Second Trump assassination attempt

[peregrinator]

As I said above, he did not grow up in Appalachia. I read it back when it came out, and while I do not recall the exact line "I was raised a poor white child in Appalachia", it was certainly the premise.

I think if you're going to accuse someone of dishonesty then at the very least you should show exactly what claim is being made along with its refutation.

[anawim]

Vance was just outside of the area that includes Appalachia. 32 of Ohio's 88 counties are in Appalachia.

[Kage_ar]

I'd wager in an organization as large as Trump Inc, there is someone in charge of golf courses. If I were in that job, I would have put up more than a chain link fence around the place.

[Kage_ar]

As I said above, he did not grow up in Appalachia. I read it back when it came out, and while I do not recall the exact line "I was raised a poor white child in Appalachia", it was certainly the premise.

I think if you're going to accuse someone of dishonesty then at the very least you should show exactly what claim is being made along with its refutation.

The claim he made was the length of a book!

[Kage_ar]

Vance was just outside of the area that includes Appalachia. 32 of Ohio's 88 counties are in Appalachia.

That is why I draw the parallel to my living maybe 2 miles from Kentucky.

[peregrinator]

As I said above, he did not grow up in Appalachia. I read it back when it came out, and while I do not recall the exact line "I was raised a poor white child in Appalachia", it was certainly the premise.

I think if you're going to accuse someone of dishonesty then at the very least you should show exactly what claim is being made along with its refutation.

The claim he made was the length of a book!

OK where in the book is this specific claim about growing up in Appalachia (as opposed to being raised by people from Appalachia and occasionally visiting other family in Appalachia)? You can't cite the whole book as a claim and say it's false.

[gherkin]

I'd wager in an organization as large as Trump Inc, there is someone in charge of golf courses. If I were in that job, I would have put up more than a chain link fence around the place.

Apart from the expense, there may be aesthetic reasons not to do so. After all, most golfers are not potential targets of assassins, and the golf course is presumably supposed to function as something other than a sheltered place for Trump to golf. I think the key here is that Trump isn't responsible for providing for his safety. The Secret Service is.

[peregrinator]

It is possible that they recommended against it and Trump overruled them, but we can't know that.

[gherkin]

That is true. They may have told him it was a bad idea, and he may have decided to chance it. I tend to suspect the acting secret service director would have mentioned that by now if it were the case, but what do I know?

[Kage_ar]

I think if you're going to accuse someone of dishonesty then at the very least you should show exactly what claim is being made along with its refutation.

The claim he made was the length of a book!

OK where in the book is this specific claim about growing up in Appalachia (as opposed to being raised by people from Appalachia and occasionally visiting other family in Appalachia)? You can't cite the whole book as a claim and say it's false.

I am back on the waitlist at the Library for the book now.

[gherkin]

FWIW, page 1: ...I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town..." (First page of the book's intro.)

Page 12: "My grandparents left Jackson [KY] in the late 1940s and raised their family in Middletown, Ohio, where I later grew up." (Second page of the first chapter.)

If someone is claiming that Vance claimed to grow up in Appalachia, that person is not telling the truth about this book.

[Kage_ar]

The AP thinks that Mr Vance claims Appalachia:

https://apnews.com/article/vance-rnc-ap ... 1f6254ff79

[gherkin]

The AP thinks that Mr Vance claims Appalachia:

https://apnews.com/article/vance-rnc-ap ... 1f6254ff79

A, the article doesn't make any allegations that Vance lied or misled about his own background. It whines and complains about the substance of Vance's claims about hillbilly life.

B, even if the AP article did claim that Vance was claiming to have grown up somewhere other than where he did, that would obviously not trump the citations I just provided to Vance's own words, where twice--the two "beginnings" of the book, in the prologue and the first chapter--he makes it very clear that he grew up in a steel town in Ohio. Seriously, I just happened to pick up the book this afternoon and take a quick peek at it for literally two minutes, and found those two quotations immediately because they are the very first things he says. There's not any ambiguity on this one.

[Kage_ar]

The AP thinks that Mr Vance claims Appalachia:

https://apnews.com/article/vance-rnc-ap ... 1f6254ff79

A, the article doesn't make any allegations that Vance lied or misled about his own background. It whines and complains about the substance of Vance's claims about hillbilly life.

B, even if the AP article did claim that Vance was claiming to have grown up somewhere other than where he did, that would obviously not trump the citations I just provided to Vance's own words, where twice--the two "beginnings" of the book, in the prologue and the first chapter--he makes it very clear that he grew up in a steel town in Ohio. Seriously, I just happened to pick up the book this afternoon and take a quick peek at it for literally two minutes, and found those two quotations immediately because they are the very first things he says. There's not any ambiguity on this one.

My point is that "Vance wrote a book about growing up in Appalachia" is not something I just licked off a rock. It is generally out there in the zeitgeist.

[peregrinator]

I'm not certain that's the case, but even if it were, it's not unlikely that the general idea people have of the book is wrong, and one can hardly charge an author with dishonesty or "fudging" because people have the wrong idea about his book.

[gherkin]

I'm not certain that's the case, but even if it were, it's not unlikely that the general idea people have of the book is wrong, and one can hardly charge an author with dishonesty or "fudging" because people have the wrong idea about his book.

Right. I don't know where the idea came from--I wouldn't have suggested Kage licked it off a rock--but it didn't come from the book itself, which is admirably clear on where Vance did and did not claim to grow up. If a false idea is part of the zeitgeist, it doesn't make it OK to buy into it contrary to all evidence, like the two unambiguous quotations I provided.