40 Comments

This seems to be confusing seeking out humiliation for sexual gratification, with the willingness to humiliate oneself for power. The former is a fetish, the latter is common behavior, especially in politics. Trump is crude and public about humiliating subordinates, but he's hardly the first President to do that overall. Look up some of the stuff JFK did to Lyndon Johnson, and later what LBJ did to others. And that's just off the top of my head.

Also, the issue is the reverse of not being afraid of negatives from telling the truth. This is more about how many lies would someone tell to have a reasonable chance of being President. The probability of Vance getting to be President is around the 50% of Trump win and then whatever probability of Trump dying/incapacitated in the next four years (nontrivial given that he's 78 and has poor health habits). Whatever that number is exactly, it's not insignificant.

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No, I'm not confusing them together, but I am acknowledging there is overlap between the two. I further acknowledge the two scenarios have distinct motivations, but I find them contemptible for the same reason.

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You do a great job tossing jabs while not trying to claim some tough-guy high-ground. I also would not claim to be some superhero action star, and would probably succumb to torture or threat to my family's safety. But I wouldn't forfeit my self-respect just to lick some reality star's balls even if I had political ambitions. Reminds me of how Ted Cruz forfeited his dignity coming to Trump's team after what Trump said about Cruz's wife. You let a guy call your wife ugly, and then you become his waterboy? That's as cucky as it gets... https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/politics/ted-cruz-donald-trump-flip-flop-the-view/index.html

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Goddamn don't get me started on Cruz. Not standing up for his wife was more pathetic than anything Vance has done. Why the fuck is he still married to her if he's going to lick the boots of the guy insulting her?

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Because licking the boots gets him more power and influence and chicks love power and influence, including his wife

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It's extremely easy to say what you would or wouldn't do with your political ambitions when you don't have any political ambitions.

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Is it cringe that JD Vance is smart enough to know that the 2020 election was not stolen but that he must not publicly say so because of Orange Man? Yes. Cuckoldry? No.

Trump is not literally fucking Vance's wife. He is not figuratively fucking Vance's wife or Vance or anyone else. This is just politics. And politics is stupid and full of contradictions.

What I think you were trying to express with this piece is that there is a person who could and should do better, JD Vance, but he didn't and won't. And therefore you made some crude sexual connections to the way in which these power dynamics played out. I generally find these types of jokes funny, but yours missed with me because I also just listened to that interview with Lulu this afternoon while doing yard work, and like most media attempts to connect with Vance it felt disingenuous.

The real gotcha in that interview is that when asked about Vance's "I hate the police" comment leaked by his scumbag former friend, Vance described a specific anecdote in which his car was broken into and memorabilia related to his wife were stolen from it. But then the fact check at the end of the episode (a long time after the question) pointed out that the scumbag friend reported that the "I hate the police" comment was specifically in reference to police bodycam footage and Michael Brown. This was presented as a fact, not an allegation.

If true, it means that Vance has invented an apocryphal story to post-hoc explain away his occasional social justice bone fides. Which is... also not an important story? Politicians doing politics is just the news, but your post especially focused on JD Vance, which makes me think you had higher hopes for him.

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Humans are post-hoc justification machines, and I'm included in that cohort. Nothing means anything unless we endow it with context. Someone's wife getting fucked by another dude is meaningless without the values we attribute to the situation. The specific aspect that stands out to me is the servility of the cuckolded, that's the fulcrum of my derision. When I see that same servility replicated in other scenarios, I feel the exact same derision, which is a good sign that my problem is with the servility itself rather than the sexual connotation.

I take it further by tying servility to its consequences, and I think the connection between bravery and progress is clear enough. It's true that politicians doing politics is normal, but the amount of prostration apparent with today's Republican party is unprecedented. We've never had a party leader carry so much fragility to reality, and never had such an entourage so willing to debase themselves to affirm his delusions. I think that's uniquely bad, and I used cuckoldry as the emotional framework to convey why.

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What's the actual alternative? They tried to get rid of Trump, they can't. The base likes him too much. Start a splinter party and lose every election for the foreseeable future? Yes, it's humiliating. Yes, it's pathetic. Trump is not able to be dislodged by his party and demands humiliation. If you think the alternative is ruin what do you actually do? No, clever "I would simply convinced the base to change their minds" dodge. Say you're running up against the boogie man the republicans claim their running up against, say it's Robostalin, and you can't win without Trump, what do you actually do when he slaps your wife's ass on stage and dares you to do something about it?

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At this point, by which Trump has more or less completely co-opted the party, I'd agree there aren't a lot of pragmatic alternatives. I do think there were practical alternatives before we got here. The safest way to handle riding the tiger is to not get on in the first place. Lindsey Graham famously said that "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it." And then went on to become one of Trump's most sycophantic supporters, before he won the 2016 election. One alternative at that point was to not line up behind him, accept that the lack of unity would probably result in a loss for that election, recoup with a better candidate next cycle, try to make Clinton a one-term president and not lastingly sacrifice the integrity and credibility of their party.

Another option, after January 6th, would have been to not block the attempted impeachment and disqualify him from office. This would have been unpopular with Trump's base, but he would have been politically disenfranchised afterwards. It would have been demotivating for his base, but they'd have had a full four years to field another candidate, and could have tried to find someone who could have topped Trump's always low voter favorability ratings. More extreme Republicans might have tried to primary politicians who voted to disqualify him, but being pro-Trump in itself wouldn't be a very strong political stance in an environment where Trump is disqualified from office and can't do much to return political favors. It's not like their base would have started voting for Democrats instead out of spite.

It's hard to coordinate to avoid this outcome when the party norm is to fall in line even behind a figure they mostly hate or hold in contempt, but it's not like that's an intrinsic factor in all coordination problems.

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Exactly. It's indeed a serious coordination problem, but not an insurmountable one. The second impeachment would've been the clearest and cleanest break, but too many defected from that outcome.

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This is naive and conflates party with his base. It's just the "I would simply have made his base stop supporting him" dodge. You have not alternative for Vance. There is no universe you'd have supported him where he has any ability to influence anything

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The base would have no power had the party and its leadership not accommodated them. Had Trump been disavowed by the party, it's true that he could have started his own party, but I doubt it would've gone anywhere if they had to build an apparatus from scratch.

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You're asking for something to have been done a decade ago.

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There were many many other exit ramps since then.

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I can't stomach any piece of writing that deploys the term "cuck." It's a gross, ugly word, and immediately puts the image of the most unpleasant type of contemporary male in my head. Sorry!

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I get it.

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Wasn't that his intention? Or do you mean the image of the male is of the person saying it?

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ICYMI, Terry Southern's Magic Christian:

"Grand buys a huge downtown vacant lot in a major city. He then has a three-foot brick wall built around the perimeter and fills it with feces and offal into which bills of all denominations have been mixed. He then takes pleasure watching immaculately dressed people defiling themselves by braving the stench, and ruining their clothing and dignity, by wading through the muck for the bills."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Christian_(novel)

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A nasty post.

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Which specific part do you have a problem with?

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Probably the part where you kept calling people cucks. For myself and a few others, the "I mean it's *like* being a cuck" doesn't pass muster.

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Time to break out the fainting couch

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Uh it's not the tone offensiveness that bothers me. He can say nigger or jesus-freak or whatever for all I care. It's the fact that he's using such a horrific, ugly word, the word for when a man sexually debases himself for another man, to describe basic toxic politics. It's weird and factually wrong, and it's stupid.

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I don't get this. My thesis is: "I find debasement in being cuckolded to be profoundly pathetic. That same debasing element is present in this political context, and I find it profoundly pathetic with the same revulsion."

I explained why this is different than just basic toxic politics. I know of no other politicians who require to be surrounded by this level of deluded affirmation from their entourage except for dictators.

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"It's not the offensiveness of it, but it's the offensiveness of it."

Your comment makes no sense. The analogy is apt. These guys are indeed metaphorical cucks.

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I think this line of thinking "Oh, you're just too faint to handle how *real* this is", has seriously lost its punch in the last ten years.

People here aren't fainting any more than they faint when they see someone piss in the street. They just find it distasteful, note that it's distasteful, and move on.

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I'm always open to feedback. I'm still surprised a metaphor has gotten this level of pushback, and I wonder if it's the negative connotations of the thing itself that people are objecting to.

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I mean, it's not like I'm going to unsubscribe over this.

I do find your posts about "cuckoldry" to be generally distasteful, but you're allowed to have opinions I don't like, it's your blog, it's fine. But I'm not gonna be apologetic about the distaste it evokes, or act like Ryan DC's "fainting couch" argument is anything more than vice-signaling.

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I think it’s just people telling on themselves

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It's gross for us for the same reason it's gross for you. But it's not at all analogous to politics.

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People always say they wish they had a recording of Trump saying the n-word. I instead wish we had a picture of him with his shirt off so people could make fun of him relentlessly and make him fully lose his mind.

Not generally into making fun of a person's physical appearance, but would obviously need to make an exception for Trump.

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I think a defensible and principled stand on this is it's 100% ok to make fun of the physical appearance of people who make fun of other's physical appearance.

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Seriously, though, imagine that shirtless pic. He would look like absolute dogshit.

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