Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion • Hacker News Board

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#561

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #522

pookha wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America was founded with a constitution that guarantee's citizens a megaphone as part of a list of inalienable rights (God given per words in the constitution). Bankrupting Jones won't remove his ability speak or muzzle him and it's more than likely only going to give him more of an audience. He'll still be able to voice his performance art about growing babies-in-cows-for-25-years and gay-frogs. He'll more than like…

Chemicals in the water turning the frogs gay is an actual thing though. E.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3280221/ https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1501065112 https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/ However https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/frogs-rev... but, > The findings in no way exonerate pollutants like the widely used herbicide atrazine, scientists caution.

I don't see anything in those articles about gay frogs.

Trans frogs, sure, but sex and sexual orientation are different.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

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Post by pdpi » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

lupusreal wrote: post #517

pdpi wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might or might not be true. If Infowars is _that_ worthless without Jones, then _any_ offer is a farce and the whole auction is pointless.

> If Infowars is _that_ worthless without Jones, then _any_ offer is a farce That doesn't make sense. A genuine offer for an unprofitable thing could be made. That's not farcical, just a bad investment.

Yes, that's precisely what I mean. It might or might not be a bad bet, but the Sandy Hook families are just as entitled to take that bet as anybody else. The idea that it's farcical to entertain any offer that doesn't involve putting Jones back in charge leads you down a really weird road.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#563

Post by motorest » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #543

dylan604 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid, I'm kind of okay with that. Just kind of. His fix will not go to Jones. Jones is not going away however this ends. Just the brand. He can create a new brand.

> You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid, He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's literally where all news gets broken. All of it. And he's using it to influence global politics.

> He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you.

It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.

What's also indisputable is that even Elon Musk was refusing to pay that much for Twitter and tried to back down until he was sued to force him to put his money where his mouth was.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#564

Post by buttercraft » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

dublin wrote: post #468

jasonjayr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he did was beyond mere defamation. It was heinous, it was blatant and deliberate dishonesty, and targeted vulnerable victims. Repeating the verifiable lie that the Sandy Hook incident did not happen, and promoting violence against the surviving families, despite repeated opportunities to stop without penalty, is beyond forgivable. And this penalty is because he declined to defend this behavior. Remember, it's a…

No matter how heinous you may find his speech, in America, under the First Amendment, Jones (or any nutball or even Nazi you may choose to pick) has a right to say it - even if he has a large Radio and Podcast megaphone. The First Amendment is nearly absolute, and must protect unpopular and offensive speech even more than it protects popular speech. (Don't start with the bogus "fire in a crowded theater exception" -…

Is he prohibited from speaking? Or just being held accountable for what he already said?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#565

Post by bArray » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

impossiblefork wrote: post #249

I really don't understand how a judgement this large can be reasonable in a case where nobody has had his house burned down. A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments. I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't…

[flagged]

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#566

Post by the_optimist » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #331

logicchains wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished. The first amendment absolutely gives you the right to lie, and the right to profit from that lying if you're not explicitly committing fraud or defaming anyone. You may disagree with it, but that's what the law is.

Have you really never heard of perjury or fraud before? You don't have a right to lie.

Both of these concepts are specifically defined in law, whereas “lie” is not. You are made of marshmallows! Sue me.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

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Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #516

ceejayoz wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name. They get to garnish those profits, too.

No bankruptcy resolves the debt. Otherwise there would be no point in a bankruptcy process.

No, not necessarily, and not in this case.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/alex-jones-cant-avoid-sandy-ho...

> Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.

> Bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, but not if they result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, according to a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.

Bankruptcies have all sorts of exceptions like this for fraud, student loans, child support, unpaid taxes, etc.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

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Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #546

skulk wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to dig up the transcripts, but I was following this pretty closely when it happened. If memory serves right, Jones was given several chances to comply with discovery requests and was constantly attempting to misdirect and otherwise disrupt the proceedings. It's not like the court balked at the first weird thing the defense did and immediately entered into a default judgement. I believe the default judge…

>given several chances to comply with discovery requests The Jones side claims that these discovery requests were for documents that don't exist. The linked judgement provides no detail on what the specific discovery requests were that went unanswered. Do you know what the discovery requests were for specifically?

No, I do not know.

But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist.

(If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various bad things can happen to you. The judge can look more skeptically at everything you say thereafter, the judge can rule that the other side is entitled to assuming the contents of the document are whatever would be most damaging to your side's case, you or your lawyers can be fined, and your lawyers can be disbarred. Judges deal with this kind of stuff all the time; detecting and blocking such games is a major part of what they do.)

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#569

Post by j2kun » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

mintplant wrote: post #510

hbn wrote: post #188

Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd. I'm not being hyperbolic saying people would be less mad at him if he had done the shooting himself. And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories abo…

Popping open Podcast Addict, the top 10 podcasts right now are: 1. No Such Thing As A Fish; 2. My Brother, My Brother And Me; 3. Planet Money; 4. Revolutions; 5. 99% Invisible; 6. Stuff You Should Know; 7. The Adventure Zone; 8. This American Life; 9. Freakinomics Radio; 10. The Rest Is History I had to scroll to #32 to find Casefile which sorta fits your criteria, except it's hosted by a dude and I think he generall…

Yeah OP is out of their mind on this point. Even spotify doesn't have many true crime podcasts in their top 50.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#570

Post by capybaraStorm » Wed, Dec 11, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #335

zztop44 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hugely depends on the circumstances.

No it really doesn't. There are no legal consequences for insulting someone, unless you actually defame them. Nearly all defamation cases are dismissed by the court immediately for not rising to the very high level of facts required for defamation.

The interesting precedent here is if you lie about the dead (who until this fiction, had no protection from defamation), you have defamed any living person who says the opposite and factual information about them.

But we all know the precedent set in this case was a lie. Otherwise anyone who said the kids were really killed would have standing, since Jones thought they were "crisis actors."

We all know this was really used as a back door way to pay the parents for dishonoring the dead. Basically "meh we can't extract justice from the murderer, best we can do is get a lot of money from someone with mutual hate."

Edit: s/precedent/historical precedent/ . I did not mean to imply as assumed below this precedent is legally binding.