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At the time of writing, a /pol/ thread claims that this passage, in which Vance admits to masturbating with the lubed interior of a rubber glove held between two couch cushions, was in the first edition of his book, but was deleted from later editions.
So that's what Twitter was on about last night. Nice to know I can stop feeling uneasy about the Kamala blowjob jokes.
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I'm... kinda impressed by how bad that is. I get that no one reads the original text, but good lords, you couldn't get a sharper tonal or stylistic mismatch from Elligy's writing style with a steel blade and a whetstone.
The man wouldn't use the word 'lush' unless held hostage, and I think 'chambers of manhood' would by only work Red Triber frameworks as a testes joke.
EDIT: for contrast, the portion where a lot of the words he would use was lifted from.
The more outrageous a lie you can get your followers to believe, the deeper you buy them into your team
Insofar as such half-joke-half-smear claims go, "JD Vance had sex with a couch" is rather benign compared to, say, "Big Mike Obama" or the implications of "I have information leading to the arrest of Hillary Clinton" and the like.
The things happening around Clinton were highly dubious and she is obviously corrupt, in a sleazy eastern European way (improbable futures/stock trading etc), not the polished American one (speaking fees etc).
And seeing as how Epstein died - and he was heavily associated with Clinton, who flew Lolita express numerous times, apparently 26 times - I don't have a hard time imagining she has been at times involved in someone getting killed outside of her official government work. (Where she infamously asked "Why don't we just drone Assange ?"..
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Why are the other ones worse than this one? Also, is this the final verdict on whether this sort of thing is ok? No one is going to flip out anymore, if you pin that sort of thing on a left-winger?
"Big Mike Obama" - ie. the idea that Michelle Obama is trans, if taken seriously, implies there's been a decades-long conspiracy to cover up this fact, including, presumably, everything related to make people believe she has naturally birthed Sasha and Malia. The Hillary thing implies she's a mass murderer who kills everyone who opposes her. Vance having sex with a (lubricated glove stuck in a) couch, while embarrassing, would not be a completely expectional thing for a young-ish man to do.
The point is that right-wingers crying foul over this while not crying foul over similar but worse jokes from their own side.
It's a half-joke on your own terms, why should all of it's implications be taken seriously?
When that Home Depot lady got fired we were posed a question of whether right-wingers are here are going to decry it, now that it is their side doing it. My point is analogous to that, if that cancel culture question was valid, it is valid to ask left-wingers that didn't like these sorts of insults to decry them being made about Vance. Either that, or to explicitly endorse a free-for-all.
It's a free-for-all in any case. It's always been my point about cancel culture, too, that both the left and the right will do it if they have a chance, and have done it forever and ever, so it's useless to go "you started it, we're just responding!" and so on. The cycle cooling down either happens naturally or due to an external pressure, not by expecting either side just voluntarily and consciously give up and then expect the other to nobly do the same.
This only really makes sense if you assume there are only two sides. The eager willingness to play the "Republican talk radio" game ticked off people who needn't have been anything but friends.
Of course, it makes more sense if getting to hurt people is the point and the policy is just an excuse.
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