It's bad taste and trashy but that's kind of it.
The problem is exactly that it's not an unusual attitude to hear. The difference is who it was aimed at. So for me the real issue is that we're cherry picking when we apply a very vague and loosely applied law based on who said it to whom, and in my eyes it should be a valid case for the defense, and element of a judges decision for sentencing, of just how situational it is.
Making 'an example' of someone is not a basis for a societally-positive criminal justice system.
You would be better served by pointing out that governments tend to become more authoritarian over time & the harder citizens resist authoritarian creep, the longer they have before a bloody revolution is usually required.
It used to be the case that peers (ie lords) had a somewhat different treatment in the law: they would be tried for crimes in the House of Lords instead of a regular court. The idea of that seems more reasonable the further back in time you go as the nobility had more power. However that is not the case anymore either.
It continues to be the case that the justice system is more accessible to some people than others and having better access likely correlates with the probability that one is knighted.
If the target were a random member of the public, it seems that the offence would still be made out (he would still be found guilty) but perhaps the sentencing would be less severe.
It does seem that judicial discretion was thrown to the wind here. I don't agree that the sentencing reflects the gravity of the offence, given the mitigating circumstances raised by his defence counsel.
Unfortunately we in Glasgow are still dealing with this nonsense in 2022.
I hope this case is appealled, and the law thoroughly weighed against human rights.
One of the nice things about being able to ask for a trial by jury is that jury nullification can help ensure that laws aren't abused even when judges are perfectly willing to "make examples" of people
If you think any single example of a law being applied in a manner that is technically defensible but (arguably) morally wrong should rule out an entire category of laws - you'd have no laws left.
My guess is that most laws are occasionally abused. The trick is to distinguish between those laws that invite it and those that don't.
I’m always surprised that people in the UK put up with so many of these authoritarian nanny state and “think of the children” laws.
Fake name on Twitter is immediate red flag
This one of The Crown's protectors who is being disrespected. Now do you understand?
(Not taking away from the fact that the tweet is of course moronic and disgusting)
It seems currently and historically, such social norms and expectations have been primarily enforced through social shaming and avoidance, rarely government intervention. That's the baffling part to me.
Maybe government intervention on such “trifling” matters is now possible thanks to IT systems, and we will come to see this as the norm, rather than the exception, as more and more people forcefully or willingly give up some of their liberties in order to have (or merely feel?) more security.
No, it isn't.
It's actually kind of amazing how free the internet is compared to TV and radio. Nobody seems to be worried that you can't broadcast such offensive things on those traditional media. Why should the internet be a special free-speech zone when it can have the same reach as them? Not saying I agree with it, but that could be the common feeling among British voters.
How is that outside of evolution?
Your definition of "organic" seems suspect.
"Naturally on their own", you say?
It sounds like you consider humans outside of forces of nature, outside of evolution.
Are you a theist perhaps?
I'm trying to understand your position, because to me humans and human relationships and human societies and human actions seem (obviously) a part of nature. They're complex systems, yes, but there's nothing inorganic or unnatural or magical about them. The same rules of biology and physics apply as everywhere else.
And yes, coercing others to capture more resources for self seems a prototypical example of a (co-)evolutionary arms race.
Let's agree to disagree.
You come back with ad-hominems.
And then add new wrong assumptions into the mix – why should I abhore religion? You can do better.
As opposed to 'organically' would you still have an issue understanding?
Assume here that normal is a linguistic approximation to the mathematical idea of arithmetic mean. It could also be replaced with the word typically.
In this context, your notion of a top down demand that blue means red or vice versa, is not 'organic' evolution, it's guided. Closer to the dog than the wolf.
I claim it is textbook evolution. An almost trivial observation.
Note that mine is not a moral judgement. I said nothing about whether I like such coercion or not, whether I think it benefits humanity in the long run or not, etc. Just that it's completely in line with natural evolution – not outside of it.
Typical, normal, organic… whatever you want to call it. Not necessarily desirable because such vocabulary is alien to evolutionary processes.
The only way you could call organisms taking advantage of other organisms to gain preferential access to resources "atypical", is if you consider humans outside of the natural world. Then statements like "top down" and "unnatural" would have substance.
I called that view theist (mystical may have been better), which decremental took strong umbrage to, for some reason. But again, a rather trivial observation IMO.
So I bring China not as to put UK in a worse light, but to put an example of countries implementing these sort of systems of surveillance and enforcement.
The USA is protected by its Supreme Court and the fact that the Constitution is impossible to amend at this point, but if the younger cohort could vote for criminalization of unpopular speech, I suspect the proposition would actually win. Definitely so on many university campuses.