#metalgate: When bullies play victim

by Cory Van der Pol on February 23, 2015

feminism_on_the_internet

#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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1990s “Satanic panic” videos show same attitude as #metalgate hipsters

by David Rosenberg on February 11, 2015

praise_the_master_satan

Back in the 1980s, many panics gripped the land. People knew on a subconscious level that their society was falling apart, but could not find the source of the decay. They started blaming traditional scapegoats, like Satan, Jews, Nazis, atheists, pedophiles, drugs, sex and rock music.

It takes society a decade or more to respond to any change, so the best examples of this phenomenon occurred in the 1990s as people finalized their arguments on the topic, having learned from those who went before them and incorporated the ideas of many different sources into a single culture (for lack of a better term). The following videos show the 1980s/1990s “Satanic panic” as what it was: an attempt to use a think of the children style excuse to seize power, in the name of banishing evil rock lyrics but actually with the intent of taking control.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt_T5EF-uzU

This situation is entirely analogous to #metalgate. SJWs are hipsters who want to use “social justice” as an excuse to seize power. They don’t really care about the topic, because if they did they’d be out there setting up communities for people to be safe from whatever evils they complain about. Instead, they are posturing on the internet about how good they are and how (by reverse implication) bad the rest of us are, and thus how they deserve power over us since they are so good. The current “misogynist homophobe” panic from SJWs is entirely equivalent to the fear of Satanists under every bed that gripped the US in the 1980s, and the underlying mentality is the same: pick someone to bully that no one will defend, and use that person as a scapegoat, then like a good salesman claim that you can banish this demon in exchange for the low, low price of… handing control over to you!

Libertarian/open-source/anarchist Eric S. Raymond formalized the judgment of the “social justice” movement advanced by this blog a few weeks ago, calling them bullies in search of a cause:

Whenever I see screaming, hate-filled behavior like hers the important part never turns out to be whatever principles the screamer claims to be advocating. Those are just window-dressing for the bullying, the dominance games, and the rage.

You cannot ameliorate the behavior of people like that by accepting their premises and arguing within them; they’ll just pocket your concessions and attack again, seeking increasingly abject submission. In one-on-one relationships this is called “emotional abuse”, and like abusers they are all about control of you while claiming to be about anything but.

Third-wave feminism, “social justice” and “anti-racism” are rotten with this. Some of the principles, considered in isolation, would be noble; but they don’t stay noble in the minds of a rage mob.

The good news is that, like emotional abusers, they only have the power over you that you allow them. Liberation begins with recognizing the abuse for what it is. It continues by entirely rejecting their attempts at manipulation. This means rejecting their terminology, their core concepts, their framing, and their attempts to jam you into a “victim” or “oppressor” identity that denies your lived experience.

He is correct: #metalgate is what happens when bullies become Bully 2.0, and start wrapping themselves in the flag (civil rights) and carrying a cross (social justice). While their religion is secular and their patriotism is more to an idea than a particular nation-state, SJWs are bullies wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. They have come to seize power and use it to destroy all who are not like them, because they are fundamentally unstable as people. We have seen this pattern in history many times and SJWs are just the latest (incompetent) iteration.

He also makes a point that people in metal should pay attention to: “show us the code” translates into “show us the metal.” There are zero SJW bands with as much power as Darkthrone, Motorhead, Judas Priest, Slayer, Malevolent Creation, Burzum or other SJW-bane bands. The reason is that these bands have nothing to offer but attitude and surface adornment; they have no real content, and thus are as boring as the bubblegum pop they claim to abhor but secretly emulate.

On a side note, atheists have joined the religious wars and somewhat confirmed that they are indeed a religion with a a recent shooting:

In one post widely shared online, Hicks, who claimed he is an atheist, allegedly wrote: “When it comes to insults, your religion started this, not me. If your religion kept its big mouth shut, so would I.”

No one speaks up for the agnostics, so I will. Science is agnostic. It does not take a position on God one way or the other because it cannot measure God. Conjecture in either direction is in its view unwarranted. Atheists on the other hand have taken the position that they know the nature of the supernatural, which is the exact position that every other religion takes, which makes atheism a de facto religion, and like religions, it will be prone to clash with those of competing belief systems. Maybe agnosticism deserves another look.

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#metalgate hipsters continue faking the news

by Cory Van der Pol on January 31, 2015

caïna-band_photo

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

justin_bieber-post_metal

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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Sympathy for the Hipster

by Brett Stevens on January 11, 2015

gigging_hipster

I write a lot about hipsters because I am fascinated by subcultures and how they attempt to find meaning independent of the center. You can join the ska kids, Goths, rivetheads, wi-fi hobos, ecolos or channers. You might have a thedic identity, a de facto tribe combined of ethnic pride and politics, or an outright political group like the earth firsters, crypto-coms or far-right. In a time of no actual commonality to our deconstructed societies, you know you will be a cog in the machine: working a job, paying taxes and housing, and doing all the day-to-day stuff like shopping at Costco that is about as romantic as math homework. To counter-balance that, people seek an identity which shows why their lives are important. All of these are extensions of the original “keeping up with the Joneses” that saw people trying to out-consume each other, but now we are consuming the image of ideas instead of pure product.

Modern life represents at its core a long slow grinding compromise. Any idea is taken from where it is found and made into a product by simplifying it, exaggerating its surface features, and then presenting it for mass consumption. Joining an identity first involves a shopping trip for music, books, clothing and personal accessories including tattoos, piercings, scarification and hitting the gym. Through this process, unique identities are gradually “assimilated,” or made into variants of the mainstream. Every ideation operator declares the gradual entry of those who perpetuate this process into their chosen identity — the falses, the poseurs, the day-trippers, scenesters and imitators — because when enough of them arrive, the unique group becomes overwhelmed and as happens in democracy, what is popular and easily understood wins out over the original idea, which then fades into a distant memory and a cartoon of itself.

Hipsters represent those who have given up on the idea of idea itself. They realize early on that this society is a kicked clip, empty of ammunition and fit only to be returned to the pocket and another retrieved, starting over. But discovering what we want for a future represents a good deal more ambiguity and risk than knowing simply what we detest, and in the meantime, people need an identity to distinguish themselves from the faceless mass. The hipster was born out of this situation by Generation X, who combined slacker culture with counter-culture and added the suburban desperation of their parents, who were only to happen to discuss in detail how the world was going to hell, in front of their children. As a result a new identity formed based on those who have dropped out of society but still seek a way to distinguish themselves, and instead of doing so through strong group identity, they base their concept of self on self-image alone. Thus the hipster opposes the idea itself, and instead seeks a different kind of center: what everyone else is doing, but with some unique conceit for the individual itself. Hipsters are bog-standard people who have hobbies in craft beer, tattooing, making artisanal objects, odd collections, activities chosen for their apparent randomness, and of course art, art and more art, because nothing makes a person look profound like the boho artist lifestyle.

As the definitive article on this topic says:

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

People who seek an idea loathe hipsters because hipsters are the anti-idea. They reject the notion that we can have purpose outside of ourselves, and instead make their time by adorning the self with new fascinating attributes which are always bizarre because their sole goal is to distinguish themselves from the rest, and so whatever is sensible and normal is verboten. The hipster seeks to be unique, individual and different (UID) so that they do not get mistaken for the rest. Part of this is a counter-culture style protest saying that they do not endorse or enjoy the mainstream, and in fact oppose it so should not be held accountable for its failings; the rest comes from the simple need to distinguish oneself in a social scene flooded with people who are all trying to be noticed. Where in the 1920s doing stunts on the lawn might have worked, and in the 1980s it was enough to join an indie band, for the people who come after the reunion of right and left in the 1990s there is no longer an obvious majority culture to oppose. There is only the gradual compromise, and trying to stand out in its midst.

Hipsters suffer for the time into which they were born and the lack of easy and safe ways to rebel against it. Smoking weed and living in a VW van involved relatively few risks; at worst, an arrest occurred in some random little town in Ohio and dear old Dad had to dispatch money and lawyers to fix it. But opposing the conglomeration of democracy, capitalism, liberalism, consumerism and patriotism takes some guts and some time on the thinking couch, because it is not like The Establishment an easy thing to identify. Who can blame these people for laboring as poor cogs just trying to have normal lives? They can laugh at them but not indict them as the problem itself. The focus of the hipster becomes not reform of a society that is already lost, but saving oneself by at least being socially competitive through appearance and having a life independent from concern about the inward collapse — an idea — which might obligate one to sacrifice time otherwise spent on self toward some purpose.

That tendency reveals the problem with hipsters: they are perpetual entryists. Their only idea is the self, so any identity they discover they will turn into a product just as surely as their grandfathers did back in the 1950s. In essence, hipsters are the same consumers that people have always been, except now they are casting around for an appearance of having an idea and thus always sacrifice the idea itself because they are fundamentally opposed to ideas. Subcultures fear the hipster because to admit the hipster is to abolish the subculture and allow it to live on in zombie form as another branch of the great compromise but now as an adornment, like the “French bread” flavoring in the industrial-processed bread aisle or the “exotic scales” used in bog-ordinary rock music to dress it up and disguise its ordinariness. The hipster is indeed the dead end not of just Western civilization, but all civilization, because civilization requires an idea and with hipsterdom, all ideas have been sacrificed to the self.

At the same time, hipsters deserve our sympathy. They are the people on the deck of the Titanic, watching the unstoppable disaster that will inevitably compose them, choosing to get another pint from the bar and bum another cigarillo while bravely chatting about the inconsequential. The water grows incrementally closer and the lifeboats are long gone. Nothing remains except to live it up a little, stand out from the crowd and have your fun, before the darkness inexorably takes over. If you wonder why hipsters look as stressed and miserable as their parents, even when they have trust funds (and an alarming number of them do) and hip indie bands with the flavoring of metal, it is because they too see the approaching disaster and have found nothing to do about it.

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#metalgate reminder: SJWs tried banning metal in the USSR

by Brett Stevens on December 26, 2014

Bands the SJWs in the USSR tried to ban

Uproxx unearthed a list of bands that SJWs in the Soviet Union tried to ban for reasons such as nationalism, racism, neofascism, sex, eroticism and their favorite, “Anti-Soviet propaganda.”

Included on this list were Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Nazareth, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Kiss. As we go through another round of political figures attempting to brand metal as evil and force people to ostracize it, it helps us remember who their ideological ancestors are.

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#metalgate goes mainstream

by Cory Van der Pol on December 23, 2014

the_crab_ponders_its_assault

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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#metalgate SJWs blink

by Brett Stevens on December 22, 2014

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Last night, the Music, Metal and Politics mailing list had its archives available for the world. Then we ran an article here showing various list members calling for censorship, career destruction and other forms of retribution against me for having published articles critical of SJW antics in #metalgate.

This morning, the list archives are password-protected, as if there were something to hide and a fear of outsiders. In round one of #metalgate, the SJWs struck what they thought was a decisive blow, but in the end, they blinked.

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#metalgate SJWs prove their real purpose: censorship

by Brett Stevens on December 21, 2014

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Let us quickly get rid of a basic confusion: censorship is using social or governmental pressure to remove from view unpopular ideas that are also plausibly accurate depictions of reality. This separates the act of removing someone spraypainting “death to all metalcore” from a ban on articles about metalcore.

Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) comprise the driving force behind the incursion into metal against which #metalgate is a reaction. Metalheads do not want to be told what to think by a self-appointed cabal determining what is “true” based on their ideological agenda. It does not matter which agenda that is, only that it swallows up truth and metal equally and uses them as means toward its real goal, which is power and control.

Our first #metalgate article pointed out that the agenda of such people is inevitably control. Written by Cory van der Pol, the article detailed how political movements assimilate genres like metal, re-purposing them for the movement’s own needs. He followed this up with an article showing how the methods used by SJWs are bullying. Passive-aggressive bullying perhaps, hiding behind the pretense of morality and “good” politics, but nonetheless bullying. Then he illustrated how SJWs are associated with metalcore and indie-metal and are using it to slowly blot out real metal and replace it with this ersatz and inferior substitute. Finally, he predicted that SJWs would deny and conceal their actual goal, which is to censor — see definition above — any metal that does not fit their ideological needs and by doing so serve as a justification for their employment in media, academia and promotions.

He was 100% correct.

Today SJWs mounted a concerted campaign to remove me from the MetPol mailing list, which discusses metal and politics. As of this evening, apparently I have been removed. Here are some of the highlights:

Can the mods please block Brett Stevens / writing an article like the one natalie linked to is not only repulsive it’s misogynist.

We should take stand against this kind of thing. It’s unacceptable. It’s offensive. Especially to survivors of rape and sexual assault. – Rosie Overell

I would feel immensely safer if he were removed. – Natalie Zina Walschots

I am aiming to give #metalgate and its instigators as little oxygen as possible, but am glad Natalie brought this up here and would support the moderators if they chose to show Brett and his sympathizers the door. This is a place where people strive to broaden the understanding of metal, not narrow it, and while narrow views have a place in the world they’re not in keeping with the mission of this particular list. – Beth Winegarner

As one of the people that this piece of shit screen-shot their FB page and posted on his website, I must add that what astounds me – but doesn’t necessarily surprise me, unfortunately – is the lack of comments from both this thread and my so-called metal ‘friends’ on Facebook and Twitter about racism that surrounds the issue. – Laina Dawes

I will say, however, that I have been dismayed by this situation and I remain in awe of Laina’s courage to speak out despite the harassment and terrorization she has received. – Jeremy Wayne Wallach

This is a public list, with public archives that you can search via Google, Bing or the search engine of your choice. They are open to all and can be read by non-list members without a login or leaving any identifying information. These people are voluntarily posting this data to a public list where they hope it will be read for years to come. With this kind of outcry, it is not surprising the moderators chose to avoid damaging the list with more such drama and to remove me. It was the act of the small group — a dozen members out of a thousand — who chose to demand that I be censored and removed.

I have been a member of this list for the past year, entering in discussion about metal and providing links to resources there, without engaging in a single political opinion. To my mind, #metalgate has never been about politics and whether one side is right or not. It is about the tactics of a certain group who, in Cory’s words, use politics as the mantle behind which they assume power. In other words, they are doing it “in our best interests” and against our wishes are educating, enlightening and improving us to make us good citizens of their ideal society.

I’d like to keep this conversation going without hammering on the idiotic obvious. I appreciate the banning, but I’ll echo Olivia by quoting her: “…banning a single individual is not going to solve the problems of racism and sexism in the metal community. These prejudices are within us and among us, and begin with the complacency purchased by our various privileges.” – Sara Sutler-Cohen

My stance on this issue has always been clear: we stood up to the Christian right, then we stood up to the NSBM people, and now we’re standing up to SJWs. Metal has a unique view of life and a unique viewpoint on how to handle certain things, and it benefits no one to have metal start parroting the points of view of other groups. We should have a diversity of approaches instead of a lock-step uniform viewpoint enforced with guilt and threats of censorship and lack of tenure. My participation in this entire event was as someone opposing censorship, and those who can read will note that none of our articles here targeted the beliefs of SJWs, only their methods and motivations.

During my twenty years of writing about metal, I have sought to avoid both political dogma and commercialization. After initial experiences, I did not trust academia because of its long-standing bias in one trend or another. (And if metal hates anything, it is trends.) From starting the first underground metal site on the net, first as FTP and later as a series of web sites, I have always advocated an open mind and open discussion. This apparently is not the agenda of SJWs and despite their initial denial, they proceeded exactly as their dissenters said they would: with calls for censorship and propaganda.

In the meantime, #metalgate is gaining momentum with new articles in the work on both metal and social commentary websites. The SJWs have defeated themselves by becoming the caricature that their critics said they always were. And if we need to look for a silver lining to this cloud, it is the confirmation of that stereotype.

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#metalgate SJWs fight back

by Brett Stevens on December 20, 2014

natalie_zina_walschots-metalgate

As you, our readers, know we tackle many difficult topics on this blog. Some involve pointing out what metal is trivial and what is not; others tackle “big people issues” like politics, society and moral questions. One of those has been Cory van der Pol’s recent series of articles on #metalgate, a conflict between “Social Justice Warrior” (SJW) journalists and those who feel that politics should not invade metal.

Death Metal Underground has for over two decades committed itself to truth, meaning those ideas which correspond to reality and imagination at the same time. We have broached many difficult issues and disappointed people from all sides of the political, social, sexual and ethnic spectrum, as well as delighting many others of similar orientation. If you like truth and metal, you will like this blog even if it has a somewhat acerbic style.

It is disappointing to see grown men and women behaving in such a way that there is only one word for them: bullies. Like witch hunters, bullies rely on a perception of social support in order to shame, humiliate and ostracize others. It is one of the lowest attributes of humanity to use bullying instead of the original form of getting anything done, which is honest discussion and debate. In fact, bullying is meant to prevent exactly that.

People such as the SJW above do not want a discussion; they want to ensure one does not take place. It is for this reason that we at Death Metal Underground proudly resist them and continue to run controversial articles by controversial writers. Anything else is preaching to the choir and I see no reason why we should waste your time with such a mundane endeavor.

Cory van der Pol may have another article coming on the #metalgate issue, or he may not. Regardless, Death Metal Underground will continue its mission of providing quality metal information no matter who gets offended and decides we are Satan. We will save you the trouble: we are the Satan to your pharisaic interpretation of God that excludes truth in the name of obedience, and we will always oppose you.

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