I am 90% sure that post about the mom who buys watermelon pizza and the dad who buys burger patties from Food 4 Less is some particularly obscure brand of classist bigotry.

A memory from Cub Scouts: some scouts performed a skit making fun of homeless people. Another scout modified it to make fun of gay people instead, but was interrupted and told that was inappropriate. As a kid, I didn’t understand why either was inappropriate. As an adult, they both seem bigoted.

There were these interviews with the scriptwriter for 12 Years a Slave where he talked about how horrifying it was that this intelligent, accomplished person could be enslaved. I saw one person react by saying he was putting a weird amount of emphasis on social status, as if it would be less messed-up to enslave a lower-class person.

I don’t expect people to know that several years prior, he argued that poor black people were only poor out of laziness. He never wrote anything like that again after the backlash. But it felt frustrating to see someone groping for the reasons why his other statements felt odd, knowing there was a missing piece that put it all together.

Sometimes people talked about how a certain rationalist blogger’s political statements seemed questionable at best and heartless at worst, and I remembered the time he told me genocide was a good thing. Or . . . I know some of you won’t be as offended by this as I was, but there was this one rationalist blogger who told me disabled people should be paid less for the same jobs as abled people, and in my worldview, that was the unforgivable statement that made all his other questionable statements make sense. I can’t have any reasonable expectation for people to know they said those things. It’s just frustrating sometimes.

So this whole “people in the South love having sex with their siblings” meme has to be a proxy for some kind of classism, right?