Huh. Digging around in his blog archives, it seems the Vargonauts have been following Lindy and Friends for quite some time. They are not amused. For example, check the comments section on this one (search "Lindy"):

http://thuleanperspective.com/2014/04/10/from-whence-i-came/
"Lindybeige, just like Skallagrim the Anti-White, has turned out to be another useless Leftie" ~ some white power guy who does not approve of Lindybeige's anti-Holocaust videos



I guess it's not really surprising that these guys are into YouTube's HEMA community too; I was a black metal kid back in the day, and historical sword dorkery is just sort of something that's genetically ingrained in us viking black metal nerds. But still, small world!

Let us imagine a parallel universe where the planet Krypton sacks and occupies Gotham City as an official city state of Krypton and has proven that it can keep it as long as they like. Basically, everything is the same except above the .0001% is a new Olympian class that oppresses them like they did everyone else. On the streets, life is pretty normal. One day, a young prince named Kal El is walking the occupied territory with his parents when a poor criminal steps from the shadows and clumsily shoots his parents with gathered kryptonite fired from a zip gun. Right before Kal's eyes, his parents die in agony and this changes him. He sees humans as a violent, barely controlled species and he makes it his charge to walk among them, correcting their violent ways for the honor of his parents and the betterment of humankind. Wherever he finds humans preying on each other, he kicks the shit out of them and forces them to get along, all while ignoring the origins of said behavior in the classism that predates the occupation that the occupation nonetheless benefits from constantly. Is Kal regarded as a man of steel? A super man, fighting for a just humanity? No, he's the biggest alien asshole possible, and everyone should rightly hate him for his peoples' actions as well as his own naive blindness to the actual human condition.

Now let us look at another parallel universe...

Adolf and Eva tried their best and finally had the child they always wanted. Unfortunately, he was born right as the Allies were sacking Berlin, so there was no future for him in the Fatherland as its rightful pure heir. In an act of desperation, they load him into an experimental V-9 rocket and try and fire him to the moon base. The rocket fails, however, depositing the young Hitler in a field in Kansas where he is found by an elderly childless couple who find the rocket filled with Nazi propaganda and a baby. Fearing for the baby's safety in an alien land, they hide his origin and choose to raise him as their own. The name tag reads Karl, but that's a German name, so they call him Brian. Brian Kent, or, most days, Bruce. When Brian is old enough, he gets restless, he can just FEEL that he's different and not cut out for farm living. So, he decides to go to the big city of Metropolis and finds himself in a few short years one of the world's top journalists. He exposes everything from human trafficking to Lex Luthor's plan to use Japanese homeless people to clean up Fukushima. Lois Lane, the love of his life, became the first person to win a pulitzer writing about another journalist in her instant hit "why the world needs Brian Kent." Everyone wants him for their network news show, but he refuses, citing the street as where the news is, not in a corporate showboat.

In that same universe is another story. You see, this isn't the one where Krypton sacked Gotham immediately, no, they did it decades later, long after one of their own was found in a gutter encased in a meterorite and raised by the wealthy Wayne family, who, like Bruce Hitler, had a true identity kept a secret. Like the Kal from the bad universe, this young man, whom they called Thomas Jr, also saw the street crime of Gotham to be a horrible waste of human potential and decided to do something about it. So, when he came of the age to gain control of corporate power and start running Wayne Enterprises, he instead joined the police academy and became one of Gotham's finest. As a cop he was famous, coming from a rich family he became known as the man of the people. The cop of steel. The one fair man in blue. He stood for truth, justice, and the American way, but never insisted those three things were the same at all times. It took years before people got used to his boyish charisma enough to start questioning why the richest cop in history only fights street crime. He became detective Wayne soon after those questions were asked. Pitted against drug cartels, the mob, and some bonafide super villains, Detective Wayne shone like the sun and no one questioned him again... until Krypton invaded.

My point is, in our universe, Bruce Wayne squandered his fortune, using it as a shield to squander his sense of justice and skill in fighting. Superman the cop is immediately a more compelling character than Batman. Batman the journalist is immediately a more compelling character than Batman.

The strength of Batman is that he's not well adjusted, and he is a waste of his own life. He isn't using his wealth to fight crime, because every one of his villains just wants to be a rich crime boss, not a lunatic living in a sewer afraid of the dark. Being inexperienced at business, Bruce Wayne could easily let them rise to power and put them under overnight, but he wont. He keeps them at street level, where they're Batman's problem. Batman owns all the gutters as his territory, but he never advances his cause. His sole purpose is to prove himself the alpha thug and not allow his enemies to become greater than himself, to compete with Bruce Wayne. This is because Bruce Wayne and Batman are two different identities. It's not like Superman and Clark Kent, where the mild mannered reporter is just an alien god's way of harmlessly studying humans when Superman isn't around to distract them (a journalist job for an alien is downright scientific!). Batman and Bruce Wayne just do not get one another at all. Bruce Wayne could be a real force for good, but Batman wont let him. His life is eaten up by the need to just keep the poor poor and the scared scared, just like he is inside.

This makes Batman important to us, because by following Batman (and we all love him and follow him) we get to know what it's like being a henchman for a villain (and not even a super villain, as Batman never makes progress, nor seeks to) while thinking it's normal and good to follow them. We are just like the Joker's henchmen, only for us it's Batman. This gives us a rare, mythologically unprecedented, opportunity to approach Batman, cautiously, and say "hey boss, me and the fellas, we been talkin' and... well, we was wonderin'... what's it all FOR...?"

We have these characters so that we can learn about ourselves, and we shouldn't abandon Batman for being a broken, low class street thug with no ambition or insight. We should try and help. Sure, he'll never be as important as a journalist, a cop, or a rich person, but he's our boss. He's the Bats. Without him, we'd just be low life scum instead of feared low life scum. We need him, he needs us, but we all need reality.

He ain't no Superman.

Sorry this took a while, and this is the stupendously abridged version of what I wanted to say, with lots fewer details and examples (such as the crossover part where Krypton invades, finds Super Cop, and outs Brian Hitler, forcing both to have to work together in a human underground post WWII that hates them both with a fever. A true building exercise in trust and forgiveness a ton more compelling than either Superman or Batman's normal arcs). Real life hit me in the back of the head with a folding chair, and the ref had to count real slow to wait for me to get back up.

I guess my ultimate point is, now that Varg is getting old and kind of busted looking, I no longer want to fuck him, so he's just another boring bigot now.

He's no Batman.

I've wondered from time to time about the grey area between sword guys and black metal neonazis, because you know their shared interest in the history of early European warfare means the two groups definitely overlap.

I assume you've seen Until The Light Takes Us; even maximum security Norwegian prisons are nicer than most low-income housing projects in the US, with internet, Xbox, musical instruments and everything.

**holy shit I guess I wasn't paying that much attention myself. He's out of jail?**

Nice to hear they don't like Skallagrim, he never seemed like their type when he actually talked but he was the most likely candidate in terms of personal style.

Varg's been out for years, unless he went back in again and I missed it, I don't pay much attention.

4 meme d

Yeah I wrote my reply before MD's showed up.. that's a good analogy. As far as sword enthusiasts, I know plenty of people who enjoy guns and support the right to bear arms. And doing anything, including really dicking them over like cheating with their girlfriend or something even worse wouldn't get me shot (not like I'm gonna try and find out or anything), just as I assume Lindybeige has never actually killed or even threatened somebody with a sword. I'm Norwegian myself, so they fascinate me too. My uncle devoted his life to runestones, and at least in Lisleherad, Norway, my last name's a pretty big deal, dating back to like 900 AD. So it's cool. I'm Pagan. But I'm not gonna cut someone's head off, especially not my band mate's.

Why do you say Superman the Cop is a more *compelling* character than Batman? Superman the Cop sounds just as boring as Superman the Superman, perhaps even more so! Batman the Journalist sounds pretty boring, too, although I did like the Hitler twist. Subtle, but fun, as all the best Hitler-tainment should be.

Another statement that I have a problem with is this:

"He isn't using his wealth to fight crime, because every one of his villains just wants to be a rich crime boss, not a lunatic living in a sewer afraid of the dark."

Are you saying that a crime is not a crime, if the criminal's motive is simply material gain, and a desire to overcome socially constructed power discrepancies, thereby realizing his own potential? Because on the surface of it, stopping a villain from "becoming a rich crime boss" sounds an awful lot like "fighting crime"!!! I do not dispute the rest of your deconstruction of Batman - I agree that there is a very real sense in which Batman is a villain, for, like all "legal" regulatory entities, he seeks not to eliminate violence from society, but rather to monopolize it for his own gain. However, your views on the meaning of criminality are not entirely clear.


Finally, you wouldn't fuck Varg? Just because he's looking a bit worse for wear? That's rather shallow of you. Poor Varg. :(

... but, why would we expect Varg to be Batman? Varg's thesis, at least here in this video, is that in order to be fuckable, one must be a hero (he is referring explicitly to procreative heterosexual intercourse, but I suppose that for the sake of argument we can expand this to include hairy guy on guy action). Varg believes himself to be a hero, and thus, fuckable. **But Batman is not a hero**†, as you yourself have just argued! So, by Varg "being no Batman", it wouldn't necessarily mean that Varg MUST be a hero, but it would certainly leave open the POSSIBILITY of his being a hero.




† additional thought: given Varg's thesis, then Batman's apparent lack of any romantic attachments or sex life would provide fairly damning proof that Batman is, in fact, not a hero, at least not until we got the more angsty, douchey Batman of recent 'Selina Kyle and Talia al-Ghul fucking' years. Conversely, if one insists that Batman is indeed a hero, then Varg Theory could be used as compelling proof of the oft-suspected but never-quite-confirmed pedarasty between Golden Age Batman and Dick Grayson.

how'd you make your text go bold like that?

With the power of Óðin.

It just happens sometimes. I think it's based on line length or something, the posting code inserts an html break that gets truncated to a bold tag or something.

My parallel universe dialectic and your standard rhetoric are incompatible, but not entirely unentertaining. Addressed in order of importance...

It isn't that he's old and busted looking. I have no problem fucking a dude that looks like Uncle Jesse was a character on Rescue Rangers, BUT, not if that person is ALSO a bigot. Cute Norwegian bubble blonde Varg could get away with being dumb and hot, but not this Varg. His looks wont carry him over his opinions anymore.

You think going around every single night beating up the same poor criminals and their strung out bosses is more compelling than journalism, the act of learning new things both hidden and unknown. I lack a frame of reference to discuss this really, I've always been more of a fan of knowledge than mindless violence. Batman as a WWF wrestler would be unwatchable in two years, we'd all get sick of the schtick.

> Are you saying that a crime is not a crime, if the criminal's motive is simply material gain, and a desire to overcome socially constructed power discrepancies, thereby realizing his own potential?

No, not even by accidental simile did I even imply this. This is what was just running through your head when you weren't reading what I wrote. I'm just saying they want money and power and Bruce Wayne is a more powerful person than Batman, but is wasted because Batman wont let him do anything except be his sugar daddy.

>... but, why would we expect Varg to be Batman?

That was called a "one-liner," which is a statement of humour tied loosely to a running narrative, which contains no information in itself and is designed to change the tone of the conversation to one of levity.

You're no Great Detective.*



*another example, do not take literally. You may, in fact, be a great detective.

>>bigotry

How does one, or rather, how do YOU, define the word "bigot"? I ask because most use the word "bigot" to denote people who are intolerant of those that hold values and opinions different from their own. A bigot would, for example, be more than willing to let political differences get in the way of love.


>>journalism, the act of learning new things both hidden and unknown.

Your view on journalism is... I don't want to say "quaint", but certainly odd and more than a little anachronistic. In an ideal, optimistic, 1950s world, yes, maybe journalism would be, at it's BEST, the act of learning new things both hidden and unknown (albeit with various constraints imposed upon the precise epistemological procedures implied by this definition, to ensure that our understanding of "journalism" remained distinct from other pursuits designed to arrive at hidden truths, such as "science", "mysticism", or "police work"). However, in the real world (and presumably also the comicbook world), very few journalists actually do this. Most journalism is just chafe; advertisement, clickbait, cynically spun propaganda, and bullshit information which is no sense "hidden" and never was. Only investigate journalists ever really aspire to the sort of journalistic mission that you propose as being essential to ALL journalism, and of course, I needn't discuss Chris Hansen or Carl Monday at any great length to show the poverty of this line of thinking!

If you really believe Batman would be more "compelling" as a man in search of knowledge rather than power (and even the meaning of the word "compelling" in this context could be an entire discussion in itself), then would it not be better for Batman to be a scientist? An archeologist? A neo-pagan HEMA researcher who runs a popular online video hosting site? Or even, dare I say it, a cop? (albeit one more concerned with procedural drama, than with the summary dispensation of martial justice) I put it to you that journalism is one of the *worst choices* for the sort of hero which you find compelling, unless of course you wanted to make your comic a tragedy, and the reporter-hero's inevitable loss of idealism and integrity, a central part of your story.


>>I'm just saying they want money and power

Please don't take this statement as intentionally hostile or disparaging, but what you meant to say, and what you actually said, may sometimes be two different things. Using the word "crime" in various, seemingly contradictory senses, makes for a tasty word salad, I'll admit! But perhaps your meaning would have been conveyed more clearly, had you instead used the word "villainy" (which has moral, but no inherently legal connotations), over the word "crime" (which is entirely legal, but in our modern, prison-and-control-obsessed society, will often be used vernacularly - and unwisely! - to imply moral badness as well)?


>That was called a "one-liner," which is a statement of humour tied loosely to a running narrative, which contains no information in itself and is designed to change the tone of the conversation to one of levity.

Oh. Well, that's a shame! I was rather hoping you were doing one of those things whereby you tie what you just said in with the premise of the video currently on display. I was aware that your line was meant to be humorous, deriving its humor from the abrupt tonal shift it causes, and it was! Humorous, I mean. I really liked it! But I assumed that there was more meant by your last line beyond just humor; a method to your madness.

Because you really can tie together all the stuff you said about Batman, your brief musing on Varg's sexual eligibility, and the main hypothesis put forth by Varg himself in this video! It is really quite brilliant, and I think (at least in my own reading) that this is indeed what you were doing... even if you, the author, are for whatever reason resistant to admitting it. Do not sell yourself short, Mr Dumpster! There's some real artistry there, and you should be proud!

You say "most people define it as" and then use the definition from the dictionary, as if I was unaware of it. You really like arguing by creating controversies that don't exist until you create them. All of the insight and subtle thinking I tried to put forth has been buried by your desire to bury it. I can't make you think beyond your station, and I hate that you insist on maintaining your own simplicity, as if you have no will to be anything but the least possible. It fucking makes me sad. This is another attempt at a meaningful conversation completely aborted by pedantry and Internet malice.

The fact you call propaganda and capitalism journalism just shows you buy into it, not that you know what the word "journalism" means. You embrace wholeheartedly and consistently every modern ersatz contrivance of things that used to exist as if those things were as valid as the things they are an insult to.

I had no intention of tying Varg into my Batman discussion. The one-liner was a one-liner. It's kind of sad that you think I'd just troll-lie to you for such a superficial reason. It shows you're trying to beat the Mark Inside (lookitup) and failing. I require no such tactic as a troll, I'm way better at wrecking a conversation with tactless honesty than any kind of tactical deception. Tactical deception only deceives the tactician, never the target. Look at how fucking stupid the government is with their own delusion of the efficacy of misinformation.

I still like you though.

?

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings or offended you in any way, Memedumpster. That was not my intention at all! I ask you how YOU define the word "bigoted", because I am not entirely clear on your meaning. I am not trying to "bury" your insight or subtlety; on the contrary, I appreciate these qualities in you, and I would like to draw it out more! After all, I do not read a dozen paragraphs worth of your writings, and then respond at length to the points you have made, because I am uninterested in you or trying to be cruel.

The problem specifically re: bigotry, is that going on the "dictionary" definition - which of course you know, you are not stupid and no-one here think you are - then your rejection of the love you once felt for Mr Varg would itself be an expression of bigotry. (tolerance can be a difficult virtue to adhere to!) Varg is like Applejack; traditional, family-oriented, and deeply committed to a rustic DIY lifestyle. You, on the other hand, are like Rarity; sophisticated, tempestuous, urbane. The two of you are, in many respects, very nearly opposites. Society tells you that you and he should be enemies. But in your heart, I think, you know you could be friends.


Your subsequent comments on the matter of journalism actually support this contention! I don't know where you want to take this vision you have of True Scotsman journalism from here - you say that my damning comments on the true nature of journalism are "ersatz modern contrivances", but tellingly, you don't actually say that they are WRONG. However, it bears pointing out that a severe dissatisfaction with the Modern, and a yearning for some idealized Mythic Age of virtue (as you are doing here for journalism), are some of the strongest themes underlying Varg's work and philosophy!! So, you and Varg may have different opinions on politics. You might not see eye to eye on every issue. But I think that you both share a fundamental romanticism, and a deep sense that all is not quite as it should be in this world. Like Bruce and Bats, you and he are different expressions of the same person.

Albeit a heroic ("no Batman") one.


Finally, please stop putting yourself down! You are not a troll, and you are not just wrecking conversations. You made a very profound point about Varg and heroism, or almost did, and even if that point was made completely by accident, it is something that you should let yourself feel good about, and should own, without shame or apology.

In his defense, he's probably the least nauseating member of his old crew.

Yeah.. This whole "sulk at the bar at midnight" thing's not working for me lately, even though it's metal as fuck.

Maybe it's just the fact that he's getting older, but he seems to be a lot more reasonable now than he used to be. It IS good advice, and it cuts right to the heart of the matter - if you want a wife, you have to work for it - rather than just falling back on cynical psychological tricks designed to facilitate one night stands (PUA), or worse, whiny misogynistic conspiracy theories (MGTOW, TFL).

It's a sad reflection on our society when Varg gives the best dating advice on the internet.