Metal Gig Axed For Anti-Religious Stance - my response

Here's an interesting story from the Australian heavy metal community:
http://themusic.com.au/news/all/2013/08/26/metal-gig-axed-for-anti-religious-stance/

A Brisbane metal band have been forced to move their Melbourne show after a promoter objected to their anti-religious imagery.
Industrial outfit Darkc3ll had been announced to play Melbourne’s Rock Dungeon in the CBD Club, but yesterday announced on Facebook that they were looking for a new venue after the promoter allegedly “was offended by our album cover,” which features an upside-down cross
Today the night’s booker Bryn Peter Collins confirmed the mid-November show had been cancelled and told theMusic.com.au that he had first booked the band as a favour to an old friend, before he was entirely familiar with them. After objecting to the band, he contacted them “in a private email” to advise that they wouldn’t be able to move forward with the show for his own “personal and private” spiritual reasons.
He said that the band then took his private email and used it as a “publicity stunt” and started what he described as a “witch hunt” online.
The band’s manager Robyn Morrison today denied to theMusic that the band had played a publicity stunt, and that in email negotiations he stated bluntly that his Christian faith was the reason for his concerns over the band and their album cover. He had offered to honour the booking if he could be assured that the band wouldn’t say anything overtly “blasphemous” about his faith on stage.
Morrison replied that such restrictions “would hinder the band’s ability to play a show that their fans had expected.”
Collins said, “The band have gone out to offend and now that they’ve offended someone they’re complaining about it,” he said today, also describing the band as the “wrong fit” for the venue.
“We’re a classic metal and rock club and they’ve a more industrial goth feel. It’s not really suited for our night is the main point.”
The booker told theMusic he had offered to find the band another venue, but will not anymore as he claims the band have used the incident for their own “sensationalism.”
Morrison denies this, saying that he was concerned that a potential gig by the band would complete with his night.
Collins added that he was usually better at vetting the material and artists who appear at the club according to his priciples.
“I have to take a level of responsibility… I don’t book the more extreme metal because of the crowd they bring. They disrespect the venue.”
In Darkc3ll’s Six Hundred & Six Six song the band sing, “It’s a middle finger kind of day/Hey Satan what the fuck do you say… Holy daggers in these eyes/I’ve got evil on my mind.”

Just in case it doesn't get posted, here is my response to the article and a couple of commenters:

Funny that a Christian is running a rock venue with the word "dungeon" in the name. Then again, given the brutality that early Christians brought against ANYONE and EVERYONE who even remotely questioned the Bible and particularly the Gospels (or whom, despite personal illiteracy, acted in a heretical manner without knowing it), maybe it makes sense. In which case, why wouldn't you want a bunch of heretics in your venue, Rock Dungeon? You could give 'em the flogging they deserve, then stick them in the "Iron Maiden".

Incidentally, if Bruce and the crew turned up at your venue, would you ask them to leave?? What a f%^&ing hypocrite! Iron Maiden's album covers and their lyrical content (especially early on) might have been set to what we now call "classic metal" tones and sung by an "air raid siren" instead of growled or screamed, but on pure facts alone, the manager of the Rock Dungeon shouldn't be able to play Maiden, or about 70 per cent of ALL METAL, at his club!!

@Jesse Kuch, I hate it how people who live their lives in this day and age with personal philosophies that are stuck in the 6th-14th Century can somehow fraudulently be involved in "promoting" a musical genre that rails against the failed systems that religion attempted to hold us all to, yet the moment it gets a little too heavy, suddenly they are up in arms. Yes, Mr Holland has a faith-based opinion. Unfortunately for him, it is clear that his faith alone makes him a hypocrite for hosting bands and genres in his club when most of those bands demonstrate anti-Christian, pro-secular, pro-atheist philosophies and ways of living, then picking and choosing when a line is crossed. He should quit his role or do exactly as @Adam Greaves has suggested in his post vis-a-vis Hillsong/evangelist fluff! But you're from Cairns, so based on the statistical likelihoods generated by your place of residence and your probable educational history, your grips on logic, rationality, reason, and well-researched, well-written journalistic practice are all likely to be fairly weak. Perhaps you should join Mr Holland at Hillsong and start writing about how "great" (read: awful) the lyrics are on the Hillsong United album "Zion" (clearly Christian rock lyrics are the truest product of Satan, for they promote mindlessness and idleness) and enjoy that album cover (which looks awfully like what the planet Mars may have looked like two to three billion years ago when it had running water - I put this to a prospective purchaser once: he ran out of the store as fast as his half-dystrophic legs could carry him...).

I wonder what Michio Kaku thinks about the future of the automobile and of petroleum...

Thought I'd start the rants by being cheeky on the Facebook page of the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, a one-issue group running in the Federal Election for Senate seats across Australia. Brett Cozzi is going to kill me when he sees this.

Basically I have trolled a post by some bloke called Keith. Here is his post:

By nature of our chosen passion, whether it involves bikes, cars, 4WD's, trucks, or all of the above, we tend to all be individuals. Even though we may have plenty of like-minded mates, attend shows, cruise, and all the other things we like to do with our vehicles; the thing that stands out is that we are all individuals - we all have our own idea of what a great ride is, what wheels look best, paint jobs and all the other cosmetics; and we all have our own ideas about performance mods. On top of all this, we all have an unfinished project, or a wish-list for changes we want to make to our vehicles. In short, no two enthusiasts vehicles are ever identical - they are individually tailored by the individual who owns them.

As individuals, we become an easy target for authorities and for governments who are out looking for easy vote winners. We are legislated almost to extinction by legislation, slagged by the media, and terrified of by the public. We are seen as little more than urban terrorists tearing up the bitumen in the early hours of the morning...

There are millions of Motoring Enthusiasts in Australia covering every facet of motoring, yet we are seen as a minority by those who would make it illegal for us to live our chosen lifestyle. With unity comes power, one unified voice speaking to the authorities on behalf of us all. Only after we are no-longer seen as a minority will we have the power to make a difference and be able to preserve what we now have - otherwise we'll all be driving buzz-box smart cars in the future, and there's certainly no appeal (or desire) in modifying those.

In uniting as one powerful group, one powerful voice, we ask no-one to surrender their individuality or become one of a faceless group - indeed, we encourage everyone to retain their individuality, to live their chosen lifestyle as they have the democratic right to. What we suggest is that all motoring enthusiasts unite in the common bond of our chosen lifestyle; allowing us the united front and the powerful voice to show that we are not a minority who can be kicked around by governmental bully tactics for the sake of a few more votes at the polling booth. We are individuals yet we are strong. We demand recognition, we demand respect, and we demand to be left alone. In unity there is strength...

If you agree, share this with everyone you know.

VOTE 1 - AUSTRALIAN MOTORING ENTHUSIAST PARTY - In the upcoming Election in the Senate. It is about protecting our future not only for ourselves but for future generations.

And here is my response:

Yes Keith, so basically cars are all about the individual and their apparent rights and freedoms and blah blah blah. Here's a question for you mate - in 300 to 400 years time when there is NO PETROLEUM left on this planet, and science has had to solve transportation issues with (a) other sources of fuel that will not be approved for use in private one-to-seven-person vehicles with top speed of approx. 150km/h because there won't be enough of said fuel/costs too great, or (b) solar powered, fully electric, hydrogen fueled, or other as-yet-unknown future power source-based vehicles that will probably end up being severely restricted in the speeds they do, and (c) increased public/mass transportation that actually works (especially when Maglev trains become cheaper and the infrastructure easier to build) thus leading to a reduction in the number of roads, what will your car-loving descendants (presuming you are capable of producing such) going to do with themselves? I see one guy going on about modifying smart cars, and one of the AMEP people (as well as you) responding "who would want to?". Well, in the future, your progeny are going to have to do exactly that, but even then the adrenalin that surges through your bodies now in response to the primal urges that cars somehow bring out in you is not going to be replicated in the post-petroleum era, and the mass enthusiasm for motoring will have at best roughly a three-hundred year lifespan, thus annulling the concept of your "future generations" of car-lovers.

One-issue parties are a complete waste of time at the best of times. One-issue parties where the citizens who will vote for them are either nihilistic, lacking vision, or just downright lazy or criminal (in the case of the people the State and Federal Governments are targeting with all the legislation you people complain about) are a bigger waste of time again. Yes the people who run this country and the respective states are a bunch of useless, corrupt f#$%wits who are doing nothing to make Australian recession-proof, climate-change-proof, exhausting-of-natural-resources-proof, annihilation-proof or religious-fundamentalist-proof. Unfortunately, neither will you or anyone who votes for the AMEP. Get some people with brains amongst you and come up with policies in other areas!

One hopes that civilisation, which has existed for thousands of years longer than the automobile and its offspring, will last far longer beyond the demise of noisy cars and bikes. Perhaps if you get some scientists amongst your ranks, and pay your taxes and your speeding fines and so on, you may be able to prepare yourselves for a world (or even directly contribute to it) where you can ride about the Solar System (and heck, why not the Galaxy eh?) in really fast vehicles (no noise though, unfortunately - but ironically the space ships will be doing exactly what you folks are doing with your lives right now: living in a near-vacuum!).

I have enjoyed this, my first "trolling" moment in a number of years (though to be fair I am making valid points). In the words of Doc Brown - "Where we're going, we won't need roads..."

 I await the response of the apparent masses, and I welcome your commentary. What is the future of motoring on Earth? What is the future of renewable and non-renewable energy? The answers are out there, but the AMEP are not the sorts of people who have no interest in finding them, nor providing those answers to the public. Why would anyone vote for that?

DC

After years of misplaced anti-brevity, I make my blogging debut on Blogger

It is to an audience of no one bar myself that I finally arrive on a blogging site - free of the irrelevance of MySpace; unhindered by the dislocation of blog sites that are not affiliated with internet titans such as this place we are in now; less internally tormented by the divergent notions of either keeping Facebook as the majority viewpoint wishes it to be (a place for faces, not for books), or bucking the system (and in the process being highly inconsiderate to all of my friends as they browse Facebook on their mobiles, only to have to scroll for metres to get past my "updates").

It is to a potentially wider audience that I can take the many crystallized concepts in my mind and share them, in order to make the world and the future inherently better. It has been wondrous to test my various ideas and theories on those whom I am already familiar with, and it has been an honour to have praise from those who support me, but also continuing relationships with those who have disagreed with me on a number of points. 

The civilisation we are both blessed and cursed with can be viewed as containing philosophies and perspectives coloured in fifty shades of grey, but with white and black at each end of the spectrum. Very few people are in the "black" (ie. truly extremist, fundamentalist, regressive, draconian and selfish), and no one is actually "white" (ie. entirely selfless, purely progressive, perfectly tolerant), but by treating people as if they fit a particular philosophical shade in relation to your own, there is always opportunity to teach, to learn, to compromise, and to maintain peace even when the ingredients for war still bubble at the surface or lurk beneath (unless they are indeed "black" of heart and mind, in which case there is hypothetical cause for punitive action against such individuals, but such matters will be discussed in this place very soon).

I intend this to be a place whereupon I rail against apocalyptics, nihilists and radical environmentalists. Conversely, I seek to praise the scientists, the technologists, the philosophers, the artists, the workers, the families, and in sparing cases the athletes and more sparingly the politicians, as well as others who don't fit a category, whom are dedicated to giving Earth, life and civilisation the best possible chance for continuation and improvement.

As I write this first blog here, in Australia we are faced with the seemingly never-changing electoral choice of people dominated by nihilist intentions (with some apocalyptic colleagues in tow) whom have run a fairly dysfunctional Federal government, and a bunch of halfwits (most of whom desire the impossible "Second Coming of Jesus") who have shown no interest in progressive policy, infrastructure improvement, and are inherently anti-science and anti-future-technology. The next party along has absolutely no idea of how it will take the world to 100% renewable energy and gigantic reductions in carbon emissions and reductions in other pollutants without ensuring the deaths of billions of people. Australian politics is an absolute schemozzle right now, and none of Palmer, Katter, the Sex Party, or Julian Assange will do anything to correct the current imbalance and instability. The only way there can be a "New Way" (sorry to say, Kevin) is for all of the current 226 sitting members to resign, for every member in our State parliaments to resign, to disband all the major parties, and to have new elections in which only people who actually give a holistic shit about the future are allowed to run.

I have run for Federal politics and local government before, though not in any serious capacity. When one has almost no discretionary funding, no media connections and no public profile, it is always going to be an uphill battle to get more than a thousand votes in whatever contest you're in. But that experience, and other more recent ones, has led me to meet countless people who are actively engaged in politics, and I can safely say that just about none of them has any vision, let alone a positive one, for the future of Earth, life and civilisation. Six years after I first ran, on the basis of being appalled at the lack of intellectual calibre, rationality, reason, and charisma in our crop of politicians, it feels twice as bad right now!

I'm not currently in a position to run at Federal level again. Much of that is based on reasons with great merit - being in the band CALIGULA'S HORSE, we have an album due out in October, and things are going so well for the group that international touring and bigger things lie on the immediate horizon. As I build my finances, my equipment base, and contacts in music, I will look to release my own musical works concurrently, hopefully as well as literary works. I am privileged to be in a band where not only are the gentlemen in question extremely gifted musicians, but also themselves intelligent, logical, rational, scientific and philosophically progressive. It keeps the standards of discourse at a constant high, and much of that comes out in our music.

The other thing preventing me at a tilt at Federal politics at this present moment is the small matter of have acquired British citizenship in 2008. The Australian Constitution was written at a time when citizenship was a strange beast, and certainly no one would have foreseen the idea that an Australian-born man, who has lived his entire life in one Australian city as a Australian citizen, would decide to acquire a second nationality as a way of opening up more potential lifestyle and economic options. The most important political document in Australia only cares that you are "not a citizen of another nation". With the likelihood of constitutional change in this area being minimal in the next fifteen years, I will eventually have to renounce my British citizenship. It is fairly surmised that one only gets one shot at that arrangement, so I hold that maroon passport for now (don't worry, I'm not going to move to England and bowl legspin for them!).

So for the coming years, while my hands and my four-to-five-octave vocal range still work effectively, I will continue to make the most of my artistic and musical career. Along the way, I hope to spread the word about the best of the best in the aforementioned fields, and demonstrate some of my own ideas about how we can make this place and this life inherently better.

I call this blog The Layman Polymath because I read widely and I think widely, but my qualifications and my current lines of employment do not appear to match the concept of what a true polymath would be. Indeed, it will be upon me to relate some examples of the many mistakes I have made in my approach to life, particularly from 2003-2009, in order that those who read these ramblings take note and do not engage in the same errant methodologies. But for all the mistakes, I wouldn't change the underlying fabric of my being for anything - to know as much as I can about as many things as I can, in order to understand the world as best I can, and to be able to call out people on their anti-intellectual, anti-progress, anti-future bullshit when the opportunities to do so arise.

As my audience grows into the tens (lol!), I hope you will engage with me on this keyboard journey, be it through comments or through sending me topics for discussion. 

Peace,

Dave