"From late summer’s Vice-Presidential pageant of Democratic middle-aged American white men, Walz emerged as an avatar of football-coaching, social-studies-teaching, father-figure affability, and this appeal helped carry him past arguably more strategic choices to a spot on the Harris ticket.... Walz embodies a model of nontoxic masculinity the Harris campaign has hoped to represent with such outreach as the 'White Dudes for Harris' fund-raising Zoom. 'Weird'—Walz’s inspired epithet for magaleadership—was delivered in a tone of
goshdarnit perplexity, and with it, he laid claim to the role of norm-setting paterfamilias. The other guys were the basement-dwelling nephews and conspiracy-theorizing uncles.... The idea of fatherhood that Vance and his pronatalist ilk present is at once maximally literal and maximally abstract: it is a matter of gametes and hormones on one hand and social order on the other. In contrast, Walz’s rendition of fatherhood conveys an identity rooted in particularity—the reality of particular children, particular parents, a particular shared life...."
I'm reading "Tim Walz and J. D. Vance’s Battle of the Dads/Duelling visions of fatherhood will define the Vice-Presidential debate" by Mollie Fischer (in The New Yorker).
Abstract versus particular... dad.
I don't know if that's a fair representation of either man (or the theater surrounding them), but it makes me think about the way human beings can reason from the abstract or the particular. For example, in a legal case, one could begin with an abstraction like fairness or equality, listen to arguments by ideologues, and then decide what will be done, in the future, when particular cases arise, or one might wait for a concrete controversy between adversaries with a real stake in the outcome and then work from the particular to a rule that can be stated in the abstract.
Do you like things in context or out of context — abstract or concrete — when you're doing your own thinking? When you're stuck relying on the decisions of others?
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Democrat daddy issues. They want a daddy so badly, they will f*ck the whole country to get one.
In theory, I like to work from abstract to the particular. But in practice I always prefer working from the passionate, messy concrete to the abstract.
I stopped reading when I got to the part where the writer without any irony (and without evidence) lumped Andrew Tate in with Jordan Peterson. I think I have diagnosed the problem right there.
Walz has taken up the dad mantle? Aw Shucks! That's hard!
Politics mixed with... is DEI (e.g. racism). Forward!
The Democrats have no idea how to appeal to men and no idea that they have no idea.
It's nice that you have the time to try to find some deeper meaning to the propaganda shoveled by left controlled media.
The whole point of articles like this is simply to smear the Republican candidate and tell democrats how to think regarding the politician being pushed at them. There's nothing deeper than that, no matter how many fancy words or concepts they use. You may get pleasure pretending there is but there isn't.
They hate men, and they secretly hate manufactured archetypes of men like Tim Walz even more.
I am with Alexander. I like to think of myself as abstract, and perhaps I am, but the parts that go around in my head are the concrete.
The reason Walz gives off a superficial "dad" vibe is that he's completely unimpressive in all other respects. I'm confident that JD Vance is a great dad, but when I see him I don't picture him cutting the grass or walking the kids to the bus stop. I think, "What an intelligent, thoughtful, brave, well-spoken young man. Where do people this accomplished come from?" With Walz, it's more like, "I wonder that guy down the street, mowing his lawn, does for a living. Probably sells tires or something."
Walz embodies a model of nontoxic masculinity Of course. Walz is the nontoxic man that will remove a child from a home because parents won't go along with transgender mutilation. Batshit crazy women like Walz's wife like men like this.
Walz wonderful "non-toxic" masculinity led him to abandon his unit before being deployed, and then lying to take credit for seeing combat. That seems REALLY toxic to me. It's actually kind of psychotic. A special kind of douchebag.
Non-toxic masculinity = manipulative coward.
When does Tampon Tim come out of the closet??
I suppose beta males need a hero.
The debate watchers will see two kinds of dads on display. They'll be able to recognize two distinct types, especially if they've been raised within the experience of neighborhood organizations, like sports teams for kids, or church Sunday schools, or after-school clubs. Kids know very well what phonies look like, once they reach about 8 or 9 years old. And then they're faced with the choice of rejecting the behavior internally, or adopting it for themselves. Tim Walz lays no special claim on fatherhood - but that won't stop him from reaching for another helping of stolen valor. I think Vance is smart enough to keep Walz focused on the defensive.
Never. His beard, Gwen, would never allow him to put their success in jeopardy like that. She's got speeches and fancy DC parties to attend dammit!
The media wing of the Party create a narrative, 'Tim Walz is America's dad', then they report on the narrative as if it was something that had happened organically and exists separately from the narrative.
I'll take pounding the facts, then the law, over pounding the table any day.
He’s clown daddy.
Concrete here. If it’s data, then see how it fits any appealing or unappealing abstraction, and if it’s an appealing or unappealing abstraction, see if any data supports it. Is this a nature or a nurture trait? I think nurture in my case but who knows.
Pennywise daddy.
The idea of fatherhood that Vance and his pronatalist ilk present is at once maximally literal and maximally abstract: it is a matter of gametes and hormones on one hand and social order on the other
The social security Ponzi requires that there are enough working young people to support the retired elderly. Social Security itself is pronatalism.
1940: The ratio was 42 workers per retiree
1960: The ratio was 5.1 workers per retiree
2022: The ratio was just under three workers per retiree
2030: The ratio is projected to be less than 2.5 workers per retiree
I was born in 1969. When I log on to the SS site to see benefits starting at 62, and full benefits at 67, they already show what you will receive if you work until 70, which for me is 2039. Generation X is going to get a SS haircut.
If I work until I'm 70, maybe Zelensky will draft me when I retire. He'll still be needing troops.
They would have us outsource. Dad, father, and papa, too?
Meanwhile, remote workers are returning to office with fears of labor arbitrage through immigration reform and global transition in progress at a lower, unsubsidized cost of living.
He's more the model of a boyfriend who offers bennies for 'burdens" in Obamanomics.
Speaking for dads everywhere, I cringe at the idea of a buffoon like Walz as a dad figure. Dads see a problem and bend heaven and earth to fix it. Walz rushes into a room doing a stupid dance and gladhands everyone. Sometimes inappropriately.
The hick and the weirdo. And the fun thing is, that works both ways.
In my own thoughts, the particular sharpens the focus. But one case seldom provides a rule by its own. One goes from a single case not to the abstract, but to as many variations as one can think of. The beauty of the common law is that it has focused on the particular again and again and again over hundreds of years providing rules shaped into something everyone can live with. Civil law, or statutes, being one person's or one groups idea, likely based on an abstraction, run the risk of being unworkable. Even this dichotomy is not a rule, but only a principle to keep in mind if speculating with oneself as to how society should be organized.
Democrats always and only think from the abstract to the particular.
Are fertility specialists who treat women with IVF part of the dreaded pronatalist ilk?
Not certain why I spat those banal comments out this morning. Maybe it was the observation on democrats worming its way out of my brain, or perhaps because I could not bear to read the comments on Walsh annd skipped to the end of the post. Agree with the comments of Aggie on Dads and kids.
Shirley they cant be serious
They can't use Kamala's husband as America's Dad ... because of course he banged the au pair and got her pregnant.
… but it makes me think about the way human beings can reason from the abstract or the particular.
Engineers do this every day.
Watch Tim Walz sashay into a room. He's gayer than Richard Simmons.
Non-toxic masculinity = Gay bear
Incels vote, bro.
You just hit the peepee on the head, so to speak. Democrats are the party of dysfunctional families, and in particular, the ones with no dad. It's so much a part of their identity that they really should have a drill team that marches in "Missing Dad Formation". Thus, they're joyful now to have both a Mamala and Coach Dad. Together. At last. Kinda sorta.
This is why they're importing new wage slaves. The day that Social Security check bounces is the day the Revolution starts and they're put up against walls. And they know it.
I wonder if they will talk about pussies tonight? And dogs and ducks et al.
Something I learned the other day that surprised me is that Chile has a large Haitian population. Wikipedia puts it at 186m in 2019. It is probably more now.
The reason I learned about this is because there are enough Haitians and eating dogs and cats is enough of a problem (real or imagined) that Chile passed a law last week forbidding it.
It would be cool for JD to through this in non-coach Walz' face if he brings up cat eating.
Perhaps pointing out that it is still legal to eat pets in Ohio.
John Henry
More likely he's the blow-up air tube guy outside with the arms and legs inflating/deflating wildly to get you to come in to the tire store.
I think that in politics, the concrete is easier to imitate, to play. That's what Walz is doing in spades. Beam, wave, blow kisses at people you don't know. Then shove your confused, handicapped son into the "proper" place on the convention stage, because the look is what really matters.
The babble is overwhelming. And the attempt to paint Walz as "normal dad" is pitiful. It's not weird at all to visit China dozens of times. It's not weird at all to do leg kicks on stage. It's not weird at all to drive drunk and make up several stories to try to excuse it.
Every dad does these things.
What’s funny to me is that my daughter and her husband wouldn’t associate with the Walz family, but will vote for him, over Vance, any day, but would rather associate with the Vance family, if given the opportunity. They are part of the modern Yuppi class, of highly educated young people. The Vance’s are high achievers, while the Walzes are lazy slackers. Not too bright, but nice at barbecues.
The scary thing is that Gwen Walz looks an awful lot like Crooked Hillary? Is that short blond Bob, or whatever it is, covering the sort of fetid corruption that it does with Mrs Clinton?
What’s funny to me is that my daughter and her husband wouldn’t associate with the Walz family, but will vote for him, over Vance, any day, but would rather associate with the Vance family, if given the opportunity. They are part of the modern Yuppi class, of highly educated young people. The Vance’s are high achievers, while the Walzes are lazy slackers. Not too bright, but nice at barbecues.
The scary thing is that Gwen Walz looks an awful lot like Crooked Hillary? Is that short blond Bob, or whatever it is, covering the sort of fetid corruption that it does with Mrs Clinton?
Hey, I'm a dad too. I just never claimed to be in China when I wasn't.
Social Security is no more a Ponzi scheme than food stamps or Dept of State. It is funded as welfare out of the general purse.
The grift is that so many people believe that it is an insurance or pension of some sort. We have no right to SS, the amount we get has next to nothing to do with what we have paid in. It is simply what Congress decides we deserve. Or don't deserve.
It will continue until Congress stops funding it.
For a bit about how SS came to be, and how Justice Stone showed the FDR administration how to get around the prohibition on insurance see here:
https://www.ssa.gov/history/tea.htm
More detail here https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html
John Henry
Is "social studies teaching" supposed to be a positive?Teachers tend to be female, is that the new perception of masulinity that we are supposed to experience? Let's face it, Walz presents as a likely pedophile and cliseted gay mal, thats the prrception.
Just got that image of Walz jerking his son around like a rag doll in my mind again.
'Read our article on Dueling Visions: one is good and decent, the other bad and weird. Then subscribe for more enlightened writing.'
Should we not prefer a lazy slacker for president/VP? If they were actually lazy slackers it would mean that they would not attempt to get anything done. That would minimize govt effect on our lives.
The problem is that in office they are not really lazy slackers, they enact all kinds of stupid laws.
John Henry
None have taken up the mantle in this manner since Papa Joe Stalin, anyway.
Two recent media narratives:
Joe Biden is George Washington
Tim Walz is the father of our country.
+1
Heh, heh, heh. Once dad isn’t looking, we can nick the keys to the Porsche and a bottle of whiskey from the liquor cabinet. No problem.
*checks*
Oh shit, they already did that!
Vance should not be distracted by this bullshit. His job is with Kamala, not the beta male.
That's all manufactured stuff. Walz is half nonentity, half toxic authoritarian, so the America's dad and model of non-toxic masculinity persona was invented for him in an effort to make him appealing.
Eisenhower was "America's dad" -- all the more so since he didn't come out and say it. Come to think of it, George Washington was America's dad, though I don't think "dad" was the way they put it back then.
[loudly clears throat]
If you mean by "mantle" the cringy weirdo caricature of American dad's as depicted in television sitcoms since the '60s and onwards, then sure. Governor Walz fits that trope entirely. It was funny watching him cheering on the Golden Gophers football team playing against Michigan last Saturday and getting booed by what he thought would be a friendly audience in Ann Arbor. Walz isn't what he seems and the "avuncular, but a dumbass" mask he wears slips easily and often.
With respect to the matter of litigation starting from theoretical and moving to actual or vice versa, I never handled (or presided over) a case that didn’t involve actual parties with an actual dispute. That’s usually a jurisdictional requirement.
Thinking back to the George Floyd riots of 2020, I have to say I’m not impressed by a “dad” that encourages his “kids” to ply with matches.
Walz let Minneapolis burn for political gain. Beta Cuck WI Gov Tony Evers let Kenosha burn for political gain. Both are "men" cut from the same cloth.
"Dad" bailed out on his kids as they went off to Iraq.
The New Yorker publishes nauseating claptrap once again.
"From late summer’s Vice-Presidential pageant of Democratic middle-aged American white men, Walz emerged as an avatar of football-coaching, social-studies-teaching, father-figure affability, and this appeal helped carry him past arguably more strategic choices to a spot on the Harris ticket...."
What BS - Walz was selected primarily because he (a) was not Jewish, and (b) was believed to appeal to the Muslim community who thought that Biden/Harris' tepid "support" for Israel against Hamas was disqualifying.
Good one. Exactly
Also, my dad would never have flipped off a large crowd on national television.
Leftists make the mistake of thinking that normal people want a government appointed “dad” in their lives. Yuck, no thanks.
JD Vance has the most to gain because he is currently one of the most disliked figures in America (favorability is *deep* underwater), while Walz, for his various foibles, is very well liked.
Well I see Vance with his kids all the time but I've never seen Walz with his. They are purposely hiding the Antifa-loving girl, and no the special boy being drug onstage like a misbehaving dog doesn't count for much. Without even thinking hard I can remember at least three recent bits on Vance that showed him with his kids (and one with a dog for bonus points). And I actively AVOID news 99% of the time.
Ha ha ha. You guys hate everybody. Normal people don't. Especially best selling authors. Try again putz.
A long way up from the bottom. Expecting Walz to shine.
He has all of the talents of Clark Griswold, except the humor part.
He's better at projecting affability than Kamala is at projecting joy. He bounces around a lot. It looks a little forced, but there's no denying that he's got energy. It's a welcome contrast with Joe Biden in his appearances with Kamala......His wife is good looking and good looking in an accessible way. I haven't heard any of mud attached to her so good for them as a couple......He got elected governor of a large state. He's a successful politician if you define success as getting elected.......I hope Kamala crashes and burns but I don't think he will be the cause.
Walz looks like he’s 80. The American Dad bullshit isn’t working. America’s Alcoholic Uncle could work
Likek most New Yorker pieces this article is "weird". Walz showed his "dadliness" by giving the double finger to the Michigan fans at last weekend's football game. Walz thinks he's Huey Long--but as Al Campanis once said about a certain group --which got Campanis canned--Walz lacks the essentials.
Walz is mostly not avuncular. The other part of that is what he mostly is.
"Social Security is no more a Ponzi scheme than food stamps or Dept of State." Disagree. With SS, people paying taxes today are being promised (to some extent based on how much they pay) money in the future in the form of retirement benefits. There's nothing comparable with food stamps, a program that could be ended tomorrow.
From what I've read he was actually cheering MI (Dearborn voters?) against his home state's team.
Poor Molly apparently has never met a man or a dad. Tragic.
I live in Minnesota. Walz has always been a horse’s ass. Put a fur hat on him and he’d be perfect on the Kremlin balcony circa 1977.
They’re eating teh cats and rich is screwing teh P00ch… repeatedly.
I think the one place Walz could go after JD Vance repeatedly is:
‘JD, I was a teacher for many years. I had a lot of students like you, kids who were in a hurry to make a name for themselves and be someone and they were willing to say and do anything to get there. That’s how you end up being the attack dog for a guy who doesn't care about working people who, in 2020, you said Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver on economic populism.” Even more damning, that comment was followed by, “accepting a disjointed China policy.” And now you're running around the country, telling lies and trying to divide the country. And then Walz would try to create this narrative around JD that becomes a motive for everything he says and kind of undercuts him. And it sort of gets at his lack of qualifications for the job.
I mean, that's one opportunity, but other opportunities to drive a wedge between Trump and Vance with either different positions they've had. Or remember when Vance mucked up by saying that Trump would veto a national abortion ban. And Trump said, “I never told him that.” Hammer Vance on that.
We know that Trump will be watching and try make Vance be a supplicant for Trump and just embarrass himself. This is a real audience of one for Vance. It's like a relentless message about Trump being in this for himself and not working Americans and then just getting Vance on defense. I think a draw is a win. Do no harm.
That was revealing.
Walz is the doofus dad in every sit-com since The Cosby Show.
James K you are almost completely wrong, likely bamboozled by DNC propaganda.
I believe the Supreme Court has ruled that Social Security benefits are expressly NOT a future obligation and could be cut to 0 at anytime. Social Security benefits have NO relationship to taxes paid into the system. A person who never worked can claim Social Security benefits even if divorced from a working spouse.
Mollie Fischer in the New Yorker says, without evidence, that "Walz emerged as an avatar of football-coaching, social-studies-teaching, father-figure affability" As Bob Boyd said , this is created by the media wing of the DNC and try as they might, I doubt anyone buys it. It is, however, what the Harris campaign wanted and in their mind, that's enough to make it true.
I hated my sociopathic, abusive Big Brother, and won't be accepting a government "Dad" figure either. Why is Walz being declared a "Dad" rather than a "Man" or a "Leader" or "competent" or "honest" or anything I'd rather have in an office holding politician?
Except that FJB was, probably by necessity, a lazy (senile) slacker, and look at what his Administration managed to do (and almost none of it was good): 30 million illegals, supported by our tax dollars, including tens of thousands of convicted murderers and rapists; military at its lowest level of readiness since probably Carter, filled with DEI and unable to resupply its ships at sea; LawFare run rampant, with many hundreds of political enemies jailed and then imprisoned, and his Presidential opponent indicted by two different federal prosecutors for non-existent crimes, etc. His Sec of Commerce didn’t know or understand the Longshore Strike, just as his Sec of Transportation sat out the LA and Long Beach port breakdown on maternity leave for the two kids he had bought; etc. while FJB did nothing, his minions did quite a bit, running the federal government as fiefdoms.
He's more like Sitcom Dad than America's dad.
Ha!
Rewriting DNC press releases is harder than it looks, right Mollie?
Until now I've thought of those air-blown muffler dudes as dancing like Elizabeth Warren, because they do. Exactly. But now, maybe I'll see Walz in the next one I drive past.
Yeah SS is worse than a Ponzi scheme because at least victims volunteer their money to Ponzi. Here they take it before you even see your check. And I can't compare anything that uses confiscated wages "earmaked" for SS to food stamps, because at least they are honest about how food stamps and welfare are funded.
Arguments that are out of context are just mis formulated, why argue a point that violates the conditions specified? The abstract subsumes the concrete. If the concrete violates the abstract, then the abstraction is wrong.
By the way, this election is to choose the Vice President of the United States and the President of the Senate, not a casting call for a guy to play the goofy next-door-neighbor on television. There's a whole world outside of show business.
When I first learned anything about Vance, I learned he had changed his name multiple times. That was a turnoff until I read his book. He changed to a different last name each time his mother married to match his new step father's name. He finally gave up and assumed his family name.
Good luck.
Eat the dogs, bich.
"Do you like things in context or out of context — abstract or concrete"
The preference varies with the circumstance - the particulars. In either case, it's usually best to take it as it comes. In politics, the effort to gain context or clear away abstractions should be exerted sparingly.
I thought Democrat women wanted abortions, not a father figure.
The Democrat Party press employees obsession with politicians being their "daddy" is rather telling.
Wish casting.
Kinda creepy if you think about it.
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