Too many tweets makes a twat

This weekend, a football player had a heart attack on the pitch. Twitter went mad, with people who had no connection with the club or the team grieving and paying fulsome tribute to someone they didnât know or care about five minutes before. Of course, some idiots went the other way:
A man has been arrested after allegedly making racist remarks on Twitter relating to critically ill footballer Fabrice Muamba.
The 21-year-old man from Pontypridd, south Wales, was arrested on Sunday.
As it happens, I read some of the comments this chap made, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they were despicable, unpleasant, uncharitable, racist and mean-spirited. I read them because people were retweeting them to show how outraged they were. Now, there are a couple of points I want to raise about this:
- the people who retweeted the racist comments are, as I understand it, technically just as guilty of âhate speechâ as the man from Pontypridd
- given that the person was not advocating any kind of harm to a particular race, merely approving that a black man was harmed (from the tweets I saw, anyway) Iâm not sure what grounds there are for arresting him
Even if he was advocating stringing up âthe blacksâ, I donât really see that being an offensive, âintolerantâ idiot is something that you should be arrested for, or have anything done to you except being ignored for being an idiot. If you look at what he was arrested for, he was arrested by people who are being intolerant of intolerance. I donât advocate any form of bigotry, but itâs clear that bigotry is not going to ever go away, no matter how much legal thuggery you bring to bear.
But it seems to me curious, in the way that so many things are in the statist, social democratic world, that the one kind of intolerance that is perfectly acceptable is to be intolerant of intolerance. This is somehow magically transmogrified into âtoleranceâ.
It is no such thing. It is merely a socially acceptable intolerance ⦠at the moment. I have lived and worked in countries where other, state-sanctioned and socially-approved intolerances existed and changed over time and I have never found any state-decreed intolerance to my liking. Bigotry is bigotry, irrespective of the target.
The man from Pontypridd has been vilified and abused, his personal details have been published on the internet and he has been hounded by thousands of baying, self-righteous people, in much the same way a black man might have been treated in apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil rights âdeep southâ in the USA. The justification in both cases is exactly the same: âthese are the laws and norms by which we live nowâ.
Somehow, I find the justification as unsatisfying now as I would have then.
March 20, 2012 at 16:31
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Do remember â if you are a Labour functionary, this sort of behaviour is
quite acceptable
http://order-order.com/2012/02/22/labour-councillor-dearly-wishes-thatcher-would-go-blind/
Perhaps the CPS should have these links referred to them?
March 20, 2012 at 14:59
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@Engineer
I think â witness my post above regarding the crime of âracismâ â that if
you say something that someone deems offensive, it may now be an offense. Pace
Sunny Hundal, most of whose output is Leftist gibberish â he is right on this,
it is a thought crime, and is one of the may timebombs the last shower of
bastards left us. And that includes the âEqualityâ laws the grotesque Harmen
got in before New Stasi were kicked out.
March 20, 2012 at 14:53
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I believe that legally, an act that anyone perceives to be âracistâ is
deemed to be so.
Enough said.
March 20, 2012 at 10:39
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âToleranceâ is being redefined. It used to mean âput up withâ, now it is
âwholeheartedly acceptâ.
Before Twitter the mainstream media did, and still does, spread the
âoffenceâ. I recall hearing of the closed meeting where a senior police
officer made a comment that a reporter thought might upset the âSohamâ
parents, so he put his theory to the test. Who was being offensive there?
Just last week the BBC was hyping up a stolen post-Hillsborough memo,
completely out of context and time-expired, to try and work up victim anger.
When the messenger makes up the message he dserves to be shot.
March 19, 2012 at 23:54
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When the state wants to suppress something the mob comes in handy.
At
first the âcrystalnachtâ will be purely local but it will spread as nobody
wants to be seen to be a doubter.
Followed by the âracistsâ being removed
from prison to camps. For their own good of course.
Maybe tories will
follow them.
March 20, 2012 at 04:23
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They already removed âthe smokersâ, something pre-WWII Germany was happy
to remove early on as well, along with property rights, along with
disbanding people from congregating in a non state-approved fashion, lest
anyone forget. 2007 July1 was early fair warning.
March 19, 2012 at 20:39
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I thought I read in the Museum of Scotland that Calvinist Scotland had a
bad rep for witch burning. Not just Catholic countries â though I thought they
persecuted Jews more.
March 19, 2012 at 20:36
March 19, 2012 at 20:24
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I am sick to death of people who think they have a right to say whatever
they please, no matter how hurtful or disgusting.
March 19,
2012 at 20:36
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But they doâ¦.
March 19, 2012 at 20:43
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Well â I sort of agree with you, in as much as anyone with a modicum of
sensitivity would not set out to deliberately or gratuitously offend others,
but there does remain the question of what constitutes hurtful or
disgusting, and under what circumstances. Many people make remarks in
same-sex company that they wouldnât dream of making in mixed company, for
example.
Thereâs also the possibility of people claiming that something offends
them just to shut down a discussion, thus curtailing freedom of speech.
Everyone has a right to offend, but most of us try not to.
March 20, 2012 at 07:57
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Iâm sick and tired of people behaving like little children going âAwww,
he said a naughty wordâ everytime somebody says something âoffensiveâ.
Offence is subjective, what you may find offensive, other people wonât.
So who determines what is and what isnât offensive?
Grow up and get over it.
March 20, 2012 at 10:35
March 19, 2012 at 19:42
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Does nanny know you can tweet in any language? Is nanny targeting English
tweets sent in the UK, or all language tweets in the UK? What about English
language tweets from abroad?
If only English language UK tweeters are targeted isnt that
discrimination?
And its going to be interesting to see what happens when someone in another
country makes a racist tweet on a UK topic. If the tweet had been sent from
the US then the tweeter would be protected by Freedom of Speech. However if an
American had tweeted about the riots last year, they might have violated the
US riot act (incitement to riot is not protected by free speech).
Pandoraâs box comes to mindâ¦.
March 19, 2012 at 19:15
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How many more times do I have to say this?
Twitter is just haiku for morons
March 19, 2012 at 18:51
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Sunny Hundal was expressing the same kind of sentiment yesterday.
Tweets are here if anyone missed them.
March 19, 2012 at 18:41
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We stopped burning witches in the 19th century. Seems weâve just changed
target a bit.
Why on earth was anyone in Pontypridd taking any notice of round-ball
football on Saturday of all days?
March 19, 2012 at 20:13
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Burning of Witches was left to Catholic countries.
We just tortured, drowned, crushed and stole their chattels.
March 19,
2012 at 18:02
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If the man from Pontypridd was seeking attention, heâs certainly got it
now.
Whatever happened to ignoring such antics? Has the twitter age of instant
reaction and stream-of-consciousness deprived people of the ability to
reflect?
Plenty of us are familar with the idea of âbloggo ergo sumâ but I wonder if
the twitter generation feel that if they donât visibly react, they somehow
cease to exist. Such a rich seam of attention is the ultimate temptation for
twitter trolls or whatever one calls them â this could be the shape of things
to come for HM Constabulary.
March 19, 2012 at 17:25
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With regard to the arrest, it all hails back to the MacPherson report. The
police have been told that all allegations of racism must be investigated at
all times, with vigour. The result is that if someone makes a complaint to the
police, the police feel they MUST make an arrest and investigate. The risk, as
they perceive it, is that failing to act robustly means that if the perp then
goes on to commit a real crime (or someone else is spurred into committing a
real crime), the police will be guilty because they failed to act. And so they
go OTT every time.
Someone used the word âniggerâ on Big Brother a while back, and
Hertforshire police spent many man hours âreviewing the evidenceâ and
considering appropriate action.
Nothing will happen with this twit(errer) because, as you say, no crime
seems to have been committed.
As for those publishing his name, and vilifying him, theyâre entitled to.
Itâs called free speech. And provided they havenât acted illegally in sourcing
his name and address, then thatâs fine.
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