Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, February 12, 2024
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60 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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Dark Biden for the win.
Looks like the RWNJ were right, the Superb Owl was rigged.
@Tony W: Too funny. Love the MAGA heads reaction to it. It appears even a couple of leftier than thou folks couldn’t laugh about it.
@OzarkHillbilly: The thing I can’t get my head around is that MAGA adopted the San Francisco 49ers as their team. Yeah, that San Francisco, the “sanctuary city” in “communist California”, instead of supporting the team from deep red Missouri/Kansas.
All because Taylor Swift (you remember, that country music star from deep-red Nashville, Tennesee) told young people to vote, and Travis Kelce did a Pfizer commercial.
The mind boggles.
@Tony W: Don’t forget Swift baked some “Biden 2020” cookies and Kelce supported BLM. Probably the first and last time we will ever see the MAGAs root for team Pelosi.
They really are just a bunch of fragile little snowflakes.
@Tony W:
Have you any idea how hard it was to stage a blocked extra point?
@Kathy: Plus that whole punt-hits-the-foot act. Those things don’t happen without a TON of rehearsals.
Well played, Deep State.
They are eating their own.
I don’t know what (or how) to think about this yet. Are private companies who own and operate public infrastructures like communications supposed to be neutral (assuming SpaceX is neutral)? Or should they be nationalized in time of war and conflict? On the other hand, while the US and others are fighting this war by proxy we are not “officially” at war. And therefore, officially neutral? Like I said, I have to think about how to think about this.
Russia is using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite devices in Ukraine, sources say
@Tony W:
That I think sticks in Trump’s craw even more than it does the anti-vaxxers. Even though he’s been generally pro-vaccine (though he’s backed off on it quite a bit due to the views of his base), he’s held a grudge against Pfizer ever since they announced they were independent of Operation Warp Speed after he tried to take credit for their development. The flap has fallen down the memory hole for most people, but the Trumpluphant never forgets.
Trump is complaining that if Taylor Swift endorses Biden she will be so “disloyal” to him, given that Trump made Swift so much money.
Regulatory capture strikes again: EPA again OKs use of toxic herbicide linked to Parkinson’s disease
@Tony W:
It almost looked real, didn’t it? 🙂
@CSK: In what way is Trump saying he made money for Taylor Swift? Or is he confused again and mixing her up with someone he had on his reality TV series?
@CSK:
Donald Trump ‘Did Nothing’ on Music Modernization Act, Key Attorney Behind Legislation Says, Despite His Claim That He Made Taylor Swift ‘So Much Money’
So, opinions differ. You can guess which opinion I think is factually accurate.
I was way too sleepy and tired by the time the game ended yesterday, so I turned off the TV pretty much after the last score.
So, I need to ask: how did the marriage proposal/Biden endorsement play out?
@MarkedMan:
See Ozark‘s comment here @OzarkHillbilly: .
Biden did all of KC’s play calling from the situation room. Reid is just a front…
@anjin-san: Then why wasn’t the statue of liberty called or was there an argument going on about the presence of Biden’s dog Major and the rest of the cabinet wanted to call a Flea flicker?
I missed this when Trump was in Harrisburg.
““We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.”
As much as it hurts to admit it, he is correct this time. With the Super Bowl plot now successfully carried out we will proceed with changing our name to “Swiftia” later this year.
Steve
“We need to inject some youth into the presidential race,” RFK Jr. said cadaverously.
@CSK:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Such a missed opportunity. This would be the perfect time to advise Swift to shock the world by the depths of her ingratitude.
If only she had something real to be ingrateful over.
@Kathy: I really just need Trump to stop commenting on things other than politics (which is really bad enough). It is his insistence on inserting himself into every cultural event that is soooooooo exhausting.
@Joe:
I wish he’d stop talking altogether.
Of course, he’s afflicted with Ford-Addams disease. If he stops talking, his brain starts working.
Which would be a nice change of pace, too.
The size limit for a human brain at birth is limited by the head’s anatomy, and the size of the human birth canal. Even so, it’s a very tight fit (as anyone who’s given birth can attest). It causes other problems, too, which explains, in part, the rise in the use of cesarean sections for a great many deliveries. In some places, these account for up to half of all deliveries.
There’s speculation about selective pressure due to this. It will depend on how far in time the practice extends. Maybe c-sections will increase to be used in the majority of births, maybe the use will decrease in time. It’s impossible t predict.
Still, assuming a majority, or even all, births come about by c-section, would this have an effect in human evolution?
It may. A great many people speculate it will result in larger brains at birth. This may indeed happen. If it does, it may or may not lead to larger brains overall. After all, the human brain develops and grows for about 25 years. A larger organ at birth may simply not need that much development time.
It does seem like a larger primate brain at birth correlates with a larger brain overall. See the difference in brain size at birth for humans as compared to chimps or gorillas. We also know the most important thing about correlations.
If the prevalence os C-section does lead to larger brains overall, would this mean people would become more intelligent? Again, correlations. Larger brains as a ratio of body size correlate with high intelligence. Again see ratios for humans, chimps, gorillas, etc.
But even if the correlation in this case were associated with causation, there remains the matter that other body parts could also grow bigger at birth, if not facing the filter of birth canal size. maybe humans would evolve wider shoulders, too, or instead of larger brains.
It’s hard to take something as complex as evolutionary development, make one change, and expect to be able to tell what all the consequences will be.
@Kathy: Interesting possible consequence. I have no say in the matter, missing some essential equipment to do the job, but hopefully they solve multitude of problems resulting from unnecessary C-sections before increasing them further.
@Franklin:
One size difference between humans and other primates, other than the brain, is the digestive tract. The human one is quite small in comparison.
The explanation is that 1) it began to shrink when our ancestors began to cook and otherwise process food, and 2) resources used to maintain a larger digestive tract were diverted to larger brains.
More likely both. Cooked food led to smaller intestines, led to larger brains. Maybe.
No one, so far as I know, has proposed reducing further the size of the large intestine. But we are processing our foods even more now.
On the other hand, we may be eating more food as well. Certainly we eat with more regularity than many of our ancestors, and we face famine less often.
So, who knows.
@Kathy: It seems to me that it may result in larger average brain size but only because babies with larger heads or whose shape present difficulties and who therefore would have died during birth are more likely to live. But I don’t see that there will be any reproductive advantage to having a big head, so no evolutionary pressure.
As for whether big brains correlate to more intelligence, I think Stephen Jay Gould got halfway there in his “The Mismeasure of Man” when he demonstrates that a couple of generations of 19th century scientists spent no end of time on this question and failed to demonstrate it convincingly one way or the other. Whatever difference might be there is small enough as to be too hard to measure.
But I always felt he missed the obvious. When measuring brain size it is always adjusted for by the size of the person. But if simply enlarging the size of the brain was enough to make one more intelligent then big people should be smarter than small people, and noticeably so. But this is obviously false, or at least of such little impact as to be unnoticeable as a general rule.
‘The voice we woke up to’: Bob Edwards, longtime ‘Morning Edition’ host, dies at 76
RIP
That link in my post above appears to take you to a bootleg PDF. When I searched the site showed up as “UNESCO” for some reason and I assumed he gave them permission, but I just realized the link appears to have nothing to do with UNESCO.
FWIW, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in intelligence, IQ, the scientific method, or experimental bias. It is truly a humbling read. And if you have ever thought about reading “The Bell Curve” you should read the Gould’s foreword and the first appendix of the revised edition, which he devotes to a pretty thorough take down. When Murray and Herrnstein’s book came out I was a member of a science book club and was regularly buying everything on intelligence and IQ so got a copy and read it before I knew anything about it. As I recall, I could never get over some of the fundamental flaws in their logic. Just as a for instance, they handwave away the data showing that IQ is not only not immutable, average IQ has been increasing significantly and steadily, decade by decade, since it was first measured, and the difference over time dwarfs their “immutable” charts showing the differences between various ethnic groups. Or the fact that they ascribe individual success to group characteristics which are spread along a very wide bell curve, and this despite the fact that the vast majority of all people, regardless of ethnicity, sit snugly within the overlap of all the bell curves.
@Mister Bluster:
RIP indeeed. I got to see him speak when he was promoting his book on Edward R Murrow. Really interesting guy. I still miss his hosting to this day.
@Kathy:
I too turned it off immediately after the game (in fact I had the broadcast muted for over half the game) so I missed out on any marriage proposal theater.
But … a few days ago Tucker Carlson promised us he would commit suicide if the Chiefs won.
I think Tucker is going to reneg, that is if he isn’t defenestrated in Moscow.
\Today is the deadline for Trump’s attorneys to file an application in the Supreme Court to stay the order of the appellate court. Unlike an application for a writ of certiorari which requires only four of the justices, an application for stay requires a vote of five. If the stay is not granted the case will return to the District Court for trial.
@MarkedMan:
Thanks for the recommendation.
The first thing to know about biology, is that it’s messy. The second it that it’s complex beyond belief.
For instance, take the matter of cell receptors, which were much in the new through the trump pandemic. The popular idea is they are like locks, which only one key can fit and turn. In actual fact, they approximate the shape of a molecule or protein, so several can fit and turn it, as it were.
This has advantages, like how a vaccine for the ancestral strain of trump virus will produce memory B and T cells that will also react to similar proteins, like those in the Delta and Omicron variants, even if not as well.
It also has disadvantages.
@a country lawyer:
TY for the reminder (and for your great summary of the ruling last week). I’ve been meaning to write a takeaway article from that ruling. Maybe this will be my excuse.
After the Super Bowl my wife and I started watching “In the Know,” an adult claymation-style animated sitcom created by Mike Judd, streaming on the Peacock app.
It’s absolutely hilarious, and perfectly lampoons the NPR crowd. I think a lot of the commentariat will enjoy it.
@al Ameda:
He really shouldn’t. I’m sure there’s no shortage of people willing to help him.
@MarkedMan: the only thing IQ tests measure is how good one is at taking IQ tests.
If there actually were a correlation between IQ and ability, why is it that the people who brag about getting high IQ scores rarely show commensurate success in their lives and are only seen as guests on TV talk shows for people to gawk at their “high IQ”?
@Grumpy realist: IQ does correlate to some extent with success and happiness. It makes sense since it does indirectly measure skills that lead to better paying jobs and security. This wasn’t always true. Up until a hundred years or so a hard working and healthy giant of a man was just as likely to be in demand.
@Grumpy realist:
I first began having doubts about how effective IQ measures intelligence, when I found how many people at Mensa take astrology seriously.
@Kathy:
That reminded me of something I once saw about bird evolution. Happens so fast in some birds scientists can watch it happen.
The implication is there is some kind of mechanism, at least in birds, which allows them to direct their evolution for bills and other tools that fit the environment they are in without it happening simply by random chance. This mechanism may be in all creatures to some degree, and it would be subconscious.
It would be so advantageous it would be logical for it to have sprung into being pretty early in the history of life.
@dazedandconfused:
The speed of evolution has been much discussed lately. At least I’m coming upon it a lot.
IMO, it’s important to draw a distinction between evolution and natural selection. Take the birds in your link. Maybe every generation has a few misfits with larger beaks, which usually proves a disadvantage for breeding for some reason. enter larger snails, and now it’s an advantage. So the change, evolution, was there already. The increase in numbers, selection, happened quickly.
It’s similar to the pepper moths in England in the industrial revolution. When the dominant white moths gave way to black moths, as the latter could find effective camouflage in trees covered in soot. But the black moths were there all along, they just had scant chance to reproduce as they were easier prey before fouled up air changed things.
A better documented case study is the fox domestication experiment in Russia. Change happened quickly, but the project begins as en exercise in selection. Foxes that were not afraid of humans and who displayed less or no aggressive behavior, were selected to breed with others of their kind.
Obviously this reinforces the alleles researchers are selecting for, and far faster than would happen in nature.
I’m not claiming to be right. You can tell because I used the phrase “for some reason.” But ti’s worth thinking about.
One last thing. When speaking of evolution taking millions of years, this usually means the time it takes one species to diversify into several, and these into several more, and so on, until the current creatures bear not even a passing resemblance to the species one began with.
I mean begin with something like the menagerie from the Cambrian explosion and end around the time of the dinosaurs. That takes millions of years.
The notion that a bird will evolve into a similar kind of bird in a few decades, does not seem as astonishing seen in this light.
@Kathy: It’s an interesting question: how much intelligence is enough? And I suspect but have no evidence that joining Mensa or doing something else to publicly promote your supposed genius indicates you have other issues.
@Neil Hudelson: As NPR parodies go, this one’s good, too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsufMtUOXtI
@MarkedMan:
Ayn Rand held thinking is a volitional act. She was close to being right. Critical thinking is a volitional act. That is, taking one’s time to examine, compare prior knowledge, use logic, reason about something, etc. that is a conscious choice. The rest of the time, one resorts to heuristics and emotional reaction, as a form of automated thinking.
Often smarter people are better at rationalizing their opinions, ideas, or beliefs, than thinking about the validity of their opinions, ideas, and beliefs. Hell, it’s taken a lot of people, many of them devotees of Rand, to rationalize supply side economics and market supremacy for the past forty years. It didn’t just happen.
@MarkedMan:
Years ago, I was asked to give a talk at the Boston meeting of MENSA. That was one weird crowd…people wearing signs that read “Do not touch me,” people wearing paper crowns…
@Kathy:
Good point!
ETA: @CSK: Yours too! I think that fair numbers of people have overplayed the utility of the “eccentric genius” card to varying degrees.
Interesting story that the NYT just bubbled up:
Trump Is Considering Backing His Daughter-in-Law for R.N.C. Co-Chair
Because if you own it lock stock and barrel, then you may as well appoint family to run it.
That way the money can flow easier to… where it will do most good, I suppose.
It’s fine. Who could even question that? … Not at all what an autocratic dictator would do. Nope. Why would anyone even think that?
@a country lawyer:
He did. I can’t wait for the supreme court to unanimously agree that a president has complete immunity in all things.
But only when they are Republican.
———————–
In all seriousness, I have to ask: If he has immunity in all things, couldn’t he just suspend the Constitution, adjourn congress and appoint himself king?
Because he wouldn’t be wrong if he did so… right?
@Liberal Capitalist: If he’s not likely to be impeached (ETA:) and convicted, why would it matter whether it’s wrong or not?
@Liberal Capitalist: In all seriousness, I have to ask: If Biden has immunity in all things, couldn’t Biden just suspend the Constitution, adjourn congress and appoint himself king?
Because he wouldn’t be wrong if he did so… right?
Almost forgot, couldn’t Biden just order summary execution for trump? Maybe have him drawn and quartered just for shits and giggles?
eta: why stop there? Just do the same for the whole GOP.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve been saying that for weeks. I’ve even advised it’s the first thing Biden ought to do if the Supremes come out with a supremely moronic decision.
Because it would be easy to find a few loyal Secret Service/FBI/CIA/Military personnel to take out one person. It would be harder to find the thousands needed for a bigger operation. the more people you involve, the higher the chances they’ll disobey or refuse orders.
While old man Biden rails at the shrinking Snickers bar size, Jillian Micheals nails the current economy
@Liberal Capitalist: I’m 100% in favor. She’s a loud mouthed know nothing and will definitely damage the Republican effort
@OzarkHillbilly: The argument we should be making is not that Biden could have Trump killed, but that he could have Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, etc. killed.
@gVOR10: Pourquoi pas les deux?
@JKB: Average car prices are up because most low end models have been eliminated due to lack of demand (poor sales). What is in demand is electronics and chips everywhere and in everything which further drives up the average price.
House prices are always rising and it’s mostly driven by the prevailing view that houses are investment opportunities not living areas…
I bought a dozen of large eggs last week for $2.31. What are they even talking about? Egg prices dropped off a cliff for the vast majority of the USA last year. I say vast majority because everywhere I’ve looked has seen a drop in egg prices nearing the end of 23. I’m still trying to find a real example of hyper inflated eggs that aren’t some kind of heirloom over priced egg to begin with. What really annoys me is that these morons are glossing over the real driver of egg prices during the high times. That driver being the bird flu causing MILLIONS of egg laying birds to either die or be culled. When you have to destroy a significant portion of your production it tends to cause high prices. IF we didn’t have all our food supply concentrated in the hands of the few this wouldn’t be nearly as big of an issue. As it is when one factory ends up with contamination issues everything explodes on the market side. Since these morons are supply side corporate cock suckers they want to blame inflation and the poor..
Meanwhile corporate profits are breaking records galore. But yeah sure it’s all inflation not the corporate overlords taking an opportunity to get a little pricing gouging on.
What I really hate about that exchange is that I’m on Maher’s side and I don’t like that dude’s opinions much at all…
EDIT : I imagine they are bringing out the egg inflation talking point again because they are aware that California is having serious issues with bird flu right now so it’s inevitable that prices will be going back up.
@Kathy:
Not if the materialists are right, and thinking is just brain chemistry. In that case, there is no causal distinction between “conscious choice” and “instinct” — it’s all just chemistry. The distinction is illusory.
For some reason, the Daniel Dennetts of the world don’t want to talk about this.
@JKB: Wow, if Biden has lost Jillian Michaels, a has-been fitness guru last seen peddling snake oil pills on a podcast, then the election really is over.
@JKB:
Tripled where? In what time frame? The house my parents bought for 41K in 1971 was going for 1.6 million the year Trump left office. Biden’s fault?
Does this brain-dead tripe really appeal to you, or are you just a lonely dude desperately seeking attention among strangers online by citing idiots?
Pro tip JKB: quality real estate is generally a good long-term investment.
@JKB:
Spell much?