Happy Sunday: Violentacrez, Trolls, Pussy Riot, etc

Ok, I don't spend any time on Reddit but this news article showed up in my news feed. Somewhere in the last 15-20 years the free speech argument has been trotted out to defend general idiocy on the web.I had a number of other articles I wanted to cite but lets stick with this one.

The Violentacrez thing... is this what we are defending when we talk about free speech?

Segue--there is something singularly embarrassing about hearing your 89 year old mother railing against Pussy Riot--calling the girls "the Pussy" in her lingering Russian accent. For a good 3 weeks every time I dropped by for a visit Mom would have the Russian language channel on and the news would be all about Pussy Riot, their antics at the Orthodox church, Putin etc. The girls have been sentenced to hard labor for their performance art, punk prayer, act of civil disobedience (they have an appeal in action and I believe one of them managed to get out).. Mom wanted them to go to jail for a very long time and I wanted to know why? They were a disruption but nobody was harmed and no property was destroyed. Mom replied "they hurt the feelings of those people in the church". Mom isn't even a practicing Orthodox. From the way Mom was going on you would have thought "the Pussy" had marched into her home and peed on her carpet. My policy is to not irritate my Mother by waging pointless battles but I had to quip that while I am generally not in favor of anyone's prayers being disrupted, hard labor and imprisonment seemed kind of heavy for the crime. It reminded me of Act Up laying down in St. Patrick's Cathedral during the height of the AIDs crisis. I'm pretty sure some of them spent the night in jail but I don't think anyone ended up breaking rocks as punishment either.

So how do we judge these things? How do we know when speech that offends, causes controversy, moral outrage etc is something to defend? And when is it garbage?

If a thousand people sandbag one blogger with violent, gross commentary, is it freedom of speech? If Rush Limbaugh calls a girl "slut" for her position on birth control is it ok for thousands of people to threaten to burn his house down? (I don't think that happened exactly but I'm sure the commentary wasn't all butterflies and sunbeams). Was it defensible free speech for him to call her a slut in the first place? There is a difference between moral outrage caused by something that offends our principles and speech and expression that dehumanizes in concrete ways--where words and images cause actual damage to real people.

I don't believe we can legislate our way out of this behavior (we shouldn't, please no random legislation).  I believe that the trend we are going through in our discourse will eventually come back to something more civilized and thoughtful. I'm looking forward to it. If you read through the link on the Reddit Troll Violentacrez you will see his own friend outed him because he thought his behavior was too extreme (namely his fixation on posting borderline porn pictures of underaged girls). This was an individual personal action however--one person doing something in real life to put the brakes on something that a crowd says isn't "real" or is only harmless. (And also permit me to digress one more time--there is a big difference between one teenage girl showing a picture of herself in a bathing suit on Facebook and that same picture being hijacked and entered into a repository for a bunch of anonymous people to masturbate over--context means everything--ok, back to our programming). No matter how much Net mud was thrown at Violentacrez online, he was backed by a group of people just like him. The anger the Violentacrez following has about his outing is because that they too want to be anonymous and "free" to say and do what they want. It pisses me off because anonymity allows truth telling in a world where governments and corporations can crush individuals. I don't like that they are confusing a supposed entitlement to bad behavior with freedom of speech--if there is a point the trolls of the world are trying to make I can only think it is that they wish to show the degree to which we can rationalize our dark impulses in a crowd.