Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, January 14, 2024
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59 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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-5 °F and the next round of snow has started. At least the wind has died down.
It’s been raining most of the morning here.
Im glad that the world has sorted itself out so well and we can spend a second day talking about the weather.
😉
+3deg f on the front porch this morning. +13deg f is the forecast high today in Makanda Township IL. One January morning in 1976 as I left for work at the Murphysboro IL Street Department about 10 miles from here the front porch thermometer showed -25deg f. Don’t mind if I never see that again.
@MarkedMan:
Somebody once said, Mark Twain?, that people talk about the weather but no one does anything about it.
Sometime in the recent past Dr. Joyner road tested a new format for OTB. It allowed contributors to embed cat videos with their comments. Too bad that didn’t work out.
@MarkedMan:
The weather is another thing that we can’t do anything about, but have long accepted that we can’t. Lots of other stuff makes us angry and impotent, because we have no positive effect. Discussing the weather can be helpful.
For what’s it’s worth this morning, bright blue sky and low 30’s, that maybe the high for the week.
For those who live vicariously, our trip update:
Today is the day that we (the wife and I) had scheduled our departure from Pensacola for Evergreen CO via RV.
As we are both avid snowboarders, getting back to the Summit County and making some freeride turns is our driving motivation.
Whie google maps may say that is a 20-hour drive, in reality it is a 6-day drive of reasonable travel time and breaks, with overnight stays along the way.
“Reasonable” being a mapped 4.5 hour drive (which becomes 6 usually start to finish). We tried longer segments but running an RV for a 10 hour goal became stupidly exhausting, with nights being far too short to get rest.
Looking at the arctic blast, mapping out the weather for our route, it became obvious that leaving today would bring us into the potential of freezing rain in Jackson MS, northern LA and eastern TX. and continued bitter cold as we went westward.
By delaying departure until Wednesday, we may be leaving Pensacola on a chill morning (sub freezing low the night before in the gulf coast area), but with dramatically improved weather along the way, with highs in the 50’s and 60’s.
Our planned travel takes us from Pensacola through Mobile AL for our first night stay in Jackson MS. Then on through LA to Kilgore TX, on through Dallas (…uugh. worlds worst drivers) to Witchita Falls, TX, up through Amarillo TX to Dumas TX, then through northern NM and up and over the mountain via Raton Pass toward Trinidad, a stay in southern Colorado in Walsenburg, and then a short drive “up the hill” to our home near Genesee / Mt. Vernon.
Last summer our drive to Colorado had us in Wichita Falls for the 114 degree heat wave. Outrageously miserable. Did not want to discover the other extreme of that spectrum.
While fuel costs are always higher than one would like (as one can imagine it would be, driving a small home down the road), lodging/parking costs are inexpensive. We are not the type that pull into a Walmart and crank up the generator, so we look for interesting and cheap stops along the way. State Parks are usually reasonable, but we were surprised how many communities provide a free/donation RV spot with power, water and centralized sanitary dump.
Leflur’s Bluff in Jackson and Lathrup State Park in Walsenburg CO fit in the first category, Kilgore, Wichita Falls and Dumas fit in the second.
Well… calling Dumas “interesting” is really a stretch. Let’s just say cheap for that one and let it go at that.
Finally, no, I am NOT a person that considers himself a member of the RV culture or the “Van Life” smiling happy people youtube clique. This is just a way to connect two points for me.
I like traveling by air, in the front of the plane. Roughing it for me is room service. This RV thing is such an anomaly. But I refuse to pretend that a 125lb malamute is a “service animal” to get him on a plane, so there is no other real option.
I think the Leamonheads said it best: The Outdoor Type
Keep warm folks!
Apparently Mark Twain never said:
“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
That line comes from some Giants fan after watching a night baseball game at Candlestick Park.
@liberal capitalist: Kevin Drum has a chart, butI repeat myself, showing that, inflation adjusted, gas is as cheap as it’s been in the last 20 years. Way to go Brandon.
I used to tow to races in an RV. Typically relatively short distances so I wasn’t that upset about fuel cost.But it was a nuisance that gas for a while was over $5 and I couldn’t fill the tank because of the $75 dollar limit on credit card transactions at the dispenser.
Sunny here now, but it’s supposed to be rainy and snowy this afternoon.
The one day game I attended at the stick back in the’80s was at least that bad but Giants came from behind to beat the Mets in xtra innings so it was good times.
(No runner on 2nd base to start the 10th inning. That rule makes me want to puke.)
@Mister Bluster:
I feel similarly.
@Bill Jempty: Laura Loomer, “a far-right Florida (of course) activist and former congressional candidate” charged that Nikki Haley’s defense contractor donors arranged the bad weather for the Iowa caucus.
@gVOR10:
Loomer ran for the congressional seat I live in.
LOL about the Haley stuff. Maybe Loomer has been watching too much Irwin Allen television. In one VTTBOTS episode, Werener Klemperer before playing Colonel Klink, had it snowing in Miami.
The other day, during one of The Bulwark’s podcasts, Ben Wittes recommended Ionescu’s Rhinoceros as an absurdist political allegory, with a lot of relevance for our time. After reading it yesterday, boy howdy, is he right. While people keep turning into rhinoceroses, other people just dither, worrying about the wrong things. There are definite connections with today’s dithering, such as the endless articles about what Trump voters really want, the ridiculous pretense of life going on as normal (hence the obsessive media focus on the meaningless Republican debates), and the hesitations in calling things what they really are. It’s a short read, and worth it.
@Bill Jempty: South edge of Sarasota county here. Howdy.
@Mister Bluster:
As I have noted many times here, I play past seasons of Strat-O-Matic baseball. Two of them are 1983 and 1985. So I have more than a passing knowledge of the Giants back then. I8 Bob Brenly, Mark Davis, Jeffrey Leonard, Johnny
DisasterLemaster, Mike Krukow, Atlee Hammaker to name a few.More of the intersection between literature and our current unpleasantness:
I’m re-reading Beowulf. While Googling for answers to questions I had about some odd elements of the story I had forgotten (swimming in armor?!?), I found a blog with the enticing title, Better Living Through Beowulf. One of the featured posts, “How Beowulf Can Save America,” an excerpt from the author’s book, is definitely worth reading. It describes Beowulf as a parable about anger, and how it can turn us into monsters.
We’re an angry country. The traditional liberal view of politics has been, “Let’s identify the sources of the anger, and deal with it. Then the anger will go away.” However, that perspective overlooks that the problem may also be the anger itself. People can get drunk on anger, especially given the ease with which they can justify their anger as righteous. Whether it’s Anglo-Saxons revenging themselves on their neighbors for stolen livestock, or a segment of white Americans outraged that their Mayberry vision of the United States doesn’t exist, people can quickly turn into angerholics.
@gVOR10:
Howdy back.
Never been to SW Florida. I’ve been to St Pete/Tampa/Clearwater area around a dozen times. Which isn’t much when considering I’ve been a FL resident since 1976 and before that was here as a tourist many times.
Generative AI is going to kill Google. I’m setting up a specific brand of Network Attached Storage on my home network and wanted to see if I could use it as a drive for Time Capsule. I googled “How do I use a Buffalo NAS as a Time Capsule drive” and saw that the first thing that popped up was from a user who did specifically that thing. Oh Joy! … and then realized that it was just generative AI bullshit and didn’t offer any real help at all. Then I scanned down the next 7-8 Google hits. Yep, same kind of bullshit. At least the awkward language, the bizarre emphasis on irrelevant details, and the logorrhea tips you off. But as it gets “better” that tip off will go away. It will still provide bullshit though.
One of the most amazing and useful things about the internet: searching for a somewhat unusual use case and finding someone who has done that very thing. And now it’s gone, almost overnight. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to use it that way again.
@Kingdaddy: Serendipitously, Kevin Drum hits the same theme today. He starts by quoting a Peggy Noonan column on the danger Trump supporters see in our modern world. Then quotes a similar column of hers from the 70s. Drum concludes,
Maybe the lesson is that we shouldn’t be sending out Cletus safaris to find the causes of their discontent so we can address them. Maybe it’s like stochastic terrorism. Maybe the problem is that the potential for Trumpian faux populism is always there, under the surface, available for amoral politicians, Huey Long, Hitler, Orban, etc., to summon it up. More of a psychological than political leaning. Maybe the actionable problem is the amoral politicians.
We could, as one example, reform our candidate selection process so it doesn’t promote opportunistic extremists. Or enforce the clear Constitutional prohibition against someone holding an office who has previously violated an oath of office by attempting to overthrow the government
I had not really been following the Bill Ackman stuff that closely. I had thought his wife’s plagiarism was limited to some footnote and quotation errors. Turns out she copied entire paragraphs. Not surprisingly, the guy thinks it’s OK when it was his wife. My bet at the time with Gay, and it still remains, is that low level plagiarism is actually very common. People consciously or not writing almost word for word what they read elsewhere. I think when you are writing technical stuff and someone else has worded something well it just sticks with you.
However, it turns out the guy is a whackadoodle in a number of areas. Including supporting Sam Bankman-Fried up until he was convicted, supporter of RFK as an anti-vaxxer and Kyle Rittenhouse was a patriot.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/bill-ackman-neri-oxman-plagiarism-wikipedia-insider-harvard-mit.html
Steve
@Kingdaddy: “Ionescu’s Rhinoceros as an absurdist political allegory”
There was also a film version made for the short-lived American Film Theater in 1974, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. You can rend it on Amazon…
@MarkedMan: Yesterday I was just trying to ask Google about a map of the Dakar Rally, because I was made aware that it no longer went to Dakar, Senegal. Google provided completely baffling results which were useless, for example telling me about some street market in Dakar. This shit used to work.
After asking seven different ways, I finally just went to Wikipedia and discovered it moved to South America at one point due to unrest in Mauritania, then eventually to Saudi Arabia. It turns out it was the history that I was curious about, which would have normally come up in the first page or two of Google results. Now they apparently decide what they think you’re asking, usually incorrectly, and then only give you an answer for that wrong question.
@Kingdaddy: I read the Seamus Heaney translation a few years ago when it came out. It was so much more enjoyable than when it was forced upon me in school. Hope you enjoy it.
@Kingdaddy:
Hwæt!?
@MarkedMan:
I keep waiting for Google to offer a feedback mechanism on search results that allows you to flag crap, presumably with a captcha-equivalent test for being an actual person. Surely that information would be extremely useful to them, and users would be happy to provide it…
@Franklin: I commented above about Laura Loomer’s craziness @gVOR10:. I couldn’t remember which female RW loon has said it. Try writing a Google search string today “XYZ Iowa caucus” that doesn’t return a huge list of standard issue “Iowa caucus” less XYZ. Their algorithms seem to hugely prioritize popularity over content.
@Franklin:
Unfortunately I suspect it’s worse than that. I don’t think those are Google answers for the most part. It’s dozens of people trying to monetize AI.
@gVOR10:
This.
Of course, this has been true all along of conservatism, as well. There are no conservative policies — the same policy can be conservative or anti-conservative, depending on when and where you propose it. Republicanism was radically anti-conservative 300 years ago, and is conservative now. Evangelical Christianity was radically anti-conservative 200 years ago, and still is in the UK, but is conservative here. Gun control is deeply conservative in the UK and deeply anti-conservative in the US. Ditto national health care, national educational standards, etc. When it isn’t a fig leaf for raw greed, conservatism is a psychological phenomenon tied to asymmetric risk aversion. The least comprehensible argument of all to a conservative is “what have we got to lose?”.
@Mister Bluster:
The inverse of that is beautiful January days like today, blue skies, crisp air & mid-high 50s. I’m in the East Bay, but SF is about the same today. It’s probably a fantastic day to drive up the coast, but I’ve got work to do.
@wr: I watched Rhinoceros on either Super Channel 9 from NY or on PBS a long time ago.
The Governor on Benson once made reference to the movie but incorrectly IIRC. He described the movie having scenes where people physically transforming into rhinoceros on screen.
@gVOR10:
Oh, this I know. But it’s still $800 – $1000 to do that 1500 mile trip.
I justify it in my head, thinking that it is in the realm of possibility that two airline tickets + massive dog crate could also cost me approximately the same to do that trip.
However, as a former Chevy Bolt owner that had (what felt like) free power for 4 years, seeking out that cheap pump sucks.
@steve:
One of the textbooks that I used in the writing from sources class (Eng. 102 at my schools) that I taught from suggested that source material always be copied word-for-word from the source for research notes.* The reason to copy exactly was that as the writer revises their draft, their paraphrases will move back toward the original source material so writers need exact copies of their source material’s paraphrased content to check against.
(Of course, given that Ackman is an enemy, and a political one at that, this information should not be used in an attempt to somehow imagine any excuse or explanation of what happened. Oxman’s actions cannot possibly be anything other than nefarious. 😐 )
*Until I used the specific text this suggestion had come from, I don’t recall ever having heard this suggestion before–even though I had taken a year-long research workshop while I was writing the thesis for my degree in music history. Then again, universities only taught composition to “remedial” students in those days. The rest of us learned how to write before we got to college and didn’t need any instruction.
Here’s a good explanation of the MAX 9 door plug’s workings, and informed speculation on how the incident may have happened.
@MarkedMan: Amazon has 3rd party people (or non-people algorithms) using AI to generate product descriptions, sometimes resulting in error messages as product names.
https://futurism.com/amazon-products-ai-generated
Our dystopian present is not what we imagined it would be 20 years ago when it was our dystopian future.
(I was predicting e-ink tattoos that show ads until you pay them off. It can still happen, but now I expect it to be a subscription you need to pay for the rest of your life, until the managing company stops supporting it and you have error messages. Also it would be a target for hackers and ransomware)
I grew up in Chicago, which is fairly cold and windy and then spent ten years in Rochester, NY, which is even more cold and windy. Now I live in Maryland where grown-ass people huddle inside on any day lower than 50 and whine about the cold like little babies. I was just out for a walk along the Inner Harbor and I had a revelation: they literally don’t know how to dress themselves. It was cold, but not super cold, maybe 36, but windy as hell. Had to walk backwards through a couple of spots where a some buildings pinched off a wind tunnel. I saw all these people wearing what looked like serious coats but in a worse than useless way. Loose at the bottom and not zipped all the way up, so as to leave plenty of room around the neck. In other words, their coat was a chimney, guaranteed to suck all the heat out. And not one in ten had their damn hood up, the thing specifically designed to block the wind. I was out for an hour and a half with a proper coat, hat and gloves and hiking half boots with a decent sole. My only concern with heat was when I got away from the water and into a neighborhood which blocked the wind a bit so I had to readjust zippers and such to keep from getting overheated.
I have a friend who was the victim of a violent crime about a week ago, and a third friend and I were helping them around yesterday to be supportive and help keep them calm. Unfortunately, they had something of a breakdown in a train station. While we were trying to comfort them, this lady kind of sidled up and had the unmitigated gall to try and use that moment as a hook to proselytize to them, and what the ever loving fuck is wrong with people these days.
@Kathy: That was good. Thanks
I know there are a few people here who follow Libertarian sites and I was wondering how they are treating their boy, Milei, in Argentina, given that he’s going all in shifting that country to Libertarian principles. Are they ignoring him? Embracing him? Predicting that Argentina will shortly rule the world?
@Stormy Dragon: When I worked on campaigns ages ago, I was onsite in district for a special election and was in a car accident. The candidate’s wife tried that crap with me maybe an hour after my car got towed away, asking me if I had died in the wreck, would I have been saved.
Let’s just say that incident didn’t endear me to religion, particularly that flavor of proselytizing. I really have a BIG BIG problem with people who cannot keep that stuff to themselves. Read the room, lady.
@Jen:
People like that candidate’s wife either can’t read the room or refuse to do so.
Dak Prescott’s cadence is annoying. I’d rather hear the World Cup vuvuzelas.
@Kurtz:
Awwww, I think it’s kinda cute. Like he’s the rave mom trying to get his lil’ wooks in line before raging.
@Kurtz:
Awwww, I think it’s kinda cute. Like he’s the rave mom trying to get his lil’ wooks in line before raging.
@MarkedMan:
You’re welcome.
If you ever get interested in aviation accidents, the same guy runs a channel called Mentour Pilot where he deals largely with such things. Production values lag far behind Air Crash Investigations, but his info is more accurate.
@Kathy:
I don’t know whether a Mentour is going to be a very fun time, or a truly terrible time. Really could go either way and be anything from gay burlesque to incel incorporated.
(Probably just some guys slightly odd family name and he’s sick of the jokes, but he’s not here, is he?)
@MarkedMan: Marginal Revolution mentions Milei. Not a lot about him, but a point of interest. And his success seems to be assumed. The attitude seems to be that Libertarianism cannot fail, it can only be failed.
(It’s hard to get Milei past spell check.)
Doug Burgum endorsed Trump for president. Apparently when Obama he disrespected all the heartland states, and trying to work with his administration was a disaster. Maybe it was like Cleavon Litle in Blazing Saddles. he couldn’t get past the color of his skin. Guys like Burgum truly have no integrity.
@Beth:
“Here we go-ohhhhhh”
Nah. I like Dak, but man. I don’t know wtf that is.
On another note, decent chance that this kills any hope for Arthur Blank to get Belichick to Atlanta. I doubt McCarthy survives this.
A couple weeks ago, I commented to someone that I couldn’t see Belichick tolerating Jones and Son. But since then, I’ve read some seemingly solid reporting that there is mutual admiration between Jerry and BB. If that’s the case, that seems to be a likely destination for the sith lord.
@Kathy:
Just to add: The reports of loose bolts apply to the two that hold the lower brackets to the plane, not the retaining pins, and are visible on the shot at 16:30. Like he said all reports in the press are questionable though.
@MarkedMan: @gVOR10:
I’m curious about that myself. I may take a look at some point soon.
I know one thing, if I see a description of a person that includes something to the effect a economist of the Austrian School, I feel pretty comfortable dismissing that person.
But that dismissal is a little harder to do when that person is influential in some way, and impossible if that person is a head of state.
@Kurtz: Here is my prediction. Absolute failure, at which point Libertarians will memory hole him and never mention him again. They will not think about the failure or learn from it in any way.
Remember Sam Brownback? Savior of Kansas? The one who would finally show the world and all the haters the unbelievable success a libertarian government would bring? Well, if you remember him you must not be a libertarian, because they certainly don’t.
[I had to look him up. He resigned as governor in 2018 to become Trump’s Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, whatever that was]
@SenyorDave: I think we have new candidate for Chief Sycophant aka VP in the running.
Predictable play: a nobody candidate drops out, throws support to the frontrunner in the hopes he will get picked for the term in which the hamberders catch up with him.
The Detroit Lions just won a playoff game, their first playoff victory since defeating the Dallas Cowboys on January 5, 1992.
Next Sunday they’ll meet…either the Eagles or the Buccaneers, it’s not decided yet. But they’ll play at home again thanks to Dallas’ loss today.
@Mikey:
There is something comforting in watching Jerry struggle with depression at about this time every year, but this year seems special. Some say they haven’t seen Jerry this sad since the Civil Rights Act was enacted.
@DrDaveT:
I am sure that Google is using AI to provide that feedback, and AI is telling google that everything is fine… just fine. In fact, very very good.
(… insert “It’s a Good Life (The Twilight Zone)” meme here.)