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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23863 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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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.

Not really. It was more that the Judge and the plaintiffs refused to accept his financial statements and insisted he had secret money. It was a mix of hating Alex Jones and leftists needing to believe that Jones was a grifter in it for the money. Accepting that there wasn't much money would have damaged their world view.

The plaintiff's lawyers refused settle and now the plaintiffs won't get much of anything.

Infowars has creditors who have priority in the bankruptcy. The talent doesn't have exclusive contracts. The studio can only be sold for pennies on the dollar. Infowars generates no income if it's off the air.

Texas has fairly generous bankruptcy protections. Jones will get to keep his home, his retirement savings, and a vehicle for each adult in his home. He'll be able to start up a new video stream hauking supplements fairly easy. Production values will be lower at first.

Obviously it's a huge blow but it won't destroy him.

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.

One of the reasons that the Judge needed to do a default judgement is that Jones isn't nearly as guilty as people think. People mentally lump him together with "Alex Jones types" but he wasn't the primary driver of the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. The defence was doing mock trials and found that some of the time they could win, even with an Austin jury.

An Austin jury would be one of the most anti-Jones juries you can get. The level of performative progresivism and Alex Jones hate here in Austin is hard to describe.

How do you know it's performative progressiveness and not the genuine beliefs of the people which act that way? Is there any way to test for this?

Does whether it is performative or not impact anything about a jury selected from Austinites?

Yes, genuinely held beliefs probably have some philosophical or moral reasoning that has led to a broadly consistent set, rather than ones which are sharply contradictory or inconsistent.

How exactly would you propose distinguishing between "genuine" beliefs and performative ones? Why wouldn't they lead to similar kinds of behavior? Is there a chance that performative beliefs may result in even more extreme actions than genuine ones?

And I'll point that even and maybe especially "genuine" beliefs are not free of contradiction or inconsistency and are not necessarily rooted in philosophical or moral reasoning.

I appreciate the dozen different irrelevant counter claims or suggestions that the opposite may be true, but I think this all demonstrates why accusing random strangers' actions of being performative is just a boo-outgroup exercise.

They aren't irrelevant at all. You're hung up on my use of the word "performative" and I'm pointing out that it doesn't matter if it's true in the sense that you've interpreterd it or that this interpretaion may even make my point stronger. There's not even necessarily a reason to think that performativity precludes sincerity, so your perception of this as "booing" is really just your own built in assumption, as I tried to point out.

How does it not matter, and how does that make your point stronger, and how can something be sincere and also performative? My assumption is based on what you wrote, nothing is built-in.

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Can they come after the new entity once he starts that one up?

It'll be a lot harder if it's outside of Austin and there's some sort of vesting structure.

They aren't supposed to be able to shut down new companies since they are supposed to be limited to recouping damages. They don't have any right to try to silence future speech or prevent Jones from making a living.

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