One bad apple jailed

I think there is a need, first, to define the notion of fairness. Does 'fairness' essentially mean something like 'equality of treatment'? Because if so, the racist comments I have seen in the comments section under the news feeds of one mobile phone website and the jingoism in the comments section of one mass-circulation newspaper site has appalled me, utterly and totally disgusted me. But, nobody seems to say or do much about either of those. I think yours is a fair question, but it raises a huge number of very complex and interconnected questions that don't really readily lend themselves to the simplistic, social-networking world of Web2 posting and drop-of-the-hat reactions. That comment, mine, is not a comment on your question but a worry about how web2 posting benefits society ultimately - if at all.

What happened to just ignoring the ramblings of idiots? Why does everything have to be raised onto a pedestal for moral dissection by mass media? Just because reality TV has afforded us the ability to portray little microcosms of the world, you know, pondering over the moral dilemmas therein, talking about them over the watercooler, doesn't mean we have to turn the whole world into a fecking soap opera. It all seems a totally pointless waste of time and money to me, and even though he said some abhorrent things, yes, I do feel sorry for him. Why not go and round up all the BNP cretins who incite racial hatred, you know, the kind of racial hatred that morons actually listen to and give a political platform to? Or does what they are doing just count as free speech?

Not to mention the weird world of the internet, and the implications it has on our moral standpoint, or rather our flippancy in judging people. Although Animan has covered that base. :)

I find social networking mind-numbingly boring. Perhaps it's because I'm not ten anymore. As for social debate, there is none, just a bunch of idiots saying they agree with that or they abhor this, as if they never did anything wrong in their lives. Liam Stacey asked for notoriety through a disjoined ccry for help and now he's got it. Was it a fair sentence? In terms of serving a sentence, sentencing isn't fair because those sentenced only serves half a sentence. Maybe they should call it a strapline instead. In Liam's case, he was always going to get (half) the maximum sentence available, purely because of the ridiculous public outcry. Are we not big enough to close our eyes to his comments? Does anyone actually think this sort of social abuse will stop because one twerp was jailed? Stroll on. He is a headline, no more no less, and I can just see the non-job prats at work tomorrow, high flippinn' fiving that justice has been done over the watercooler (nice one, Steve), only to scurry back to their desk to check what other heinously wordy crimes have been committed on their fave social site, yah. These people are easily as mindless and pathetic as good old Liam. And while you pray for Fabrice Muamba, perhaps set some time aside in your busy surfing scheduele for the thousands upon thousands of starving children in Niger entering into the hunger months and about to die in the arms of their mothers. GET SOME FUCKIN PERSPECTIVE PLEASE

Yes, I think that is a fair point but (and I don't know if this is off at too much of a tangent exactly), in a way, morality/fairness maybe should begin at home so that this kind of thing is less likely to be committed abroad (not a life and death issue but hardly palatable and it seems to have had deleterious consequences, by extension from Sudan, for Ghana and Mozambique): http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/jul/25/macmillan-educa...