MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: Identity-stealing sockpuppet troll finally crosses line, gets just desserts

> The problem is that these jihadist types were raised on it. No amount of mental
> health treatment can change that. It's hard to take it simply as a madman shouting
> nonsense on a corner, when like people are actually bombing marathons, raping and
> massacring Christian groups, and so on and so forth. Whether or not the people making
> these speeches are the very same people acting on it, people ARE acting on it. This
> should not be protected speech, in my personal view. I must therefore concede that
> there really should be (albeit very specific) limitations to freedom of speech.

You know what, I can actually agree that it's a very distasteful situation, with people being led to these attacks by folks espousing certain distasteful views.

I do want to point out, though, that the people who actually commit these crimes are an infinitesimally small proportion of the people who actually are exposed to these sorts of ideas. Your reaction is considering the precious few people who actually respond to this particular expression by these particularly mentally insane individuals, but is not taking into account the countless people who see said person and write him (correctly) off as a nutjob with nothing constructive to say. What you're essentially saying is that we should limit speech based on the extremely small (but very real) chance that someone will take these statements seriously and act on them.

The thing is, any person sufficiently mentally ill can be compelled to do any number of horrific things, specifically because he or she is not thinking on the same rational plane as the rest of us. Charles Manson compelled the fellow mentally ill into committing a murder spree, but in the 60's and 70's we were rational enough to recognize that this was simply an instance of insane people going off the rails. There are countless other examples of people espousing views that ultimately led to suicide and death, not the least of which would be the Heaven's Gate cult back in 1997.

Basically, what I'm saying is that crazy people are going to do crazy things regardless of what sort of laws you put into place in a failed attempt to prevent against these things. Yeah, I agree, it really sucks to hear jackasses standing on street corners claiming that we need to have some sort of revolution against white Christians. That's really fundamentally fucked up. But if you ban that particular form of speech, then those crazies are simply going to find some form of speech that isn't banned, and then you find yourself in some legal version of Whack-A-Mole, trying desperately to stamp out the speech you find distasteful while perpetually narrowing down the sort of expression that is approved by the general public.

We already have laws in place that ban expressions that could be considered to impel immediate lawless actions. I don't think that the rather few instances of people snapping and committing mass homicide should be used as a reason for suppressing speech any more than it already is by law. These people would have snapped regardless of what someone tells them, it was simply a matter of time. You appear to think that it was this person's specific diatribe that led them to committing the crimes that they did, and that's a valid interpretation of the events, but I choose to interpret it as meaning that that person would have used any sort of excuse, no matter how tenuous, as a reason to go off on a killing spree.

Ultimately, if you choose to ban a certain form of speech, people will simply find another form that is permissible according to the law, and you find yourself in exactly the same sort of situation. What we should be concentrating on are the circumstances that cause people to want to go and commit mass murder, not the tenuous link between some jackass on the street and a madman who actually takes it literally.