Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

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> "whether the state should have a role in controlling what private individuals share amongst one another."

The state has a century long history of answering that in the positive; under the Criminal Law Act 1977 a person agreeing with another person to do a crime is guilty of conspiracy to commit that crime[1]; section 5 talks about "the offence of conspiracy at common law" which it replaces, including when it does/doesn't apply to "conduct which tends to corrupt public morals or outrages public decency".Further back, the Offenses Against The Person act of 1861 says that encouraging, soliciting, or proposing to any person to murder another person is a misdemanour punishable by imprisonment for life[2].

AFAIK the UK doesn't ban the classic film The Towering Inferno which is about people dying in a burning tower block. The Titanic has no remaining survivors to be offended where the video here was <2 years after the Grenfell Tower fire, and your joke about the Titanic isn't mocking the dying, it's mocking the builder's hubris. So it's more about the "outraging public decency" part.

Even the most free-speechy places have arguments about what free speech is acceptable (classic example: yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre) and have ideas about free speech, with consequences.

I would rather the UK government had put that effort into earlier holding the tower management company to fixing the problems reported by the fire brigade and the Grenfell Action Group in the years before the fire, and knocking the Council for trying it silence that group for repeatedly reporting fire problems, and of course for the excellent business decisions to save money by using flammable cladding.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/section/1

[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/section/...

> The state has a century long history of answering that in the positive;

I would rather it didn't. It dangles like the sword of Damocles over a number of acts, and it's very selectively enforced, and really depends on the tastes/mood of the public and or prosecutors. My example with the Titanic was to determine where the outrage is meant to lie; is it in the act of mocking a tragedy or not? Does it matter if the families of the victims are alive or dead, if neither are the intended audience?

It also interferes with what ought to be private, let's say an entirely willing, paying theatreful of Jerry Sadowitz fans enjoying his attempts to offend them in exciting and new ways. A recent development is that Scotland introduced its Hate Crime act, which insisted that even things said inside your own home to your own family could be a hate crime. Legal theorists warned about introducing this, but as per usual the ScotGov didn't listen. On the day it came into force, J.K. Rowling basically said "here's a list of convicted rapist men who think they're women, they aren't women, I fucking dare you to prosecute me for saying that", and the police did nothing. They also did nothing when right-wingers mass reported Humsa Yousaf's "white people" speech for racism. So it's an empty-threat law, on the books to be threatened or used quietly against someone stepping out of line, rather than setting a clear line in the sand as to what's sayable and what's unsayable.

From a legal aspect, another thing that bugs me is this was a private gathering of (presumably) like-minded individuals. That it was filmed and shared among each other should be fine. They could equally have been indoors and swinging or orgying, or something else that harms nobody if it's consenting adults, but would disgust the public at large if spread to them.

If you're then going to nab people for "outraging public decency", and there's no principal tortfeasor, the onus should be on those who spread that video outwith the participants who wanted it kept private, but the liability on each person would be very dilute, and the public who were "outraged" were likely participants in their own victimisation by passing it on themselves. It's not the same as someone intentionally going on social media and uploading it in a prominent place.

I too would rather the UK government spent more time writing regulations about how people safely construct buildings rather than what private individuals do with their time. There's a terrible web of fingerpointing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c049yvrd5qxo - but my main takeaway was that the privatised certification body, BBA, was hopelessly incompetent, and the French company selling cladding (that they wanted to offload onto the UK because it was illegal to sell it in their own country and they had a large stock of it) took full advantage of that fact. There is plenty more blame to go round, even London Fire Brigade fucked up, but that's the crux of it.

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