@MC G-Tek 501092 wrote:
Ha ha, no worries on the coherency front mate, but it is bad if a t-shirt can now get you sent to prison. There are a lot of companies that specialise in ‘offensive’ t-shirts, especially online. Does that mean that the owners of these companies are now going to be hauled up before a judge?[/quote]
you can get at the very least arrested for wearing an offensive t-shirt in town simply if enough people complain to a cop. long before the internet people were getting busted for this especially in the 1980s when punks became a regular sight upon the streets of some cities. In the case of the chap with the anti-police t-shirt he already was in breach of a suspended sentence for drugs and presumably they found other evidence of bad character. Even with this we actually have more free speech than other liberal Northern European countries, ironically these limitations in DE etc are to deter the hard right, but meant that a interesting website about the Hellschreiber system (a very ingenious digitial radiocommunication system the Germans built and used widely in WW II and afterwards) that a Dutch dude put together must be hosted in USA because of all the swastika logos and other references to WW II on there (even though he is not any way a Nazi or rightwing sympathiser!)
Quote:
As regards Nick Griffin, if he doesn’t get charged for what he did, that’s an absolute disgrace. He deliberately set out to endanger and intimidate that couple by putting their address on one of the world’s most popular public forums. Surely even under the data protection act, things like that are illegal? (not 100% sure about that, but hopefully GL, or one of our other wise owls who know about such things, will be able to shed more light on it)
it is not illegal to publish anyones address (its regularly done by crime reporters minus the house number) but illegal to incite violence to be done against them – unfortunately Griffin and co are smarter than people realise and know how to choose their words carefully. They are not the ones going to get their hands dirty, it will be the “lone wolf” types what do the really nasty stuff. The BNP are doing this because they have not done well at the ballot box and at least a third of their membership want to see “harder action” like the 1970s and 1980s…
but obvious stereotypes are not good things to go on. I live in a very mixed multicultural area of town but there are simmering tensions. In 2007, a BNP leaflet and a Christian newspaper came through my letter box around the same time (not in the same delivery though) I looked out of my window and saw a bespectacled, bald old white man with a troubled, angry look on his face walking away from my house. I was going to give him some grief but thought “hang on, think first before you act”. As in the back of my mind I thought “I’ve seen that old man somewhere before. perhaps on telly, on the news and he wasn’t anything to do with BNP”. So I read the Christian newspaper – and then it became clear – he was the dad of one of the murdered sex workers, lived not too far away from me, his article on how he coped with it using his faith was in the paper (it was an interesting article even though I am not religious). He is definitely no racist, his wife (and mother of the dead girl) is black, and he came across as a decent chap too!
I eventually worked out who the BNP activist was – a young lad who could pass himself off for a trendy raver/hipster urban chap who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a rave. They aren’t all ugly knuckle draggers, some do have brains in their head and learn to focus their hate.
We owe it to those who died very recently in Norway to be aware of the real threats (especially to large groups of multicultural people) and not be distracted by right wing “amateur dramatics”…
