She has declared the current Starbucks holiday cup ‘controversy’ stupid.
Do not buy in to the media hype surrounding this story!! It is just another attempt by the LEFT to make Christians look stupid.
She still gets some things wrong. All of us on the “LEFT” are shocked and bemused by the fact that anyone on the “RIGHT” thinks this is a matter of any significance at all…but the original instigator, people like Joshua Feuerstein, are most definitely not part of any left-wing conspiracy.
I am also amused by one other little fact. She thinks the controversy is stupid, but…
But even Palin said that she had chosen to buy her coffee at the local Mocha Moose instead of patronizing Starbucks.
But then maybe that’s entirely because Starbucks coffee is terrible.
Deciding to buy local? Make that two things she managed to get right. That’s AM and PM taken care of.
“Palin added: “Do not buy in to the media hype surrounding this story!! It is just another attempt by the LEFT to make Christians look stupid.””
I always thought this type of outragathons were attempts by CHRISTIANS to make christians look stupid: sort of mortifying the flesh related activities.
She didn’t say it’s a left-wing conspiracy. You skipped the part where she says:
So she admits that a group of Christians is being stupid about this, but also claims that what the left is doing is attributing the stupidity of a small group of people to wider Christianity.
… which probably isn’t far from truth.
Christians seem to do a great job of looking stupid without any help from the LEFT at all.
Dear Bristol,
Why would I work at making you look stupid when you
right-wing Christian types are doing such a good job all by yourselves?
Happy Holidays!
Beatrice #3
Except the initial “story” was featured on Breitbart. Not exactly a bastion of the left even if she considers other mainstream news agencies as “left”.
The other news orgs have definitely amplified that signal, but when the #1 network in USA has Bill O’rly who constantly goes on about the “war on Christmas” for just as silly reasons, I don’t see why this round’s moral outrage wasn’t noteworthy, or shouldn’t have been considered such by the others.
I’m reminded of this exchange.
Pretty much all of the “World Is Ending” claims have come from the religidiots.
AlexanderZ,
I admit, I haven’t really followed this closely enough to know where the story spread from. So you’re free to strike that second part as a claim without evidence.
My point about PZ misinterpreting Palin stands.
Beatrice #9
Agreed.
I don’t see how taking off snowflakes and reindeer makes them less christmassy. They’re still red.
I wonder if people in the southern hemisphere use snow to evoke Christmas.
Starbucks have omitted reindeer and snowflakes from some cups? And that’s upset some Christians?
Because snowflakes and reindeer are what Christmas really means to Christians..?
An anthropomorphic moose standing on its hind legs, pouring coffee and making idle chit-chat with fellow Alaskans?
I’ve seen quite a few responses to the initial call for boycotting Starbucks (for antiXmas nonsense), yet None (zero, no one) thought the lone dissenter as being representative of all Xians. All have been mocking him alone for misapplying his Xian beliefs to attack a company for not doing anything outrageous. Bristol is overstating the media response to the blogpost of that ‘angry person’.
Sounds a little like a ‘persecution complex’ goin on in Bristol’s comment about the Red Cups Media Storm.
Yes, that was my reaction as well.
I’ll say it again: If you’re offended by a plain red cup you need anger management therapy.
I saw cups over the last couple of years on one site, and it looked like they were going more and more minimalist with time. It seemed to me that making this year’s cup plain red fit the pattern.
It must have also been cheaper than printing something more complex.
But isn’t that what she’s doing when she manufactures outrage when some small group of christians, that she agrees with, get offended. The only difference this time is that she thinks the whining about the red cups is stupid as opposed to the other times she got bent out of shape over something stupid.
Support your local coffee shop – and tip your baristas well.
Bristol Palin is outraged that she’s being tarred with the same brush as someone too easily outraged just because the person with Starbucks-outrage is a conservative Christian?
I’ve got 3 bits of news for you, Palin.
1. You’re not a conservative Christian. They believe in things like sexual abstinence before marriage. You don’t.
2. Since you’re not a conservative Christian, you cannot possibly be tarred with the same brush “because you’re a conservative Christian”.
3. Since you’re getting outraged over something that isn’t even happening, you are, in fact, too easily outraged.
NYC atheist @12:
Yep. We Southern Hemispherers see a lot of winter and snow-related themes in our Christmas marketing. It makes no sense geographically, but a lot of sense culturally.
In oztralia its hot. We drink white wine in the sun , thanks Tim. Santa uses kangaroos to pull his sleigh. No snowflakes or reindeer here.
White fluffy snowflakes were very important to the reindeer that Jesus rode into Bethlestine (making the dusty road easier to walk on, obvs) and Jesus was all about empathy for the little animals (except for the bigger sacrificial-size ones) See 3 Kings Ch25v12.
Won’t nobody think of the reindeer, fer Christ’s ache?
Beatrice and Alexander Z
Palin made a ridiculous sweeping claim that the controversy was a leftist anti-Christian beat-up when the story came out of Breitbart quoting a conservative evangelist. So the person who came up with the story and the media group that first promoted it are both far, far right-wing. How is this in Palin’s words “just another attempt by the LEFT to make Christians look stupid”? And why is it OK for Palin to complain about tarring all Christians with the same brush while herself doing the same thing to leftists? PZ didn’t misrepresent Palin at all.
My complaint is that the red cups mean the Christmas music starts, an endless drone of Bing et al singing about dreams and chestnuts and drummer boys (with OMG David Bowie) and, oh, don’t we feel happy slogging through the shopping crowds.
Thank you 20 and 21.
21 reminds me of a video I once saw about misconceptions about Australia. Most Australian interviewees couldn’t understand why Americans think they ride kangaroos, and a decent number claimed to have told Americans that they ride them, to mess with us.
@24
and so it begins the ordeal of saccharine kitsch, obligatory sentimentality and forced joviality!
happy holidays?
uncle frogy
chrislawson #23
It’s not. Beatrice didn’t know about the Breitbart article and retracted this point as soon as I told her about it.
It isn’t and nobody (at least here) is saying otherwise.
This post can be read as if Palin is solely blaming the “Left” while ignoring the real instigator. Which is false – she knows and acknowledges that this “controversy” was started by a stupid Christian. Her actual claim is that while this is something that “one small group” (as she said it) believes, the mainstream media (which she incorrectly labels as “the Left”) is giving this story undue attention and portraying it as if this outrage is more popular among Christians than it really is.
Basically, she’s a bit more nuanced than would appear from a casual reading of this post alone.
What’s this ‘coffee’ you speak of?
In fairness, elves complaining on Twitter is an accepted sign of the apocalypse.
These are the same group of people who have declared Paul Ryan to be a leftist sell-out. It wouldn’t be surprising at all if they now have decided that Breitbart is not sufficiently right wing and belongs to the leftist media…
@AlexanderZ #27
The question should be, “Why is she blaming ‘the Left’ AT ALL?” We didn’t make Starbucks change. We’re just reporting what other christians are doing. They did it to themselves. Maybe if there wasn’t such a knee-jerk reaction to even the slightest possibility of not being the center of attention, we wouldn’t laugh so hard.
@ Anton Mates:
I was wondering if anyone else was going to notice that…
Gotta disagree with PZ and the rest of you here. I’ve tried a couple of the local (Texas) coffee shops and I really, really wasn’t impressed. I will drive past them to hit my local Starbucks.
magistramarla @ 33, yep. Same. My daughter is a huge fan of the local coffee place in my town, but nope, it’s not for me. Uh, disclaimer: I don’t drink coffee. But I do love the chai, and the local place just doesn’t cut it for me at all. I did try.
Palin added: “Do not buy in to the media hype surrounding this story!! It is just another attempt by the LEFT to make Christians look stupid.”
Indeed. They need no help from the LEFT to make them look stupid.
And we care what the brainwashed daughter of SARAH PALIN says, why exactly?
So let me get the straight. Starbucks comes out with christmas themed cups in christmas colors during the christmas season. And this was done deliberately by the left because we knew the conservatives would find it evidence of “war on christmas” and then we’d succeed in making christians look stupid.
Okay…….
re magistramarla@33:
have you tried Dunkins? Only CA has no Dunkins. Better than Starbucks (IMO). Disregard their pumpkin flavored abominations, Dark Roast is best.
Colonel Mustard: Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?
Wadsworth: You don’t need any help from me, sir.
Colonel Mustard: That’s right!
I was at McD’s last week to pick up breakfast for myself after early shopping. The holiday coffee cup (better than Starbucks over roasted stuff and much cheaper) was red with a knit winter cap. No Santa, stars, trees, or reindeer. It must be a conspiracy.
magistramarla @33:
You may want to rethink that.
Consider for a second-what do all PZ’s detractors say happens to people who disagree with the poopeyhead?
But with kangaroos pulling his sleigh (Boing! Boing! Boinggg!), I imagine there’s considerable precipitation in the form of Santa vomit.
How did you think they make beer there?
+++
As for coffee, I never understood the Starbucks hype. Sure, if it’S the best place you got it’S the best place you got, but before they were almost everywhere people would insist on going there when in a town that has one as if it were a tourist destination. No matter the waiting time, no matter the price.
I can understand going there if you want COFFEE (me coffee zombie) and that’S the easy solution instead of looking around for a place in a strange city, but walking past a dozen places just to get to Starbucks (and these days even McD offers decent coffee) is beyond me.
PZ:
Amphiox:
Didn’t you guys get the memo? Everybody is part of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy!
As for the coffee, I’ve gotta throw my hat in with the “Starbucks is vile” crowd. If that’s the best you can find, you’re in dire straights, coffee-wise. But then, I’m a terrible coffee snob…
to understand the Starbucks thing you have to look at it from the historical perspective when they started to spread their franchise around the coffee available in the U.S. at restaurants and “7-11” was very different from what is available today almost entirely bland, terrible or even woody, to ok “american style, espresso was rare and the rest of the drinks sold by them unheard of.
They had a distinct flavor strong “rich” coffee in comparison with lots of variations of added sweet and cream. They also had an easily setup franchised package that worked they were almost always the only game in town and like all franchises very predictable. Now they have momentum, enough so that they can be a political subject.
uncle frogy
I love local coffee places, especially in the pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, here in Florida there are no local coffee places, unless you include the Hooters type drive up they opened. Every other place to get coffee is a chain restaurant or diner with the expected low quality coffee. So more often than not I will go to Starbucks if I can’t make my coffee at home. I don’t particularly like Dunkin Donuts, but that may be a symptom of Florida-itis, or maybe I just need to find a place that has dark roast.
Apparently Donald Trump has now jumped on the “boycott Starbucks because their Christmas cups aren’t quite Christmassy enough” bandwagon… Yet another scalp for the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy(tm)!
Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf uses actual chai tea instead of syrup for their chai lattes, and their coffee is much better than Starbucks, to my taste. They also have a lot of different teas, and they brew to order. Which means I can get things like Lung Ching Dragonwell green iced tea whenever I want it, instead of being limited to whatever that shop has made up and sitting in a jug.
Also, their cups (and their straws) are purple. How’s that for un-Christian?
Dunc: Starbucks isn’t particularly good coffee, yet in many places, it’s a huge — massive — improvement on the status quo. They’ve had more trouble penetrating into the Montreal market, where cafe culture is (a) about the food — panini and pastries — which Starbucks *really* falls flat on, and (b) very competitive. They’re present and slowly expanding, but not dominating in any way.
numberorbis: Yeah, I realise that, and it makes me sad. But yeah, for many people, it’s the best of limited choices.
What I really don’t understand is why people continue to go there when they have much better choices available. Here in Edinburgh you can find top quality independent artisan coffee shops on practically every other block (in the city centre, anyway), and yet there are branches of Starbucks everywhere.
Starbucks’ chai lattes are good, but too expensive; I avoid the place when possible (don’t drink coffee). Here in Ontario we have Balzac’s, which actually serves good, real tea, and (I am told) good coffee. It is a chain, albeit a small one, but much more like an artisanal shop than Starbucks.
numerobis @48: My knowledge of the Montreal scene is very limited, but could the difficulty Starbucks is having entering the market be something to do with people still worshiping at the altar of The Most High Lord Timmy?
The reason not to frequent Starbucks (in the UK, at least) is not just their mediocre coffee, but also their brazen tax avoidance.
This makes me wonder, what would Jesus do? Render unto Caesar? “Veni, vidi, venti.” I came, I saw, I ventied.
fear of the unknown. Starbucks is known. Even if not the best, at least “good enough”, with no risk of “unknown”. Like when being a tourist in some distant locale, one may like to taste the locale, yet often tasting the unknown can be daunting, better to go with a known vendor than exotic.
Often, the perplexing thing is that even knowing that better coffee is available in one of the many shops locally, searching for it seems risky. Starbucks is a form of safety. Like sampling diners during a road trip: often McD’s (or B.K.) is the first choice, as being a safe choice, not a preference. One must be in the mood to explore, to pop into some random diner for a meal to get a sense of ‘the local vibe’.
Starbucks coffee is terrible.
Starbucks’ unique flavor is a result of buying the cheapest beans they can get, then overroasting them until the carmel/burnt flavors begin to come out, then fine-grinding them (to get more flavor out) and brewing with them. It’s so bad they have to time the pot-life of the coffee because otherwise all the flavor hints (which are mostly smells) blow off and you can taste the pit of stomach-churning acid that you’re supposed to drink. Their great innovation was selling literally the cheapest coffee that money could buy, at a premium price.
I used to occasionally do blind taste tests with various coffees (all prepared using the vendors’ bean/roast) prepared in a Keurig (not my favorite way but it’s consistent) and pretty consistently Starbucks came in dead last against a field of Dunkin, McDonalds, and “whatever’s on the shelf at Wal-Mart”
Oh, and fuck Starbucks for insisting people use their branded marketing sizes, instead of “small” “medium” “large” and “trough”
I hate the “it’s predictable” argument for Starbucks. If you go to a coffee place and you think that their coffee might not be good: if it’s empty of customers, hint #1. If it doesn’t smell good, hint #2 (look for hidden air fresheners), if they’re more about marketing CDs, insulated mugs, and Tshirts, hint #3. Lastly you can always ask the barista to pour you a little bit of coffee in a cup so you can smell it. That way you can be insanely pretentious if you like.
Usually what I do is order my coffee, doll it up, and drink it. If I think it’s too acid I ask how long it sat in the pot, and if they could fill my cup when they make a fresh batch. If it still manages to taste like boiled dog, you’re either at Starbucks or at someplace that also overroasts floor-sweepings.
The great thing about coffee is it should be cheap enough that if you buy a cup and it sucks, you can just put it down and never go back there again. That works great.
Coffee should never be sitting in a pot. It should be prepared to order from freshly ground beans. If the first step in preparing your coffee isn’t grinding the beans, go somewhere else.
Beatrice: TBQH, this point doesn’t make sense. The left is still mostly Christian, in the USA. And people who aren’t on the left are laughing about it too, and they’re /also/ mostly Christian (In the USA). None of this reeks of ‘let’s say wider Christianity is stupid’, but ‘When we feel the need to specify Christian, it’s because t hey”re religious nuts.”
Frankly, we’re talking about people who are, if anything, embarrassed by sharing a religion with them. Why are we pretending they’re blaming all christians?