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.)
Nothing to add here; just want to say how wonderful it is to see so many folks back and commenting! Your voices have been missed.
I’m also very grateful for the stalwarts who have been here through the lean times.
I feel like an excited puppy! Hopefully there’ll be no piddling on the floor, but no guarantees. ;p
@David
Ooh, I have an outcry!
Oh wait, I thought you said “Who wants puppies and high fives from other awesome people”
Carry on
@Hambeast, sorry I was gone, I was alternating obsessive refreshing of news sites with deep dives on Tumblr and I didn’t have the energy to deal with dipshit red pillers.
I hope everything was copacetic while I had my head down, and David was recovering.
welcome back Falconer (and everyone else). Glad to see you! You’ve always been one of my favourites <3
Welcome back, Falconer and Hambeast!
I quite liked this troll. He was stupid, but he was entertainingly stupid in an assfax, NWOslave way rather than a direct offensive way.
EJ (TOO),
I sometimes wonder whatever became of Owly. He was *so* full of bitterness.
David, you will not hear any objections from me, anyway.
Hey, Hambeast! Hey, Falconer! *Waves*
How are your twins doing?
Welcome, Fluffy Spider! I’m glad you got away from your ex. I’ve seen a lot of similar stories to yours throughout my years here. Not that liberal or apolitical people aren’t sometimes abusive as well, but there does seem to be a strong correlation between alt-right views and abusive behavior.
Pretty much on both points (I’ve had other abusive exes on all sorts of political spectrums) he just happened to be the most manipulative when I broke up with him I lost a few friends for “ditching a great guy” that was the hardest part of dumping him. Coincidentally he was a fan of avfm I kind of suspect that contributed to some of his later behavior . Off topic question how do change the Avatar on here id like to put my cat’s glorious self as it
@ fluffy spider
You go to a site called Gravatar. Upload a picture and through a mechanism I can only assume is magic, it appears here.
In addition to what Alan said, you have to use the same email address on gravatar as you use to post here.
I got it I chose to quick doodle a fluffy arachnid because doodling is fun
That’s a very cute spider (I love spiders).
On a somewhat related topic, the Toronto Star ran this WaPo story that was dated February 23rd in its Insight section on Sunday, so I gave it a read.
This guy is pretty much a failson right out of central casting. Can’t get a job, lives at home, spends all day on Facebook, so isolated and desperate for a community that doesn’t challenge him that he becomes a literal Neo-Nazi. And the article makes clear: he has other things he could be doing with his life. That’s probably the most depressing aspect of it: of all the activities, of all the potential creative pursuits that his guy could be doing in his overabundance of time, he chooses to stare at white nationalist memes on Facebook.
Honestly, this is the kind of article I want to see more of. I want to be able to point to articles like this and draw the trajectory from “just asking questions” about why blacks get all the handouts to decorating the bedroom with swastikas. And I can show this article to other failsons “just asking questions” and offering them the obvious class-based reason that jobs are scarce and college costs an arm and a leg. There are narratives out there that don’t rely on hatred. Hatred just happens to be the easiest one to reach for. Because hatred never challenges your preconceptions. It always has that easy answer. It’s not you. It’s the Jews. It’s the blacks. It’s the Moose-lambs. It’s everybody else but you.
I can’t help but think that Facebook and Twitter have some culpability here too. It’s easy to just blame “the internet” for this phenomenon, but these people were around in the early days of the internet too.
We’re still missing a few regulars from before David’s illness: dreemr, Ellesar, Francesca, Katie, Katz, Policy of Madness, and Still Fiqah, maybe a couple more.
Anyone who knows them via other channels might like to let them know things are back to some semblance of normal around here, in case they’d given up on the place.
Oh, and while compiling this list I ran into something very weird. Page 35 of the infamous oft-necroed Cassie Jaye thread causes “System.exe” to saturate a core in dxgmm1.sys!VidMmInterface+0x266d0. Research led me to http://www.overclock.net/forum/132-windows/1184934-high-cpu-usage-ntoskrnl-exe-dxgmms1-sys.html which indicates that highly demanding GPU calculations can be the cause. Of course there’s nothing particularly demanding on that page except for a few animated GIFs, as usual (as long as you don’t allow autoplaying videos anyway).
This has me wondering if someone managed to somehow sneak a coin miner Javascript onto the page that uses CUDA. I would hope the comment box filters out such potentially seriously abusable HTML as the script tag, but perhaps it doesn’t; anyway I think the problem is in a comment based on the fact that simply visiting page 35 doesn’t immediately trigger the problem, ctrl+end to the bottom also doesn’t, but scrolling up a very short way does. From the top one must scroll most of the way to the bottom to set it off.
It’s a serious problem; it can be nipped in the bud by hitting “back” but if allowed to continue gobbling resources for too long it seems it will eventually hang the operating system and necessitate a cold boot!
Contrary to what that page indicated, susceptibility isn’t limited to people with weak integrated Intel GPUs. I have a mid-range ATI Radeon in this box and nearly had to three finger salute it because of this. I managed eventually to close the Firefox process from the Task Manager.
Symptoms visible immediately are sluggish, stuttering scrolling and mouse movement while trying to skim the thread. If a task manager is open the System process will be using one core’s worth of CPU and the Physical Usage memory statistic will rapidly climb north of 90%. Resource Monitor does not show any process using more memory than normal, so whatever is using the excess memory is able to hide from OS auditing! Definitely malware-y behavior.
No accusation against David or any regular is intended here. Either the site got hacked, or a troll posted a comment with a Turing-tarpit script or embed (WebGL?) in it during that thread’s infamous history of necroings.
@Alan
Same here and thank you I cartoon doodle a lot it’s a relaxing Hobby.
Thanks surplus I’ll be sure and avoid that page. I miss Fran especially, she was fun.
Probably best to ban the troll if only for the tsk tsk tsking. He can always come back as a sock, or maybe if he promises not to tsk. Fairly polite troll as they go.
@Surplus
Katz is on Twitter, but she left before David went quiet and announced her departure so I don’t think she would want a notification.
@Dalillama:
I was always amused by the old Frantics sketch ‘Heaven is for Presbyterians’, which parodies that attitude with God being a somewhat finicky, indecisive fellow who keeps switching ideas on which is the ‘True Faith’.
@Katamount
You mean like Strom Thurmond? Richard Nixon? Preston Brooks, perhaps? Please do be specific.
I can see where the “conservatives used to be sensible and moderate” line of thinking comes from, but… well, as with any question of the politics of respectability, it’s a tricky one.
Is it “conservatives used to be closer to what was considered decent” – as in, their policies haven’t changed, but they’re more blatantly out of touch with the majority viewpoint? Or “conservatives weren’t always so blatant and vehement about their views” – as in, they were getting what they wanted, often without even having to ask, and weren’t lashing out so much?
(A side-thought: even when a debate is apparently about tax policy, or whatever, often enough it’s still about human rights, treatment of vulnerable groups, etc. It’s just a question of how explicit they are in opposing taxes that would be spent on groups they prefer to see suffer.)
@Diptych
Lee Atwater had something very specific to say on that point, actually. (CN: Racial slurs)
Given that the southern strategy has been in full force for many decades now, I do find it hard to believe that old school conservative politicians and pundits were somehow unaware that racism is a feature of the GOP rather than the bug. Perhaps there were some voters that didn’t hear the dog whistles, but considering that they voted for Trump anyway, I really doubt that too.
When I hear Republicans lamenting about how Trumperism has destroyed their party and made it unrecognizable, I think they just mean they don’t like the tone of Trump, Bannon and the rest of the alt-reich. They don’t mind the actual bigotry.
Take this interview with Jeff Flake https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/03/politics/jeff-flake-axe-files-cnntv/index.html
He makes some noise about Trump not being a real fiscal conservative, but ultimately he winds up making a tone argument. He doesn’t object to the actual culture war positions, just the noise he makes about them.
Then there’s Paul Ryan suddenly finding his spine and standing up to Trump
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/paul-ryan-urges-trump-make-tariffs-more-targeted-prevent-retaliation-n854026
Not when he sympathizes with Nazis. Not about the obvious corruption. About the tariff issue. The one that the GOP donor class doesn’t like.
My opinion is that “classic” Republicans just prefer their iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove.
I have a theory. (okay it was created in context with books)
You have your own political opinions. The further away from those opinions the other is the less likely that you enjoy it.
For relationships or even friendships I would adept that theory.
In Germany most partys share a consens. Human rights and exspecially the right to live are a part of it.
Everyone has the right to live as he wants as long as he doesn’t break any laws or it doesn’t hurt the rights of other people.
This is part of our constitution, it is a reason for every law to be taken to court.
Hello, Who?
From what you wrote, I believe you are a German speaker who prefers to use simple English. I will write the rest of my response in simple English because of this. Please tell me if you don’t like this.
I agree with what you said. I see that you have focused on human happiness and human life. Some people prefer to focus on ideas or other non-human things instead. I think you are right to focus on humans. I think what you said shows that you are a very kind person.
We like kind people here.
When you talk to Americans you will find that they often use the word “rights” in a very different way from how you use them. Because of this you may find that Americans think you have said something that you have not said. In order to avoid this, you may want to be more explicit about what you mean.
If you would like to be a regular commentor here, we would be happy if you told us a little bit about yourself. That would mean that we could understand more about why you say what you say, and it could help us to avoid misunderstanding you.
@Dalillama
“Principled” Whigs of yore. They didn’t actually exist, but Republican grandpas the nation over claims they did.