https://x.com/captgouda24/status/1805764880294707632
Quantifying emotional distress with money is always a crapshoot. That's why I think the parents of the Sandy Hook kids should be allowed to shoot Alex Jones and then claim he was a crisis actor.
Definition of crisis actor as per VICE:
a cohort of “crisis actors”—who they claim are fed lines and paid to appear on TV—are putting out a false narrative about what really happened
You think Jones is writing everything he puts out? I think we might have a case here. /rj
For good things
Supports the deliberate creation of an addiction crisis which has claimed over a hundred thousand lives in the name of profit
As far as I'm concerned the Sacklers deserve a taste of their own "medicine."
The Sacklers deserve what happened to the Sackler family stand-ins in Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher.
They definitely shouldn't have paid a penny.
They should have been first in line for the reintroduction of the guillitone and then assets seized and distributed to those whose lives they ruined and continue to ruin.
But paid? Heavens no.
i vote we keep him as court jester and every time he acts up we throw him in the gay frog chemicals pit
They're really trying to push this idea that Jones is only being punished because he said something true. Not because he's a monster and lied about the deaths of children.
The dollar amount of the award is meant punitively- not just restoratively. The judge(s) and jury(ies) involved know Alex Jones didn't "cause $1.5B in damages."
Well, for one, how do you measure emotional damage including things like being told you never had a kid, you're a fake, your kid didn't die, etc. when you did have a kid, your kid did die, and you aren't faking... obviously. These awards for emotional damages or loss of hypothetical income, etc. will always be "made up" to right wingers (the OP post seems to be a liberal ie right wing/reactionary) because they want to just view the world as private property and that's it basically. If Jones had destroyed a neighborhood they'd probably agree $1.5B is fine, but because he "only" used his platform to allow for and at times actively push for harassment of these parents, they don't see real damage occurring.
I'm reminded of the hot McDonald's coffee spill lady that people still mock even though her thighs got actually super fucked up by essentially boiling water spilling. They act like McDonald's should only be on the hook, at most, for medical bills and lost work time type stuff, not anything extra as a punishment.
The insane award is basically the point. It's not an indictment of Jones' content per se, no court has commented on his other material to my knowledge, it's a condemnation of his repeated illegal targeting of victims even after being told to stop, even after being sued, even while the case was ongoing in court, and still he continues to play the victim, pretend he did nothing wrong, etc.
If Jones had on a guy who said these parents were faking one time immediately after the shooting and he pushed back like "that doesn't sound correct." And then never brought on anymore denier guests and never revisited the topic... no one would be targeting him. But he did keep pursuing the topic and he never denounced (not until years later anyway and he flip flops on it) the lies told on his network.
Basically this is one example of one time the justice system is kind of working as intended. It's too bad it's so rare and that it takes such aggressively hostile actions to get this response from courts.
I'd love to see corporations suffer the same fates. Hit Apple with a $1.5T judgement for their refusal to abide by the recent EU laws including allowing sideloading worldwide forever with no limits. You can't restrict stuff to certain areas in a global market or you're still violating the law anytime some rando Dutchmen flies to New York. Anyway, side tracked there, but similar idea that courts do this to make a point and force changes. It's the way it's "supposed" to work under capitalism, where the idea is less direct government control. The balance to that is supposed to be the government still coming in and squashing egregious cases of abuse. (Supposed to, rarely happens though)
Obviously, Alex Jones didn't cause 1.5 billion dollars worth of damages, but he dug that hole for himself when he behaved like the stupid asshole he is in front of the judge and jury.
Idk how you put an objective monetary value on the damage he did. Like one of the parents commited suicide over what he did.
Pretty sure twitter got worse with stuff like this since Musk took over. Anecdotal, but even with all the wild BS twitter had, I could swear it used to have more of a veneer of decency on the surface at least. Now it seems like every other post that has a mildly "human decency" perspective has got accounts flooding it with stuff that reads like astroturfing for the capitalist, imperialist order.
And I know the porn bots got worse on there (that's easy to see and I've not been the only one to mention it) so if those bots are getting through, it would stand to reason other bots may be getting through more as well. Not to say there aren't real people who push this stuff, but the sheer amount of it is hard to believe as authentic "deep in propaganda" posting. And with LLMs being how they are now, it's feasible to produce bots who can write more coherent and human-sounding BS.
