Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, September 10, 2023
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40 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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There’s a piece in the Atlantic about the speech Condaleeza Rice would have given if 9/11 hadn’t happened. It was meant to rally support for the Bush Administration’s desire to go full speed ahead with Reagan’s anti-ballistic missile program (Star Wars). It’s an interesting article on its own, but one tangent caught my eye: a certain Senator from Delaware who was publicly challenging the focus on the ABM program, arguing that it was taking too much attention from the threat of terrorism. 10 days later Saudi Arabian hijackers flew the planes into the twin towers and the Pentagon.
This is why I put aside the optics about frailty and old white men and high gas prices and all the other political bullshit that consumes the press. Biden is a damn good thinker. He understands the world and our place in it. I am glad he is President at this moment in history, and I am more than happy for him to get four more years.
@MarkedMan: Interesting, for some reason or other I am not surprised.
Today in GOP: DeSantis backs Florida surgeon general in urging residents against new Covid vaccines
Democrats say deaths will follow false claim by Dr Joseph Ladapo that new boosters were not tested on humans
New Mexico officials call for governor’s impeachment after firearms restriction
But but but how ever will all the pansy assed republican men defend their precious little tykes from the drag queens trying to groom them?
Link to the clinical study of the new vaccine.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/moderna-says-updated-covid-vaccine-is-effective-against-newer-variant-2023-09-06/
Steve
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m a resident of FL. My GOP governor is trying to kill me. D Governor Grisham is trying to prevent her citizens from getting killed. Party of life my ass.
@OzarkHillbilly: It’s darkly comic to hear the same officials talk as if they had some closer association with the founding documents of the country, which started with a promise to protect “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” all three of which are impossible if you’re killed by gunfire or a communicable disease.
After sixty years:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/09/nation/jfk-assassination-witness-breaks-his-silence-raises-new-questions/?p1=HP_Feed_ContentQuery
@gVOR10: I have “Pro-Life my ass” on the back of my truck.
Today is the second anniversary of Teve‘s death in a car crash. Still miss you, pal.
Interesting that the Florida surgeon general eschews vaccines. When I worked in a medical field, I got vaccinated for two reasons. One, I was around sick people and wanted to minimize the risks to me. Two, I wanted to decrease the risk of being a vector for other people. Being young and healthy is pretty good protection from disease, but there is a responsibility to others.
@CSK: Have you noticed Mu around lately? Wasn’t he planning a trip to China?
@Slugger:
Seemingly a foundational difference between liberals and conservatives.
As to the FL Surgeon General, see Jame’s Two Chinas post for a discussion of the behavior of underlings in autocratic regimes. Would a mediocrity like Ladapo have had a shot at state SG without sucking up to someone like DeUseless? Speaking of which, I see more stories about our FL insurance crisis, which Puddin’ Boots is ignoring.
@gVOR10:
I don’t think this is really a liberal/conservative divide. It is, of course, a Libertarian thing but I don’t consider that a conservative philosophy in any way. But more importantly, it is an obnoxious and/or clueless thirteen year old mentality thing, and that makes up the bulk of self identified Republicans today.
“[Venus and Serena] are the reason why I have this trophy today, to be honest,” she said. “They have allowed me to believe in this dream growing up.”
-Coco Gauff.
@MarkedMan:
To mask or not was an easy test of patriotism. If one cared about one’s fellow Americans, the choice was obvious.
@MarkedMan: I keep picturing a radar chart. They’re often used to compare things on multiple criteria. I keep picturing one with arms scaled 0 to 5 labeled “foreign policy”, “economic policy”, “respect for the office”, and so on. Comparing Biden and Trump, Trump would be represented by a tiny polygon wavering between 0 and 1 compared to Biden’s large polygon of 4s and 5s, except for one dip on the “age” axis down to .9 inside Trump’s 1. No brainer.
Also, too, an administration is not one man. Should Biden becomes incapacitated he leaves his administration in place, cooperative and competent, compared to the clown act Trump would leave behind.
@Jax:
I don’t know about the China trip, but he usually doesn’t post on weekends, as far as I recall.
While we’re talking about responsibility to others, I have noticed much more litter and garbage in public places. In parks and camping sites, there are piles of garbage often a very short walk from a proper receptacle. Does being upset by this make me too old to live?
@MarkedMan:
I occasionally refer to Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. But it looks like you already agree that current American conservatism falls under his argument that conservatism is what conservatism does. But he adds that conservatism was always so. Dictionary “conservatism” and political “conservatism” are very different things. And the Republican Party profits from their conflation.
I would add that the Billionaire Boys Club Republican funders, who still call the shots, are very libertarian.
@Kingdaddy: @gVOR10: I agree that there are fundamental differences in moral perspective between the right and left. That said, I think the larger differences are epistemological: they’re dependent on what factual claims each side accepts as true and real. In the information bubble in which they live, gun ownership makes the country safer; and Covid was a plandemic that was never as dangerous as the Deep State pretended, it can be cured by ivermectin, and vaccines are the true public health danger.
Of course none of these claims can be taken purely at face value. For example, the arguments about guns are deeply racially coded. When they talk about responsible gun owners, they aren’t usually picturing a black or brown person. That’s the image they think the so-called responsible gun owners are protecting the community against.
That’s why stating that “the right believes X, the left believes Y” is too simplistic a framing. The right’s perception of reality is shaped around its presuppositions. To some extent that’s true of everyone, of course. But on the right there’s typically an extreme absence of introspection, since their entire worldview is based on trusting their intuition. It’s only on the right that you see people constantly making raw appeals to “common sense” and to the idea that they just know something is true, without having to engage in any further examination. It’s a recipe to being blind to their own biases, and to ignoring or dismissing evidence that runs contrary to how they think the world ought to work.
It’s exactly this mindset that leads people to storm the Capitol in the name of protecting democracy. It’s sort of like a guy who goes on a shooting spree in his neighborhood, then after being caught he tells the cops he was protecting the neighborhood by getting rid of serial killers. It’s easy to manipulate people into becoming the very thing they claim to oppose, once you understand the labels that govern the way they think.
@OzarkHillbilly: “It’s an honor to be in that stat with Althea Gibson, Serena, Venus, Naomi, Sloane. They paved the way for me to be here. I remember Sloane winning this trophy in 2017. I had lost in the final of junior US Open. It was an inspiring moment for me to see her win because I grew up watching her. And I’ve known Sloane since I was 10. Obviously, Serena and Venus — words can’t describe what they’ve meant to me. I hope I’m continuing a legacy. I hope another girl can see this and believe they can do it. Hopefully their name can be on this trophy too.”
– Coco Gauff
Get this girl all the endorsement deals, she says all the right things.
@Jax: Jax, I’d noticed that and attributed Mu’s absence to his trip. I believe he was going for a few weeks?
@steve: A week or so ago, I saw some people on social media getting wound up saying that the administration was going to limit distribution of the booster to over 65s and those with compromised immune systems. I can’t seem to find anything supporting this…have you heard anything along those lines? I really want a booster before we travel in late October.
@Kylopod:
Mzmy of us on the left do this too, I think.
But knowing it to be true that ‘racism is an empirical social evil that demands vigilance’ and ‘poor people should not die for lack of healthcare’ leads to less dangerous dogmas and behaviors than knowing it to be true that ‘Hillary is running a pedophile ring in the basement of this pizza shop that doesn’t have a basement’ and ‘Trump won and was thwarted by mass fraud, despite other Republicans outperforming him on the same ballots — and despite his own judges and audits rejecting his sore loser whining.’
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m pretty sure a majority of Albuquerqueans are (1) not at all unwilling to do things to curb gun violence, and (2) don’t consider that a radical progressive agenda.
@OzarkHillbilly:
@DK:
Got to meet Coco a few months ago when she guest starred on our series. She was awesome.
Fast forward to 1:55 mark of first video:
https://youtu.be/DOaIb7pLqiU?si=JNAUcaAnpnsi4o7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rAvvsxcLK4
She was a sweetheart. Total pro, even though it was her first acting gig. She has a great team behind her.
@DK:
I agree. Coco’s a champ in more than one regard.
@Slugger: I have noticed it. I’m a hiker and birder and over time the rudeness of others on the trail, the trash and dog scat have increased. Seems to have started during Covid.
@Slugger:..too old to live
Don’t be so hard on yourself. I worked on the side of the road for landline telephone companies for 35 years. Urban and rural. There was always trash* everywhere.
*here I mean litter not the people
@DK:
I make a distinction between moral presuppositions and factual claims. Granted, the line between the two can get blurry, as there’s often an empirical component behind moral beliefs (such as the idea that racial differences are social and cultural rather than biological). But it’s still an important distinction. And there comes a point where a moral belief (e.g. murder is wrong) is just an axiom that can’t be proven or disproven.
I wasn’t trying to imply that intuition is inherently bad. To some extent it’s unavoidable. But there is a clear difference between those who make it a fundamental part of their worldview and those who are more skeptical of it. Based on what I’ve seen, the left (by which I mean the mainstream left–I’m not talking about tankies) usually fall in the latter category, while the right typically falls in the former category. This is a generalization, of course, and it’s not true of everyone on the left or right, but I do think it’s overwhelmingly the case.
For example, here is what Wayne Allyn Root wrote last year after the disappointing midterms:
“When something is so obvious, if the outcome makes no sense, if the outcome is literally impossible, then it is what it is. Forget ‘proof.’ You know it. You saw it. You felt it. You experienced it. It happened. It’s real.”
Similarly, I watched one of Luntz’s focus groups a while back, where most of the people were convinced Trump won the 2020 election. The main reason they cited wasn’t any direct evidence of fraud, but the “fact” that Biden spent the campaign in his basement. To them, the notion that Biden could have won made no sense. They didn’t need proof of fraud because the election outcome to them was self-evident. Trump didn’t just happen to win and have the election stolen from him, it was literally impossible that anything else could have happened.
None of this is to suggest that the left has no biases or blind spots–far from it. But you almost never find them declaring something to be so self-evident it doesn’t even require examining the evidence–certainly not election outcomes. Indeed, the contrast in how Dems reacted to the 2016 election is a perfect example. They were shocked, to be sure, but they didn’t claim the vote was fraudulent (and no, that’s not what Russiagate ever claimed), they certainly did nothing to obstruct the transfer of power, Hillary conceded the very next day, and there was no mass of Democrats spending the next several years claiming that Hillary won.
The outcome of 2016 led most Democrats to rethink their understanding of the American electorate. That is the opposite of how Republicans reacted to the 2020 outcome. They rethought nothing, because their entire worldview is based on the belief that their perception of reality can never be wrong, which is fundamentally not the way the left, broadly speaking, sees the world.
@Kylopod: Kahneman and Tversky talked about “System 1” and “System 2” in human cognition. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and easy — the realm of hunches, gut feelings, first impressions, guesses, and also prejudice and implicit bias. System 2 is slow, rational, logical, and hard — the realm of reasoning and facts and evidence and proof.
I’m not sure it occurred to them that there is a segment of society that actively rejects System 2 entirely, and only trusts System 1. While I suspect that there are some on the far left like that, it seems to be endemic in the current GOP base.
Jen- Nothing definite yet. That kind of decisions will either be made at the state level or individual network, I think it will be the latter. The ID folks think there is enough covid fatigue that demand wont be huge.
Steve
@steve:
My gut says the opposite. Well, maybe not “huge” but at least robust.
@DK: She’s good, and I’m not talking about her tennis game.
@Kylopod: Remember the RNC “autopsy” of the 2012 election?
They burned that fvcker at the stake in 2016.
@OzarkHillbilly: I remember Jon Stewart doing an impression of Reince Priebus solemnly intoning, “Remember, when you tell a gay person that their love is too unnatural for society to recognize: Smile!”
@MarkedMan: I wonder how many people get their flu shot at their place of employment. My wife’s school district arranges flu shots, free of charge, at the various schools in the district. Being in the military, the flu shots were easily available but not mandatory. Tried to find online an estimate but couldn’t find one. To many, convenience can be the deciding factor.
@Scott: FWIW, I think it’s becoming a thing for family members to get it there to. My wife and I will get all three doses (COVID, flu and RVS) at my workplace later this month. No insurance BS to deal with.
@OzarkHillbilly:
And the good Republiqans of New Wayvo Mexico thank you for finally seeing the light and coming to your senses.
Wait… Were you being snarky when you said that? [chagrined emoji]
@CSK: Mu posted a couple of days ago on the post about Coach paralyzing the Senate and Pentagon.
@DrDaveT: Sure, but which sounds like the greater threat:
or