lamont
Clearly if Dylan is getting death threats over this that’s one thing.
But while this is legal to hunt these octos, its also perfectly legal to speak out against it. We all have the freedom of speech, particularly divers like Bob Bailey. Bob has the freedom to take the pictures, the freedom to post them. Dive shops in the area have the freedom to deny anyone they like to their shops and their compressors and deny anyone they like training.
This is what happens when you do something which is perfectly legal in the eyes of the law, but which which community standards judge you to be a asshole. And myself and Bob saying that Dylan is an asshole isn’t defamatory, its our opinion, and that is protected first amendment speech.
And the Seattle dive community is surprisingly small and has long memories and he’s going to be banned in a lot of dive shops, he’s going to be banned by a lot of instructors and anyone he dives with is going to have these articles pointed out to him. But far from being a ‘victim’ when he was doing something ‘perfectly legal’ that means that he really should have thought this through a bit more before he did it, and particularly after there was outrage and he decided to announce that he’d come back and do it again.
Sure what he did was legal, but he’s got most of the dive community around puget sound (and a lot of people around the world) who think he’s an asshole who we don’t want to deal with, and nobody can force us to think otherwise or accept him. Legally he doesn’t have a case against us… Although if people are giving him death threats they should stop that crap, immediately.
And if he lost his job over this, then that’s good and its a “teachable moment” for him and nobody can sue anyone over it. That is the consequences of his actions. His employer does not need to employ anyone who is getting bad press all over the news. The fact that its a free country applies to Bob and me, and the dive shops and the news media and his former employers.