domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
DradisPing
20m ago
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.
Not really. It was more that the Judge and the plaintiffs refused to accept his financial statements and insisted he had secret money. It was a mix of hating Alex Jones and leftists needing to believe that Jones was a grifter in it for the money. Accepting that there wasn't much money would have damaged their world view.
The plaintiff's lawyers refused settle and now the plaintiffs won't get much of anything.
Infowars has creditors who have priority in the bankruptcy. The talent doesn't have exclusive contracts. The studio can only be sold for pennies on the dollar. Infowars generates no income if it's off the air.
Texas has fairly generous bankruptcy protections. Jones will get to keep his home, his retirement savings, and a vehicle for each adult in his home. He'll be able to start up a new video stream hauking supplements fairly easy. Production values will be lower at first.
Obviously it's a huge blow but it won't destroy him.
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.
One of the reasons that the Judge needed to do a default judgement is that Jones isn't nearly as guilty as people think. People mentally lump him together with "Alex Jones types" but he wasn't the primary driver of the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. The defence was doing mock trials and found that some of the time they could win, even with an Austin jury.
hydroacetylene
24m ago
Texas and Oklahoma banned abortion before Dobbs, and were probably going to be joined by another dozen or so states even without it.
And, to my point- abortion rights as a top priority is more of a wealthy woman thing than a poor woman thing. This is because avoiding unwanted pregnancies is A) kind of the default anyways B) already a good idea and C) obviates any desire for abortion. Poor women have actual problems to worry about, ones not the result of their own bad decisions. The PMC feminist obsession with abortion rights is mostly feminist signaling.
Glassnoser
28m ago
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.
hydroacetylene
28m ago
Multiple births are less affected by family planning decisions. Or so it seems to me.
TIRM
31m 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
37m 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
42m 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
46m 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
48m 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
53m 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
55m 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
1hr ago
When has Trudeau opposed Canadian sovereignty?
Baila
1hr 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.
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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"
1hr 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
1hr 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"
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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.
Which means that there are more potential sources of loose nukes for remnant Da'eshbags or other deranged cultists to get their hands on.
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