note to self:

Honestly, I think less of him now than we started this conversation.

There is still a strange distinction between parody and satire. Parody is covered under fair use, and satire is not. I think what Al is doing is considered "satire", because his songs, while intended to be funny, are not necessarily funny at the expense of the original composition. That is, "Amish Paradise" isn't a…

I really don't think that's it. There have been countless Eagles covers done before, and he's not complaining about those. I think he's bitching *because* they released them for free, which he sees as devaluing the work. I'm also not sure it's "perfectly legal" to do that, because I'm not sure when the compulsory…

You actually can, as long as you pay for the compulsory license.

Ok. So 70 years ago the laws were changed because recorded music became much easier to make and distribute. I'm really not sure why you're trying to pin this on Don Henley.

Ah yes, I see. Not worth engaging then.

You keep posting this. Do you have a specific claim to make about the melody of Hotel California? It would certainly be a Great Moment in Hypocrisy if Don Henley ripped Hotel California off, but so far, you haven't actual said that he did. So what's your point?

Previous to the 50s, blues and folk artists would re-record other people's songs and put their own twists on them all the time. Pick up any album by Lead Belly or Blind Willie McTell and you'll hear their own takes of other people's songs.

Yeah, you really don't understand what intellectual property is.

Not to be that guy, but….

"there aren't very many of these people so it doesn't matter…" what you call everybody else who is not them. This is a true statement. Especially if you try to call everybody else the same thing. The definition of "cis-gendered" that's been brought up a few times here, "one's gender identity matches that assigned at…

You really knew people in *high school* who had sexual reassignment surgery? That strikes me as terribly unlikely and probably unethical.

False equivalence, since I don't see any epistemological dualists insisting that people's refusal to identify themselves as naïve realists is tantamount to discrimination.

I don't think there was anything weird about your high school. I think teenagers like to play with their identities, gender included.

"those who self-identify as something other than cis, ie, trans people" is a tautology. If you define terms like that, you could count nearly anyone.

They're not, actually. I'm being generous, since the stats say transgenderism (not "gender-noncomformity", which could apply to anyone at certain times) has an incidence of somewhere between 1:10,000 and 1:30,000.

That would be pretty difficult, just numbers-wise….

But there's also a huge space between gender-variance and what we refer to when we say cis- and trans-gender. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I've never seen any studies that put the prevalence of true transgenderism at anywhere near 1%. Gender-variance could refer to an effeminate man, or a stereotypical tomboy.…

It's a pretty contrived usage. It would be like referring to nearly all cats as "cis-tailed" because the Manx exists. It does not deny the reality or humanity of trans people to say that what they live and experience is a pretty rare phenomenon.