Onto the outer fringers of libertarianism

Occassionally, Reason Magazine's blog, Hit & Run, publishes an interesting post. This means that I have to subscribe to the blog with my RSS reader in order to avoid missing said monthly post. Yesterday, I encountered this.

Basically, the post excerpts a review in the NY Times of Mark LeVine's book, Heavy Metal Islam, which is about, um, Heay Metal in the Islamic world. And about how awesome metal is and how it transcends boundaries of class, culture, race, language, religion, etc. Then I read this from the poster at Reason:

I'm not sure if the guys in Slayer have ever been called agents of tolerance and goodwill before, but there's no question that openly listening to a Slayer classic like "Altar of Sacrifice" might get a young Iranian in some trouble with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. But, as Hampton argues in his review, LeVine is on pretty shaky ground describing Slayer and Metallica as alternatives to "ruthless corporate" globalization rather than as explicit products of it. Who does he think releases and distributes their records, anyway?

First of all, the singer for Slayer is a Christian. The fact that he has shared a stage for decades with the man who wrote the riffs to "Raining Blood" should prove that Slayer isn't filled with intolerant assholes. See image below.



I have a point to make here. How badly is your personal life infected by your ideology that you can't listen to Slayer or (old) Metallica without immediately thinking about how an awesome huge corporation packaged the CD that you are listening to?

None of this matters because Reason is retarded, and those poor kids listening to "Mandatory Suicide" in Baghdad probably listen to metal on a bootlegged casette, DRM free of course.