We all know I’m not a fan of JD Vance, to put it very mildly, but what does it matter what he believed or said in 2017? Changing one’s mind when new evidence comes in is a sign of a functioning brain. It is a sad sight, indeed, when somebody proudly informs one that they “have said the exact same thing for 30 years.”
Vance grew up in a lumpen family. He went to Yale where the intellectual authority of people around him overwhelmed him. As a result, it took him a while to figure out what he actually believes. This is neither shocking nor bad. His journey deserves enormously more respect than that of those who keep parroting whatever line they are fed.
Also, after seeing the outlandishly sexist attacks on Vance, I kind of begin to warm up to him. I am waiting for just one Dem voter to say openly that falsifying a person’s autobiography to include ridiculous pornographic confessions is not OK. All I’m seeing, though, is widespread glee on the Democrat side. “Yes, it’s false but it’s so funny!”
Clarissa's Blog 
Do you mean like you said that making fun of the attack on Paul Pelosi and saying it was his gay lover was not OK and apologized for doing so when the video of the attack came out?
I don’t even remember you saying that the gay lover rumor was clearly not true but still funny.
LikeLike
It’s a trial to have to come in contact with people who can’t even pretend to concentrate and follow what’s being said.
Paul Pelosi wasn’t running for office. He’s just some rich dude with no impact on anything. We are presently discussing a presidential campaign. Please, try to follow or go seek the company of your equals someplace else. I’m thinking Instagram would be fun for you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I guess I’ll have to make the connection for you.
We are discussing JD Vance. I’m saying that your opinion on the “attacks” with a joke on JD Vance is irrelevant as you are blinded by either partisanship or your own ego’s fragility and unable to see your own behavior for what it is.
LikeLike
Instead of this vapid bickering, I highly recommend you go do something useful with your life. You clearly can’t follow what is being said and are learning nothing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“your own ego’s fragility”
Glass houses. You’ve been asked multiple times to use an alias and you’ve written that you don’t care because Clarissa can see your IP address (hint: no one else can).
You act and write in a rude and entitled manner and complain about someone else’s ‘ego’….. seriously?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Did you know that an arbitrary number of people can comment anonymously?
Do you have a different argument?
LikeLike
Then pick an alias and stick with it, so we don’t confuse you with other anons. You don’t have to provide any real information. Make a fake email address and a fake name, I promise you it will work.
LikeLiked by 2 people
(rude comment)
–someone calls out rude comment–
(oh, no, that wasn’t me, it was one of the *other* anons who make rude comments)
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Did you know that an arbitrary number of people can comment anonymously?”
People do know that. But is that a reason to continue without a persistent handle? Can’t tell what your point is supposed to be.
LikeLike
And by the way, I can’t see IP addresses on this app. I could if I went on my desktop but I do 99% of blogging from the app. Running to a computer every time somebody comments is not feasible even when I’m capable of running and not hobbling around on an injury.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ll respond with this avatar. I wasn’t rude or entitled. That was Clarissa.
She said I couldn’t even pretend to concentrate and follow what was being said. She told me to go seek the company of my equals someplace less intellectual.
I merely used the common technique of asking questions to make a person reflect on their behavior. When that completely failed I had to make my meaning explicit.
At no point did I insult Clarissa’s intellectual abilities or ability to concentrate. I think she is brilliant in some ways and fallible and spouting complete nonsense from time to time about subjects she doesn’t directly work on. In other words, human.
I remarked on a specific behavior – in a very specific instance – and tried to make Clarissa understand she was being a huge hypocrite. How the fuck do I tell her that in a way she understands without hurting her feefees? This is something that can hurt people’s feelings if they can’t process it properly.
LikeLike
Oh, thank goodness it’s you! I’m sincerely glad. You should have said from the start.
I’m not in the least insulted. Everything is good. Fun, peace, bubble gum.
LikeLike
“sexist attacks on Vance”
Most attacks on Vance I’ve seen seem to be more class based. A big chunk of the right and a bigger chunk of the left in the US is about preventing class mobility.
He’s dumb white trash who’s trying to rise above his station in their view and, Horatio Alger aside, that is no longer cool in modern America where you’re supposed to live and die in the class you’re born into, unless you’re a non-white immigrant* whose success can be used to show how useless the deplorable whites are….
*yes many successful non-white immigrants come from successful backgrounds but that’s ignored as ammo in the domestic class war.
LikeLiked by 2 people
There’s a massively promoted story about how Vance supposedly confessed to having sex with a piece of furniture in his autobiography. People are sharing fake quotes, etc.
It’s curious how liberals’ fantasies about conservatives are always sexualized and always in bizarre, pervy ways.
It’s definitely classist, too, in that “poor white trash” are supposed to be sexually weird. So there’s a lot of that going on. Vance clearly clawed his way out of the family dysfunction but that no longer is admirable in America. And that’s very sad.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Now the Harris campaign is openly promoting this fake story. Which goes to show how much Harris is prepared to respect us if elected.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The comments from the peanut gallery are gross of course, but I can’t say they make me feel any different about JDV. His connections remain highly suspect. Yale, Peter Thiel, and his wife has worked for the Clinton foundation. Have either or both of them been out there saying “Yeah, that was a dumb mistake I made when I was young, and I regret it but I learned a lot… ?” or anything like that?
LikeLike
Also interesting that Clarissa can be mad about something in JDV’s biography from 30 years ago, but Kamala’s relationship as a 29-year-old is worthy of wide dissemination.
But then no one ever accused Clarissa of being without inconsistency.
LikeLike
If only there were a way one could escape from my inconsistencies and madnesses and never encounter them again. If only one weren’t doomed to experience them over and over and over.
Can anybody think of anything? How can our anonymous friend break free from this torture?
LikeLike
Perhaps we all exist only as furniture in his cell in purgatory.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Did the purported item in JDV’s bio involve exchanging sexual favors for career advancement?
We all have our faults, past present and future. When I was in my twenties and full of bile, I enjoyed spats like these– let us go and find someone we disagree with, try to pick a fight, pick pick pick. I’m right. I’m righteous. Let us find an enemy to combat. It didn’t make me feel better, really, but it gave me a safe place to file the anger: instead of being angry at, say, my parents or my personal failings, my inability to help my best friend as she slid into addiction and self-harm (I still feel like I failed her), failure to manage fulltime school and work at the same time (I was raised to think everyone could do this), fear that I’d never have a life worth living… instead I could be angry at someone or something distant from my daily life: political issues that didn’t affect me directly were perfect for this.
That’s not a thing I’m proud of, but I understand the urge. Why do I feel so angry? I am not ready to examine or solve that. I will find something I have no chance of solving, and I will place the anger there. Look, I am very angry about this distant injustice: I am angry because little girls in Africa and the middle east are subject to FGM, because Palestinian Christians had their olive groves mowed down to build a border wall, because archaeology advances only as published academics die, because sea turtles are damaged by trash in the ocean, because Leonard Peltier is still in jail, etc. No shortage of injustice.
I would like to say that I figured that out on my own, but I really didn’t– it took working through crushing personal trauma and taking up a religion to finally grow up and out of it. Couldn’t have managed it by myself. I was too confused and immature, and unable to step outside my emotions.
It gives you a quick rush, a little validation, a minute’s distraction and an emotional buzz. And it dissipates your life energy. What could you build with that? What could you learn? What positive change could you work for yourself and those around you? You say you are doing it from work on a separate tab— is your work so stultifying that you need this escape? Why not plan your exit from the work that oppresses you instead? You will never get the time back. What will you have to show for it?
May God bless you. I hope you do not need to have your whole life crushed to break you out of the rut, like I did. I hope you are smarter and nimbler.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, I was trying to make this same point, albeit less eloquently.
At any point a person can move on and seek better entertainment than my blog if for whatever reason it doesn’t satisfy. The world is brimming over with options. One thing there’s no shortage of is online content. Why stay if you detest absolutely everything here? Why do this to oneself?
I used to read Rod Dreher daily. Loved his blog on American Conservative. When he went in a direction I didn’t like, I didn’t pester him into infinity. Or at all. I quietly betook myself elsewhere. He has the right to be who he is and godspeed. So do I, and I’m happy to do it far from him. It would be a weird pastime, indeed, to hang around Dreher’s blog, seething that he isn’t a mirror image of myself.
LikeLike
Ditto. Found your blog through Dreher, actually. Then he became addicted to opiates, slid into some kind of manic thing where he was writing more and more and more, and editing less and less, and clearly there was something not right in his head… and it became painful to read: forest of red flags. Got enough of that going on among IRL friends and relatives, and it hurts just to be *adjacent* to it. I didn’t want to watch that trainwreck
I hope he got some help and he’s doing better now, but I don’t check back to find out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And, you know, thanks for the blog. Congenial conversation with interesting people is in short supply IRL, for now. Things improve as the kids get older, but it’s nice to join a chat about… something other than the laundry, the geometry lesson, what commas are for, and getting ready to teach Spanish colonies in Florida for the 3rd time.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m very happy you are here, so Dreher’s loss is my gain.
LikeLike
My memory of discovering your blog is still vivid. I used to follow a bog-standard POC feminist blog (womanist musings) in the late aughts and they had a guest post about a white woman writing that she offended her POC husband by committing a racial faux pas in front of his parents and he scolded her. As you can imagine, the blog owner and all the commenters were giving this woman a hard time, saying she was so insensitive etc.
And this commenter called Clarissa wrote if my boyfriend dared to talk to me like this I would break up with him on the spot and what kind of feminist blog would pile on a woman for not being sufficiently deferential to a man, just because he is a POC (inadvertently prophesying the discourse to consume our lives in the decade to come lol). That view was so refreshing to read so I followed that commenter to her blog.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ha! I remember! Gosh, back then “womanist” was mega progressive. I’ve not heard the word for years, though, because that crowd doesn’t feel comfortable saying “woman” anymore.
I’m so so glad you followed, and doesn’t this go to show that we changed but we also didn’t change. I always found that sort of attitude to people of other races to be weird and fake. But who knew it would dominate our lives to this extent.
Thank you for the great memory.
LikeLiked by 1 person
POC… I’m rusty enough on abbreviations that I got 3/4 of the way through that comment before I realized that was supposed to be Person of Color and not Piece of Cr*p.
Sigh.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“I am waiting for just one Dem voter to say openly that falsifying a person’s autobiography to include ridiculous pornographic confessions is not OK.”
Have you been living under a rock the past 8 years? Politics is now a vicious game of lies, fake information, and personal attacks. Republicans and Trump have been playing this game for a long time; they have lied through their teeth, launched personal attacks against people and their families, fabricated news stories, etc. How in the world are you surprised Democrats are starting to to the same to the opposition? They would be absolutely idiots not to.
LikeLike
“Mommy, but Billy did it first!” doesn’t impress even on the playground.
LikeLike
It’s more like someone keeps slapping you on the face, and then you finally slap back.
LikeLike
The Democrats have been going high over and over and over again as Republicans were going low. And, it turns out, that’s not how you defeat Trumpism. They are finally fighting back.
I do not care. I’m done with class. I have seen enough politics over decades to want to use what works. I will applaud every successful nickname the Dems come up with and every good joke.
I will strip naked and get down in the mud with the pig of Trumpism if that’s what it takes to drown it.*
* don’t come after me about threats to any people. I’m talking about winning political strategies.
LikeLike
OK, you are funny.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Too large to be accountable, or even representative.
If we are lucky, we get a Czech divorce and maybe some of those problems will become tractable.
I think we are not that lucky.
LikeLike
I think that Slovaks would be offended about your phrasing of “Czech divorce” 😉
LikeLike
Slovaks are responsible for their own feelings 😉
LikeLike
The divide in the US is ultimately an Urban/Rural divide. This is not something you can simply break up in nice lines as with Czechia and Slovakia.
LikeLike
Biden carried pretty much every major population area in the country. What if the people in Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Austin, Houston, Atlanta, etc. etc. etc. don’t want to be part of whatever “country you envision” What do you do then? Chances are they wouldn’t, since Biden carried all major metropolitan centers. Trump did not win a single city over 500,000 population in 2016.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-demographic-contrast-biden-won-551-counties-home-to-67-million-more-americans-than-trumps-2588-counties/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-small-town-big-city-split-that-elected-donald-trump/
LikeLike
You understand this is fantasizing, yes?
I can’t imagine any such thing actually happening without terrible violence, and I don’t wish for that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
True, to an extent. The framers predicted that problem, and it’s why we have things like the electoral college, the house and senate… and still, over the years, we have found ways and more ways to weasel around those provisions and render them moot. I do think a regional divide would help with the urban/rural thing, though not directly by cracking the blue and red bits apart, which as many have pointed out is not practical or really possible. More that it would bring systems back down to a size where some transparency and oversight is possible.
LikeLike