And while this article is a bit older, the fact that it was written during Ferguson where people were being harassed and beaten by cops for daring to be upset that their children were being casually murdered with little to no repercussions is just the icing on the fucking cake for how myopic this shit is.

Bobo* Brooks, The Old Grey Corpse:
Why Partyism is Wrong

Hey everyone, listen up!

Bobo has a very important problem he wants to share, one deathly important to humanity at large and a huge swath of ill-done and oft-oppressed people. Yes, our brave narcissist is stretching himself for once, showing great empathy for what is truly a national tragedy. One whose pain is all but ignored by even the most fierce social justice paladin.

You may wonder what group has so tragically slipped through the cracks of even the most conscious parts of our society? Well…

It’s right wing think tank hacks.

Well, not right-wing think tank hacks who are happily employed, receiving huge buckets of money to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. No, no, what breaks Bobo’s heart is that there may be no place left for the next generation of talentless blowhards and sociopaths who trusted the wingnut welfare system to be there when they graduated college with zero information learned and nothing but an extensive trust fund and a VP chair in their daddy’s company to support them. And now, they are forced to get real jobs, one’s that may even look askance on a collegiate career of being a constant bigot and doing nothing but wingnut welfare “work”.

Truly, no other group has been so betrayed and disempowered!

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Snff. It’s just not fair that companies and academic institutions aren’t overrating complete hacks anymore simply because they’ve spent their time waging war against actual work and academic endeavor! Sob. And like that’s literally the worst oppression like ever. People shouldn’t judge people by qualifications, because that’s discrimination. Oh no, that sounded too close to being something almost sane, so let me expand on that to note that people shouldn’t judge people by their politics in everyday life and interpersonal relationships, because it’s all a game anyways and doesn’t have any real impact on anyone’s life… well, not anyone that matters, anyways. Like that’s the worst bigotry that ever bigoted!

Yes, Bobo has many tears to shed for those who are the victims of the terrible bigotry known as “partyism”. Haven’t heard of partyism? Well, that’s probably because you’re not a self-obsessed asshole who can only pen whining pieces about how everyone has done you wrong by not regarding you as a genius.

But anyways, this is a national epidemic befitting only the highest pants-shitting panic and concern. I mean, after all, many conservatives are being thought of as assholes and membership in organizations that campaign for the worsening of the lives of others is not given the endless blowjob buffet it used to be.

If that isn’t a portent of the End of Days, then what the fuck is?!?

But luckily Bobo, dear Bobo, is able to lead us out of the chaos and terror with calmness and dign- Oh, Bob damn, I can’t keep a straight face any longer, ROLL THE FAILPOCALYPSE!

A college student came to me recently with a quandary.

Bobo… when you have me working under you, why do you always have me working… under you… as it were?

He’d spent the summer interning at a conservative think tank. Now he was applying to schools and companies where most people were liberal. Should he remove the internship from his résumé?

…

Four responses:

1) Oh poor poor widdle wich boy. Oh, are you having to think about leaving off an optional internsip which demonstrates a total lack of qualifications and which might be looked at slightly awkwardly by those directly affected by the hate groups you volunteered for? Gosh, let me just weep all the fucking tears and somehow forget the last Bob damn has it been a lot of years where I had to lie about my name and gender on every application I sent out and where I couldn’t put down all of my skillsets because it’s still far more of a resume killer to note you’ve done work for a queer center or a liberal clause than even the most bullshit of right-wing think tank. Or the part where I’m still living in the closet today because who I am, not what I have done, is considered a fireable offense in the industry I work in. But no, please, let me forget all that so I may rend my sackcloth at the grave injustice that is your pasty white ass having an awkward conversation with an admissions board or interviewer who is actually aware of the scholarship level in a right-wing think tank and is reasonably concerned about letting that level of rampant dishonesty take root in their school or company.

2) Um… it’s not because you’re conservative that people are advising caution in putting it on. It’s because it’s an internship. There’s this weird undercurrent among hiring companies of completely disregarding any internship no matter how much work you accomplished or how varied your skillset was in it. To their minds, if you’re not getting paid for it, it doesn’t count (oh hey, all those people who accepted unpaid internships because those same companies said it was necessary to build one’s resume). I’ve actually had interviewers in the past literally sneer when I mentioned that one job was an internship, which is why I started leaving off internships completely and only putting on my paid research assistant gigs even though I was doing the same work in both.

3) Schools, eh? Yeah, I can imagine most academic institutions worth a damn are going to look askance at a fucking right-wing think tank stint seeing as how they aren’t fucking morons and actually know something about academic scholarship and how much think tanks have poisoned that. Similarly, they would be well aware of current right-wing efforts to “infiltrate and destroy” what are seen as liberal bastions like education and so might be somewhat wary of some right-wing think tank hack wannabe asking for the seal of approval from their school so they can go on bringing shame to that name for decades to come.

4) “Where most people are liberal”. Well, well, well, now we come to the crux of it. What really upsets Bobo and is giving him the night terrors. The knowledge that the Depression economy is not just hitting hard on the recent graduate liberal scum what with their new genders and hippity hop, but also good decent hard-working trust fund babies who think waving an Ayn Rand book around and liking Ron Paul makes one an intellectual. And so, some poor innocent trusting right-wing hack to be is going through the traditional wingnut welfare path and there’s just no committee seat or paid pundit gig waiting for them.

And that’s the most terrifying thing in the world to the likes of Bobo, because it means that the little protected wildlife zone that is the right-wing pundit factory isn’t expanding and may even be stagnating and retracting and that hits way too close to home for Bobo. I mean, he might have to get a real job or retire without ever having someone call his farty little column the works of an unparalleled genius and that prospect cuts the little narcissist where he lives.

And so we get an amusing tableau of a man trying to totally stick up for his “friend” while whining continuously about himself.

I advised him not to. Even if people disagreed with his politics, I argued, they’d still appreciate his public spiritedness.

Yeah, you go girl! Fuck the standard narrative and the violent threat of continuous unemployment. It’s much more important to have dignity and integrity than it is to eat. Well, until the first couple of missed meals and then it turns out that integrity and dignity are only too happy to walk the streetcorner for a potato or two.

Oh wait, we’re talking about rich fucking assholes who’ll be carried indefinitely by their daddy’s money so long as they don’t do anything untowards like be queer or a liberal. Never mind. It might actually be a resume boost to be an out and out fuckburgler.

But now I’m thinking that advice was wrong. There’s a lot more political discrimination than I thought.

Gosh, is that just now hitting you? Cause, pretty much anyone who has ever been any flavor of liberal or leftist has been intimately aware of not only how much impact your politics can have on your hireability, but even your suspected politics can have. I mean, there’s a reason why “professionalism” always seems to mean that everyone needs to don their conservative white man cosplay and never ever bring up anything outside of a heternormative white picket fence with armed guards to keep out anyone with a melanin count higher than “dull peach”. There’s a reason why only those outside the norm are seen as being “disruptive” when they bring up their families and their home lives. And it’s why moral scolds like you have been concern trolling young liberals for decades now on why people shouldn’t ever speak their minds because some employer someday might see it.

But that’s all well and good, but it suddenly becomes a problem when even the barest conjecture that a liberal boss somewhere might have an issue with someone whose “qualifications” mostly consist of ranting about “whores” on the internet is a possibility because some daddy’s little rich boy somewhere might have to send out a second application? Uh huh.

Oh, and a little aside. It is nigh criminal how much tacit discrimination is standard practice in most forms of employment. From the especially egregious examples that so many I love have tripped over (suspicious behaviors or policies designed to specifically target one person for being queer, disabled, a woman, etc… for discrimination despite it being super illegal) to the well documented way similar resumes that have names that imply a different gender or race had radically different results in spite of being literally the same to the more subtle shit that’s become “standard professional attire” but is really about excluding certain individuals from the standard of “professional” regardless of ability to perform a job which just so happen to be traditional markers of counterculture identification, nontraditional gender, or race (see the way “straight” hair is deemed professional, but dreds or natural hair isn’t, or the way tattoos or long hair on men or short hair on women is often punished by employers and treated as a “failure to be professional” if people don’t do their best to hide it.

Fuck, the whole way we structure “business” style to directly reward whiteness, heteronormativity, conservatism, age, and wealth is probably the single best method the right-wing has to enforce their idea of “normal” on the world.

Oh, don’t like the state of affairs, want to be yourself? Well, hope you like sleeping on the streets, comrade (see also why conservatives like economies where unemployment is high, but the stock market is going up).

In fact, the best recent research suggests that there’s more political discrimination than there is racial discrimination.

Surrrre.

Yeah, call me back when literally poisoning your skin becomes a standard practice among conservatives in the same way that “bleaching” has been recommended for years for black individuals who wanted to land a middle class job (want to feel terrible about the world? Google “skin whitening” and see how many results are companies selling toxic chemicals promising to “whiten your skin better” and how few are people reacting in horror and shock). Or when conservative business owners can be counted on the same one hand as black CEOs or women CEOs.

Bob save me from oppression-envy rich white fucks who want to imagine the world is against them because there was a brief gagging break in the blowjob they had gotten so used to. Wahhh, there’s one single instance of a Republican not being treated overly well, well, not really, but there could be, and that’s totally worse than whatever the niggers and bitches are whining about, right?

Ugh, for the last time assholes, you really don’t want this oppression shit. I know you think you do, because it’s one thing you don’t own wholesale, but believe me, you really don’t. (I will gladly trade you people looking askance when you argue that black people shouldn’t count when they are murdered for the ability to walk down the street with someone whispering behind me without getting hyper-vigilant to the point of a panic attack or hell, the ability to be fucking out at work).

For example, political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood gave 1,000 people student résumés and asked them which students should get scholarships. The résumés had some racial cues (membership in African-American Students Association) and some political cues (member of Young Republicans).

Race influenced decisions. Blacks favored black students 73 percent to 27 percent, and whites favored black students slightly. But political cues were more powerful. Both Democrats and Republicans favored students who agreed with them 80 percent of the time. They favored students from their party even when other students had better credentials.

Iyengar and Westwood conducted other experiments to measure what Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School calls “partyism.” They gave subjects implicit association tests, which measure whether people associate different qualities with positive or negative emotions. They had people play the trust game, which measures how much people are willing to trust different kinds of people.

In those situations, they found pervasive prejudice. And political biases were stronger than their racial biases.

Okay, this is a weird one. The research in question that is naturally not cited in any shape or form is most likely this academic paper here.

And what makes it weird is that one of the names on the paper, as far as I can tell, is a legitimate political science academic (I’m not that up on this guy that much or plugged that much into the Political Scientist gossip chain, but looking over his other papers he seems at least somewhat legit and not just breaking the concept of academic research in a cynical exploitation of layperson ignorance).

But yeah, Sean Westwood, the second name on the paper seems to be a genuine academic who specializes in partisanship on legislator action and behavior and what’s more it looks to be genuinely aware of reality and in some cases deeply toxic to dominant media narratives (I particularly am impressed with his study deconstructing the bullshit factory that is claiming to be bipartisan or “above the issue” to sell a deeply political worldview or make oneself look moderate (“When Bipartisanship is Partisan: The Strategic Use of Bipartisanship in Congress”)). So yeah, some self-aware and earnest chops in most every other paper he wrote.

Which just raises all the questions when you stop and think about why the hell he’s slumming with some weasel from the fucking Hoover Institution (let’s all say it together class) “think tank“, which has been infamous for years for abusing academic rhetoric and sending it out to walk the streets of paid hack alley despite not consenting at all.

Though there might be a little bit of internal school politics and bitter feelings involved in this match from Hell seeing as how the paper Bobo is playing the creepy John for is labeled as being written in June of this year and Westwood has a paper written in August of this year with a legitimate researcher researching the same topic the bullshit paper claims to and finds exactly the opposite conclusion:

While we find that partisan prejudice predicts promotion of hostile rhetoric and avoidance of mem- bers of the opposition, it is not related to discriminatory behavior. Even the most affectively polarized—those with the strongest disdain for the opposition—are no more likely to materially withhold from or hurt the opposition than those with minimal levels of affective polarization. Partisan disdain does not outweigh basic democratic norms, but it is, however, consistently related to in-group favoritism. While hostility is growing in the electorate, for now, it is largely avoidance and bluster.

A) This is the academic equivalent of throwing up both middle fingers and deliberately rubbing one in the other person’s face.

B) So apparently the dire problem of partyism was solved in a matter of two months, which is pretty impressive seeing as how there are still people over a 150 years later still pissy over slavery having ended.

Or maybe, just maybe, the Iyenger paper is an atrocity of bullshit myth-making for right-wingers trying to dismantle academia to pass around like it was the last doobie at a 70s rock concert.

But that is ignoring the wealth of evidence that… um, what was the evidence again?

Well on Page 4, in an introduction section labeled “The State of the Evidence” they point to… the existence of the term “out-group”, which as a marginalized community activist is just cute as far as an attempt to claim oppression. But hey, that’s followed up (Page 5, bottom) by the fact that the kids use the Twitter and Facebook and have bumper stickers which is a totally brand new and not at all decades old phenomenon, donchaknow? Also, apparently liberals are equally responsible for white flight breeding conservative exurbs as conservatives because… um… one sec… er…

Also, apparently mixed party orientation marriages only occur about 9 percent of the time (because who the fuck would want to marry someone who didn’t respect them or whom one had nothing in common as far as morals go?), which is… um… not that bad all things considered. Actually, rather common, considering unlike interracial marriages, political difference would actually affect couple’s ability to feel safe with and bond with romantic partners (Page 6, also, is everyone else as sick as I am of dishonest fuckers trying to treat party identification as some innocuous and inherent thing like race or gender identity, instead of something people choose to be and is a direct reflection of how they treat other people personally?).

But hey, that’s just the Introduction in which Iyenger mostly cited himself and his buddies. What about the new research? Especially which shows that reverse racism is totally real and good honest white as bleach Republicans are being discriminated against in favor of unqualified black people who are illegally put in charge of the Free World just because more people vote for them?

Well, there’s the study on “racial animosity vs partisan animosity” (Page 9-10), which purports to be a study of animosity but is actually a study of response times among a semi-random pool of adults… (seriously, they use median response time as the only measured metric that they do calculations with), which is impressive seeing as how Democrats still came out more “forgiving” by this totally legit metric.

Then they did the same thing, but with “explicit questions about race relations” (Page 11 and 12) leading to testing reflex speed… and this somehow was supposed to show that people were more… “reflexive” and this is about the time I start doing my “why do these chucklefucks think they can do science” dance and we arrive at the “meat”, which apparently consists of the same “pseudo-random” group of nobodies being asked to decide a college scholarship… something they have no background in doing with some “similar” resumes.

Now, this is superficially alike a common study of bias, in that it places equal resumes with one small change in the hands of those deciding a task and seeing how they decide.

But real social science A) actually studies the people whose job it is to decide these things such as HR professionals or college admission board members and charts how they treat identical resumes, instead of grabbing a bunch of nobodies off the street and asking them to decide a scholarship (you know, those usually given to students who need them) and changing a bunch of different factors). Shockingly, this supposedly showed a bias for African Americans by BOTH GROUPS OMG as compared to whiteys in a way totally not done for partisan group identity where everyone was so entrenched (but it’s all the fault of the DemonRats) and B) isn’t completely full of shit with poorly defined parameters and sketchy phrasing around exactly what and how they conducted any of their studies.

Now, there’s many ways they may have found this BS given how sloppily their “study” is designed, but I have to admire how they actually did it.

Their “racial markers” (Page 45) were for “blacks”: “President of the African American Student Association” and for “whites”: “President of the Future Invest- ment Banker Club” cause apparently “President of the Golden Yacht Appreciation Society” just didn’t sound more silver spoon douchebag enough.

Gosh, I wonder why random yahoos of the streets were less than excited about handing over a scholarship being described as being about financial need to the sorts of assholes who sound like they plopped fully formed from the Land of Muffy. More worrying than the fact that these poor little fictitious poor widdle rich white boys didn’t get their clearly unnecessary scholarship is the fact that even with a researcher fully committed to the worst in ethics and a setup like that, 44.2% of whites favored the white guy anyways out of what we must presume was bitterness over Rush Limbaugh fantasies of “affirmative action”.

But yeah, point being, the study is impressive levels of garbage as one would expect from a “counter-intuitive” think tank piece that just so happens to go against every credible social science paper published in the last 10 years and the findings of half the same researchers in two months time.

In a Bloomberg View column last month, Sunstein pointed to polling data that captured the same phenomenon. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of Republicans and Democrats said they’d be “displeased” if their child married someone from the other party. By 2010, 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats said they would mind.

Gosh, geewhilikers, Batman, only your sophisticated detective mind could unravel the puzzle of why the ever loving fuck that could be.

Gee, I wonder what changed in the last 50 years that might change people’s opinions on party identification… hmm, it’s a complete bloody mystery.

Holy fuckballs, I’ll never get over just how reliable it is that any dogwhistle that conservatives rant about caring just so much about will turn out to be the thing they are deathly allergic to ever doing.

Conservatives whine about being pro-life, which they demonstrate by cheering every single method of increasing the death rate they can think of. Conservatives whine about caring about the family, which they show with a common practice of disowning their children and denying them for perceived slights like “being gay” or “marrying a foreigner” and other things that are totally rational.

And of course, there’s the ever-present whine about personal responsibility that conservatives like to trot out whenever they see a rape victim or war zone survivor they want to kick in the goolies with a nice bit of victim blaming. Cause, if there’s anything conservatives like less than sharing existence with people who aren’t exactly like them, it’s got to be taking any amount of responsibility for utterly poisoning the name of conservative ideology with their 50+ year bigoted tantrum.

“Waahhhh, people don’t like us because of a history of doing bad things and standing for hurting said people.”

“Okay, why don’t you try… well, not doing that?”

“Waaaahhhhh, partyism, I demand you like me anyways. Otherwise you’re the real bigots and that bigotry is like eleventy billion times worse than our bigotry! Nyah!”

Politics is obviously a passionate activity, in which moral values clash. Debates over Obamacare, charter schools or whether the United States should intervene in Syria stir serious disagreement.

Well, ain’t that a bloodless way to sum it up.

What ho, a little spot of passion on some minor disagreements on some issues that surely don’t impact most people’s lives in any way and which are almost civil disagreements one could have. Ha ha, how silly it is that people have a negative view over Republicans with such little political things.

All you have to do away with is all of the instances where Republicans actively fought to make specific people’s lives worse. The support for segregation and the reintroduction of the literacy tests, the papers please laws and the racial profiling, the endless drug war and the way white collar crimes aren’t really prosecuted, the fights against treating AIDS, or marriage equality, or the right of some people to pee, the fights against contraception or in favor of rape and domestic violence, the fights against any means of social support for those for whom it is literal life or death, the way conservatives let-no are continuing to let our economy burn because they want to delegitimize a black president. And so many other moments all wound up together in a giant ball of death. Many deaths for those who bled out slowly so that shit could glacially change or at least stay consistently bad.

So, mayhaps it might be understandable that some of the people whose lives were made inexorably worse by fuckers like this may not be the keenest to invite them over for Sunday tea.

And what really gets buried is any notion of conservative malfeasance. It’s all oh, isn’t it a shame that people are so polarized on politics which means young white conservative assholes aren’t receiving their daily blowjob with little acknowledgement of the dark truths. Little mind paid to how many more conservatives seem to despise liberals and hold even stronger prejudices despite not actually being on the receiving end of any liberal legislation or even really being subjected to much of it over the last 50 years.

I mean, conservatives haven’t had to watch their friends die because liberals refused to fund any research, because it was just killing conservatives. Conservatives haven’t had their voting rights abrogated, in fact, they’ve constantly been supported in making it ever easier for them to vote.

But somehow conservatives have become even more incensed at the existence of liberals, which can be summed up in the last dirty little secret ignored. The way liberal or Democrat has come to serve as a dog whistle for you fucks for various minority group members. You don’t hate race traitors, you hate “urban” liberal “youth”. You don’t hate niggers, you hate all those “Democrats” in the inner city. You don’t hate the kikes, you just hate this “liberal media” and all the “liberal” types like Soros who are clearly funding everything. You don’t hate the spics, you hate the “Democratic” blocks “invading” “your” cities like LA or Houston. You don’t hate bitches, you just hate “liberal” women who just so happen to be defined by not being a perpetual doormat and occasionally asking for equal rights. You don’t hate faggots, you just want “Democrats” to stop “redefining marriage”.

So yeah, clinging to how Republicans react like a trained seal to the word “liberal” as if it exonerates the well-established bigotry and makes it somehow cleaner doesn’t at all rinse off the stench of manure coming off this pity whine.

But these studies are measuring something different. People’s essential worth is being measured by a political label: whether they should be hired, married, trusted or discriminated against.

A) You didn’t point to a single study on hiring or discrimination, largely because if you did, you’d have to reveal that you have jack all or worse, that most of the people in charge of HR decisions are more likely to reward conservative markers than liberal ones.

B) Gosh, how horrible would it be if people were treated less equally because of a label or a warped social idea of what an identity meant? That would be the worst!

C) No, what you have is that random people in their daily lives, according to some bullshit nonstudies by some hacks from a right-wing think tank manufacturing fake evidence that rich white assholes are the real discriminated people despite your lying eyes and lying reality, not liking people who absently fuck them personally over and think that that shit don’t stick.

And well, no. People aren’t going to be happy meeting someone who was responsible for ensuring their birth control wasn’t filled or why they can’t come out to work about their wife Zoe or why they got their nose broken by some bigots a week ago. And less so when they put on a defensive posture about how they should be totally distanced from the consequences of their actions because politics is all a game and how could you be a bigot against conservatives and where’s the affirmative action for douchebros.

Because people don’t like assholes, ignorant pieces of shit, nor bigots and well, hate to break it to you, son, but your trainwreck of a party got rid of anyone who wasn’t ALL three of the above so many years ago, you’d need an archaeological expedition to find them again.

So fucking suck it up and DEAL with the bed you made!

The broad social phenomenon is that as personal life is being de-moralized, political life is being hyper-moralized. People are less judgmental about different lifestyles, but they are more judgmental about policy labels.

Mmm hmm, yup, a man who thinks that gosh darnit, taxes are a little high, no offense Mr. Obama, sir is TOTALLY reacted to with far more of a shit-storm than say… me having a girlfriend. Yup, totally. Okay, yeah, again, maybe if you’re being that asshole at the office, getting up in every woman’s face and calling her a whore while making monkey cracks at any black clients… actually, no, the lesbian is still far more likely to be fired first.

The features of the hyper-moralized mind-set are all around. More people are building their communal and social identities around political labels. Your political label becomes the prerequisite for membership in your social set.

Politics becomes a marker for basic decency. Those who are not members of the right party are deemed to lack basic compassion, or basic loyalty to country.

You know, I do have to give Bobo this. The one thing he can muster to perform semi-competently is little disowning spins like this. You know, people are building social identities around political identities and enforcing that tribal space as a requisite for belonging. Just general people and since the outcasts of the former groups sometimes band together in groups of their own, then that’s just like both sides doing it right.

It’s a nice little neat way of making the crimes of conservatives and the nearly cultish way they demand absolute tribal loyalty even at one’s own personal expense into some universal flaw in humanity. It’s semi-competently done, to the point where the only way to fuck it up would be to provide an example which reveals just how one-sided it really is in practice and- oh look there it is.

Finally, political issues are no longer just about themselves; they are symbols of worth and dignity. When many rural people defend gun rights, they’re defending the dignity and respect of rural values against urban snobbery.

Poor little Bobo. Can’t even succeed at being a disingenuous hack. Well, at least there’s still sucking dead white man cock.

There are several reasons politics has become hyper-moralized in this way. First, straight moral discussion has atrophied. There used to be public theologians and philosophers who discussed moral issues directly. That kind of public intellectual is no longer prominent, so moral discussion is now done under the guise of policy disagreement, often by political talk-show hosts.

Waah, where’s the glorious philosopher-kings who’ll take me back to their enlightened caves and regale me with their vast manly wisdom and fawn over how intelligent and philosophical I am before sheathing off their heavy robes and-?

Second, highly educated people are more likely to define themselves by what they believe than by their family religion, ethnic identity or region.

Oh yeah, hurgygurgy, something something cocktail chit-chat has gone downhill these days.

…On that note, I want to stop for a second and dissect this wonderful bit of dumbassery. He’s complaining that people in his cocktail set of pompous wanna-be smart guys are defining themselves by their moral code, what they believe, how they shape the principles that guide their life rather than meaningless fluff like what goddamn part of the country they are from.

In short, he’s complaining that people are daring to be deeper than being set-in-stone morons defined by what God their parents prayed to, what a bunch of bigots say they should believe out of “racial loyalty”, or what part of the country they were spawned in.

I’ll repeat. In Bobo’s world, philosophers are the grand glorious silver haired foxes in the sky, but actually thinking about the world beyond “my daddy dun’ tol’ me” is the most evilest thing evar!

… There’s a reason why Bobo is a Bob-damned treasure trove for us snark merchants.

Third, political campaigns and media provocateurs build loyalty by spreading the message that electoral disputes are not about whether the top tax rate will be 36 percent or 39 percent, but are about the existential fabric of life itself.

…Because they are.

Politics governs how we are allowed to live. Whether or not we need fear going down a street or whether we can marry the person we love. Whether we are considered people or disposable objects. Whether our children have a chance to learn about this great world or are seen as meaningless wastes of space.

As the old adage goes: The personal is political. Our personal lives are affected by political laws. Whether an accidental pregnancy means a brush with death or competent medical care. Whether we need to be wary that we’re going to get raped if we go to a party or aren’t suspicious enough with a new partner. Whether our 11 year old can play at the park and wake up the next morning. Whether my cousin and his friend can walk home at night together without being accused of being in a street gang.

I know this is a difficult concept for one such as you, Bobo, who is so swathed in privilege that all this politics shit is just a humorous game for making merry sport at the cocktail hour (and may I just point out how quickly this went from even the most feigned attempt of caring about someone else to being the same old narcissistic shtick you always end up at), but for the rest of us, those little games have the ability to help or to hurt us.

You may not care about Obamacare beyond how it affects the “hostility” at the chips table, but for those of us on the ground, it was literally the difference between life and death (I have no doubt that I would not be here if I didn’t have the clinic I belong to only because I had the Health Insurance given by the changes the ACA made). You may not give a damn about the existence of welfare beyond how it’ll affect your tax cut, but it may be the difference between someone eating this week and not.

So yeah, those of us fucked by your BS laws and your BS dismissals (uh huh, sure, there’s been a fight in the last 14 years as frank and minimal and not charged as your little example… well, I guess there was your little example, which is notable in that your side and you personally flipped the fuck out about it and basically ranted like supervillains about how if the poor wanted class warfare you’d show us all class warfare, but hey, who can say what happened, amirite?) might just be a wee might testy when they are fucked over by your shitty dismissive attitudes to whether they live or die.

Again, beds and the lying thereof.

The problem is that hyper-moralization destroys politics. Most of the time, politics is a battle between competing interests or an attempt to balance partial truths. But in this fervent state, it turns into a Manichaean struggle of light and darkness. To compromise is to betray your very identity.

Mmmhmm, yes, what a universal problem and not at all the proudly chosen defining characteristic of a group of violent nihilists trying to burn down the country than ever admit that a black leader can exist or people other than cis het white rich dudes have a right to decide anything about the country… or you know, live.

When schools, community groups and workplaces get defined by political membership, when speakers get disinvited from campus because they are beyond the pale,

And there we get to the real bee in his bonnet. The sad notion that his massive speaker’s fee on behalf of fellow travelers in University management wanting to piss on their students is threatened by those same soaking wet and stinking masses taking some small umbrage to their ever-increasing fees going to people who openly despise them and the very process of honest academia.

Cause the right to fleece is a sacred Constitutional right, donchaknow!

then every community gets dumber because they can’t reap the benefits of diverging viewpoints and competing thought. This mentality also ruins human interaction.

We live with the internet. And thanks to the well-funded trolls paid by the Koch Brothers and any number of privileged assholes who make it their personal hobby to try and regularly ruin the days of anyone who isn’t white and rich and cis and het and male, we really don’t.

We, in fact, can’t ignore the deluge of piss-ignorant half-conjectures about how we be thrown out by the inbred fucks of the world who apparently can’t manage the enormous effort of performing a google search from time to time. And even if we were to shut ourselves from the world, the world has a nasty way of pummeling us from time to time and reminding us of the “current political state” as the decaying bodies of more than a few dead black youths will demonstrate.

But I get it. You were once almost potentially inconvenienced and that hits home for you more strongly than anything else, because so far nothing else negative has ever happened to you and you were protected by layers and layers of cocktail party niceties that sucked your dick and told you how handsome and intelligent you were to whore out your pen exclusively to the rich fuckheads of the world. And that hurts. And you need to spit and whine about how this is worse than any oppression ever because it is happening to you.

It’s okay, momma’s here… to slap some Bob damn sense into you for being such a spoiled fuck!

There is a tremendous variety of human beings within each political party. To judge human beings on political labels is to deny and ignore what is most important about them.

Whether or not I can trust they’ll treat me like a full human being?

It is to profoundly devalue them. That is the core sin of prejudice, whether it is racism or partyism.

Oh, I’m sorry, next time I’ll realize that real bigotry is being wary around people I’m not sure will kill me or not and being less than happy when someone admits supporting the party that seeks to further limit my rights and profits off of my dehumanization.

I guess, I really need to stop being so self-absorbed and hateful and remember that it’s all a game and who cares who thinks I am an unperson deserving of death and has supported the systems that make too many I love fear to walk outside alone.

The personal is not political.

To you, perhaps. Except for where it has affected your life. Making you support such things that even the overly forgiving cocktail set is not giving you the free-pass they once did. Where society dares change and what once was cheeky is now considered “wrong” and “so damn racist it would make a Klansman blush” and that burns you.

Because it needs to be a fiction for you to still have pretense to a morality. It needs to be separate to what you consider your “true core” even though you can’t find your true core after dozens upon dozens of soul-searching “think pieces” and wank sessions on philosophy, because otherwise… you’re just an asshole who sold out the happiness of so many others for an unearned comfort devoid of meaning or worth, to be forgotten the second you enter into the gullets of worms.

And that terrifies you and makes you feel scared. So it must be the real bigotry. Because it is the only aspect of politics that can reach you in your fortified bunker of privilege and self-obsession.

And that may be the saddest piece of all of this, just as it is for all of these “grr arrgh, being called out as a douchebag is so much worse than any other form of bigotry ever” pieces that have been exploding as of late.

Cause the personal is political. The personal is affected by the political. And the fact that those affected are starting to take that personally when you rant about how their marriage is a sin against God is not some made up oppression of “partyism”.

It is you reaping what you have sown.

If you’re judging a potential daughter-in-law on political grounds, your values are out of whack.

My last primary basically got driven away because my family and her family abused her so much because I was trans* that she literally couldn’t take the stress and things got bad because of it. A circumstance that also involved me being disowned from my family for awhile and being thrown out of a job.

But hey, let me just put my saddest record on and we can talk about your hypothetical bullshit where someone worries about their daughter because they are marrying someone who believes that bitches make up rape stories to punish men for bad sex.

Bed. Lie. It.**

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‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. Turning shorters into loungers is invented by me. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

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*Obligatory

** But hey, if these assholes are feeling blue because casual racism, sexism, and homophobia isn’t given the free pass it once was and people are feeling a little upset about society being held up in the middle of a Depression so a bunch of fucks can have an extended freakout about the president being black, then they could always, you know… stop. Maybe be less assholic, maybe block less legislation, or at least feign to pretend to listen to someone other than yourself at the cocktail party.

But as always, conservatives find it far easier to pretend that freedom of speech, means freedom from criticism than to accept the consequences of the policies they support and the words they say.

Because it apparently isn’t enough that we’re shoved down, gagging and sputtering, into their crotch again and again as they fuck us over, but we’re supposed to wheeze out a thank you for the honor as well as if they were our fucking dom. Well, sorry dickticks, but you’re not our fucking dom.