Saturday’s Forum

More killing time.

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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

Comments

  1. OzarkHillbilly says:

    ‘Over our heads in chaos’: Wisconsin on edge of election fiasco amid pandemic

    As states across the US delay their primary elections in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, Wisconsin has decided to stay the course – and it is in complete disarray.

    Some 111 jurisdictions don’t have enough poll workers to staff a single polling location for the Tuesday vote, and the governor has enlisted Wisconsin’s national guard to help run them. One election official said he feels “sick” asking people to work the polls, knowing it could kill them. Others have advised some voters to isolate their mail-in ballot envelopes for 24 hours before getting a witness to sign it to avoid spreading the virus. And Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called for the election to be delayed.

    In Milwaukee, home to around 300,000 registered voters, there will be just five election day polling locations, instead of the usual 180. Days ahead of the election, Neil Albrecht, executive director of the city’s elections commission, didn’t know where those sites would be or who would staff them. The city usually requires 1,400 poll workers, but had just 400 earlier this week.

    “We are over our heads in chaos right now,” Albrecht said. “The level of public confusion will be so rampant and the access to voting will be so limited.

    On Friday, Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, ordered the legislature to meet in special session at 4pm on Saturday to decide the fate of the election. Evers is pushing to convert to an mail-in election ending on 26 May. Republicans said Friday afternoon they would not take up the proposal.

    Words are insufficient.

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  2. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Which states have done the least to contain coronavirus?

    While most states in the US have ordered their citizens to stay home as they deal with the coronavirus outbreak, some are stubbornly defying expert advice – even as cases continue to rise. The urgent need for action was made clear on Thursday, when Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, issued a plea for states to force people not to leave their homes.

    “I don’t understand why it’s not happening,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “We really should be.”

    Here are five states who have taken the least action:

    Misery makes the list!

    Missouri

    Missouri saw a 600% rise in coronavirus cases over seven days at the end of March – the largest increase in the country, according to Johns Hopkins University. Despite that, Governor Mike Parson has said he will not introduce a stay-at-home order: “It’s very difficult sometimes to just put a blanket order in place,” Parson said on Thursday.

    Parson did not order schools to close as the seriousness of the coronavirus became apparent, instead leaving it to school districts to decide whether to close. All 555 did so.

    Some cities in Missouri, including St Louis and Kansas City, have issued their own stay-at-home orders, but leaders there have pleaded with Parson to introduce a statewide measure to prevent spread from rural communities. On Thursday, a column in the Kansas City Star summed up the governor’s lackadaisical response. It was headlined: “Missouri’s Mike Parson in contention for governor who’s done the least to contain Covid-19.”

    I’s so proud…

    Arkansas and Oklahoma too. Maybe it’s that Ozark water?

    1
  3. Teve says:

    Voters in Florida overwhelmingly passed an amendment saying that formerly convicted people are now eligible to vote in elections. In response the Republican Legislature came up with everything it could, like requiring all fines and court costs etc. to be fully paid off before a person is eligible. A federal court just struck that down as a poll tax.

    linky

    Trump won Florida by fewer than 113,000 votes.

    5
  4. OzarkHillbilly says:

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has abruptly changed its description of the Strategic National Stockpile and put forward a narrower vision of the role the federal government’s repository of life-saving medicines and equipment should play in supplying states’ needs.

    The change comes as the White House already is facing growing anger and worry from governors over federal assistance to fight the coronavirus outbreak. But it conforms with President Donald Trump’s insistence that the stockpile is only a short-term backup for states, not a commitment to ensure supplies get quickly to those who need them most during an emergency, the latest front in a concerted White House effort to try to put the onus for battling the crisis on the states, with Washington meant to play more of a supporting role.

    Without doing any actual, you know, supporting.

    6
  5. Teve says:

    @imillhiser

    Remember that time when Obama ordered a hamburger with dijon mustard and it was a three-day long scandal?

    17
  6. Mikey says:

    @Teve: And don’t forget the Utter National Scandal of…the TAN SUIT!

    9
  7. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Teve: @Mikey: Saluting with a cup of coffee!!!

    2
  8. Teve says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: how did we ever endure?

  9. Tyrell says:

    Sprint merges with T-Mobile. So there are three carriers, for now. I remember when the government broke up AT&T. Our phone bill went from $8 to $14.
    “Hawaii 5-0” had its last episode last night ending a great ten year run. This has been a high quality show with good stories and cast.
    Wrestlemania will have two nights: tonight and tomorrow.
    Google is tracking peoples’ movements. This has something to do with the Carona virus. They have stated that no data on individual persons is collected, yet. Some groups have expressed concern over this. Maybe I should remove Google.

    1
  10. CSK says:

    Trump says he won’t be wearing a face mask because he’s “feeling good.” And also because he wouldn’t feel right sitting behind that “beautiful Resolute desk” greeting queens and dictators while wearing one.

    Melania is advising people to wear masks and keep to social distancing. Not her hubby, though, I guess.

    3
  11. gVOR08 says:

    Overnight I received this message in an email from my Senator Rick Scott.

    Thank you for contacting me regarding the federal response to the Coronavirus global pandemic. I appreciate the opportunity to respond.
    Congress recently passed, and the President signed into law, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which helps those workers who have lost their jobs, had their hours cut or are getting lower tips, and small businesses that have been forced to close or have lost significant revenue. There are many good things in this bill, including funding for our health care workers, personal protective equipment and expanded testing, and support for small businesses.
    We have to remember that $2 trillion in new spending means a $2 trillion tax increase somewhere down the road – even in a crisis, we need to be smart about how we spend taxpayer dollars. When this crisis is over, Congress MUST propose a plan that cuts federal spending over 10 years by AT LEAST the total amount this bill spends.
    Again, thank you for contacting me with your concerns regarding the Coronavirus. Please reach out to my office with any specific questions on the resources available in the CARES Act. I am proud to represent all Floridians and am working diligently to help get the necessary resources to Floridians to combat this public health crisis.

    The bodies have only started piling up in FL and this ass is worried about the deficit and setting the stage to cut SS and Medicare.

    And do you think Scott, McConnell and the rest of their ilk aren’t gloating about blue states bankrupting themselves with inadequate federal support and gaming out how to take political advantage of it?

    4
  12. OzarkHillbilly says:

    via germy @ Balloon Juice,

    Qasim Rashid for Congress
    @QasimRashid

    Citizens who lost health coverage in past 2 weeks due to economic collapse:

    USA 3,500,000
    Australia 0
    Belgium 0
    Canada 0
    Chile 0
    Denmark 0
    Finland 0
    France 0
    Germany 0
    Greece 0
    Hungary 0
    Italy 0
    Japan 0
    New Zealand 0
    Norway 0
    Portugal 0
    S Korea 0
    Spain 0
    Sweden 0
    Turkey 0
    UK 0
    8:46 PM · Apr 3, 2020·Twitter for iPh

    ETA: somebody in the replies noted that there had been 10 million jobs lost. Qasim replied that, yeah, but 6.5 million of those people never had health insurance to begin with.

    13
  13. Sleeping Dog says:

    @Teve:
    @Mikey:

    And Michelle baring arms!

    5
  14. Sleeping Dog says:

    @Tyrell:

    Sprint merges with T-Mobile. So there are three carriers, for now. I remember when the government broke up AT&T. Our phone bill went from $8 to $14.

    Funny because at that time I managed a medical practices business off and our cost of telecommunication dropped 50% since we were no longer required to lease the equipment from phone company. Also ended up with more feature rich office phones.

    You have to love competition.

    5
  15. OzarkHillbilly says:

    josh
    @josh_atf

    ·
    18h
    SELF-MADE BILLIONAIRES

    Bill Gates: Mother had board of IBM to hire son’s fledgling company

    Jeff Bezos: Started Amazon with $300k from parents and more from friends

    Warren Buffet: Son of congressman with investment company

    Elon Musk: Father owned emerald mine in apartheid SA

    5
  16. Mike in Arlington says:

    @Tyrell: The reason that the phone bill went up was because AT&T was subsidizing local service with long distance service. After the divestiture, they ceased being able to do that because the company that provided long distance was separate from the company that provided local service. IIRC, they subsidized local service to curry favor with the majority of the public. I think it was also the reason that calling someone long distance was such a big deal at the time.

    5
  17. Tyrell says:

    @Mike in Arlington: Thanks for that information. Our bill with old Southern Bell was on like a postage sized card. With AT&T it was three pages with a bunch of unclear fees listed.
    I like AT&T cell service. They aren’t pushy about buying their phones. I can take just about any unlocked phone in there and they get it to work with their system.
    Why do they still have the second T in their name?

  18. Michael Cain says:

    @Mike in Arlington: One of the interesting bits of history is that during the 1930s business strongly supported those subsidies: anything to get wider adoption of residential phone service. In the 1970s, business strongly opposed continuation of the subsidies, because they knew residential customers weren’t going to give up their phones.

    1
  19. Liberal Capitalist says:

    Remember when the GOP were the ones that championed States Rights over Federal Rights.

    Now:

    “The notion of the federal stockpile is that it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

    (source )

    So, you are on your own. Feds trump States.

    And… what is the result? In Colorado, Governor Polis stated in a public video yesterday that while Colorado had an order for Ventilators, with a P.O. and committed delivery date, the Federal Government intercepted the order.

    And then sent it… where? Jared’s bedroom?

    4
  20. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Dan Zak
    @MrDanZak

    A new machine designed to churn out millions of masks at high speed during a pandemic was green-lit by the Obama administration. In 2018 the Trump administration received a detailed plan on the initiative. It went nowhere.

    There is a WaPo link embedded in the tweet.

    1
  21. Kathy says:

    @CSK:

    It’s a question of moral leadership. Trump has neither.

    2
  22. Bill says:

    The Florida headline of the day-

    Cops: Crooks said they have ‘the virus’ and then stole Corona beer

    It is only appropriate this is the Business headline of the day-

    Corona beer stops production

  23. Michael Reynolds says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Bezos started with 300K and built a company worth a trillion? Come on, give some respect. That is a hell of an accomplishment by any standard.

    No one is entirely self-made. Did you get a public school education? Did your parents feed you? Then you’re not self-made. The paradigm is silly. No man is an island. (Feel free to quote me on that.) And even before environment kicks in there’s DNA. You don’t build your own DNA, you don’t craft your own environment, you’re barely a conscious participant in your own life till your teens and then most of what you ‘contribute’ is stupid.

    My philosophy (and I use that term very loosely) is that our lives are defined by four main factors – DNA, environment, free will and luck. Americans hate the idea of DNA mattering since it’s un-democratic and implies that no matter how hard I try I can never play for the NBA. Americans hate the idea of luck even more. Randomness is scary and unsettling and the opposite of meritocracy. Americans will acknowledge the influence of environment (upbringing, education) but only the good parts, the bad parts you’re meant to simply rise above.

    We insist on placing 90% of the credit or blame on free will. Thus we are responsible for all that we do wrong, and credited with all that we do right. A nice, simple dichotomy, because we aren’t capable of more nuance than black and white. Given that this is the US of A where the only value we all agree on is, money good, we use wealth as a marker of virtue, which brings us to billionaires thinking they’re self-made and vast swathes of the population nodding along.

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  24. @Michael Reynolds: Have you ever read the John Rawls?

    4
  25. Michael Reynolds says:

    @Steven L. Taylor:
    Well, I just looked him up on Wikipedia, does that count?

    3
  26. @Michael Reynolds: Some of my past students would think so, yes.

    16
  27. Mister Bluster says:

    It should be noted that United States v. AT&T was the antitrust lawsuit that ended with the divestiture of 22 operating companies and Long Lines and Bell Labs from AT+T.
    This action was initiated in 1974 by the Justice Department under the
    Republican President Gerald Ford.
    This lawsuit named AT+T. It did not affect the Independent Telcos that were never owned by AT+T.

    The size ranged from small mom and pop companies run by a husband and wife team, to large independent companies, such as GTE, Theodore Gary & Company, United Telecom, ConTel and Centel, which resembled the Bell system with vertical integration. GTE was the largest non-RBOC domestic telephone company, and included local operating companies, long line (toll) companies and manufacturing companies.

    The deregulation of the landline telephone industry, which allowed customers to buy landline telephones from Radio Shack and Walmart instead of leasing them from the local phone company was a different event that applied to the entire landline telephone industry that started in the early 1980s and culminated with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

    3
  28. charon says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    Bill Gates is still a nepotism thing, his dad was an executive at IBM.

    IBM did not need to contract out PC-DOS/MS-DOS, it chose to do so, could have done it in-house.

    1
  29. Teve says:

    @gVOR08: Rick Scott had the unemployment system re-designed here in Florida so the fewer people would qualify and he could claim that he cut unemployment rolls. @charon: no, Bill Gates Sr. was not an IBM executive. His son was privileged 10 ways to Sunday, but not that way.

    2
  30. CSK says:

    @Kathy:
    Indeed he doesn’t. He’s also on the record as saying that when he looks in the mirror he sees a 35-year-old, so he probably thinks the mask would spoil his looks.

    1
  31. Mu Yixiao says:

    Possible cure for COVID-19?

    A new study has shown that an anti-parasitic drug already available around the world can kill the virus within 48 hours. Scientists found that a single dose of the drug, Ivermectin, could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture. The next steps are to determine the correct human dosage — ensuring the doses shown to effectively treat the virus in vitro are safe for humans.

    The caveat being that, so far, it’s only been tested in vitro. In vivo testing needs to be done, but since it’s already FDA approved, it seems the concerns are just a matter of dosage, side-effects, and contra-indications.

    1
  32. Mu Yixiao says:
  33. JohnSF says:

    Good news from Britain!
    The Labour Party elects Sir Keir Starmer as leader; an actual, sensible, human being, as leader.
    It really is incredible how the crazy left has so rapidly lost it’s grip on the party.

    Partly because the left went to it’s default mode of intra-factional warfare and backstabbed each other.
    Partly also because the membership as a whole, despite the dreams of the Corbynite activists, are not exclusively hardline socialists fixated on anti-zionism and the moral perfidy of the West, and the majority actually want to win elections and improve the country.

    Labour victory is far from odds on, given their decline in Scotland, and the Conservative advance in midland/northern “working class” marginal seats. But neither is the Conservative ascendancy as firmly based as many pundits have proclaimed.

    And to Jeremy Corbyn, goodbye and good riddance.

    1
  34. Michael Reynolds says:

    @charon:
    Yes. It is definitely a good thing to have rich and/or influential parents. From the 15 years I spent living with my parents I came away with zero dollars and no education. It’s key to my inflated ego that I got nuthin’ from no one. Yay me.

    Except that I got a useful DNA package. And I was a first born, which can help. And got to travel and live in France and become bilingual, and in the Azores and not. Clearly DNA and environment played their parts, but I didn’t get the nice house because I’m virtuous, I got lucky. Random chance and my own stupid decisions (free will) landed me in Austin, Texas in 1979, where everything changed because of one chance meeting. Then using my free will I found a way to exploit the DNA package and now (if I were not in lockdown) I could be cruising in my brand new Merc convertible and sneering at all the lesser (and presumably blameworthy) losers driving Priuses.

    DNA – or I’d have no talent to exploit. Environment – because peripatetic and weird meshed well with my DNA. Free will, quite often shockingly stupid but with the occasional right call. And sheer random fucking chance because I glanced up at the right moment and saw the right girl in a window. A Venn diagram with four circles overlapping in shifting patterns, the edges all indistinct as each force influences and modifies the other, because after all, DNA is also luck, and environment shapes free will, etc…

    But see, all that conflicts with a strict good/evil Manichaean cosmology in which winners deserve to win, and none of us need to be concerned for losers because they must deserve to be losers.

    3
  35. Mu Yixiao says:

    Today is Qing Ming Jie–the Chinese “Tomb-Sweeping Festival”.

    It’s a tradition I brought home with me. The first year I was back, the weather was shit for a week, so we never got out to do it. Last year my mother and I went to the cemetery and cleaned the gravestones of my father (his is actually a bench), my grandparents, and my great-aunt.

    My mother (88) is severely self-isolating (and going crazy with boredom–she’s still very active), so I can’t take her up to clean the graves.

    We tend to focus on big things during times like these, but it’s the small stuff that really hits hard.

    ETA: Just called Mom to get her insulated water jug (for hot water), and she’s willing to go. So… not so bad.

    1
  36. DrDaveT says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    We insist on placing 90% of the credit or blame on free will.

    This is one of those things that shows a sharp divide between conservatives and liberals. Liberals are more likely to think of society as a system, where the outputs (including human behavior) are a function of the inputs and structure. Liberal political philosophy generally seeks to optimize the outputs, subject to constraints on basic fairness and individual naughtiness. Conservatives think of human behavior as entirely free, regardless of context or incentives, and (in principle at least) seek to reward moral behavior and punish immoral behavior, within the context of some allegedly universal moral code that is most likely almost indistinguishable from whatever their parents taught them.

    You see the differences most sharply in social engineering that achieves good overall results by failing to punish misbehavior. Needle exchanges are the perfect example — liberals like them because everyone is better off; conservatives hate them because they fail to punish (and even, in some sense, reward) drug abuse.

    5
  37. MarkedMan says:

    @charon: I concede your point that having an IBM connection helped. But IBM didn’t think they were giving up anything by farming this out. In fact they saved a little bit by letting him keep the rights and selling it to others. And that made sense at the time because up until MS-DOS (the name came about because IBM did retain the rights to the proper name: PC-DOS), few outside of programmers even knew what various operating systems were called. Almost no one in the general public thought of them as distinct things. By 1980 even moderately educated people could name a lot of hardware such as the Commodore 64, the DEC PDP11, or the Cray supercomputers, and they knew a number of programs such as VisiCalc, the grandfather of spreadsheets, or ELIZA, a novelty computer “psychiatrist” program. But, taking VisiCalc as an example (it was the killer app for the Apple II computer) even a geek like me had to look up the operating system (Multics). It eventually ran on a dozen different operating systems.

    Gates’ true genius was in understanding that an operating system could be branded and promoted, and that software companies would appreciate a common platform so they didn’t have to rewrite code for every new computer that came out, and that personnel computers would progress beyond toys. He turned computer hardware into a commodity and took the thunder away from the manufacturers. Which is better, a 1972 Porsche with 120 horsepower or an Oldsmobile Caprice with the same amount? Well, you would say, horsepower is only one measure and certainly not the most important. But in 1982 the computing world changed so that you could compare products with just a few numbers. Which was better, a Compaq or an HP? Well, which one had a faster processor or more RAM or two 5 1/4” floppy drives instead of one? Because they all looked the same when you turned them on. They might have briefly displayed their logo during boot up but then went right to Microsoft prompts. Gates was a business, not a technological genius, and Microsoft never had anything technologically that others didn’t have better* and earlier. But he certainly saw an opportunity and built an empire around it.

    *The same can be said of Jobs and Wozniak and Apple but I would argue that point. Using MS-DOS was essentially the same as using CPM or Linux or Unix or any other line based OS. But Mac OS had a truly specific look and feel. And although you can’t credit Apple for creating thAt graphic user interface (When asked what he had to say to those who accused him of lifting MacOS in its entirety from Xerox PARC, he replied (paraphrasing), “I consider PARC a national resource. Someone had to take their work to market, lord knows Xerox wasn’t doing anything with it!” Further development of that GUI interface was legitimately lead by Apple, especially in realizing technologies that were slow on computers costing 10 or a 100 times as much.

    2
  38. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Sleeping Dog: Yes, the cost of telephone service was transferred from businesses who had wanted and needed specialized services to consumers who mostly hadn’t used them. Glad you caught that.

  39. MarkedMan says:

    could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture

    My, admittedly depressing, comment: when it comes to medical breakthroughs almost everything promising eventually fails. The caveat is that buried amongst all the promising failures is sometimes one that works out.

    Wasn’t it just last week that chloroquine was the wonder cure? We already know that’s a bust…

    1
  40. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Tyrell: Because in a bygone era, telephony and telegraphy ran on the same system. American Telephone and Telegraph.

  41. Jax says:

    @Mu Yixiao: The good news is, I’ve got gallons of Ivermectin. The bad news is, it’s meant for cattle. It’s got dosing instructions per hundred-weight, though.

    Everybody line up, the doctor is in!!! 😉

    3
  42. JohnSF says:

    Odd, link vanished.
    Trying again: BBC link
    And Guardian

  43. Michael Reynolds says:

    @DrDaveT:
    What’s so odd to me is that conservatives are so into Christianity whose founder made an explicit point of surrounding himself with people of low status – fishermen, prostitutes – and frequently targeted established figures as well as the rich. Christ’s core philosophy was that we should do unto others as we’d have others do to us. That is a value of civilization, of community, not of rugged individualism. It presupposes the possibility that in doing so you may lose something, it suggests deferred pay-off, hence the promise of a reward in the afterlife, all of which can be helpful if you’re building a civilization but not of much use to the average cowboy being all loner-ish.

    Evangelicals are actually much more in line with the Old Testament. (They could be Jews if they were capable of reading, analyzing, discussing and had senses of humor.) What they do is take the savagery of the OT, add it to the NT’s eternal life promise, and come up with a worldview that allows them to shit on anyone having more fun than they are while nevertheless convincing themselves that they are destined for eternal reward. From ‘love thy neighbor’ to ‘I got mine and I deserve it so fuck you.’

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  44. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @charon: Gates’ father may have been on the board of IBM but he was, I believe, the managing partner of Bogle and Gates (as it was called at the time), a law firm headquartered in Seattle. IIRC, Gates’ father was a leading intellectual property (then called patent law) attorney.

    Grew up in Seattle. Went to university with kids whose parents worked for Bogle and Gates, Ryan/Thorgrimson and other big (for Seattle anyway) law firms. (I was one of the poor kids at the school.)

    ETA: IBM did have its own disc operating system back in the early days. Called it IMB DOS (I had a copy on one of my computers.) As I recall the development of things, MS DOS outperformed the IBM product and was adopted by the company for that reason.

    3
  45. Liberal Capitalist says:

    One comment on telecommunications.

    Most people don’t realize that AT&T isn’t really AT&T.

    Everyone knows about divestiture, when all the regional and LATA phone companies were created. and of course, AT&T became the long distance company.

    But the big revenue came from the regional areas due to innovation (specifically billing innovation), and long distance started getting decimated by increased completion.

    There were many powerhouses: PacBell, Ameritech, SBC…

    And them SBC did the unexpected in 2005: they bought AT&T so they could rename themselves AT&T… because America loves branding.

    For those that want to see the results of divestiture and consolidation, look here;
    https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13389592/att-time-warner-merger-breakup-bell-system-chart

    3
  46. Liberal Capitalist says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:

    IBM did have its own disc operating system back in the early days. Called it IMB DOS (I had a copy on one of my computers.) As I recall the development of things, MS DOS outperformed the IBM product and was adopted by the company for that reason.

    But IBM made HUGE leaps forward with OS/2.

    That was a great solid OS… that went nowhere.

    1
  47. Kari Q says:

    @Mu Yixiao:

    Scientists found that a single dose of the drug, Ivermectin, could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture.

    Oh great. Now people are going to start eating their dogs’ heart worm prevention medication.

    2
  48. senyordave says:

    @Michael Reynolds: From ‘love thy neighbor’ to ‘I got mine and I deserve it so fuck you.’
    I think a lot take it further than that. Paula White, who is said to be Trump’s spiritual advise, preaches something that some call the “prosperity gospel”. The thrust of this seems to be spiritual people (by her definition, of course) will be rewarded is some tangible ways. Naturally, those who are not prosperous are in some ways deficient spiritually. Basically, it is I got mine and I deserve it so fuck you, and if you are poor, well you deserve it.
    For example, in an appeal for money on her website in 2018, White says, “I Prophetically Decree and Declare Deliverance & Prosperity are Yours in 2019. This is the Year YOU Inherit YOUR Promised Land!”
    Is it any surprise that Trump’s spiritual advise would be a con artist?

    3
  49. charon says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:

    MS DOS outperformed the IBM product and was adopted by the company for that reason.

    Did IBM have something else before PC-DOS? Because I recall PC-DOS and MS-DOS as different names for the identical thing.

  50. DrDaveT says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    What’s so odd to me is that conservatives are so into Christianity whose founder made an explicit point of surrounding himself with people of low status – fishermen, prostitutes – and frequently targeted established figures as well as the rich. Christ’s core philosophy was that we should do unto others as we’d have others do to us.

    As with the parallel discussion of the history of AT&T, you have to be careful not to be fooled by spurious continuity of name. The various religions that self-label as “Christianity” mostly have very little to do with what the followers of Christ practiced in the first couple of centuries after his death — or with the man’s teachings, for that matter. Paul had more influence than Jesus, and much of Paul’s teachings have also been back-burnered.

    My personal theory is that any state religion gets co-opted by those who control the state, and ends up defending and sustaining that power bloc. Christianity was the state religion of the West for 1500 years, and did not escape that fate. Every now and then a splinter sect of fundamentalists* notices that nobody is practicing what Jesus taught, and provokes a local and/or brief period of “revival” that re-emphasizes gospel teachings, but it always gets captured by either the established church or the grifters.

    What Jesus and Paul taught was outright nonviolent small-c communism, with a large side order of “…but don’t worry the details because the Second Coming is just around the corner.” Quakers started as fundamentalist radicals rejecting the established church (and getting persecuted for that); their transformation over time into inoffensive pacifists is probably conservative capture in progress.

    *I use the word in its original sense of those who advocate getting back to fundamentals — i.e. the teachings of Christ — and dropping the accumulated traditions and trappings and digressions of the established church. In America, this started as a rejection of Catholic tradition and a reliance on only the Bible as a source of trustworthy doctrine and history.

    4
  51. Mu Yixiao says:

    @DrDaveT:

    You’re making a common mistake with your description of conservatives. You’re equating “conservative” with “Christian”, and getting it all mixed up with “contemporary, vocal Republicans”.

    This is where the bullhorn of the parties drown out the voice of the people. For a lot of conservatives, their priorities are fiscal responsibility, federalism, and defending personal rights. I live in Wisconsin–broad swaths of red with blue hot-spots. We’re a swing state because (in my experience) most voters care about issues, not ideologies. Outside of Madison–specifically the UW and its young ideologues–we’re pretty much a “live and let live” sort of folk.

    The conservatives here are far more interested in fiscal responsibility than they are in anything to do with morality. They’re farmers, factory workers, and small business owners who don’t want their tax dollars paying for (what they see as) frivolous government spending[1].

    When I lived in Texas (many, many moons ago), I it seemed 50/50. There were definitely conservatives who felt that the Republican party should be governed by “God-fearing Christians who will put an end to that unholy stuff”. But there were also a lot of conservatives who just wanted DC to get off their back and let Texas deal with stuff itself.

    And I can give equal examples on the liberal side.

    I’ve seen multiple studies and surveys over the years which suggest that 50%-70% of Americans are “middle of the road” moderates.

    The problem is that liberals only see conservatives as evangelical Christians, and conservatives only see liberals as radical socialists. If this were any other time, I would encourage you to sit down at a local bar and start a (polite!) political conversation. I think you’d find that the hard-core approaches you attribute don’t hold up when you talk to actual people.

    [1] That being said, they’re all-in when it comes to dairy subsidies, so… y’know.

    3
  52. Sleeping Dog says:

    @Liberal Capitalist:

    I’d forgotten all about OS2, that and Steve Jobs NeXT computer were two of the great personal computer failures of the 20th century. Though the NeXT OS became the basis for the revived Mac OS when Jobs returned to Apple.

    When the NeXT computer came out I was in a computer store who carried the brand and asked to see it operate, they could only show me the home screen as there were no application software available.

    2
  53. DrDaveT says:

    @charon:

    Did IBM have something else before PC-DOS? Because I recall PC-DOS and MS-DOS as different names for the identical thing.

    DOS (originally “86-DOS”) was a (pirated?) port of the existing CP/M operating system for 8080-based microcomputers made specifically to run on the 8086 processor that IBM chose for its PC. It did introduce a new file system (FAT12) and an improved memory management algorithm. Microsoft hired the guy who wrote 86-DOS, bought the rights for $75k, and renamed it MS-DOS. They then licensed MS-DOS to IBM for use on their PCs, under the name PC-DOS.

    2
  54. DrDaveT says:

    @Mu Yixiao:

    For a lot of conservatives, their priorities are fiscal responsibility, federalism, and defending personal rights.

    Yeah, I used to believe that too. Just like I believed that Christian priorities are the Golden Rule, loving their neighbors, and giving glory to God. But then I spent 50 years watching them, and discovered that there is a fundamental disconnect between what they profess and how they behave.

    The conservatives here are far more interested in fiscal responsibility than they are in anything to do with morality.

    [Snarky version of my response deleted, to be replaced by:] If this were true, we would expect them to have been loudly opposed to this administration blowing up the deficit while wasting billions on a useless border fence and an insane, unwinnable trade war. And yet, not only have they not objected, they’ve been 100% behind all of that. Clearly, they have values that they prioritize way above fiscal responsibility. (Not to mention those farm and dairy subsidies you mentioned, and any other public aid that they benefit from but “urban” people don’t.)

    And I can give equal examples on the liberal side.

    I’m not sure what you mean by ‘examples’, but if you mean that there are liberal hypocrites too, then I agree completely.

    The problem is that liberals only see conservatives as evangelical Christians, and conservatives only see liberals as radical socialists.

    I was raised a Southern Baptist in a couple of different midwest states. I have been exposed to every flavor of conservative in detail, from dirt poor to Young Republican, from bible thumper to actual Christian to atheist, from selfless philanthrope to miser. I do not believe that I have an overly-simplistic understanding of conservatism, though I will confess to having spoken here in broad generalities.

    10
  55. Sleeping Dog says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:

    After that business manager gig and an attempt at making a living doing what I loved* 🙂 I ended up in sales and found my way into telecom. Had a pretty nice 20 year run.

    *I always laugh when I hear someone tell a kid to make a career out of what you love to do. What they should really tell the kid, is find something you don’t mind doing and fits your talents and learn to love it.

    2
  56. Kathy says:
  57. DrDaveT says:

    @Mu Yixiao:

    I think you’d find that the hard-core approaches you attribute don’t hold up when you talk to actual people.

    I’m not sure what you mean by “hard-core approaches” here. What I have mostly said is that conservatives are not motivated by what they think motivates them. This leads not only to confusion, but also a lot of defensive behavior and denial when it is pointed out that their behaviors are not consistent with their self-asserted principles.

    Others here have noted that there is a body of research (such as this paper) that concludes that conservatism is not a set of policy beliefs; it is rather a tribal identification, perhaps augmented by a set of aesthetic preferences about how to approach questions of authority and change.

    ETA: To be clear, I should say that I’m talking about conservatism in the field, at the voter level. The pundits and the politicians are each drawn from a totally different population.

    5
  58. Kari Q says:

    @DrDaveT:

    To be clear, I should say that I’m talking about conservatism in the field, at the voter level. The pundits and the politicians are each drawn from a totally different population.

    Who are motivated almost to an individual by their desire to win reelection at any cost. In practice, this means that whatever the voters pretend to believe, their representatives will echo.

    3
  59. Mu Yixiao says:

    @DrDaveT:

    And yet, not only have they not objected, they’ve been 100% behind all of that.

    Show me the data to back that up.

    Political beliefs–in every jurisdiction–are a spectrum. You’re saying that “everyone on the other side is all the same”. That’s patently and demonstrably false. We’ve become more polarized, yes, but there’s still a strong central core (and “strongly conservative” is smaller than “strongly liberal”)

    You can insist that we have a binary, mutually-exclusive, combatative, set of polar opposites with no hope of reaching common or middle ground… or you can work to find common and middle ground.

    Are you trying to achieve the best for everyone? Or are you trying to paint the opposition as evil and prove you’re right?

    1
  60. Teve says:

    @MarkedMan: the last info I had on that was that it was still up in the air. Where do you get the info that it’s a bust.

  61. Bob@Youngstown says:

    @charon: I’d defer to Dr Dave, but I remember 2 different operating systems that I had load after auto exec.bat depending on what program I needed to run. Certain programs required PC-DOS while other programs would only run on MS-DOS. As I recall the MS-DOS had commands that were not available in PC-DOS O/S

  62. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    For a lot of conservatives, their priorities are fiscal responsibility, federalism, and defending personal rights.

    Yeah, each of the various splinters in the conservative sphere imagines that their particular beliefs represent a large block of the movement if not the majority.

    ETA: @Sleeping Dog: Actually, that’s pretty good advice. I think I’ll steal it for the next time I’m asked such questions by young people.

    3
  63. 95 South says:

    @Teve:

    Where do you get the info that it’s a bust.

    Trump said it showed promise, so all the press pounced on it and said it wasn’t true. That’s enough to convince some people it’s a bust.

  64. Mikey says:

    @95 South: Every word of your comment is bullshit, including “and” and “the.”

    5
  65. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @DrDaveT: I’ve come to the conclusion that when most people use the term “hard core,” they mean it simply as a pejorative for things they don’t care to try to understand. As a case in point, one of my friends has always worried about falling in among “hard core Calvinists” only to discover that most Evangelicals wouldn’t recognize John Calvin if they were introduced to him personally. And they know even less about his actual teachings.

  66. mattbernius says:

    @95 South:

    Trump said it showed promise, so all the press pounced on it and said it wasn’t true.

    Perhaps they did that because there is currently no evidence for that. Or if you have any actual verified study please post it.

    Perhaps they also did it because the President says stuff like this today about plaquenil:

    “It’s also a drug for Lupus … There’s a study out that people with Lupus aren’t catching this horrible virus … Maybe that’s correct, maybe that’s false.”

    So he admits he has no proof. He admits he’s making shit up on the spot.

    His own advisory staff walks back these statements.

    You’d said you don’t support the president. WHY ARE YOU DEFENDING HIS MAKING SHIT UP ON THE SPOT?

    Why are you defending this behavior?

    11
  67. mattbernius says:

    BTW, if I’m coming off a bit hot on this, I’m married to someone with Lupus who depends on plaquenil to survive. Given she’s immunocompromised, we have to tread Covid-19 as a potential death sentence. So the reason she’s not getting sick is because we take every possible precaution not to expose her.

    We’re also increasingly concerned that plaquenil could threathen her health. On the plus side we’re white and upper middle class — so chances our her drug supply will not be limited. However 2/3rds of lupus sufferers in the US are PoC (WoC in most cases). Many are not in as privilaged a position. So a run on medical Hydroxychloroquine could be a matter of life and death for them.

    If it helps treating COVID-19 people, that’s great. But again, there is absolutely no proven peer-reviewed clinical studies that say that’s the case. And until there are, the effing President of the United States should not be spreading these rumors.

    And people should NOT be defending or normalizing his behavior.

    10
  68. Mister Bluster says:

    Trump is a moron:
    President Trump made his first public comments about the coronavirus on Jan. 22, in a television interview from Davos with CNBC’s Joe Kernen. The first American case had been announced the day before, and Kernen asked Trump, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?”
    “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

    “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,”

    “We have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”

    “I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.”

    “very much under control,”

    “I’m not concerned at all.” On March 10, he promised: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

    1
  69. mattbernius says:

    BTW, @95South if you believe the President is telling the truth about that Lupus study and you can find it and post it here I will donate $250 to the COVID-19 relief fund of your choice.

    4
  70. DrDaveT says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:

    one of my friends has always worried about falling in among “hard core Calvinists” only to discover that most Evangelicals wouldn’t recognize John Calvin if they were introduced to him personally. And they know even less about his actual teachings.

    I knew some hard-core Calvinists once. They were really sweet people, in general, but very Presbyterian.

  71. grumpy realist says:

    @MarkedMan: I think they just came out with yet another review saying that it was No Bloody Good.

    @Sleeping Dog: I have a very soft spot in my heart for the NeXT because if it hadn’t existed I wouldn’t have been able to finish my doctoral thesis. (Supercomputers for the heavy number-crunching and Monte Carlo simulations, downloaded results, used Mathematica on the NeXT to create pretty graphs and spit out the LaTeX code necessary for the ridiculously complex matrices which showed the mathematics of the system…..)

    1
  72. I was not a good blogger today–couldn’t quite get enough cogent thoughts together apart from some nonsense on Twitter. If anyone isn’t following me on Twitter who would like in the on said nonsense, I am @drsltaylor

    1
  73. DrDaveT says:

    @Mu Yixiao:

    Show me the data to back that up.

    Here’s an example. I haven’t yet checked how Coronavirus is affecting Wisconsin support for Trump, if at all. I will admit that 100% was an exaggeration; it appears to only be 93+%.
    Here’s another, from last September:

    While Trump’s job approval rating among rural Democrats is only at 7 percent, he gets 97 percent support from rural Republicans and 51 percent support from rural independents.

    Virtually all of the people in Wisconsin who self-describe as Republicans and half of those who self-describe as independents were behind Trump on all issues and on his personal attributes, across the board, a few months ago. How many conservatives are there who don’t fall into one of those two categories?

    4
  74. mattbernius says:

    @Steven L. Taylor is worth following for the classic random Marvel Comics panels alone… Today he reminded us of the time Dr Doom’s goal was to become a Cabinet Member* (all he has to do was wait for the current administration and he would have been welcomed with open arms).

    [ed note. it was from classic FF #17. – Mediocre Matt!]

  75. 95 South says:

    @mattbernius: Show me where I defended the President’s lupus statement and I’ll donate the same. Or, I’ll apologize if I did, and you apologize if I didn’t.

  76. An Interested Party says:

    @Mu Yixiao: I’ve seen/heard the argument that most Americans dislike government in the abstract but love specific government programs, at the same time, it is quite obvious that many Americans love to have certain things but don’t want to pay for them…I guess that is what “moderate” is these days…

  77. Kylopod says:

    William Jennings Bryan ended his career defending creationism at the Scopes Trial, but in terms of his economic views that made him famous in the first place, he was in many ways the Bernie Sanders of his time, attacking a corrupt and unfair economic system slanted toward the rich, and preaching substantial government action to combat inequality. His fundamentalism and his economic populism were not viewed at the time as being in any way in conflict. In fact, his creationism was partly based on his economic outlook. Contrary to the way he was depicted in Inherit the Wind, Bryan was not a strict Biblical literalist; he accepted an old earth and was not even opposed per se to the idea of evolution below humans. His opposition to Darwinism was fueled heavily by his associating it with Social Darwinism, which he felt underlay the greed and corruption of the upper classes.

    What’s bizarre is the extent to which modern-day evangelical conservatives have adopted an almost Ayn Rand-level worship of material wealth and and unfettered free market. It’s become such a part of the fabric of today’s evangelical culture that it’s easy to forget how historically anomalous it really is.

    7
  78. MarkedMan says:

    Re: Chloroquine Phosphate. It’s already in the “diminishing claims” category. Like most such things it started as a miracle that would cure someone who had corona virus. That would have been incredibly easy to prove as in certain climes it is an incredibly common drug. I took it every week when I lived in West Africa. So if it cured the disease it would be known everywhere by now. So that’s a bust so it moves on to the next phase: claims that it makes a statistical difference. But why even investigate that? It was supposed to be a miracle cure based on nothing and now that is known to be false why should we divert resources to investigating it further? Trump, a known moron, pulled it out of his twitter feed which is 99% morons and lunatics. I can’t think of a dumber reason to spend time on something than that it popped out of the mouth of a half retarded orange baboon.

    1
  79. DrDaveT says:

    @Mu Yixiao:

    You can insist that we have a binary, mutually-exclusive, combatative, set of polar opposites with no hope of reaching common or middle ground…

    I could, but I wouldn’t. And haven’t. Did you read the list of the kinds of conservatives I have known? Some of them were admirable, wonderful, lovable people — but I doubt that a significant fraction of them are now Democrats. That’s the key here — that it doesn’t seem to be about policies for the vast majority of them.

    Are you trying to achieve the best for everyone? Or are you trying to paint the opposition as evil and prove you’re right?

    I am trying to understand how so many people who self-describe as “conservative” can not only continue to support Trump, but believe that he is honest and competent and has America’s best interests at heart, when essentially nothing he does embodies any of the alleged conservative values. Rule of law? Gone. Fiscal responsibility? Gone. Personal moral and ethical responsibility? I have to laugh, in order not to cry. Strong national defense? The man panders openly to Putin, pissed away the Iran agreement, let Kim spin him in circles, and diverted billions from essential DoD operations and support funds to build his stupid fence. Free trade? He started a tariff war with China, which is not merely anti-conservative, it’s a Princess Bride-level idiocy.

    Federalism? Trump has actively interfered in the efforts of states he doesn’t like to do what they need to do for their residents. He has attempted to coerce state and local jurisdictions to provide law enforcement support to federal priorities. He has overridden California’s autonomy to enact such environmental laws as they see fit to enact. The number of multistate lawsuits against the federal government tripled from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.

    Whatever it is that causes people to support Trump, it isn’t his promotion of the principles that conservative thinkers profess publicly.

    7
  80. An Interested Party says:

    Show me where I defended the President’s lupus statement…

    Hmm…so…

    Trump said it showed promise, so all the press pounced on it and said it wasn’t true. That’s enough to convince some people it’s a bust.

    …is more anti-press than pro-Trump? It’s easy to see how the two things can be seen as one and the same…

    Whatever it is that causes people to support Trump, it isn’t his promotion of the principles that conservative thinkers profess publicly.

    Maybe they just want to send a huge “Fuck You” to everybody else…if that is their reason, it is working out splendidly for them…

    3
  81. 95 South says:

    @MarkedMan: It must be a bust because you haven’t heard about it working, therefore it’s a waste of time to investigate whether it has an effect? Seriously? It’s not like this stuff is tiger urine; there’s reason to believe it could be effective. But you want call it a bust based on nothing except Trump mentioned it.

  82. 95 South says:

    @An Interested Party: It’s a statement of fact. You don’t have to be afraid of them. They can be true even if they don’t insult Trump.

  83. Kari Q says:

    @MarkedMan: @95 South:

    There are a few studies underway, but none rigorous enough to say conclusively. One found some benefit, but not a complete cure. One found none. Neither study had more than 50 subjects. Comprehensive studies are still in the works.

    2
  84. 95 South says:

    @Kari Q: No need for studies. MarkedMan already knows that it’s a bust. He has anecdotal information, because he took it. Or a lack of anecdotal information. Because everyone hasn’t heard that it works. So why bother testing it?

  85. gVOR08 says:

    @Kylopod:

    His opposition to Darwinism was fueled heavily by his associating it with Social Darwinism, which he felt underlay the greed and corruption of the upper classes.

    I read somewhere that his problem with social Darwinism came from reading a memoir by an American who’d directed aid in Belgium. He was housed by the German occupying forces and ate in a German officers mess. He recounted their use of social Darwinism to justify their aggression. Unfortunate,and a bit unfair, as Darwin offered no support to social Darwinism.

    Stephen Jay Gould wrote quite a history of the Scopes trial. Says it was a put up deal. The city fathers of Dayton TN were looking for a way to publicize the town. A new TN anti-evolution law got some national attention so they got Scopes to say he’d taught evolution and charged him. The ACLU expected to lose but saw the case as a vehicle for an appeal to the Supreme Court. A plan thwarted by the TN Supreme Court overturning the conviction on a technicality.

  86. MarkedMan says:

    @95 South: It’s not anecdotal. University of Washington Medical Center and has been treating hundreds of COVID patients with it for weeks. If it was a “miracle cure” they sure as hell would have seen it by now. What is their conclusion so far? That they cannot rule it out that it might have some effect. (Which is exactly what I said, that it has entered the “statistical significant stage – i.e. you can’t tell by experience but if you look closely at the data you might be able to tease something out.) They also admit they have no hope to give to their patients anyway and so they may as well give this since it doesn’t seem to have bad interactions with other drugs.

    Side note – you shouldn’t take it for a long time or in high doses as it can cause significant damage. And, speaking from personal experience, it can give you wicked bad nightmares. You know the ones where you have to wake up because someone is in your room, maybe standing over your bed with a knife, and you know you are asleep and you have to, have to, have to wake up and you just can’t? That’s what I would have all night long, variations on that scene until I finally would actually wake up as the sun came in the window, drenched in sweat.

    2
  87. MarkedMan says:

    @gVOR08: Stephen Jay Gould should be required reading for, well, for everyone. His “The Mismeasure of Man” is a truly humbling work for anyone interested in becoming a scientist.

    2
  88. mattbernius says:

    @95 South:
    I concede that at no point did you explicitly defend the President.

    I hope you will also concede that currently there is no peer reviewed evidence to support his claims and that you agree they are reckless given that lack of proof.

    Perhaps we can both find agreement in the idea that while we hope this might work, but we don’t want people who rely on Hydroxychloroquine to live suffering because of shortages due to his careless words. If this is process to work, then efforts should be taken to balance existing need with the emergency need.

    And, if you are serious about not supporting him, we can count on your vote against him in the fall.

    4
  89. mattbernius says:

    @95 South:
    I will also note that you avoidance of my challenge also suggests you think he is full of shit too… But, I suspect that you would take such an explicit position.

    Feel free to prove me wrong.

    1
  90. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    No one is entirely self-made.

    I seem to recall a certain black man being roundly criticized by figurse on one side of the political spectrum for saying something to that extent.

    As to it being a hell of an accomplishment, I wouldn’t know. I never got that kind of a head start.

    2
  91. Kylopod says:

    @gVOR08: Oh, yes. The Scopes Trial was a pure show trial; Scopes himself, who volunteered for the trial, was mainly a high school football coach who occasionally taught science classes, though it’s not clear he ever actually taught evolution. The penalty he faced was merely a fine, but the play and film show him being arrested and thrown in jail.

    But there was one element of the play and film that was surprisingly close to reality. It shows Bryan’s fictionalized counterpart dropping dead right in the courtroom as soon as the verdict is announced. That didn’t quite happen in real life, but he did die five days later.

  92. gVOR08 says:

    @DrDaveT:

    I am trying to understand how so many people who self-describe as “conservative” can not only continue to support Trump, …
    Whatever it is that causes people to support Trump, it isn’t his promotion of the principles that conservative thinkers profess publicly.

    Two reasons. One, they don’t know. FOX, Limbaugh, WSJ, Breitbart, et al ad infinitum won’t tell them, and they are determined to not know. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. Two. Race.