What the fuck is the matter with you?

It *is* verbal assault. It's pretty much the textbook definition of "verbal assault".

"Those wimmins shouldn't be getting all high and mighty and demanding that people treat them with a minimal amount of respect. Fuckin' bitches."

Who are you quoting?

I have zero respect for TV news people. They're fake journalist shills that make everyone stupider. I'm not making a special exception to that for women. They should all be shouted down. I don't really care if a bunch of dudebros are doing it, or how.
(sportscasters aren't parading as "news" so I do have sympathy there)
Watch any random local news broadcast and any random cable tv news hour and tell me I'm wrong. Everyone who makes that shit should get an earful.

The fucking high horse their on is the pretension that they're doing something noble and being persecuted for it.

They were not put in a reasonable fear of harm based on those words. Fuck you.

Why does nobody know the difference between assault and battery? And why does everyone who thinks assault is battery get super angry any time someone uses the term correctly?

How many legal sites would you like me to find that explain that a *reasonable threat of bodily harm* is required to constitute verbal assault, and that words alone are often not enough?

These are all some dudebro yelling bad words at the camera. They are neither a threat, nor do they include a threatening gesture.

I expect better trolling That Guy-- but legally speaking, you are generally right about assault. You can dislike the worthless and inane content of the news, but I think there is a huge distinction between a joke and behavior that is sexually demeaning and threatening to women. Not threatening in a legal sense-- but the kind of obnoxious shit that women deal with from men walking down the street. These are people just trying to do their job surrounded by idiots-- and even if you do not like the product, at least treat the people with respect. For fuck's sake-- don't be That Guy.

But I am.

Hear hear, That Guy! It should also be remembered that FHRITP is not solely directed towards female newscasters, nor is it even directed at newscasters themselves. It's a form of culture jamming and photobombing; the FHRITPee is addressing *the home-bound audience* (who can be of any gender! Women watch the news, too, and there are many lesbians who enjoy FingHRITP!), and the "her" whom the audience should be fucking is an ephemeral "her" - she can be anyone you know, or even no-one at all. The idea that FHRITP should, or even CAN, be parsed to "Hey! MEN! Look at this BITCH NEWSCASTER, let's all RAPE HER!" is simply absurd, and shows either a complete unfamiliarity with the cultural ritual in question, or a deviously mercenary willingness to twist the truth in order to sell a soft news story.

It's like the "Pool's Closed Because AIDS"/ New Braunfels controversy, only now the lone clueless old lady is a whole gaggle of clueless-acting old-media news-people.

Although in the interest of politeness, maybe we can reach a compromise? If reporters REALLY can't deal with FHRITP, maybe instead of shouting "fuck her right in the pussy!", we can all try shouting something like "Google Edward Snowden!" or "when the revolution comes, television journalists will be first against the wall!"

I think we could all live with that.

Buddy you try that shit on your secretary in the coffee room at ANY company worth working for and you'll be out on your ass before you can say hostile workplace.

Tv news has been racing us to the bottom for decades.

Disrupting tv news by rudely yelling stuff while they're "just doing their job" is fine by me, if their job is part of the bullshit lobby.

I'd prefer something classier and more mature, like:
"TV news is bullshit, you farthead!!"
or
"I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!!"
but I'll take what I can get. Enemy of my enemy etc.

(I suppose PBS news hour would get swept along in the flood of heckling, but they don't do a lot of away pieces anyway)

The fact that they're calling it "assault" when it's not is just the fuckin' cake-taker to me.

Has anyone even attempted to show these outraged newscasters the original viral video? Would it matter at this point? Super funny all around.

Also: FHRITP was fake. It broke my little internet heart.

so it's okay to be terrible to other people just because you aren't breaking a law?

Yes. What part of free speech don't you understand?

Ah yes. The Shirley Phelps argument. Favored by MRAs, SJWs and terrible people everywhere!

... and when they invoke it, Shirley Phelps, MRAs, SJWs, and misterbuns are right.

You don't HAVE to be a jerk to people, of course; being a jerk is Not The Pony Way. But the whole point of freedom of speech is to allow people to be jerks regardless.

I guess the question you'd have to answer here, Mr Misterbuns, is when you say "okay", what precisely do you mean?

screaming gross shit at people is lame.

do you need a power point presentation.

People should be thrown into jail for being verbal jerks in public places because MRAs, gross, lame, problematic, and feelings. The prosecution rests, your honor.

screaming gross shit into a microphone (I really don't think it's directed at anyone specific) is lame, but the appropriate response is to roll your eyes and move on.

misterbuns-

no, this was meant as a reply
"verbal assault" =/= what the people above said it equals
this is not assault

and it's NOT OK to be terrible to people

I don't count tv news people as people.

>>But the whole point of freedom of speech is to allow people to be jerks regardless.

No it's not. The point of freedom of speech is that when people are jerks, they get called on it, no matter who they are.

Ditto to John Holmes. It amazes me how a scolding some how exaggerates into "vote for the punishment of chaining up the fuckers and drag them by their heels" no matter how much there may be terrible people who exist who will go that direction. If you're not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to someone's intentions then you got bigger problems than being surrounded by imaginary/real idiots.

>>People should be thrown into jail for being verbal jerks in public places because MRAs, gross, lame, problematic, and feelings. The prosecution rests, your honor.

Nominal, you sure taught that strawman a lesson.

You've been sounding exactly like conservatives who hate the ACLU for being a "bunch of Nazi defenders".

You and the other boys who cried rape culture have no clue what freedom of speech really entails. Hint: it still applies even when it involves a pretty girl on YouTube whose pants you want to nice guy your way into is involved.

>>You've been sounding exactly like conservatives who hate the ACLU for being a "bunch of Nazi defenders".

The ACLU doesn't defend Nazis. They defend the first amendment.


>> it still applies even when it involves a pretty girl on YouTube whose pants you want to nice guy your way into is involved.

Are you even vaguely aware of what a vile misandrist stereotype that is? No feminist pushes anti-male stereotypes more aggressively than an antifeminist with a man he disagrees with. If a man can only support women for sex, our entire gender really is a bunch of pigs.

>>You and the other boys who cried rape culture have no clue what freedom of speech really entails.

Nominal, you really need a fucking clue, so here it is. FREEDOM OF SPEECH APPLIES TO CRYING RAPE CULTURE, DUMMY! It also applies to criticizing the ACLU, but I'd never do that.

You're essentially using Gamergate's Orwellian "Speech is Censorship" argument. It's nonsense.

For all I know, the legality of publicly yelling FHRITP may be debatable, particularly in Canada, but I'm not advocating a legal remedy, and neither are the reporters on the video. One of them very explicitly says that the way to deal with it is to talk about it because THAT'S WHAT FREEDOM OF SPEECH REALLY ENTAILS.

Freedom of speech entails me having the right to say that FHRITP is a dick move, and why it's a dick move.

^^^

I didn't claim it was clever, subversive or hilarious. It's not.
I'm not sure that they're always catcalls.

It isn't assault though- fact.

I'm totally fine with people harassing remote news crews, because I don't think the news is anything but a fucking variety show.

Also, did you really just 'rape-culture' this?
*fart noise of contempt*

You obviously don't know what rape culture is.

It's a net that can be cast as widely as it needs to be to condemn shit.

You clearly don't know what rape culture is.

Rape culture isn't necessarily rape. It's sexual humiliation as a sport. It's sending dick pics. It's catcalling, in a context where a person feels vulnerable. It's calling every woman on YouTube, even one who is 14, a "cam whore". And sometimes, it's definitely this.

Sending saucy selfies is rape culture, but only when men do it.

The more you comment on this stuff, the more it's revealed as a smoke screen to being an increasingly sexually irrelevant creepy old man trying to limit the competition for female attention.

Rape culture is what gives the patriarchy its power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds society together.

>>The more you comment on this stuff, the more it's revealed as a smoke screen to being an increasingly sexually irrelevant creepy old man trying to limit the competition for female attention.

Oh, is THAT what's being revealed?

Boy it's just not fair that you can read my mind over the internet. I can't tell anything about your sexuality from here, and so if I tried to drag your sexuality into a discussion of free speech on the internet, I might risk saying something really stupid.

>>Sending saucy selfies is rape culture, but only when men do it.

Once, a feminist who didn't agree with something I said, and who was a bit of a tool, posted a GIF of a man being punched in the balls. That might qualify as rape culture. I'm going to acknowledge that a female rape culture is possible, but if you seem to be implying that it's somehow sexist or hypocritical to idenify gender as a defining characteristic of culture, I'd suggest that this isn't an argument that a smart person would make.

It's sexist enough.

It's not verbal assault or rape culture. 'Rape culture' is a bullshit metaphysical construct:

1)You don't need theory jargon to understand that blaming the victim and other shit like that is shitty.

2) Because of this rhetorical move:
a) cast a wide net and call anything we don't like 'sexual objectification'
b) define ALL of that objectification as making rape more likely in the absence of proof, and as being threatening
c) lump it in with truly shitty behaviors under the term 'rape culture'

and then, of course
d) march around on campus, try to change speech laws, get guys expelled for looking at your tits, etc

Crying foul on everything isn't always an effective technique.

Yelling FHRITP is boorish and sexist. Where's the reason to believe that the reporter's more likely to get raped because of it? Do you really think that anyone in any of those FHRIPT videos is getting wound up to do some shit?

I'd advance the theory that if someone got raped after a bunch of yells of FHRIPT, it's because there were a bunch of goddamn rapists there (with an opportunity, and without the empathy that 98% of us have) and the FHRIPT yells were fucking incidental.

The idea that The Culture (predominantly or entirely) Makes The Rapist is part of the intellectual vice of Humanities theory for decades now- the constant and almost total denial of both biological causes of human behavior, and of empirical thinking in general; and in turn, the aggrandizement of cultural studies and back-pocket Idealism.

I'd also have to wonder if tolerating casual and trifling sexism and racism and so on isn't generally healthier for a society than whatever the fuck would happen if you could repress it and establish Your New Perfectly Sensitive Regime (as so many colleges try with fairly grotesque results in the worst cases).

If I was going to heckle a news reporter, I wouldn't yell FHRITP because it's not rhetorically what I'd want to do with the heckle, and I wouldn't want my message to get lost in the sexism. It's a stupid meme anyway, but none of this makes the reporters Suffering Heroes of The Resistance. They're fucking assholes who pretend to be journalists for a living.

>>It's not verbal assault or rape culture. 'Rape culture' is a bullshit metaphysical construct:

Yelling FHRITP is boorish and sexist. Where's the reason to believe that the reporter's more likely to get raped because of it

You really really REALLY don't know what it is.

>>Crying foul on everything isn't always an effective technique.

What part of "freedom of speech" don't you understand?

>>I'd also have to wonder if tolerating casual and trifling sexism and racism and so on isn't generally healthier for a society than whatever the fuck would happen if you could repress it and establish Your New Perfectly Sensitive Regime (as so many colleges try with fairly grotesque results in the worst cases).

Or how about this? When people act like dicks, you say that they're being dicks. That's all anybody is doing, and this is the part of freedom of speech that some people really don't seem to understand. This is how free speech actually works.

What did I say about freedom of speech, at all? Were you drunk when you replied?

'Rape Culture' is a bullshit metaphysic, dude. No one knows what it means. You couldn't find 2 women's studies cranks that agree on it.
It's like asking someone for a perfect definition of the holy spirit or a monad or how kantian ethics is actually supposed to work or phallogocentrism or trickle-down economics, or what the exact definition of postmodernism, or genres in the arts, are.

They're all fucking bullshit, who cares what The Correct Definition is. You don't know what the correct definition is because it's the empty set.

Look, I'm the one who said this was rape culture, and then I told you what I meant by that. I didn't pull that definition out of my ass, and I'm not aware of other definitions. But don’t tell me it doesn't mean anything. i just told you what it means.

>>So yeah, apparently calling it "assault", while semantically problematic, is not meant as a legal term. It's a metaphor, or hyperbole, or some other rhetorical device. It's not referring to a crime.

Who even knows what they meant by that? They want it to do rhetorical work and I'm calling it bullshit.

You can guess that they don't mean for it to be a crime, and I can guess that they'd love to have them all brought up on charges and convicted.

>>You can guess that they don't mean for it to be a crime, and I can guess that they'd love to have them all brought up on charges and convicted.

Who cares what they'd love? They're not advocating a legal remedy, and they're being pretty explicit about that. I'm responding to what they're actually saying. If they start talking about criminal penalties, I'll reconsider my support.

Dear Simillion,

Written press on civil Civil Forfeiture & improper Eminent Domain seizures has been going for over a decade.

Tv reporters following real journalists' stories with 2% of their airtime isn't a fucking victory.

Define groundless. Cry more about shitheels behing harassed while they do remotes on how the brunch is in the new downtown district.

I love you,
That guy

You're right, it isn't a victory, That Guy, but it certainly is a start.

>>Define groundless.

Based on a presumed knowledge of all TV news everywhere that you couldn't possibly have.

>>Cry more about shitheels behing harassed while they do remotes on how the brunch is in the new downtown district.

So you're opposed to brunch?

Stuff I hate, in order:

1) Star Wars
2) tv news
3) bronies
4) brunch
5) injustice
6) most cats
7) high school football
8) war

I think "myself" is in there somewhere, but I can't decide exactly where so... let's say right between 5 and 6.

Seriously, you might as well condone harassing the kids behind the counter at McDonalds because there's not enough fiber in a Big Mac.

oh, I do

So, like, a war to end all high school football would be worth it, but not a war to end McDonald's low fiber food.

Does this help, at all?