Pearl Harbor Day Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Thursday, December 7, 2023
·
69 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Indeed. I’m a little surprised he has that much self awareness.
Pearl Harbor Day. Anniversary of the attack that finally showed the folly of the isolationist, pro-fascist America First crowd. Two years after the Nazi and Soviet attack on Poland on 1 September 1939, we finally woke up to our responsibilities to make the world safe for democracy.
Today, we have history repeating itself. A pro-fascist, isolationist America First faction has taken over one of our political parties and is denying the dangers of militaristic authoritarian regimes.
We will pay an even greater price if we stick our head in the sand once again.
New research undercuts Republican views of racism.
Interesting if confusingly displayed in some cases, bottom line is that Whites have a persecution complex not connected to their lived experience. IOW they think Whites are discriminated against while at the same time having no personal experience to back up their belief. Black and Hispanic respondents don’t seem to have that problem: their reports of lived experience match their perceptions of discrimination.
I was fascinated by the Asian and American Indian responses, but they were not covered in depth.
TLDR: Republican White people, have a big disconnect between what they claim to experience, and what they claim to believe. A syndrome known as being full of shit.
@Scott:
Japan’s ambitions may have doomed the Third Reich and saved the world in the end. Our victory over Japan and Germany made both countries rich, strong and mostly free.
History writes all the best twists.
@OzarkHillbilly:
He’s probably planning to pursue the “Former Republican who admits they were evil the whole time now that they’re out of office and can’t do anything about it” lane for the Libertarian party Presidential nomination
I saw a screenshot of this tweet on an ad for one of those listicle sites. So I googled the first sentence, halfway expecting that the author would have deleted it. So far, this person has not deleted it.
But now I wonder something else. Considering that this person argued with several other people who pointed out that (2+3)^2 does indeed equal 25, is it possible that this person still thinks it equals 13?
@Kurtz: He’s an idiot. Anything is possible.
A while ago, I said McCarthy would serve out this term in Congress if Santos was expelled. I underestimated McCarthy’s vindictiveness. Happy I am to have been wrong.
@Kurtz:
13 is not the square of a whole number. Therefore no X squared can equal 13 if X is a whole number.
This guy seems to think one squares the two, to get 4, then the 3, to get nine, then adds them. So 2 squared + 3 squared does equal 13.
But that’s not how the parentheses work.
@Kurtz: I’m confused…by what logic could that equal 13? I literally cannot back into it (I understand your point, I’m just oddly wrecked by not being able to understand what that person is getting at!)
This is so Cambridge I can barely stand it:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/04/metro/indigenous-translations-cambridge-street-signs/
I’m sorry, but Prosecutors Seek Jail Time for Criminal is not exactly newsworthy.
@Kathy:
It would be if the criminal were Trump.
From: Texas police arrest suspect after six people killed in spree of violence
WooHoo! We’re #1! We’re #1! We’re #1!
@Jen: I’m not at all sure it’s a good idea to explain incorrect procedures, but the calculation, which is wrong, is that (2 + 3)^2 = 2^2 + 3^2 = 4 + 9 = 13.
But there is no distributive law for exponents. (2 + 3)*2 is indeed equal to 2*2 + 3*2. But this does not apply to exponents.
@OzarkHillbilly: Apparently, Kevin McCarthy decided to let his California show. Even the Central Valley is cosmopolitan in comparison with a lot of the rest of the country.
@Jay L Gischer: Oh, THANK YOU. And, while I typically would agree that it’s a bad idea to explain wrong answers, it would have driven me nuts that I couldn’t “see” the wrong answer. I literally couldn’t grok what they were getting at, and that bugged me!
Thank you for bringing some peace to my mind. 🙂
@Jen: @Jay L Gischer: Credit where credit is due, @Kathy: has it figured out too.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Was he being aware of a flaw, or was he bragging?
@OzarkHillbilly: I may be reading this wrong and it is still early in the investigation but this was a tragedy in many ways. Apparently, he was mentally ill but even though there were many signs he never received help. The whole tragedy screams failure by family, by law enforcement, by society.
Sheriff identifies two killed in Bexar County home in connection with Austin killing spree
This killing spree started off in his own house by killing his parents.
@Jay L Gischer: Many calculators can handle parenthesis, as can Excel. If the guy had bothered to test his theory, they would have told him 25. We live in a post-modern world where we’re entitled to our own facts. But arithmetic?
@OzarkHillbilly: The next test is whether he resigns this month or next. If next month, Newsom doesn’t have to call a special election and the seat remains vacant until November. Since this is a Republican district, it puts them down a seat for the whole year.
@MarkedMan: His announcement states that he is leaving his seat at the end of this year. The NYT reported yesterday that this means:
@gVOR10: What we’re seeing here is the rigidity of math grammar. It could mean 2^2 + 3^2, but doesn’t. Ever.
@Scott:
And of course he could get a gun, because America.
Arithmetic has changed. The new math says Republican votes >(always) Democrat votes.
Steve
The House of Representatives Rules That Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism.
I assume up next will be a ruling that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism. Or any support for Palestinians as a people in antisemitic.
In Texas, it is now the judges who get to make medical decisions:
Texas judge allows Kate Cox to abort fetus with lethal abnormality
@Jen:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Here’s the easiest math problem:
What’s the largest number you can come up with using the numbers 1, 1, 1, and 1, and any mathematical symbols in any amount each. Example: 1*11*1, or 1+11+1, or 11*11, etc.
The answer is infinity. Hint, you do need parentheses.
@Michael Reynolds: One of the classic patterns of anxiety disorder is that fears become facts. Those fears will often bully the people who have them, and even the people who are around them. It’s an ugly situation for sure.
Speaking as someone who has tried to do this, though not in the political arena: Being dismissive or pejorative of those fears doesn’t make them go away. It’s quite the opposite. They will be defended fiercely.
What makes them go away is exposure therapy. Which has to be calm, measured, patient, and long-term. This is how it works at a personal level, I can attest to that. It does work. I don’t see much hope of it working in media on the political level, people are way too eager to jump in and start swinging.
@SenyorDave:
Meanwhile three university presidents are unable to decide whether calling for the genocide of Jews is a problem. Apparently not, unless students actually start to build gas chambers. Substitute literally any other minority and calling for their extermination would be a wee bit of a problem.
Progressives who faint at the use of the wrong pronoun cannot quite decide whether it’s OK to suggest a second Holocaust. Very much of a piece with their deliberate blindness toward the rapes and sexual mutilations practiced by Hamas in their attack and their evident wish to eliminate the ME’s only democracy and replace it with yet another thug state run by terrorists.
@Jay L Gischer:
If exposure therapy were a cure you’d expect the least White racism in the places with the highest number of Blacks – Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland, South Carolina, Alabama. . . Hutus and Tutsis lived side by side until they didn’t. German Jews were most assimilated in pre-war Germany.
@SenyorDave: All contained in this one.
@Michael Reynolds:
Except that they weren’t asked that question. They were asked if calling for genocide violated their university’s speech policy. That’s the question they answered.
I didn’t feel like going through the whole x thread. But I did find a gem or two in the parts I perused.
Apparently, it trended on
r/facepalm contemporaneous with the OP and again in the last yearish.
Anyway, there are multiple ways to do that problem. The thing is, if one is unsure if the answer is correct, one can check their answer using another method.
(2+3)^2=(5)^2=25
(2+3)^2=(2+3)(2+3)=
(2)(2)+(2)(3)+(3)(2)+(3)(3)=4+6+6+9=25
(a+b)(a+b)=a^2+2ab+b^2=
2^2+2(2)(3)+3^2=4+12+9=25
I don’t think there is a way to get 13 out of the second and third methods even if you somehow screwed up the order of operations.
Maybe there is, but I doubt it. And I refuse to try to figure out how.
ETA:
Maybe the third method sheds light here.
Perhaps dude thinks (a+b)^2=a^2+b^2 which would give you 13. But the confidence in defending the incorrect answer is alarming.
The UNLV shooter was a 67-year-old career professor, Anthony Polito, who’d been turned down for a job at the school.
@MarkedMan:
.
Do you have the slightest doubt that had you subbed Black for Jew the answer would have been different? “Yes, calling for killing all Blacks is OK under our university speech policy.” Or, “I don’t know if calling for killing all Gays is OK or not, but certainly would be if they actually killed a gay person.”
What exactly is problematic under a “university speech policy” if calling for Holocaust 2 is not? What more important issue does this policy address?
The Left needs to stop pretending it doesn’t have an anti-semitism problem. It does. Not anti-Zionist, anti-Jew.
Heh. OTB needs to stop pretending some of its commentors don’t have a racism problem.
Some people here need to remove the plank from thine own eye first, per Matthew 7’s evergreen admonition.
@MarkedMan:
Okay, but even in that case their answers were still garbage.
All three should resign or be put on leave.
@Michael Reynolds: There is a voluntary, consensual aspect to exposure therapy. It is not an automatic thing. This is really important. You will find in these areas that there are some white people who have made the journey and have a rich, multicultural existence.
Meanwhile others who have the fears pass them on and guard them jealously, thus propagating their fears. Because those fears for them are facts, and they believe that they are protecting people from danger. I’m sure you’ve seen this working: there’s a huge selection bias in what people pay attention to, because it confirms their priors.
For someone who has been inculcated in this, it is a big, long, slow task to change out of it.
For instance, take someone who is phobic about bees. Just seeing a bee doesn’t make them less afraid. If anything, it makes them more afraid. Exposure therapy is a very specific thing, it isn’t “just seeing bees”.
@DK:
Oh, I forgot: I’m racist against Argentinians. Damn Argentinians doing. . . whatever.
So many moral lectures from progressives, only to find them turning a blind eye to the oldest of the race hatreds. The British Labour Party went through the same denial of anti-semtism. Didn’t work for them, won’t work for you.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m not a progressive, nor have I denied anyone’s hate and bigotry. Including yours.
Morals are good. It’s unsurprising those who spew a firehose falsehoods don’t know that.
@Jay L Gischer:
OK, but aren’t you cherry-picking then, relying on people who already have an open mind?
I don’t doubt that fear is a large part of racism, essentially stranger-danger. I’ve accepted that view myself, but I have doubts. I think to go Nietzsche a bit, there’s an element of the will to power, the desire to dominate and control. People are pricks, sometimes scared pricks, but sometimes just pricks. It reminds me of parental reassurances that bullies are just cowards. Not really. Some are, some are just pricks because there is evil in the world. People need someone to look down on.
You know, it kind of seems as though y’all expect university presidents to be moral leaders.
Meanwhile, they are assiduously selected to protect the financial and legal interests of the institutions they serve, and we know how well that mixes with moral clarity, right?
I mean, who gives a flying fig what those guys say, anyway? Other than the people that work at the university? Seriously, I do not look to university presidents for moral and ethical insight. That isn’t their job. Their job is to avoid any unnecessary trouble for their university, and they are good at executing on institutional prerogatives, or else they wouldn’t have the job.
The one university president I’ve seen up close and personal was not a shining beacon of much of anything at all. But he was pretty good at the job he was hired to do, which was to manage funds and build out some new programs.
@Jay L Gischer:
I mean, yes, they should be as should anyone who works with or around young people. It’s not about the general public looking to them. In dangerous and fraught moments like these, their students do need protective moral and ethical guidance.
But it doesn’t require any special kind of leadership to say, “Calling for the genocide of Jews — or any ethnic or religious group — is unacceptable on our campus.” You don’t need to be MLK or Ghandi to do that, just some basic decency and humanity.
And if their job is to keep the university out of trouble, they failed at that too.
@Jay L Gischer:
Well, a college or university president is generally the public face of the institution and one of its primary spokespeople.
@Michael Reynolds: Far be it from me to say that this will work, every time, on every person. It relies on the subject wanting to be different somehow.
And it is the recommended method for addressing phobic behavior and beliefs.
Let’s take a playful, not-real scenario: You could host a party. Invite some people who have some, uh, attitudes about black people. Offer them free food and music they like. They show up, and there are black people there. Well, they can engage with the free food and music they like, and maybe desensitize a bit. Or they might bail. It’s hard to predict.
The ones that stay might soften up a bit.
(By the way, doing something like this is a very, very BIG ask for black people. I’m not asking it. I know there are problems there. It’s just a hypothetical.)
Nothing is guaranteed to work on everyone. People change slowly, and not that often. But they do sometimes change. I have observed this in myself and in others.
@Jay L Gischer: There is also the residual idea that universities and colleges in general exercise “in loco parentis” over college kids. Now that went out decades ago but the responsibilities and behaviors attached to that linger on in society’s collective memory. Hence, university leaders will never say “not my job”.
@Scott: It’s always a tragedy, but I can’t help rubbing it in with the “keep yer stinkin’ dirty commie hands off muh guns!” crowd. People may feel it’s in bad taste (it’s always too soon until it’s forgotten, and who cares then?) but I say hit them where it hurts while the iron is hot.
@MarkedMan: IIRC he said, “at the end of this year” which could be 12/31 or 1/1.
@Michael Reynolds:
I suspect we are going to get nowhere here not because we disagree with each other but because we are talking about different things. So, first, let me say that if the presidents actually said, “I don’t think it should be an expell-able offense to call for genocide”, I would be saying what you are saying. And maybe that happened, but I only saw one snippet where some self righteous phony of a congressman asked “Does your university speech policy prohibit calls for genocide?” (or words to that effect) and a university president attempted to answer that. And rather than saying to myself, “That means he thinks calling for genocide is acceptable!”, I thought of the discussions throughout my career about the contents of our employee manuals and how even the most innocuous sounding thing can come back to bite us. When an employee gets terminated and sues the company, 99% of the time it’s not over some law that was broken but rather over what the employee manual stated and how it is enforced. Effectively it’s considered a contract. Did you follow the policies and procedures in the manual when you terminated them? And, if so, did you also enforce it in the same way against other employees. “No” to either of those and you have a problem. So manuals tend to be very wary of lists and instead try to couch things in cautious terms. “An employee should not use language generally considered offensive in the presence of another employee”, rather than, “Here’s a list of offensive language we cannot use in the presence of another employee…”
Now, maybe if I watched more of those it might turn out the Prez’s went on to say problematic things. But if all they did was state that the policy didn’t have an explicit policy against genocide then I think this is a totally manufactured outrage.
@Scott:
I read this one a little differently Scott. I saw this as a judge looking at the record, and b**** slapping the legislature to say what are you maroons thinking.
But I’m absolutely certain the Texas legislature will rant about liberal woke judges and their agenda
Give this poor woman a break everyone, she has more than enough on her plate right now.
@Michael Reynolds:
Fuck you very much. Tell me how it feels when someone gets in your face and sneers “ma’am”. Tell me how it feels to politely correct someone on the phone and then have them “Miss” you loudly and pointedly over and over.
Oh, or my new favorite, I’ve had two bull collectors hang up on me after accusing me of not being “Beth”. One asked if I was Beth’s husband before hanging up on me.
Keep us out of your bullshit and stop being an asshole.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
@Scott:
I’m pretty sure the TX Supreme Court is going to overrule this post haste. Then she’s going to get charged if she leaves the state for her abortion. I hope she makes it out of this alive and can have another baby.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
@Scott:
I’m pretty sure the TX Supreme Court is going to overrule this post haste. Then she’s going to get charged if she leaves the state for her abortion. I hope she makes it out of this alive and can have another baby.
We interrupt the ongoing middle eastern flame war to report the seismic alert just went off in Mexico city
The quake was barely felt
@steve:
Yeah, yer kinduva putz, Steve… but you don’t haveta prove it every dammed day.
@MarkedMan: Some context:
…
So, she started out with a prepared statement decrying anti-semitism and stating that Israel has a right to exist. But when asked about the official school policy she put on her administrator’s hat and repeated verbatim from the manual.
@Michael Reynolds:
1.8M people displaced and 20K known dead. Have some perspective, Michael.
And, sadly, rape has been a tool of war going back to whenever war began. It’s part and parcel of war.
If 1/3 of the population cannot vote, and are not considered citizens, and are held in apartheid conditions, is it really a democracy? Perhaps of the two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for dinner variety. (The sheep, in this case, being another wolf like creature)
@Gustopher:
Israel was once a more or less legit/fledgling democracy, when it was still electing heroes like Yitzhak Rabin. Sadly, Israel is now run by terrorist-enabling, authoritarian, hopelessly corrupt Benjamin Netanyahu, whose coalition includes violent extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir — once convicted in Israeli courts of terrorism and incitement to racism, now inexplicably serving as Israel’s Minister of National Security.
This sorry state of affairs was established not by American progressives (nor by the Argentinian pope, nor by “blacks and Hispanics”) but by the Israeli electorate. Both Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir help incite Rabin’s assasination, as Rabin was dedicated to the search for peace and lasting security, insufficiently committed to killing Palestinians and ethnic cleansing.
So as far as ‘replacing Israeli democracy with terroristic thugs’ goes, that call has long been coming from inside the house.
@Kathy:
Is no one worried this could be a pre-shock to something bigger? I remember watching a documentary on the Mexico City quake from the 80s, and there was a 5.something quake some months before the Big One, supposedly.
@Michael Reynolds:
After 9/11 there was a huge uptick in anti-Arab racism. It is, sadly, natural and expected from people. People associate the entire group with the violent actions of a few.
As images of Israel’s assault on Gaza have continued, yes, antisemitism is on the rise. The images are awful. People don’t like looking at parents cradling their dead children. People find shit like that traumatizing. And whole swaths of a city leveled, showing how indiscriminate the death and destruction is.
It harshes people’s mellow.
The increase in antisemitism — genuine antisemitism* — is an expected outcome of the brutality of the Israeli assault. You can assign moral culpability to that however you want, people are responsible for their own actions, so the people giving into antisemitism are clearly to blame. But people are also responsible for the foreseeable outcomes of their actions, so I would say that the state of Israel is also partly to blame.
——
*: genuine antisemitism, as opposed to the “all criticism of Israel is antisemitism”. And there’s a big fuzzy boundary there, and it often overlaps.
The crowd protesting the Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia (the owner fired two workers for Palestinian flag pins, and was donating a lot of money to Israeli something-or-other (conflicting reports)) had some people protesting legitimate specific grievances with that restaurant, and some people out for as close to Jew bashing as they could get.
(and some people protesting because they had been told lies)
@DK: The earthquake talk and the Gaza talk together remind me of the prologue to Slaughterhouse 5.
I think that prologue is the best part of the novel. After that prologue, do you even need the rest of the novel? It’s nice, and I like it, but the prologue says it all.
It is darkly funny that we are doing better stopping glaciers than wars though.
@Gustopher:
There’s a passage in Gone With the Wind (the book, not the movie) in which a grief-stricken Scarlett asks Rhett why there have to be wars. He replies, “Because men like them.”
@Michael Reynolds: @MarkedMan: Kevin Drum did a nice short explanation of this school speech code thing. As is entirely normal practice in congressional hearings Elise Stefanik was grandstanding with a “Yes or no, have you stopped beating your wife?” question.
I will add that Republicans are having way too much fun taking advantage of this opportunity to pretend that antisemitism isn’t primarily a RW thing.
I’m shocked that the guy always telling us that minority individuals just have to accept that normies are bigots and it’s the minority individuals’ job to make them comfortable expressing that bigotry, otherwise they’ll all get mad and vote Republican, is less enthusiastic about this approach when he’s suddenly in the minority group being asked to endure casual bigotry in the name of political expediency.
@DK:
I try not to worry about things I can do nothing about.
On the other hand, since the 85 quake, building codes have changed and are enforced, largely, to make structures more resistant to quakes. We got the seismic alert, which is really good the majority of the time. We do an annual quake drill.
The 2017 quake was also quite bad, but most newer and renovated structures survived. Many took damage, some had to be torn down, but they didn’t collapse. The exceptions were newer structures that were not built to the current code.
I figure we’ve done what’s needed.
Here’s the answer to the easiest math problem:
Infinity
Thusly: ((((((1111!)!)!)!)!)….!)
Now the hard problem: would an eternity allow one time to place an infinity of factorial symbols? Or would that require an infinite amount of eternities?
This is why physicists loath obtaining infinities in their data or theories.
@Kathy: I believe that is countable infinite, and thus no larger than 111111…