Bob Vylan at Glastonbury

[Tristan]

Here’s the “we’ve done it all, from working in bars to working for Zionist c.nts” and “from the river to the sea” parts… https://x.com/londonette/status/1939653789117809060

I don’t think I’ll lose any sleep at antisemites losing their festival slots.

[IvanV]

Just in case anyone missed it:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... t-them-all

Is she jealous that 'sublebrities' Bob Vylan write better lyrics than she does?

That undeserved insult aside - (trying to get a cheap laugh on the grounds that most of her readers hadn't heard of them until yesterday either) - the rest of the article is a well-judged piece on that very difficult subject of where should the boundary lie in terms of what speech acts are crime in those difficult borderlands of politics and terrorism. See extract below.

I used to think masses of legislation around what horrible things people could or couldn’t say was a niche-application civilisational advance, but I have changed my view, and now fear we are sleepwalking towards a society where half the people will think certain incarcerated miscreants are political prisoners, and the other half will think a different bunch of incarcerated miscreants are political prisoners. I am very much for living in a country where we don’t think we have political prisoners at all. Getting there isn’t simple – but stopping travelling in the wrong direction would be a good start.

For avoidance of doubt, many speech act are clearly crime, such as extortion and fraud, so we have to put boundaries somewhere. Our libel laws remain excessively strict. The Twitter joke trial of 2010 was an early warning the authorities were trying to set the boundaries too strictly on this. But even though the defendant there was exonerated in the Supreme Court - the DPP offering no evidence and so vacating the conviction without an explicit judgment which would then be words of precedent that applied like law - they did not learn the lesson of that. And the authorities have continued to "travel in the wrong direction" as Hyde puts it. I understand why a right-wing Conservative government did not mind that. But I despair at this apparently right-wing Labour government failing to address the many illiberalities that crept in over the previous 14 years.