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

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

i'm not a lawyer; this is the judge who presided over the case?

yeah it's the trial judge there was no expectation she was going to overturn the verdict

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html

admits it, says he's doing charity work

given the events of the past year, a screenwriter honestly wouldn't come up with a twist this on-the-nose.

jesus that article. "free speech except when i don't like it."

How Can We Make You Happy Today, Mr. Thiel?

Lol

Gawker always attracted the weirdest enemies but a Dark Enlightenment billionnaire who believes freedom and democracy are "not compatible" is like, whoa.

he got real mad because some people wrote about him and his friends

and now everybody is going to write about him and his friends!

yaaay

I still think this is less about the "outing" and more about the clowning of ideas like libertarian island

Absolutely

It's an ideological battle. In some ways Gawker represents the worst tendencies of the cultural left but still, that's my team in the end. Go Gawker.

what thiel is doing is bad but i also feel like if i had his money i'd probably be a vindictive motherfucker and do the same thing lol

absent in most of the handwringing about thiel's use of his evil bastard powers against gawker: any strong condemnation of the existence of those powers. you couldn't ask for a clearer example of free-market "justice".

really? most of the articles I've seen question, if in passing, whether what he's doing should be legal

what is the legal argument against what he is doing?