Skip to main content

A Form of Psychosis




Alex Jones, of Infowars, has decided that sometimes mass shootings aren't staged. They aren't all "false flags" operations, and apparently the Sandy Hook shooting was one of the real ones.

Further, he has diagnosed himself, saying (in response to a lawsuit by one of the families of the dead children), that he suffers from a "form of psychosis." I'm not sure that diagnosis helps him in the civil case.

Here is Slate's coverage of Jones' latest, with links to others: click at will.

Unfortunate psychosis indeed, from which (1) he has not as yet fully recovered; (2) he only recognizes as such when things aren't going his way in court, and (3) one that he continues to try to create in others.
Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryApril 6, 2019 at 7:12 AM

    Christopher, you raise an excellent question, which I've never thought about: is insanity a defense in a civil (tort) suit? If I recall correctly, a criminal conviction by itself constitutes proof in a tort suit for damages resulting from the criminal conduct. That is because a criminal conviction requires a higher burden of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) than does a civil suit (preponderance of the evidence). So, would a successful assertion of a defense of insanity in a criminal prosecution get the defendant off in a civil suit? Perhaps not, because the mens rea required to be convicted of a crime is not required to be proved in a civil suit. But maybe it depends upon whether the civil suit is for an intentional tort (which it probably would be if the plaintiff is suing for damages resulting from the defendant's criminal conduct), in which case the defendant could argue that he lacked the intention to commit an intentional tort; or the suit is for negligence, in which case the defendant's state of mind might not matter.

    The above comments are off the top of my head and not the product of legal research.

    ReplyDelete
  2. PescoSeptember 1, 2019 at 8:04 AM

    Good Article Thanks.
    Cricket Update

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more