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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31617 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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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.

I don’t see indisputable evidence he’s morally or intellectually wrong here.

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.

Do you think he was not completely incorrect intellectually when he claimed that the massacre never occurred and the parents are just actors whose children weren't murdered while attending elementary school? Or that he was not completely incorrect morally when he claimed that?

In absolute sense - No.

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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On that note, I've often wondered why Michael Dukakis responded the bizarre way he did to the famous 1988 debate question on the death penalty, in which he was asked whether he'd want the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. He responded technically with a dismissal of the concept, reiterating his long history of opposing capital punishment without actually answering the question. Personally, my response would have been:

There was an episode of West Wing in which the fictional President Bartlet was prepping for a debate and gave that same bumbling, technocratic answer to "What if your wife was raped and murdered?" and his aid Toby (Aaron Sorkin's mouthpiece) proceeds to rip into Michael Dukakis President Bartlet giving him basically a version of your speech.

(And then because West Wing was Aaron Sorkin's Democratic Party fan fiction, everyone laughs because it turns out they were pranking Toby, Bartlet just wanted to set him off, of course he'd never actually give such a terrible response in a debate!)

The courts should at least look at his defenses for this case of defamation. They did not; they used procedural shenanigans to obtain a default. And if they did indeed look at his defenses, they should consider them in the same light as other high-profile defamation cases, such as Kyle Rittenhouse's and the Covington Kids. These cases are usually dismissed early on; they never lead to near-billion-dollar verdicts.

I agree that Rittenhouse and the "smirkgate" kid were defamed and deserve compensation, but even so the journalists who defamed them were much closer in relative terms to having a reasonable and good-faith opinion than the deranged shit about "crisis actors" that Alex Jones said. It's apples and oranges.

I would disagree, considering that "journalists" claimed Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an AR-15 and murdered 3 black protestors in cold blood. After the trial. And other journalists made equally wrong, if less (but not non-) defamatory, claims about the Covington kids. Covington Catholic school was shut down due to threats of violence. But as with Jones, those defamation claims were never tried; unlike Jones, it is because most were dismissed in the early stages (though admittedly some settled instead), rather than the alleged defamers being ruled against by default.

He should sue them. But I stand firm that factual errors of this nature are objectively less crazy than claiming that the Sandy Hook Massacre literally did not occur.

I agree that Rittenhouse and the "smirkgate" kid were defamed and deserve compensation, but even so the journalists who defamed them were much closer in relative terms to having a reasonable and good-faith opinion than the deranged shit about "crisis actors" that Alex Jones said. It's apples and oranges.

This is a matter of opinion and for the record I disagree. And that's why we're supposed to have a neutral system.

Just to be clear: you claim that arguing that Rittenhouse murdered those two guys is on par with arguing that the Sandy Hook massacre never actually occurred and Sandy Hook parents are literally just acting?

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