Having written previously on the very strange case of a man being arrested and subsequently charged for “making aircraft gestures” (FT – I still have no idea exactly wtf they are), today he appeared before the beak and she certainly has no sense of reality :
A Crawley Town football fan has been given a suspended jail term after he pleaded guilty to mocking victims of the Munich air crash in a music video.
James Butler, 19, from the Sussex town, was charged with using threatening, abusive or insulting words with intent to cause harassment alarm or distress.
He appeared before Crawley magistrates, where he was sentenced to eight weeks in prison, suspended for 12 months.
Butler was also told to pay £85 costs and given a 12-month supervision order.
Sentencing him, chair of the bench Rosemary Scott said he had offended wide sections of the footballing community.
“This was a deliberate and planned action targeted at a wider audience and considered grossly offensive to both Manchester United FC and Crawley Town FC and the public in general,” she said.
In this case I am not sure how “the public in general” were offended here other than by proxy as the video was only briefly online before someone decided to become offended enough to make a complaint about it.
Possibly, the by proxy part does come into play here as people do seem compelled these days to join in with displays of grief and outrage, even if they themselves have no actual first hand knowledge of the person or event (as Anna Raccoon wrote about so eloquently earlier this week).
That this case actually made it to an arrest, let alone a charge and even less so to a prosecution is still something I find utterly incredible.
Are people in this country so thin skinned and fragile these days that they can feel offended by the actions, words and deeds of others even when witnessed in a third party manner?
Do the police really have nothing better to do than protect peoples feelings (admittedly safer than defending peoples property or right to life)?
Will this ridiculous “using threatening, abusive or insulting words with intent to cause harassment alarm or distress” law be repealed by our benevolent masters?
Like fuck it will.
They love laws like this as they bring the heavy hand of the state down to bear on every single persons thoughts and speech – it is indeed thought crime brought to life and they will not give that up without a piano wire necklace.
Indeed, how long before this law is used against blogs and bloggers? If the police and CPS will prosecute someone in a video for their gestures, how long before someone is prosecuted for their online comments?
Room 101 beckons for all at this rate.
XX Will this ridiculous “using threatening, abusive or insulting words with intent to cause harassment alarm or distress” law be repealed by our benevolent masters? XX
Quite. I much prefer “swords and pistols at dawn”. Things were so much BETTER those days.
How did it come to the point whereby the people of a country that owned half the world,and gave Napoleon, the Kaiser (debatable) and Hitler a good kicking, are scared shitless by “aeroplane gestures”?
FT – I have no idea how we got here either.
I would seem that it has many small steps taken over such a long time that no one has really noticed the full horror of where we are until all the pieces have fallen into place.
The old joke asking how do you eat a whole elephant has the same punchline as asking how do you subvert a country – a little bit at a time. Only in the case of the latter it is certainly no laughing matter.
“Are people in this country so thin skinned and fragile these days that they can feel offended by the actions, words and deeds of others even when witnessed in a third party manner?”
I’m going to assume that’s a purely rhetorical question…
Julia – indeed it is but it is still beyong me how we arrived at this point with absolutely no fuss other than a little tub thumping in the usual press which unfortunately does nothing more than raise the blood pressure of retired majors and the blue rinse mob.