Call it hare-brained — or maybe hair-brained. While London just surpassed New York City last year in homicides, and while British police couldn’t muster the will to investigate Muslim rape gangs, some U.K. cops are getting right on top of a real menace: Law enforcement in South Wales is threatening to prosecute people who mock a convicted drug dealer’s hairstyle.
As the Independent reports, “Gwent Police used Facebook to appeal for information about Jermaine Taylor (shown) from Newport who is being recalled to prison after breaching his licence release conditions.”
“They shared the 21-year-old’s mugshot, which appears to show the man with a receding hairline, alongside the appeal in a bid to track him down,” the paper continued.
“His hairstyle attracted a slew of jokes and puns in the comments — with the image of Taylor having been liked more than 10,000 times, shared 14,000 times and commented on over 80,000 times.”
This certainly is a priority. I mean, who knows? The mockery may so traumatize Taylor that it hampers his drug-dealing endeavors (video of Taylor, hair and all, below).
Don’t consider the Gwent (Thought) Police bereft of a sense of humor, however. They said on Monday, “We’re really grateful to everyone who is assisting us in locating Jermaine Taylor, and we must admit a few of these comments have made us laugh,” reports the BBC. “However, when the line is crossed from being funny to abusive, we do have to make sure we are responsible and remind people to be careful about what they write on social media.”
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Becoming too careful, however, may mean not hearing lines such as these: “‘He’s vanished into thin hair,’ Lawrie Hillman wrote, while Lea Hook joked, ‘He was last seen in town; Police are combing the area,’” the New York Post tells us.
“‘You need to retrace his steps with a fine-tooth comb….and then please give it back to him,’ Simon Townend wrote, while Nick Sleek Meek said, ‘Looks like his hairline is on the run too.’”
I’ll just add that you must think twice about releasing such people from prison so early because, well, hair today, gone tomorrow. (Taylor had received a three-year sentence after being convicted of involvement in cocaine distribution in September 2017, but was released on December 10, 2018.)
Moreover, we can’t be confident he’ll recede from the drug business because his involvement seems extreme — I mean, even his hair is high. And if once bitten, twice shy, the man is determined not to go to prison a second time, during the next arrest the fur may fly (in fact, it looks like that happened the first time).
On a serious note, what Britain in particular, and the West in general, are not high on is freedom. The reason the Gwent Police issued their warning is that the U.K., like most Western countries, has so-called hate speech laws.
While these laws are tolerated by a prostrate populace, they don’t actually punish “hate”; this is impossible since hate is an emotion and cannot be objectively measured. All these laws do is punish speech the thought police happen to hate; this, in fairness, certainly would include some vile words. The problem is that it also includes anything politically incorrect, anything too effectively refuting establishment schemes.
A good example is how these stifle-dissent laws are often, if not most often, used to suppress criticism of Islam. In fact, even a British politician was arrested on this basis.
Meanwhile, for 16 years U.K. authorities ignored a child-trafficking ring — and the beating, terrorizing, and sexual abuse of 1,400 girls — because the perpetrators were Muslim. Authorities even went so far as to silence a whistleblower, accusing her of — surprise, surprise — “racism” (i.e., hate speech).
Additionally, lesser-known people are frequently punished under hate-speech prohibitions in Britain, France, the rest of Western Europe, and Canada. But one of the worst offenders is Sweden, which has a law criminalizing anti-immigration Internet commentary. In fact, a major Swedish newspaper used criminal hackers to obtain the e-mail addresses and identities of people leaving such comments and exposed them to the public; this resulted in some of the individuals being persecuted, with at least one losing his job.
In the United States, there are leftists who’d like to replicate these laws, and the persecution they bring. Thankfully, our First Amendment is precluding any such legislation — at least for now. As I explained in my 2006 article “How We Will Lose Our Freedom of Speech,” however, the future is uncertain.
We shouldn’t lose much sleep over the mocking of lost hair, but should worry about lost souls authoring a tomorrow of lost liberties.
Image of Jermaine Taylor: Screenshot of video by BBC News
