Search






Jeff's Amazon.com Wish List

Archive Calendar

November 2024
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  

Archives

Amanda Marcotte on the unbearable unfairness of ideals [Darleen Click]

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. ~~ from Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

St Mandy of the Order of Perpetually Offended Womyns’ article about the inherent unfairness (and sexism!) of home-cooked meals hit a nerve that boils down to “are you kidding?”

However, while the responses of Meghan McArdle and Mollie Hemmingway offer well-reasoned rebuttals, they both concentrate, as it were, on plot while missing Marcotte’s theme.

Marcotte starts by following the usual “Progressive” m.o. – uncritically cite a sociological study as proof that some strawman assertion

In recent years, the home-cooked meal has increasingly been offered up as the solution to our country’s burgeoning nutrition-related health problems of heart disease and diabetes.

..is, of course, bad for the Womyns.

the stress that cooking puts on people, particularly women, may not be worth the trade-off.

Now, let’s not get distracted by how Mandy, herself, spent a great deal of time blogging about her own adventures in cooking, but observe the real motivation in her Down with Kitchens blathering.

It’s expensive and time-consuming and often done for a bunch of ingrates who would rather just be eating fast food anyway. If we want women—or gosh, men, too—to see cooking as fun, then these obstacles need to be fixed first. And whatever burden is left needs to be shared.

The Left looks at any particular human behavior through the lens of Race, Culture, Gender and if something is unequal then it is up to [The State] to do Something™.

So let’s move this conversation out of the kitchen, and brainstorm more creative solutions for sharing the work of feeding families. How about a revival of monthly town suppers, or healthy food trucks? Or perhaps we should rethink how we do meals in schools and workplaces, making lunch an opportunity for savoring and sharing food. Could schools offer to-go meals that families could easily heat up on busy weeknights? Without creative solutions like these, suggesting that we return to the kitchen en masse will do little more than increase the burden so many women already bear.

For the fairness.

It isn’t about people getting together to share strategies like what McArdle and Hemmingway are doing by citing their own personal experience.

If person A is unable to access the ideal, even by circumstance or choice, [the ideal home-cooked meal via a motel room microwave], then [home-cooked meals] are articles of privilege to be either provided by The State or shunned as a vestige of a by-gone culture best left upon the heap of history.

Marcotte, like all Leftists, argues against ideals. Every argument, diatribe, and piece of demagoguery put forth by the Left carries this kernel of dogma – if some people will never be able to achieve the ideal, than the ideal is wrong.

Whether it is turning the military from its mission of excellence into a sociological experiment in “equality” or the arguments about marriage “equality” or the pro-affirmative action arguments for college campuses and corporate boardrooms, standards, ideals, goals …

…indeed, even personal choice …

… are invalidated by unequal outcomes.

Mandy has done little more than spend years auditioning for the role of Diana Moon Glampers. Her screed about home cooking is just another reading.

41 Replies to “Amanda Marcotte on the unbearable unfairness of ideals [Darleen Click]”

  1. Drumwaster says:

    I’d be okay with Tammy Bruce keeping the job, but Saint Marcotte would claim that, as a conservative lesbian woman, she is disqualified.

  2. Mueller says:

    Betcha Ole Mandy is a real whore in the kitchen.

    My girls tell me I do a pretty good job making supper.
    As long as I have a grill and a crock pot I can cook anything.

  3. Drumwaster says:

    Betcha Ole Mandy is a real whore in the kitchen.

    Not to mention a chef in the parlor and a duchess in the bedroom.

  4. Ernst Schreiber says:

    [P]erhaps we should rethink how we do meals in schools and workplaces, making lunch an opportunity for savoring and sharing food. Could schools offer to-go meals that families could easily heat up on busy weeknights?

    That’s a great idea!

    If you want to turn people into cattle, you first have to teach them how to feed.

  5. Ernst Schreiber says:

    And I imagine Amanda Marcotte is about as useful in a kitchen as are tits on Amanda Marcotte.

  6. Ernst Schreiber says:

    You know what else is expensive, time-consuming and often done for a bunch of ingrates?

    Motherhood

    Though, I suspect Amanda already knows that.

  7. eCurmudgeon says:

    Fortunately, those Soylent wafers are pretty tasty…

  8. Blake says:

    St. Amanda of the Perpetually Aggrieved thinks feels ________________________ is of the patriarchy and therefore, it’s the debil’s work.

  9. Blake says:

    html fail.

  10. Blake says:

    St. Amanda of the Perpetually Aggrieved thinks feels ________________________ is of the patriarchy and therefore, it’s the debil’s work.

  11. leigh says:

    If you don’t like home-cooked meals, don’t have one Mandy.

  12. McGehee says:

    On second thought Amanda, don’t make me a sandwich. But see if you can bring me a beer without burning it or putting in too much salt.

  13. cranky-d says:

    She would manage to spill the whole beer before it got to you, and blame the patriarchy.

  14. happyfeet says:

    bitch don’t wanna cook

    bitch don’t gotta cook

  15. newrouter says:

    can the bitch in ? cook?

  16. McGehee says:

    Bitch don’t wanna cook, bitch don’t gotta cook eat.

    FTFY.

  17. sdferr says:

    bitch don’t wanna cock

    bitch don’t gotta cock

    Hey! What italic chef sliced those o sides off?

  18. happyfeet says:

    that’s borderline massageyness mister

  19. happyfeet says:

    mr. m i mean

  20. geoffb says:

    bitch don’t wanna cook

    bitch gets to do the dishes

    That was the rule when I grew up up not put as coarsely.

  21. geoffb says:

    “But’ not 2nd “up”.

  22. LBascom says:

    I’m thinking Mandy spends too much time gazing at her navel.

  23. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Well, the hand mirror was already down there anyways

    did I just say that?!?!

  24. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Since I’m on a Dalrymple kick:

    Out of misplaced delicacy, perhaps, certain factors that promote obesity in our societies are seldom emphasized or even mentioned because they refer to the lifestyle and choices of those who become fat. In the course of my work, I would often visit the homes of the kind of people most prone to obesity: those on long-term welfare, whose unhealthiness, consequent upon obesity, was a further impediment to any employment for which they might otherwise be suitable. In such homes, I rarely detected any sign of real cooking having taken place, despite the oceans of disposable time for it. The only tool in culinary use was the microwave: there was no table at which members of the household, often with an unstable membership (particularly of adult males), could have eaten together. Surveys have shown that a fifth of children in Britain do not eat with other members of their household more than once a week, a figure in keeping with my own observations; at this end of the social spectrum, it was probably much more than a fifth. It was obvious that children in this environment foraged for industrially prepared, fat- and fructose-rich food, found in the refrigerator whenever the mood took them, which was often, and which they ate distractedly, while sitting in front of the giant flat-screen television on the wall, which was never, in my experience, extinguished, except maybe in the dead of night. Eating, the most elementary of social activities, had become in these settings solitary, almost solipsistic, having lost all connection with anything except the appetite of the moment: and appetite grows by what it feeds on. All this, again, in circumstances in which no pressure of time could explain or excuse such behavior.

    But eating in Michelle Obama’s organic chow hall will make all that go away. Yeah, right.

  25. McGehee says:

    Soylent Green is organic! (Also high in fat, but…)

  26. As I said last night to my wife: Liberals ruin everything.

    (That comment was made during our evening stroll, as I gazed up at the moon and thought to myself, “We used to go there.”)

  27. Neo says:

    Put simply … Amanda can’t cook, she needs to blame somebody other than herself

    Amanda also needs a lesson in brevity .. so many words were force to give up their lives for this oversized tome.
    I guess the upside for Amanda is that it would take so long to write a suicide note that she would probably change her mind.

  28. geoffb says:

    Found at Insty,

    Home Cooking And The Left’s Resentment of Effort

  29. sdferr says:

    Perhaps someone else at Slate wrote the drop-down sub-headline which includes the word “tyranny”, for Marcotte does not use that word in the body of the text. Of whoever it was that did use that term then, we can say with certainty they have no genuine understanding of the meaning of tyranny, as tyranny is wholly out of place regarding meal preparation.

    As to the terms “ideal”, “idealization” and “idealism”, we may also wonder whether Marcotte possesses more than the merest grasp of a loose or jumbled association with these terms, as opposed to a thoroughgoing understanding of the origins of the terms, and of the origins of their contrasting competitors in speech, namely “real”, “realization” and “realism”? Our doubts on that score are plentifully justified, I think. Marcotte doesn’t seem to evince any of the signs of the serious curiosity of a learner, let alone a teacher who might justifiably offer help to others.

    Still, isn’t the oddly human interchange with necessity (i.e., eating and drinking), making art of it, finding joy in it, or even as with Marcotte, taking time to grumble about it one among the human beings’ greatest peculiarities, setting them apart when compared with the other animals with whom we share the earth?

  30. McGehee says:

    tyranny is wholly out of place regarding meal preparation.

    And yet, the school lunch program…

    Then again, that was tyrannical even before MichelleO got involved.

  31. sdferr says:

    In the way way olden days they used the term despotes, “despot”, “desoptism”, as a commonplace to describe the relations of final parental authority (as to ends or teloi decision-making) over children and slaves, and even, where it came to it, to the guidance or rule over wives, though the womankind had their own sort of despotism over the household: the “economia” [eco- — house — -nomia from “nomos” — rule, law, or custom]. None of this, of course, was considered to be any part of the business of the polis, to which tyranny would apply.

  32. McGehee says:

    When the polis sticks its nose in despotes and ekonomia — that’s tyranny.

  33. sdferr says:

    Yeah, to some extent to be sure, though we could have a tyranny without the ruler — as opposed to the polis which wouldn’t play any active role in the decision-making, since tyranny kinda by definition displaces that participation — ever meddling with, bothering or fussing with the household as such. So tyranny could be on the loose in the city without that step, though with the step there wouldn’t be any doubt about it I guess.

  34. serr8d says:

    I gaze with pity on any recent photo of Amanda Marcotte that I come across. As inwardly miserable a human being as I’ve ever seen; in no way tempering with the wisdom one expects as aging progresses.

    She is a cauldron of hatreds churned by ever-deepening despair. Worse that her hatreds are self-renewing, because to turn from her life’s course and be newly truly happy, she would have to repudiate her life’s work.

    So, I sigh, look away, and use the helpful eye bleach.

  35. dicentra says:

    Sociopaths are easily bored, they being in need of constant stimulation.

    Stirring it up using any pretext whatsoever seems to be the MO of the sociopaths who infest the Internet.

  36. BigBangHunter says:

    – Marcotte? Hasn’t she died of an incurable case of yeast infection yet?

    *smack* …. Ohhhhhh “cooking”…What?….sorry

  37. Mueller says:

    Ernst Schreiber says September 5, 2014 at 2:23 pm
    And I imagine Amanda Marcotte is about as useful in a kitchen as are tits on Amanda Marcotte.

    To her credit, though, she can fashion a dildo out of almost anything. She is very “scout” like in that regard.

  38. Dana says:

    Alas! You are taking the lovely Miss Marcotte’s article too seriously. If you read her article, the problem is obvious: she had some sort of deadline to meet, and no inspiration, none at all, and still had to knock out something. The article is as dull as the dishwater she thinks is unfairly assigned to women.

  39. happyfeet says:

    hi amanda potato salad is quick and super easy and it doesn’t have to be unhealthy

    you can make it even if you have boobies

    here is all you have to do

    boil 3 medium-sized potatoes or so

    do NOT watch the pot

    you can tell when the taters are done cause they get all soft to where you can jab a butter knife through them super-easy

    when they’re done run them under California’s plentiful cool tap water while you assemble your other ingredientses

    ok the first other ingredient you need is chipper-choppered up black olives – i buy the whole ones and chipper-chopper them all by myself with one of those poundy poundy chipper choppers

    the olives are the key thing to adding the flavor you’ll want that’ll let you dial back on the unhealthy stuff

    now mix up your spices in a bowl – i do garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, salt and cavender’s greek – i use a good bit cause it’s potato salad and potatoes can take a good bit of seasoning

    now chopper up your potatoes

    chipper-choppered up celery is optional

    throw the potatoes and olives together into a mixing bowl and add just a tablespoon of mayo and drizzle a bit of olive oil as well

    mix it all together then, adding spice a bit at a time as you go until you fell like you’ve done your duty with the spice

    and bam you have tasty healthy potato salad!

  40. happyfeet says:

    until you *feel* like you’ve done your duty with the spice I mean

  41. Mueller says:

    Sooper easy chicken breasts ,feets. For when you need taco filling, or chicken burritos, or whatever.
    In your crock pot toss in 4 or 5 chicken breasts. They can even be frozen. Add 2 tablespoons on chili powdr and a half a tablespoon of cayanne pepper. I like to add some cumin and some onion powder and finally half a jar of salsa.
    This is the important part.
    Turn the crockpot on.
    It takes a looooong time if you don’t turn on the crock pot.
    If you do this before you leave for work it will be ready when you get home. Shred the chicken with a fork and fill your tacos.
    Even Amanda could do it.

Comments are closed.