I Do Not Intend To Annoy Anyone

Just for the record, I do not post on this blog with the intent to annoy anyone. Any annoyance is entirely incidental. I do not use the name Vache Folle in any context other than blogging and commenting on blogs, and I use this nom de guerre mainly to protect myself from any job related repercussions from having slightly off kilter opinions and because I do not want to embarrass my wingnut conspecifics whom I sometimes report on. Otherwise, it would be pretty easy to figure out who I really am, especially if you were a government agent who asked Blogger. So, if I get prosecuted for being annoying under the new federal “don’t anonymously annoy anyone” law, it will be pure gratuitous persecution.

I am not sure how a court would ever determine that a post was made with intent to annoy unless you said something like “I sure hope this annoys old so and so” or “this will probably annoy old so and so but that is what I aim to do” or such like. Besides, just about anything I write is liable to annoy someone, either because they don’t like my point of view or because what I write may be just plain stupid in their estimation. That can’t be helped, and I urge anyone who finds my posts toxic or unduly annoying to avoid this blog as billions of others do.

But, one might say, the law is not meant to be applied to blogging. It is meant to stop stalkers and meanies and harassers, and prosecutors would be way off base to apply it in any other context. The fact is, if a law can be misapplied or abused, it will be misapplied or abused. We can’t trust prosecutors to be faithful to the spirit of the law. They’re prosecutors, for Pete’s sake. They like asserting power over others, sometimes just for kicks. This is just an observation, mind you, and I trust that no prosecutors will be annoyed by the simple statement of an empirical fact.

What kind of blogging activity is meant to be curtailed by the new law, I wonder? If I criticize the grocery chain for selling me contaminated food, will that subject me to prosecution? If I set up a site just to heap abuse upon another person, a la the “Palmer Periscope”, would that be forbidden? Would disputatious comments to a blog post be criminal? Might “trolls” be imprisoned for trolling?