Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, December 5, 2020
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82 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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Hooboy, 3:42 and I’ve already got 3 to pass along. First from Adam Silverman over at Balloon Juice, a good piece on why A Retired General Officer or Flag Officer Should Not Be the Next Secretary of Defense. The nut of it:
The whole of it is worth reading.
SQUIRREL!!
Ocasio-Cortez hits back at critics who pounced on $58 ‘Tax the Rich’ sweatshirt
Christian group tears down mysterious monolith on California mountain
It’s even money on whether or not they burned the cross after erecting it.
No no, Ms Mayor, these are Christians. Don’t you understand how superior they are to all others and how we must all defer and cater to their special feelings?
China conducting biological tests to create super soldiers, US spy chief says
There you have it folks, Jason Bourne is Chinese.
The U.S. Has Passed the Hospital Breaking Point
And yet, New Jersey investigates Republican gala over Covid rule breaches
A rather large part of me hopes that this asshat has a compound fracture of his leg and is denied surgery because they don’t have the time, the space, or the personnel to fix him up and that he then spends the rest of a very long life in constant pain with an inability to walk more than 25 feet at a time.
Eric Feigl-Ding
@DrEricDing
My bank has closed their lobby. If one needs to go inside (to access a safe deposit box for instance) one needs to make an appointment ahead of time. All dealings with tellers are done at the drive thru. Which by the way is a horrific infringement on my freedumb. I should be able to conduct face to face mask free banking any time I feel like it. trump should issue an executive order banning this unchristian practice immediately.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, I guess my first question would be: Why would anyone think that a piece of free-standing metal is anti-Christian? Or un-Christian? Were pagans observed worshiping it and making sacrifices to it?
And even if it were pagan? So what? The world is full of pagan symbols.
@OzarkHillbilly: FYI – their request was limited to public-facing bank workers, like tellers. Not traders.
http://www.thebulwark.com/this-is-your-brain-on-newsmax/
Worth a read.
@SKI:
Note, they differentiate, starting by saying the all inclusive “financial services employees” and then separately speaking of “front-line bank employees”…. “at a minimum”.
They want it for all, and are trying to piggyback it in on the need to protect tellers. As I mentioned above there are already ways to do so, which is not to say there aren’t good reasons for putting tellers in the 1b group, there may well be.
The Kraken, Sidney Powell and QAnon:
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55090145
The Abuser and the Terrorist
The under recognized web of shame, honor, and twisted masculinity that connects domestic violence and political violence.
Food for thought. She has a lot to say, more than can be put into an article, hence it’s an excerpt from a book.
@CSK:
If you’re not with them, you’re against them. Everyone and everything must support them or is the enemy. Do they make a stink about Starbucks holiday cups because they carry an anti-Christian message? No, they just fail to carry a pro-Christian message. These people are incredibly insecure.
Forget where, but I saw a nice piece yesterday saying it’s comforting to see Hannitty back to bitching about Starbucks cups. After four years of Trump it’s nice to be back to familiar, trivial nonsense.
@CSK: Rod Blagojevich, Sean Spicer, Joseph diGenova, Dinesh D’Souza, Richard Grenell, Rick Gates, Matt Gaetz, Dick Morris, all together…As Tim Miller said, a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
From Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing:
At what point do we stop making excuses for these people? After all, they had access to the same data as I and yet an 8 point majority just voted for 4 more years of this shit. Misery gave trump a 15.4% margin and I can assure you, I’m not excusing a single one of those pig ignorant pricks.
@gVOR08:
Gee, I hope they never get loose in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or Boston’s MFA, or the Chicago Art Institute, or the Getty in Los Angeles. Lotsa pagan shit in those places.
@Kingdaddy:
That was a good piece, wasn’t it?
@OzarkHillbilly:
We’ve always known that when the vaccine became available that the wealthy would seek to finagle their way to the top of the queue. This is one attempt at getting the camel’s nose under the tent.
Why pray tell bank tellers? Why not the checkout person at the grocery and bus drivers?
@OzarkHillbilly:
They actively wanted to be told to conduct their normal lives, employment, business etc., that’s the source of the approval of Trump’s handling of Covid-19.
@Sleeping Dog: This is one time where I think the govt should be allowed to sell vaccines to the highest bidder: “$415,649 going once… going twice… SOLD to the man in the pinstripe suit!”
They have already been defined as essential workers.
@charon: Tell people the lies they want to hear and they will accept them without question.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The Governor ostriched her way through spring and summer. If I don’t look at it, it will go away. Echoed Trump’s blarings.
A very substantial threat you ignore because of partisan fealty. I hate her.
In raw numbers Reynolds killed more people than Noem. Though Trump has the top slot nailed.
Early in the spring I e-mailed my state Rep and Senator to encourage a more proactive state response. The replies were hearty and surface optimistic. Subtext was “not gonna happen”.
What can I do? Think good thoughts, they said. Volunteer.
They knew Reynolds was going to ignore this pandemic until it became an undeniable crisis.
They were correct. Exactly what happened.
The inaction is shameful. Immoral. Unprofessional. Monstrous.
@gVOR08:
If you’re not part of the solution then you’re part of the problem?
Though I suspect lack of a sense of humour is the bigger problem — anyone who’s seen or even heard of 2001: A Space Odyssey should be able to get the monolith joke.
Responding to various above:
I don’t see Aragorn as the hero of LOTR. He shows up well into Book One. He is sent off on a side jaunt for most of Book Two. He scores multiple ‘assists’ with the central goal, the destruction of the ring, but only assists. And he’s gone by the end. He’s certainly important, but the restoration of the monarchy is a side effect of the destruction of the ring – Frodo’s plotline. Aragorn’s success is a function of Frodo’s, not the other way around. Had Frodo failed, Aragorn would have had no chance.
In terms of ‘screen time’ in the books, Frodo clearly dominates, but who else is always present? Sam. He carries the central plot, but he fails in the end, seduced by the ring. Sam, OTOH, does not fail but is only failed by Frodo. Nevertheless Sam persists, literally carrying Frodo up Mount Doom. Sam bore the ring briefly and was able to give it up. And it is Sam who we hear from last as a weakened Frodo sails off into the west.
Tolkien was an old-school Christian. Frodo’s life is sacrificed, but unlike Christ who could, presumably, have magicked himself right off the cross, Frodo fails the ultimate test. Who never fails the test? Sam. Who forms the foundation of Hobbit society going forward? Not Frodo, Sam.
Tolkien was an Oxford don but he had a middle class (in the American sense) background, he was not posh. So WW1 would not have been his first introduction to the hoi polloi. The relationship between officers like Tolkien and their soldiers, and particularly their batmen, which is Sam’s role, is interesting. Occasionally the toffs (and poets) did manage to notice that they were no better on the battlefield than the common soldier.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Why do they insist on fucking with AOC? She’s always three steps ahead on social. They’re like drunks heckling a comedian and imagining they’re going to win a verbal confrontation. Nope.
Yes, this is the wrong thread. If I had a goddam edit function…
@Michael Reynolds:
Samwise is the undisputed hero of LOTR. If not for him, all was for naught.
At some point we must stop allowing ourselves to be scammed. Thus I propose a small step toward consigning Trump to obscurity:
NO TRUMP TUESDAY!
This Tuesday let’s not mention him. I know he’ll be doing something outrageous, but let’s just let it go. Ignore him on this website.
@CSK: jesus.
Sotheby’s is selling an Ansel Adams collection. In the collection is this picture.
@sam:
That’s a nice sky.
Meme on FB
@sam: 20 years ago I took a look at Ansell Adams’s stuff but it left me cold. Maybe I should take another look at it.
There are little places like Hernandez all through northern New Mexico, where they speak a version of Spanish traceable back to the conquistadors.
@Slugger:
You are tempting fate. He might do something outrageous and obscene that needs to be mentioned. Or preposterous.
What if he says this: “A lot of people are saying that I’m winning this election. A lot of people. It’s because I see the big picture. It’s like the Buddha asked, ‘would you rather sit on a dick and eat a cake, or sit on a cake and eat a dick?’ People struggle with that. For hundreds of years people have struggled. But I know — Neither. It’s easy when you see the big picture.”
Or he will sign an executive order to set homeless people on fire.
@Gustopher: Of course he’ll say or do something outrageous: that’s what he does. We don’t need to give him our attention. Our attention is valuable; let’s withhold it from him.
@Slugger:
If you can do it, I salute you. Trump’s like a 20-car-pile-up for me: I don’t want to look, but I can’t keep myself from so doing.
@Slugger: most days he’s about a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. You’re tempting fate that No Trump Tuesday will be way more than 7.
If the Four Seasons Lawncare Fiasco was on a No Trump Tuesday, would you want to miss it?
Oh, god, I just started laughing. I’m going to be that way for the rest of my life, aren’t I?
Apropos of nothing:
We appear to be having our first major snowstorm of the season: up to 18 inches in some areas. It started at 3:30 and the plows have already gone by. Oh, well: I did my panic buying yesterday.
Coffee? Check.
Vodka? Check.
Toilet paper? Check.
Italian sausages? Check.
I’m good.
@Teve: Hey! There’s only so much money out there. More for you is less for me. Try to guess which side of the equation I prefer to stay on.
You know that it’s not like when I was young and one salary kept a person’s family with a roof over their heads at least, right? Them days is gone.
The Breaking Bad finale was in Sept. 2013.
My brain rejects that. That was maybe three years ago. Tops.
2013? No freaking way.
I know the timeline is true. Part of my memory processing is stunned by that date and refuses to accept it.
I know this is true. It feels false.
@CSK: You’re so lucky–snow and Italian Sausages. All we have here is cold temperatures and a thermal inversion/stagnant air alert. But my new year’s supply of albuterol came a couple of weeks ago, so I’m good, too.
@CSK:
Be safe. Have fun with it. I get a big charge out of big snowstorms. It’s primal.
File under: Not Surprised
First shipments of coronavirus vaccine will fall short
@CSK: @Just nutha ignint cracker:
There is a relatively famous local sausage maker. People raved about it.
I tried it and it was weird – too much fennel, too much some spice I think is paprika.
Now I buy a pound a week. It no longer tastes weird. Time is funny.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
The sausages are simmering on the stove in a tomato, green pepper, onion, and garlic-basil sauce. I’m sipping a vodka martini. The plows have made 3 passes so far. If the power doesn’t go out, I’ll be fine.
@de stijl:
It’s beautiful here. Jen and Sleeping Dog just a bit to the north of me are probably experiencing the same thing.
This month we have new Sigur Ros and new The Mountain Goats and Sean Bonnette (AJJ) does a weekly at home concert Live From Quarantine.
2020 sucks hard, but there is hope. All is not lost.
@Michael Reynolds:
Tolkien was a bit ambivalent about Sam; and “ordinary” Hobbits in general (both upper and lower class: Bilbo and Frodo both being very much out of the ordinary) .
In one of his letters he said Sam had
With the difference from most Hobbits that he was at least open to curiosity and awe in regard of the elves and Numenoreans.
OTOH he also wrote of Samwise as the “chief hero”, the “jewel among hobbits”, “the geniune hobbit” (probably in the sense of the Hobbits indifference to the glories of the ancient world being linked to their indifference to power, and thus less open to the corruption of the Ring)
On the third hand IIRC Tolkien also said that if Sam had had to endure being the Bearer (not to mention morgul-wounds etc) as long as Frodo, he would have failed as well.
Hence my love of her. I wish I was half as quick as she is.
@Slugger: I’m on board with that, tho sad to say I’ll need a reminder come Tuesday morn. Hope you get up early. 😉
@CSK: We’re doing sunny with highs in the 50s and no wind this week. We’re in a new city so I’m still learning where I can get a variety of things to go. Tomorrow I’m going to hit up one of the barbecue places for their sampler.
@de stijl:
I recall you saying you liked Millwall after I referred to their “Nobody likes us, we don’t care” attitude; and I referred to them as “a rather argumentative bunch”.
Well, that was British understatement.
I should have been clearer.
Gonna be now.
There a reason nobody f@ckin’ likes them.
They are not very nice people:
Millwall fans embracing their long-awaited return to the stadium by … booing their players — and Derby’s — for taking the knee. What the hell is wrong with these people?
I had a nice walk today. Then a sit.
Looked at bare trees and a creek bed. Listened to aggro music.
Then a nice walk back home.
Super sweet!
@de stijl: Good.
@Michael Cain:
I think you said you and your wife had bought a townhouse, am I correct? I’m guessing you have a small backyard where you can relax and have a drink. Perhaps cook out. I miss not having a private outdoor space of my own, but then…I don’t have to take care of it. Everything’s a trade-off.
@JohnSF:
Always a sucker for an underdog, but racism is not a thing I am ever going to be okay with.
Fuck Millwall.
Newcastle it is then, I reckon.
Riots? The dissolution of the state? Tune in tomorrow to find out!
@JohnSF:
I imagine most writers have ambivalent feelings about characters. I do. I see my characters as employees. I hire them to do a job. Reluctant hero. Main villain. Significant other. They are all imperfect instruments, deliberately so, usefully so.
It sounds like one of those bullshitty author things to say, but characters often end up surprising you, going in ways that are logical but not what you anticipated. And that seeming lack of control is what you hope happens, on the page it’ll mean the character has a sense of life about them. It’s also one of the advantages of not outlining, at least to me, it frees you to improvise and embrace randomness.
I give my employees a long leash and, if they don’t work out, I kill them.
@Michael Reynolds:
Absolutely. The best fiction is always character-driven. Otherwise it falls flat.
@JohnSF:
If you are looking for a scrappy US baseball team, I highly recommend the St. Paul Saints.
Not affiliated with an MLB team. They have a cute trained pig that runs the balls out to the ump. Bill Murray is a part owner.
They used to play at Midway Stadium in a bleak industrial zone north. Sold good, local beer. A mile from where I went to Uni. Nuns in the right field bleachers doing massages. Trains running directly behind center field blasting horns randomly.
They have a new park downtown which I have not been to yet. Word is it is pretty awesome.
@de stijl:
Sounds interesting, pig-wise 🙂
And if I can understand the rules of cricket, I’m pretty sure I can figure out baseball.
Just reassure me it’s not like American football that stops every couple of minutes for no apparent reason.
(As a rugby fan I can appreciate the sheer prowess and accuracy of American football but for the love of Osiris can’t they just GET ON WITH IT!)
@JohnSF:
American football was born from rugby, but became a different animal. Four downs. Set plays. Compact, intense action, then pause until next play.
In gaming terms, a turn based RTS.
Go Vikes!
@CSK:
It is only raining here. An advantage to being about 1/3 of a mile to that large, weather effecting puddle to the east. I expect that if we get any snow it will be less than an inch of slush. It will melt tomorrow.
@de stijl:
The news probably hasn’t made it to Des Moines, but the Saints will be the Twins’ AAA farm club.
@de stijl:
Whereas Rugby is the real time zerg rush! LOL.
Watched the NFL slot on BBC late Saturday a few times.
Intense, but I can’t get into the lack of flow and continuity.
Too “bitty”.
Key difference apart from that is that forward passes are legal; it would be laugh to try a rugby game that allowed forward passing, but not the team swap-overs thing or off-the-ball tackles.
Probably go crazy as each team clocked up a try ten seconds after kick-off!
Thinking about it, it’s prob. only off-ball tackling that make American football anything but just a “boom-try” sequence.
@de stijl:
George Will: “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”
Anyone who has attended a live NFL game has to be impressed by the difference. The TV directors are amazing, filling the dead space between plays with a replay, a shot of the coach on the sidelines, cut to the cheerleaders, maybe showing the players shuttling in and out, and occasionally the commercials. The live experience, OTOH, has a lot of down time punctuated by intense group experience that simply doesn’t come across on the screen.
@Sleeping Dog:
Same in Newburyport. I’m about 20 miles further inland.
@Sleeping Dog:
Should anyone care, here it’s 1°C, 100% humidity, mist.
Rising tomorrow to a balmy 4°C, 93% humidity, cloud.
Sunrise 8:03, Sunset 3:56
Lovely.
@JohnSF:
Sounds just like England in December.
@Sleeping Dog:
No shit! As of when?
Actually, I’ll push back on that. You have to show proof. I’ll eat crow, no prob. But I seriously doubt that and Google agrees.
The Iowa Cubs are a very nice AAA club. They have a pretty decent park just south of downtown. I used to live in a highrise about a mile north.
Been to a shit ton of games. Best is when they play the Isotopes. Makes my Simpsons’ nostalgia relevant.
After the seventh inning they withdrew guards on the turnstiles so you could walk in unchecked.
My buddy Pete and I would get boozed up at the Mile and shimmy in at the top of the eighth.
@CSK:
Newburyport?
I recognise that name from somewhere.
H.P. Lovecraft and the fishy folks?
@CSK:
*ding* We have a winner. 🙂
@JohnSF:
I don’t think Lovecraft did Newburyport. He was Rhode Island. Newburyport is on the northeast Mass. coast. But that’s a good guess on your part.
@JohnSF:
How did I ever guess????
One time at the Metrodome I had a bad epiphany.
I can’t recall. It might have been the Vikes, or the Twins, or the football Gophers.
I am sitting on a plastic seat under a plastic dome looking at a plastic field. Woah!
The Timberwolves played their inaugural season at the Metrodome. I went to two games. It was horrific.
The coolest thing I ever saw at the Metrodome was Kent Hrbek hit a home run so solid that it was a straight vector line from his bat until it hit a broadcast booth above center field.
That ball would have gone a half mile before gravity took over if not for the intervening infrastructure.
@JohnSF:
I spent the majority of two days trying to understand cricket. It is really opaque to a newbie. The rules are very obscure on scoring.
Australian Rules Football OTOH is bonkers fun. I have no idea what is happening, but it is glorious.
@JohnSF:
I recall reading years ago TV broadcasts of NFL games were popular in the UK. In 2007 they actually played a game in London. Supposedly everyone reacted, “Three bloody hours?!” They’d been cutting dead time out of the broadcast games.
If you have clothes in your closet you do not use regularly, please consider a donation to your local homeless shelter.
@de stijl:
😀 😀 😀
Man Shouted “Fuck You, I’m Millwall” Before Taking On London Terrorists Bare-Fisted
@Mikey:
Dude! I love the concept of Millwall. I would love to embrace Millwall. (I ordered a jersey due to be delivered sometime next week.)
Not down with a solid cadre of racist fans.
It’s English football, so there’s going to be racist fans.
But I prefer my club’s fans to boo out the racist wankers rather than chime in.
If Man U and City were not so big and powerful, I would be totally okay with Madchester just because of the explosion of musical talent in the late 70s. That was glorious.
But no way am I gonna root for the EPL equivalent of the Dallas Cowboys. Fuck Jerry Jones.
Highly recommend 24 Hour Party People.
RIP, Ian.
@JohnSF:
Off the ball “tackles” are blocks and are 100% legit (within the rule-set).
Linguistic oddity: you say sport when we say sports. You say maths when we say math.
@de stijl: conservation of the letter s.
I’m betting there are all sorts of words that are missing a u in England to make up for all the colours and favours. I have no idea what those words are though. Thogh?
@Gustopher:
That is the first physics based linguistic theory I’ve ever heard.
For every phoneme there is an equal and opposite anti-phoneme. That kinda explains Scandinavian vowels.
Hawaii absorbed our cast off u’s. Ukulele. Muumuu. Pu pu platter.
It amuses me when Brits claim spelling rights on certain words. Dude! That word is categorically a borrow word from French. It’s barely five centuries old in usage.
@JohnSF:
Baseball is like Netflix when you have spotty wifi.
Action for a few dozen seconds and then the ouroboros buffering endless circle.
Baseball is great when you wanna drink beer and jaw with your friends for three hours. A half hour of that is relevant gameplay.
Mostly its gassing about with your lads / ladettes.
It’s great fun. I recommend.