I can already taste the food poisoning and explosive diarrhea!
Eccitaze
joined 2 years ago
Forget a loaf of bread, he didn't even outlast a tray of cashew chicken put out by a shady Chinese buffet one health code violation away from permanent closure!
On the one hand, the article has a point as applied to very tight elections, especially considering that if you swing a couple tens of thousands of votes in a few swing states and we're knee deep into a second trump term. On the other, it's a fucking politico article and their writing is all geared towards creating a horse race and stoking fears and anxiety so that you keep reading politico, and so any nuance beyond "DEMOCRATS ARE IGNORING WARNING ALARMS AND THEY AREGOING TO LOSE THE NEXT ELECTION! ⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️" is intentionally drowned.
Between all the shit he's hidden in various shell corporations and offshore bank accounts, I wouldn't be surprised if he did have a billion dollars.
Besides, people get hit with fines that far exceed their ability to pay ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Grandmas were getting hit with 6-figure judgements back in the early 2010s before the RIAA figured out that suing random individuals for music piracy was bad publicity. Nintendo got a $10 million settlement and $4.5 million criminal fine from one guy selling devices to hack the Switch.
But once, just once, a fine is high enough to fuck over a rich guy after he did literally everything wrong and invented a few new ways to fuck up, and suddenly it's "Ohhhhhh no, this is a MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE, how DARE the courts hold a rich man accountable for their actions, why won't anyone think of the poor, oppressed rich guy ruining people's lives so he can hawk fake diet pills?" Cry me a fucking river.
The dude has enough resources to casually spend more money in a month than most of us make in multiple years, he got those resources by deliberately and knowingly telling lies that ruined the lives of multiple grieving families, he took a giant shit on the entire judicial system by refusing to appear for multiple hearings and repeatedly telling bald-faced lies to the court, and then he handed direct evidence of those bald-faced lies to opposing counsel and let them use it in court. If there's anyone who deserves life-ruining punishment, it's this shithead.
Unironically, wholeheartedly, YES, we should be okay with this. I don't think you realize the full extent of how badly Alex Jones fucked up. He made specific statements about specific people, that were false, and that he KNEW were false. These statements ruined the lives of multiple grieving families, forcing them to hire personal security at great personal cost, and to uproot their entire lives and move to entirely different states out of fear of their personal safety. That's the baseline defamation, and it's as close as you can get to the textbook legal definition of defamation. Then Alex Jones ignored the lawsuits, refused to turn over evidence he was legally required to provide for discovery, and then proceeded to lie to the court that the evidence didn't exist. His actions were so bad, the judge warned Alex "if you don't start doing what we say, we're going to enter a default judgement, and that means we're assuming everything the plaintiff says is true and that they would assume the worst about Alex's actions. He continued to ignore the court, so they got a default judgement. That's the second part of why it's so high.
Then while holding a trial to determine how much Alex owed after getting the default judgement, his lawyers fucked up and leaked evidence they had previously lied about not existing directly to the plaintiff's lawyers, AND ignored the plaintiff when they said "hey did you send this to us on accident, because if you don't respond we're going to use it as evidence." So now the court has direct, incontrovertible evidence that Alex Jones not only defied the court, but gave a bald-faced lie while doing so. He directly attacked the entire legitimacy of the entire judicial system. And that's the biggest reason why the judgement is so high: if the court DIDN'T award damages high enough to ruin his life, it would have sent a message to every billionaire and megacorp in giant flashing red letters saying "That massive team of lawyers you've been paying millions for to make sure you don't lose a lawsuit? You don't need them, you can just ignore the court outright, and even if you get caught red-handed lying it won't make a difference."
So yeah, if you mistake the Defamation 101 chapter in the textbook for a how-to guide, don't take part in the legal process at ALL, repeatedly lie to the court, give the plaintiff clear and convincing evidence that you lied, and ignore the plaintiff when they do their due diligence and ask you if they can use the evidence you accidentally gave them, your life SHOULD be ruined.
And the admins (and myself, for that matter) want to exist without the risk of doing a perp walk because Little Timmy saw a peen.
I'm on an NSFW Lemmy instance. I have multiple NSFW accounts spread over the various platforms, and my single biggest fear is that some shithead kid is going to ignore the giant "18+ only" warnings because they're so MATURE for their age, they're going to find adult content (or worse yet, try and message me and pretend they're over 18 so I don't block them), and one of their relatives find out and call the police. Intentionally done or not, I've seen exactly that scenario play out, ruining the lives of multiple people through no fault of their own.
The Lemmy admins all have to worry about this exact same thing too, except they have to worry about every kid and every NSFW account/community, unless they decide to either play whack-a-mole with the various NSFW instances, or move to default deny federation and only federate with known-SFW communities. And that's on top of the existing CSAM spam concerns that they appear to have only recently gotten under control.
I don't give a single solitary flying fuck about whether children can express themselves equally. They're NOT equal to an adult, because I don't risk jail time by showing off my [REDACTED] to them.
Yeah, but those were brown people that were displaced, nobody gives a shit about them /s
'sup
(This instance definitely has some NSFW communities)
This is what I did when I visited the UK a few years ago. I paid about $30 and I was covered for the entire trip.
I think the horrible truth of the matter is that the cycle won't stop until one side is dead, no matter how much we wish otherwise. There's just too much bad blood for either side to trust the other, too many old grudges spawning new grudges that in turn result in more bloodshed. I legitimately, honestly, seriously don't see a peaceful solution--the Israelis won't give anything up because they (rightly) fear any concessions will simply be used to fuel further attacks by militants until they're driven out or eradicated, and the Palestinians won't give anything up because they don't have anything left to give up, nor do they have anyone who will take them in, so they can't even leave (which they don't want to do anyway since they'd been living there for centuries).
The worst part is that deep down, pretty much everyone knows this, and they know that supporting one side means tacitly supporting the genocide and eradication of the other. But nobody in power wants to come out and say it, because admitting you're supporting genocide is a surefire way to piss off literally everyone. So we get platitudes and high-minded speeches about preventing civilian casualties, and everyone hems and haws while we create our own little Hell on earth.
Theoretically yes, but pretty much every modern Linux installation has some guards built in to the rm command to prevent it from deleting everything. Adding the flag --no-preserve-root removes this and gives you the classic DFE experience. (even without the flag though rm -rf / will still majorly fuck up your system.)