Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, January 16, 2022
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27 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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‘I got you buddy’: Miami police officer rescues dolphin tangled in fishing net – video
When I was in Canada I rescued a loon from a fishing net. The ungrateful fck tried to stab me in the leg after I cut the last of it away from him. No good deed goes unpunished.
Tonga underwater volcanic eruption creates tsunami waves – video
Pretty cool satellite video of the explosion.
To the surprise of absolutely no one: Face masks make people look more attractive, study finds
Think about it. In your life, how many plague rats have you hugged?
@OzarkHillbilly: There was one of the sonic boom heard on Tonga, as well….I hope I never hear that sound in person!
If you wore a mask frequently before covid you were well aware that masks or tof make people look better. Sort of because what they do is level the field a bit. It covers up asymmetries, a large nose, receding chins, moles, etc that are not found to be attractive by most people.
Steve
Novak Djokovic has left the country.
@gVOR08:
Sounds good, until you realize he’ll inevitably end up in another country.
Speaking of covidiots, I noticed in yesterday’s playoff games that very few people in the sidelines and in the stands wore masks. Yes, it’s outdoors, but it’s crowded as well. No wonder the NFL has been lousy with Delta.
@Kathy: They say religion is the opiate of the masses–false. Its entertainment. Its was not lost on the .01% how restless the natives got during lock downs and started to think of their own lives and happiness.
They can’t let that happen again. The show will go on
In a rational world, I’d say Bibi is now toast.
In the trumpy world we live in, where this guy kept heading a government after being indicted, who the hell can ever know?
Manchin is an arse, but not much of a mystery. He’s raking in tons of money and he’s polling well in WV. Sinema is more mysterious. She’s pulling in money, but it’s become a commonplace that she’d lose a D primary in AZ anyway. LGM links to a fascinating twitter thread from Amy Suskind based on what she’s gotten from an unnamed AZ insider. Basically a) she has a huge ego, b) donors are manipulating her both with money and with flattery, so c) she thinks she’s going to successfully run for prez in ’24. She thinks she’ll be a magical centrist and draw MAGAt support away from TFG. More proof, as though we needed it, that you can be very smart, very well educated (PhD in justice studies), and still be a complete idiot.
@gVOR08: Lololololololol–if true it would show that she doesn’t understand the Right.
Bipartisanship is not an option because of reasons I laid out in another post. These people are convinced its all going to hell in a handbasket and they need TOTAL control to stop the left’s march to total control. Yes, they realize this is not in keeping with American values–but those are going to be tossed aside by the left anyway once they take control. Its almost a remix of the “Lost Cause” mythology for them. There will be a dystopia–and they’d prefer the right’s version to the left.
Unity and Bipartisanship are not theme that have legs until the disinformation that grips rural American is taken head on.
@gVOR08: @Jim Brown 32: She’s been reading too many of her own newspaper clippings.
@Jim Brown 32: Still overall, I can understand a white person (especially a white power advocate/leaner) preferring a dystopia of the Right to a dystopia of the Left. For one thing, classic literature has almost no right-wing dystopia fiction, whereas against the other alternative there’s Brave New World, 1984, almost anything by Ayn Rand. That a dystopia of the Right would be bad is pretty unexplored territory.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Interesting. But what makes a dystopia “right” or “left” in the first place?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: How about Fahrenheit 451 for a hellish dystopia?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I think nazi Germany was a right wing dystopia.
Just not in fiction.
@MarkedMan:
Who gets shuffled off to the re-education camps and/or jailed
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, then. We should start promoting burkas–more is better, right?
The study result of the study is BS. Masks don’t make people more attractive. Agreeing with the viewer makes people look more attractive. I’m betting if you looked at the subjects of the study (those who were asked about attractiveness) you’ll find that there were predominantly pro-masking. Run the same study in Florida or Texas and, dollars to donuts, you’ll get the opposite result.
@MarkedMan: Your approval of the dystopians in charge factored by your political leanings. If you lean right and disapprove of the situation, it’s leftist, just like “liberalism” and “socialism” now. If you lean left and disapprove, the reverse would be the case. (And you’d probably identify the situation as a fascist one.) My point being that dystopias in literature have mostly been understood as leftist because most of the authors were disillusioned leftists/Soviet escapees.
A few days ago someone mentioned that they couldn’t read The Atlantic because they’d used up their free articles for the month.
Get an RSS reader.
The Atlantic publishes full stories via RSS. It’s text-only, so you don’t get any of the graphics–but you also don’t get any of the ads. Because of the way it works, the RSS feed doesn’t limit the number of articles you can view per month.
And… If you’re a news junkie, you should be using RSS anyway. The last time I checked, my aggregator has 100+ feeds. I don’t need to go to all the different websites to see if they’ve posted new articles. If there’s something new, it shows up in my feed. And I’m not reliant on any company to provide the service (so they can’t take it away).
@Mu Yixiao:
Depends rather a lot on what they look like under the mask, I would assume.
@Mu Yixiao: I haven’t found a good rss reader for iOS since Google Reader was cancelled. Any suggestions?
@SC_Birdflyte: Certainly works for me. I’ve not read it all the way through, so I may be wrong, but the system seemed apolitical. The comment was more about anti-intellectualism than politics. But I may be 180 degrees off. As I’ve said before, I was never big on “literature.” Also the book wasn’t popular yet for a text when I was in school.
@Kathy: True. If only the US had been unified in its opposition to Hitler. Sadly, he had many fans here.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I guess I would consider almost all dystopian societies to be conservative (small c), since acceptance of the existing power structure is paramount.
@MarkedMan: And, just taking a wild guess, I would assume that you probably count yourself as Center Left or further along the continuum. Stalin’s Russia as basically conservative is an argument I’ve made myself, but it requires a less than standard definition of conservative. It’s definitely a move against conventional wisdom. But as the TV lawyer said “Truth is relative. Pick the one you want.”
So what happens if we find out Trump actually did manage to F#$% with the Census hard enough to make a difference?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/16/politics/census-bureau-commerce-department-trump-political-interference/
There are apparently already challenges planned. This is just in Utah.
https://www.ksl.com/article/50328945/let-the-challenges-begin-time-for-contesting-census-is-here