By parents whose children were slaughtered. Alex Jones intimidated, harassed and lied about those parents. They deserve our empathy. And you know what? So does Alex Jones.
But extending empathy to someone does not mean you give that person what they want. It's possible to empathize with Alex Jones for what he is: a deeply disturbed man who has hurt many people and who regularly engages in either outright lies or unhinged self-deception.
Being empathic does not mean we leave our brains at the door, it means being thoughtful and respectful and when Joe Rogan continues to provide a platform for Alex Jones he is showing an extraordinary lack of respect for the parents and families of the children who were killed.
True empathy extended toward Mr. Jones would be to reach out as a friend and tell him what he needs to hear: He needs to get serious help.
There are a lot of interviewers who would have both Shapiro and Sanders on, so your point on that is just not relevant. Most of those interviewers would not touch Alex Jones with a six foot.
I have a real problem with people "deciding" who "gets" to have a platform.
I have no problem with individual social media sites setting their own policies as to who they will allow a voice on their site.
I have a big problem when people go further than that, and try to prevent certain people from having any platform anywhere. They'll go after hosting, after advertisers, after anything they can to completely shut a person down.
It is so unbelievably naive to think that those tools of suppression won't be used against everyone at some point in the future. The collective track record of human governments throughout history with regards to human rights has been, and currently is, absolute dogshit.
Whether the true point of "common carrier" should be the internet backbone, I don't know. But there needs to be a point where anyone can run a site to put forth their views, no matter how any individual feels about those views. The problem with restricting speech is that everyone's idea of acceptable free speech infringements is different, and the devil is in the details with something so vitally important.
Like it or not, Jones is in the popular zeitgeist - or was. One could make the argument that Rogan having him on exposed him to people who hadn't gone down the Info Wars rabbit hole and now he's somewhat faded from relevance. Jones came off utterly unhinged, you're right. But isn't this a kind of control mechanism for what gets in the popular narrative?
>There are a lot of interviewers who would have both Shapiro and Sanders on, so your point on that is just not relevant.
Who? Shapiro, an orthodox Jew, is repeatedly slandered as a white supremacist. I'm pretty skeptical that mainstream interviewers who would love to interview Sanders would touch Shapiro. Not necessarily because they aren't interested, but because of the potential wrath from their regular viewers/listeners. Rogan just doesn't have that kind of polarized following, at least it doesn't appear so to me. Interviews with people like Sanders garner just as much interest as his interviews with e.g. Bret Weinstein. People show up because it's interesting, not because they're looking for confirmation of their own views.
By parents whose children were slaughtered. Alex Jones intimidated, harassed and lied about those parents. They deserve our empathy. And you know what? So does Alex Jones.
But extending empathy to someone does not mean you give that person what they want. It's possible to empathize with Alex Jones for what he is: a deeply disturbed man who has hurt many people and who regularly engages in either outright lies or unhinged self-deception.
Being empathic does not mean we leave our brains at the door, it means being thoughtful and respectful and when Joe Rogan continues to provide a platform for Alex Jones he is showing an extraordinary lack of respect for the parents and families of the children who were killed.
True empathy extended toward Mr. Jones would be to reach out as a friend and tell him what he needs to hear: He needs to get serious help.
There are a lot of interviewers who would have both Shapiro and Sanders on, so your point on that is just not relevant. Most of those interviewers would not touch Alex Jones with a six foot.