MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
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User ID: 2887
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
5mo ago
It seems like the push finally came to shove for Alex Jones, as he will have to liquidate pretty much almost everything he has to pay the $1.5 billion dollar settlement after the Sandy Hook defamation lawsuit went the plaintiffs way. Via AssociatedPress:
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is seeking court permission to convert his personal bankruptcy reorganization to a liquidation, which would lead to a sell-off of a large portion of his assets to help pay some of the $1.5 billion he owes relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Jones and his media company, Free Speech Systems, both filed for bankruptcy reorganization after the Sandy Hook families won lawsuits against him for his repeatedly calling the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, a hoax on his Infowars programs...
...Liquidation could mean that Jones would have to sell most of what he owns, including his company and its assets, but could keep his home and other personal belongings that are exempt from bankruptcy liquidation. Proceeds would go to his creditors, including the Sandy Hook families.
If Free Speech Systems’ case is withdrawn, the company would return to the same position it was in after the $1.5 billion was awarded in the lawsuits and it would send efforts to collect the damages back to the state courts in Texas and Connecticut where the verdicts were reached.
Jones already has moved to sell some of his personal assets to pay creditors, including his Texas ranch worth around $2.8 million.
But a liquidation of Jones’ and his company’s assets would raise only a fraction of what he owes the Sandy Hook families.
According to the most recent financial statements filed in the bankruptcy court, Jones personally has about $9 million in assets, including his $2.6 million Austin-area home in Texas and other real estate. He listed his living expenses at about $69,000 for April alone, including about $16,500 for expenses on his home, including maintenance, housekeeping and insurance.
Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, which employs 44 people, had nearly $4 million in cash on-hand at the end of April. The business made nearly $3.2 million in April, including from selling the dietary supplements, clothing and other items that Jones promotes on his show, while listing $1.9 million in expenses.
Considering $9 million is more than 100 times less than what he owes, I don't see any other way for this to end in his completely left in the dust, with no business media, no career in journalism (at least as a self-owned publication, though I doubt anyone wants to hire him, and I don't think him having a Rumble channel with no structure to back him is going to bring him that much money). His only hope involves a Hail Mary crowfunding moneybomb from his supporters and people annoyed by the veredict a la Trump, but even if he raises as much as Trump, he's still owing hundreds of millions left, and I doubt he could even reach that point; not only we're talking about somebody not as popular, but the specifics of the case do touch sensitive spots (nobody likes someone stating falsehoods about dead children)
The $1.5 billion settlement for claiming an event didn’t happen the way it is popularly believed to have happened was always absurd and had nothing at all do to with justice delivered to the families who lost their kids in Sandy Hook and everything to do with silencing a voice long a thorn in the side of the establishment, which the lawyer essentially concedes in the above quote about the ruling not just being about money — lawfare waged via a weaponized legal system I wrote about in detail when the ruling came down from on high last year.
Please miss me with comments about how Alex Jones is an unhinged pseudo-evangelical lunatic with a drinking problem or whatever. The vast majority of Alex Jones haters, in fact, have never listened to a single hour of his broadcast. Their negative impression of him comes entirely secondhand from ten-second clips and the non-stop, orchestrated bleating of hostile corporate media — a consensus-forming propaganda campaign of, arguably, unprecedented scale targeted at a single individual in the 21st century.
But anyway, I’m not here to do apologia for Alex Jones or to sell him to anyone; I am aware of his flaws, as I am aware of my own. We all live in glass houses...
...The Alex Jones censorship sage is not about Alex Jones.
When Jones was universally banned overnight from all major social media platforms in 2018 in what was clearly an orchestrated move among the Big Tech giants, that was an allusion to things to come.
It was only two years later, if that, that the mass censorship regime came for all dissident media, including me when I got the banhammer from multiple platforms in 2020 for “COVID misinformation” and other alleged crimes of wrongthink.
It’s InfoWars today and the rest of us tomorrow.
Two things that come to my mind:
First, from what I understand, the final payment number came from Alex Jones not being willing to disclose his net worth, which allowed to the plaintiffs to imagine an infinite net worth if they wanted to. But once the books are finally displayed, does that make sense? And even if he hadn't, why isn't the level of damage caused to the plaintiffs part of equation to lower the number? Isn't this institutionalized debt slavery as punishment for what is at the end of the day an civil case? Don't get me wrong, as a libertarian I certainly don't oppose debt slavery for a sort of tort system where crimes are punished with payments; but it has to be equivalent to the crime and the criminal's means; $1.5 billion would be too much of a punishment for Adam Lanza, the actual sicko who murdered the children in Sandy Hook, let alone for the guy who espoused things that weren't true about the shooting. Is he even going to able to ever pay for it entirely?
Secondly, isn't this simply a completely disproportionate answer to Jones sins? Yes, he went on for too long with this charade and should had never started it in the first place, not to mention that his claims didn't went against the NWO or the globalist elites that he despises, but against parents of dead children, claiming that the most emotionally painful thing that had ever befallen them was something they were lying about on TV. However, is he responsible at all for the fact that his followers went too far and harassed those people? Are CNN or MSNBC liable for defamation since they broadcasted Jones making those same claims? Do we know that if the people that harassed the victims parents actually got their information directly from Jones himself?
It seems to me that defamation law is a two edged sword...a society that doesn't have it allows misinformation to be used to harm people, but a society that doesn't have it on a tight leash allows to weaponize claims of misinformation with far worse repercussions.
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
5mo ago
I'm planning someday to write an entire post of my own proposing an alternative to the up/down vote system, but here I will provide a basic sum up of my thoughts on it: I agree that it's a good way to convey accurately the overall opinion of the community on the post/comment, it's just that this leads to biased interpretations of people of whether it's right or wrong.
Take for example the post here about Café Américain's article questioning the mainstream climate change narrative. I thought the article made some good points, most people didn't agree, that's okay. The problem is that the voting itself kinda warps the perception I already had; just seeing it made me feel the article had some problem or was mostly based on faulty reasoning/evidence. If it's downvoted, must be for some good reason, right?
Of course, you may scoff at this and reply "Oh hoho, we're rationality aspirants here, buddy, we're able to understand disapproval of someone's opinion does not mean anything regarding whether that opinion is solid or not!" However, this entire community is made (supposedly) of people who think that way, so that sampling leads to an not so subtle bias whether we like it or not: "since the community is made of people who try to be above bias and interpret opinions in a way that is unaffected by public opinion or peer pressure, any voting sample of those same people of an article must convey whether that article was well argued or not".
If we're going to be a rationality community, we can do better, and we might as well at least try having a review system for posts/comments that conveys how much light it brings. I'm thinking of something like Reddit's awards system along the lines of this SSC article on levels of disagreements: basically, the post/comment gets an award based on whether there was a genuine attempt to disagree in order to find some truth, or whether it was just made to boo some point of view and generate a negative response towards it, with an award that categorizes the post/comment as a meta-debate, an (bad) award for social shaming and gotchas, one for at least avoiding that and making an argument or a series of ones, one for high level disagreements over facts/meaning of words, and one for value disagreement, where there isn't any attempt to claim the other side is factually wrong, but states to have another moral framework.
Prone to improvement? Absolutely, but I consider it a step in the right direction.
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
5mo ago
As far as I can tell, virtually every single place on earth where they make up the majority of the population is some kind of dysfunctional shithole and it doesn't seem to matter what continent it's on, what country it's in, or how many generations of effort well-meaning white liberals have squandered trying to fix it.
What about Bahamas or Mauritius? They both have an Human Development Index comparable to Western Europe (I don't consider HDI to be the ultimate measure of quality of life, but it's a pretty good approximation nonetheless).
For historical examples, what about the Mali Empire?
Western civilization is, in the words of Gandhi, "a good idea". Even if I were to concede that Sub-Saharan Africans are little more than pitiful savages (and that's one big if!), they're still capable of copying valuable institutions created by another ethnicity and apply them to their own countries. Didn't the Western world itself took more than just notes from Arab math?
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
6mo ago
I'm honestly getting sick of hearing the word 'antisemitic' as if this is some major moral standard that matters. It is honestly starting to make me...anti-semitic.
I think the word is even worse than you think; it's not just that it's being overused, it's that it's so wrong.
What does 'Semitic' mean? It's a linguistic term for referring to people who spoke Semitic tongues. If Hamas is anti-Semitic then they might as well be called a "self-hating" group, since Arabic comes from the same Semitic family of culture as Hebrew.
What does "Anti" mean? It means to oppose something; but to oppose doesn't mean "a wish to destroy each and every single one of it's advocates". It's why it's so obtuse and disingenuous to use the term "anti-trans" to refer to someone who opposes any of the trans lobby's social and institutional takeovers; since the term "anti-semite" is the biggest culprit of "antis", you're basically implicitly putting someone who thinks male serial rapists who all the sudden identify themselves as female shouldn't be in women's prison in the same camp as someone saying "We should lock all transgender people into death camps and exterminate them until none are left alive, and hunt down all those who got away to the end of the world".
Gustavo Perednik, famous historian of Judaism and philosopher (who I met once!), uses the term "judeophobia" to describe this feeling, which is better because at least the targeted group is being accurately represented, but I still think it comes short; fear isn't the root of what we're talking about here. Guys who rub their hands on their shoulders after shaking them with someone gay can be called homophobic since he can be understood as being afraid of them; someone who wishes to place restrictions of homosexual behaviour on public places, put gay people into ghettos and make conversion therapy compulsory (or worse) isn't being homophobic since he isn't operating out of fear, but disgust and hatred.
The only "marginalized" group who's had the dubious luck to have the correct term for people who despise them are women: misogyny (ironically, they are also a group who despite all their oppression have never been a victim of genocide! "Women, can't live with them..."). Some times it can be over used (oppressing women of the "keep them in the kitchen" variety isn't misogynistic; raping, murdering them and treating them live slaves of the opposite sex is), but if you want to imply hatred or disgust of something, that's the correct prefix: "miso". Hence, the prefix "miso" should be used to describe someone/something that holds a group of people in contempt.
The result being: a force like Hamas, who wishes the genocide of Jews, should be described as miso-Judaic or having miso-Jewry at it's core. I think anti-judaic is a ludicrous label to place on someone chanting "They've got tanks, we've got hang gliders, glory to all the resistance fighters": it's a valid way of describing someone who mows the lawn on Sabbat while rubbing it in its Rabbi neighbour face, or someone who doesn't stop making dumb jokes about its co-worker's yarmulke because he can't stand it, but I think it comes short of describing in accurate dimensions the feeling harboured by Nazism/Islamic supremacism.
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
6mo ago
Becoming Jewish if not born one is a headache of all sorts, starting with what type of Judaism are we talking about:
Look at that flowchart. I mean reaaaaly look at it. If Jews are interested in not being thought of as a secret society that rules the world, would it hurt them to begin by making the process of becoming one of then a little simpler? Not even Masonry is that complicated; I was offered to become part of them without asking them just by knowing the right people!
-Make a two state deal with with the West Bank that implies a massive land-swap ; in exchange for giving up on any claims of rights to the Gaza Strip and allowing its full annexation by Israel, full condemnation of 10/7 and declaring Hamas to be a rouge organization, Israel will abandon all settlements that aren't Ariel, move back the Wall correspondingly, and the map will be radically redrawn in order to give the West Bank a nice chunk of the Golan Heights (if Syria wants to give the piece it claims to own too, better yet), which is decently fertile and apparently has a boatload of oil (although it's not clear if it's any good to be refined and used). Israel will abandon all military occupation of the zone, recognize the Nation of Palestine as fully sovereign and will let them be whatever they want to be. Abbas gets to make Palestine a better place for its citizens, or to turn it into another corrupt petrodollar tyranny (or both!)
-All people and descendants of who left the place due to Nakba will get right of return to the Palestinian country, as all Gazans. All Israelis currently living in the Golan Heights region and the settlements will be moved to Gaza. Cities will be created on the Golan Heights from scratch in order to accommodate the massive flow of immigrants, while the already existing towns will be expanded if it's needed to. Gazan cities will be massively redesigned from scratch to allow Israeli high quality infrastructure. Both refugee groups will get free housing for the troubles caused. All this will require money, and looots of it; so the peace deal will be executed with the financial support from the international community (The G7 and the Gulf Tigers will pull 90% of the weight, BRIC the rest)
-Having gotten the two-state solution done and over with, in exchange for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign country, Saudi Arabia and the UAE agree to push all the buttons on Qatar and do a full blockade of the country in joint with the US until all Hamas leaders are turned over to the Israeli government to do with them as they please (and this is very important; the Israelis want more than justice; they want revenge; if they want to stone Ismail Haniyeh in the streets of Tel Aviv and broadcast it on TV, let them)
-The international community agrees to consider the Gaza Strip as belonging to Israel, the IDF invades Gaza by land mostly with troops on the ground and a very few targeted non-carpet bombing campaigns, in a no-prisoners-taken approach; anyone living in Gaza who collaborates in the IDF will be rewarded (and its identity shielded in order to avoid being punished for treason), anyone who fights for Hamas will be shot on sight short of dropping their weapons inmediately, laying on the ground/rasing the white flag.
-Turn the script I just wrote.
I mean, let's be fair, from a rationality point of view, I don't see any egregious with my plan (except for Jerusalem, which I don't know what to do about it); even with the logistical costs of the relocation of millions of people and building of cities amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, they get easily compensated by avoiding WWIII and getting long-lasting peace in the Middle East. The problem is that it implies massive sacrifices to both sides; neither is getting what they want at all; they're just giving up things in order to avoid losing even more. Israelis want the whole land. Palestinians want the whole land. Neither is going to give an inch of it. But the two state solution thought about by the mainstream is impossible to work; two pieces of non-continuous land becoming a country? Get out of here.
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
7mo ago
This seems like it touches upon the same topics as all the secession/independence debates do - who is obliged to get out of the way? Do the people who want nothing to do with the secessionist project have the right to a state of their own, and who has the obligation to get out of the way for that? The idea that any group of people can consensually obtain their own clay on which they only answer to themselves is appealing enough to me in theory, but the practice of it runs into insurmountable problems. Any such group seldom already controls a contiguous piece of land, and fair division algorithms (forgetting for a moment about their asymptotic complexity) only work if the subdivision valuations are independent (so you don't have preferences like "I want parcel A iff I can have parcel B"), which is basically never the case for land.
I don't want to comment on the viability of an European ethnostate or how its supporters are hypocrites by not actually allowing those who don't wish to form part of it to have to move.
However, as someone who is pro-separatism, I would like to to say that the quote above reeks of being a too correct argument. If there's a problem with the people inside a territory not being able to leave, then there's still a problem with that territory itself being part of another larger territory; that means you're left with two choices to solve to conundrum, either the individual is the maximal sovereign unit and there isn't a state at all (anarchism) or you have a one-world government that everyone is stuck with and that's it.
In order to defend the nation state just as it is by saying it's not fair for some to leave the unit and others can't, but without advocating either of the two options above, it seems like you would like you would have to make the case that nation states just like they're now are the result of natural political/territorial/demographical processes, and people have to suck it up or move to another country if they don't like it. I don't deny that plays a role; however, from my (admittedly not deeply researched point of view) history seems to show there's quite some degree of violence behind their creation instead, to say the least.
At the end of the day, you're always going to have people unhappy with the social experiment they were handed, so that practical problem doesn't go away with decentralization but I think it's better at solving it; more sovereign units with less territories makes it easier for both un-popular social experiments but desired by a passionate minority to prop up, and to remove oneself from them .
American involvement also helped produce the two most stable, productive South American countries in Chile and Uruguay.
Defining "stable" and "productive" is a headache all by itself, but even if I assume you mean "political stability" and "economic prosperity", I think that thanking the USA for those in the two countries you mentioned makes little sense.
What happened in Chile was a series of quasi-fortunate events. Unlike leftists would like you to believe, Pinochet began his regime being just as much socialist as Allende; the CIA trusted him merely because he hated commies, but that's about it; he had no economic ideas for the country at all, so basically continued doing the same as his predecesor but with an CIA stamp of approval (he even met with Fidel Castro! Seriously!). The only reason why things took a free market turn was due to Milton Friedman (who at that time was advising Xiaoping's China to end communism there) meeting with Pinochet once and writing him a letter explaining what he should to turn things around. That's it. Never did the CIA or the Pentagon had anything to do with the so-called "Chilean Miracle". If it wasn't for that visit and the involvement of the Chicago Boys (José Piñera, Hernán Büchi, etc.) in Pinochet's rule, the CIA would've merrily go along with whatever crap Pinochet would've thought that made things better as long as he continued throwning tankies off helicopters.
While I myself consider the Chilean model to be a very good example of how to achieve economic well-being, there's no doubt it that caused signifcant social unrest that climaxed in the 2019 protests, and even if you consider to be the protests to be unworthy of merit (just because people dislike economic policies doesn't necesarily mean they're bad, even if legitimitate concerns like the massive unemployement in the just-out-of-college-with-student-debt demographic and the privileges the goverment continued to hand over to the military elite where there), it shows there are consequences that go beyond economics to take into consideration when a country formulates policies.
I can't comment much on the country's political stability, and it's true that there wasn't any dictatorship after Pinochet, but social unrest, justified or not, is never a sign of it, and even if we assume stopping communism justifies a strongman with an iron fist, I don't think the 3000 people killed during his regime were all a threat to the country.
Regarding Uruguay, as someone who was born and lives there...please. First of all, lumping those two countries together makes it sound that the CIA was also involved in the country's military junta rule, and it wasn't at all. It's true that they collaborated with the democratically elected National Party goverment of the sixties and the following presidency of Jorge Pacheco Areco's as part of the Condor Plan by training our military and police forces in counter-subversion techniques including torture (one of the most famous murders carried out by left-wing guerillas in that turmoil of an period was of a CIA operative named Dan Mitrone, who had also worked in Brazil with the military junta that was there at the time), but by the time the tanks rolled in 1973 and the dictatorship started, the buck had already ended for the US; the left wing guerrillas were completely defeated, and the military junta began its rule with no foreign involvement of any kind (why it happened deserves a post of it's own).
So why is Uruguay so politically stable? We...just sort of are that way, I guess? Democracy and the rule of law is in our DNA: the military junta was an anomaly, and in 200 years there were only two other dictatorships in the country, which were resolved as peacefully as the last one and which shed little blood. Our parties institutional resilience is both a cause and proof of this: of the four major political parties in the country, just one (CA) started recently; Broad Front, the main left-wing coalition, started over 50 years ago, while both the aforementioned National Party and Colorado Party have been around ever since the country's beginnings. There are cracks which are starting to show however; ever since the end of the pandemic, the tripartite coaltion led by the NP, which won in no small part due to several corruption scandals by the Broad Front, has been mired on scandals of its own which are arguably worse, one of which involves a very important Senator who has been prosectued for a long history of sexual assault of minors, while the Colorado Party, which once was pretty much the country's dominant party, has become a shell of its former self and lives off its memories, has plenty of candidates for their next primary but no leadership (their leader shockingly resigned and left politics during the pandemic due to disagremeents with the goverment, which considering the guy's reputation I suppose had much to do with its lack of care for accountability and transparency). Add the fact that we have become more polarized, and yeah, we got problems.
As for "productive", we're like the third world that everyone would like to live in if they had to live anywhere in the third word, but that's it; our economy isn't doing horribly but it isn't doing that great either. The fact that we're considered both one of the most "stable" and "productive" countries in Latin America speaks little of us and volumes of how fucked up the region is.
Michael Huemer has published an article on Substack criticizing "pure empirical reasoning". His thoughts on the matter :
He later goes on to criticize "subjective Bayesianism":
The thread's OP asks if there's a question that I'm kinda embarrassed to ask. Well, I'm completely embarrassed to say that I understand very (if any) of the arguments posited here by Huemer regarding Bayesian probability, because I know little of it besides its very basics (make statements in terms of likeliness, not absolutes). I don't fully understand Bayes Theorem and I'm not quite sure what math skills are required to know it. My question (not embarrassed to ask it) is: where is a good place to start learning Bayesian probability and how to use it? Apart from what's mentioned in LW Sequences, is there a beginners book anyone can recommend?
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