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Comment by teakettle42 | Hacker News Reader

> I read your moral position here as "if you are too frail to resist someone's words, you don't deserve protection from their verbal abuse with malicious intent"

I’m not the original parent, but I read (and share) the position as:

Barring intent by the speaker to inflict direct and immediate physical harm, if you are too frail to maintain your mental health in the face of someone else’s speech (or you pretend to be), then you are not served — and neither is justice, fairness, or truth — by the state applying its monopoly on violence to forcibly silence others at your behest.

Instead, each individual is personally responsible for their own mental well-being, while the state’s responsibility extends no further than offering services and support to help enable your own individual resiliency.

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In the case of the UK's laws, they are targeting people with specific intent to cause psychological harm. That's a critical component of "trolling": if no harm was caused to the abused party, then the trolls wouldn't bother, because they're fixated on hurting others for personal pleasure. So, then, "barring intent" is an invalid condition for this discussion, right?

I said direct and immediate physical harm.

“Psychological harm” is something else entirely.

Your position presupposes the guilt and innocence of both parties.

The individual claiming “psychological harm” can just as easily be the perpetrator, and psychological harm will be inflicted on the victim by the state when they’re arrested for upsetting someone with narcissistic personality disorder.

I do not presuppose guilt or innocence, but a claim must be made in order to reach a judgment on either, so all claims are presupposed in that sense.

It seems unlikely that a UK court would reach such a judgment in favor of the perpetrator, as opposed to simply jailing them.

What constitutes intent when it comes to words? Do you have some magical device that enables you to extract intent from people's heads?

I thought tru-crime was just science fiction and yet we have multiple individuals actually supporting a dystopian future where that's a real thing.

It’s not necessarily magical, but we call those devices “judges” and “juries” here in the states, referring to those whose roles in the legal system include judging someone’s intentions. They usually do so without widespread access to telepathy or divination, and so too their UK counterparts.

There are problems with that system aside from that. The UK specifically will always have to content the case when they put a fine on someone making a pup doing an unfavorable gesture as a joke. It wasn't a good joke in itself, but it really lived by the reaction.

They judge "intentions" after a physical crime has been committed using those intentions to come up with appropriate punishment.

They do not place judgement on intention alone. There's a clear difference.

Incorrect. Judges regularly evaluate the intentions of non-criminals where no crime has been committed in family courts and in cases of contract law (disagreement is not unlawful), and juries have the ability of jury equity (UK) or nullification (US) to declare someone's actions as non-criminal even if the actions they are accused of are accepted as fact and are (by definition of law) unlawful. There is also "contempt of court", in which a judge may declare anyone criminal for refusing to comply with the judge's orders.

This all demonstrates that judges and juries are familiar with evaluating intentions and criminality within the frameworks of law provided. A framework of law may declare certain speech as unlawful (such as obscenity or slander) may declare intentions a key factor in criminality, and the systems of law that judge the legality and criminality of that speech are already in place in the UK (and US) to support laws that criminalize speech with malicious intent.

Then explain why a new law needs to be passed.

Things like slander and libel require clear demonstration that you've been damaged monetarily etc.

I don't see how you can clearly show damages from a person deciding to commit suicide or feeling bad because of trolls. Prove it.

Regardless, at the end of the day I don't really care whether there's a legal framework in place. I don't agree that it's helpful to society at all and I'm going to err on the side that almost no speech harmful to anyone and should NEVER result in imprisonment. There's almost no road where criminalizing trolls on the internet leads to a better society or helps mentally ill people.

I've laid out my concerns about the arguments presented by HN commenters, and laid out how societal structures permit such a new law to be passed.

The original article does a credible job of explaining why a new law may be passed. You may agree or disagree, or you may require more information than is yet available, but that's for you to determine on your own.

Whether there are already societal structures in place isn't relevant. If there weren't they would just create them anyway.

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