I’m pretty sure based on the structure of the deal between the Onion and the Connecticut families this basically guarantees that the families (and any other creditors I guess) take home less money. Given the amount of money that they’re owed from the Connecticut judgement those families are basically 95% of the beneficiaries of this sale, and the original deal with the Onion had them giving up a huge chunk of what they could be entitled to in order to make sure that the Texas families (who were victimized in the same way but weren’t part of the same suit and got a much lower reward from a Texas court) got $100,000 more than they would have under the next-best offer. So in order for this to end up being a gain the next-best bid would need to either be so high that giving up $1.5 billion wouldn’t be enough to exceed what the Texas families would get, or else it gives the other bidder the ability to cut their bid to basically nothing and in turn reduce the amount that the Connecticut families forgo and the amount the Texas families take home by however much they want.

This is all amateur analysis, but short of rejecting the Connecticut/Onion bid outright for some reason I don’t think there’s any way that this doesn’t put the families in a worse spot. Instead whoever is behind the FUAS bid (widely believed to be Jones’s allies) may get to decide how much to screw the families over.

Edit to fix some numbers. What’s $1,498.5 billion between friends?

Anyone remember when Chrome had that issue with validating nested URL-encoded characters? Anyone for John%%80%80 Doe?

I mean, it sounds like they did ask how much it would cost, he just bulldozed through the question instead of seriously engaging with it and legacy media is too chickenshit to report it as “Trump apathetic about costs of deportation plan” or “Mass Deportation to Cost Billions Despite Trump’s Claims” because putting the things he says in context makes him sound like the madman he is and apparently truth is no longer sufficient defense from defamation.

Wait hang on you only read 2? I’m disappointed, I put a solid fifteen minutes into googling to find those 11 separate links.

I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but this makes a lot of sense. Especially in a 2-party system the election is inevitably going to be a vibe check on the status quo as much as it is a specific election focusing on specific candidates and policies. I’d like to look more closely at the margins to get a feel for whether the Republicans could have run a ham sandwich and still been successful as opposed to the specific appeal of Trumpism.

Not that that changes how rough the next 4 years are going to get for a lot of people.

What constitutes a terrorist organization is up to the electric officials and police organizations to define.

That’s kind of the point, mate. In the current political climate I half expect them to start describing any organization giving humanitarian aid to Palestinians as terrorists.

But to ask the real questions: is providing material support to terrorists not already a crime in Sweden? Does having a Swedish criminal record not complicate eg visa renewals and make it harder for someone to stay in or return to the country? Assuming that’s the case, why is this something that needs to be specially handled now? Is this actually a problem, or just a way to stoke racism and fear for political benefit?

Right.

Russia’s immense respect for Ukrainian culture has defined this war

So the difference is not whether they’re trying to be imperialists, but in their relative ability to do so. I’m sure there’s some fascinating and useful graduate level historical analysis to be done in understanding why Russification was relatively unsuccessful, but that doesn’t change the fact that Russia has time and again attempted to impose Russian culture, Russian language, and Russian law on parts of the Russian empire that were very happily doing their own thing.

lolwut

In other news, Germany should be allowed to keep half of Poland and the Sudetenland.

We don’t do right of conquest anymore because we recognized how it obviously incentivizes more wars of aggression and the associated humanitarian disasters.

Just keep smashing yourself into the bricks to “deny the wall legitimacy” or whatever. I’m sure it will work this time.

Yeah, mate. This is the most credible source I can find and it’s literally about how impossible it is to actually use crypto without tying yourself to the wallet somehow.

The exchange where you traded BTC for USD, which had to comply with AML and KYC laws in order to have access to the US banking system in the first place.

Like, it’s theoretically possible to work with perfect operational security and never ever link your Bitcoin address to the real world, but doing so basically precludes you from doing anything in the real world with it, including buying crypto in the first place.

Would you believe that there’s a racist element to this as well?

So first off, Ukraine couldn’t have joined NATO because of the active territorial dispute re: Crimea, which had been ongoing since 2014. But more importantly, please for the love of God stop following the cold war colonial logic that only Great Powers have any agency in their own international affairs.

Poland, Lithuania, and all the rest of the countries that Putin wants out of NATO are in there because they wanted to be, mostly because they wanted security against Russian invasion. Like, Poland basically blackmailed President Clinton into expanding NATO by threatening to support the Republicans in the next election.

But why would anyone be worried about Russia invading them if they tried to exercise independent agency and leave Moscow 's sphere of influence? Oh wait, look at what’s happening in Ukraine. Maybe those fears weren’t so unfounded. Sweden and Finland certainly seem to think so, since the war led to the most significant expansion of NATO in decades and gave NATO a direct land border within spitting distance of Moscow.

Even Yanukovich had been trying to push for EU membership, AKA the guy who was the target of the so-called coup you’re bitching about. He had to shift gears when Putin’s attitude changed and he could no longer split the two, but the whole “euro” part of Euro Maidan was about the sudden shift away from the EU.

Gee, I wonder if there were any major shake-ups in the Ukrainian government circa 2014 that could have explained this change in tune.

Ukraine wasn’t able to join NATO because of active territorial disputes regarding Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. The 2022 invasion and intervening Russian-backed fighting in Donestk and Luhansk were naked imperial land grabs trying to force Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence despite their democratic processes repeatedly trying to move towards the EU.

Or in simpler terms, imperialism is actually still bad when Russia does it and it’s weird that you don’t seem to understand that.