general ever said this to Trump, anywhere, anytime.
http://www.rawstory.com/trump-access-hollywood/
@CSK: That is hilarious! A general told him that a debating point was braver than battlefield valor! Who believes such a thing? How can someone who makes such a claim be taken seriously. Of course, Trump is taken seriously by lots of people. I’m out of step with the times.
@CSK: Maybe the general could recommend that Trump receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service to the country.
There was a town a couple miles from where I grew up that had a plaque commemorating a CMOH winner who lived there named John Basilone. One day I looked him up and remember thinking what he did sounded like a cartoon (I mean this in the most positive way possible). It basically was unbelievable that one person could have done what he did. He came back to the states, participated in war bond tours, but felt out of place and re-enlisted. He ended being killed in action at Iwo Jima, winning the Navy Cross for his actions on the battlefield.
That being said, does it really measure up to the valor and honor that Mr. Bonespur showed on that fateful day in 2016 when to great personal sacrifice he stood on a stage and debated Hillary Clinton?
@Slugger: @SenyorDave:
What’s most appalling is that anyone would believe this crap.
@SenyorDave:
I know the Basilone story. Anyone who thinks they’re tough should read his story. I wrote a trilogy set in the European theater of WW2 and used Audie Murphy as a touchstone. If I were ever to do the Pacific, it’d be Basilone . . . except for the fact that in fiction you can’t write something that over-the-top without it seeming ridiculous.
I have long held the belief that part of our nation’s issue with guns and gun culture is at least somewhat attributable to entertainment, specifically, watching movies wherein a character picks up a gun sliding along the floor and manages to eliminate an entire gang of Bad Guys by squeezing off perfect shots while never getting hit themselves.
Which is a long way of saying, I think that might also be in play with this finding:
Almost half the men surveyed think they could land a passenger plane. Experts disagree
HALF???!!! Oh, to have the confidence on display in that result…
@Jen:
Somehow, I don’t think so.
@Jen:
If there’s not a mechanical or weather issue, they probably could.
There was a Mythbusters where they were doing myths from various airplane disaster movies, and one of them was “passenger lands the plane” and the first run through was hilariously anti-climactic because it was just the flight controller telling them how to type several numbers into a computer and then sitting there while plane lands itself.
@Jen:
The half that think they could really annoy the half of us who know we could.
@CSK: Was that the same debate that Trump brought a bunch of Bill Clinton accusers and sat them in the front row? Does that make Hillary the bravest woman ever?
@Slugger:
Oh, it’s entirely plausible…for General Flynn.
@Michael Reynolds: It is sorta amazing how easy it is to tell when certain authors, often quite good ones, start basing fiction on real life incidents or real experience. The level of believability just plummets. I’m thinking of one of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin series where a significant part of the novel is a multi-ship battle with Aubrey temporarily raised to Admiral to command the British side of the engagement. I love the series and have re-read it multiple times, but that one is excruciating. No one acts in a believable way, with battle hardened captains with decades of experience making laughably amateurish mistakes. And then you get to the post script and find out that it is based on one of the most well documented multi-ship engagements of the war, largely because of the various courts martial that ensued. Almost nothing was made up.
@becca:
We see this a lot in history, where as a tyrant rises to power and does awful things, they are aided by people who may or may not be true believers in the evil, but may just be cynical and amoral.
Maybe the people who ran the concentration camps and gulags were just amoral functionaries, cynical careerists or true believers. But in the end it doesn’t matter, their actions had the same consequences as if they were believers.
@Scott:
Well, I don’t know when Trump invented the story about the general, but he told it for the first time last night, speaking in NY.
Yes, the alleged general was speaking of the same debate as you cite.
@Stormy Dragon: Immediately what I thought of. In that they showed that generic passengers are horribly ill-equipped to land planes, which, from experience…yeah, it’s hard. On the other hand, it’s shocking what a person can learn in an hour of “emergency training” directed entirely toward getting the plane down safely (and not necessarily fully on the runway + intact).
I count myself among the 50% who could land pretty much any plane I find myself in. Then again, I’ve got a few hundred hours and certificates to back it up, so…
In the ““The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” category:
BTW, it is not called the Reconciliation Memorial; it call the Confederate Memorial. They can’t help but lie.
From the Arlington National Cemetery website
This history is from the Arlington National Cemetery website. There is more. If they want to put that up in public for all to see the context, then leave the statue. If it is more Lost Cause BS, then take it down.
@MarkedMan:
Is that the one that took place in Mauritius/La Reunion? I just started the series, and just finished that book. I thought the descriptions were all pretty believable, but that could be because I’m reading it during the post-Trump era and I’m primed to believe that a whole roster of people elevated to a position of extreme importance and power are fools and charlatans, the lot of them.
@Scott:
Nearly 160 later we’re still fighting the Civil War.
Sometimes it feels like, politically, we (the Union) lost the war.
@Neil Hudelson: That’s the one. From Wiki:
I didn’t read the afterwards until, well, afterward and thought that O’Brien had seriously missed the mark, portraying seasoned captains making ridiculous mistakes such as an experienced captain recklessly driving his ship onto a sandbar and ending up having to burn it to prevent capture.
The only other time I thought he went AWOL was when he had Stephen lead Jack around France in a bear suit (!!) in “The Post Captain”. I later wondered if that was based on some truth too.
@MarkedMan:
I love the O’Brien series. And yeah, I’ve read it through probably four times. So far. He’s the gold standard for accuracy in historical fiction. When he died I was really angry that the series had finally ended.
Someone here mentioned The Wager, a non-fiction account similar to the Shackleton story in that I couldn’t help thinking I’d have given up and walked off into the ice way earlier in the stories.
When I pitch GONE, because it’s about teenagers rising to seemingly ridiculous levels, I cite Calvin Graham, and the fact that in Nelson’s navy 14 year-old midshipmen used to command gun crews in the middle of ship-to-ship battles where they stood there with 24 pound iron balls flying by.
Humans aren’t the strongest or fastest creatures on earth, but for sheer, bloody-minded determination to survive against insane odds, homo sapiens takes the cake. 3000 Japanese soldiers vs. one guy? Rounding Cape Horn with starving, scurvied men in an open boat? Kids barely out of puberty fighting on after having an arm blown off?
It’s almost enough to make me think my gritty determination to endure a hotel without a mini-bar is not quite an inspirational tale of heroism.
@MarkedMan: Just to make clear who is in charge of Israeli policy. From The Nation:
Yes, a senior Minister in the Israeli government explicitly called what is happening in Gaza a Nakba. From Wiki:
@Chip Daniels: 100% agreement.
@ptfe:
I suspect most pilots could get through it…assuming they were over Macho Grande, of course.
Non-pilot? It would take some time to get such a person’s attention directed to the proper gauges and switches verbally. Everything would be a mystery to the poor bastard. Be lucky to get the crash somewhere near an airport, I reckon.
On the continuing tragedy/oppression/farce of Kate Cox and Texas:
After state’s high court halts historic abortion ruling, Kate Cox leaves Texas to terminate her non-viable pregnancy
What are the odds that she will be prosecuted on top of all this?
@Jen:
No time for a nuanced answer:
It depends on how you define “land.” If it means taking the plane off the air and placing it on solid ground or the surface of a body of water, no matter at what speed, angle, or deceleration, then 100% of all people who ever lived or ever will live are capable of landing any plane.
@CSK:
Adolph equated screwing around and getting the clap with serving in Vietnam. After that, nothing he does or claims ought to surprise you.
@Scott: I’m curious as to how this is playing in Texas? Is there local media coverage? From what I’ve heard and read, there’s going to be a slew of cases flooding the courts in the coming months. One in Kentucky coming up based on privacy. Some Jewish women are suing on religious grounds. Some serious whirlwinds are ready for reaping.
Headline: Giuliani’s lawyer says awarding up to $43m in damages would be ‘death penalty’ for client
I was under the impression Rudy’s lawyer is supposed to give reasons why his client shouldn’t have to pay punitive damages. Apparently, I was wrong.
@becca: I really don’t know. I don’t follow much social media and I haven’t seen any commentary yet. It is a story that is going fast; it is the holiday season, etc.
On the “land a plane” thing:
* By “land” the article means Can a person with no prior training simply guide everyone to a smooth touchdown?
* Regarding autopilot, the article states:
And, it concludes:
So no, most people could not.
@Kathy: The court would not let Giuliani plead poverty without a lot of discovery about his actual net worth, which I am sure this court and jury would take with at least a pound of salt. Beyond “proving” his poverty the plaintiffs can tell him this is more of “you” problem.
@MarkedMan: @MarkedMan: Yes. It seems obvious that Netanyahu’s plan is to do to the Palestinians what we and the Australians did to aboriginal peoples, while recognizing that in the 21st century he can’t say so.
Erick Loomis at LGM has a set of numbered comments that I find unusually insightful, clear and, persuasive.
Apologies for the long excerpt, but it’s all worth reading.
@SenyorDave: @Michael Reynolds:
About Basilone — absolutely agreed. Also about Murphy who has a nice memorial on the Appalachian Trail (where his plane crashed).
A note about Audie Murphy. I read in a book about his movies that he never drew a sober breath if he could help it and he slept witha loaded pistol every night. Hope that is not true.
@becca:
when Roe was overturned and various trigger and other state laws started to bite, what did take, a few days?, for the horror stories to start coming out, starting with the raped ten year old on OH who had to go to IN for an abortion, weeks ahead of IN also banning it and the IN AG going after the doctor.
I try to read some conservative media. It started as a desire to understand, now it’s mostly a study in xenopsychology. They’re big on outrage that a guy might lose his fundamental 2A rights over something like domestic abuse. I have yet to hear the first story about someone being mugged or carjacked or home invaded because he had his guns taken away. As I get older I see much of our political divide as between pragmatic consequentialists and fanatic followers of some set of normative beliefs, Popper’s Open and Closed Societies. Over at, say, Volokh, were you to speak of the probabilities of practical consequences from being deprived of arms, most of the commenters and front pagers would react as though you were writing in Greek.
@becca: @gVOR10: If Kate Cox goes through with her abortion, she could be charged with a 1st degree felony even though she attempted to get approval ahead of time and the State basically said, “We can’t and won’t tell you whether you meet the legal requirements for an exception to our abortion laws”.
Just do it and we find out later.
And then there is the whole matter of private suits against anyone who aids and abets which the courts have said “We can’t judge that until it someone actually files a suit.”
Legal monstrosities.
@gVOR10: A few more of Loomis’s points:
“Deserve” is a strong word, but yes. It’s why I cannot get worked up over the Hamas attack — what the hell did the Israelis think would happen? They’re lucky it wasn’t worse.
I’m a kind person. I would like most people to not get everything they deserve.
Here I disagree. People have a right to self-determination, and that includes self-segregation. If Israeli Jews, Palestinians, the French, or Porcupine enthusiasts, or whoever want to set up their own country to live as they want, and they have the resources to do so, they should have a right to give it a go.
But, note the word “self-segregation” — that’s not driving people from their homeland, that’s not segregating other people.
You can draw borders around people. You can provide massive assistance for those on the wrong side of the borders. It doesn’t have to be the India-Pakistan partition all over again.
“Separate but equal” has never worked, because there’s always been too much of a focus on separate, with “equal” as a fiction. And that’s worked it’s way into liberals’ thinking as a contempt for those who want to live their lives differently from us.
Look at the way Red States are viewed. We look down at them with their guns and their trucks and their country music and their Covid… We don’t accept that someone might want to live sickly, coughing out the word “yeehaw!”, while fondling their truck nuts and their penis substitutes and that this is an equally valid choice of how to live your life.
That said, no one has been seriously suggesting a kinder, gentler ethnic cleansing. I think it remains mostly untried solution to the problem, that works on paper. We have the history of other partitions where it went very badly, so it should be possible to anticipate and minimize the known problems (the next set of problems would be harder, as there are doubtless an entire set of unknown problems)
As a thought experiment: Allocate $1M per Palestinian for resettlement in a neighboring (or non-neighboring) country, $500K direct to the refugee to get set up, $500K to the host country. Does it change the equation?
I’m sure it shows my inner NeoLiberal, but I cannot help but think that there is a market-oriented answer to this problem, if the Israeli Jews value a religious ethnostate enough.
Do we know that Morocco (picking a mostly stable country with the same language and religion as most Palestinians that is far enough away from Israel that no one can shoot rockets over the border) wouldn’t want $2.5T to create a very wealthy Little Palestine neighborhood? Or several smaller clusters in multiple countries? Most of Gaza is under 18, we can sweeten the pot with some XBoxes.
(For $500K and a gaming console, I think we can get most 12 year old Americans to move to Idaho or somewhere like that voluntarily…)
@Scott: Whenever I read things like the argument the GQP is making about Arlington National Cemetery, I become more sympathetic to Eric Loomis’s obituary pieces where he notes some having been buried “on land confiscated from the traitor Robert E. Lee” as his designation for Arlington.
@al Ameda:
Well sure, but that’s only because you’re assuming that slavery was a crucial issue in the North related to fighting the war. I’m not sure it was, but if citizen-status and liberation for blacks was “the” goal, you’re probably right about the Union losing.
@gVOR10:
Well duh! On both points!
@Scott: Dear Texas, please try to prosecute Kate Cox right before next year’s election. Thanks in advance!
@JohnMc:
Audie Murphy became a confirmed alcoholic and abusive. He did sleep with a gun under his pillow and had frequent nightmares. PTSD, obviously, but he denied PTSD (or the contemporary term) was a thing. Being a hero – and he sure as hell was – is not a defense against PTSD.
He was a little guy, somewhat effeminate looking. Marines turned him down. Navy turned him down. The Army took him but his officers tried to keep him away from the front because he just did not look big enough or tough enough. Needless to say, he got to the front and won essentially every medal the US (and some allied countries, too) had to hand out. Murphy was 5’5″ and maybe 120 soaking wet. He was basically Steve Rogers before the super-soldier serum. I used him as a touchstone for a female character (in my alt history) named Rio – there are quite a few women bigger and stronger than Murphy. His lack of bulging biceps and six-pack abs didn’t impede him much.
history moves fast sometimes. Not quite three years after it was ruined, Mr. Tusk has a chance to redeem the name Donald for a chief of the executive branch.
@Gustopher:
I’ll reference Popper again. A tolerant society can tolerate anything, except intolerance. Because once you do the whole thing breaks down. Ethnonationalist states don’t seem to work very well either. The treaty of Versailles tried to establish ethno states in the rubble of the defeated empires. It was a horror story. Oppression of a minority in Germany was more the rule than the exception in Eastern Europe. Culture War, Kulturkampf, was oppression of German Catholics by German protestants. In our Civil War there were big pockets of southern sympathy, Copperheads, in the North and rebellious enclaves like the Free State of Jones in the South. Many people may want the U. S. to be a white Christian state. Shouldn’t have brought in millions of Africans and stolen half of Mexico. Too late now. And if they succeeded, pretty soon the Evangelicals would be oppressing the Catholics.
The answer is not to keep sorting finer and finer, but grow up and broaden the definition of “us”.
@gVOR10:
I have a slightly different answer. People have the right to segregate themselves, but a government should definitely not be taking sides in exalting one race/religion/sect/ethnicity over another and/or giving special rights or extra votes or what have you. Religious states are by definition undemocratic.
But… Saudi Arabia exists. Israel exists. Pakistan and Indian and, yes, Iran and Afghanistan. These exist in the world and so must be taken into account. Theory meets reality, and unless theory can figure out a way to get from A to B, it will lose.
@Jen:
One thing to keep in mind is how many accidents occur on approach or landing, with pilots who are trained and experienced. Many of this involve bad weather or other difficulties, but some occur in clear weather with everything working perfectly.
The other important thing is type rating. A pilot has to train and qualify for every type of aircraft they fly. So a B737 pilot won’t have an easy time landing a 787, never mind an A350.
There was an accident in Mexico years ago involving a cabinet secretary. the big contributing factor, was the pilots were not rated for the small executive jet they were flying.
Past the Mythbusters experiment, which was criticized by several pilots online, there have been a few pilots willing to go along with someone with minimal training, such as people who’ve played thousands of hours of flight simulator software at home. But the few I’ve read about, confined themselves to take off and/or simple maneuvers in the air. None allowed the wannabe pilot to land.
One great American WW2 movie is David Lynch’s The Straight Man, which is about an elderly guy in the plains driving his tractor down the highway to see his sick brother for the first time in many years. There’s a scene in there where he and another WW2 vet are talking about coming home and drinking hard and having nothing to hold onto after what they had seen. It’s about 3 or 4 minutes and it’s devastating and it centers the entire character. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. The movie is entire movie is both sweet and unnerving. It’s like a Spielberg film for adults.
As far as drinking goes, one thing I’ve noticed is that my generation (and class) drinks way more than our parents. And I think this is because my parents experienced their parents (Dad, in addition to being a vet of either Korea or WW2, was married in the wholesome nuclear fashion to Mom and both were struggling in the wholesome nuclear way) dealing with real trauma via cocktails at 5 every day, and said no way. There was no therapy, no self-help. Only booze and benzos.
As week 3 of Hell Week proceeds unabated, a company-wide email yesterday reminded us tomorrow Dec. 12th, is a half day due to the Virgin of Guadalupe holiday (whoever that is*). I asked my coworkers if they’d seen it. they had.
I then asked “Did it make you laugh or cry?”
Today’s email reminded us the company Xmas party is on Friday 15th.
If I’m still conscious by then, I expect I’ll be working late same as everyone else in our department. Hell Week is horrible, but at least I get to skip a loud party (silver lining).
*I’ve a very vague notion of who she is.
@Kathy: Those criticisms aside, there are actual cases of passengers/near-zero-experience students landing planes with “talk down” help from (usually) qualified instructors brought on the radio.
In a pinch, I really do think almost any reasonably ok pilot could land even a very different plane from what they’re used to, as long as there’s not a “trick” (like a completely different control system or a partially missing wing or something).
There’s a difference between a one-time emergency event where an unfamiliar pilot is thrust into the role vs a paid agreement to fly a plane you don’t actually know. Nobody would bat an eye at the emergency pilot doing practice runs at 5000′, familiarizing with the plane systems in the air, or going around a few times to increase safety. But you bet your ass there would be questions if the supposedly real pilot came on and said, “just gotta slow the plane down, see how she handles, because I’ve never landed one of these before.”
Not that I want to test this theory.
@ptfe:
I’ve heard of such things on smaller prop planes, which have simpler controls and fewer gauges. there’s a reason why one can solo on a Piper Cub but not on a 747.
Of course, my last comment blatantly overlooks fighter planes. these are very complex, even without the addition of combat procedures, and invariably flown by a single pilot.