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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Dude, NSFW.
NSFJD
💥 GOT’EM
Come on Donnie, replace him with Brain Worm Bob. Just do it! Nothing could possibly go wrong.
The chance we will see his severed head strapped to the top of a station wagon would increase EXPONENTIALLY
Sadly, RFK is more popular and might actually gain him votes.
Peter Thiel wanted him. Who knows why.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jd-vance-trump-vp-peter-thiel-billionaire/
Peter Thiel is so weird. Gay and conservative just don’t go together. But I suppose his billions cushion him from the usual level of contempt.
The thing that baffles me is that Thiel thinks for some reason he’ll be spared by the theocrats that are in the Trump bandwagon.
He won’t. The Nationalist Christians really hate the gays. He’ll eventually be “reeducated” just like the rest if the fascists win.
All they need to do is to look at how someone like Turing was treated. The guy pretty much is responsible for winning the war, for Pete’s sake.
Nope - chemical castration for Teh Ghey as a thank you. And that was from the side fighting against the Nazis. Of course, the Nazis really got things rolling early on by cracking down on trans, so they were far, far worse. Someone like Thiel will NOT be shielded by their money: if the cons ever get their night of the long knives, they’ll carry out their vendettas and they have their lists, and prominent gays, no matter how much they are bootlicks of the far right, will be on those lists.
Did someone say cushion?!
- J.D. Vance
Easily moldable. Like a couch cushion.
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.”
He said he wouldn’t have certified 2020. That was all the vetting Team Cheeto needed.
*…new blow-up couch.
I’d be absolutely shocked if he was vetted at all, in the traditional sense.
Im still convinced Vance was chosen primarily because it sounds similar enough to Pence when Trump forgets who his VP is.
Meanwhile, he’s likely an awful parent to his own kids.
Son, shut the hell up for 30 seconds about Pikachu.
-JD Vance
If you don’t shut up, I’ll smack you after I’m done smacking your mother for disturbing me during my alone time in the sectional…ON THE SECTIONAL!!
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.
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