And So It Begins... The Normalization of White Supremacy (in the media)

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New Atheism’s Idiot Heirs | Alex Nichols

https://thebaffler.com/latest/new-atheisms-idiot-heirs-nichols

In the heyday of the internet message board, let’s say in the 1990s, a certain species of idiot materialized. He was male, aggressively pedantic, self-professedly logical, committed to the hard sciences, prone to starting sentences with “actually,” and almost always devoted to the notion that his disbelief in God imbued him with intellectual superiority. This archetype’s golden years were the 2000s, a decade that saw George W. Bush’s politicized creationism and the use of web forums peak in unison. Once that decade ended, the internet tired of his antics and made him central to a series of in-jokes —“neckbeard” described his less-than-stellar grooming habits; and his hat of choice, the fedora, became the butt of innumerable jokes during Obama’s first term. No longer needed or tolerated, this misunderstood paragon of Enlightenment-core values began a journey that brought him to the worst possible destination: the Republican Party.

The Bush years provided militant atheists and amateur debate enthusiasts adequate fodder for their performative condescension. It seems almost quaint in retrospect, but newish, performative Christianity was being lab-tested at the time. Bush himself was a born-again Christian who cited a vision from God when justifying the disastrous invasion of Iraq, and his leadership inspired zealots across the country to up the ante. In 2001, Jerry Falwell, who had recently accused the show Teletubbies of “modeling the gay lifestyle” to children, blamed 9/11 on pagans and abortionists. In 2003, Judge Roy Moore installed a 5000-pound Ten Commandments monument outside the Alabama Supreme Court, refused to comply with court orders to take it down, and was eventually removed from office as a result.

The Bush presidency was a fantastic moment in which to be a self-satisfied dork with a penchant for explaining things to people.

It was a fantastic moment in which to be a self-satisfied dork with a penchant for explaining things to people. Richard Dawkins’s 2006 The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s 2007 God Is Not Great each sold millions of copies, and Bill Maher’s Religulous was the highest grossing documentary of 2008. South Parklampooned Mormons, and internet trolls declared war on easy targets like the Westboro Baptist Church and the Church of Scientology. Until his disbarment in 2008, gamers mobilized to stop evangelical lawyer Jack Thompson from filing frivolous obscenity lawsuits against the makers of Grand Theft Auto. Atheists invented a religion around the “Flying Spaghetti Monster,” and demanded it be given equal weight in textbooks, to satirize the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. This subculture was dubbed “New Atheism.” It had a nice jaunt.

Once Bush left office, the promoters of “intelligent design” curricula retreated from the public sphere, and millennials asserted themselves as the least religious generation to date; the group that had coalesced around the practice logically refuting creationists needed new targets. One of the targets they chose was women. Militant atheism had always been male-dominated, but it took several years and a sea change in American politics for the sexism within its ranks to fully bloom. In 2011, skeptic blogger Rebecca Watson described in aYouTube video how a male fellow attendee of an atheist conference had followed her into an elevator at 4 a.m. in order to ask her on a date—behavior that, understandably, made her uncomfortable. The community erupted into what was later remembered as “Elevatorgate.” A forum was created to harass Watson, and Richard Dawkins himself wrote a comment telling her to “stop whining” because she had it better than victims of honor killings and female genital mutilation.

This dynamic played out again and again. In 2012, the popular atheist vlogger Thunderf00t (real name Phil Mason) aimed his sights at Watson in a video titled “Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning Atheism,” thereby reigniting the previous year’s controversy. This time it took off, leading him to create several follow-up videos accusing women of destroying the paradise that was New Atheism for their own gain. In 2013, Mason inaugurated his “FEMINISM vs. FACTS” series of videos, which attacked Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist video game critic who was then receiving an onslaught of harassment and violent threats for daring to analyze Super Mario Bros. This sort of idiocy, combined, again, with the growing popularity of jibes associating outspoken atheists with fedoras, neckbeards, and virginity, led to an exodus of liberals and leftists from the “atheist” tent. Those who remained for the most part lacked in social skills and self-awareness, and the results were disastrous.

New Atheism and the Gamergate movement of 2014—which sicced vicious online mobs on female journalists and game designers based on spurious allegations of media corruption—overlapped in several ways. They were both male-dominated, the latter almost exclusively so, and they both festered on nerd-oriented internet forums. Both movements resented women and minorities who asserted themselves within those spaces, ostensibly because it provided an unimportant distraction from their respective goals of destroying religion and uncritically consuming entertainment products. The difference, though, was that Gamergate had no basis in reality. The central allegation of that controversy, that a developer slept with a Kotaku writer in order to secure a positive review of her game, was blatantly untrue. No such review existed, which posed a problem for anyone who viewed himself as the protagonist in a battle “vs. FEMINISM.” In order to continue this all-out war on feminists—the curious replacement creationists for a new decade that lacked for them—these New-New Atheists had to break with reality altogether.

The heirs to New Atheism may have a new target and a remodeled ethos, but their rhetorical crutches remain the same. They announce at every opportunity that they revere logic, evidence, and science, even if the opposite is plainly true. We saw this play out with James Damore, the engineer who was fired from Google after spreading a memo critiquing the company’s pro-diversity policies. Damore argued in his memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” that biological differences between men and women, not sexism, could account for the lack of gender parity in the tech industry. In the memo, he repeatedly used the favored buzzwords of atheist pedants. He wrote that he “strongly value individualism and reason,” claimed that “the Left tends to deny science” and asked that Google “be open about the science of human nature.” The repetition of these sentiments failed to strengthen his case, which was made from gut feeling and justified retroactively with garbled logic and irrelevant studies. An investigation by Wired found that two of the researchers Damore cited disagreed with the conclusions he drew from their work, with one telling them that “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me).”

It became more evident that Damore was less interested in scientific truth than giving credibility to his prejudices when he immediately brought his grievances to the right-wing internet. Despite writing in the memo that “some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change),” he was willing to be interviewed by campus gadflies Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro, both of whom are climate change deniers. Damore’s choice of interviewers damaged his cause, but it revealed his motives.

Ben Shapiro, formerly of Breitbart and now editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, has made a project of adapting the pedantic rhetorical style of New Atheism to conservatism, an ideology that persists in constant tension with rational thought. His speeches and television appearances are a mainstay of “Feminist DESTROYED by Facts” YouTube, and they often accumulate millions of views. His orthodox Republican political positions are nearly identical to those of the nutjob theocrats New Atheists gleefully tore down during the Bush years—including that homosexuality is a choice, transgenderism is a mental illness, pornography should be illegal, and G-rated TV shows are corrupting our children. Even so, he frequently professes to love “science,” which is all his credulous fans require. Comically, given his religion-derived worldview, Shapiro’s current catchphrase is “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

James Damore’s first and most damning interview after being fired was with prolific writer and YouTube personality Stefan Molyneux, who represents the most extreme example of the misuse of militant atheist rhetoric. Molyneux is an enthusiastic Trump supporter, a frequent Alex Jones collaborator, and a fixture in the alt-right. Like Damore’s other acquaintances, he denies climate change exists, but he also subscribes to fraudulent race science, argues that mental illness is a Jewish conspiracy, and believes the Las Vegas mass shooting was the result of a nationwide war on children. Despite all this moonstruck gibberish, Molyneux writes and speaks in the New Atheist style, fashioning himself as a master of logic, reason, and evidence.

In a political cartoon by Ben Garrison, an ex-libertarian who now panders to the alt-right, Molyneux is drawn popping bubbles—labeled “Trump is a misogynist,” “Trump is stupid” and “my feelings”—using enormous needles tagged “logic,” “reason” and “evidence.” In another, Molyneux holds a golden shield emblazoned with “REASON EVIDENCE LOGIC” as Hillary Clinton fires arrows representing her various campaign slogans. In these portrayals, the evidence or reasoning in question is never revealed, and for good reason. The depicted slogan “Stronger Together” is unmemorable, sure, but what about it is inherently illogical? What evidence could conceivably “disprove” it? The concepts themselves, imbued with such inherent value that they may as well be magical incantations, are powerful enough to frighten attackers before an argument can ever take place.

Molyneux’s latest book, titled The Art of the Argument, is riddled with errors and provides incorrect explanations of intro-course concepts like syllogisms and inductive reasoning.

Molyneux’s latest book, titled The Art of the Argument, is riddled with errors and displays a complete disregard for the conventions of formal logic. He provides incorrect explanations of intro-course concepts like syllogisms and inductive reasoning, but it makes no difference to the Infowars-addled target demographic. For the average Molyneux reader, who was almost certainly explaining Darwin to video game forums circa 2006, rhetoric is less a field of expertise than a trove of context-free buzzwords to throw out during online spats. Simply owning a copy of The Art of the Argument provides the amateur logician with enough confidence to unleash Molyneux’s signature retort, “not an argument!” To anyone with more than a cursory understanding of these concepts (or a familiarity with the Molyneux cult) an accusation that their retort fails to meet Molyneux’s jumbled, self-contradictory criteria for an “argument” is meaningless. To the conduit for Molyneux’s sophistry, its use is akin to a fatality move in Mortal Kombat.

The only surprising thing about this marriage of convenience between the most irritating rhetorical style and the dumbest possible ideology is that it took so long to come about. Whatever merits anti-theism may have with regard to social issues, humanism was never the prime mover for New Atheism’s most devout adherents. They were after the burst of dopamine that comes from feeling smarter than other people, from exercising some pathetic simulacrum of masculine power, from seeing someone else feel bad and knowing they were responsible. Strangely enough, this is also the goal of modern right-wing politics. Just as conservatives discovered they could skip straight to the “angry liberal” portion of the argument by electing Donald Trump, the worst New Atheists discovered they didn’t need atheism at all. They could be just as insufferable alone, on Youtube, spitting nonsense into the vacuum. The Greeks, those purported inventors of Western logic, had a name for such a man divorced from the public good. They called him “idiot.”

 

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Reddit CEO Says Racism is Permitted on the Platform, and Users are Up in Arms

Reddit’s Steve Huffman clarifies his more radical approach to free speech on the internet

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17226416/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-racism-racist-slurs-are-okay

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has found himself once again embroiled in a controversy surrounding his website’s policy on moderation. In a Reddit thread announcing the platform’s 2017 transparency report findings, in which Reddit identified and listed close to 1,000 suspected Russia-linked propaganda accounts that have been banned, Huffman replied to a straightforward question about the company’s rules around hate speech, which is a verbal attack based on race, religion, or another protected class.

“I need clarification on something: Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against reddits rules or not?” asked Reddit user chlomyster. “It’s not,” Huffman, who operates on Reddit under his original handle “spez,” responded.

Huffman elaborated on his point, adding:

“On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behavior from beliefs. This means on Reddit there will be people with beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so. When users actions conflict with our content policies, we take action.”

Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules.

It’s a controversial approach, to say the least, and it has many Reddit users outraged that communities like the Trump-centric r/The_Donald are allowed to walk up to and over the line of racism repeatedly without any site action. Many Reddit users responded to Huffman by pointing out that hate speech does constitute behavior in a way, and that communities like r/The_Donald directly participated in the conversation and organizing of events like the Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist rally that resulted in Heather Heyer’s death. This conversation around Reddit’s light moderation has been simmering for quite some time, boiling over most recently last month when the company discussed its approach to Russia propaganda.

Huffman's position here is an evolving one. Nearly a decade ago, Huffman’s approach to hate speech mirrored that of other major social media platforms today, which is to ban it except in extremely narrow or uniquely circumstantial situations. For instance,Facebook’s policies on hate speech are well-documented, and saying something racist will typically lead to some type of disciplinary action. Other platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram all have hate speech policies as well that can result in suspensions or bans.

“I guess I’m a little late to the party, but I banned him. We rarely ban non-spammers, but hate-speech used in that context is not something we tolerate,” Huffman wrote in a thread nine years ago about banning a user over hate speech. “This isn’t any change in policy: we’ve always banned hate speech, and we always will. It’s not up for debate. You can bytch and moan all you like, but me and my team aren’t going to be responsible for encouraging behaviors that lead to hate,” Huffman wrote in response to another user in the same thread.

Yet, when Huffman took over in 2015 for interim CEO Ellen Pao, who was pushed out of her position in part due to the platform’s toxic and vehement opposition to Pao’s leadership, his approach to hate speech had shifted. “While my personal views towards bigotry haven’t changed, my opinion of what Reddit should do about it has,” Huffman wrote on the topic nearly three years ago, a few weeks after he had returned to lead the company. “I don’t think we should silence people just because their viewpoints are something we disagree with. There is value in the conversation, and we as a society need to confront these issues. This is an incredibly complex topic, and I’m sure our thinking will continue to evolve.”

Reddit still takes hardline stances on calls to violence, threats, doxxing, and other activities that may lead to real-world harm. But Huffman has often been wishy-washy on moderating the more complex gray areas in between innocuous content and those extreme examples. That’s where hate speech, which is not illegal in the US, thanks to First Amendment protection, typically falls. For instance, in 2015, Reddit banned the fat-shaming community r/fatpeoplehate and the openly racist community r/c00ntown. Infamous situations prior to that included the banning of the community sharing leaked celebrity nude photos and a community dedicated to sharing so-called “creepshots” of underage girls.

More recently, Reddit took action against the artificial intelligence-generated fake porn community r/deepfakes as well as a handful of alt-right subreddits and Nazi boards. But each time it does this, Reddit cites a specific rule like the use of violent speech, doxxing, or the sharing of non-consensual pornography.

When it comes to raw speech, however, Huffman seems to be more permissive, which stands in stark contrast to other tech industry platforms, nearly all of which are grappling with hard questions about moderation these days. Just this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by Congress over the ongoing Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, and he was asked numerous questions about how the company plans to handle hate speech on its platform. The matter for Facebook is especially pressing, as ethnic violence in Myanmar has erupted, thanks in part to organizing and the spreading of propaganda on the social network.

Facebook’s approach seems largely centered on AI. Zuckerberg says his company is increasingly looking to automated algorithms that parse text, photos, and videos to do the work even tens of thousands of human moderators cannot. That work decides whether involving a piece of content breaks the company’s policies around fake news, hate speech, obscenity, and other inadmissible forms of content.

 

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I bet Serena's husband is pissed.....or not, probably...

 

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I Know Them People Have An Affinity For 14 & 88, But What’s The Bigger Picture Here

 

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I Know Them People Have An Affinity For 14 & 88, But What’s The Bigger Picture Here

i think hes just calling the guy a ws

Another commonly used variation is another 14-word slogan: "Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth." It is often combined with 88, as in "14/88" or "1488" with the 8s representing the eighth letter of the alphabet (H), with "HH" standing for "Heil Hitler."

 

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Editorial Cartoonist Critical Of Trump Fired From Pittsburgh Newspaper

© Provided by AOL Inc.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/e...mp-fired-from-pittsburgh-newspaper/ar-AAyFu2E

A veteran editorial cartoonist for the was fired Thursday after he and the newspaper’s management clashed over some sketches critical of President .

Rob Rogers, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who had been with the Post-Gazette for 25 years, announced his own ouster on Twitter. Earlier this month, he’d revealed that he was working through with the paper’s leaders over certain cartoons that they’d declined to publish.



“I knew in March” ― when he said the paper first started rejecting his cartoon drafts and ideas without explanation ― “that we were headed for some kind of a compromise or a showdown,” Rogers told HuffPost. “I didn’t know what it was going to be, but it turns out it was a showdown.”

The Thursday meeting in which he was fired, Rogers said, was the last of several he’d had with the human resources department since the paper’s editorial director, Keith Burris, began cracking down on his cartoons.

Since March, the Post-Gazette had axed without explanation, Rogers said. Over the course of a typical year, he noted, only a couple of his submissions would be rejected.

Rogers’ concerns mounted when he said the paper rejected six of his ideas in a row starting on Memorial Day, including one that depicted Trump laying an R.I.P. wreath before a tomb reading “Truth, Honor, Rule of Law” and another showing the president separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents.

© Rob Rogers

© Rob Rogers

Rogers estimated that about 90 percent of the rejected cartoons were Trump-related. Some others that were spiked involved issues linked to the president, such as drawings commenting on the presidency or football.

© Rob Rogers

© Rob Rogers

The cartoonist suggested that his firing ― and what it represents ― is more of a loss for the Post-Gazette’s readers than it is for him.

“I’ve had a long and very successful career ... and I feel very lucky to have had that, and I’ll be fine,” Rogers said. “But I think the people and the readers of Pittsburgh, and even beyond Pittsburgh ― because my voice has been silenced and opinions on the page have been silenced ― I think it does a disservice to those readers, and that actually makes me even sadder than losing my job.”

A broader push for less negative Trump coverage in the paper has been seen, and to Burris, the editorial director.

Around the time that Trump announced his candidacy for president, Rogers said, Block began leaning on the paper’s editorial section to publish more Trump-friendly pieces.

In January of this year, according to the paper’s Twitter account, Block asked that the term “****hole countries,” which the president had just used to much criticism, be removed from the top of an Associated Press story that ran on the front page. The phrase “vulgar language” was substituted.



Block also raised eyebrows during the 2016 campaign when he shared a photo of himselfon the candidate’s plane.

Burris has come under fire for writing defending Trump’s aforementioned “****hole countries” comment ― which was aimed at Haiti, El Salvador and African nations ― as not racist.

“Calling someone a racist is the new McCarthyism,” Burris wrote. “Calling the president a racist helps no one — it is simply another way (the Russia and instability cards having been played unsuccessfully) to attempt to delegitimize a legitimately elected president.”

Burris and other editorial leaders at the Post-Gazette did not immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment on Rogers’ ouster.

But Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s office released a statement condemning the firing of the cartoonist: “The move today by the leadership of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to fire Rob Rogers after he drew a series of cartoons critical of President Trump is disappointing, and sends the wrong message about press freedoms in a time when they are under siege.”

Rogers said his work will continue to be published in other publications through Andrews McMeel Syndication.

 

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21 Savage is Being Detained, But He’s Not a Threat – Except to White Supremacy
By targeting the rapper who dared to criticise the US immigration policies, officials have proven their tactics are unrelated to border security



https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/12/21-savage-immigration-ice-deportation

Rapper 21 Savage was scheduled to perform at the Grammys on Sunday night, where he was also nominated in several categories. The Atlanta-based performer, who is known offstage as Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, wasn’t there because he’s being held without bail by US immigration officials for overstaying a visa over a decade ago.

Holding Bin Abraham-Joseph prisoner indefinitely for a visa violation doesn’t make sense – he does not pose a flight risk, or a threat to the community – unless you confront the painful reality that many of us who work as advocates for justice have been saying now for some time. It doesn’t matter if you are black, Asian or Latinx, or if a government official is an unjust district attorney or an out-of-control Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agent – if you are a person of color, they will find a way to lock you up.

The threat Bin Abraham-Joseph presents is not to the community, but to the system of white supremacy that underlies American policy. He is a black man, and in a nationally televised performance just days before his arrest he dared to criticise our government’s sinful policy of separating immigrant families at the border. For that, apparently, he was made the object of what Ice officials admitted was a targeted sting. Early media reports amplified falsehoods about Bin Abraham-Joseph, which reporters took from authorities without even considering their source – a phenomenon of criminalization in the press that has become commonplace.

The threat he presents is not to the community, but to the system of white supremacy that underlies American policy

By targeting Bin Abraham-Joseph, Ice has managed to prove clearly that their aggressive tactics have nothing to do with border security, just like local law enforcement’s perpetuation of the system of mass incarceration has nothing to do with community safety. Both are about maintaining power for a dwindling white majority. Any elected leader who claims to care about racial justice therefore has a responsibility to demand that Ice release Bin Abraham-Joseph, not to mention end the inhumane detention and separation of families with children. Any journalist who wants to talk about the truth needs to talk about this. Unlike Ice officials, they are directly accountable to American voters. They should keep in mind that communities of color, who make up more of America than ever before, are together on this.

One of the most well-known tactics of white supremacy, that has sadly been effective, is to pit communities of color against each other, so that we fight over the meager resources available to help our communities. Divided, we are less of a threat.

But, more than ever, our communities see our struggles as linked. It’s why the two of us, a black man and undocumented Asian American, are working together on this. It’s why more and more organizing of these communities includes work to bring in allies from other communities of color.

What we share is not just a generalized oppression, but the very specific experience of being targeted, specifically and relentlessly, by law enforcement.

Undocumented immigrants are too often forced to live in the shadows. We learn to hide in plain sight to prevent Ice from ripping us from our homes, families and lives without any due recourse. We live with this looming constraint on all of our aspirations for our lives and families.

None of this is new. The recent surge in anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States has been startling in its ferocity, but its roots run deep, intertwined with the atrocities visited on generations of black bodies. After all, forcibly separating immigrant families at the border is not entirely new for a nation that imprisons more people per capita than any other, and jails people of color, in particular, at disproportionate rates. The United States has the largest imprisoned population in the world, in terms of both citizens in prison (2,172,800) and non-citizens in immigrant detention centers (39,322). Ice is particularly punitive to black immigrants, who face the highest deportation and incarceration levels of non-citizens.

The system of white supremacy cannot sustain itself on numbers in this country, and it is fighting hard against the changes that are coming. It wants a generation of us kept quiet, locked away and unable to fight for change, just like Bin Abraham-Joseph. If we want to hear his voice again, and the voices of thousands of people of color languishing behind bars in local jails, state prisons and Ice detention camps, then we have to start recognizing that none of this is about safety or justice. It’s about power and control, and who has it. It’s about a system of white supremacy. Every day, voters and consumers are making it clear they have no interest in supporting that system. It’s time for politicians and journalists to listen.

 

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Huffington Post’s ‘Black Voices’ Gets Called Out For Having White Writers

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Huffington Post’s ‘Black Voices’ Gets Called Out For Having White Writers

Lara Witt—editor of the feminist publication, Wear Your Voice Magazine—pointed out on Twitter that majority of the writers for the Huffington Post’s Black Voices editorial are…white.

Hi @blackvoices:

Did you know that there are Black writers. with Black. voices.

— Lara Witt (@Femmefeministe) July 30, 2018

The editor for Black Voices, Taryn Finley, is a Black woman, a Delta, and a Howard University graduate. How is it that the company felt comfortable enough hiring what seems like a token Black person to run the site, but did not feel the need to pay other Black writers to be a contributor? Black Voices claims to be sharing “our news” and “our voices,” but this cannot be true when it is non-Black people who are writing the stories. No matter how much Taryn edits for them, the stories are still not ours.

If you click on the first page of bylines on @blackvoices, there isn't a single Black writer who wrote on that page.pic.twitter.com/CNm35Ihaoh

— Lara Witt (@Femmefeministe) July 30, 2018

Continued:pic.twitter.com/aEibJjCKmg

— Lara Witt (@Femmefeministe) July 30, 2018

Continued:pic.twitter.com/aEibJjCKmg

— Lara Witt (@Femmefeministe) July 30, 2018

We have seen time and time again how white people will slap the word “Black” on a source of entertainment and feel justified in keeping their voices centered in that space. We’ve seen it with Viacom through BET and now we see it through Black Voices, which is owned and, apparently, operated by white people. If Huffington Post wants to fix this, they need to hire Black writers. There is nothing else to it.

Thoughts?

 

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Highly Political Song Hatred Will Prevail Chosen As Icelands Entry in Eurovision Hosted By Israel

Link

The performance, however, is heavy on fascist symbolism, with members dressed in BDSM attire, screaming lyrics about the impending doom of Europe, the triumph of hatred and the void, which the band claims will eventually devour us all.

As some have pointed out, Hatari’s shenanigans might be in violation of regulation, most notably section 10.2 that states that entries should not cause emotional distress to viewers or other contestants, and should not bring dishonour to the preliminaries, The Icelandic National Broadcasting Service or the Eurovision Song Contest.

The rules also state that political lyrics, speeches and gestures on stage are not allowed in the preliminaries or in the Eurovision Song Contest. What this means for Hatari, a band that is known for its theatrics and fantasy role playing, remains to be seen.

Another link

The song “Hatrið mun sigra” (“Hate Will Prevail”) by the band Hatari (‘Hater’) will be Iceland’s entry in this year’s Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv in May, RÚV reports.

Hatari said that they accepted the honor of being Iceland’s Eurovision champions with “apprehensive respect,” and remarked that their win brought them “one step closer to taking down capitalism.”

“Thank you for the faith you’ve shown in us,” the band continued. “We’ll see to this task with conscientiousness and courage and forefront issues that matter.”

Their performance last night



The music video

Allt sem ég sá. (All that I saw)

Runnu niður tár. (Tears ran raw)

Allt sem ég gaf. (All that I gave)

Eitt sinn gaf. (That I once gave)

Ég gaf þér allt. (I gave you all)


Alhliða blekkingar. (Universal deception)

Einhliða refsingar. (Unilateral punishment)

Auðtrúa aumingjar. (Guillable imbeciles)

Flóttinn tekur enda. (The escape will end)

Tómið heimtir alla. (The void reclaims us all)


Hatrið mun sigra. (Hate will Prevail)

Evrópa hrynja. (Europe will crumble)

Vefur lyga. (A web of lies)

Rísið úr öskunni. (Arise from the ashes)

Sameinuð sem eitt. (United as one) (x2)


Allt sem ég sá. (All that I saw)

Runnu niður tár. (Tears ran raw)

Allt sem ég gaf. (All that I gave)

Eitt sinn gaf. (That I once gave)

Ég gaf þér allt. (I gave you all)


Hatrið mun sigra. (Hate will Prevail)

Ástin deyja. (Love will die)

Hatrið mun sigra. (Hate will Prevail)

Gleðin tekur enda. (Happiness will end)

Enda er hún blekking. (For it is an illusion)

Svikul tálsýn. (Deceitful illusion)

Hatrið mun sigra. (Hate will triumph)

 

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