[semantics] christmas trees lit in iceland today

The lights of the Christmas tree in Midbakki in Reykjavík harbor will be turned on today at 5 pm. The tree in Akureyri town center will start glowing at 4 pm. The Christmas tree in Reykjavík is a gift from Hamburg in Germany. This is the 41st year Hamburg has given Christmas trees to Reykjavík out of gratitude to Icelandic seamen who brought food to children in Hamburg after WWII. Fréttabladid reports.

Quiz Question 1: What is the most unusual thing about this otherwise mundane story?
Answer: It actually gratuitously uses the word Christmas in four places.

This is enough to make a godless leftie fume. After all the hard work getting into positions of power and influence over the last few decades, after rewriting all the schoolbooks, after expunging any references to THAT superstitious myth and after educating the common man in the cold, materialistic humanistic light, these throwbacks in Iceland still insist on using the correct name for the tree. What hope is there for the world?

Here's the oldest trick in the book:

1] You want to normalize and make acceptable an unacceptable concept;
2] You group some other generally accepted concepts together and lump this one in with them;
3] You then concentrate on or attack something else altogether and mention this group of concepts in passing, thereby never opening them to question but assuming they’re taken as read.

The Chinese are good at this. They speak of THE three enemies of society, for instance: Crime, Drugs and Careless Speech or the three eternal verities: The Family, Hard Work and the State Leadership.

In the same way, the Labour Party gave us this one:

''Whether the barrier is their background, their race, religion or sexual orientation, the Labour party has always been prepared to take the decisions to open up opportunity for all.''

Except that the first two are equal and different but the third, cleverly tacked on at the end, is simply deviance from the biological roles of the higher animal kingdom. It is no more a choice than paedophilia. It’s deviance from the norm.

The cleverest part of it is that people will be so incensed by Labour’s claims in the last five words that the real aberration will get through unchallenged. They've been very clever about it.