During an appearance on "Morning Joe" on Wednesday morning, MSNBC host Symone Sanders Townsend expressed shock that another damaging video of Republican Party vice president candidate J.D. Vance has surfaced which will force the campaign of Donald Trump to remain on defense.On Tuesday another clip o...
  • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
    953·
    3 months ago

    Honestly, I don’t think any of this would have been flagged as a problem by their campaign. They want these perspectives front and center, they’re a feature, not a bug.

    They very, very much want the power to indoctrinate children, they’re fully aware they cannot survive in a world where people are taught how to think rigorously for themselves. That’s just not how religion works, and it’s not how autocracy works.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      272·
      3 months ago

      they’re fully aware they cannot survive in a world where people are taught how to think rigorously for themselves

      The more elevated tiers of the conservative movement have plenty of rigorous thinkers. That doesn’t save you from bad policy, because the thinking is rigorous within the bounds of their revanchist ideology.

      You’ve still got guys from PNAC running around the Project 2025 committee, looking to MAGA like it was at the end of the Cold War. You’ve got billionaire tech gooners eager to kick off a shooting war with Iran and China, because it will benefit their aerospace investments. You’ve got paleocons eager for a new mass media fueled Great Awakening religious revival.

      Meanwhile, you have a large body of progressives routinely getting rounded up by police during protest marches, raided by the Texas AG, censured by the AIPAC wing of the Congress, and expelled from universities for even mild criticism of our foreign policy. These aren’t uncritical thinkers either.

      What we have isn’t a cognitive imbalance. It’s a power imbalance.

      • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        3 months ago

        That power imbalance did not arise from nothing though, it’s not a necessary state of being in a democratic society. A cognitive imbalance is a necessary pre-requisite for it to form within our structure.

        Not half a century ago we didn’t have unlimited money running our politics for instance. How it arose merits examination.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          71·
          3 months ago

          Not half a century ago we didn’t have unlimited money running our politics for instance.

          We had a more fractured and localized fund raising system. But politicians still routinely came from the wealthiest families - the Bushs, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, the Rockefellers - and cash on hand has always been a measure of a campaign’s strength.

          A cognitive imbalance is a necessary pre-requisite for it to form within our structure.

          So long as education is privatized to some degree, imbalances will persist. But even the most crunchy of liberals don’t want to abolish Harvard.

          • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6·
            3 months ago

            I think you’re conflating elitism, wealth and political power. They are three independent factors that certainly can but do not have to co-exist. Any one of them makes the others easier, but is not fundamentally necessary. While you can certainly cherry pick examples where all three are present, this is a far cry from a proper statistical analysis of how often that is actually the case. We wouldn’t want simple confirmation bias mucking up our perceptions, and making us forget all the politicians that did not have great wealth, after all. That would be a gross error in thinking.

            I disagree that imbalances will persist so long as some private education exists. Basic critical thinking skills can be taught public or private.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
              41·
              3 months ago

              Basic critical thinking skills can be taught public or private.

              Two people with the same critical capacity and different moral compasses or economic circumstances will reach radically different conclusions on a given subject. The executive manager and the line cook can receive the same education, but reach very different conclusions about - say - a reasonable starting salary or the appropriate amount of sick leave.

              Aligning the ideals of the cook with the crook means establishing certain long term social expectations and assumed rewards. “Oh, one guy has an MBA from Wharton. They must just be better than the other so that’s why they get more stuff” fits within a rigorous critical analysis wherein elitism is considered a function of meritocracy and certain human lives have more value than others. The executive can go to the grave thinking they deserve the surplus profit extracted from all the base-pay line cooks under their thumb. The mere capacity for critical thinking doesn’t change that.

              • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                3 months ago

                Perhaps. My issue is not solving economic injustice, however, it’s getting to a functioning democracy. For that we do not need a perfectly equitable distribution of wealth, but an understanding of sound information and decision-making processes so that individuals are capable of making voting decisions that align better with their interests over just voting for the salesman. This just takes some critical thinking skills.

                I don’t believe that every person needs to have their interests “aligned”, people should be allowed to decide for themselves what their own interests are, even if that be the pursuit of blatantly destructive ends. The system can be made robust in spite of them. It needs to be able to handle that, not necessarily preclude the possibility altogether.

                And no, that does not fit with a rigorous critical analysis whatsoever. What if the MBA guy cheated through most of his schoolwork to get his MBA? That would not necessarily be merit anymore. When I say rigorous, I do mean rigorous, and sound critical thinking should uncover these possibilities and take them into account.

                • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  31·
                  3 months ago

                  My issue is not solving economic injustice, however, it’s getting to a functioning democracy.

                  Very hard to function as a democracy when a single wealthy patrician can command the economic future of millions of registered voters.

                  people should be allowed to decide for themselves what their own interests are

                  Deciding what to do matters little without the means to accomplish it. It means even less when you’re deprived of the education and opportunity to know what your options even are. That goes beyond simple critical thinking. You need a real vibrant economic community, one in which “freedom” means the ability to pursue a career and a station irrespective of ethnicity or gender or religious affiliation.

                  What if the MBA guy cheated through most of his schoolwork to get his MBA? That would not necessarily be merit anymore.

                  At some point, you get what you measure for and the degree becomes the definition of merit. But I’m less worried about a guy who cheats on a midterm than I am about the capable student who is never admitted in the first place, on the grounds that they aren’t of the correct pedigree.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
      8·
      3 months ago

      Agreed this wouldn’t be flagged. This seems entirely consistent with their current messaging and actions. I’d equally believe it was vetted as ok

  • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
    31·
    3 months ago

    Vance launched a broadside at teachers who don’t have children of their own, telling a crowd he thinks they are “trying to brainwash the minds of our children.”

  • Jyrdano@lemmy.world
    14·
    3 months ago

    Im still convinced Vance was chosen primarily because it sounds similar enough to Pence when Trump forgets who his VP is.

  • smokebuddy [he/him]@lemmy.today
    11·
    3 months ago

    The media was sent this guy’s whole binder of vetting papers after they were leaked, why are they still feigning surprise that this guy is a weirdo?

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    3 months ago

    I thought vetting was only for the Blah people? Remember how well they “vetted” the dumb-dumb Palin? And then spent so much time caterwauling about how the media, the gubbermint, and basically the world, did not properly vet Obama?

    And by that, they meant that he was BLACKITY BLACK BLACK and had a foreign-sounding name, if you weren’t catching their drift about what they meant about “vetting” in relation to Obama. The center-right Obama had nothing to really be concerned about, since the Democratic Party does things like this, including running oppo research on their own. They thought it was just plain criminal, no, socialism, no, Communism, no, fascism, that Hillary would run oppo research on donOLD, though, so you can see what we are dealing with here.

    Of course, they had no problem with the “liberal media” doing next to nothing in 2015 and 2016 to explain to the American public just who and what donOLD was, and it was not a bigly successful bidnessman, LOL. The media, and the right were just fine when no one was vetting donnie for the American public and letting Johnny Public think that donnie’s persona was all about the one created for him on the game show he was given.

    Long story short - the cons don’t really have a good relationship with vetting.