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He didn't lose his entire business for being wrong. He lost his entire business for being wrong, doubling down on being wrong in light of contradictory evidence

He didn't lose his entire business for being wrong. He lost his entire business for being wrong, doubling down on being wrong in light of contradictory evidence, tripling down on the doubling down, being sued, ignoring the lawsuit, having a default judgment rendered against him, getting to a trial-based penalties phase, and performing so badly on the stand (along with a major error on the part of his lawyer, but one the law accounts for and has a process to ameliorate, which the lawyer did not follow) that a jury of his peers awarded a $1.5 billion dollar finding against him. If anything, the takeaway from this story is that the United States Court System is still a system of law and when they demand your attention, you ignore that demand at your peril. > Do you think CNN should be sued out of existence? Perhaps it should give us pause that nobody they are ostensibly calling Nazis can make a defamation case stick against them. And to corroborate your point: perhaps whether or not they lie, the public opinion already holds them accountable so no legal action is needed. But to properly answer the hypothetical: they retain a legal department in preparation for such lawsuits. Perhaps Jones should have done that, since he had quite a bit of spare money to spend on engaging with the law of the land he lives in. Instead, he chose to flout the authority of that legal system, to his loss.

brvsft 2y ago
> Perhaps it should give us pause that nobody they are ostensibly calling Nazis can make a defamation case stick against them. Lol, you know that isn't what's happening.
- jjulius 2y ago
  What is happening?
  - brvsft 2y ago
    They (CNN, etc.) brand a large group (roughly half the electorate) as Nazis / fascists or Nazi-and-fascist-adjacent without any real scrutiny. Generally, this doesn't target any specific person except maybe Trump. The consequence to society is that a lot of normal people start believing that someone who votes Republican is definitely some form of a Nazi or sympathetic to Nazism, which I imagine you don't really care about. An obvious example of this was comparing the fact that Trump had a rally in Madison Square Garden to the fact that Nazis also had a rally there in 1939 (basically this meme: https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a82b081b356cc04d070231931da79bb30a6 https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a...). For the most part, this was a talking point from the Harris campaign, but CNN's coverage of it put very little scrutiny over whether this was a fair comparison, rather just covering the premise of the comparison (i.e., repeating it ad nauseam with some level of deniability that 'they' believe it to be true). You can dig around for yourself and find some of their on-air personalities--who they pay money to--openly agreeing with the comparison. https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2024-10-28/segment/18 https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2024-10-28/segment... > HOLMES: All right, let's bring in Ron Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst and senior editor at the Atlantic. Good to see you, Ron. I mean, the Donald Trump rally was quite something. I mean, I watched it. I mean, a quote unquote comedian calling Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. Another speaker spoke about what said he spoke at what he called a Nazi rally. Kamala Harris being called the anti-Christ. And that was before Trump spoke. And we know what he said. > Who is the Trump campaign trying to appeal to literally days out from the election? > RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I mean, you know, the two precedents of this kind of rally was George Wallace in 1968, which is what going in, I imagined it might be like. But of course, the darker, more distant precedent was the 1939 Nazi rally, pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, which it may have had more overlap with. Do you take this stuff seriously? Or is it all a joke to you, a competition to dunk on people on the internet by asking questions not in earnest? Will your response be to have some sort of backwards reasoning to suggest it is valid to compare a political party responsible for systematically killing millions of human beings to Republican voters or Trump supporters?
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Of course, you can also dig around and find actual footage of the Madison square garden rally held by the Trump campaign... Which looked pretty Nazi-adjacent at least. There was a time before the Nazi party was orchestrating a genocide. The party didn't start obviously evil. It found its way there through a series of circumstances and a need to maintain control in the face of global opposition and no policy within the party itself to actually address successfully the problems Germany was facing, leading to blind trust of a leader and his his inner circle over sense, reason, and morality. There is a real and tangible risk that the modern American GOP is following the same path. And hey, the German people who supported the Nazis didn't want to hear what they were turning into either. Their descendants got to live with that on their consciences. ... but back on topic: none of this explains why, if the accusation isn't true, nobody is suing CNN for defamation over these accusations.
quantadev 2y ago
Translation: Yes our Legal System allows a prosecutor and 12 jurors to vent their pre-existing highly-biased hatred towards a man to the tune of awarding $1.5 billion to a group of people who were at worst, insulted. Same thing happened to Trump. A bunch of his political enemies are using the Legal System to go after him because of their personal hatred. That's evil, if you ask me.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  The court system is adversarial, no doubt. It is built to be so; there's a reason what happens to a defendant is called a "trial." But the legal defense of both Trump and Jones had every opportunity to take every rule that favors the defendant to their advantage and... They didn't. That set of 12 jurors with "pre-existing highly-biased hatred" was filtered by Jones's own representation. The evidence that Jones had evidence the rules of the Court require him to disclose that he did not disclose was revealed by his own lawyers. There are rules to this process and he either chose to ignore them or he retained incompetent representation. Powerful men believe they don't have to play by the same rules as the rest of their fellow citizens. The system disagrees.
  - quantadev 2y ago
    You seem to dislike powerful rich men. It comes thru loud and clear in all your posts. The sum total of your last post can be summarized as: "They both lost Lawfare Fair and Square, because the system works how it works, and their lawyers failed, and thus they probably deserved to lose, especially because of their wealth and fame, making them probably bad people." I disagree. The biggest weakness in our Legal system is that people who think exactly like you do get themselves onto Juries, by saying all the right words, and appearing unbiased when you're absolutely not.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Juries are the worst system except for other systems. There's a reason defendants have the option in many cases to waive trial by jury. But do we like them more or less than one judge deciding facts and sentencing? Do we believe a judge would be more or less forgiving of a defendant who just skips his deposition? (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/24/1088639577/alex-jones-skipped-his-sandy-hook-deposition-again https://www.npr.org/2022/03/24/1088639577/alex-jones-skipped...) The biggest stumbling block to Alex Jones prevailing in the civil case against him was Alex Jones, by treating a legal proceeding as a minor inconvenience. Anyway, I wouldn't put much worry in my opinion of powerful rich men. Neither of us will ever be enough of one for it to matter. (FWIW... Jones losing a civil suit doesn't make him a bad person. Accusing the families of eight dead kids of making up that their kids were massacred, then profiting off of that lie, would have made him a bad person whether or not he ever saw justice over it.)

brvsft 2y ago

> Perhaps it should give us pause that nobody they are ostensibly calling Nazis can make a defamation case stick against them. Lol, you know that isn't what's happening.

jjulius 2y ago
What is happening?
- brvsft 2y ago
  They (CNN, etc.) brand a large group (roughly half the electorate) as Nazis / fascists or Nazi-and-fascist-adjacent without any real scrutiny. Generally, this doesn't target any specific person except maybe Trump. The consequence to society is that a lot of normal people start believing that someone who votes Republican is definitely some form of a Nazi or sympathetic to Nazism, which I imagine you don't really care about. An obvious example of this was comparing the fact that Trump had a rally in Madison Square Garden to the fact that Nazis also had a rally there in 1939 (basically this meme: https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a82b081b356cc04d070231931da79bb30a6 https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a...). For the most part, this was a talking point from the Harris campaign, but CNN's coverage of it put very little scrutiny over whether this was a fair comparison, rather just covering the premise of the comparison (i.e., repeating it ad nauseam with some level of deniability that 'they' believe it to be true). You can dig around for yourself and find some of their on-air personalities--who they pay money to--openly agreeing with the comparison. https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2024-10-28/segment/18 https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2024-10-28/segment... > HOLMES: All right, let's bring in Ron Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst and senior editor at the Atlantic. Good to see you, Ron. I mean, the Donald Trump rally was quite something. I mean, I watched it. I mean, a quote unquote comedian calling Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. Another speaker spoke about what said he spoke at what he called a Nazi rally. Kamala Harris being called the anti-Christ. And that was before Trump spoke. And we know what he said. > Who is the Trump campaign trying to appeal to literally days out from the election? > RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I mean, you know, the two precedents of this kind of rally was George Wallace in 1968, which is what going in, I imagined it might be like. But of course, the darker, more distant precedent was the 1939 Nazi rally, pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, which it may have had more overlap with. Do you take this stuff seriously? Or is it all a joke to you, a competition to dunk on people on the internet by asking questions not in earnest? Will your response be to have some sort of backwards reasoning to suggest it is valid to compare a political party responsible for systematically killing millions of human beings to Republican voters or Trump supporters?
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Of course, you can also dig around and find actual footage of the Madison square garden rally held by the Trump campaign... Which looked pretty Nazi-adjacent at least. There was a time before the Nazi party was orchestrating a genocide. The party didn't start obviously evil. It found its way there through a series of circumstances and a need to maintain control in the face of global opposition and no policy within the party itself to actually address successfully the problems Germany was facing, leading to blind trust of a leader and his his inner circle over sense, reason, and morality. There is a real and tangible risk that the modern American GOP is following the same path. And hey, the German people who supported the Nazis didn't want to hear what they were turning into either. Their descendants got to live with that on their consciences. ... but back on topic: none of this explains why, if the accusation isn't true, nobody is suing CNN for defamation over these accusations.

quantadev 2y ago

Translation: Yes our Legal System allows a prosecutor and 12 jurors to vent their pre-existing highly-biased hatred towards a man to the tune of awarding $1.5 billion to a group of people who were at worst, insulted. Same thing happened to Trump. A bunch of his political enemies are using the Legal System to go after him because of their personal hatred. That's evil, if you ask me.

shadowgovt 2y ago
The court system is adversarial, no doubt. It is built to be so; there's a reason what happens to a defendant is called a "trial." But the legal defense of both Trump and Jones had every opportunity to take every rule that favors the defendant to their advantage and... They didn't. That set of 12 jurors with "pre-existing highly-biased hatred" was filtered by Jones's own representation. The evidence that Jones had evidence the rules of the Court require him to disclose that he did not disclose was revealed by his own lawyers. There are rules to this process and he either chose to ignore them or he retained incompetent representation. Powerful men believe they don't have to play by the same rules as the rest of their fellow citizens. The system disagrees.
- quantadev 2y ago
  You seem to dislike powerful rich men. It comes thru loud and clear in all your posts. The sum total of your last post can be summarized as: "They both lost Lawfare Fair and Square, because the system works how it works, and their lawyers failed, and thus they probably deserved to lose, especially because of their wealth and fame, making them probably bad people." I disagree. The biggest weakness in our Legal system is that people who think exactly like you do get themselves onto Juries, by saying all the right words, and appearing unbiased when you're absolutely not.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Juries are the worst system except for other systems. There's a reason defendants have the option in many cases to waive trial by jury. But do we like them more or less than one judge deciding facts and sentencing? Do we believe a judge would be more or less forgiving of a defendant who just skips his deposition? (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/24/1088639577/alex-jones-skipped-his-sandy-hook-deposition-again https://www.npr.org/2022/03/24/1088639577/alex-jones-skipped...) The biggest stumbling block to Alex Jones prevailing in the civil case against him was Alex Jones, by treating a legal proceeding as a minor inconvenience. Anyway, I wouldn't put much worry in my opinion of powerful rich men. Neither of us will ever be enough of one for it to matter. (FWIW... Jones losing a civil suit doesn't make him a bad person. Accusing the families of eight dead kids of making up that their kids were massacred, then profiting off of that lie, would have made him a bad person whether or not he ever saw justice over it.)