The JD Vance Thread

[Victoria Raverna]

They should check RFK Jr.'s car.

[hepcat]

Is it just me or does J.D. Vance look like he's comfortable in his own skin....or the skin of just about any of his victims?

[Isgrimnur]

[hepcat]

“I admit that I like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But I'm a psycho and if I want to make headlines, I realize that coeds at summer camps are soft targets. You have got to bolster security at summer camps. You've got to bolster security so if I wanna walk through the front door and kill a bunch of coeds I'm not able.”

[Scraper]

Is it just me or does J.D. Vance look like he's comfortable in his own skin....or the skin of just about any of his victims?

It's the robot effect. The more you're around politicians in real life the more you'll recognize that many of them aren't comfortable spouting the stuff they say and really do come off like stiff robots. Vance is one of those people. He memorizes the talking points and just blindly spouts them, all the while feeling what remains of his soul being sucked away.

I know there are other people on this board who have been around a lot of politicians who can back me up on this. Heck Parks and Rec did an entire episode on this issue late in the shows run.

[hepcat]

Randy always knows what to say.



"Slay the house down boots mama" has entered my lexicon forever.

[Smoove_B]

What the hell is this nonsense?

"When Vance is talking about installing 'our people' in the government, it’s fair to assume that he’s not talking about enlisting the hobbits," wrote reporter Ian Ward. "He’s talking about promoting the dark elves."

...

For Yarvin, a neo-reactionary who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug, it's not so much a "Game of Thrones" but of hobbits, zombies and elves — one of whom will become a “national CEO, [or] what’s called ‘a dictator.'"

Drawing from JRR Tolkien's classic trilogy, Yarvin casts the ruling class as elves, the middle class as hobbits, and the working and lower classes as dwarves, zombies and orcs, Politico reported.

"The elves are almost uniformly liberal, but Yarvin believes that mixed in among the elves are 'dark elves' — reactionary elites like Yarvin who oppose 'the regime,' sympathize with the plight of the hobbits and understand democracy for what it really is: a cover for a corrupt oligarchy," wrote Ward.

"The only way to realize a 'pro-hobbit' regime, Yarvin argues, is for hobbits to form an alliance with the dark elves to defeat the normal elves, and then to allow the dark elves — and eventually a single dark elf — to rule on their behalf."

Vance may be that single dark elf, Ward argued.

[LordMortis]

What a nut.

Though now, this is Shady, the real Vance Shady



Professed to be benevolent dictator to the halflings by some dude from Yavin? Or was two of the guys from Black Sabbath? Does s/he have a ring? As much as I try I can't find a picture of Lolth on a couch.

[raydude]

When the GOP realizes too late that Dark Metal Kamala is actually pretty cool imagery.

[Blackhawk]

When you need a flowchart to figure out a metaphor, it's a bad metaphor.

[Alefroth]

Vance doing the work of neo-Nazis-

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/t ... rcna170796

Trump’s line at the debate was the culmination of a weekslong rumor mill that appears to have at least been amplified by Blood Tribe, which has sought to demonize the local Haitian community online and in person. The debate drew more than 67 million viewers, according to the media analytics company Nielsen.

As with most rumors, the beginning of the baseless claims about Haitians eating pets in Springfield is hard to pinpoint, but Blood Tribe undoubtedly helped spread it.

[Chraolic]

What the hell is this nonsense?

"When Vance is talking about installing 'our people' in the government, it’s fair to assume that he’s not talking about enlisting the hobbits," wrote reporter Ian Ward. "He’s talking about promoting the dark elves."

...

For Yarvin, a neo-reactionary who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug, it's not so much a "Game of Thrones" but of hobbits, zombies and elves — one of whom will become a “national CEO, [or] what’s called ‘a dictator.'"

Drawing from JRR Tolkien's classic trilogy, Yarvin casts the ruling class as elves, the middle class as hobbits, and the working and lower classes as dwarves, zombies and orcs, Politico reported.

That's so messed up. Dwarves are obviously bourgeoisie, have you ever seen a person from the working class who had a gold hoard?

[Blackhawk]

That's so messed up. Dwarves are obviously bourgeoisie, have you ever seen a person from the working class who had a gold hoard?

Based on Tolkien's intent, that's not far off. The Dwarves were written as the British middle and upper class, and the hobbits as the British common people.

[El Guapo]

What the hell is this nonsense?

"When Vance is talking about installing 'our people' in the government, it’s fair to assume that he’s not talking about enlisting the hobbits," wrote reporter Ian Ward. "He’s talking about promoting the dark elves."

...

For Yarvin, a neo-reactionary who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug, it's not so much a "Game of Thrones" but of hobbits, zombies and elves — one of whom will become a “national CEO, [or] what’s called ‘a dictator.'"

Drawing from JRR Tolkien's classic trilogy, Yarvin casts the ruling class as elves, the middle class as hobbits, and the working and lower classes as dwarves, zombies and orcs, Politico reported.

That's so messed up. Dwarves are obviously bourgeoisie, have you ever seen a person from the working class who had a gold hoard?

Also are there dark elves in Middle Earth? I think there are a couple evil elves here and there, and there are dark elves in Warhammer, but I don't recall any formal "dark elves" in the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least.

[Smoove_B]

There was *a* Dark Elf, but I'm not nearly nerdy enough to know the whole story. I'm hoping Colbert has a 45 minute bit on it next week.

[Holman]

If you're a Nazi with a social taxonomy based on Tolkien, I'm guessing the dwarves stand in for what you consider to be a despised outsider religious/ethnic minority with secretive ways and a love of money.

[Chraolic]

Also are there dark elves in Middle Earth? I think there are a couple evil elves here and there, and there are dark elves in Warhammer, but I don't recall any formal "dark elves" in the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least.

There are dark elves in the Poetic Edda, so you'd better believe they were going to be in Middle-Earth too. Wikipedia had this inside a giant loredump about the Sundering:

"The Vanyar, the Noldor, and those of the Teleri who reached Valinor are called the Calaquendi (Elves of Light) because they saw the light of the Two Trees of Valinor. In Quenya, the language of the Noldor in Valinor, all other Elves were called the Moriquendi (Elves of Darkness) in recognition of the fact that they did not see (and did not desire) the Light of Valinor, but later the Sindar were counted among neither of these groups. Instead, Moriquendi was used for all other Elves except Noldor, Vanyar, Falmari, and Sindar.[2][8] The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that the Sundering allowed Tolkien to explain the existence of Norse mythology's Dökkálfar and Ljósálfar, Light and Dark Elves. The Light Elves lived in Alfheim ("Elfhome") and correspond to his Calaquendi. The Dark Elves, who lived underground in Svartalfheim ("Black Elfhome"), Tolkien "rehabilitates" as his Moriquendi."

[Blackhawk]

There are dark elves in the Poetic Edda, so you'd better believe they were going to be in Middle-Earth too.

And also quite a few dwarves listed by name - including Thorin and Gandalf. Yeah, he's a dwarf. His name actually means 'wand-elf', which is a funny name for a dwarf, although he's not the only dwarf a name that calls him an elf (like Vindalf, the wind-elf.) It feels odd, at least until you realize that it's widely believed that the Svarftalfr (dark elves) and Dvergar (dwarves) were actually the same beings (and both lived in Svartalfheim.)

Norse mythology is really, really strange. Just ask Audhumla (the cosmic cow who created the original gods by licking them out of blocks of salt) about Naglfar (Loki's ship, constructed entirely from the fingernails and toenails of the dead.)

Oh, and they didn't have couches (to keep the post on-topic.)

[gilraen]

(to keep the post on-topic.)

That ship might have sailed...

[Unagi]

(to keep the post on-topic.)

That ship might have sailed...

Which just means it's soon to arrive in Dwarvenport




I'll see myself out.

[Carpet_pissr]

(to keep the post on-topic.)

That ship might have sailed...

…to Valinor.

[$iljanus]

(to keep the post on-topic.)

That ship might have sailed...

…to Valinor.

[Max Peck]

My former friend JD Vance has aligned with something far worse than MAGA

Unlike the MAGA movement, which is led by a candidate who is defiantly amoral, post-liberalism is steeped in a revolutionary religiosity.

Most Americans haven’t heard of the post-liberal right, the small but influential group of conservative, mostly Catholic men who have declared that liberal democracy, the animating principle of America’s founding, has failed and want to bring about a new social order where there is no separation of church and state and men and a hyperconservative Catholicism reign supreme. They are disdainful of secularism and individual liberty. Just like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump illustrated during Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, these men idolize the authoritarian Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.

They’re also nostalgic for Spain as it was run by the dictator Franco and see Orbán’s government and Franco’s as potential models for the kind of regime they wish to install in the United States. The group’s political priorities — which include restricting access to contraception and divorce and banning marriage equality and pornography — are wildly unpopular. And yet the Republican nominee for vice president, my former friend JD Vance, is a prominent voice of this fringe movement, as so many of his regrettable podcast interviews have demonstrated.

To repeat, I once considered Vance a friend. We were in the same class at Yale Law School, he knew me as an openly trans person, and we remained in communication until 2021. That’s the year that he announced he would be running in the U.S. Senate race in Ohio the next year. Before running in post-liberal and neoreactionary circles, Vance was far less angry and extreme. He was also, as everybody will remember, riding the attention from his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and was a vocal and unambiguous critic of Trump, using words like “idiot” to describe Trump and “reprehensible” to describe his views on “Immigrants, Muslims, etc.”

Despite the time we spent as friends, I have no real insights (other than political expediency) into what drew him to post-liberal men like the academic Patrick Deneen, columnist Sohrab Ahmari, legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and expat journalist and author Rod Dreher, who was present for Vance’s baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019. What I do know is that Vance used to condemn Trump’s racism and be empathetic to how such rhetoric made Americans feel unwelcome in their own country. But these men have had an obvious and heartbreaking effect on Vance’s worldview.

[Holman]

My former friend JD Vance has aligned with something far worse than MAGA

Unlike the MAGA movement, which is led by a candidate who is defiantly amoral, post-liberalism is steeped in a revolutionary religiosity.

Most Americans haven’t heard of the post-liberal right, the small but influential group of conservative, mostly Catholic men who have declared that liberal democracy, the animating principle of America’s founding, has failed and want to bring about a new social order where there is no separation of church and state and men and a hyperconservative Catholicism reign supreme. They are disdainful of secularism and individual liberty. Just like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump illustrated during Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, these men idolize the authoritarian Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.

I posted an article on this movement in Religion Randomness the other day:

from Vanity Fair: Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex.

Pretty fascinating and disturbing essay on reactionary Catholicism and its courtship of right-wing influencers.

The Catholic Right is best understood not just as a reaction against Pope Francis but against Modernity writ large, often with an expectation that European authoritarian movements offer the best path back to a world in line with God's true order. Among those who have experienced their conversion to Rome via this route is J.D. Vance.

[Kraken]

He's apparently "tripled down" on his pet-eating fantasy, because the bigger the lie, the more often one needs to repeat it to make it true.

[Holman]

Vance claims he and Trump have to "create stories" about migrants eating cats and dogs "so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people."

There is then some awkward dead air as Bash tries to highlight the absurdity of what he just said

Needless to say, none of Vance's constituents have come forward with their "first-hand accounts" (which they supposedly brought to the attention of their senator's office rather than to, say, the mayor or the local police).

[Daveman]

[hepcat]

Ooh boy, that’s going to tick off some people.

[Max Peck]

Here's a pretty good essay about a road trip to Springfield, to get a look at what is and isn't going on there.

The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio

A pretty long story about a thing that didn’t happen.

They come to Ohio from one of the most desperately poor places in the Western Hemisphere. They have few to no belongings. In many cases, they are uneducated, and most don’t speak English well. They do not understand the local culture where they have settled—and it shows: in their dress, in their speech, in their manners, in their housing arrangements, in the food they eat, and in the music they dance to.

Most profess to be Christians, but many maintain superstitious folk magic traditions from their homeland, and many quietly hold to a belief in witchcraft. They blithely violate social taboos. Locals complain that they are stealing their jobs, driving up costs, and consuming too much in the way of social services. And then there are the dietary norms: Though the rumors no doubt exceed the reality, some of them eat animals not generally considered food by the good people of Ohio. Ask the locals, and many of them will quietly say that they wish they would all go back to where they came from.

But that was a long time ago. And while J.D. Vance’s hillbilly ancestors may not have been the inbred, possum-eating, superstitious bushwhackers of legend and lore, as they descended on Ohio from the hills of Kentucky they had more than a little in common with the Haitian immigrants Sen. Vance now spends his days vilifying in terms that would have been familiar to Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker whose 1941 propaganda film Der ewige Jude comes to its climax with images of leering kosher butchers covered in the blood of animals slaughtered in the service of “the so-called Jewish religion.”

Lord Acton would have us believe that it takes absolute power to corrupt absolutely. But even the dream of the vice presidency—that “bucket of warm piss” in the immortal words of Vice President John Nance Garner—will do the trick, if you are the right kind of person.

By which, of course, I mean the wrong sort of person—the wrong sort to wield power. You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.

Poor people have been coming to Ohio in search of jobs in its factories and warehouses for centuries: From the original New Englanders who settled in the Northwest Territory to the Scots-Irish to the Irish and Germans in the 19th century to the Haitians today, that story has been repeated over and over. At the turn of the 20th century, a majority of Cincinnati’s population consisted of those who either were foreign-born or were the children of foreign-born parents, mostly German. Naghten Street in Columbus, on the other hand, became “Irish Broadway” in the middle of the 19th century. The J.D. Vances of that era didn’t much care for the whiskey-drinking, potato-eating papists invading their cities, but they made good use of the canals and railroads built by those illiterate exotics from distant lands.

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy understood all that. This asshole who is running for vice president, on the other hand …

[Isgrimnur]

[Holman]

Here's a pretty good essay about a road trip to Springfield, to get a look at what is and isn't going on there.

The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio

The whole article is very much worth reading.

[Kurth]

Here's a pretty good essay about a road trip to Springfield, to get a look at what is and isn't going on there.

The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio

The whole article is very much worth reading.

+1 - Great article.

[Dramatist]

How is it possible that the republicans found someone more unlikely and more repugnant than Trump.

I mean, I heard that Vance was bad, but he’s terrible.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Max Peck]

The most compelling narrative I've seen is that the GOP didn't find Vance, he found them. His political ideology is so unpalatable that he needs to latch on to something else and try to subvert it rather than convert any meaningful amount of support to his actual agenda right from the get-go.

[Holman]

The most compelling narrative I've seen is that the GOP didn't find Vance, he found them. His political ideology is so unpalatable that he needs to latch on to something else and try to subvert it rather than convert any meaningful amount of support to his actual agenda right from the get-go.

Vance is a creature of Peter Thiel and other authoritarian-leaning techbros. I have to assume that he brought a lot of money with him (for the campaign and for various of other Trump ventures).

[Kraken]

The most compelling narrative I've seen is that the GOP didn't find Vance, he found them. His political ideology is so unpalatable that he needs to latch on to something else and try to subvert it rather than convert any meaningful amount of support to his actual agenda right from the get-go.

Vance is a creature of Peter Thiel and other authoritarian-leaning techbros. I have to assume that he brought a lot of money with him (for the campaign and for various of other Trump ventures).

I read that he's a Trojan horse. The new cabinet will invoke the 25th and remove trump for mental unfitness rather than wait for him to die in office so that Vance can get right to work on the GOP's real agenda. People like to write amusing things...it wasn't clear how trump's chosen cabinet will be persuaded to go along with this.

[Holman]

The most compelling narrative I've seen is that the GOP didn't find Vance, he found them. His political ideology is so unpalatable that he needs to latch on to something else and try to subvert it rather than convert any meaningful amount of support to his actual agenda right from the get-go.

Vance is a creature of Peter Thiel and other authoritarian-leaning techbros. I have to assume that he brought a lot of money with him (for the campaign and for various of other Trump ventures).

I read that he's a Trojan horse. The new cabinet will invoke the 25th and remove trump for mental unfitness rather than wait for him to die in office so that Vance can get right to work on the GOP's real agenda. People like to write amusing things...it wasn't clear how trump's chosen cabinet will be persuaded to go along with this.

Trump's cabinet won't be made up of GOP true believers but of grifters like Tulsi and Vivek. They'll be happy to serve Trump because he'll be keeping the gravy train open.

[waitingtoconnect]

They did this in the UK - they appointed “true believers” and grifters into government and now they are in massive trouble.