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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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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?

That Rittenhouse murdered anyone as opposed to acting in self-defense is simply blatantly untrue and contradicts all available evidence as far as I can see. I can't consider it as a reasonably debatable point to anyone who has looked at the facts.

Meanwhile, though by no means do I believe that all victimized by Sandy Hook were "crisis actors" (mostly because I don't see what the deep state gets from not just actually killing kids, much easier and more satisfying for them), that's only a stone's throw away from the perfectly plausible in my view suggestions that the shooting was not actually committed by Lanza or that he was some sort of asset. Powerful entities acting maliciously and duplicitously is always within the realm of reason. Plus, there actually is a pretty suspicious video of Sandy Hook dad Robbie Parker, which is more evidence than there is as far as I know for any anti-Rittenhouse theories.

With that being said, as Rittenhouse being a murderer is again simply impossible to me based on established facts, whereas Sandy Hook being an artificial event staged by crisis actors is merely implausible and improbable, no, they are not "on par": I would readily accept the latter as true before the former.

I think that you need to qualify the first by a careful parsing of the facts, and the second by widening the aperture to an adjacent claim, really speaks to the core of the matter here.

careful parsing

This is only necessary if you consider "knowing the full context, like by for example watching the freely-available video" as "careful parsing". But by this logic, every instance of self-defense though requires "careful parsing" beyond "A shot/stabbed/punched B", which always naively means A is in the wrong.

To me, "careful parsing" is trying to figure out if ivermectin is effective against the 2019 Chinese coronavirus and by how much. (I'm now inclined to believe that it is, but even that required a lot of informational intake and analysis and even at that I'm still not all that sure exactly how effective it is.) "Careful parsing" is understanding the argument as to why George Floyd's death was (as I and many others believe) most likely mostly self-inflicted by drug abuse in spite of the infamous and horrific-looking but misleading video.

Watching a video where somebody is attacked in a possibly fatal fashion and retaliates against those attackers, and only those attackers, and only those attackers for the duration of the immediate threat that they present, doesn't seem to require "careful parsing" to me to conclude self-defense. Really, considering the heavy media bias against Rittenhouse, the fact that he still got off at all would heavily indicate his actual innocence to me even if I were blind and literally couldn't watch the video. No "careful parsing" needed.

the second by widening the aperture to an adjacent claim

I admit this but I don't see the relevance to the argument. "Literally, 100% true" and "probably not literally, 100% true but suggestive of broader/deeper truths and in a reasonable ballpark" have both been recognized gradations of truth for a long time and equivalently that the latter is still more correct than "blatantly wrong and in contradiction of simple evidence". "The core of the matter" is the reasonableness of both claims. The second claim being in a slightly broader category of reasonableness-via-implication as opposed to in the category of pure, absolute truth does not invalidate it at all in regards to "the core of the matter".

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