What is there to dismiss? I think the GoP has made their position abundantly clear: we will continue to cry foul whenever we don’t get exactly what we want, and we will continue to use bad actors in key positions to advance these political temper tantrums, and we will continue relying on 70 million + idiots to prop us…

I grew up in the City of New York and we had blue collar workers, drug addiction, hard ass times and Ford and Reagan literally telling us to drop dead. No one in America ever made a movie about us to dispel the myths of the “Welfare Queen”, Black on Black crime or “The War on Drugs”. Nope. The people that elected…

As a lifelong New Yorker and former full-time journalist in NYC I also find it kinda funny that “reporter from New York” has gotten conflated into a nice elitist strawman gumbo that doesn’t necessarily get at the reality of the situation.

That link to the story about her being Italian-American is really cool. I had no idea that Jill Biden was of Sicilian descent. I am too and I’ve often wondered if I have any distant relatives in the villages my great-grandparents left.

Agreed. The book, like all books and takes, has issues. But people are WAY too hard on it. Here’s the deal, if you think the whole book is bullshit, go work in social services in a rural area, and you’ll see how wrong you are. Perhaps people thought Vance was being too hard on victims, but there’s also a tough love…

He uses the term “learned helplessness” to describe people who have internalized the idea that nothing they do makes a difference in their lives. How else to explain the rampant domestic violence, ignoring of birth control, a diet of Mountain Dew and cigarettes, declining honest work in favor of being on the dole?

I feel like you’ve gotten the wrong impression from that statement: Those kids were told by their parents and grandparents that you never needed to read books or learn anything because only stupid people read books and learn thing. Anyone who is smart doesn’t do that, they become farmers or truck drivers.

People are too hard on that book. I think JD Vance is sympathetic to the plight of Appalachia/Rural America, with full acknowledgement that he was lucky to succeed.

The Secret Service has to protect the First Lady whether she works or not.  I doubt that there is much (if any) marginal extra cost associated with her having a job, I highly doubt it is going to be $50 million a year.  And, like, protecting the First Family is literally the Secret Service’s job.  It is not like this…

Also it’s sometimes used an anti-semitic dogwhistle, especially if the words “costal elites” or “globalist” are used in conjunction as synonyms.

those are the same people who tell you they live in upstate ny and then give you a mt. krisco address

I grewup in rural northern lower Michigan and knew many people living these types of circumstances. Now, perhaps my ‘privilege’ was being born to MA degreed librarians descended from industrious German and Polish stock in the economic and cultural center for the approx. 100 mile square micro-region and that’s why I…

Well that’s just not fair. Melania has a full-time job too. There’s like a contract and shit.

I find it funny when people use the phrase “from new york”, as in “a reporter from new york, as some sort of short hand for urban sophistication and privilege. I also grew up in an economically depressed town full of blue collar workers who did probably know about extra forks but just didnt see the point. That town was…

And she lost by fewer votes than trump.  

Who refused to accept the last election results, ya mad turtle? Questions were asked about foreign interference (ya know, the foreign interference the FBI and CIA flagged) and what role the Trump campaign may have had in it (as it turns out, at least some, as per Donny Jr). But nobody refused to accept the results or…

Well that’s a longer conversation (Angela Davis does a good job of explaining it in “Are Prison’s Obsolete?” which I linked a pdf of below) essentially police/prisons are something we take for granted, similar to the institution of slavery which people also couldn’t imagine a world without.

I tend to think of defund the police as part of reform/“sure we need police but just different police”. And what you are saying as “abolish the police”. I have a hard time imagining a world without law enforcement entirely, and I dont think we need to keep law enforcement the way we do it now.

This also isn’t really on progressives. This is the BLM protests that the GOP is using here, linking candidates to large scale protests. And I hope you would agree that these protests are absolutely needed and crucial to a healthy democracy. The problem here is that voters and America at large is really fucking…

Indeed, nobody thinks of fire departments and paved roads as socialism, they’re just basic services that protect people from collective threats and support pleasant living and prosperity.