Last Sunday night, I got home from watching Borat with Sean, and didn’t feel like going to bed yet. To sooth my savage soul, I chose music.

Every once in a while, I give myself a Ramm-o-fest, where I listen to every Rammstein album, in order. I’d just finished spending a few days with both Herzeleid and Sehnsucht. Mutter was next, an album I usually think of as unspectacular and uninteresting. I almost skipped over it, but decided to give it a go, in favour of continuity.

Sometimes I amaze myself with how wrong I am.

The only reason I don’t care much for Mutter is that it was the first Rammstein album I ever bought, and I spent months and months during high school listening to nothing else. The same twelve songs looped ad infinitum.

It was, naturally, this album that swayed my musical tastes in the direction they have since taken.

After not having heard it in a long time, I was shocked by Mutter. I was acoustically assaulted, subjugated and dominated. I fell victim to elemental forces.

I was particularly amazed by the guitar parts. They were a solid wall of pure emotion; they were weapons more than instruments. They were lovers more than sounds.

I found myself wishing that the sound of my voice could be like that, that when I opened my mouth guitar riffs would come out.

Alright kids, it’s time for the latest installment of “Things that Piss Vega Off!”

What’s the deal with all the people ragging on the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty? I am getting so sick of reading articles by people who feel that, because Dove has made a stack of money off of this campaign, it is evil and Dove is the devil. If they turn a profit, then clearly the people at Dove never really cared about women’s self-image.

No one sympathizes with the Left more than me, but sometimes I think that Leftists know lots about relationships and human rights, and jack-shit about economics. I well imagine the people who have a problem with this campaign are people who’ve never read any philosophical works dealing with economics, save for the Cole’s Notes version of Das Kapital. They seem to think that money is evil in-and-of itself, no matter how it is earned or how it is used. If Dove made two million dollars from this campaign, that’s two million pure-evil-points, and the CEO of Dove is probably masturbating using the bodies of dead kittens even as we speak.

The key is choice. We have the right to choose what we buy or don’t buy. If the messege a product is sending is positive, we have the right to buy is as a means of expressing that we support it. No one is forced to buy Dove products, but they chose to do so, as free-willed, self-determined adults. And what’s wrong with that?