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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 17 – Woman Assaults Student For “Cultural Appropriation”, Claims She Is The Victim

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

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Identity Politics preaches that violence is an acceptable tool of coercion to make other people conform

Watch this video of a woman – believed to be Bonita Tindle, possibly a university employee – accosting a white male student in the corridor of a campus building at San Francisco State University, because she objected to the “cultural appropriation” behind his choice of hairstyle.

The Daily Wire gives context:

In a video published on Monday, a black female said to be a campus employee accosts a white male said to be a student at San Francisco State University out of hostility to the “cultural appropriation” of his dreadlock hairstyle.

“You’re saying I can’t have a hairstyle, because of your culture? Why?” asks the white male, who appears to be wearing a dress.

“Because it’s my culture,” responds the black female.

“Do you know that it was in Egyptian culture? Are you Egyptian? Naw,” replied the male student with animated body language.

Interjecting, a black male observer who appears to be wearing pink leggings asks the white male if he’s Egyptian.

As the white male attempts to leave up a staircase, the black female grabs his left arm sleeve. Giving in to the pull, the white male demands to be left alone as he descends back to the main floor.

Except that this is not the whole story. The white male student does indeed attempt to leave up a staircase, and is repeatedly prevented from doing so by the female. He is clearly, demonstrably trying to leave the scene and is prevented from doing so by the person accosting him.

At one point (20 seconds and 25 seconds in), she actually pushes him back as he attempts to walk up the stairs, prompting the student to say “Yo, girl, stop touching me.” Once he makes it up the stairs, the female has a hold of his sleeve and tries to cajole him back down, saying “come back”.

But then, when he does, she has the temerity to exclaim “you put your hands on me!” as though an unconscionable assault on her own person has taken place. “Do not put your hands on me” she warns, gleefully, as she takes out a notepad, presumably to document her own very biased take on the incident.

Forget the stupidity of taking offence at cultural appropriation in the first place.

Were it not for the fact that the encounter was recorded on video, it is not difficult to imagine the white male student being reported to campus authorities for having “put [his] hands” on his own aggressor, being dragged through a disciplinary process and quite possibly being found guilty at the end of it – especially given how spineless many university administrations have proven to be in the face of student power grabs.

Bonita Tindle - Assault White Student for Cultural Appropriation - Identity Politics

Consider the mindset one must have to accost a perfect stranger, harass them about their personal appearance, push them and actively prevent them from leaving, and then turn around and complain “you put your hands on me!”.

Consider, too, the entitled, mischievous grin of the perpetrator as she harasses the male student, believing that her weaponised Identity Politics-driven actions give her the license to do whatever she pleases, because she is “in the right”. We saw exactly the same look on the face of the young student protester who vandalised a pro-life campaign stand and was then unable to explain her actions to a campus security officer.

There is nothing noble about this person’s attempt to fight “cultural appropriation”. This is the action of someone who has been taught that she can get away with anything if only she only uses a few words from the Identity Politics lexicon as her shield. And if the San Francisco State University administration are even remotely competent, the aggressor will (if she is indeed a university employee) be terminated effective immediately.

But the point is not this one incident, caught on camera. Other, similar incidents like these are happening on college campuses across America with increasing frequency.

The same toxic ideology of Identity Politics has infected our academic institutions in Britain, and we are only lagging a couple of years behind the United States.

Those of us sounding the alarm are not making this stuff up. I follow this issue closely and have Google Alerts set to inform me when new stories break about campus authoritarianism, free speech curtailment and Identity Politics-inspired violence, and there are simply too many for me to cover on this blog. I currently have a backlog of over twenty incidents, each one worthy of comment, most of which will never be written up here for sheer lack of time.

Watch the video. Because this is where worshipping the cult of Identity Politics leads. Remarkably, it does not turn out well-rounded, robust young adults ready to become productive, engaged citizens. On the contrary, our Safe Space and Trigger Warning culture is turning out a generation of snarling, vindictive crybabies, people who are completely incapable of managing interpersonal relationships and interactions without the assistance of the higher authorities to which they constantly turn for help.

And when there is no higher authority to hand, these Identity Politics priests and priestesses are quite happy to lash out physically, assured of the righteousness of their cause.

This is no longer a joke. Bad actions – now including physical assaults – spring from bad ideas. And the cult of Identity Politics is the academic mother lode of bad ideas.

 

Update: It has been confirmed by San Francisco State University that the aggressor is not directly employed by the institution. The university has opened an investigation.

 

More outrageous “Tales From the Safe Space” are documented here.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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No Prosecution For Matthew Doyle, But Free Speech Is Still Diminished

Samuel Hooper21 Comments

Matthew Doyle - Facebook - Twitter - Brussels Attacks - Muslim Woman - Arrest - Free Speech - Police

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No trial for Islamophobic tweeter Matthew Doyle, but the mere fact of his arrest has served to further chill freedom of thought and speech in Britain

Vindication for “mealy-mouthed” tweeter Matthew Doyle, who will not be prosecuted for inciting racial hatred with silly social media messages after the police realised that they vastly overstepped their authority by arresting a man for speechcrime without first consulting with the Crown Prosecution Service.

The Guardian reports:

Charges against a man accused of posting tweets likely to stir up racial hatred have been dropped, Scotland Yard has said.

Police charged Matthew Doyle, 46, with a public order offence on Friday amid allegations that he tweeted about confronting a Muslim woman to ask her to “explain Brussels”.

But officers admitted later the same day that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) disagreed with their decision, adding that they did not have the legal power to bring the charges in the first place.

A statement released by police in the early hours of Friday morning said Doyle had been “charged under section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986; publishing or distributing written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, likely or intended to stir up racial hatred”.

[..] But, late on Friday night, the Metropolitan police released a second statement saying that Doyle was “no longer charged with the offence and will not be appearing at court”.

It said: “Police may not make charging decisions on offences under Section 19 of the Public Order Act. There will be further consultation with CPS.”

So Doyle escapes on a technicality, the police (ever eager to respond to busybody public complaints about alleged thoughtcrime but much slower to respond when real crime occurs and your house is burgled) having brazenly overstepped their authority.

No doubt this is a relief for Matthew Doyle, whose initial tweet suggesting that all Muslims bear responsibility for the Brussels attacks, and subsequent inflammatory defence of that tweet, saw his life briefly put on hold and his flat ransacked by the police in their search for “evidence”.

But is this a victory for free speech?

Absolutely not. The fact that these draconian hate speech laws are on the statue book in the first place is an intolerable, long-standing affront to free speech in Britain. And the fact that the Metropolitan Police in London were able to drag a man from his home and hold him in jail when they did not have the authority to do so without suffering any kind of consequence whatsoever – there is certainly no talk of disciplining the officer(s) involved – is despicable too.

We must understand that the battle for free speech is won or lost at the margins. That often means defending the rights of people with truly heinous opinions on all manner of subjects to express themselves, while abhorring what they actually say. In this case, Matthew Doyle is hardly the world’s number one villain. He tweeted something particularly stupid about Muslims in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Brussels, but he was light years away from cheering on such attacks himself (as many others do), or urging reprisals on all Muslims for what the Brussels terrorists did.

Under no reasonable definition of the word did Doyle “incite” anything at all, except in the minds of those joyless thought police who hold such a low view of humanity that they constantly fret that the public are mindless lemmings liable to being whipped up into a violent mob if they ever encounter a slightly controversial ideas. No, Doyle’s only crime was to be ignorant, and to broadcast that ignorance on social media.

Look at Doyle’s Twitter account page now, a full five days after his arrest and release. There is nothing new. Doyle has effectively been silenced, stopped from expressing his sincerely held opinions – opinions which he is fully entitled to hold, no matter how silly or wrong they may be – after the full weight of the criminal justice system came crashing down on his head one sunny afternoon:

Matthew Doyle - Twitter Timeline - 28 March

The online disappearance of a man who was until now a fairly prolific Twitter user is quite poignant. It shows a case of public idiocy being responded to not with rebuttal, debate, correction and forgiveness, but rather with vengeful mob justice backed by the power of the state. It shows a free voice, however ignoble it may have been in this case, being frightened into silence.

Prior to his arrest, Matthew Doyle was more than happy to interact and debate with the army of online critics who mocked and argued with him. That is how free speech is supposed to work. Bad ideas are drawn out into the open, debated, dissected and discarded. Maybe Doyle would never have changed his views in response to his Twitter critics, but others observing the dialogue unfold may have done. And in any case, it added to the infinite tapestry of our social discourse.

Following his release, there are no new tweets. Any future opportunity for learning, debate or correction has been lost. And all because some moralising busybodies with nothing better to do thought that the best response to seeing something they disliked on the internet was to report it to the police. And because the police, who prefer to sit at desks scouring Twitter looking for thoughtcrime rather than getting out and tackling real crime, leapt at the opportunity to show their PC tolerance by arresting a man for his beliefs.

You don’t need to throw people in prison to create a chilly, hostile environment for free speech and free thought – although there are plenty of people languishing in British prisons simply for saying, writing, posting or singing the “wrong” things, “offensive” things.

You can suppress free speech in a society just as effectively by the threat of public shaming, harassment by the police and potential prosecution under draconian but arbitrarily applied laws. And in the case of Matthew Doyle, the message has been received loud and clear:

Think the wrong thoughts or write the wrong thing on social media, and we will come for you. We are watching you, all the time. Give offence to anyone, intentionally or not, and they have the right to make a criminal complaint about your speech. And in response, the police will come to your house in the middle of the night, bundle you into the back of a police van, take you away and leave you to fester in a jail cell for a day before grudgingly releasing you. Your arrest will be made public, and your reputation will be forever stained as the person whose ideas and opinions were so heinous that they got in trouble with the law. Good luck with the rest of your life and career.

This is Britain. In the year 2016. And this is what now happens to people who say the wrong thing or express an unpopular idea in public or on social media.

And you dare to boast that we live in a liberal, tolerant country which respects human rights and free speech?

 

Free Speech - Conditions Apply - Graffiti

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 16 – The Prequel Begins Long Before University

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

School - Marking - Grading - Red Ink - Infantilised - 2

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The banning of red ink for marking schoolwork – just one small part of our Prizes for Everyone educational culture – directly feeds the student authoritarianism on our university campuses

Over the course of this “Tales from the Safe Space” series we have seen glimpses of a coddled, fragile yet snarlingly authoritarian generation of young activists who perceive any disagreement with their ideology as tantamount to a physical and mental “assault” on their person.

These students demand not only complete submission from fellow students and university administrators to the arbitrary laws of Identity Politics, they also have the audacity to portray themselves as being so uniquely victimised and oppressed that unlike the generations which came before them, they alone need special protection and validation from an external authority. This, of course, is achieved through the establishment of safe spaces and draconian restrictions on freedom of thought and speech for everyone else on campus.

But students do not suddenly become baby-faced tyrants the moment they cross the threshold of college or university at the age of eighteen. Young people today are acted upon by three key environmental factors: the rise of Identity Politics as a movement, the West’s growing disregard for freedom of speech and the therapeutic culture in which we now live.

Every day brings new examples of each of these areas of civilisational decay. And one key factor in our modern day therapeutic culture is the way in which state schools increasingly pander to the feelings of their pupils rather than seeking first and foremost to impart a rigorous education and a strong character. Of course there are many noble exceptions. But if we ever believed that there would be no negative consequences to our present Everyone Wins A Prize culture, then we were sorely mistaken.

The Daily Mail reports on the latest depressing example:

Teachers have complained about a ‘ridiculous’ marking system which forces them to use pink ink for negative comments because it is ‘less aggressive’ than red.

The bizarre system is being implemented by some headteachers who believe pink is a softer colour which will make children feel less like failures.

Many are also making staff use up to six different coloured pens to give different types of feedback to pupils as part of a ‘triple’ or ‘deep’ marking strategy.

In one example, a school has asked pupils to respond to teachers’ comments in purple or blue, and if teachers want to give encouragement they have been told to use a ‘positive’ green pen.

[..] Lee Williscroft-Ferris, a modern languages teacher from Durham, said that in one school he worked at he had to draw a pink box at the end of each piece and insert positive comments in green ink and suggestions for improvement in pink.

This is not a new phenomenon. The Mail reported a similar story back in 2013:

Tory MP Bob Blackman revealed his anger after being told a secondary school in his Harrow East constituency had banned teachers from using red ink.

He told MailOnline: ‘A teacher contacted me and said I cannot believe I have been instructed by my head to mark children’s homework in particular colours and not to use certain colours.

‘It is all about not wanting to discourage youngsters if their work is marked wrong.

‘It sounds to me like some petty edict which is nonsense. It is absolutely political correctness gone wild.

The University of Colorado study often cited as being behind these ridiculous changes to school grading procedures warns that the colour red evokes “warning, prohibition, caution, anger, embarrassment and being wrong”. But surely that’s the whole point? Where there is error, the teacher’s red pen should be there to bring truth, and do so in an unambiguously clear way.

According to the same researchers, “in the context of communication, writing in red seems to shout in the same way as writing in all caps or writing which is underscored”. In other words, the current drive to eliminate red ink from schools stems from the same self-absorbed social media culture which frets that someone doesn’t like us because they failed to put a smiley face or a kiss at the end of their text message. But do we really want to be applying the neuroses experienced by the first generation to grow up with the internet to the current crop of students going through school?

While some of us might like friends, colleagues and bosses to validate us at every turn and sugar coat their feedback to us in warm and constructive ways, real life will not always be so kind. And children should be made ready for the world as it is, not as some naive idealists wish it should be.

School is the place where it is possible to fail in a safe and relatively consequence-free environment. Many people that students meet and collaborate with in the real world will not take the time to encouragingly point out the good parts of a report, presentation, product or other piece of work that generally failed to meet expectations. In some cases, the feedback may be quite harsh, often deservedly so.

This criticism is not usually an attack on the person, or an attempt to “invalidate their experience” or whatever other therapeutic phrase du jour is being used to pathologise everyday life. It is simply a statement that the work produced is incorrect, or in some way not up to specification. And children need to learn how to handle such feedback at a relatively early age. Young minds must be prepared for the challenges of life, not coddled and protected before being released unprepared into the wild.

Safe Space Notice - 1

We in the West increasingly live in an environment described by Rod Dreher as “a culture of autonomous individualists who don’t order their lives toward a common religion, or anything higher than what they desire”. And to that I would add that there is also an ascendant culture in which no longer values truth, where changes in how a person chooses to “identify” are taken to instantly overwrite reality.

In this brave new world, where even deluding oneself into thinking that one is an animal trapped in a human body is increasingly common among certain people, the awkward fact of a human birth certificate is just an inconvenient bureaucratic error to be erased as a new identity is created.

No wonder then that the teacher’s red pen is so hated – it stands as testimony to the despised idea that there is an objective reality, and often a right and wrong answer. For children who are raised to believe that everything they do is special and praiseworthy, and that their feelings are somehow sacrosanct and never to be trodden upon.

As my Conservatives for Liberty colleague Sara Scarlett puts it:

For years, children have been artificially insulated from any form of loss or emotional upset. The common practice of everyone getting a prize for taking part in sports regardless of how good they are, or how much effort they have put in. The reasoning being that no one’s feelings should get hurt. Whilst I appreciate that adults want their children to have happy childhoods, this has been taken way too far. It is not just the job of parents and educators to make children’s lives as happy as possible. It is the job of parents and educators to make their children into adults who can thrive in the adult world.

The rise of students who cannot exist outside of a ‘safe space’ shows that parents and educators have failed in many respects. Children should be exposed to competition and tests, offered incentives for doing well in them and working hard because that builds resilient adults who are ready for a world where not everyone gets a part in a blockbuster movie or a book deal. In trying to create a world where children are never subjected to rejection or losing, they are unprepared for an adult world where so much of life is about how you deal with rejection, loss, grief and disappointment and avoiding it is impossible. This is, after all, precisely what school is for; a place to fail when the stakes are low.

So as we can see, today’s young adults are uniquely susceptible to the toxic brand of Identity Politics coursing through universities, starting from the moment that they arrive on campus.

From birth, parents and teachers have instilled in these young adults the belief that they are special, unique and beyond reproach. And from there, it is only a small step toward internalising the language of Identity Politics to paint oneself as an oppressed or privileged individual who must be constantly mindful of – and responsible for – the slightest impact that their words or actions have on others.

That’s how you go from grading essays using friendly purple ink to a coddled, incredibly privileged black Yale student aggressively screaming at her college master because he refused to establish dictatorial, school-like rules governing what other adult students were allowed to wear at Halloween.

And that’s how abandoning red ink in schools today helps to create the baby-faced student tyrants of tomorrow.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Asad Shah, Murdered For Showing That Islam And The West Can Coexist

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Asad Shah - Murder - Happy Easter Facebook Message

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Islamist murderers are as much a threat to peaceful Muslims as they are to any other British citizen

The cold blooded murder of Muslim shopkeeper Asad Shah this week is further proof, if any was needed, that primitive, reactionary Islamist thugs are just as much a danger to law-abiding, patriotic British Muslims as they are to anyone else in this country.

The Telegraph summarises the tragic murder of Asad Shah:

A popular shopkeeper was stabbed to death by another Muslim in a “religiously prejudiced” attack hours after posting an Easter message on Facebook to “my beloved Christian nation”.

Asad Shah, 40, a devout Muslim originally from the Pakistani city of Rabwah, had his head stamped on during a savage attack, according to one eyewitness.

Around four hours earlier the victim wrote online: “Good Friday and a very Happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation.

“Let’s follow the real footstep of beloved holy Jesus Christ and get the real success in both worlds.”

It was later confirmed by the police that a man has been arrested in connection with Shah’s death, and that it is being treated as religiously motivated.

This should come as no surprise to anyone. Islamist extremists – whether acting in coordinated fashion or as lone wolves – cannot abide the idea of religious and cultural understanding, or of a strain of Islam which seeks peaceful coexistence and cooperation with its neighbours. They want holy war. And just as this leads them to commit terrorist acts like those in Paris and Brussels as an attempt to create a broader anti-Islam backlash and inflame tensions as an effective recruiting tool, so it also urges them to carry out reprisals against those Muslims who conspicuously reject the Islamists’ violent ideology.

The real tragedy is that too many politicians – with their blind devotion to unchecked multiculturalism as a positive end in itself – have actively made it harder for more people like Mr. Shah to emerge. Doggedly insisting that any culture is above criticism or reproach, as many apologists do, only encourages the British population to stratify into parallel “separate but equal”communities, without even the most basic fundamental values tying us together. And by all accounts, this is the very opposite of what Asad Shah wanted.

This peaceful, devout Glaswegian shopkeeper was murdered in cold blood by primitive, fundamentalist thugs who betrayed Islam and the peaceful majority of its adherents with their cowardly actions. But Shah was also betrayed by his own government, and a generation of politicians who sought to burnish and show off their tolerance credentials while the seeds of Britain’s own radical Islamist threat slowly took root.

As Rod Dreher wrote in his eloquent eulogy to Shah from across the Atlantic:

Asad Shah is with our Creator today. I am confident of that. Please, Christians, wherever you are this Easter weekend, pray for the soul of a righteous man, murdered for his compassion and love of mankind.

Remember, too, that if you condemn all Muslims over the bloodthirsty killers of ISIS, you also condemn this good man Asad Shah, may his memory be eternal.

May God bless the soul and the memory of Asad Shah, a man whose own life proved that religious identity can indeed blend harmoniously with a strong national identity, and whose bright example was extinguished far too soon.

 

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Arrested For Thoughtcrime In Britain Following The Brussels Terror Attacks

Samuel Hooper13 Comments

Matthew Doyle - Facebook - Twitter - Brussels Attacks - Muslim Woman - Arrest - Free Speech - Police

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Britain has become an authoritarian dystopia where the police prefer to waste scare resources scouring Twitter for instances of supposed thoughtcrime, rather than tackling real-world crime

Matthew Doyle of Croydon, south London, was not the first person to say something stupid in the aftermath of the Islamist terror attacks in Brussels yesterday, and he will certainly not be the last. But Doyle does hold the dubious honour of being the first person in Britain to be arrested for thinking and saying – or in this case, tweeting – the wrong thing about the Brussels attacks, the latest victim of Britain’s dystopian hate speech laws.

As with most people whose free speech most urgently needs defending, Matthew Doyle does not come across as a remotely sympathetic character.

The Telegraph explains:

A man who tweeted about stopping a Muslim woman in the street yesterday, challenging her to “explain Brussels”, and lambasted on Twitter for his comments, has responded to the criticism today, insisting he is not some ‘far right merchant’.

Matthew Doyle, partner at a south London-based talent & PR agency, posted a tweet on Wednesday morning saying: “I confronted a Muslim woman in Croydon yesterday. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said ‘nothing to do with me’. A mealy mouthed reply.”

He was later arrested.

His tweet referred to yesterday’s bomb attacks on the Belgian capital’s main airport and Metro system that left at least 34 people dead and 198 injured. His comment went viral, being retweeted hundreds of times before he eventually deleted it.

Mr Doyle told the Telegraph he had no idea his tweet would be the “hand grenade” it has proven to be – and that Twitter’s 140 character limit made the encounter sound vastly different to how he thought it went.

Now there is a good case to be made that Matthew Doyle is something of an idiot – in a follow up tweet, he later exclaimed “The outrage I felt was real. I cannot understand why I decided to ask the nearest Muslim I ran into”, which certainly suggests that perhaps we are not dealing with a world class mind here.

Matthew Doyle tweet

And his subsequent tweets veered firmly toward the knuckle-dragging bigot end of the spectrum, when he retorted “Who cares if I insulted some towelhead??”

Matthew Doyle tweet - 2

But let’s be clear – even if we apply the most unforgiving interpretation of Matthew Doyle’s tweet, and his subsequent account of the conversation, it should not be enough to land a citizen of a supposedly free democracy in trouble with the law.

Even if Doyle literally sought out the first Muslim-looking person he could see on the high street, approached them unbidden and asked them to account for the terrorist actions in Brussels yesterday, no country calling itself free should drag that man through the criminal justice system.

It may be incredibly ignorant and offensive to suggest that all Muslims share responsibility for the terrorist attacks in Brussels this week. It may be astonishingly stupid. But stupidity and lack of manners should not be enough to earn someone a knock on the door from the police.

In this case, the initial response of the Twitterverse was (for once) exactly what should happen – society’s self-righting mechanism kicking in against the actions of a conspicuous idiot. Doyle said something irretrievably stupid which was then widely retweeted, and he found himself on the end of thorough, fully deserved mockery from complete strangers online. Many of the subsequent parody tweets effectively (and wittily) exposed the total lack of logic behind Doyle’s sentiments and actions.

https://twitter.com/ThaKingSlayer/status/712613539366748160

So why is confrontation, rebuttal and mockery not enough in twenty first century Britain? Why can we not simply go to bed content that a self-declared idiot has had his idiocy widely exposed, refuted and mocked, without wanting to twist the knife further? Why is it now also necessary to compound his punishment by heaping an arrest, a trial and a possible criminal conviction on top of the self-inflicted public shaming?

As Alex Massie recently lamented when looking at the public’s response to Donald Trump’s comments about Britain, cases like these only prove his how snarlingly authoritarian and illiberal a place modern Britain can be once the sunny, progressive façade is peeled back:

It is always depressing to discover that there are vastly fewer liberals in this country than you might wish there to be. But that discovery should no longer surprise us.

This is the true attack on British and European values, and it comes from within. I am far less worried about the slim possibility that I will find myself standing next to a suicide bomber on my morning commute, and far more concerned that every single day I am apparently rubbing shoulders with people who smile and appear friendly at first glance, but who would not hesitate to bring the full weight of the criminal justice system crashing down upon my head if I happen to one day say the wrong thing (defined by British law as anything which gives them offence).

As a political blogger with sometimes forceful and controversial views, I am less worried that my writings may earn me a punch in the face from a stranger (I couldn’t be less famous, and my reflexes are quick – though I am probably playing with fire when I criticise our national religion, the NHS) and far more worried that someone will read something that I write, take massively overinflated exception to it, and – with a few clicks of a mouse or a quick telephone call – report me to the police, who would then be obliged to investigate me under Britain’s oppressive hate speech laws.

In the age of Islamo-fascist terror, my liberty and wellbeing is far more under threat from the Public Order Act 1986, the Communications Act 2003 and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 than it is from the terrorist’s bomb or the bullet. Not because I ever incite racial or religious hatred – indeed, I abhor those who do so – but because under the same laws that put Matthew Doyle in a jail cell, my “guilt” would depend entirely on the perception of the supposed “victim”. Anybody at any time can read anything that I write, claim to be alarmed and distressed by the ideas that I express, and have me carted off to prison.

They can do this to idiots like Matthew Doyle. They can do it to political bloggers like me. And they can do it to you. Sitting at your computer right now, you can get yourself arrested and cautioned, convicted and even sent to prison just by typing fewer than 140 characters on your keyboard. In Britain. In the year 2016.

In case the government actually cares, this is how the terrorists really win. They’ll never make Britain part of a radical Islamic Caliphate, but they can certainly help to ensure that we become such a snarlingly authoritarian, freedom-hating society that our country is changed irrevocably for the worse.

And as the freedoms and liberties which distinguish Britain from more benighted parts of the world – including primitive quasi-medieval regimes like the Islamic State – are shot to pieces, it is our own hand on the trigger. No one else’s. We do this to ourselves.

 

Postscript: What remains unclear at this time is whether Matthew Doyle was arrested for the content of his original tweet, his subsequent tweets (some of which were actually far more offensive) or the real-world act that his initial tweet described.

It may seem an arcane detail, but it will be interesting to discover whether the woman accosted by Doyle made the complaint, or whether it was a foot soldier in Britain’s growing army of professional online offence-seekers who took offence on her behalf. I would bet a very large sum of money that it is the latter, and that while the “victim” herself probably shrugged off the incident, Doyle’s prosecution is being urged most strongly by other people who are completely unconnected with the incident and who were not adversely affected in the slightest by his tweet.

 

CCTV - Police State

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