Gals! Are you looking to date men who get inexplicably angry about black women playing flutes?
Fellas! Are you looking to date women who sound like bad actresses awkwardly reading their lines off of a teleprompter?
Well, now there’s a dating app for you!
Anyway, the dating app is live (at least in Washington DC), it’s funded by asshole billionaire Peter Thiel, and it’s going to fail as hard as Truth Social. I can only assume.
It’s not that conservatives don’t need help finding dates. They complain all the time that no one wants to date them.
“Seventy-two percent of young Democrats say that they wouldn’t date a conservative,” Right Stuff co-founder Dan Huff told POLITICO. “The reverse isn’t true. So essentially they started this. We had to build this app to survive.”
Good luck with that!
You see, when news broke about the impending launch of the app, the Daily Beast made some calls to see how it might be received by actual right wing ladies. Not so well, it turns out, at least if you’re looking for a dating app that won’t be a total bratwurst fest.
Instead of drawing singles, the app has thus far largely drawn mockery, according to female Republican operatives who spoke to The Daily Beast.
Two Republican staffers in Washington, D.C., said many young conservative women have ignored [the site’s] outreach and have instead jeeringly passed around screenshots of [their] messages to group chats.
Other Republican staffers in D.C.—the sort who boast about downing drinks at the Navy Yard watering hole Mission and claim their pronouns are “Yee” and “Haw” on their Instagram profiles—told The Daily Beast the app has an array of possible problems, like liberals masquerading as right-wingers and the awkward potential of matching them with conservative staffers they already know.
“It’s all of Mitch McConnell’s staffers,” a female Republican operative said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she still works in pro-Trump politics.
That does not sound promising.
Also, the Beast reports, there’s already another well-established dating app called The Right Stuff that has nothing to do with politics, and they’ve already sicced their lawyer on The Right Stuff Mach Two. So they’ve got that going for them.
This app, I suspect, is going to end up with roughly 200 men per woman. And that woman is going to have to block every single one of them.
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@bumblebug,
totally makes sense; there isn’t exactly much of an overlap between wanting-kids and not-wanting-kids, for example. I think that’s pretty much the “no Tories” thing which my friend includes on their profile! :-s
@Alan
“Tax the rat farms” (Lord Vetinari, after the bounty on rats led not to their eradication but to an increase in numbers…)
@Raging Bee- “mutated junkyard rats”? Well, I never! 🙂
I’m a Brit who watched The Wombles as a kid, and I’m amused to find that my inner child is oddly outraged by that comparison. I know that fantasy media that seemed innocent when you watch it as a child often has unsettling implications when seen as an adult, but I’m afraid I can’t get past my mental associations between Wombles and lovely cuddly wholesomeness. Comparing it to TMNT feels a bit like calling Clifford the Big Red Dog ‘a sort of American kaiju movie’ 😉
(I did also watch and enjoy the TMNT cartoon as a kid, though. I think Shredder was one of my early childhood crushes.)
@ raging bee
How very dare you!
I’ll be sending Orinoco round to have words. If we can wake him up. 🙂
I wonder if the conservatives wanting to date liberals thing is because:
@Love Is All We Need:
Well I imagine it’s a disappointment, no matter who you are, to find a dating app is full of people you already know, since if you were romantically and/or sexually attracted to any of them you’d already be dating them. Also I don’t know if congressional staffers are forbidden to date each other, but a lot of jobs have either official or unspoken “no dating your coworkers” rules.
@Alan:
I came across the Wombles in book form when I was a six-year-old in Canada, and for a few years had an obsession with them that was difficult to satisfy, as the show didn’t run here that I know of.
Total mystery why women don’t want to date men who don’t think we have the rights to bodily autonomy.
@opposablethumbs
That is probably a reference to the “cobra effect”, named for a probably apocryphal incident where the British colonial government supposedly offered a bounty on dead cobras,. discovered that people were farming cobras for the bounty, and cancelled the bounty. The now worthless cobras were then released into the wild, leading to more cobras than before. There is no documentation of this ever actually happening, but it’s very widely used in economics texts as an example of perverse incentives. The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre is documented, though. They used a catch-and-release process instead of farming the rats, though, the bounty being on rat tails.
David, are you going to cover Maya Forester’s now 4 day meltdown over Tala the non-binary cartoon alien? It’s pretty hilarious. She’s even dragged Billy Bragg into it for some reason.
@David J
I’ve always wondered about point 2. Like, people can tell if you don’t like them, and they’re gonna not like you back. And how in the world can someone feel comfortable being that vulnerable with someone who doesn’t like them/hates them?
I might just be too scared of things in general, but I definitely do not feel comfortable being vulnerable around people who hate me.
@Dali, I did not know about the cobra story – thank you!
@Alan: I am now informed and will
amazebemuse my friends.If you don’t want to annoy Tetley’s any further, just get batches of regular tea and mix up your own — of course as you already know, it has to be stronger than hot tea to survive the ice. Make a pot, put it in a pitcher in the fridge with the ice cubes, there’s your daily cold drinks sorted.
Americans traditionally use black tea, for when you need a sturdier beverage.
@oppo thumbs: Lord Vetinari would be preferable to many world leaders of today.
@David J: I hear gay men are also capable of fucking men they despise, and since they aren’t fussed about baybeeeezz, it’s even less trouble. Lord knows many of Lindsay Graham’s butch rent boys probably hate him.
Moon Custafer:
Presumably, if you’re a political staffer/lobbyist/activist, you already tend to know a lot of people who openly share your political leanings.
However, if you’re also a straight woman looking for dates in Washington DC, it can be disappointing to find that a) all the men in your circle of proudly conservative associates are douchebags b) there are actually no large numbers of hidden conservatives (that you optimistically hoped might sometimes not be douchebags) in your area.
@ lumipuna
We were recently having a discussion about the appropriateness of lawyers dating their clients; and the rules in various jurisdictions.
We had to explain to our American colleagues that the general view at the Bar here is “A conflict of interest is when you’re sleeping with both parties in a divorce case.”
Since a few months, Bumble added “Liberal” as a choice for political orientation. The problem is, the meaning seems to depend on where you live. Here, in France, for left leaning persons like me, this is not good (liberalism = less State power, less State intervention, less and less public services, and all for the Economy and private entities). But that does not seems to be the case in England and USA ?
@Alan Robertshaw There was a book I read as a kid about the Borribles (looking up on wikipedia apparently it was a trilogy); It was pretty funny but funniest part was that the enemies of the Borribles are the Rumbles who are quite clearly the Wombles, and in fact they really are portrayed as “mutated junkyard rats”.
@opposablethumbs, Dalillama:
The province of Alberta in Canada makes a fairly big thing about being rat-free, and has a program to keep it that way since the 1950s. (Basically there was a generic ‘pest control’ legislation framework in place in the 1940s, and rats were officially listed as a pest under that framework in 1950.) My understanding is that bounties were tried at one point, but ran into similar issues with people trying to abuse the system… in Alberta’s case, though, owning a rat at all is a crime, and there was a massive province-wide eradication attempt, so anybody trying to run a rat farm to get bounties was risking serious jail time. And I don’t believe there are bounties anymore, it’s just a ‘civic duty to report’ thing.
@ occasional reader
In the UK the Liberals have been the centre party since the formation of the Labour Party in 1900, before that the Liberals were the left wing party in so far as there was such a thing. The current incarnation is known as the Liberal Democrats and formed when a bunch of centrist Labour politicians broke away from Labour in the 80s (?) to form the Social Democrattic Party, then couldn’t make a go of it on there own so joined up with the Liberals. They haven’t been in control of the government in over a hundred years.
@GSS ex-noob, the fact that a Vetinari government – with all its, um, interesting features – would still be streets ahead of many Roundworld governments in RL is one hell of a reflection on many Roundworld governments :-s
I suppose Vetinari and DEATH could be said to have a couple of things in common; both are omniscient (well, or as near as makes very little difference!) and both are inexorable and merciless – but neither one indulges in gratuitous cruelty.
Vetinari does actually want Ankh-Morpork to flourish, which is one of the things that puts him predatory-flamingo head and shoulders above many Roundworld governments :-s
@Jenora Feuer, Alberta clearly got ahead of the rat-farming loophole in pretty short order! 🙂
@ whomever
You sent me down a Womble hole there!
And now I have yet more books to add to my ‘will I ever get round to reading these’ list.
Thank you!
@opposablethumbs:
Yes, they did. I remember reading somewhere that there was actually a ‘rat farm’ running out of Saskatchewan at one point so they weren’t in the province itself, but that didn’t last long either.
One of the advantages Alberta had was that in 1950, there weren’t very many rats in Alberta yet; they were coming in with other trucking and produce, so as long as the province stopped things at the border, they could keep ahead of the problem.
There was actually a story on Not Always Right that not only involved rats in Alberta, but also is somewhat site-relevant given that it involved someone trying to scare the newbie: https://notalwaysright.com/i-smell-a-rat/60556/
@david j
Most of the rapes done in prison are by straight men done on other straight men. Sometimes I have to wonder how much of it has to involve having sexual attractions to other another human vs just wanting a warm body to masterbate with.
@Elaine the witch:
Most of the rapes done in prison are by straight men done on other straight men. Sometimes I have to wonder how much of it has to involve having sexual attractions to other another human vs just wanting a warm body to masterbate with.
I’d hazard a guess that dominance displays also play into it.
> Jazzlet
Thank you for the information !
Yeah, i can think why it was considered as “Center”.
Here, as i said, it is more associated to right, but there has been a non-negligeable part of the left with “liberal” views of the economy, that was (and still is) called “la gauche caviar” (caviar left), one of the most prominent and known being DSK, which had been director of the IFM, candidated for presidency but fail even before the elections following the Sofitel scandal (which shown him as the raper he is). There also have been Fabius and Rocard in their time, both having being prime minister.
On the other side, we had a party “Democratie Libérale” (Liberal Democracy party, closed in 2002), lead by Alain Madelin, a liberal far right politician. And the other right wing parties are more or less liberal themselves, even the ones claiming to be gaullists (a ludicrous claim, De Gaulle not being a fan of liberalism, to say the least).
Well, i was fearing the meaning of liberal in anglo-saxon and US countries was linked to progressism, but if it is not the case, it is one more good raison for left swiping.
Have a nice day.
@prophet309 I think it’s a bit more complicated than “not liking someone”. I’ve witnessed that people who dehumanize others don’t really think of themselves as hateful or that they generally don’t “like” acertain group of people. They’ll argue that they would totally like women for example if those said women wouldn’t be like… women. They like to talk to women only if they’re entertained by what those women say – not challenged. They enjoy their company as long as they agree to whatever they wanna do and dont come up with their own annoying ideas.
In my late teens, early twenties I met more than one guy like this and it took me a bit to realise that I don’t care about being liked by them.
I remember when dating agencies just for left wing people were set up such as Socialist Singles and there was an article about it in the Big Issue. Then somebody said there was no need as left wing people would easily meet each other at conferences and protests. Their personalities are not as off putting as right wing people hence the better ease at forming relationships.