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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?
Jones is punished this harshly because he's rather unsympathetic at the best of times, and indisputably in the wrong morally, legally, intellectually on this particular issue. Ergo, pretty much nobody with half a reputation to lose will bother staking that reputation on defending Jones for free, out of principle, and Jones can be bankrupted a thousand or a million times over.
Thus it is possible to neatly make an example out of him, a precedent of a right-wing loudmouth ruined beyond belief and made radioactive; and this will send a signal to all future wannabe cultural icons who disagee with the mainstream culture, and more importantly to their cooperators. In effect this imposes a permanent pentalty on the social credit score of an entire stratum of people.
This is arguably a continuation of the Richard Spencer Charlottesville case, Nick Fuentes no-flight-list incident and probably some other disproportionate sentences I have missed. Certainly @SecureSignals can describe it better than me.
I don’t see indisputable evidence he’s morally or intellectually wrong here. He went to far for sure but he’s fundamentally correct about the issues of your school shootings as a political opportunity to take away gun rights. In this area I believe he’s morally and intellectually in the right.
He’s should pay out a little bit on this because he went too far but morally he’s on my side and not the side I find troubling of politicizing school shootings.
You think the Sandy Hook parents are crisis actors engaged in a literal conspiracy theory to falsely persuade the nation that their children were murdered en masse while attending elementary school? Or you think that this claim is reasonably disputable, either morally or intellectually?
Please let's not confuse Alex Jones's behavior with the comparatively bland claim that school shootings are a political opportunity to take away gun rights. The court proceedings did not concern that claim.
I see you want to call him morally wrong by removing the majority of his argument because you know school shootings are used for politics and law he’s fundamentally correct on that point.
I don't care about the rest of his argument, I care about the part that was the subject of this dispute, since this dispute is what we are discussing. Was that not the part that you think is at least disputable in its moral or intellectual wrongness? Or do you believe the courts should overlook this clear case of defamation because he separately made some other arguments that were reasonable?
You are speaking in absolutes. I think he did defame but I disagree he’s completely intellectually and morally wrong in this case. The parents entered the fray when they decided to politicize anti gun messaging.
I don't think it's a good thing to try and argue this from a culture war perspective; parents of school shooting victims are perhaps simply always destined to go campaigning against guns. As someone who is pro-gun, I don't need Alex Jones on my side, I can simply try and argue from other angles why I think the Brady Campaign and so on are wrong without trying to undermine the tragedy they suffered. If anything, we are served better by people like Open Source Defense, Karl Kasarda, and so on than we are by Alex Jones. "Arguments as soldiers" is one thing, but Alex Jones's problem was taking that a bit too literally.
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