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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

JD Vance famously grew up in poverty and chaos caused by his mother's chronic drug addiction and his father's having abandoned him when he was a toddler.

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Vance grew up with middle class access to stuff like stable housing, food in the fridge, his grandparents had stock and pension plans, he peppers his book with spicy poverty stuff like finding a weed plant or second hand stories of blood fueds to vet hillbilly cred. There are many middle class families that go through similar shit, but the common black/latino poverty experience often involves surviving narco gang cultures, ambient verbal and physical harassment among friends and family where calling the cops isn't an option, or coercive sex or rape at an early age. Urban poverty is an entirely different beast where you witness 12 year girls olds being given MDMA and entering the sex trade, later having to go to witch doctors or cauldron chemists for improvised poison abortions because Vance's party demedicalized the practice in your state.

It's interesting to note that Vance's assertion he grew up in poverty has been challenged. My assertion was that his position as a white middle class kid from suburban Cincinnati taking golf lessons does not necessarily make him the best person to speak from first hand knowledge about the effects of poverty on educational attainment. I'm also fairly certain that Vance did not wander the streets of Middletown, feral and unparented. My understanding is that he was raised by his grand-parents, not that he lived with the chaos of his mother's situation.

Also... great deflecting.

>I'm also fairly certain that Vance did not wander the streets of Middletown, feral and unparented. My understanding is that he was raised by his grand-parents, not that he lived with the chaos of his mother's situation.

So an addict mother, having to be raised by grand-parents, having to go to the army and then use the GI Bill to study, growing up in an declining small working class town in Ohio, are not enough?

He had to be "feral and unparented" to qualify? Because that's what people mean when they talk about the working and middle class "white American struggles"? Vicorian street urchins?

In any case, by those elements alone, he knows 100x about "white American struggles" than the average champion of the poor at the Met Gala and the New Yorker.

>In any case, by those elements alone, he knows 100x about "white American struggles" than the average champion of the poor at the Met Gala and the New Yorker.

Doesn't that kinda make his current actions worse? The "met gala" people can claim ignorance, he understands struggling and still screws over the struggling.

There is legitimate trauma in his past. But "grew up in poverty" is a distinct thing.

Is your point that childhood trauma makes him an expert on public policy about poverty? I would suggest the public administration degree he got did that.

I'd suggest first-person experience makes you more of an expert than any public administration degree. No shortage of clueless public administration degree holders, with no idea of the thing they're administering, only good in theoritical bullshitting and backstabbing.

No. My point is that "JD Vance famously grew up in poverty" is not well supported.

Okay. Dude. You triggered me. The Marine Corps is not the Army. Nothing else you say has any merit with me because you can't get that basic fact right.

Are you an AI? Probably not. I think most LLMs would understand the difference between the Army and Marines.

Who cares about the exact breed of government dog?

I do.

I don't know or care which specific branch he went to. The point I make is that he had to enlist as a way out and to fund his studies, he wasn't some dude born with a silver spoon.

Don't care about the distinction between them either, or their subdivisions. Most of the times I call all of it "the army" (as in armed forces) anyway, chalk it to dyslexia if you wish.

That's not how I've heard him tell it.

Lies from a liar.

Alas... it's unclear who you're replying to. Are you calling me a liar or Vance a liar (or some other poster here a liar.) I think Vance is more of a Bullshitter in the Frankfurt meaning of the term. Me? I'm more of a liar. If I propagate an untruth, I usually know it's an untruth and am doing it for a specific purpose. That being said... I do try to limit the number of lies I tell. I also try not to lie to myself, but that's the most vexxing of all. Figuring out the untruths you believe because it makes your day easier or frees you from having to help someone you would rather not help is hard.

Not that I'm implying you're a Liar or Bullshitter, but we're all bozos on this bus and give a sinner a break.

But specifically, I am not lying when I say that some people have cast doubts as to the degree of poverty Vance lived in as a child. And if you're saying that the people who say Vance didn't live in abject poverty for most of his childhood are lying, then I don't know what to tell you. We all have to choose what we believe. Some people believe vaccines cause autism. The data supporting this assertion seems kinda thin when I look at it. But having tutored a number of pre-med students through stats classes, I'm not confident members of the AMA are the people who should be doing medical research (thankfully that is changing recently as we get more MD/PhD programs where they teach experimental design.) But I digress...

This seems like one of those "fact resistant" issues and I apologize for bringing it up. People on both sides of the "is J.D. Vance a poop-head" debate should understand there's plenty of mis-information out there and while some people may believe he's a cynical charlatan banking coin on the suffering of people in Appalachia, others believe he is bringing light to a largely under-reported pandemic of systemic under-investment in rural quarters of our country.

It's probably a good idea to examine your own beliefs and biases, and maybe this is a good touch-stone to begin that process. Why do you think Vance is a dork? Why do you think Vance is a valiant defender of social justice for an under-served community?

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