Try hyper pathetical
The Met today reopened its investigation into a transgender activist and convicted attempted murderer who told activists at a London march to ‘punch TERFs’ in the [fucking] face.
Sarah Jane Baker, who spent 30 years in jail for kidnap and then the attempted murder of a fellow prisoner, provoked outrage over her inflammatory comments on Saturday against feminists who are critical of trans ideology.
…
Astonishingly, Baker was defended by the organisers of Trans+ Pride, who said Baker ‘holds a lot of anger’ which she had the ‘right to express… through their words’.
Astonishingly but not all that astonishingly if you’ve been paying attention to trans ideology and “activism.”
She was reported to the police for inciting violence, but a Met officer told a complainant that it was not in the public interest to pursue the case. They said the call for violence was ‘hypothetical’ and allowed under free speech laws.
No it wasn’t. You can claim it was hyperbole if you want, but not hypothetical. That would be “What if we all punched a terf in the fucking face?” That’s not what he said; he told people to do it. He can always claim he didn’t mean it, but he’s in the video saying it.
However, the Met has since confirmed to MailOnline that the crime report has now been reopened and ‘enquiries remain ongoing’.
It’s almost as if claiming to be trans is a cloak of invisibility for threats of violence. Normally a man telling a crowd to punch women in the fucking face would be considered sexist and abusive, but when it’s a “trans woman” doing it then it’s righteous.
The Met. has a deservedly rotten reputation for blatant misogyny going back decades*. Of course the rank and vile are going to side with an abusive man over uppity women. Male officers are perfectly horrible to female ones. Solidarity with fellow officers only extends to other males. The entire edifice is corrupt.
*So does the law in general. We forget at our peril that men abusing women physically and sexually (including rape) was only made illegal recently, provided that the women they abused were married to them; and the police and courts behave to this day as if it’s still perfectly legal and have effectively extended the freedom to all men regardless of the status of their victims.
… HIS inflammatory comments …
… which HE had the right to express …
HE was reported to the police …
And the hyperbole defence is pretty damn weak. If he’d said “If I see another terf I’ll punch them in the face” that could indeed be interpreted as a hyperbolic expression of anger. To make a charge of incitement* stick you’d have address both his intention and how his statement might reasonably be interpreted. But with a command (or a recommendation or however you want to interpret it) the only real consideration is causal efficacy. And if you tell a crowd of angry people to do something that most of them are physically capable of, chances are one of them will end up doing it.
*Not necessary a legal charge.
Every political movement or activist group will have its idiots, hotheads, and just plain moral monsters, who say things that go well beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse. The test for movements and groups is what they do when a member does that. Trans+ Pride is failing that test.
Sadly, so did a large part of the atheist ‘community’. Hyperbolic rage at the idea of codes of behavior at atheist conferences were nasty and ubiquitous. Ragey men gonna rage.