This silly little Halloween commercial for Twix candy has the creationists coughing up all kinds of bizarre ahistorical nonsense. It features a goth nanny with witchy powers who is non-judgementally taking care of a little boy who is wearing a princess dress. The non-judgmental bit is clearly anathema to fundamentalist Christians.
Answers in Genesis discusses it in their weekly “news” show. I learned many things from this segment. You don’t need to watch it, I’ve transcribed the relevant bits, but if you must, the bullshit is flowing at around the 8 minute mark.
Patricia: It’s pretty incredible the messages it is promoting. One of the things I noticed is that actually if you take that narrative that is happening it basically summarizes the key principles behind Marxism. So that whole idea is that you have this minority that is being oppressed so then the solution to that, to make everyone live happily ever after, is to violently overthrow the oppressor, commit some kind of revolution, forcibly remove them, and then everything is good. And that’s actually what you are seeing in this commercial. So that’s an interesting connection to Marxism there.
Tim: And that’s what we see historically with Marxism. Every time there’s a revolution, everything is perfect afterwards and nothing ever goes wrong. It’s utopia.
Patricia: That’s the idea, but it’s not going to work in a sinful world.
Tim: And it never has worked.
It is November, which puts us about four months after the Fourth of July, so I guess we just pinned down a measure of how far back into the past a creationist’s mind can reach. About 4 months. Which explains a lot about the whole young earth notion, I guess.
It’s a bit of a reach to call it Marxism, though. So the key principle of Marxism is for oppressed minorities to have a revolution, period? I’m no expert on Marx or communism, but I’m sure there’s slightly more to it than that. By that definition, the United States is Marxist.
Oh, but she’s not done. It’s also the key principle of Wicca, which is the same as Marxism, a connection I’d never seen made before.
Patricia: She’s teaching him the main principle of Wicca, it’s called the Wiccan rede, it says “an ye harm no one, do what you will”. So throughout this video she’s encouraging him to wear this dress because he wants to. You know, that sounds OK because you’re not harming someone, but actually civilizations have tried that in the past. One civilization that tried it said that “liberty consists of the freedom to do everything that injures no one else.” You might think that sounds pretty good, but what civilization was this? It was revolutionary France, where they tortured and guillotined thousands and thousands of people because, without God, a creator as your source for absolutes in truth and morality, you can define harm however you want, you can define human rights however you want, these were all things that were seen happening in this culture, and the commercial, unfortunately, summarizes that pretty well.
Wait wait wait…the French Revolution was run by Communist witches? I’m a little confused by the contradiction here: the Wiccan rede says “harm no one”, and according to AiG, that was the cause of a bloody revolution with guillotines lopping off heads? It seems to me that if the revolution were actually inspired by Wiccan principles, there would have been no bloodshed.
Remember: the French Revolution was an act by Marxist Wiccans.
The AiG show goes on with more instances of idiocy. They are also upset by another commercial, “Doritos made this ad for the Mexican market where a dead guy’s ghost comes back to tell his family he has a gay lover in heaven”. Yeah, it’s the Gay Agenda again. They’d don’t like it.
Curiously, almost all their sources for these stories is a crappy conservative sort-of-humor site, “Not the Bee”, which is a spinoff of the not-at-all funny Babylon Bee. That tells you something about the depth of their research. One exception is that they comment on an article from Science Daily, “DNA tangles can help predict evolution of mutations”.
In that article, the authors describe how loops or tangles in unfolded bacterial DNA can act as hotspots for mutations. It’s basic research into the mechanisms of evolution and discusses how identifying these hotspots can lead to better predictions about likely new mutations in a line of bacteria.
You can guess how deeply Ken Ham discusses this topic. “They’re still just bacteria.” Done and done.
Damn, those people are stupid. I’m sure they’re sincere in their deeply held beliefs, the problem being that their beliefs are so idiotic and ignorant.
The French Revolution was Marxist, they say.
The French Revolution, which took place in the late 18th century, was Marxist.
Marx, who wasn’t even born until 1818, inspired the French revolutionaries. In 1792.
It’s depressing how these imbeciles can spout off idiotic, ahistorical nonsense that can be debunked with a five-second Google search and be believed by their adoring public.
Minor correction to my #1: the French Revolution actually began in 1789. The First Republic was established in the year I cited above.
Now I’m singing “Communist witches” to the tune of “Besame Mucho.”
@UnknownEric: Or “Commie Witches” to the tune of “Tiny Bubbles”.
There’s a Communist revolution in a Twix ad? What else did I miss while watching the Virginia election?
So when Jesus comes back, overthrows the ruling class of antichrist oppressors and brings about a utopia for the minority of True Christians…. that’s different? Cause that sounds like the “key principle to Marxism” to me. Or is the Second Coming “not going to work in a sinful world”?
My limited understanding is that Marxism involves the workers taking control. The workers are a majority.
How did they jump to a repressed minority? Oh wait, this is America, so this is a racist dog whistle.
@6: I think they’re saying the Second Coming is the ONLY way to achieve the perfect just world the Marxists (and other utopians) dream of. At least that’s what the born-agains told me when I was a Marxist.
…so basically they’re admitting the Marxists are absolutely right, but then insisting only their God can make it happen, so that’s their excuse for refusing to lift a finger to achieve any of the goals they know are right.
It’s quite a wholesome commercial, though.
Communist witches?
My response:
“Crab people! Crab people!”*
.
*from South Park
Communist witches? You mean the Nochnyye Vedmy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches
Kinda sweet commercial. Wish the real world was like that.
Well, good. My work here is done, I suppose.
What’s really clever about this commentary is the way it depicts all social change as revolutionary. So
Premise 1. You can either have the status quo, or revolution. There is no middle ground — “incremental change” is just a slightly slower revolution.
Premise 2. All revolutions are bad, because France and Russia. (Note: If someone asks about what happened in America in 1776, yell “FREEDOM” really loudly and then run away.)
Conclusion: Any change whatsoever to the status quo is the moral equivalent of chopping peoples’ heads off.
(Another note: unless it’s a change to the status quo that we support, in which case change is absolutely necessary and ignore this syllogism.)
I get really fed up with people going on about the revolutionary terror in France. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but it was a pinprick compared to the absolute bloodbath when they massacred the communards. But when the authorities do it it gets a pass.
I do have an issue with the end of the commercial. Yes, that bully will probably grow up into a maga, but I’d feel a lot better if the wind just blew him up in a tree where he’d be hanging by his belt as opposed to being completely disappeared like that.
There is a historical link between the French Revolution and Marx, but, quite obviously, it goes the other way. Marx was very keen on the ideals of the French Revolution, growing up as he did in the generation following it, and much of his thinking got started when he realised that replacing feudal structures with capitalist ones wasn’t the route to liberty, equality and brotherhood that it had been sold as by economists of the previous generation. Marx set out to explain why the French Revolution was insufficient in its aims, because it didn’t address the fundamentally exploitative relationships within the capitalist system of production.
… Communist witches? I’m a little confused by the contradiction here…
Having the workers seize control of the means of production happens a lot easier when that entails only a cauldron and parts of small animals.
The best plea for becoming a Wiccan Communist I’ve ever read! Thank you, AiG!
It just looks like a would-be bully getting his comeuppance to me.
I wonder how AiG would interpret the end of The Neverending Story when Falkor the Luck Dragon chases down Bastian’s bullies. Would that be an example of “obvious draconian Marxism and asymmetric warfare”?
The frightening thing about AiG is the invincible stupidity of its members. Really depths of stupidity I didn’t know existed before I became aware of Ham and Purdam and co. The really frightening thing is that it has an audience of believers.
The irony of this particular diatribe is that the Christo-Fascists in America are increasingly shrill in their revolutionary rhetoric to rescue their vision of the true America. They, including members of Congress, are openly talking about killing liberals, and even some conservatives if they don’t go along with the plan.
Raging Bee @6:
Reminded of a march I went to where one jerk with a bullhorn was yelling at us about how god was so perfect that we couldn’t possibly compare, implying that there’s no point in actually trying to be good people like we were. I later referred to it as the Gospel of Sloth. One of my Christian friends at the time was quite weirded out when I brought up that guy and others like him.
brucegee1962@15 I thought we were supposed to be in favor of the French Revolution, maybe not the Reign of Terror, but at least the storming of the Bastille. Do we now support restoring the monarchy?
OT
Is the universe fine-tuned for life? ( this is NOT some creationist drivel, but serious physics. I myself do not know enoug science to have a meaningful comment)
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-universe-fine-tuned-life.html
The 4:3 format (or is it 1:1? O_O) weirded me out.
The YT video has 10 times more “unlikes” than “likes”, seems like it was swarmed by the bigots.
Also, yes, witchcraft is communism and Philosphy Tube explains you why https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmk47kh7fiE ^_^
Bronze Dog @24: Yep, the Gospel of Sloth is very real; I’ve been hearing about it since the early ’70s, and even in my early teens it smelled fishy. There’s a LOT of people clinging to a version of Christianity that explicitly rationalizes not giving a shit about anything (and hating everyone who does).
@birgerjohansson, #26: No, the universe is not fine-tuned for life. Which is why life is so sparsely distributed throughout it.
It used to be thought that the electrical constant ε0 and the magnetic constant μ0 were independent. It was later discovered that ε0 * μ0 = c ** -2. There are still enough gaps in our understanding of physics for more of the fundamental constants not to be quite as independent as we once thought.
There are also various Pareidolia-like coincidences such as the acceleration due to gravity being almost exactly π ** 2, a pendulum one metre long taking one second to swing from side to side (but that’s literally the same thing) and the kinetic energy of a 10-tonne truck travelling at 60mph being almost exactly 1kWh …..
Raging Bee @28: I find it unsurprising, since it seems like a natural extension of some theologians arguing that faith alone gets a person into heaven, rather than good works. See also: the religious jerks who live in a complete moral vacuum and think they can just whisper notpologies into the ether to get it all wiped away.
With how common those attitudes are, I have great difficulty believing in the sincerity of religious people.
Bronze Dog@30 It reminds me of those smug bumper stickers “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.” Uh… what. It might as well say “I have a blank check from God, fuckers. Get used to it.” In fact, it probably does mean that.
F.O. @ #27: Urgh, “Caliban and the Witch” is a pile of ahistorical nonsense, and the author’s now-manifest, then-latent TERFyness can already be observed in it by an attentive reader. I do wish that Abigail would employ greater intellectual rigour, but…well, her last video cited Naomi Wolf as a credible source, no? Tsk, tsk, tsk….
birgerjohansson@26,
The “fine-tuning” argument is that there are many ways the universe could be different, and most of them would not permit the appearance of life. But while I could not have existed if life didn’t, most of the ways that would permit life would not have permitted me to exist, so I conclude, by exactly the same logic the fine-tuning argument relies on, that the universe is in fact fine-tuned to produce me.
My favourite response to the fine tuning argument is Douglas Adams’:
I don’t see how you can exclude the possibility that other universes might be better tuned for life – possibly entirely different kinds of life. We’d probably need to start with a rigourous definition of what we mean by “life”, which is currenlty something of a stumbling block…
bluerizlagirl @29:
“fine-tuned for X” does not mean “there is a lot of X”. It means that if one or more parameters were slightly different, there would be a radical change in the amount of X, or no X at all.
A comment in an earlier thread;
So, the universe is indeed, as I said @33, fine-tuned for me. Exquisitely so, in fact, since it seems highly unlikely that I would exist if the second-lowest excited state of the C12 nucleus had been different from its actual value by even 0.000001 MeV!
I would prefer to say that you are fine-tuned for the universe.