Man in UK Convicted for Being #GrosslyOffensive

A Scottish YouTuber who goes by the name Count Dankula has been found guilty in a UK court for a joke video he posted.

He is currently facing jail time.

The Video

The video in question was created by Count Dankula, Markus Meechan, in 2016 as a prank on his girlfriend, who was always telling him about her cute pug.

The joke was that Meechan would teach the dog to raise its paw to Nazi phrases as if it were giving a salute. As he stated in the video, he wanted to make the cute dog into the least cute thing he could think of, a Nazi.

Being a YouTube personality Meechan uploaded a video of him training the dog to his channel. The video was viewed over 3 million times and has been put in a suspended state by YouTube as offensive content.

The Verdict

This video landed Meechan in hot water with the UK authorities under the Communications Act of 2003. This lead to charges being filed against him and a court case that has lasted two years.

On March 20, 2018 a guilty verdict was handed down. It stated that Meechan was guilty of being grossly offensive (#grosslyoffensive) and he will be sentenced on April 23, 2018.

This means that being offensive in the UK is now illegal and you could face jail time. Since anyone can be offended at any time by anything it means it is up to those in power to determine what is and is not offensive.

A situation has developed in the UK that would seem laughable if it were not so horribly true. The police refuse to investigate and bring to justice Muslim grooming gangs for fear of appearing racist but will gladly send someone to jail for an offensive video on YouTube.

It is a dark day in history when your government ignores young girls and women being abused, raped, tortured, sold into sex slavery and in some cases killed because the perpetrators of those crimes have a specific minority status (some might call it privileged), but the full weight of the law needs to come down hard on someone posting a ‘grossly offensive’ joke on social media.

I am thankful that I am in the US but my heart goes out to the citizens of the UK and I stand with them in their fight for free speech.

#grosslyoffensive

#Liberalist

Social Justice Utopia: A Brief Story

The police lights flashed in the neighborhood as two police officers stood over a man on the ground in handcuffs with a gag over his mouth. The younger officer motioned to his more experienced partner who was writing down some notes on a pad. The older officer looked up to see a woman approaching and put his pencil in the binding of the pad and placed the notebook in his pocket.

            “I’ll handle this rookie,” said the older officer stepping forward to meet the woman.

            “Why are you arresting my husband?” She demanded

            “Please stay calm. May I ask your preferred pronouns?” The officer said in a calm deep voice.

            Her eyes narrowed on the officer and she slowly said “She/her.”

            “Thanks you. Now this is your partner?”

            “Yes this is my husband.” She said her emphasizing the word husband and fixing her eyes on the officer.

            “I have not asked for his pronouns yet so I’ll have to take your word for it for now.” The officer said. He reached into his pocket and produced his notebook. “I have a few questions to ask you if you do not mind.”

            “I mind,” She said “But I assume I do not have a choice.”

            “You have a choice,” the officer said “We are only here to help.”

            “Yeah my choice is cooperate or end up like my husband there.” She pointed to the man in handcuffs on the ground. The cuffed man moved a bit and tried to look at her but the younger officer put his foot on the man’s back.

            “Do not resist, Hate Speaker.” The young officer said pushing his foot down on the man’s back. The young officer looked up at the woman to find fire in her eyes that startled him a bit. He lifted his foot and regained his composure by placing his hand on the gun on his hip.

            “Look at me miss,” the older officer said, “Is your husband a part of any hate group such as The Republican Party, The Sons of Reason, the Free Speech Movement, or the First Amendment of the Constitution Truther’s also known as the F.A.C.T.?”

            “No.” She said nothing more.

            “You know it is a crime to lie to a police officer correct?” The older officer said while writing something down.

            “I am aware.” She said steel in her voice.

            “Just making sure. Is your husband currently or has he ever been associated with infamous Hate Speech outlaws like Ben Shapiro, Carl Benjamin A.K.A Sargon of Akkad, or Jordan Peterson?” Her teeth clenched and she shook her head no. The officer wrote something in his notebook.

            “Why do you have a gag over his mouth? Can’t you take that thing off?” The woman asked looking between the two officers.

            “It is on for everyone’s protection.” The younger officer said his eyes narrowing as he looked down at the man on the ground. “He has already committed felony levels of Hate Speech, we would not want anyone, including you, to be harmed by the things this Nazi says.”

            “Nazi!? He is not a Nazi.” She said a growl in her voice.

            “That is for a Social Justice Tribunal to decide miss.” The older officer said. Her face dropped and tears started to come to her eyes. The young officer watched her for a moment and then dropped his eyes down to the man on the ground. His face contorted into one of rage and he started to kick the man in handcuffs. People started to gather around to watch.

            “You damn Nazi,” the young officer yelled as his put a boot to the ribs of the man, “See what your straight white cis patriarchal oppression is doing, you have hurt this woman here and now she is crying.” The woman looked shocked. A cheer came up from the crowd and people started to shout “No Nazi, No KKK, No Fascist USA.” The older officer stepped over and got between the man on the ground and his partner.

            “Keep calm, we have to follow the law.”

            “Why?” The young man asked forcefully “This is what the people want, this is Social Justice and why should we not stop these Nazi cockroaches now?”

            “He needs to go in front of the Social Justice tribunal and they will decide his fate.” A boo rose up from the crowd.

            “He is a filthy Nazi and he should be shot now.” The young officer said and put his hand on his holstered gun. The older officer looked him right in the eyes and shook his head no.

            “You are going to get into trouble, partner, we need to do this by the book.” The older officer said. The young officers narrowed his eyes at his partner.

            “Are you sympathizing with the Nazi?” The young officer said loudly. His partner’s eyes went wide.

            “Alleged Nazi.” The woman said stepping up next to the older officer. “That is for the tribunal to decide.” The young officer turned and stomped off toward the police car. “What exactly are you charging my husband with? What has he done?”

            “First degree spewing of directed Hate Speech, Second degree bigotry, and felony Hate Speech violation.”

            “What exactly did he say?” The woman asked

            “He told his friend he was throwing the football with quote “you throw like a girl.” The officer started to write in his note book again. “He started to call us Fascist and Racist when we pulled up. He said that we were only arresting him because he was white. That reminds me, I need to add aggravated assault of an officer.”

            “Assault? He hit you?” The woman asked surprised.

            “No but he called us names and my partner and I were hurt by his words, that is assault.” She could do nothing but watch. The older officer called his partner over and the two picked the man up off the ground and took him to the cop car. The crowd surrounded the officers and were screaming at the man. One person punched him in the face and the crowd cheered him as if he were a returning hero. The officers did very little to stop this but the older officer finally put him into the car. The woman with tears streaming down her face approached the car.

            She sucked in a giant breath of air and screamed, “Stop it you animals! He is a human—”

            A shot rang out and the woman was knocked on her back. A moment of silence fell over the crowd as the light fled her eyes a pool of blood form on the ground underneath her. The man in the back of the car started to thrash around pulling at the handcuffs until his wrist started to bleed and chewing at the gag trying to get it out of his mouth. The young officer put his gun back in his holster and got into the car with his partner.

            “What was that!” The older officer demanded.

            “She called the crowd animals, clearly relating the People of Color in the crowd to monkey’s. It was violent Hate Speech and we had a crowd to protect, I could not just let her hurt all those innocent people. Now call it in and let’s get this Nazi to the Facility of Rehabilitation and Social Justice.” The older officer put a call in on the radio for someone to come and collect the body and drove away.

            “You did not need to shoot her. She was a person.” The older officer said on the way to the Facility. The younger officer eyed him.

            “You are starting to sound like you have sympathy for her. She was a Nazi that was all I needed to know.”

            “That is not for you to decide, that is for the tribunal to determine.” The young officer just looked out the window and ignored his partner the whole way back. They booked the man, broken and bloody, into the Facility of Rehabilitation and Social Justice and then went to file their reports.

 

The man was found guilty of Nazism, Hate Speech and Promoting Genocide and was executed later that week. The older officer had two Antifa agents show up to his home and arrest him for Nazi sympathy and for two accounts of Failure to Denounce. The younger officer was promoted to captain and had a reporter write his story. He was given a medal for his bravery in the line of duty and for fighting systemic oppression in the police force.

Words as Violence

Words are not violence and it is dangerous to fail to address this point of propaganda. The Far Left, Regressive Left, Illiberal Left, Ctrl Left or Activist Left (whatever you want to call them) argue as if the idea that words are violence is fact.

Never agree or apologize when someone is making this statement or arguing from this perspective. To give here would cede linguistic ground and provide a path to erode the first amendment right to free speech.

People can use words offensively, crudely, and can say hateful things but with a few minor exceptions (such as direct credible threats) they are not violence.

I define violence in this blog post in the most common use of the word meaning, “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.”

The Monopoly on Violence

The theory of the Monopoly on Violence is that the state, through a process of legitimation, is the only entity that can claim legitimated use of physical force. It is a more complex theory and you can find more in Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan and more recently Max Weber’s essay Politics as a Vocation, but for now this quick definition will do.

If the state has a monopoly on violence, they are the ones who can regulate its use, or rather state officials are the ones who will control its use. If we accept the idea that words are violence than we are being asked to accept that the state has a monopoly on the use of them.

This is a round-a-bout way of saying that the state should be able to control what people say. This idea was presented briefly in a talk between Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt (here). To make the claim that words are violence is to say that some ideas are violence. Part of how we think about things is that we talk about them, but if we are not allowed to do that then we lose the natural right to our own ideas formed by interaction with other people through speech.

Words are NOT violence.

The Self-Defense Justification

If we again accept that words are violence than we also have to assume that you are allowed to defend yourself from this violence up to and including the use of force.

This would mean that you have the legal and moral justification for hurting someone with force who is saying something you do not like. This is where the Punch A Nazi meme comes from and how groups like Antifa justify their use of force.

Hate speech would be considered violence and could be met with violence. The biggest flaw in this sort of thinking is that each individual has a different idea of what hate is. Some people believe saying there are biological differences between men and women are hateful, even if it is backed up by biology and human experience.

This line of thinking just allows people to use force against those they do not like or agree with all while giving them the ability to live with themselves.

Words are NOT violence.

When you are on social media or having conversations in the world listen to what other people are saying. If they try to start from a position of words can cause harm or something of that sort you should immediately reject their position. That is not to say words cannot be dangerous, they certainly can be, but they are dangerous like a car or gun is dangerous, but words and speaking them is never violence.

If you consider words violence then you must allow the state, and by proxy state officials, to hold the monopoly on the use of words. You must also allow for the use of force against people speaking words that are considered violence. I know I have said this a few times, but I feel that it cannot be said enough.

Words are NOT violence.