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Can we have a thread about Alex Jones? Apparently the "victims" of his actions are pushing for something like a trillion dollar award.
I get it, he spoke some really shitty things about some people that just lost their children in a horrendous event. I can't imagine what they're going through. But I can't get past this mental block of "Yeah he said some shitty things, but he never directed his followers to do harassment, and the parents essentially just got cyber bullied, like just walk away from the screen, seriously. There were like two incidents of real life harassment, which have been prosecuted, and also were inflicted upon the parents who chose to engage with the public media."
Am I missing something here? Why is he being destroyed so thoroughly?
Thinking about it again, this question belies a misunderstanding of just how seething mad we'd expect Jones's victims to be. He's basically engaged in an old school feud with these people, who did absolutely nothing to provoke him besides have their lives ruined.
We live in a society where we resolve things with court cases and laws and such. For most of human history, this group of victims would probably have just murdered Jones for being a pest. We live in a unique period where we don't allow you do that just because you're justifiably angry.
A judgment like this tries to protect society from that chaos. It acknowledges that what Jones had done is beyond the pale, but mollifies the homicidal rage of the wronged.
Free speech is meant to protect citizens from a tyrannical government, isn't it? If he'd stuck to defaming the government like a normal person, I suspect he wouldn't be in nearly so much trouble.
In short: Ingroup>outgroup?
The problem here is the 'direction' of the society you are talking about when justifying things that happen within it. To illustrate: There are thousands of things that happen every day that, in the past or under difference circumstances, would have instigated a potentially fatal altercation between those involved. So lets ask the question in the OP again, why is Alex Jones specifically getting sued for an amount seemingly plucked out of an Austin Powers movie, yet the other thousand instances that happen every day get ignored or even celebrated? I can certainly think of worse instances of abuse and harm than what Alex Jones did. Can't you?
To put things in a different context, if public figures start talking about the inherent evil of a people, and then others start attacking those people in the street at random, do we punish the public figures or the people who committed the crime? It seems bizarre to blame Jones as if he was the one phoning these peoples homes, right?
No it's not. Free speech as a concept is meant to sanctify and elevate the individuals right to expression within a society above that of the right of others to silence.
Alex Jones could have been Alex Jones and made up a different lie that didn't implicate random strangers as adversaries in some grand conspiracy. For example, he could have said that Adam Lanza was CIA.
Many many cases go to court every day, so I'm not sure what you're saying here. Jones clowned in court, and if you do that, all bets are off.
I have difficulty imagining a more ghoulish use of a radio show than to slander the mourning parents of slain children.
Consider the way 9/11 truthers operated. Very few denied that people actually died. I suspect that someone saying 'Cops are liars, none of them died in 9/11, they're just trying to take away our right to brandish box cutters on airlines' they'd be in shit just as deep.
In my ideal world we'd discourage that type of thing, yes. I think that there's a difference between slandering, say 'all white people', 'all black people', 'cops' or 'politicians' and, say, a very specific small group of people ('sandy hook families') and a necessary increase in liability to go with it. If someone says 'Officer Jones is a killer' and someone shoots Officer Jones, it's probably different than if Activist Bob says 'All cops are killers' and someone shoots officer jones. Now, if Activist Bob is the most recognizable cop hater in the whole country, which brings me to:
We live in the age of untouchable useful idiots who can be used for plausible deniability. In days past, people were more direct, and law enforcement got good at nailing organized crime. So now we have this: distributed crime with no explicit orders and all relationships are parasocial.
Which would still be irrelevant to the question as to why he got slapped with a trillion and not others.
Really? There are that many trillion dollar bills flying around the justice system?
I didn't specify radio shows. I said any instance of abuse or harm. Can you not think of any worse ones, more deserving of a trillion dollars in damages, than what Alex Jones did?
Why would you suspect that? Has that ever happened? I mean, when was the last time anyone got into shit a trillion dollar deep?
But we would not discourage group slandering, even though it leads to the exact same result? I don't understand the distinction you are trying to make. What if someone started killing members of the CIA because Alex Jones said Adam Lanza was a member of the CIA? Would that not, by your standard, be the fault of Alex Jones?
I don't understand the relevance of this. Nor do I understand the conflation of Alex Jones and InfoWars with organized crime.
Same reason Amber Heard got slapped with the judgment she did, despite the entire media apparatus and even many lawyers (for purely legal reasons, unlike the media) stating she would win: he behaved badly enough to be sued, put up a poor defense, was found guilty of egregious behavior and punished.
Are we going to argue that Amber Heard was an enemy of...there's really no name for it that doesn't sound conspiratorial... The cancellation machine wielded by the Left tribe?
Kevin Spacey, one of the original villains of MeToo, just won his court case against the accuser that torched his entire career. Are we going to argue that he's a favorite of the Left-tribe cancellation machine?
People will sue you for anything, to try to destroy you, but that doesn't mean that some people actually haven't put themselves into a position to face destruction as decided by a reasonable or at least median juror or judge.
EDIT: To use an example: Gawker was rightly destroyed due to their (hypocritical) behavior when they got Hulk Hogan's sex tape. Like many unwary internet people, they fucked around with real world consequences and found out. However in that case, unlike these ones, we know for sure that Hogan had a benefactor who had his own beef with Gawker. But I don't think anyone here thinks that that means that Gawker was destined to lose because Thiel skewed the trial. No. They made an enemy so he pursued them into the legal system. He won because Gawker was seen (rightly) as behaving egregiously.
Those would all be relevant arguments if we were talking about purely win/lose consequence. But we're not. We are talking about trillions vs slaps on the wrist.
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