Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

If someone says I'm racist because I cooked a dish with shallots in it written by a woman who (dumbly) criticized two women of color for selling out by slapping their names on products, I am going to ignore that person forever.

which side is the racist side again? the ones who like the shallots or the ones who don't?

If I cooked that dish with shallots in it as a show of solidarity with a suspended writer who dumbly criticized two women of color for selling out by slapping their names on products, I'm also a dumbo.

I hadn’t been reading this thread but now I see that something has happened to it

so it's not about the shallots at all? the shallots are just a prop in a drama?

But I think a lot of the confusion is whether we're talking about shallots or Alison Roman - the tweet you linked earlier was about the ingredients themselves and didn't appear to have any moral component, the Alison Roman thing is about two teams of people arguing about whether one team is woke enough.

oh i get it we're talking about the olympics

the logical thread is:

- I only learned as of earlier this evening the act of making a certain shallot pasta recipe makes you a bad person because it means supporting someone bad, but also it is wrong to say that it is wrong to make the pasta recipe. both sides are adamant in this, with no wiggle room. the reason this is because I find a lot of my recipes by googling ingredients and thus literally have no idea who they are associated with, so I don't know what other recipes are and aren't acceptable. (one data point :an article around this implied that everything bon appetit puts out is suspect, which I feel shitty about, since I made something they published tonight.)

- in this particular case I dodged a bullet because I dislike shallots, and thus there was no risk of my making the pasta even if I was team hell yeah do all the racism

- however, it is hard to call that "dodging a bullet" when disliking shallots, itself, is another act that has been previously construed -- many times, usually via mocking someone who doesn't like them -- as something that makes you a bad person. in other words, I only passed the test by failing another.

- these are just examples, everyone is fixating on these examples but on another day I could give you another example of a thing that makes one a bad person, in a way that isn't necessarily predictable beforehand; and then on another day entirely I could give you the discourse agreeing that doing the opposite makes you a bad person. (baking bread in a pandemic is a good example -- first it was wrong to do it because it wastes yeast others need, and then someone on medium published an article saying essentially that, and she was mocked relentlessly for suggesting it was wrong to waste yeast others need)

sorry, editing mistake, the first point should be "the reason I feel stuck is because I find..."

it's not logical at all!

there is no reason to listen to these voices!

I don't see how shallots can be shamed into voting for Biden, surely there has to be a better approach

some kind of tax credit maybe

yes, that (who to vote for, should you vote, etc.) is another excellent example of a case where there is no acceptable option presented, and the stakes should be much easier to grasp in that example

easy, just vote for the democrat, next

In no way does making these recipes or having an opinion pro or con about a mundane ingredient make you a bad person or a racist. You seem to have somehow waded into the middle of a debate that has nothing to do with just picking out recipes and cooking them.

If someone wants to make the point that famous white cooks or influencers who cook food from other cultures should do more to acknowledge those cultures, that's fine, they probably should! But it's completely stupid to yell at anyone just because they are trying to cook themselves some food they like regardless of what ingredients they do or not use. Don't take it to heart, people get angry about a lot of tangential stuff that really has nothing to do with the actual issues they are grappling with.

xp -- by no means is "just vote for the democrat" an uncontroversial stance

I only learned as of earlier this evening the act of making a certain shallot pasta recipe makes you a bad person because it means supporting someone bad,

I think this dilemma solves itself right here - you didn't know about it until you ran across a cesspool on Twitter accidentally, ergo had you made the dish at any point you would not have acted with ill intent and all those people accusing each other (and by extension, you) of terrible things can go fly a kite.

If you have a Paula Deen cookbook that doesn't make you a racist, it makes you someone at higher risk of getting diabetes. If you bought all of Paula Deen's cookbooks because she's a racist, then you're a racist - but short of that, you're in the clear.

that shallot pasta recipe is tasty

the shallot sauce is really versatile too. I make a full jar and keep some aside to add into scrambled eggs

- these are just examples, everyone is fixating on these examples but on another day I could give you another example of a thing that makes one a bad person, in a way that isn't necessarily predictable beforehand; and then on another day entirely I could give you the discourse agreeing that doing the opposite makes you a bad person.

delete twitter imo

yes, that is a frequent thing told to people who have been identified as bad people/"the main character of the day"/etc

But - who to vote for is theoretically important! Like, it's easier for some people than others, but it is making a decision to endorse a person who will almost certainly be responsible for some terrible actions, and who might also prevent suffering for many others. That is a genuine moral dilemma that's worth thinking about. The pasta recipe is not important at all! Whether or not someone makes a recipe impacts no one but themselves and whoever eats the pasta, unless the cooking is accompanied by some rabid anti-SJW ranting, which is not anything you're going to do. Random Twitter flare-ups do not necessitate a new set of rules to follow, and they do not deserve to compete for space in your brain with genuine questions of morality and ethics. No one will remember this shallot shit by July.

I meant the whole thing, but sure people should delete their individual accounts also as a first step. spent far too much time on it during 2015-2019 following the_discourse and learned that all of the main characters and feted voices in blighty's Benighted National Conversation are mostly talking pish and awful basturts to boot. you won't find your moral center on twitter - far too much noise, not enough (any?) signal

no one will remember this shallot shit by friday next week

zero signal

I dunno about that, moral center of Twitter is easy to find - https://twitter.com/BassetMortimer

"so if someone says you're being racist, you find it an acceptable answer to say "lol you don't matter"?"

Depending on the person and the context, absofuckinglutely

this thread reminds me that for some reason i can never remember what a "shallot" is

Real life example: I run an open gym,for basketball. 2 native Americans came one night, male and female. The guy was being a jerk to me, for no reason (well actually turns out he was intimidated by my skills and was trying to "get in my head". We're friends now). The woman saw me and the guy squabbling and so she started playing dirty: shoved me, elbowed me, etc. I told her if she didn't stop, she had to leave. She got in my face, yelling. I said stop being stupid, your guy being a jerk to me is no reason for you to physically assault me. "Oh you're calling us both stupid?? You fucking racist!!" To which I replied yep you got me, I'm racist.
She was being ridiculous and acting out of emotions (the guy was her husband). I knew I wasn't being racist and so dismissed her accusation.

You go away for a while and you come back and everything is 0_o

it's good pasta tom

sorry

No need to apologize.

facebook: good for private groups (i am sorting out a lot of personal shit atm), i don’t use it for anything else or even have friends on there

instagram: so many ads that i don’t even open the thing any more

twitter: i have not felt more alone or ignored since high school (even before it went to shit)

reddit: just where i get my breaking news (ever since twitter went to shit)

discord: i’m pretty low key on the whole, mainly because most servers are full of adolescents and i don’t want to be that guy, but it can be pretty good when you find your people

language exchange apps: depends on where my head is on any given day; usually comprises overwhelming amounts of unrewarding small talk with strangers

ilx: the longest i’ve ever been active on one platform

linkedin: actually worse than eating my own balls

twitter trolls don’t faze me bc i was once brutally dragged in a houseplant forum for overwatering my fiddle leaf fig tree and i haven’t felt anything since

— alexa (@mariokartdwi) October 10, 2018

I like shallots

What the shit are y’all talking about re: shallots and pasta??

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Friday, 22 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

https://twitter.com/search?q=shallot%20pasta&src=typed_query

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Friday, 22 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

There have been numerous threads on ilx over the years where people act all outraged around people's tastes, no? What's the difference?

By the time I got on twitter and saw people talking about what an abomination Dolmio was, or pineapple on pizza...I had just seen it all (or something like it, with similar levels of logic applied) before.

Pineapple and prosciutto is a solid pizza combo, may god let into the light those who do not see its wonder.

Pineapple Canadian bacon ricotta is heavenly

I can't imagine a subject I couldn't care less about other people's opinions on than what I enjoy stuffing into my gaping maw

on another day I could give you another example of a thing that makes one a bad person, in a way that isn't necessarily predictable beforehand

I really hope that it doesn't sound smug when I assert that it's possible to be a productive and well-integrated member of society, while not being a consumer of social media. I've never had a an account on Facebook or Twitter and I'm not even 100% sure what Instagram is.
The reason why, I guess, is that I don't care in the slightest what any of those fuckers think about anything. Try it!

Wow, this thread turned into a dramatic reading of David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person" really unexpectedly.

Each and every thing is bound up with countless contexts, whose existence we scarcely even suspect most of the time. As a general rule, however, we ascribe a limited set of contexts to a given thing, and an even tinier subset – one, at times two – of these contexts tends to trump all others in day to day life. In Western cultures, for instance, viewing the swastika as a mere religious symbol is a glaring dogwhistle more often than not. But what of the shallot? As with all ingredients, it possesses its own cultural connotations, which make it an object of inquiry for sociologists of food, but none of these connotations are prominent enough to thoroughly saturate its meaning, i.e. to tie it, more or less irreversibly, to a specific context ('swastika = Nazism').

When someone makes a blanket statement about shallots ('they're bad and you're a racist for liking them' or whatever), you are instinctively prompted to evaluate their claim. The argument may well be intriguing, but in this particular case it only seems to make 'sense' against the backdrop of a hyper-specific Twitter beef that 99.9% of humanity has never heard of (tbh I've already forgotten who its dramatis personae are and what the exact issue was in the first place). Is an obscure scandal enough to exhaust the meaning of 'shallot', let alone its taste? Why would you universalize this esoteric frame of reference in particular? Why value it over and above all other contexts? You may feel like the 'shallots are bad' crew deserves a fair hearing, but once that's done, why would you grant their opinion (which may not even be one per se, since much of it looks like trolling to me) more weight than all other possible opinions about shallots, which suddenly appear to be reduced to naught?

that shallot to take in

Draw near, and fear not.

Unperson otm :(

Hard to read tbh

it's not about shallots in general, it's about the specific pasta, the making of which is showing support/"solidarity" to someone you shouldn't be showing support to. again, all of this would be apparent if people would just read what people are saying

and again, this is just one example, I don't know why everyone is so fixated on this as if there aren't thousands more examples. maybe I should have chosen the lana del rey blog post instead

it's about the specific pasta, the making of which is showing support/"solidarity" to someone you shouldn't be showing support to

To reiterate: why give so much weight to this specific subcontext?

because I don't want to support racists?