This is a bad idea (**waves in the general direction of S. Huntington**) but it’s also a petulant one, born of frustration that a "lower-case c conservative" institution has not abandoned that conservatism and whole-heartedly embraced the kind of populism others have. https://t.co/hZxtyNrA7y
— Andrew Exum (@ExumAM) March 14, 2021
At least, Vance hopes those cornpone-sucking clodhoppers will fall for his high-dollar schtick…
A long-anticipated shoe drops in #OHSen: Peter Thiel is backing a J.D. Vance super PAC to the tune of $10 million. (via @jbalmert) https://t.co/oYnflIxNV9
— Henry J. Gomez (@HenryJGomez) March 15, 2021
Vance, like his paymaster Thiel, wants ‘the proletariat’ to be semi-literate serfs who vote — when they’re allowed to vote — the way they’re told. Letting those serfs better themselves by trading military service for an education damages their usefulness to Vance / Thiel, because educated troops are uppity troops. ‘Libertarians’, d/b/a the GQP Death Cult, prefer the ancient Chinese model — You do not use good iron to make nails, or good men to make soldiers.
Every upper middle class self-styled progressive who sat at some dinner party in Jan 2017 and said “oh you gotta read Hillbilly Elegy, really helped me understand…those people,” come get your boy https://t.co/4EgLa5fVV6
— Patrick Dillon (@mpdillon) March 15, 2021
Super weird how the right is whining about a “woke U.S. military” the moment there’s a black defense secretary and a long-overdue review of white supremacists in uniform.
— REMOTE SCHOOL PROCTOR (@attackerman) March 14, 2021
Has anyone who’s not a rightwinger, & who grew up poor or close enough to it to know the fear of potential poverty,who has _not_ seen through his bullshit? https://t.co/LOb35uE5YB
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) March 16, 2021
Mother Jones, on Thiel’s generosity:
… Thiel’s $10 million donation went to a super-PAC formed last month called Protect Ohio Values, which on its website describes itself as “a network of grassroots conservatives committed to electing a Senator who will stand for and defend Ohio’s values in Washington, DC,” and tags Vance as the one to do that. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, which first reported Thiel’s donation, the super-PAC also received a “significant contribution” from the conservative hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who also backed Trump in 2016, but was far less involved in 2020. (Mercer also supported the same super-PAC backing Portman in 2016 that Thiel did).
Thiel and Mercer may stretch the definition of “grassroots conservatives,” but Thiel and Vance do have some personal history. Vance worked for one of Thiel’s venture capital funds after he graduated from law school, and Thiel later backed Vance’s own venture fund.
Salt of on the earth!
Awfully dumb take, but probably something we’ll see more of after the Trump era unhinged the officer corps from the GOP. https://t.co/ilovAdOUwx
— Robert Farley (@drfarls) March 14, 2021
A bachelors degree does not necessarily mean that someone has basic proficiency in a set of skills (reading, writing, mathematics, civics) that are important to the effective performance of an officer’s duties, but it’s a useful proxy.
— Robert Farley (@drfarls) March 14, 2021
Why would the U.S. military need engineers or computer scientists, or officers can speak Chinese or Russian? What would a Space Force officer gain from studying orbital mechanics that grit and manliness don't supply? https://t.co/VlOKQakGT4
— David Burbach (@dburbach) March 14, 2021
no amount of Hooah!, leg tucks, and cornpone common sense is going to tell you if you have enough delta-v left to rendezvous with that adversary satellite
— David Burbach (@dburbach) March 14, 2021
Here is the thing: he doesn’t need to go on that program or any program for that matter. He made enough money that he’s covered for the rest of his life. If he went on that neo-Nazi’s program is that he wanted to go that neo-Nazi’s program. He shares Gorka’s worldview & beliefs.
— Tahar (@laseptiemewilay) March 14, 2021
(Apologies in advance to Adam Silverman… )
Breaking: Mass Shooting Apparently Targeting Asian-Americans In Atlanta; Suspect In Custody
NotMax
Feel as if I just exited the shuttle arriving from Neptune, in that have no idea whatsoever who these numbnuts are. Nor why that status should be altered.
bluehill
I guess Vance is the next Manchurian candidate. The war never needs.
Mary G
Wasting a
firstthird,maybe, to say that J.D. is The Former Guy with a thin veneer of respectability.Ruckus
@Mary G:
Very thin.
Zig Zag thin. And that’s thin paper.
NotMax
Oh joy, oh rapture. Skies just opened up to dump water in great quantity. Again. Had a mere half hour of rain this afternoon, which promptly moved on. By the sounds coming from outside right now at 8 at night, this bout will take off its shoes and proceed to make itself much more comfortable.
Comrade Colette
@NotMax: Ugh, I’m sorry. Still hoping for a cross-Pacific redistribution mechanism – we could use some of yours.
Apropos, I watched Weathering With You last night, and if you haven’t seen it, telling you all of why it’s apropos would be a spoiler. Lovely movie.
HumboldtBlue
rikyrah
Nothing but a clown.??
Martin
Wait, going to college would make one less woke?
Half of the point of residential educational programs is to take people out of their homogeneous communities with their particular cultural quirks and shove them head first up against other people from other cultures, other religions, other lived experiences to learn to put aside their biases because, well, these people are your roommates, classmates, study group, lab partners, and all that.
This is why large universities invest in study abroad programs and seek to build very diverse student populations.
HumboldtBlue
@rikyrah:
Here, smile at this
NotMax
@Comrade Colette
Title filed away for the future. Thanks.
Currently screening in the background is one of the most curious WW2 films have ever come across, The Last Tattoo (on Prime). Variety‘s review is too rough on it, IMHO, although do agree the pacing is overly languid and the multiple plot threads a tad choppy. Perhaps the only VD noir ever attempted?
Still, even in smaller roles, Robert Loggia and Rod Steiger always worth a glance.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
If your’ idea of Collage is four years of being blind drunk in a Frat while dad buys your’ degree and the silence of a half a dozen coeds.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: No, you have it backwards, Vance wants our officer corps to be less woke and achieving that by not requiring a college education.
Gretchen
@?BillinGlendaleCA: if they go straight from their small town homeschooled church community to bossing troops in the army without ever meeting another person not exactly like themselves…well, that will work out fine.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Gretchen: They’ll be in touch with Real America, ya know white folk. It seems that Vance thinks that there are just white folk in the US military.
Martin
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah, that’s what I expected, but somehow I can’t arrive at that understanding from those words. Maybe I’m too tired.
Gretchen
Rod Dreher over at American Conservative is a fan of Tucker Carlson and thinks that women in the military is a big problem, because the military is all hand-to-hand fighting, right? https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/ Neither he nor Tucker has been within 50 miles of a military base, but they know more than the generals what the military needs. He’s a big fan of Vance.
James E Powell
It will take an especially good candidate and a unified as never before Ohio Democratic Party to put win that senate seat. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but my beloved home state has really gone wrong.
opiejeanne
@Martin: No, you’re not too tired. His remark was unclear because he got his phrases in the wrong order. It makes no sense otherwise.
Gretchen
@James E Powell: Tim Ryan against Josh Mandel might be doable.
opiejeanne
@NotMax: Lucky you. We lived in the SF Bay Area in the 90s and were all too aware of Thiel and his asshole behavior.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: No, it’s in the right order, it’s not a very precise wording.
This is what Vance is saying…
Dumb to have an educated officer corps.
Less educated officer corps less woke. This is a good thing
Morzer
@Gretchen: To be fair, Rod Dreher does have to work really hard at writing AND reading AND responding to all those Letters To Himself From Reasonable Bigots.
something fabulous
@Martin: nah, it was so weirdly written, it took me several reads but i think he means the opposite: getting the less-educated up in there will free us from The Dire Shackles of Wokeness. Or something.
ETA: Or what Bill said.
something fabulous
@Gretchen: Oh dear. Wasn’t it Newt Gingrich with the women can’t be in combat because they’d get monthly infections in foxholes or something? That was in the 90s! Do catch up, Rod.
something fabulous
@Comrade Colette: Hi! Nice to see you again on the night shift! Just wanted to thank you for your kind support the other night in my financial procrastination swirl. Much appreciated!!!
HA TO ALL YOU FIRST-SECOND-THIRD-ERS! How about the highly sought after and rare threadkilling-threepeat?!
Honus
Military officers shouldn’t have college degrees because education is bad for them says the newly wealthy Ivy League educated redneck hedge fund manager.
WereBear
@Honus: So typical of right wingers. “Now that MY nest is feathered, let’s shoot all these upstart birds!”
Geminid
@Gretchen: In 2018, Sherrod Brown won reelection by 300,000 votes. Brown is a very good Senator and politician. But he is not a freak, but more of a throwback: a New Deal Democrat. If Brown can win by 300,000 votes in 2018, another Democrat can win by 100,000 next year. What would really help is a competitive but not destructive Democratic primary. A bitter Republican primary wouldn’t hurt, and there seem to be some hard feelings going around on that side.
Soprano2
I guess Vance is unaware of Officer Candidate School. That’s how my husband became an officer without having a degree. I assume it still exists. So at least in the Army, what he proposes already exists.
raven
@Soprano2:
Commissioned officers generally enter the Military with a four-year college degree or greater. In certain cases, enlisted service members can advance and transition to officers during the course of their military career as well.
About 5 years ago I took a group of university presidents and admins to Ft Stewart to meet the 2nd Brigade, Third Infantry Division CO to talk about higher ed opportunities on the post. He was pretty clear that not only officers but NCO’s would increasingly need an undergrad degree in order to survive RIF’s.
raven
@Soprano2: Sorry, it was the 1st Brigade.
raven
@Soprano2: In order to qualify for Officer Candidate School as an active duty, enlisted Soldier, you must be:
In order to qualify for Officer Candidate School as a civilian, you must be:
Geminid
@Soprano2: My former* Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman (VA-5) enlisted in the Air Force, and as an enlisted man earned an undergraduate degree and then became an intelligence officer.
*Riggleman became a former Congressman last year, when an alliance of tea party cranks and bible thumpers rolled him in a convention. Their loathsome candidate won in November by 5 points, but I’m hoping he will be a one termer.
raven
@Geminid: They are called “Mustangs”. My old man was a enlisted destroyer sailor in WW2, came home, got his degree and was commissioned.
PST
Vance has no charisma and no political experience. Everything about him is more likely to appeal to people like Thiel and Mercer than ordinary voters. He might the candidate Democrats need.
sab
@PST: As an Ohioan, I wouldn’t want to risk it. He might win. Kasich isn’t all that charismatic either, and he won two terms.
Geminid
@sab: If Ohio’s Republican Senate primary is anything like this year’s Republican nominating contest for Governor, you can count on a ton of negative ads in which PACs aligned with one candidate tear another candidate down. This won’t help Republicans in the general election.
SFAW
Wasn’t it Thiel who, a few years back, prattled on about buying an island and setting up a libertarian paradise there? If so, I wish he would effing do it already, and take his little dog Vance with him. Maybe the entire Mercer family can move there, too.
Jeffery
I read his book. He’s from a screwed up family. Most people are. He lucked out and got into the rightwing “elite“ club. After a lifetime of indifference to religion he joined the Catholic Church a few years ago. His wife is Catholic. As are 6 sitting Supreme Court justices. Seemed a cynical calculated political move.
Geminid
@PST: Candidate quality is an interesting electoral factor. I tend to believe that what it takes to win a tough election is a really good candidate. But a political scientist I follow says that demographics and base mobilization count much more. She bases the assertion on analysis of data from many recent elections. To illustrate, she said that Tammy Baldwin could not have won Missouri in 2018, while Claire McCaskill would have won Wisconsin that year.
Of course, Baldwin is gay, which would have been an additional drag in Missouri. But even if Baldwin had been “straight as a blueberry pie,” as Nellie Forbush self-describes in South Pacific, she could not have won in Missouri in 2018, says the political scientist.
Since Ohio demographics are not changing much, it would seem that next year’s Senate race will be a battle of base mobization. Good luck over there!
Geminid
@SFAW: I volunteer Peter Thiel and Elon Musk for Musk’s first Mars mission. They deserve being cooped up together in a small cabin for a year. A webcam of them squabbling could make a lot of money!
SFAW
@Geminid:
I find your plan interesting, but would suggest the destination be change to the Sun.
Many years ago, there were two asshole* engineers, running semi-competing groups, who were hated by all who knew or worked for them. Some wag suggested that we get them in a room together, after telling Asshole A that he now worked for Asshole B. Someone else suggested instead that Asshole B would be told he now worked for Asshole A. However, the best suggestion was telling each that he worked for the other. We figured a steel-cage death match would result, would some would call a win-win-win scenario.
Not sure why I thought of that.
* No, NotMax, they did not engineer assholes.
Peale
Putin says “Yes” to replacing the general officers of the US Army with with slack jawed yokels more interested in shooting up American cities than these woke guys in charge now.
Kay
@Jeffery:
I read the book too and it fits the pattern. The first half was a standard “up from nothing” story and actually interesting because he talked about how incredibly fucking violent white working class/poverty homes are, which I think is an underexplored aspect and ignored when they romanticize their own tribe.
Sadly, however, it’s like he realized halfway thru the book that he could craft this narrative into a topical political theory and so the second half of the book is his boring, conventional Right wing punditry.
It’s too bad. He was on to something looking at the violence and rage in these homes and where that comes from and how they might fix it because it isn’t working for them.
Soprano2
@raven: That’s a change then from when my husband was in, which was in the 1960’s and early ’70’s. He went to OCS without having any college at all, and was a captain when he was RIF’d in ’72. He wanted to be career military, but said he wasn’t willing to go back to his highest enlisted rank and then work his way back to being an officer, so he took the money and got out. He said OCS made basic training look like nothing, and from the way he describes it he’s right. He loved being in the Army, he always felt a little bitter that they’d rather have a graduate from West Point with no experience than him, who had a year’s combat experience and was working on his degree when he got out.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Gretchen: These last 5 years have really made me realize just how much misogyny animates and drives the right wing.
NotMax
@SFAW
The Man from
U.N.C.L.E.A.N.U.S.?:)
Soprano2
Yep, there’s a reason so many police calls are for domestic violence situations.
SFAW
@NotMax:
Not your best work, kiddo. I guess the 40 days and 40 nights of downpours is affecting you.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Oh, it’s a big subject. Someone on the Right should explore it because it goes to their objections to “woke” culture and before that it was “political correctness”.
We need to talk about why Right wingers have so many objections to treating other people decently and with respect because that’s all anyone is asking them to do. Stop treating people like shit. No, you cannot beat people up or hurl insults at them or bully them at school and work. No. If you learned that at home you must unlearn it. It’s not something to be proud of and it’s not a “culture” to promote or treasure.
SFAW
@Kay:
C’mon, Kay, it’s only certain types of people that they beat up. You know, like POC, women, “elites,” liberals, anyone they think they are superior to, the weak, children.
NotMax
@SFAW
“You want gems, go to Africa.”
– Groucho
:)
Another Scott
@Honus: +1
They’re shameless, and they live for this free publicity.
Cheers,
Scott.
Uncle Cosmo
In the spirit o’ th’ day, by way of immiseration, allow me to relate (from memory) a sentence from An Irish Mother’s Letter to Her Son in America:
This BTW is the same letter that announces his father has a new job, with 500 men under him – cutting the grass at the cemetery.
And now a favorite Oyrish joke:
** What’s that ye say? A pint o’ what? If ye have to ask… All right, yer not from the Auld Sod. A pint o’ Guinness, fer fook’s sake!
Soprano2
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen variations of the “I was spanked as a child and I turned out OK that’s why today’s kids behave so badly” meme I’ve seen on FB over the years. They honestly believe that there’s a point where violence is the only answer to a problem. You know, I was spanked a few times when I was a kid and I turned out fine, but that’s not why I did! There are many types of discipline, hitting people is only one but it’s a bad one.
I think they want permission to treat people who they don’t like badly, because they think somehow that will make it better. Someone needs to write a good book about this whole situation. I heard an interview with someone who I think might have written a decent book about it; it was a woman who went to Louisiana to interview people. I can’t remember her name or the title of the book (what use am I, right?), but I distinctly remember her talking about how these people felt that they were standing in a long line to be able to get ahead, and they felt that the current culture was allowing “those other people” to butt in line ahead of them so that they would never be able to succeed. She said she heard this from almost everyone she interviewed, this resentment that others were unfairly getting ahead of them and preventing them from having anything good.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Hmm sounds like more BS from Thel, my family is poor working class and I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. And beyond the usual, too much spanking and my aunt getting punched by her drunk of husband until she had enough and beat him senseless one night with a frying pan kind of stuff it wasn’t all that more violent than now. What did shocked me was going to collage and finding out the Rich did the same stupid shit as the poor; drink too much, take too much drugs, watch too much TV and abused their children.
L85NJGT
@Soprano2:
Back in the good old days, the military was more labor intensive, that required a larger head count, and there were less college grads.
They can still enlist, military pays for college, go to OCS. But that takes a lifestyle and career commitment. For starters, they would have to legalize meth and oxy to build a white power aligned military. You see a similar dynamic in recruiting for the transportation trades in places like southern Ohio. Lots of washouts on account of the can’t be high on the job requirements.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I’m on a school committee and we saw it with anti-bullying here. Ya know, kids will be “sissies” if they don’t get their nose broken on the school bus. I just refuse to engage on some “societal” level, bullying is not a “culture”. I was really impatient with it because anti-bullying initiatives in schools are really simple- what they do is make it unacceptable to treat people like shit at school. Is that a higher standard? Yes, it is. But kids can meet it. There’s nothing innate in children that says they have to victimize other people. If they’re expected to treat classmates decently, ALL classmates, they will meet the standard.
I don’t want to talk about “wokeness”. I want specifics. I want to know why Tucker Carlson thinks women in the military can’t have a maternity uniform. WTF does he expect them to WEAR? Why can’t he just treat them decently? Could he learn that, since he obviously didn’t learn it at home?
It’s a higher standard of behavior. They need to meet it so we can all progress. You MAY NOT torture the gay kid at the high school. That’s not acceptable behavior. It won’t be tolerated.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I was reading about Cuomo and it’s offensive not from a “feminist” perspective but from a human being perspective.
Maybe make it simpler for these folks since they’re tying themselves into knots babbling about “culture”- don’t scream at your employees and don’t touch them– any of them. If it was ok in 1974 it isn’t okay now. Behave better. It’s a higher standard. Get busy meeting it.
Soprano2
@Kay: Oh man, you’re singing my song. I was bullied when I was in junior high because my dad was the school superintendent. I went to a small K-12 school (average class size of 30). The 7th and 8th graders ate lunch with and had some classes with the high school kids, plus we all walked through the same hallways. Things were fine as long as I was in elementary school, even though my dad was the principal then and became superintendent when I was in 6th grade, because the other kids in grade school didn’t really care that much about it. Once the high school kids who resented my dad could get at me, though, they started treating me like shit, and pretty soon the kids in my class started emulating them. It was horrible, and the teachers seemed to be mostly helpless in the face of it. The advice I heard was “just don’t cry, that’s what they want” (try getting a 7th grader not to react to being treated like shit all the time by almost everyone!) and “you need to toughen up, it’s life”. They would also say that of course it was wrong that those kids did that, but they didn’t seem to have any power over whether it happened or not even though it was happening in school! I swear, most days I went home from school crying, and I loved school. My dad took a superintendent job at another school after my 7th grade year, partly because of how the kids treated me, but it was too late – I didn’t have a “normal” school year until I was a junior. It shaped me to this day – I have to fight against the idea that there’s something wrong with me and that no one really likes me, and I attribute that to the bullying. And you’re absolutely right, in these conservative towns and cities the men especially are absolutely terrified that if their sons can’t be allowed to bully the weaker kids they’ll turn into homosexuals. There’s no reasoning with them, either, because they say “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my kids”.
Soprano2
You’d think this would be obvious to people, wouldn’t it? But it’s not, sadly enough. Powerful men and women too often decide to abuse that power they have over their employees, it’s disgusting.
Miss Bianca
Fuck, I had a black (female) retired cop tell me I should read “Hillbilly Elegy” to understand “those people”!
I was all like, “uh, no…thanks, I’m good.”
PST
@sab:
This might be an ex-thread, but in case there is still any interest, I would add two thoughts. First, Kasich may not be all that charismatic, but he is an experienced political operator who has presumably learned to avoid gross mistakes and has contacts around the state and organizing skills that help him turn out the vote. Vance will be entirely dependent on hired guns, probably has few non-wealthy contacts with political capital, and could turn be someone who trips over his own dick when he tries to meet real people. Second, granted that some uncharismatic candidates do win, I’d rather oppose a dud than someone appealing. Also, I should have gone further about Vance than just uncharismatic. For a guy whose schtick is authenticity and humble beginnings, he has migrated with frightening speed into the plutocrat class. These days he seems to me like someone born in a blue blazer. I grew up in a predominately blue collar school district in Toledo and still have old friends there. He strikes me as the kind of guy they’ll hate when they get to know him, which they don’t yet. None of them read Hillbilly Elegy, I’m sure. It was college graduates, mostly white, who read it and, sometimes, admired it.
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
I’m so glad to see you’re back, Kay. And you’re absolutely right.
Kay
@Soprano2:
What you suffered was needless pain. People don’t have to go thru it. It’s not required or inevitable or “natural”. We can have schools where the rules are everyone has to treat others decently. They don’t have to like everyone or agree with them but they have to treat them decently. That’s an achievable higher standard and one we can and should aspire to.
The question should be “where do you get off, Mr. Cuomo, behaving this way? Who told you that was a right?”
Why are we indulging this with endless analysis? It’s not appropriate in a school or workplace.
Soprano2
@Kay: I couldn’t understand why the adults couldn’t stop it, they seemed to be so helpless. It was only a lot later that I understood that they didn’t think they should stop it, that it would “toughen me up” because I was obviously too sensitive to be successful in life. That’s the only explanation I could come up with, anyway. Instead, I got to spend years in therapy figuring out how to not automatically think anyone I met wouldn’t like me “just because”. I had a boy tell me once, when I was 15, that I was cute so it was too bad I was such a bitch. This happened in school!
pluky
@Soprano2:
FYI:
https://www.part-time-commander.com/top-10-famous-army-ocs-graduates-of-all-time/
J R in WV
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Strange. Vance apparently hasn’t ever worked with any people of color in college, I guess one can self-select away from that experience, even in the Ivy League.
But I worked and sweated with black guys while in the Navy, no self-selection away from the sweat gang back then. No, none. Vance is a clown akin to Rudy or Trump, who pretends to be sophisticated.
Woah, appears he was in the Marines out of high school… surprised he did well with the other marines of color. Perhaps he didn’t do well?
We are all pink and red inside, and share the same fate at the end of our lives. We all hurt using the same nerves and tendons. Just my $0.02…
JaneE
I was in college over half a century ago. The Navy sending people to my school because they needed skills they didn’t have yet and the field itself (telecommunications) was fairly new. The people I sometimes shared a class with would be the ones teaching the Navy programs they wanted to start. Now they could just look for graduates that already had at least some of those skills. Much cheaper for sure.
Starboard Tack
@Soprano2:
That’s a lot of it. To them, it’s fuck or get fucked.