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Notes -
I want a vice presidential debate top level post.
So JD Vance sounded pretty good here overall. If you ask me, both speakers were miles ahead of their presidential candidate counterparts, which is sad. There is probably a lot that can be read from the debate, but I did want to discuss a couple moments making waves on other social media. First I will mention I was surprised to hear JD Vance support nuclear energy, and I will also mention a lot of people were probably unhappy with how he handled the gun control/mass shooting question. But back to the two I wanted to mention
The first such moment originated from a fact check:
Tim Walz responds to his statement, and then a debate moderator comes in with this:
I will cut it off there to not balloon this post. You can read the transcript here.
It seems many blue tribers saw him complaining about a fact check and seeing a win. Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying? This is another example going back to Scott's post about the media rarely lying. Hey, they're temporary asylum seekers, so since they were allowed in with little hindrances to speak of, they're legal. Fact checked. This is an example of why I tend to dislike fact checking in a debate. It introduces an opportunity to use unfavorable framing on an opponent with lawyerspeak on technically true things. Let the candidates do it themselves if they want.
Next up, the January 6th and failure to concede the election:
Once again, there is more to this exchange than that. I said earlier that they had good performances, and I'll go further here and say that JD Vance had a pretty great night. I'd never heard him speak before and he sounded very well spoken, very well informed, and brought up many issues that I so dearly wished that Donald Trump would have brought up, like specifically naming the asylum system and mentioning the partial birth abortions allowed in Minnesota (I noticed Tim Walz's denial was not fact checked). That is to say, JD Vance is competent and might have won against Kamala Harris, representing a return to civil debates and "normal" politicians, despite the "weird" allegations.
But he is really dragged down on this issue. It's lame he has to defend election denial claims in the first place, and leave room for challenging more later. I know many of you have strong feelings on the truthfulness of the claims. I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again. That is very powerful ammo for the other side. And it's far from the only ammo. I am very disappointed with the rhetoric Trump throws around. His lashing out against Taylor Swift reads as totally pathetic. And it is sad to see someone with as much talent as JD Vance have to try to slip around all this crap coming at him, from both Tim Walz, the debate moderator, and untold amounts of unhappy people on Twitter.
"That is a damning non answer" is hilarious coming from Walz.
Walz' response (bolding is my own):
Followed by this absolute banger from the mods;
Tim Walz is the politician you get with a highly censored and early prototype ChatGPT. You can see that he's snatching bits and pieces of talking points and stringing them together in loosely probabilistic ways, but there's no coherence. It also lacks that wonderful post-modern impressionistic word salad of both Harris and Trump.
The Democrats really love doing this. Back with Hill Dog, they chose Tim Kaine and, IIRC, leaned in to calling him "America's Dad." Walz pick reinforces something that's obvious but hard to see - the Democrat party is absolutely loathsome of effective masculinity. A squishy assistant football coach who was part of the National Guard (but never deployed) is just fine. Or a "technically I was in the Navy!" gay dude. But an actual Man with hard coded male sensibilities is a non-starter.
I think the election is mostly back to a 50/50 toss-up, with some big risks for Harris (the longshoremen strike and fallout from Helene being the first of the October surprises). What is not a 50/50 toss-up is the relative Male-Female support. Regardless of the winner, the exit polls are going to reveal a societal level bifurcation at the sex level.
Can you elaborate on the meaning of this term, as you understand it?
I understand the sentiment. When he was picked, he was largely marketed as something akin to "Americas Dad" or "Americas Grandpa" of "America's football coach". But every guy who actually has a dad, a grandpa, and played a sport thinks of him "not my dad/grandpa/coach".
Given that all of his children were conceived in some not-IVF but medical procedure it is a plausible thing to say about Tim Walz that he has never had sex with a woman. If JD Vance was in an actual locker room and wanted to win 90%+ of the votes of a football team he would have credibly accused Walz of that. And almost every guy in said locker room would have felt in in their gut that it is true.
Walz is, to use a now out of fashion insult, a fag. That is almost certainly what his high school classmates called him, its what the football players he assistant coached called him in the 90s/2000s. Culture really hasn't evolved a proper insult since the "banning" of "gay" and "fag" as insults for a male who lacks manliness. Perhaps "Walz" can become said new insult, because he does truly embody the essence of those insults from my youth.
It was my understanding that the majority of these procedures are performed when a husband and wife have been trying and failing to conceive in the traditional manner....
Yeah, but its Walz. An adult man who decided to be a teacher and founded the gay club. Saying he has weak swimmers is probably more true than saying he's never had sex, even with his own wife, but its certainly funnier to say the latter.
To paraphrase Democrats after the 2020 election, there is no evidence that Walz has had sex.
More of a "gay-people-shoudn't-be-under-constant-threat-of-violence-intended-to-force-them-back-into-the-closet" club, or a "shift-the-societal-response-to-gay-people-existing-from-violent-repression-to-minding-your-own-d*mn-business" club.
Sure, you can tell yourself that, but being actually gay wasn't a problem in the 90s or 2000s. It was faking manliness that was as far as high school kids were concerned.
Of course, there is the overreaching issue of pederasty in the gay male community that would also cause the erudite mottian to speculate.
I don't think they drew much of a distinction between those two things, or between any two non-heteronormative characteristics.
Admittedly, this may have varied between regions; some areas (the 'fly-over' states) would have been more hostile than Boston or San Francisco.
And if gay teenagers are shunned and rejected by the broader society, are they more likely, or less likely, to associate with that community?
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Are you from Saudi Arabia or something? Every authority in vicinity not only doesn't violently represses being gay, it actively promotes it.
That was not the case in the 1990s.
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Isn't that the purpose of narrative technologies like "silence is violence" and "microaggression"? As long as anything has happened in living memory that so much as made a member or "ally" of the protected group uncomfortable, the protected group is under attack (and implicitly deserves and requires additional resources for protection).
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