Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
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Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#2Audience capture and sunk costs creates an incentive to be more extreme, to dig in even when proven wrong. He messed up big time.
Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#3Audience capture and sunk costs creates an incentive to be more extreme, to dig in even when proven wrong. He messed up big time.
Lindell has plenty of chances to turn back, to renounce falsehoods and embrace truths. But he insisted on being an Argument from Authority personified. If anyone deserves to be penalized, Mike Lindell does.
Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#4In arbitration. Now he's saying he'll take it to court. Depending on how the arbitration clause was written, he may not find that easy to do. If he does take it to court, well, IANAL, but I doubt he'll find it easy to get the arbitrator's decision overturned.
Past that, he could either refuse to pay, or declare bankruptcy. Both have legal downsides; both also rather strongly damage his public image. (Of course, if he cared about his public image, he would have gotten off this road a long time ago...)
Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#5I read the article but I feel like I didn't get it. What was the point of this contest? Why were they given some random files that they struggled to even open?
Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#6In arbitration. Now he's saying he'll take it to court. Depending on how the arbitration clause was written, he may not find that easy to do. If he does take it to court, well, IANAL, but I doubt he'll find it easy to get the arbitrator's decision overturned. Past that, he could either refuse to pay, or declare bankruptcy. Both have legal downsides; both also rather strongly damage his public image. (Of course, if he…
> In arbitration. Now he's saying he'll take it to court.
Meh. That’s what they all say.
Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#7Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#8I read the article but I feel like I didn't get it. What was the point of this contest? Why were they given some random files that they struggled to even open?
It wasn't clear from the article, but I think this is fallout from something Lindell called "Cyber Symposium" in 2021. Lindell promised PCAPs to people, which as we know, are files with ethernet or WiFi frames in them, in a conventional format. Conservative-leaning infosec expert Robert "rsnake" Graham was in attendance and live tweeted it. Graham is something of a curmudgeon, and apparently independently wealthy, so he would almost certainly have been happy to find PCAP-formatted files that showed any contact with voting machines.
Graham did not find any such thing, and was disappointed that the Cyber Symposium was such a mess, and that he didn't get any PCAPs. So the winner of the challenge isn't alone in saying that the files provided were untainted by packet captures and had nothing to do with the 2020 election.
Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#9>The cExtractor tool being provided to contest participants after the contest didn't help Lindell in the panel's view because "the data at issue is the data provided to contestants as part of the Contest, not some data in hundreds of files informally provided later."
thats like saying a zip file must not contain any data because it didnt come with a copy of the unzip program.
the underlying arguments for this judgement are just as nonsensical as the contest
Re: Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
#10I read the article but I feel like I didn't get it. What was the point of this contest? Why were they given some random files that they struggled to even open?
It wasn't clear from the article, but I think this is fallout from something Lindell called "Cyber Symposium" in 2021. Lindell promised PCAPs to people, which as we know, are files with ethernet or WiFi frames in them, in a conventional format. Conservative-leaning infosec expert Robert "rsnake" Graham was in attendance and live tweeted it. Graham is something of a curmudgeon, and apparently independently wealthy, so…
So I think I'm starting to get a theory of what happened. Lindell was duped by some guy that came forward to him with "proof" of election interference. However Lindell had a problem, he had no ability to personally verify the files, and everyone thought he was too much of a looney to bother taking his claims and files seriously. So he came up with a solution, namely to pay people to take his claims seriously. By making it into a contest, he wouldn't even have to pay up, since the files would undoubtedly (in his mind) turn out to be real.
Could this be it?