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The Onion buys Infowars

nytimes.com

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Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#891

Post by chippiewill »

superfrank wrote: post #687
barbazoo wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't know how much the families gave up (could be a little, could be significant) It's hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes but as a parent I can imagine the money not playing an important factor at all in this. Money would hopefully be the least of my worries.

Jones owes them $1.5 billion. They're never going to see most of that judgement. They're likely giving up money they were never going to receive anyway. My hunch is that the judge and everyone involved knows that they aren't going to get anything substantial from Jones, which is why they allowed them to use money they are owed from the judgement as part of the bid. It allows them to get something of value out of the…

> They're likely giving up money they were never going to receive anyway.

They're giving up money that a higher bidder would have paid for infowars. Essentially the difference between The Onion's bid, and the bid of whoever else would buy.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#892

Post by coderjames »

superfrank wrote: post #687
barbazoo wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't know how much the families gave up (could be a little, could be significant) It's hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes but as a parent I can imagine the money not playing an important factor at all in this. Money would hopefully be the least of my worries.

Jones owes them $1.5 billion. They're never going to see most of that judgement. They're likely giving up money they were never going to receive anyway. My hunch is that the judge and everyone involved knows that they aren't going to get anything substantial from Jones, which is why they allowed them to use money they are owed from the judgement as part of the bid. It allows them to get something of value out of the…

The judge in the case put the brakes on the sale after it was revealed that the bankruptcy trustee did not accept the highest bid, and instead allowed the Sandy Hook families to 'assist' by pledging their massive judgement towards the auction.

It isn't reasonable to pledge money they didn't have because the families aren't the only creditors of the estate. The rest of the creditors get a lower recovery if the assets are "sold" for the price of one group reducing their claim.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#893

Post by barleyworth »

djfobbz wrote: post #770

I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but this is fake news. This deal is not final. The judge in the liquidation case is holding an evidentiary hearing next week to understand how and why secret bidding was set up and why it was not open to the general public. Sounds like a BIG loss for The Onion, not to mention the potential defamation cases that could arise from news outlets publishing an unverified story about a sal…

I doubt you'd call it "fake news" if a corporate acquisition was announced, just because the deal hadn't yet passed regulatory approval.

But then again, you clearly seem to have a dog in this fight.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#894

Post by anonfornoreason »

tightbookkeeper wrote: post #799
icegreentea2 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be specific, the suit against the mother was against the mother's estate, since the mother was murdered by the shooter... like right away. The suit was settled by the estate. The suit against the school administration was eventually dismissed (the families lost on appeal) ( https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Two-Sandy-Hook-famili... ). I agree it seemed kinda dubious, and I think the right outcome happened her…

AR-15 is merely a body style, there is no metric by which it is more dangerous than a hunting rifle.

This is not even remotely true. I have done a decent amount of shooting, some dedicated training, and own multiple firearms of different types including AR style rifles. Your sort of rhetoric is at best disingenuous and not even remotely true.

If you have ever trained with any rifle you will quickly realize that while there are hunting oriented semi-automatic rifles out there, the minimized recoil, the high rate of fire, the lightweight nature, and all the ergonomic accessories make AR style rifles incredibly fast and easy to shoot. Using a red dot site you can fire two rounds to the chest and one to the head at 25 yards in under 2 seconds with a small amount practice and training. Minimally trained people can do the same with iron sites in under 3.

I am a big fan of the AR platform because of these reasons. They are not unique to the AR, but they are unique to a class of gun that is designed with these characteristics in mind. These are not the characteristics of hunting rifles.

Honesty is important, even if it works against your beliefs!

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#895

Post by rvense »

rs999gti wrote: post #509
qingcharles wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawfare? This is literally how defamation works. If someone said on the Internet said that rs999gti was a "tax-evading, pyramid-scheming, mullet-wearing, karaoke-ruining, ferret-hoarding, snake-oil-selling, cereal-with-water-eating, grammar-mangling, table-manner-less, engagement-ring-pawning, salad-dodging, traffic-cone-stealing, apology-dodger," and it wasn’t true, I think you’d probably like to sue them and take t…

> Lawfare? Yes the court's judgment is so high, 1B USD, that he cannot make money without it being garnished. How does he get back to work? I personally do not think anyone should lose their livelihood over speech, NOTE: I did not say free speech. What he did is reprehensible but not enough that he is basically black balled from making a living. Penalties yes, loss of livelihood no.

The judgment was not for an off-the-cuff remark or writing a few paragraphs online. He ran a smear campaign against people whose kids were shot, for almost a decade, even though he knew what he was saying was untrue. Jones's "speech" had severe real-world consequences for his targets, and there's no reason to assume he has repented. It would be no injustice if he was never allowed near a microphone again.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#896

Post by wsintra2022 »

randomdata wrote: post #861
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.

> it has increasingly become a right wing echo chamber and place to promote conspiracy theories. In what way? I still only see the very same industry-focused information that I first started using Twitter for. If anything, X has improved in pulling in information from more industry players than I was seeing before, so I consider it to be an even more compelling product now. But perhaps that same algorithm improvement…

Just yesterday the Guardian newspaper put out a statement saying they will no longer be posting to x/twitter cause it’s gone down the toilet.

https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/13/the-guardian-n...

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#897

Post by tim333 »

pahool wrote: post #889
djfobbz wrote: post #770

I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but this is fake news. This deal is not final. The judge in the liquidation case is holding an evidentiary hearing next week to understand how and why secret bidding was set up and why it was not open to the general public. Sounds like a BIG loss for The Onion, not to mention the potential defamation cases that could arise from news outlets publishing an unverified story about a sal…

do you have a source other than a tweet from the Twitter account of a political hack?

https://nbc16.com/news/nation-world/alex-jones-challenges-th...

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#898

Post by russnes »

djfobbz wrote: post #770

I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but this is fake news. This deal is not final. The judge in the liquidation case is holding an evidentiary hearing next week to understand how and why secret bidding was set up and why it was not open to the general public. Sounds like a BIG loss for The Onion, not to mention the potential defamation cases that could arise from news outlets publishing an unverified story about a sal…

The plot thickens...

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#899

Post by cogman10 »

djfobbz wrote: post #770

I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but this is fake news. This deal is not final. The judge in the liquidation case is holding an evidentiary hearing next week to understand how and why secret bidding was set up and why it was not open to the general public. Sounds like a BIG loss for The Onion, not to mention the potential defamation cases that could arise from news outlets publishing an unverified story about a sal…

It's not fake news. The onion did indeed win the auction.

What remains to be seen is if the sandyhook parents are allowed to forego some of their claim against Jones to secure the purchase, which frankly I can't see why they couldn't.

The auction is there to settle Jones' debts and some of his largest debtors are willing to release some of his nondischargeable debt for Infowars.

He owes some of the family's 100 million dollars. The next highest bid was 3.5 million. The sandyhook families have the leverage particularly in this case.

Oh, and not for nothing, the second place bidder was the guy running Jones' new supplement company which mysteriously has 3.5 million to burn after being open for about a month.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#900

Post by hackernewds »

oddevan wrote: post #456
NelsonMinar wrote: post #444

The NPR article conveys that this was more than just a very clever stunt > "The Connecticut families agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion's bid, enabling its success," according to their lawyers. ... Jones was hoping a bidder ideologically aligned with him would have bought Infowars and hired him back to keep doing his show. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-518939…

Yeah, this seems like a clear-cut "We want justice, not money" decision. We don't know how much the families gave up (could be a little, could be significant), but whatever it was was the difference between Infowars remaining what it is or utterly destroying Infowars' credibility. Because now the Wikipedia entry is going to say "parody site" at the top.

It seems as if a win. However Alex Jones can just spin up another website and platform. It's the Internet, not a sandwich shop
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