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Comment by oska | Hacker News Reader

I know this is a shallow remark and the song was only used as an example but the forgetting of Imagine can not happen fast enough, in my opinion. It cheered me to know that there are people unfamiliar with it. Which I guess speaks to the benefits of forgetting.

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While I believe in free expression, I also believe the internet should show a human-like characteristic to forget i.e. old items, news, etc., non-scientific news and such should slowly decay in relevance and drift downward in indexing, so that that idiotic tweet and that drunken spouting off by Jill ten years ago doesn’t haunt her as if she did it just yesterday.

People make mistakes, we are fallible. Unless it’s a felony, these things should not haunt people who have learned and matured enough to have not made the mistakes recently (and thus recorded/indexed and available)

> People make mistakes, we are fallible. Unless it's a felony, these things should not haunt people who have learned and matured enough to have not made the mistakes recently.

Do you have a personal philosophical justification for stating that a felony should continue to haunt people who have learned and matured enough not to do them again? If so, why? (or is this more of a practical "well we don't have a chance in Hell of getting the Justice system on board to forget felonies" type of exclusion)

I am more thinking of this from the minor social offenses first PoV. These things should not follow people indefinitely. It’s easier to make this case. Felonies often (but not always) involve serious crime, so I can see the PoV of not allowing these to decay; however, yes, for non-violent felonies, I can see advocating for that too.

Also, things you say and do at 14, 15, 16, should not follow you and often, in the justice system, they don’t (depending on severity) but on the internet immature age makes no difference.

There is no getting past rape, murder, or kidnapping. Those crimes change who you are. There should be a social stigma attached to being a rapist, a murderer, or a kidnapper, even if the felon feels bad about it afterwards.

In other words, the defining characteristic of a felony is that it's the kind of crime that's so serious that it can't just be forgotten and moved past. Sadly our legislatures are rather daft sometimes, so many lesser crimes are legally classified as felonies.

> the defining characteristic of a felony

I thought the defining characteristic was the extent to which it is pursued and punished by the law. Off the top of my head I can think of one or two felonious charges that at least "arguably" don't satisfy your definition.

Law often follows morality but one should be wary of mistaking them for the same thing.

EDIT sorry I read through your comment again and realised you pretty much end up in agreement, though we perhaps start at different points.

Why?

It's widely considered to be lyrically facile, musically boring and one of the prime examples of John Lennon's late-career hippy excesses

Widely considered by who? I've never heard of this consensus before

The fact that Hidalgo's student mistook Imagine for a Coldplay song is pretty damning evidence.

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2012/12/06/imagine-jim-borg...

I mean, some people like it and some people even love it, but lots of people also think it's bloody awful, and awful on many different levels too.

I like it OK as a song. It's not spectacular, but it's adequate, and "adequate" is a modestly high bar from me. It wouldn't stand up to being elaborated on much more than it is, but there's a place for such simplicity.

However, philosophically, the lyrics of the song boils down to "What if we could all just get along?", which is an even weaker message than "Why can't we all just get along?", which is already a sentiment so childish that I never deploy it as anything other than an example of something so hopelessly naive that it can't be taken seriously by any adult.

It's not that simplistic. More like, if we realized that god is a fantasy and there's no afterlife or other mystical values to strive for, and the life we have on earth right now is all there is, the world would actually be a better place.

"Imagine there's no countries", said every armchair revolutionary ever, before going back to getting high and thinking of other things to say to appear deep and radical to impress girls

I wonder how much of this 'consensus' is driven by the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex' desire to write John Lennon out of history for all his talk of peace being within our grasp, and of war not being necessary, and that we should stop being led around by war-mongers whose only real desire is profit from the death and destruction wrought by it all.

I mean, a lot of todays Western culture is derived from ideals promoted and promulgated by said military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex. A lot of peoples livelihoods depend on the export of death and destruction to the world. It follows that Lennon would be being written out of history by such culture ... and that there would be an effort to replace his ideals with those more aligned with the very real social goals of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex running the West...

ON the contrary, John Lennon was a useful relieve of peaceful expression that never had a single chance of actually bringing about any change in the world. He was a useful idiot, allowing the masses to feel that there was a real movement for peace and that their desire for peace was being reflected back at them, but he never even came close (or indeed even really tried to come close) to doing anything about the military-industrial complex.

He is fading because his late music wasn't very good and the generation that loved him is dying. The deep state, powers-that-be are the ones who will mourn him, because as an impotent fantasist, he was no threat to them at all while playing the perfect appearance of one.

Amen Brother

My first encounter with the song was A Perfect Circle's version in a minor key: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rakape74oNY

I still prefer it to the original, but do you think it's as boring or facile as the original?

IMO, APC's sinister-sounding cover was the perfect response to the original. Because however one would go about trying to implement that dream, it would be far worse than anything we have now. If you doubt it, just think about how a human-run government would enforce those ideals, particularly on people who felt differently.

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