Out of Pod Experience

The way the system was intended to work, from English Common Law up to US Constitutional principles, was "no victim no crime".

Unfortunately these laws were written on paper and paper won't protect your rights from bad government any more than it would from a thug trying to rip your eyes out and pee in the sockets.

Governments tend to treat such laws in the same manner. On paper and useless.


Off to jail he goes....

He got what he deserved.

Good to see, he should have had a longer sentence though.

I don't have any kids myself but grew up being bullied and later on got engaged in helping other younger kids.
Lucky for us we didn't have all these mobile phones and conncted computers everywhere, back then it was a more "hands on" and verbal abuse.

It's good to see this debate is starting to take off everywhere, atleast in the EU.

(This must be the most serious post I ever made on here, sorry.)

In my opinion, when that free speech is both damaging/threatening and unavoidable beyond reasonable actions.

After reading the story more carefully (I mearly skimmed it through first time) it seems he went out of his way to repeatedly harass these people so, some action against him does seem just.



Yes and no. I think there is a gray area where we should leave room for people to voice opinions that others may not agree with or want. In the states we have these assholes called the Westboro Baptist Church that like to protest military funerals.

I'd be lying if I didn't have a side that said I wish someone would just spray these bastards with bullets, or police come and haul the lot of them to jail, but the reason we do not is that there is a place for free speech whether we agree with the speech or not. It's better to allow borderline inappropriate speech than to take drastic legal measure that might stifle more appropriate speech down the road.

The line in the sand from an Americans point of view is traditionally: Your rights end where another persons begin. That is to say, in the case of these WBC basterds they can protest, but they can't outright disrupt the actual funeral.

In the case of the man in the article (again after another review) it seems apparent that he did go out of his way to disrupt these other people. But then again (devils advocate) facebook is a public forum.

My opinion stands. An ideal outcome would have been to give the victims the abilitiy to ignore this man. If he then took further action (created another account soley to further harass) lock him up.

I'm not going to lose any sleep over the guy being in jail. And it was done according to the legal process of your nation. But I always err on the side of caution when it comes to punishing people for words and speech. Barring the ability to censor this man from their facebook page, yes, it was most certainly harassment and criminal.

So now you should be jailed for being an *******?

Enjoy your police state :)

Nothing wrong with being a backpassageHole at all. Just don't inflict it on others.

Furthermore, if one does this anonymously then it could argued that the person did this with afore-thought and malice.

If the person in question isn't willing to behave in society then he should be excluded from it.

Too many people think that it is perfectly acceptable to bahave appalingly on the internet and think that they can get away with it by being anonymous. That cowardly behanour should not be tolerated and is no better, if not worse, than bullying.

This has nothing to do with a police state it's all about social responsibilities. Personally, I am dead against police state (as anyone who know my history of protest since the 70s would know) but I am a firm believer in peple have a greater responsibility to themselves and to others.

(Real name not given here because of the structure of the fourms but I have never hidden it away if anyone asked via private mesage)

not "trolling", it was "sending a communication of an indecent or offensive nature". Going to the effort of making youtube videos about it is pretty extreme.

I think the law that covers that, also covers the malicious phone calls, malicious letters, and other such things.

however, I think in order for it to be malicious and prosecutable, it has to be aimed at a private setting.

E.g. it wouldn't be prosecutable to write to Tesco's customer services and include drawings of Tesco employees being pornographically assaulted by baboons or something like that. It would be prosecutable to write to Tesco employees home addresses with the same material.

So, are facebook "memorial" pages a private setting? I honestly don't know.

Iirc, you can set groups and pages to private though. Or at least you could. I don't know anymore, never used it, only have vague ideas about it, reading things in which facebook executives say things like "everything should default to public" or "users shouldn't be able to say no" or "if you have nothing to hide" and other similar such things. i.e. if some person you don't like sends you a "friend request", you shouldn't be able to decline it, according to facebook executives. Which is a good reason to avoid facebook, imo.


Though, cemeteries and gravestones are also public places where there's an expectation not to have to encounter abusive comments, e.g. messages written on the headstones, shouting abuse at people, and so on, where there isn't the same freedom of expression as there is in other public places.

so should facebook "memorial" pages be considered equivalent to headstones? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know enough about how easy it is to administer a facebook page, compared to how easy it is to create it. (I suspect it's very, very easy to set up, and difficult to administer).

Ugh... meant to edit instead of quoting myself.

Well, his future is less bleak than if he were Sectioned. That really messes up one's future prospects more than a custodial sentence and I am reliably informed that lobbing Pink Slips at people is really the last option.

Also do bear in mind that a lot of mental health issues (as I am reliably informed by my better half: a keyholding mental health nurse) isn't treatable. So 'therapy' most often isn't the answer.

Got more freedom than you do buddy