A terrifying visage
He’s a naive eugenicist. This review of Hillbilly Elegy (both book & film) notes that he blames all the problems in his family history on “bad genes”, and entirely ignores the issues of mental health and poverty.
The ways in which each version of “Hillbilly Elegy” avoids this crucial topic are different, but both are tragically ill-advised. The book itself is a Frankenstein hybrid of looping, repetitive memoir chapters told almost entirely in a voice-over style summary (the creative writing teacher in me kept screaming give us something to see, smell, feel — any sensory detail at all, please!) sandwiched between slapdash social science commentary on the “lurking” “ethnic component.” Vance argues that the bad genes passed down through his Scots-Irish ancestors are the cause of the current social ills he is examining. He bases this argument almost entirely on a blog post from Discover magazine by a writer with a history of contributing to racist, far-right publications.
But James Watson himself told me that he’s Scots-Irish, and that that is the best ethnic background to have!
Well, I guess if Vance has a “lurking” “ethnic component,” that ought to disqualify him for the position of vice president.
Vance argues that the bad genes passed down through his Scots-Irish ancestors are the cause of the current social ills he is examining.
Wait, he’s saying WHITE genes are bad?! That should lose him at least half of the white-supremacist vote, if racists ever thought about such things with any consistency…
Wonder if they’re going to start turning the clock back and declare Scots-Irish people as not real whites.
I imagine he believes the only “good genes” are WASP genes.
Not the last reason to dislike JD Vance either, I’m sure.
Most likely, he is just getting started in his career as a GOP fascist monster.
There are so many small “m” monsters in the GOP that after a while, I at least, stop paying attention. Ted Cruz, the Trumps, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Boebert, Rubio, DeSantis, Abbott, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.. I don’t know too much about Vance except that he is a fascist.
From a Google search, he is a generic GOP fascist. There is nothing intelligent or original there. He doesn’t seem to believe in anything except that he needs more money and power.
Vance has changed his mind on just about everything he claime to believe in.
Vance hates the US democracy.
He doesn’t believe elections should matter.
He supported the GOP attempted coup d’etat on January 6th.
OhmyCthulhu, I sort of agree with Vance on one point, for the exact opposite reasons.
He thinks Trump and himself should just ignore the US Supreme court as they dismantle the US Federal government.
Which BTW, the Supreme court probably wouldn’t do.
The US Supreme court is now controlled by the enemies of the USA, who are making up laws whenever they want to.
I would say ignore the Supreme court when they stop ruling on the laws and start making up laws that attack our current government.
Walter Solomon @3:
Since Ulster Scots (aka Scots-Irish) were largely descended from Lowland Scots and English Protestants transplanted to Ireland, they’re about as WASP as one could be.
Scots-Irish were generally considered “real whites” as they were good protestants and spoke English natively (the areas they came from in Scotland before moving to Ulster generally spoke Scots [a dialect of English] and not Gaelic). It was the Irish Catholics who were considered not quite the right race especially if they were also poor and Gaelic speakers. The Scots-Irish on the whole came to the US before the Irish Catholics (most of the latter came during and after the 1840s potato famine while the former started coming in large numbers in the 18th century).
I had good WASP genes, at least until my father’s ancestors turned Catholic in the mid-19th Century…
I spent 15 minutes on Google looking up Vance.
About all I could conclude was that he was a generic GOP monster who didn’t actually believe anything or care about anything except acquiring more money and power.
The word I was looking for is…opportunist.
And, this is a common observation of anyone who looks at JD Vance for 15 minutes or more.
If Vance wasn’t so intent on destroying huge segments of the US population and its government, I would find him really boring.
Other than being a potential mass murderer, there is nothing interesting there.
These WASP genes are terrible. Where’s my stinger?
Most of the time so far, the GOP’s plans for mass murder are more implicit than explicit. They never say outright how they will solve the gay problem, the Trans problem, the nonwhite problem, the immigrant problem, the atheist problem, the cultural Marxism problem, the Woke problem.
The common solution in the past for groups of people that they don’t like for who they are, not what they did, is to kill them. This is happening at this moment around the earth, for example, the live tracker has…Gaza · Killed: at least 38,848 people. The number of Ukrainians killed by the Russians lately runs around 70,000.
Yesterday, the CEO of a cryptocurrency firm presented his Final Solution to the democracy problem. He wants to start a Civil War and kill anyone who votes against Trump. I’m sure it is a popular idea.
Not yet popular enough though. He lost his job.
(I expect he will end up as Chief of Staff or Advisor to…someone like JD Vance.)
So he is intellectually stuck in the 1920s? Why am I not surprised?
Also – considering creationism- aren’t leading Republicans required to be two full centuries behind the curve? So Vance is a dangerous lefty radical.
raven @ # 11: They never say outright how they will solve … the immigrant problem…
In that one instance, they do get pretty explicit: did you see (the reports on) those “Mass Deportation Now” signs handed out and waved at the Republican National Convention?
Project 2025 has more detail, including ideas for concentration camps to hold over 10,000,000 deportees-to-be.
As for James David Bowman Hamel Vance’s ideas, they somewhat remind me of Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, which goes into great (if somewhat selective) detail about the maladaptive shortcomings of Irish/northern English peasant (my ancestors!) values in the late-colonial/early-national US in comparison to the Protestant-work-ethic lifestyles of the southern-English/German/Dutch settlers, though at least McWhiney stays out of the genetic-arguments swamp.
Almost all of our Presidents have been of Scotch-Irish descent.
Just imagine how great we would be if we had chosen folks from a better gene pool. /s
Oh, the C word.
They are going to have to use a different terminology.
Call them relocation camps or something.
I doubt the GOP has thought it through too far. They are big fans of magical thinking.
We are spending ca. $4 billion to deport around 1/2 million immigrants a year.
So to get 10 million immigrants deported would run around $80 billion in direct costs.
It would also probably wreck the economy and cause a recession. Those immigrants are holding down jobs, paying taxes, and buying houses with mortgages. Over a million mortgages are held by households with undocumented migrants. They also often have US born children they may leave behind which will cost someone to raise.
All this to fix a problem that isn’t all that big a problem.
I suspect they will have a few token immigration crackdowns and then forget about it.
They are saying they want to build camps where they can put undesirables. So they are ‘concentrated’ in one place and easier to process.
Pierce. R. Butler @ 13
If we are to talk about maladaptive cultural heritage, remember one reason the South fell behind the North was the south was colonised with people from the economic periphery of Britain while the North got colonised from people closer to the center of the budding English ‘proto-modern’ economy.
It is not a coincidence the latter tended to be just a bit more thrifty while people of the former group tended to be more tradition-bound.
So, why bother to build bridges if you can ford the river most of the time? Why bother with quality control of wine caskets if most of them are fine? (The last part was the reason why early wine export from the South to Europe failed).
Birmingham Alabama has both coal and iron, but did not get industrialised until the 1880s – with nothern investments. It was only during the 20th century the culture was homogenisized – although there are certainly places that live in the past.
I absolutely hate living in “interesting” times.
To his credit (?), it’s a rare eugenics fan who considers himself to belong to the inferior group. I’m assuming that he has no kids, consistent with his beliefs. But no, I see that he’s inconsistent on that bit too.
OT, but as we are talking about genetic components… And this will make PZ happy.
.
“Botanists vote to remove racist reference from plants’ scientific names” | Science | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/20/botanists-remove-racist-references-plants-scientific-names
( Kaffir ironically comes from arabic kuffar. We imported a lot of useful arabic terms, this one is useful for racists)
I like the Scotch, and I like the Irish, but I would not mix them.
(Only the one is peaty)
birgerjohansson @ # 20 cites ““Botanists vote to remove racist reference from plants’ scientific names”” – but I fear to read that out loud to the Wandering Jew(s) in my yard…
Oh no, most of the eugenics clan are happy to claim they belong to the second most intelligent group. Makes them look less bigoted, you know.
Seconding @John Harshman, it’s pretty weird that he admits of being less than the master race.
I don’t expect any kind of consistency from fascists, but like, doesn’t that disqualify him?
This is a new strategy, worth keeping an eye on it.
So he’s a eugenecist. We know where eugenics led to. Perhaps when he called Trump America’s Hitler he was actually looking at himself in a mirror.
PZ, this looks more as if he’s declaring himself to belong to a loser race, not just second best but just plain genetically problematic. Then again, you know more than I do. I’ve never read Hillbilly Elegy</> and for sure don’t intend to.
@Raging Bee #1,
That’s pretty standard for US-style white supremacism, actually. WASPS are smart and Italians are cunning and Celts are hot-tempered and righteous and Poles are stupid blah blah blah, but they’re still all better than non-whites.
I’d be very surprised if Vance was claiming genetic inferiority to, say, black people. Except on metrics related to professional sports and porn.
John Morales …”I like the Scotch, and I like the Irish, but I would not mix them.” When the Scots dance the “Irish Jig” they do it with lots of exaggerated foot stamping and fist pumping to mock the legendary Irish temper. Meanwhile the Irish claim they gave the Scots the bagpipes as a joke but the Scots were too stupid to realise it.
As PZ says, the ‘Asians are even more genetically gifted than whites’ line is pure misdirection so the ‘race realists’ can claim they’re not really racist. The obvious proof is that they use these claims to justify the low proportion of African-Americans in positions of wealth and power, but at the same time they don’t have the slightest concern that there have been so few Asian political leaders in US history. Obviously the American political system is blocking the best people and needs to change…right?
And the definition of Asian seems to include East Asians but not South Asians. It’s almost as if their defining feature of racial intelligence is melanin.
[OT]
garydargan, when I was a lad just entering secondary education in Oz, I had a teacher whose name was Mr. Cock. Really.
Anyway, he was… um, eclectic.
He taught Japanese and he taught fencing (swordsmanship) and Highland dancing — you know, the type where one hops over the swords.
He claimed that the dancing superbly enhanced the leg muscles–especially the calves–and one’s footwork and timing.
(Wasted on 14-yo kids, of course, but memorable nonetheless)
I think at least some people here may be misinterpreting Vance’s position. He’s not really putting himself, or his genetic cohort, down. He is, rather, demonstrating his ‘superiority’ in a way that fellow white nationalists recognize and identify with.
In part, he’s bragging, because he ‘pulled himself up by his bootstraps’ to become a senator and vice presidential nominee despite the supposed disadvantage of his genes. This plays into the self-flattering narrative of the right, wherein they’re the real persecuted underdogs, but they succeed anyway because they just work that much harder than everyone else.
The other half of this is the implication that those people could do the same thing and succeed to, if they weren’t so lazy/shiftless/decadent/whatever. Those people is often described in the vaguest possible terms by those who tell these stories so that the listener can insert whatever minority they most resent.
Yes, the narrative is rife with contradictions and incoherent as fuck, but that doesn’t matter. The gist of it is “us superlatively good, them unspeakably bad,” and the audience for Vance’s drivel picks up on that just fine. It doesn’t have to make sense, because it’s not an argument at all. It’s a bunch of pathetic losers angrily masturbating to the thought that they’re the rightful rulers of the rest of us by virtue of their limitless virtues, despite any minor faults that totally aren’t their fault like “ethnic components.” They desperately want to believe they’d be our rulers if the rest of us didn’t “cheat” by utilizing evils like cooperation and democracy.
So basically what Vance is doing is screaming “I’m better than all of you!” Meanwhile, what Vance’s fans are hearing is “We’re better than all of you!” because white nationalists all think they’re going to be on top of the heap when they start sorting out whose is inferior.
@20. birgerjohansson : “OT, but as we are talking about genetic components… And this will make PZ happy. “Botanists vote to remove racist reference from plants’ scientific names”
Good. It usually annoys me when taxonomists change species names but this time & for this reason I strongly approve. Its good that there’s only a letter in it and they are very similar too. Incidentally there’s also this ABC artilce :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-16/hibberts-flowers-hitlers-beetle-species-named-history/100702442
Losing the name Hibbertia will be harder toget used to but willing to do that.
[continuing John Morales’ off-topic thread @30…sorry]
IIRC, the late Judith Durham was born a Cock. (She used her mother’s family name professionally.)
Oi, PZ answered my question right after I asked. XD
JD Vance shares his journey from atheist law student to practicing Christian
(eye-roll)
But now that he’s all growed, his faith is really deep as he is lying profusely in an attempt to get a corrupt, untruthful, sexist, racist, narcissist convicted felon to the most powerful office in the land. Just like Jesus would do.
Makes perfect sense (?)
StevoR @32
Way OT: I’m totally disgusted by the Hungarian gifting. Not a real win.
@ ^ Hemidactylus : Oscar would’ve won anyhow if McLaren didn’t mess up on his pitstop strategy – Oscar Piastri DID earn this. A shame its tarnished Oscar’s first proper win not counting the Quatar sprint race last year. It wasn’t his fault – & very glad Lando Norris did the right thing but Mclaren messed this up badly. Not ideal but Piastri is now an F1 fullrace winner so happy for that.
Watching the F1 post-race show now & resept for Lando’s comments there :
Echoes of the multi-21 situation w Webber but this time Norris did what Vettel then didn’t – the right thing. Also that start by Oscar.
Dóh! My apologies for the embed clip. Respect for Lando. Awful situation for both drivers that Mclaren created for themselves.
PS. Guess people who aren’t longtime F1 fans like us don’t know about the whole multi-21 thing here so explanation here :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Malaysian_Grand_Prix#Post-race
Was really afraid this race would be a repeat of that.
Again, I don’t think it was a “gift”” here, I think Mclaren messed up on strategy and did end up creating the right result where they nearly created an unjust one. Think about Piastri’s start and lead and situation befroe they brought him in..
In unrelated news: Hell just froze over.
We’re fucked.
The late Canadian academic and racism fan Phillipe Rushton claimed that Asians tended to be more intelligent that whites. But he also claimed they were also less sexual than whites. Which always made me roll my eyes given the presence of porn, prostitution, and related activities in Japan. I suspect Rushton probably limited this supposed intellectual superior to the Chinese, Japanese, and maybe the Koreans, not other peoples that fit the North American use of the term Asian.
Latest: Vance blames his mother’s addiction to immigrants carrying drugs when in fact she was a nurse who stole opioids from her patients. His ad actually got community corrected.
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/07/jd-vance-called-out-over-lie-about-his
StevoR
Lando was ahead by 5 seconds or more and taunting over the radio that Oscar should catch up then. Screw pit strategy screw ups. That happens between teams all the time. Lando was winning and was commanded to stand down. Screw that. He was ahead. Full stop. That he did stand down shows his magnanimity and team play, but I would have been fine with the middle finger. Is Lando expected to stand down for the less capable team favorite for the rest of the season now?
Max would have laughed off a similar request for Checo. Seems very wrong and anticompetitive.
I would have rather seen Max take Hungary with a 20 second gap on McClaren than this travesty. At least Hamilton had a legit 3rd place podium.
I was pissed at this crappy fake win outcome.
@ ^ Hemidactylus : team order s have always been part of F1. Back in the 1950’s – 1956 – Peter Collins gave up his car & remarkably his title chance to help temaate Fangio win the title :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Collins_(racing_driver)#Later_career
Different era of course.
Fixed it for you. Piastri ha d done everything he needed to win -beaten Norris and max and therets off theline at the srta and intothe first corner, built anddefended his lead. He did nothing that deserved tolose him the race. Oscar beat Norris fair and square until the team botched his strategy and left him out too late allowing Norris to unfairly get ahead on other than merit. More than that, it wasn’t the first time Mclaren strategists have messed up Piastri’s race with poor calls.
No. Piastri is nether the team favourite nor less capable.
Max is a douche. One of the signs of that was when despite Perez helping him repeatedly he defied team orders to win :
Source : https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/motorsport/300738981/max-what-happened-verstappen-refuses-to-help-red-bull-teammate-sergio-perez
In contrast Lewis Hamilton has given up wins and places for his teamate like here in Hungary 6 years ago (1 min 43 secs) and Schumacher has previously allowed Barrichello to win as did Senna gifting the 1991 Japanese GP to Gerhard Berger among other example. Its been part of the sport all along.
Oscar Piastri being robbed by his team of a victory he’d effectively won because of their poor strategy would’ve been the travesty here. Puiastri deserved the win, did everything right here and Norris was only leading becuase the team stuffed Oscar’s race up and put him ahead by mistake – their mistake not Oscar’s. I’m glad they fixed that.
JD Vance tried to be a VC. He didn’t do much, old colleagues said.