Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, September 27, 2023
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64 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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The headline of the day- More than 100 dead, over 200 injured in fire at Iraq wedding party
Longish, but worth the time to read it.
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks for sharing this, fantastic article – and I think many of us see a little of ourselves, or somebody we know, in her story.
Yesterday’s finding that many Trump businesses are fraudulent and they must go into receivership serves as a coda to a lesson I learned in 2015/2016. At the time I said that Trump would not stay in the Primary race because even he could not be so stupid as to draw intense scrutiny to his business dealings. Those of us who followed NYC business news know Trump has been sketchy from the 80’s and after his bankruptcy virtually every business dealing he engaged in appeared to be either a con or money laundering. The typical reaction amongst longtime observers was amazement that he himself was never criminally indicted (although there were some cases where business associates got charged and he didn’t leading to speculation about possible deals).
What was the lesson I learned? Well, back then I repeatedly said words to the effect, “The most important thing to know about Donald Trump is that he is a moron, but even he isn’t stupid enough to draw so much attention to his shady business dealings.” So it turns out that I got the first part right, but the second part epically wrong. Today, anytime I’m tempted to say, “Even Trump isn’t stupid enough to…”, I stop, and tell myself, “see part I”.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/american-hatred-goes-global
@MarkedMan:
Not just stupidity/cognitive impairment/senile dementia although there is that, there is also extreme narcissism as a factor.
@Tony W: I’ve been dealing with depression all my life. So has my older sister and my elder brother. When it comes to my brother, I should put that in past tense. He killed himself this past June.
@OzarkHillbilly: I am so sorry man….no words.
Best to you and your family.
@Tony W: As I said at the time, for 24,241 days he fought off his demons. On the 24,242 day he decided he couldn’t do it anymore.
I long ago decided that if a person was in that much pain, then suicide was a viable option. That was purely an intellectual exercise on my part, nothing I have ever considered. Despite all that, his death has hit me a lot harder than I thought at the time.
@OzarkHillbilly: my deepest condolences. So very sorry for your tragic loss.
Epistemic bubbles contrasted with echo chambers.
Separate phenomena with very different mechanisms of entrenchment, and very deifferent in permanency.
The early part of the paper is pretty familiar ideas, but progressively gets pretty interesting.
https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUECA.pdf
An abstract of the piece:
https://philarchive.org/rec/NGUECA
Sorry for your loss Ozark. My brother-in-law killed himself after a long battle with depression. Didn’t help that some of the family didn’t accept him when he came out as gay. Wife and I always thought he would kill himself since he was so miserable. Wife still feels a bit guilty over it. Thinks she could have done more when in fact she was his biggest supporter.
On the professional side it is more than just surgeons. Running a department that’s a 24/7 pretty intense operation I hear a lot of stories from people and it’s pretty amazing what people survive and keep coming to work. I hear stuff I thought only occurred in movies or novels. Have learned to not be so quick to judge people. There is often a story I don’t know.
Steve
Episode 10 of Futurama was awesome.
Spoiler free: The Professor creates a simulation of the universe, and we get to follow the simulated crew of Planet Express inside it.
The good people of Alabama elected this piece of work to represent them in the most powerful legislative body in the world. I don’t see how these voters would somehow elect a rational, intelligent and competent person if they had more choices.
@MarkedMan: This is probably what triggered him:
Found at LGM:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/09/isnt-it-pretty-to-think-so
@charontwo: “The system isn’t working” arguments assume Americans are potted plants. We are not.
Voters do not have to vote for or support Trump. They choose to.
Voters do not have to nominate or re-elect Gold Bars Mendendez.
Voters do not have to vote for Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, or Tommy Tuberville.
The system is not working because too many American voters are amoral and idiotic. American voters get away with being amoral and iditioc because rather than hold each other to account, we use “moralism” as a pejorative and use “economic anxiety” to justify bigotry and stupidity, because “shame doesn’t work.” Yes it does. It’s just not comfortable.
As the idiom goes, I have seen the enemy, and he is us. We choose to make bad choices. We are the system. We have the system we deserve.
@MarkedMan:
I said the exact same thing in 2015. I knew, from all my finance friends in NYC, how toxic he was to the entire NY banking world. Everyone in NYC knew he was a joke. Winning the presidency might have been Trump’s biggest mistake.
As MR has said, he’s going to die penniless, maybe in prison. I’ll dance a f**king jig on the day he passes.
@charontwo: Interesting. I read, well skimmed, the paper.
Good morning, Michael.
The author did an article in Aeon magazine a few years ago. Briefer and aimed at a general audience.
The author notes that in discussion of how to deal with epistemic closure most writers offer solutions to an epistemic bubble. It’s very difficult, and very rare, for anyone to break out of an echo chamber. Difficult for the participants to even recognize their situation. At the end of the paper where some plan for solution is expected, as is all too common, the author offers vague hope and hand waving. I fear my conclusion is that once people are in the RW echo chamber there’s no realistic way to get them out. They’re going to have to be isolated and bypassed.
@EddieInCA:
So NYT, and WAPO, treated his clownish criminality as old news, not worth repeating. And here we are.
@DK:
For a more charitable explanation see @charontwo: and @gVOR10: . I would add that piles of Billionaire Boys Club money has been spent, with malice aforethought, creating the echo chamber those voters are in.
@gVOR10:
Many voters are predisposed to enter their echo chambers by their cultural traditions, as can be seen by the geography (rural, southern. midwestern) of where this behavior is most prevalent.
(obviously, a lot of cultures can produce such behavior, as can be seen in places like Brooklyn and Rockland Country as another example).
ETA: As the articles point out, kids raised in such cultures, such as many home-schooled kids, can find it hard to break out.
@DK:
Bingo.
@DrDaveT: I worked for Les Lyles back in the early 90s when he was a 1 star (he made 4 stars). Generals can be a mixed bag to work for but he is near the top of the list in my book. One of the smartest people I’ve met.
@gVOR10:
…the echo chambers that those voters are (making an active and affirmative choice to participate) in. Yes, you are right.
It’s in my nature as a once and future behavioral psychologist to not let people pretend they do not have agency when they quite clearly do. Much of my time in therapy is spent persistently reframing passive client statements in the language of choice, until they can no longer deny the control they have over their thoughts, mental health, problems, and behavior.
We Americans left, right, and center love to pass the buck, blame shift to amorphous sources (the Deep State, the System), look for saviors, play victim, and complain about why others should be doing what we want done. Tale as old as time.
Political Wire quotes a Tom Nichols piece at Atlantic, American Democracy Requires a Conservative Party (paywalled). I didn’t become aware of Nichols until recently. The piece strengthens my initial impression that he is a slow learner. He writes of his own anti-Trump “conservative” views,
So he’s contrasting his views with his idea of “progressivism”, not with the Democratic Party. Republicans have absented themselves from governance, so any issue actually being adjudicated is being adjudicated within the Democratic Party, and the centrist wing is doing a fine job of representing Nichols’ idealized “conservatism”.
But I will give Nichols credit for one delicious line,
@DK:
Exactly. Was someone holding your children hostage? No? Then whatever choice you made was your choice, your responsibility. I have a lot to take responsibility for and I do. If you get the credit for the good decisions, take the blame for the bad ones.
@gVOR10:
I don’t think that’s fair at all. Both papers extensively reported on Trump’s business dealings, past and present. You can’t blame the papers for the fact that a) most people ignore financial stuff, b) many people simply don’t care. They did their job and I wouldn’t be surprised if the AG got a lot of leads from that reporting.
My ex-father-in-law was VP of an architectural firm in Philly that. got screwed when they did some work for Trump in NJ. I think it’s been very clear for a long time and there has been stuff covering it in the NYT and other places that the guy is a crooked NYC real estate person. It always amazed me that he got away with it but as much as I don’t like him and he comes across to me as a total con man, it is clear that he is good at some things. He is good at picking out his marks and who will buy into the image he portrays. He is good at self promotion. It’s also pretty clear that he has been good at legal stuff. He sues and gets sued a lot. I honestly can’t tell if this is because he has good/lots of legal help or if this is just the result of the connections he has built up starting with what his father developed. I always assumed if it got to his court where his connections didn’t matter he would be in trouble. However, just because he appears to have lost this round that doesn’t mean the appellate judges wont be old buddies. I also think that if he manages to get this up to SCOTUS he walks.
Steve
@steve:
He does seem really good at being a terrible person and lying about it.
@MarkedMan: The citizens of ‘Bama wanted a bigot to be their representative in the Senate and elected him. Easy as that.
@gVOR10: My theory is that people don’t break out of echo chambers because they don’t get trapped in them to begin with. They enter of their own free will for specific reasons.
@Kathy:
@just nutha:
@DK:
How does one even reach people who think Trump is more a “Person of Faith” than Pence or Romney? WTF?
Poll: Republicans see Trump as a ‘person of faith’ … more so than Mitt Romney, Mike Pence and Others
Finally the latest Win11 update brought in the option never to combine taskbar buttons. Now it looks like a proper desktop.
It was driving me crazy switching between two Excel windows. I kept clicking, moving o an empty spot to the left and clicking, mistaking other windows for the one I wanted, etc.
This has been an issue at least since WinXP, if not earlier. In that one there were no labeled miniatures, but the button expanded upwards to show what else was open. I recall trying it, and not being able to work at a decent pace.
The option to never combine taskbar buttons has been there in all subsequent Windows releases: Vista, 7, and 10. I can’t comprehend why it didn’t come off the box in Win11.
@DK:
I think of the echo chambers as akin to the obesity epidemic. It is possible for a person to make better choices, but all of the default options are set against that. Unless it becomes a priority, most people will just go with the defaults because they have limited energy and are dealing with other things.
News just keeps getting better regarding El Cheeto. Not for him, but for the rest of the world.
In this piece of analysis in The Guardian, William Black, described as “a white-collar criminologist, corporate fraud investigator and distinguished scholar in residence for financial regulation at the University of Minnesota law school,” and who helped expose wrongdoing at Lincoln Savings and Loans, contributes this:
I fervently hope he’s on to something.
@MarkedMan: I will have to respectfully disagree. Following Eddie, I was specifically thinking about 2015 and 16. The lefty press talked about Trump’s shady past and I recall at least one good New Yorker article, but not much from NYT or WAPO.
As FTFNYT is something of an obsession of mine, and not wanting to tar them if my memory is faulty, I searched NYT’s online archive. A search for “clinton email” turns up 1,614 hits from 1/1 thru 11/1/2016, most of which presumably have something to do with Hillary’s email. In the same date range “trump crime” gets 705 hits. Spot checking a couple months of those using titles and summaries, I find no mention of Trump’s suspected criminal history, only three then current stories about him insulting the judge in the Trump U case. And one about Hillary and Bill.
I’ll stand by my recollection of little coverage in the MSM of Trump’s shady past, along with remembering lefty commentary at the time complaining about the absence. Even Trump’s foundation, later to be proven corrupt, got very little coverage compared to the deep dives NYT did into the Clintons’ squeaky clean foundation. And I’ll link to an LGM post, not for the story, just for the pictured front page of NYT a week or so before the 2016 election. James Comey and FTFNYT elected Trump.
Kathy- Futurama is very underrated. Good stories and great one-liners. Since we like to cook watch the one where Bender takes up cooking if you have not done so yet. Great take off on Emeril and some wonderful one-liners.
Steve
@EddieInCA: One doesn’t. Thinking that way is making the same mistake Evangelicals make: that if they come up with the “right” sales pitch(s), everyone will buy their product. I happen to think this one is similar to MR’s obsession with tactics in political argument. You simply have to accept that some people disagree, for whatever reasons they have, and do what you believe is best. Consistently*.
*Which is another problem altogether.
@just nutha:
ObligatorySFRef: “Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies” by Greg Egan.
Without for a moment denying the reality of free will, I think several posters in this thread are greatly overestimating how much practical ability most people have to step outside their conditioning. The extreme effectiveness of intergenerational transmission of religion is powerful evidence that exercising actual free will is rare.
@Kathy: He’s probably onto something, but it may not be as important as it seems. I suspect that Trump probably isn’t rich enough to be ” paying for a number of key lieutenants in terms of their legal needs.” His business and financial “empire” may well be more of a Ponzi scheme (with himself as the mark–how ironic is that?), than either a business or even a tax swindle.
@EddieInCA: Their Christianity is as fake as their fealty to the Constitution.
@steve:
I’ve seen all eps. I loved it since it debuted late in 1999. I had a bit of trouble seeing during the first (second?) revival, as the channel that showed it here had an erratic schedule. Eventually I caught all on streaming.
@DrDaveT:
I agree that conditioning plays a distinct role in what people can do. In my case, it’s just my skepticism about how all-encompassing behaviorism is that makes me wonder how conditioning works and to what extent.
This particular cohort, with its high numbers of “I used to be X when I was growing up…” stories would seem to argue against this point. We might be a unique cohort on this question, but that’s not my experience.
Religion is difficult to do well. And seems easy to abandon, in practice, when one is not good at it. My take is the biases so ascribed are held on a basis other than conditioning, but, as I said, I’m not a behaviorist.
@OzarkHillbilly: Well, yes. But to reframe Dr. DaveT’s question, is the fakery conditioned or a demonstration of free will? 😉
@OzarkHillbilly: Alas, he left all those who loved him with a legacy of pain. Our sympathies go out to you.
Just when you think you’ve seen every shitty thing imaginable…
Young Black gymnast appears to be snubbed during medal ceremony in Ireland
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
That, and he’s as likely to part with money as with a vital organ.
Of course, now it seems more natural, seeing as he has little money by rich white guy standards.
Drum has a nice piece hope Dr T sees claiming that the cost of college tuition and fees basically has not changed over the last 30 years. Schools list increasing total costs then give students “grants” with the result that for the average student costs have not changed. Average does some work here as it means some students in some cases actually do pay the higher published fees, but most don’t. Struck as nonsense at first but the numbers are there and certainly fits with the experience of many we know, where schools have high list prices but get big discounts. (Drum cites Currell at National Affairs for the origins of this work.)
https://jabberwocking.com/the-cost-of-college-has-barely-changed-in-the-past-30-years/#comments
Steve
@gVOR10:
James Comey was being influenced by the FBI New York office. Specifically by some FBI guy, McGonigal, who was a Russian stooge, being paid by Russia. We have Pooty to thank for Trump, not just the NYT.
@Gustopher:
This is true.
There’s also people — lots of them — who are not good people.
Others are scared of the unknown, and change often involves unknowns.
Some people vote for amoral defaults because they are selfish and benefit from a unethical status quo.
No one likes to admit it, but there’s lots of men who see themselves as benefitting from misogyny, or whites who see the benefits of white supremacy. And they are not smart enough to consider how these short-term gains cause long term loss. They are just not intelligent enough to see the long term benefits of racial and gender equality and how more justice and domestic tranquility will make us all wealthier and safer.
Amoral + stupid. (And weak.)
@gVOR10: Google “NYTimes coverage of Trumps finances”. Here’s one off the top. And another. And another. And ano -whoops, I could go on all day but it would take me over the link limit. Note that all the linked ones are part of series with multiple lengthy pieces. And you can narrow it down year by year going back to 2016 and you will find many more in each year.
I imagine that “Trump Crime” doesn’t uncover them because he’s never been convicted of a crime and so the press wouldn’t use that.
Can someone get me out of Comment Jail? I must have gone over the link limit in my reply to gVOR10
@EddieInCA:
Michael Cohen’s come to Jesus moment was his dad telling him, ‘I did not survive the Holocaust to have Donald Trump destroy my family name.
Listening to Cassidy Hutchinson make the rounds the past few days, it’s clearly she’s horrified at her past as a Trump true believer.
Contra to pop psychology, shame can work. It’s just another form of accountability.
@DrDaveT:
Nobody said change is always easy. I admire the instinct to understand and give benefit of doubt, but decent, well-meaning are sometimes too ready too let bad political actors off the hook. Doubly so when such people are of a lower class, due pastoral myths that romanticize the so-called common man.
Growing up as I did in suburban/exurban Georgia with the types of people who sent Newt Gingrich and Marjorie Taylor-Greene to Congress, I am less sanguine about the inherent virtues of the working class. A lot of those I grew up with are nice, sweet people — good Christian conservatives with standard issue human flaws and blindspots. Like me and everyone.
But a lot are just plain ole assholes. Phony, hypocritical, selfish and bigoted. It’s not any more complicated than that. J.D. Vance of Appalachia made a career of calling out people like this, til Peter Thiel converted him into a MAGA grufter.
@steve: Trump isn’t good at legal stuff once it gets to court – he loses most of his cases – even before his political career. What he’s good at is grinding the litigation and making his less well-heeled opponents go broke on legal fees. Not so easy when he’s facing the DOJ.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
There are several religions that have been around for centuries and have hundreds of millions (even billions) of adherents, vanishingly few of whom changed religions or adopted religion for the first time as adults. That’s extremely effective transmission; a virus would die of envy.
Yes, we are the outliers.
@DK:
I get that — but that’s the same logic that gets you to “my bigotry is justified because those people are just like that.” No thanks. I want to understand why people are the way they are, the better to make them better in the future. And a big piece of the way they are is habit and conditioning.
Just to be clear: I do not confuse explanation with excuse. Understanding the causal path by which someone became a shitty person does not excuse their shittiness — but it does offer clues to how to make the world less shitty in the future.
@OzarkHillbilly:
You have my sympathies for the loss of your brother.
@DrDaveT:
This is just bothsidesm. Extremists and their enablers love to equate bigots and their targets, to try to silence the latter.
No, calling out white supremacists is not the same as white supremacy. No, holding homophobes accountable is not the same as homophobia. No, it is not bigoted to tell the truth about the amorality and stupidity of fascists and extemists.
No thanks to false equivalency. Equating the targets of bigotry with its perpetrators does not improve the world.
Insight and behavior change are not the same thing. The pop version of psychology is a person suddenly remembers they were abused as a child, and voila –they’re cured.
In real life, most understand their problematic behaviors; this does not automatically inspire change. Substance abusers know exactly why they drink or use. PTSD suffers know the source of their trauma. Knowing why is not an antidote. Not for alcoholism, not for depression and anxiety, and not for hatred and political extremism.
Change starts with accountability for one’s choices and actions. Blame shifting does not help.
@DrDaveT: @DK:
In my personal experience character growth comes from having fucked up, then acknowledging you fucked up, and trying to unfuck whatever you fucked. Sometimes it happens very quickly, like when they put shackles on you. A clarifying moment. Other times it’s slow as you realize, generally in debate, that you’re losing too many points to go on pretending you’re right. Sometimes it’s a bit of both – you read a comment or an article, or just overhear some remark and you get that feeling that you just heard some truth and you should look into it.
But what is required as a predicate to any growth is a devotion (sorry to use a religious word) to truth. The truth, not my truth, the truth of science and math and reason and evidence and examined experience, all while acknowledging the near inevitability of mistakes and the impossibility of perfection. This is how corny I am: I actually sat down a few decades back* and asked myself which of the virtues I thought was most important. It was capital T truth. Without truth there’s nothing worth anything.
As unobtainable goals go, it’s pretty good.
*Conveniently immediately after I stopped needing to lie.
@DK:
I have no idea who you are responding to here, but it isn’t me. I did not say anything remotely like these things. Try again.
@gVOR10:
Sharing is caring…
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/09/america-us-democracy-conservative-party/675463/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I’m good friends with a woman who was in the religious bubble as a child and has broken out now. She is quite upset about the overt attempts she sees (textbooks in Florida, for instance) at maintaining it. She says that if you are raised in it, it can be very, very hard to break out. Mostly, you can’t even process “the real world” according to her.
Not that it’s impossible, but it’s really hard. They have explanations for everything and reasons to distrust all outside authority.
Traditionally, the way groups like that were eliminated is via death and slow leakage. Sometimes by wars and pogroms and yes, genocide.