The Mouthing of Bollocks
When we talk about “ethnic” food, we’re not referring to French, German, or Italian cuisine, and definitely not those Ikea Swedish meatballs.
I suspect few people think of German cuisine as particularly mysterious and alluring. There are, I fear, very few German restaurants beyond the borders of Germany. Good cars, though.
Usually, we’re talking about Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Ethiopian, and Mexican food – places where food is cooked by the “brownest” people.
As is the custom with articles in Everyday Feminism, the density of assumption in what follows is quite high. For instance, when my family ventures out for a meal, table for twenty, I can say with some confidence that the choice of restaurant isn’t determined by the melanin levels of the people cooking it.
What happens is that food becomes the only identifier for certain places. Japan reduced to ramen and sushi, Mexico reduced to tacos and burritos, India reduced to curry, and so on.
Again, note the loadedness, the questions begged. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten, say, chili while convinced that said meal was an adequate distillation of the entire population of Mexico and Texas, past and present. Nor can I recall “fetishizing the sustenance of another culture.” Or “subsuming histories and stories into menu items.” It’s a meal, not an attempt to absorb world history or to flirt with some notional brownness. Yet this is asserted as “what happens,” as some universal fact. And then promptly contradicted:
Eating food from another culture in isolation from that culture’s history and also current issues mean [sic] that we’re just borrowing the pieces that are enjoyable – palatable and easily digestible.
Um, isn’t that rather the point? You know, tastiness without baggage? Isn’t that what makes foreign cuisine commercially viable, a livelihood of millions? Or is ordering takeout only acceptable following lengthy, brow-furrowing investment in each and every vendor’s ancestral culture and current politics? Should every visit to, say, a Pakistani restaurant entail a stern lecture on the pros and cons of European colonialism and a lifetime subscription to the fever dream of Islam? Would that aid digestion? Stated plainly, it sounds a little silly. But Ms Kuo wishes to appear concerned, deeply concerned, that people of pallor might enjoy falafel and a spot of hummus “but not understand or address the ongoing Islamophobia in the US.”
Well. Contra Ms Kuo, I’m pretty sure that the family running my local Chinese takeaway actively encourages heathen white folk to sample their wares, regardless of whether those paying customers are intimately familiar with All Of Chinese History, and regardless of whether those customers dutifully ponder how the cooking of this particular family may differ from other Chinese families in a country as vast and sprawling as China. And I very much doubt that they expect their patrons to acquaint themselves with “the complex relationships and power dynamics between Asian countries” and issues of “labour equity and immigration policy” as a precondition of buying hot tossed chicken. No. What they want is custom. Pretentiously agonised pseudo-sensitivity is, alas, not billable.
And yet for Ms Kuo neurotic fretting is, and should be, a staple of eating out:
Food can be used as a tool of marginalisation and oppression… It’s critical for us to reflect on how we perceive the cultures that we’re consuming and think about the relationships between food, people, and power.
Imagine the fun. The thrillingly politicised mealtime conversation.
Ms Kuo describes herself as “a scholar and educator based in New York City.” Her interests include “racial justice, intersectional feminism and digital media activism.”
“studying racial justice + intersectional feminism + digital media activism.”
That $50,000 liberal arts education is really paying off.
What strikes me is how so many contributors to Everyday Feminism appear to have been rendered dogmatically neurotic in exactly the same way. See, for instance, here and here. The rote regurgitation and mental inflexibility is… quite odd.
I want to eat noodles without being racist. Help me, oh wise feminist!
Golly! I’ve not oppressed people by eating a spring roll before!
Let me get this straight. If I don’t like foreign food I’m bigoted. But if I *do* like foreign food I’m also bigoted unless I worry about “food as a tool of oppression”?
Being a social justice warrior is so much fun.
I am so very very offended that the entire world outside of Europe (and in scientific cultural terms I include North America, Australia and New Zealand) fully enjoy the fruits of the scientific enlightenment which kicked off around the time of Galileo.
Offended I say.
Stamps foot in disapproval…..
Oh, yes you have.
In other news:
Please update your files accordingly.
Why do these ‘racial justice’ activists always sound like racists?
Why do these ‘racial justice’ activists always sound like racists?
I’d imagine it’s because their worldview is typically premised on tribal condescension and Designated Victim Groups. And if you think of people chiefly in terms of whatever group they might be said to belong to, and how righteously brown they are, the effects are often unbecoming.
As we’ve seen.
Being 25, my daughter is about to start a Twitter parody account shrieking at appropriatists who have, through some willful racism, constructed successfully unappropriatable unappropriations. Among the first to fall shall be the Amish, LOTR, and Medieval Fairs.
There will be others and they will be rife.
Should every visit to, say, a Pakistani restaurant entail a stern lecture on the pros and cons of European colonialism and a lifetime subscription to the fever dream of Islam? Would that aid digestion?
If customers started thinking about Islam it would put half the curry houses in the country out of business.
@jones,
You beat me to it. I’ve noticed no one ever complains about culturally appropriating polio vaccine.
…digital media activism…
I believe that means she sits around her tiny overpriced NYC warren typing out tweets and other screeds read (and noddingly approved) almost exclusivly by her tribe as opposed actually to getting out and doing something.
Usually, we’re talking about Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Ethiopian, and Mexican food – places where food is cooked by the “brownest” people.
Well, that’s a relief. My family had take-out Sushi last night, prepared by a sushi chef who immigrated with his wife from Hokkaido. He’s quite pasty complexion-wise, so we’re off the problematic hook it appears. Oh, and BTW, he has a little daughter. Her name is “Angela.”
Actually, there are quite a few German restaurants in the US, though I could see where they might not go over so well in the UK. And the mid-to-up-scale Mexican restaurants here serve much more than tacos and burritos. One family Mexican restaurant I used to frequent in a small Florida town had a rediculously large menu selection.
So as she is a scholar and educator based in New York City I’m guessing she’s more than likely “culturally appropriating” our tax dollars? Yes, I could be wrong, but I’d say that’s the real crime here.
If customers started thinking about Islam it would put half the curry houses in the country out of business.
Real effects: If the clowns with all the world’s brown people tucked safely under their wing could elaborate just how their various irrational constructs would benefit said brown individuals, then at least we’d have some odd, passive rationale, a rationale these kooks could ask whitey to consider on the purported benefits.
Instead, whitey is a de facto criminal per a preemptive, exclusionary, devious, spiteful, and completely manufactured ideology that has never and can never bear direct, contemporaneous fruit as the result of its jumped-up bleating. I mean, it can’t, so thick is the contradiction.
I refuse to play along by reacting with a disclaimer that I’ve never been racist, but I’ve never been racist. I’ve always found other everythings immensely interesting and ingratiating. Don’t Brits, for example, adore Indian and mideastern culture? Didn’t American culture once thrive on painting other cultures as wonderful and fascinating, no matter the inevitable western commercialization and cheapening thereof (none of which was evil or even diminutive)?
So what’s the point? What benefit shall these SJW misfits serve to the world’s many peoples? I’d like to know. Because it’s not even remotely evident, and where I come from, works take no back seat to faith, and never to projecting, blame-casting, and sheer pharisaical paradox.
So that Japanese restaurant I went to with my parents for my birthday, we were oppressing the entertaining Hibachi chef? Shall I rend my garments in grief or something?
If customers started thinking about Islam it would put half the curry houses in the country out of business.
Ah, but we’re only expected to fret about the “marginalisation and oppression” of whichever Designated Victim Group is notionally preparing the food. While dining, we must “address the ongoing Islamophobia in the US.” That kind of thing. The centuries of Islamic imperialism and modern-day jihad savagery, Chinese and Japanese racism, etc – these things are to be studiously ignored. How else can we imagine that the people cooking dinner are part of the Great Brown Mass of Grievance™?
The North Americans Indians should give us back our wheel.
Answer me this: What is the point of multi-multiculturalism if we’re forbidden to enjoy the foreign?
Pretentiously agonised pseudo-sensitivity is, alas, not billable.
It is in the clown quarter of academia.
I want to slap Ms Kuo upside the head until my hand bleeds. She is the main problem with America and the West to day. It is her ilk that is handing our culture over the wogs of history.
As a self-identifying oppressor, I am grateful to MS. Kuo for having shown me so many new avenues of self-fulfillment.
For lunch today, I’m going to eat Mexican.
It is in the clown quarter of academia.
Heh, yes. And behold the mental feats of those so billed. But it’s such an odd set of assumptions, all aired as if self-evident. For instance, the claim that when visiting the local Thai restaurant or enjoying their excellent takeaway, I’m somehow the agent of “a dominant culture” and am casually “reducing another community to it’s [sic] cuisine.”
Or not, which is apparently just as bad.
We have White Supremacy, Professor, because for 2500 years we, whites, have produced the best minds on the planet, the greatest flourishing of the arts and sciences ever seen, the most complex and organized societies. We have White Supremacy, whatever exactly it may be, because we have been the earth’s most successful race. No other has come close. Deal with it.
We put probes on Mars and invented the thousands of technologies needed to do it. We developed the symphony orchestra, the highest form of musical expression. We invented the airplane, the computer, the internet, and tennis shoes. Putting it compactly, we invented the modern world. A degree of privilege, however you may conceive it, goes with the territory.
Do not sell our wonderful white man’s culture short … we have been and still are the leading culture on the planet.
Read the rest here …
http://hellobirdy.blogspot.ca/2015/06/are-white-men-gods-ii-getting-facts.html
It’s worth the read and you may feel a bit prouder to be who you are.
Man, she sounds like a fun date. I’ll bet life for her is the social whirl unending.
PS: I think I’ll start calling myself an “intersectional Logician”, just for fun.
Ancient Egyptian (of dusky hue) No. 1: Where did it go?
Ancient Egyptian No. 2: Where did what go?
Ancient Egyptian No. 1: The — thingie.
Ancient Egyptian No. 2: What ‘thingie’?
Ancient Egyptian No. 1: The ‘ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference’ thingie!
Ancient Egyptian No. 2: Oh, yeah! The, uh — What did we call that?
Ancient Egyptian No. 1: I can’t remember either. (Thinks) It was those Greeks!
Ancient Egyptian No. 2: The ones that were in here last week?
Ancient Egyptian No. 1: The very ones! They stole it from us!
The North Americans Indians should give us back our wheel.
And horses.
I live in California and would like to know just how racist it is when I am happy to find a restaurant that sells “authentic” Chicago-style pizza.
I find these articles, and the mentality behind them, hilarious. I am a German, raised in Japan, living in the US, and working in Asia and Africa. My mom very much learned how to cook while we were living in Japan. Japanese food is comfort food for me. I was taught to not be easily offended. But here is what happens to me, and it happens a lot. We go to some authentic Thai, Vietnamese, or Japanese restaurant. I order something that is a personal favorite of mine. The waitperson frowns, makes me repeat the order, then fetches the manager. The manager tries to get me to order something else, because “white people don’t like that dish!” I then have to go over my whole background to convince them to provide me with something that is on the menu. Then, when it is served, the whole staff comes out to see if I actually eat the dish. This happens in Japan all the time. it happens in Thailand. It happens in Houston. It happens when I order while speaking Japanese or Thai. And in those places, I deal with it with a sense of humor and good manners.
Then I have run-ins with the appropriation people. This only happens here. Most of the time, they are telling me about respecting a culture that they are not even part of. It does not happen very often, but when it does, it is surreal. I do, in fact, know what the Japanese words on my shirt mean. I also know that the girl lecturing me about Japanese culture is from the Philippines. ( Often, I wear shirts with archaic anti-western slogans from the Perry era. Only elderly Japanese ever get the joke).
And your precious traditional cuisine practically defines globalism. Imagine Thai food without American Peppers. Almost every vegetable or animal food source that is part of anyone’s traditional diet originated somewhere else. Potatoes, rice, corn, beef, and chicken were all once specific regional specialties. Some items, like Chocolate and Tobacco, were used for primarily religious purposes. There is no such thing as appropriation. Whatever practice you think someone is appropriating probably did not originate where you think it did. So stop whining.
In other news, arch-leftie Benedict Cumberbatch has come under fire for playing a trans character in Zoolander 2, with activists calling on the film to be boycotted. Apparently;
“By hiring a cis actor to play a non-binary individual in a clearly negative way, they film endorses harmful and dangerous perceptions of the queer community at large.”
Obviously they didn’t get the memo about the film series being a deliberately over-the-top, exaggerated send-up of the fashion world and its pretensions and foibles.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/12010388/calls-for-zoolander-boycott-benedict-cumberbatch-character-branded-transphobic.html
Incidentally, apologies for the off-topic comment derailment, I didn’t know where else to post it.
Incidentally, apologies for the off-topic comment derailment, I didn’t know where else to post it.
Oh, you won’t derail this crowd. They’re tenacious. And fragrant.
“I’ve noticed no one ever complains about culturally appropriating polio vaccine.”
How about we allow her to have her polio vaccine, but ONLY with the requirement that every time she uses a product of Western civilization she must spend 15 minutes contemplating the wonderfulness of Western civilization and all those dead white males who created or invented what she uses every day.
Eating food from another culture in isolation from that culture’s history and also current issues mean [sic] that we’re just borrowing the pieces that are enjoyable – palatable and easily digestible.
Just, she says.
Why do these ‘racial justice’ activists always sound like racists?
It’s been my experience that when you encounter someone who’s, as it were, professionally ethnic and ostentatiously fixated with grievance and ethnicity, it’s best to give them a wide berth. Little good can come of being exposed to their personality. Though as a warning to others of how people can be rendered dull and obnoxious by an expensive education, I suppose they may have value.
I also know that the girl lecturing me about Japanese culture is from the Philippines.
By hiring a cis actor to play a non-binary individual
Then there’s the Korean playwright who wrote a play about the Jewish Messiah set in India, who burst out in angry tears and demanded the cancellation of the performance because WHITE student actors were cast.
Have we reached peak absurdity yet?
Her interests include “digital media activism.”
It means she knows how to turn a computer on and not only find Huffington Post but also the comments section.
Wow, just wow…
Have we reached peak absurdity yet?
The absurdity must never end. Trivial and prosaic things must be deemed “problematic” in order to ensure that resentful mediocrities can imagine themselves as superior when scolding the rest of us.
For instance.
So I’m guessing that in her eyes, Jeffery Dahmer was also guilty of cultural appropriation?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#Cannibalism
Potatoes, rice, corn, beef, and chicken were all once specific regional specialties
Potatoes could be ethnic now?
As in Mexican and not Irish?
Cultural appropriation, you say?
*worried face*
I hate intersectional feminists, especially at four way stops, they never know how to do it right. They either go before their turn or they insist on letting someone else go out of turn ahead of them. It is so irritating.
where food is cooked by the “brownest” people … Japan reduced to ramen and sushi
One of my sisters- in-law moved to Japan and married a Japanese man. Neither he nor his family are particularly brown- certainly less brown than many southern Europeans.
This helpless victim hierarchy is quite complex.
My wife, who has spent time with her sister in Japan, reports that the Japanese appear quite xenophobic and racist towards non-Japanese generally- very matter of factly-so. They do not have a cultural or racial inferiority complex.
Ungrateful shower.
‘”Yoga class cancelled due to “cultural appropriation.”
Please update your files accordingly’.
Oh my.
I’d love to see them try that with a martial arts class.
SJW: You can’t teach Kung Fu here! That is racist! You must change your course to teach Defendu or Bartitsu or else!
Sifu: Or else what?
SJW: We will stop you … er … umm … Where have all my friends gone? … I will stop you …
when visiting the local Thai restaurant or enjoying their excellent takeaway, I’m somehow the agent of “a dominant culture” and am casually “reducing another community to it’s [sic] cuisine.”
Upthread I asked to what benefit all this crap aspired. Apparently we can rule out simple enrichment. While apparently brown restaurateurs still don’t know it, they really want the public’s arbitrary, fawning, racialist doting – whatever that may be – whenever a menu enumerated in pounds or dollars is printed. With which to vend edible capitalist misappropriationalism.
Knowing now how to plead and not wanting to tread on such virtue, I expect my next tasty take out free.
SJWs. The Enlightened.
The Irish are responsible for two massive cultural misappropriation attempts:
1) Slavery in the Americas
2) Potatoes
From 1625 to 1839 Irish men, women and children were misappropriating slave status in the Americas with the conniving of the British, displacing the true victimhood status of African-continent sourced slaves. These Irish slaves, often masquerading as ‘indentured servants’, even had the temerity to allow themselves to be sold cheaper than the African slaves in the 17th century, thus depriving the true slaves of their rightful place in history. Fortunately today we been able to rectify this, and so Americans now only recognize African-sourced slaves as the true historical slaves of the Americas.
The Irish misappropriation of potatoes, stolen from the natives of South Amerca, found its just deserts in the Irish potato famine of 1845. Although no supporting records have been found, it is likely that social justice warriors following in the footstep of Rachael Kuo deliberately set loose the potato blight to ‘take back’ the potato on behalf of the natives of the Andes.
As you can plainly see, the attempts of the Irish to culturally misappropriate both slavery and potatoes led to disaster, and this failure is no doubt applauded by all right-minded Social Justice Warriors.
While you are giggling, something terrible is going on. A class is targeted for elimination. THEY WANT THESE RESTAURANTS TO CLOSE. The point is to squelch entrepreneurs and nuclear families. Ethnic restaurants are small businesses. As are nail salons. They don’t need the state to take care of them. They are outside The System of Universal Dependence and Control. And, there must be no people who are so firmly married with children. Loyal, non-rebellious children, who help in their parents’ business, instead of hating their parents, like the good, proper, moderns on the campuses.
The people-labeling is so reminiscent of slave auctions of the past. This slave is tall! This one is strong! Pay more for this slave! Out come the tape measures and everybody is minutely described. You are brown! You are this! You are that!Slave auction language. Once you let someone describe you, you are that person’s slave. And, you get a funny symbol sewed to your coat. Watch out.
Social Justice Warriors now in inner turmoil: should they reject their previous cultural misappropriation and return the coffee bean to its rightful originators: the Ethiopians. Or is that the Yemenis who are first recorded as preparing coffee as a drink? Regardless, Americans must forgo any drink based on this culturally misappropriated seed, and also would not even be allowed a chicory substitute as chicory belongs to the Mediterranean Europeans.
What a dilemma! Has Starbucks committed the unforgivable sin and based its entire business on a stolen cultural item and so must be driven out of business?
How to simulate menstruation. http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2015/but-how-do-you-simulate-cramps/#comments
Be disrespectful. Very disrespectful.
Or is ordering takeout only acceptable following lengthy, brow-furrowing investment in each and every vendor’s ancestral culture and current politics?
Before you buy takeout you have to pass a cultural sensitivity test. Business will boom!
so Americans now only recognize African-sourced slaves as the true historical slaves of the Americas
I gotta admit, I sometimes enjoy annoying these ‘more-culturally-sensitive-than-thou’ self-anointers on the ‘net
SJW: African-Americans today still are oppressed by the racist, living legacy of slavery!
Me: Really? So slavery is responsible for bad grades? high school drop-outs? single motherhood?
SJW: Yeah, easily said by someone who has reaped the benefits of slavery because of White Privilege.
Me: My family was brought here in 1697 against their will as slaves. They were sold to work a plantation in Virginia.
SJW: …
Me: If I screwed up a test in school, it never crossed my mind to blame the family that owned mine.
SJW: Funny, you don’t look black … LIAR
Me: You think the only slaves in the New World came out of Africa?
SJW: ….
SJW: ….
SJW: [blocking you]
I prefer to think of them as “People Of Stupor” or POS for short
In other news:
Yoga class cancelled due to “cultural appropriation.”
A friend of mine just got back from her, presumably, quite familiar and ongoing yoga class.
My friend is extremely, or as she puts it, stereotypically, Russian.
Ms Kuo says,
I’ve yet to meet anyone who believed that tasting falafel or sag aloo gave them great insight onto Middle Eastern culture or life in the Indian subcontinent. It’s laughable, the stuff of comedy sketches. In fact, this was the premise of a gag in a short-lived sitcom called The War at Home, in which the gay son of a Middle Eastern family recoils from some ‘authentic’ home cooking and explains to his Jewish friend, “I think this is why my people are always so angry.”
I forgot to sign my comment properly with my full title — President #Obama Mc Faily-worsethanfkncarter — humble apologies to all concerned.
. . . . for playing a trans character in Zoolander 2
That is indeed a definite problem. There is to be a Zoolander Two??!?!
—Of course, as far as I know the original is fine, I should get around to seeing it, where one one hand there was La Chèvre , Les Compères, and Les Fugitifs, all without a single Roman numeral in the lot, and then on the other hand there was La Cage aux Folles, La Cage aux Folles II , and La Cage aux Folles 3: The Wedding . . . .
. . . and for stuff in English, there is the entire James Bond series of movies, The Three / Four Musketeers followed by The Return Of The Musketeers . . . .
I’m British. I live in Costa Rica. A couple of weeks ago, I had a friend round, and we had one of her favourite dishes: falafels (to which I introduced her). I made them myself, from scratch. From whom and on whose behalf did I ‘appropriate’ this typically Eastern Mediterranean food? What about the time we had Lamb Rogan Josh (also made by me, and generally unknown in Mesoamerican cuisine)? When I eat gallo pinto or patacones, am I being culturally hegemonic or just eating what everyone else eats here (when they’re not stuffing their faces with burgers or southern fried chicken or pizza or sushi)?
I’ve said it before: the very essence of ‘culture’, the thing that stops us from having to invent everything ab novo every twenty years or so, is seeing what other people do and copying them.
It’s all so repulsively stupid.
I had my wife read this article, and the source material. Her immediate response was to ask why Ms. Kuo wants to put all the little immigrant-run restaurants out of business. And she is right. This country is full of tiny little places where little old ladies from places like Thailand and Burma are able to support their families by providing wonderful food to a small number of people who really appreciate it. I have enjoyed a bunch of meals at such places. We are regulars at some places like that, and have been customers long enough to know their extended families, and for them to know ours.
And it pisses me off a little that Ms. Kuo is offended that people would expect her to know where to get “authentic” or high quality ethnic food. She may be offended, but I bet she could absolutely tell you which are the best Korean restaurants in her area. But the thing is, anyone who cares about food can usually offer such advice, and it can be a big deal to them. I am no hipster foodie, but I come from a family that takes good food very seriously. I can absolutely tell you my favorite place to get BBQ in West Texas or South Alabama, or recommend a place to get a great meal in Madrid, Tokyo, Singapore, Santa Fe, Lome, JBurg, and many other places. And yes, I can recommend a good soul food restaurant. It is not my goal in life to try to eat at every McDonalds in Asia and Europe.
Toadboy,
You said “The waitperson frowns, makes me repeat the order, then fetches the manager”
I don’t mean to sound like a lacist bigot but how do you know it was a different person?
The Mouthing of Bollocks
I see what you did there.
dw,
Please can I have the link to that vid? Do share.
And for the rest of this crowd….
Ta
A
PS I only want to see for research purposes.
Having travelled extremely extensively through a lot of the world I have noted foreigners are quite keen on steak, burgers, fish and chips, Irish pubs and just about any other Western food, not to mention the fact that Asia has some of the best musicians and dancers in the Western classical tradition. In fact Japan would have to be the most culturally appropriative country in the world, and not only that but their ‘ethnic’ restaurants tend to be better than the original versions in Italy or France.
And re the Twitter account, I have one, which I programmed in Python to spew out random feminist and other right-on phrases from a database – other intersectional feminists have favourited my tweets, and right-wingers attack me completely unaware of the fact that I am a bot. There was one futurist who liked the phrase “radicalism is the essence of futurism”.
The Catch-22 of the Progressives: you must import immigrants who will provide diversity to the host country in culinary offerings. These authentic culinary offerings you will be unable to sample in your host country, because to do so is to encourage an ossification of immigrant culinary food culture, but will also create a demand that is preventing the poor in the source country being able to afford this food[*]. Therefore, you must import people who cannot provide the goods and services that you say they need to be imported for.
A cynic would be saying that the idea is that these immigrants must live off welfare and cook only for their own racial or cultural groups instead of setting up small businesses and engaging in harmful ‘Capitalism’ that sabotages the ‘Progressive’ ideology.
[*] All part of the arguments Rachel Kuo makes in her article.
From a comment on Dom’s link:
Had my wife read this and tell me what it means. After the third re-read, she realized what was going on. She then got mad at me for reading my stupid blogs and all that crazy stuff that’s way out there. I blame Dom for this.
Yep, WTP, that one made me pause a bit, but further on in the thread is this from Dad
uh huh
WTP and Darleen, the part I liked was — when making the simulated menstrual blood — she used only ingredients that were edible, in case a trans-woman wants to stick it in her vagina!
Up until that point I didn’t know what else it was good for.
I mean, do you just dump it in a plastic bag and tell everyone, “Look. I’m bleeding. Just like a real chick.”
Shhh…I opened a bottle of red, grilled us two two-and-a-half inch steaks, and S’mores for dessert (hopefully cultural appropriation from the Girl Scouts is still OK) and she’s forgotten all about it. Shhhhhhh.
“Her immediate response was to ask why Ms. Kuo wants to put all the little immigrant-run restaurants out of business.”
1. Ms Kuo does not care about the people who work at those immigrant-run restaurants.
2. Ms Kuo has chosen a career built on destroying other peoples’ lives.
Ah, progressives. Aren’t they such wonderful people? /sarcasm
A reminder: the site in question is eschewing the phrase “trigger warning” because “the word ‘trigger’ relies on and evokes violent weaponry imagery. This could be re-traumatizing for folks who have suffered military, police, and other forms of violence.”
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/guide-to-triggering/
And apparently they’ve never heard of the “euphemism treadmill”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Evolution
Easy to remember rubric for fretting Westerners: If you like their stuff, it’s “cultural appropriation” and therefore bad; if they like our stuff, it’s “cultural imperialism” and therefore bad.
See, it’s easy!
Oh, you won’t derail this crowd. They’re tenacious. And fragrant.
Especially after I’ve appropriated chorizo and eggs for breakfast. o_O
Oh…
The SJWs want us to feel guilty for things that are innocent, like enjoying food from another culture. If they can make you feel unearned guilt, then they have power over you. And power is what the “social justice” nonsense is about, ultimately. Two excellent responses are rational argument and ridicule, which (as we can see above) often can be done at the same time.
When we talk about “ethnic” food, we’re not referring to French, German, or Italian cuisine, and definitely not those Ikea Swedish meatballs.
Not at my grocery store we’re not.
Marmite? LMAO!
R. Sherman: Close, but you forgot that if you don’t like their stuff, you’re ethno-centric and/or racist.
From the trigger trigger warning:
So they don’t use the word trigger in the phrase trigger warning but they use it IN the warning
Ethnic restaurants adjust their recipes to suit local tastes. So when you go for an Indian, you are not, as you previously thought, culturally appropriating Indian cuisine but in fact imperiously imposing you own culture by making the chef cook chicken tikka the way you like it, not the way he likes it.
“Hello. Can I take your order, please?”
“I want you to know that, being progressive and enlightened, I don’t think of your food as abnormal or weird.”
“Er… okay… Can I take your order?”
“And I won’t be eating what I’m about to order in isolation from your culture’s history and current issues.”
“Right. That’s nice. And your order is…?”
“And I in no way regard the meal I’m about to order as a comprehensive representation of your culture…”
“Yes, about that order…”
“And I want you to know that I’ve been thinking deeply about labour equity and immigration policy.”
“Look, lady. There’s a queue…”
You may be about to feature this by Zoe Williams:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/23/socialism-innovation-ipad-john-mcdonnell?CMP=twt_gu
It contains a classic quote: “human progress is about more than the iPad”
Who knew?
It contains a classic quote: “human progress is about more than the iPad.” Who knew?
Apparently, market economies, their innovations and wealth creation are merely “base and unenlightening.” As opposed to Zoe’s lofty mental horizons, being as she is our Philosopher Queen.
Her interests include “racial justice, intersectional feminism and digital media activism.”
Translation: I wasted $200,000 of my parents’ money on a joke degree and now I channel my anger on Twitter.
“the word ‘trigger’ relies on and evokes violent weaponry imagery. This could be re-traumatizing for folks who have suffered military, police, and other forms of violence.”
Aside from police and military, what other forms of violence could there possibly be? Surely they’re not referring to brown people and others throwing off the yoke of their oppression by liberating stuff and stuff. Social justice is not violence.
Every time I see shit like this I get the urge to black up and dress as one of The Black & White Minstrels.
“Hello. Can I take your order, please?”
I want you know before I place my sushi order, I’ve rewatched the entire Shōgun miniseries from the ’70s. That Toranaga dude was bad-ass.
I’m rather tickled by the idea that before eating anything more exotic than a sandwich, you first have to establish your ‘progressive’ credentials, publicly and at length.
Oh, the fun they must have.
‘Every time I see shit like this I get the urge to black up and dress as one of The Black & White Minstrels’.
The latest is the call for a boycott of ‘Zoolander II’, because Benedict Cumberbatch is playing a tranny.
If stupidity were a lethal pandemic it would be worse than the Spanish Flu right now.
So that Japanese restaurant I went to with my parents for my birthday, we were oppressing the entertaining Hibachi chef? Shall I rend my garments in grief or something?
It’s actually acceptable to culturally appropriate Japanese culture, because cultural appropriation is a part of Japanese culture, and when in Tokyo…
Seriously, how else would one explain the following:
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/articles/curse-colonel-japans-obsession-kfc
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-japan-is-obsessed-with-kentucky-fried-chicken-on-christmas-1-161666960/?no-ist
I’d love to get one of these Social Justice types to sit down and work through exactly who is appropriating who in these cases.
@Civilis
A couple of Summers ago, my daughter spent several weeks in Taiwan with a local family which included a business executive and a physics professor. Their “go-to” place was 7-11. My daughter first thought they were merely trying to accommodate her Western tastes.
Wrong.
The Taiwanese love 7-11 for takeout American food.
I used to work for a small college on the Canadian Prairies that had a lot of aboriginal/First Nations/Metis/Indian/whatever students taking upgrading classes. One of the committees was an Non-status/Metis Committee to address issues that these students might have – good idea overall. The interesting thing is that in the world of identity politics, Metis is a vague term and generally ends up applying to anyone who identifies as Metis(Metis used to refer to descendants of French fur traders and native women). So the chair of this committee was a blond, nordic woman who would likely burn in the sun quicker than I (I’m Scot-Irish redhead).
Sackcloth and Ashes, is that for real? There’s a Zoolander II? Now I really am offended!
As a Lebanese guy, I give you license to “appropriate” all of the damned culture you want if you buy enough of the tabouli and kibbeh…
This stance these ad self-abusers muggung fot attention take is ridiculous. THERE ARE REAL THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT IN THE WORLD, NOT THIS CRAP.
Besides, what “xhe” may not get is that by sampling the scents and flavors not native to their culture, they do more to learn about it and honor it than to “appropriate” it.
Do these same idiots take back their averring that non-european immigration add “texture and depth” to western societies?
Not likely – because their penchance is to hate the society that made them, and their self-regard is based entirely on the extent to which they can tell happy, normal people (whom they hate,) how to live.
Obviously she doesn’t want white people to eat nasty foreign food. Only dirty foreigners eat foreign food.
(It would be a great joy to phrase it to her thus in person in order to watch the reaction.)
What they want is custom. Pretentiously agonised pseudo-sensitivity is, alas, not billable.
Something tells me Ms Kuo has never run a food business or any business (and most likely never will).
Eating food from another culture in isolation from that culture’s history and also current issues mean [sic] that we’re just borrowing the pieces that are enjoyable – palatable and easily digestible.
Millions of people will pay for good food and feeling welcome.
“Complex colonial stories” about “labour equity and immigration policy”… Not so much.
The thing I find most dispiriting about this is that Ms. Kuo is a Taiwanese-American. I used to think of them as competent. Honorary Westerners, if you will.
My world crumbles.
You bastards will have to peel my coffee cup from my cold, dead hands.
Regarding Ms.Kuo’s experience in the food industry…assuming I have the correct Rachel Kuo, behold her experience working the Weinermobile and other interesting or not so interesting stuff on her LinkedIn page:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelkuo
You will probably not be surprised to find out she’s a Mizzou grad.
Disappointed to find out that the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile doesn’t have higher standards. 🙁