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The Onion to Take over InfoWars

nytimes.com

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Re: The Onion to Take over InfoWars

#161

Post by alistairSH »

afavour wrote: post #143
z2 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No joke, I use Facebook every year or so to access the marketplace and at the time my feed was roughly half rage-bait, and the other half being what I can only describe as AI-generated almost-pornography. Both had thousands of what looked like genuinely real interactions per post, mostly from developing country users.

I'm loathe to defend Facebook but most people's experience is not yours. The algorithm pushes content you're most likely to engage with, in your case it has nothing to go on so probably pushes whatever causes the most reaction in general.

It could just push his friends and family. Or nothing at all. But here we are.

This timeline sucks.

Re: The Onion to Take over InfoWars

#162

Post by guywithahat »

tnelsond4 wrote: post #125

Organizations love to run controlled opposition. Just came out that the Southern poverty law center has been funding the KKK of all things. https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdal/pr/federal-grand-jury-char...

It's sort of tragic the onion takeover came on the heels of him being right about SPLC. There's something morally questionable about the largest civil fine in history being against a guy who accused a shooting of being a false flag and then apologized a few weeks later when better information came to light. I'm not saying he shouldn't have been sued, but rather it feels like the wrong amount for how apologetic he was even long before the lawsuit, especially given his show has a strong comedy aspect to it.

Re: The Onion to Take over InfoWars

#163

Post by jandrese »

pie_flavor wrote: post #47
mikeodds wrote: post #25

Maybe I’m out of touch, but doesn’t a $1.4b dollar settlement for this seem rather… large?

The context is that Jones blew up the court process every chance he got, setting a new record for contempt fining. The most important piece was refusing to comply with discovery (his lawyer was so bad-behaved here he ended up with a disciplinary suspension). As a result Jones received a default judgement, i.e. the plaintiffs win by default and he doesn't get to argue his case. This also means the plaintiffs get every…

Jones basically handled his defense like Donald Trump handles congressional subpoenas, but Jones doesn't have the Supreme Court covering for him so he got burned to a crisp. I think in his heart of hearts he thought he was going to get some kind of pardon that would make all of the problems go away. He doesn't think he's the kind of person that would ever have to face the consequences of his own actions.

Re: The Onion to Take over InfoWars

#164

Post by cogman10 »

declan_roberts wrote: post #159
cogman10 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jones wasn't personally directing the legal strategy, he was doing the same thing you'd do. Yes he was. Jones didn't have 1 set of lawyers from start to finish on the cases. He went through about 20 different lawyers in both cases. That doesn't happen if a client isn't personally directing the lawyers. His strategy was very clearly to bring in new lawyers at each depo that didn't comply with the court order. When c…

His lawyers were objectively bad. You'd bring in a new team and fire them also. Example: they sent a copy of his cell phone to the prosecuting attorney on accident and didn't request it back in time, so 2 years of his text messages were used against him.

That was literally the last lawyer he had which ran the trial (Reynolds).

And the reason his lawyers were so objectively bad was because they all had about 1 month working on the case before getting fired and replaced by a new lawyer.

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs had exactly 1 set of lawyers representing them (1 in TX and one in CT).

I'm not joking when I say that Jones went through about 20 different sets of lawyers throughout the cases. You can listen to his various depositions and there's not a repeat defense lawyer in any one of the depos. I highly doubt they were all just uniquely terrible, especially given how much money Jones has. A few were really terrible (Norm, Barnes). Reynolds was actually one of Jones's better lawyers, he just messed up. Unsurprising given how little time he was on the case.

IIRC, the reason for the phone copy getting shared was because of the case hand-off between reynolds and the previous lawyers. The TX lawyers were CCed when they shouldn't have been. And in the process of getting ready for trial, reynolds missed the email informing him of the mistake.

Re: The Onion to Take over InfoWars

#165

Post by tsimionescu »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #135
tsimionescu wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absurd line, and plainly wrong. If I were to bring a civil suit against you because the comment above offended my sensibilities, it would be quickly thrown out of court because it is your first amendment right to say anything you like, with certain exceptions that the government recognizes as limitations of this right. Even though this is a civil matter, it is still a judgement on government law. This is n…

Alex Jones will not have a criminal record as a result of this. He has not been declared as committing a crime. He did take actions that, by civil law, created civil liabilities. He was sued over those liabilities. He failed to participate in the civil litigation process and lost badly as a result. Civil and criminal law are not the same thing and your insistence otherwise doesn't change the reality.

Civil and criminal law are separate things, absolutely. But the first ammendment applies to both civil and criminal law - it is a limitation on the government's ability to create laws, not just a limitation on the government's ability to pursue criminal penalties.

Alex Jones is only liable because there exists a law that the government created that says that defamation is illegal. Since this is a law, it could have been in conflict with the first ammendment - and, in fact, there have been legal challenges on this very line that reached the SC. But the Supreme Court has found that this is an acceptable limitation on the first amendment rights, with the specific limitations.

But, for example, if the US government wanted to adopt the English law on defamation, it would not be constitutional in the USA, it would run foul of the first ammendment.

Re: The Onion to Take over InfoWars

#166

Post by carlosjobim »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #131
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>deliberately so I’m not entertained that the court is playing an unrealistic and hyberbolic game. I know, I’m a weirdo that wants to see realism and pragmatism in the court systems even if the defendant is a real asshole.

What do you feel would be an outcome to this situation that aligns to the realism and pragmatism you believe the court system should have? All of the threads related to this topic have had a pile of folks going "the amount was too much!" but hardly any of them say what they think an appropriate punishment would look like...

Not the person you asked, but the sensible thing is of course that the court decides the amount - not the plaintiffs. That's how it works in other places.

In criminal cases, I've seen victims getting anywhere between 50% to 10% of what they've demanded, or even nothing even when the judgement has been in their favour.

Re: The Onion to Take over InfoWars

#169

Post by malshe »

jandrese wrote: post #160
afavour wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm loathe to defend Facebook but most people's experience is not yours. The algorithm pushes content you're most likely to engage with, in your case it has nothing to go on so probably pushes whatever causes the most reaction in general.

No matter what you follow if FB thinks you are a man it's going to feed you those foreign near-porn shorts. I'm not sure if it is just what escapes across national boundaries or if social media in other countries is just way more horny, but every time I see a post where the text has been auto-translated from a different language it is thirst trap content. This is true across multiple social media platforms. It's espe…

> No matter what you follow if FB thinks you are a man it's going to feed you those foreign near-porn shorts.

I don't know about FB as I quit it several years ago but I saw this happening on Instagram before I quit it too.

Re: The Onion to Take over InfoWars

#170

Post by some_random »

mcdonje wrote: post #35
mikeodds wrote: post #25

Maybe I’m out of touch, but doesn’t a $1.4b dollar settlement for this seem rather… large?

We're not going to have a rehash of the McDonald's coffee settlement argument here, are we? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages

Stella Liebeck was awarded 2.7 million in punitive damages, that seems like a much more reasonable number than 1.4 billion.
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