I think you are a supporter of freedom of speech in general - that's something I thoroughly approve of too.
I also think you are able to understand the difference between seeing a horrendous crime and seeing that crime and attempting to profit from it.
That seems to be what this bloke did: He tried to change and engorge the narrative regarding these horrific murders. This wasn't simply the usual run of the mill "American conspiracy theory".
He tried to convince the world that the crime didn't actually happen and even worse tried to convince the world that the dead were actors and other nonsense. He was caught out rather neatly when his defence team sent rather too much SMS data to the prosecution.
I am a fervent supporter of freedom of speech and other fundamental rights but there have to be boundaries - of reasonable decency and other quite tricky to pin down terms.
His own statement said the SMS data was from 2019, it was all messages from that year rather than the ones filtered by the relevant keywords.
The media reports did not have the same conclusion you are suggesting.
I'm a Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors. I'm also American. I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have. I appreciate the thought behind those laws. But I appreciate freedom of speech more. And I do have faith that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that truth will prevail over lies.
On the other hand, but not in contradiction, I'm also a huge fan of the American system of Tort Law. It's the discovery and enforcement mechanism of a free country.
I think in this case, the system is working exactly as intended. No one is jailing Jones for his speech. But he can be held responsible for the damage that resulted from it, in a way that will dissuade others from profiting off of similar attempts to rewrite history.
What I find fascinating is that even after panama papers the banking system is reluctant to really tackle the problem. We learn more from whistle-blower and (possibly law breaching) seizure of strong boxes, than we do from Swiss banks voluntarily. They really only love money. Social justice is nothing.
Swiss neutrality is an enabler of bad things, in finance.
Fair enough. My Jewish roots (int al) are rather more convoluted than yours.
"I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have."
Both of my parents were soldiers and I grew up in West Germany and the UK in the 1970s-1990s (on and off, here and there!)
Tort is to do with contract law.
Be American as much as you can - and I will stand in your corner for that too. However there is some history here and Jones was riffing and profiteering on an event that was nominally genocide and he described it as such.
Please don't mistake free speech for hate and spite.
if you'd put this some other way, I'd be down with it.
However, people who say "hate speech is not free speech" are just plain wrong. Yes, it is.
Want Biden or Obama to have some power? Are you going to be okay with Bush or Trump gets that power?
Freedom of speech still exists where debate, conflict and truth discovery can still occur. Regulating speech mediates free speech, but doesn't have to eliminate it. The marketplace of ideas can accept that some ideas are not worth keeping.
Why are you talking?
For that matter, why do we have media, or even schools?
I would suggest that you at least try to put yourself in the position of these parents when thinking about this topic (as impossible as that may be). Imagine having your child murdered then having this waste of life make up vicious lies about you and your dead child.
Greater, and Actual Transparency combined with a trust worthily network of news outlets would go along way to shut down these types of discussions
Sadly we have neither government nor really judicial transparency in any meaningful way, and we are at a point in time where trust in "news" is lower than trust in congress...
Want to tone down the number of people that believe in conspiracy... More Facts, less Spin...
What the United States needs to target is the economics of news. Actual news. Not infotainment.
Don't attempt to regulate good/bad news: economically incentivize good reporting and disincentivize bad reporting. The market will follow.
If 24/7 news channels weren't profitable... there wouldn't be any 24/7 news channels.
the Economics of news is going to be very different is media can not hide by "anonymous sources" and "it is just opinion" while spreading lies about individuals or events.
I think the next cases may find more well known news outlets in the defendants chair of defamation action
Really? More facts will change their minds? Who will they trust with those facts?
This is bordering on cult-like behavior and it shows no signs of improving -- I'm not optimistic about this at all.
News outlets (on both sides) have been caught in multiple partisans lies, disinformation, and spin/suppression of inconvenient facts for "their side" for many years now, this has eroded the trust in media and makes presentation of facts harder.
Neither side wants to acknowledge anything that would be seen as supporting the position of the "others"
So in the context of the election, you have one side that refuses to concede that Biden was elected by the people, but you also have the other side refusing to concede that because of COVID and other factors the 2020 election has some pretty non-standard events that (while not impacting the outcome of the presidential election) is the basis of the questioning of the integrity of the election, instead we have people saying the 2020 was the freest, fairest election in all of history because their side won..
neither position is true or healthy, and both position have Cult-Like behavior
It's rather bizarre that instead of seeing this cult-like behaviour (in the news, in politics, etc.) as an emergent property from the general American culture most will blame the news and the politicians for creating it. It's the inverse, they are just feeding what the populace actually is and behaves like.
> Neither side wants to acknowledge anything that would be seen as supporting the position of the "others"
You seem to be holding up your side of that argument but I don't roll that way. I abhor partisan politics and am happy to point out flaws of the Dem establishment.
As to the last election, it was as fair as one can hope for -- you're taking the defense of the legitimacy of the election to cult-like behavior? What exactly is the left doing that's cult like in that regard?
And thanks for the lecture on the veracity of news -- gosh I had no idea that people like William Randolph Hearst ever existed and manipulated the media generations ago.
Maybe too hard for you, but nuance is a thing -- any source of information is going to have bias and imperfection and it's a matter of understanding that bias and taking nuggets of knowledge. Case in point: while the NYT has made many egregious mistakes (supporting the Iraq war being a biggie), I still trust them as a news source more than Fox.
Fox news was designed as a propaganda wing of the GOP. This is documented. And yet all of you on the right happily lap it up and dismiss any source that doesn't satisfy your preconceived biases.
And as far as COVID goes -- prior to the past president viruses were not political. Bush was at least pro-science in that regard.
I dont think when you have governors of various states in real time changing election rules, and regulations under "emergency" powers can be considered "fair it one can hope"
Also contrary to to democrat talking points there have been successful legal challenges to those election regulation modifications done by governors or election boards.
2020 election was unusual for a variety of reasons not just COVID, and it should not be controversial to say we need to look at all of the changes, emergency orders, and other activities that were happening to ensure everything was handled correct, something I don't think many on "the left" want to even acknowledge
>>while the NYT has made many egregious mistakes (supporting the Iraq war being a biggie), I still trust them as a news source more than Fox
Most likely because your personal bias leans in the same direction as NYT, so you are looking for confirmation of your worldview which NYT, most of the time, provides you.
>>And yet all of you on the right happily lap it up
I am not on the right, nor do I watch fox news ( or CNN or MSNBC or NYT), I get most of my news from varied sources (my RSS feed is currently following over 250 feeds) i also love the GroundNews App / Website.
Ideologically I am a homeless nomad, and reject all political parties, I would love a system where political parties are completely banned. Individualism is my preferred state
>And as far as COVID goes -- prior to the past president viruses were not political. Bush was at least pro-science in that regard.
and you believe only the right has politicized covid? Interesting
Show some evidence for this concern or just drop it. Ironically, election security is in peril because the GOP is installing officials that are ready to steal the next election.
I don't treat the NYT as gospel; it's yet another input for consideration. I'm painfully aware of confirmation bias and do my utmost to take whatever truth becomes apparent.
"Political" has varied meanings/interpretations. In the context of laws and regulations vs. partisan power mongering.
Dealing with a pandemic required unfortunate actions which are political in the first sense. The anti-vax movement has been embraced by the GOP and it is very much political in sense of identity.
I do agree with you on the corruptive nature of political parties.
Long and short of it: I "lean left" but don't make my identity about that. There are classic elements of old school conservatism that I agree with but modern conservatism has now been coopted by the Evangelicals and they are bat shit crazy. Goldwater was prescient and correct in his concern about that happening.
Which changes that were made as we tried to navigate a presidential year election during a pandemic do you believe made the election unfair? Why did the vast majority of the complaining about these changes come after the election rather than as they were being made?
I dont believe governors have, or should have, the power to change election law at all, for any reason even "during a pandemic"
I also dont believe governors should have most of their so called "emergency powers" that is ripe for abuse, and many governors did just that, and continue to do just that even outside the election context
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...
I wish I had that faith but I think the Holocaust stands as a pretty big counter-argument. I'm genuinely curious about your faith, do you think that something could have been done in Germany in the 30s which would have preserved free speech and prevented the Holocaust?
It's extremely obvious that Trump (his government, his admin) not being able to control the media, control speech, was a really good thing. And that's true whether it's a terrible Republican or terrible Democrat, or any other terrible politician, that is in power. If you give them one big lever of speech control to start from, they'll expand that control, you can count on that.
While the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 didn't, you are correct, outlaw the Klan as a group, it did authorize a whole lot of measures—including authorizing federal military force and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and new federal civil and criminal causes of action—to combat their actions and those of similar groups, and those authorities were liberally used in suppressing them. Describing the successful strategy as “sunlight as disinfectant” rather than massive application of force is... not grounded in fact.
I don’t know if the First Amendment would have stopped the totalitarian takeover of Germany. But it certainly would have made it harder.
Easy problem today, harder problem at the time due to lack of knowledge.
They used a list proportional system (the same system used today in Germany, and similar to that used across Europe). Candidates were controlled by the party, rather than self-nominated. It's a huge oligarchical system that lends itself to enormous perversions of democracy. We have self-nominated candidates in the United States, but party primary elections and every type of election used here (MNTV, SNTV, first past the post, and run-offs) are broken and create extreme distortion, polarization, and disenfranchisement by their mathematical nature.
Democracy only works when it's actually democratic. When it's not, a polarized minority can become dominant over the majority, thus dominating the public discourse and shaping the public reason, retaining and expanding power. Most systems tend to reject whichever represents the view of the voters as a whole body; STV deals with the problems of fair and equal single-winner elections (which suppress minority voices) by proportionality for solid coalitions, capturing the median voter group as well as those minority views leaning away from the median voter in proportion to the size of the groups, which are of roughly-even size, thus introducing diversity into the conversation without lopsided a priori voting power, maximizing the efficiency of the public reason.
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
In my opinion, this whole ordeal is pretty close to being deserving of a criminal trial because his speech has incited violence and harassment again and again on these parents.
The argument is obviously wrong, for a number of reasons, but I wouldn't mind denying them that talking point.
Governments have been regulating speech since the beginning of governments. Every society doesn't exist in a state of maximal speech oppression as a result, so it cannot be the case that any attempt to regulate speech chills free speech in general.
That does not follow. It only follows that it doesn't chill free speech maximally.
> I don't mean to imply he shouldn't be penalized in this case.
Those two statements would seem to contradict each other. How can you believe that the government should not try to regulate speech, yet it should still be able to penalize someone for their speech?
We don't live in this legal abyss, most institutions make decisions for their business, but also for what they view to be higher, civic purposes.
Cable and Broadcast TV standards aren't just about profit maximization, they're kind of there to set a 'decency precedent'.
I mean, for the same reason you don't see 'porn everywhere' - you don't see the kinds of hyperbolic stuff Jones is saying all over the place.
Almost all organization have thresholds of various kinds, certainly Search, Social Media, Netflix, Cable/Broadcast in general, news outlets, Cable carriers, Academia yada yada.
The question will be perennially 'what to enforce and why' but we definitely already have standards.
Aside from fighting about the rules at various institutions, we then have 'legal' rules (a bit different), and of course we probably want to make sure there are at least some forums where anything can be said.
> The question will be perennially 'what to enforce and why' but we definitely already have standards.
Yes, but each of us has a different standards.
In usa for example, they have "the nipplegate" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh... where one nipple (a thing kids hang on for some time, then are disallowed to see for a few years, then want to hang on again,... and well, girls see in the mirror every day) causes such controversy...
...and in the country of my birth (yugoslavia), even in the "dark socialist times", you had nipples on public tv in a milk commercial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYhaHhpLKag&t=21s
It's same with speech, you might agree with your own personal standards, but many others don't, some believe in absulute free speech, and some want to censor what they believe to be "hate speech".
This is again one of those things where people say that they agree to a standard of what is and what should not be free speech, but each has their own standard incompatible with the other ones.
Then let's see, when was the last time you were exposed to a child pornography image? Hopefully never (though we do have this whole pornhub drama going on).
It is obvious that there are ways of controlling speech and we do it all the time. I think only Americans believe in this absolute negative liberty view of speech.
That's a wonderful compliment.
Some groups due to historical or biological reasons require special protection. It is why we protect kids, it is why we protect people with disabilities. But if you take negative liberty to its extreme this special treatment that we offer these groups of people become unwarranted privileges. A world view that is based entirely on negative liberty ends up in a "survival of the strongest" state.
Obviously there is a big discussion on which groups require what sort of positive reinforcement from society to be able to truly enjoy and perform as close to the rest as possible. One simple example is access to buildings for people in wheelchair. When the government requires businesses to put these they're infringing on the businesses liberties to decide how to, well, run their business. But I know very little people who wouldn't agree with this situation.
So, i don't know, I think a purist vision of the state as a non-interfering voice (negative liberty) has for a long while been deemed an inadequate way of structuring society. So I don't think it's a wonderful compliment.
But whatever the legal reasoning behind it is, the consequence is that you are pretty much forbidden from distributing this material on the internet and so your right to show something to others is being restricted. I would consider that a limitation of free speech. But of course, I can totally see why you'd have the need to justify it in some other way, because we don't want our freedom of speech to be limited in any way. The law is always open to interpretation after all.
What's the reasoning behind restricting people from sharing copies of copyrighted material? Obviously it is also an illegal action. My point being, there are many ways in which our speech is monitored and restricted already.
Speech is information, and in the information age there is a lot of speech that can rapidly be brought to bear on someone. We've already seen it happen with internet mobs and similar things.
What happens when someone weaponizes it? Because that's what is going on here, and to pretend it is simply like "speech" from the ages of horseback and paper, much like when "arms" were muskets, is naive from a policy standpoint.
Minor nitpick: this was a civil trial so it's just plaintiff vs defendant.
https://twitter.com/Spiro_Ghost/status/1555690309077565440
And it's effectively is to silence Alex.
Jones is a total psychopath. What he did to those grieving families is just beyond despicable. Mentally abusing children who survived a murder rampage is way way beyond just dirty politics, propagandizing, and typical grifting.
We love to point the finger at this guy but a lot of people were responsible for many, many insane productions by him, and no one questioned if it should be aired long enough to realize this would be harmful to the victims’ families.
When pressed in court, he admits that he doesn't really believe anything he is saying. He just doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as he keeps making money.
I said this in another comment as I hope his platform disappears, but I don't think justice is being served here.
He put himself on the air, he's the creator of InfoWars. I'm sure other people are involved, but ultimately he's still the one to point the finger at.
I wasn't trying to say Jones shouldn't be accountable. Even if he isn't a sociopath, what he did was inexcusable. I simply meant to say he didn't work independently, and I'm surprised/concerned he wasn't shut down much sooner.
He’s a professional troll, as in says things he doesn’t necessarily believe in himself but fit whatever public brand he is trying to sell because it brings him attention which in turn makes him money.
Sometimes it seems like we have all these words to describe people exactly like him aka troll, LARPer, astroturfer, and yet for whatever reason when we actually see someone doing any of these things we somehow think he’s actually crazy and believes all these conspiratorial things when the most likely explanation is that it’s all just a bit.
As if someone is saying "see that paradoxical/hostile bit of mental terrain over there? I can go there. _Ordinary_ people can't go there, but _I_ can. I have (for progressives) the exceptional acrobatic courageous flexibility / (for conservatives) the unbreakble mental backbone necessary to occupy and even defend a place that others can't tolerate even contemplating from a distance. "
wish I had a better term for this specific flavor of one-upsmanship, but it's creeping into dialog more and more on a lot of fronts, from a lot of different corners of society. I have a hunch that the boom in podcasting is a symptom and also an aggravating cause. People have given up on talking to each other, and now prefer to broadcast at each other.https://youtu.be/-HzOqZeX3Yk?t=524
He also claimed the parents were actors, and it was all done in front of a blue screen:
https://www.mediamatters.org/embed/clips/2016%3A11%3A29%3A51...
Those followers would track down the parents no matter the circumstances, if they moved, they would be found and harassed, if they changed their names, they would be found and harassed. Jones kept platforming a lunatic named 'Wolfgang Halbig' who spent years as one of Jones' primary sources on sandy hook. Halbig would show up to the parent's houses and taunt and 'question' them and their neighbors. It was abhorrent.
After a while the parents (via counsel I think) reached out to inforwars and asked them stop. They did not. At one point one of the infowars editorial staff in an email pointed out that they were in a legally precarious situation and should back off the sandy hook shit. It didn't stop.
It was only when the suits were brought that alex tried to cool things down on his show. Then he did everything he could to delay the trials which eventually ended when he was found in default on all four pending suits. This is the first to go into damages phase.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/shooting-school-tex...
> In our exchanges, Kelley Watt had spoken proudly of Madison, a gifted artist and linguist, who to Watt’s frustration “doesn’t question things the way her mother does.”
> In a fraught, seven-hour conversation, Madison relived the breakdown of her family while her mother pursued self-actualization through conspiracy-mongering. A reserved, cerebral young woman, she left Tulsa for good when she won a scholarship to a prestigious university in New York. Today she lives with her family in Europe, where she works as a consultant. She pushes back against her mother’s beliefs, but has never been able to dissuade her.
> When cornered by the truth, Kelley Watt “moves the goalposts,” Madison said, and she didn’t see much hope for changing her mother’s mind. “The only thing that could make her question it would be if that inner circle of hers started to doubt or chip away, but even then, it would be hard,” she told me.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/the-sandy-hook-hoax....
> Alex Jones invited Halbig on his show to share his run-in with the police and to detail the 16 questions Halbig believed needed to be answered about Sandy Hook. (“12. Why did the parents of the two children who died at the Danbury hospital not allow their children to donate their organs to other children waiting for the gift of life?”) Halbig told Jones the stress of the investigation was threatening his marriage, but said in another interview that nothing could stop him. “You’re willing to die for this?” the host asked.
> “Yes, I will,” Halbig said.
No one will have a link to everything he actually said, since some unclear amount of it was deleted.
Intent matters and after watching the trial I have very little understanding how the jury came to that verdict other than they just wanted to punish a bad person any way they could.
I think the world will be a better place if Jones and his gross idea of media, disappears, but I have a feeling he's just going to be made into a martyr here.
Huh? Maybe I missed something, but I'm pretty sure he was still claiming Sandy Hook was a false flag on Joe Rogan as late as 2020
Any suggestion that he's "admitted it was 100% true" are BS. He seems to be allowing (for now) that people really died and at least some of the families were not actors, which is an improvement, but he's not really caught up to reality yet.
A lot of the trial was spent trying to convince the jury that there was some ulterior motive behind the lawsuit, and he's been airing stuff suggesting that the judge and the plaintiff's lawyers are shadowy government agents.
The standard for defamation in the case of public figures (for which the parents of the Sandy Hook victims probably qualify because it's that broad) is "actual malice"--the speaker needs to either know that the statement was false (at the time it was made) or entertained serious doubts as to its veracity. For non-public figures, it's generally lowered to "reckless negligence". The other required element for defamation is that it has to be damaging--you need to show that you suffered as a result of the allegedly defamatory statement.
If it's at the point where the statement is causing people to issue death threats against you, it's not a "potentially genuine mistake".
That's true, but also somewhat irrelevant since Jones suffered default due to wilfully refusing to comply with court process; there was no trial on liability, only damages.
Had Jones wanted to make the argument that he made a genuine mistake rather than knowing libel, he could have participated in discovery and trial rather than stonewalling and getting a default judgement.
Had he wanted to argue that he had made an after the fact retraction which reduced the damages suffered by the victims of his libel, he had the opportunity to make that argument, AFAIK, in the compensatory damages phase.
> Intent matters and after watching the trial I have very little understanding how the jury came to that verdict other than they just wanted to punish a bad person any way they could.
There is a reason punitive damages are called punitive: they aren't to compensate for harm, they are to punish, and thereby deter repeats of the action by the same or other parties.
Or in the years between when he started his smear campaign, and the consequences thereof finally catching up to him.
Between this and the Tim Eynman verdict[1] (Who pretty much followed the same legal playbook, up to filing for bankruptcy[2]), it's not been a great week for grifters.
[1] https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/judge-orders-eyman...
[2] And then trying to take back that filing. When he realized that you can't use it to hide your stolen money from the courts. [3]
[3] https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/bankruptcy-judge-a...
He did, and he made the argument, and played the video in which he claimed he retracted them to the jury.