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Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

nytimes.com

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Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#641

Post by samatman »

buttercraft wrote: post #564
dublin wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You may wish to look up the concept of 'jawboning' if you're under the misapprehension that this sort of workaround to the First Amendment is generally supported by historical jurisprudence.

You're going to be hearing that word a lot in the next four years. May as well get a head start on it.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#642

Post by hoten »

dnissley wrote: post #574
_zgx0 wrote: post #506

The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me. He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered. He's scum of the earth. That business was taken away from him, and folks think that's too much? What the actual fuck.

To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.

It is unreasonable imo. He deserves to see jail time.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#643

Post by gms7777 »

thorum wrote: post #638

Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.

From the article: "Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret. “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added."

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#644

Post by crazygringo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #231
pclmulqdq wrote: post #6

This is probably the correct decision. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash, and in the case of a bankruptcy, cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt." Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are wor…

Will hold judgement until I read the judge’s opinion, but this bit: “‘It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,’ Judge Lopez said.” is nonsense from an auction theoretical perspective. First-price sealed-bid auctions are a vetted auction system [1]—almost all real estate and corporate mergers, for example, are sold like this, as are government tenders [2]. (They’re not as efficient a…

> They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.

I've always been curious -- do you know why?

It's certainly not for lack of familiarity, considering that paying the second-highest bid is basically how eBay works.

And eBay doesn't reveal people's maximum bids either. And so between that and the prevalence of last-second sniping, it essentially operates as sealed for all practical purposes.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#645

Post by NoGravitas »

thorum wrote: post #638

Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.

This is the legal pretext, which appears about 2/3 of the way through the article:

> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#646

Post by vizzier »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #317
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. You actually can, so long as it's the best offer for the other creditors. So long as you can come up with sufficient cash for the minority creditors you're entitled to dispose of the asset in any way you see fit. The Pennsylvania families came up with…

In your theoretical framework you can. In real-life bankruptcy court, you almost certainly can't.

Honestly I don't see how this theoretical framework is much different from corporate leveraged buyouts.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#647

Post by anigbrowl »

Canada wrote: post #447
alt187 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is "shocked", the irony is that Musk postures as a rabid free speech advocate. It's not surprising, but it's hypocritical.

You can support people's right to say what they want, while also saying it's against the house rules to impersonate other people. Doesn't seem that unreasonable.

But it's not impersonation. Jones was ordered by a court to give up all the Infowars assets, including the brand and the associated social media handles. The sale is on hold for legal reasons but that's beside the point.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#648

Post by User23 »

roenxi wrote: post #227
acdha wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jones continued to inflict harm on families who’d lost children, and profited significantly from it both financially and politically. He defied multiple courts, too, so there was no question of premeditation or incapacity, just repeated decisions to cause harm year after year. That’s the difference: true crime podcasts don’t cause harm on that scale, and few people are going to defy the authority of the legal system…

While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones. Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else. It makes sense that Jones would lose the case, but the scale of the judgements was eye wate…

My understanding is he didn't lose the case on the merits. During discovery he was required to hand over documents from his Google account, but Google had locked his account and he couldn't get access. The judge then ruled he was in default for failing to produce.

This is obviously a massive abuse of the justice system, violating the maxim that the law does not compel the impossible. But, since the prevailing opinion (including both judge and jury) observably is "enh, fuck that guy" nobody much cares. However the shoe is going to be on the other foot sooner or later. It may be that hounding Alex Jones wasn't worth the precedent (making this style of lawfare acceptable, not an actual legal precedent) that this case sets.

I can easily imagine a case where, say, X blocks discovery in a similar way to achieve a similar outcome for someone on the left. Do we want this to be how we do things?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#649

Post by ryandrake »

impossiblefork wrote: post #454
pavlov wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the system accommodate people who refuse to defend themselves? I understand that in a system like Russia where dissidents face made-up charges and their attorneys are harassed by the state. But Alex Jones isn’t in that kind of position at all. He has no problem getting legal representation. The default judgment basically means he admitted guilt by his refusal. That was his choice.

Because such a system creates absurdities. There are always going to be crazy people and a system must be able to deal with them.

The system is dealing with them: By imposing the maximum possible judgment.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#650

Post by pclmulqdq »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #437
pclmulqdq wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it's not that at all. The problem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid. In any case, a judge does make the decisions in a bankruptcy court when the parties disagree about things. In this case, the creditors are not in agreement that this was okay. A sealed-bid auction is a bit non-standard in a bankruptcy, but the…

> roblem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid Which would make sense. That's not what the article quotes as the judge's reason (nor what you've said). The quote in the article criticises sealed bids. That's mind-blowingly wrong to the point of having substance on appeal. It's so wrong I expressed scepticism it's actua…

Yeah, the article is incorrect about that (like I said, sealed bids are very unusual in bankruptcy auctions, but the actual opinion cites the other stuff), and when I said that the auction procedure was farcical, I did not mean that the underlying algorithm of the auction was wrong, but that the procedures run by the auctioneer were awful.
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