Whenever I read someone say something is "problematic" all I can think of is a big robot overlord stamping my head with a big red P. "YOU ARE. PROBLEMATIC."
According to wikipedia, he does have an older brother who is a teacher. This is the part of the story that is kind of weird to me. "Oh it's your birthday? I'll take you to a concert where you can meet my brother." SEEMS kind of like something that would be out of line in teacher-world.
When I walk into a room, and see someone sitting on a couch with folded drinking straws crammed in his teeth to prevent damaging grinding and his eyes darting wildly while staring into nothing, and then move into a pacing, obviously agitated phase where they can't settle down for hours, I see a hard drug.
Besides, I've heard the toys themselves kinda suck. Lego has been putting out gender-neutral proto-engineering sets for all kinds of age levels, for decades. I honestly don't think I'd be the person I am today without Legos, and if I have daughters or sons, they are all playing with Legos.
If they had just made this as a standalone cover/parody, and even sold it as such, it would have been a slam dunk fair use. The problem is, they parodied the song for the exact same reason one would license the original song: promotional material. People get confused by the word "use" in fair use. Use isn't necessarily utility but sometimes it is, especially in different licensing agreements. Since the original song wasn't made specifically for promotional material, but could be licensed as such, a parody doesn't change the use of the song in that context.
"If their lives depended on it in a fictional scenario that will never happen"
Except the billions of scenarios every day where food insecurity is a real thing. This is what pisses me off.
I'm saying that certain militant vegans already ARE hypocritical by morally elevating themselves in an objective sense above a huge percentage of the world where considering the existential worth of an animal is simply not comparable to the survival imperative. If someone like Morrissey will not stay in the same room as someone eating meat, he is simply setting himself up for a huge moral crisis when it comes to people who would otherwise starve to death: He, as a wealthy white westerner, is in a position of ethical privilege, the moral objectivity of which is undermined by the very fact that if he did not ever have access to the foods and choices that he does, he would have most likely never bothered with the question. His moral superiority is by virtue of economic superiority. Maybe vegans could theoretically make some kind of case that humans should not consume animals when they have a legitimate alternative that I could find compelling. I also, would of course, never tell a vegan to eat an animal. But veganism is absolutely the product of a society of choice, and choice in many, many cases throughout human history, is a luxury. So when it comes to how a vegan relates their dietary/ethical choices to other people, they would do well to show a little humility and thankfulness that they even have the choice to be a vegan instead of starving in the first place.
Rio isn't really concerned with copyright law as it is, they are more concerned with their ideas on what intellectual property should be, as they see it. I'm a professional photographer, and IP law is what keeps that industry running, as a legitimate way for us to make an honest living. Their main confusion is this notion that IP law somehow makes abstract "ideas" proprietary, which it doesn't. It makes a certain communicable manifestation (a constructed product, a specific design of a product, written words, lines in sequence, music) of ideas proprietary.
"Maybe they develop a loyal fanbase who are willing to purchase their records even though they have access to free copies." Translate that into any other industry, and you see the insanity of it: "Maybe Toyota should convince people to buy their cars out of loyalty as opposed to just stealing cars out of the lot of the dealership."
That's also a spectacular misuse of the word "genocidal." No one is sitting around thinking "VEE MUST EXTERMINATE ZEE COWS!"
Cruelty to animals is vile, but it comes in different degrees. Factory farming is cruelty by way of cold economics, not inflicting pain for pleasure's sake. OBVIOUSLY changes need to be made, but for more reasons than just a cow's existential crisis.
But just to hammer something home: Cow's milk is a legitimate complete protein source. That's a fact. Is it the ultimate food? No, there are drawbacks, and I'll let the internet rage back and forth about them.
My main problem with the argument "no other animal eats a fluid for the young of another species" is not actually an argument against drinking milk. It proves nothing. At all. Horse blood is not "intended" for consumption, but there are animals "intended" to eat horse blood. Impalas are not "intended" to be food, but lions thrive on them.
Am I saying humans are evolutionarily tuned to consume cow milk? Not exactly. There are obvious issues with that concept. But. That doesn't change the fact that dairy products are delicious to a lot of people, and they do provide vital nutrition in cultures/parts of the world that would not otherwise have access to a complete amino acid source in any kind of sustainable way, which is an age old problem. Why do you think people started drinking milk in the first place? It helped keep people alive. So from that perspective, the evolution of husbandry was vital to human evolution, and to try and paint it as poison, or totally "unnatural" is just preposterous.
It would also be particularly survival-threatening to a given individual who got in the way of me and a pint of Phish Food.
A vegan asked me once, while I was drinking something with milk in it, "Don't you think it's fucked up that you're drinking something made for the baby of another species?" and I said "Not when I eat the entire family of that species."
Eat whatever you want, because approaching food ethically is a privilege of western modern society. Put an aggressive vegan in a position of starvation and then they can see how ready they are to pontificate to everyone else.
I like the policy from a purely spiteful standpoint. I know people that absolutely must share every single thing they do on social media, to the point of making other people in their lives feel weird. I'm also a photographer as my job, so I look at the times where I can put my camera(s) down and just enjoy what's in front of me as treasured opportunities.
Oh, yeah, that fight lasted for years. That was one of those cases where Ted Kennedy let his rich-kidness hang out for all to see. It was preposterous.
I have a lot of pretty hard-right friends, and it's really interesting to see them get worked up about something that should be completely void of any political ideology. (Getting worked up in a funny way isn't exclusive to the hard right, I have some leftist friends that are just as funny to me) ANYWAY, I asked someone why they thought clean, sustainable energy was such an outrageous thing, and he stuttered and stammered something about "giving control" of our energy to "them" and I got wicked freaked out that he doesn't realize he has absolutely zero energy independence, and so much of some of our ideas are shaped out of a response to "them," however anyone defines that.
Now let's watch Al Green on Soul Train.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCXEtvbJkkY
It drives me particularly crazy when I read about some guy who buys a household wind turbine, and ends up putting power back onto the grid. Like, that dude bought one thing that makes more energy than he can use. I mean, go that guy, I'm not mad at him, I just don't really understand why that isn't at least WAY more prevalent than it is.
My girlfriend made me some turkey chili and a loaf of cornbread, I'm going to lunch the hell out of that. So, unless you want to come over, find some of that.
I think we should petition that the next episode of Goop is Gwenyth trying to gut and clean a deer, by herself, with printed instructions from the internet. Just imagine the crying-face.
So here's a story. I searched "giant water bug" and there was a video link about water bugs killing fish, so I clicked on it, and it didn't work. There was a comment from someone that just said "i wanted to see a bug kill a fish but the video didn't work, i hope the rest of my day goes better." I followed the link to his profile where he had a status that read "i want to take the time to say thanks to the pussy tommy triplett for showing me my wife is a whore, sorry I busted your pussy head open with a pipe wrench."
So. Bugs. It's fine.
The real question should be "If a girl is drunk, is it weird to offer pre-emptive Tums BEFORE you both eat a couple ballast slices of pizza at the end of the night so you can sober up and pizza is so good but oof heartburn. #tropicaltums, #wheredyougethatslice
Fair point, but I don't mean have them move there, I mean fly over the slums of Monrovia and just drop them in from a helicopter, with no possessions or access to their money. Just helmet cams and jeans. Maybe a granola bar. They have to share it.
This show is only half of the equation of the best possible show: The Rich Kids of Beverly Hills Get Dropped in Liberia And Just Have To Figure It Out For Themselves Wearing Helmet Cams.
You can leave my Emmy's next to the pile of flowers from all the fans.
About a year ago, I had a really complicated, heartbreaking rupture in a relationship that was really important to me, and it ended in a nightmare of accusations, misunderstandings, exploitations of known soft-spots, and basically two people finally seeing the reality of the situation we were in, catalyzed by one very shitty night.
The next morning, I woke up, sat outside, had a cigarette and listened to It's Different for Girls by Joe Jackson, and I think I even wore sun glasses (I never wear sunglasses, I don't even know where I would have gotten them, but give me a break.)
Not that any of that happened with Gabe. I think we all saw him off on good terms, not because we found him making out with some random person from the karaoke bar while you were just trying to get to your car so you could avoid seeing the body language between those two, but they somehow ended up in your path anyway and OH MY GOD.
A year later, life is great, and Kelly is great, so, onward and e-ward.
I love how she justifies honesty as simply "owning your emotions" and not a matter of being a responsible and accountable member of society, a friend community or a family. The Goop Guide To Ethics (Goopics)
That's not the point I'm trying to make. Point it out. Take away her publicity and the monetary privilege that she's clearly abused, examine the damage that she's done both as a public figure, and as a private person. However, at some point, realize that the total vilification of someone, while it may offer some satisfaction to one's own personal offense, can and does cross over into an area that no longer effectively remedies the problem that she's guilty of in the first place, and that's when it becomes self-serving and counterproductive. Racism is a human problem and error that happens in humans with the same make-up as everyone else, unless we want to suggest that Paula Deen is a clinical psychopath. To behave in such a way that says "They made a mistake that I do not make and that establishes some kind of unbridgeable gap between us." is regressive and counterproductive. I mean, not to get all ultra-heavy, but this is a sad thing that's happened, and let's at least be aware that there's such a thing as too-much-fun by way of righteous indignation in the very delicate dialogue that all complicated problems need.
I may be nitpicking, but to say "Let's kick her while she's down," (which is a colloquialism, sure) is to definitely invoke an A-OK to break the normal rules of civility.
I'm not arguing against pointing it out, discussing it, being upset, calling it for the problem that it is, or in any way advocating downplaying the problem.
I'm saying, we have to be careful to not indulge the instinct to prop someone up as some kind of distinct other, wide open to whatever we want to do with them. Casual racism is a far more complex problem than someone making a purely malicious decision, although that can still happen within those confides, it's not an automatic result. We can still treat that as a legitimate toxin of society from a moral stance, and thus it should make you upset. But in how we go about handling the problem, we have to make sure we aren't turning "this makes my blood boil" into the motivating moral axiom, because that opens the door for revenge and gratuitous punishment, which is fine if we just want to feel better about it by tearing someone's face off, but that's not going to fix the problem of what's going on inside someone's head from the racist's point of view.
I know this has been touched on in different circles, but I do take issue with justifying kicking someone while they are down. Paula Deen OBVIOUSLY has misguided views on race that has manifested in malignant ways, and that's not defensible. She's also gone on to show us that she isn't a mastermind of, well, anything. She's a bumbling, tone deaf white lady, and I'm sure she's still a little confounded as to how she got to where she is today.
The thing is, I think some people want her to be David Duke in oven mitts. There's a gross triumphalism going on here. Like "HEY LOOK! WE FOUND ONE HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT!" I think there's enough of a lack of coherency to Paula Deen for her to not be a continuing legitimate danger, and I don't know how much more of an example we can make of her before we just turn it into sport.
There is a very large danger in going from combatting racism as a moral imperative to just reducing it to a taboo, because taboo just introduces a new power structure based on public consequence vs private virtue as a transformative agent. As in, don't be racist or Gabe will rake you over the coals as opposed to don't be racist because it hurts others and limits your own experience. Consequences are involved with that, but let's make sure we don't make the doling out of consequences (which is a result of tragedy, and thus part of the tragedy) a job that we do just to make us feel good.
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