Right-wingers spend their whole lives seething with incomprehensible rage.
Left-wingers spend their entirely lives butthurt.
Discuss. This observation explains pretty much everything you need to know about the blogosphere.
A Thought
by John Cole| 57 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
gopher2b
Rumblings about moving KSM trial back to military tribunal. Awesome fail that will be.
Egilsson
Odd, I just read the WaPo this morning and now I feel like I’m seething with incomprehensible rage.
Redshirt
It’s an age old question: How do nice people fight back against mean people, given that the standards for each group are wildly different?
The only answer: By sheer numbers. But given that the tools of major communication (tv and print) are in the hands of the mean people, out of luck….
Robin G
Nah. I spend plenty of time seething with rage. The difference is that it’s comprehensible.
On the open thread front of things, I think the rage will subside somewhat now that I have spring training to focus on. BAAAAAASEBAAAAAAALLLL!!
4tehlulz
RAGE AGAINST THE BUTTHURT
UNITY 2012
General Egali Tarian Stuck
This is largely why I can’t be a member of either party and avoided politics with passion until relative recently.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Does that mean you have an incomprehensible raging butthurt?
J.W. Hamner
I think that may be right, but I’m not familiar with using the term “butthurt” to describe a mental state… and am too scared to Google it.
Zifnab
@4tehlulz: Seconded
cleek
my butt don’t hurt!
it’s my soul that hurts!
oh, and my lower back, cause i don’t like this new chair.
numbskull
What is “butthurt”?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@numbskull: Soap Opera in the Asylum
Robin G
Butthurt: An inappropriately strong negative emotional response from a perceived personal insult. Characterized by strong feelings of shame. Frequently associated with a cessation of communication and overt hostility towards the “aggressor.”
Urban Dictionary is one of the truly great parts of the internet.
Bill E Pilgrim
Rage, rage, against the hurting of the butt.
FormerSwingVoter
I dunno about you guys, but I’ve got plenty of incomprehensible rage for the worthless fuckers on the right.
geg6
Well, I don’t know about any left-wingers, simply because I’ve never met one IRL since, oh, about 1970. Plenty of fake ones or ones who think they are but who advocate actions in support of their agenda in terms that are no different than those of right-wingers, but no actual ones. I think it’s those fake lefties who are those annoying whiners who take pleasure in their butthurt.
As for me, someone who could be characterized as a classic Dem liberal, I’m pissed. I’ve been pissed since 1980 and it has done nothing but increased. My pissedoffosity is now at about the Mt. St. Helen level. But since I’m a liberal, I am barred from raising my own private militia with its war wagon with a 50 caliber. So I just seethe and shout into the void on blogs.
norbizness
To be fair, this hardly qualifies as a thought.
Leelee for Obama
@cleek: This is my thinking, cleek. And I’m not sure if butthurt means what I think it means. I usually think the Constitution must be weeping, and that makes me haz a sad.
Most Left leaning people I’ve known are more heart-broken than vaguely feeling screwed. What was hoped for was fairness-a concept lost somewhere near the Political Divide. We usually want all to share in the Dream. Righties seem to believe that they deserve to have, and others do not. Totally alien concept for me.
Brick Oven Bill
1. “I Am Doctor Amy Bishop” who killed her brother, punched ladies in the head, and recently shot and killed three more. (Harvard Democrat)
2. Architecture Professor who punched out a lady so hard that the cooks could hear his fist strike her jaw in the kitchen. (Columbia Democrat)
3. Professor who screamed mom slurs as he chased a decent Democrat policeman out of his house. (Harvard Democrat)
4. Engineer who crashed a plane into the IRS building. Communist creed in manifesto. Mocked capitalist creed in Manifesto. Chose to live in Austin. Therefore likely Obama voter.
5. Union members who crashed Tea Party and threw conservative black to the ground beating him and repeatedly calling him ‘nig*er’. (racist Democrats)
6. Potential kamikaze attack on Capitol with a drunken green Ford Mustang. (Patrick Kennedy, Democrat) Or perhaps he really was showing up at 2:30am for a vote.
7. Twelve victims sent daily to the emergency room by Democrats following the application of Barack’s Harvard training to his Chicago neighborhood.
8. Man bites off cop’s nipple (Democrat).
9. Martin Scheen.
Then there were those Teabaggers in Washington with the signs.
JGabriel
John Cole:
Yes, if by “butthurt” you mean “comprehesible rage”.
.
Nick
@Redshirt:
This is a problem for me too…you hear people like Glenn Greenwald say we need to shame them. How do we shame the shameless? Are people that naive?
If people like Glenn Greenwald think it’s the REPUBLICANS who are the one Obama caves to on national security, he needs to come to a Democratic club meeting in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan or Northern New Jersey and tell the crowd that we need to stop torture, close GITMO, and put KSM on trial in a civilian court. He’d be in for a mighty surprise.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
From health care to the KSM trial to global warming to finance reform, I am just worn the fuck out by Teh Stoopid.
PTirebiter
@Brick Oven Bill:
“At AstraZeneca, we believe it’s not enough for us to simply make medicines. We have to make sure that the people who need those medicines can get them. It’s why we’ve offered patient assistance programs for over 30 years.“
strawmanmunny
The squeaky wheel gets the grease and the right wing and TV bobbleheads have a lot of “SQUEAK” in them.
The problem I have with some people getting upset about some of Obama’s decisions is that they should get out there and make noise like the teabaggers,etc. Raise hell, go after the other side or STFU.
When you have a avalanche of noise against you and silence from your own side….well…let’s just say I would suspect most of us would “cave”.
Don’t just sit around and piss and moan on a blog.
Nick
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Which is their goal, to break down the intelligent and those who want to bring a better nation, and take back power for the dumb, arrogant, NASCAR loving real ‘merkins.
WereBear
My partner worked in DC for decades, and states that W broke the “unwritten law.” This was the complicit understanding that politics was politics, but everyone had to maintain the Layer of Competence, without which the country could not function.
Well, he broke it. He staffed everywhere with his cronies, his ideologues, his Liberty University Idiots.
And here we are. Yog sothoth and the goat with a thousand young.
Nick
@strawmanmunny:
That’s not really up to then, whether or not they can raise hell and go after the other side is up to producers at the major news outlets. Glenn Greenwald, for as much as I think he is a prick, isn’t all over CNN or MSNBC because he chooses not to be, it’s because they don’t want him there.
Platypus
What about libertarians, then? Seething with incomprehensible smugness?
Max
The ipad goes on sale April 3rd.
That should ease some of the left-winger’s hurt.
Mike E
@Brick Oven Bill:
10. BoB (closet Democrat)
Osprey
@Brick Oven Bill:
1. George Bush and Dick Cheney: Started 1 illegal and 1 pointless war, both of which have led to the needless death of at least 100,000 innocent civilians, almost 5000 American soldiers, and helped bankrupt the USA. (most definitely REPUBLICANS)
We could do this shit all day.
Blue Neponset
@Nick:
That would be true if the people at the top of the wingnut movement were wingnuts themselves, but they aren’t. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol, etc. are using the outrage of the wingnuts to further their goals. The wingnuts are just useful idiots.
JGabriel
@PTirebiter:
I know there’s gotta be a pun on Zoroaster and Avestan in there somewhere.
.
Sarcastro
Who are these “left-wingers” you speak of? I see a lot of butthurt centrist pantywaist asshats running around, but I don’t see leftist fucking one anywhere close to the national stage.
As JGabriel notes, leftist rage, by its very nature, is entirely comprehensible as it is the rage of rationalists faced with romantic claptrap posing as serious political thought. And as you yourself have noted, the real left tends to be consistently correct on the issues yet is constantly sidelined since being right comes in a distant second to sucking the cocks of corporate donors and fluffing the fantasies of moron constituents.
Coda: Centrists spend their entire lives insisting they aren’t the problem.
burnspbesq
@Max:
If you can get one, that is. I read somewhere that due to a combination of problems at Hon Hai (Apple’s favorite contract manufacturer) and shortages of key components, there may be only 300K units available on Day 1, rather than the 1 million they were hoping for. The lines outside every Apple Store are going to be as long as space and mall security permit, and a ton of folks are going to be shut out.
Apple is apparently going to start accepting on-line pre-orders on March 12. That may be the way to go.
jibeaux
@Nick:
Well, you know, most of those shows END after a half hour or an hour. Somebody with a little charisma who can stick to less than a million words can get on those shows, albeit mostly because they’re playing the “we’ve got on a liar (or two or three liars) and a truthteller, you decide which side you believe!” game as learned in the On the Other Hand, Mr. Hitler Contends school of journalism.
Ash Can
I don’t know about that. I don’t think either side has a monopoly on either rage or butthurt. Drama queens are everywhere.
I do think, however, that the right is more violent these days. It’s kind of a photo negative of the mid-sixties-to-early-seventies. Back then, it was the radical left wing that tended toward violence, and was in the forefront of civil unrest. Now that the Overton Window (yes, I’m a firm believer in that theory) has shifted so far right, it’s the radical right wing in the forefront of civil unrest. The jingoism is different, but the effects are the same.
@Robin G: How ’bout it! I made myself a couple of dawgs for lunch yesterday, cracked open a beer, and turned on the first Cubs spring training game on the radio yesterday. Good times.
flukebucket
When you are constantly taking it up the butt it hurts.
Rex
It’s the old dichotomy of pussies, dicks and assholes, see: South Park, Bigger Longer, etc.
Comrade Mary
@PTirebiter: Nicely done. Bonus points for the Firesign Theatre reference in your handle, too.
PTirebiter
@JGabriel: No doubt, but
it would be a long walk for a short drink. I was just trying to be helpful. I’m a giver.
electricgrendel
Hm. Apparently I’m a conservative, then. Because I seem to have a lot more incomprehensible rage than I do butthurt.
Neutron Flux
@geg6:
geg6
@Neutron Flux:
They would tear up my liberal card if I did that. And hell, I don’t need to go to a gun show for that. All I need to do is ask any number of my neighbors to borrow theirs. I do live in gun nut heaven here in Western PA, after all.
Cerberus
Agreeing with others before, the difference seems to be more (for real liberals and leftists, not media personalities and Washington centrists) comprehensible rage versus banal “they’s different” rage.
The fixed version is more:
Right-wingers spend their whole lives seething with the incoherent rage and unfocused butthurt.
Left-wingers spend their whole lives kneading a migraine and seething with wholly rational “oh for fucks sake” twitchy anger.
Certainly is how I spend my life. “Let me get this straight, no trans person has ever assaulted or peeped on a straight person in a bathroom, while several trans people have been attacked in restrooms and thus you need protection from us with a bill banning us from your bathrooms? (Nurse forehead) Oh for fuck’s sake.”
And I’m not sure their banal, “I don’t like them coloreds” rage really holds a candle to the raw contempt and rage I feel as a radical feminist and leftist living in the current society.
Unfortunately for our media, incoherent butthurt from the right-wing gets treated as “genuine anger that needs to be addressed at the highest level (to assauge the feefees of pathetic man-children upset that their dominance over society is slowly falling apart)” and leftist genuine rage at real horrors and injustices is constantly treated like “oh there go those drama queen liberals again, nice puppet you hippie freak, let’s all ignore their teen rebellion crap and get back to that dire problem butt hurting the right wing again”.
maye
Mr. Cole might benefit from some exposure to Gangaji:
“To meet reality is ruthless. To meet it without the mediation of the thought ‘I can control this,’ is to face death. Really to face death, here and now.
This is Ramana’s awakening. If your life is about going, becoming, getting or escaping—stop.
The invitation is to let the life that is living this life, live it. When you let life live itself, you are actually surrendering to yourself.”
iLarynx
@Brick Oven Bill (aka Over-Baked Bill):
I suppose Timothy McVeigh is an asterisk somewhere on that list?
A Democratic nipple? Does that mean all nipples are Democrats?
Will
Ash Can,
You might want to read Nixonland. Right winger violence has always been more prominent than left wing, but the media fixates on the left wing.
There was a thousands of acts of violence documented from political rightists in the 60s, including quite a few prominent assassinations of people you might have heard of like Martin Luther King. Oswald is either the exception or the confirmation of the rule, depending on which version of his life you believe.
So, a handful of student bomb empty buildings and rob a bank, and a century later we talk about all the left wing rage. Thus, nobody but the occasional historian and social scientist remembers the thousands of murders, assaults and other antics by right-leaning “lone gunmen” and “regular Americans.”
RareSanity
I’m going along with others. What I feel is definitely NOT butthurt, it IS comprehensible rage…
I’m sick of this shit…all of it!
Wingnuts, the Jane Hamshers of the left, CNN, FOX, Congress, President McCain, and Wolf fuckin’ Biltzer…
Hmmmm, thought I would feel better after that…I don’t…
Sentient Puddle
I think a lot of you are totally over-thinking this.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Left-wingers spend their entirely lives butthurt.”
Well, that’s what one gets for supporting teh ghey.
“He [Dubya] staffed everywhere with his cronies, his ideologues, his Liberty University Idiots.”
Yes, but Monica Goodling was sooo charming and pretty when she rejected DoJ applicants who hadn’t shown their patriotism by joining the Federalist Society and interning at Heritage.
“And here we are. Yog sothoth and the goat with a thousand young.”
I think extra-dimensional incomprehensible horrors would be insulted at the comparison with the GOP.
After all, the Great Old Ones would enslave us all (and eat some), regardless of economic status; you couldn’t buy your way out of being Hastur’s next breakfast pop-tart. (Which makes the Great Old Ones socialists, of course.)
Now, if Governor Conservathulu proposed a voucher system to those who wished to buy themselves out of being additional protein to his eldrich cthonic appetite, I’d say we might see talk of a joint ticket with Palin on Politico soon.
http://www.cthulhu.org/cthulhu/positions.html
Billy K
I think there’s a new species of Democrat that seethes with incomprehensible rage, as well. It’s usually over their own party, but it’s rage nonetheless.
daveX99
You’ve made my butt cry.
I guess that proves I’m a leftie. (sniff).
-dave.
Chuck
@Maye
FTFY
Linda Featheringill
I have seen a lot of anger on both sides. However, I have observed that the folks that are totally CONSUMED by their anger usually consider themselves conservative. Several of those angry people were related to me.
Regarding my rightwing relations, I often wondered if they had given up on sex and engaged in anger instead. I guess we all need passion of some sort.
Sometimes I wonder the same thing about strangers. But I REALLY suspected it was true about my extended family.
chrome agnomen
@geg6:
oyez! oyez!
chrome agnomen
@JGabriel:
and if by ‘incomprehensible rage’ he means butthurt.