domain:nature.com
TIRM
3hr ago
some middle number is "okay did I actually have some error/wrongness?"
When I get a moderate net downvotes on a comment, it is because I've gone against an American conservative sentiment. So I don't generally question my wrongness but instead take it as a difference of opinion. Me not placing great respect for the norms of 1950s America is quite unpopular. I'm going to acknowledge it is locally unpopular and refuse to change my opinion.
TIRM
3hr ago
This gives me a moment of inspiration: don't count the votes of lurkers. Set some minimum level of comments for votes to start counting.
aichanuwu
3hr ago
Chinese immigration isn't a social threat like Indian immigration is. Chinese are visible aliens, but they prefer to carve their own space and reap the rewards. Indians are climbers who will supplant the host when they can. That Indians are competent enough to perpetuate the institutions they take over doesn't change the fact that bringing in a single Indian IIT exec somehow transforms your entire IT department into a sea of guys from his own program. When Chinese sense an opportunity to make more money, they leave and take a third of your book. When Indians do so they plant themselves at the top and kick you out.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
3hr ago
I watched the full Extended Editions of LoTR in the theater over weekend. It was the first time in years that I have watched them all the way through, and my wife's first time seeing them, ever. We popped edibles in the parking lot and smuggled in a full dinner in her purse for the FOUR HOURS we were in that chair each night three nights in a row. Random disorganized thoughts:
-- This is the first time I've been in a movie theater this year. Last year I attended three movies: I took my dad to a showing of American Graffiti for its fiftieth anniversary, I took my wife to see Barbie and to the Eras Tour movie. Halfway through 2024, I've also seen three movies: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. So in the past eighteen months, they've convinced me to go to the movies six times, and in that time I've only seen a single new movie (Barbie), plus an "event" film in the Eras Tour. The movie theater business is dying, at a rapid clip, and the cause of its death isn't cost it is competition. Competition from the past. My dad, as many boomers, is under the impression that the problem is that movies cost too much, when he was a kid they were a dollar! Well, from 1960 to today a dollar is $10.59, meaning the difference in price compared to this weekend is $2.41. My wife and I got through the whole trilogy for $78 in tickets, and I ordered a large diet Dr. Pepper (felt like about a liter) for another $21 total, for a total of around $100 on the weekend. Essentially nothing for us, a fancy dinner. No, the problem is that the new movies that come out just aren't compelling enough. The streaming product is that we start a movie, often a movie from some list of "the best [genre] of [decade]" and if we don't like it (like when Elizabethtown was recommended by so many people as a great RomCom, only for me to find it totally unwatchable because Orlando Bloom couldn't do an American accent to save his life) we can stop halfway and try a different one. The only things that pull me into the theater anymore are movies I know I like (LoTR, American Graffiti) or movies that are so important culturally that one ought to see them out of paraseitin (Eras, Barbie). Unless the film industry can figure out how to produce a lot of culturally important events in a hurry, they're dead. Movie theaters are going to look more like amusement parks in density within a decade or two.
-- Going with my lovely wife really felt like an event. It was the same people each night, of course, mostly in the same seats, it felt like clocking in for a shift. It really felt like a moment, I enjoyed that a lot.
-- Comparing the female leads and their plots, Eowyn aged much better than Arwen. Eowyn's story is handled perfectly, Hall of Fame Not Like the Other Girls. She doesn't hulk out, she's not as strong as the lads, she struggles and barely hangs on, her triumph is based on a mix of luck, courage, and legalistic interpretations of prophecy. Just perfectly handled. Arwen, on the other hand, fell flat for me. Victim of her own success: while Tolkien pretty much originated most of the modern system of "races" in every fantasy universe, he was a stoic proper Catholic and viewed human-elf relations as something that might happen a couple times an Age; his hornier progeny have basically agreed that if we can make halves with anything, we will, all the time. So the Human-Elf romance thing just didn't hit that hard for me, though watching it again I did think about how Elrond had seen his brother go down that path. I wonder to what extent it's how common it all is in fantasy, and to what extent this just maps onto interracial marriages in our reality. In Tolkien's day they were mostly pretty rare, and a big deal. Today, it just isn't enough to carry a plot, interracial relationship plots are actually on my "banned plots" list next to "WWII resistance" and "Ivy League NYC Jew/WASP drowns in ennui" which I refuse to read a book about.
-- It's interesting to me how GRRM's argument with Tolkien stays stuck in my head, seeing the film has me thinking those same thoughts:
Tolkien, of all the authors I mentioned earlier, had an impact on me, but Tolkien is right up there at the top. I yield to no one in my admiration for The Lord of the Rings – I re-read it every few years. It’s one of the great books of the 20th century, but that doesn’t mean that I think it’s perfect. I keep wanting to argue with Professor Tolkien through the years about certain aspects of it.
He did what he wanted to do very brilliantly, I’ve said this before, but… I look at the end and it says Aragorn is the king and he says, ‘And Aragorn ruled wisely and well for 100 years’ or something. It’s easy to write that sentence. But I want to know what was his tax policy, and what did he do when famine struck the land? And what did he do with all those Orcs? A lot of Orcs left over. They weren’t all killed, they ran away into the mountains. Sauron fell down, but you see all the Orcs running away. Did Aragorn carry out a policy of systematic Orc genocide? Did he send his knights out into the hills to kill all the Orcs? Even the little baby Orcs? Or was there Orc rehabilitation going on. Trying to teach the Orcs to be good citizens. And if the Orcs were the result of Elves… could Orcs and Elves intermarry?”
GRRM has stated that a lot of the inspiration for ASOIAF/AGOT was an attempt to correct or explore Tolkien. What happens the day after the true king takes the throne? What does Aragorn's Tax Policy look like? AGOT opens post RoTK: Ned Stark and Bobbie Baratheon were the heroic kids who overthrew the wicked king, and then what happens? At his best, ASOIAF does provide interesting views and answers and insight into those questions. Characters like Rob Stark and Tyrion Lannister are fantastic explorations of fantasy tropes. But his ultimate failure is simple: he can't land the plane. He can't write the last book. Until he manages to bring the whole thing home, he loses by default.
But watching all three films, in three nights, I kept asking myself the same questions. Why were the tactics practiced in Gondor so uniformly AWFUL? What was the idea when they launched a cavalry charge at a fortification? How exactly were the Orcs kept out of the Shire? Where was Denethor getting all those tomatoes? What do trade routes look like, there are lots of ports but it isn't clear what's on the other side? What did existing power-centers in Gondor do with Aragorn, who has little administrative experience at a city scale? I get it, GRRM, I get it.
-- I vibed with Theoden a lot more in my 30s, and Faramir a lot less. At 12, idk Faramir just made sense to me, I recognized the under-appreciated son immediately. This time, I thought Faramir was kinda whiny and annoying, remaining under Denethor's command even as he's sent to cavalry charge a wall was...just too stupid for me to respect him as a character. How was there no Gondorian alternative government or opposition? Theoden, I got. I didn't really appreciate reading or watching as a teen, the way guilt must feel on him, knowing he let Rohan fall into destruction, and the redemption he finds in Pellenor Fields.
-- The Uruk Hai are overrated Tomato Cans, they can't win a war to save their lives. We see Uruks get killed by everyone who steps to them. In general the film's violence is perfectly choreographed, I loved watching it, but it felt like every cut showed either Bad Guys Killing Good Guys or Good Guys Killing Bad Guys, rarely or never both at the same time. I didn't count, but it felt like 90% of the scenes in Helm's Deep or outside Minas Tirith one side is clearly winning locally. This was overdone aggressively in the Ride of the Rohirrim, it felt like I watched more of them die than they said they had on hand.
-- Fanghorn is FDR, Eomer is De Gaulle, Osgiliath is Verdun and Denethor is Petain, Saruman is a Quisling, the ringbearers trip to Valinor is soldiers accepting their PTSD scarred alcoholic buddies fading into irrelevance. Tolkien rejected Allegory, which is why it's so easy and appealing to map allegories to his work.
-- We loved this movie in the boy scouts, and watching it now it's so obvious that it's a movie about going hiking with your friends. The core key element is Frodo and Sam hiking the distance of the Appalachian Trail. Frodo and Sam were just so fucking good at walking! It makes me think of how, reading War and Peace I thought about Napoleon, and his famous forced marches, and how up until relatively recently, walking really fast (especially as a group) was a top tier military skill. Only since WWI and WWII has walking really fast been rendered pretty much irrelevant. The film constantly features people running when they should be walking, sprinting when they should be jogging, to give the impression of pace. But the reality of traveling that far, carrying weapons, would have been more like A Walk in the Woods than anything else, just trying to keep moving over absurd distances. Makes me want to listen to an audiobook of LoTR while I walk every night for a year or however long it would take.
-- It's sad to me that the media made since the trilogy has been so bad I don't even want to watch it. I might get around to finding somewhere to stream the 2hr cut of all three Hobbit movies. But my wife commented: if they want to make this diverse, why not just make the people from different places be different races? Rohan calls for aid and people turn up from all over, make some of them Arabs or whatever. Make a TV show out of the Blue Wizards that we know piss-all about and how they kept the Chinese out of the war. There's so many stories to tell! Why fuck up the ones we actually got?
-- This has to be the number one fantasy film of all time, collectively, right? Nothing else comes close in my mind. They did such a good job on the adaptation, there are so many Easter Eggs in the acting and the dialogue that people who read the Silmarillion will pick up on, but for the most part none of it gets in the way of someone like my wife enjoying the show.
aichanuwu
3hr ago
The beta male is called automation. In all actual societies the undersupply of domestic duties is made up for by domestic help... which are threatless women. Creaming off the tax revenue created by excess men is only possible by value creation and system-participation of these losers. They can barely contribute when disassociated with netflix and porn, it'd be easier if they weren't constantly berated for existing.
I have repeatedly tried to create AI girlfriends to spur my demotivated friends out of their slumps, but we still are a way to go from that. Turns out syncing the fleshlight to whatever VR porn is playing doesn't actually fulfill the emotional gap causing the motivation chasm. Further testing is needed.
aichanuwu
3hr ago
Incels need a forceful hand because you don't know if shy Larry at the copy desk is secretly a misogynist and by interacting with him you'll turn on his creepdar. By grinding all incels into the dirt, you can avoid ever dealing with the ick these parasites bring to civilized spaces.
aichanuwu
3hr ago
Lost lonely men aren't plotting revenge fantasies where they hold the lever on the day of the rope, we just quietly wish for death while being endlessly castigated for merely existing. Every discord meme about femoids is backed up by three thoughts about how to kill myself, and all of this stems from the endless barrage calling men the real problem.
I was one of these men and every time this discussion comes up there is always a point about the instrumental necessity of dealing with lost men: conservatives fret about how can to maintain our productive value to society, liberals speak of feminizing us or putting us down to sleep lest we rape and murder.
I will take a brief aside to fucking SEETHE at the liberal framing of things, whereby the real threat to societies is asocial middle class men waiting for the chance to snap while ignoring black-led interracial murders or muslim sexual crimes. All criticism is ONLY for white and white-adjacent losers, and WE are the monsters to be shamed into submission.
Ahem.
Plenty of better thinkers downthread have shared the vaguely social aspect of this sex recession and the impacts on society. Not a single one actually seems to care about men unto themselves. We are bombarded CONSTANTLY with invective on social and traditional media that men are the problem that we should make the future female that men had it good so its time to step aside for women. Only in the last few years are crumbs of 'oh these poor men might turn out to be mass shooters!' dropped as reasons to have sympathy, with conservative calls for male vigor met with eternal shrill bitching from the media-amplified feminist brigades. The only people who directly commiserate are our moms at best, and bros in the suck. Every female friend offers the same sui generis platitudes 'you're not actually like that' every actual lover calls us 'the exception'.
We aren't. We know that we are the same as every normie who sees the same message repeated eternally the same denigration and disrespect vomited out onto a generic male, with soothing words reserved for the most undeserving.
I never experienced the 70s joy of Father As Eternal Strongman, thats just cultural osmosis transmitted memetically by rose-tinted mass media. My FATHER never experienced that, nor HIS father, but fuck asian peasants, we are nowadays successful so we get to enjoy the fruit of being shrieked at still.
All this talk of society needing us and therefore reminding us of our potential value just infuriates us further. We are threats to be managed or wages to be exploited. And the moment we say a single fucking thing we are shouted down by angry women who fucking despise our existence as a whole and make hypocritical carveouts for their own loved ones, because they can't handle their own emotional fallout when we kill ourselves. Women on socials put their face front and center when whining about 'helping men'. We have seen what these people say about us in other circumstances, and we have zero reason to presume charitable intentions when revealed presentation always stays the same.
The sex recession is bad for women because the Eat Pray Love aesthetic turns out to be emotionally unfulfilling for people who aren't self absorbed narcissists lacking self awareness. The sex recession is bad for men because it means we may rise up as a threat. If even the people here can't see how this framing CONTINUES disrespecting us then I cannot see how there is ANY way you can bring yourself to consider us for a second.
Glassnoser
4hr ago
When has Trudeau opposed Canadian sovereignty?
Baila
4hr ago
If "Comintern" was still in the public parlance, you wouldn't have needed to search for such a term. Trudeau clearly sees himself as the General Secretary of the Canadian Union in its temporary position as a state, during its transition to an indivisible part of Communism.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4hr ago
Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident.
All smart and sensible.
And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft.
Eh, there's a lot you can get done by being nice and soft if you're good at social manipulation. I'd say from experience it's easier to leverage nice+soft into getting what you want than disagreeable+hard.
Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots.
And now you've completely veered off into the deep end.
phailyoor
4hr ago
When you hear that 5 shell companies are declaring bankruptcy, you should think that the person running those companies is winning, not losing. Alex Jones is a bona fide criminal con-man and we should expect him to pull tricks that make madoff, ponzi, sbf, and al capone look like saints. He's been embezzling all of the money out of his companies and accounts into hard-to-reach places, to the point that right now his paper net worth is in the negative.
Now you have Jones' creditors asking for money, the Texas plaintiffs asking for 50,000,000, and the Connecticut plaintiffs asking for 1,500,000,000, and they all have to fight it out in Texas court for the crumbs. The fact that the CT plaintiffs are supposed to get 30x more than the TX plaintiffs doesn't mean they're going to get a 30x bigger portion of the pie in TX court, and we don't know how much Jones' existing creditors are asking for.
When the dust settles, Jones is shooting to keep his house, the only remaining thing of value under his name, and to have the important IP of his media companies in the hands of that supplement company, which may be independent, but are definitely Jones aligned. I see Jones coming out of this intact, though for all the wrong reasons, and the plaintiffs getting a pittance, also for all the wrong reasons.
Jones deserves to be shut down, for being a fraud and a con-man, not for defaming some liberal agitators. And the plaintiffs deserve to get nothing, because their claims are baseless drivel, not because the defendant will successfully doge the judgement by any means.
Baila
4hr ago
If anyone knows of real politic assessments of the US-CAN relationship, please send them my way/post them here. I hope that there are at least some plans for dealing with a rump/decrepit/hostile/defunct/failed Canada within US Govt. and policy circles. The increasing importance of the Arctic should increase demand for such thinking, along with the pivot to Asia/China, and a few other factors.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
4hr ago
No, under this theory, if I repeatedly use my public platform to say "@MaiqTheTrue is murdering children in his basement," and I continue making this claim for years, even knowing that some of my followers are now harassing you (and the Sandy Hook parents weren't just having mean things said about them on the Internet, they were being followed and harassed and physically threatened in meat-space), you can hold me responsible. There is a difference between having total control over your followers and knowing what your followers are doing and not only saying nothing to discourage them, but continuing to do what you know is encouraging them.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4hr ago
I don’t buy that as a theory simply because it makes it too easy to shut up dissent. Under this theory, my repeating of a statement that I believe is true makes me liable for any actions taken by people who listen to what I’m saying even if I never tell anyone to harass or harm others, and even if I’m not giving out personal information. And thus it’s now easy to shut down dissent by suggesting that a speaker has total control over all of those who listen to his show.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5hr ago
However, is he responsible at all for the fact that his followers went too far and harassed those people?
I have only kind of paid attention to this case so I will not claim deep legal knowledge here, but I suspect this case is, like so many others, one in which the deep legal details matter, and are mostly ignored by partisans in favor of "He's being punished by the Elites for offending the NWO" or "He's an evil monster who mocked dead children."
A number like $1.5 billion is basically saying "We're taking everything you have (except your home)." Is that a fair judgment? Eh. I don't feel sorry for him, and not just because he's a crank.
My understanding is that the huge judgment was not so much because he claimed Sandy Hook was a hoax and told parents their children didn't really die (vile and obnoxious and possibly cause for a defamation suit, but not $1.5 billion), but because of all those followers of his who harassed and threatened the parents for years. So as to whether he is responsible at all: having some crazy followers who do things without your knowledge or instigation is one thing, but if you keep beating the "crisis actor" drums for years, until you know darn well what your followers are doing to those parents, then at some point yeah, I think you become responsible for continuing to egg them on. That and his legal fuckery with the court makes me think he FAAFO.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Post-birth infanticide in the USA is extremely rare and shouldn't be used as evidence of anything. Sex selective abortion is harder to track, but isn't it mostly confined to specific subcultures/ethnic groups that may well have different values?
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I don't think rambling on about mass shootings or serial killings is the big issue.
I think slacker men is the big issue. Men do the vast majority of productive labor that generates and sustains our society's prosperity- that prosperity which keeps us from living in primitive savagery- and efforts to get women to do it have failed. Marriage incentivizes men to actually go do that labor instead of playing videogames and masturbating all day.
In a primitive society, you can motivate people by the threat of starvation instead, but ours is far too prosperous for starvation or even extreme boredom to be a credible threat. Getting men to do the unpleasant work that needs doing- which women mostly won't do- to run a complex society when they can fuck off to watch netflix is an important problem to solve, and 'your woman and kids depend on you' is the best way to solve it.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
If you want a rule that says you can't get a gun unless you bring your girlfriend to say you aren't a threat (not a bad idea IMO), stories like this one are how you get it.
If you think that sounds implausible it's the law in some countries right now. I believe at least Canada's gun licensing regime- one of the more liberal ones, globally- requires an interview with an intimate partner, although it's aimed at domestic violence prevention. I would be surprised if it was the only such example.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
If getting out of Canada became important enough, I guarantee you they would drive to the middle of nowhere and cross over into Minnesota or North Dakota.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
6hr ago
However, is he responsible at all for the fact that his followers went too far and harassed those people? Are CNN or MSNBC liable for defamation since they broadcasted Jones making those same claims? Do we know that if the people that harassed the victims parents actually got their information directly from Jones himself?
None of this was ever litigated, because they used procedural tricks to obtain a default judgement against him, then slap him with the largest civil judgement in history. Having not been litigated though, it now becomes effective "precedent" that indeed if you are not in good odor with the establishment, you ARE responsible for pretty much anything someone can come up with a legal theory for. And insurance companies will refuse to insure people who refuse to act according to these new "precedents", and if you go to a lawyer they will advise you not to do things which might result in this sort of liability for you... so everyone will behave as if this is the law, which means it is the law.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
6hr ago
If things go south up north, are we going to have all those "new Canadians" hopping the border to the U.S. and bringing Canada's social ills with them?
The US-Canada border is actually really defensible, all things considered; the bodies of water one would have to cross are significantly larger than the Rio Grande (the US would lose a war in 1812 partly for this reason). Sure, it's possible to trivially cross the border provided you can get over the St. Lawrence, but because most of the "new Canadians" live in Toronto they'd have to spend a non-trivial amount of money to do that.
The only other city that has a large population of immigrants is Vancouver, which is right on the border; a fence long enough to be more than a few days' walk would be enough to prevent those crossings (as you get into "in the middle of nowhere" territory pretty quick outside of that, and Washington State isn't exactly the most habitable place either).
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
6hr ago
It seems like the push finally came to shove for Alex Jones, as he will have to liquidate pretty much almost everything he has to pay the $1.5 billion dollar settlement after the Sandy Hook defamation lawsuit went the plaintiffs way. Via AssociatedPress:
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is seeking court permission to convert his personal bankruptcy reorganization to a liquidation, which would lead to a sell-off of a large portion of his assets to help pay some of the $1.5 billion he owes relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Jones and his media company, Free Speech Systems, both filed for bankruptcy reorganization after the Sandy Hook families won lawsuits against him for his repeatedly calling the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, a hoax on his Infowars programs...
...Liquidation could mean that Jones would have to sell most of what he owns, including his company and its assets, but could keep his home and other personal belongings that are exempt from bankruptcy liquidation. Proceeds would go to his creditors, including the Sandy Hook families.
If Free Speech Systems’ case is withdrawn, the company would return to the same position it was in after the $1.5 billion was awarded in the lawsuits and it would send efforts to collect the damages back to the state courts in Texas and Connecticut where the verdicts were reached.
Jones already has moved to sell some of his personal assets to pay creditors, including his Texas ranch worth around $2.8 million.
But a liquidation of Jones’ and his company’s assets would raise only a fraction of what he owes the Sandy Hook families.
According to the most recent financial statements filed in the bankruptcy court, Jones personally has about $9 million in assets, including his $2.6 million Austin-area home in Texas and other real estate. He listed his living expenses at about $69,000 for April alone, including about $16,500 for expenses on his home, including maintenance, housekeeping and insurance.
Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, which employs 44 people, had nearly $4 million in cash on-hand at the end of April. The business made nearly $3.2 million in April, including from selling the dietary supplements, clothing and other items that Jones promotes on his show, while listing $1.9 million in expenses.
Considering $9 million is more than 100 times less than what he owes, I don't see any other way for this to end in his completely left in the dust, with no business media, no career in journalism (at least as a self-owned publication, though I doubt anyone wants to hire him, and I don't think him having a Rumble channel with no structure to back him is going to bring him that much money). His only hope involves a Hail Mary crowfunding moneybomb from his supporters and people annoyed by the veredict a la Trump, but even if he raises as much as Trump, he's still owing hundreds of millions left, and I doubt he could even reach that point; not only we're talking about somebody not as popular, but the specifics of the case do touch sensitive spots (nobody likes someone stating falsehoods about dead children)
The $1.5 billion settlement for claiming an event didn’t happen the way it is popularly believed to have happened was always absurd and had nothing at all do to with justice delivered to the families who lost their kids in Sandy Hook and everything to do with silencing a voice long a thorn in the side of the establishment, which the lawyer essentially concedes in the above quote about the ruling not just being about money — lawfare waged via a weaponized legal system I wrote about in detail when the ruling came down from on high last year.
Please miss me with comments about how Alex Jones is an unhinged pseudo-evangelical lunatic with a drinking problem or whatever. The vast majority of Alex Jones haters, in fact, have never listened to a single hour of his broadcast. Their negative impression of him comes entirely secondhand from ten-second clips and the non-stop, orchestrated bleating of hostile corporate media — a consensus-forming propaganda campaign of, arguably, unprecedented scale targeted at a single individual in the 21st century.
But anyway, I’m not here to do apologia for Alex Jones or to sell him to anyone; I am aware of his flaws, as I am aware of my own. We all live in glass houses...
...The Alex Jones censorship sage is not about Alex Jones.
When Jones was universally banned overnight from all major social media platforms in 2018 in what was clearly an orchestrated move among the Big Tech giants, that was an allusion to things to come.
It was only two years later, if that, that the mass censorship regime came for all dissident media, including me when I got the banhammer from multiple platforms in 2020 for “COVID misinformation” and other alleged crimes of wrongthink.
It’s InfoWars today and the rest of us tomorrow.
Two things that come to my mind:
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. But once the books are finally displayed, does that make sense? And even if he hadn't, why isn't the level of damage caused to the plaintiffs part of equation to lower the number? Isn't this institutionalized debt slavery as punishment for what is at the end of the day an civil case? Don't get me wrong, as a libertarian I certainly don't oppose debt slavery for a sort of tort system where crimes are punished with payments; but it has to be equivalent to the crime and the criminal's means; $1.5 billion would be too much of a punishment for Adam Lanza, the actual sicko who murdered the children in Sandy Hook, let alone for the guy who espoused things that weren't true about the shooting. Is he even going to able to ever pay for it entirely?
Secondly, isn't this simply a completely disproportionate answer to Jones sins? 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. However, is he responsible at all for the fact that his followers went too far and harassed those people? Are CNN or MSNBC liable for defamation since they broadcasted Jones making those same claims? Do we know that if the people that harassed the victims parents actually got their information directly from Jones himself?
It seems to me that defamation law is a two edged sword...a society that doesn't have it allows misinformation to be used to harm people, but a society that doesn't have it on a tight leash allows to weaponize claims of misinformation with far worse repercussions.
I'm not sure ancient Rome is the correct analogy here. Rome was quite stingy with offering citizenship. It did happen, but it took hundreds of years. Even as late as 100 BC, when Rome was already master of the Mediterranean Sea, many cities and towns within 100 miles of Rome were merely "allies" and not citizens. This caused the Social War (91–87 BC) in which Rome was forced to offer citizenship to some "allies" in order to suppress the others.
It wasn't until three hundreds years later, (212 AD) under the reign of the notorious tyrant Caracalla, that the citizenship was extended to all free men in the Empire. By then, many people didn't actually want it, and the reason it was granted was to extract more tax revenues.
Rome was ascendant when it was a nation state composed of Romans. When it offered citizenship to others, it was generally from a position of weakness. I will concede that the Romans held out for a long time.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
7hr ago
New Jersey's even better -- if you've ever seen a mental health professional at any time since birth, you have to tell the state their name and hospital affiliation to even apply to be able to buy a gun. Don't know it? No gun for you.
It may affect more people than you think. In many cases, it affects men who later go on to have active sex lives, but this delay means they don't make the most of their youths.
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