Reggie rehearsing Tristan in 1981

[french frank]

By "in the same context as art" I meant on this forum, so yes indeed it was the case.

That is what I understood you to mean in saying that it was never allowed on this forum. What was 'not allowed on this forum', and the rules tried to prevent, was a small group of people taking over and reducing every serious debate with a political tinge (and like you, I wish could have been debated - however 'sensitive') to exchanging abuse. Indeed, I recall - on the old BBC boards - a holocaust sceptic whose post caused outrage (including vicariously on r3ok). Nothing could have been more 'sensitive' yet essentially there was no opportunity to marshall the overwhelming evidence because debate was shut down by objecting posters.

In my view, all subjects can be discussed - provided participants stick to facts and evidence. The reality is that some people can't resist ad hominems, which are disagreeable for a majority of the members. My guess is that that is one of the reasons why the few survivors of r3ok have no wish to join this forum. Discussing ideas is fine; attacking each other is Neanderthal.

[teamsaint]

All comments and judgements about a composer's political views are based , at best, on partial , flawed information. We should be extremely careful about certainty in these things. But there is plenty of music to choose from if we do decide to make a judgement .

Anyway, the Labour party looks in good nick compared to the Lib Dems, or the Tories . Just waiting for the disintegration of the tories that Europe has always threatened to bring, riding in to save something that looks acceptably like a working relationship with Europe, and a few policies that look something like those of the left. Or so they must be hoping.

[Beef Oven!]

One thing I would like to see more of is the questioning of the assumptions behind the positions people adopt. I think this has been done quite successfully - at least from the programmes I have heard - by Michael Sandel who has had quite a few "lectures" on R4 in the past in which, rather than provide his own viewpoint, he invites members of the audience to indicate their views on particular moral and political questions, but also to try to explain why they hold that particular position. Sandel then summarises the position and the justification and invites others to counter it, in a sort of dialectical approach. I think this is useful in forcing you to examine your own reasons for holding particular positions, and you might perhaps find that those positions are on shakier ground than you thought.

https://www.theguardian.com/theobser...michael-sandel

Thanks for the link to the Guardian article. I've enjoyed Sandel for some time and have a few of his books. I also added Kindle narration so I often drift off to sleep listening!

He has a very straight forward, deceptively simple approach to some of the most perplexing moral questions. I would strongly recommend his first year Harvard politics lectures to forumites - seemingly innumerable on YouTube.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you refer to people holding opinions that might be based on shakier grounds than they realise. This might be part of the reason why some people move quickly to the ad-hominen.