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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   19051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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This week in the dankest timeline: Satire publication The Onion buys Alex Jones’ Infowars at auction with Sandy Hook families’ backing.

Yes, a site for unbelievable comedy playing to the biases of the gullible is now owned by the Onion. It appears they intend to use it to promote gun control. I can only hope this is presented in the style of existing InfoWars schlock.

While I deeply disagree with gun control activists, I’d much rather the site goes to them than to Jones’s merchandising companies. One of them was apparently the runner-up. But it’s alright for Jones: he’s allegedly on the short list for Trump’s next press secretary. Wait, no, that was last year. It was also only ever going to be a temporary fling, but that’s a given for the position.

I suppose Jones will have to keep shouting at globalists under a different brand.

The justification for this ruling was that unstable people listened to Jones, right? So Jones is culpable. I don't even agree with prosecution under "incitement of imminent lawless action," it goes against our entire philosophy of law. If a person who would not otherwise commit a crime, would do so if told by the right person, they can't be held accountable. If for no other reason than the continued function of civilization, we are required to hold all adults as solely responsible for their actions.

To maintain civilization we must also be free to challenge all "established" narratives, at any time, for any reason. The United States owes its continued existence to its foundational documents assuming the worst. 1A assumes that unchecked, the government will lie, so people must have legal protection for calling out those lies. 2A even more so, which accounts for the possibility and need for violent revolution. i.e.; "1, so you can shed light on their tyranny, 2, so you can kill them if all else fails." It assumes bad actors will appear and so enshrines the ability to fight them, while holding the spirit of the whole, the whole of the people in good faith in vesting the power to fight them with the people.

It's also why, and you can call it wasted rebelliousness, I consider this as absolute moral mandate to call Sandy Hook a hoax. The government conspired to destroy a man for questioning it, downthread there's debate about "He would have had to pay less if he'd done it/well actually he might be sued for more if he'd done it," yeah but not much more, and that's the point. His punishment for questioning appears to be in the realm of the monetary punishment for having committed it. It's a hoax. The system is a hoax, that it's unquestionable is a hoax, everything about it could be true, and it's still a hoax.

Gun control is never happening. So the masses laugh as in this ruling the families make the short lives and most violent deaths of their children part of nothing greater than a soon-forgotten joke. It's disgusting.

At a court hearing Thursday afternoon in Houston, the trustee who oversaw the auction, Christopher Murray, acknowledged that The Onion did not have the highest bid but said it was a better deal overall because some of the Sandy Hook families agreed to forgo a portion of the sale proceeds to pay Jones’ other creditors. First United American Companies, a business affiliated with one of Jones’ product-selling websites, submitted the only other bid. The trustee said he could not put a dollar amount on The Onion’s bid.

...

“This was a auction that didn’t happen, with a bid that was lower, with money that wasn’t real,” he said.

Is this legal? At this point it's not an "auction" anymore but a free handing over of the property to whatever grift the trustee desires. In the previous thread on this, I predicted that Jones's supporters would be able to snatch up the assets at a relatively cheap price, but I never guessed that Jones's enemy would win, not by outbidding, but by manipulating the process.

Of course this AP fake news drivel says "the judge in Jones’ bankruptcy case said Thursday that he had concerns about how the auction was conducted" but didn't post the name of the judge or what the judge actually said. I'll follow up on this but fuck AP. The judge had a video call with the interested parties and possibly the AP reporter and others where invited to listen. I'm not sure if a recording is available.

As a side note, I remember the onion being much more relevant sometime in the past. I wonder if its decline is related to it becoming just another mouthpiece for the democrat agenda, or if I'm totally off track.

I wonder if its decline is related to it becoming just another mouthpiece for the democrat agenda, or if I'm totally off track.

The bigger issue is that the barrier to entry is so low publishing online now that theonion.com doesn't hold much value.

The pay for writers isn't that great either afaik.

So a talented funny person is better off doing their own thing. YouTube used to be easy to monetize. I think it's more streaming and podcasts now.

The bigger issue is that the barrier to entry is so low publishing online now that theonion.com doesn't hold much value.

So why did the Babylon Bee manage to overtake them in terms of relevancy?

As a side note, I remember the onion being much more relevant sometime in the past. I wonder if its decline is related to it becoming just another mouthpiece for the democrat agenda, or if I'm totally off track.

Yeah, that tracks.

They are the dog that caught the car. Cultural victory is very bad for a humor publication. Pro-regime propaganda is never funny. And neither is the Onion, not for a long time now.

Probably the pendulum will swing again at some point.

They do a good piece every now and then, but all the best content that people still talk about seems to come from a 10-year period that ended somewhere in Obama's first term.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

It's probably my mere-mortal unsophistication compared to highfalutin' lawyers, but "eleventy gazillion dollars" civil judgments seem much, much more like violations of the spirit of the Eighth Amendment than prohibitions on sidewalk camping do.

I would not be surprised if someone on the federal circuit asserted that punitive damages aren't punishments.

That's the glory of these judgements. They aren't punitive damages. They're compensatory damages. You can't put a dollar value on emotional distress, so who are you to say that "eleventy gazillion dollars" isn't appropriate compensation for mean phone calls?

Apparently, Jones should have just claimed that being a kooky conspiracy theorist is a status.

It ought to be. It's the only outlet for mythmaking that we're still allowed and the United States was explicitly founded on the free and liberal exercise of the natural right to make up ridiculous tall tales.

I say this without a hint of irony: Alex Jones is here being unjustly persecuted for his religious beliefs.

If Jones had killed those kids the civil suite would have been a fraction of this.

Edit: How to get the answer to a question online? Be wrong. I appreciate all the work; so what I am seeing is that if Jones did kill all these kids damages might approach this judgment which I think pretty clearly demonstrates just how egregious this judgment is.

What makes you think that? As someone whose job it is to evaluate cases for settlement potential, it would be high but not totally out of line considering the heinous nature of the act and the age of the victims. High sympathy factor plus incredibly unlikable defendant means big verdict. 1.44 billion divided by 28 victims equals about 50 million per, which is less than a lot of cases you've never heard about. Like the products liability case against Mitsubishi that netted a single plaintiff nearly a billion dollars. Or the medical malpractice case that awarded over 100 million to a child born with cerebral palsy. Or the 50 million mesothelioma verdict awarded to the widow of a guy in his 60s (and that was back in 2010).

Are murderers sued in civil court for damages?

Yes.

Wrongful death actions can be pursued against a person also facing criminal charges for the same event. Even if the person is not found guilty of a criminal charge, he may still be found liable for wrongful death due to the lower burden of proof in civil court.

Can you provide a link for the Mitsubishi award? I did a simple Google and couldn’t find it.

Assuming you mean “civil suit,” yeah. It would have been a criminal case rather than a tort, and he would most likely have ended up with multiple life sentences, since Connecticut banned the death penalty that same year.

If Alex Jones had killed those kids with overwhelming evidence pointing to him, but somehow been found not guilty in a criminal case, then the parents of the murdered children had sued him in a class-action civil suit for wrongful death in which he'd been found guilty (à la OJ Simpson), the amount of damages he would've been ordered to pay would've been lower than this. OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. Adjusting for number of victims and inflation, our hypothetical Alex Jones would have been ordered to pay $922.41 million - far short of the $1.48 billion the real Alex Jones was ordered to pay.

Ah, but what if it was a full moon? I don’t want to break out the tide charts, but I bet you could clear a billion, easy.

OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. Adjusting for number of victims and inflation, our hypothetical Alex Jones would have been ordered to pay $922.41 million - far short of the $1.48 billion the real Alex Jones was ordered to pay.

That's not how this works. First, the civil suit divvied up damages in a non-intuitive manner. OJ was found liable for $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the parents of Ron Goodman, and for $12.5 million in punitive damages each to the estates of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. (Rufo v. Simpson (2001) 86 Cal.App.4th 581, 614). The compensatory damages for a single victim's murder, adjusted for inflation, would be $16,717,408.10 today. Multiplied for the 26 Sandy Hook victims, that's $434,652,610.60 in compensatory damages in a hypothetical Sandy Hook case.

However, there's significant reason to think that the Sandy Hook per-victim compensatory damages would be significantly higher than the California damages awarded against OJ. compensatory damages, per the California standard at the time, reflected the "loss of love, companionship, comfort, affection, society, solace, or moral support suffered as a result of the death, but not for their grief or sorrow or for the decedent's pain and suffering." Notably, "pain and suffering" are two concepts which routinely factor hugely into the size of jury verdicts in tort cases. There also was no reference to "economic damages" like lost wages, which are also a large driver of compensatory damage awards. I'm not a CT lawyer, and none of this is legal advice, but a quick google turned up these civil jury instructions which, on page 121 (Instruction 3.4-7) lays out the types of damages permissible in wrongful death cases:

Wrongful Death Damages We have a statute that governs damages in cases such as this where there is a death. It allows for just damages which includes:

Economic damages of :

  1. the reasonable and necessary medical and funeral expenses and
  2. the value of the decedent's lost earning capacity less deductions for (his/her) necessary living expenses taking into consideration that a present cash payment will be made, and

Noneconomic damages of:

  1. compensation for the destruction of the decedent's capacity to carry on and enjoy life's activities in a way that (he/she) would have done had (he/she) lived and,
  2. compensation for the death itself, or
  3. pain and suffering.

The inclusion of pain and suffering and economic damages (if accurate) indicates to me that the per-victim award of compensatory damages would likely have been much higher in a hypothetical Sandy Hook wrongful death suit than in the OJ case, let alone the increased sympathy a jury would likely feel for the parents of murdered children versus the elderly parents of a middle-aged adult victim.

As regards the punitive damages, $12,500,000 in 1997 dollars is worth $24,584,423.68 today. Thus, a hypothetical Sandy Hook case awarding the same amount of per-victim punitive damages as the OJ case would have awarded $639,195,015.68. However, Connecticut handles punitive damages oddly, and in common law counts appears to restrict them to the prevailing party's attorney's fees, less taxable costs. (CT Jury Instruction 3.4-4). In other cases CT statute appears to mandate double or even treble damages. Frankly I'm too lazy to dig into what amount of punitive damages would have been available in this case, but this should demonstrate that calculating damages really is not as simple as just extrapolating from a different case in a different jurisdiction.

Those cases aren't really comparable, but even using the OJ verdict as a guide you still get pretty close and possibly higher if you take the right factors into consideration. the Sandy Hook kids had 25–30 years of life expectancy on the OJ victims, which greatly increases the verdict potential. And while I don't know if Connecticut allows parental loss of consortium claims, the nature of the relationship increases the value of the case. The 8.5 million in compensatory damages awarded to the Goldmans for the loss of their son would cover emotional distress and loss of companionship. The loss of companionship damages would be higher in the case of a small child who lives with the parents, as opposed to an adult child who moves out, so a Sandy Hook parent can expect more in that respect.

The other technical thing that I wouldn't expect you to know about is that the jury didn't award any significant compensatory damages for Nicole. Their are two kinds of cases filed on behalf of deceased Plaintiffs: Wrongful Death cases and survivor actions. Wrongful death cases compensate the heirs of the deceased person for their loss, and are usually associated with deaths that occur fairly quickly after the incident. Survivor actions compensate the actual decedent for his own damages, and usually occur either when a Plaintiff dies after the lawsuit has been filed or when the Plaintiff survives for a significant time after the injury. In a straightforward murder case, a survivor action is of limited value because there are no medical bills and only a few minutes of pain and suffering (as opposed to, say, a car accident victim who survives for a few years after the accident and racks up a ton of medical bills and is confined to a nursing home the whole time).

Since a wrongful death action is for the heirs, it requires the heirs to testify as damage witnesses. Nicole Brown Simpson's heirs were her children, and the family did not want to subject them to testimony concerning their mother's death and how they were affected by it. In turn, they waived the wrongful death claim and only filed a survival action, leaving significant compensatory damages on the table. The compensatory damages for the survival action were de minimus, and only served to set up the punitive damage claim. The Sandy Hook parents don't have this problem, so we can expect every Plaintiff to have a wrongful death claim. It should also be noted that Ron Goldman's mother didn't ask for punitive damages, though she was entitled to them.

Let's say Germany decided to bring the hammer down on some Shoah denier. It sentences him to life in prison, and assuming he is quite young and genetically excellent, he spends 100 years behind bars. This is 876600 hours. Each hour of Shoah deniers life spent unfree would have to valued at 1255 USD in order for his punishment to equal to that meted out to Jones.

This would be a draconian punishment by any standard, yet as you can see it pales to camparison to Jones's. And Jones denied an atrocity of a much much smaller scale.

Your analogy doesn't hold because the purpose of a civil suit isn't to punish the defendant but to compensate the plaintiffs for their loss. There were 15 plaintiffs in the case, and each was awarded about 64 million in compensatory damages. The judge then added on another 30 million per plaintiff in punitive damages (and if there ever were a case for punitive damages, this is the one). On a per-plaintiff basis, it's more like 35 dollars an hour for the punitive part. And he didn't lose the suit because he denied the event had happened in a general sense. An equivalent to your analogy would be if a holocaust denier, who admits that he actually believes the holocaust really happened, publicly denied it, claimed specific survivors were merely actors, posted their addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged a decade-long pattern of harassment for the purpose of making money.

Anyway, the analogy doesn't hold because it suggests that civil verdicts should be dependent on how highly you value time incarcerated. If you destroy a piece of artwork worth tens of millions of dollars, the theoretical civil settlement will be worth a lot more than the max 7 years in prison if you're doing some kind of hourly rate equivalent.

Punitive damages are literally trying to punish someone; not make the plaintiff whole.

As a litigator, I'm well aware. I wanted to point out that the bulk of the damage award had nothing to do with punishment. In cases with multiple victims, the numbers can get very big very quickly.

But you started off saying:

“Your analogy doesn't hold because the purpose of a civil suit isn't to punish the defendant but to compensate the plaintiffs for their loss.”

Damages clearly are about making victims whole. Punitive damages are about trying to regulate behavior (ie deterrence). That is, civil suits are in part about making the victim whole and in part about regulating behavior.

Yeah, sorry if I made that confusing.

Why stop at life in prison? Terry Nichols could meet Jones’ penalty at only $7.70 an hour.

But neither he nor Jones are expected to actual pay the balance of that debt. There’s a ceiling on how much you can penalize one person with one lifetime, and everything past that is about certainty. Terry Nichols will stay in prison for the rest of his life. Alex Jones will lose his assets. Why try to compare apples to oranges?

Terry Nichols could meet Jones’ penalty at only $7.70 an hour.

I don't know if this is a fun fact or unfun fact, but it is amazing either way and I say thank you for it.

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