Aesthetics, Ayn Rand, Keep it Metal!, Philosophy, Slayer

Art is art

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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)

Justice, Local Government

Rotorua District Council is Stealing Land (Update)

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Update to: Rotorua District Council is Stealing Land

I did decide to do some investigation… I’ve spent a couple of hours on the phone with Council staff but I still haven’t figured out precisely how Council intends to take away existing property rights from land owners. My questions probably seemed stupid to Council staff but everyone I spoke with was pleasant and helpful.

I figured out enough to put a question in writing so, I sent this email on Monday…

Hello

I have spoken with several Council representatives concerning the Proposed District Plan – in particular I have been enquiring about the proposed rural road designations.

Most recently I was advised by Council that the statutory authority being relied upon was the RMA (sections 166 to 186) and that Council will be seeking the designations in its capacity as a network utility operator under the Act.

This explanation doesn’t make sense and it contradicts an earlier explanation I was given by Council. The earlier explanation I was given was that Council was seeking to correct rural road (or road reserve) widths; that Council considered some roads too narrow and was seeking to widen roads (or road reserves) from 15m to 20m as part of the District Plan.

Can you please clarify the following points…
1. Is the Council proposing these designations in its capacity as a local authority or in its capacity as a network utility operator?
2. For what purpose is the Council proposing these designations?
3. What statutory authority is the Council relying on to propose these designations?

Regards

Reed Robinson

At this point I am trying to establish if there is an unjust law that allows Council to take away land owners rights or whether the Council is acting illegally.

As I understand the law (corrections welcome), for the Council’s (or any government agent’s) actions to be legal they must :-

1. have a law (statutory authority) that explicitly enables the action; and,
2. act according to the intention of the law.

I suspect there is no law that is intended to allow councils to widen road reserves in this manner. If my suspicion is correct (that the Council is acting illegally) then Council recognising the illegality should be sufficient to stop the Council from proceeding.

Faith, Hope, Humour, Jesus FTW!, Salvation, Uncategorized, Zombies

Buggin out. Mayan Apocalypse.

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Buggin Out to secret bunker for Mayan Apocalypse…awaiting Rapture of The Saints.

The Final Sands of Time are passing through the Orifice!
Can you look back on your life and say your are proud of how you lived?
Have you found Peace and forgiveness with God your Creator?

The Good news according to St Paul…
“…God Commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Christ’s Triumph over sin and Death was proven by his Resurection.
“Whosoever shall call upon the Name of the Lord shall be Saved.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvT_V_oReS4

Propaganda, Sheeple

The new Zeitgeist

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Here is the formal statement I gave to Federal Police on 16 June 2012:

On a trip to visit family in Seoul in April, I was approached by a man and a woman who claimed to be North Korean defectors. They presented me with a DVD that recently came into their possession and asked me to translate it. They also asked me to post the completed film on the Internet so that it could reach a worldwide audience. I believed what I was told and an agreement was made to protect their identities (and mine).

Despite my concerns about what I was viewing when I returned home, I proceeded to translate and post the film on You Tube because of the film’s extraordinary content. I have now made public my belief that this film was never intended for a domestic audience in the DPRK. Instead, I believe that these people, who presented themselves as ‘defectors’ specifically targeted me because of my reputation as a translator and interpreter.

Furthermore, I now believe these people work for the DPRK. The fact that I have continued to translate and post the film in spite of this belief does not make me complicit in their intention to spread their ideology. I chose to keep posting this film because – regardless of who made it – I believe people should see it because of the issues it raises and I stand by my right to post it for people to share and discuss freely with each other.

Sabine

I have translated this film, laid in the English voice over and subtitles, and on legal advice have blurred the identity of the presenter and/or blacked out certain elements.

0:00 Introduction
6:54 Creating Ideas & Illusions
16:48 Fear
19:35 Religion
25:00 Beware the 1%
28:10 Emulating Psychosis
31:21 Rewriting History
41:15 The Birth of Propaganda
45:49 Cover Ups and Omissions
54:10 Complicity
58:05 Censorship
1:01:50 International Diplomacy
1:06:14 Television
1:08:11 Advertising
1:14:36 The Cult of Celebrity
1:22:34 Distraction
1:28:01 Terrorism
1:35:00 The Revolution Starts Now

Please share and discuss with as many people as you can, and if you have questions for me or want to discuss the content further, please do so below or go to: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Propagandafilm/427263763965283

Bugs, Joel, Keep it Metal!, Neurosis, Old Testament

Locust Star

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Hear this, you elders;
   listen, all who live in the land.
Has anything like this ever happened in your days
   or in the days of your ancestors?
Tell it to your children,
   and let your children tell it to their children,
   and their children to the next generation.
What the locust swarm has left
   the great locusts have eaten;
what the great locusts have left
   the young locusts have eaten;
what the young locusts have left
   other locusts have eaten.

Wake up, you drunkards, and weep!
   Wail, all you drinkers of wine;
wail because of the new wine,
   for it has been snatched from your lips.
A nation has invaded my land,
   a mighty army without number;
it has the teeth of a lion,
   the fangs of a lioness.
It has laid waste my vines
   and ruined my fig trees.
It has stripped off their bark
   and thrown it away,
   leaving their branches white.

Mourn like a virgin in sackcloth
   grieving for the betrothed of her youth.
Grain offerings and drink offerings
   are cut off from the house of the Lord.
The priests are in mourning,
   those who minister before the Lord.
The fields are ruined,
   the ground is dried up;
the grain is destroyed,
   the new wine is dried up,
   the olive oil fails.

Despair, you farmers,
   wail, you vine growers;
grieve for the wheat and the barley,
   because the harvest of the field is destroyed.
The vine is dried up
   and the fig tree is withered;
the pomegranate, the palm and the apple tree—
   all the trees of the field—are dried up.
Surely the people’s joy
   is withered away.

Put on sackcloth, you priests, and mourn;
   wail, you who minister before the altar.
Come, spend the night in sackcloth,
   you who minister before my God;
for the grain offerings and drink offerings
   are withheld from the house of your God.
Declare a holy fast;
   call a sacred assembly.
Summon the elders
   and all who live in the land
to the house of the Lord your God,
   and cry out to the Lord.

Alas for that day!
   For the day of the Lord is near;
   it will come like destruction from the Almighty.

Has not the food been cut off
   before our very eyes—
joy and gladness
   from the house of our God?
The seeds are shriveled
   beneath the clods.
The storehouses are in ruins,
   the granaries have been broken down,
   for the grain has dried up.
How the cattle moan!
   The herds mill about
because they have no pasture;
   even the flocks of sheep are suffering.

To you, Lord, I call,
   for fire has devoured the pastures in the wilderness
   and flames have burned up all the trees of the field.
Even the wild animals pant for you;
   the streams of water have dried up
   and fire has devoured the pastures in the wilderness. (NIV)

Atheism, Bogus Science, Evolutionism

Evolutionism

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On his blog View from the Right (added to blogroll), conservative Christian blogger Larry Auster summarises his views about evolution. Auster’s views and my own evolved independently, but on the following five points our views converge.

The truly scientific position (i.e. the honest recognition of the difference between what we know and what we don’t know) is that we DO NOT KNOW how new life forms came into existence. We know that various forms preceded or succeeded others, but we do not know how new forms came into being. It is a mystery.

Many Darwinians (not all) believe in Darwinian theory, not because they have any real interest in or knowledge of it, but because it abolishes God and validates a view of man as wholly material and a form of society based on nothing but supplying the material needs of man.

Their belief is correct. It is indeed the case that Darwinism precludes God from playing any role in the evolution of life (as well as any role in the conduct of human affairs). Despite the many people who want to believe in both Darwinism and in a divine ordering of life and the universe, they are mutually exclusive principles, as I have demonstrated repeatedly. See this discussion about whether God and Darwin are compatible. And here is a more concise statement by me on the question of whether God’s direction of evolution can be reconciled with Darwinian randomness:

From “The never-ending Darwinian two-step”:

I dealt with this as far as I was able in a recent blog entry. This “stochastic” idea is apparently that God could plant all the apparently random mutations in the mix which would still lead to fish and spiders and birds and chimpanzees. And I repeat, if the “randomness” was created by an intelligence to have certain results, then the process is not random, even if it appears random to us.

This idea is exceptionally hard for people to get, for two reasons: one, because it is so simple; and two, because they want so strongly to believe both in God and in Darwinism, and this idea precludes that. If the mutations occur randomly, then there’s no intelligent purpose behind them. If there is an intelligent purpose behind the mutations, then they are not random. Any definition of randomness that is used to get around this fundamental logical contradiction is not honest in my opinion.

If the explanation for the origin of species is either Darwinism or some intelligent purpose and direction, and if Darwinism and intelligent purpose are mutually exclusive, and if Darwinism is not and cannot be the explanation of the origin of species, then the origin of species must proceed from intelligent purpose, a divine intelligence of some kind.

The last point is an inescapable logical inference. It is not a scientific theory, it does not offer a how of evolution. It simply recognizes that given the impossibility that life and new species originated from random material events, the origin of life and the origin of species must come from a “higher” source, which remains beyond our ken. This insight means the acceptance of mystery, something that human intelligence is not able to penetrate.


Evolutionism, Genesis, Intelligent Design, Old Testament

Trees of Life

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What is a species? Even Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species, was none too sure. In the book, Darwin wrote

No one definition has satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species. Generally the term includes the unknown element of a distinct act of creation.

But later, in The Descent of Man, when addressing “The question whether mankind consists of one or several species,” Darwin wrote

it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point on sound grounds, until some definition of the term “species” is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an element that cannot possibly be ascertained, such as an act of creation.

Wikipedia notes the difficulty of defining “species” and identifying particular species and says

Over two dozen distinct definitions of “species” are in use amongst biologists.

Most textbooks follow Ernst Mayr’s definition of a species as “groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups”.

Now this serves as a good working definition in many cases, but it clearly won’t do for asexually reproducing organisms (which, in fact, is most organisms).

Fast forward to the modern evolutionary synthesis (neo-Darwinism) and we find that the definition of species has something to do with ancestry or lineage. Evolutionists these days believe that all life is descended from a small, single-cell organism called LUCA, an acronym for last universal common ancestor. Evolutionists like to draw a highly simplified family tree or tree of life that looks like this.

The root of the tree at the bottom of the diagram is LUCA. The tips of the branches at the top of the diagram are the species that exist today. Extinct species are the tips of branches below the top of the diagram. Speciation, the formation of new species, is represented by the branch points.

An obvious and attractive definition of species would be those organisms between two adjacent branch points (or branch point and branch tip) of the tree. And it’s the right definition (or so say I). But … there seems to be a problem.

Darwin was right when he said, “the definition [of species] must not include … an act of creation.” Not because an act of creation “cannot possibly be ascertained,” but because a definition of species must not include any creationist presuppositions. But neither must a definition of species include any evolutionist presuppositions! Therefore, the definition must not depend on the reality of the evolutionists’ tree of life.

(I’m conducting my own investigation into the origin of species. I remain agnostic, at least for now. Thus, I cannot accept any definition of species that begs the question in favour of either creationism or evolutionism.)

The problem with my definition is only apparent. Creationists, you see, have their own trees (plural) of life. Imagine the evolutionists’ tree of life more or less severely pruned, then throw away the tree. What you’re left with is a bunch of miniature trees that look a bit like this.

Here, the roots at the bottoms of the trees are the original created kinds (each “after his kind”) as described in Genesis 1. (In the case of land-dwelling creatures, the roots at the bottoms of the trees might as well be the mating pairs that boarded Noah’s Ark. Strictly speaking, Noah’s Ark represents a population bottleneck for each species that boarded.) Creationists these days are quite happy to accept microevolution, or speciation within kinds. Biblical kinds are usually identified with biological Families, and less usually with Genera or Species. This makes the logistics of getting the animals on the hypothesised ark a whole lot easier. No need to have mating pairs of tigers, lions, cheetahs, ocelots, Smilodon, etc. No, just a mating pair of cats, from which all members of Felidae are descended. (Heard of ligers and tigions? No, neither had I. They exist.)

Speaking of arks, in the news is wealthy Creationist Dutchman Johan Huibers who built a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark and this week opened it to the public. Check it out!

Give me Liberty, or give me Death!