The reality is that people do have a choice and don’t have to believe every nasty thing some other person says.
#Illustrate antonym free#
Moreover, given that people are free to ignore the accusations of Person A, it is especially absurd to assume that Person A is somehow responsible if Person C then uses the opinion of Person A as a reason to inflict some kind of harm on Person B. Similarly, there is no reason why anyone must believe the latest theories spun by Alex Jones. Rather, we are to assume that people are robots who believe everything they are told. If Person A says nasty things about Person B, we are supposed to assume that people do not have the freedom to reject the accusations and ignore them. Yet, this is what the logic of defamation assumes. The idea of defamation as a punishable legal matter is based on the notion that people do not have free will and are not responsible for their own actions.įor example, if a stranger tells me that my neighbor is a pedophile, I have no reason to automatically believe the accuser. The idea that Jones is somehow guilty for the acts of third parties he doesn’t even know follows from the basic twisted logic of defamation laws. (Actual threats of violence directed at specific persons are dangerous, but are not what we are talking about here, and that’s not what Jones has been accused of.) In a society which does not respect free speech, however, merely saying words is apparently grounds of levying fines of hundreds of millions of dollars. In a free society, a private citizen saying things that other people are free to ignore is not punishable by law. But it appears that Jones has been convicted here of simply saying things that the jury and the plaintiffs found objectionable. The real guilty parties here are the people who have committed acts of harassment. If people have harassed the parents, of course, that’s a crime for which the actual harassers are responsible. It’s difficult to see, then, how Jones actually inflicted any actual damages on his supposed “victims” in this case. Jones is being ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because some other people-who were not acting under any orders from Jones-allegedly committed some crimes on their own. The harassment allegedly also includes the desecration of the graves of victims. (He has since said he thinks the shootings were real.) Some of Jones’s listeners chose to agree with Jones’s claims that the shootings did not occur, and this allegedly informed the decisions by some listeners to engage in the harassment of some of the parents of murdered children.Įssentially, Jones was found guilty of saying things that supposedly inspired other people to say cruel and disrespectful things to the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. In the years following the massacre, Jones repeatedly stated that he thinks the shootings were staged and that the purported parents were so-called crisis actors. In the latest demonstration of the absurdity of defamation laws, radio show host Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $965 million to people who didn’t like things Jones said about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.
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