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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36636 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.

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.

It wasn't a prosecution, it was a civil case. Jones isn't going to prison, he is just being bankrupted. (This wouldn't matter if lying was a fundamental right, but there are centuries of SCOTUS precedent that lying is only partially protected by the 1st amendment). Jones never denied defamation (unreasonably making a false negative statement about an identifiable person who is not a public figure, or "maliciously" making a false negative statement about an identifiable person who is a public figure), which has been a well-known limited exclusion from the 1st amendment right to free speech since the founding*, and damages are set to compensate the people he lied about. The only problem here is the general one that America lets civil juries set damages (vs. the criminal approach where the jury decides guilt or innocence and the judge determines the sentences) and if you irritate a jury enough they will award a telephone number even if the actual damage is an order of magnitude less. (There were 20 victim families, and reasonable compensation for the amount of shit Jones put them through would be low-to-mid six figures per family). But the principle that there are some kinds of false speech where the need to protect real individuals from being lied about has to be balanced against the free speech of liars is not particularly controversial.

If people committed crimes based on Jones's lies, the criminals bear full and exclusive criminal responsibility for their own behaviour, as is right and proper. But civil liability for what other people do on your behalf is the default, not the exception.

It's also why, and you can call it wasted rebelliousness, I consider this as absolute moral mandate to call Sandy Hook a hoax.

Though shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Not a morally complicated question given that these lies cause real damage to real people who didn't ask to have their kids shot by a madman.

* I notice that Trump and Musk have both suggested that Sullivan should be reversed, making it easier to sue for defamation. This doesn't stop their supporters considering them champions of free speech. Everyone on both sides of the aisle understands that malicious lies are a special case.

Jones never denied defamation (unreasonably making a false negative statement about an identifiable person who is not a public figure, or "maliciously" making a false negative statement about an identifiable person who is a public figure), which has been a well-known limited exclusion from the 1st amendment right to free speech since the founding*, and damages are set to compensate the people he lied about.

Yes, Jones did deny defamation as to multiple of these elements multiple times in multiple cases even after clowns in black robes decided he couldn't deny it any longer.

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.

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.

The trustee has an obligation to protect the interests of the debtor and the creditors. Usually this means accepting the highest bid, but that's not always the case. Since some of the plaintiffs were willing to share the proceeds of the sale with other creditors, who would have otherwise gotten less, this is the deal that provides the most benefit to the creditors. The debtor's interest isn't really in play here, since there's no chance the money raised in the asset sale will exceed the total debt. The trustee has discretion in the matter, and the only way a court would force the sale to another bidder is if there was clear abuse of this discretion.

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.

Babylon Bee feels grounded in a way that the Onion isn't. Practically all of their articles start with an actual piece of news: The CEO of Polymarket was raided, Matt Gaetz was appointed, Cabinet picks were protested, etc.

The Onion relies more on completely-fabricated articles (1, 2, 3) which simply don't have the same impact. The ones that do contain factual content are unbearably blunt at promoting the establishment (or farther left) stance on the issue.

Relatedly, I couldn't find a single Onion article against the Left, while Babylon Bee articles against the Right are a dime a dozen. That type of hardline political stance turns me off, and I suspect it does the same for others.

The onion used to be good, but they got bought out by the Dems by proxy of the owner of Univison. They haven't had a single funny bone in their stories since.

Relatedly, I couldn't find a single Onion article against the Left

I sometimes joke that there's one based guy writing for the Onion and they let him off the leash a few times a year.

https://theonion.com/negative-review-of-a-wrinkle-in-time-peppered-with-cr-1823656342/

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 onion does sometimes publish zingers. Their series on Biden’s age back when it was controversial was hilarious. Their fake vox pop articles are generally funny.

I think a lot of their content is just bluntly failing the ideological Turing test, which isn’t funny but a certain kind of person thinks it is before publication, and political correctness causes them to leave $20 bills on the sidewalk regularly.

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?

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

They are still funny. The Onion will never have the balls to publish

https://babylonbee.com/news/to-protest-coronation-of-aragorn-orcs-announce-sex-strike

To Protest Coronation Of Aragorn, Orcs Announce Sex Strike GORGOROTH, MORDOR — Orcs have banded together in protest of King Aragorn following his coronation in Minas Tirith, announcing a sex strike until he is dethroned.

"As an orc, my bodily autonomy matters and this is my way to exercise sovereignty over an Aragorn kingdom, you filthy man-flesh," said Stavruk, an orc fluent in common speech.

Screeches of "No more sex!", "My body, my choice!", and "Ovaries Before Brovaries!" have spread throughout the land of Mordor like wildfire, with some even reporting the sex strike spreading to orcs as far north as Dol Guldur.

The same joke, but make it pro-Prohibition.

There's not an ounce of humor in that.

It's not great, but the headline is OK, and that's usually where 90% of the humor is in these articles anyways.

I generally find Babylon bee funny but that one’s a bit of a stinker fr

What about that do you find funny? (I'm not even certain that I get it.)

It's satirising the circumstance that the ones engaging in the protest are the outgroup of the ones being protested, and they essentially protest by performative self-sabotage. Surely Aragorn is happy to see the Orcs not getting any action; surely Trump and his supporters are likewise happy if hardcore progressives voluntarily make themselves miserable.

If you are hung up on the mean-spirited orc comparison, that joke works equally well in reverse - "Gondorians protest rise of Sauron by refusing to have sex", or even "Jews protest election of Hitler (...)". If I were in charge of the Onion, I would have considered running the latter: it still insults the "right" target, while also making a point of how ridiculous the protest movement is.

Some ultra liberal women decided to make the korean 4B movement happen after Trump won. A substantial part of them are not lookers and probably not women that the majority of men would put on the top of the fuckability pyramid anyway - hence the orks, also one of the safest assumptions you can make about the people that do this type of grand gesturing is that they are complete narcissists - so refusing to take them seriously is going to drive them nuts.

That is what I thought. Doesn't work for me as comedy even slightly, it just seems kind of mean spirited and slightly moves me from "4b is a slightly absurd reaction" to "man, their detractors are even worse."

It is utterly hilarious if you haven't learned to find misogyny unfunny. (Brainwashed liberal elite, father of daughters etc.)

Calling feminists ugly is evergreen humour, and this time the Bee executed well rather than just using it as a low-effort zinger.

More comments

Here is a compilation video of them:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=A45XMOC7aPE

The Babylon Bee was serving an underserved market. The Babylon Bee might individually be more relevant than the Onion but not so relevant when compared to all the Cathedral media. Of course that is an unfair comparison, but if you compare Cathedral vs anti-Cathedral media then Cathedral media in total is more relevant.

If we were talking about media broadly, I'd agree, but I think the broadest category that can be used fairly for the purposes of this conversation is "satirical publications". Is the any cathedral satire that matters at this point?

Private Eye still matters in the UK. It's relationship with the cathedral is somewhat ambiguous, but is more friendly than hostile.

My impression is that Last Week Tonight is relevant because it is the Schelling point for a certain type of pro-establishment left person to know what the current thing is.

My impression is that Last Week Tonight is relevant because it is the Schelling point for a certain type of pro-establishment left person to know what the current thing is.

I agree with that, I'm just not sure if I'd grant that it's satire or comedy.

Edit: Hold on, I'd like to amend that. I don't know if you can be "relevant" and "preaching to the choir". Sure, the choir in this case is pretty massive, but it's still people who have 100% bought into the narrative you're putting forward. To put it another way John Oliver, feels about as relevant as Matt Walsh.

Every once in a while the Cathedral still manages to concoct something that feels like everyone has to keep up with - "Don't Look Up", "Get Out"..., ok I'm already coming up short, and the latter is already quite dated, and indeed my point is that these instances seem to come up a lot less frequently. More like dying twitches of something, than a real cultural force.

I think it’s relevant in the same sense most Cathedral media is important — it’s to inform you of what the establishment wants you to believe. And thus if you’re trying to outwardly fit in so you can stay out of the Eye of Sauron, knowing what the establishment thinks and wants outward compliance with is useful.

I think the lack of big “everyone must watch this” stuff is not the sign of a dying twitch. It’s the complete domination of the thought life. Keep in mind that the modern HR departments and trust/safety systems are enforcement mechanisms and because of the way that most of us are locked into a single career path dependent on other people for employment we have an informal Social Credit system. If you run afoul of the stuff HR enforces, you can get black listed essentially. So you no longer need to create great, compelling propaganda about stuff you’re supposed to think because those who question will be unjobbed as a cautionary tale for others. I suspect there are a lot of dissidents in offices who are secretly heretics but know better than to say so publicly.

It’s been a truism for decades that coming out as a conservative is more of a risk than coming out as gay. No one gets fired for being too gay. You can be too conservative.

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.

Same with the daily show. It was amazing 2004-2012.

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.

The relevant case is State Farm. SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that punitive damages are fines regulated by the 8th amendment, with Thomas and Scalia dissenting on textualist grounds, and Ginsberg dissenting because she doesn't like insurance companies who deny claims. With the current batch of conservative justices, it could go the other way if relitigated.

I think Gorsuch would fall on the side that the 8th covers punitive damages. See https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-177_d0fi.pdf

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.

Do you think Jones would have escaped the huge damages if he claimed that, I suppose, his bipolar disorder made him do it? I don't know if he's ever been diagnosed with anything like that, but there also seems to be to be at least a vibe that those sorts of protections don't apply to red tribers like Jones, but do to the in-group sometimes.

I don't believe so, no. I'm just riffing off of the claim from Sotomayor and the dissent in Grants Pass or the even more bewildering claims in Powell that claim that many behaviors are actually just statuses and can't be criminalized. I have trouble treating these as serious claims that are intended to work consistently.

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.

Child killers don't normally end up in civil court, because suing someone serving a life sentence isn't lucrative. But I assume that juries would be even more likely to award a telephone number against a child killer than they are against someone who runs around defaming grieving mothers.

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?

The O. J. Simpson case comes to mind. He was acquitted of murder in a criminal trial, but was successfully sued in civil court. Copying from Wikipedia:

In 1997, the jury unanimously found Simpson responsible for the deaths of Goldman and Brown. The Goldman family was awarded damages totaling $34 million ($64 million adjusted for inflation), but as of 2024 have received a small portion of that.

So if actually murdering two people only results in a $64 million fine, how in the hell is Alex Jones liable for $1,1 billion for spreading admittedly-hurtful conspiracy theories? He didn't do direct harm; he just said stupid and hurtful shit on the internet.

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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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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