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

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.

tbf to the tabloids and the fascists generally, if he had followed my mum's much-repeated rules on eating he would not have come to grief in this instance

a: "that bite was much to big! take smaller mouthfuls!"
b: "keep your mouth closed when you're chewing!"

If you have really poor quality bacon it can be difficult to take a clean bite no matter how small a bite you take.

theresa may eats only the finest british bacon, made from churchillian pigs.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was munching which”

On the food theme, isn't there some alleged account of Peter Mandelson mistaking mushy peas for guacamole at a chippie in his constituency?

"Typical Guardian reader" is often thrown around as a pejorative term by peopel who I'm sure also read it.

I love George Orwell, but I don't think that notorious passage does him much credit. Rereading it now, I am coming to think it is as bad as all the people who say it is bad have always thought.

sometimes guacamole IS MADE WITH PEAS

Mandelson/guac story has also been attributed to Caprice and is presumably apocryphal

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- A political committee set up by Florida Gov. Rick Scott is criticizing the woman who shouted at him in a coffee shop and blasted his support of an anti-abortion law, saying she's a "latte liberal."

Video of the confrontation has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube and shows 39-year-old Cara Jennings calling the governor "an embarrassment to our state." She tells him her health care costs had increased because of his policies.

Scott replied that he has created 1 million jobs, before turning around and leaving the Starbucks before getting his coffee.

xp was just coming to post about The Prince of Darkness and that apocryphal story about Hartlepool guacamole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwRx8-Hjlk0

guacamole for Mandelson performed the same function as Bacon Sandwich-gate did for EMili: a chance to have a good sneer effete, out of touch, chattering class Hampstead liberals for other effete, out of touch Hampstead liberals AKA the gentlemen of the press

brexiteers and jam

Jam also probably symbolises the battle against liberal PC do-gooders who won't let them have a golliwog on the jar any more, which must be the fault of the EU. Racist jam will make Britain great again.

"moet medics"
^^^this seems a reach

"chardonnay-swilling"
^^^this seems to have undergone the social drift that croissant hasn't -- viz it used to mean the same as "champagne socialist" (and still does in eg australia?) but e.g. on mumsnet now means something a bit more TOWIE or WAG-ish

great thread:

https://twitter.com/WeWantPlates🔗

people who go to shit restaurants complaining about their choice by criticising the perceived pretentiousness of the crap restaurants they CHOOSE TO GO TO, as if they've dipped their toe into a dimension that disgusts them, rather than being the only ones living in that dimension.

But but but this is a disease and it is spreading! You go to a place for years and then one day they bring out your burger on a fucking board! Betrayal.

Mandleson's guacamole faux pas is indeed apocryphal, according to Peter Bazalgette; I hadn't realised that Kinnock was involved in popularising the misconception

So, before I report on a tasting of guacamole, I have to deal with an urban myth: that the politician Peter Mandelson, visiting a northern chippie, asked for “some of that guacamole” when referring to the mushy peas. I have investigated this thoroughly and it turns out the real culprit was a young American intern. This was compounded when former Labour leader Neil Kinnock unkindly attributed the remark to m’lord Mandelson. That sorts that.

https://www.ft.com/content/7dea4d8e-6c6d-11e5-8171-ba1968cf791a

It's true about chardonnay. The last time I heard it mentioned was someone saying 'book clubs that get together and drink chardonnay'. What could be so wrong about that? (The implication was that it was a bit 'common' or something)

(Compare ILB club that gets together over Harvey's)

the culinary synecdoche

we call em frogs, they call us rosbifs

wikipeida is telling me that the Irish equivalent of champagne socialist/chardonnay socialist/gauche caviar etc is "smoked salmon socialist", can anyone confirm if this is true

"lambrini-swilling"

as in "labrini-swilling social hooligans"

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-09-06/new-bbc-comedy-motherland-has-the-realities-of-the-school-run-down-to-a-tee
You may think that middle-class mums (and dads) are everywhere – in life, in popular culture, blimey you may even be one yourself. But us quinoa-munching stalwarts of the school run haven’t had a sitcom of our own yet.

further to my point abt my mum's opinions upthread, if ppl didn't "munch" or swill" but ate and drank nicely perhaps all this bigotry would vanish?

quaffing is also bad

starfish and coffee, brexiteers and jam

GQ UK went to that shop and reported that dry, crusty bread was to blame, declared the sandwich "difficult."

I'm reminded of John Kerry's unforced error in requesting actual cheese on his Philly cheesesteak order instead of cheez whiz, as Real American Dubya did.

Just searching "munching liberals" gets you:

lentil-munching
granola-munching
quinoa-munching
muesli-munching
cock-munching (this is probably not about food)
arugula-munching (this is something of a curveball)
tofu-munching
Guardian-munching (possibly a typo)
kale-munching
croissant-munching (FINALLY!)
lettuce-munching
salad-munching
mashed yeast-munching (WTF?)
vegetable-munching (this is just lazy)
bean-munching (not even mung beans at that)

I gave up after page five.

you missed yoghurt weaving

lentil-munching
granola-munching
quinoa-munching
muesli-munching
cock-munching (this is probably not about food)
arugula-munching (this is something of a curveball)
tofu-munching
Guardian-munching (possibly a typo)
kale-munching
croissant-munching (FINALLY!)
lettuce-munching
salad-munching
mashed yeast-munching (WTF?)
vegetable-munching (this is just lazy)
bean-munching (not even mung beans at that)

is this from "Cheeseburger in Paradise"?

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.