The Pecksniff/Grinches are busy ruining Christmas by minutely scrutinizing every favorite Christmas movie or song for signs of moral failure. Gone is the song “Baby, it’s cold outside” (sexual predation), and with it now goes the movie Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer—at least according to the HuffPo (“All the News that’s Fit to Pecksniff”) video below (click on screenshot to go there):
Here are some of the ideological crimes committed by the movie (and I’m not kidding you, nor are they!):
Child abuse:
Bullying!
Bigotry!
Marginalization!
Sexism!
And, HuffPo’s ultimate take:
This would seem like a parody of “Social Justice Warriorism” if it weren’t serious. But it is serious.
These are not college students who have yet to mature; these are graduates who publish a widely-read website. So don’t suggest that some day these people will grow out of this: it’s simply too late. They are grown, except emotionally.
In what way will this Pecksniffery help our world? Will we all realize that Rudolph is a parable of bigotry and abuse, and become more woke? I doubt it. The world these people want to create is Orwellian, and the Pecksniffs are creating it not by helping people, but by petty tests of ideological purity.
Enjoy your holiday, including watching Rudolph. And god help us, every one!
UPDATE: Reader Pliny the in Between has contributed this cartoon:
Hey, the coach and Santa are assholes, and I don’t mind it being pointed out.
Exactly. I caught on to all that the first time I saw this story.
I agree here. The show works just fine, even so. Assholes are real thing in the world, and it’s inspiring to see Rudolph thrive in a world full of assholes. But it’s OK to tell you kid, “Don’t be an asshole like the coach”.
Indeed. Are movies not to have villains anymore?
Ah, for the good old times when kids ran around in the wood with their friends and sometimes got hurt but figured out things for themselves! Parental over-supervision has created a generation of whinny, overly sensitive grownup babies.
Ha! Did you mean whiney? But whinny is good, in this context.
I agree with everything except the adjective ‘grownup’. I’d agree with that too so long as it’s understood to be chronological, not emotional. 😉
cr
This is so true. Parents and teachers step in at the first hint of squabbles between children to prevent ‘bullying’. But (within reasonable limits of course), this is part of socialization learning.
Children learn the skills of getting along, including not being an a-hole (because then everyone hates you) as well as the value of learning to cooperate with others. They learn that some anti-social or selfish behavior makes them unpopular.
“Do your own thing” sounds great, but in the real world, it has become the foundation for some of the immature idiocy we see around us–people wanting to behave however they damn well please, yet still demanding that everyone else love and respect them.
Kind of looks like a joke but then everything at HUFFPO is a joke.
“The world these people want to create is Orwellian, and the Pecksniffs are creating it not by helping people, but by petty tests of ideological purity.”
Very true. And they know no indulgence with any moral ” fault” they have identified, not even at Christmas time.
Huffpo always drips with sanctimony but I have to say that I’ve never liked the theme of that damn song.
http://farcornercafe.blogspot.com/2017/12/news-of-world.html
😃😃😃
Typical half-empty perspective. Instead of the lesson that everyone has something to contribute, they see this.
I gotta say I don’t begrudge the SJWs ‘Baby it’s cold outside’. They’ve got a point, that song ranges from obnoxious to outright rapey.
Aw, get your mind outta the Rohypnol. 🙂
I suggest you go post on Everyday Feminism, where Pecksniffery is the daily theme.
You can’t imagine that two people are in love and flirting with the idea of having sex?
He didn’t first ask her if he can flirt, so she hasn’t consented to flirting. It’s flirtual assault.
As was pointed out in an earlier post, the ‘she hasn’t consented’ assumes they are strangers. But this assumption is unwarranted. The song works just as well as reparte between current lovers. Given the time when it was written, that’s frankly even more salacious.
I was joking. I thought “flirtual assault” would make that obvious, but I guess one can never know when someone is being sarcastic about stuff like this anymore 😀
No, it’s the normal playful banter of seduction.
To adapt an old saying: Against stupidity like this, even Ceiling Cat contends in vain.
All Huffington’s strictures are perfectly true, of course, but my children knew that years ago, approximately when they stopped being charmed by 1st-generation stop-motion animation. The article is devoid of actual information. Anyone who would agree knows it already… Well, it might sway a few nine-year-olds, but do they read HP?
By the way, isn’t everyone involved in this long-ago production retired or dead?
Oh deer! What a petty caribou-boo hath Huffpo wrought.
Isn’t there an actual message in the Rudolph story.
Rudolph shows them all that their prejudices were wrong by doing good despite them.
Lessons learned.
It’s a story, like many others.
I don’t know much about the “Baby it’s cold …” song, but isn’t it a dance too.
A stylized interplay between a man and a woman.
Some of the inter-play going on in some dances is pretty sexual.
Yes, little if any of what they describe is presented as a good thing. Rudolph’s travails make him a sympathetic character.
As for Cold Outside, “interplay” is a great description (with the possible exception of when she questions how strong her drink is).
” “interplay” is a great description (with the possible exception of when she questions how strong her drink is).”
The question about the drink is just another in a long line of feigned excuses. Just as with every other excuse she offers, it’s clear she doesn’t really mean it. Plus, she just asked for another drink, so saying “say, what’s in this drink” isn’t exactly a serious question.
Yeah, maybe I’m late to the game here but I thought that the whole point of the story was to teach kids NOT to be mean to others who are different, and in the end all the other reindeer and elves learn they were wrong and welcome the “misfits”. Huffpo seems unable to recognize this rather obvious (to anyone of at least five years of age up) moral of the story. I’m not surprised though. I just recently read a story, maybe in the Guardian, about how Paw Patrol and Thomas the Tank Enginge perpetrated the racist, colonialist patriarchy. I can’t help but to quote what is almost certainly another racist, sexist, patriarchal movie…
“I knew it, I’m surrounded by assholes!”
IMO, Mister Orwell would be aghast that his name would be used as a connotation for something that he abhorred.
I think he would understand that it is a compliment to his powers of invention in creating a plausible and unforgettable authoritarian nightmare.
cr
We’ll agree to disagree, and not knowing the man personally, maybe he would have been tckled by the irony.
Hopefully so. The writer of Animal Farm and the creator of the memorable phrase ‘but some are more equal than others’ surely had a strong sense of irony.
cr
Reblogged this on The Logical Place and commented:
Believe it or not, this video is serious – not satire.
I don’t think it is serious, but even if it were, it is a story about ostracism and overcoming it, In such a story you are bound to find prejudice and ‘villain, that is what the story is about!
I am sure it is serious. HuffPo doesn’t make fun of this kind of “social justice”.
Well, it would fit “The Onion”, maybe I’ve been reading too much on the latter site.
How could Huffpo have overlooked the White Privilege underlying the Bing Crosby Christmas favorite “I’m Dreaming of a —– Christmas”? Oh, wait, University College London beat them to it.
I’m confused by all the people saying that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is somehow “rapey.” It could be seen that way, if only it wasn’t for the woman’s half of the dialogue. The conversation in the song is obviously between two people who want to be together, but the woman is worried about the social consequences of staying. Eventually, she decides “to hell with what everyone will think” (her last few words of “baby it’s cold” imply that she’s landed on her excuse for remaining) and we have a happy ending!
Aren’t approximately half the songs in pop music about opposite sexes getting together (or sometimes failing to?)
That description of ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ reminds me strongly of
We’ve Got Tonight
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3BuITOx3Cs – an ode to a one-night stand if ever there was one
I’m reliably informed that rap music is similar in this respect – if so then it’s not entirely without redeeming literary merit.
cr
I tried presenting that case on a feminist site once, which would make the song a bit edgy but benign. The feminists kicked it around for a bit before deciding that I was wrong.
On the page, the lyrics can seem a bit coercive (bordering on false imprisonment), but the way it’s sung by the masters — as it is here by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan — it’s a tune of playful seduction. (Though pity the poor woman the chilly walk of shame on the morrow morning. 🙂 )
Anyway, I don’t know how people can get upset about this tune when so many misconstrued The Police’s ultimate stalker song, “Every Breath You Take,” to be a love anthem.
Time to throw out all of those Bible parables, no?
Wow…
Soon they’ll be condemning song lyrics like “she was just seventeen, and you know what I mean”, or even this Chuck Berry classic:
Help me, information, more than that I cannot add
Only that I miss her and all the fun we had
But we were pulled apart because her mom did not agree
And tore apart our happy home in Memphis Tennessee
Last time I saw Marie she’s waving me good-bye
With hurry home drops on her cheek that trickled from her eye
Marie is only six years old, information please
Try to put me through to her in Memphis Tennessee
I dunno, Ol’ Chuck might not be the best example to go with, since he did a three-year bid on a violation of the Mann Act, for transporting a 14-year-old across state lines for immoral purposes. Might wanna leave Jerry Lee & his cousin Myra outta that mix too. 🙂
Errm, re ‘Memphis’, from Wikipedia:
The narrator offers little information to the operator at first, only that he misses Marie and that they were separated by Marie’s mother. The final verse reveals that Marie is, in fact, the narrator’s six-year-old daughter; her mother, presumably the narrator’s ex-wife, left their home and took Marie with her.
– why, what relation did anyone think he had with Marie?
I’m sure everyone in the world at the time instantly got the point of the ‘reveal’ at the end. Only in these current paranoid/prejudicial/censorious times would anyone get it wrong.
But, on your other point, half the songs in the world are to do with l*ve or s*x so ‘they’ have an inexhaustible stockpile of material to be outraged about.
Let me contribute a few off the top of my head:
We’ve got Tonight I already mentioned
Girl, You’ll be a woman soon
Soon, you’ll need a man
– Neil Diamond, and howcome the offence peddlers haven’t gone stratospheric over that second line I have no idea
Summer Wine – Nancy & Lee
Tonight’s the Night – Rod Stewart
(almost anything by Rod Stewart in fact)
Young Lust – Pink Floyd
Everything will be all right tonight – Bowie & Turner
Shame on the Moon – Bob Seger
Wherever I Lay my Hat, That’s my Home – Paul Young
Another Night – Hollies
I’m on Fire – Bruce Springsteen
How’m I doin? (That was a question, not a song title 😉
cr
I’m a big Chuck Berry fan, but when it comes to “Memphis,” I’m partial to the cover done by Johnny Rivers.
The more we talk about this, the clearer the parallels between 80s religious conservatives and regressives become. They hate the same things for almost the same reasons, and they want to shut it all down.
We managed to rip significant influence from the former group, but they’ve just been supplanted by new pecksniffs with righteous rage and far more social cachet.
Absolutely agreed. It’s the exact same authoritarian/puritan personality type, whether they’re peddling ‘morals’ or ‘social justice’.
The thought of people just doing whatever they want to do, with no controls or authorisation, is anathema to them.
cr
They did more than just parallel each other. The religious right and the first batch of anti-sex feminists actually came together as strange bedfellows to support the censorship crusade of the Meese Commission (named eponymously for Ronald Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese).
Good point. This also brings to mind the PMRC. I’m still in love with Frank Zappa’s speech to the committee.
Wait until they find the music video for Bowie and Jagger’s Dancin in the Streets. They’ll be horrified at the artists doing gayface!
They were pretending to be gay in that video, right?
…right?
Well, one of them was.
cr
(How’s that for an enigmatic reply? 😉
Neither of them were. Bowie said in 1993 that he was “always a closet heterosexual.” The joke is that, if you go back and watch that video, it’s so absurdly campy that it’s unintentionally feels like it’s about a love between two gay rockers, even though that was not at all intended 🙂
“Neither of them were.”
Were which? Gay, or pretending?
See, I said that was enigmatic 😉
Bowie certainly was… enigmatic.
cr
Oh, hell, Bowie had gone butch by then, at least compared to his early days as a Space Oddity.
It wasn’t about either of the rockers’ looks. Perhaps this Family Guy clip can elaborate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRBsJmLveKQ
It doesn’t matter that they’re both straight because the video is just…so…gay! And that’s not what they intended! It was just the aesthetic of 80’s music taken to its logical endpoint.
I saw that at the time. What struck me was not the gay-ness, but the sheer exuberant fun they seemed to be having, camping it up and upstaging each other. People talk of ‘energy’ but boy, I know of no other video that can approach that one.
cr
1) The does save the bucks from the Abomidable’s cave;
2) Being a misfit and ‘in-DEE-pen-dant’ is celebrated;
3) The conformity and peer pressure is a necessary backdrop to achieve #2;
4) Materialism is emphatically rejected in the lovely song, “Silver and Gold’;
5) The Island of Misfit Toys is the epitome of of Tumblr Intersectionality;
6) Charlie-in-the-Box is gay. Hermie is gay. All the elves are completely gay;
7) The Abominable is converted into an ally who shuts up and listens;
8) Mrs. Santa is a BBW.
WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?!!
You’ve got it exactly bass-ackwards.
The more ‘good’* things there are about it, the more they can demonstrate their zeal and virtue by finding things wrong with it.
cr
*’good’, of course, in relation to the approved SJW orthodoxy.