Good! It should be. Alex Jones is a ghoul making money from dead school shooting victims. Anything that embarrasses him is entitled to as much glee as it wants.
No, I don’t. Those situations aren’t remotely comparable. I suspect you already know this but are using the Sandy Hook victims as a jumping off point to discuss something unrelated. Please don’t do that.
Then make a full argument, not just implying that "making money from dead school shooting victims" is somehow immoral. Every newspaper does just that! Very low quality comment, not worthy of HN (but of course useful for woke virtue signalling about "how bad is Alex Jones").
I can't imagine a more valid use for defamation laws than to prevent someone from knowingly and repeatedly causing death threats and other harassment to be directed at parents whose children have been murdered. After being sued, Jones completely failed to defend himself in any meaningful way and lost the suit by default. I honestly have no idea which part of this chain of events you object to. People should be free to send mobs after parents grieving an unimaginable tragedy? Morons who get sued should win by default?
I think the opposite precent would be worse. Regulating your tone around anyone with even a mediocum of power for fear of repercussion is part of the reason we're in the situation we face today.
He inspired the harassment. It was obvious to everyone, Jones included, that his actions were resulting in grieving parents being harassed and he did not change his actions. At some point people should be held responsible for the actions they know they are inspiring in others.
> Funny how quick "he harassed them" turns into "he inspired the harassment"
Yes, it's called a "clarification". OP misspoke, I clarified. If there are any other language features we can expand upon in this thread now is as good a time as any, I suppose.
> for which there is no legal precedent anywhere, ever.
May I introduce you to the concept of "incitement"? Not on the law books in Texas so Jones wasn't tried for it but let's not pretend it doesn't exist as a concept "anywhere, ever".
"Someone harassed someone" and "someone else drew inspiration to harass someone from remarks" are wildly different things.
"hurr durr someone misspoke", lol no -- those are wildly different thing and someone just got called out for posting total horse shit.
> May I introduce you to the concept of "incitement"?
Show me a single video clip where a sane and sober person could construe one of Alex's remarks to be "incitement". Pro tip: you CAN'T. We already know you fucking can't.
The Paradox of Tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance not as a moral standard but as a social contract. If someone does not abide the terms of mutual tolerance, then they are not covered by the contract. By definition intolerant people do not follow the rules so they are no longer covered and should not be tolerated.
I think it's actually closer to "terrorists should go to prison". Terrorists and other criminals have broken a social contract, and a level of punishment that some approximation of society deems to be acceptable is extracted from the terrorists. This doesn't mean that terrorists don't/shouldn't have some rights. Similarly, thinking about tolerance as a social contract doesn't require stripping anyone who violates this contract of all of their rights.
FWIW I don't actually have a problem with Jones specifically getting in trouble over defamation after getting his day in court. What I have a problem with is the broad notion that it's generally okay to "not tolerate the intolerant" to the point of forcibly suppressing them. The paradox of tolerance is not really a paradox when we're talking about intolerant speech.
I'm kind of worried about society deciding which speech is "intolerant", so I'm not completely on board with the idea of treating tolerance as a social contract. That being said, if we could stop a genocide merely by suppressing people's speech, I feel like that would probably be a worthwhile thing to do. That is to say, it feels like the least bad way to prevent a genocide.
Again, figuring out which speech is worth suppressing is a whole other can of worms.
EDIT: note that Jones did have his speech suppressed, and this was done because his speech was causing people to make death threats against the sandy hook parents. I feel like we could classify Jones's speech as intolerant against sandy hook parents, and the same logic applies as for any other type of intolerant speech.
Indeed. And one of the wonders of this is that anyone can determine that you have not abided by the terms. Even Stalin’s Russia was tolerant. It merely deemed many people to not abide by the terms of mutual tolerance.
Look, I'm a nix fan and a former SRE which seems to be a similar background to you. I obviously don't have details but I think it's clear you're not in a good headspace, if you can, would you consider taking a short break and going for a walk or something? HN will still be here.
Good! It should be. Alex Jones is a ghoul making money from dead school shooting victims. Anything that embarrasses him is entitled to as much glee as it wants.