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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Anecdote, but I absolutely despise her. I think she's a genuinely terrible person, combining vacuousness and disinterest in personal conviction with a thirst for power. The only thing she truly believes is that she should be in charge. I would be surprised to find that others with my general inclination think differently.

The one caveat would be that I think I would probably get along with her just fine in person, but that's true of many terrible and destructive people.

I think she's a genuinely terrible person, combining vacuousness and disinterest in personal conviction with a thirst for power. The only thing she truly believes is that she should be in charge.

I think this is true of many, perhaps even most, politicians. Some of them just do a better job at hiding it.

Relatedly, I think an underrated force in politics is that the job of being a major politician, along with the process required to get there, is genuinely very unpleasant. Not only is the pay low and the workload high relative to other options, but people are constantly criticizing you, mocking you, scrutinizing your every word for a way to use it against you and combing through your personal life for damaging stories. You also have to do a lot of personally awkward things like call all of your friends and ask them to give you as much money as they possibly can just so you can be elected. Without the motivation of either intense ideological commitment or extreme megalomania, it seems to me that it would be very difficult to remain in politics for long, especially on the national level.

Just want to echo your sentiments.

Especially during the Kavanaugh hearings, and then the VP debate with “I’m speaking….Im speaking.”

She comes across as a bitter “cool wine aunt” who doesn’t understand her place in the world.

She comes across as a bitter “cool wine aunt” who doesn’t understand her place in the world.

I don't know exactly what your thought process is to get to this sentence but to me it just sounds like you're saying she's a woman who should know her place and leave the male politicians to get on with the important business of striving for power.

Or understand how dumb she is, or understand that people who disagree with her have rights.