georgioz
12hr ago
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, which means but at the same time he cannot declare bankrupcy. So he will have to pay damages for the resto 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
2d 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 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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