Looks like you’ve been making friends again Stan. Your swipes at the QPR players are starting to wear a little thin it seems and some of them have pointed out your double standards. Your constant, albeit reasonable, fixation that everything should be said to your face is on display again. It works both ways though, would you actually approach Rio Ferdinand and the rest of the QPR squad and tell them per your retweet: “If you defended each other on the pitch as well as you do on Twitter then you wouldn’t be going down”? Verisimilitude aside, I’m willing to bet you’d only do so if you were sure it could all be laughed off as banter. Some of the QPR lads don’t look so sure that it’s banter, mind you.
But I understand attention-seeking is something you strive for and I guess it’s fair enough in your career. But when that publicity-hunting crosses the borders of free speech and political correctness, it gets very annoying and hypocritical. Your tirades against what you call ”hate speech” , which you identify as insulting someone because of “race, gender, sexuality or disability” has turned into something of a moral crusade for you.
Let’s quickly put the obvious points to bed first: any football fan over thirty knows your history of drama and publicity-hungry quotes and knows how to take you. One popular discussion thread on a Liverpool forum (Liverpool being an old club of yours, of course) suggested nobody should pay your views much attention in the first place. Secondly, that incident with Ulrika Johnson shows you aren’t well suited to spearhead any campaigns on morality but fair enough, it was ages ago and the media milked it. By the same token, your views and writings on depression are something I have little knowledge or experience of. Perhaps you’ve helped others and done good work in that area. It’s not my focus here.
To the bigger points then. When you made your phony crusade on Twitter, you vigorously defended yourself on radio shows and such with the same line repeated over and over again: “If somebody said this to me on the street, I wouldn’t stand for it, would you?”. Essentially you’re saying that anything you deem hate speech should be made illegal because nobody would say it to your face without fear of being arrested or intimidated by you. (Correct me If I’m wrong but I don’t believe you have approached veterans of the Falklands War or the relatives of those who were KIA and quoted that tweet you have since deleted?). You’re really saying you have the right to dictate that policy to Twitter, although as you put it: “Twitter just hide behind the fact that they are an American company.” That comment alone shows me you don’t really understand how law works.
But here’s the problem Stan: as Spiked have pointed out, people do and always will say things on the internet they wouldn’t say in person and that’s the problem. It doesn’t make it right, but it’s a reality we can’t escape from. When some morons sent you insulting tweets referring to your skin colour, you reported it to the police. The UK police – overloaded and understaffed with serious cases like child abuse, rape and murder to deal with – then dedicated tax-payer money to investigating a tweet because it contained the word “black” in it. I think it’s fair to say they probably felt under pressure to do so because of political correctness and your relatively famous profile. I can’t help but wonder how much time police would have to deal with violent crimes and cases of abuse or cruelty if they had to investigate every comment on the internet that was deemed hateful, as they did for you.
Stan, not so long ago I read a post in a Christian Facebook group from someone claiming that Christianity was a scam invented by an Egyptian king who lived three hundred years before Jesus. I was so amused I posted a slightly childish comment: “Sounds like you need a psychiatrist, LOL”. Now obviously, I didn’t know the person who made the original comment, but apparently he clicked on my profile and saw the only public picture of me, which includes my wife and kids who all happen to be Asian. His response then was to post a reply insulting my appearance and referring to my “mail order wife”, essentially calling the mother of my children a prostitute based on her ethnicity. It’s not the first time someone’s made that same remark.
If you were me Stan, what would you have done? Called the police? Demanded a full investigation? I and my family laughed at the stupidity of the comment, then I posted a reply : “Thanks, please tell me and my mail order wife more about your hilarious theory, we’d love to hear it.”. I never heard from that idiot again, nobody in my family suffered any form of trauma over a Facebook comment and no police time or tax money was consumed.
I’ve also received harassment aimed towards my children from some strange character online who was professing to be from a white supremacists group. He sent me a private message suggesting one of my children “looks like downs syndrome, it’s the mixed genes”. I clicked “block” and forgot about it. But said Nazi must have been banned by Facebook and re-registered under a new profile because he actually took the trouble to find me again and send a copy of the same message. I blocked him again. I guess he got bored or he realised that it takes him far longer to set up profiles than it does for people to click ‘block’, because I never heard from him again and I certainly didn’t bother chasing him. Why would I? He was clearly a hateful coward. He’s punished already.
No doubt you would have approached things differently in those situations. Which of us would have been right? I don’t know, but I do know this: my solution not only saved police time, it’s better for the ‘victims’ in the long run, and I can back that up by experience.
Like you I grew up in a England and went to a typical school. Like any normal school environment we had the ‘fat kid’, the ‘short kid’, the ‘nerdy kid’, the ‘girly kid’ and so on. When anybody wanted to upset a student, they called them the name that they hoped would upset them. Kids can be mean, kids can put labels on people. It’s how they are.
Like everyone else I grew up and forgot about school teasing. I became a teacher and lived in South East Asia. There I learned about cultures and I noticed something: in almost every South East Asian culture, people say what they see. One of the questions people often asked me off the bat is: “Aren’t you a bit small for a foreigner?”
I shook this off as an amusing quirk but when I watched the students do the same to each other in class, I noticed something: kids calling their peers as they see them actually puts them at ease. I’m not saying it’s some kind of cruelty-free Utopia but it’s incredibly rare in a South East Asian school to see the ‘fat’ kid or the ‘small’ kid or whoever hiding away in the corner looking upset because someone just teased them. They’re as happy and sociable as anyone else. And as for the self-proclaimed ‘lady boys’, well they’re often the most popular kids in class! Why? Perhaps it’s because we don’t wrap them in cotton wool, we don’t say: “You musn’t say this! You can’t be prejudiced against this child because of their skin/body/gender/whatever!”. Kids can get on with just being themselves. We put things out in the open and move on.
When we fight that Stan, we’re essentially applying the very same stigmatic labels you profess you are against. We’re sending the message: “This person has something making them different, be sensitive about that”. It’s wrong. It’s wrong logically, morally and socially. It only increases the self-consciousness of it all.
Don’t get me wrong, if there’s a truly dangerous person out there or someone who has the means to find and harm either you, me or any of our family based on some demographic then of course we should get on the phone and call the cops straight away, but that’s because we are in genuine physical danger. Words on the internet – unless they encourage actual, possible violence – cannot hurt us unless we let them.
See Stan, that’s where I stand on it and unlike you I’m basing my outlook on practical experience. I can’t help but wonder if you’ve really thought this all through or if, more likely, you don’t really care that much anyway. Perhaps it’s just about a bit more publicity for you.
I remember one radio call-in show where the presenter asked you “Stan, I like you but what if I called you a ‘numpty‘ who knows nothing about football? Would that be OK?”. You replied: “Of course it would, halleluiah!.”
Well Stan let me pass that test, and the other test you always throw out to back up your argument. Yes, you are a numpty and yes, if you buzz me before the Southampton Vs Tottenham match next month, I’ll gladly repeat all this to you in person.
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