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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

#251
post #126

Crickets from the usual crowd who would be crying "cancel culture!" on all TV and radio for weeks and calling for heads to roll had the tweet been about something other than a cause they support (military worship). Governments and companies continue to get more and more empowered to do this stuff because people always show that it has never really been about freedom but rather pushing their own views.

So you agree that cancel culture is bad, then? Delighted to hear it.

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is racism actually worse in the US? I feel like in many other western nations it's just more socially acceptable, and not so controversial.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by racism. Interpersonal racism seems to fly under dogwhistles moreso than outright statements now that it's socially unacceptable (in most places), where e.g. casual racism against Romania people is still pretty common in Europe. Judging from economic outcomes, though, I'd say the US is still pretty racist, even if being individually racist is mostly condemned (though I think it…

That's fair, though I understand economic outcomes are very sticky across generations (IIRC descendants of Irish immigrants, for example, remain significantly poorer than other white people). Even if we could wave a magic wand today and eliminate racism altogether, I'd expect this inertia to result in black families having significantly less wealth on average than white families for many years to come.

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

#253

>> Hundreds of UK citizens have been found guilty under Section 127, often for insulting, abusing, and harassing public figures like athletes, journalists, and MPs. A good opportunity for the Americans among us to feel gratitude at our constitutional right to insult the dunderheads in both chambers of our congress! It's times likes these that I like to reflect on how fortunate it was that the Sedition Act of 1798 was…

I feel like we've got this totally backwards. If we're going to have laws around speech at all then it should protect the general public more than public figures. In fact some public figures, such as politicians, should be entirely exempt from protection. But we don't see it protecting the general public because those cases are never as high profile.

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

#254
post #3
post #2

Interesting case: drunken tweet to a small follower count, deleted after 20 minutes, leading to prosecution and conviction. The Online Safety Bill which is due to be passed, with further empower institutions to police 'harmful messages'. I guess ideological conformity is a good thing for stable society?

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.

> No one is stopping you thinking, or saying, whatever you want at any time.

They literally arrested and prosecuted someone for an off color joke. This is as straightforward a case of “them” stopping you from saying what ever you want at any time as it gets.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it’s UK and may be the most influential western country in the last 200-300 years. But time goes on, countries evolve and often they do so in unexpected ways. My argument is that, at some point we must detach a country from its past (whatever that means) and accept the direction its constituents are now wanting to take. Even if we personally don’t approve of said direction.

Except it's not an evolution. There's nothing organic taking place. It's a concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce populations into going along with things that are expressly against their own freedoms and interests by people who are by any standard their enemies.

> a concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce [others] into going along with things [I want].

How is that outside of evolution?

Your definition of "organic" seems suspect.

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

#256
post #57

This is part of why we have the first amendment. People should be allowed to express their opinions even if they're "grossly offensive".

Are you sure about the first amendment protects against speech that would be considered grossly offensive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test

Absolutely, yes. The first amendment not only protects against offensive speech, but even hate speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul

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

#257
I remember 8 years ago when the UK police started conducting night raids on houses like they were going after the Taliban, because the people tweeted something anti-muslim after a terrorist attack:

https://www.businessinsider.com/in-britain-police-arrest-twi...

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OK hand sign is racist now. There's rumbles of milk being racist. The scary thing that should terrify everyone is we are going to come to a point where being called racist no longer matters or nobody cares, and then your gonna see REAL racism come back with a fury and force you wont like.

Wait, milk?

People of European decent tend to be much better at digesting milk (lactose) as adults and there's a meme that if you can't chug a bottle of milk you have to get out. Or something silly like that. Turns out groups of people with ancestry in east Africa have the gene for lactose as well.

So, milk could become a symbol of this if used within that context. People are paranoid enough today that if a picture of someone enjoying a glass of a milk was published, they could assume it was a signal of this. And it could be, to be sure.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OK hand sign is racist now. There's rumbles of milk being racist. The scary thing that should terrify everyone is we are going to come to a point where being called racist no longer matters or nobody cares, and then your gonna see REAL racism come back with a fury and force you wont like.

Wait, milk?

These are just pranks made by 4chan and their ilk.

The circle of life on this sort of thing, I think, goes something like:

Come up with a contrived reason milk could be considered racist, film a video or whatever about chugging milk while making a racist screed, get criticized for being a weirdo, and then some reactionary clickbait site can have the headline "Internet user called 'racist' for drinking milk."

It is dumb, don't worry about it.

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

#260
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slippery slope isn’t automatically a fallacy. It’s a fallacy if you don’t articulate why A would lead to B. The government using an anti-CSAM filter to further restrict, say, copyright infringements has precedent, so could be a valid slippery slope. The idea people pushed that marriage equality would lead to people being able to legally marry their animals was fallacious because nobody could articulate a logical jump…

Your last sentence seems to itself refute the point it is trying to make. You refer to "marriage equality", not "same-sex marriage". So you presumably think that the justification for allowing same-sex marriage is not some consideration of whether recognizing same-sex marriages in particular is beneficial, but rather that the justification is that they must be allowed for "equality". That justification easily general…

Marriage equality is generally implied (if not expressly stated) that it is about humans. Functionally speaking, there's no evidence to show that people who like people of the same sex might move on to toasters. The movement was always about people. The lack of specificity was because the context was obvious, not because it was nebulous.
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