By David Futrelle
The most heartening thing in the news today — I mean, aside from ex-Trumper Sam Nunberg’s live TV meltdown — is this story by Mimi Montgomery in Washingtonian magazine about the sad plight of right wingers in D.C., none of whom are apparently able to find anyone who wants to get into their pants.
Yep. In these politically fraught times, it seems no sensible person wants to have anything to do (in bed or out) with those who like, much less work for, that orange thing in the White House.
In a city as overwhelmingly Democratic as DC, the combination of lingering anger over Hillary Clinton‘s loss and President Trump‘s existence makes it tricky for conservatives to date across party lines.
“A lot of times you’ll connect with someone [on an app] and they’ll Google you, find out you worked for Trump’s campaign, and then it’s pretty much all downhill from there,” says a Trump Administration official.
Aww. Let me play you a little song:
But actual White House staffers aren’t the only ones suffering:
People who work in right-wing media say they don’t have it any better.
“The political divide has gotten so wide that a lot of younger liberals don’t have any interest in meeting conservatives,” says a reporter at a conservative media company. Working for a right-wing publication is such an obstacle to dating in DC, he doesn’t put his employer on any dating apps and avoids talking about it until meeting someone face-to-face, he says.
Maybe this will cheer you up a little bit:
No matter how hard they may try to hide their perverse political proclivities, there are always clues. One self-described “moderate conservative” tells Washingtonian that he
once brought a woman back to his place, and while checking out his bookshelf, she noticed some books by conservative thinkers, he says. “She was like, ‘Oh no. First question: Did you vote for Trump?’,” the reporter says. He told her no, but that he was conservative. “She was like ‘I have to get out of here. I can’t see you,’ and left.”
Let’s listen to the song that’s already playing in your head:
While conservatives complain that all the liberal hotties lump Trump true-believers in with “principled” conservatives, one progressive woman assured the Washingtonian she’s perfectly capable of distinguishing between dudes who want “lower marginal tax rates” and those who believe no “woman should have a right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.”
Generally, it’s not that hard to tell.
Most of the self-identifying progressives I talked with said they could tell how far right a man or woman leaned based on their dating-app photos—”Make America Great Again” hats are an obvious tell, but some also listed photos of US flag paraphernalia, hunting gear, or fratty beach parties as turn-offs.
But sometimes stealth conservatives can slip past liberal filters.
When she first moved to DC, a former Obama White House staffer who now works at the Aspen Institute was set up on a date with a Republican who worked on Capitol Hill. “We had a really nice time, but at the end of the date, he told me he didn’t believe in global warming,” she says. “I started laughing, because I’m from Colorado and didn’t realize people actually didn’t believe in global warming. But he was serious.”
They didn’t go out again.
Evidently, it’s those on the left who are doing most of the rejecting.
Republicans say it’s liberals who are more likely to turn down someone across the aisle. “Democrats are usually more vocal” about their opposition, the Trump staffer says, and therefore quicker to demonize all conservatives.
“I feel like they look at me and are like, here’s a tall white dude with brown hair wearing loafers, and he probably has a picture of Reagan and the NRA in his bedroom or something,” says one of the reporters from the conservative media company. “I just think they have a very hyperbolic view of what a conservative is.”
Yeah, I don’t think that’s it. I think the problem is that you are all fucking terrible. (And probably terrible at fucking to boot.)
1) Pascal’s Wager doesn’t work that way.
2)Pascal’s Wager also just doesn’t work, because it posits a binary; but if there is a god(s), you also have to bet correctly on which one you’ll encounter.
Offensive in what way? Is it that you are offended by the blatant misuse of science? I know I am.
We Will have to agree to disagree on that, I a.m not going to risk my own eternity just merely because of simple human intellectual arrogance.. Ever read the Book of Job? Tsk tsk tsk
And the sheer vanity of those atheist naysayers, as it is said, there are much more things in the heavens and the earths than exists in their philosophies!
translation: he talked bullshit and clearly Dali and Misophistry are smarter than him so he just writes some religious nonsense now.
go to bed – it is late in America and you are awake all night wrighting this garbage.
@JDSM
But you’re already risking it.
Why do you hate Vishnu?
@ JDSM
We’ll, you haven’t defined ‘supersplash’ so that’s qualitative rather than quantative, but shall we try and work it out?
A pebble by definition can have a maximum diameter of 64mm; so for simplicity let’s assume a spherical pebble.
The densest material that can form pebbles is gabbro. That’s got a density of 3.3g per cubic centimetres.
Applying that to our pebble we get a mass of 463g.
Now ‘toss’ is a bit arbitrary; but let’s assume you flip the pebble from about waist height. So it’s falling about one metre and accelerating at 9.81 ms^2. That gives kinetic energy of 4.44 joules.
Now we work out the Weber number. That’s We = p v ^ 2 l / a
Let’s assume puddle water has a dentisty of 1g/cm^3. We know l = 64mm. V is going to be 9.81ms^1. a is going to be about 72.8 millinewtons per meter (assuming it’s about 20 degrees outside)
I’ll leave the arithmetic as an excercise for the reader; but that’s everything you need to know to determine how big the splash is.
As to whether that’s ‘super’ is a matter of subjective opinion I guess.
Yep. To even attempt something like Pascal’s Wager properly, you would need a probability distribution function on a) what sorts of afterlives existed, with what conditions inside, and b) what sorts of rules might decide who goes to which one. Then perhaps there’d be some things likely to send one to somewhere not very nice, which you’d want to avoid, and others likely to send one to somewhere nice.
My own best guess at such a distribution, by the way, accords probability zero to pretty much every traditional religious afterlife belief. The most likely scenario is “oblivion behind Door No. 1, a buggy beta version of a simulated world behind Door No. 2”, with the criterion for Door No. 2 being to be sufficiently young and sufficiently rich to be an early adopter when mind uploading tech gets to the point of adequate fidelity for continuity of personality/subjective experience.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you got to the Pearly Gates and instead of St Peter it was Monty Hall?
Of course, why didn’t I think of that?
Quantum entanglement proves that feminism is nonsense and shows that the early-21st-century first-world anglophonic Protestant version of YHWH must exist. It’s all so clear now.
What Makroth said; Pascal’s Wager assumes the only options are the existence of the Catholic version of Yaweh or the existence of no gods at all. However, it is equally as likely that the Baptist, or Muslim or Jewish versions of Yaweh are out there instead, or that you’ll find yourself explaining to Odin why you deserve a place in Valhalla.
ETA: And all the others who commented while I wasn’t refreshing the page.
After he shows you one of the doors you didn’t pick has a hell behind it, switch!
Or having your heart compared to a feather by Maat, or being reincarnated because you didn’t attain Nirvana, or going to Grethor because you weren’t a fierce and honorable enough warrior to gain admission into Stovokor …
@ dalillama
I thought it was the Valkyrie who chose. I’ve been sending them chocolates!
I have read the book of Job and the message I took from it is not to be Job, god hates Job.
I will rest easy and will not fear rocco’s basalisk or any other made up thing you care to name. Enjoy your fear.
I have to go now and make an offering of cookies to the cookie monster so that I may spend eternity in his cookie jar.
So these dickheads chuckle at ‘triggered’ libs, but can’t handle any disagreement themselves?
I just wish that I could see the day that someone on the right drops their smug ‘objectivity’ and just admits to being as political as the left. Fuck
Oh, so much smug coming off this new troll. Our shields cannae take much more!
Just kidding. Smug away, smuggy. Nobody cares.
Let me second the urgent reminder to switch when making a deal with St. Monty, with the caveat that there is no chance he’s going to show you a door with a car behind it; he knows where the goats are and where the car is. If you always switch, you’ll win more often than if you stand!
@misophistry: God certainly doesn’t seem to love Job, but I always took it as a message that shit is going to happen and you shouldn’t stop
supporting the priesthoodbelieving in God when it does. I don’t know about the Jewish tradition, but the Old Testament God of Christianity never promises love, just that he’ll uphold his end of the contract.Right-wingers, blergh. I went out of my way to avoid those guys in college.
When I first visited my now-boyfriend’s apartment, I spotted a book by William Safire (a conservative and an expert on language) on his shelf. I informed him that I couldn’t possibly sleep with someone who read Safire. But my boyfriend wasn’t actually a conservative, so I was just kidding.
Which “gays and bis” are saying so? Because all the gay men I’ve known have the same types of relationship problems as straight people. Two people aren’t automatically compatible just because they share a gender. Just because TV told you that being a gay man is a constant carefree sex party, doesn’t mean that’s the reality.
In addition to everything else that’s obviously terrible about conservatives–they think corporations should be allowed to exploit workers and wreck the environment, that women aren’t capable of making their own medical decisions or deserve to be equally paid, that LGBT people are second-class citizens at best and subhuman at worst–it increasingly seems like they’re colluding with a hostile foreign power to mount a soft invasion of our country. That some of them are doing this unknowingly does not, shockingly enough, make them any more attractive. HARD PASS from me.
Any omniscient god would know perfectly well if your only reason for belief was a cynical calculation of the odds.
I prefer the Marcus Aurelius version, where you should focus more on trying to live a good life: if there are no gods, at least you’ll still have lived a good life; if there are just gods, they’ll care more about your actions towards other than about whether you specifically worshipped them by name; and if there are gods, but they’re unjust, well, they didn’t deserve your worship anyhow (and you’ll probably find better company in hell than in any heaven they might have sent you to).
I did “Nine first Fridays” when I was a kid. That’s going to mass on the first Friday of the month nine consecutive times. Under church rules that guarantees me a place in heaven, even if I shoot a nun.
That’s the great thing about Catholicism, it’s so legalistic.
I’ve always wondered which pagans a particularly good medieval lawyer/theologian could get completely released from Hell, not just shunted over to Limbo or somewhere.
Virgil, probably, but maybe most of them as long as they hadn’t committed murder or adultery or something.
Vala Mal Doran: “I think I understand why you came back, Daniel. I wouldn’t have liked their company, either.”
I’ve slept with rightwing people, but it was Sweden where the political landscape is a bit different… we’re talking low-tax people rather than anti-abortion-anti-birth-control people. I might have felt weird even sleeping with the latter kind of person. Never dated a right-winger of any flavour though. I think if you’re gonna date, you gotta share values. I can see how someone voting for the left could date someone voting for the right if they were both, ultimately, pretty disinterested in politics, but not if you really care about these issues.
I have, however, dated a super duper radical anarchist. He was a really nice guy, but we still ended up arguing a lot about politics… I think that if I’d stayed with him, I would have ended up as a conservative myself, as a pure counter-reaction!