Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Defamation is free speech now?
No defamation was ever proven in court. It was a default judgement.
Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in such a way that he caused threats In such a way that somebody else decided on their own do something...
I don't know about the US, but incitement to violence is a crime in other countries.
It has fairly strict criteria which Mr. Jones emphatically did not meet. It's referred to as the Brandenburg test, or the "imminent lawless action" test, you can read more here.
Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#633The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me. He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered. He's scum of the earth. That business was taken away from him, and folks think that's too much? What the actual fuck.
To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.
Torts are not just about damage, they're also about deterrence. Jones repeatedly demonstrated in the court battle that no deterrence would work on him.
His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?
Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
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By his own admission, Jones spent years spreading malicious lies about these people. Some people have had to go in to hiding because his unhinged followers started tracking these people down. As soon as you say "I think more gun control might be a good thing to prevent children from being murdered" you get threatened, bullied, and harassed by a lunatic unhinged fringe stoked up by dirty malicious lies. Is this free s…
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Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Onion didn't have the cash. Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars). > It was basically an IOU from one of the families This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any o…
>This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason. You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth…
>>You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly.
Except what if all the creditors prefer that outcome to the "more cash" outcome? If the way it would get divvied up is $499m to you and $1m to me, vs $350m to you and $50m to me (but you get some other benefit that you prefer), why shouldn't that be accepted?
Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I've also never seen video of him inciting people. But supposedly he did? Does someone have the actual evidence?
For one, he specifically gave financial and logistical support to Wolfgang Halbig so that he could harass the families of the victims.
Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#637Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#638Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.
Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
No matter how heinous you may find his speech, in America, under the First Amendment, Jones (or any nutball or even Nazi you may choose to pick) has a right to say it - even if he has a large Radio and Podcast megaphone. The First Amendment is nearly absolute, and must protect unpopular and offensive speech even more than it protects popular speech. (Don't start with the bogus "fire in a crowded theater exception" -…
I don't disagree with you. As much as I'd personally enjoy never hearing from or about him again, I agree that 1A is an extremely important right that should be defended, even if you hate what the person is saying. But free speech does NOT mean freedom from consequences. Taking away infowars does not stop him from continuing to speak his nonsense.
(nb this is not a defense of Alex Jones or the events of the article, please read my whole comment to understand my point)
> But free speech does NOT mean freedom from consequences
Freedom of speech most certainly means freedom from coercive consequences. Or do you think the first amendment merely prevents the government from engaging in physical prior restraint such as putting duct tape over your mouth, and post facto punishment is legal? Ultimately this "consequences" refrain is a broken talking point that was arrived at by people arguing for the attractive cryptofascism of big tech censorship [0].
The right answer is that there are "exceptions" [1] for freedom of speech based on other concepts. For example, forming a contract (especially a verbal one) is done entirely through speech but yet still commits parties to performing other actions in a legally enforceable way. Defamation and harassment are other concepts that get equitably weighed against the ideal of freedom of speech. And those last two are what Jones ran afoul of.
[0] It started off something like "... consequences from private parties" and then the last bit got dropped because the focus wasn't a good faith discussion of freedom but rather a cheering on of the consequences. See also the fake libertarians saying "edgy" things like those who can't afford food should die - their focus isn't really the freedom but rather it's the death.
[1] In actuality they are not exceptions but rather equitable balances. The axiomatic-foundation framing of rights is a dead end, as it intrinsically supports the cryptofascism of denying rights through an ever-increasing amount of preconditions.
Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty…
Selling to a business involved with the individual that lost in court.. It seems like a Fraudulent Conveyance to my non lawyer self (but I could be wrong) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_conveyance
The fraudulent conveyance may have been the move of the vitamin company itself, but the purchase in bankruptcy wouldn't be a fraudulent transation.