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> The lawyer for the accused never recants either the confession, or that his client said what he is reported to have said. In typical defense lawyer posturing, instead he criticizes the metadata around it. For good reason given that the accused has repeatedly admitted, to the police, prosecutors, and even the media, having written exactly what was reported, but now we're to pretend that maybe it was a different person, or that Facebook messages were doctored? Again I ask: Should actors be liable for threats they've delivered in a movie? Surely not. Why? Because of what you call "metadata," which is commonly called "context." We know that these actors were not sincere because they said the words in the context of a movie. The idea that context doesn't matter is positively absurd. Human communication is hugely reliant on context for meaning, and humor even more so. > Since you like anecdotes, imagine that someone walks around pretending to punch random bystanders, but he pulls up at the last second. Hilarious, right? Now they have no intention of actually hitting, and can even point at a history of being the sort of person that pretends to hit people. > Is it assault? > Yes, of course it is. The recipients of the threat reasonably believed in its validity, so what the perpetrator thought is irrelevant. Precisely — it is normal to assume that you are being punched when somebody swings his fist at you. But when somebody in the middle of a lighthearted conversation responds to the statement "You're crazy" with "I'm totally CRAZY — in fact, I'm so crazy I'm going to $CRAZY_THING," it is not necessarily the case that they are actually going to do $CRAZY_THING. If he had said "fling poop," would you have actually assumed he was going to fling poop? The objection here is that there is no reasonable belief in the validity of this so-called terrorist threat. The mere fact that somebody said the words "I am going to shoot up a kindergarten" doesn't mean he is actually declaring an intention to do so. I just said them right now. Are you going to report me? The rest of this comment is, after all, just metadata. |