Boutique Suffering
In the comments, Pst314 and Dicentra steer us to new realms of niche woe:
In which, Ms Taylor Lorenz, an “online culture journalist,” struggles with causality. Including the seemingly difficult concept that a heavy reliance on delivered takeaway, and the mindset that implies, may have some bearing on how little cash one has left at the end of the month. And so, via some contortion, we arrive at the conceit that preparing a simple meal, even a packed lunch, is a physical impossibility for those deemed downtrodden.
Readers may note that, during the exchange, the more excuses that Ms Lorenz conjures into being, the more she pretends to care, the less she sounds like an actual person so much as a weird programme that’s been left running.
Despite Ms Lorenz’s pretence of cosmopolitan expertise, there’s no sense at any point in the exchange that the topic has actually been thought about, autonomously, poked at from various angles. Her mouthings merely suggest someone who’s memorised some pre-approved excuses for suboptimal behaviour. I don’t believe that any actual thinking has taken place.
Instead, there’s a sense that Ms Lorenz has merely recalled the mouth sounds that will denote some fashionable stance, an approved position, one selected well in advance of any mental activity.
Should any occur.
Update, via the comments:
Chow Bag adds,
When not dining out, that is.
At risk of sounding insufficiently sensitive, I’d suggest that if your life is so disorganised that you use delivered-to-the-door takeaway services for the bulk of your meals, week after week, in ways you cannot afford, then the problem, the actual problem, is your being so disorganised.
Readers will note how Ms Lorenz has to add implausible and contradictory complications to bolster her assertion.
And so, not only are these weirdly incompetent young people all working double shifts, every day, every week, but they’re also elderly and disabled and unable to operate a hob or reach for kitchen utensils. And they’re so pressed for time, so downtrodden, that they can afford to spend half of their food budget on dining out in restaurants.
As one does.
I doubt it’s ever occurred to Ms Lorenz that, by excusing foolish, unaffordable behaviour and the habitual displacement of responsibility, by encouraging the cultivation of victimhood, she’s making poverty more likely, and more likely to persist.
Her supposedly compassionate philosophy, such as it is, seems to be, “Carry on doing that really stupid thing. Just remember to blame other people for your own bewildering choices.”
Ms Lorenz has subsequently restricted who may reply to her assertions.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
It’s amazing what I managed to learn with nothing more high tech than paper books and chalk boards: differential equations, chemistry, geology and paleontology, electromagnetic theory, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity.
But shouldn’t that be blacks and liberals and teachers union cronies?
“Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without.”
Yes indeed. I remember Mom’s bacon grease canister. Likewise eating the heels–peanut butter made them tastier.
I can afford various luxuries now, but still have a “do I really need that?” attitude, and tend to hang on to stuff because it still has some wear left in it or it might come in useful some day. Some of my Goodwill donations could have been made 20 years ago except that I hung on to them “just in case”, LOL.
[ Checks tomorrow’s Ephemera for mortifying typos, clicks schedule. ]
Raises eyebrows.
[thinks about the linen closet shelf where old t-shirts, repurposed to cleaning rags, sit]
Like crumpets, baked potatoes are a pretext for ingesting vast quantities of butter.
As all God-fearing people should.
Cargo cult.
Or post hoc ergo propter hoc if you want to be fancy.
Home-made or delivery app?
[ Indignantly shakes large potato at screen. ]
A few weeks ago, I heard the phrase “luxury poverty” for the first time. I thought the person was joking, but it apparently is actually real.
It’s apparently a mindset that says you’ll never be able to generate or attain actual wealth, so you may as well spend what little you do have on luxury items to appear wealthy. Rather than spend $2000 on a payment for a used car, buy a designer handbag, and then complain about not being able to afford a car.
Boutique suffering appears to be luxury poverty for the narcissist class.
Decades ago I hired a 40 yr old guy to write code at my work. He admitted that he “could not cook” and ate out every meal, while unemployed and living with his parents who in fact were paying for the meals and using their savings. I had to fire him for being unable to code anything whatsoever.
This conceit that you don’t have time to cook is hilarious. In college I had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, took sandwiches and fruit to school for lunch, and threw some chicken with BBQ sauce in oven for dinner. How hard is that? But if you are spoiled and need nice food all the time, well, then time can be limiting. The inability to budget and make tradeoffs is a sign of immaturity.
THAT.
You’ve just defined modern liberalism at its core.
Cargo cult as aelf said. See also lowering lending criteria so deadbeats could buy a house and become “middle class” because the middle class own homes. Causation, how does it work? And we saw in 2008 how that worked out.
My mother collected our older bits of bread in big tin. The kids would then compete to see who got to grind them to crumbs for later use.
I still have that (hand crank) grinder. Its probably 80 years old.
I have equally old stuff from Mom’s kitchen: cooking utensils, pressure cooker, iron fry pans. Still in excellent shape.
Starship’s Twelfth Flight Test
Re: Starship’s Twelfth Flight Test
Scrubbed ’til tomorrow.
Aye…we wodda been ‘appy ta have us a tin. Or old bits o’ bread. We had ta meek doo wit old wrigley’s gum wrappers taped together. And crumbs? We used ta raid the ant nests ootside our neighbor’s hooses and pry the bits of bread from the jaws of the ants who were steelin’ from them.
Ah, poverty.
Four Yorkshiremen- Monty Python
I’m afraid I’m a frequent user of DoorDash, for the reasons stated at the link and downthread.
However, I’ve been working full time at a decent-paying job for 2.5 decades, and my financial advisor has done good things with my savings et al., so I can afford it.
Also, when I opened X dot com today I found I was logged out because they “detected unusual activity” with my account, and many of the responses to the above post were oddly hostile. Did someone decide to mess with my account because of THAT?
She’s Taylor Lorenz, former columnist at WaPo and NYT. She comes from wealth and is most definitely Cluster B. That linked wiki article has a heading called “As a target of harassment” but it doesn’t mention that she has directed far worse harassment at others, including doxing. She outed Libs of TikTok back in the day. Her weeping about harassment is pure DARVO.
So this cluelessness about how teh poors live is very on-brand for her and explains why Bridget goes after her without mercy.
If they actually were to pull their lives together, they wouldn’t need HER to be their pious champion.
The intended inference being that Ms Lorenz somehow became a despised figure for no reason whatsoever, or just because she’s a woman. Not because of her own obnoxious behaviour, repeated many times.
A few years ago, Ms Lorenz lied on then-Twitter, quite gleefully, about the tech investor Marc Andreessen, claiming that he’d “openly” used what she deems scandalous language during an online event. The object of this deception was presumably to inflict reputational damage while claiming a scalp.
Several participants at the event, including the event’s moderator, pointed out that her claims were entirely and utterly false. Under pressure, Ms Lorenz eventually deleted said Tweet, but so far as I can see, never admitted error and never apologised. At the time, Ms Lorenz was working for the New York Times.
Like so many champions of fashionable piety, she’s a nasty piece of work.
She still wears a covid mask, ffs. Pretty sure she was fairly recently making a stink about it and harassing people, which outside of the bluest of the blue would be everyone, about not wearing them. But she’s a “target of harassment”. What BS. Insane that anyone who takes her seriously is taken seriously by anyone. The woman is an attention seeking nutcase.
True of most NGO’s.
I was hoping that readers here would follow that link.
Note that Wikipedia fails to mention the reprehensible things she’s done. . . Which illustrates why Wikipedia is just as deserving of enmity as she is.
Perpetrating libel and slander are job requirements at the New York Times. Obviously.
Do you have your account set up with two-factor verification?
NGO’s?
Most NGO’s exist not to solve problems but to provide well-paying jobs to shit people. The last thing they want to do is actually solve problems and end the gravy train.
Possibly relevant news story:
Starship soft landing done.