A couple of stories perturbed me last week, first there was one about a guy who got cell time for posting an offensive tweet about the murdered teacher Ann Maguire and then there was the DJ on radio Devon who played a 1932 version of the song "the sun has got his hat on" that has the n* word in it. Two different stories both with pretty severe outcomes for the people involved.
In the first case you have someone who is an idiot, his adrenal glands are too big and his frontal lobes are clearly too small but since Twitter is an opt-in kind of platform (i.e. you have to follow someone) I don't see what a person could possibly tweet that would warrant a jail sentence perhaps if they actually organised some kind of violent or harmful event in the real world then maybe but failing that, sticks and stones etc. In the second case the DJ in question claims that he didn't realise this word (latterly adopted as a racist insult, among other meanings) was in the song. This seems perfectly plausible to me, certainly not something worth losing your job over.
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that liberal relativism and free speech aren't good bed fellows, if we have to ditch one of these to get back to a sensible level of personal accountability then it's the former that needs to go, anyone who disagrees will offend me greatly.
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