hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

The naïveté of loujag but about 80x more boring

...

zzzz

hating from ittoqqortoormiit

Anyway, maura otm

I am still 90% sure the actor Christoper Welch, who portrayed a character very similar to Thiel on HBO's Silicon Valley, died of cancer, but you never know

https://caterina.net/2016/05/24/champerty-or-third-party-litigation/

Caterina Fake, entrepreneur, angel
investor, board member, writer,
artist and reader. Homeschooling
mother, thinker. Co-founder of
Flickr, Hunch, Sesat School, Kahvila
Silli. Founder of Findery. Board of
Sundance.

fake af

caterina is a great lady

yesterday i would've felt sketchy defending hogan trial as impt for future freedom of press, but damn... thiel plot twist makes gawker unequivocal heroes in this imho

first comment from Denton
http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people?comment=3414140#comments

He was so paranoid that, when I was looking into the story, a year ago, I got a series of messages relaying the destruction that would rain down on me, and various innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, if a story ever ran.

also if it weren't for their weird beef over wapo trump coverage thiel and trump (who wants to expand libel law, restrain media) would be natural allies

o I got him mixed up e Bezoz nvm... thiel is the one who campaigned for trump lol

Thiel would never buy a paper, he'd fund a company whose goal was to make a machine that would blow up all printing presses simultaneously

That's the craziest part of that character on Silicon Valley -- the harebrained schemes, like libertarian island on an oil platform, were real

Regardless of his politics, this news should disturb everyone. People talk a lot about the dominance of the 1% or in this case more like a tiny fraction of the 1%. But being able to give massive political contributions actually pales in comparison to the impact of being able to destroy a publication you don't like by combining the machinery of the courts with anonymity and unlimited funds to bleed a publication dry.

We don't have to go any further than Donald Trump to know that the incredibly rich often use frivolous litigation to intimidate critics and bludgeon enemies. Mother Jones had a lawsuit like this, clearly intended to bleed them dry through endless legal expenses. They won, though at a steep cost. But when bully plutocrats do so in their own name there is at least a self-correcting dynamic at work. A plaintiff in a libel suit opens him or herself up to reputational harm and highly intrusive legal discovery which is often enough to scare people away. (Remember, when Trump sued Tim O'Brien for publishing Trump insiders' claims that Trump was worth less than $250 million dollars, Trump was eventually forced to show O'Brien's lawyers his tax returns.) In some ways, this lines up with something I noted in my 'Brittle Grip' series of posts: growing calls from the extremely rich to not only be able to use their money without limit to shape the political process but to do so anonymously to avoid being "intimidated" or "vilified".

It all comes down to a simple point. You may not like Gawker. They've published stories I would have been ashamed to publish. But if the extremely wealthy, under a veil secrecy, can destroy publications they want to silence, that's a far bigger threat to freedom of the press than most of the things we commonly worry about on that front

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-huge-huge-deal

i don't know much about this Peter Thiel guy. why do we hate him, because he's a Trump supporter? it's fucked up you can abuse the court system like that (and part of the reason my dad hates doing business in the US) – but it sounds like his beef with Gawker is they outed him years ago, and if that's the case, i'm not really feeling any sympathy for them.

did you actually read the "outing" article, or anything else about his history?

his endorsement of Trump was new to me but has absolutely nothing to do with my opinion of the man

"i don't know much about this Peter Thiel guy"

he's a silicon valley libertarian who was born in germany, but his parents immigrated to the US shortly after his birth. he's both a religious conservative and gay. he founded a conservative publication at stanford after deciding he hated multiculturalism and the idea that "hate speech" is a category

politically his organizations have funded muck-raking bullshit like James O'Keefe, anti-marriage equality laws, and anything that

he paid a bunch of young ppl $100k as a start-up fund on the stipulation they do not go to college. he hates higher education.

outside of hedge fund shenanigans, he's currently known for championing philanthropy, but only when it relates to pie in the sky silicon valley-style utopian visions (see Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism) related to immortality, the singularity, and most hilariously, literally building an island for libertarians to move to.

the point isn't even really about peter thiel vs gawker anyway

there's def a lol regarding libertarianism and freedom of press vs. big government lawy-uhs somewhere to be found here

i guess outing him makes a little more sense now.

Peter Thiel once called Valleywag, Gawker's tech branch, 'the Silicon Valley equivalent of al-Qaida'.

most of what valleywag did, outside of publishing the "you're gay, that's fine, everyone in the valley knows it and is fine with it, wtf" article, which doesn't seem to correlate to them being al-Qaida, was repeatedly criticize and joke about the ridiculous business schemes and cyclical nature of funding ventures that only make sense to valley people

Jordan OTM. It's often fuckheaded to place sympathy over principle when making sense of legal issues.

I mean, J0rdan's right, the two main points are still:
- wtf was up with that whole trial
- wtf is with private anonymous parties being able to fund a handful of lawsuits against media outlets they don't like in an effort to take them down

wondering why Peter Thiel in particular is doing this is a sidebar but a pretty interesting one

imo the answer is that he really would love to sue them personally but
- he doesn't really have a legal case for anything he's angry about
- he really did want to be anonymous and not let anyone know he is the maddest anyone has ever been

I would like to believe that this is really about him thinking the press ruined libertarian island

Should have called it the PayPal States.

sorry to go all Tuomas on US political ideals – but why would a libertarian think the gov't has any business telling people who they can-or-can't marry?!

Because what they claim to believe is inconsistent with what they do believe?

thiel has said some version of the following highly nazi-fied things (from mem, i could dig it up):

america has gotten stupider since the 60s, we don't have enough technological breakthroughs anymore because the hippies took over

giving the women the vote was a bad idea

democracy and liberty are incompatible

i don't know what his stance is, or what he did for/against, prop 8 or gay marriage tbh

his support for trump wasn't any surprise at all, his whole steez is that we're doomed because the wrong people are in control of everything

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”

lol he is like a cartoon villain libertarian

I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years

you don't say

anyway goole otm; when thiel came out for trump i had that sense of relief you get when you don't have to complicate your categories

In 2010, Thiel supported Meg Whitman, who as CEO of eBay had purchased PayPal from Thiel and his co-founders and investors, in her unsuccessful bid for the governorship of California.

I forgot that Carly Fiorina wasn't the only terrible tech CEO with political pretensions!

i had that sense of relief you get when you don't have to complicate your categories

― le Histoire du Edgy Miley (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, May 25, 2016 10:51 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

charles murray just came out against, if you want to chew on that

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435805/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-why-hillary-is-even-worse-doesnt-cut-it

glib reconciliation: as a professional manufacturer of dog whistles charles murray fears obsolescence

charles murray otm tho:

Just watch and listen to the man. Don’t concoct elaborate rationalizations. Just watch and listen.

More than any executive action, Reagan's hanging of Calvin Coolidge's portrait in the White House remains his most noxious legacy.

why would a libertarian think the gov't has any business telling people who they can-or-can't marry?!

expecting tech libertarians to have coherent idea sets is almost like expecting unicorns to carry us all away to a private island where these people don't exist and can't hurt us

American libertarians are generally relatively well-off white dudes who want to vape and not pay taxes and have funny ideas about what the past was like

I forgot that Carly Fiorina wasn't the only terrible tech CEO with political pretensions!

Whitman > Fiorina by almost ever conceivable professional metric imaginable

@AP BREAKING: Florida judge denies Gawker's motion for a new trial in Hulk Hogan sex-video case and won't reduce $140 million verdict.

unexpected!

man