I think there is a way to tell whether this video has had a positive or negative impact. The YouTube video of it has gotten 5.5 million views (of course there are a lot more views if you count the copies and the official CNN video, so Jones has gotten a lot of exposure for the points he raised). Of those there are 18,000 likes to 2,700 dislikes. Based on that, it’s a gain of 6.7 for every loss of one. That’s a huge win for liberty.
I’d also like to say that I’m glad Jones drew a line in the sand for a revolution when they try to take our guns. Many people probably don’t know where their personal line in the sand is, and Jones just helped them make it. Concerning craziness, it’s good that he said that part about a new 1776 with passion and a hint of craziness, making the politicians think that the people who follow Jones might just be crazy enough to actually start a revolution unlike the cowardly British and Australians.
Reagan sent B-2 bombers in attack formation towards the USSR and had them break off just before they got into Russian airspace. He did it so that they would think he just might be crazy enough to be unafraid of doing something ballsy. Alex Jones has done the same for us.
This is what Daniel James Sanchez said about this on Facebook: People may say Alex Jones was over the top, but I disagree. Bootlicking tools like Piers Morgan need to be called out to their face for exactly what they are. The fact that Jones did that to both Morgan and the TSA on the SAME day makes him a bad-ass and a freaking hero.
…Alex wasn’t hysterical. He was passionate and talking fast and forcefully to make the most of the opportunity. As for rudeness, manners are context-specific. In a private conversation, that certainly would have been rude. But, given that Morgan is using his enormous platform to help disarm a whole country, calling him out in the strongest, most frank terms cannot be considered rude.
As much as Morgan represents the establishment elite, Jones was representing tens of thousands of ordinary Americans in this televised exchange. By saying, in no uncertain terms, “NO WAY” to Morgan, he effectively said that to the establishment itself for us. Any members of the power elite who watch this exchange may get the message that Americans are serious about not being disarmed.
According to this article, Swann’s stats are wrong. It appears that he lifted his data wholesale from a story in the Daily Mail, without checking it.
The gist of the article can be summarized with this quote: "The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports defines a ‘violent crime’ as one of four specific offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
The British Home Office, by contrast, has a substantially different definition of violent crime. The British definition includes all ‘crimes against the person,’ including simple assaults, all robberies, and all ‘sexual offenses,’ as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and ‘forcible rapes.’
When you look at how this changes the meaning of ‘violent crime,’ it becomes clear how misleading it is to compare rates of violent crime in the US and the UK. You’re simply comparing two different sets of crimes.
…Due to fundamental differences in how crime is recorded and categorized, it’s impossible to compute exactly what the British violent crime rate would be if it were calculated the way the FBI does it, but if we must compare the two, my best estimate would be something like 776 violent crimes per 100,000 people. While this is still substantially higher than the rate in the United States, it’s nowhere near the 2,034 cited by Swann and the Mail.
…At best, Swaan is giving gun enthusiasts bad reasons to support the Second Amendment when perfectly good reasons are already available."
While I agree that the talking heads on TV need to be called out to their faces, Alex Jones is not the right guy to do it. The dude is a wackjob, and comes off to your average citizen as a lunatic. It doesn’t help that he also throws in references to 9/11, chem trails, etc.
Seriously, the fact that 9/11 truthers and chemtrail people were often attached to anti-Federal Reserve messages was what kept me away from the liberty movement for a LOOONNGGG time. Jones should not be our spokesperson. The resounding reaction I’ve seen to his apperance has been negative. Jesse Ventura would be a better spokesperson, if only he would clean himself up, ha. A strong message is the core, but you need to have a good image too to get anywhere.
Or we could just let everyone present themselves and their cases however they want and let everyone else use their brains (or not) to pick the people and the arguments that make sense to them. Sometimes AJ makes a lot of sense to me – sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes I like his presentation/behavior, sometimes I don’t. He could be a disinfo agent – or maybe not. I’m fine with that since I’m neither marrying him nor electing him as my shepherd/leader. The liberty “movemement” doesn’t need a spokesperson.
That said, I tend to agree with Anarcho-libertarian and Daniel James Sanchez’s take on the event.
Yeah personally I don’t need a spokesman? And to whom do they speak? Oh that’s right. People who’s opinion not only doesn’t matter to me, but pathetic creatures I wouldn’t piss on if they were burning, but just might consider doing it if they were drowning. God forbid someone who isn’t me “embarrasses” himself in front of people even he can’t see and will never meet. How dare he do that to me!
Liberty movement? Bah… It’s a beauty pageant.
“our”?
Well yeah, when you watch CNN’s own coverage, and read Huffington Post, that’s the kind of “reaction” I would expect, wouldn’t you?
You do realize literally everything you just said to delegitimize Jones could be said about Ventura…right?
Wow Ben Swann just knocked the heck out of Morgan.
Where I come from that’s called Pawnage.
You noticed this, too… LOL
Clayton -
Right, but the gist of what he said remains intact. Thanks for the info though.
“Facts, schmacts. You can use facts to prove anything that’s even vaguely true” - Homer Simpson
Good luck with the “facts” arguments with this kind of stuff. There are enough places that track statistics on various things that anyone can find them to prove about anything…
Also, as per the thread title, Jones is an embarrassment in general. It is insulting to my intelligence to be constantly reminded of his “method.”
If people need info from academia concerning the ongoing situation that Jones rants ignorantly about. They can have at any of these incredibly more useful tools (I’ll forgo the stuff from Rothbard since it is…here):
Propaganda and Persuasion - Sage Publications# The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy - Farrar, Straus and Giroux (because no university dare publish it…)# Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History - Cambridge University Press# Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management - South End Press# American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission - Cambridge University Press# NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe - Routledge# Handbook of Intelligence Studies - Routledge# For Reasons of State - New Press# Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion - Cambridge University Press
“Facts, schmacts. You can use facts to prove anything that’s even vaguely true” - Homer Simpson
I always wondered about Britain’s violent crime rate stated at 2000 per 100k population. I know that’s a wild exaggeration, as I used to live there for some time. But these are the numbers that people use, to make the case for/ against gun control. Never mind that the methology for collecting data is different from country to country. I think opponents/ proponents can do better than that.
@Anarcho-libertarian: That article is beating its fists at the air… it is pointless contrarianism.
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“The US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world.” → The article “refutes” this claim by pointing out that many gun owners own more than one gun so the total number of guns in the US does not automatically translate to the number of gun-owning households. But this is just sophism… ceteris paribus, anywhere else in the world that gun ownership is legal, presumably there is the same phenomenon of many gun owners having more than one gun, thus causing the same difference between gun-households and total guns owned. Therefore, the highest number of guns per capita is prima facie evidence of the claim “highest gun ownership rate in the world” where “rate” is understood to mean the ratio of gun-households to non-gun-households. Which leads to the second rebuff of this nonsense: “rate” could just as well simply mean “per capita”… the ratio of guns to people. My bet is that this is what Swann meant.
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“In the UK there are 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people. …The US has a violent crime rate of 466 [violent] crimes per 100,000 residents.” → While Swann does not point out the difference in the definition of violent crimes, I strongly doubt he has already admitted he made a mistake in citing these numbers without clarification and is issuing his correction. In any case, he did not attempt to infer from these stats that therefore guns cause less crime, which cannot be said of Piers Morgan and other anti-gun advocates who are attempting to make an ad hoc causal theory from the statistics: more guns means more crime (in particular, more multiple-victim public shootings).
Clayton -
Piers Morgan had to find someone easier to make look crazy than Jesse Ventura:
Also, I want to underscore the importance of what is being swept under the rug by these gun debates: the social causes of violence. We can go back to Alfred Nock, Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, Lew Rockwell and Roderick Long to get the simple answer: the political means… the war principle… social parasitism… rejection of the golden rule (privilege)… these are all different ways of looking at the same social phenomenon. They are all different manifestations of the same underlying moral rot. The only solution to this problem is a moral reformation put into action by the uncompromising withdrawal of all who are convicted by the moral truth of the message of peace and productivity to withdraw from the political means and to evade victimization by those who practice the political means.
Demonizing guns is typical of the externalization of a hypocritical culture. A licentious culture will blame the prostitutes. A gluttonous culture will blame the farmers and the bakers. A lazy culture will blame the productive and competitive. And so on. Our violent, hypocritical, war-worshipping culture naturally blames the guns.
Clayton -
And lest we forget drugs, from a link in **this **post by Aristophanes:
**
Clayton:
Excellent point.
What do you mean by this?
Perhaps I should have written: “rejection of the golden rule (that is, supporting a system of privilege)”. Does that clarify it? The golden rule immediately implies peaceful co-existence (non-aggression)… rejection of the golden rule is an assertion of privilege… “I’m entitled to hit you over the head but you may not hit me over the head”… it is the foundation of the political means.
Clayton -
Here in Brazil we have a guy called Diogo Costa who was on this debate about drugs. He was extremely polite, soft spoken and made all the austrian arguments about drug legalization.
The other guys were like “You are right, but I don’t agree with you”. What is quite a contradiction, Sphairon is right, people are not ready, refuse to have a libertarian stance even when it is obvious. New ideas cause a shock that breeds doublethink.