Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, June 26, 2021
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49 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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Simone Biles COMMANDS U.S. Olympic Trials on Day 1 with dominating performance | NBC Sports.
@OzarkHillbilly:
She’s incredible. I watched that with my jaw flapping.
@CSK: Two times she wobbled a bit on the balance beam. I guess she’s human after all.
13 year old Kayla Han is one to watch in swimming, especially after that performance.
Donald Trump will hold a rally in Wellington, Ohio (pop. 5000) today, mostly in order to trash Rep. Anthony Gonzales, who voted to impeach him. He will probably also whine about other Republicans who stabbed him in the back, as he sees it.
WTF is going on with American police? A guy saves a policeman’s life, and is then shot and killed by the next policeman on the scene. The Floyd killing hasn’t taught them anything?
https://www.newsweek.com/officer-shot-good-samaritan-johnny-hurley-who-killed-arvada-shooter-police-confirm-1604358
@George:
So much for the hero with a gun theory…
@George:
@Sleeping Dog:
What happened is a logical outcome of the nexus of private citizens inserting themselves into crime scenes and today’s force protection police policies. Someone, particularly a cop is shot, and it should be expected that LEO’s arriving on the scene will shoot first and ask questions later.
After Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in Tucson several years ago, I heard and interview on NPR with one of the citizens that subdued the shooter. That person said he was carrying that day but left his gun holstered, knowing that arriving LEO’s would like come out shooting anyone with a gun. In fact he came around a corner of a building and found two men wrestling over a gun. The one who had possession, but not control, was another citizen who was trying to subdue the shooter. He said if he had come weapon out, he might have shot the wrong guy.
Malcolm Gladwell has lost it.
In his latest season premiere of his podcast Revisionist History, he expects pedestrians and cyclists will take over the streets once self-driving cars are the norm, because these cars will act rationally and not hit people (or other cars), while people will go even more irrational and no longer use caution on the streets.
Sure, this is one possible outcome. The “lost it” part is he thinks this is great, and is happily looking forward to the day he can run in the middle of the freeway, or cross six lanes of traffic to hug someone on the other side of the street.
The cars may act rationally, be endlessly patient, and never get angry. The passengers in those cars will not be as forgiving as Darth Vader.
To a lesser degree, he sounded like a shill for Waymo.
@CSK:
Good. maybe he can ruin the GOP for the Republicans, like he’s ruined everything else that doesn’t sufficiently kiss his orange ass.
BTW Biden joke of the day:
In an unaired portion of a debate, the following scene transpired:
trump: Kiss my ass!
Biden: You’ll have to be specific, Donnie. From where I’m standing, you’re all ass.
@CSK: I don’t know what I’d do without the nearly daily reports of what’s going on with FG–probably try forget about him even more than I do now. Of course, forgetting about FG may not be the wisest possible course. [eyeroll emoji]
@Kathy: At a startup company I worked for decades ago, one of the big investors was a self-described futurist. All of his big ideas stemmed from taking current trends and extrapolating to horrible conclusions, assuming no one would ever try to change those trends.
He was also a libertarian.
The world would be obese people wearing spandex, zipping about on Segways (this was before segways, so he was thinking little scooters), relying on medicines to prevent the medical issues associate with obesity.
Also, Morlocks — a lower class kept out of sight.
He was less a futurist than a guy who read HG Wells as a kid and remembered none of it, except he kept pulling up variations of the same idea.
He was, however, right about cloud computing, back in 1998. Hard to tell if he was looking forward or back there, though.
@George:
To me that’s a very poor example of our general police ROE training problem. The officer arrives at an officer down situation and sees a guy standing there with an AR 15 in his hands? Unfortunate tragedy though it be, it’s also something of a case of who wouldn’t have shot him.
@Kathy: My theory about cars:
– we will get self-driving cars
– we will get solar powered cars
– we will combine them (obvious next step)
– we will screw up the security
– someone (14 year old boy, or Russian state actors) will hack in and set the cars free.
– autonomous, self-driving, solar-powered cars will be loose in America
– efforts to catch them will falter, but it will be decided that eventually the tires will wear out or something else will break.
– people will be repairing broken ones and releasing them again, first as a joke, but then as an entirely earnest and stupid preservationist movement.
@dazedandconfused:
Except, of course, that this analysis is wholly incompatible with the Second
CommandmentAmendment absolutist view of gun rights. If you see someone standing in public with a firearm, you should assume that this person has every right to possess and wield that firearm until proven otherwise. If they’re white, that is.I keep coming back to my basic question: when the bad guys break into my home in the middle of the night yelling “Police! Freeze!”, what am I legally entitled to do with my legally-owned and licensed personal firearms? Anyone? Buehler? That’s a much more clear-cut case than the “officer down in public” case, but we still can’t deal with it coherently.
@Kathy: I wonder if Gladwell remembers that an Uber test car hit and killed a woman walking a bicycle in AZ a couple years ago. The Volvo test car came with an emergency braking system that would have stopped it, but Uber had disabled it.
As autonomous vehicles become more common, I expect people to take advantage of them and ratfuck with them. Many people now seem to think they can just turn on a signal and change lanes without finding a hole. It’ll probably be easy to force a self-driven car to yield. I occasionally see Tesla’s in “autopilot”. You can tell because they hold position between the lane lines very precisely. That and the driver has a phone in their face. Always sore tempted to pull alongside and start inching over, or pull in front and brake.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I wish I’d never heard of Trump, but, as numerous people have observed, he’s going to be an ugly and unfortunately very prominent feature of the U.S. political landscape for at least a few more years.
He’ll do these rallies until he’s physically prevented from holding them, because they serve his two greatest needs: for adulation and for revenge.
@Gustopher:
Not too dissimilar from the premise in Sally
@Kathy: And it never occurs to him that a car which thinks rationally will be incapable of anticipating the irrational acts of humans?
Ignorance is bliss, so I guess that’s where you’d blissfully live.
@CSK: Certainly. That’s what makes completely ignoring him “not the wisest available choice.” Still if your reach doesn’t exceed your grasp, what’s a world for?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Heaven knows.
@CSK: 😀
@Gustopher: “He was, however, right about cloud computing, back in 1998. Hard to tell if he was looking forward or back there, though.”
Interesting. What would he have been looking back at?
@gVOR08:
I understand that in retirement villages that only allow speed limited golf carts, the first thing most people do when they get one is bring it to the “that guy” who knows how to disable the speed limiter.
@CSK: Part of my morning ritual is to go to YouTube and see what the late night comedians have to say. I find I am tuning Kimmel out more and more because he is still talking endlessly about TFG. I don’t want to hear about his soap opera unless and until he gets indicted.
@wr: Networked computing? I’m trying to remember the name of the 90s era attempt to sell PCs that were essentially very smart terminals. Some things were processed locally but most of the grunt work, CPU-wise, was done via a hefty computer on the network.
@OzarkHillbilly:
It doesn’t occur to him that pedestrians who completely disregard traffic, will find out that the superhuman reaction time of autonomous cars is not instantaneous.
On the other hand, programming the car to notify emergency services should be a simple matter.
Now, if the autonomous ambulance gets bogged down in traffic, caused by people crossing the street where they want, children playing baseball on the street, Gladwell doing his daily run in the middle of the freeway, cyclists pedaling in packs, etc., there’s little comfort in taking back the streets.
@MarkedMan:
Well, there’s this:
http://www.rawstory.com/trump-org-criminal
and this:
http://www.news.yahoo.com/trump-organization-could-reportedly-face-182609433.html
If I were a Republican party operative, I’d be desperately hoping Trump would be tossed in prison, because short of his death, it’s the only way they’ll ever be rid of him.
@DrDaveT:
I view the officer down situation as the more clear cut. In the other scenario we have a situation, if both sides follow their rationalizations to their bitter ends, of everybody being entitled to blow the other guy away. As Oliver Hardy might put it: “And a fine mess this is!”
@MarkedMan: Yup. A combination of Networked Computing and data centers — combining them and coming to running apps rather than just servers.
We were building a special client-server framework using the early JVM as a container.
There was also a desperate hope that the future wouldn’t be html and JavaScript, but that didn’t come to pass.
Today, in “Why reporters who cover legal issues would benefit from actually attending law school”:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/26/politics/voting-rights-act-arizona-georgia-supreme-court/index.html
Throw a headline up, and then spend several paragraphs (somewhat badly) explaining why the headline is BS.
@HarvardLaw92:
The headlines aren’t normally written by the person who writes the article. You, the author, can title your piece. Some editor will almost invariably change it.
@MarkedMan: Citrix? One of the school districts I work at has Citrix terminals in the classrooms for the teachers. Very compact. Saves a lot of desk space, even over a laptop.
@DrDaveT: Alas, your real problem doesn’t come from bad guys breaking into your house. The real problem comes when the Police break into your house. I assume you’re not black, so your problem will be smaller, but it will still be big. Hope you know a good lawyer.
@CSK:
Understood, but at least try to be concise. Sheesh.
@Gustopher:
The last time I coded anything, the Web was all PHP and JavaScript. 😀
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Client/Server, which someone mentioned above, was what I was thinking of. Citrix falls into that category. Interestingly, many businesses use Citrix, but not to save money on employee’s computers. Your school seems to be the exception, although the security, having everyone on the same version with the same options, eliminating the need to constantly upgrade hundreds or thousands of computers, and other benefits probably weigh in there too.
@HarvardLaw92:
I won’t argue with you there.
Seems like you’re admitting there’s a whip which is being wielded by white people.
https://news.yahoo.com/hotel-chain-ceo-says-bigger-135553853.html
Please give my employees more money because I sure as hell won’t.
@DrDaveT:
Being white doesn’t seem to be that much help actually — this guy was white, so was Daniel Shaver (killed by police while crawling unarmed down a hallway begging for his life). Being rich on the other hand seems to work very well against police — how many billionaires (or even people worth tens of millions) are killed by police every year?
In most places the police, on seeing someone with a gun, start with “Put your hands up” and “Drop the gun”, rather than shooting first and asking questions later.
@dazedandconfused:
In most places the police, on seeing someone with a gun, start with “Put your hands up” and “Drop the gun”, rather than shooting first and asking questions later. If the person doesn’t drop the gun then (in most countries) the shooting starts.
@Teve: He’s 91 years old. I’d be willing to bet that he can’t remember what he said 15 minutes after saying it most of the time. Anything he’s saying about racial matters, he probably channeling from what he believed in 1965 or so.
ETA: WA! Got to correct my first draft revision today. Yee haw!
Unless the person is black. See Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Philando Castille, George Floyd, Laquan McDonald, Breonna Taylor, Walter Scott, Levar Jones, etc etc etc.
eta: just for the record, none of the above had a gun.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I figured the readers here would be able to make that leap without prompting. If the behavior required by the police to prevent them from murdering you in your home would also nullify all rights to defend one’s home against invaders pretending to be cops, that’s a solution acceptable only to the police.
@DrDaveT: I believe that the solution is simple: when you hear someone beating down your door, look into your heart and ask yourself whether you have done anything to warrant the police executing a no-knock or nearly-no-nock warrant in the middle of the night.
If you cannot see into your heart, turn on your bedside light and examine the color of your skin.
Would any judge knowingly sign off on sending the police to invade the home of a suburban white person?
Mistakes will happen, of course, but the odds are in your favor. You can’t live in fear, of something with such a tiny chance of killing white suburban you.
It’s like covid: its far more dangerous to those other people who have lived their lives badly by getting pre-existing conditions or getting old.
You’re worrying over other people… you’re worrying over nothing.
My brother sent me a video which he claims is of a current anti-lockdown rally in London. I don’t trust my brother on anything, so I don’t know whether it is real… but…
My immediate reaction is that it’s time to start deliberately infecting the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. At a certain point you can’t argue with the willfully stupid. If they want to go for herd immunity the old fashioned way… let’s get it over with.
So, I guess I am in favor of weaponizing a virus and deploying biological weapons against protesters. Go figure.
(I would also accept FEMA re-education camps, and offering them a choice of vaccine or virus — I’m not a cruel man)
My brothers are also sending me “climate change is a hoax” stuff, while it’s 100 degrees in Seattle, and the next few days will be worse.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Or poor and white. Like Daniel Shavers, or any of the 50+ unarmed white men killed by police every year.
Three times more blacks and indigenous people per capita are killed by police than whites every year. Hundreds of thousands more poor people (of any race) per capita are killed by police than rich people (of any race) are killed by year. Which do you think is a bigger factor in police killings, race or wealth?
@George:
In any given encounter, race — and it isn’t even close. In a traffic stop, the white janitor has much better odds than the black executive.