Why "Until The Light Takes Us" matters

Thursday 02 September 2010 at 7:27 pm Brett Stevens on Until The Light Takes Us:

I think this movie is solidly excellent.

No single movie is going to be to everyone's tastes, and I'm sure if I knew more about movies I could critique camera angles, pacing, color balancing and all that film school critic stuff.

But I think "Until the Light Takes Us" stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of content, content, content.

Think about this: when "Lords of Chaos" (the book) came out in the middle 1990s, people immediately jumped all over it for focusing too much on the tabloid aspects of black metal, like murders, church burning and Nazism.

Far too many people have come up to me at shows and said, "You know, I don't really like how that book missed the whole point. Black metal isn't about burning churches, although that's part of it, or being a twee Nazi like Varg. It's about the music, and the music's about a feeling."

Well, "Until the Light Takes Us" explores that feeling. This is a movie that ties up emotions with ideas, and shows us how black metal got birthed out of that.

It's not a fanboi movie. If it were a fanboi movie, it would get into all the gory details about how black metal formed, all the crap bands that failed at first, then the few lucky ones who pulled ahead of the bunch. We'd hear a lot about record collecting, spikes, drinking, living on welfare, and Dead blowing his head out.

Or you could go Sam Dunn about it, and interview every insignificant black metal band on the planet, and miss out on the big seven (Darkthrone, Mayhem, Immortal, Emperor, Burzum, Gorgoroth, Enslaved) that really defined black metal as we know it.

But either way, no one except black metal fanatics wants to watch that -- and they already know all that stuff. "Until the Light Takes Us" isn't a movie for record collectors, black metal fanatics, and fans of obscure black metal bands.

It's a movie for anyone interested in what black metal meant as an artistic movement that came out of nowhere, grabbed us by the chest and made us give a damn for a few minutes before we went back to our jobs, and made us think about what black metal meant. Black metal is a feeling. That feeling made the music happen, and it's why today those classic bands still capture our imaginations.

As for the rest, hell, you've got Hot Topic for your black metal/zydeco crossover bands, and you've got "Lords of Chaos" for the gorey details, so who cares? This is the kind of movie you can turn on, sit someone in front of, and say: "This. This is why it matters, and this is what it means to me."

I can't think of anything else like it. - Brett Stevens at MetalSucks.net

If you didn't catch why this movie is so great, pre-order it now to get it on September 28, or get it via Netflix to your home. Or you could read our interview with the filmmakers, or even read our review of it.

End the negativity of modern people

Monday 30 August 2010 at 12:18 pm Modern people, projecting their inner fears outward, have made a world of negativity. Those who have seen more of the eternal are going to laugh at their neurotic, domesticated, neotenic, fetal worldview.

The hysteric world view of climate change may be the best thing that has happened to us conservatives. Thanks to it and the social guilt liberals always project unto each other, they've become society's whiny, dogmatic doomsday prophets. People nowadays laugh at those who say we need to recycle everything in sight, that we can save the world if we donate billions to poor children, that a grey race culture can be achieved. Election results across Western and Eastern Europe speak for themselves: people don't buy the shit anymore. - It really is a great world, by Alex Birch

Let's throw out the laughable shit, laugh at it, and move on to better things that are more fun. Zzz to the neurotic, beta-male, whiny-indignant drama of liberals.

Nihilism

Sunday 29 August 2010 at 8:55 pm Thanks to the hard work of our web team and content team, as well as two of you who really went beyond the call of duty:

http://www.nihil.org/ - The Center for Nihilism and Nihilist Studies

Up and running, with new content plus some old friends. And the worlds' most nihilistic web design to boot!

A Return to Modesty, by Wendy Shalit

Saturday 28 August 2010 at 09:31 am A brief excerpt here:

Couples who live together before marriage are much less likely to get married; and if they do marry, they're more likely to get divorced. Yet the vocabulary of modesty has largely dropped from our cultural consciousness; when a woman asks a question that necessarily implicates it, we can only mumble about "space issues."

I first became interested in the subject of modesty for a rather mundane reason - because I didn't like the bathrooms at Williams College. Like many enlightened colleges and universities these days, Williams houses boys next to girls in its dormitories and then has the students vote by floor on whether their common bathrooms should be coed. It's all very democratic, but the votes always seem to go in the coed direction because no one wants to be thought a prude. When I objected, I was told by my fellow students that I "must not be comfortable with my body." Frankly, I didn't get that, because I was fine with my body; it was their bodies in such close proximity to mine that I wasn't thrilled about.

I ended up writing about this experience in Commentary as a kind of therapeutic exercise. But when my article was reprinted in Reader's Digest, a weird thing happened: I got piles of letters from kids who said, "I thought I was the only one who couldn't stand these bathrooms." How could so many people feel they were the "only ones" who believed in privacy and modesty? - Mystagogy

People forget that morality is not arbitrary; it's an adaptation to reality, and not just material constraint but the nature of reality itself. You get one life, and one youth; you probably want those times to be as important, as impressive, and as sacred as possible. Modesty is the gateway to that end, which in turn delivers a more intense experience -- through choice, or quality over quantity -- than ten thousand one night stands could hope to deliver.

See how they spin

Thursday 26 August 2010 at 3:56 pm How they present it: altruism evolved through natural selection (Headline: "Altruism can be explained by natural selection")

In a second mathematical analysis, the team investigated how eusociality could evolve through standard natural selection. They found that a gene for eusociality could spread readily as long as the advantages it confers — increasing the lifespan and reproductive success of the queen — kick in even for small colonies. So colonies that have as few as two or three workers must provide significant advantages to their queen for the gene and the behaviour to become widespread. - Natur

What it actually means: close kin-ties, like ethnonationalism or racism, evolved through natural selection.

These ants aren't being altruistic; they're helping their own team, e.g. being collectivist.

But they couldn't spin it that way or you'd all go join the Black Panthers or Hitler Youth, and that wouldn't be fair to gay blind Hispanic dwarves.

Four words to save your life

Thursday 26 August 2010 at 10:48 am People generally run away from solutions to their problems, because solutions require you get to the cause of the matter, and then make structural changes. It's easier to make changes on the surface or demand a subsidy.

In the case of modern society, here in the industrialized West and anywhere else stupid enough to undertake this goal, we have a problem with lots of people in oblivion because they're justifying their fake solutions. They don't want to stop their lives to take on a real problem, especially an unglamorous one as deep-seated, far-reaching, entrenched problems always are.

They're rather have an easy problem, like another war or recession. These are single factors they can deal with and when they've beaten back the enemy, the problem goes away. But what about problems where the enemy doesn't exist, unless we consider "disorganization","entropy" or "solipsism" our enemy?

They're not so good at tackling those, mainly because not everyone in a cross-section of society can see these problems. In fact, at first it's limited to a few really exceptional thinkers, and only later does it trickle down to people of a normal intelligence range. For those below one standard deviation from the average, it's unlikely that they'll see the problem at all until it explodes in their faces.

I’ve got my own theories about the high rate of suicide in New Zealand (and most of the western world). To my mind we need to address the alienation, the atomisation and the anomie of modern life if we want to get to the roots of the problem. In addition I find it hard to believe that at some level we don’t all feel the ecocide rending the planet. We are part of the fabric of life, despite the illusion of separation, and cannot be mentally healthy while we continue to wreak destruction on ourselves. - 3news

"Firefighting" happens when you cannot address underlying causes, so you tackle surface manifestations. See the image of the enemy? Fire, and hope it's not in a mirror.

The four words that can save your life:

Our civilization is declining.

When your family members invent needless drama, your workplace is ruled by idiots, you can't drive across town because too many fools are causing obstructions, and your politicians are corrupt, don't kid yourself: your society is falling apart. It happens slowly, so people have been saying this for years, and it has been true but it has taken some time to happen. Of course, there are also idiots in any age who claim the sky is falling, but there are also idiots who claim that doing meth is good for you. The problem is idiots, not that their message automatically makes anyone who ever speaks it wrong.

All the people you know are under great stress because (a) they subconsciously know this civilization is falling apart and (b) they lack the guts to confront it, because that means they have to stop being selfish and start a fight involving real sacrifice; a fight that isn't immediately obvious to everyone, like a war or natural disaster. Oops.

In his latest research study, released today by the Center for a Stateless Society, Kevin Carson makes the case for progressives as the bitter-enders of a social project made obsolete by liberating technologies and the production and distribution methods those technologies make possible.

“Thermidor of the Progressives: Managerialist Liberalism’s Hostility to Decentralized Organization” traces the development of managerialism in the political and economic realms, the history of progressive attachment to the managerial vision, and the siege mentality displayed by progressives as they confront what Carson calls the “Network Revolution.”

“For liberals,” writes Carson, author of _The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto_, “the American Golden Age was the ‘Consensus Capitalism’ of the New Deal and the first post-WWII generation. … This general affinity for large-scale organization and hierarchy, more recently, has been reflected in hostility to the new forms of networked organization permitted by the emerging technologies of the late twentieth century.” - C4SS

How did hippies become consumerists, bohemians become bourgeois, progressives become establishmentarians? Their underlying goal was always the same: ignore decline, and to compensate, make good for self. When you're 18, you want free sex. When you're 28, legal drugs. When you're 38-58, you want to keep the stash of income you've made at the job you didn't want to go to but had to anyway, so you might as well get paid (well) for it.

It's a great runaround. No one believes their ideology -- well, except a few. If you remember a bell curve, you see that most people are in the center and very similar. At the edges are outliers, who are either geniuses or retards. The few who believe are the geniuses. Why do people not believe their own ideology? First, most of them are unsuited for having ideological thoughts at all -- they're just not competent at it. Second, their ideologies are usually justifications for their way of life. I love meth, therefore, drugs should be legal. Ta-da!

Among the future consequences of not fixing our national problems will likely be an increase in social unrest and an increase in crime.

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Doing nothing is not an option for America. Much of poor America, especially in our major cities, has been Third World America for decades. Soon the urban middle classes and even upper classes will become better acquainted with that world.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/third-world-america-fast-tracking-to-anarchy-2010-8#ixzz0xjeDHOfZ

As we go further into the abyss, we're seeing what people have been denying for 2,000 years -- a long steady decline into irrelevance, narcissism, and negativity. We no longer have a goal, except ourselves as individuals and (a) people are selfish (b) most people are not bright enough to see the consequences of their actions.

We could either man up and face the problem, or keep blowing it off and hoping it detonates only after we die, leaving a disaster where once a near-paradise stood.

Hacking is not information democracy

Wednesday 25 August 2010 at 09:46 am Let us consider two principles of hacking:

(a) Information wants to be free;

(b) Those who have the skills to use such information should have it.

In an interview with AFP Tuesday, the lawyer also rejected Assange's claim the allegations were part of a plot to harm WikiLeaks.

"This is not a smear campaign," Borgstroem said, pointing out that his clients, aged 25 to 35, had gone to police separately over different alleged incidents and had no links to anyone who would be interested in discrediting the website.

"This has nothing to do with WikiLeaks or the CIA," he insisted. - Swedish Wire

International superstar Julian Assange believes that information should be democratized, or by taking that first principle to the extreme, he offers up to the world what the masses cannot handle and will shortly dumb down into an us-versus-them scenario.

He should have paid attention to the second principle: those who can use information should be the ones to have it, not the clueless and destructive masses.

Why we are nihilists not fatalists

Wednesday 25 August 2010 at 07:32 am Life is sacred:

As for ethics, they are elemental in Bradbury’s fiction and screenplays, and even in his horror stories (every devotee of ghostly fiction should read his collection of early stories titled The October Country). Moral truths appear not in obvious nuggets, like raisins in a raisin cake, but blended among the basic ingredients.

They bespeak Bradbury’s beliefs that human beings are more than the flies of summer — they are in fact made for knowing beauty, truth, and eternity — and that each movement toward political centralization, materialism, sham intellectualism, and needless destruction of the natural environment endangers all that makes life fulfilling and worthwhile, rendering man little more than a trousered ape. - National Review

Every time we try to reduce reality to convenience, safety, equality and peace, we make a hell of boredom, irreverence, resentment and stupidity.

If parents all around us are clutching their children close, it’s easy to understand why: It’s what pop culture is telling us to do. Stories of kidnappings swamp the news. Go online, and you can find a map of local sex offenders as easily as the local Victoria’s Secret (possibly in the same place). Meantime, if you do summon the courage to put your kids on a bus or a bench or a bike, other parents keep butting in: An unwatched child is a tragedy waiting to happen.

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We have to be less afraid of nature and more willing to embrace the idea that some rashes and bites are a fair price to pay in exchange for appreciating the wonder of a cool-looking rock or an unforgettable fern.

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When we watch TV, we have to remind ourselves that its job is to terrify and disgust us so that we’ll keep watching in horror. It is doing an excellent job on both fronts.

We have to learn to remind the other parents who think we’re being careless when we loosen our grip that we are actually trying to teach our children how to get along in the world, and that we believe this is our job. A child who can fend for himself is a lot safer than one forever coddled, because the coddled child will not have Mom or Dad around all the time. Adults once knew what we have forgotten today. Kids are competent. Kids are capable. Kids deserve freedom, responsibility, and a chance to be part of the world. - The Week

Everywhere there is fear, there is control.

Control works from the negative -- what is the biggest fear? Who is most likely to screw up and become a victim? -- which turns society inside out.

Instead of focusing on goals and the people most likely to be a credit to our society, we focus on fears and those who are hopeless.

And who are the fear preachers?

Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism.

It’s striking that many American Republicans share with Al Qaeda the view that the West and the Islamic world are caught inevitably in a “clash of civilizations.” - NYT

If you don't want us all to be one big happy family, one human race -- then you're afraid. Right? Well, that's what the professional idiots want you to think.

But if you analyze it, the "one big family" and "equality/everyone wins" outlook is fear of life itself. Fear of different abilities, or different decisions.

Given the number of British writers who have been attracted to the camels and tents and desolation of Arab tribal life it is tempting to reduce it to an infatuation with the noble savage. But this is misleading. As Ernest Gellner points out in Muslim Society, it was more often the aristocratic ranking of a feudal order that appealed to those drawn to the Arab world:

The European discovery and exploration of Muslim tribal society occurred in the main after the French Revolution, and was often carried out by men—long before T.E.Lawrence—who were possessed by a nostalgia for a Europe as it was prior to the diffusion of the egalitarian ideal … They sought, not the noble savage, but the savage noble.

That’s an interesting twist. Savage nobles aplenty can be found waving their swords and daggers throughout The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a work some regard as one of the important books of the twentieth century. - Roger Sandall

The egalitarian ideal means that we must all be forced to be equal, at the expense of all else. Naturally it includes control, because nothing in nature is equal, and humanity won't be "equal" until we're equal in abilities which means either (a) lowest common denominator or (b) let the best beat the rest into submission and rape them.

But we live in a false reality, because our thinking starts with that post-1789 egalitarian-control fiction, so we're completely oblivious to reality:

"If you're a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there's good reason to believe they're wrong," Dr. Henrich says.

After analyzing reams of data from earlier studies, the UBC team found that WEIRD people reacted differently from others in experiment after experiment involving measures of fairness, anti-social punishment and co-operation, as well as visual illusions and questions of individualism and conformity.

Others punish participants perceived as too altruistic in co-operation games, but very few in the English-speaking West would ever dream of penalizing the generous. Westerners tend to group objects based on resemblance (notebooks and magazines go together, for example) while Chinese test subjects prefer function (grouping, say, a notebook with a pencil). Privileged Westerners, uniquely, define themselves by their personal characteristics as opposed to their roles in society.

Moreover, WEIRD people do not simply react to the world differently, according to the paper, they perceive it differently to begin with. Take the well-known Muller-Lyer optical illusion, which uses arrows to trick the viewer into thinking one line is longer than another, even if both are the same length. (See the diagram on this page.)

"No matter how many times you measure those lines, you can't cause yourself to see them as the same length," Dr. Henrich says. At least that's true for a Westerner. For some hunter-gatherers, the Muller-Lyer lines do not cause an illusion. - National Post

We see only the surface of appearance, because we're so used to controlling each other socially. Our means of control are guilt, obligation, passive aggression and most of all, punishing those who are not egalitarian. It's a perfect perpetual witch-hunt.

If you want to know why the West is dying, it's this kind of "we must all be one" thinking that prevents anyone from climbing above the mass of clueless humanity. It has made us into a society of obedient sufferers beholden to the lowest common denominator.

No wonder Islam appealed to those who saw what 1789 portended.

Truth elusive in modern times

Tuesday 24 August 2010 at 09:01 am Man releases secret documents, people get killed, and he tells us that now the Pentagon is coming for him:

After the report began to circulate worldwide, WikiLeaks issued multiple responses via its Twitter account denying the allegations. An early statement said: "We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks'. Now we have the first one." A later tweet, attributed to Assange himself, said: "The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing."

...

The lurid on-again/off-again allegations are bound to fuel the already rampant paranoia of both WikiLeaks supporters and Assange himself, a nomadic figure who associates say is difficult to locate and contact at the best of times. - Some magazine sold for $1

The instant there's a rape accusation, and all the nodding nobodies out there become TOTALLY CONVINCED it's a Pentagon plot. TOTALLY.

Assange had since told Al-Jazeera that Wikileaks was tipped off to the allegation by Australian intelligence officials.

"We were warned on the 11th by Australian intelligence that we would expect this sort of thing," he said.

"They had some concerns that we would have something like that.

"Now we have no direct evidence at this stage that this is an intelligence operation or has been influenced by an intelligence operation but certainly there's some surrounding context [that] is disturbing."

Assange said the "only question is who was involved" but stopped short of any direct allegation, citing a lack of direct evidence. - UpsideDown Newspaper

Then we find out, lo and behold, the person making the rape accusation is a LIBERAL ACTIVIST who is TOTALLY HOSTILE to the Pentagon:

Swedish news website Newzglobe.com named a woman in the scandal as Anna Ardin. Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag said she was the political secretary and press officer of the Swedish "Brotherhood Movement", a group of Christians from the Social Democratic Party. - Stuff.co.nz

That's the Christian Social Democrats, who are not like American Christians. They're liberal, pro-Muslim and occasionally anti-Semitic but only because they're standing up for Palestine and other third world immigration to the West. They make Barack Obama look right-wing, and out-Christian him too! These people are hostile to the United States.

Yet somehow, that doesn't make it into the mainstream press -- conspiracy > reality for selling newspapers, blogs and teenage angst -- and so we're left wondering what else is agitprop or disinfo.

One of two women involved told Aftonbladet in an interview published today that she had never intended Assange to be charged with rape. She was quoted as saying: "It is quite wrong that we were afraid of him. He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him."
...

In her interview, she dismissed the idea, seized on by many conspiracy theorists that 'dirty tricks' lay behind the rape allegations, because of WikiLeaks' defiance of the US government. She said: "The charges against Assange are of course not orchestrated by the Pentagon." - The Guardian

Then there's this, which seems to be setting the groundwork for blaming The Holocaust on Those Jews:

Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.

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A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

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Haplogroup E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18 to 20 per cent of Ashkenazi and 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population. - The Telegraph

First, of course, this is bad science. They didn't test him -- they tested his relatives 65 years later, after marriages of several generations, and tried to guess based on that. Depending on the technique used, they should be able to tell us roughly when this entered the bloodline. But never mind that, and nevermind that historians have looked into this accusation for years and found nothing. It's a convenient weapon. Against Hitler? No, no, no.

This is a weapon against Jews.

Could Hitler's hatred for the Jewish people have been a case of self-loathing? - NYD

At a time when our press and rock stars are fawning over Palestine, it's convenient to blame the world's most recent horrible genocide on... the victims. That takes away the validity of their suffering, and the validity of their claim to Israel in the eyes of many. How convenient! They did it to themselves -- well, so much for that idea that we need Israel then...

Dubious accusations, both from Assange ("Australian intelligence told us this was coming") and then from Swedish rape victims, and then dubious accusations against Hitler that end up being a convenient way to blame Jews for their own misfortune. And how cleverly it's all worded, so that in two years when this has fallen into the memory hole, no one will know it wasn't true -- it will become a part of public lore, and then enough people will cite it to make it "truth."

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. - Fred

Cannibals and cultural anti-relativism

Sunday 22 August 2010 at 07:57 am About cultural anti-relativism, which is that idea that we can't compare cultures, so don't try to equate them:

The famous Carib people were reputed to be cannibals, but doubt has later been cast on this theory. The Disney Corporation has been criticised for scenes in "Pirates of the Caribbean", in which the Carib are portrayed as cannibals. Remnants of this people reportedly still live uncontacted on the border between Venezuela and Guyana. In any event, there are sound reasons for not visiting them, they have nothing to gain from contact with our civilisation. - Some Nord

This man dares to say what many can't fathom: why bother to contact people who are perfectly happy living as they are? You can't claim their way of life is primitive or that your own is better, but that means you leave out the second part of relativism, which is where we make excuses. Don't -- just leave them alone. Same idea generally applies to American rednecks and inner city ghettoes.