Youth need rights.
Ageism is bad.
I love Christmas!
I mostly love Christmas music.
Harry Potter is awesome!
People are stupid about religion.
People are stupider about politics.
People are especially stupid about love.
Everyone else does things weird.
Food is yummy.
Unless it’s cheese. Fuck cheese.
Minesweeper rules.
Disney movies give us a lot to ponder.
Go Redskins!
Dallas sucks.
…
That about sums up the past nine years.
Happy 9th Anniversary, Eight Mine Fortress! 😀
(I wanted to call this “Right Doesn’t Make Right” but I already used that title for another post eight years ago. Oh, well!)
I’ve mentioned before that merely having the right to say something doesn’t mean you can’t be criticized for saying said thing. Yet so often when someone says something completely abhorrent or just stupid, and they get called on it, they come back with “Hey, free speech! I have a right to say it!”
No shit, you have a right to say it, dumbass! Nobody is saying otherwise. It’s not an attempt at censorship. It’s a reply. Replying is – gasp! – also free speech!
Seriously, a friend of mine shared a screen cap on Facebook recently of a conversation with an acquaintance, in which said acquaintance posted some racist article, and my friend asked why they’d post such an article, and the person literally came back with simply “Free speech.” My friend asked again, and the person gave no other answer.
As it often does, xkcd covered this one nicely.
This goes beyond speech, though. Sometimes those defending the right to something seem to act like any and all use of said right is okay or even heroic.
You see this with gun rights, where there’s a nasty shooting, and the problem is not that the shooter had a gun, but that everyone else didn’t. 🙄
You see it with abortion rights, too. Pretending every woman who has an abortion is a hero. Barely a word against those who abort because of the baby’s sex or (compatible with life) disability. Yes, you can support abortion rights and still say sex-selective or disability abortions are really shitty. Even in general, you can support abortion rights without necessarily even believing abortion is a good thing.
It’s an important distinction to make. Believing something to be wrong and believing something should be illegal are and should be very different things. It’s the difference between believing someone shouldn’t do something and believing said someone should be arrested/imprisoned/have their life ruined over it.
Imagine how much better the world would be if this distinction were more widely recognized!
I hereby decree…
Christmas is not a Christian holiday.
Well, it’s not.
Yeah, “Christ” is right there in the name, and I find switching the name “Christmas” out with “Solstice” or “Yule” to be really fucking obnoxious. But Christmas is not a Christian holiday. And it shouldn’t be.
There are Christian aspects of it, and that’s how it got its name (in certain languages anyway). There’s the nativity story and the midnight masses. But that’s about it. And that’s far from all there is to the holiday.
I see people getting all up in arms, that they feel being wished a Merry Christmas somehow excludes them because they are not Christian. Which is fucking stupid. Christmas is not a religious holiday. It’s a holiday of lots of stories and symbols of varying degrees of association to the winter solstice. It’s everything this very awesome Cracked article talks about.
What do we do for Christmas? It varies. I go to the late night Christmas Eve church service, but that’s about the extent of any explicitly Christian activities for the holiday. Other than the Christmas carols whose subject is the nativity, but those are just telling stories, right alongside the other songs telling about glowing fog-light noses or sentient snowmen or a man playing the cello while Sarajevo gets bombed. Other than that, it’s a lot of twinkling lights, fuzzy garland, sparkly pine trees, candy and cookies, and of course gift exchange. Much of it is derived from other religions’ winter solstice traditions, but other than that, there’s nothing Christian or otherwise religious here (well, unless you want there to be, but it’s up to the individual on that one). Some aspects are specific to certain cultures or regions, but as a whole, it’s just a worldwide human thing.
So that’s why I don’t get why people think they’re being excluded. They’re human and part of the world, aren’t they?
Oh, have I run out of Roman alphabet languages already? Er, no, there’s a few more. Next year, next year…
Well, nothing all that unusual about this Christmas. Same stuff. Work early on Christmas Eve, which was cool, not because I had to work but because I actually have a job at Christmas time for the first time in three years. Then cookie baking. Then putting up with family. Then church and Silent Night. Then wrapping presents. Then finally in bed at almost 6am, having been awake nearly 22 hours.
Anyway, it’s Christmas Day. Today is for joy. For love. For peace. For hope. For generosity.
We’re a bunch of assholes to each other much of the year, in many ways. But for this day, let’s just try not to be. Let’s at least be the peace we want the world to be. Let’s put kindness and understanding first. Let’s forgive and be together and be happy. Let’s put aside differences and annoyances. Even if just for this day. So that even when we go back to our normal rotten selves, we’ve at least had a taste of what could be. So we know it’s possible, at least in theory, at least in small doses.
Or, well, that would surely be nice. Anyway, I’m stuck with my family today. Excuse me while I get back into the fray. *cocks shotgun*
Merry Christmas! 
Yay, Christmas songs are fun! 😀
I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day in the morning.
The Virgin Mary and Christ were there
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
The Virgin Mary and Christ were there
On Christmas Day in the mor-
*massive earthquake*
*reality itself seems to split at the seams*
Whoa! What’s happening?
“OVERLOAD! OVERLOAD!”
Huh? What? What’s overloaded?
“THERE IS TOO MUCH SHIT IN THE NATIVITY SCENE!”
There is? How so?
“HOW SO?! THINK ABOUT IT. IT’S FAR BEYOND JUST MARY, JOSEPH, JESUS, AND THE STAR. THERE ARE SHEPHERDS. THERE ARE THREE WISE MEN. THERE ARE A CRAPLOAD OF FARM ANIMALS. THERE’S THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY. AND NOW… FUCKING SHIPS!”
I didn’t write that song. I was just singing it. Besides, what’s wrong with ships?
“THERE ARE NO BODIES OF WATER CLOSE ENOUGH TO BETHLEHEM FOR SHIPS TO MAKE ANY DAMN SENSE!”
What if they’re flying ships?
“WHY THE FUCK WOULD THERE BE FLYING SHIPS? HONESTLY!”
For the same reason there’s a baby born from a virgin impregnated by God, under a conveniently placed star. Why the hell not flying ships?
“ONE SUPERNATURAL THING AT A TIME!”
Speaking of supernatural, what the hell are you supposed to be?
“NEVER YOU MIND.”
How about repairing reality? Whatever you are, you sure pitch a fit when the nativity scene gets out of whack. Wait, does this mean you’re…?
“EVERYTHING NORMAL!”
*reality restores itself*
Huh. That was weird.
One of my favorite pieces of classical music is Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca”. Believe me, you know the piece even if you don’t know the name. Go find it on YouTube, listen to the first three seconds, and be all “oh yeah, this one!”
Told you!
Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes. So, like I said, this has always been one of my favorite classical pieces. Just a few years ago, I finally taught myself to play it on the piano, though not very well. It’s a lot of fast parts and unnatural stretching of the hands for some monstrous chords! But I more or less got it down and have thus achieved a goal I’ve had a long time. Yay!
So how did this piece of music come to my attention? Did I hear it on a classical radio station at a special time that it stuck with me? Did I see or hear someone perform it at an event I attended?
Nope.
It’s one of the background music tracks in Lemmings. 😛
Seriously.
How I found what would become one of my favorites was hearing it repeatedly while trying to steer some adorable little blue-green idiots through a bunch of violent obstacles.
Here, give it a listen. It’s the first level here, Fun 11, and the first level in which it plays.
So, yeah, that’s some serious rocking out there. :cute:
But, no, it’s not weird. This sort of thing is why the music from Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda is so popular and beloved. Because we all spent so much time listening to it while working our way through these games that the sounds grew on us.
And, hey, I got lucky in that the Lemmings background track that caught my attention was one that was already a real piece of music and not one of the created-for-the-game tunes as several of the others are.
On a related note, all the above having taken place like literally 20 years ago, it was only a year and a half ago that I learned that one of the other Lemmings tracks is a modified version of Pachelbel’s Canon.
You know what’s fun about listening to Christmas music? Well, a lot of things.
One thing is that it makes everything you do seem like it’s part of your very own Christmas special. That mundane actions suddenly become festive.
Filing paperwork? Meh. Filing paperwork with “Sleigh Ride” in the background? Festive!
Driving to the grocery store? Meh. Driving to the grocery store with “Jingle Bell Rock” in the background? Festive!
Stuck in traffic while in a hurry? Meh. Stuck in traffic while in a hurry with “Carol of the Bells” in the background? Festive!
Sitting around eating cookies? Delicious. Sitting around eating cookies with “Holly Jolly Christmas” in the background? Still delicious. And festive.
You know what (among a lot of things) has been irritating me about the recent racially-based police violence, with Michael Brown and Eric Garner and others? How politicized it has gotten in ways that it has no business being politicized.
It should be a no-brainer that a police officer shooting an unarmed person is not okay. Even if you could say said officer, at that moment, had reasonable cause to shoot, you’d think there would at least be a little bit of remorse and regret about the incident. That there would be some genuine interest on the part of the police force and other related entities in preventing anything like it from happening again. Even if Michael Brown and Eric Garner were armed and ready to shoot the cops, there should still be at least some degree of regret about the deaths.
But there’s so much digging in of heels about it that everyone forgets to be compassionate humans. And worse it is for some reason divided along party lines. That the left wingers are calling for change in the racially-targeted police violence, while the right wingers fight tooth and nail to insist it’s either justified or not real. And the police forces, rather than apologizing for the incidents and pledging to prevent it in the future with any sincerity, stick by what happened unashamedly, blaming the victims for trying (without a shred of evidence) to take the officer’s gun or for being overweight.
Not to mention the “Support Darren Wilson” assholes. I really don’t know how they sleep at night.
There’s a lot of collateral damage in activism. When making points for change, you need to be careful. Who is getting thrown under the bus in your talking points?
In youth rights, we sometimes make the case, when someone goes on about how “undeveloped” teens’ brains are, that studies have shown that, despite this, teens’ brains function better than those of people over age 60. Which on its face is a good point, showing that we’re not so fussy about this same metric in another context. But I’m generally uncomfortable with it, because a “solution” to the double standard might be then to restrict the rights of the elderly. Though the intention is to expand the rights of young people, the flip side is the point throws the elderly under the bus.
A couple months ago, I saw at an event about climate change a print-out from some old article on Mother Jones. I don’t feel like looking for it, because fuck that article, but basically it was demonstrating how people in wealthier countries use up more resources than those in poorer countries (which is a major “no shit, Sherlock!”). And a lot of its points were basically about keeping the population low, so there’d be fewer people to use up resources and generate greenhouse gases. Points included: praising China’s one-child policy (you know, the one with the forced and sex-selective abortions and infanticide that resulted in a severely skewed gender ratio), implying that countries with the most unrest are in turmoil because such a huge portion of their population are young adults (you know, because young people just do nothing but start wars, right?), and even some completely ridiculous points about how apparently TV families are getting larger (their entire basis was the existence of the Duggars), and a few more that were just rotting my brain cells with each letter.
You know, no matter how much I might support a cause, I just can’t get behind the ridiculous hyperbole and fearmongering and outright lies that a lot of them resort to. Especially when, as said, some of this causes damage to other causes for human rights and whatnot.
And ultimately it’s self-defeating. It’s hard to defend your position on an issue when most of the points and info you’ve been given to use are full of shit. You have to spend so much time weeding out the bullshit to find the one tidbit that’s actually valid. And if most of what there is to defend the cause is so exaggerated, it discredits what’s real.
All of it is to make a serious problem look worse than it actually is. So the organizations and other entities working on it can get more support and funding. Like I mentioned before about how groups talking about child marriage in certain parts of the world are using a rather loose definition of “child marriage” in order to inflate the number of “victims” to make the problem look even worse than it already is.
The groups who do this know they’re doing this and are often proud of it. There’s usually the “yeah, that video is fake and the facts are pulled out of our ass, but it truly really is a serious problem and needs your attention!” They don’t seem to care that all they did was expose themselves as shameless liars.
For God’s sake, these causes and movements are only necessary to fix a problem. They are a huge waste of time in the long run. But these people turn it into a morbid self-promotional tool in and of itself. Where doing good for people comes second to making damn sure you look like you’re doing good for people. 🙄
What’s that sound? Is that Eartha Kitt?
Oh no. Aww, man, I hate this song! 
…
Santa Baby, slip a sable under the tree for me.
I’ve been an awful good girl.
Fur is murder, you know. How good can you be?
Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight.
He’s got a lot of other houses to visit. Settle down.
Santa Baby, a ’54 convertible too, light blue
I’ll wait up for you dear.
I think you’re supposed to be asleep when he visits- ohhhh…
Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight.
You just requested a specific car. Give him a minute!
Think of all the fun I missed
What fun? Did you not go on a roller coaster you wanted to ride?
Think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed.
Whoa! Why would Santa have any problem with you kissing someone? Are you… saving yourself for Santa? 
Next year I’ll be just as good
If you’ll check off my Christmas list.
Wait, seriously, how does having fun or kissing a guy make you not good? That’s not right.
Santa Baby, I want a yacht and really that’s not a lot
You’re getting an inflatable raft and you’re going to like it! 
I’ve been an angel all year.
Somehow I think we have different definitions of “angel”.
Santa Baby, hurry down the chimney tonight.
There are children who might not get a Christmas meal, but yeah, he should rush right out and get you a goddamn boat.
Santa Honey, one thing I really do need… the deed
A deed? To what? A mansion? A fancy car? A fancy resort?
To a platinum mine.
Wha… what? Huh? What?
Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight.
He’ll get to you when he gets to you. Go take a cold shower.
Santa Cutie, fill my stocking with a duplex and checks
Wait, a duplex? As in one of them townhouses with one other house attached? Rather than, say, a mansion. And even so, it needs to be inside the stocking. With checks. What, too good for tens and twenties?
Sign your X on the line
What makes you think Santa is illiterate?
Santa Baby, hurry down the chimney tonight.
Yes, yes, hurry and supply a mediocre house and an unspecified amount of money.
Come and trim my Christmas tree
With some decorations bought at Tiffany’s
Pick up some breakfast while you’re at it.
I really do believe in you
Let’s see if you believe in me.
Giggity?
Santa Baby, forgot to mention one little thing
Uh oh.
A ring
Wait…
I don’t mean on the phone!
I… didn’t think you meant that at all. Are you supposed to be Mrs. Claus then? *facepalm*
Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight!
Yeah… he’ll get right on that…