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The Onion buys Infowars

nytimes.com

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Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#581

Post by nyanpasu64 »

tgv wrote: post #7
jsheard wrote: post #2

The announcement by America's Finest News Source: https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/ Alex Jones response: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857058831135645739

Wonderful news. I'm glad their CEO recognizes the great value of CEOs. My only worry is that this acquisition makes Global Tetraeder so large that it attracts the attention of those pesky EU bureaucrats, who will want to split it up into multiple imperfect solids.

Well a tetrahedron can be split into four tetrahedra and an octahedron...

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#583

Post by ryandrake »

Maken wrote: post #209
jsheard wrote: post #2

The announcement by America's Finest News Source: https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/ Alex Jones response: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857058831135645739

I like how he still tries to sell his merchandise until the very last moment.

That and the defiance, conspiracies, deep state, freedom-fighter verbal diarrhea until the bitter end. You almost get the feeling that he actually believes it all.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#584

Post by bandyaboot »

wyager wrote: post #572
sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Musk's acquisition of Twitter, it has increasingly become a right wing echo chamber and place to promote conspiracy theories. And Alex Jones' InfoWars and Elon Musk's Twitter are both likely to show you advertisements for supplements of dubious effectiveness and other generally scammy products. So yeah, Jones fits right in there.

So on the one hand you had Twitter, where the impression you would have had in the first few days of November is that Trump was probably going to win the election. On the other hand you had most other platforms like Reddit, with relatively heavy-handed moderation, where the impression you would have had in the first few days of November is that Trump was probably going to lose the election. So when you want to make a…

If I confidently declare ahead of time the result of a coin flip, I may turn out to be correct, but my confidence was still unjustified. And furthermore, my getting it right would not necessitate a “fluke”.

I’m on Reddit a fair bit and while it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what I see individually, I don’t have a lot of trouble believing that there was a bias toward a particular desired result. But, I honestly didn’t see much in the way of a bias one way or the other in the expected result. I mostly saw a lot of anxiety over not knowing what result to expect.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#585

Post by lynndotpy »

At the time the news of the Sandy Hook shooting broke, I was a highschooler in a vo-tech school in Connecticut.

Friday in late December are usually unserious days in K-12! People had their sights set on winter break and work was thin. But I remember that day had a lot of commotion, a lot of seriousness, and then a lot of silence.

Being a vo-tech school, we had students from all over the state. Some kids left or were taken out early, some of them having had ties to the families in Newtown. Throughout the day, our school got emptier and emptier.

A lot of students didn't return to the building for the whole week or so until winter break started. Even though the seriousness weaned over the days, there was an unbreakable eeriness that just comes with the building being so sparsely populated. Our highschool was a small one (about 400 students total) which exacerbated it.

I lived with my parents at the time and I saw my mom gradually become a Sandy Hook "truther" as she fell deep down Facebook rabbitholes. It was bad. Although she eventually came around, that created distance between us that never recovered.

There's a lot of bad and mind-boggling news abound, but this is a very personally satisfying headline.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#586

Post by spacechild1 »

ackbar03 wrote: post #214
plorg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The auction included all of the InfoWars and several associated corporations' assets, including the studio and the supplements business. At one point the settlement administrator was trying to get Alex's Twitter handle. I believe he's been doing some half-ass scheming to create essentially the same company but in his parents' name, and I doubt he has a problem getting listeners back.

... Infowars had a supplements business?

I didn't know that either. That's absolutely hilarious! This could be straight out of a South Park episode.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#587

Post by quantadev »

openasocket wrote: post #562
quantadev wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jones has been wrong about multiple things. So has every media outlet especially since someone came down some escalators. I don't personally think someone should lose their entire business for being wrong. CNN has called all conservatives Nazis for years, and they are liars. Do you think CNN should be sued out of existence? Personally I think CNN has every right to lie. They've now done it so much that they self-dest…

What happened to Alex Jones is not some new phenomenon, it is the status quo. There are tons of carve outs and exceptions in defamation law, particularly to protect journalists being sued for "getting it wrong." Amon other things, plaintiffs had to demonstrate that Jones acted with "actual malice", which essentially means that Jones either knew what he was saying was false or acted with deliberate disregard for the t…

Alex Jones haters always fixate on that law suit, because it's a win for them. However in my view 99% of what Alex Jones says is important for people to hear, and about 90% of his claims (even the ones that sounded wild and crazy) ended up being proven true. So I think Alex Jones was a net/net benefit to America, by uncovering facts the Deep State Blob doesn't want people to know. Jones is very performative and an entertainer too, so he's not perfect. Nobody is.

Regarding totalitarianism: Democrats have been fighting against Free Speech in countless ways, but thus far keep getting defeated in their efforts, by conservatives with more wise minds. Take Britain as an example. People over there are now being JAILED over non-violent political speech, and even speech that is merely "impolite" to protected groups. So to think totalitarianism can't happen to Western Countries is wrong. It can. It is. Currently in the USA however, the good guys have just won an election, and a clean sweep and a mandate to restore Freedom and Common Sense.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#588

Post by pacomerh »

glonq wrote: post #406
jsheard wrote: post #2

The announcement by America's Finest News Source: https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/ Alex Jones response: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857058831135645739

Wow, crazy to watch all the bootlickers and nutters in his feed who are angry about this.

right, I was reading their comments, I cannot believe it. But hey, if you view the world like that, guys like Alex will always prosper and have a crowd.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#589

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

brabel wrote: post #435
mooreds wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice." Glorious.

That part hurt a little bit, recently had to start looking at family just like this.

It felt like coming home here.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#590

Post by jancsika »

tialaramex wrote: post #121
consumer451 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I was thinking. Being funny is great, but for years people will continue to go to the website not knowing what has transpired.

The core idea of satire, which is often missed in supposedly satirical works is that you should not only make fun of the thing you don't believe, but you should also explain what you do believe under the cover of pretending to dismiss it. For example everybody knows Swift's Modest Proposal does not seriously intend that the problems in Ireland ought to be fixed by literally eating children , but if you read it, the p…

> The core idea of satire

I've never read this definition from any historical author or famous literary critic. I think you made this up yourself from first principles-- am I right on that?

In any case, this definition would make a special case out of Animal Farm which is probably the most famous satire. I cringe imagining Orwell have one of the animals "dismiss" his preferred theoretical vision of good governance as a wink to the audience. I don't even think Orwell presumed to know what that would look like.

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