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Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

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Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#361

Post by sacrosancty »

candiodari wrote: post #21
onion2k wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess ideological conformity is a good thing for stable society? I don't think this is about "ideological conformity". No one is stopping you thinking, or saying, whatever you want at any time. The problem is when you use a platform to broadcast that message to a wider audience, especially one like Twitter that will show your posts to people who don't follow you.

The problem is that that is never, ever, where it stops. There's always people that society suddenly decides are "really important", usually the most dumb-witted, cruel abusers you can come up with. And of course, the rules don't apply to them. Just look at the president of France, if you want to see a particularly bad fuckup. He, and his wife, have confessed, publicly, on TV, repeatedly to having a paedophilic relat…

I wish people would stop misusing the word pedophilia. Most normal adults can be sexually attracted to 15 year olds. Pedophilia is something completely different.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#363

Post by Dylan16807 »

autoexec wrote: post #333
Dylan16807 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is to recognize discrimination.

The fact is that everyone has a certain amount of "privilege" due to their membership to a group and the complex dynamics that exist between groups. There is no person who doesn't have a list of advantages and disadvantages compared to others. Understanding that, and that your experience will not always be what everyone's experience has been is all you need. Men get harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, b…

> The fact is that everyone has a certain amount of "privilege" due to their membership to a group and the complex dynamics that exist between groups. There is no person who doesn't have a list of advantages and disadvantages compared to others. Understanding that, and that your experience will not always be what everyone's experience has been is all you need.

It's really hard to get people to realize that, and to see the different types of things they benefit from silently. Do you have better suggestions to get people to notice?

> Men get harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, but we don't really hear much about "female privilege". If you want to point out discrimination, you don't need any concept for "privilege". The problem was never that one group has something. The problem is that one group does not have something. It's the inequality that needs to be addressed, not the "privilege".

People do talk about both sides, but you're right that they don't use "privilege" there.

I think the word privilege is useful to point out when one group has a huge advantage over another, even when there are some advantages or 'advantages' going in either direction.

> Making blanket assumptions about people on the basis of their skin color is something we should be avoiding, not encouraging. Keep the focus on what needs to be solved and suddenly you avoid all the problems focusing on "white privilege" causes like resentment, defensiveness, blame, and guilt.

It's not really an assumption that if you're white you face a tiny fraction of the racism that a black person gets, for example. As far as defensiveness and guilt, etc... I feel like any language used to talk about this will get politicized and twisted that way.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#364

Post by tshaddox »

Traster wrote: post #208

There's something I find loathesome about this "Send a message" sentencing. What the judge has done is send a clear message, that he won't sentence you on the merits of the case but will sentence you to serve his own agenda. The only message this sends is that justice has failed. It's always completely transparent who exactly gets made an example of, and who gets off with a slap on the wrist. We'll spend months hunti…

I don't really understand your argument. It's one thing to disagree with the law itself, but in what way was this case not judged on its own merits, and what agenda was the judge serving? I hardly think "I'm sentencing you in accordance with the law so that people will see that if they break the law they will be sentenced in accordance with the law" counts as some person agenda. I see no indication that the judge said or believed that the person did not violate the law or did not deserve the sentence according to the law, but was being sentenced merely to serve as an example to other people.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#365

Post by da39a3ee »

Wow the examples of UK prosecutions under Section 127 of the Communications Act are an embarrassment: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/7/22912054/uk-grossly-offens...

Most of them are just losers saying stupid offensive shit; clearly not worth giving the time of day let alone prosecuting. And one was someone who was understandably angry about the actions of foreign troops in Afghanistan; he has a right to express his anger.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#366

Post by SamBam »

tshaddox wrote: post #364
Traster wrote: post #208

There's something I find loathesome about this "Send a message" sentencing. What the judge has done is send a clear message, that he won't sentence you on the merits of the case but will sentence you to serve his own agenda. The only message this sends is that justice has failed. It's always completely transparent who exactly gets made an example of, and who gets off with a slap on the wrist. We'll spend months hunti…

I don't really understand your argument. It's one thing to disagree with the law itself, but in what way was this case not judged on its own merits, and what agenda was the judge serving? I hardly think "I'm sentencing you in accordance with the law so that people will see that if they break the law they will be sentenced in accordance with the law" counts as some person agenda. I see no indication that the judge sai…

Except that the judge said specifically that he was sentencing him as a deterrence to show other people.

> "The deterrence is really to show people that despite the steps you took to try and recall matters, as soon as you press the blue button that’s it. It’s important for other people to realise how quickly things can get out of control. You are a good example of that, not having many followers."

Jesus, 18 months supervision and 150 hours unpaid labor, for a tweet by an unknown Twitter user, who named no names, and who deleted his drunken tweet after 20 minutes.

Did the judge have minimum sentencing requirements? If not, this was absolutely discretionary and absolutely out of proportion to the "crime," and is only "justified" by the judge using him as an example.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#367

Post by dane-pgp »

ng12 wrote: post #190
helloworld11 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from me absolutely being in favor of even offensive and racist speech out of general principles, you'd be surprised (or not) by how easily "racism" can be redefined to include all kinds of things that are very, very dubiously racist by any normal definition. There are extremely woke people who consider even questioning any of their arguments about race or class as a racist act. There are cases where a person ma…

This is exactly why we need free speech. It's a pragmatic position. Of course I would like to live in a world where people don't spew vitriol. But for the reasons you outline that cannot happen except in an authoritarian society. As an illustrative point both Russia and China have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. They just added enough caveats that it's worthless.

> except in an authoritarian society.

I would point out that governments in authoritarian societies have a habit of labelling certain groups of people as enemies (either because those groups challenge them politically, or because it's convenient to have a scapegoat to blame the government's own failures on), so in practice you end up with just as much, if not more, vitriol spewed in authoritarian societies.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#370

Post by tshaddox »

SamBam wrote: post #366
tshaddox wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your argument. It's one thing to disagree with the law itself, but in what way was this case not judged on its own merits, and what agenda was the judge serving? I hardly think "I'm sentencing you in accordance with the law so that people will see that if they break the law they will be sentenced in accordance with the law" counts as some person agenda. I see no indication that the judge sai…

Except that the judge said specifically that he was sentencing him as a deterrence to show other people. > "The deterrence is really to show people that despite the steps you took to try and recall matters, as soon as you press the blue button that’s it. It’s important for other people to realise how quickly things can get out of control. You are a good example of that, not having many followers." Jesus, 18 months su…

> Except that the judge said specifically that he was sentencing him as a deterrence to show other people.

Right, that's precisely the statement from the judge that I was paraphrasing as "I'm sentencing you in accordance with the law so that people will see that if they break the law they will be sentenced in accordance with the law." The judge is not saying "you didn't do this" or "you don't deserve this." The judge is saying "you deserve this sentence according to the law, and this will show people that if they break the law they will also receive the sentence they deserve according to the law."

Argue as much as you want about the law itself, or even about the judge's specific decisions within whatever sentencing leeway he legally had, but it's just plain ludicrous to say the judge isn't sentencing based on the merits of the case or is serving a personal agenda. There's nothing even remotely hinting that this is the case.

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