Loki_The_Good said:
Or you know a five minute database search gun registry brief scan over past writing previous record done. And no by th eway that wasn't the first thing posted on facebook there was a fair discussion led to the previous person calling him crazy to which he replied. ?Oh yeah, I?m real messed up in the head, I?m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts? which was followed by saying JK (just kidding) and LOL (laughing out loud). I'm going to guess from your previous comments you haven't really picked up on the basic cues of writing presented here so I'll go through a break down.
"Oh, yeah" This part right here is already a good indicator of sarcasm. The tone implies by this part is clearly false agreement meaning he does not believe the previous statement to be true and that the following is most likely exaggerated satire. This is a fairly basic and common pattern of sarcasm and also that there is not truth or intent in what will follow.
"I'm real messed up in the head" Here is the reassertion of the false agreement part of the setup clarifying the part he is 'agreeing' to. It's clear that it's a false agreement as they had been previously arguing heatedly and so the likelihood of him changing his tone and position once being insulted is around zero. Since it follows "Oh yeah," the tone is also too aggressive for a true relinquishment of the argument which would take a far more passive tone so it is fairly obvious he is not agreeing with the person he is talking too. In fact you can pretty much picture the eye rolling that was done as he wrote it.
"I?m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts." And here's the exaggeration as expected from the sarcasm setup. The first part gives an example of something a messed up person would do. This is also a good indicator of a lack of intent. He is labeling it as a messed up thing to do through the structure of the joke. People who are actually messed up - actually crazy - don't think they are. They think that their actions are justifiable through some sort of mental gymnastics. Strange as it sounds people who do these kinds of attacks see themselves as the victim and the kids as aggressors or facilitators of some wrong. Bulling is a common justification the idea that all the kids allowed them to be picked on even if it was only a handful. In the Sandy Hook case the man in question saw the children as taking away his mothers affection and support turning her against him. By labeling the action as messed up he shows none of the necessary mental justification is present for this to be a true threat and further calling it messed up shows a level of awareness someone considering these actions would not have. Nobody who commits atrocities thinks they are committing atrocities.
However, the biggest clue that it is exaggeration comes from the latter half. People don't say things like "eat their still, beating hearts"" it's a trope that comes from badly written comic books and movies. In essence the phrase is used here to evoke an image of a super villain speech taking something serious and exaggeration it to absurd levels using a stock cliche line. Hence "the joke" part of the sarcastic comment.
Then come the part that makes the sarcasm smack you in the face obvious the "lol jk" this is a receding of the statement to clarify that it's intents were fictitious to anyone who had not yet clued in. You say a bomb threat or threat of violence is not justified just because it's followed by just kidding. ........ In what paranoid universe is that true. Go to a comedy club I promise you one if not all comedians mill make a violent threat against someone followed by just kidding and everyone will laugh. You know why? He's not serious. How can you tell? He just said so. Heck keep your ears open to some conversations on the street. Our language can be pretty violent no matter what the level. Context identifies which are true threats of violence and which are invocations of violent imagery for another purpose. In this case the context was given both indirectly and directly. The context is that it was a joke, a bad joke true, but a joke none the less. How do we know? Because among other things he said it was - flat out. Should he maybe have followed it with "HAHAHAHAHA I made a joke just then exaggerating your paint to discredit it look over there <----- seee it it's a joke and should not be taken seriously I bare no ill will against anyone." I don't know it's a bit over kill to me and rather clunky but if some people still don't get it maybe we need to start like the warnings on coffee cups that yes indeed coffee is hot.
There is the context of when it was said too. Professing your desire to commit some other crime to someone you don't like during a heated argument is not something anyone would do. Even crazy people would be too paranoid to let it slip like that. The kinds of people that do this kind of thing tend to rarely post their intentions explicitly and when they do it is past a designated point of no return. An almost religious expression glorifying general violent imagery and vague justifications that are written to "make sense" after the fact. These are then posted to the general public without any direction as an attempt to seek validation for the actions they plan to take. The context of this comment is completely atypical of the behavior of someone who intends to do this. By informing not just anybody but an enemy of your plans you jeopardize the whole operation. Paranoia and a persecution complex are both typical of these kinds of people and so the chance that this would even happen by slipping out does not make sense. In other words these kinds of threats are not made this way.
I hope this helps you understand written context better and that sarcastic comments are more obvious in the future. To help out I've littered the previous messages with different kinds of sarcastic statements. See if you can find them all
I think the two of you could do with being a lot less sarcastic. Myself and fletch argued past each other due to it for half a page.
I don't think we actually know who the woman is who contacted the police in this example. Have we been given that information? Aside from the fact that she was Canadian, I don't think we have anything. Which is probably safe, frankly.
In any case, the comment was dumb. I think in hindsight a few people, myself included briefly, got angry with the woman who phoned the police because, in hindsight, it turned to shit.
But that's not her problem. There are plenty of older people who, frankly, are terrified of school shootings. It's still not her fault that the police went nuts. She didn't need to turn into a psychic to figure out if the kid was being sarcastic. She might not even know what "jk" means. Right?
You've written a page on how to detect that the kid was joking. I think we can also determine that he was joking by the fact that he didn't have any weapons in his house, but whatever. It's difficult to shoot up a school without guns and weapon training. Two points:
1)The police get a decent amount of shit after every actual school shooting. There's usually an inquiry into "Should the police have known?". Right? So they have to be careful on that point. Even after the Boston Bombing they had an inquiry into whether the police should have done something about the terrorists earlier, after Russia contacted the US about them.
2)Like fletch said to me, and it gets caught up in the sarcasm so we need to cut it out:
For the police to actually read the comment, they need to investigate. I was confused by this point when fletch pointed it out, I didn't consider reading the comment to count as investigating, but he is right.
They're the ones who need to figure out if the kid is joking. If they can't be sure (and to be fair, the comment is fairly ruthless), then they visit the kid or phone his parents/school:
"Miss Carter, sorry to disturb. We've received a complaint about your son. Is he home at the moment? We would like to send a constable around to talk to him."
(At this point you can probably figure out that I'm not super familiar with policework).
And then after twenty minutes of talking to the kid they should have figured out that he wasn't a psychopath. And with no weapons, that's really it. Case closed. "Don't do it again, son."
You can do ALL that and not even get remotely close to threatening to imprison the kid, for 8 years or at all.
And despite your essay about the intricacies of his facebook post, I wouldn't blame someone for getting scared from reading it, nor would you blame the police for investigating. To us, it might be obvious. In hindsight it's clearly obvious. The kid's a regular nerd. It SHOULD be obvious to the police now. I have no idea what they're going to say in court.
"No your honour, we have no evidence on how he was going to put his plan into action. No, your honour, just one facebook post. Yes, your honour, he did write how he was going to eat their hearts. Err, 'jk' means 'just kidding', colloquially, your honour."
So yeah. It's absurd.
TL;DR: You can't blame the woman for phoning the police. Chances are, she was scared by school shootings. It's not her fault that the police force in the kid's jurisdiction are fucking off their rocker.
You also wouldn't really get angry with a police force for starting a brief investigation, for the two main points above:
They cop tons of shit if the kid actually goes nuts and they knew about it beforehand.
They actually have to investigate, if you want to call it that, to figure out if he's joking.
