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The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

nationalreview.com

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Re: The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

#81

Post by brazzy »

rfnslyr wrote: post #17
ams6110 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In response to someone calling him "insane." In that context it's pretty clear this was a sarcastic response.

Anyone who has ever played video games even pseudo seriously knows that comment is just scraping the bottom of the barrel. So much worse shit is said daily in games like WoW/CS/League/anything competitive. It's mind boggling that someone took his comment this seriously. I hope he sues whoever he has to sue and lives out the rest of his life in absolute comfort. I'd be paranoid forever online because of this. Spending…

It has never occurred to you that what's really wrong here is that such comments are ever, under any circumstances mundane, normal and to be expected?

Re: The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

#82

Post by anon1385 »

phaus wrote: post #59
ianstallings wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are always armchair prosecutors ready to bring out the electric chair for jaywalking. They are the same ones saying we always need to be tougher on crime even though we lock more people up than any other country. They are completely out of touch with reality.

Most of the time, when people are talking about getting tough on crime, they are talking about stuff like murder, rape, child abuse, selling crack to kids, or DUIs. They generally adopt this attitude after seeing people commit horrible crimes and get out of prison almost immediately to do the same or worse. We do lock more people up than any other country, and it is shameful, but that doesn't mean that everyone who w…

I can't speak for the people in your community but here in the UK 'tough on crime' most certainly does mean getting tough on what is called 'antisocial behaviour'. In our recent Police and Crime Commissioner elections it was these lesser 'antisocial' offences that were the central campaign point for just about all candidates (along with 'giving victims more say').

The result of this attitude is that we lock up people for 4 years for joking about starting a riot on Facebook[1].

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/16/facebook-riot-calls...

Re: The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

#84

Post by Confusion »

willvarfar wrote: post #7
Ma8ee wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the concerned woman who reported him to the police?

Actually, if you saw that posted, would you not consider whether to tell the police? The proper thing to do - as said in the article - is for the police to investigate if he was serious. And you or I would - depending on lots of context on whether we thought it a remotely credible threat I guess - report it for them to investigate? The problem seems to be on the police end, not the concerned citizen (of another count…

We have provided people with easy ways to voice their thoughts and we are now confronted with what everyone should already have known: that people have a lot of 'bad' thoughts.

Every teen has at one occasion thought: I feel like killing [everyone in school, my team, my so-called friends, my brother, my ...]. Writing such a thought down gives it extra power and a screen doesn't confront you with a person and make it easy to misjudge whether you can press 'send'.

Monitoring that speech and acting on it, directly by the government or indirectly via 'concerned citizens': that way lies police state insanity.

So the answer is emphatically, decisively: no. You should not want to report this.

Re: The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

#85

Post by floobynewb »

adventured wrote: post #66
zaroth wrote: post #19

I know articles like this bring out the trolls, but I can't get over the sheer number of commenters (on the target site) happy to see Justin being 'taught a lesson', or claiming that his speech was truly criminal. What hits me the hardest about this story is that, what if an HN post of mine strikes the wrong nerve and next thing they're coming for me? Maybe next they'll be coming for you. Or 15 years from now my kid…

There are a lot of targets of blame these days... politicians, bankers, parents, teachers, you name it. At the core, I believe it's my fellow Americans that have become frightening. They represent the rotting culture that accommodates our increasingly violent, extralegal form of government, the one now almost entirely unchained from the Constitution. The sheer apathy; the willingness to hand over fundamental libertie…

"Every nation gets the government it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre. Thank you, this quote suddenly really clicked for me. I had interpreted it as an indictment of apathy. It's actually a statement of fact, the government refelects society.

Re: The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

#86

Post by Confusion »

Twitter, Facebook and similar services have provided people with easy ways to voice their thoughts at whim. We are now confronted with what everyone should already have known: that people have a lot of irrelevant, illogical, uninteresting, confusing and reprehensible thoughts. I sure do.

Every teen has at one occasion thought: I feel like killing [everyone in school, my team, my so-called friends, my brother, the neighbour dog, ...]. Writing such a thought down gives it extra power. A screen doesn't confront you with people, which would make your brain stop and think, so it is easy to misjudge whether you can and should press 'send'.

Monitoring that speech and acting on it, directly by the government or indirectly via 'concerned citizens': that way lies police state insanity. It means the system, and many of the people in it, is in denial of the complex, inconsistent nature of humans. They want clear rules, easy judgments, binary divisions between right and wrong. They lose sight of what 'being human' means: a huge variety of things, not all of them pretty, but all of them human.

Re: The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

#87

Post by peteretep »

singular wrote: post #26

This is ridiculous, outrageous, insane. Terrorism is less likely to happen to you than a great many extremely unlikely events, I can't find a citation right now but I suspect it's less than being struck by lightning, yet the risk justifies... this? The odds of being struck down by a careless driver must be vastly higher, yet I don't see people who text as they drive being sent to jail for >= 10 years, or those with d…

> in my country (UK)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/16/facebook-riot-calls...

Re: The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

#88

Post by antihero »

mig39 wrote: post #30
singular wrote: post #26

This is ridiculous, outrageous, insane. Terrorism is less likely to happen to you than a great many extremely unlikely events, I can't find a citation right now but I suspect it's less than being struck by lightning, yet the risk justifies... this? The odds of being struck down by a careless driver must be vastly higher, yet I don't see people who text as they drive being sent to jail for >= 10 years, or those with d…

Toddlers killed more Americans this year than Terrorists did. Time for a war on toddlers. http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/toddlers-killed-...

Well the obvious argument for that is that the terrorists didn't kill people because all these powers allowed us to stop them.

Re: The 19-year-old jailed for the crime of sarcasm

#89

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

rayiner wrote: post #20
wavesounds wrote: post #4

"He’s been incarcerated since March without trial." That's the problem. A jury of his peers would throw this out no questions asked.

I wouldn't count on it. It was some uptight woman who saw the comment and told the police in the first place, and you can bet its the fear of uptight parents that's causing the prosecution. Can you imagine how the shit would hit the fan if the kid had said something like that, the police had been notified, and the police had done nothing, and the kid had shot up some school?

Everything up to calling the police and them searching his house is fine, even expected. Police investigate and find that this is a random, sarcastic comment from an otherwise normal 19 year-old and warn him not to do that again - that's what we should expect, not sitting in jail awaiting trial.

But at the same time, I have to ask where the line should be drawn. Our babysitter's boyfriend was arrested and jailed (charges of making "terroristic threats" again) for leaving a bomb threat in the bathroom of their high school His stated reason: he wanted the day off. He's harmless, but ridiculously stupid. However, he did make the threat. Even if it was an empty threat, he has to be held responsible for the cost of evacuating the school, bomb-sniffing dogs and police searching and the general disruption that ensued.

In the case of this story, though, I'd like to believe that the police or the DA would have had the balls to say "this is just a dumb kid shooting off his mouth. We told him to be careful and let him go."

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