Metal Reviews

I'd just like to say that the idea of a pregnant man getting bummed makes me feel ill.

It still has a vagina. You know you'd hit it.

I saw it's picture in the paper today and my dick instantly circumsised itself, just to prove a point.

Do human males?
No.
Please, enlightened one, bestow upon this poor benighted rube the reason why they don't.

Bah, there's a million things humans can't naturally do but can today with the age of technology. Flying is the most obvious, I guess. But we don't think of that as terribly wierd and unatural and against the laws of nature. Or, some of us do, but we think "Hey cool in your face nature" rather than "aaagh this is wierd and strange we must stop it" and burn effigies of the Wright brothers.

At what cost?
Natural resource depletion (oil demand / control will probably be the catalyst for the next global war), nuclear waste, air polloution, carcinogenic water and soil, ozone depletion, global warming, strange new diseases afflicting man, etc...
All a result of man fooling around with things which he doesn't fully understand.

The only group of people I ever see "burning effigys" are liberals (and religious fanatics), so whatever.
And nobody said "agghhh...we must stop it". Pure knee-jerk jumping to conclusions, and it was never stated. I maintain that it is unnatural and there is nothing you are going to say that will convince me it is normal.
So rather than wasting my time (and yours for that matter) with a ten page quote-box wank-a-thon, why don't just agree to disagree?

Well with the burning effigies comment I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect, rather than suggesting that was what you were doing, so nevermind. Regardless of wether you literally want to put a stop to it or not, the point remains that you are having a big go about how awful it is on the grounds that it is not natural. Well, an awful lot of things aren't natural.

Re: your "at what cost" comment, some of the things you list are natural problems that have been ameliorated by technological advancement. Disease for example- people in technologically advanced countries have a tiny chance of dying young from illness compared with in the past, regardless of whether new ones have appeared recently. But you do have a point on some of the others (such as pollution), so sure, let's agree to disagree. (although, many would say that the answer to that is more technological advance, not less, ie producing cleaner equipment)

True, there are good things that come out of technology / science, advances in medicine being one of them, but there is a down side to science as well. I am merely saying that our fooling around with the natural order of things will come back and bite us in the ass one day.
But enough about that.

We may disagree on socio-political issues, but anybody that digs Argento is o.k. in my book.
Cheers from across the pond!

Aight, agree to disagree on the whole natural thing. But this:



This is pretty much entirely nonsense. Saying sexism and racism are just as rampant as they were 50 years ago, but we just can't see it, is unempirical. I'm not saying that there isn't racism and sexism; clearly, there is, and its a deep problem in our society. But when a black man and a woman can run succesfully to become a presidential candidate, when more than half of university degrees are given to women, when black people and white people go to schools without riots and work together in the office, when black people now don't need to sit at the back of the bus or worry about that KKK or Jim Crow laws, when women are CEOs and high ranking execs and managers and bus drivers all along with men instead of being homemakers and rearers of them children, or at best, teachers. How is society more sexist and racist than it was 50 years ago? Some women are "treated as whorish objects of sexual gratification," perhaps (what the hell does that even mean? Porn stars?) and there do continue to be problems with sexism, but I hate to break it to you, Val, but porn existed fifty years ago, as did strippers; is this some idealized view of the 1950s, when men were men and women stayed home and loved being homemakers and cigarettes were healthy, and when the KKK could still hunt down some black folks in relative peace? Lets not forget that five years before, Americans were sending Japanese citizens to internment camps, and that ten years before, it was all the rage to bash Jews.



Come on, are we really going to idealize the past like this?. Many people in small towns still do leave their doors unlocked; however, ask people who actually lived in big cities the 1950s and 40s and ask if they kept their doors open, or their keys in their car. I note that children are still playing outside everytime I go outside, that the homicide rates per 100,000 people is just about equal now to what it was in the 1950s in America (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/hmrt.htm), though I will grant that crime is greater now than it has been in the past. I will also note that I've only gone to school once to be witness to an orgy of violence, which wasn't so much an orgy as one schizophrenic person shooting at us; yet most students do not experience this and most days at school are not an orgy of violence, but an orgy of learning and douchebaggery.

Yep, the fun 1950s. Get persecuted for being a communist and get to implicate all your friends and give up your rights, join up a nice Christian fundamentalist group (the 50s, after all, were the time when "under god" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance), maintain them gender roles at all costs, and make sure them blacks stay at the back of the bus, and don't you dare to do something artistically provocative or else be blacklisted!

Our society is far from perfect, and has many, many, flaws. People always look back to the past as a golden age, its natural. Hell, take the Romans. Cato in 150 BC was bitching about how the Romans weren't virtuous like they used to be in the second Punic War; Cicero in 60 BC was bitching about how they weren't virtuous like Cato; Livy was bitching in 5 AD about how Roman society was corrupt in comparison with the past; Juvenal in 130 AD was bitching about how Roman society wasn't virtuous like it had been in 5 AD, and Ammianus Marcellinus in 380 AD was bitching about how the Romans had corrupted themselves since the good old days of 130 AD. And indeed, there is a lot of good to observe from the past; but I think that we should always be suspicious whenever anyone talks about the good old days in an idealized way and discounts any modern progress.

Whats your fucking problem? Typical far left bullshit is all you are bleating. Tell, me do you wear a Che t-shirt?
I never said you couldn't see sexism and racism, where did you get that from? I said the exact opposite in fact. Yeah, porn and strippers existed 50yrs ago, who said they didn't? But it wasn't mainstream like it is today. And this isn't about that, anyway.
Unempirical? Oooohhh, such a big, educated word.
I get it; you got some college. Bravo! Who gives a fuck?
Who said anything about the fifties? What are you like 20 years old? You "heard" about the 1950's, hahaha...
KKK, bashing jews, etc. WTF are you even talking about?
That's all that happened in that period of time?
Next you'll be spouting that how evil whitey is crap. Spare me.
I am not talking about a specified period of time; I am talking about a mindset.
You're all over the place here; McCarthyism, censorship, blacks at the back of the bus... gee, I guess that's all they did back in the day, was persecute others. Get real. It happened; it still does, and it always will... the paradigm (oooh, another big smart sounding word!) may change from time to time, but the basic drive inherent in humans to place themselves above others and form cliques
probably will not. Get your nose out of the books once in awhile
Get some life experience than get back to me.


Society is ruder, more selfish, more crass and materialistic, more dangerous, and yes more sexist; you cannot turn a corner without seeing female objectification used to hawk something nowadays, they are in the workforce, true, but: at what expense? Children left to their own design, latchkey kids, the family (the cornerstone of society) less likely to maintain cohesion, teen pregnancy is waaaay more common now than before, why? because nobody is there to guide young minds; too busy busting heavies so they can afford their second SUV and big screen tv-home theater- entertainment system. These are good things?.
As for racism: it has always existed and will (probably) always exist.
So blacks are better off now than before, is that what you are saying? Then, 'splain me this, please:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Homi ... y_race.gif

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Life ... ration.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_V ... e_Rate.jpg






BUT back to the topic AT HAND: I asked noodles and he declined to answer, so, I'll ask the college boy, since you obviously have your finger on the pulse of Nature:
Do human males give birth?
Why not?

You said:



So I assumed you were implying that the 1950s were a better time to live in than nowadays. I disagreed. Is that what you were saying or not?



Oh yes, you caught me. I was trying to act all smart by using a big word. Now my entire argument falls to pieces! Oh shit! Because you know, the word "empirical" is never used at all. Never.

I also like how a few posts back you ragged on me because I said that many Christians tended to dislike gay marriage and therefore that their studies were biased because I was turning it into a "left right" discussion, when your last post is half random ramblings about how I'm a lefty college nerd who clearly hasn't been out in real society because I'm too busy reading. Nice (though I am a nerd, and in college, I make it a point to go out at least once every few months).



See, most people kind of talk about how "civilized" a society was by talking about things that actually happened in that society, instead of some "mindset" that we can define by watching an episode of Happy Days. At least I think thats how, because we're talking about a mindset. But not at any particular time. Or anything. Or place. I apologize for trying to include evidence, and studies, and you know, reading about stuff that people have written about the past after studying it for a long time instead of just randomly saying that society today sucks, man, compared to everything else.



Society is definitely more materalistic and crass; I don't see why the crassness is a bad thing. As for sexism, I was recently out into "the real world" and asked some of my girl friends at a pub whether they thought that society was more sexist now than it was in the past; would they prefer to live in the 50s or the 30s or whatever the fuck? Somehow, they said they like the present better. There is still sexism, and female objectification (just like there's more objectification of men, actually); but to discount the entire civil rights movement and basically all the accomplishments of feminism in the last hundred years because you see lots of billboards with half naked women makes no sense. As for rudeness; hey, maybe we are ruder, I don't know. But I do know I meet lots of nice people every day, in school, at work, on the streets. I also meet some that are a pain in the ass, but you know, so did my parents and grandparents.



I thought we agreed to disagree about this. Oh well. No. Men do not normally give birth, because they don't have uteruses and vaginas and things. Men also don't normally have conversations with people halfway around the world by themselves, because they don't have antennas and the internet and things. Men can't do lots of things that they do. You seemed to agree that this kid won't have physical or mental defects, so what does this even matter?

I said they were more civilized.




My last post was a response to the typical pedantic far-left ramblings of the Che crowd, I merely pointed that out.





Happy Days... lame.
I'll make it simple for you:
Listing a few of the worst aspects of a time period does not define the entire era.
You included evidence? Where?
And lets turn it around:
Yep, the 20-ought's: when gunmen open fire on their classmates, then themselves, repeatedly, any little kid can log onto the most obscene pornography on the internet, or worse, because both parents have to work, when crack cocaine is available to anybody with $25, when 5th graders are gang raping their classmates, when random violence is a part of life, when people are overstressed and underpayed, when road rage is a bona-fide mental condition, education levels are at an all time low, the so-called American dream is a thing of the past, when crime is nearly ten times what it was 50 years ago...
as for blacks: they are worse off now than ever before; 70% of black babies born with no baby-daddy around, black crime is through the roof, black poverty is as bad as ever, gang violence, etc...
as for sexism: did you ask any of your girl friends what they thought of the current porn industry, and how mainstream it has become?
Yep, the 2000's are definetly a better time.





You asked two or three girl friends at a pub, of all places? Talk about empirical!
But, really you lost me after this:
I don't see why the crassness is a bad thing.



In other words, because it is not natural.

no they don't and this isn't a male giving birth. "he" is a male BY LAW, but as far as anatomy goes, "he" still has all the "she" parts.


you do realize the graph is going down, right? o_O


also going down... although it peaked in the 90s, which were obviously the pinnacle of societal and moral decay. fucking Nirvana.

Than "he" is not a "she" or "she" is not a "he"... WTF? This is getting ridiculous.


The graphs are not in relation to the era in dispute... in fact it only goes back to 1960, which following the trend, would indicate that it was even lower.
And anyway, wrong graph. That graph is to indicate that the abolition of Jim Crow, etc. somehow improved the plight of blacks, those evil 1950's after all.
Anyways, I have said all I am going to say on this; you guys can go back and warm yourselves in your own glow of self-righteous enlightement and so on, but I have better things to do than engage in a lot of futile internet shenanigans over this stupid crap.


Nice try though.

Amen to that!

That's out of fashion?

Well, for one, I actually included a link to homicide rates, which showed that they were



Hey, there are deep problems now, no question. But wealth has never been as equalized as it is now in the West. 5th graders "gangraping their classmates" is much rarer than say, the KKK killing some and is not morally supported by anyone; crimes happen, sorry, and it is worse nowadays in most areas than it was in the past, but to counter that, you're not going to get drafted and neither am I. As for education levels; source? What does education levels are the lowest of all time even mean? Are they lower than in 1900? Because there are now 73.6 million people in schools in the U.S., an incredibly high amount. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/ And sorry, if one of your great big examples of moral decay is that a grade fiver can see a tittie, then I think I'll stick with the era whose mindset doesn't consider it strange when say and doesn't get a huge media uproar, when, say, a black woman sits at the front of the bus.



There are indeed some horrible problems right now. Though first of all, 70% of black babies are not born without a father- they are born out of wedlock (http://racerelations.about.com/od/paren ... edlock.htm),.
Black poverty is in fact much better than it used to be; though there is indeed more in terms of numbers, in 1959 55% of blacks lived below the poverty level, whereas now its at 22.7%. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/ ... tpov2.html


as for sexism: did you ask any of your girl friends what they thought of the current porn industry, and how mainstream it has become?
Yep, the 2000's are definetly a better time.







Hey, its not the best thing ever, but at least it beats your method of "I'm just going to assume that because there's a big porn industry, we must be a more sexist society than in the past!Ask any feminist or woman whether they'd prefer to live now or in the 1950s. Chances are they will say yes, no matter how much they dislike the modern porn industry, and to think otherwise is actually kind of insane. The porn industry does exploit some women, but to say: "Society is more sexist now because of a single industry, even though the vast majority of women don't participate in it and are no longer type cast into the homemaker or teacher position and mainly go to university, can get jobs as CEOs and even run for president" is completely dishonest.



Oh come on. Your entire last post is crass and rude, and begins with the words "whats your fucking problem" because I... disagreed with you.. You were goddamn banned from here a while back because you were crass and rude (glad to see you back, by the way). Stop acting so holy.



In other words, every time your finger touches that keyboard and clicks the submit button, it is not natural- yet I don't see you bitching about that. Not to mention, as Noodles notes, that this "man" is anatomically a woman, making it "natural."

Who is it?

Who do you think?!

(It's Valefor, I thought that was well known by now)