It happens, every day, often without warning. Normal grown adults — completely capable ones who do things like work in an office, pay bills on time and help their children with their homework — engage in a discussion, often by accident, about politics.

At least, it starts as a discussion. More often than anyone cares to admit, it descends into an argument, a blowout and eventually a volleyball match of personal attacks and insults these bill-paying, job-working, homework-helping, ostensibly fully together adults didn’t even know they had in them. If you haven’t been that person, you likely have met, befriended, worked with, crossed the street to avoid, unfollowed, been related to or perhaps even married that person. You’ll know soon enough, because during election season, that person is about as hard to avoid as the politicians they’re arguing about. (If you don’t know if you are that person or not ... you might be that person. Sorry you had to find out this way.)

Sometimes, the only thing you can do is shake your head and laugh at it, which is what this colorfully illustrated book (sample pages below) aims to do. We will not probe the human condition or explore the biological processes that compel us to sabotage our otherwise pleasant days and good moods in the name of winning an argument no one ever wins. The only goal here, as another election year descends on us and threatens to pull yet another promising leap year into the darkness, is to marvel at how absurd these arguments can get. So let’s put aside our differences (for 50-something pages at least) and do that.