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

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?

Defamation and privacy law in the US has always been a free market, for the most part in the UK too with some caveats. It is too much of a financial risk for most individuals to take on a corporate publisher so most viable cases never see a courtroom. Where they do, they are typically either where the plaintiff is wealthy enough to bear the risk or where the risk is underwritten by an insurer / no win no fee legal team. Usually that free market system works for the publisher. Thiel is probably one of the ten worst people in America but giving Hogan 'access to justice', whatever the motive, doesn't really traduce an already broken system.

One of the arguments is that juries would find the fact the case they're hearing isn't one in seclusion -- damages figures are often pitched as a punitive measure. If a handful of people with cases that may have merit are all suing a single journalistic entity, then maybe finding punitive damages in each case make sense. But when you have punitive damages, they're based on the idea that it's a disincentive for the defendant to continue the same behavior.

If the behavior in question is, for one of the major stakeholders in the case (who has been anonymous thus far) not even related to the case at hand, then the jury might start asking questions, like why the one charge that would have put Gawker's insurance on the hook was dropped when it would have actually made it more likely the plaintiff would see a payout. I mean, if it was just Terry Bollea he probably would have kept that charge and be negotiating his paycheck right now, or any appeals would be at the behest of the insurance company.

the handful of cases might have merit but the real game is Thiel-by-proxy vs. Gawker, not whatever they're actually being pitched as

that wired article is hilarious.

they probably ran with the Hogan thing first because of the likelihood of greater jury sympathy given the venue and the size of possible payout. a strategic move by the proxy plaintiff's attorney

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/no-death-no-taxes

btw i just remembered this george packer profile of thiel from a few years ago, which i cannot recommend highly enough

No technological change would have more effect on the living standards of struggling Americans than improvements in energy and food, which dominate the economy and drive up prices. “That’s not one I focus on as much,” Thiel admitted. “It is very heavily politically linked, and my instinct is to stay away from that stuff.” Such oversights are telling. In Thiel’s techno-utopia, a few thousand Americans might own robot-driven cars and live to a hundred and fifty, while millions of others lose their jobs to computers that are far smarter than they are, then perish at sixty.

The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won’t automatically improve most people’s lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly, but also inescapable. The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up. An appetite for disruption and risk—two of Thiel’s favorite words—reflects, in part, a sense of immunity to the normal heartbreak and defeats that a deadening job, money trouble, and unhappy children deal out to the “unthinking herd.” Thiel and his circle in Silicon Valley may be able to imagine a future that would never occur to other people precisely because they’ve refused to leave that stage of youthful wonder which life forces most human beings to outgrow. Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be. Thiel is no different. He wants to live forever, have the option to escape to outer space or an oceanic city-state, and play chess against a robot that can discuss Tolkien, because these were the fantasies that filled his childhood imagination.

http://daringfireball.net/2016/05/thiel_gawker_freedom_of_speech

I, for one, don’t dispute Peter Thiel’s right to back Hogan’s case. I simply think he’s an asshole for doing it, and a coward for having attempted to do it in secret.

Yeah, that's my take on it as well. It's perverse to use the insane amount of money you have to willfully try and kill a business for spite. There are other, more 'elegant' ways, to 'fight back'.

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

― k3vin k., Thursday, May 26, 2016 10:55 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. i completely understand this as an act of long game personal revenge. ethically and legally questionable at best, though

I suspect it's more ethical than some of the measures the minority investor Gawker brought on board to help fund their case has taken to deal with his critics in the past, tbh.

if he was mad about things they said about him he should have sued them himself over those things.

Why?

lol but those things aren't legally actionable, that's the thing

"valleywag said libertarian island is dumb! that hurts my feelings."

nothing to sue them on there

if he didn't have a case then he should have realized that he doesn't have a legal right to destroy gawker. bankrolling bollea's case with an ulterior motive is cowardly and unethical.

him funding a bunch of lawsuits is not illegal. there's no legality or illegality in destroying a company through funding lawsuits. afaik that isn't even addressed by the law

yeah i suppose that's true

it seems like something that should have been disclosed but i guess that's not how it works.

like if you're my neighbor and your favorite hobby is sunbathing in your backyard and that annoys me, I could fertilize a tree on my property all I want with the long term intention of blocking the afternoon sun to your backyard, and in most areas, that is perfectly legal. all I'm doing is growing a tree.

you could also pay for the trees on the property of the person on the other side of your sunbathing neighbor if that owner wanted to put up some trees but couldn't afford it

and all i'm doing over here is cultivating my colony of asian longhorned beetles, not my fault i made their home out of wood and the nearest wood after that was your tree. funny how life works out.

https://media.giphy.com/media/10FDsotj2F4Gkg/giphy.gif

I like how DJP thinks

imo I could sue nomar for negligence or for violating a number of agricultural and environmental controls but I'd probably still lose the tree :(

http://gawker.com/this-is-why-billionaire-peter-thiel-wants-to-end-gawker-1778734026