March 28, 2014

Judge rejects ABC's motion to dismiss, which included the contention that the world "slime" is not defamatory when referring to beef.

The product it called "pink slime" is "much like all ground beef... slimy,” ABC argued.... hilariously.

The commenters at the link (to NRO) mention "Ghostbusters"...



... and "Nickelodeon"...



But when I hear "slime," I go right to my copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness":
The For-Itself is suddenly compromised. I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy, and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me. Its mode of being is neither the reassuring inertia of the solid nor a dynamism like that in water which is exhausted in fleeing from me. It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking…. Slime is the revenge of the in-itself. A sickly-sweet, feminine revenge which will be symbolized on another level by the quality “sugary.” … A sugary-sliminess is the ideal of the slimy; it symbolizes the sugary death of the For-itself (like that of the wasp which sinks into the jam and drowns in it)… But at the same time the slimy is myself, by the very fact that I outline an appropriation of the slimy substance. That sucking of the slimy which I feel on my hands outlines a kind of continuity of the slimy substance in myself. These long, soft strings of substance which fall from me to the slimy body (when, for example, I plunge my hand into it and then pull it out again) symbolize a rolling off of myself in the slime… [Slime] transcends all distinctions betwen psychic and physical, between the brute existent and the meanings of the world; it is a possible meaning of being. The first experience which the infant can have with the slimy enriches him psychologically and morally; he will not need to reach adulthood to discover the kind of sticky baseness which we figuratively name “slimy”; it is there near him in the very sliminess of honey or of glue.
He wrote that while eating a cheeseburger.

17 comments:

Rocketeer said...

Irony is a Sarte rumination on a cheeseburger actually being a big nothing burger.

YoungHegelian said...

It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking….

Well, J.P. never had a problem with getting down with that! With Simone de Beauvoir, with Simone & her "friend", or with just the "friend".

J.P. was just a busy little an und fur sich in that way.

MadisonMan said...

It seems to me that the ABC lawyers just have to give the jurors a pound each of the "beef" to fondle, and then ask if it's slimy.

Known Unknown said...

"But when I hear "slime," I go right to my copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness"

You're the academic version of Gwyneth Paltrow.

Anonymous said...

ABC will settle. Not so much for the slime reference, but for the post video campaign they orchestrated against the firm to put them out of business:

The network sent Avila to grocery stores across the country to ask whether their ground beef contained “pink slime” and urged consumers to demand answers to the same question.

Rumpletweezer said...

They've turned something that's inedible into something that one can eat. Shouldn't they be punished for that?

iowan2 said...

Rumpletweezer, learn what the product is.

It is lean finely textured beef. Highly edible and tasty.

For ABC To argue that the term "pink slime" is not derogatory ignores that 3 plants closed and 1000 people are unemployed.

Rumpletweezer said...

Sometimes my sarcasm is too subtle. I blame my father.

Anonymous said...

What if eternity is nothing but a bathhouse full of cheeseburgers?

Martin said...

When I took anthropology in the 80s, we were taught that indigenous peoples, especially the Inuit, were ingenious and virtuous because they used every single bit of the animals that they killed, wasting nothing. But now, in the glorious 21st century, we're supposed to throw good beef away because it's not pretty.

William said...

Does anyone want to run out and buy Being & Nothingness based on that passage? It does, however, explain some of his attraction to Simone de Beauvoir, but, to be fair, they were both species of pink slime.

Mark said...

Now I'm all hungry.

dbp said...

My first degree was in philosophy and even I could not plow through Being And Nothingness Part of the problem was that I felt like it would be pointless if I didn't read Being And Time by Martin Heidegger first.

The rest of the problem was a growing suspicion that it was just a bunch of gobbledygook with no meaning whatsoever and every second I spent on it was a second of being scammed.

Jim said...

Let me just say, without being defamatory in the least, that I would like to slime Katy Perry.

Sam L. said...

Yeah, well, JP, he's like that.

Tom said...

Me too. Mark. I'm TDY in NorCal and gonna go grab a Double Double RIGHT NOW

Paco Wové said...

Sartre othered that cheeseburger. I mean, he just othered the shit out of it. You're going to tell me that French cuisine doesn't have things just as slimy in it?