Bride of Satan?

English is not my mother tongue, but I like to think of myself as rather proficient in it.  I don't mean to brag, I just think that it would be a fair assessment to say that I have a good grasp of the English language.  I have extra reason to be proud of my ESL skills today because it turns out I am much better at it than large numbers of my English speaking peers.

As I discussed in my previous post, the South African Council of Churches tried to prevent Lady Gaga from performing in South Africa.  The following message was spread by many concerned Christians via social media:

“Lady Gaga! Real name Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.  She sold her soul to the devil for fame and fortune, suddenly having 8 million followers on Twitter, top selling artist and the top winner at the Grammys. This is clearly the devil at work!

Fellow believers in Christ Jesus, you may or may not know the seriousness of what I am saying now. We need to stand firm against the Lady Gaga concert. She is a self-confessed Satanist and the bride of Satan. Letting her into SA will bring spells of evil.”

For the moment, lets ignore the fact that we have people talking about "spells of evil" in the year 2012.  Instead I would like to draw your attention to the second last claim about her being a "self-confessed Satanist and the bride of Satan".  This very quickly became a meme amongst Christians opposing Lady Gaga.  Anytime an article about her was posted online, dozens of comments calling her a "self-confessed bride of satan" would suddenly show up.  For some, that claim wasn't enough going on to say things like:

"O and she not only confessed to be satans bride, she also said she is his nr 1 bride. If she isn hiding it I wonder why satans children are teying to hide it? Doesnt make any sense? Anyways deceit should be the order of the day when it comes to satan and his kingdom so maybe it makes perfect sense. What ever, not interested."  *

See, she's didn't only confess to being Satan's bride, she claims to be his Number One Bride.  That seemed like an odd thing to me since I consider myself pretty clued up on Gaga-facts and have never heard her confessing anything of the sort.  Heck, even Lady Gaga herself was kind of surprised by it.  So I decided to fact check this claim.  I figured it was probably something being taken out of context, seeing as how the good folks concerned with demonic influences in music tend to overlook things like subtlety, nuance, context, humour and theatricality.

This guy knows what I'm talking about!

So after an exhaustive search of the internet I found ... nothing.  Nothing at all.  This claim is not based on anything Lady Gaga said at any time.  Turns out this is one of those self sufficient internet rumours that people believe is true because other people are saying it's true.  The only places you will find Lady Gaga being a self-confessed bride of Satan (or number one bride) is in claims by concerned Christians that she is a self-confessed bride of Satan. 

Still, I was curious about where it all started.  Sure, absurd claims can live on the internet indefinitely, sheltered away from reality  for as long as the gullible can keep regurgitating and swallowing the same stupid claim.  However they have to come from somewhere originally and since it didn't come from anything Lady Gaga said, the question remained - where is this coming from?  Well according to Google Trends, this claim appeared only twice, right now and early 2011.  As near as I can tell, the source for this traces back to an anonymous email that was widely circulated at the time.  Here it is exactly as it showed up in my inbox back then (minus the random fonts and colours of course):

***

"The Song “Alejandro” by Lady Gaga.

Very subtly the devil sneaks into our lives to steal and destroy souls!

We don’t even realise that just by singing the lyrics of a seemingly ‘innocent’ song with a nice tune, we open the door wider for his evil spirit!!

‘Alejandro’ means: man’s defender and protector’ (GOD).
‘Fernando’ means: ardent for peace (JESUS).
‘Roberto’ means: bright or shiningly framed (HOLY SPIRIT).
‘Babe’ is the same as ‘child’

Now the lyrics again:

“Don’t call my name; don’t call my name, Alejandro(GOD).I’m not your child, i’m not your child, Fernando (JESUS). Don’t call my name; don’t call my name, Roberto (HOLY SPIRIT) Alejandro; Alejandro (GOD), Just let me go.”

People, please stop listening to Lady Gaga! Real name Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. She sold her soul to the devil for fame and fortune, suddenly having 8 million followers on Twitter; top selling artist, and the top winner at the Grammys. This is clearly the devil at work!


 

Remember the images with her inside the egg carried on a cross? Hatching from an egg signifies the cold blooded rebirth. Implanted horns on her shoulders and cheek bone indicating the transformed BRIDE OF SATAN!

(Save a soul and pass this on)
I received it, and I’ve passed it on. The blood is off my shoulder…

SHARE PLEASE !"

***

   
That may be the most tortured exegesis I've ever seen.  So you take half the lyrics, translate the names then do a double logic backflip to somehow relate those names to the Trinity and then a song about a girl saying goodbye to her latin lovers becomes a confession of satanism.  Excuse my while I slam my head against the desk for a bit.

...

By this logic you can take the statement "I like apples" and turn it into an endorsement of witch burning.  Apples come from trees, trees are made of wood, we use wood for fires, fires were used to to burn witches THEREFORE when someone says "I like apples" they OBVIOUSLY really mean they enjoy seeing women burn at the stake.  Right?  Or maybe this kind of tortured analysis is bullshit and maybe things just mean what they appear to mean.

See this is the bit that makes me feel pretty good about my English Language reading comprehension skills.  I know what "self-confessed" means.  Pity though that none of the people passing on this rumor has the foggiest idea.  See, self-confessed means someone actually explicitly admitted to something.  For instance my blogging friend Ali is a self-confessed vegan as well as a self-confessed fan of Cabin Pressure.  I would also be within my rights to call my blogging friend Dasia a self-confessed fan of roller derby and Benedict Cumberbatch.  I know I am correct in saying this because if you were to go to their blogs you would find them admitting those very things!  I didn't have to analyze or infer or deduce much of anything, they flat out stated it.  On the other hand if I called them "self-confessed Olympic gold medalist transvestites"** that would be wrong because a) that is factually incorrect and b) they never said anything remotely like that!!!

Seriously people, I know the English language can be tricky at times, what with flammable and inflammable meaning the same thing and all, but come on!  Self-confessed is not a hard word or concept!  It pretty much means exactly what it says!  Surely the idea of things meaning what they appear to mean has not lost all meaning yet?  Words mean things.  They mean specific things.  They can't just mean whatever you'd like them to mean instead of what they actually mean.  Am I alone here?  Is everyone else taking crazy pills?!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*This person is on my friends list so I happen to know that, contrary to his claims of not being interested, he would pounce on every possible opportunity to post this on any thread related to Gaga.  Repeatedly.
**Dear Ali and Dasia, if this accidentally becomes a meme I am really really sorry!

The Grammar Nazi Gene

I've been reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and while some of the references in it may be a little dated, it is still a great and interesting read.  Every chapter is like:

I never quite realized just how amazing genes are!  They control so much!  I guess I've always been a little anthropocentric in my thinking because as humans we can do things because we learned to do them.  In many cases though, learning had nothing to do with it, it was just the genes telling the organism what to do.  One example he gives is the gene for hygienic behavior in bees.  When larvae gets infected with disease some bees will open the nests and throw the diseased larvae out of the hive thereby keeping the whole hive safe from infection.  Not all bees have this gene though.  The fascinating thing (for me anyway) is that experiments showed that this behavior was not due to one gene sequence but two - one for opening infected nests and one for throwing out sick larvae.  If a bee only has the one they will either just open nests and do nothing or do nothing until someone else opens a nest.  So a hygienic bee is a bee with both the genes.  Nature, it's pretty amazing right?

So that got me thinking.  How much of my behavior comes from my genes?  Certainly not all, maybe not most but surely some, right?  I'm really wondering about that because someone put this sign up in my neighbourhood and it is driving me NUTS!

Honey bee's what?  You move Wendy's what?  What?!  WHAT?!?!

Why do people who can't use apostrophes upset me so?  Is there a grammar nazi gene?  Do I have it?  Because it would explain a lot!  I shouldn't care about spelling errors on home made posters but I do!  So much!!  English isn't even my first language but when I see English language spelling and grammar mistakes I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to correct it.  It feels like I'm itching on the inside and the only way I can scratch it is by fixing the mistake! Could it be because both my parents were teachers?  Did they pass on the gene that gives me the urge to whip out a red pen and fix spelling mistakes?  Could such a gene sequence really have evolved?  The other day I was at the hospital and the trilingual sign they had up had a translation error in the Afrikaans part.  It took every bit of self control I had not to get a pen and fix it, even if it meant irking the very people in charge of strapping me into things and sticking needles into me!

I think I have a problem.

You know what?  No.  I'm not the one with the problem!  People who can't use apostrophes, they're the ones with the problem!!

Eat Some Bugs. Naturally.

I sometimes worry that my rants against lazy language are unnecessary and a little silly.  What's the harm, right?  But then something happens that totally vindicates my stance on the matter and I am once again motivated to be pedantic on the internet!

See if we get lazy with our language, if we get too reliant on those little mental shortcuts we love so much, bad things happen!  We get exploited!  We are deceived!  We eat bugs!

Does this taste buggy to you?

Yeah that's right, I said bugs.  See, recently people were shocked and outraged to find out that the secret ingredient in Starbucks' Strawberries & Creme Frappuccino, Strawberry Banana Smoothie, raspberry swirl cake, birthday cake pop, mini donut with pink icing and red velvet whoopee pie was: insects.  They used crushed cochineal insects to give their strawberry products a nice pink colour.  Naturally once this got out, vegans and vegetarians were upset that their soy frappuccinos had animal products in them, Jews and Muslims were upset that their food wasn't Kosher/Halaal and basically everyone was a little grossed out by the whole thing.  So once the story broke, petitions were signed and Starbucks have now found a vegetable alternative to the beetlejuice. 

So why use the bugs?  Well it doesn't say but I couldn't help but notice that the people at Starbucks kept pointing out how these bugs were a natural food colouring.  Obviously just adding actual strawberries didn't give the food a pink that really popped so they needed something to colour it with.  Obviously they couldn't just add artificial colouring because artificial is baaaaaaad.  So they had to use something natural.  Therefore bugs.  Bugs are 100% natural.

See marketers are prohibited by law to straight up lie to us but that doesn't mean that they're not messing with us.  Turns out you can be fooled by someone telling you the truth.  But I don't blame the marketers.  We are to blame.  We are the ones who got lazy, we're the ones who chose short, easy answers over the whole, often complicated, truth.

Fat free tea.  Just because it's technically true doesn't mean they're not fucking with you.

Until we move past the stupid, simplistic notion that Natural = Good and Artificial = Bad, we will continually end up in ridiculous situations like this.  Natural is not the same as good.  Arsenic is natural.  Hemlock is natural.  Snake, spider, scorpion and blowfish poisons are all natural.  Natural can be really really bad!  On the other hand, houses are artificial (they don't grow on trees after all!) and so are the clothes we wear, the glasses that restore our sight as well as plenty of other good and necessary things.  Just because something is artificially manufactured doesn't automatically make it bad for you!  Saying something like "this product is all natural, it's not full of chemicals" is a completely meaningless sentence.  Like I said, "natural" doesn't necessarily make it good and also EVERYTHING IS MADE OF CHEMICALS!!! 

Impossible

 If we are Facebook friends and you posted something along the lines of "Just believe in yourself, nothing is impossible!" at some point then you probably don't like me that much anymore.  Sure, right at the start when I replied "Believe all you want, impossible things are impossible" you were probably still high enough on positive thinking to to playfully challenge me to name something impossible.  See that was your biggest mistake.  I am an angry zen master and I take challenges like that pretty seriously as you no doubt figured out by the third page of my subsequently posted list of absolutely impossible things.

Look, I get that it was a pretty douche-y thing for me to do and I understand why you don't want to talk to me anymore.  I would apologize if I thought I could mean it at all.  Thing is I'm not sorry.  I wasn't sorry the first time it happened, I wasn't sorry the subsequent times it happened and smart money is on me never being sorry for any of it, ever.  Can't help it, this just brings out the worst in me.  For some people it's neglecting to use apostrophes or using "ironic" incorrectly, for others it's pronouncing "espresso" as "expresso".  For me - unfortunately for our damaged friendship - it's people saying "nothing is impossible".

Now I'm not going to go off on one of my fun rants about how pointless and destructive positive thinking (or its retarded cousin The Secret) is.  I think I've done enough of that.  Positive thinking has led to an epidemic of narcissism and entitlement.  We have an entire industry built around the fact that people believe they can do anything they set their mind to, no matter how untalented they may in fact be.  Not trying to be alarmist but all this endless self affirmation will destroy us all.  Seriously, when you start talking about how just by believing hard enough you can achieve the impossible, this is what you look like to me:

Yes, that is you, believing in yourself and looking like an idiot because of it!  Deeeeep breath.  Sorry, I got sidetracked there for a moment and started ranting again.  Said I wasn't going to do that, didn't I?  Right so all I really wanted to say that it's not so much the positive thinking bullshit that made go off on your Facebook status.  Sure, I despise it (as my brighter readers may have been able to deduce by now) but that wasn't it.  It was the fact that you said something really stupid when you said the impossible was possible.  Look, that simply isn't true!  If you can do it then it was never impossible!  It's a bit like that cheesy line from Roadhouse when Swayze says "Pain don't hurt".  Because, well actually, yes it does!  That's why we call it "pain".  If pain doesn't hurt then what do you call something that hurts?  Gah!  Sorry, that's a completely different rant!  Where was I?  Oh, right.  Impossible means something that cannot happen or cannot be done.  It does not mean something that is hard or improbable or slightly tricky to master.  Impossible means impossible.  If we don't use words right then we may as well just start inventing new words all the time and language would cease to mean anything and CIVILIZATION ITSELF WILL END!  Is that what you want?  Is it??

Yeah, didn't think so!  Getting a job, riding your bike to work, losing that extra weight, finding a parking space in the mall - none of these things are impossible.  Building a condo on the sun, running faster than the speed of light or literally consuming your own bodyweight in cheesecake - these things are actually impossible.  Which is why you can't do them.  Because they are impossible!  And that's what the word means!

In closing, here is a little poem I first heard on The Benny Hill show a long time ago that have always helped me to understand the distinction.  Perhaps it will help you out too! 

THEY SAID IT COULDN'T BE DONE
by
Benny Hill


They said that it could not be done,
He said "Just let me try."
They said, "Other men have tried and failed,"
He answered, "But not I."
They said, "It is impossible,"
He said, "There's no such word."
He closed his mind, he closed his heart...
To everything he heard.

He said, "Within the heart of man,
There is a tiny seed.
It grows until it blossoms,
It's called the will to succeed.
Its roots are strength, its stem is hope,
Its petals inspiration,
Its thorns protect its strong green leaves,
With grim determination.

"Its stamens are its skills
Which help to shape each plan,
For there's nothing in the universe
Beyond the scope of man."
They thought that it could not be done,
Some even said they knew it,
But he faced up to what could not be done...
And he couldn't bloody do it!

Excerpt

Us, Them, Here & Not Here - A Language Lesson

If the apocalyptic topic of the previous post was something you are interested in at all, then you really should do yourself a giant favour and check out The Slacktivist's weekly dissection of the Left Behind series.  Its a lot of fun and you will learn a lot about Evangelical End Time beliefs and Evangelical beliefs in general.  One post in particular has always stuck with me.  Without being hyperbolic it's hands down one of the best blog posts I have ever read on any topic.  In it he talks about the weird idea some Christians seem to have that all non-Christian people are basically exactly the same.  While he only discusses a very specific topic here I think this is actually applicable to many instances of groupthink, whether it be religious, cultural or racial.  I strongly recommend you click on the link below and go read the entire post:

TF: Not Xianity

Tribulation Force, pp. 274-277

"Well here I am and there you are. Since you're not here, you must be elsewhere.

This kind of basic binary distinction is a necessary and useful tool for making sense of the world. We need words to mean things, meaning we need them not to mean everything else too. So if you're not here, you must be elsewhere because this is what "elsewhere" means. (It's also, in a way, what "here" means, i.e., not elsewhere.)

But while such necessary distinctions can be useful, they can also produce confusion if we forget the rather important ways in which the categories they create are different. "Here" is singular and particular while "elsewhere" is vast and diverse. (You're all, plural, reading this elsewhere, but I shouldn't assume that means you're all crowding around a single monitor somewhere.) "X" marks the spot, a single spot, but "Not X" marks everything else. "Not X" is the rest of the universe.

Of course. No duh. Why, you may be wondering, am I wasting our time with such an elementary and obvious discussion? Who could possibly be confused about something so simple?

Who else? Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. And any of their readers and fans who manage to get through this next section of Tribulation Force without laughing hysterically at the crazed absurdity of it.

This weirdly laughable confusion is the premise of this section and of much that follows it. LaHaye seems to believe that "elsewhere" is a single location. He believes that "Not X" marks the spot. He believes, specifically, that all of those left behind — every believer and non-believer who subscribes to anything other than his very specific variety of real, true Christianity — believes one thing and the same thing. All of them. All of us. Christopher Hitchens and Muqtada al-Sadr and you and me and the Dalai Lama — we all believe Not X and so, to LaHaye, we are all the same and must agree wholly on every other point.

This singular uniformity of Not X is essential to the plot of LaHaye's story because it is essential to the fulfillment of his supposed prophecy. If his prophecy is true, then we must all be identical and uniform.

That also means, of course, that if we are not all identical, then LaHaye's prophecies as described in these books cannot be true. That makes this a rather important section of these books, a passage that provides the opportunity to disprove LaHaye's claims without having to wade into the deep weeds of the Bible's apocalyptic imagery. We don't need to become experts on Daniel and Revelation to demonstrate that Tim LaHaye's reading of them is bogus. All we need to do is to show that, for example, Tom Cruise and Richard Dawkins don't share a uniform belief system."

Lazy Language

For sale here

I’m trying to make healthier eating choices lately and since I’m going off meds for a month starting today, I need to make healthier choices than ever.  It’s not easy though, I like good food.  On the one hand both my father and paternal grandfather died of heart attacks but on the other hand I don’t want to live in a world without delicious bacon!  So I’m trying to find a good balance between eating well and eating healthy only to find that the marketing department of every food manufacturer is trying to make that as hard as possible.  Worst part is that they are using my own laziness to do it!

Here’s the thing about shortcuts – we can’t live without them.  We need shortcuts.  Sure, its lazy but can we live any other way?  If we had to do life Ent style and take endless hours to ponder every decision in detail civilization as we know it would grind to a halt.  It’s a good idea to carefully consider some things of course, but who has the time to carefully consider everything?  That’s why we have clichés and stereotypes, for better or worse they’re real timesavers!  Unfortunately, advertisers figured this out a long time ago and have been using it against us ever since.

Fat free tea.  Because apparently that was a problem that needed solving.  

Obviously they can’t tell a bald faced lie about their products because that’s the kind of thing leaves them drowning in lawsuits.  However it’s not illegal to tell the truth about your product, even if it’s a very creative truth.  For instance, a few years ago a couple of sunflower oil manufacturers advertised that their products had 0% cholesterol.  This was technically true but only because cholesterol is an animal product and you were never going to find it in a plant product anyway!  Most of the time it seems they just let us do the heavy lifting ourselves.  By just using a few “shortcut” words, we jump to our own conclusions and they don’t have to go making too many claims that need factual backing.  These are words that make you instinctively assume something good (about their product) or bad (about a competitor) when in fact these words are actually quite neutral.  They can mean something good or bad but over time we have associated some with good things and other with bad.  Some examples would be words like:

Traditional.  Ahh yes, you see the word “traditional” and you immediately assume this product is just filled with the goodness and wholesomeness of the good old days.  Just hearing the word brings to mind your grandma’s kitchen – which is probably the intention!  But wait a second, who said “traditional” was the same as “good”?  The word “tradition” only refers to “a long-established or inherited way of thinking or acting”.  In other words it’s simply a way of doing things that’s been around for a while.  That doesn’t necessarily make it bad but it certainly doesn’t make it good and it definitely doesn’t make it the best way.  If you go back a 100 years you would find that people were probably doing the best they could with the knowledge and technology they had, but you wouldn't assume they were doing it better than we currently do in any field - except apparently with food.  For instance the traditional way of traveling between continents was by using a ship.  These days we travel by airplane.  Now is traveling the traditional way bad?  No, certainly not.  However it’s definitely by no means better than the modern form!  Just because something is older does not make it better.  If you find a 200 year old recipe for lemonade that includes 2 cups of badger urine, would you choose that over a different brand simply because it’s “traditional”?

Sometimes "Traditional" is just another word for "pain in the ass"

Natural.  If you see that a product is “natural” then you know it’s good for you because everything from nature is good for you right?  Well no, no it’s not.  Lots of things from nature are terrible for you!  Some of the most poisonous thing in the world are 100% natural.  The thing is that while there certainly are a whole lot of wholesome things in nature, you will find that nature can be pretty vindictive too.  Plants actually produce their own pesticides to ward off bugs, so odds are that the totally organic broccoli you bought from that hippie at the farmers market is probably still full of pesticides.

Chemicals.  Grrr, argh, chemicals bad!!  No one would want chemicals added to their food right?  You probably wouldn’t like it if I added 2-oxo-L-threo-hexono-1,4- lactone-2,3-enediol to your juice would you?  How about if I added some extra Vitamin C, would that be OK?  Sure, no one would object to that, even though Vitamin C and 2-oxo-L-threo-hexono-1,4- lactone-2,3-enediol (or L-ascorbic acid for short) is exactly the same thing.  Think back to your basic chemistry classes for a second.  Everything is made of chemicals.  Your body is full of chemicals and so is everything you eat.  Water, air, carrot juice, rump steak – all made up of chemicals.  There are good chemicals and bad chemicals so to simply and reflexively consider the word “chemical” equal to “toxic waste” is just lazy thinking

Di-hydrogen monoxide - it kills thousands of people each year!!!

Processed.  Again, here is a word that we associate with bad, plastic food almost immediately.  Sometimes that is most definitely the case (looking at you processed cheese).  However, the term “processed” when applied to food simply means that the food has gone through some kind of process.  If it was sliced, peeled, dried or even just washed it’s technically processed.  Therefore if you want your carrot “unprocessed” then you better have it fresh from the ground, dirt and all.

I hate having to be so on guard when I’m grocery shopping, but these people leave me no choice.  Bastards.  They are forcing me to confront my shortcuts!  Not cool guys!  Now I have to judge every product on its individual merits!

So these are some examples of lazy language I have come across so far.  Does anyone else have some more for me?