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Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

nytimes.com

841–850 of 1001 posts

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#841
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.

>he built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered

That not what he built his business on. That was one (bad) thing he did.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#842

It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences.…

[deleted]

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#843
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.

You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.

This articulates something I couldn't put my finger on. I think it comes from the internet becoming the main propaganda tool of -- well could be any government -- but for the audience here nation states or actors hostile to the English speaking "west".

The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.

Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.

This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> auction failed to maximize the amount of money I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.

It is quite wild and frankly just shocking. The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale. What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a we…

> The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.

This is actualy quite common with judges. Or so i heard from Popehat who is a practicing lawyer. What is going on is that the judge is feeling that one side is making a stronger argument, in their opinion, and they then tend to give more procedural leeway to the other side. In order to be, or appear to be unbiased. Then commentators or sometimes even the plantifs interpret it as the judge signaling that the judge is agreeing with them.

Supposedly this is common enough that lawyers get worried if the judge is too “nice” with their side.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#845
post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If someone started a rumour that “the_optimist on HN sleeps with seventeen goats every Thursday” and you started getting calls of people saying “you’re a pervert for sleeping with seventeen goats”, it would be quite obvious what motivated the call, would it not? Before calling something impossible, consider the bare minimum effort to skim the linked article, or read any article on this subject. It is in fact quite tr…

Your hypothetical is neither trivial nor provable.

How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?

What if I, in fact, have today received 400 calls on the matter you have stated? Am I eligible to sue you?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#846
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He's been ignoring the courts. I don't know what you want them to do? I guess they could put him in prison, but I'm guessing that would be considered harsh too. Again, for the 2nd time, its not what he's done, it's that he's ignoring everyone telling him to stop, including the government. I don't know what you expect the punishment for that to be. If it were you or I we would have had our asses dragged into prison a…

Prison would probably be better. I don't think they should let him off the hook, but I'd expect a lot of people lie in court and flashy penalties for Jones aren't going to change that, so there are questions here about consistency of outcome for people going to court. Given that his lawyers were in on it it is questionable whether he does actually understand the risks of his actions, he appears to be getting very bad quality legal support.

He could be go to court every day of his life, lie continuously, fight them every step of the way and it still wouldn't do a level of harm that justify some of the payouts. They are huge, numbers have been tossed around in the range of billions. The engineering value of an entire human life is only around the 10 million mark. And the courts agree with a lot of that because these are punitive damages, so it is very much a judgement call about what is appropriate. It doesn't look like the judges are doing a great job on that front. The punishments are too extreme; from the outside it looks like Jones targeting these people was the best thing that ever happened to them by a wide margin.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about in a case where libel was relentlessly thrown at families over the course of years, on one of the internets largest and most engaged audiences, leading to harassment, threats, and assault? What should the judgment be for that?

This is a "millions of dollars" lawsuit. Not a 10 billion dollar lawsuit. Alex Jones owes what Reddit as a platform is worth. That is insane.

> Reddit as a platform is worth

RDDT market cap today is 29.1B.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#848
post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would it do that? You need to leave a little on the table for the deal to work.

Because they'd be paying a dollar more than the second highest bid, not the amount of the highest bid. Frankly, I'm not sure how that could not be more clear.

They wouldn't have made that bid if the rules were different! A vickrey auction has a lot of support as getting revenue.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#849
post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations. Not necessarily. In many sealed-bid auctions, bidders hope to win with a lower bid (often much lower) than they would if they were bidding against others in the same room. This is especially true if you have no idea whether anyone else is bidding on the item at all. I have placed very low bids on…

> I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low

Would you think it would have gone differently in an English Open Cry situation?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#850
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.

It's Hacker News. I hate to say it, but this is all the website is known for at this point. Bring it up in passing conversation with the in-crowd and you'll get laughed out of the room for using "Orange Site" and fraternizing with drug-addled Elon worshipers and "soloprenuers" that beg for recognition for their dogshit SaaS product. The score has been known for years, the political leaning of Hacker News is basically…

The thing is, this (admittedly common) opinion is as facile as the opinions of progressives who act as though all of reddit is /r/TheDonald. Overall, both are actually very left-leaning websites (in reddit's case, almost overwhelmingly so), they just tolerate the existence of pockets of very right-leaning individuals - because of lofty ideals of "free speech". However, even then, you'll usually see legitimate social conservatism get downvoted pretty heavily, and even fiscal conservatism will garner rapid disagree in most cases.

(That said, to a lot of those people, it doesn't matter if the "majority" are left leaning. And for some of those (e.g. trans people), they're even somewhat justified in that stance, since it doesn't make a difference if the harassment they get from being brought to the attention of "orange site" users comes from the majority or the minority)

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