Logan wrote:
^^ Lorenzo. Sharing the music would be fine, especially if not exposing one's own biases or seeming to have an agenda other than sharing the music that you think others might be interested in or enjoy. I have inferred because you have made topics before on the subject of the song and not just from a music perspective. It's an agenda that you have demonstrated time and time again. Moderators look for patterns of behaviour, and it is obvious with you. We have a topic for mentioning videos in General Music Discussions. Had you not made a topic there then I would not have interfered. I also have changed my mind on locked topics, or an avatar recently which i had removed, when people have PMed me explaining their intentions.
I did not censor the music, I even properly embedded it and said how to do it. What I did do was censor any future discussion on it in the thread by locking the thread. The topic is visible. We made decisions as collaborators. If you have access to the collab zone, other Prog Reviewers do, then I suggest you present your case for changes there. I'd sit out of it until it develops, but of course if called on that it got to heated, I would have to deal with it. This stuff is time-consuming and believe me, I don't enjoy it one bit.
I suggest that we avoid politically charged and controversial topics here. |
Dear Greg, dear administrators, dear forum members
only authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, go to investigate ‘intentions’. In fact, Gorky went so far as to ban the novels of two of the greatest Russian writers of the 20th century: Bulgakov and Platonov (I highly recommend the latter, who is less well known than Bulgakov) because they were ironic about certain dynamics of Soviet Russia, so he suspected their intentions, but they were not actually anti-communist.
Even the East German Stasi interrogated suspects to find out their intentions.
Civilised and democratic countries stick to their words and facts. Laws sanction certain words and certain facts regardless of intentions. Precisely because with the ‘trial of intentions’, one can attribute any intention that suits us to the one we want to punish.
But isn't this the logic of war? I bomb you, I destroy you because you have the intention of destroying me (I decide what your intentions of my supposed enemy are, so I am free to do what I want).
So, what my intention opening the thread BBOBBYY was is completely irrelevant.
I posted a song that I think is important in today's landscape. I obviously wanted many to listen to it, and to see the video, that goes without saying. I made no political comment.
These are the facts.
Those who attribute to me intentions of wanting to make a political speech are committing an impropriety worthy of repressive authoritarian regimes (and this should give the forum administrators pause for thought).
I alone am authorised to explain my intentions. And I know that I had set out not to make any political comments on the song lyrics, because I gave up trying to discuss politics in this forum months ago. And that is also why I frequent the forum less and less.
If I wanted to use this song to make political speeches, I would have done so straight away, that has always been my style when I open a thread (if you don't believe it, go and check the old threads I opened).
I predicted that the thread would have been closed because I imagined that some forumist would start talking about the lyrics of the song to polemicise and ask for the thread to be closed.
What I did not imagine was that the thread would be closed without any comment, attributing it to me or the song to be political. From here my question: if Yes have written this song what would have been happened? (a question that was not answered by anyone).
That is why I opened this thread. And this thread was instead opened by me with the intention of discussing how political censorship inevitably also leads to censorship of art. And I repeat: I would interest to listen to (and to analyze) any songs about Gaza and Israel, no matter the contents of the lyrics). But here this is not possible.
Now I'm going back to my hobby as a human rights activist. Because in reality,
talking about international law, what the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court say about what is happening in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and what the duties of Israel and its allies (USA and EU) are, is not politics, but civic education on international legality.
In this forum, this discussion is not allowed.
As much as we can, I and other teachers do it at school with our students. And it was one of our students who pointed out the song by BBoBBYY to us. We saw it in class, we read the lyrics carefully because there are many quotes that need to be contextualized, we watched it again at half speed, because the editing is very fast and you can't see all the images well. And I think it's very well done. A song that in 4 minutes manages to condense a remarkable series of images and quotes with a good rhythm. That's why I think it's important. Are these last sentences of mine political or are they critical analyses of an artistic musical product?
So, I'm fine with this thread closing too. I've said what I had to say.