Moonbox

I think it's fair to question the Trudeau Liberals' overreach (especially with the Emergencies Act and how that played out with the truckers). What you're saying about politicized monetary policy, however, is exactly what I'm talking about with Pierre and his "platform". You don't actually know what monetary policy is (and that's fine - 90% of people don't even have a basic understanding), but people talk about it a lot and you know it's a powerful tool. The mechanics of it all are a mystery to you, but you know that it's DOING THINGS, that Trudeau-man is BAD, and it's part of his PLAN. Pierre understands the central bank. He doesn't believe what he's saying about it. He just knows that you're vaguely mad about all sorts of things you don't really understand and he'll channel that if he can.

He was making the noises the apes wanted to hear. He doesn't actually believe what he says about crypto. He knows it's not going to supplant sovereign fiat in any major economy for a long, long time (if ever). He just knows that if you grumble about the central banks you score points on 4chan and reddit (bonus points for mentions of Klaus Schwab). The funniest part about the crypto bros is that while they bemoan the evils of the central banks, they hinge on every word out of Jerome Powell's mouth and sit at their computers for hours in advance of every rate announcement, or watch streams of monetary policy meetings/updates. No, PP is too smart to actually believe this stuff. Like any intelligent crypto investor, he understands zero-sum ponzinomics and just likes making money off of idiots who don't know any better.

Only because the dumbest dredges of society listen to him, and spend their money on the garbage supplements, trinkets and doo-dads he hokks. If you're going to laugh at anyone, laugh at them. Oh wait...

Unfortunately for you, it really isn't as simple as that, and there are well-established limitations to the First Amendment with 100+ years of legal precedent proving you wrong. The First Amendment doesn't protect speech that directs to incite or produce imminent lawless action or that is likely to incite or produce such action. Fortunately for everyone, legal systems around the world are well-equipped to deal with the sort of goofy distinctions you would try to draw, or Alex Jones' lawyers would. When you whip people up into a mob, for example, it doesn't matter that you didn't tell them to burn those trucks down the street. You whipped them up into a mob and got them angry and spurred them to action (however vague), and the consequences (though not specific) were foreseeable. You likely won't get charged for burning the car yourself, but you'd be held accountable for setting the stage. That's how the Law actually works. You are responsible for your words and in many cases the consequences that arise from them. This is why slander and libel cases succeed. Your words have consequences.

The harassers are accountable (if you can find and catch them). That doesn't mean that Alex Jones isn't responsible telling them lies and convincing them that other people were committing nefarious acts that they chose the act on. He did that. Sure, but that's the whole problem with telling lies and committing slander/libel. It has consequences. You don't sue someone simply for lying. That's frivolous. You sue when the lies that were told lead to harm, and the action and consequence chain here is: 1. Alex Jones tells malicious lies and knew they weren't true over an extended period of time. 2. People believed those lies and were convinced they had to act on them. Those people would not have bothered any of these parents if they were not convinced by false stories Alex Jones told, and without his incitement. That's what he's responsible for. That's how the Law works.

Nope. You can still be liable with no malice intended. Reckless stupidity is something that can and does get punished regularly, and if you knew even the starting basics of legal theory you'd not have claimed otherwise. The basis of every case is the harm caused, and often the intent is often of secondary importance. A real apology, with actual (not fake) contrition, and the judge and jury get to decide if it actually matters. Yet I'm not the one sticking up for an angry clown who told the nation, despite it being a self-evidently true, that a bunch of kids getting murdered was a government false-flag operation, and that no kids actually died. You couldn't have made up a stupider and more obviously untrue story, but there he was, and here you are now looking dumb for defending him.

I know this might be jarring seeing your boy embarrassed like this, but spare us your attempts at applying legal theory. It's pretty clear this isn't your wheelhouse. An apology only matters if it's genuine and shows actual contrition. Coming years after the fact, after you already realize you're in trouble, it counts for very little. Sandy Hook was in 2012. Alex Jones was screeching his nonsense years after the fact, when from the start it was clear and obvious this was not a "hoax" and that the mere idea that it could be was completely implausible. Even if the apology was genuine (which it obviously wasn't given his perjury and aggression towards the trial judge), it doesn't absolve you. Whether or not you believed what you were saying, being aggressively stupid and reckless has consequences too.

It's not evidence of mitigation. Apologizing long after the fact, only after you find yourself in trouble and after the damage is done, is not mitigation. Any first year Law Student knows that. Considering he was online smearing the judge during the trial, only a fool would believe that he's even demonstrated regret or contrition.

Lots of states have punitive damage caps, some have been struck down, they are not always respected and sometimes they have to be re-written. In Texas, the punitive damages can be 2x the economic damages + no more than $750,000 per plaintiff. Baseline we're therefore looking at $9-10M, but let's see open the Texas superior courts, or even the Supreme Court show themselves to a dude who repeatedly perjured himself during the trial and mocked the judge herself on his idiot show.

According to Alex Jones! "She's possessed by demons!" You couldn't make up stupider shit. This is one of many trials he's facing, and if there's one thing the Courts don't like, it's questioning and disrespecting their authority.

Texas' punitive damages cap is an unusual law that will likely get tested/challenged (constitutionally if necessary) and probably won't hold up. What it amounts to is relative immunity for the super-rich. The point of punitive damages is to punish bad actors from profiting off of bad-faith activity, and if they make more money off that activity than they pay in damages, then they have practical immunity. Let's see how that holds up to a legal test, shall we? As far as appellants go, you'd struggle to find one who'd garner less sympathy than Alex Jones. He's guilty of defamation, among many other things. This is one trial of many. He declared bankruptcy with all of his companies to delay/postpone as many as possible (though the forensic economist hired to analyze his wealth determined this was just more of Alex Jones' bullshit). His legal problems are only just beginning. This idiot couldn't stop perjuring himself during the trial, was caught lying numerous times and told his viewers (while the trial was going on) that the judge was possessed. He's digging himself a nice little hole.

Sometimes I'm reminded there may still be hope for humanity. Alex Jones, one of the world's most shameless hacks and ridiculous conspiracy theorist, is ordered to pay $4M to the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim. Mr. Jones, as many as you may know, spent years telling the world that this was a hoax and the parents were paid actors and other such brainless nonsense. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/jury-alex-jones-defamation-case-begin-deliberations-punitive-damages-2022-08-05/ The mere idea that this sort of conspiracy would even be possible is baffling to me, considering the thousands of people who'd have needed to be involved to make up a "hoax" like this and keep it a secret, but Alex Jones never cared. All that mattered to him was that he could yell at the camera, and rile up the fools who watched him by telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. Whoopsy. Free speech only goes so far. When you're deliberately lying to people in order to make a buck, and when those lies are so egregiously shameless and harmful, and when the idiots who listened to you to harass and threaten people because they believe your made-up bullshit, the Law says you can be liable. Even a Texas jury agrees.

How many of them died? How many unvaxxed have died? The math is there, but you can't fix willful ignorance.

You are talking out of your rear here my man. Canadians care about the environment. Maybe you don't. Maybe people in Alberta and Saskatchewan don't. Most of the rest of the country does. Liberal policy over Canadian pipelines (both here but then even more in the USA) has been asinine, ineffective and counter-productive, but that doesn't mean nobody cares about the environment.

You talking about cognitive dissonance is a pretty grand lark. Thanks for the laugh. Go read some more clown news. Alex Jones can tell you what you want to hear.

but you're just blowing your dog-whistle again. If you ever come up with a reasonable explanation for how/why millions of politicians, climate scientists, techies, professors, MD's, journalists, bureaucrats, ordinary citizens, lawyers, judges, police etc from all parts of the world and all walks of life are all working together to take away your freedom, let us know.

That's the best part of this whole deception though. The "underprivileged" Trumpies are just picking a different poison. Republican (and those similar to them) rarely/never help their poor/uneducated base, but they DO channel their anger against wokeism, immigration and green stuff. Meanwhile, they and their pals continue to get richer with lax regulation and tax breaks and don't generate the jobs they promise. You're exchanging the woke elite and their virtue-signaling for the old-school DOW Jones fat cats. Neither give a shit about the "underprivileged".

Jagmeet Singh has really nothing to do with the question of Tory leadership. He's a boob and that's about all you need to say about him, so I'm not sure why the socialist dog whistle had to be blown here ? I'm not as certain as I was months ago that Poili can't win the Prime Minister's seat, but if he does win it's going to because of a poor global economy and general ennui with the Liberals, where the CPC will win in spite of him instead of because of him.

Unless you're burning coal/coke, the EV's are still probably greener. I don't really know for sure but I have to assume that power generation to grid-scale is more efficient than a vehicle's ICE, even if you account for transmission and then battery production. You're right though. They're probably a marginal improvement unless the batteries are being fueled by renewables or nuclear or something. That's why it kills me to see activists protesting so hard against nuclear when it really is the viable clean solution we have today. The new builds and refurbishments are expensive and they're always overrunning on cost, but if we embraced it we'd probably end up with the proper skills and infrastructure to expand capacity efficiently and on budget.

We will not run out of oil anytime in the foreseeable future. There are huge untapped reserves all over the world. We can switch to synthetic if things get tight. Switching away from coal/oil for cars and electricity is a pretty obvious necessity over the coming years. We just have to make sure that we don't let special interests rape us like the Ontario Liberals allowed with the Green Energy shift or whatever it was called years ago, which sent billions to Samsung etc and resulted in negligible amounts of actual power being generated. There's no secret as to why Doug Ford resoundingly won this year's election.

QE as a vehicle for monetary stimulus was pretty new in the 2009 recession, owing to the fact that they really couldn't lower the overnight rate any further than it already was. Beyond that, they had to find other ways to maintain market liquidity, so they start a large-scale purchasing of bonds and other financial instruments from the financial institutions etc. I oversimplify but the TLDR is that the central banks aren't actually just printing money out of thin air and giving it to their friends like some of the geniuses here think. The QE from the last recession was mostly tapered off. This is an interesting summary of policy decisions relating to it: https://www.yardeni.com/chronology-of-feds-quantitative-easing/

Monetary policy and quantitative easing probably accounts for inflation at 4-5% and that's something that can be sorted out with a reversal of the policies that led to it. The numbers beyond that are more supply-oriented (especially gas and food) and the Ukraine conflict made it way worse. The problem we have to avoid is entrenched inflation, where the embedded expectation of inflation actually perpetuates it. That's why it's becoming increasingly likely that the central banks will shock the economy into recession (on purpose) to break this negative-feedback loop. The inflation numbers I'm posting are from a head economist and some chief investment officers at large Canadian FI's.

You guys are making this forum a joke. It gets pretty boring.

The Supreme Court isn't trying to defend intoxication and has not ruled out subsequent legislation to deal with what you're talking about, going so far as to suggest and recommend the federal and provincial governments table other (better) legislation. The key issue here is one of intent. The Court confirmed that it was unconstitutional to deprive someone of the right to defend themselves against accusations of criminal intent when they are so tripped they aren't even in control of themselves. This isn't just getting drunk, this is black-out auto-pilot cracked out messed. That doesn't mean they can't be held responsible and the Court explained that "drunkenness is never a defence for certain crimes, including manslaughter, assault and sexual assault, a clarification Owens said was valuable "given the many ways in which we see the criminal justice system fails survivors of sexual violence." https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/law-barring-use-of-extreme-intoxication-as-criminal-defence-unconstitutional-scc-1.5901881 They have also explained that if you get high on mushrooms or meth or get black-out drunk, a reasonable person should foresee consequences and offenders can be held accountable for their actions in this regard. They just have the right to defend themselves against claims that they intended to commit a violent offense.

Who cares? Whether it was "whoopsy the pills and condoms didn't work" or "I got drunk and made a bad decision", I'm not sure why you think that women shouldn't have control of what grows in their own bodies. Some of the women who seek abortion are already raising 2+ young children and can't afford another. This can sometimes be confusing and jarring to me as well. As you say, however, it doesn't affect me. Where I feel there are legitimate concerns maybe is when trans athletes compete against females or whatever where there are some fairly obvious muscular-skeletal advantages. Maybe. I don't know too much about this but it's hard to gauge another person's suffering. If you have 4 doctors pleading on behalf of the woman to find her safer accommodation and it's for naught and she decides her best outcome is suicide, that's pretty sad. To me this sounds like a mental illness issue and as you say but that makes it really complicated.