The announcement by America's Finest News Source: https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/
Alex Jones response: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857058831135645739
Wonderful news. I'm glad their CEO recognizes the great value of CEOs. My only worry is that this acquisition makes Global Tetraeder so large that it attracts the attention of those pesky EU bureaucrats, who will want to split it up into multiple imperfect solids.
They'd better think twice as long as Ted Kaczynski remains on The Onions editorial board[1], he also knows a few things about splitting things into multiple solids.
Didn't he die in jail last year?
I rather suspect that won't matter to The Onion.
I'm sure Zombie Kaczynski will have cogent contributions to make still.
My next low budget horror film is going to be Zombie Kaczynski
Not a movie I would not see.
"The Unazombie"
Suh-weet!
Positive ones, even!
If T. Herman Zweibel didn't let corporeal death force him out of the Onion, why should Kaczynski?
I mean would the Onion lie to us
That's what they want us to think... Is what I'm pretty sure InfoWars would tell me.
If Brexit taught me anything it was that the correct phrase is pesky unelected EU bureaucrats!
Now if we want to get into dirty details, no bureaucrat is ever elected. You elect the representatives, and they nominate in turn whoever bureaucrats they feel comfy to work with. Or is this in the UK different?
> You elect the representatives, and they nominate in turn whoever bureaucrats they feel comfy to work with.
This is not always the case, although I guess it depends how you define bureaucrats. As an example, in France, most of the administration is not nominated. You become a public worker through exam, and the representative usually have no power over your nomination, raises, etc. It does make sense in a lot of cases. For example, in a city, only the mayor and its advisers are elected, and they do not have any control over the administration of the city. But the administration cannot refuse to work with a specific mayor. If they do, they would need to be moved elsewhere, or simply be fired for not doing their job. On the other hand, they are also bound by the law, so they also act as a counter power to crazy mayor who wants to do illegal stuff. Meaning, if the mayor ask the administration to do something illegal, they can absolutely say no with no fear of repercussion for their job.
It also makes sense for other counter-power office, where having the currently elected representatives being able to choose who control the office would go against its whole purpose.
> I guess it depends how you define bureaucrats.
“If Gondor, Boromir, has been a stalwart tower, [those who work at public bureaus] have played another part. Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay. You know little of the lands beyond your bounds. Peace and freedom, do you say? The North would have known them little but for us."
> You become a public worker through exam, and the representative usually have no power over your nomination, raises, etc.
Who else would have power over "nomination, raises etc" of anyone, if not elected representatives? Other public workers? At this point would they not be a sovereign group distinct from France, untouchable by the french people?
I guess the elected representatives have indirect power over everything in the end, if France is still a democracy. May be lots of layers of indirection, like the need to pass or change a law, but still.
Who defines and administers the exam you mentioned? Other public representatives? Can they decide to pass their relatives?
> Who else would have power over "nomination, raises etc" of anyone, if not elected representatives? Other public workers?
Yes, that's how the civil service works in most countries, more or less. The US is an outlier in that the executive appoints about 4,000 civil servants; most places don't work like that (even in the US; _most_ civil servants (about 2.8 million of them, federal) are hired, promoted, disciplined etc by other civil servants; the president doesn't sit in on every interview or anything.)
> I guess the elected representatives have indirect power over everything in the end, if France is still a democracy.
The elected representatives pass laws. The civil service implements them.
Separately, at least in many countries, not sure about France, you have the concept of power devolved to the minister, where the legislature passes a law allowing the minister to make orders in certain restricted areas, a bit like a scope-limited version of US presidential executive orders.
This occasionally has amusing repercussions if the original devolution legislation was insufficient or unconstitutional; for instance in Ireland nearly all drugs (morphine, heroin, cannabis and possibly cocaine remained illegal) were accidentally legalised for a day, when the supreme count found that the legislation used to enable the Minister for Justice to ban drugs was insufficient, thus legalising everything which had been banned since it was passed.
> The US is an outlier in that the executive appoints about 4,000 civil servants; most places don't work like that (even in the US; _most_ civil servants (about 2.8 million of them, federal) are hired, promoted, disciplined etc by other civil servants; the president doesn't sit in on every interview or anything.)
This is one of the concerning parts with the incoming administration.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/25/project-2025...
> Project 2025, which is backed by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank, has proposed to “dismantle the administrative state”, while Trump’s official “Agenda 47” calls for “cleaning out the Deep State” and “on Day One” issuing an “executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats”.
> That executive order would set up a system, known as Schedule F, that would revamp the federal bureaucracy so that far more jobs could be filled with political appointees rather than through traditional merit rules. Trump’s supporters say Schedule F would cover about 50,000 federal employees, but unions representing federal workers say it would cover many times that. Currently, approximately 4,000 federal positions are subject to presidential appointment. Trump’s allies are said to have compiled a list of 20,000 loyalists who could quickly move into federal jobs in a new Trump administration.
---
That 4,000 is looking to become 20,000 and potentially increase up to 50,000 (and beyond depending how far reaching the reclassification is).
I suspect the coming administration would find a way to do the same thing even if it was in Germany or France. I suspect if the extreme right parties there ever win, they will find a way to achieve this too.
Best to be aware of this, not deceive ourselves that public servants are untouchable. Some people might get the idea that voting for a very bad politician would just send a message and not have much real effect, as the civil servants are the same and will do the same job and cannot be removed. They can. Even in Germany.
> I suspect the coming administration would find a way to do the same thing even if it was in Germany or France. I suspect if the extreme right parties there ever win, they will find a way to achieve this too.
Possibly. They’d need majority control of the legislature (not merely the sort of plurality control that seems within the bounds of possibility on some countries) and control of the courts. They’d also potentially need to be able to change the constitution; in most countries the Lisbon treaty is either implicitly or explicitly above local law. They’d need to be ready to face sanctions from the EU. I think Germany in particular also has some regulation of the civil service actually in the constitution. But ultimately, yeah, if the far right successfully took over the government (rather than just leading a coalition or something) they could probably do this; the Nazis did, after all.
> Who else would have power over "nomination, raises etc" of anyone, if not elected representatives?
In many countries that is done based on laws describing career progression process.
In Germany most administration workers are "career" folks, who study at the university of administration and then have a career paths, where levels at are relatively clearly described. Only heads of different authorities are "political" positions, which are nominated by ministers and can be fired/retired relatively easily but even those in most cases stay across administrations. Only ministers and their direct staff change.
In some ministries there sometimes is the saying "we don't care who is minoster below us" but if a some minister with an agenda is appointed they still can be very effective.
Seems like a pretty good system. Or who knows.
But since the law is written by elected representatives, to say that the representatives have no power in this case seems wrong, to me. That's all.
If the voters will vote for the "fire Joe" party 20 years in a row, I guarantee Joe the civil servant will eventually be fired, even in Germany, France, anywhere. Well, maybe not in China, but that's different. Anywhere where votes still matter. Solutions would be found, laws changed, exceptions provided, and so on.
But now we’re in reducto ad absurdum territory because elected officials can pass laws to force private companies to fire specific employees, too. And before you say “constitution,” that can also be amended.
I have no clue what your point is. Reductio ad absurdum is a useful argument, not a logical fallacy.
> And before you say “constitution,”
I have zero idea why I would say "constitution" or anything really. My entire point is that nobody is beyond the reach of elected representatives, and that is by design and a good thing too.
> My entire point is that nobody is beyond the reach of elected representatives
That’s just stating the obvious.
> that is by design
No, it’s not. It’s just a fact of life that governments can control every aspect of a person’s life if it chooses. It’s always been this way and always will be.
This is why your statements are absurd.
When people refer to a civil service as being “apolitical” or “not politically appointed,” it’s obvious that they’re not referring to absurd cases like “a government can outlaw them from having a job.”
That’s why I said you’re reducing the argument to absurdity.
Civil servants are a-political so why would you need to fire them? A civil servant carries out whatever law is enacted by the government. The bureaucracy is a tool and tools don't have a will.
> Civil servants are a-political so why would you need to fire them?
Have you watched the British documentary series "Yes, Minister"?
you mistake lethargy for strategy!
> The bureaucracy is a tool and tools don't have a will.
As if it's not made of humans. This view is in grave error. Nobody is perfectly rational, nobody is beyond bias or subjectivty, nobody is beyond human emotions.
One reason is scapegoating. If a politician fucks up they can shift the blame to civil servants. Another reason is conflicts. Politician proposes a law and the head of the affected department says that the law will lead to major loss of tax revenue.
I don’t think this is strictly true. There are documented cases where, for better or worse, apolitical civil servants undermined politicians. Rory Stewart’s book has some great examples.
This ignores the self-interest of civil servants, which they most definitely have and is the basis for public choice theory.
Building upon economic theory, public choice has a few core tenets. One is that no decision is made by an aggregate whole. Rather, decisions are made by combined individual choices. A second is the use of markets in the political system. A third is the self-interested nature of everyone in a political system.
Like any other worker, they should be fired when they don't do their job well enough.
Civil servants are people like you and me, and have as strong will as anyone.
There are two factors: One is that the Constitution disallows laws for a special case. Thus a "fire joe law" may not exist (without Change to constitution)
However: Yes, who you vote for impacts government. If you vote for a party which sets priority in building bike sheds, the authorities will move staff to the required departments, while Joe remains in the department nobody cares about anymore and thus can't meet the promotion goals. (While he will still receive the regular raise for the job level he is in) And if one truly wants to get rid of Joe there certainly is a way to find a reason for demoting him ..
But it's way different from the American system which sweeps thousand of jobs, according to [1] about 4,000 jobs directly, where then many of those bring in their assistant, advisor etc.
[1] https://presidentialtransition.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
Yeah, I get it's different. Not saying it's the same. Just don't give me the absolute "civil servants are untouchable by politicians". It would be bad if they really were untouchable.
I never stated that. But there is a notable cultural difference between Europe and US.
This goes also further: Many offices which are elected in the US are appointed in Europe (I'm not aware of a European country where population elects state/district attorneys, sheriffs, judges, school boards, etc)
You are not wrong. Exam, raises, lateral and vertical move are decided (in most case) by:
1. The law. For example, public worker salary's are explicitly defined on a public grid, which depends on several factor (exact position, how long you have been in the job, the national public worker salary index, ...).
2. Their boss / future boss. Promotion it partly a matter of law, but also partly at the discretion of your boss. Same for a lateral move. If a position open, and you are qualified to fill it, you have to have interview just like a normal job offer.
There is a bunch a caveat and details, but that's the gist of it. So, technically, representative do have power over this. Some representatives can change the law, and some are technically more or less the boss of the top officer at some administration. But it still make a lot of things difficult if not impossible. A mayor cannot change national law, only Deputé of the national assembly can, so he has no power over the salary of his administration. He also has no power to fire someone from the local administration unless he can prove that they did something that the law consider a fireable offense. The same would go for a minister.
Of course, in effect, they do yield a lot of influence. While public worker are very, very rarely fired, they can be moved to another position, which is easier to do and what usually happen when someone powerful want them gone without having the actual power to do so directly.
> I guess the elected representatives have indirect power over everything in the end, if France is still a democracy. May be lots of layers of indirection, like the need to pass or change a law, but still.
Yes, in the end of course. But these layers of indirection are extremely important. In my country right-wing politicians are currently rallying against prosecutors they think are "too lenient" with criminals. If it weren't for the indirection those prosecutors would have been replaced with the politicians' yes-friends long ago.
Meanwile, Macron chooses to ignore a left victory, then refuses to accept their prime minister and instead co-opts the election to instant the same center-right government that was broken up a few months prior. :+)
Now, to be fair that is partly the result of the left-wing coalition imploding (as usual… sigh) and being generally unwilling to compromise. It turns out that when you don’t have a majority, being the biggest party does not matter that much if you are unpleasant enough to make the other parties rally against you. Yes, I am bitter.
But.. they did not implode? They put forward a reasonable candidate that they all agreed on. Macron then refused that candidate and made clear he wouldn’t verify any PM that wasn’t center-right. He stole the election, plain and simple.
If you can find a copy of the game Koalition ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/303/koalition ) it has some of the fun of European politics in it.
> 60 politicians of all colors stand for election in the 15 countries of the European Union: unimaginable benefits and positions of influence await their power brokers, for it is these Machiavellian lobbyists and self-appointed “leaders“ who hold the real power in the palms of their hands.
And from the rules:
> The player with the most total votes played in a given party is the party representative. If a player has two cards in the same party, their value is added. If two or more players have the same vote total in a party, the one with the highest single card is the party representative. Remember that a doubler card, if played, will always be considered the highest card. Also, note that it is possible for one player to control two parties.
> If Gaudino is played in a party in competition with another politician valued 7 in that party, he is considered to be the higher card.
> The green-leaf party is a special case. If two players tie for total value in green cards, it is possible that they will still tie for highest single card value. In that case, the two players are given thirty seconds to agree on who will be the green representative. If they do not agree in that time, each player with green cards may negotiate separately.
> For example, in a city, only the mayor and its advisers are elected, and they do not have any control over the administration of the city. But the administration cannot refuse to work with a specific mayor.
The mayor can still dictate policy and the administration have to implement it if it is not illegal, right?
That's still democracy! Right?
Yes, but that is not the point. The point is it was a favorite attack point used by Brexit supporters. A whole lot of the accusations against the EU applied just as much - sometimes much more - to the UK itself.
We have people who frothed at the mouth over the role played by unelected bureaucrats now frothing at the mouth at proposals to remove the last hereditary Lords from our legislature...
(in fairness, those people tend to hate the Civil Service in the UK too. And they're elected hereditary Lords, albeit via a franchise consisting entirely of other hereditary Lords)
How few people need to vote to appoint someone before they're considered "unelected'"? The 805 Lords? The 538 of the US electoral college? The 121 Cardinals of the Conclave? The 101 of the American Senate? The 27 EU Commissioners?
Indeed. That pattern was obvious even before the referendum. The UK is know for its strong civil servant body that can keep the ship afloat when the old chaps in the government have no clue which way is up. And its first past the post system. It is admirable on a lot of levels but certainly not any more democratic than the EU.
This!
> Or is this in the UK different?
A bit; mostly as you say, but also it's a kingdom and has the House of Lords whose seats are partially heritable, partially religious appointments from the state religion with the monarch at the top, in addition to those appointed by the elected government.
> partially religious appointments from the state religion
There are also, in practice, a number of other religious appointments made to provide other religious groups with representation.
> in addition to those appointed by the elected government.
Those are the most problematic IMO. Businesspeople (because the rich do not have enough influence on politics and cannot get their voice heard?), and former politicians.
I think how it works is nicely summarised by the fact that at least one of the founders of an ecommerce website (lastminute.com) is a peer but no-one like (for example) Tim Berners-Lee is.
> no-one like (for example) Tim Berners-Lee is.
Alexandra Freeman [0] or Lionel Tarassenko [1] might fit your criteria as technocratic appointments to the peerage - just how "like" TBL do they have to be? Sir Timothy seems like the kind of character who could reasonably be appointed, too, if that's what he really wanted.
I agree with your point that it's dominated by businessmen and aristocrats, but maybe not quite as badly as you think.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Freeman,_Baroness_Fr...
The EU is governed by the European Commission, which is not elected. Say what you will about reactionary British conservatives, the fact remains that the EU is not a particularly democratic organisation.
A bit ironic hearing that critique coming from a monarchy... maybe because it takes one to recognize one?
The Bundesrat in Switzerland is also not elected directly by the people, it's elected by Congress. The Bundeskanzler in Germany are not also not elected directly by the people, they are elected by Congress.
How is that true, if the body that nominates the European Commission _is_ elected??
By the same argument you could say UK or US or any other solidly democratic is not democratic, because some commission or organisation is not directly, by the people, elected.
(If you go for the direct election argument, the UK fares pretty badly BTW.)
> By the same argument you could say UK or US or any other solidly democratic is not democratic, because some commission or organisation is not directly, by the people, elected.
It's a matter of degree rather than a binary. Representative democracy is a little less democratic than direct democracy. Elections every 20 years are a bit less democratic than elections every 5 years. Having the elected representatives appoint a head of state is a bit less democratic than electing one directly. The more layers of indirection you add, the more it becomes a bureaucratic oligarchy.
The body that nominates the Commission isn't elected.
In theory the Commission is mostly made up of civil servants who answer to commissioners, who are themselves nominated by each country's own government or civil service. Each commissioner has one area of responsibility only, and they answer to the head of the Commission who is their boss. So someone in the UK votes for a politician, who votes for a party leader, who appoints some ministers, and those ministers may or may not have much of a say in whoever gets nominated to be a commissioner - one of many. But there is at least a path there, even if long and indirect and the person your vote ends up influencing doesn't do anything important to your country or needs.
In practice it doesn't actually work that way. In practice, the head of the Commission has veto power over the nominations. They aren't supposed to according to the treaties but the treaties are ignored. This means that in reality it's the head of the Commission who picks the Commissioners, because they can just reject anyone who isn't sufficiently aligned with their own agenda.
So that leaves the question of how the head of the Commission is picked. Once again there is theory and practice. In theory, it's a decision of the heads of each state that they take together to select some candidates, and the Parliament then gets to vote for their preferred candidate. In practice ... nobody knows how the head is picked. Ursula von der Leyen was recently re-appointed despite being plagued by scandals and having a long career of failing upwards. Parliament was sidelined by giving them a voting list with only one candidate on it (her). Seek out an explanation of how she got this job and you won't find one because:
1. The heads of state don't talk about how they decide as a group. Is it a vote? Some sort of horse trading? Do they take it in turns? Are they even all able to take part? Nobody knows.
2. There's no record of which country voted for who, or why.
3. The process by which someone even becomes a candidate is unclear.
4. Because no head of state has any control over who gets onto the candidate list, they never talk on the campaign trail about how they will "vote" (assuming that's how it works) for who runs the EU.
In other words, the process is entirely secret. The potential for corruption is unlimited.
So when critics say the EU Commission is a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, they are right and those who argue otherwise here on HN are wrong. People who got their jobs via a process so opaque and indirect that how it functions can't be explained, not even in principle, cannot claim to be democratically selected.
You're absolutely right.
You can also even just observe the following litmus test of democratic legitimacy: what percentage of people have even heard of Ursula von der Leyen (or most of her predecessors) before her appointment to the most powerful position in the EU? Contrast that with their country's president or prime minister and you will see why one is democratically legitimate and the other is not.
The members of the Commission are appointed by the governments of the member states which are elected?
Not in all EU members; in parliamentary republics (as opposed to presidential republics) governments are not typically elected.
That's also the case in the UK.
Yeah but the EU ones are very powerful
Beware the EU deep (super)state! But don't fear, it's no match for our shallow catchphrases!
"Deep supranational political and economic union" really doesn't have the same ring to it.
Deep Economic Supranational Political Association Integrating Regions would be catchy.
Newsflash: the Pentagon has literally _millions_ of bureaucrats.
None elected.
Unelected people are tasked with defending the free world. how about that?
defending the un-free world, I think you mean. Unless you are exempt from forcible extraction of your wealth (taxes).
> My only worry is that this acquisition makes Global Tetraeder so large that it attracts the attention of those pesky EU bureaucrats, who will want to split it up into multiple imperfect solids.
Based on what previous in-real-life examples is this a realistic worry? AFAIK, "EU bureaucrats" haven't broken up a single US-based company before so seems like a weird thing to be worried about.
Are you really criticizing The Onion's fact-checking?
Can you spot any problems with their plan for the supplement inventory?
> we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal
>Can you spot any problems with their plan for the supplement inventory?
as a regular reader of infowars and a happy customer of their supplements, i cannot see any flaw in that logic and can only hope that i, a successful business executive, will be the person they choose to give immortality to.
I was a worker on that project. A crumb of the omnivitamin fell off and touched my right hand and now that hand doesn't age anymore like Bruce Willis's hands in Death Becomes Her
More like Death Becrumbs Her
Sorry, we're being critical of the EU - logic doesn't apply!
It almost feels like a joke to be honest!
> Based on what previous in-real-life examples is this a realistic worry
My interpretation is that the post you replied to was 100% satire.
Well a tetrahedron can be split into four tetrahedra and an octahedron...
The actual CEO, Ben Collins, has been running The Onion for a short while and his background was as a reporter for NBC. He covered a lot of internet topics very, very well (IMO).
Ben Collins' personal Twitter presence did real damage to the credibility of modern political journalists, imho.
His tweets were soaked in that glib faux-distinterested mid-2010s hyper-online style (but he would still tweet four times an hour, carefully calculating the most likely-to-trend level of ironic detachment for his 'epic' dunk on whoever Twitter's victim of the day was). He had a memorable feud with Nate Silver, in which he (Collins) demonstrated utter ignorance of elementary math, to farm likes off of the then-'out' Silver. Collins treated Twitter like he was the starring character in a high school melodrama.
For almost any 'bad Twitter take' cliché you can think of, there's a Ben Collins tweet (which, to be fair, is still much less bad than the worst of the new Twitter).
The Onion is a good landing point for him.
> His tweets were soaked in that glib faux-distinterested mid-2010s hyper-online style
I think this is generational rather than decade-al. That's just how Gen X/early millenials talk about everything, and it's why Bluesky is still like that.
The other big example is that awful Cory Doctorow babytalk word "enshittification" - they love dropping in the occasional swear but only to make things sound even more smarmy.
dont get it twisted. this is a business move lol.
"Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice."
Glorious.
That part hurt a little bit, recently had to start looking at family just like this.
It felt like coming home here.
On a whim, I decided to peek at the InfoWars homepage. At this moment, I cannot determine which of the headlines are genuine InfoWars content and which are the product of Onion writers. (I assume it's genuine due to the recency of the sale closing?)
This seems like an incredible opportunity to see if it's possible to reprogram InfoWars readers away from the hate and the conspiracy theories.
It would be a massive undertaking but wouldn't it be funny if the savior of modern media turned out to be a student newspaper from Madison, Wisconsin?
The difficulty with this is that anything that isn’t a hard 180 involves continuing to publish approximately the same type of content for a while, which is probably unpalatable to The Onion. Anything that is a small enough course correction to retain its audience is too small a shift to get away from that hateful nonsense. It’s a nice idea to try to steer people away, but you have to start off by driving in the same direction, which nobody wants to do.
> This seems like an incredible opportunity to see if it's possible to reprogram InfoWars readers away from the hate and the conspiracy theories.
Not a chance; they just flee to other outlets. Even Fox News saw huge numbers of people jump to NewsMax and OANN and whatnot.
Only if they notice. They're stupid enough to have followed infowars in the first place
The trick is to do it without the readers noticing.
Not terribly hard as Info warriors aren't known for being detail oriented. Credulity is somewhat of a requirement to be sincere.
> The trick is to lie to them to get them away from their hateful and conspiracy theories
I can't articulate what you're admitting to exactly, but it's an interesting admission.
On a more serious note, most of the readers of these kinds of outlets aren't stupid in this specific sense. They go looking for confirmation, rather than new information. This is why they're hard to untangle.
> They go looking for confirmation, rather than new information. This is why they're hard to untangle.
This applies to most readers of most things, not just fringe content on the Left or the Right.
Most people are stuck in their confirmation biases, and few make an intellectual effort to look at topics from multiple angles and via multiple media outlets on various sides of the political spectrum.
what is the difference, really, between the way the word "hate" is used now and the they the word "sin" was used 200 years ago?
It looks like it's down now?
Reading the article didn't give me any confidence it's actually real/true. Which could be seen as a compliment.
It is actually true! https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/business/media/alex-jones...
No-paywall link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/business/media/alex-jones...
Alex Jones using Twitter/X is on-brand.
I hadn't realized how hilarious this is until now
Of course, Tim Onion is primarily on Bluesky, other than to occasionally rile up Musk
I don't understand your point
Since Musk's acquisition of Twitter, it has increasingly become a right wing echo chamber and place to promote conspiracy theories. And Alex Jones' InfoWars and Elon Musk's Twitter are both likely to show you advertisements for supplements of dubious effectiveness and other generally scammy products.
So yeah, Jones fits right in there.
The reason it's increasingly an "echo chamber" is because liberals are so offended by actual free speech that they stopped posting there. To blame conservatives for this development is illogical.
So on the one hand you had Twitter, where the impression you would have had in the first few days of November is that Trump was probably going to win the election.
On the other hand you had most other platforms like Reddit, with relatively heavy-handed moderation, where the impression you would have had in the first few days of November is that Trump was probably going to lose the election.
So when you want to make a prior judgement on an extremely consequential outcome, which a posteriori was not even close, and one information ecosystem gives you the right answer, and most of the other information ecosystems give you the wrong answer, which information ecosystems do you classify as "echo chambers"?
It's possible that this was just a fluke, but it should certainly make you update your priors on which ecosystems provide a more representative sample of base reality.
If I confidently declare ahead of time the result of a coin flip, I may turn out to be correct, but my confidence was still unjustified. And furthermore, my getting it right would not necessitate a “fluke”.
I’m on Reddit a fair bit and while it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what I see individually, I don’t have a lot of trouble believing that there was a bias toward a particular desired result. But, I honestly didn’t see much in the way of a bias one way or the other in the expected result. I mostly saw a lot of anxiety over not knowing what result to expect.
> I’m on Reddit a fair bit and while it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what any one person sees
Left. Censored media leans left. Censored forums, news, communities are censored to give credit to left ideas. Symmetrically, left ideas only thrive by hiding information.
With complete transparency, people lean right.
Elections are not remotely a "coin flip" though?
Well sure, but the predicting the results of this particular election was very much a coin flip.
I disagree. The media makes it seem like a coin flip, but the prediction markets where people are focused on making money was accurate. This is compared to the media who are more interested in pushing lies and ideology.
Personally, I don’t care what the “media” was saying. I care what the polling data and the election models based on the polling data were saying. They were saying pretty consistently that this could go either way, but that at the same time the result may not turn out to be actually that close. Those two aren’t incompatible.
It could go either way? It might be close, or maybe not?
Imagine taking any of that seriously. Didn't they give Hillary an 80% chance?
Why wouldn't you take it seriously? "Could go either way" is a perfectly reasonable prediction based on the polls that we all were seeing.
Imagine being such a condescending douche…and an ignorant one to boot.
If any other profession was as consistently wrong as pollsters are, would they be taken seriously? I think the main job of pollsters is to provide content for corporate media (the closer the polls the better for attracting eyeballs for advertisers). And they do this job admirably. It just has nothing to do with the election.
You don’t value polling, ok. No use continuing to go back and forth about it. Instead, maybe you’ll feel like responding to one of the other commenters that replied to you about prediction markets…
Polls are twisted to return falsehoods from gray information. It’s hard to fathom that you don’t notice neither the methods nor the results. It’s a bit like living in Beijin and saying that Tiannenmen is conspirationist storytelling, or a coin flip on whether it happened or not. It did. 100% chance.
“It’s 50% probability. Either it’s true or it isn’t.” — what meddlers pretend when they’re not happy admitting the high probability of their enemy candidate being elected. It wasn’t a coin flip.
The prediction markets can be influenced by governments, companies etc who have no desire to make short term money.
But polling results cannot. Right.
> the prediction markets
PredictIt was predicting the opposite outcome up to the day of the election.
Not true. PredictIt was predicting Trump for 3 weeks prior up until 27th where it took a dive. This is likely due to over-reacting to the Puerto Rican island garbage joke at MSG on the 27th. Not saying prediction markets will be perfectly accurate but they will certainly be better than pollsters.
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-t...
The most historically accurate and least able to be gamed, predictit.org, did not overwhelmingly predict Trump.
Reddit depends very much on which subreddit you are. There's plenty of racists, trump supporters and so on on reddit.
The vibe on other platforms was that it was going to be close, not that Kamala was going to win, which is the correct even handed judgement, and now all the votes have being counted, was correct.
The idea that I stopped clock is right twice a day but because it's twitter that means it's always right is a bit... come on. Hackernews commenters are supposed to be better than that.
One of the two echo chambers was bound to be correct in terms of vote counting.
what's the standard now for a not close election? dems have to always win the popular vote now?
4 swing states were decided by a 1% difference. this election was close.
Given the large amount of information that Twitter claimed that turned out to be false, one correct claim doesn't really change much. It goes from around 0/1000 correct to 1/1001 correct. Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.
You realize old Twitter was literally censoring things they knew to be true but politically damaging, right? Or are you still operating in 2022?
Twitter is right wing because your country (and the world) are shifting right. Sorry.
You realise new twitter is literally censoring things that are a mild inconvenience to the Boss - who happens to be the new President-for-life buddy?
They were censoring leaked pictures of Hunter Biden's penis.
You can't run a service where it shows every single post that someone wants to put up, even if they're "legal". It'd get full of spam, offend everyone so much they leave, or just force everyone to see Hunter Biden's penis.
I take it that left wingers feel that "community notes" isn't effective or sufficient to combat right wing beliefs that are wrong?
The people on the right seem satisfied for now that they can "combat misinformation with more information". (That's a misquote by the way, I believe he said better information, not more. On second thought, he may have said it both ways.)
Has anyone discussed why the right believes this can work, and the left doesn't?
The problem isn't "beliefs that are wrong", the problem is that it's Calvinball.
Say something happened, they'll say you don't have proof.
Show proof that it happened, they'll say it isn't a big deal.
Demonstrate a negative consequence, they'll say it's an isolated incident.
Show that it happens a lot, they'll say the victims deserve it.
And so on. Of course I don't have any proof.
That's true, and I think you might agree it happens on both sides if I may talk about sides.
I'm most concerned about enduring falsehoods that people continue to believe despite efforts to correct, such as the belief that Trump called white nationalists fine people(asterisk), or, believing 2020 was stolen (which is one I'm willing to believe).
(asterisk) Maybe people are only pretending to believe this. I'm not sure.
Anyway are you most concerned about enduring falsehoods that are (arguably) harmful to a functioning nation?
I think it's difficult to come to any agreement unless we name the problem we're trying to solve, and also name a better alternative. Personally, I prefer free speech because I'm pretty sure the alternatives are far worse. I'd like to hear about an alternative with an explanation why it's truly better. That's not meant as a challenge; just my true thinking at this time.
Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[0] always applies.
By the time Community Notes has appeared, tens or even hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people will have seen the misinformation.
Even once Community Notes have appeared, many won't read them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_asymmetry_principle
Why are we so worried about adults reading incorrect information? Once they eventually find the info was wrong they'll be more sceptical of that source. We know policing speech doesn't work, whoever does the policing introduces their own biases, this was clear as day with the hunter laptop story and how the goverment put pressure on social media companies to supress it.
> Once they eventually find the info was wrong they'll be more sceptical of that source.
If they’ve internalized/amplified it, they’ll believe the source, and disregard the contradictory information.
This has been well-established over the last, oh, 10 years. Facts are irrelevant if you can choose your own sources.
This “sounds smart” and I’m sure it circulates well in conversation. In practice, no. The point of “facts” is to identify useful truths that guide decisions. When some portion of the distribution of people identify misalignment, which is inevitable—not optional—then they will true up.
4 years on and a significant proportion of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen. Just how many years will it take for that to true up?
I notice you don't make a definite claim that it wasn't stolen. You're annoyed by the fact others believe it was, based on what you feel is insufficient evidence, yes?
But if you can prove it wasn't, I'm interested
Surely the burden of proof is on those making a claim of election interference? Elections are designed to be reliable and there haven't been reports of previous elections being "stolen", so I would think that reasonable evidence should be provided if people want to push the idea that an election was interfered with.
There is no burden of proof required to assert a hypothesis. This is how none of truth nor science nor security operate. There is evidence gathering activity which supports or undermines, strengthening or weakening a hypothesis. Ideally, one dispositive form of evidence affirms or denies a hypothesis. It is not difficult to find historical precedent of election fraud, but in any case, other claims are weak evidence.
80% of republicans believe 2020 was stolen.
don't worry, community notes on Twitter will fix this /s
> Why are we so worried about adults reading incorrect information?
Because I'd much rather my grandma get a COVID vaccine than trying to find a source of Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
And I imagine the owners of Comet Ping Pong would have greatly preferred that adults didn't read lies about Hillary running a child sex ring in their basement. [0]
Haitian immigrants in Ohio certainly weren't fans of Trump claiming that they're kidnapping and eating pets.
Speech has consequences.
> Once they eventually find the info was wrong they'll be more sceptical of that source.
...have you been living in a cave for the last 10 years? I just can't fathom how someone can be so naive to actually think this.
If there was any truth to this, Infowars would have been damn near been dead on arrival. Fox News would have been bankrupt before Obama even began his second term.
Or maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse and operating under the assumption that people will accept when they're wrong.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
> Because I'd much rather my grandma get a COVID vaccine than trying to find a source of Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
So the misinformation didn't affect your decision making. Instead, the misinformation you were exposed to was corrected by your exposure to more, better information.
Those are all valid disadvantages of community notes, and free speech in general.
How do you explain that there are smart people who have known about these very disadvantages for many years, and still respond positively to "the solution to misinformation is more/better information"?
I don't suppose you know of a solution (to a problem that I admit I haven't fully specified) that has no disadvantages. The proposed solutions I've seen appearing on the left are frightening.
Community notes isn’t scalable.
So when you have people like Musk constantly posting by the time a note is added the value of it has long since diminished.
Also your left/right wing argument is entirely something you’ve invented.
I agree with the first part totally, and you're probably right I invented something there. I only meant that free speech / "more information helps" seems to resonate with the right, and censorship seems to resonate with the left. Not so?
Censorship of books seem to resonate well with the right.
It really hasn’t.
My experience disagrees with yours, I suppose.
To me, as a casual user of the platform, that has been the trend. I've been visiting less because of it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65246394
there are both in-depth studies and anecdotal evidence that suggest hate speech has been growing under Mr Musk's tenure.
Data Shows X Is Suspending Far Fewer Users for Hate Speech
> Twitter/X
Why not call it one or the other?
Call it Twitter. Everyone knows what you mean, and it annoys Elon.
I'm not even your average Elon hater, and I still think X is a stupid name. Dude should've just kept the name and brand that everyone knows already.
Elon just likes X. I feel he bought the entire site in part due to ego. And it was part of the "everything app" branding too IIRC.
I guess the "everything app" aspect would make sense for a rebrand. But that aspect feels nowhere close to reality yet, so it still seems to odd to me.
old good ole Twitter was when your feed was only those you followed.
new X is when your feed what Elon wants you to see and react to.
Twitter stopped doing the "follower feed" thing for years before Elon bought the website. The propaganda has gotten much worse, but let's not pretend Twitter wasn't widely considered the worst website on the face of the planet (except Facebook) even before Elon took over
1. I think the main thing is that Elon's own tweets are almost always make it to global broadcast via For You feed.
2. This effectively makes everyone see whatever Musk personally likes/retweets
3. It is soft of correct that there is more freedom of speech due to slashing/nonexistent moderation
4. But because algo promotes whatever Musk retweets, it makes Musk chief in charge of the algorithm. Whatever Musk likes - will be shown to everyone.
5. Because the rest of the feed is noise and garbage, this effectively makes Musk inject a strong signal to a feed and makes him a moderator. If censors previously would censor by deleting posts, he censors by throwing garbage and noisy posts and sprinkling signal in a few places
You can block him and that doesn't happen. The main problem is the algorithm is wildly oversensitive and will show you 100 of any one thing you linger on for too long.
Same thing happens with competitors though. That's all Threads is. I enabled Bluesky's occasional algorithm posts in the following feed and it will not stop trying to show me hardcore gay porn I very much didn't ask for.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Bluesky behaves like the Twitter of yore where you see only who you follow.
This is misleading.
At the top of the feed, there are two tabs: "For you" and "Following". If you select "Following", then you only see people you follow.
Ever since they introduced that, it tries hard to switch you back to for you and has never let you stay away from it permanently.
a lot of people use the For You feed by default, since Titter makes it very inconvenient to use Following:
- cannot disable/hide For you
- always default for you, and no way to default to Followingbut you don't see _all_ from the people you follow in "following", some end up in "for you". So if you want to see stuff from people you follow you need to look at the rage-bait from the algorithmic feed.
Or "Twitter, the site desperately trying to be know as X".
My favorite so far is: “The platform [Elon Musk] wants you to call “X” for his own sexual gratification”. It’s admittedly too wordy though.
I heard that deadnaming is uncool.
I think the product should be called Twitter and the company called X. Sort of like Facebook/Meta. Which is what Musk should have done from the beginning, but we can fix it for him.
Call it X. Everyone knows what you mean and it really stirs shit up with people who are emotionally attached to the old brand name.
> Call it X. Everyone knows what you mean
When I see "X", I think X Window System.
I saw your comment and thought, "I bet this guy is a Windows user." I was right! LOL.
https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&sort=byDate&query=autho...
Congrats on your keen insights.
Use both and get everybody!
I believe Xitter (pronounced 'shitter') is the preferred satirical term, and one that many deem to be an accurate portrayal of the sites user experience since it was taken over by Mr Musk.
Xitter is my favorite!
I like Xitter too. Also "the dead bird site" which occurs quite a lot on Mastodon
Maximum clarity
I guess this is about the domain name infowars.com which belongs to a bankrupt company.
Alex Jones is such a big name and has other channels (x.com, Joe Rogan etc.) that he can easily build a similar site/business under a new domain name.
Perhaps The Onion should ask - who gets most promotion of this?
The auction included all of the InfoWars and several associated corporations' assets, including the studio and the supplements business. At one point the settlement administrator was trying to get Alex's Twitter handle.
I believe he's been doing some half-ass scheming to create essentially the same company but in his parents' name, and I doubt he has a problem getting listeners back.
... Infowars had a supplements business?
From the statement -
| As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.
On the internet, telling people what they want to hear will always attract an audience. If the audience is larger than a thousand or so people, then you can make money by leveraging your audience's trust in you to sell them supplements, cash for gold schemes, boxed mattresses, meal delivery kits, or VPNs.
Some people wonder what the point is of flat-earthers arguing with everyone about their "alternative science". The answer is so they can identify the fools who they can scam with their various schemes...
nfts, crypto, low poly trucks etc.
> low poly trucks
My lego builds from when I was 5 were a scam?
I think the studs are high polygon count.
The ads on some information-channels carry a lot of information about the audience, and so, about the channel.
Some are dominated by reverse mortgages, supplements, buy-gold ads, Franklin “mint”, and, if online, crypto scams.
This happens to be a convenient way to quickly tell when you’re headed deep into a particular part of Bullshit Country.
[edit] point is I find it unsurprising they had a supplement business. It’s probably the easiest of the above to break into.
InfoWars was a supplements business. The political stuff was just a funnel to sell the supplements, where the real money was made.
Infowars basically was a supplements business. Sold a load of soy based products while ranting about soy
Its how they made most of their money.
Infowars is basically only a vehicle to sell supplements and other various crap.
Not dissimilar to Fox News or any other media company where the main purpose of the content is to get people to stay for the ads. Turns out rage-baiting works extremely well for driving engagement among certain groups.
The trick that Jones has perfected is the ad pivot. When you watch most media, the line between content and ad is generally pretty clear. With jones, it was often very blurry. Like, he does do regular ads, but he'll also be ranting about globalists for 10 minutes and then drop in something like "They want to destroy your mind which is why you need our deep earth iodine crystals and sea algae which is proven to stop globalist mind control."
He does it pretty much out of habit. He literally did an ad pivot while on the stand in his court cases.
The literal only way the Onion could mock this man was with… reality.
Fox news is pushing an agenda first and foremost. The ad money was just a bonus. Rupert Murdoch didn't need the ad money. Just like with Sky News he was more interested in the "reasons of prestige and politics for keeping it" than the profits.
That allegedly had elevated levels of lead.
Which, you know what, tracks.
I didn't know that either. That's absolutely hilarious! This could be straight out of a South Park episode.
Infowars is a supplements business. It’s grifts all the way down.
Anyone ever wonder why there are very few far-right comedians?
Because their idea of comedy is something like: "foreigners, am I right?" *shaking head
They exist, though few in number. They’re the ones loudly complaining that you can’t tell a (racist) “joke” any more.
What do you mean, is Washington DC not a comedy circuit? /jk
It's because they all identify as comedians.
(Yes, this is the one rightwing joke).
You need to be self-reflective enough to laugh at your own BS. Monomaniacs spouting out their grievances don't make for the best laughs.
Hey, come on, carrying a sink and saying "Let that sink in" is god damn hilarious...
/s
Infowars was a supplements business. their business model was to brainwash people with conspiracy theories and sell supplements that solve the problems they made up
>... Infowars had a supplements business? Yeah check out an advert for CAVEMAN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ZqD9-W1_8 . I used to like Infowars 10+ years ago (I'm from New Zealand) when the site was a news aggregate site so you could read the sources. Now that it is him just talking I don't visit the site that often. I remember walking around in a small township in Norway (just under 10,000 people) and seeing a Infowars sticker on a road light. So yeah he used to have massive reach, I don't know if he still does.
Most of these things are DTC operations and usually for supplements since they are relatively unregulated. Turning viewership into money is usually done through ads but these guys are fairly toxic to most advertisers.
Supplements are a good alternative for podcasters. They’re like merch is for musicians etc. but usually run as a recurring revenue stream.
Scratch the surface of any of these people and you’ll find they are like this: huberman, Bryan Johnson, they’ll all have a DTC business.
There is a reason the archetypal scam artist is referred to as a ‘snake oil salesman’.
Oh man, you're in for a treat. Look up some videos on youtube, the classic being John Oliver's 2017 piece; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyGq6cjcc3Q . He's adjacent to the newly mainstream right, yes, but he's been around for a long time as a more radical+fringe actor, and has all the baggage that goes along with that. A good portion (most?) of his money was made from selling vaguely anti-GMO and pro-masculinity products sold with a heavy dose of "big pharma doesn't want you to know this one trick".
They ranged from insane horse bone dust stuff to plain overpriced vitamins; https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/we-sent-a...
And the Knowledge Fight podcast if you really, really wanna get into it. Almost 1000 episodes now. https://knowledgefight.com
Behind the bastards also has a few that are good summaries if you want something shorter, with the Knowledge Fight guys as guests.
Whatever episode they're making right now is going to be great.
Of course, it's random nonsense peddling, how else would it fund itself other than via a obvious grift? If you're gullible enough to watch Alex Jones and believe him, you're gullible enough to buy snake oil to increase your penis.
Snake oil will increase my penis? Where do I sign up?!
I think it's all the assets of the website.
I believe that the current state of play is that Jones has to pay $1.1bn damages even post bankruptcy so maybe any future successes will lead to money for the Sandyhook families. I certainly hope so.
Ironically he may live longer to earn more for them - he'll never be able to afford a cigar again.
Wait am I understanding this right?
- Collins buys InfoWars
- Auction money ends up going to SH victims
- SH victims have an anti-gun organization set up
- This org enters into a long term ad deal with Collins
- Some of the money therefore flows back to Collins, effectively helping with the auction buy
That's what I guessed from the story - I suppose that there would be a lot of reticence about buying this site from a lot of corporate actors, but maybe there are a lot of crazy people who could have bought it if the price was right. So, this way it is for sure a "dead" property.
Perhaps The Onion should ask - who gets most promotion of this?
Well, we’re all talking about the onion. And I, personally, haven’t read onion content in a long, long while. So this kind of put them back on the radar for me.
But I could be one of only a few people who fell out of onion readership?
More likely is that they believe the next four years will provide them a lot of comedy fodder and they’re setting their pieces early. For them the election is likely to be pretty good for business.
>I, personally, haven’t read onion content in a long, long while
The onion was kind of dead for a while under various shitty owners, but was bought this year by Jeff Lawson of Twilio and is now being run by former NBC reporter Ben Collins. The new stuff since the acquisition has been a bit hit or miss, but at least they're trying again.
They also restarted the print newspaper (I'm a subscriber)
So far I've gotten two of those, and each time I've thought the lead headline on the front page was super clunky. It always tries to fit in a joke by being twice as long as it should be.
They have posted great news segment videos again
I miss the autistic reporter. That guy was my favorite.
While their stuff is brilliant at times, I don't actively seek it out because it leaves me pretty depressed and anxious. The parodies are almost indistinguishable from real events these days.
Alas, "Onion Now: Focus" https://youtu.be/Bex5LyzbbBE
Yep, that's my feeling everyday. I would have liked to have seen Patrick Warburton cast in that role, though. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaghIdSJKvQ
I even felt that way reading The Onion's article about this and then listening to Alex Jones' rant on Xitter. They sounded like they came from the same writer.
They have become the embodiment of Poe's Law (or the world is such a hellscape that Poe's Law is just taken for granted now?)
Hmm NBC seems to imply that they purchased "Free Speech Systems", which is the parent company for the entire operation. Of course, who knows what they'll actually get other than the domain and copyrights -- Jones will just move all the physical assets into a storage unit/another office and dare them to complain, Guliani-style. Also, who knows if any of these stands for long, anyway; the cases are in state court (Connecticut and Texas) but what's stopping the president from issuing an executive order clearing them? Laws?
Re: "who gets the most promotion", IDK I think it's definitely the new owner of the Onion. Personally speaking, I think we're past the "don't give them attention" stage of fascism, and "they were bought by a satire company" isn't exactly a better rallying cry than Jones has already been spouting during the entire litigation. Plus, I trust them;
The anti-violence organization Everytown for Gun Safety said it will be the exclusive advertiser in The Onion’s new venture as part of a multiyear agreement. John Feinblatt, the group’s president, said in a statement that he hopes to “reach new audiences ready to hold the gun industry accountable for contributing to our nation’s gun violence epidemic.”
They are almost certainly going to sue for illegal enrichment. I'm certain that Jones will try and move assets and I'm sure he'll get caught doing that.
It means Onion sues Jones will likely be in the headlines a fair bit.
He has been getting away with moving assets for months now.
> Alex Jones is such a big name and has other channels (x.com, Joe Rogan etc.) that he can easily build a similar site/business under a new domain name.
Maybe but the judgement was for 1B USD. So any profits would probably be garnished away.
Basically, lawfare was used to censor Alex Jones. I wonder if this is a case for the Supreme Court and First Amendment rights?
Lawfare? This is literally how defamation works.
If someone said on the Internet said that rs999gti was a "tax-evading, pyramid-scheming, mullet-wearing, karaoke-ruining, ferret-hoarding, snake-oil-selling, cereal-with-water-eating, grammar-mangling, table-manner-less, engagement-ring-pawning, salad-dodging, traffic-cone-stealing, apology-dodger," and it wasn’t true, I think you’d probably like to sue them and take their money too.
> Lawfare?
Yes the court's judgment is so high, 1B USD, that he cannot make money without it being garnished. How does he get back to work? I personally do not think anyone should lose their livelihood over speech, NOTE: I did not say free speech. What he did is reprehensible but not enough that he is basically black balled from making a living. Penalties yes, loss of livelihood no.
Having your wages garnished doesn't mean you starve to death. He's perfectly capable of making a living, supporting himself and his dependents, if any, but his ability to build wealth will be restricted. I don't know the particulars of this case, but generally:
"The garnishment amount is limited to 25% of your disposable earnings for that week (what's left after mandatory deductions) or the amount by which your disposable earnings for that week exceed 30 times the federal minimum hourly wage, whichever is less."
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/if-wages-are-garnish...
$1B is the amount it took to get him to stop. He could have stopped earlier, and had ample opportunity, but that was apparently his price.
Alex is free to work at the local car wash.
"Lawfare" is when people break the law and are actually prosecuted for it even though they are rich and right wing and think they laws don't apply to them.
Alex Jones wasn't even subtle about it. He was getting judgements telling him to stop spouting blatant lies about victims of a mass shooting and he just doubled down on the lies. Repeatedly. The courts kept giving him more rope and he kept tying more nooses.
Was it? The constitution lays out slander and libel as types of speech that can be censored. The trashy Jones then knowingly and maliciously lied about people for profit - aka libel and slander. Seems reasonable to take the money he made as well as punitive damages.
How is censorship?
The constitution lays out slander and libel as types of speech that can be censored
I don't think defamation law is unconstitutional, but, no it doesn't.
The US courts have ruled that there are time, place, and manner limits on freedom of speech.
Yes. But as he didn't overtly call for violence against anyone here, it doesn't apply.
I don't think defamation law is unconstitutional.
Neither do I
> How is censorship?
How does he make future money, you know for living?
The judgement basically means the courts get to garnish his wages until the judgement is paid.
Jones is a goof to me and I like seeing him rant and rave and wear foil hats. But I don't think anyone should have their livelihood taken from them by censorship of the courts. EDIT: remember all judgments and penalties cut both ways. Today Jones tomorrow someone you follow in the media.
Lower the judgement to 1M USD (EDIT: or something reasonable) and let's move on.
> Today Jones tomorrow someone you follow in the media
Anyone who knowingly spreads lies about a person and causes them harm should face legal consequences.
Not sure how it works in the US, but e.g. in germany only a certain portion of your wages go towards debts, they let you have a certain portion for yourself since you need it to live.
> Today Jones tomorrow someone you follow in the media.
Christ. As a non-American, this comment says a lot about the hilariously broken state of your political landscape.
“It could happen to one of your guys, and that somehow makes it bad!”
Anyone that does what Alex did deserves his punishment, and I’d be against anyone that did what he did, even if I previously “followed” them.
His livelihood wasn't taken. His assets were taken because he did damages and has to pay for those damages.
He can go get all sorts of jobs. Yeah his wages will be garnished, but that doesn't mean his whole paycheck - just the lesser of 25% of the paycheck or 30x minimum wage. He can make money and a living with that just fine. Same as I'd expect for anyone intentionally lying and hurting people for money - whether I "follow" them or not.
Perhaps you should find some reputable sources for information, instead of relying on the proven liar to tell the truth about his situation?
Wow, crazy to watch all the bootlickers and nutters in his feed who are angry about this.
They're all "verified" (paid) accounts too, which is why Twitter is such a cesspool. They sort paid accounts to the top.
Freemium speech?
right, I was reading their comments, I cannot believe it. But hey, if you view the world like that, guys like Alex will always prosper and have a crowd.
This has been halted due a judge deciding it was a private sale masquerading as an auction: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857290045536780334
Is there a credible source on this?
I don't want to link to paywalled sources, but yes, multiple outlets are reporting that the sale has been halted until next week to ensure that the process was fair.
Yeah, this one. Why?
I like how he still tries to sell his merchandise until the very last moment.
He has for some time been telling his listeners to buy supplements from a new company set up in his father's name that is a thin cutout for the one ostensibly run by himself. It seems likely a good lawyer could pierce that corporate veil and go after the new company, but I don't know if that has happened.
> It seems likely a good lawyer could pierce that corporate veil and go after the new company, but I don't know if that has happened.
He's spent the whole time since losing the lawsuit illegally shifting assets to his parents and they bankruptcy courts haven't seemed to be able to stop that.
For what it's worth, a lawyer _did_ ask the presiding Judge Christopher Lopez to tell Alex Jones he definitely can't do that and solidify this in writing the terms of bankruptcy, and the judge simply refused to even try on the basis that everyone involved is an adult and ought to know better.
That and the defiance, conspiracies, deep state, freedom-fighter verbal diarrhea until the bitter end. You almost get the feeling that he actually believes it all.
I'm hoping that Department Head Rawlings and Jim Anchower will return as contributors. When did T. Herman Zweibel pass the reins to Bryce P. Tetraeder?
That is the funniest thing I have read in a very long time.
Truly a great piece of satirical writing on The Onion. Just one example:
> With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal.
How can Jones respond this way when families are backing that. Does this qualify as insanity or more like bottomless greed ?
they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning
He seems surprised. I guess losing a multi-year court case, being fined $1,500,000,000.00 by a jury, and going through bankruptcy court wasn't enough of a warning?
Part of the MO of these outrage merchants is that they simultaneously claim that the government perpetrate the most vile acts (killing children, poisoning the water, false flag attacks) while also acting outraged and surprised that they'd do something as mundane as ignore a procedure.
It's a grifting method. Provoke outrage among the less informed and watch the money roll in
I like the twitter comments. They're already baking how it's part of the secret globalist plot.
See also https://reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/ if you haven't yet.
"They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon."
I saw the onion post and didnt really believe it.
I’m cracking up
There was an emergency hearing to challenge the sale to the onion.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/not-funny-onion-buys-inf...
This is great!
Seems like the article is really gleeful. Somewhat ironic since The Onion could be brought down in the same way by defamation lawsuits.
> Somewhat ironic since The Onion could be brought down in the same way by defamation lawsuits.
Unlikely.
It's worth remembering that Jones was never actually tried for defamation. He instead received a default judgment. In the US, both sides of a civil case have the right to a fair and speedy trial. If there's delays, you had better have a good reason for them and they need to fit the rules of procedure.
Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, more-or-less refused to participate in the trial. The Knowledge Fight podcast has some episodes dealing with the discovery and deposition process for the suits, with actual deposition audio. I'm not a lawyer but it was absolutely brutal to listen to how ill-prepared Jones, his employees, and his representatives were. They were submitting Wikipedia articles about false flags as evidence, had a comprehensive background check on one of the parents that was in FSS records that no one could seem to explain the presence of, and generally didn't comply with other discovery requests.
The end result of this is that his life's work has been reduced to a satire and he is likely financially hobbled for the rest of his life.
For The Onion to have the same fate, they would have to basically disregard every single common-sense rule regarding what you should do when you're sued.
Jones' lawyers at one point forwarded a full phone dump of Jones' phone by accident to opposing council. They of course notified Jones' lawyers immediately to ask if this was a mistake that they should delete/disregard, as was their right. Jones' lawyers promptly ignored this, or didn't understand what was going on, resulting it becoming fair game after X days had passed. This goody bag of text messages and pictures contradicted several points of Jones' defence regarding who he was communicating with and a bunch of incriminating evidence that wasn't produced during discovery. That was my understanding of that episode, I may have misunderstood parts of it. Oh, and they revealed this when Jones was on the stand, and it is available to view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC9RiRUF21A
Legal Eagle (among many others I suspect - that's just the channel I tend to follow for pop legal) did a breakdown of that clip explaining what was going on for the layperson: https://youtu.be/x-QcbOphxYs
I wonder if attorneys have any liability at all. Granted, lawyers do not provide any guarantees, and I usually tend to be more forgiving of genuine fuckups, but this seems a bit too much. The very least you expect from a hired lawyer is not to single-handedly destroy all your defense.
You can sue a lawyer for malpractice, same as a doctor. They even carry insurance for it.
Also worth remembering, the entire lawsuit wasn't about defamation.
There were several claims about things such as Alex Jones paying individuals to call the plaintiffs 24/7 and other direct forms of harassment.
Feel however you want about free speech but the lawsuit wasn't just Alex Jones said mean words.
IANAL, but I'd also imagine there's a difference between clear satire and something being presented as the truth. Additionally, The Onion generally goes after public figures while Infowars, in this case, was targeting private individuals. Not sure how either of these have bearing in the legal sense, but could be important factors.
Of course, in a politicized legal context, these points may not matter since legal action could simply be an endurance trial.
>>I'd also imagine there's a difference between clear satire and something being presented as the truth. There is, and the 1st amendment's coverage of Parody/Satire is very well documented. The Onion has always made it clear that it's fake news, Infowars fought tooth and nail to say they're allowed to say their "truth" even if it's harmful lies. When you can prove that someone believes the damaging bullshit they're saying (not always easy!) they get their dick kicked in.
To your other point, "a well-financed bad actor could ruin any business with enough SLAPP lawsuits" falls away because anti-SLAPP laws exist and award damages if you push too hard.
Do perfectly good people get ruined through litigation? Sure. Is it the epidemic that grifters trying to sway public opinion in their favor make it out to be? Highly unlikely.
A lot of jurisdictions have anti-SLAPP lawsuits, but not all. I think Logan Paul is trying to sue YouTuber Coffeezilla in a district that doesn't have anti-SLAPP protections with the express intent of bankrupting him.
Fair enough. I didn't know it was a walkover in the end. And it is not really surprising there was no sane defence.
I believe Info Wars etc becoming big is pretty much a symptom rather than the problem. And it has escalated lately. I fear that they will be used as excuses for getting at others.
> I believe Info Wars etc becoming big is pretty much a symptom rather than the problem
I believe the problem is how incredibly easy it is to both disseminate and consume utter bullshit. You're no longer that weird loner in town. You go online and can find hundreds and thousands of people who agree with you. Why would you go find people that challenge your views, when you can get those dopamine highs from people who love everything you say?
Get pushback from people in your life? Cut them out. They don't get you, and they're just hating.
The worst part? It's self-sustaining. Humans are really bad about going against a group. So much of our social behavior is around what others do, and the more we find out about others believing XYZ, we'll start to believe it ourselves. Unless they're from a different group, in which case it is anathema.
Combine those 2 things and you get these people who basically live in separate worlds. And social media/internet enables that.
I think there is a three fold problem of the mental health crisis, decreased social trust (broken communities etc) and algorithmic feeds.
I don't know if Alex Jones is mentally ill or pretends to be. His targeting seems suspiciously self-aware and lame compared to how it usually sounds when people wander down that path.
But I guess most of his viewership is. But they existed on the internets in the beginning too. Plenty of them. Maybe the recommendation engines bring more people into the "self-sustaining" circle, than would be otherwise?
I think what has changed is mainly that there are more 'leaders'. I might have had the wrong conception of what it was like earlier, but apart from Alex Jones and the lizard guy (David Ike?) it didn't seem to be that many.
Something has changed. There are so many lunatic "influencers" nowadays that keep getting pushed to the top. Earlier you had to get out of your way to stumble upon them.
> I believe the problem is how incredibly easy it is to both disseminate and consume utter bullshit.
But more importantly, how easy it is to make a lot of money disseminating it.
> Why would you go find people that challenge your views
Obviously in some kind of minority, but I love having my views challenged. It’s how I grow. I want people to argue with me, though ideally, respectfully.
the problem was that it was profitable.
> Seems like the article is really gleeful.
Good! It should be. Alex Jones is a ghoul making money from dead school shooting victims. Anything that embarrasses him is entitled to as much glee as it wants.
Yes and he profits from fooling mentally ill people. Selling homeopatic pills and whatever.
But I think the right to be wrong is way more important than getting at Alexander Jones.
The precedent is bad.
I can't imagine a more valid use for defamation laws than to prevent someone from knowingly and repeatedly causing death threats and other harassment to be directed at parents whose children have been murdered. After being sued, Jones completely failed to defend himself in any meaningful way and lost the suit by default. I honestly have no idea which part of this chain of events you object to. People should be free to send mobs after parents grieving an unimaginable tragedy? Morons who get sued should win by default?
> The precedent is bad.
I think the opposite precent would be worse. Regulating your tone around anyone with even a mediocum of power for fear of repercussion is part of the reason we're in the situation we face today.
There is a right to be wrong.
But when you profit off the suffering and harm you've caused by being wrong knowingly and continuing to cause harm, then its a very good precedent.
Calling Sandy Hook a hoax and harrassing grieving parents is not "the right to be wrong".
"Being wrong" and "repeatedly defaming people" are quite different.
The Paradox of Tolerance: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance>
A good reply I found online:
The Paradox of Tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance not as a moral standard but as a social contract. If someone does not abide the terms of mutual tolerance, then they are not covered by the contract. By definition intolerant people do not follow the rules so they are no longer covered and should not be tolerated.
That's awfully close to "terrorists shouldn't have rights", and problematic for the same reason.
I think it's actually closer to "terrorists should go to prison". Terrorists and other criminals have broken a social contract, and a level of punishment that some approximation of society deems to be acceptable is extracted from the terrorists. This doesn't mean that terrorists don't/shouldn't have some rights. Similarly, thinking about tolerance as a social contract doesn't require stripping anyone who violates this contract of all of their rights.
FWIW I don't actually have a problem with Jones specifically getting in trouble over defamation after getting his day in court. What I have a problem with is the broad notion that it's generally okay to "not tolerate the intolerant" to the point of forcibly suppressing them. The paradox of tolerance is not really a paradox when we're talking about intolerant speech.
I'm kind of worried about society deciding which speech is "intolerant", so I'm not completely on board with the idea of treating tolerance as a social contract. That being said, if we could stop a genocide merely by suppressing people's speech, I feel like that would probably be a worthwhile thing to do. That is to say, it feels like the least bad way to prevent a genocide.
Again, figuring out which speech is worth suppressing is a whole other can of worms.
EDIT: note that Jones did have his speech suppressed, and this was done because his speech was causing people to make death threats against the sandy hook parents. I feel like we could classify Jones's speech as intolerant against sandy hook parents, and the same logic applies as for any other type of intolerant speech.
Indeed. And one of the wonders of this is that anyone can determine that you have not abided by the terms. Even Stalin’s Russia was tolerant. It merely deemed many people to not abide by the terms of mutual tolerance.
I have yet to hear what meaning tolerance has in this interpretation.
Surely chairman mao agrees with free speech that doesn’t harm his society and social programs
The precedent would otherwise be that it is ok ignoring and debasing the US Justice system.
What precedent do you think this sets exactly?
The right to be wrong is important.
The right to deliberately lie in ways that harm people is not a "right" that we want to uphold.
And profit off of the lies.
Great point! When The Onion starts making threats against survivors and relatives of school shootings, they should also face defamation lawsuits.
Honest question: what threats did Jones make against them? I understood that he claimed it was a hoax/conspiracy, not that he had made any threats. Not even sure how he could make threats against people he didn't believe were real.
The threats were made by Jones followers rather than Jones personally.
Okay. But I think that undermines the argument the OP was making significantly.
"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"
I think that's a very different statement from "God, I hate that stupid priest. He's so meddlesome." Criticizing people should not count as incitement in a liberal society- consider whether people who told an audience that Trump was a fascist should be held accountable for the assassination attempts. This is defamation.
A court already determined he is guilty. If he thought he was innocent, he had the opportunity to present any defense he wanted. Whether or not he is at fault isn't a point of discussion because it's already been determined for a fact.
And when one of your followers has done the deed throw them under a bus.
Did he actually call for people to make threats or use violence? Did he even imply it?
Do you apply the same standard to public figures who call Trump a fascist or a Nazi? Are they responsible for the person who shot him?
If I understand correctly: if I threaten a third party based on something you’ve said, you now face legal liability?
A single person reacting that way is unlikely to make the speaker liable, but when a large crowd reacts the same way and the speaker does not make attempts to defuse the situation, then liability should be assigned.
I’m glad that you didn’t waste effort saying “I am not a lawyer” here, because it’s very very apparent that you aren’t.
The Onion was not telling the parents of dead children they were crisis actors and were lying
Don't want to be sued by defamation don't make BS about people in a fragile position. It's that simple
In the US, the truth is a strong and approved defense against defamation. If you are for some reason terrified of defamation lawsuits in the one nation with the highest bar required to prove defamation, you can avoid any possible loss by simply not lying.
Not likely. Satire is protected under the First Amendment.
Are you as confident about the 22nd?
Can't tell if this is satire or not, that's the real irony here.
it absolutely can not, satire is protected under the first amendment and there are piles of precedence
You have to step extremely far over the line to be brought down by such a lawsuit, particularly if you have money to spend on legal defense (as Jones did previously, or the Onion does today). Jones went over that line one time too many, in a country where a lot of people strongly dislike him. It's like being Martin Shkreli, the system* is going to keep targeting you and eventually get you (entirely warranted) on one of your legal infractions. The more you're a jerk and stick your head up prominently, the more you're going to draw counter attacks to your behavior by the varied masses.
* the system referring to the vast combination of peoples: politicians, legal, monied interests, lobbyists, news media, corporations, journalists, agitators, whatever, et al
Tim Onion's (Ben Collins) statement on Bluesky: [0]
> Hi everyone.
> The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars.
> We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website.
> We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.
> I can't wait to show you what we have cooked up.
Next post: [1]
> Does anybody need millions of dollars worth of supplements?
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3law22g...
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3law23r...
The funniest thing would be to keep running the site as-is but swap out the insanity for stuff that reads like insanity but is legit or morally sound. The audience might not notice, and could (IMHO) easily be duped into supporting good causes!
This is exactly what I was thinking. Being funny is great, but for years people will continue to go to the website not knowing what has transpired.
The core idea of satire, which is often missed in supposedly satirical works is that you should not only make fun of the thing you don't believe, but you should also explain what you do believe under the cover of pretending to dismiss it.
For example everybody knows Swift's Modest Proposal does not seriously intend that the problems in Ireland ought to be fixed by literally eating children, but if you read it, the proposal also very clearly explains what should be done, in the form of taxation of the wealthy absentee landlords (many of them English) for example - it just couches all these boring but entirely reasonable steps as ludicrous and easily dismissed while insisting that eating babies is a good idea.
> The core idea of satire, which is often missed in supposedly satirical works is that you should not only make fun of the thing you don't believe, but you should also explain what you do believe under the cover of pretending to dismiss it.
I often suggest that satire is a dangerous double edged sword and not a good primary vehicle for positive change. Part of your audience will understand it's satire, but a significant part maybe even a majority, might take is as genuine or worse come to embrace/support the satirized.
I believe we ask and expect too much of satire which relies heavily on hypocrisy and shame, two concepts that no longer carry the same weight.
Examples: South Park, The Colbert Report, SNL, The Onion
> I believe we ask and expect too much of satire
Yes, if you expect anything from satire you expect too much. Let it be art, not propaganda.
Allow yourself to find poor execution of agreeable messages distasteful. Allow yourself to enjoy good execution of messages you disagree with.
> Allow yourself to find poor execution of agreeable messages distasteful. Allow yourself to enjoy good execution of messages you disagree with.
This makes sense. If you find yourself understanding and judging messages based simply off of their merits then you have failed to insert an arbitrary aesthetic filter into your cognitive process. The wisest sages know to value style over substance
One could say 'the wisest sages know to value style and substance'
Or even: 'the wisest sages know that incorrect results can be based on some sound thinking and some muddled thinking, and correct results can be derived by tortuous thinking'
Or maybe: 'the wisest sages know that some things are neither objectively true nor objectively false, and can appreciate good arguments for positions they disagree with'
You can execute the message "We think you, and people like you, should be killed" as well as you like, I'm still not going to enjoy it.
> Let it be art, not propaganda.
My friend I have some news for you.
Edit: almost ended it there but remembered what website I’m on.
I don’t think there’s a material difference between art and propaganda. The art you like is merely the propaganda which you do not question.
> The art you like is merely the propaganda which you do not question.
I like this thought because it can be directly refuted by Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex — a highly popular piece of art that does nothing but present the audience with questions to ponder.
So..... Monet's Water Lilies is propaganda....
What is it's message?
"The classical tradition of "accurate" painting (Raphael and Michelangelo and Rembrandt) is not exciting.
But we're not ready to go full on free jazz/postmodernist/de-constructionist. You're not ready for it yet, but your kids are going to love it."
Floating flowers rule, land flowers drool
the ephemeral beauty i strive constantly to capture, studying these same details in this same garden across the infinitely variable day, this honest and perfect imperfection that i'm famous for revealing and sharing with the world, is within every moment of every life and every human being.
(significantly he made a gift of these paintings to the french state as a war memorial)
For a contemporary example, what is the message of a painting of a watermelon?
It could be merely that watermelons are beautiful. Or it could be that the artist supports the people of Palestine.
For a less extreme example, think about the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Are they just pretty images? Or do they communicate norms?
Think also about what is censored vs what is not censored.
> Let it be art, not propaganda
You cannot “explain what you do believe under the cover of pretending to dismiss it” without blurring the line between propaganda and art. That is true of both the best art and propaganda. If someone disagrees with the message, or coöpts it, it’s propaganda.
> I believe we ask and expect too much of satire which relies heavily on hypocrisy and shame, two concepts that no longer carry the same weight.
Indeed. It's amazing to me how many people I encounter these days who don't appear to consider hypocrisy a moral failing.
been shamed too many times, man. Moral failing itself became just a button people try to press in my brain. Often very dishonest people. So, welcome to moral learned helplessness, and damn the moralizers.
ALSO: thinking means changing your mind, which often exposes you to being called a hypocrite
Those are all still far more positive than negative examples, even if they each spawned small contingents of people who don't get the irony. Plus, if you know that's gonna happen anyway, then steer the dumb ironic interpretations towards something equally useful - or so ridiculous it at least educates other people.
I definitely see the problems you are pointing out, but ultimately these calls from you and gp to forms of responsibility or to be a "vehicle for positive change" of satirical or otherwise funny things leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I just sometimes want things to be cathartic, I don't really care if they are pushing the needle of the world's ills. I want to be able to laugh and not necessarily be a better person for it! There has got to be some space for that too, right?
And ok, if there is some committee somewhere to dictate that all satire must be "responsible", must follow its founding Swiftian maxim, then fine, we don't have to call it that. But whatever it is can still be good, can help those find a little fun in an absurd world. We should care as much about the simply depressed people as we do the possibly confused or evil.
I don't think there's a committee, I'm pretty sure I do not have veto over online comedy. Think of this as a pointed criticism of how things could be better, not as a tearing down of what is good. And you don't need to be made a better person per se, but my argument is that the work should try to offer that, not that you must accept it when offered.
I don't need to use a toilet on a train most of the time, but I think long distance trains obviously should all have toilets - even if I didn't need one this trip.
In larger works the other side of the coin needn't be in the next paragraph. When I read Private Eye for example the cover headline "MAN IN HAT SITS ON CHAIR" isn't doing anything beyond poking fun at the King (the crown is just a hat, the throne is just a chair) but the magazine overall funds a lot of serious investigative journalism and sheds light on important issues. Years before a TV drama made it into a government scandal problems with Horizon and getting justice for those wrongly convicted were extensively discussed in the Eye for example.
Satire is not a tool for change. In fact the opposite as laughter sublimates the emotions that would otherwise lead to action (cf Orwell’s 1984).
However people are not always in a position to change things and satire can be a useful outlet for venting, but culturally can also be good for providing talking points.
Southpark and the Onion strike a chord with me the others less so, I think because they believe that they are agents for change.
I love John Oliver though. He follows up his rants with some sensible ideas sometimes. Not everyone’s cup of tea though for sure.
>I often suggest that satire is a dangerous double edged sword and not a good primary vehicle for positive change.
When I write with the intent of my words being read at face value I get downvoted, flagged or my post get sent into the void by some AI depending on platform.
So satire and memes it is.
Can't decide if the people downvoting you don't realise the irony, or are deliberately downvoting you for the irony.
> The core idea of satire
I've never read this definition from any historical author or famous literary critic. I think you made this up yourself from first principles-- am I right on that?
In any case, this definition would make a special case out of Animal Farm which is probably the most famous satire. I cringe imagining Orwell have one of the animals "dismiss" his preferred theoretical vision of good governance as a wink to the audience. I don't even think Orwell presumed to know what that would look like.
Satire requires a good deal of intelligence and education to both write and consume. Without those two inputs, satire is a propaganda.
When you take a satirical concept and ratchet up the absurdity such that only ignorant (willfully or otherwise) people believe it, the result can be a powerful influence over them. Conspiracy theories often use this approach, as do talking heads on some networks.
Think about how early Stephen Colbert skits often comprised of him acting like Bill O'Reilly; not saying funny things in the style of O'Reilly, but merely imitating him. The difference between satire and propaganda is often packaging and audience.
For another example, you can look at posts of people who read Onion articles without realizing they are satire. These people are often pissed off, so much so that they share a 3 year old article on social media to spread the word.
The original idea of satire was to make fun of unjust leaders. It doesn’t have to be as sophisticated as swift at all. It just has to strike a chord (originally, literally) with the audience.
Yep. Insert little-known stories that are documented conspiracies that aren't hypotheticals similar to the fine content of DamnInteresting. Be sure to use lots of graphics and editoralizing/clickbait headlines.
- Radium girls
- Eugenics experiments
- Forced sterilization
- ~600 Tennessee sober "drunk driving" arrests
> documented conspiracies that aren't hypotheticals
And, ironically since it's what launched Jones' career, Bohemian Club & Grove: https://x.com/abbieasr/status/1462953203067240450
Luckily my conscience is clean because I discovered the existence of that place not from AJ but by studying the North Pacific Coast Railroad, which used to go directly to The Grove in Sonoma:
https://archive.org/details/bwb_W7-BOG-168
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1SkFrgLj-TR4gyw9Y4m...
For anyone so inclined, the path of the NPCR makes a beautiful Sunday drive!
> And, ironically since it's what launched Jones' career, Bohemian Club & Grove: https://x.com/abbieasr/status/1462953203067240450
Too late to edit but I just realized the version of this I linked removed the “Bohemian Club” that was present in this older version. Strange! https://x.com/abbieasr/status/1312512066071060480
What is the conspiracy? It’s a social club for old rich men that has some goofy rituals. It’s just freemasonry for the upper crust elite.
I think it's interesting that so many governmental and corporate leaders meet up (or maybe met up? in the 20th Century) to talk shop outside the view of the public eye. It's relevant to anyone who wants to study Bay Area history or the history of World War Ⅱ technologies. For example, the Manhattan Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee#/media...
> “The September 1942 meeting [of the S-1 Executive Committee] was held at Bohemian Grove. Nichols and Major Thomas T. Crenshaw, Jr., attended, along with physicist Robert Oppenheimer. This meeting resolved most of the outstanding issues confronting the [Manhattan] project, but [Vannevar] Bush and [James B.] Conant felt that the time had now come for the Army to take over the project, something that had already been approved by the president on June 17, 1942. After some discussion, it was decided that [Leslie R.] Groves, who would be promoted to the rank of brigadier general, would become the director of the Manhattan Project on September 23, 1942. He would be answerable to the Military Policy Committee (MPC), which would consist of Styer, Bush (with Conant as his alternate) and Rear Admiral William R. Purnell.”
- Project Timber Sycamore
- The Douma Gas hoax
Fun times.
The receptive audience would notice and then find other venues, I suspect. Especially with the warning of the former webmaster.
Crazy bullshit is only tempting if it's part of your engrieved group. A clever roleplay won't have the spiritual depravtivy needed.
> The audience might not notice, and could (IMHO) easily be duped into supporting good causes!
What a deranged fantasy this is and yet how often it shows up. The audience will notice. Those who don't and eventually discover your duplicity will never forgive you for it. What you propose is disgusting and amoral, as it has no value, and is designed to mollify yourself by bulling people you clearly perceive as being beneath you.
It's amoral (sic) to improve the accuracy of a journalistic publication you've purchased? I'm struggling to find a more charitable way to interpret your statement.
Or is just the usage of the word "duped"? Some people are more interested in sensational rhetoric than more even-keeled reporting. It's unfortunate that they're currently mostly taken advantage of by hucksters. I think the creation of publications genuinely interested in facts but that use more appealing rhetoric is important to preserving journalism as an institution.
keep running the site as-is but swap out the insanity for stuff that reads like insanity but is legit or morally sound.
Sounds like that's sort of what's happening:
"The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/business/media/alex-jones...
Those links don’t work for me. But these do:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x4qyokjtdzgl7gmqhsw4ajqj/po...
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x4qyokjtdzgl7gmqhsw4ajqj/po...
Interesting. They should.. but Bksy is bouncing between 15 to 133 new users per second at the moment, and they are on bare metal. There is major service degradation at the moment. Pour one out for their team.
Only for the platform to die in a month anyway, when everybody inadvertenly runs back to Twitter...
Indeed, your links now work for me. My post got a few upvotes, so I don’t think I was the only one experiencing the failure.
You were correct. When you replied, I tried my links and indeed they did not work at the time.
The Onion is truly a national treasure.
they are fueled by clickbait, and they've promoted the practice.
it's probably the first site I've manually added to my dns blacklist.
I find this comment so funny I burst out laughing. I cannot tell whether you're serious.
My friend, you have eaten the onion.
I'm not from the US so naturally they've confused me in the past.
more than once I caught myself clicking on a shared headline of theirs, so I've added them to my DNS blocklist to avoid giving them clicks, decades ago.
my problem is not with their obviously ridiculous headlines, but the ones that hit the grey area, where it's as much good humor as a screamer is good horror.
The thing is the onion is pretty much always ridiculous, so if some of them are in a "gray area" I think that moreso speaks to the overall climate or your own personal biases.
More likely to be a case of not being familiar with US politics and events. We're not the world, and plenty of Americans forget that.
Area man is consistently fooled by The Onion.
Got im
Please note that Bsky servers appear to be suffering under the load of 15 new users per second, with bursts as high 133 new users per second!
They don't have to do much, it's already very funny and very stupid.
Yeah, my first thought was "the Sandy Hook parents chipped in for you to leave it as it is?"
Is that enough to tank the market with a fire sale? Probably not.
Absolutely poetic.
Dude tried a career in journalism.
Had a crazy theory that a school shooting was fake.
School shooting wasn't fake.
Dude doesn't say "I'm sorry, my bad, I'm retiring from journalism", but goes down fighting.
Looks good to me.
> Dude tried a career in journalism.
> Had a crazy theory that a school shooting was fake.
This is absolutely not what happened. Jones is a grifter, and was never a journalist. He had no journalistic aspirations, and peddled exclusively in inane conspiracy theories either crafted personally or adopted selectively to inspire a constant state of fear and paranoia in a particular type of vulnerable person while aggressively channeling their anxieties into purchases of his prepper gear and phony health supplement business. This is a rare case of such a fraudster managing to accrue enough ire and attention that legal charges stuck and sunk him for the harm caused by one of his many careless lies. There are many like him who continue on with much the same strategy, some of whom have gained enough power and influence through their actions that they are now effectively untouchable by the legal system.
I'd chip in just to have that shit destroyed and see them selling onions instead.
I doubt that the SH families will receive the kind of money they could have had if they accepted Jones' original offer. Their lawyers made it clear they were in it not for their clients' interest but for their own political agenda.
Maybe the families were more interested in fixing the issue than in receiving some blood money in exchange for continued harm.
Well they asked for money, not "fixing the issue", which is not enforceable anyway without violating the 1st so that's not even a power the court has. Alex Jones will still be able to speak and profit from it, just not under the Infowars brand.
Lawyers file cases they can win to establish legal precedent.
The 1st amendment doesn't protect all forms of speech. Shouting Fire in a theater, sedition, inciting mobs, entrapment, accessory to a crime (by encouraging someone to do it). None of these are covered in the 1st Amendment.
> Lawyers file cases they can win to establish legal precedent.
That's actually very rare. Most cases get settled out of court and most court case don't make it to appeal; thus no legal precedent.
> Shouting Fire in a theater
This is a common misconception. This decision was reversed by the Supreme Court.
> sedition, inciting mobs, entrapment, accessory to a crime (by encouraging someone to do it). None of these are covered in the 1st Amendment.
None of which are what Jones was sued for.
Can you elaborate? What was the offer? They won a judgement over $1B.
Also, I don’t think their agenda is political, it is personal.
Jones is not worth $1B. He's barely worth a million with the lawsuits and legal costs; thus the bankruptcy. He offered them about $100M over 20 years or something like that but the SH families lawyers refused.
I've watched the trial, the SH lawyers are not loyal to the victims and families.
Right, the intention of the suit was to personally harm Jones as retribution for the immeasurable harm he has caused them.
They don't need money, I'm sure they have enough. They denied his money because that isn't the point - they want to mock him.
And, I fully support them. They're in a unique position and frankly I'm very impressed at their restraint in choosing the legal system over violence. If I were Jones, I would consider myself very lucky.
Their intention was to silence him. Literally what they said; which is illegal.
> They don't need money,
These are normal people, what are you talking about?
> I'm very impressed at their restraint in choosing the legal system over violence.
That's not impressive, that's what the vast majority of people do.
Did the original offer include shutting down Infowars? Of not I expect many of them feel they got plenty more that whatever cash Jones was offering. There is more to this life than money.
> Did the original offer include shutting down Infowars?
That was part of the SH families' lawyer final argument to the jury.
> There is more to this life than money.
Sure. But there's not much a civil lawsuit can ask outside of damages and reparations.
And yet seeing the case through to the end instead of taking the first offer has seen Infowars taken from Alex Jones. I don't speak for the families, but if I were in their shoes that would be far more valuable to me than maximizing my payout.
Alex Jones just created a new company and be shielded by Texas very protective laws against civil damages. So they accomplished nothing and will get barely nothing after legal costs.
I don't think the families wanted money. They wanted to ruin his life.
> We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website.
Isn't it that already?
And how would The Onion know what funny actually is? Their content hasn't been that for well over a decade now.
The NPR article conveys that this was more than just a very clever stunt
> "The Connecticut families agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion's bid, enabling its success," according to their lawyers. ... Jones was hoping a bidder ideologically aligned with him would have bought Infowars and hired him back to keep doing his show.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5189399/alex-jones-auct...
The "Global Tetrahedron" site already has an Infowars Web 1.0 slant, the Everytown for Gun Safety ads are great.
Have it look like the year 2000 infowars website.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000229143934/http://www.infowa...
Yeah, this seems like a clear-cut "We want justice, not money" decision. We don't know how much the families gave up (could be a little, could be significant), but whatever it was was the difference between Infowars remaining what it is or utterly destroying Infowars' credibility.
Because now the Wikipedia entry is going to say "parody site" at the top.
> We don't know how much the families gave up (could be a little, could be significant)
It's hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes but as a parent I can imagine the money not playing an important factor at all in this. Money would hopefully be the least of my worries.
Jones owes them $1.5 billion. They're never going to see most of that judgement. They're likely giving up money they were never going to receive anyway.
My hunch is that the judge and everyone involved knows that they aren't going to get anything substantial from Jones, which is why they allowed them to use money they are owed from the judgement as part of the bid. It allows them to get something of value out of the ruling (or at least take something of value from Jones).
I'm a parent. I've woken up in a panic just because I had a bad dream that something bad happened to my kid.
If I were one of the Sandy Hook families, I don't know if anything in life would ever bring me true joy again. But contributing to this would make me smile a little.
LOL, it's already being updated...
"InfoWars was an American far-right[2] conspiracy theory[3] and fake news website[1] created by Alex Jones.[36][37] It was founded in 1999, and operated under Free Speech Systems LLC."
This is actually one of the dumbest stunts I'd ever seen. InfoWars is nothing without Alex Jones. They've wasted all their money since Alex will start a new project and his viewership will move.
>bought Infowars and hired him back to keep doing his show
So, if any, where's the value? In InfoWars, or with Jones? I.e., can't he just go into a new venture, or go onto someone's payroll?
Making life harder for Alex Jones, making him start again with nothing, is quite a satisfying thing to do for many counter-parties here.
Referring to Jones as "...the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name)..." in the announcement is a masterstroke given Jones' ridiculous ego.
I hope Jones is never named on the new site, but frequently and flagrantly referenced in a manner like this.
I hope for the opposite, Jones has so much video and audio content available cloning him digitally and shoving an AI generated fist, ahem, somewhere, and using his likeness as the satire would be cathartic. Better yet he himself argued in court that the person live on Info Wars is a character inseparable from the brand.
They should make a video of Jones actually eating his neighbors.
This has been my thought all along. Drown out his real stuff with AI generated slop. Slop him.
There's tonnes of worthless merchandise and supplements of a dubious nature which The Onion, the least expected of all possible buyers, now has to find a use for. My first suggestion would be melting down all of the 500% marked up gold bars[0] and make a one-time-run charity auction collectible for the Sandy Hook families. Or upcycling all the paper in Alex Jones' books [1] into paper mache, and use it to make globes, to really stick it to the globalists!
[0] https://www.infowarsstore.com/24-karat-999-pure-gold-collect...
[1] https://www.infowarsstore.com/infowars-media/books/the-great...
> As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.*
Funny, for sure, but does not explain what they will be doing in reality.
> On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.
Ah, that explains it. They can test them on animals. Thanks!
They probably don't want to be in the business of selling unregulated, scammy, and potentially dangerous goods. They might destroy the merch. Who knows.
I'd assume destroy, maybe keep a bit for novelty value. Like, they're not going to resell it, you'd assume.
There were a bunch of suggestions on the bluesky thread that they should donate samples of them to researchers so that they could figure out what was actually in the fucking things.
That, or you didn't take them seriously enough. Bring me the candy bar!
> melting down all of the 500% marked up gold bars[0] and make a one-time-run charity auction collectible for the Sandy Hook families
Or a monument / memorial to the deceased, in the hopes that the truth would outlive Jones's lies.
InfoWars only shilled for gold sellers. Their business was entirely Vitamins/Supplement, Merch, and crazy AFAIK they never sold gold directly.
Phenomenal point!
And the flat earthers.
I don't know man, it's not like the dude caused the Sandy Hook massacre, just take this win and let the victims rest in peace. Let the Onion do it's things and cut ties.
And pocket the money from the gold bars? Probably better to donate them anyway, better yet to give it back to victims involved in his lies
> supplements of a dubious nature
They are re-labled existing products that are sold in other places, and unironically already-recognized, before being re-labled by InfoWars, as very high quality.
If you're gonna criticize InfoWars you have my 100% support in your right to do so, but try not to post out of your ass. This is HackerNews, not Reddit.
There was a past disclosure where lead was found[0] within an in-house product. Buzzfeed did a story about sending some products to a lab and you're right they're safe existing products[1] only with Infowars' own exaggerated marketing labeled on.
[0] https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/prop65/notices/2017-02319.pd...
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/we-sent-a...
Can you give an example of these high-quality supplements? Otherwise folks just have to take you at your word that they exist.
Honest question: are we talking about penis size supplements? Wondering if there is a joke going right over my head
>> make a one-time-run charity auction collectible for the Sandy Hook families
They've got $1.5billion. Probably don't need the gold as well. There might be equally valid causes with less funds.
They have a claim for $1.5B, they are going after all Alex Jones assets which are much less than $1.5B.
Don’t forget their many other successful lawsuits:
- school administration
- rifle manufacturer
- the shooters mother (home insurance)
- other journalists who wrote about the event
I don’t know exactly what compensation they should get, but this does not seem like a healthy or sustainable way for our society to deal with tragedy.
To be specific, the suit against the mother was against the mother's estate, since the mother was murdered by the shooter... like right away. The suit was settled by the estate.
The suit against the school administration was eventually dismissed (the families lost on appeal) (https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Two-Sandy-Hook-famili...). I agree it seemed kinda dubious, and I think the right outcome happened here.
The suit against Remington ended in a settlement, probably because Remington didn't want a chance in hell to set any legal precedent. The fact that the families got settlements is really a symptom of how unsettled the issue of gun control is in America. Like it's completely inane that it's fully legal to manufacture and sell AR-15 rifles to basically anyone, BUT that somehow marketing them to civilians is inappropriate. Remington settled because they just don't want any possibility of the status quo moving against them.
AR-15 is merely a body style, there is no metric by which it is more dangerous than a hunting rifle.
If you want to murder dozens you do not bring a hunting rifle.
> but this does not seem like a healthy or sustainable way for our society to deal with tragedy
I don't know, this, to me, is the proper set of incentives. Nobody wants to lose money, so you better do everything you can to prevent these tragedies. If we just sob a little and move on, the systems in place will not change.
A healthy & sustainable way would probably be to do something about school shootings in the only country where they happen on a regular basis.
In the absence of that, what else would you propose?
> what else would you propose?
Not suing others for millions or billions and spreading misery. Nothing can bring those kids back.
Maybe the government could have offered education and employment guarantees to the families?
> only country
Want to list some other things only the US has?
> I don’t know exactly what compensation they should get, but this does not seem like a healthy or sustainable way for our society to deal with tragedy.
I don't know if it's healthy or sustainable, but it definitely sounds healthier than ignoring the tragedy altogether.
Agreed. It doesn't seem like a long-term solution, but it is the best way we have _right now_ to visit consequences on people/orgs that enabled the tragedy. If our society sees everything in cost/benefit, then increasing the costs of actions that lead to tragedies like this is one of the best things we can do.
Suing into bankruptcy is the only flavor of capital punishment we have for corporations.
> people/orgs that enabled the tragedy
They didn’t though. Holding a rifle manufacturer liable for a shooting makes no sense, unless applied universally.
A journalist writing a book did not cause the shooting.
This is greed and lashing out in pain. I’m sure members of the community have ruined their life in pursuit of these things.
They did, if even indirectly. Just like how McDonald's holds some responsibility for the obesity epidemic.
The company that makes rifles makes them to be sold. It is in the company's best interest that as many mass shootings happen as possible. By providing guns, they DID contribute to the tragedy. We can tell, because if they had never produced that gun then it would've never shot anyone.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that the reason gun laws are so lax is because these companies lobby for it to be so. Again, they are incentivized to cause as many people to die as possible. Incentives matter. If mass shootings were the next blue jeans, these companies would quickly overthrow Apple.
Blame is very hard and tricky, but any institution or system in place is responsible for an intuitional failure. And that's what mass shootings are - an institutional failure.
No. I actually don’t think lashing out at any wallet that happens to be in the area will make anyone happy.
The people who are responsible are dead.
Depends on the wallets being lashed at
Sounds like a principled take based on rule of law.
I guarantee you these do not add up to a billion dollars.
Wikipedia page disagrees with you. Whether they collected that amount, I do not know.
I had the goldbugs and silver bugs in mind- they'd be more than willing to pay exorbitant markup, with the feel-good ennui of it going towards a good cause. These were $100 for a 1/10 gram at the time of writing and now are sold out. Coincidence???
They've got $1.5billion.
No, they've got a judgement on paper for $1.5 billion. This is part of the process of actually getting that money.
The onion should just keep Alex Jones without any filters but put the onion logo on every page. The joke is already good enough, just keep it going.
The Onion already did that joke: https://theonion.com/sale-of-bet-to-white-supremacist-group-...
Sources: Hackers Vandalized Drudge Report For Last 15 Years
https://theonion.com/sources-hackers-vandalized-drudge-repor...
Not a good idea, Alex Jones is a big reason for the hate against people like Anthony Fauci.
Idk I think the global events of 2020 to 2022 had a bigger effect on public opinion than fringe lunatics like Alex Jones.
Anthony Fauci is a big reason for the hate against people like Anthony Fauci.
> His advice was frequently contradicted by Trump, and Trump's supporters alleged that Fauci was trying to politically undermine Trump's run for reelection
- Wikipedia
Seems like a nice fellow
In one sense this is funny, in another it's justice, but I think from a broader perspective this is just more of the same tit-for-tat nonsense that moves the needle in the wrong direction.
My hypothesis is that the U.S. didn't become more divided because of moron sites like I.W. but rather because of our collective reaction to them. These groups are far easier to ignore when we stop trying to silence them.
I get the broader point of eye-for-an-eye.. but in this case how are people supposed to ignore when the harm done is very real and very cruel? These groups don’t want to operate in their own little corner of the world. They will up the ante until they gain notoriety and the attention they want, which enables them to make the money they want. The collective reaction is all but guaranteed, I would argue and it’s not because people want to silence morons, but to limit harm.
I don't think the causation runs either direction. At most, I'd say that a site like InfoWars reflects the division, rather than either causing it or being caused by it.
Divisiveness in the US goes much deeper than that, and long predates both the Internet and that kind of radio program. You could perhaps pick the early 70s as a starting point, with the US deeply divided by Vietnam and Civil Rights, at exactly the same time as real government conspiracies (Watergate, COINTELPRO, MKUltra) came to light.
I'd actually trace it back further than that, through McCarthyism, the Civil War, and back before the Revolution. But there's a fairly direct course between the divisiveness of the 1960s and where we end up today.
I really don't think it would have helped anything to ignore Alex Jones.
An outcome of two-party systems is polarization. A voter in a true multi-party democracy can vote in a multidimensional way, whereas a voter in a two-party system is forced into one of two "sides" on a one-dimensional line. As the values people hold dear are threatened, they will inevitably flatten their values and be pulled towards a pole.
Nice summary and agree in the way you put it, which I am stating to all sides - so nobody likes to hear it :-) since majority is literally polarized (i.e. their objectiveness, capacity to think deep, sort/prioritize is disrupted by impact to emotions/biases)
I had a friend who often said "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Of course, he was saying that in about 2010 and I'm pretty sure it's aged extremely poorly, because the increasing publicity around conspiracy theories has only made them more popular. It feels like a stretch to say "but people were trying to silence the conspiracy theories, that's why they caught on!"
Jezebel wrote an article in 2013 about feeding the trolls until the explode [1]. I disagree today, and it seems quaint. IRL, professional trolls, the Proud Boys, come to my town (Portland) to stir up shit every few years. Do we ignore them? Or do we subscribe to "broken window theory": if they get an inch they'll take a mile? I have a tough time with this, both responses seem correct and wrong at the same time, but there's no way to tell which is working.
[1] https://www.jezebel.com/dont-ignore-the-trolls-feed-them-unt...
The traditional way was to have an eating contest with the troll, where you hide a bag under your shirt, surreptitiously slipping some of the food into that, and at some point pretend to extravagantly cut up your stomach to be able to fit more food, so the ambitious troll will try to do the same.
>because the increasing publicity around conspiracy theories has only made them more popular.
Or because after Iraq war and Covid the default is to be skeptical of everything government.
It's like fighting mold in my opinion. Happy to turn the disinfectant on a particular area if we get that chance. It's poetically done here - the parents who were hurt the most were able to capture the source of that pain and turn it towards better purposes.
I really can’t imagine a better steward. Truly amazing. I doubt there’s any way to undo all the damage that has been done, but at least we’ll get some cathartic laughs out of it all.
I actually almost fainted laughing when I read this and then some of the coping responses on X. I needed this today. What a good move.
Jeff Lawson the founder of Twilio owns The Onion, glad he's growing his quality retirement project.
He seems to be doing a better job running a newspaper than Bezos.
I bet they sell fewer fraudulent merchandise than Bezos too
definitely printing fewer lies in the newspaper than Bezos
What “lies” is Bezos printing? AFAIK the only influence he had was pulling the endorsement for president.
how did it feel when Saudi Arabia stole your handle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom
heh, I've been using neom online for over 20 years, when they announced the city people I knew from the early 2000s emailed me ha. mine is from my original irc name neomonk.
At the time the news of the Sandy Hook shooting broke, I was a highschooler in a vo-tech school in Connecticut.
Friday in late December are usually unserious days in K-12! People had their sights set on winter break and work was thin. But I remember that day had a lot of commotion, a lot of seriousness, and then a lot of silence.
Being a vo-tech school, we had students from all over the state. Some kids left or were taken out early, some of them having had ties to the families in Newtown. Throughout the day, our school got emptier and emptier.
A lot of students didn't return to the building for the whole week or so until winter break started. Even though the seriousness weaned over the days, there was an unbreakable eeriness that just comes with the building being so sparsely populated. Our highschool was a small one (about 400 students total) which exacerbated it.
I lived with my parents at the time and I saw my mom gradually become a Sandy Hook "truther" as she fell deep down Facebook rabbitholes. It was bad. Although she eventually came around, that created distance between us that never recovered.
There's a lot of bad and mind-boggling news abound, but this is a very personally satisfying headline.
Thanks for sharing. Watching your mom deteriorate like that must have been hard, to say the least.
I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but this is fake news. This deal is not final. The judge in the liquidation case is holding an evidentiary hearing next week to understand how and why secret bidding was set up and why it was not open to the general public. Sounds like a BIG loss for The Onion, not to mention the potential defamation cases that could arise from news outlets publishing an unverified story about a sale that isn’t final.
Source: https://x.com/behizytweets/status/1857195724242329997
I read your comment with skepticism but it looks like you are correct. Very odd that they would publish this story so prematurely.
Odd but not surprising. There are political implications so any press is good press.
What really should have happened in this case, like the the Parkland killer, was for the people who sued to also take his Name and Likeness.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/families-settle-court-b...
This would hopefully avoid letting him just rebuild another slime empire.
Then we just end up with "the artist formerly known as Prince" situation where everyone knows the nom de plume is actually him.
Is Alex Jones the new Press Secretary yet?
The next 4 years are going to be an absolute farce in the US.
You don’t think a fox news host is a great SecDef? Or a non-practicing briefly disbarred AG?
Tbf successfully avoiding prosecution for white collar crime is a credential in understanding the law, sorta...
Child sex trafficking and statutory rape are not what I consider white collar crime.
When was he convicted?
He wasn’t, but the court of public opinion has a much lower barrier of evidence than criminal court.
We will see how the confirmation goes.
Seriously stop. He’s a decorated combat veteran with 20 years in the military and two Ivy League degrees.
He absolutely has not been “in” for 20 years. Someone will publish his actual record between active duty, active reserve, and inactive reserve. He was in the National Guard as a basic infantry officer. No ranger tab, no SF, hell not even airborne, so let’s stop acting like he’s a badass. He’s perfectly qualified for leading a company-sized unit. That’s it.
He has, in aggregate, around 4-5 years of experience as a junior officer. Most of his time is IRR which has ~zero [1] obligations and is basically just a higher priority draft list for former military.
I know you know all of this, of course, and you’re either defending him in bad faith or pure ignorance, so I’m mostly replying for the benefit of others.
[1] https://ec.militarytimes.com/guard-reserve-handbook/joining-...
Indeed. As concerning as this appointment is the US should worry more about where Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock are appointed.
Wondering if that's what Mike Judge is waiting for: free inspiration enough for a 12 season long "Idiocracy: the series".
I don't know if I need a documentary of the times I'm living through.
Maybe?
Looking from abroad some folk have the impression that the previous four years were. They were a triumph?
The US has recovered from inflation better than practically any other country. Yes, the last 4 years have been far, far better than trump's first term by any measure you care to mention, except maybe hate, lies and fear.
I’m not a Trump supporter but clearly inflation was worse during Biden than Trump, that’s just a fact. So your claim that it’s on “any measure” is wrong.
Fiscal policy was used to ensure we didn't all starve during the pandemic, and that 2024 didn't do it's best 1928 impersonation. Was inflation worse? Of course. The conditions and context of either presidency aren't even close.
The money printing started in 2020 under Trump's watch, so if we're going to blame U.S. presidents for inflating prices (?) then it follows that Biden gets credit for the recovery.
What do you think Biden did to cause inflation? What specifically did he do to cause food prices to rise? Please be specific. Your claim requires at least some thought put in to explain it, not just "prices high, Biden bad".
Biden wins on inflation, real wage growth, illegal immigration, and international military conflict?
I worry that this might make The Onion a less credible news source.
Really curious what the bidding was like or who else made an offer, since it seems that the Sandy Hook Victims (who own all of the debt?) wanted the sale to The Onion specifically
Part of the sale is that Onion InfoWars will run pro-gun safety ads from Everytown USA. That and the obvious goal of humiliating Jones is probably why the Sandy Hook parents sold it to the Onion.
Can't say I'm not happy. Jones is an evil man who has richly earned this indignity and worse. His campaign of harassment against people whose children were murdered was so bad, some parents brought private security guards to testify at his trial [0]. They described death threats, strangers confronting them in their homes and shooting at their cars.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/shootings-texas-school-connecticu...
A buyer is not always required to select the bid of the highest monetary value; sounds like the Onion had a proposal that was "a reasonable sum of money, and also we help lead a healthy way to find a path to redemption for this website and make it a kinder place than before"
I wondered how the structure worked too. Technically the Sandy Hook Victims can buy Infowars. All the money they bid would just all come right back to themselves anyway. This article calls it a "joint bid".
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-14/the-onion...
Meanwhile, Alex Jones is calling a hearing next week to accuse the bid process of being rigged https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857223561754059168
> Meanwhile, Alex Jones is calling a hearing next week to accuse the bid process of being rigged https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857223561754059168
Alex Jones is not a reliable source
I'd be surprised if there weren't any safeguards to prevent Infowars from posting hate ever again.
I'm watching his stream just to see how the drama goes down and a silly tech-adjacent bit popped up when he started ranting about Linux and how if "they" were trying to take Linus Torvalds down, they still couldn't ever own Linux!
Linus Torvalds political opinions, to the extent I've seen him express them, are hardly in line with Alex Jones. So this feels odd.
He was clutching at straws. He's famous for random tangents and non sequiturs. He was comparing himself to Colonel Travis at the Battle of the Alamo in the next breath. I just thought it was funny/weird that Linux, of all things, jumped into his mind as an example to use during his rant.
I remember a claim that the wokies were trying to take down Linus Torvalds doing the rounds at some point. E.g. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/04/feminists-are-tryi...
The source being Eric S. Raymond covering for why women avoid him checks out.
Woke scaremongering makes the old red scare hysteria look like a mild panic attack.
And I believe he is wrong in this case. Linus is absolutely a lynchpin for Linux control. He can be replaced, but whoever replaces him then becomes that lynchpin. He's the benevolent dictator for life after all.
You're assuming that would be one person and one organization, the way it is now.
I think that's the most likely outcome, but it isn't a safe bet by any means.
In any case I hope it's a good long time before we have to find out, since I wish Linus long life and good health.
There's already a contingency plan, and Linus has designated his consigliere, Greg Kroah-Hartman, as his successor.
I don't expect the structure to change. I guess we'll see.
Is there a recording of this?
No, but I imagine it'll pop up somewhere given everyone who records and shares his stuff. I was going to clip it at the time but my screen capture software decided to spontaneously update and demand money for the upgrade.
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. Thanks, Tim Onion.
https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3law23r...
Financial Ruin and Mockery seem appropriate for the peddlers of vitriolic clickbait.
Interesting piece on The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/post/188430/alex-jones-meltdown-reac...
Inside a lot of humor is some deep seated truth.
It's encouraging that an org based on humor / even a little truth here ultimately buys and will discard an empire of hateful lies.
I wonder if Cards Against Humanity bid against them.
They can just run the original content with a The Onion logo and every will find it hilarious.
Making satire today is really hard. This could even be some article title on The Onion.
Reality is their biggest competitor.
I wish I lived in the reality where the Waking Life (2001) version of Alex Jones was the one we got: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5HLn3eYLSo
I hope they preserve all the URLs - I'm laughing already just thinking about the wealth of inbound links soon pointing to parodic content.
> striv[ing] to make life both scarier and longer
There are "weather", "climate" and "Climate"... And that above is "Climate". A concise definition of the Times.
Bless the Onion!
What does this mean?
I heard bidding got pretty heated between the Onion people, cards against humanity, and the pinboard guy
Justice, both poetic and civil. Bravo to The Onion.
> “By divesting Jones of Infowars’ assets, the families and the team at The Onion have done a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones’s ability to do more harm,”
How hard is it really to start a new podcast?
He likely still owes them significant money, so they can keep pursuing him for that for a while. But even without his financial troubles, trying to rebuild his brand is just going to lead to endless self-debasement. James O'Keefe is still at it since Project Veritas shut down, but has little reach any more.
IANAL but isn't it going to be very hard for Jones to meaningfully profit from a podcast, or anything really?
Jones isn't in it for the money.
Narrator: Jones was in it for the money.
Holy cod, Infowars' afterlife as a (presumed) parody of itself is going to be bigger than its regular existence ever was.
Wait. When I first saw this news on Twitter I thought it was a joke, since it was a tweet by The Onion.
That's the best practical joke I have ever heard!
Inside a lot of humor is some deep seated truth.
It's encouraging that an org based on humor / even a little truth here ultimately buys and will discard an empire of hateful lies.
Looks like a judge has blocked the finalization of the sale pending a hearing: https://nypost.com/2024/11/15/media/infowars-sale-to-the-oni...
Worth remembering that Donald Trump embraced Alex Jones after his sustained campaign of vicious, hateful and provably-false lies about dead child.
So did Joe Rogan.
I actually kind of liked Joe Rogan (from the little I saw of him interviewing scientists and other ‘intellectuals’), but the more I think about it and learn the more I realise he’s just a moron.
He's a very likeable personality. But he offers the same platform and uses the same kids gloves on all of his guests, regardless of if they are world class professionals at the top of their field or the most deranged sicko fucks peddling insane conspiracy theories.
Yeah — exactly. I’ve never seen anything that makes me doubt he’s a good person. But he seems utterly unable to distinguish between bullshit artists and genuine experts.
What's wild is that if I go to the Infowars website I can't actually tell if The Onion is controlling it yet or not. It all looks like satire already, full of absolutely ridiculous headlines.
Imagine there are humans who read those headlines and think to themselves that it is real.
Worse yet, imagine that those humans are armed, and many of them routinely fantasize about what they do when "it's time". My local gun store has sported an InfoWars sticker for many years now.
> imagine that those humans are armed, and many of them routinely fantasize about what they do when "it's time"
I don't think those people actually exist. I've never seen an actual person who wasn't satirizing or parodying an image of this person.
> My local gun store
Not a thing for most places
Can't say that about the USA.
The Onion did a fundraising campaign a few months ago. Glad to see this is where my donation went!
This is actually one of the funniest things I've seen
Well not so fast the judge says: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857223561754059168
It looks like Everytown for Gun Safety is now getting ads on The Onion, too - of course The Onion is still out of money, but what the hell at least there’s a serious part to this.
Anybody else have to triple check it wasn't just The Onion trolling?
Strange. I like The Onion as much as the next guy, but you can't make Infowars more of a "parody of itself" than it already is. Just shut it down?
The current speculation by the right-o-sphere that Alex Jones is about to be appointed the Trump press secretary is apt for the moment where Trump seems to have made his nominations on the basis of how much they will disturb the left. It's hard to imagine anyone that could be more effective at achieving that than Jones.
If by "the left" you mean pretty much anyone non-kkk then yes he's an excellent nomination and while we're at it, let's skip those useless political details as "what is left" anyway (yes, sarcasm).
The KKK hasn't been relevant since Jerry Springer dredged them up for his show in the 90s, you may need to update your roster of Boogeymen.
The KKK hasn't been relevant since America collectively decided it was safe for proponents of ethnic cleansing to walk around and exist in polite society without having to hide their identities.
It's more like polite society has become less relevant. The pussy footing around and talking out of both sides of your mouth just doesn't work anymore.
> The pussy footing around and talking out of both sides of your mouth just doesn't work anymore.
It took me a while to parse this, are you saying that lying doesn't work anymore???
But that hasn’t happened.
... except it has, on many occasions. Seeing neo-nazis at conservative rallies is a much more common event than it was 20 years ago.
And before anyone says, "well you call everyone neo-nazis!" Erm, self-proclaimed neo-nazis. They call themselves that.
When?
I don't think this is in good faith because you know what I'm talking about, but here's a rather famous example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally
Or, if you prefer something more contemporary, here's two days ago:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/masked-protesters-with-nazi...
And please, I don't want to hear any arguments along the lines of them being "not real conservatives" or "not real republicans". Both of us know who these people voted for, so just leave it at that.
Not that I'm saying conservatives are nazis. I'm not. But I am acknowledging the reality that neo-nazism is real, does exist, and has a foothold exclusively in the American right.
Are you sure that referring to an event from 8 years ago as an example of a much more common phenomenon is in good faith? Your second example doesn't specify exactly how large the gathering was, but from the context of the article it sounds like it was maybe a dozen people. What threshold are you using for "much more common"?
Yes, because I stated "in the past 20 years"
I chose that example because it's incredibly famous, so you should already know it.
> What threshold are you using for "much more common"?
My eyeballs. Look I'm sure there's hard data for this somewhere, but I'm not going to look for it.
Here, PBS has a video on it: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/far-right-violence-a-growi...
I haven't watched it, so maybe it's good, maybe it's not.
From everything I've seen, this type of stuff is much, much more common now than it used to be. I think we all know that, you included. I'm getting skeptical that you, and the other commenter, are doing this in good faith.
From my perspective, and the perspective of everyone I know, this is obvious. If you're not seeing it that's very strange to me.
> And before anyone says, "well you call everyone neo-nazis!" Erm, self-proclaimed neo-nazis. They call themselves that.
You should watch the video before posting a link. Proud Boys don't call themselves neo nazis. Other parts of the video touch on stats about violence from who knows what source - left or right - and then touches on people "storming the capital" and "insurrection". So, nothing real or concerete and in particular nothing to do with neo nazis.
You're very quick to accuse others of not being in good faith.
> Yes, because I stated "in the past 20 years"
No. You wrote:
"Seeing neo-nazis at conservative rallies is a much more common event than it was 20 years ago."
Do you have evidence of nazis at conservative rallies?
1. I already provided evidence
2. You don't actually care because you're playing stupid. I know you know what I'm talking about, but by your own self-prescribed idiocrasy you will act as if it's your first day on Earth.
I have no more patience for people who are wrong, know they're wrong, but continue to be wrong for the fun of it. It's not fun, it's sad and pathetic. I'm not your therapist here to force you back into reality.
The fact of the matter is there are modern neo-nazis and they largely gather at alt-right or conservative events. I'm not making any judgement past that, so do whatever the fuck you want with that information, I don't care.
> I already provided evidence
No. You told everyone to “look it up”. I have seen to evidence that nazis are more popular now than 20 years ago and that’s obviously quite a substantial claim.
> I have no more patience for people who are wrong, know they're wrong, but continue to be wrong for the fun of it.
Yes.
> You told everyone to “look it up”
I provided two links. I can't imagine the undeserved confidence to lie this blatantly.
Are you denying you have been at any conservative rallies?
Doesn't it tell you something that the most famous example of your case is from 8 years ago? If it was so much more common you'd think there would be many other easily referred to examples. I haven't seen the PBS video but the headline is "far-right violence", and there was plenty of that in the media in the 90s too. The boogeyman back then were "far-right" militias rather than the more fashionable Nazis you hear about these days.
All this is beside the point, because this violence was not condoned by Republican party officials. You could make a case for Jan 6th though, and then I'd point to the riots of 2020 on the other side. Both sides have their extremists.
> Doesn't it tell you something that the most famous example of your case is from 8 years ago? If it was so much more common you'd think there would be many other easily referred to examples
There are, feel free to look them up. I'm not here to convince people who willingly play stupid. You know what I'm talking about, and I know you know what I'm talking about, so we're on the same page.
> The boogeyman back then were "far-right" militias rather than the more fashionable Nazis you hear about these days.
It's not a boogie man when people wave Swastikas. They just are. I don't give a fuck what you do with that information, I'm just telling you it's happening.
> Both sides have their extremists.
Why is it that any time somebody tried to remind people of obvious realities conservatives get so incredibly defensive and weird?
I never said anything about the left. I don't know why you're talking about them, and I also don't care. Fix the neo-nazi problem or don't, and if you wish to stop being told about it then get rid of them. I'm not the one planting neo-nazis at conservative rallies. The left isn't planting neo-nazis at conservative rallies. You're blaming the wrong people.
If the simple and factual reality of the situation upsets you then I can't help you. In fact, nobody can. So remove yourself from the conversation, as evidently there is no solution. So why waste all of our time?
I don't think you're being very charitable. I'm not playing dumb, I just don't think you've made your case, and "trust me, it's happening" is not much of an argument.
I have made my case, and you do know it's happening.
Here's some statistics, if you care. There's multiple sources referenced: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/the-facts-on-white-nationa...
To be clear, I do think you're being stupid because this, to me and every single person I know, is obvious.
If it's not obvious to you then I think there is something seriously wrong with your perception of reality. For lack of a better phrase, get a grip.
I don't think it's happening either.
Both left and right are assemblages of compromises flying in loose formation.
Vivek ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard and usha Vance and Marco Rubio.... Kkk has become very diverse lately /s.
Okay, but really... If you're going to criticize, can we at least make valid analogies?
I don’t think effective government is founded on the basis of lolz.
Haven't you seen the DOGE department yet?
> DOGE department
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DepartmentOfRedu...
Haven't you seen the DOGE department yet?
How do you make government smaller?
Step 1: Make government bigger by inventing a new department!
(Strictly speaking, it's not a government department. It is a private entity that will operate outside the government, and influence the president. What could possibly go wrong?)
> It is a private entity that will operate outside the government, and influence the president. What could possibly go wrong?
National Science Board is an external advisory board to the US gov. There's tons of examples of this sort of thing, especially in education and science.
The National Science Board was established by Congress, its activities are defined and governed by the law that created it, and it is clearly a part of the executive branch. Why do you consider it to be external to the government?
I'm guessing Doge would be regulated under this act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Advisory_Committee_Act...
If they actually follow the legal requirements listed in that article I will come back and apologize to you.
Pretty sure the National Science Board isn't co-chaired by a CEO and part owner multibillionaire with direct personal interests around government funded science projects though.
Not defending Doge just saying it's not new. Defence Business Board is a similar analogy. Plenty of people working at companies with gov contracts on the board during its history
Nothing screams efficiency like 2 dept heads.
In fairness, the possibility the two heads' respective egos will cancel each other out is the most efficient thing about it...
And let's be perfectly clear - given two weeks in office they will be screaming at us.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy… They have two people running the Department of Government Efficiency
Whatever it is, it for sure has the lolzs as its basis.
I’ve found the testable hypothesis!
It's effective at disorientation and disbelief.
Well it also wasn't founded on whatever the hell we were doing before either
> It's hard to imagine anyone that could be more effective at achieving that than Jones.
Asking as a non-American: how disturbing would it be if he appointed Putin?
If you wanted your comment to hit a bit better, you might have considered, e.g., Lavrov.
I didn't know who that was until googling before replying, are you sure that's going to hit better with an American audience?
Either on Hacker News or as an "own the libs" choice for Trump?
He is owned by another foreign government.
Buying trash in order to put it in the dumpster forever is honorable.
But trash belongs in the dumpster, and nowhere else.
Prediction:
Over the next decades the onion will slowly become not a, but the only, source of real news as all the other sources become more like info wars.
"And now with the State of the Onion address, President Swift!"
She'd probably be a better president than Trump, I imagine she's already a better businessperson than he is.
I hope they reward the Knowledge Fight guys for helping to make this happen
I've been a bit out of the loop, may I ask what Knowledge Fight did on this front?
I hope that they can keep the spirit of the infowars conspiracy genre alive.
> “US seeks to destabilize Canada into a war with Mexico to solve the border crisis “
I'll take the bait: Is that from Infowars or from The Onion?
Gotta be the onion. Infowars publishes higher quality conspiracy theories that is fit to print.
Beautiful.
The poet they sent couldn't have done better.
"Infinite Growth Forever," - that onion-y sign off made me laugh.
Actually started laughing seeing that
Can Global Tetrahedron buy Twitter please?
today an onion made me cry a bit
The dankest timeline
What a perfect end to 30 years of lies.
This is going to be the greatest satire website ever
I understand the vitriol against mr jones perfectly. Before his sandy hook saga I was actually somewhat of a fan of his work. I remember hearing an idiotic rant of his complaining that the US government was putting chemicals in the water that turned the frogs gay. But sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. "Researchers have found evidence that even extremely diluted concentrations of drug residues harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/birth-control-in-...
That, and the purposeful addition of fluoride and other additives do put our freshwater at risk of a scandal if we ever undercount or overcount any risk. I wouldn't even put it past 1960's era scientists to have come up with insane grant proposals for asymmetric warfare of freshwater. Hell, who knows what project flies under the radar until its not. These are all things I would expect to read in an onion news article. Alex jones had the same vibe the onion had with their 9/11 coverage and why I think the purchase is both satirical and not at the same time. Satire is heterological in that way.
What I would like to remind the reader of is that alex jones made a big mistake in vilifying the victims. But please do not take that as a pass to do the same to alex jones as he did to his victims. An eye for an eye will make the world blind.
After the coup we will finally have the most trusted source of our news back.
What a time to be alive !
I love this, it's like a pinnacle of performance art.
Maybe "performance satire"?
They should name it X
XWars!
Is not even funny
This is actually really good news.
The money they paid is going directly to Sandy Hook families
Nobody can use Infowars for evil.
Alex Jones looks like a fool.
All I can do now is hope and prey that this ends up being the literal dictionary definition of “Poe’s Law”. #goodspeed
A significant percentage of the population will always gravitate towards the type of content produced by Alex Jones and Infowars.
Russia solved this by making "controlled" media outlets (and in recent years Telegram channels) for people who gravitate toward conspiracies and contrarian viewpoints without making them critical of the current Russian administration.
Obviously that is not what The Onion is planning to do but that is what this story reminded me of.
The US already does this. The problem is that most Americans can't understand that their favourite Red/Blue scandal is just a side show at the circus of genocide.
The hilarious thing is that they just basically need to add the label "Satire:" to every "news" title on the site to realize value from it.
Not sure if this is true or just another Onion article.
The onion has not yet bought the times.
When they do I hope it's Infowars that first reports the deal.
why would they buy something that no longer exists? https://theonion.com/new-york-times-to-cease-publication/
> yet
Infowars itself confirms it: https://www.infowars.com/posts/watch-live-last-infowars-tran...
NBC is reporting it too. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/onion-wins-alex-jones-i..., reported on HN by elsewhen at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42136327.
So... I guess it's real? Still feels surreal...
The past 10 years feels surreal...
Narrative security.
I thought this was a prank, but "The satirical news company plans to shutter Jones’ Infowars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/onion-wins-alex-jones-i...
See also: "Why I Decided To Buy 'InfoWars'"
"Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over... we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal."
OJ Simpson payed 33.5M to the family of the woman he murdered.
It's insanity that you can flat-out kill someone and get paid less in civil court than denying a murder ever happened.
Everything about this is pure win
Fitting!
God I wish I could contribute to that.
Good news for you: https://membership.theonion.com
This sounds like an Onion headline.
And to add extra spice, they're actually doing it for a good cause, educating about gun safety in cooperation with nonprofits and the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre.
Obligatory fuck Alex Jones with a bat with rusty barbed wire. He profited off the misery of murdered kids, this is beyond low.
The first time I heard about it was from an Onion headline about it: https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/
Everytown isn't an educational organization and they have no gun safety programs. It's Michael Bloomberg's gun control advocacy group.
I refuse to believe in any conspiracies except that The Onion took over The Matrix and is running a Truman Show program full of unreal absurdities to see if I'll go insane.
Breaking news: Trump names Alex Jones head of FCC
potentially hilarious. can't wait to see what they launch.
Oh now this is some good news in the post truth world of Trump 2.0
I'm very much not a fan of Q-anon and related subcultures, but the sandy-hook award of $1.5 billion is obviously ridiculous, and is clearly just a government/institutional exercise in dictatorial/systemic power.
There is no possible way that someone ranting on the internet can cause 1.5 billion of emotional damage or whatever the claim was.
In particular, the libel (and it should be libel, making claims that are not true, rather than 'defamation' which is merely slurring them), should be from a credible source. Alex Jones is obviously not a credible source in this, or any case, and is unlikely to have caused any material harm (loss of jobs etc) to the 'victims'.
I mean, good riddance to Alex Jones, but the tools and methods used were entirely inappropriate to a liberal democracy, where you prevail with better arguments.
It was a civil case, so no government/prosecutor, and the jury awarded much more than plaintiffs asked for.
EDIT: Also you can disagree with the amount, but the award is literally the jury saying that the plaintiffs “prevailed with better arguments”
That doesnt mean it was a reasonable amount.
Clearly the jury placed a higher value on wiping out Jones financially than you would have.
No but it dispels the opening statement of gp about supposed dictatorial power.
I didnt see anything about a dictatorial power, just a complaint about incompatibility with liberal democracy, and I tend to agree.
That can come from broken systems as easily as a dictator.
It is hard for me to imagine what would support 150 million per plaintiff. That is and order of magnitude more civil damages than are often awarded for cold blooded murder.
Everyone hates Alex Jones, and I don't like him either, but that shouldn't trump justice and proportionality. It makes me think that the penalty was for more than what was on trial, and rather a reflection of mob justice by other means.
> clearly just a government/institutional exercise in dictatorial/systemic power
fair, I missed that and read the system version, which is also there
Indeed 'dictatorial power' was not quite what I meant - I did not mean that Trump or Biden demanded a certain outcome for example,
I mean that the system prosecutes these kinds of cases seemingly quite unfairly, as with Assange, or some of the maneuvers against Russell Brand, and that the actions just so happen to mesh with the interests of those in power.
People can claim that everything is OK because, court of law, etc, but to me the system is clearly not delivering correct answers.
Well, it moves the claim. Now the dictatorial power lies with the jury.
The normal corrective for such a thing is to appeal the amount of the award, on the grounds that it is clearly unreasonable. For Alex Jones, it probably didn't matter - he was bankrupt either way, so the extreme amount of the award is just a middle finger from the jury, with no practical effect.
5'500'000'000 people on the internet, which means an average of 27 cents per user. To say that there is "no possible way" of reaching that level of emotional damages is a stretch.
he wasn't paying for emotional damages done to the users of the internet. He was paying for emotional damages to 15 plaintiffs. 100 million is a lot of emotional suffering. Civil damages would have been lower if he killed the children himself. OJ paid 30 million civil damages for murder, and that was outstandingly high.
The courts might as well have assigned a 1 trillion dollars of damages.
You could argue that he was fined for wilfully communicating his lies to everyone on the internet (at least in the anglosphere). The award made by the jury (not the court) was explicitly for punitive damages. They picked a number to ensure he would be wiped out financially, and I think he deserves every bit of suck he is currently experiencing.
This look like the same argument the record companies use for piracy.
Oh "we would have made 10 billion if everyone downloading illegally would have paid." Except of course most people wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't free.
So, how much is 1.5B, per 'victim' of some obvious crackpots' rants.
It depends. If the courts went through the regular processes and he did nothing but defy them, you could argue that on top of the money, he should have been in jail by now.
What is unreasonable about it?
Someone should get to lie and spread conspiracy theories for decades and have to only pay a little? The man had been doing it because he could, not because he didn’t understand it was a lie. Then when called out and asked to stop, he kept doing it.
The amount of money versus the damage
The damage is tremendous, there are still people that are radicalized by it and spouting his lies today. Doesn’t sound like an unreasonable amount of money to me. What is unreasonable about the amount of money, what should have it been?
that isnt the damage that was assessed at 1.5 billion, and isn't what he was paying for. It is damages done specifically to 15 families for emotional pain and suffering.
Yes pain and suffering caused by lies used to radicalize people about a tragic event. Cute little caveat you’re willing to carve out in your head for lies, though.
Still waiting on your more appropriate number.
oh f off. 'being radicalized' is not damage. That argument fully supports the assertion that this is a government/systemic effort.
show some actual, material damage.
Being radicalized is damage. Some of those people radicalized will go on to perform mass shootings, literally. I would wager heavily that the risk of someone being a mass shooter amongst Jone's audience is much higher versus the average population.
damage to whom? Is that who got the the 1.5 billion? the money didnt go to fund deradicalization. It went to 15 people to compensate for the harm that those people specifically suffered.
If you are saying the fine is an appropriate punishment because of harm done to some other people, than that itself is illiberal. That isn't what Jones was on trial for.
That is intentionally giving an excessive penalty because you want to punish them for something else, that certainly wasn't litigated, and may not even be a crime.
Do you understand how people might be uncomfortable with that logic?
It's not my logic, the jury decided it. I guess take it up with them.
The fines are mostly punitive, which I frankly support. Why? Because Jones deserves it. If anything, Jones should consider himself lucky to be surrounded by such outstanding citizens that they go through the legal system instead of taking matters into their own hands.
Maybe if it was someone else I would care more. But for him, I can't bring myself to care much. Maybe that's illogical, but I don't mind much. Life is always a case-by-case basis.
I think people should also care about the integrity of the court system, and it should not be adapted on a case by case basis.
Case by case basis is the point of civil courts.
Material damage would be collecting money by spreading lies about dead children…1.5billion sounds perfect.
Why bother? Jones didn't provide credible evidence for the bullshit claim that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake, so he's being paid back in his own coin. Fuck him.
This is a good take:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:s6j27rxb3ic2rxw73ixgqv2p/po...
If he wanted to avoid losing a billion and a half dollars, he sure went about it oddly.
no, it wasn't a civil case.
https://x.com/AlexJonesMW3/status/1856495252850229386
its so frustrating that the only reason i am able to post this is because of X... because searching for this guys name or "poject veritas nudge" does not produce the result that it obviously should anywhere except for X. this is the tactic that is so often used by people like you. state something that is factually correct but completely incorrect and misleading when the full context is taken into account. even if this were an actual civil case brought on in the normal way it would still be the undeniable truth that one billion is silly and that this is political.
It's not that simple though. The initial guilty verdict was not even the decision of a jury, but the result of a fairly abnormal procedural decision by the judge. There was then a follow-on hearing to determine the amount in damages, where Jones' lawyer "accidentally" sent loads of evidence, not required by discovery, directly to the prosecution. The entire suit against Jones is filled with interested parties and corruption. It is definitely not a good example of better arguments prevailing.
>There is no possible way that someone ranting on the internet can cause 1.5 billion of emotional damage
I'd like to see someone quantify what a reasonable number would be and how they came to it.
I served on a jury where we had to award similar damages. "Anyone got any ideas how to account for this?" I asked .... nobody had any good ones.
You cannot quantify it. IMHO emotional damage is not a thing, at least in terms of people merely saying things about you. Have you not heard 'sticks and stones...'?
If someone claims false facts about you, and is credible, and that then has a material impact on you, then sure, that might be something for the law.
Otherwise we'd be prosecuting every gossip.
> You cannot quantify it.
You can, within some reasonable margin, quantify the opportunity cost, though, which is what such reparations are intended to compensate.
Best I can find was that there were 15 plaintiffs, each representing a family. If we assume an average family of four, let's say there are 60 beneficiaries, or $25 million per person. That's about an order of magnitude more than the typical person would expect to make in their lifetime.
There should be something to suggest that they had an income trend or other demonstration of similar potential to have otherwise earned that much if Infowars/Alex Jones had not done what they did. I wonder what showed that?
Your feelings that it is not a thing have no bearing on the actual law. I'm sure you and Alex Jones both agree, but luckily the victims, the jury, and the law don't.
That is my point, the system is broken and political.
The number seems to be based on the fact that he made money of it. And if that was in the 100s of million, the fine should obviously be higher to ward of other people doing so (and not just have it as a cost of doing business). Kind of like the german movie piracy thing where the convicts had to give up thousands of bitcoin, which the state sold for more than 2 billion.
(Beside the fact that in other liberal democracies, he would be in prison now)
There were 2 issues. The first is that he made money off of it. The 2nd (and likely bigger issue) was that he repeatedly violated court orders (e.g. not complying with discovery, repeatedly lying under oath, threatening the jury on his show while the trial was going on, etc). Judges and juries generally really don't like it when one of the parties is lying their ass off and ignoring the judge's orders.
He made 100s millions specifically from libeling the SH families?
Or his entire lifetime earnings were 100s millions?
The point is the law has been used (imho totally disproportionately) to bankrupt someone for things they said, and therefore censor them.
The same as with Thiel and Gawker.
Whether or not you agree with what they say, they should be able to say it.
> where you prevail with better arguments
What is your argument? It sounds like you aren't very familiar with the case ("whatever the claim was"), and I don't think just declaring that something is ridiculous is a very good argument.
They did prevail with better arguments… in front of a judge and jury.
The ends justify the means, in some circumstances. If you play fair against monsters, monsters win.
> but the tools and methods used were entirely inappropriate to a liberal democracy, where you prevail with better arguments.
I strongly disagree this is our operating environment, based on the evidence.
Better arguments prevail only works when participants argue in good faith grounded in curiously, evidence and reason. The guy who flips the table isn't proposing a novel gaming strategy, you just kick him out of board game club.
> If you play fair against monsters, monsters win.
If you become a monster to fight the monster, the monster always wins!
As is part of the journey and story arc!
The USA has an adversarial legal system. Jones and his lawyers didn't do anything that they could have done to prevent this.
My understanding is that the suit against Jones was pretty standard in what damages it asked for, and that defendants (Jones in this case) are giving every opportunity to negotiate and legally lessen the damages. Jones' lawyers did not do this, apparently at his direction. Jones also refused to produce evidence that is always traded between parties in suits like this. There was a "Perry Mason" moment when Jones was on the stand testifying that revealed (due to an incredible screw up by his lawyers) that Jones had apparently withheld info he should have disclosed during discovery.
Basically, he directed his lawyers to do nothing, and they did so. The size of the judgement is statutory. It's not that there was a governmental thumb on the scale, it's that Jones and his lawyers didn't do anything to scale it down, or even do much to contradict the plaintiff's claims.
>I mean, good riddance to Alex Jones, but the tools and methods used were entirely inappropriate to a liberal democracy, where you prevail with better arguments.
The tools and methods used were "a trial by a jury of his peers," in which better arguments did prevail. That seems entirely appropriate to a liberal democracy.
This isn't the 18th century anymore where the dissemination of arguments barely traveled outside of the immediate vicinity, this is the globally networked firehose of disinformation blasted right in your face 24-hours a day. Relying on better arguments to win hearts and minds in this environment is hopelessly naive.
He knowingly rallied his supporters to harass the victims and their families. That's a bit more than "someone ranting on the internet".
I'm not aware of him suggesting people harass anybody. There's a wide line between saying crazy things and calling people to take specific action against specific people.
he repeatedly asked his audience to "investigate" the families and a number of them did so in person.
My dude. He was ranting for years to an audience of people self-selecting as susceptible to propaganda about how a specific group of normal ass people was assisting the Government in dismantling their second amendment rights.
Like no he didn't literally say "go torment them" but come the fuck on. The connection between the events here isn't 1/10th as complicated as most of Alex's actual theories, it's literally just a line.
a liberal democracy, where you prevail with better arguments
This is only true when everyone argues in good faith, and is committed to accepting the possibility of being proven wrong. Sociopaths and other kinds of assholes exist and can corrupt any system if allowed to do so.
Looking forward to when the Trump DoJ has $1B+ judgements issued against auth-left echo chambers like HN and reddit. That ought to wipe the smiles off a lot of the smug, sneering faces in this thread. What goes around comes around, and it will in short order, I guarantee you.
Can anyone explain how InfoWars was sued and found guilty of free speech? There must be much more I’m not getting but although Jones sounds like an asshole I don’t think that’s illegal.
Why can’t someone sell an opinion that a tragedy didn’t actually exist and was created to push an agenda? It could be a provably false claim but don’t they have the right to make it? Isn’t being despicable a basic right?
That’s not how defamation laws work.
There is a ton of information out there about this. It goes beyond free speech to defamation, inciting harassment etc. Repeatedly calling grieving parents "Crisis Actors", publicly calling them liars over and over again, it turns out is not OK.
And then Jones/Infowars spectacularly failed to engage properly with the legal system, and the case went to default judgement.
https://apnews.com/article/shootings-school-connecticut-cons...
> Isn’t being despicable a basic right?
Personally I'm glad something could be done about it. He was profiting from causing further pain to people already going through something pretty unimaginable.
The Onion used to be a great free comedy tabloid with good serious media reviews, then became a big national brand that still maintained the humor to some extent, eventually sold off the review section which was successful for a while until purchased again and shut down, while the Onion was sold to Gizmodo, which was then bought by Univision (G/O Media), then sold to the private equity firm Great Hill Partners, then sold to (or spun off as) Global Tetrahedron, run by the worst, most establishment journalist on the planet, Ben Collins, since April 2024.
Middle class people just love being validated by their dumb brands. They're slapping themselves on the back like they won something. This masthead has no relationship to that cool paper from the 90s.
The Onion is irrelevant. In 3 years they will be gone and Alex Jones will pick this up for $5m
Alex Jones still owes $1.5 billions to the people he wronged, he's never buying anything ever again.
Next step: The Onion buys X.
They should buy the NYT instead, given it has been a joke in itself for the past ~10 years.
When The Onion itself goes bankrupt in the not too distant future, can Alex Jones buy the Onion and get the domain back?
