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Three Years in Prison for Posting Hatespeak
Vainglorious Coward writes "In the UK, a man has been sentenced to three years in prison for posting inflammatory messages to a website. Pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred on a site dedicated to the memory of a murdered black teenager, the 30-year old accused stated that he was not racist, and had intended to stir up an argument on the website, but did not believe in what he had written. The defending lawyer described her client as 'isolated and living in a fantasy world, spending hours on his computer in his room where his persona could be as he made it, good or bad.'"
He got 6 months of his sentence for child pornography charges.
Maybe you are not aware, but there is no free speech in Europe, at least not like in the US. It is not uncommon to get in trouble for written text or speech.
If you read the article, it talks about child pornography as well, so I do not say it was unfair in this case.
Read TFA:
He was sentenced at Liverpool crown court to two years and eight months' in jail for the race hate crime and six months consecutively for the child pornography offences.
At least you don't live here in the US. Oh wait, we have free speech here.... never mind.
But seriously folks, this rather smacks of Thought Police. I can understand why it is illegal to yell "FIRE" in a crowded movie theatre, but I have always believed it is better to allow those who have repugnant ideas to voice them openly so the whole world can see how big of a nut they are.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
If you knew anything about the case in question, you wouldn't have any sympathy period.
Anthony Walker was a nice black kid, waiting at a bus stop with a couple of white friends when a bunch of thugs starting shouting racist abuse at them. After they attempted to walk away from the abuse, the thugs chased then down, and murdered Walker by plunging an ice pick into his head.
It was a shockingly brutal and unprovoked attack that shocked the vast majority of people in the country.
Then less than a week after this happens, this guy anonymously posts on a memorial website that white people should celebrate the murder, that Anthony's family should be burned and made references to slavery and a "banana boat".
The reason these laws exist is that they're not merely tabletop dicusssions, they're incitements to violent acts. It's not illegal to hate someone because of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, height, weight or operating system, but when it moves into "You should kill this group.", then it's not just a thought, it's something serious, and dangerous.
I agree that it's sometimes great to let the nutcases say their peice in public in order to ridicule them, but we also have to protect people from violent acts by these nutcases. It's obviously a fine line- the UK (and most of Europe)'s rules differ quite a bit from those in the US.
I think the common ground here which we can all agree on is that racism is a problem, and that we want to protect the public. From there, we can have a dialog on how to best accomplish it while maintaining individual civil liberties.
Is this sort of law universally accepted by people in the UK or is there any sort of sizable opposition to it?
There is no sizeable opposition to any laws ever in the UK.
As long as Brits can get to work without "leaves on the rails delaying the trains" in autumn, and can go out to the pub in the evening or switch on the gogglebox, they couldn't give a toss if they're shafted daily through the ass with a bulldozer.
And that's why we are now living in a police state. Apathy.
So, you are Dutch but you know of no movement for more free speech?
Amazing.
Pim Fortuyn asked for more free speech. Theo van Gogh asked for more free speech.
Last thursday Diederik Ebbinge was in the socialist TV show Pauw en Witteman. to talk about the manifest he made together with Hans Teeuwen and Eddy Terstall which pleads for more freedom of speech. They offered the manifest to the Dutch parliament.
Using a Nazi tactic to protect people from unacceptable speech. The main difference being that in Germany, at the time, it was hate of the leader of the state, an individual, that was banned, rather than hate of a group of people.
History, for those that refuse to learn from it, will repeat itself. Speaking of history repeating itself, why can't the UK repeat some more useful history, like the 5th of November?
Maybe where you live, but over here that kind of radio does not exist, because the host would be in jail indeed.
This is what happens when editors don't do their job and actually *edit* the title to reflect what the article is about.
/. community for protecting freedom of speech and thus all the responses are diverted away from the actual topic.
The article says that the offender was charged with speech to incite murder. Not just hate, but calling upon other people to kill the remainding family members. In addition he also was charged with carrying child pornography on his computer.
However, the title tries to incite the deep feelings of the
The UK had hardly any gun control laws prior to about 1920, when the government began to worry about Bolshevik uprisings.
Prior to that, there had actually been a history of private firearm ownership *and legal protection for same*. See an historian's book about UK/US firearm regulation history for details. The Glorious Revolution produced a charter of rights guaranteeing weapons posession (by Protestants only, but that's another issue). This is all well documented but almost forgotten.
(Not to mention that our notions about using force in self-defense come from UK law).
The US may be unusually devoted to free speech, but our reasons come from your own philosopher John Stuart Mill. For one thing, the arguments on the side of good (e.g. cooperation among racial groups) need to be refined and tested against counter-arguments to make sure they will convince people and thus improve society. For another, it's important to know how widespread racism actually is. Driving something underground only gives you the illusion of safety. For another, it's also good speech that can be unpopular. In 1830 you abolished slavery, after decades of abolitionists speaking against the "property rights" of slavers and calling them names. Fortunately the abolitionists were not suppressed for "hate speech".
The US also has a problem that makes regulation of speech dangerous. Some people here are far too quick to label any criticism as being racist. Fallacious scientific research, objections to affirmative action, and references to the Mafia have all drawn allegations of racism. Hernstein and Murray deserve to be exposed as wrong, not to be imprisoned. Affirmative action may not be working the way it's supposed to and that's a subject that needs careful discussion to protect everyone's rights.
You're dead wrong my limey friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918
The Sedition Act was repealed in 1921. Although the Sedition Act was upheld by the US Supreme Court in Schenck v. United States, most legal experts view the Sedition Act as being antithetical to the letter and spirit of the United States Constitution, specifically the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
And allow me to speak freely when I say that anyone wishing (albeit minor) financial support for a coup of my state or federal government, I'd be overjoyed to contribute. I'm positively sure that this is inciting violence under some reading of your laws, but under mine the only exception to the first amendment is falsely presenting a clear and imminent danger in order to severely disturb the peace.
It's a mistake to believe Amish peity is somehow more civilized or superior to the court system. Amish forgiveness cuts both ways, they also forgive their teenage boys who rape and molest their daughters. In fact daughters going to the outside world for protection from predators in their own community has resulted in retaliation against the victims by the community.
Impressed by their piety, courts have permitted the Amish to live outside the law. But in some places, the group's ethic of forgive and forget has produced a plague of incest--and let many perpetrators go unpunished.
Amish forgiveness has just as much chance for arbitrary tyranny as any other system. Only a rational, secular legal system can successfully remove arbitrariness from the social order you live under.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Yes, overrated and underrated avoid metamod, but they also do NOT add/subtract from Karma, so it's kind of a half way.
Great Intellect...
Thoughtcrime is in your head. The premise was that cops with brain-scanners could read your mind as you thought seditious thought. This was out-load-and-person, in a public forum dedicated to the victim, calling for further violence against his family. I couldn't say yes or no as to whether the idiot who posted it was kooky enough to try something, or gather others, but I could see people such as KKK members and other gathering to this call.
When somebody is stuffed in jail for thinking - just thinking - of something, then it will be thoughtcrime. When he's arrested for mentioning it to a friend or two, that's still a step beyond. When he posts on a FUCKING FORUM, visible to the world, and setup by the family's victim, it is not thoughtcrime. When the posting calls for violence against the family, it's can go beyond even hatespeak into the areas of conspiracy to commit murder (not used). You don't know if that's what the guy intended, I don't know, but personally I'm pretty damn happy that they slammed him before he ended up on front page news for following it through.
3 years, there's a criminal system and that's the punishment it decided on. Maybe you can judge on that. If you think what the guy did, threatening the family in an area dedicated to the victim - akin doing the same at a funeral - is something he, or anyone else should be allowed to do, then I'd say the world outcome is no better than Orwell's. In fact, with the increasing amount of people desensitized to this sort of things, that's likely exactly you'll get.
Regardless, it's not fucking thought-crime, at least not in the oft-quoted Orwell variety.
Now some bastard may mod me down because I dropped an F-bomb too many times, but perhaps those who keep using the same b.s. cliches will at least learn WHEN they apply.
Then what do the governments do about the mosques where imams openly preached jihad?
Since you ask, they give the imams seven years.
How quickly and conveniently the racists forget anything that doesn't conveniently support their twisted worldview.