I agree, these settlements are absurd. The other thing that I recall is Alex Jones supposedly paying out $1.4 billion with court ordering to liquidate everything he owns be it InfoWars or his personal assets. Mind you there were 15 plaintiffs representing 10 victims and he had to pay from $28.8 million to $120 million. Now I am not defending Jones and his character here, but it seems excessive to me especially because of course Jones is not a billionaire and has only fraction of that money, but at the same time he cannot declare bankrupcy. So he will have to pay damages for the rest of his life. He basically became something like indentured servant to those people.
I am not sure if this is a normal practice in USA especially for verbal crime. But even for some other crime - is it normal for a criminal to be sued for billions thus becoming basically indentured servant for his victim? Surely raping or crippling somebody is much worse than ranting on internet, I guess the damages should be in trillions. It seems insane to me how arbitrary this is, but I guess this is what we get from jury system which is basically a theater where regular people can use state power for their own power trips.
georgioz
5d ago
techniques like ‘street game’ hitting on a hundred women in public and then trying to hook up with the single one who seems receptive and gives them their number are tailor made to filter for 99th percentile promiscuity women.
It does not even has to be that, you can filter for women who are currently in manic phase of their BPD or who want to get revenge on their boyfriend who literally dumped them an hour ago etc. This is also strategy of various sneaky fuckers who embed themselves in women's organizations - they are there exactly to use any opportunity they can get. It is just game of numbers.
I am also baffled that people do not know this. We had many such cases around BLM riots - rioters were arrested, they sued the local PD for excessive violence and sympathetic government enthusiastically settles. It is now basically accepted way of financing political players on par with "learing center" frauds, US AID frauds, or frauds via other supposed NGOs that are solely financed from government to do party activism.
It is the way how parties are financed in current day-and-age everywhere including in Europe. This type of legal corruption is now baked into the society, it is how business is done and it is inevitable. Your local political activist protests with understanding, that his legal fees will be covered by some leftist activist group who in turn understand that they will get financed from some fake project or settled lawsuit with possible career moves from activism into local, state or federal bureaucracy or maybe some consultant job. This is how millions of people live and do business, it is the same system that was in place in Rome with politicians having their client network attached like leeches on tax systems and monopolies etc.
Refusing to play this game means that you will lose and then get laughed off the stage by cynical progressive wonks as a stupid moron. They can now gleefully claim for decades how the right does not have institutional brainpower and numbers and support network from low level activists to high level people in academia and other institutions. Of course they don't have them, they refused to play the game for decades, and let the opposition entrench deeply into all the systems.
he problem for the pro-gun side is there isn't much of a pro-gun constituency. You've got the 40% hard-core anti-gunners. And then you've got the squishy reasonable-gun-control conservatives, who will never find a bit of gun control they find unreasonable. The Second Amendment people are loud but a distinct minority.
This was exactly the situation of let's say gay marriage where the support in 80s and 90s was only 10% with huge part of the population opposing. The activists were not against using state courts and ultimately in 2015 even SCOTUS decision to ram that thing through many times without gay marriage actually having a popular support. Then all it took was several decades of culture waring and suddenly it is now a new normal. Similar things happened also in Europe, often it was using literal slippery slope such as in Austria where they approved of registered partnership only for Austrian constitutional court to decree that existence of registered partnership was basically unconstitutional and discriminatory and that it should be turned into gay marriage with everything including adoptions etc. No popular vote or law passed specifically to turn this millennia old institution.
Recently I am actually a huge fan of this tactic, the left used it all the time: do not be afraid to be brazen. Ask for ability to privately own tanks and missile systems and then just meet in the middle with the left to allow machine guns and RPGs. I think that there is also additional value there even if you are not that much of a pro-gun person - just by focusing on this topic it takes energy out of other stuff so you can go after other things such as gay marriage or education or some such. Additionally wage open legal warfare by every means possible even on topics that are supposedly settled, and also wage culture war. Do not be afraid to infiltrate and turn around existing movement - e.g. homeschooling movement that started as countercultural hippie thing was basically taken over by religious right by 1990s. Things like that.
It seems like a pipedream now, but I think it can be quite successful. I think something similar happened with COVID - I think that the "antivaxx" supposed extremes really blunted some of the actually extreme things that happened around the world. I believe that the politicians genuinely feared them such as when street riots in Netherlands prevented more fascist vaccine passports, Canadian convoy definitely sped up cancelling lockdowns in some states and it actually even worked in China where they reverted their longstanding Zero COVID policies. These "extremists" and "crazies" are often the unsung heroes of rightist causes, such as recently with multidecade win in Roe vs Wade or pushback against trans agenda. The left realizes that they can accommodate them, and they actually even openly sung songs to them and they turn it to eleven. Crazies are now mainstream and they accommodate even outright terrorist such as Weathermen and find safe haven for them at universities and think-tanks.
I think this is correct observation, however I do not think it as totally wasteful. Even in early days of internet you could have people sending emails only for those to be printed and then put into folders - a common practice in 1980s and 1990s. Many of these had decades old processes and legal requirements behind, including signatures etc. It will take some time of decade+ before AI will be fully integrated in businesses and there will be a lot of work for this combination of AI and old processes/people.
This is just constructing a narrative to suit your assumptions. Yes, the Southern Italy was much more stable compared to the North It did not see as much of a direct conflict but it experienced more of a silent subjugation. But this does not explain anything. Northern Italy was fractured and constantly at war as battleground of Great Powers especially during Italian wars which was also the time of renaissance. So conflict supposedly helped?
Interestingly enough tight next to Italy we have Balkans which was also literal battleground between Ottomans and Habsburgs with armies moving around, endless rebellions and revolts and betrayals - and it did not make them center of science and prosperity. Plus there is also one other place which was also safe from any direct conflict except devastating civil wars and literal Game of Thrones power struggles, centralized and ruled by foreign rulers. It was endlessly exploited to finance their continental war adventures against Holy Roman Empire and France in futile and disastrous Hundred Years War and beyond. This place is called England. And they seemed to end up okay moving to modernity.
georgioz
17d ago
It will get worse. As of now preteen girls gulp on content of youtube beauty influencers, and they are all-in when it comes to beauty products and the rest of it. Including the usual extremist pipeline from here is a night procedure for soft skin to > use homemade creams for early teenage girls to prevent aging. In fact the trend is so strong that it seeped over to the male side of social media with looksmaxing influencers like Clavicular who practice "jaw smashing" - hitting oneself with hammer to create the chiseled Chad square jaw and other nonsense.
The problem is that nations are not games of civilization with some benevolent player moving things around. Totalitarian states solve for one thing and one thing only: accumulation and protection of power. The power is then exercised mainly in these self-centered ways and sometimes on insane projects like Ceaușescu’s Palace of the Parliament or Castro’s "Ubre Blanca" icecream parlor and related diary projects or of course Deng's One Child policy in China.
To that extent your post is just a general screed against failed states. Well, so far every state is a failed state. Except N-Korea, of course. So what is the point? Are we pretending that the course of human history hasn't been dictated by authoritarian leaders?
Yes, I actually would posit such an argument. In a sense even modern democracies are much, much more authoritarian than even medieval states. The level of taxation and control over information and communities is absolutely insane, there never was such a domination before even in dreams of absolutist monarch such as Louis the XIV, where his orders took weeks or months to get somewhere, often only in distorted manner that was implemented only partially.
By the way something similar happens also in socialist and fascist countries, but the distortion is more deliberate corruption
georgioz
25d ago
Maybe you jest, but there was a ministorm in my country where foreign media reported it as Slovak government banned running by limiting limit for pedestrians to 6km/h.
Of course all they did was that they defined the value of "walking speed" in the law, but that speed only applies to vehicles, especially electric bikes or scooters who are driving on the sidewalks among pedestrian traffic.
By the way it was a funny thing as many people in Slovakia scratched their heads and saw first hand how sensationalist many "respectable" media were. It was Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on large scale, as domestically it was considered a good law or at least good intent aimed at a real problem of people driving around on the sidewalks with scooters going 40km/h.
georgioz
26d ago
This is nothing controversial, you can find many articles regarding this. For instance here is the article about how government cuts disproportionally affect women and especially black women
Actually there was the New Stateman article recently that found such a radical shift. It is paywalled but the shift even between Millennial and Gen Z women was staggering when it came to basic attitude of women toward men. I think 21% of women said they have strongly negative attitude toward men compared to 7% of men saying the same. It is hard to imagine that there will be meaningful pairbonding between these groups.
I do think that individually you can get away from it - what else is there. But there is a strong trend that is hard to overcome. Women attitudes and political leanings are shifting en masse, it will have macro impact on society, there is no ifs or buts about that. Maybe it will be passport bros or some other shift, but there will be one.
I am not sure what these mythical security guarantees should be. They can be anything including ineffective guarantees for South Vietnam ("respond with full force" by Nixon) which broke within months of enacting them. Or as in case of Afghanistan, where USA simply withdrew the guarantees and just asked Taliban to behave for 14 months needed to abandon their security partner.
I am not sure why either of those scenarios cannot happen at any time. Especially if there will be multiple countries doing that - e.g. USA, France, Germany and UK being the security partner. I can imagine a new US administration asking Ukraine for mineral resources rights in exchange of guarantees in 2029 and when denied, they will just say they are withdrawing them in 2 years or some such leaving everything up to France and UK and other countries who may do their traditional Munich Agreement solution to unwanted security guarantees.
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