Great takedown of Bourdain. I love how they linked his anti-veganism with the rest of his bog-standard bourgeois lib ideology
Calling vegans “terrorist scum,” Bourdain once fulminated that
“These fucking people are not really all about us not eating duck liver,” snarls Bourdain. “No, no, no. They don’t want us eating any animal product whatsoever.
“When they win this tiny battle, they’ll move to the next one, like freeing the lobsters.
“These people,” says Bourdain, “are the worst kind of terrorists. And they must be stopped.”
Obviously such a histrionic level of bile over something that didn’t actually affect Bourdain at all indicates that the vegan-bashing was motivated by something other than the objective importance of the carnivore cause. The fact that Bourdain was so upset over being divested of foie gras and lobster is surely a clue. Elsewhere, Bourdain complained that “being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.” If one wants to highlight self-indulgent first-world lifestyles, “travel show host” might seem downright sybaritic compared to “person who chooses to forego animal products,” which is actually a sacrifice and not an indulgence. To most people, Bourdain’s career sounds like a series of Caligulan excesses—look at how quickly the no-fuck-giver threw a frothing tantrum over the idea that someone, somewhere disapproves of his eating habits. In his famous quote on the “Hezbollah-like” vegans, Bourdain called vegans “an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.” If “all he stood for” was “pure enjoyment,” then who exactly is self-indulgent?
Inflating his reputation by strategic projection and disavowals is something Bourdain did a lot. Like so many people held up by the propaganda machinery as progressive luminaries, Bourdain got to masquerade as something he’s not by constant repetition of his outsider mythology. We are told he wasn’t someone with an agenda, we are told he was edgy and iconoclastic, we are told he was unique, et cetera. People are told this despite the fact that his material, when it counts, was totally conformist and utterly conventional. Ultimately, he was a guy who was paid a ton of money to indulge his every whim, and tell us the same things we are supposed to hear everywhere else along the way. And that’s why Bourdain carried on his campaign against people who give up meat: they are the dark other onto which Bourdain could project what he really was: utterly spoiled, wildly privileged, and truly parochial.
Anthony Bourdain and his consequences have been an absolute disaster for cooks who treat their job like a job.
The paragraph about CNN scheduling an interview with the Serbian politician so the US would know where and when to bomb him is a new one for me
The line about a tweet quoting The Wire, as it relates to Russian corruption, made me genuinely laugh out loud
Huh. Used to think he was good. Didn’t he say he would gladly go vegetarian if he lived in India or something?
Sad.
I'm not sure why leftists ever liked him. He was well known to be wildly abusive to his workers and people under him
Probably this quote:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. “
Hating Kissinger is milquetoast tho. Everyone hates Kissinger, and hating him doesn't make rich assholes who abuse their workers and spread liberal interventionist propaganda into good leftists we should stan
https://youtu.be/G3981TCLe5c
You asked why leftists had a good impression of him, and the answer is because he was a celebrity who said he wanted to kill Kissinger
I didn't ask at all. I was scolding leftist stans for being unprincipled
As the article said, maybe because he had a veneer of progressivism (ie: good pr).
Inflating his reputation by strategic projection and disavowals is something Bourdain did a lot. Like so many people held up by the propaganda machinery as progressive luminaries, Bourdain got to masquerade as something he’s not by constant repetition of his outsider mythology.
Like even if you didn't know all his bad politics, which he never hid, his rampant anti-veganism should have clued our comrades in that he was a reactionary going after easy targets. I mean it's literally US state law to classify animal liberationists as the worst, most high profile terrorists, and that's the exact language and level of vitriol Bourdain himself used. These things are linked. Vegan leftists have been talking about this since before he died.
It's not very leftist to swallow bourgeois liberal media pills about how animal liberationists are "the worst kind of terrorists" who "must be stopped." Ignoring red flags like that is how you get leftists stanning CIA mouthpieces like Bourdain and Zizek
I don’t know about others, but the only thing I ever knew about him were a couple clips on YouTube and a few comments on places like Reddit, around the time he died.
They said he was a cool, progressive dude and I didn’t really see any reason to look deeper, because I’m not into food channels or tv shows. And that’s basically the opinion I carried through till I saw this article.
