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.
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.
Just look to youtube for innumerable examples. (I have to admit I did the audio book of my book on youtube using AI deepfake of my own voice while I had covid, so I'm not stuck in traffic in this regard I am traffic, but the book is 100% human written)
I'll have to listen to some with my son. One of my goals as a father has been to expose him to as much music from around the world and throughout time as I can, this sounds right up my alley.
I hosted a map site for a while using openstreetmap. You start with the world, and you think you see everything, then you zoom in and start to see countries. Then you zoom in and start to see provinces. Then you zoom in and start to see cities. Then you zoom in and start to see streets. Then you zoom in and start to see buildings. And you can't keep zooming but there's stories in every building, every room, in corners of your own home you have no idea are even happening, and fractally microscopic worlds we can't even see could have someone spend their entire lives studying one particle, and it exists everywhere.
I feel the same way as I learn about things I didn't even know existed to know about. Like the two forms of classical music in India, and now a new little piece of its musical history.
I hosted a map site for a while using openstreetmap. You start with the world, and you think you see everything, then you zoom in and start to see countries. Then you zoom in and start to see provinces. Then you zoom in and start to see cities. Then you zoom in and start to see streets. Then you zoom in and start to see buildings. And you can't keep zooming but there's stories in every building, every room, in corners of your own home you have no idea are even happening, and fractally microscopic worlds we can't even see could have someone spend their entire lives studying one particle, and it exists everywhere.
I feel the same way as I learn about things I didn't even know existed to know about. Like the two forms of classical music in India, and now a new little piece of its musical history.
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.
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.
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....
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....
"Communism is Soviet Power + Electrification of the Whole Country"
I remember a long time ago reading that word "Electrification" as part of propaganda, since it's just such an unusual word it stuck with me.
It struck me recently how odd it is that we're in a process of electrification right now.
Odd, eh?
I remember a long time ago reading that word "Electrification" as part of propaganda, since it's just such an unusual word it stuck with me.
It struck me recently how odd it is that we're in a process of electrification right now.
Odd, eh?
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.
It's a pair of civil cases. Anyone can sue anyone in America.
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.
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.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/tesla-charging-nightmare-in-chicago-car-graveyards-reportedly-emerge-amid-extreme-arctic-chill/ar-AA1n3zqI
Yeah, that's sorta what I expected...
Yeah, that's sorta what I expected...
Tl;Dr because I just do walls of text when I'm thinking...
I don't think the right answer is to go from one extreme to the other, the right answer is to move towards what should be the ideal.
The ideal being seeking truth whatever that truth may be, IMO.
The crime here isn't conclusions that people came to, is the fact that many people were essentially driven to certain conclusions by corrupt means. If your only choice is to come to one conclusion or face punishment then you aren't doing research, you're studying theological patristics.
Societies that seek truth tend to do quite a lot better than ones that rigidly adhere to orthodoxy. China's century of humiliation, India being conquered by the Islamic mountain people in the 9th century, and the barbarians controlling Europe after the fall of the Roman empire are all examples of less practical, real, grounded civilizations getting trounced by more practical, grounded civilizations.
We live in a society with a powerful and rigidly defined orthodoxy. It pretends to care about other cultures but besides surface level facts or ensuring they don't break our taboos we don't care about them because we already have all the answers as a culture. Research, particularly in the soft sciences often (not always but often) is intended to just reinforce that orthodoxy since you're going to be rewarded for doing so and punished for going against orthodoxy. In such a situation we can't exactly say such a state is conducive to finding the truth.
This is all why I'm quite happy to be on the fediverse, where I can see all kinds of different ideas that have a chance to challenge the status quo, and all kinds of ideas can find a home, even ones far from the orthodoxy that may not find a home elsewhere. It's an environment where there is no single centralized power that can punish someone for saying the wrong thing and so I get the privilege of seeing many different ideas expressed that I would not otherwise, and without the stifling inhibition of knowing any moment the sword of Damocles might snap and sever the thread of conversation.
I don't think the right answer is to go from one extreme to the other, the right answer is to move towards what should be the ideal.
The ideal being seeking truth whatever that truth may be, IMO.
The crime here isn't conclusions that people came to, is the fact that many people were essentially driven to certain conclusions by corrupt means. If your only choice is to come to one conclusion or face punishment then you aren't doing research, you're studying theological patristics.
Societies that seek truth tend to do quite a lot better than ones that rigidly adhere to orthodoxy. China's century of humiliation, India being conquered by the Islamic mountain people in the 9th century, and the barbarians controlling Europe after the fall of the Roman empire are all examples of less practical, real, grounded civilizations getting trounced by more practical, grounded civilizations.
We live in a society with a powerful and rigidly defined orthodoxy. It pretends to care about other cultures but besides surface level facts or ensuring they don't break our taboos we don't care about them because we already have all the answers as a culture. Research, particularly in the soft sciences often (not always but often) is intended to just reinforce that orthodoxy since you're going to be rewarded for doing so and punished for going against orthodoxy. In such a situation we can't exactly say such a state is conducive to finding the truth.
This is all why I'm quite happy to be on the fediverse, where I can see all kinds of different ideas that have a chance to challenge the status quo, and all kinds of ideas can find a home, even ones far from the orthodoxy that may not find a home elsewhere. It's an environment where there is no single centralized power that can punish someone for saying the wrong thing and so I get the privilege of seeing many different ideas expressed that I would not otherwise, and without the stifling inhibition of knowing any moment the sword of Damocles might snap and sever the thread of conversation.
I don't really think that you said anything in this post that actually meaningfully refutes what that I said. You're getting bogged down in minutia and ignoring the real point which remains whether or not you agree with my example.
My argument was implicitly accepting your case that one incompetent professor does not mean that the entirety of the engineering discipline at the university of Regina is broken. In that case, one bad actor doesn't come close to tipping the scales, especially when there are the successes of building the world on the other side of the balance.
But there are a thousand scales for a thousand situations, and there's certainly never just one thing going on at once.
If you have two people, and one of them acts in a trustworthy manner, and the other one acts in an untrustworthy manner, it is fallacious arguing to say that because one of them is trustworthy they must both be trustworthy.
If you have two people, and they are both generally trustworthy, but one of them will lie about certain things, perhaps both of them are generally trustworthy but it doesn't mean that the one guy won't lie about certain things.
I chose the cigarette industry as my example, and I limited it to studies that were sponsored by tobacco companies, quite intentionally. While there are trustworthy studies about the link between tobacco and cancer, you probably don't trust studies that come from the tobacco industry on that subject.
But if a study on a new method of fertilization of tobacco plants was funded by the tobacco industry, most people wouldn't have a reason to mistrust that.
Going back to your original example, I think it's safe to say that one professor turning out to be a quack doesn't discredit the entire field, but on the other hand there are examples where certain things weigh heavily on every scale. String theory in quantum physics has been around forever, and in spite of major problems with it, it just won't go away because it serves a beneficial purpose for the students working on it -- in spite of some very questionable things about it, it will get you your PhD to write a paper on it, it will get you grants to research it, you might even get the opportunity to build something like the Large hadron collider, which was built at huge expense in part to prove that supersymmetry exists (so far it doesn't) -- and examples like this, and there are quite a few, way heavily on everyone's scale because it shows that the process can be corrupted from within by incentives that are not in any way malicious -- the people pushing the theory think it'll end up becoming a unified theory of everything and the students are just following the thing that'll let them succeed.
But there are a thousand scales for a thousand situations, and there's certainly never just one thing going on at once.
If you have two people, and one of them acts in a trustworthy manner, and the other one acts in an untrustworthy manner, it is fallacious arguing to say that because one of them is trustworthy they must both be trustworthy.
If you have two people, and they are both generally trustworthy, but one of them will lie about certain things, perhaps both of them are generally trustworthy but it doesn't mean that the one guy won't lie about certain things.
I chose the cigarette industry as my example, and I limited it to studies that were sponsored by tobacco companies, quite intentionally. While there are trustworthy studies about the link between tobacco and cancer, you probably don't trust studies that come from the tobacco industry on that subject.
But if a study on a new method of fertilization of tobacco plants was funded by the tobacco industry, most people wouldn't have a reason to mistrust that.
Going back to your original example, I think it's safe to say that one professor turning out to be a quack doesn't discredit the entire field, but on the other hand there are examples where certain things weigh heavily on every scale. String theory in quantum physics has been around forever, and in spite of major problems with it, it just won't go away because it serves a beneficial purpose for the students working on it -- in spite of some very questionable things about it, it will get you your PhD to write a paper on it, it will get you grants to research it, you might even get the opportunity to build something like the Large hadron collider, which was built at huge expense in part to prove that supersymmetry exists (so far it doesn't) -- and examples like this, and there are quite a few, way heavily on everyone's scale because it shows that the process can be corrupted from within by incentives that are not in any way malicious -- the people pushing the theory think it'll end up becoming a unified theory of everything and the students are just following the thing that'll let them succeed.
There's too many parallels to today and the fall of the roman republic, but I think most people hope that it would be more like the fall of the roman empire.
DeSantis I think started smoking his own supply at some point. He lucked into some good policy stances (and has since done a good job of undermining some of them), and he had a friendly congress in his state to get them through, and mistook that luck for intense skill.
I've said many times the many reasons I think Trump isn't a great candidate (He's not the devil by any means and there's a lot to say that's positive about him, but he just isn't as competent as people give him credit for and his missteps as president should show that regardless of the MSM's treatment of him), but I have to admit, given the deeply corrupt tactics being used against him, I sort of hope he wins in a landslide just to spite the people using those tactics.