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Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> I lack the vocabulary and metaphorcraft necessary to even begin to break down such a false equivalence Odd given it was your comment, not the one you're replying to, that first drew the analogy.

yes, I brought up another event and compared and contrasted the two, with the intent of demonstrating how the two things are not equivalent, yet the demonstrably more impactful media falsehood campaign remains wholly unpunished, contrasted with this situation, which is being punished rather dramatically. fairity characterized these two events as directly equivalent ("most here would agree that was equally vile and punishable. Two wrongs don't make a right.").

how's that "odd"?

-- edit, because I'm still Posting Too Fast, somehow: --

with the load-bearing word "equally" removed, your response to my post begins:

> Bringing up unpunished propaganda during the Bush era is irrelevant when most here would agree that was vile and punishable. Two wrongs don't make a right.

what conversation are you trying to have? "bad things are bad?" comparing and contrasting formally similar situations (media lies) with differing magnitudes (independent media organization calling single-digit number of individuals lying paid actors vs. an organized propaganda campaign that manufactured civilian consent for a foreign-soil invasion leading to a six-digit death toll) and the outcomes thereof (nearly a billion in fines vs. no punishment whatsoever) is not worth discussing?

the point of my post was to demonstrate how unpunished coordinated mainstream media lies are, by using an example of something that happened in the lifetime of nearly everyone who reads HN and basically everyone agrees was a concerted effort in willfully propagandistically disseminating misinformation, which resulted in wide-scale death and destruction, completely without any punishment of any kind whatsoever, to this day. then you compare and contrast that with Alex Jones, whom you have been told repeatedly by mainstream media outlets is a terrible, terrible person, for defaming about a handful of individuals to his audience (which is sizable, but not on the scale of "everyone in the US paying attention to the news, pre-social media, in the 2000s, in the wake of 9/11").

how is anyone supposed to come away from this thinking justice has been served in any way?

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#252
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alex was free to say it and the people he defamed were free to sue him for saying it. Alex was free to hire competent legal counsel for the trial(s), and he hired a bunch of wacky, like-minded nincompoops instead. There were so many points in this saga where Alex could have made decisions that would have made the outcome less severe and he doubled down almost every time instead. Even as the last trial was wrapping up…

> There is such a thing as consequences for your actions. A system which produces effects extrinsically equivalent to direct proscriptions on free speech is not better than a system which explicitly proscribes some speech, and is arguably worse, because it tricks credulous people into thinking it's not as bad.

Do you believe there is any kind of speech that is appropriate to have consequences for, or is there literally no line that could be crossed in your world view?

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#253
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the kind of thing a jury of your peers could decide. Kind of like what happened in this case. It also bears mentioning that the gulf between "it's going to rain" and "the parents of murdered children are actually 'deep-state' actors aiding a conspiracy to take away your rights" is vast.

Neither contains a call to action.

I don't think that's a great standard. For example if I consistently call a group of people subhuman and vermin that should not exist I may not have a call to action but the ideology I'm promoting is pretty clear. It's not unreasonable to hold me accountable when a member of my audience decides to attack an individual from the group I'm dehumanizing. Nor is it unreasonable for a member of that group to sue me.

And again, the grey areas here seem like the kind of thing that a jury is able to decide. Alex wasn't found guilty by executive order from the president.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person” and other variations are usually used in a facetious manner. Basically, it’s sarcasm. The people using this turn of phrase are effectively saying “good, he deserves it for being a bad person”.

Yes, the comment here is noting the irony of how those words apply differently here.

yes, I'm a native english speaker, I was pointing out exactly that

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#255
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Okay bud. The common law has been developing for hundreds of years. It is an extraordinary institution and an important part of Western traditions. At its best, the common law has allowed a finely balanced rule to develop - not in a vacuum, but incrementally and iteratively proven in thousands of real-world cases. Some of the best minds of our civilizations have tussled over these guidelines, and the more lawsuits th…

I much prefer the civil code.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#256

The people who released opioids upon the American public didn't get fines like this. Insane

Cigarettes kill 7x as many as opiates in the USA every hour, day, week, month, and year.

Those companies aren't even fined or put behind a prescription-wall.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#257
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there ever was such a country, would people want to live there? And if they wouldn’t, doesn’t that just mean it would change? I can’t see how some form of free speech absolutism would even function. As for the size of the damages: in the US, weirdly, rich people pay more damages because I assume it’s also a way of making them stop committing the crime and not simply compensation for damage done.

Yes, I think people should be able to tweet things like “masks do/don’t” work without being able to be sued. It’s the same thing with covid. It was made illegal to question it

> It’s the same thing with covid. It was made illegal to question it

It was not

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#258
post #213

To the free speech purists in this thread, I have a hypothetical I'm curious about: What if it happened to you? Let's imagine that a media source with millions of viewers - like a local news channel, for example, or a radio show, went live with a story that had specific and false allegations that you did something odious. Like they said you were a cannibal or a pedophile or something like that. And as a result, you w…

What if you performed simple public records requests and realized that this whole event stinks to high heaven and that it was immediately politicized by politicians and billionaire media elites to suppress the rights of American citizens?

There always has to be room to question events that dominate the news cycle.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#259
post #250
post #72

"CIVIL-RIGHTS LAWYER NARRATOR: But punitive-damages awards aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy. So Alex Jones will be paying off these debts from wage garnishments, attachments, & sheriff’s sales of his stuff for the rest of his wretched, pathetic, worthless life." from: https://twitter.com/SubodhChandra/status/1580285453348921344

Honest question - could Jones sue Subodh Chandra for defamation given that his life was just valued at at least a billion dollars by a jury?

Pretty sure it was the jury that decided that

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn't lie in the 1970s or 1980s. If you did, you would be sued for libel or slander (depending on how exactly you lied). In the 90s, 00s, and 10s, we somehow forgot about libel / slander laws. I'm happy to see that something as egregious as Alex's Jones's lies here are finally getting punished, but I'd like to see more protection from libel/slander in modern 2020s era America. ------ Lies, traditionally speaki…

Lies are covered by the first amendment. There is a rather narrow exception for lies that can be proven to have harmed somebody, and you can prove that they knew that they were acting negligently (i.e. knew that it would case harm and knew that it was false). Those are very high bars to meet. Beyond that, you can lie your head off. Jones has been lying for decades. This is the first time that it was so egregious that…

> acting negligently

> knew that it was false

Wrong. The bar for negligence is "should have performed X, but failed to do so".

Ex: A toddler dying by falling off a deck is negligence. The homeowner "should have repaired the deck", but failed to do so. (This bar would lead to negligent homicide or manslaughter, depending on jurisdiction).

Similarly, a journalist "should have done basic research", but failed to do so, is negligence. Its a much easier bar than "malice" (ie: knew it was false, but lied anyway).

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