Alex jones - hero, anti-hero or villain?

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I wonder if there's a limit, to how many times it can be used, before it just completely breaks functionality.

A right winger complaining about conspiracy theorists!

I totally hear you on the time and patience thing, I'm absolutely not kidding when I call it an obsession, I'm not normal at all here, and I really do try to account for that when interacting with other people, with varying degrees of success. I'm in a bit of a conundrum because I know I can't expect other people to follow anything close to my media diet, it's insane and a personal compulsion of mine, but I also do usually have a stronger understanding of current events than most people, at least within the US, and sometimes it's hard to channel "No, You're Wrong!! !" into something more constructive.

As to the both sides thing, I live in a progressive area, went to a weird hippie alternative school with hard left teachers and students who became the base of my friend group, and then went to gunsmithing school out of state with far right people and am immersed in that world due to my hobbies, so my views are, uh, complicated. Like my media habits, my personal life and friend group are weird, and again, while I know that I'm the odd man out here, that doesn't always come out constructively when I think someone is speaking ill of people I know without really knowing about them.

I'm just going to throw in here that I'm on a new med today that seems to be chilling me out and making me talkative, in case you were wondering; we'll see if it sticks, I kinda like this version of me, more like my offline persona in that I'm actually pretty friendly for the most part.

Why would I do that when there are much more defensible gun rights advocates out there? This is what projection is, you can't imagine why I might do something, so you assume that I must be acting like you would, when in fact I process things very differently than you. I don't care at all about the specifics of Alex Jones' politics, I don't even think you can call him left or right wing, I'm just using him to illustrate a point about knowledge.

There is very little speech that I think ought to be legally punishable, a shock jock speculating that a mass shooting might have been faked for political purposes does not rise to that threshold.

Just because it's the only reason you can think of doesn't mean it's the only one, I think we've well established that by now. And no, I'd be happy for the Democrats to come around on gun rights, but instead they've gone full ret*d, so I can't support them.

Do you actually know what "partisan" means? I base my political preferences on positions, not parties, which I'd think you would have noticed by now, were you not so invested in not knowing things that are inconvenient to your worldview. I'm a Bush to Obama to Johnson to Jorgenson voter, kinda blows up your theory there.

Okay Dox -
If your defense of Jones isn't related to your gun rights obsession, then what's it about? You don't seem to care about the real emotional damage Jones has caused the parents of the Sandy Hook dead. So just what justifies the emotional wounds Jones has inflicted on those people? Please don't tell me that he's been misrepresented by the media, because we both know that's not the case.

I think this is where the anti-woke movement championed by the right fall over is they don't seem to care the damage they do the mental health of those who are actually victimised and their families.

A number of users on this forum quote Thomas Sowell and I've watched his videos. While he is articulate and attempts to be intellectual, he comes across as uncaring with little empathy for the plight of many of his own people (he's African American). Unless you have blinkers on its obvious he is openly denigrating African Americans the same way as Larry Elder and Candace Owens.

You're still missing my point, what I'm trying to do is get you to see that everything you think you know about Jones comes from being told about him by people with agendas, you wouldn't know if you were being lied to or not because you're not willing to check. Jones may well be every bit as bad as you think, but he also might not be, you just don't know for sure, but you think that you do.

If you notice, I haven't even really defended him, I've simply questioned the narrative around him and pointed out that he's far from the only purveyor of conspiracy theories out there, but he is the one who's painted as this evil boogeyman because it's in the interest of a lot of people to do so. I stated my opinion pretty early in the thread, I don't watch his show but occasionally enjoy him as a guest on other shows for entertainment purposes and as a mental exercise in hearing some truly out there theorizing, which helps me keep an open mind.

For me, there's also the open question of is there something actually wrong with him, as that would cast his ravings in a completely different light, kind of like a diminished capacity defense. If he truly believes what he's saying, it's hard to prove actual malice, he's just spinning theories that some of his fans took too seriously, and I don't see how you can say that someone isn't allowed to discuss conspiracy theories in public because someone might take them the wrong way and do something bad because of it.

This doesn't really have anything to do with wokeness, this is about a conspiracy theorist whose fans harassed people because they believed his theories, wokeness is all about identity politics, and those aren't present here.



Sowell is interesting, he was a Marxist as a young man and became disenchanted with that ideology as he aged, which makes him a good critic of Marxism, as he can accurately point out the issues with it as someone who is very familiar with it from the inside rather than going off of observations from the outside.

He doesn't denigrate blacks, he actually believes they are a strong and resilient people, and that the best way to help them is not to coddle them with handouts and set asides, but by treating them as equals who can succeed on a level playing field. He's also not afraid to call out cultural pathologies within black American culture that hold them back, such as anti-intellectualism, honor culture that creates tit for tat cycles of violence and retaliation, glorification of criminal lifestyles, etc. His book Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a must read despite being a bit dated, he compares what is generally thought of as contemporary, "authentic" black culture to white "redneck" culture, pointing out the many similarities, and convincingly arguing that this style of black culture is actually derived from the poor whites they were most commonly in contact with going back to slavery, violent, clannish border people who were frequently spoken of in similar terms to blacks well into the mid 20th century. Even their dialects are similar, with certain southern and Appalachian whites speaking in a manner that sounds "black" to the modern ear.

I feel this is a common mistake on the left, believing that the "tough love" approach often favored by the right means they don't care, rather than recognizing it as a different approach to the same set of issues. John McWhorter, who's as liberal as they come has a similar philosophy, feeling downright insulted by the belief that his people are so damaged that they need all sorts of special treatment in order to succeed when other groups, including black immigrants, do not, despite facing the same structural obstacles that native born black Americans do, and some they do not such as language barriers and culture shock. McWhorter also fears that programs like affirmative action in college admissions actually contribute to racism in that they put black professionals under a cloud of suspicion regarding whether they actually earned their qualifications through hard work and study, or were let in under the bar in the name of racial justice. His go to examples are pilots and surgeons, as in if you got on a plane and saw that the pilot was black and knew that black pilots may have been admitted to flight school and allowed to graduate with lower scores, would you be comfortable on that flight, or if you were about to be operated on by a black surgeon, how could you not help but wonder if they were truly the most qualified knowing they could have gotten in and graduated under the bar? McWhorter himself was the beneficiary of an affirmative action program, and he's often said he regretted that, as it's robbed him of some of the pride of his accomplishments, knowing that he wasn't held to the same standards as his classmates.

My first girlfriend, who was black, came from the most stereotypical broken home imaginable, rampant drug abuse by both parents, multiple relatives in jail, including her brother who literally shot two people in a drug deal gone wrong about a week after we started dating, physical and sexual abuse, etc, was one of the most driven people I've ever known, taught herself multiple foreign languages including Mandarin and German (Chinese people reacting to a black girl addressing them in their own language never got old) and got herself a degree in linguistics with a minor in computer science without any assistance (and now makes way more money than me). She got taunted constantly by other black people for "acting white", taking school seriously, speaking without a blaccent, and otherwise doing everything in her power to escape the culture she came from as she didn't want to end up like her relatives, and she's hardly a unique story, I've met many black people like her with similar stories, they weren't being held back by racism, structural or otherwise, but by the culture they came from. Black thinkers like Sowell, McWhorter, Glenn Loury Thomas Chatterton Williams and others like them recognize this and want to change this culture, and think the liberal/progressive approach, particularly its modern woke incarnation, is not just the wrong approach but actively harmful, for the reasons I've mentioned and others.

To sum up, they, and I, are not anti woke because we think less of black people and other minorities or want to keep them down, but because we want to see them succeed, and think the older MLK style colorblind approach is the better way to achieve this.

Last edited by Dox47 on 15 Jan 2022, 6:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

If you don't watch his show, then very likely it's you who doesn't have a grasp of what sort of waste of working human organs he is. And that's exactly what a person with no human sympathy or empathy is.
Sure, there's something wrong with Jones. His severest critics know that there is. Regardless, there are plenty of people in prison or even on death row who suffer from severe mental illness but still know what crimes they had committed were wrong. I have no doubt that Jones fully understands what pain he's caused to those grieving parents with the lies and hysteria he spread solely for the sake of ratings.

Notice though that I'm saying I don't really know, while you're claiming to have perfect knowledge based on second hand information. That is my whole point here, you truly can't seem to grasp that there is the possibility that you don't know the whole story, where as I'm far more cautious despite being generally better informed. The funny thing here is, while I'm the "arrogant" one, I'm not claiming to know things I don't, while you are; Jones might be absolutely as guilty and awful as you claim, but I'm not so sure, and I'm unwilling to commit because I don't want to watch years of AJ videos in order to consider myself informed enough to render judgment, while you're happy to make absolutist pronouncements based on second hand information from non-impartial sources.

Also, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm an absolute bleeding heart when it comes to the justice system, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the fact that we have people in prison, let alone on death row that may not have even realized that they did anything wrong, so you're barking up the wrong tree there.

Last edited by Dox47 on 15 Jan 2022, 6:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

What is your understanding of why he made them?

He's a conspiracy theorist, and that shooting was very helpful in pushing gun control, a longtime goal of the Democratic party, and Barack Obama in particular.

If you're not familiar with this debate, it might not make a lot of sense, but there is in fact a long history of shenanigans around mass shootings and Democrats, though not rising to the level of actually faking one for political gain, more like lying and mischaracterizing them in order to push their agenda. A good example would be the Pulse shooting in Florida, that was reported as an anti gay hate crime for years, I still see people make that claim on occasion, even though the FBI rather quickly determined that that wasn't the case, the shooter was a self radicalized ISIS terrorist, and he picked the club essentially at random after his first choice had too much security, in fact he was reported to have asked where all the women were because he didn't realize it was a gay bar. Parkland was another example, Democrats pushed for a magazine capacity ban after that, even though the shooter used 10 round magazines, the usual proposed limit, because they were easier to conceal in his backpack, and they presented the March for Our Lives movement as a spontaneous student led movement, when it was funded and organized by Michael Bloomberg's anti gun organization based on a contingency plan they had stashed in a drawer for just such an opportunity. That shooting also had clear warning signs that were ignored, as well as a cowardly cop who hid outside rather than confronting the shooter, but that was largely glossed over by the media who overwhelmingly support gun control. There's more, the sites that claim to track mass shootings who lump gang related shootings in to pump up the numbers when most people think of a mass shooting as a random attack on strangers or include shootings involving BB guns, as well as calling any shooting near a school as a school shooting, even when it happened after hours and didn't involve students. Then there's the classic move, talking about "gun deaths" as if they are all murders when 2/3 are suicides and lumping in self defense shootings while ignoring defensive gun usage that don't involve shots fired, e.g. flashing a gun at an attacker to deter them, which by some estimates happen over a million times a year in the US, and other such trickery.

Basically, while Jones was wrong to claim that the whole thing was faked, I kinda get where he was coming from as a conspiracy theorist, there's a ton of bad information and outright lies out there when it comes to gun crime generally and mass shootings in particular.

Now, if you want me to get conspiratorial, the Las Vegas shooting is a much better candidate. The shooter was old, much out of the usual age group that commits such crimes, he planned it for a long time but chose inferior weaponry compared to what he could have bought with his resources and clean record, using commonly available firearms and bump-stocks when he could have purchased an actual belt fed machine gun that would have been far more effective, he used a smorgasbord of popular AR rifles, giving gun controllers maximum ammunition to agitate for bans, and there are still many unanswered questions about the crime across the board, it's far weirder than any other US mass shooting. That being said, I still believe the guy was just nuts and chose the weapons he did because he thought that was just how mass shooters did things, but if I were going to spin a conspiracy theory about a mass shooting, that would be the one.

I don't need to have experienced the holocaust and the Blitzkrieg to know that Hitler was evil. In the case with Jones, I don't need to go beyond so called second hand sources to know that he's a dirtbag who caused unforgiveable harm to those parents. It's inane to say otherwise.

No, you just don't know any better, and are too stubborn to learn.