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Wasn't that a finding in a civil suit being referenced in another civil suit?

Seems to me that we should definitely not make it allowable to lock up people who lose a civil lawsuit against you. That would immediately get abused badly to have the rich lock up the poor.

But this isn't an indictment, and it isn't a fine.

It's a pair of civil cases. Anyone can sue anyone in America.

There's a lot to unpack here...

Civil trials are not criminal trials, they require only preponderance of the evidence rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt so the question asked to the jury is fundamentally different than something you could lock someone up for.

For defamation, this is a tort, not a crime. The purpose of the lawsuit isn't to fine anyone (a fine would be paid to the government rather than the victim), it is to recover damage done by one party to another, and for the most part the thing courts can grant is money. The elements of defamation are 1. That a statement of fact is said by the person, 2. That statement is false, 3. If the individual is a public figure then the statement is known to be false or is made with a reckless disregard for the truth, 4. That the false statement of fact caused damages.

Typically, the purpose of suing someone is to make yourself whole, not to get the state to punish someone for you. Therefore, for a relative nobody who is claiming to have been lied about, there's going to be a limitation on the amount of damages that can be claimed, since 5 million dollars is already more money than most people will make in their lifetimes.

There is some additional money you can ask for based on stuff like "pain and suffering", but again that's not punishment for the person you're suing, it's just that you want to be made whole and the court can't undo your pain and suffering so you pay money in recompense.

There is also a thing known as punitive damages, which is more money given to the plaintiff who is suing to ensure the defendant doesn't commit the tort again. However, even this element starts to run up against constitutional constraints because excessive punitive damage awards can go beyond what's allowable under the law.

Don't take the Alex Jones defamation case as representative of how the process works, most people aren't on trial for accusing a bunch of dead kids of lying about being dead on national television and so it ended up with an exceptional outcome.

Regardless of the size of anyone's judgement against them in a civil case, it would be a massive injustice to jail anyone over it. That's not what the civil courts are for, that's not their job, that's not how they're set up, and if you jumped from a 51% preponderance of the evidence jury verdict to jailtime that would send a lot of innocent people to jail (and even the rich deserve to be free if you can't prove they did something beyond a reasonable doubt)

As an example of the differences between criminal trials and civil trials, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of the criminal act of murder, but was found to be liable to pay damages to the family in the wrongful death. There was enough found to pay a sum of money, but not enough to deprive O.J. of his rights by jailing him.

Another good example of the difference between criminal and civil proceedings is that the person sued may never even have to pay for the judgement in a civil case -- Insurance may not pay a criminal fine, but it can pay a civil judgement, so it's entirely possible that despite losing the lawsuit, a person who was successfully sued may never personally pay a penny. In fact, a regular homeowner may have a million dollar judgement against them but be protected by the liability insurance portion of their home owners insurance. This really doubles down on the fact that the purpose of a civil case is to make the plaintiff whole, rather than to specifically punish the defendant.

Your heart is in the right place with wanting to make sure punishments for millionaires and billionaires are calibrated such that they are actually painful in ways comparable to a poor person convicted of the same crime, but the facts in this matter are not aligned with that particular cause.

Anyway, I'm sorry... I'm always with the walls of text....

Unfortunately, often being a massive jerk is perfectly legal, especially in America which has a really powerful tradition of free speech.

Let me flip the question on its head: If it wasn't a millionaire or a billionaire and someone was talking shit about you, what recourse do you really have? Let's say you had a close friend, and you had a falling out and they start talking shit about you. Something really terrible, saying you did things that really were reprehensible. Really, except in some jurisdictions that have "fighting words" legislation, you can't even pop 'em in the jaw.

It's a situation where good people get hurt by jerks, and there's no good answer. If the person is poor and doesn't have liability insurance of any kind you can't even sue because you can't collect the judgement. And if you're poor you can't even sue unless you find a lawyer willing to work for a percentage of the proceeds and take nothing if you lose.

Which opens up a whole jug of access to justice issues and the fact that often whether you're found guilty of a crime or not or liable of a tort or not the process is the punishment... You can really see how in the past the solutions were built around communities dealing with stuff internally between all the people who know each other (with some help from their local religious faction as I understand it), the state is all blunt instrument and rakes that fail to pick up leaves.

All that being said though, I think in Japan (completely different legal system) there's specific laws against famous people using their platform to go after regular people, and I think that might be something the west in general would benefit from. Instead of special protections for those with larger platforms (including billionaires and politicians), provide special responsibilities to them to not do certain things with their stage. I'd have to think a lot more about it, but I feel like if it was properly structured and limited so it wasn't crippling it could be amenable to most people to have something like that. After all, freedom of speech isn't absolute, including defamation but also stuff like commercial speech.

Not long ago, someone gave a bunch of scenarios of what is the most noble, and one of the options was of a nobleman going broke to ensure his people were fed, and I actually used that term to explain why it was, that a nobleman has the wealth and power of their title, and nobody under them will question it however they use that wealth and power, but explicitly choosing to properly use it to the benefit of your people while being harmed is extremely noble.

Our civilization isn't perfect, but it's got a lot going for it. In my view, if we don't do something to keep it cohesive as a whole then eventually another more powerful civilization will roll over us and all those things we have going for us will disappear. Stuff like noblesse oblige help social cohesion and I think we need desperately for more of that right now.

I'm interested in what you're saying, could you elaborate a bit? What would you consider civic activity, and what would you consider political activism? And what are the consequences of the two being separate?

The way you describe it reminds me of a line I wrote, something like "They want to save the world, they can't even save themselves" -- whereas civic activity would be personally acting in ways that may be effective, political activism as a subversion would be being grouped together into a bloc who will do what they're told whether it's beneficial to themselves in reality or not and whether it really has any personal effect on them as individuals because it's for some nebulous greater good.

Am I on the right path with this line of thinking?

Reminds me of a key saying in project management I always come back to: "A Project is something with a beginning, a middle, and an end."

Seems like a straightforward sentence, but for some people they want to keep expanding the scope of a project forever because when you're working on a project you get money and power over the project and when the project ends it's just normal operations after that.

One of the largest projects I ever worked on I had to go to management and say explicitly "Look, this document contains the scope of what this project sets out to do, and once we've done this, it's done and the project is over" because I could see it was going to become a forever project where daily operations were being pulled "into the project" and I'd be trapped in neverending scope creep.

(last wall of text for tonight, I'm ruminating a lot today....)

No matter what, Trump is a short term thing. If he wins, he's only in for 4 years and then he's in the dustbin of history. If he loses, someone else is president for 4 years and he's gonna be in the dustbin of history.

The scary thing is that both camps are going to try to find another Trump for different reasons.

Trump was the ultimately successful solution in 2016 to the total meltdown of the Republican party in 2008. They tried a couple iterations of their previous formula which had been reasonably successful but got totally trounced by Obama (who really was more just right place right time in 2008 and didn't screw up), so Trump was something completely different and everyone thought he'd lose but instead he won. The machine that elected him rather existed before he came to power it's just the faces were a bit different, and will exist in some form or another until long after he and Biden are dead of old age and buried. I think there's reasons to be concerned that if Trump doesn't break the establishment this time (whether he wins or not) the GOP could go for someone even more abrasive who they think will break the establishment, but it could also be someone more moderate too, if they find someone with a silver tongue.

The thing that scares me is that the machine dead set on destroying Trump will still exist and the people in that machine will need to find someone new to destroy to justify their existence in positions of power.

These things never go away. Moveon is incredibly ironically named since it was created to tell congress to move on from President Clinton's sex scandals (yet it can't move on from existing since its cause is obsolete). Media Matters I think was created in light of the widespread fraud around the war in Iraq, it's still going today in a media landscape that really doesn't have that much conservative representation among the MSM.

In the same way, the political kill squads meant for Trump, I can't see why they would go away when they could be turned towards other opponents, which I can't see any reason why it wouldn't eventually just turn into tit for tat...

Many people think the Roman Republic died the day Julius Caesar was crowned dictator, but the events that really set the path for the republic were things like the first open assassination, and the first time a Roman general marched on Rome. These events cast the die from which the Republic would fall and 500 years of dictatorships (and a carousel of murdered emperors) would come about.

One thing I note is that once he's not on twitter, Trump isn't really that much of an extremist (an extremist would have broken out the lead bullets during the summer of love, for example. It would have potentially broken a bunch of rules and he might have had to answer for it later, but the office of the president has deployed troops on american soil in the past, such as when Eisenhower used the troops to enforce desegregation), just intended to break the establishment and is a massive jerk. One thing I see is that he might not be extremist, but a lot of young people are becoming more extremist because the current answers aren't working for them. Families have gone from a nuclear family to multiple generations in one home not because it's they want to but because kids can't get good enough jobs to afford a home. Some anthropologists posit that family structure dictates the form a government takes. If we go from a nuclear family to a family where the father (or father and mother) have disproportionate power in the home as the homeowner then that may in fact predict a turn towards a non-democratic government such as we see in patriarchic societies such as china and the middle east.

The change won't happen anytime soon, Trump won't be getting any kind of chance to become a dictator even if he wanted to, but in a couple generations you could have a real problem on your hands, and in other regions of the world that share such a family structure this tends to be bad for women too.

If it was you who was accused of something and a jury did find you civilly liable for requiring just 51% preponderance of the evidence, would you say it's wrong to continue to maintain your innocence?

I'm not talking about Trump. I'm asking what the consequences of this standard are for someone who isn't Trump. What about someone who was found liable but didn't actually do the thing? Should they be forced to tell everyone the court approved version of the story?

If that's the standard for civil cases, what about criminal cases? Should we make it illegal to maintain your innocence after you've been convicted of a crime? After all, we decided to a much higher standard that such a person definitely did it.

Tread carefully because the same standard will cut both ways..

Now I'd you just mean that he's a dishonest jerk, obviously. I mean, he can't even deny all the way before he starts veering off course because he needs to talk about how great he is lol.