#metalgate: When bullies play victim

by Cory Van der Pol on February 23, 2015

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#Metalgate began with a passive-aggressive attack: so-called “social justice warriors” decided metal needed to reflect the SJW ideology, and so moved into media, academia and bands to write metal that used their worldview like a propaganda weapon. Then they began complaining that they were victims of intolerance.

This was related to the previous issue with #gamergate, where SJWs moved into the gaming industry and when their mediocre “contributions” were not recognized, claimed discrimination was the cause. As usual, this was a power grab: under the guise of being victims, they claimed the right to bully others for not having the “right” opinions.

Now, it seems, the bullies are crying out as they are hitting us because feminist writers are claiming harassment from “the internet”:

Part of what’s different now is the existence of organized misogyny, with groups of men who are angry at feminism gathering under banners such as the Men’s Rights Movement and Gamergate, a diffuse network of video-game enthusiasts furious at attempts to curb sexism in the industry. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, “the mainstream culture of the media was more anti-feminist. That was when you had all that ‘feminism is dead, all women just want to get married’ kind of stuff,” says columnist Katha Pollitt, my colleague at the Nation. “But the men’s rights people, Gamergate, that’s new. There is this cadre of incredibly enraged men who have all found each other.”

As in #metalgate, these people have made a career of intruding where they are unable to compete, blaming other people for their lack of success, and then trying to cultivate an audience of other people who have failed. This is a typical strategy for taking over a group and it is known to parasites everywhere, most notably the “think of the children!” politicians and the advertising marketers who convinced people to like abominations like low-fat cheese, lite beer and tofurkey because “it’s healthier.” All lies, by liars, to seize power.

In the meantime, organized SJWs from Metal Archives continue to insult and belittle those who disagree:

At what point do people wake up and realize that #metalgate, #gamergate and the ongoing failure of our media have a common point of failure, which is the substitution of “social justice” for a detailed look at reality?

The only reason the SJWs and complaining, by the way, is that people are fighting back. Adria Richards heard a developer joke about a dongle and his friend make a joke about “forking” someone else’s project, and decided she was oppressed, so she snapped a picture and tweeted it with a typical SJW shaming/bullying message:

Her only complaint is that, as The Guardian reports, she got owned when people pushed back against her passive-aggressive victim-mentality bullying, instead of pitying her as she thought they should have:

Someone launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if she was fired. Within hours, she was fired.

‘‘SendGrid threw me under the bus,” she later emailed me. “I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.’’

They attempt to portray those of us who oppose them as “racist,” “homophobic,” bigoted, “sexist,” and other terms with no fixed definition, when really our statement is a middle path: we do not accept the reality-controlling language of either side of the debate. We look at reality as reality itself, or as close as we can get, instead of hiding it in all these neat little containers which tell us what we can think and what we must fear.

The more SJWs have made it into media, the more media has declined, mainly because it reports propaganda instead of what concerns normal people trying to live normal lives. As this image from the AEI shows, newspaper revenues are in free-fall:

newspaper-advertising-revenue

This is the same phenomenon we see in metal which is that while there is still a huge audience of indie/punk rockers who have showed up after 2001 to take advantage of this new territory to conquer, metal media is stagnant and declining, as are the new genres of metalcore and indie/shoegaze-metal/punk, mainly because like SJWs they are one-note shrill voices that seek to bully us and control our thinking, and have nothing to offer musically or artistically. Their message is always the same, and not surprisingly their music sounds the same, about like Christian metal or those annoying white power bands, come to think of it.

SJWs are death to metal and death to media. #metalgate has pushed back and now they complain about a victimhood of their own creation in the hope that uninformed people will take pity on them, fight back against those fighting back against the invasion, and by that act let the invasion succeed. Spread the word: SJWs are invaders and bullies whose complaints are hollow and whose every word is a lie.

For those who care about metal, it is time to stop supporting SJW-friendly Metal Archives, which has been distorting what is viewed as metal for over a decade in order to enforce its own agenda. A boycott is not enough; they have abused their position as journalists, and it is time for Metal Archives to be destroyed along with all other SJW media. These people are a cancer and they are bullies and until they are removed, we are all under threat of them attacking us.

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Interview with Hatred developer Jarosław Zieliński

by Brett Stevens on February 20, 2015

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As society circles the drain, some notice in art, music, literature — and video games. Increasingly misanthropic and world-cynical games like Hatred show us the direction things are going and possibly, give us a reason to fight back. Destructive Creations CEO and lead developer Jarosław Zieliński was kind enough to give us a few minutes to discuss this antisocial video game and its connection to evil metal…

What made you decide that the market was ready for an “un-PC” game about slaughtering other people seemingly at random?

I didn’t know if it was ready, actually. But observing all the shitstorm around since our reveal trailer, I think the market is ready. We’re small team from the middle of nowhere and now everywhere you have news about our game. Even Forbes! We don’t care about all the hate that is thrown in our direction. People who would like to play this title, now recognize it.

How much was this influenced by 1998’s Postal, a game with a similar theme? Any other game influences?

It was very influenced, obviously. There are many other games we played for entire life and many of them had influence for our creation, but the main inspiration is the first Postal game.

I noticed you’re a Black Witchery fan from the t-shirt in the Destructive Creations team photo. Are you the only metalhead on staff? How much did metal influence your choice of this career path?

I don’t like the “metalhead” word. I don’t listen to “metal”; I listen to some of its genres while I actually hate the others. I don’t really think there’s a link between living with this music and working on video games. Actually modding games was first in my life, since I got the first Wolfenstein 3D editor. I was like seven years old at the time. And I really doubt that making games influenced what music I listen to.

Can you name some death/black/etc metal favorites you have?

Umm, that would be a shitload of bands. I’m a lot into stuff like Revenge, Truppensturm, Bestial Raids, Black Witchery, Teitanblood, Archgoat, Wrathprayer, Goatpenis, Inquisition, Bestial Mockery, Dead Congregation, Ad Hominem, Nocturnal Graves, Goat Semen, Demonomancy etc. The list is in random order, from the top of my head, but I do have quite a spread in my taste, from Disgorge or Devourment to Enthroned or Urgehal, if you know what I mean. But it’s all in the black-death line. Someone may say that it’s dull to stick only to these genres, but I would tell him to fuck off, I don’t need more (it doesn’t mean I didn’t ever try). There’s still plenty of bands to discover.

Which genres do you dislike?

Actually: all the others. I respect thrash metal, for example, but I don’t listen to it, because I don’t like it. And I really don’t understand how someone can listen to heavy metal stuff like King Diamond or Manowar, it fucking hurts my ears, the music is cheerful and vocals sounds gay. Well, let’s say I like “evil” metal, not “cool” metal, I hope you get it. If it’s a low-distorted blastbeating about satanic tanks crushing graves of christians and hordes of MG42-armed hellspawns spreading genocide then it’s most likely my taste. :)

hatred-screen_shot

Why do you think “Hatred” upsets people? Is it similar to the reasons death metal and black metal at least used to upset people?

No, I don’t think so. I think metal used to upset people because they don’t understand the music itself, rather than lyrical themes. Hatred is making people crazy, because of its context, not because its shell. If we were to make the same game but with any other plot, they would accept it with no problems.

Why are people drawn to dark themes like in metal and video games? Do you think that this attraction will mean that Hatred will become a household name?

Because every one of us has some side of evil nature deeply-rooted inside. Some of us like to get along with the dark side, which is why brutal music sometimes makes the evil grin on your face or you get chills. I want the same player’s reaction while playing Hatred. I have no idea whether it will become a household name.

Can you tell us about yourself, when you got into metal, and how you ended up becoming a video game developer?

I don’t really feel like talking about myself, I have a lot of something you might call “underground nature.” Most parts of my life were strongly tied with death/black metal and still are, but I don’t like connecting it with my job publicly. My engagement with the metal scene is my private thing, while making games is my occupation (and a hobby too). You know, I’ve comercialized one of two of my biggest passions, and I will never do the same with remaining one.

For more information on Hatred, visit the Destructive Creations web site.

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#metalgate zombies want you to like “Christian black metal” now

by Cory Van der Pol on February 19, 2015

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The same SJWs in journalism and the media zombies who follow them want to destroy the black metal idea further by forcing it to include another genre of thought which conflicts utterly with its own, this time Christianity (in addition to the politically correct navel-gazing that provoked #metalgate). As reported in Metal Injection, Christian “black metal” is being mainstreamed:

Accuse me of not being kvlt enough, but I’ve always felt that black metal was better defined by the sound and not so much the message. We all know that black metal has signature sounds to it, and that both heavy and satanic music exists without being under the label of black metal. Having this mindset has let me into the world of unblack metal, and allowed me to understand and appreciate the goals of these bands. There’s just something intriguing about a group of Christians getting into a scene of music created with goals that specifically includes their persecution.

He says it clearly enough there: we know this is against what you believe, but we’re going to force your genre into generic status (“better defined by sound and not so much the message”) so that you are manipulated into accepting our propaganda. Whether it is Christian propaganda or SJW neurotic propaganda, the result is the same: the destruction of your genre by making it paradoxical.

I have a better idea. Let’s crucify some SJWs so their zombie political correctness gets recognized for the religion that it is, and then nail up the Christian metal bands so they can go to their holy deliverance and leave our genre alone. Then put the heads on pikes to warn others that we do not want your crazy world invading our oasis of sanity and refuge in which we can actually express a true thought without worrying about who it will offend. Fuck off!

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How #metalgate is totalitarian thought control

by Cory Van der Pol on February 1, 2015

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Totalitarianism 2.0 doesn’t look much like the former version. In the past, a dictator in uniform — like socialist and diversity advocate Joseph Stalin — would command secret police to enforce speech codes. Now, government sits back and allows a vast media establishment to enforce political ideas which just so happen to coincide with the goals of government: more control of citizens and ideological obedience, which makes government stronger.

As Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine, “political correctness” is an attempt to control thought by excluding all but one side of the debate:

But it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity. A year ago, for instance, a photographer compiled images of Fordham students displaying signs recounting “an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.”

While on the surface this does not seem consistent with government objectives, it quickly becomes a servant to power, arguing from its good intentions to demand increasing amounts of control and often, violence. As Stephen Kinzer writes in the Boston Globe, yesterday’s civil rights and human rights advocates are today’s warmongers:

Now, several decades after the human rights movement traded its outsider status for influence in Washington, it is clear that this has produced negative as well as positive results. The movement has become a global behemoth. Sometimes it functions as a handmaiden to the power it was once dedicated to combating.

The most appalling result of this process in the United States is that some human rights activists now regularly call for using force to resolve the world’s problems. At one time, “human rights” implied opposition to war. Now some of the most outspoken warmongers in Washington are self-proclaimed human rights advocates.

Chait’s view is that this trend toward SJW hipster activism is in fact forming a parallel to the bad old days of 1940s totalitarianism:

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to. The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.

In effect, as Jonathan Frum writes in The Atlantic, political correctness represents the self-radicalization of liberalism toward a totalitarian mindset. We can clearly see this in #metalgate and #gamergate, where SJW hipsters have crushed not just dissenting voices, but any voices that fail to parrot their own agenda.

The reason they target metal is that metal is chronically disobedient. We do not like illusions, metalheads, and we did not buy into the “peace and love” of the 1960s which culminated in ex-hippies getting into office and authorizing drone strikes on suspected extremists. We did not buy into the “just follow Jesus and Gordon Gekko” outlook of the 1980s, nor the 1990s dogma that all was going to be right through globalism, McDonald’s and peace. We see human society for what it is: an ugly tussle of animals competing to put their favored illusion above the rest, all while ignoring the majesty of reality as it is.

Remember how the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) acted back in the 1980s. First they said they wanted to stop “dangerous” content about sex and drugs, and suddenly, any album with swear words on it got the infamous warning label. This encouraged record stores to card you for buying the album, to not stock the album, or to put it in a special section. A few years later “censored” versions of Metallica and Cannibal Corpse albums could be found in your average record store, with conspicuous bleeps editing out the words that we shouldn’t hear, to the detriment of the music (often not in key).

It’s easy enough to ignore #metalgate right now because it may not affect you directly. But the important point is that it intends to. SJW hipsters behind the incursion into metal that provoked #metalgate want to censor your words and mine, not just avoiding bad stuff as they claim, but forcing you to repeat “good stuff” as they envision it, to the exclusion of anything else. If this isn’t totalitarian thought control, nothing is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moJOeKvK6Yw

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#metalgate hipsters continue faking the news

by Cory Van der Pol on January 31, 2015

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The increasing popularity of #metalgate has irked the hipster SJWs who promote it. One of the SJW hipsters who provoked #metalgate by demanding our editor be removed from the metal Journolist writes about the increasing popularity of #metalgate in terms of hateful denial:

Detractors included Phil McSorely, who was fired from the band Cobalt for using hate slurs towards Curtis-Brignell and others, accusing them of trying to establish a “USBM [American black metal] friendship scene” and “liberal agenda” in extreme metal. The incident became one of the flashpoints for #metalgate, a short-lived hate campaign and offshoot of #gamergate that attacked journalists and artists accused of attempting to “censor” heavy metal.

She lies. Cobalt was not the trigger for #metalgate; SJW demands for censorship and exclusion on the basis of one writer’s opinions were. And #metalgate was neither launched by #gamergate nor a “hate campaign.” It remains — and is growing in strength — a resistance campaign against intrusion by the newcomers who are hoping to make SJW metal mainstream. (As a side note, it appears that Mr. McSorely has “un-friended” our editor on Facebook, possibly for his own sometimes liberal sensibilities.)

Look at Caïna for example. Highly hyped by labels, heavily supported by media, and yet it has no staying power because metalheads do not want kumbaya indie-rock. We want metal. Like other bands of this ilk, it sells to a certain audience but goes no further, and within weeks is forgotten. No one cites Caïna as a cornerstone of the genre, which is why the SJW hipsters are trying to bring it back with this article as if it had ever been relevant in the first place.

He articulates what SJW hipsters actually want — a “safe space” meaning removal of all ideas that threaten their worldview — and tries to conceal the censorship threat behind that mentality:

“I’m done with metal culture in a sense — conventional metal culture, that is,” he explains. “I guess in the positive, it showed that there are people who did agree with me about metal’s attitude towards certain groups. So I think my real change is to be ‘done’ with hedging. I can’t backtrack and adopt some new persona to weasel out of what I said. I believe what I said. I think in the few days that followed the drama, I could have tried to distance myself from whatever it was I was accused of being.

“But no, fuck it, I absolutely believe that metal should be a safe space for women, people of colour, differently abled people, the LGBT community. There’s nothing metal about arbitrary exclusionism. Safe space: unsafe music.”

This reminds us of the 1980s, when the PMRC decided to make metal “safe” by removing lyrics about sex, drugs and obscenity. Or in the early 1990s when Christians decided to make black metal safe by releasing “white metal” or “unblack metal” which sounded like black metal, but had Christian lyrics (with Horde being the forefront). Now we have SJWs who are releasing “safe metal” which sounds like shoegaze trying to be black metal and has safe, politically correct lyrics which seem to follow the agenda of their media overlords.

In the meantime, this controversy rages in other areas. The assault is coming from the media and their lackeys, and numerous communities are reacting, with gamers being first but now metalheads and other subcultures responding. The attitude generally is not that those who react are opposed to the viewpoints offered, but they do not like the form in which they are forced upon the audience, which is a “my way or the highway” ideological test by which you either endorse the SJW hipster viewpoint or are seen as an enemy of the State… errr, media.

If you need proof of how relevant all of this is, notice how Wikipedia is censoring GamerGate-affiliated editors and how media employees are mounting a doxxing campaign against #gamergate activists who are resisting the SJW hipster incursion.

In the meantime, a number of academics and media darlings linked arms to make black metal “safe” with a academic conference entitled Coloring the Black: A Black Metal Theory Symposium which declares its intention to:

In response to this we wish to open up the more comedic, playful, camp, ludic, carnivalesque dimension of black metal and black metal theory. In so doing, we set out to “pink” black metal by questioning its more nihilistic impulses (“blackening” and more “blackening”) in favour of more affirmative approaches and utilizations of BMT.

In “pinking” black metal/theory (and we are thinking here of critical and ironic BM-related gestures such as The Soft Pink Truth, Pinkish Black, Zweizz, Deafheaven, not to mention the influence of My Bloody Valentine and “pink noise” on shoegaze, post, or “hipster” black metal) we also hope to queer it by decentering the cisheteronormative and patriarchal underpinnings of both the black metal music and philosophy scenes. We wish to further BMT from a range of feminist, LGBTQ, and intersectional perspectives, including disability studies, crip theory, animal studies, and cute studies. Our interest in a more rainbow approach to black metal would also seek to consider and destabilize the racial normativities of black metal musical and theoretical traditions.

In other words: if it doesn’t fit the status quo, we’ll “study” it until we can argue that it does, and then use that to exclude anyone who doesn’t toe the line as being deviant. Just like SJW hipsters have done with #metalgate so far.

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#metalgate goes mainstream as Machine Head flails on

by Cory Van der Pol on January 23, 2015

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The SJWs keep up a simple strategy for dealing with #metalgate: pretend it never happened and, if it did happen, it died an early death.

Instead, #metalgate is ramping up as the collision between Political Correctness and heavy metal intensifies. Recently metalcore band All That Remains’ vocalist Phil Labonte made some comments that riled a few basement neckbeards:

In 2005, on the ‘Sounds Of The Underground’ DVD I said, ‘PC is for f–gots.’ That was the first time people went, ‘Whoa, what did he say?’ I have nothing against gay people. It’s just a word. Honestly, I think the only people that have a legit grievance when it comes to any racial slurs is the black community. I know the homosexual community has problems with it and I understand their hurt feelings.

But homosexuals were never property. They’ve had a rough time and I’m not trying to minimize that, but I think the black community has a whole lot more room to be upset about a word than the LGBT community.

Apparently this outraged and upset Rob Flynn of alternative-metal band Machine Head, who seems to spend a lot of time on Facebook. He carefully assembles a series of clichés and strung them together into a post which raged against Labonte:

Where are the god damn protest songs? Where are the “War, What Is It Good For’s”? Where are the “Fight The Power’s”? Where are the white metal bands protesting about Ferguson and Staten Island? Why don’t metal bands stand for anything anymore? When did we reach this point in society where it’s unpatriotic to question our military or our police? Why are so goddamned proud to just fall in line?

Here we see the underlying issue that propelled #metalgate rising to the top: the PC people recognize only certain issues, but metal is in fact fighting back against the actual problem, which is a religious approach to reality denial through secular (but unrealistic) politics. In the PC view, if we just change our thinking, we have changed reality. This is why for SJWs it is essential that everyone think the same way, speak the same way and act the same way regarding political issues. We will be in lock-step like good Nazis/Communists/Christians and since we will all be uniform, no deviation can occur. Problem solved! …right?

The metal point of view takes an entirely different approach. In the metal view, problems do not go away until you find the root and fix it. People do not “just get along.” In fact, the more you push people to publicly affirm an idea, the more they resist it in private. In the metal view, there are no magic bullets like laws, rules, and speech codes that fix problems that have persisted since the dawn of humankind. In the metal view, it seems reckless to — knowing that these problems exist — bring them into our communities by demanding that we “tolerate” the endless clashes that result.

Flynn’s rant is stupid because he refuses to acknowledge that metal has for years endorsed sensible responses, but they are not ones that are politically correct because they do not affirm the public paradigms that everyone else is affirming. Every major corporation, police department, court, Congressperson, media outlet, and metal magazine agrees with Rob Flynn and will enthusiastically say so. They do this because people act as a herd, and while the herd is always wrong, the herd rewards its own. His opinion is not radical, it’s the norm. Metal has resisted the norm and this is why it upsets him. He even admonishes us to be more like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, two hypocrtical Baby Boomer communists who quietly enriched themselves while talking up the working classes.

Let’s face it: in the highly politicized decade in which we live, songs about social justice are the equivalent of love songs in the 1950s. They offend no one. They shock no social norms. They give people something to bond over, which is how terrible gays, lesbians, women, minorities and other groups who should be pitied are treated by the bad white people. Because, see, SJWs are the good white people — and the vast majority of SJWs are college-educated whites who didn’t quite hit the jackpot, the same audience that creates all the hipsters. Being into social justice is their way of showing you that they are “good” (and thus concealing all that is bad about them behind that symbol of goodness) like politicians kissing babies or celebrities giving money to the homeless. SJW metal is like Justin Bieber except instead of using candy pop to sell records, it uses candy opinions and recycled hippie cons to make you think the people behind it are “good” even though you know only one thing they think or do and the rest is concealed.

Metal says that society is illegitimate because it denies reality. Whether that is through its approach to religion, politics or social activity, it is all lies: it would not be popular if it were not a lie. That is not the same as saying “because it is popular, it must be a lie,” because some things are popular for simply being catchy and vapid, and sometimes society is even correct. But it says that only lies or other things which do not threaten the human pretense at the root of our rotting society become popular. Thus, if you see that all the dunces are in confederacy in favor of something, be suspicious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vou_0RW5T5g

SJWs have a simple plan. They will censor through guilt. This allows them to avoid using Nazi-style government tactics to enforce speech codes when they can simply make Soviet-style speech codes mandatory by attacking anyone who does not agree. Rob Flynn is the witch-hunter here, the same sort of person who 200 years ago would have burned witches when the crops went bad, hung black people without a trial when a rape happened, or even a generation ago would have banned kids from school for wearing all black. He is the totalitarian. He and the SJWs are using “social justice” as a means to seize power and subjugate the rest of you. Metal — nearly alone, but with a few brave others in #gamergate — is resisting this authoritarian takeover.

The same thing gets tried every generation. Charlie Hebdo was attacked so that all cartoonists and writers would think twice about criticizing Islam. Despite all the protests by people who were at absolutely zero risk, and all the warm fuzzies from media about how free speech will save us, the result of the attacks is more crackdown on people who criticize Islam, both from governments and their insurance companies who do not want to pay out for preventable deaths. The PMRC’s campaign to have record warning labels made law failed, but the legal campaign won because it intimidated record labels into putting the warnings on those records or they could not get them into stores. SJWs will do the same thing by labeling some metal as “verboten” because it did not join their politically correct view of the world, and then it will be unable to be sold openly. That is their goal: censorship. Their method is a 2.0 to book burnings, public executions and other censorship 1.0 techniques, but it aims at the same thing and is more effective.

You can see how Bieber-like it is when you look at this comment on Mr. Flynn’s comments:

You just GAINED one more fan. I don’t even know what you sound like yet.

The SJW outlook is not new. It is not revolutionary. It is what governments of the USA and EU endorse. It is in fact conformity. They however want to convince you that their ideas are “revolutionary” so they sound unique, different and exciting. They want to look like brave outsiders denying the will of shadowy oppressive forces and liberating us all. In fact, they are attempting to enslave us all — wonder who our Al Sharpton will be — and they are every bit as mainstream, ordinary and socially accepted as Justin Bieber. They appeal to the herd by telling it what it already accepts, just like Bieber offers music with absolutely no surprises that resembles every big pop act that went before it. But if you listen to them, they are heroic Christ-like bearers of enlightenment and the rest of us are just idiots in comparison and should be silenced as a result.

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#JeSuisCharlie and #metalgate are the same battlefield

by Cory Van der Pol on January 10, 2015

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The outrage over a relatively minor terrorist event shows us that the nerve that was hit had to do with more than terrorism. The events at the Charlie Hebdo HQ called into question many of the most basic aspects of our society.

We do not like to admit it, but the shots fired in Paris are just the latest in what can be described as an ideological war. Those who control what we see, hear and read are able to control the next generation by instructing their assumptions about life itself. Every side in this battle is fighting to get its message into the mainstream and crowd out other messages.

When talking about dystopia, people are fond of quoting this book, so I’ll do the same:

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

This is a necessary consequence of both democracy and capitalism. If you control the message, you can amass a mob to be your personal army without them knowing it. If you tell people the sky is supposed to be green, and they see this in school, on TV and in print magazines, they will consider sky-is-blue people to be dangerous lunatics and ostracize them, which squeezes them out of society and eventually achieves total consensus.

Our modern society contains many competing groups and ideologies and each wants to control the discussion. In the meantime, the authorities and big industry want to provide non-answers to force compromise and the continuation of business as usual. This is why they always talk about peace, compassion, tolerance and empathy: those methods do not rock the boat or change its course at all, because they say that the problem is not the problem, but how we think about it. Just change your thinking!

In addition, these are popular ideas because they make us feel good, which makes them perfect products. People spend a lot of money to feel good. Whether it is buying an Audi to feel successful, taking Zoloft to feel cheerful, purchasing a copy of Mother Jones (or Fox News) to feel righteous anger and the satisfaction of being “right,” people like to feel good. And feeling good is all about changing your thinking, not addressing the actual underlying problem.

While 1984 was great, Brave New World may be scarier. As Amusing Ourselves to Death depicts, in Huxley’s vision of dystopia we are not controlled by a totalitarian government, but enforce totalitarianism on ourselves… in our best interests. People pursue pleasure, become oblivious to reality, and create instead a hateful society where boredom and misery dominate, but all the problems have been “solved” by enforcing compromise through law and technology.

On the other side of the coin, ideologues — including extreme Islam or whatever we’re calling it this week — seduce us away from the world of pleasurable non-meaning by appeal to our sense of being important. We fear irrelevance most of all, and dying in a blaze of glory for jihad, the environment, the white race, etc. appeals to those who have simply noticed how boring our society is. This side is fighting hard to get its message out there too. The pleasure zombies and ideologues are both vying for ad space… in your mind.

Metal is important because it does not subscribe to either of these extremes, which it portrays as two aspects of the same thing. Metal looks at reality itself, and sees the nature of life as power, and so un-does the reasoning behind the ideological and pleasure zombie groups out there. They hate it for that. Metal is the outsider, the kid who refuses to go along with the agenda that the teacher wants everyone to follow, the actual non-conformist. And in popular music, where Baby Boomer attitudes have held sway for forty years now, metal is the ultimate minority. We do not buy into the easy solutions offered by these people.

We do not seek “tolerance.” – Erik Danielsson, Watain

99% of the voices we hear in media are repeating the same easy lies to us. They are doing this to conceal the problem and lull us into easy oblivion yet again. Since metal refuses to play along with this agenda, we are a target. They want to take over metal and turn it into a different voice repeating another angle of the same crap the other 99% are repeating. They want to use us for their propaganda, much like Charlie Hebdo was counter-propaganda to radical Islam and got shot down as a result. The only honorable course of action, and the only one that is not a path to total irrelevance, is for metal to stand up and resist these attempts by others to make us tools of their system.

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As in #metalgate, Islam finds metal has wrong opinions

by Brett Stevens on January 6, 2015

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People do not want to admit that there is a war on for control of what you think. Some of this is what we consider innocuous, like the constant advertising on the roadsides, internet and in print. Other forms are more insidious, like people in your social group trying to bias you against people they do not like, or governments attempting to make certain ideas seem off-limits.

We know that in modern Western civilization, government both uses and allows Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) to enforce its strict taboos on un-democratic — the new term for “un-American” — thought. But other societies have not followed this same path and instead are limiting what people can say by excluding certain forms of music view religious decree. In particular, Malaysia has declared black metal and death metal off limits for its citizens:

All Muslims know pork, booze and premarital canoodling violates Islamic teachings. But in Malaysia, home to a rising tide of fundamentalist Islam, senior clerics are warning against more insidious dangers to the faith.

Such as death metal. And puppies. And Valentine’s Day.

“Black Metal” — Malaysian authorities have been fretting the influence of death metal since the 1990s. According to an official ruling against “Black Metal,” it’s powerful enough to force a Muslim to forsake his faith.

This approach is at least more honest than instead of banning a genre sending SJWs in to flood it with poor quality imitations of itself in the indie rock style, then taking over with a legion of *core fans who look like tattooed greebos who just stepped out of mental health treatment for low self-esteem. Speaking of which, recent research at Stanford suggests that people find “equality” a compelling goal in inverse proportion to how attractive and intelligent they feel. When you have low self-esteem, you make equality your life’s quest, and this explains why SJWs are moths drawn to that flame, in addition to their fundamentally hipster insincerity which has them using a political viewpoint to demand their own inclusion.

As we saw in #gamergate, #metalgate SJWs are not exactly competent. In fact, the only reason they talk about equality so much is that they could not advance themselves based on competence alone. This differentiates the SJW incursion from moral panics such as the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in the 1980s in USA, or the type of fatwa issued in Malaysia, which seems to be a decree of general behavioral guidelines rather than an attempt to promote the fatwa-issuer based on how cool, hip and Pabst-swilling skinny-jeans wearing socially acceptable his opinions are. But the end result of both is the same: metal does not bow to their imaginary rules, and so they want metal destroyed.

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Hippies fail at metal because metal hates hippies

by Cory Van der Pol on December 30, 2014

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Hippies can’t play metal. Black Sabbath kicked off the metal movement because they wanted to make dark rock in contrast to the “peace, love and happiness” movement that had swept rock music into conformity. In this they joined other acts, like The Doors and Jethro Tull, who warned that good intentions would not save the world.

Since the 1990s, hippies are no longer the opposition to our evil conservative overlords… hippies are the Establishment, and they have become just as conservative and evil as anything before, except that now that have a mantle of moral superiority to use as a weapon like grandmothers use guilt. Not only have the hippies aged into their 60s, but they have adopted the view that they are right and anyone who deviates must be quashed. So much for the summer of love.

For that reason it’s natural that much as metal fought the suburban mom censors and Christian fundamentalists back in the 1980s, from the 1990s onward it has been fighting hippie fundamentalists who believe that peace, love, inclusiveness, happiness and political correctness are the only topics one can sing about, and if not, one is the enemy. This follows the path other ideological fanatics took, as in the Soviet Union, where their revolution for equality ended in mass executions.

This is a turf war. Hippies have wanted to take over metal since we challenged them (and their insipid rock) in the 1960s. They took over hardcore in the 1980s and songs went from rants about the imminent decline of our society to cute ditties about how the singer is outraged that people are not more accepting of everyone and everything. They transferred all that boring late hardcore into metal and threw some metal and jazz riffs on the top and called it a new genre, “modern metal.” The problem with it is that it is boring. Every single band of this type is random because the message it endorses is the anti-message: stand for nothing except going along with the hippies. This means writing transparent songs about SJW-topics that never really go anywhere since they all have the same meaning, “join the revolution!”

If you listen to enough modern metal, you will notice a pattern emerges. On the surface, this music is diverse and exciting. Jazz riffs, metal riffs, punk riffs and indie rock tropes compete for surface space. But then if you look at the heart of it, these songs really do not have much going for them. There is no melody or theme uniting them, just a loop of verse-chorus to which the band tacks on the randomness. This is because these are not songs about anything but are new and not very exciting ways of saying the exact same thing over and over again. Like a loudspeaker blaring in Moscow square, SJW-metal repeats the same propaganda in lockstep in hopes of reducing your brain to sludge so you go along with it. There is a reason it is all boring, and it relates to the purpose behind the music. Just like pop is annoying because its only purpose is to be catchy and vapid, SJW-metal is boring because its only purpose is to bleat propaganda while trying to be “unique” by making new surface variations of the same tired 1960s-1980s rock.

When hippies invaded rock, they destroyed it. When they invaded punk, they neutered it. If they successfully invade heavy metal, they will turn the last comfort of the rebellious soul into the dogma of the boring 1960s revolutionary left. SJWs are zombies who preach the same stuff that baby boomers were wailing on about in the 1960s, forgetting that all that stuff got debunked when the USSR fell in ruins and we got to see the SJW paradise: everyone was equal, and anyone who disagreed got shot, so no one did much of anything and it all fell apart. Hippies would bring us to the same end. They are essentially apologists for the decay of our society. Where metalheads want to look at reality and come up with solutions, hippies want us to space out with happy feelings and ignore the fact that we are in free fall as a society and soon to bottom out. This is why industry and government eventually embraced hippies: they do not threaten the power structure. Metal does, and that is why today’s hippies are trying to invade it, and why we must refute, resist and reject them.

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#metalgate goes mainstream

by Cory Van der Pol on December 23, 2014

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2014 will be remembered as the year when people woke up to how our minds are controlled by media. In every area of life, ideological fanatics have taken over and tried to gain control. In metal, #metalgate pushed back against these people not so much from outright disagreement with their intent but absolute hatred of their method — control through guilt — which reminds us of organized religion, high school disciplinarians, and other authoritarian types.

#metalgate has not gone away. First, Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) denied that it was happening. Then they blamed it on #gamergate. Then they claimed #metalgate had failed. In the process, however, #metalgate and #gamergate have been absorbed by the larger culture around us as people push back against the people who are getting a free ride in media, academia and entertainment by having the “right” opinions, and using guilt to force everyone to hire them and treat them as important. When in fact, most of them are semi-competent as their actions during #metalgate show.

Our own editor was kicked off a mailing list for having the wrong opinions. His satirical article which pointed out that punishments for rape are disproportionate given the nature of most “rapes” as post-sex regret, in the hands of SJWs, became treated like an actual rape. Academics and journalists on the list talked about how his words made them “afraid.” Then they kicked him off and closed their mailing list so outsiders cannot observe what goes on there. By doing so, they have made it clear that only SJWs are welcome. This reminds me of the JournoList scandal, in which media elites were using a mailing list to agree on how they would shape public opinion. Whether or not you agree with the opinions of the journalists in question, these are sleazy tactics that have more in common with totalitarian propaganda machines than a free society.

The conflict is spreading into the public sphere from several angles. #metalgate supporter and heavy metal frontman David Draiman (Disturbed) recently pushed back against the media in defense of his ancestral homeland, Israel:

“The mainstream media is setting the stage for a new Holocaust. They are the reason that this anti-Semitic fervor has been perpetuated over the entire globe,” said Draiman, who is the son of Israelis and the grandson of Holocaust survivors.

“It’s interesting how the media loved the state of Israel and loved our story when we were the underdog, and now that we’re no longer the underdog, now that we have the ability and the military might and the intestinal fortitude to always defend ourselves and defend our people and defend our right to exist, they damn us for that and they condemn us for that,” the heavy metal frontman added.

As Sam Dunn’s Global Metal illustrated, one aspect of metal is that it attaches very well to national cultures and helps people see national pride in a different way. In Israel, this means bands like Salem, Kever and Melechesh who do not shy away from the conflict in their homeland. Instead of taking an SJW-style viewpoint that there is a “right side of history” and claiming that anyone who disagrees is a racist (or sexist, homophobe, etc.), these bands explored the conflict to see what was actually driving people toward aggression. This is the metal way: we see conflict as growth, war as necessary, and we look underneath the surface illusion of society to see what is actually there. If you listen to society, you get social statements, media talking heads and neat tidy categories in politics. If you think like a metalhead, you look at the reasons for the conflict much like a scientist examines events in nature. You do not moralize, you explain.

Writing in The Federalist, Robert Tracinski discovers the high stakes of the current struggle between SJWs and the rest of us, and gives #metalgate a mention as well:

But this year, I discovered that while I might not be interested in the culture war, the culture war is interested in me. It’s interested in all of us.

This is the year when we were served notice that we won’t be allowed to stand on the sidelines, because we will not be allowed to think differently from the left.

Although The Federalist is a bit too right-wing for me, others have noticed from the other side of the spectrum. Over at Medium, Dave Pell writes about how social networking has created a culture in which we crucify people for saying things that offend others:

I worry that these new realities will lead us down path towards self-censorship. Sharing was fun at first. But now we can see the potential costs. And the risks associated with broadcasting our thoughts just might be enough to turn the era of open digital communication into the age of shut the fuck up.

Over at Spiked, editor Brendan O’Neill writes about how paranoia of this kind of public shaming and destruction is causing people to self-censor themselves, and how this makes us very much like the people who see as evil totalitarians.

Self-censorship is the worst form of censorship, for it encourages people to internalise illiberalism. It plants a secret censor in every boardroom and newsroom and gallery and even in people’s minds — an invisible tut-tutter constantly warning us ‘don’t say that’ and ‘don’t show that’ because, in the words of Index on Censorship, there’s ‘the possibility of a hostile response’. It nurtures risk-aversion, even moral cowardice, and it discourages people from taking great leaps of the mind or pushing culture in a new and provocative direction. It stultifies the soul. It hampers the human spirit itself. And worst of all, it inflames the intolerant: the more people self-censor, the more the censorious will demand it, whether it’s Oxford students, Guardian feminists, or foreign tyrants. If Guardians of Peace really is North Korea, then that shows that the West has become so allergic to liberty that even that tyrannical hermit state is taking lessons from us, borrowing from our book of using online intimidation to make offensive speakers apologise and retract.

Not only that, from a somewhat disturbing news article earlier today, you can see the rise of censorship in action in this story of a teenager who posted a (perhaps 4chan-ish) joke about a garbage truck accident.

The 19-year-old, believed to be Ross Loraine, from Sunderland, handed himself in to police yesterday evening after a number of complaints were made about the tweet.

He is alleged to have written: “So a bin lorry has crashed into 100 people in Glasgow eh, probably the most trash its ever picked up in one day that.”

Northumbria Police said he was arrested on suspicion of making a malicious communication and had been bailed while they made further inquiries into the incident.

I don’t want to defend this joke. I want to defend his ability to make this joke and for me to ignore it, much like I ignore misogyny in Cannibal Corpse lyrics and comically amateurish socialist propaganda in Napalm Death lyrics. I see those two lyrical missteps as coming from the same place, which is a desire to play with powerful and offensive symbols. Metal would scream “Fire!” in a crowded theater, blaspheme in church, eat cake in the bathroom and cross-dress at football games. It’s just what we do. We are part trolls and part people who do not trust society and its tendency to create a veneer of simple answers that conceal what is actually going on, which in our case is a very sick society possible on the verge of collapse.

Frenzied grand constructions, wars and great rituals are among the common responses of ancient leaders to crises. These demonstrate powerful responses by the leaders (enhancing their threatened hold on power), but almost never really address the problems themselves. A cynic might characterize the giant U.S. stimulus bill of 2009 as such an effort.

Leaders may recognize that they are not addressing the real problems, but they rationalize their actions with the argument that they must first politically survive in order to later address the hard problems and sacrifices. Of course, they usually don’t ever actually get around to addressing the fundamental problems later, either because they don’t make it through the initial crisis or because, even later, they are not willing to risk sacrificing their own position (or “career”) with needed measures that usually require tough sacrifices by the population.

We live in troubled times. SJWs insist that they are revolutionaries who are bringing us some kind of new enlightenment but in actuality they are repeating to us the same ideas from the 1960s that our parents and grandparents thought were new and fresh. Way to not think outside of the box, guys. While SJWs insist they are rebels against the Establishment, the truth is that they are the establishment. Government regulations and laws have created situations where offending someone, even if that offense is not sensible, can result the outsider being fired. SJWs use this threat passive-aggressively to force others out of the way so SJWs can promote their own brand of hipster “metal,” take positions in media and academia, and generally get their own way through means other than competence. This is similar to accusations in #gamergate, where female games journalists with no qualifications were getting promoted at a rate that correlated highly with their sexual conquests in the media in-group that included their employers. In “Let’s have a national conversation about race — so we can figure out whom to fire”, Eugene Volokh writes in the Washington Post:

Even without the risk of litigation, many people have long been cautious about talking about matters that their listeners might feel strongly about a deep and personal level — race, religion, politics, sexuality, and more. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the risk of vast liability has been an important factor in dramatically increasing the cost of expressing one’s candid views about race (especially at work), and in deterring people from expressing those views.

That’s what #metalgate is about. Make a joke about a garbage truck crash, or say anything about race that deviates from the official Title VII opinions set out by American laws and courts, and you are the bad guy and you will be fired. But this can be used as a weapon. An SJW comes along and says, “Promote me or I’ll claim you said something sexist, racist or homophobic.” Or they find some way to construe a relatively innocent statement as such. Or maybe you make a joke about a garbage truck. They now control you because you are indebted to them for not destroying your career, so you have to hire them. They then maneuver others like them on staff. If you wonder why journalists and academics write about things that have seemingly no relation to everyday life, this is why. You are looking at a jobs program based on government anti-discrimination law abused by a small group of hipsters who want to dominate the discussion and exclude anyone who does not agree — this is different than disagreeing — with them.

Metal and gaming are not alone. Other areas of life have been affected by these people as well, since being able to get yourself hired or promoted because of guilt makes it easy to succeed. But in 2014, people started pushing back. Metal contributed an important part of the conversation with #metalgate, and as this pushback gains momentum we will likely see more from that quarter.

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