Alt-Left Insanity: You Scream, I Scream Ice Cream Is ‘Discrimination!’

September 21st, 2018 2:45 PM

Your weekly dive into the progressive abyss.

It’s heartening to see a healthy respect for religious liberty kindle to life at, of all places, The University of Wisconsin at Madison. There, young scholars have at long last come to the understanding that the practice of religion cannot be confined to worshipping at set hours and in set places. The religious observer mustn't be required to leave his faith in the pews. He must be free to take it to the ice cream shop!

Oh, don’t get any big ideas. The revelation doesn’t apply to Christians. The young Bolsheviks on the UW-M student council would still, given the chance, force octogenarian nuns to purchase condoms by the case. Their concern is strictly for the “Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and vegetarian” communities, and their right to enjoy frozen treats without “violating their beliefs.” That’s what they say. It really seems more about enjoying a little plastic tasting spoonful of Authoritarian Crunch.

According to Campus Reform, “UW-M’s official ice cream, the Babcock, contains a beef gelatin additive,” presenting a sticky situation for the campus’s Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and pests. So members of the council shouted the incantation that has launched the career of many a budding mid-level government functionary: “There oughta be a law!”

And so the “Ice Cream for All” legislation is before the council. It states, according to Campus Reform, “the Babcock Ice Cream is an important tradition at UW-M, and ‘it would be a gross act of discrimination to continue to deprive some minority students’ from eating the ice cream because of their religious beliefs.” Stirring, isn’t it?

The legislation … already has eight sponsors, including the Chair, Vice Chair, and Secretary of the Associated Students of Madison Student Council … [but] the ASM Student Council can only recommend changes to the university administration. Nothing that the ASM Student Council passes is, in fact, a definitive change.

So it’s a symbolic gesture. But that’s okay because “Symbolic issues like these have always and will always play a critical role in whether marginalized students and people feel welcome, included, and connected to their community.” Besides, it will allow council members and all right-thinking UW-M denizens to “condemn” any campus event that includes the frozen goodness. Even better, “the ASM recommends that the administration, unions, and dining halls all ‘acknowledge’ that the official ice cream of the university marginalizes religious students on campus.” Confess your crimes and throw yourselves on the mercy of revolutionary justice. This is progress!

But, as you might expect, reactionary forces are pushing back with common sense and facts and science and junk.

According to The Badger Herald, Scott Rankin, chair of the food science department, said the university ice cream shop, Babcock Dairy, offers an assortment of ice creams that are gelatin free, adding that it would be hard to replicate the taste of the gelatin-based ice cream.

But resolution co-sponsor Yogev Ben-Yitschak shot back that “Babcock Ice Cream cannot taste that much different without the gelatin additive.” In other words, Churn the ice cream, bigot.

And now, more creatures from the dismal deeps.

Larry the Rastafarian Lobster? -- It’s hard not to be moved by the sight: slumped on their guts, glowing bright red, the life gone out of their insect-sized brains. But enough about the Irish guys I play golf with.

Many moons ago, as Elizabeth Warren might say, your Alt-Left tour guide cooked for a living in New York and New England, in some fairly nice restaurants, too. As such, I killed a lot of lobsters. My name is still whispered with dread wherever crustaceans congregate in the Narragansett Bay. I believed I knew every trick there is to preparing lobster (testing their doneness by tossing them against a wall; feeding mayonnaise to the ones set aside for lobster rolls, etc.)

But then I read in The Washington Post of one Charlotte Gill, owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound in Maine. Gill, writes the Post’s Maura Judkis, “is sedating her crustaceans with marijuana smoke before cooking them — which she says gives them a blissfully humane death.”

Really. “She plans to offer it as an option for customers who want their lobsters to be baked before they’re boiled.”

Judkis says Gill “had been looking for a way to reduce suffering of her signature menu item.” (All together now: “FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS!”) “She experimented with blowing marijuana smoke into a tank with one lobster, Roscoe (basically, she hot-boxed him). When Gill returned him to a tank with the other lobsters without his claw bands, she says, he was less aggressive." (She didn’t mention that she also gave Roscoe a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies and a copy of The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East.) "Gill has a medical marijuana license.”

Times certainly have changed, but I can’t imagine this going over well with the line cooks of my acquaintance. Those long-suffering souls adopted a courageous stoicism in the face of human folly and the cruel indifference of the cosmos. A man who is routinely asked to cook $35 steaks to a leathery medium-well, or to boil away perfectly good beer opening steamer clams can, by definition, stand a lot. But wasting perfectly good dope -- medical or otherwise -- on lobsters? A bridge too far for any self-respecting line cook of my generation.

Give this to Gill: in a marketplace in which virtue-signaling sells, she’s onto something. The kind of people who sometimes get a little queasy at the thought of boiling a live lobster might just come and feel extra good about themselves as they crack open a steaming claw and draw out that sweet, sweet meat.

But make no mistake -- not everyone is fooled by Gill’s pot ploy. “It is highly unlikely that getting a lobster high would make a lick of difference when it comes to the full-blown agony of being boiled or steamed alive,” stated PETA, with its devil-may-care sense of humor. I guess I shouldn’t mention the money I lost back in the day betting on lobster fights.

Cue the wah-wah pedal -- Kudos to Jezebel’s Tracy Clark-Flory for asking the question so many of us wanted to, but lacked the courage: Is 'Feminist' Porn Getting Its #MeToo Moment?

Well, is it?

In truth, I don’t know. The article’s long -- more than 3,000 words -- and I kept getting tripped up by … well, here’s the very first paragraph:

Rooster was preparing to shoot a sex scene for Erika Lust Films—a Barcelona-based porn production company that markets itself as an ethical, feminist alternative to the mainstream adult industry—when they allegedly asked for a break. The then-26-year-old performer, who uses they/them pronouns, says they told the film’s director, Olympe de G., that they would like to have a chance to speak with their co-star about sexual boundaries before continuing.

Allegedly, Olympe said no and Rooster dropped it. Understandably Rooster didn’t want to do anything that would “get them labeled as a ‘diva’ and damage their porn career, which was just getting underway.”

And how! There you are, a young, bright-eyed person of indeterminate gender -- a idealistic kid looking for your first big break in the glamorous world of niche porn. All of a sudden you’re on the set of Don’t Call Me a Dick. (Not to be confused with the classic rom-com Dick, Don’t Call Me or the Cheney biopic Dick Shot Me, Call Me an Ambulance.), with the lights, the excitement. You’ve been working for this moment since you were a ... er, small person of indeterminate gender. Don’t ruin it, kid!

But inevitably, the regret set in, and a year later, Rooster came back to Olympe and Erika Lust Films. The next several paragraphs amount to a “they said-she said” account of whether Rooster was given adequate time to discuss “boundaries, consent, and triggers” leading up to the filming. There is a suit and a countersuit, and things have gotten ugly.

But some good came out of this mess, according to Clark-Flory. Erika Lust Films has decided to “do something to improve and secure the work environment,” for its performers. It’s even coming up with a “performers’ bill of rights.”

Back in the U.S, Clark-Flory writes, “The Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry’s trade association, has been working on a pre-shoot checklist to allow performers to thoroughly detail their sexual boundaries ahead of time.” ‘Merica.

That’s about as much as I could manage of the article. Skimming the rest, peopled as it is with Berlin porn producers and accusatory actresses, you find ruminations on what constitutes “ethical” porn (“... whatever porn fits your personal system of values and ethics, and they are subjective, person to person,” said one producer. That’s a convenient view of ethics.), what constitutes “feminist” porn and whether “feminist” really means anything once it’s used commercially. You know, the important stuff.