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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

This is all reminiscent of the 80s and 90s Christian right groups picketing outside of Rock and Roll concerts demanding that Marilyn Manson be forbidden from playing in their town because of his corrupting influence on the youth, that his music was going to lead to real physical harm. Same with dungeons and dragons before that. Had any of them ever listened to that music? Ever played a D&D session? Nope.

It's interesting how easy it was to ignore and ridicule those movements at the time, we'd go "ah, those silly fundies", how quaint. Remember Kevin Smith picketing with them outside of movie theaters at the Dogma premiere? We got a good chuckle out of it.

Yet look at how seriously the same people are taking the current flavor of moral panic.

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Yes, McCarthyism and the censorship you highlight above were a poison of the right; modern cancel-culture is a poison of the left.

It is depressing how blind the left (my side!) are to it, you still see them denying it or - now that the mainstream has become aware of it and they are on the defensive - excusing it with nonsense about "accountability/call-out/consequence culture".

Shameful.

> This is all reminiscent of the 80s and 90s Christian right groups picketing outside of Rock and Roll concerts

The PMRC was an absolutely bipartisan effort. Tipper Gore was a founding member, and probably the most prominent person amongst their leadership. Probably a good idea to try and project your biases onto history a little less.

It's very unclear what you're saying. Are you saying the Tipper Gore is/was right wing? Are you saying that censoring music isn't something from the right wing of the political spectrum?

It’s very clear what I’m saying. The PMRC (which was the most influential music censorship lobby in the 80s and 90s) was a bipartisan organisation. To claim the music censorship initiatives of that period were right wing is simply to project one’s own biases onto history, and is trivially falsifiable.

Were the protests outside concerts also bi-partisan in nature or were they organised by Christian groups? I think the protests are different to the PMRC actions.

Edit: actually ignore me. I don't think we have matching definitions of left and right wing. And I definitely don't have knowledge of whether the US Democrats are left wing by any definition I'd use

> Were the protests outside concerts also bi-partisan in nature or were they organised by Christian groups?

In the 80s and 90s, about 90% of US adults identified as Christian. So your question here doesn’t really make sense.

> I don't think we have matching definitions of left and right wing

I’m getting the impression that your idea of “right wing” is just all the things that you don’t like, such as Christianity. Irrespective of actual the histories of right and left wing politics…

I think you're jumping to conclusions about my opinions with very few data points. I'm not from your country so I'm also not sure what history we'd be looking out without a lot of 'true scotsman' arguments about definitions.

As for Christianity, I hope we can agree that the teachings of Jesus are quite to the left on the political spectrum.

It predates Marilyn Mason by many years. Black Sabbath in the 70s and Ozzy Osbourne (solo) in the early 80s come to mind.

Totally fair. The whole playing records backwards trolling for audio that might sound like satanic verses, whatever that means, comes to mind.

> The whole playing records backwards trolling for audio that might sound like satanic verses, whatever that means

On the other hand, these claims turned out to be excellent marketing for those records.

I don't remember where, but I heard a podcast with someone who did music promotion for some of these artists. They would call the newspapers and feed them stories about the terrible musicians who do things like "eat bats live on stage", to get outraged parents to boycott these concerts. This was a very successful promotional effort for them.

Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday talks a bunch about how much of outrage about movies and music has actually been intentionally manufactured by guerilla marketers in order to promote the product to edgy teens wanting to purchase a controversial product that their stuffy conservative parents hate.

I wouldn't be completely shocked if some of the initial outrage about Jihad Rehab was triggered by a shrewd marketer, similarly how marketers would tip off the Tucker Max movie screenings to feminist organizations around campuses in the hopes that they would call for a cancellation.

Doubt we'll ever see the evidence for that though.

Is there any metal album that you can play backward and it says "Praise Jesus, my lord and savior!" I wonder what the Christian groups would do with that?

I got ones you can play forward that are basically that.

It continued all the way into the 2000s. A particularly stupid episode was the outcry around Mass Effect, which was thankfully short-lived due to Geoff Keighley's excellent response [1]. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence, but the moral panic around video games seemed to die down around the time Jack Thompson was disbarred.

[1]: https://youtu.be/PKzF173GqTU

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