Former vice-presidential candidate claims pair should have held more in-person events around the US

Summary

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has criticized the Harris-Walz 2024 presidential campaign for playing it too “safe,” saying they should have held more in-person events and town halls.

In a Politico interview, Walz—known for labeling Trump and Vance as “weird”—blamed their cautious approach partly on the abbreviated 107-day campaign timeline after Harris became the nominee in August.

Using football terminology, he said Democrats were in a “prevent defense” when “we never had anything to lose, because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”

While acknowledging his share of responsibility for the loss, Walz is returning to the national spotlight and didn’t rule out a 2028 presidential run, saying, “I’m not saying no.”

    • @tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
      1•23 days ago

      We already assess people for mental health issues.

      And, again, – if you had even passing familiarity with disability circles – you’d know that there are many people who have criticisms of his this currently works. This isn’t remotely a perfect system and its existence doesn’t suddenly make it so.

      You have an idea of a system that has already gained a complete understanding of human psychology and, also, is able to assess it without fail or error.

      We in fact should select for the traits that we want/don’t want

      Think very hard and long about what that sounds like…

      Even shitty customer service jobs use these tests

      And disabled people have discussed, at length, of how jobs like these are heated towards abled people!

      How can that possibly be a bad idea?

      I have you that answer, in my first response. Can you guarantee that these tests won’t get highjacked or used by opportunists? Can you ensure they won’t unfairly exclude those who shouldn’t be there (gay people had to struggle with the psychiatric community to get them to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; https://daily.jstor.org/how-lgbtq-activists-got-homosexuality-out-of-the-dsm/)? And these tests are not perfect, even right now (again, it isn’t surprising you don’t know this as many people don’t; but continuing to ignore the erased disabled voices which have pointed this out isn’t going to make them a smart idea).

      Respected people in the psychology field have already said that trump is mentally ill in such a way that he’s unfit to rule.

      And many people pointed out that this was wildly unprofessional and irresponsible (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/health/analyzing-donald-trump-psychology.html). It’s common amongst psychiatric professionals to not do armchair diagnosis since there’s no way you can get accurate assessment from that position. But it’s a great example of the way even professionals can exercise bias and poor judgement! Again, how will you ensure this won’t happen with a system you’ve now put in charge of gatekeeping what change is even possible?

      The problem is that now he’s manoeuvred himself into a position where he can’t be removed, and soon even us talking like this will be illegal.

      That’s a problem of other systemic issues, not because we didn’t use an assessment of human psychology that’s far from as black-and-white or accurate as you are presuming it is.

      Stealing from cancer kids charities would be a no, no matter what disability that person had.This could be summed up as ‘no tolerance for intolerance’ or ‘no kindness towards cruelty’.

      There are other means of detecting this than using psychiatric tests. And, while you’ve adjusted your requirements to include sympathy, can you guarantee that others will? Autistic people struggle with cognitive empathy, too; can you guarantee that a fear campaign won’t start up, that influences those running these tests to just, well, play it safe and keep these people out of the decision-making, for now? I have no interest in spending another century arguing with people who don’t belong to a marginalization while the supposed findings of psychology is used to justify civil restrictions and criminal proceedings while those groups don’t get a say because, well, didn’t you know that psychiatry has found those people to be antisocial and unproductive?