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Man, 19, jailed for racially abusing Marcus Rashford on Twitter
- trifit 5y agoFinally some justice for the man but still I think the sentence was a little harsh.
- freddealmeida 5y agoRidiculous. no one should be jailed for words. No matter how much we hate those words. Justice is in correcting the world so we never think like this. But that would be impossible with these kind of thoughts.
- breakyerself 5y agoThe UK has it's own standards for speech. They don't need to adhere to the free speech absolutism of the United States. This would be unacceptable in the United States, but many places do not protect racist speech. Theres good arguments on both sides. We'll see which works out better in the long run.
- sokoloff 5y agoI’m a staunch advocate of free speech, but I think that a specific and credible threat of violence should be considered a crime (assault) and subject to prosecution, even though it’s “just words”.
- burntoutfire 5y agoSimilarly, fraud is "just words". This point of view seems to assume that words carry very little weight, while our civilization is based on them.
- cato_the_elder 5y ago> a specific and credible threat of violence But that doesn't seem to be the case here at all.
- sokoloff 5y agoCorrect. It is responsive to “no one should be jailed for words” not to “this guy should/shouldn’t be jailed for his specific words”.
- conradludgate 5y agoWords can be extremely damaging. The US has libel and slander laws. What's so different about hate speech? It's harmful, almost as harmful as some forms of physical abuse. Don't forget that most domestic abuse and physical abuse starts as verbal abuse, so criminalising that is not unreasonable
- guilhas 5y agoEspecially words against willing public figures, living above average lives
- cato_the_elder 5y agoThis is dystopian. Apparently they are trying to send a teenager to jail because of a single tweet: > Price previously admitted one count of sending a grossly offensive message by a public communication network at a hearing at Worcester magistrates court on 17 March.
- breakyerself 5y agoIts outside of what we would expect in the United States, but dystopian is hyperbolic. They don't want to tolerate racism there. Racism is bad so I can understand. The US is an outlier in how extreme our speech protections go. Even with this England tolerates far more transgressive speech than many other parts of the world. I can't even list the number of places where it's dangerous or illegal to criticize the political class. That's dystopian. This is just different from what you're used to.
- cato_the_elder 5y agoI'm not from the US. I am originally from one of those places where it's more dangerous to offend the political class. I guess that's part of the reason I find this dystopian.
- BeefWellington 5y ago> This is dystopian. Apparently they are trying to send a teenager to jail because of a single tweet: In most (all?) places 19 year olds are viewed as adults. Being jailed for a single tweet on its own is dystopian, there's no need to appeal to feelings about this being done to children.
- cato_the_elder 5y ago> In most (all?) places 19 year olds are viewed as adults. Well, you are correct one sense. But the guy is quite young, and the article itself refers to him as a teenager.
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- car_analogy 5y ago> abusing It starts with language. Insults become 'abuse', and of course 'abuse' should be illegal, right?
- strathmeyer 5y agoYou think insults used to not be abuse?
- psyc 5y agoInsults are abuse. Skittles are food. Flipping off a horse in a national park is a crime. Two drunk people screwing are mutually raping each other. You can do all kinds of magic with words and categories. Some would call this magic "equivocation."
- car_analogy 5y agoEven if I thought that insults over Twitter counted as abuse (I don't), 'insult' is the obviously more accurate and descriptive term, and one would only use 'abuse' if the aim was to blur the line between insults and other kinds of abuse.
- blub 5y agoWhen I read about such insane sentences in the UK, I remember that the UK tolerated child rape by so-called grooming gangs for years or even decades *. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_explo...
- coldtea 5y agoOr, you know, that Saville guy and his friends for decades... He even got knighted iirc.
- stuckinhell 5y agoSoon this will be used to put people critical of corrupt politicians in jail. We've seen time and time again the corrupt oligarchs and politicians bend well meaning rules to hold onto power.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoObjections like yours have been raised from the start. How well meaning can these rules and the people implementing them really be if they implemented anyway them despite warnings of this outcome?
- stuckinhell 5y agoYou have a very good point. I want to believe many humans essentially want to be nice, but cannot go from first principles (abstract) to results in the real world very well. Though I wouldn't be surprised if politicians and oligarchs are absolutely aware that a being "nice" law, is a weapon that they can use. Ever since Epstein, I've been wondering, how many "being nice" laws are really just a tool for the elite to punish dissidents.
- coldtea 5y ago>How well meaning can these rules and the people implementing them really be if they implemented anyway them despite warnings of this outcome? Well, who said the people who implemented them and the rules they implemented were "well meaning" to begin with? Legislators and politicians are mostly scum, and have been so for most of history. Not to mention that it's trivial (and has been done time and again) for things being implemented by well meaning people to be abused by not well meaning people.
- dannyphantom 5y agoJust looked up whatever the follow-up of guy who made remarks about Captain Sir Tom Moore ended up being and the man avoided prison time for his tweets [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670
- system2 5y agoFreedom of speech? Racist or not, putting someone in jail for saying something is ridiculous. If the article didn't mention England, I'd assume this is Iran, Russia, or some other anti-freedom country. This is some bizarre thing to do to a 19 year old kid who clearly wasn't educated well enough to understand what he is saying. 19 is young, instead of throwing him in the locker, they should've given him maybe some community work. How is this different than Turkey's president Erdogan throwing people in jail for tweeting stuff about him? This is nuts.
- Barrin92 5y ago>I'd assume this is Iran, Russia, or some other anti-freedom country. Hate speech, in particular targeting ethnic or religious groups is an offense in virtually every democratic country, so that's a weird leap to make. >How is this different than Turkey's president Erdogan throwing people in jail For starters we're not talking about arbitrary exercise of authority here but straight forward application of the rule of law.
- heurisko 5y agoI read some of the abusive tweets after the match. One of them was apparently an estate agent https://bhplaw.co.uk/blog/the-three-lions-the-tweet-and-the-racist-comment https://bhplaw.co.uk/blog/the-three-lions-the-tweet-and-the-... He said his account had been hacked, which I actually believe, as I remember seeing some weird accounts pop up. But the trial-by-public opinion already resulted in the estate agent losing his job. It struck me that this would (appallingly) be an effective way to destroy someone else's life: steal one of their profile photos, then create an account to tweet abuse after a prominent event, and let the mob do the rest. The day after the final there was a wall-to-wall media narrative that portrayed the UK as a racist country. Not until later did they report that the vast majority of abuse came from abroad. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58094408 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58094408
- conradludgate 5y agoI put this in a thread, but I think it'll get buried so I'll put it top level. If you're from the US, you might believe you have free speech, but you don't. You already have libel and slander laws. That is, you cannot lie about someone in public written or spoken media. These forms of speech are of course harmful to the recipients of these falsehoods because they put a false representation of a public figure or a company. Hate speech is equally as harmful. One might argue that it's not illegal yet because it only harms a minority group and not corporations. Hate speech often grows into physical abuse too. If you can reduce hate speech at the source, it might reduce the amount of people exposed to that way of speaking, and hopefully reduce overall abusive nature of people. This is probably wishful thinking however
- dolni 5y agoThe bar for limiting freedom of expression should be very high. The US has the 1st amendment for a reason. Hurting someone's feelings does not meet that bar. Inciting violence does. So does financial injury.
- conradludgate 5y agoIt's not just "hurting someone's feelings". It's dehumanising and demoralising to a culture. It benefits groups to use terms like the n-word to have power over minorities. If you've ever lived with depression or anxiety, you'll know that these things can lead to financial ruin and suicide. The "hurting someone's feelings" idea is so harmful and belittling to this idea. And is another way that these abusers get away with it. "Just man up! It's just a joke! It's your fault you got offended". If that person is now afraid to leave their home, who's fault is that really?
- wassenaar10 5y agoAnd yet, it's white people who are allegedly the "fragile" ones.
- dolni 5y agoI am not condoning being unkind. You seem to miss the other half of the puzzle, where people who have suffered trauma in their lives often re-exhibit the same toxic behaviors that they learned. If a kid grows up under awful parents and says hurtful stuff to other people, should we jail that kid when they turn 18? I say no. Any good therapist will tell you that you can't control other people. What you can do is control how you react and who you associate with. It is incumbent on each of us to find self-worth and make good decisions for our own mental health. Policing everybody else is an unwinnable game and far from the most effective strategy.
- hknapp 5y agoHere is what he said: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/03/30/13/56003579-10668157-He_directed_a_slur_at_the_24_year_old_Manchester_United_striker_-m-30_1648643908608.jpg https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/03/30/13/56003579-10668157...
- wassenaar10 5y ago
- car_analogy 5y ago> ignores organized child sexual abuse for decades No it doesn't. It actively covers it up: Police in Rotherham tore up paperwork relating to one child sex abuse victim and stopped another from being medically examined, the BBC has been told. - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-29957511 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-29957511
- conradludgate 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- wassenaar10 5y agoYou ought to read that article, since this definitely isn't whataboutism.
- orf 5y agoDifferent countries value different things. I see a lot of comments here saying this is dystopian or the first step to hitler 2.0 or something equally as bad. These are equally as vacuous and empty as people from other countries asking “why can’t you just get rid of all the guns” or making other comments about school shootings. It’s more complex than that, as a society we’ve said we’re comfortable with not allowing people to say some stuff, just as other countries are OK with high numbers of gun deaths. I find one pretty natural and the other pretty abhorrent, and i expect a fair few commenters here may have the exact opposite view.