Bolt the door, Varg is loose!

i tend to believe they were some stupid fucking potheads all het up on their own little fantasy worlds, plotting some fictional "crusade" against the imaginary forces allied against them, plotting out schemes in dungeon apartments all filled up with boogers and hairballs and ugly posters and empty bottles and garbage and one day they finally got fucked up enough or delusional enough to actually try something

j0hn for how you are usually mr. moral (which i actually admire) in a lot of threads on ILM i think it's weird the mental gymnastics you go through to play captain save-a-metal-idiot

yeah I would think that trying to understand what makes dumb teenagers do dumb shit, how they ended up all fucked up, is kinda part of my mr. moral deal. I don't think anything is accomplished by decrying what total fuckin' assholes they are. the behaviors isn't meaningless expression of assholism. plus also I love heavy metal so what can you do y'know.

like this:

one day they finally got fucked up enough or delusional enough to actually try something

no. flatly no. the behavior has meaning. it's more useful to parse that meaning than to say, oh, a bunch of fucked up teens did some shit that sucked. and, in my opinion, truer.

ha, part of my problem is that it seems like 80% of the time, the answer to "what makes dumb teenagers do dumb shit" is "they were bored"

a lot of the most fucked up things i did as a teenager were due to directionless rage, but were so pointless in retrospect that even i make the mistake of thinking i did them because i was bored. to be fair, if i had taken strongly to sports, or music, or something along those lines, i might not have been so angry or had enough free time to hatch some of the plots i did.

by the way i think it's really admirable to try to understand people who do things you disagree with or hate. if more people practiced this, we might not be about to trigger a global holy war.

i see what your saying, j0hn, and i do have more sympathy for the boys that they were than the men that they are now (who don't seem to have learned much if anything)

I think maybe what's key here is that explaining the whys of something != justifying it, necessarily?

well actually I think many of them are a little embarrassed by the whole thing. and some of the kvltest were cats from Oslo who weren't actually doing it but got off on it because of the extremity of it, just the "WHOA YOU KNOW THAT ONE CRAZY FUCK? HE ACTUALLY BURNED DOWN A FUCKING CHURCH!" which I mean really, it's asking everybody to be a po-faced moralist like me to demand that they not go "insane! he burned a church for metal! fuckin' A!" But Varg would die before he'd give up the status he can get by being unrepentantly The Guy Who Stands For Burning Churches. It's hardly news that Varg's a dick tho!

xpost

he's a RL troll

I think maybe what's key here is that explaining the whys of something != justifying it, necessarily?

That is absolutely true. However, sometimes attempts to explain something are exercises in projection; there is a tacit presumption going on that casts the person doing the abhorrent thing in your mindset in order for you to come up with a sufficient motivation for their actions. Most of the mean things I did when I was a kid were born out of feeling trapped in a hostile environment combined with thinking life was pointless and transitory after my brother died at age 24, and even then I couldn't muster the will to do anything that would be permanent because I knew that if I kept out of trouble, I'd never have to set foot in that town again unless I was visiting my parents. You could paint this successful child-rearing on my parents' part combined with a pretty comfortable financial situation, but some portion of it included recognition on my part that, no matter how shitty and depressed I felt, I knew that I would be able to get out someday. And I did. And so did the vast majority of my friends. Very few of the kids I considered idiots did.

This has nothing to do with Varg really but it's the longest thing I've written in like 6 months.

man when you think of the people who never got out your heart's gotta bleed a little even if they were dicks don'tcha

maybe not I do though

every time my heart starts to bleed, I think of the dudes/girls who called me a racial slur and that pretty much kills the burgeoning sympathy

yeah i guess i would be more willing to recognize the humanity in dudes like varg if they weren't espousing a "philosophy" (half formed rhetoric) that denied the humanity of others

like, it's easy to feel sorry for someone who has never attacked you, or spat upon you repeatedly, or tried to piss in your locker, or basically spent 6 months making your life a complete and utter living hell, is kind of my underlying not-so-secret thesis here; in looking at these stories, I am much more likely to have sympathy for the people who had to bear the brunt of these frustrations rather than the people expressing them in destructive, wholly inappropriate ways

xpost: OTM

tbf a lot of the dumb destructive stuff dan and i got up to is also kind of facepalm hilarious in retrospect, which prob would not be the case if we'd burned down any churches.

if you guys had burned down some lutheran churches I would be laffing my ass off tbqf

an honest question - how different is the not really tacit but kind of wink wink endorsement that some black metal has from other musical movements (thinking hip hop and grafitti because of the proximity of the vandalistic aspect, or imo the much worse "stop snitchin'" movement (which i know is a big pile of media distorted bullshit, but so is the prominence of church burning per capita so)

xpost it is possible that i or someone very much like me might have done a startlingly quantifiable and prob felonious amount of damage during my teenage rebellion against the oppressive regime of golf courses, which is about as close to burning down a lutheran church as you are likely to get

(as an aside, I read some of that thread where you guys talk about crazy hstngs shit and man I think we had wildly different growing-up-in-werido-small-MN-town experiences)

do you have any seminal anti-golfing records i should be listening to?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtZL2RJC5WQ

Really more pro-golf but...

oh you mean Exploring the idiot youth of rural america (some HSTNGS content, but not a HSTNGS thread)

i had forgotten about that thread, i think ill go take a trip down idiot memory lane

re: golf video, i have to admit i enjoyed that much more than filosofem.

Mad props to rabies! I had two Art Phag singles! The other was exactly the same but called Chainsaw!

hmm thread got interesting!

i can kinda feel where j0hn is coming from. part of the impetus to burn an old church appeals to me, in that the burner (maybe) feels the symbolism and intent of the building very deeply. as in, "no this isn't just a nice building for tour groups to go see, it has a specific purpose to carry a set of ideas that i despise." the implication is that varg took the historical meaning of the church itself very seriously, it meant more to him than to people who just thought it was nice.

but this gets me into gore-vidal-defending-tim-mcveigh territory, oh he was just a thoughtful boy who loved freedom, while everyone else went thru life in an unthinking daze...

mcvarg

Speaking as someone who was brought up in deeply religious household and resents his religious indoctrination and education, I still find the concept of looking at churches "nice".

One of the first things I do on holiday is get in some good church, synagogue or mosque action.

Burning them down wouldn't necessarily give me a more nuanced view of religion.

Speaking as someone who cares fuck all for religion, it was really painful to see the before and after pictures of those stave churches. Regardless of political intent, its fucking criminal to destroy beautiful buildings (church or no). I mean, the Catholic religion irritates me to no end and I have so many problems with the institution, but no way in hell could I be okay with a beautiful cathedral being destroyed.

it takes a fuck of a long time to seize power & turn them into libraries tho you gotta admit

the analogy only really works if you agree, on some level, that christianity is worse than n. european paganism, and i don't

reading thru those wiki histories, and others, it looks like xtianity was spread by a combination of popular conversion, elite buy-in, and violence (basically in that order). the non-christians responded with... the exact same shit. but it's not like varg really concerned with any of this, it's all just myth.

xps

humbly submit that wiki histories maybe not the best source for determining how christianity was spread through the pagan countries

when is this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_the_Apostate

gonna get his metal concept tribute album? or has he already

"humbly submit that wiki histories maybe not the best source for determining how christianity was spread through the pagan countries"

Pipe down old man.

hahaha actually in retrospect I missed most of the truly epic dumb stuff (thinking of the J***b W********g fliers here), I was only really around for things like naked trampolining and throwing a can of pop at CB's front door

there appear to be some punk kids on my lawn xpost

(sorry that is so late, I had actual work to do)

"Punk kids get off my interweb!"

STOP GETTING BOND WRONG

i mean just

lol @ the entire nu-metal-at-the-gym overture to the symphony of "the early norwegian church burnings were due to being FUCKED UP and going out to FUCK SOME SHIT UP" could yall be more hilarious

Yeah... I'm not the only one who heard about what happened in Oslo and thought for a second Varg might be involved, right?

Apparently this guy is a christian extremist.

My wife's first comment (after learning it wasn't a muslim extremist) was "probably one of those black metal jerks."

Might have been, but this guy - while certainly a rightist - is not linked to nazi or "viking" groups. He probably has more in common with the Ku Klux Klan, or with rightist extremist party that is currently partly in office in Israel.

what the hell does that mean, geir?

geir's obviously still in a shock

geir is actually varg.

Pet Sounds influenced his most black metal efforts.

what the hell does that mean, geir?

He describes himself as a friend of Israel, and makes a point out of how he is on a crusade against Islam. He has also in various forums described himself as a conservative Christian. Basically, and extremist edition of the American religious Right.