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0 pointsjerkstate7y ago0 comments

Alex Jones is political humor, have you ever listened to his show? It's like the right wing version of Daily Show, John Oliver, Weekend Update, Bill Maher, or Colbert. Maybe you don't find it entertaining but other people do. By the way he was recently on Joe Rogan and was contrite about calling Sandy Hook crisis actors, he insists it was a hot take and he corrected himself when the situation became more clear. By the way, if you want to hold the left wing media to the same standards about harassment as you are Alex Jones, the world is still waiting for corrections and apologies from most of those shows about getting the Covington kids story wrong and in some cases calling for doxing and violence.

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joshuamorton7y ago· 1 in thread

"it's all a joke" is only a valid defense when like you actually market yourself as a comedian or satire (like Stewart, Oliver, Colbert, Maher and snl do).

And I reject your comparison to Covington for a host of reasons. Some of which include:

- no one arrested for attempts against the Covington kids

- the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake

- those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.

This "both sides are the same" talking point is garbage.

jerkstateOP7y ago

> - no one arrested for attempts against the Covington kids

There are ongoing investigations by law enforcement for threats made against the kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lInBTiL32Qo - Credible threats are not free speech.

> - the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake

You can have an opinion about what the kids could have to attempt to de-escalate and hypothesize about whether that would have led to a "better" outcome, but you can't point to anything that they did that they should not have done, unlike the other people in the story. What really happened was few frames of video were captioned and spread by a likely foreign agent: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/technology/covington-vide... and that set many peoples opinions - which has not fully been updated now that more information is available.

> - those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.

You can't really make that claim so soon from when the event happened. Some people still think the Covington kids were instigating conflict with that Native American guy and the Black Israelites, and some people believe that Sandy Hook were crisis actors. They will surely talk about it for a long time as long as they believe it's relevant.

I agree that the magnitude of harm is different - but not a completely different universe. However the reaction by mainstream media and tech platforms couldn't be more opposite. I hope you will at least consider that internet censorship is broadly only going one way right now, it is obvious to those being impacted, and really consider what the outcomes could be if taken to the limit. Listen to the recent Joe Rogan podcast with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey, and Vijaya Gadde (Twitter trust and safety) for quite a few examples.

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