The Phileas Club 120 – Merry Christmas, whether you like it or not!

On this episode we talk about:

  • Merry Christmas to all!
  • The Irish border issue and Brexit
  • The government in Germany (and G20 summit airplane)
  • Gilets Jaunes blowback: RIC (and sales in France)
  • Bonus 1: the Belgian situation
  • Bonus 2: trust in journalism
  • And more!

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Comments

  1. I haven’t even listened to the whole episode yet, but here I am commenting. Dangerous!

    I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I have NEVER been offended by anyone wishing me a Merry Christmas. (The British, with their silly Happy Christmas, are another story entirely :-). ). You may know a lot of people who are like me in that respect. Have you ever known anyone who WAS offended at being wished a Merry Christmas? Me neither.

    While there has never been a real War on Christmas in the USA, there have been battles to keep church and state separate. These involve areas like Bible study and prayer in public schools (where attendance is compulsory), and the placement of religious symbols on public grounds.

    My memory of the origin of the War on Christmas is that it started on Fox News in response to chain store management requiring sales personnel to wish customers Happy Holidays, rather than Merry Christmas. This sent (now disgraced and fired) Fox host Bill O’Reilly over the edge. It’s possible that one or more left wing social justice warriors prompted the initial action by the business owners, but it was the owners themselves whose actions generated the fuss. And I think they did it to protect profits by being more inclusive.

    My memory does not (well, did not) contain the whole story. There is an excellent article on this subject at Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/11/29/the-war-on-christmas/). Although the term ‘War on Christmas’ is of fairly recent vintage (around twenty years old), the complaint of Chistmas suppression goes back at least a century.

    I have no data to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet that there are a whole lot more people (in the USA) who are offended by ‘Happy Holidays’ than are offended by ‘Merry Christmas.’ In any case, the former are much more vocal about it.

    • Hey Bill, I think that’s a fair point, but my argument, which I might not have expressed correctly, isn’t so much that a lot of people are being offended, but rather that a lot of pre-empting this possibly minor offense by themselves avoiding saying “Merry Christmas” or being a bit over cautious about it. I don’t know how important that aspect is, but I certainly have witnessed it a lot. It’s ironic because it’s indeed possibly making the actual issue seem larger than it is…

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