I’m fast coming around to the view that the concept of free will is what Ayn Rand called an anti-concept.
An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate …
Free will is designed to obliterate human decision-making.
It’s simple. We make decisions.
Other people (including God) hold us accountable (i.e., deserving of moral praise or blame) for our decisions. That’s all there is to it, and all you need to know.
The Singularity – the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence – is coming, as early as 2030 according to some estimates. The first smarter-than-human AI will make decisions, like we do, only better. Will it have free will? That depends on whether other people (including God) hold it accountable for its decisions.
“The first was like a lion, and it had the wings of an eagle. I watched until its wings were torn off and it was lifted from the ground so that it stood on two feet like a human being, and the mind of a human was given to it. (NIV)
This is an important subject I have been wanting to blog for some time.
It has to do with the Nature vs Nurture debate.
It’s a very big topic which will only lightly be touched upon in this post.
I would like to talk about a few examples which prove the importance of how Parents nurture their children.
While it may not be strictly true to say We start our ideological/ mental lives ‘Tabular Rasa’ (with an empty slate) we… like Birds who don’t need to be taught to build nests…We humans too possess some ‘instincts’/ innate knowledge, and despite the latest controversial/ absurd claims by Evolutionary biologists that try and assert that we are born politically Left, or Right, or Libertarian….the reality is how we end up ideologically speaking as adults has a hell of a lot to do with the environment in which we live and the external influences we imbibe.
It is patently obvious to me that both Nature and Nurture work together in producing Human personalities, yet for now let put aside the discussion of Nature and focus on Nurture.
I raise this subject for discussion to highlight just how important our behavior as parents is in respect to effecting our Children’s perspective of the world and how they learn to deal with life, and how vitally important the Ideas and values we embody and teach them are to our children’s future well being.
Just two examples will suffice to get this discussion going…
The first is an article which appeared in the NZ herald
‘Hate-filled Family made monster’ read it Here:
Now in this article the brother of a Terrorist… the French Scooter Killer Mohamed Merah whom Murdered 7 people (including 3 Jewish children) and died in a hail of Bullets resisting arrest.
Yet Mohamed was not born in a vacuume.
In a book he has written this Terrorist’s brother dis-owns and condemns his own family members for filling his brothers head with hatred.
I would suggest that this is a very common thread within the Lions share of Radical Islamic extremists whom end up with a Rabid Race hatred for the Jews and others, and go on to become Terrorists, suicide bombers, etc.
Not having read the book I must ask why it is that this other brother did not become a terrorist too?
What saved him?
In what way was his individual nature and Nurturing different to that of his fanatical Brother?
Racist radical and Mana Party Leader and MP Hone Harawera.
The Next example I would like to raise is closer to home (for Kiwis)….that of the Racist Radical MP and Leader of The Mana Party John (Hone) Harawera son of the Rabid Racist… the Evil Titiwhi Harawera.
Now it is obvious to all what sort of upbringing Titiwhi gave her son!
She filled his head with stories of how the Pakeha (European invaders) executed a ‘Holocaust’ against the Maori people, and robbed them of their land, and have left them destitute. She has taught him that ever since the establishment of ‘White rule’ Maori people have been trodden underfoot and suffered vile Race oppressions.
The end result has been to produce one of the countries most militantly hateful and racist personalities… Hone Harawera.
Mummy must be proud!
This tale would be common to many of our worst Maori Radical… like Tame Iti.
Thus from these two examples we can easily see that Haters do in fact grow on trees… They are carefully propagated… nurtured… Indoctrinated.
We can be sure that had Hone been adopted out as a child to a Pakeha family (like my uncle was) that he would not be the same person today.
That many of the most vile Haters are born from Hate filled environments surely means we ought to mitigate our condemnation of Hone’s current attitudes and activities.
Putting it bluntly… he’s been brainwashed from a very early age, and his attitude is almost to be expected.
We can see that his hatred for Pakeha, and his desire for UTU has less to do with factual history, and more to do with the vile racism of his mother.
It’s like an moral virus he picked up.
I suspect Titiwhi herself had a similar upbringing.
Of course depending upon how solid a moral foundation we ourselves have been taught by our parents, (and others) will determine how resilient we are against the hatred and prejudices of others throughout our lives. Ie if we have been taught enlightened values as a child, and wisdom about how the world really works, we will be able to fend off the vile lies and hate filled Bigotry of others rather than assimilating it.
This points to just how vital it is that we as parents take pains to instill enlightened and humane values in our children to fortify them when they go to school, and eventually out into the world.
So many evils are taught in school!
Today from primary school to University our politically corrupted Education system since the late 70’s has actually taught our nations children many of the lies that Titiwhi taught her son!
And due to a serious lack of wisdom on the part of the average parent today we have an indoctrinated society of sheeple whom accept a heinously distorted view of the history of New Zealand, and embrace an apartheid system of Government!
The Great Booker T Washington.
I do not suggest that All haters result from hateful upbringings, or indoctrination. I know horrible events in peoples lives can also generate hatered.
Nor am a saying Hone’s upbringing renders him morally blameless for his prejudices and activities as an MP. I have said what I have said with hope of understanding how such a bigot came to be… where many haters come from.
As an adult he is morally culpable.
If we look at such Moral exemplars as ex slaves, Frederick Douglas, Booker T Washington, or Equal rights activist Martin Luther King, we learn from them that oppression and prejudice does not justify reciprocation.
These Humanitarians were followers of the teachings of Jesus Christ… “Render no man evil for evil but overcome evil with good” .
They broke their chains… not only the legal chains which kept their peoples under, but most importantly, the Chains that link intergenerational Race hate.
So I ask Parents here … esp to Maori parents…” What values are you teaching your children?”
“What example do you set?”
Are You holding up a torch to lighten their paths, or are you filling their hearts with malice against their white friends and neighbors?
Will the values you have instilled help them to succeed in the world or will they hobble their ability to make good judgments… free of malice?
Tim Wikiriwhi
Christian Libertarian.
Update: 28-4-13 Who Radicalised Boston BomberTamerlan Tsarnaev?
The following is an op-ed by former (?) television newsreader and interviewer Lindsay Perigo, originally published online at http://www.solopassion.com/node/7876. But don’t read it there, and don’t read it here, either. Read it on Stuff Nation, where, in just a couple of days, Perigo’s piece has attracted 490 comments (last time I checked). Nice one, Linz!
I wonder how many television viewers there are like me for whom watching the six o’clock news on TVNZ or TV3 was until recently a staple of their daily routine, but who now repair to online sources for their news because the network bulletins have become unwatchable – or more precisely, unlistenable?
An army of airheads has been let loose on the airwaves who have no business being anywhere near a microphone sounding the way they do. They don’t speak, they quack.
Many newsreaders and most reporters on flagship news bulletins now sound like panicked ducks at the start of the shooting season.
Their employers, far from being alarmed by the situation and sending their uneducated charges off for remedial speech training, embrace the barbarian triumph as a victory for the authentic Kiwi accent. It is nothing of the sort.
The quacking epidemic spawned by TVNZ and TV3 is now a national plague and an international joke, an unseemly blight on a nation claiming to be civilised.
In recent times, high-profile commentators Karl du Fresne, Sir Robert Jones, Deborah Coddington and Janet Wilson (herself a former television reporter) have rung alarm bells about it.
The newsreaders’ quacking, droning, grunting and mumbling are our worst form of noise pollution.
Their “yeah-no,” “you-know,” “like, like,” “awesome,” “cool,” “wodevva,” and so on are the bane of coherent conversation. Their mangled vowels and muddied consonants make swine sound educated.
They are clueless about the distinction between “children” and “choowdren,” “Wellington” and “Wawwington,” “vulnerable” and “vunrable,” “the six o’clock news” and “the sucks o’clock news,” “showers” and “showwwwwwaz,” “known” and “knowen,” “well” and “wow,” “health” and “howth,” “New Zealand” and “New Zilland”.
The locus of their emissions is not the mouth, but the nose. Their assault on the English language is a [N]ational scandal. Theirs is not an accent; it is a disease.
In their childlike glottal stops (“thuh office”), their selective emphasis that is 100 per cent wrong (hitting conjunctions and prepositions —”Woow arroyv UN Wawwington ET sucks o’clock”), their spluttering nasality, their dim-witted droning and silly sing-song, their inability to scan ahead and phrase intelligently, our reporters are stuck at the level of an infant.
It may be that they are not truly “airheads”, but they certainly seem like airheads with such retarded speech patterns.
No, one is not demanding they speak like the Queen, but is it too much to ask that they sound like educated adults?
All that attention to how they look, and none whatsoever to how they sound! (Except when articulating Maori words. If it’s good enough for Maori, why not English?)
One of my pupils, a budding TV actor barely in his 20s, confessed that he was in deathly fear of being made to sound “posh.”
Sounding “posh,” he believed, would activate Tall Poppy Syndrome, be “uncool” and jeopardise his career.
By “posh” he evidently meant “plummy, like Sam Neill,” whose career doesn’t seem to have suffered for it.
I pointed to the impeccably Kiwi rugby commentary duo of Grant Nisbett and Tony Johnson both of whom speak clearly and well without sounding remotely “plummy.”
And what about the beautifully-spoken Sir Paul Holmes? Or Eric Young and Alistair Wilkinson on Sky?
What does it matter, the barbarians’ cheerleaders will ask, as long as we get the gist of what they’re saying? Dominion Post columnist Karl du Fresne answered this as follows:
‘‘I have heard it argued that none of this matters as long as we can understand what people are saying, to which my response is twofold. First, it’s physically painful to listen to some of these awful voices torturing the language; and second, it’s getting to the point where we can’t understand them. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll need subtitles on the TV news bulletins to explain what some female journalists and newsreaders are saying.’’
A New Zealand in which quacking is as universal as it’s threatening to become will intellectually bankrupt us. Its democracy will be a travesty of freedom as vapid voters who routinely quack inanities such as “Yeah, no, I’m like, oh my god, that’s so totally awesome” will thus mindlessly endorse the most unconscionable bribes offered by the most unscrupulous politicians.
Not only being able to watch the news again, but also freedom and civilisation themselves, are at stake.
His dominion is an eternal dominion;
his kingdom endures from generation to generation.
All the peoples of the earth
are regarded as nothing.
He does as he pleases
with the powers of heaven
and the peoples of the earth.
No one can hold back his hand
or say to him: “What have you done?”
Still sick of David Bain? Let’s talk about Giuliano Mignini, the lead prosecutor in the Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito murder trial, instead.
Injustice in Perugia, “a site detailing the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox & Raffaele Sollecito,” says
Mignini was quick to take complete control over the investigation. Mignini had a vision of how this crime took place. He believed the crime started out as a sadistic sex game that turned into a brutal murder when Meredith refused to participate. His fantasy of a group sex game gone wrong was based on nothing more than his imagination. This is not the first time Mignini has had these visions. He already had a history of dreaming up satanic ritualistic murder fantasies.
Oh dear. Let’s see what the Daily Express had to say when Knox and Sollecito were freed on appeal.
JAILING Amanda Knox was a personal crusade for Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini.
From the moment he saw Meredith Kercher’s blood-spattered body, he cast himself as the champion of good over the forces of evil.
The deeply religious 61-year-old lawyer first portrayed Knox as a she-devil who presided over the sacrifice of the English student.
When no evidence was found to support a ritual killing, Mignini came up with the theory of a “drug-fuelled sex game gone wrong”.
The prosecutor then floated other motives including Knox’s jealousy, cannabis-induced rage and a violent clash during a row over missing money and personal hygiene.
In the past few days, he portrayed Meredith’s killing as simply a “cold-blooded murder without motive”.
But whatever the reason, Knox’s nemesis is totally convinced of her guilt. And he has called for her 26-year sentence to be increased to life with six months’ isolation.
Mignini, whose job combines murder squad detective with chief prosecutor, relished his role as deliverer of justice in medieval Perugia.
But his tactics and the standard of the investigation have been criticised by independent legal observers.
The lawyer pursued Knox and her lover Raffaele Sollecito with a zeal bordering on obsession.
Hmm. Is there, perhaps, something wrong with Mignini? Well … here’s my theory. Delusional disorder. (Credit where credit’s due. Brooke Miller came up with this one.)
Delusional disorder is characterized by the presence of recurrent, persistent non-bizarre delusions.
Delusions are irrational beliefs, held with a high level of conviction, that are highly resistant to change even when the delusional person is exposed to forms of proof that contradict the belief. Non-bizarre delusions are considered to be plausible; that is, there is a possibility that what the person believes to be true could actually occur a small proportion of the time. Conversely, bizarre delusions focus on matters that would be impossible in reality. For example, a non-bizarre delusion might be the belief that one’s activities are constantly under observation by federal law enforcement or intelligence agencies, which actually does occur for a small number of people. By contrast, a man who believes he is pregnant with German Shepherd puppies holds a belief that could never come to pass in reality.
Unlike most other psychotic disorders, the person with delusional disorder typically does not appear obviously odd, strange or peculiar during periods of active illness. Yet the person might make unusual choices in day-to-day life because of the delusional beliefs.
Most mental health professionals would concur that until the person with delusional disorder discusses the areas of life affected by the delusions, it would be difficult to distinguish the sufferer from members of the general public who are not psychiatrically disturbed. Another distinction of delusional disorder compared with other psychotic disorders is that hallucinations are either absent or occur infrequently.
The person with delusional disorder may or may not come to the attention of mental health providers. Typically, while delusional disorder sufferers may be distressed about the delusional “reality,” they may not have the insight to see that anything is wrong with the way they are thinking or functioning.
…the people suffering the disorder attribute any obstacles or problems in functioning to the delusional reality, separating it from their internal control. Furthermore, whether unable to get a good job or maintain a romantic relationship, the difficulties would be blamed on “government interference”(the delusion) rather than on their own failures or omissions.
It was bad luck, indeed, that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito had to suffer Giuliano Mignini as the lead prosecutor when they stood trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher.
Here’s another couple of folk who I don’t think get a clean bill of mental health.
Delusional disorder? Querulous paranoia? Narcissistic personality disorder? Sociopathic personality disorder? (Post traumatic stress disorder?!) Of his friend Joe Karam, Paul Holmes writes
The difficulty of being a friend of Joe – and we all found this, I think, those who were close to Joe – was that you had to accept that the David Bain case, and what he saw as a battle for justice, had taken over Joe’s life. There was a long period in the late 90s and the fi rst few years of this century when there was no conversation to be had with Joe that was not about David Bain. Joe was so committed to his cause, and so dedicated as to seem obsessed. Well, he was obsessed.
And, of David Bain, Otago Daily Times columnist Anna Chinn writes
Even if he was the killer, his identity today – including all his relationships – must be so heavily invested in his role as wrongfully convicted person that he will genuinely believe it. Denial, a powerful psychological defence mechanism, is only human.
LessWrong.com has an article with the title Bayes for Schizophrenics: Reasoning in Delusional Disorders. That’s right, folks! We can use Bayes theorem, not only to show that on the balance of probabilities David Bain almost certainly murdered his entire family, but also to gain an insight into why both Bain and Karam think he didn’t.
Is there a hyphen in the term ‘gay marriage’? No. ‘Gay’ and ‘marriage’ are two separate words.
But the English language is a dynamic, evolving entity. The general pattern is this. New terms formed from two words become hyphenated as the term comes into common use. When the term becomes established, the hyphen is dropped, and the new term becomes a new word in its own right.
A familiar example is the word ’email’. This word started out as the two-word phrase ‘electronic mail’.
As soon as “electronic mail” came into common use with the advent of the Internet, the term ‘electronic mail’ became hyphenated (and simultaneously the word ‘electronic’ was abbreviated to ‘e’) and ‘electronic mail’ morphed into ‘e-mail’.
Today, a Google search for “e-mail” yields
About 4,450,000,000 results.
It’s an impressive result. But a Google search for “email” (no hyphen) yields more than twice that number! Clearly, the hyphenated term ‘e-mail’ is now somewhat archaic. Today, the correct term is ’email’. One word, no hyphen.
As more and more governmental jurisdictions around the world recognise “gay marriage”, we will see the same, familiar pattern instantiated again.
‘Gay marriage’ will very soon become ‘gay-marriage’ (hyphenated) or, more likely, ‘g-marriage’ (hyphenated and abbreviated).
By the time the children of these g-marriages are themselves old enough to g-marry, the hyphen itself will have fallen into disuse.
‘Gay marriage’ will morph into ‘g-marriage’ which will morph into ‘gmarriage’. It’s a linguistic inevitability.
Amanda Knox is an American woman who was jointly convicted, with her boyfriend at the time Raffaele Sollecito, of the sexual assault and murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, on 1 November 2007.
Meredith Kercher, a 21 year old British university exchange student from Coulsdon, South London, was found dead on the floor of her bedroom with stab wounds to the throat. Some of her belongings were missing, including cash, two credit cards, two mobile phones, and her house keys.
Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast native raised in Perugia, was convicted in October 2008 of having sexually assaulted and murdered Kercher, and was sentenced to 30 years, reduced on appeal to 16 years in December 2009.
Also tried were Knox, an American exchange student and flatmate of Kercher, and Knox’s then-boyfriend, Sollecito, an Italian student. Knox and Sollecito were convicted on charges of sexual assault and murder in December 2009, and sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively.
Their convictions were overturned on appeal on 3 October 2011 by a panel of six jurors and two judges. In an official statement of their grounds for overturning the convictions the judges wrote there was a “material non-existence” of evidence to support the guilty verdicts at the trial. The appeal judges further stated that the prosecution’s theory of an association between Sollecito, Knox and Guede was “not corroborated by any evidence” and “far from probable”.
I first heard of the case—and it stuck in my mind ever since—when I read this
Two intelligent young people with previously bright futures, named Amanda and Raffaele, are now seven days into spending the next quarter-century of their lives behind bars for a crime they almost certainly did not commit.
The author wielded something called “the Sword of Bayes” and, to the following propositions
1. Amanda Knox is guilty (of killing Meredith Kercher)
2. Raffaele Sollecito is guilty (of killing Meredith Kercher)
3. Rudy Guédé is guilty (of killing Meredith Kercher)
assigned the following probabilities.
1. Small. Something on the order of 0.01 or 0.1 at most.
2. Ditto.
3. About as high as the other two numbers are low. 0.99 as a (probably weak) lower bound.
The author continues
Needless to say, this differs markedly from the consensus of the jury in Perugia, Italy.
How could this be?
Am I really suggesting that the estimates of eight jurors — among whom two professional judges — who heard the case for a year, along with something like 60% of the Italian public and probably half the Internet (and a significantly larger fraction of the non-American Internet), could be off by such a large amount?
Of course, the author really was suggesting exactly that. (It’s tempting to say—but, for obvious reasons, I won’t—that the LessWrong.com author was vindicated by the verdict of the appeal court in October 2011, that overturned Knox’s and Sollecito’s convictions.)
I won’t go into the nitty gritty details of the case. If you’re interested in further reading, Injustice in Perugia is a website set up by a Knox and Sollecito supporter, documenting the case.
Ok Atheists.
Lets say the Mayans are right, and a giant Comet is about to slam into the Earth.
Your Richard Branson, and have your own private spaceship.
May I ask what is your rationale?
Where do you intend going?
Earth is Unique.
… For all it’s massiveness, the Universe is Hostile, Dead, and empty.
Would the loss of the world awake you from your stupor?
Would you appreciate what divine blessings you took for granted… once they have been destroyed?
Your Spaceship is a Prison…. your Coffin.
Why not simply open the pressure hatch… and Die?
What is the point of the Atheist life?
You are Lost, and dead already
There is No Salvation for Atheists.
You must be a Self Deluded and Famous Biologist to not-understand that Atheism = Nihilism.
Is there anything so pathetic as an Atheist insisting they stand at the pinnacle of reality and maintain ‘ a sense of life’???
What’s the Point?
The average Teen is intelligent enough to know the difference between a theistic and Atheistic reality as a the distinction between Morality and Real value… from Amorality and worthlessness, sadly many are decieved into believing the Nihilistic veiw of reality.
Jim Morrison’s ‘The End’ is a Poem to the Atheist apprehension and value of Human Life.
“The Doors-The End
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surpise the End. Ill never look into your eyes again….”
Jim Morison.
An Intelligent young Teenage friend of mine Austin Carter is busy contemplating his place in the Universe…
He is asking all the right Questions… yet is confronted by all the chaos and confusion that Mankind has propagated to sway souls towards and away from the light.
Austin ponders… “Life is just a journey…”
“…Terrible things in this world happen constantly, we only hear a mere fraction of whats reality. Ignorance is bliss…”
“Logically thinking, being religious is an opinion. Not everyone agrees on opinions, nor religions, you think you are right even when you may not be and no opinion is right, it’s just an opinion. Everyone has there own views and beliefs, that’s why there are so many choices. It’s what it means to the individual, not the populous…”
“Life is an elaborate dream.”
“ There are more questions than answers. Remember that…”
“ We are all just sacks of meat and organs, a living thing, with no purpose in the world other than reproduction of our species and whatever else we make of ourselves. If I were to die right now, it would affect a small group of people, but would it change the world or send a message? No. Of course not, I am just one insignificant person as all of you are, but what if we made something of ourselves? What if we stood up and decided to make our lives worth something, mean something. To stand for something is a powerful tool to the human spirit but together we can make everyone’s life worth something. Do you just want to live a normal, mundane lifestyle doing as everyone does, a life of a sheep? “
Nothing that Ayn Rand or the Dick Dawkin’s can say can imbue Atheist reality with value or meaning.
They are Liars… and the average teenager knows it.
… and yet millions of Decieved People still follow them!
Why?
Because they seek to hide from moral duty and accountability… and that is the Primary Psychological underpinning of Atheism… This is the gospel for the Amoral and Lawless.
Can there be any question as to how corrosive… how Fatal such a world view is to a human being?
And worst of all …it’s false!
Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away”.
… Jesus Christ.
The Atheist Mockers have been silenced.
Modern science has caught up with Theistic Revelation.
The Universe/ Matter is not Eternal.
…
Now Everybody knows That one day this world will end, It’s just a question of when?
And consider this… The world and universe do not have to implode for it to be the ‘End of your world’.
For 150 000 souls 20-12-12 will be the end.
How many will step through the door and Meet their Gracious Savior?
How many of these thousands will instead step into a Courtroom and face THE JUDGE. ?
There is a greater reality than this Temporal plain!
Our Existence is not mere chance… but purposed.
Our Lives and actions do have moral weight.
God loves us and sent Christ to save us from Sin and death, and it is from God that our lives have real value.
Life is indeed a journey.
The World did not end 20-12-12.
We Christians Never believed it would.
And so the need to carry on blogging, and keeping busy with Christian Evangelism, and Libertarian activism, is still urgent…. to share this message of Hope to questioning souls like my young friend…
Without the preaching of Christian Libertarians , the lost will remain deceived by the Militantly Antichrist Atheists into thinking Religion is foolish and wrong.
They will dwell in the despair of the Black Meaningless finality of Atheist Nihilism.
In Futility will they attempt to find happiness, in meaningless, pointless, Cold and suffering Universe.
Thus in the New Year, I plan to continue to Preach The Gospel of God’s grace towards sinners, and to Defend our God given rights from A Moral Tyranny… believing this is what God has purposed for me to do…
I believe it is my God given purpose in life to Hold up the Tourch… To shine a light in the dark… to combat the Satanic lies which Damn Mankind… and when I myself stand at the Door, I will be trusting in Christ… in the Mercy and grace of God, and will be Happy that I used my time well…
Austin asks: … “Why do we create our own answers? How can we know we are right?
Knowledge = Fear
Ignorance = Fear
Acceptance = Enlightenment…”
My Retort: “Knowledge of God’s love brings Peace. Knowledge of God’s Holiness brings a sence of Right and wrong. Knowledge of God’s purpose in creating you brings a sence of Value and meaning.”
Austin has begun his Pilgrimage… his quest for the truth.
“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” Jesus Christ.
What is art? I spent the best part of a decade studying philosophy, so I had plenty of opportunity to find out, but I avoided the philosophy of art (aesthetics) religiously. “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like,” was, and pretty much still is, my answer to the question.
Music is art. I don’t know much about music, but I know what I like. Heavy metal is my favourite musical genre, and Slayer is the greatest heavy metal band of all time. It really is that simple.
But not if you’re an Objectivist. Lindsay Perigo is an Objectivist, and he thinks that Slayer is indescribable filth. Why does he think this? Is it because he is in thrall to Ayn Rand’s batty aesthetics as given in The Romantic Manifesto?
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.
Art … concretizes man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence.
The emotion involved in art is not an emotion in the ordinary meaning of the term. It is experienced more as a “sense” or a “feel,” but it has two characteristics pertaining to emotions: it is automatically immediate and it has an intense, profoundly personal (yet undefined) value-meaning to the individual experiencing it. The value involved is life, and the words naming the emotion are: “This is what life means to me.”
Art is man’s metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification—even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.
What utter bullshit. I don’t know much about art, but I know that Rand is wrong and that Tom Araya, Slayer’s vocalist and bass player, is right. Art represents. Art reflects. Araya says that Slayer’s music is “dark reflections” of society. Here’s some snippets of an interview with Tom Araya.
And here’s the same interview, lovingly transcribed by me. First up, wicked guitarist Kerry King.
Kerry King: I like to take potshots at religion because I think it’s the …. the biggest brainwashing thing that is totally acceptable in America and probably most every place else in the world. Um, I just … I think it’s a load of shit.
Thanks for that, Kerry, you atheist douche-bag. Moving right along …
Interviewer: Tom, another well-tread path with you is your Christian background …
Tom Araya: Yeah.
Interviewer: … and the juxtaposition with your music.
Tom Araya: Catholic!
Interviewer: What place do your personal beliefs have in Slayer?
Tom Araya: I guess that what we do is art. Right? And it’s, it’s … art can be a reflection of society. And I mean … and … we’re picking up the dark reflections [laughs] … and, you know, that’s what we’re reflecting. But, evil’s everywhere, man, everybody’s got it. It sits really deep in everybody. Some people can’t control it as much as others, I think it’s … it’s … it’s there. Regardless of whatever fucking religion you believe in and whatever it is you feel is right, everybody knows what’s wrong. Everybody knows that there’s … there’s wrong things, there are just things you DO NOT DO. And the people that don’t understand that or don’t believe that, then they’re really … they’re not really connected with themselves, spiritually. It doesn’t matter what the fuck you believe.
Interviewer: But God Hates Us All, I can’t help but come back, I mean … how does it fit in?
Tom Araya: How does it fit in?
Interviewer: To the …
Tom Araya: He doesn’t …
Interviewer: To the …
Tom Araya: He doesn’t… he doesn’t … God doesn’t hate. It’s a great fucking title. When we wanted to make that an album title, I was, like, goddamn, it’s fucking really good. I think it will fucking piss a lot of people off.
Metalhead: The bands that want to be the biggest badasses pick the most badass subjects. It’s not that these people believe in this stuff. It’s just … you know, it’s … it’s a cool imagery that goes along with the music and, you know … some people believe in it, you know, I’m not going to deny that the … that the Norwegian bands are real, I mean, they’ve proven they’re real by their actions.
Interviewer: OK. So Venom and Slayer aren’t real.
(One day I’ll post about “the Norwegian bands.” Black metal. EVIL stuff. Google ‘Varg Vikernes’, if you must.)
Below are two pictures, one of Tom Araya who writes songs about serial killers, and one of Heath Ledger who played the part of psychopathic uber-villain The Joker in the Batman movie The Dark Knight.
Tom Araya writes songs about indescribable filth. He is not himself indescribable filth. Heath Ledger played the part of indescribable filth. He was not himself indescribable filth.
Heath Ledger got an RIP from Perigo, and his death was cause for a rewatching of Brokeback Mountain. Yet Slayer deserve to be branded “indescribable filth”? What’s the difference?
The difference is this. Tom Araya’s taking on the role of a serial killer – getting into the mindset of the psychopath, such as in the song Killing Fields – has harmed no one. Heath Ledger’s taking on the role of The Joker – getting into the mindset of the psychopath – has killed people, including, arguably, Ledger himself.
On Friday, 23 January 2009, in Dendermonde, Belgium, a 20 year old named Kim De Gelder, dressed as the Joker, conned his way into a day care centre and attacked babies and infants with a knife, stabbing them repeatedly in their heads and neck, killing 2 babies and a daycare provider and leaving numerous infants injured. (Wikipedia)
On Friday, 20 July 2012, a mass shooting occurred inside of a Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. A gunman, dressed in tactical clothing, set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others. The sole suspect is James Eagan Holmes, who was arrested outside the cinema minutes later. … According to two federal officials, he had dyed his hair red and called himself “the Joker” … Seventy-one people were shot or otherwise wounded, reported by mainstream news as the most victims of any mass shooting in United States history. (Wikipedia)
“He’s a psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.” — Heath Ledger on his portrayal of the Joker in the Dark Knight film. (source)
“Well,” Nicholson told reporters in London early Wednesday, “I warned him.” — Jack Nicholson, who had played the Joker in an earlier Batman movie series, commenting on the dangers of playing the Joker after Heath Ledger’s death. (source)
