site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3761 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. One can dislike the mass market version of $thing without disliking $thing as a whole, because the mass market version is almost always a watered down, lower quality version of the original. If the mass produced coffee came first, you'd have more of a point, but it didn't.

No, I agree with you.

It's like people who write on a computer. Like, what are you even doing? If you aren't sharpening a quill and using ink you sourced locally, you're not writing you're just, I don't know, digital lettering. Ugh. As a true writer, I can't even. People these days are just not at all aware of what it means to scribe.

the mass market version is almost always a watered down, lower quality version of the original.

This is wrong. It's an infinitely better product because it's convenient, cheap, and tastes good unless you've retardmaxxed your tastebuds for no other reason that snobbish elitism.

Industrial strength coffee won WW2 and got us to the fuckin' moon before the Russians.

I'm not a coffee guy and I wouldn't dream of speaking for coffee. But I am a cheese guy, and I'll tell you right now that mass market cheese is almost without exception garbage. Sargento, and all that stuff? It's not worth the calories. Tillamook is decent but even that pales in comparison to any cheese you can find in Wisconsin from a typical grocery store. So yeah, mass market versions of a product tend to be an inferior version, because they cut corners. It's something I've seen first-hand, and while I'm not in a position to comment on the coffee debate it would hardly surprise me if the same rule applies.

FWIW Sargento is made in Wisconsin and sold in the grocery stores. It's fine for things like Mac and Cheese or Cheesy Potato Casserole or queso salsa. But they also sell things like Sartori and BelGioioso and lots of local micro producers which, as you note, are incredible for straight cheese eating. (I just now realized the Sar in Sargento is Joe Sartori, who sold his interest in Sargento to work on the more crafty Sartori cheese.)

Except what OP is describing isn't $thing either. What OP is describing is a 1990s invention that was only possible because of mass-market industrialization and technological advancement. If you go back to the way the Turks were drinking coffee around the time it was introduced in Europe, beans were roasted in a pan over an open fire, ground using a mortar and pestle, boiled in sugar water and drunk unfiltered. The roast was unlikely to be consistent let alone follow the precise roasting curves of today, and I don't know of any try-hard coffee snobs who would approve of the brewing method. Even the seemingly simple pourover wasn't invented until the 20th century, well into the era of industrial coffee production. There isn't some question of authenticity involved here, because historically "authentic" coffee probably tastes like crap.

turkishGreek coffee is... well I like it. Goes great with a cigarette and a pastry.

It's also fun to read fortunes in the leftover grounds.

I went to a coffee roasting event with an Ethiopian woman, and it was fun, smelled great, and tasted fine for black coffee. She told a story about highly caffeinated goats where coffee used to grow wild in her homeland.

Humans have been developing food technology for about ten thousand years, from domestication and selective breeding to improved processing techniques. Would I find you in Middle Kingdom Egypt saying that if you don't like the bitter and poisonous watermelons of our forefathers then you don't like watermelons at all? Would you deride the sweet watermelon as "a Menhtuhotep II era invention only possible thanks to a selective breeding program"?

No, I'm saying that if the only watermelon you like is some special cultivar that's only available in specialty stores, costs 20 dollars and has to be prepared in a very particular way, it's safe to say you don't really like watermelon.

You're missing the point. The watermelon we have today is the special cultivar. Presumably at some point you'd say that people who only like this cultivar don't like watermelon, and now you wouldn't.

Seems like an unfair comparison. The whole bean coffee I generally buy from my local midrange supermarket (city in the southern US) costs $12 a pound (compared to roughly $8 a pound for a 2.5 lb tub of the cheapest Folger's grounds) and is vastly better in a normal drip process. The grocery is doing enough volume that roast dates are consistently in the past month (vs typically 1-2 years for Folger's).

I think you may be generalizing from top-end third wave cafes to say that everything better than bottom-tier is snobbery. Coffee is coffee, and bad coffee is preferable to no coffee, but there can still be a reason to want more than the minimum viable experience here.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats