"croissant-munching, latte-sipping": instances of misconceived media-class self-loathing ITT

'the class they themselves come from' -- do you mean, the middle class?

The middle class is quite broad and diverse - in that sense, not surprising that people from one sector of it attack another.

I agree about the croissant and latte.

this is not abt ppl from one sector attacking another, it's abt people acting the sector them themselves are in

it isn't a question of what *i* mean by this class, i am not the one doing this anooying thing: you might well ask the ppl doing it who precisely they mean

Croissants and lattes are:

a) very visible *as accessories* for a certain type of professional
b) European, and not part of any good honest Full English

Whether Real People eat croissants or drink lattes is neither here nor there. cf "cheese eating surrender monkeys" when America consumes more cheese than France two or three times over.

nobody actually ever used "cheese eating surrender monkeys" - wasn't that from the simpsons or something?

as if croissants aren't ubiquitous and just a normal food - i hardly think the people who use "croissant-munching/latte-swilling" as pejoratives are eating a fry-up every morning.

i have never seen anyone use a croissant as an accessory. pastries of some kind are a fact of office life.

i hardly think the people who use "croissant-munching/latte-swilling" as pejoratives are eating a fry-up every morning.

Too bad, was looking forward to a generation of wasteman liberal authentocrat newspaper columnists all getting coronaries in their early fifties tbh

the point of the thread is note examples of an annoying stupid thing, not to offer reasons why the annoying stupid thing is ok and fine

it is a descendent of "Use other words please."

as far as i can tell the only people who still eat a fryup every morning are longtime civil servants and (separate circle with intersection) alcoholics

xpost

i have never seen anyone use a croissant as an accessory. pastries of some kind are a fact of office life.

They are an accessory if you imagine that outside the window are a load of salt-of-the-earth types eyeing your choice of coffee and pastry with incomprehension and suspicion, which almost certainly never happens in reality.

No one actually says "croissant-munching, latte-sipping" either but everyone knows what's being implied, as much as "hummus-eating" or whatever.

i've noticed islington being cited a lot lately. i know islington has been posh for many moons, but i feel like there's been a spike in this as lazy shorthand for all the evils of out-of-touch london. dunno if it's post-corbyn.

also "shoreditch" - it'll probably still be cited as home of all hipsters, by people who've never been there, or possibly never been to london, even after the price of a tiny studio apartment tops £2m.

xpost people DEFINITELY say "croissant-munching/latte-sipping" and "hummus-eating". afaik those flavoured hummus dips are a massive massive success in like tesco/sainsburies but still, apparently eating hummus means you're not a real englander.

re "examples of an annoying stupid thing" -- I would still benefit from more clarity about the thing.

Is it eg: middle class liberals sneering at middle class liberals?

Or eg: middle class conservatives sneering at middle class liberals?

It goes further back than that, Islington was the actual cradle of New Labour (like, Blair and Brown literally went for dinner on Upper Street), a lot of liberal actors lived there in the 90s. Corbyn really represents the other half of Islington, the poverty and the deprivation that's still there in a lot of the borough, but it suits a lot of people *within* the Labour party/liberal media to pretend that he's just another out-of-touch luvvie.

Ferns and quiche was the cliche in 1970s America, and was equally d-u-m dumb, because both were used to mean effete wealth and both were solidly everywhere and enjoyed by everyone.

I'm sure you hit at least ten examples of this whenever you read one of those John Harris columns when he leaves London in order to disparage people who "never leave London".

middle class conservatives who think they are liberals sneering at people who are almost always considerably less posh than themselves

people in eg: opening pages of Guardian G2 do do this, actually

eg: 'this new product will appeal to croissant-munching Guardianistas, too'

the sense being -- affectionate self-mockery while also bonding themselves and their readers together into an identified group

maybe this is what Mark S meant?

I agree, it is the kind of thing John Harris does, also. From him, it comes across as quite aggressive and nasty.

So that is a good example.

Never leaving London = bad

Never leaving your Lincolnshire market town = good, pls tell me more of your five point plan to put the Great back into Britain

the guardian is like a perfect circle for this stuff. simultaneously trying to write articles for their london audience and placate the hordes of users who seem riled by the fact that there is a city with a lot of people in it.

xpost to matt.

bananaman otm too. many small towns are centres for abusive and violent behaviour.

80% of the staff at right-wing newspapers are self-loathing liberals churning out cliches like this to order, you see it in the Telegraph and the Mail a lot.

My parents used to talk about brie and chardonnay filling this role in the past. The food in question is always soft, pale and a bit foreign.

"bruschetta-munching"
^^^largely associated with the iraq war, i think this was/is an islington-on-islington act of depravity (n!ck fkn cohen's endless fkn made-up dinner-parties)

"croissant-munching"
^^^the sun has switched from bruschetta to croissant BECAUSE THEY JUDGE THAT EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT A CROISSANT IS (bcz everyone munches em) thus proving localgarda's and my point

"latte-sipping"
^^^anti-liberal alliteration

comedy-marmalade conservatives

keep calm and comedy-marmalade conservatives

bring me the head of elizabeth david

I recall pejorative mention of Corbyn's vegetarian falafels before, which I'd imagine are a very nice side dish. And if Corbyn went shopping for fresh produce in my local (in the provinces) Asian supermarket, he wouldn't be found wanting for any ingredients and the only difference from N London would be the cheaper cost. I'd bet many right wing columnists who exhibit a certain type of shrill macho posturing are not fucking stupid enough to favour unhealthy "classic" junk food staples over healthier options.

Ed Miliband's populist fail when was looking at the bacon sarnie like it is a piece of dogshit in his hand was possibly another example of this? Although probably a big dose of dog whistle antisemitism in that Sun pic as well.

owen smith's cappuccino feints felt like the pinnacle of this at the time

the frequency with which falafel and houmous are cited as items of pretentious middle-class foods is very telling w/r/t the exclusion of immigrants and POC from the "working class" umbrella - only the white working class are real working class, it seems

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01706/blair-beer_1706299c.jpg

is the brexiteer obsession with jam the flipside of this?

i read a lot of the food articles on the guardian and for my sins i sometimes end up reading the comments, there is some really vile small-mindedness there, and it's exactly like this - people raging about receipes with ethnic ingredients, like as if the idea of an ethnically diverse neighbourhood is some kind of snobbery in itself.

xpost

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_wkO4hk07o

xpost

They also never contain meat, which is important. Corbyn's vegetarianism means he's isn't a real man's man, ditto E-Mili's bacon sandwich problems.

i didn't think the bacon sandwich photo was supposed to be showing ed's disdain for the common man's carcinogenic meat, i assumed it was bullying more in the vein of "lol look at this man's face he cannot rule us"

It was that as well.

I just thought "I bet there's an Orwell quote about this" and about ten seconds of Googling revealed this:

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right — the I.L.P. were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person but of touch with common humanity

"Fruit juice drinker"

you can put pretty much any banal activity into a format that makes it seem like something worthy of hatred, if you try hard enough.

i dunno what bruschetta is, i guess i have to work harder at being the liberal elite i strive to be

ok for me the miliband sandwich issue has just sedimented out into several rival issues:

i: Ed is posh and this loathed the decent working man's food which showed on his face as he forced himself to eat it
ii: Ed is vegetarian and cannot abide meat like an Orwell-loathed crank which showed on his face as he forced himself to eat it
iii: Ed is Jewish and cannot abide bacon like some kind of muslim which showed on his face as he forced himself to eat it
iv: Ed looks weird when he puts food in his mouth and chews

I had always gone for (iv): this has been an education in the layered subtleties of media-class self-loathing

i feel like it was definitely iv, in its entirety. i'm dubious about it being any other.

i didn't even know it was a bacon sandwich

you can put pretty much any banal activity into a format that makes it seem like something worthy of hatred, if you try hard enough.

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Tuesday, November 29, 2016 1:02 PM (five minutes ago)

"mouth-breather"

brexiteers and jam (aka "comedy marmalade") derives from the fact that jam is one of only a small number of popular foodstuffs that we don't need to import* to turn into a valued commodity that will bring the world's markets a-running

*however, as noted on the brexit thread: "UK farmers warn of Brexit-triggered labour crisis" = fruit and veg rotting in the fields unpicked
https://www.ft.com/content/7ceb876c-b58d-11e6-961e-a1acd97f622d

bcz the usual labourforce have noted (a) their pay packed will have dropped in value by c.20%, and (b) England is no longer a friendly place to come and do cheap useful seasonal labour in

can we pause to investigate whether or not in the very raising of this thread attacking tropes attacking tropes mark s is himself an example of a trope

i am obv in asking this performing a recognise trope attacking service and hiding behind any such accusation is not to be countenanced

Also, I recall the fact that it was a bacon sandwich being made a very big deal of at the time - bacon butty, sandwich of the people, Ed cannot eat it look at him look at him.

So basically I read it as mostly iv but with a reasonable dose of i and a tiny bit of iii for those who are looking for it.

can we pause to investigate whether or not having smelt it deems himself may have dealt it

iirc Orwell took shots at fruit juice on a number of other occasions also. really had a problem with the stuff

ah weird i never noticed the bacon part - i prob only came across this "story" via people's outrage about it on twitter so i missed whatever the tabloid's "point" was besides the photo.

i had scrambled egg today and did not in any sense munch it

Miliband was otherised by the right wing press and some members of his own party for quite some time - "he looks weird", "he's a North London intellectual", "his father hated Britain", he was compared to the Child Catcher (an actual antisemitic caricature) by some dreadful Katie Hopkins-alike. The bacon sandwich can't be separated from all that.

Yeah the sandwich being bacon-filled was mentioned too often for it not to be just 'face even weirder when eating'.

yeah i don't dispute that - i never read the actual content around the sandwich, as i say, like many things, i probably wouldn't have heard about it if it wasn't for people who were annoyed about it sharing it on twitter.

I bet that class was so fun both to teach and be a student in.

It really was. It was an honor to be given the opportunity and I’m glad I made the most of it. Haters can take their share elsewhere! It’s a great class if you need a humanities credit and have a teacher who doesn’t sleepwalk through the semester.

share - * hate

big reveal is that underwater basketweaving was being taught for the benefit of Navy SEALS undercover as liberal arts college students who were using the skills learned therein to swim up to enemy ships frogman style and attach timed charges to the hulls with a swiftly woven basket

when will we understand that everything is an op, everything has always already been an op

There was 'rocks for jocks' (geology 101) and 'clapping for credit' (music appreciation)

I forget what the actual course was but it was "math for liberal arts majors" - the professor walked us through everything using a TI-82 and then gave us all of the questions that would be on the tests in the exact order. He bragged about having 90% of his students get As, dude was awesome.

Then I took him for stats which should theoretically have been a real class but it was pretty much the same. I appreciate a professor who knows he's teaching things that only exist to fill in requirements.

re: Rocks for Jocks, I took an amazing course to fulfill my science requirement: "Volcanism 101." It was a class entirely about volcanos. Never thought I'd have so much fun in a geology class!!

Did you get to make a model with a baking soda/vinegar eruption?

i took an intro electronic circuits class which had a reputation for being easy. some people called it “shocks for jocks”. reader, i found it one of the most difficult classes i had ever taken.

geology is cool af, I took one course on the geology of the US’s national parks which was awesome, and another general geology course taught by someone who owned their own excavation company

the actual zero-value classes are obviously in the business school

(my partner is a fibers prof; she can't swim though)

Did you get to make a model with a baking soda/vinegar eruption?

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, January 31, 2024 2:26 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, but one of the jocks made a scale model of a volcano for a research project and "erupted" it in class.

I, on the other hand, found lots of archival footage of Nyiragongo and showed some wild footage of the lava lake at its center. Nyiragongo is the coolest active volcano, I think.

Ever look at something and just think to yourself: "how did we ever get to this point in humanity"? pic.twitter.com/xGvlzwmSLn

— Bang Average 3rd Cat (@BangAverageCat3) February 21, 2024

(the jrm tweet, obv)

the man never drank a glass of full fat milk in his life

we know where he gets his from

What he'd do is, he'd get his nanny to drink it, then (is violently ejected from the internet)

wtf is chad milk and how am I not supposed to assume that it is cum?

It is, cum hard and drink.

"MID IS NOT the mediocre TV of the past. It’s more upscale. It is the aesthetic equivalent of an Airbnb “modern farmhouse” renovation, or the identical hipster cafe found in medium-sized cities all over the planet. It’s nice! The furniture is tasteful, they’re playing Khruangbin on the speakers, the shade-grown coffee is an improvement on the steaming mug of motor oil you’d have settled for a few decades ago.

If comparing TV to fast-casual dining is an insulting analogy, in my defense I only borrowed it. A New Yorker profile last year quoted a Netflix executive describing the platform’s ideal show as a “gourmet cheeseburger.”

I’m not going to lie, I enjoy a gourmet cheeseburger. Caramelize some onions, lay on a slice of artisanal American cheese and I’m happy. But at heart, the sales pitch for that cheeseburger is no different from that for a Big Mac: You know what you’re going to get."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/arts/television/mid-tv.html

i didn't actually know where to put that. but i had to put it somewhere.

Is “artisanal American cheese” an oxymoron?

Oh the actual article has a link for that phrase. I didn’t click. It didn’t seem exciting enough…

can you even corn syrup in cheese

https://media1.tenor.com/m/FjRhkdAaI48AAAAC/art-is.gif

that whole damn article should have been one sentence: Art is anal cheese. boom. you're done. everything you need to know about television.

can you even corn syrup in cheese

it's called Velveeta you philistine

Good article

so the article is saying that the underlying motivation for both Five Guys AND Ted Lasso being capitalism results in both products having the same satiating-but-unsatisfying affect?

makes sense. you're selling a brand, right? the taste is secondary. starbucks very definitely doesn't make the best coffee. doesn't matter. i watched 4 episodes of SEAL Team the other day. there were very few suprises. other than that John Dahl directed one of the episodes. not that you would have known that an honest to gosh movie director had made it. SEAL Team not that far off in quality from David Mamet's SEAL team show. Popeyes definitely an improvement over Wendys though. and more satisfying. maybe even a cut above MID as far as fried chicken goes.

i disagree with that article though. i'd rather have smoothly entertaining programming than bad cable t.v. programming. i would rather watch 4 hours of Suits than 4 hours of horrible reality t.v./old Wipeout episodes/killer nanny exposes. i watch FBI while cleaning records at night sometimes. even though Jeremy Sisto is in it and he in a constant reminder of how much i hated him and his sister on PRESTIGE television show Six Feet Under.

"IS a constant reminder"

enough time as gone by. Jeremy Sisto isn't that horrible character anymore. we have moved on. i mostly watch it for the moments when Sela Ward gets all serious like a teacher i have a crush on...and if that's MID than brother i don't want to be PRESTIGE.

The article seems to omit basic foundational critique of television … idk what this person studied in college… but the structure of television (modeled on radio) is to be ongoing… to be something you can fold laundry to because it’s a constant companion… the streaming technology has actually changed to “go back to the roots” as it just goes to the next episode seamlessly (it used to stop iirc … ?)

There's no possible system of tv production that's going to consistently make The Sopranos or The Wire. Those are exceptional shows. The fact that most things are mediocre is definitional. The question to me is whether the current system even allows an occasional Sopranos or Wire to emerge, and I'm concerned it doesn't, although I'm not sure why. I wonder if it's a bit like what I've heard described as the problem with SNL, i.e. it used to be *the* place to go for a comedy writer, but by the 2010s there were way too many other places to go and the talent was dispersed. Maybe there are too many "mid" shows for there to be a handful of truly great shows.

According to my brother, who is sort of in "the industry" -- there's also just a pretty bad atmosphere for talent/quality now even though the strike is over. Lots of sitting on cash, pulling shows, shelving stuff after it's been made. Pullback after a glut, perhaps, awaiting consolidation, hoping AI will work some magic that it probably won't. I don't totally understand it. But I do suspect that there will be consolidation among streaming platforms and a reduction in the number of things made.

I think for a while the thing was that prestige TV became such a concept that a lot of stuff that was as trashy and low quality as anything from the old cable days would also get a prestige sheen just by virtue of being a streaming show or hourlong drama. I don't know that that's still the case though.

at some point cable television just became a nightmare. in the 90s it was actually kinda fun in a wild west sorta way. i have VHS tapes where i just channel-surfed thru the weirdest terrain of local public/christian/weird movies/music videos/bizzare infomercials/etc. people would try all kinds of things to get cable eyeballs. and networks weren't immune to it. the morning/afternoon blocks especially were just mayhem. soaps and shouting. i get live t.v. for my dad via Hulu and other than the news or sports its all a faux-streaming deadzone. just space-filler until prime-time or the news or some awards show or sports thing. its no fun at all to watch 4 hours of reality game wardens with tons of commercials. streaming is a godsend. even with some commercials. Tubi is the wild west now but someone will tame it eventually. all those weird Roku movie channels i get. they're just nuts as far as content.
i just feel: why complain about content being less-than-the-sopranos when everything lives forever. you'll never see all the good stuff that already exists if you are really into t.v.-watching let alone all the MID stuff. also people don't need to get too nostalgic about old bad shows. most of them were truly bad. even as novelties you don't need to watch most of it. i honestly have no idea how they are making so much stuff now. its a LOT of hours. did i read some article where they are actually running out of actors in some place like Sweden because they have to make so many crime shows for Acorn and Britbox and Netflix? maybe it wasn't Sweden.

my MID ideal now is Paramount+. the ease of it. some decent movies and shows via Showtime and tons of seasons of mindlessness. was that me starting CSI:New York Episode 1 Season 1 last night? It might have been...

I think part of what led to the glut and what is crashing now how to do that streaming services are all considered tech platforms, not broadcast networks, and the funding models for tech platforms just got ya led out because the free money era is currently receding because of interest rate hikes.

it still feels like a glut to me. but maybe that will change over time. so many shows. netflix stealing from the entire world of t.v. must mean that it will continue with 20+ new shows a week or whatever. of which 2 are really good. but even my lowly PBS app channel has way more than i can watch. and they add stuff all the time.

it is a bit strange to me that we're using this very specific and useful thread to talk about TV but since scott got told off for posting movie stuff on the streaming thread (where this discussion surely belongs) I get it

feel like i hijacked Mark's media-class self-loathing thread though. should probably take it the streaming thread.

it just felt like a really conflicted article to me. *where is the great stuff? but i fold my laundry too don't get me wrong...but the bad stuff was really bad and that was better? and i like hamburgers but they are STILL hamburgers...*

the one thing i did feel was when they talked about the smoothing/AI feel to shows to make them seem slicker/fancier. but that just seems smart to me. more people will watch a shiny thing so why not make it shiny? it also reminds me that i keep forgetting to turn off the smoothing on my dad's t.v. but he doesn't care so i don't care.

x-post!

i think we're done here anyway. haha!

i just feel: why complain about content being less-than-the-sopranos when everything lives forever. you'll never see all the good stuff that already exists if you are really into t.v.-watching let alone all the MID stuff

I don't agree with this. I'll probably never watch every great noir movie and every japanese cinema masterpiece, but I don't want to spend my life just watching near 75-100 year old stuff, I'd like there to be great art that actually reflects the time I live in.

actually, this would have made more sense. though MID is somewhat different from middlebrow i guess.

Middlebrow

"I'd like there to be great art that actually reflects the time I live in."

i just mean that there is no hurry now. or sell-by date. i get mubi and ovid and criterion and there is more great stuff from the last 5 or 10 years on there then i can get to. if there is a lean film or t.v. year there is certainly enough backlog for someone. with network and cable t.v. being kinda superfluous now you can find good things anywhere/anytime. that's all i meant.