I'm afraid I kind of agree. What brought me over to Thiel's side on this particular issue (at least mostly) was when I realized that Gawker's publication of a sex tape in this way would be considered a sex crime if the victim were female. While I still understand the problem with outsiders bankrolling lawsuits, I can't bring myself to have much sympathy with Gawker here.
I don't agree with Thiel on a lot of things but on this one I see his point.
I was referring to the popular reaction, not legal implications or moral realities. The general public tends not to see this as being as serious when the victim is male.
I don't think one needs to necessarily choose a side. I'm of the opinion that what Gawker did is wrong, but surreptitiously funding lawsuits to bankrupt the company is a perversion of the justice system.
The tension between privacy and speech is a discussion that needs to be had. Litigating it in a Pinellas County courtroom is an odd way to go about having that debate.
Thiel has now demonstrated that those with deep enough pockets can now use the courts to exact revenge in a roundabout way. Yes, Gawker is tawdry but one can't help pondering a chilling effect here on more worthy stories. Were I a journalist, I'd certainly think twice now of pursuing an investigative piece that might offend a billionaire, given that my own financial livelihood could become fair game.
Consider the way things were before Thiel showed up. Gawker destroyed lives[1] with impunity because their victims didn't have deep enough pockets to fight back in court. Thiel is just leveling the playing field.
You're free to propose that we outlaw the funding of lawsuits by non-parties, as was done historically (google 'maintenance' and 'champerty' if you want more history on that) but you're going to shut down the ACLU and company when you do so. So it's a matter of which is more important to you, really.
>I'm of the opinion that what Gawker did is wrong, but surreptitiously funding lawsuits to bankrupt the company is a perversion of the justice system?
Why is funding a case related to a cause you support a perversion of the justice system? Every time an article about the EFF funding another lawsuit pops up do you cringe in horror?
I mentioned this to someone else who made the same point (albeit with the ACLU instead of the EFF): Hm, that's an interesting point that I'll have to noodle over. Thanks for pointing it out.
If you read Gawker apologia, you continually see the claim that this is going to stifle journalism. Some people aren't able to distinguish between writing a story about a sex tape and actually showing the sex tape, when the latter behavior is the crux on which this whole thing is based.
As far as gender goes, one only has to consider that if the rule is going to be "Public figure + sexual aspect to the person's persona (e.g. Hogan talking about sex on Stern) = unlimited right to broadcast sexual material", then no porn star ever has the right to private sex again. Since that is clearly unacceptable, the error must be with the proposed rule.
Peter Thiel is all for radical freedom and libertarianism as long as the free speech that he protects isn't critical of himself.
He vehemently defended his friend's right to yell "Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!" outside an instructor's residence. As he explains in his book, "His demonstration directly challenged one of the most fundamental taboos: To suggest a correlation between homosexual acts and AIDS implies that one of the multiculturalists’ favorite lifestyles is more prone to contracting the disease and that not all lifestyles are equally desirable."
How can someone be so radically opposed to encroachments on free speech, and yet so quick to quietly fund lawsuits against those who criticize you?
Forgive me if I missed it, but has Gawker been "critical" of Thiel in the traditional sense? I'm tracking that they outed him - not that they've been publishing anti-Thiel business editorials - and that they published a sex tape without the permission of those who made it.
It appears that we're starting to conflate protected free speech with invasions of privacy. It's not immediately clear that shouting "Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!" falls into the latter category, so I don't really see how that's relevant.
If being homosexual is not societally acceptable, or carries a stigma (as it did at the time, as evidenced by Thiel's own criticism of it as an unhealthy "lifestyle"), then isn't yelling "Faggot!" at someone rather privacy-invading? As Thiel would himself know from Gawker's outing of him?
I suppose it would depend on the perception of the audience, would it not?
It's certainly possible that someone hearing someone yell "Faggot!" could construe that to mean a foul pejorative. That's wholly different Gawker's type of privacy invasion(s) that explicitly seek to convey, without doubt, someone's private sexual orientation.
I also think it's noteworthy that the fact that the person who actually breached Hogan's -trust- was "punished" so lightly (granted, he settled, but I wonder how much Hogan would have settled with Gawker for, with and without Thiel's involvement).
I'm having trouble reconciling the following two quotes
> I am proud to have contributed financial support to his case. I will support him until his final victory — Gawker said it intends to appeal — and I would gladly support someone else in the same position.
> A free press is vital for public debate. Since sensitive information can sometimes be publicly relevant, exercising judgment is always part of the journalist’s profession. It’s not for me to draw the line
So this makes me think that, if Peter Thiel considers a journalist's particular article morally wrong, he will help the supposed victim to sue them. In the case of Gawker it's hard to say Gawker was innocent but at the same time what if the next case is something more grey? Peter says he wants a free press but it sounds more to me like he wants a free press by his own judgement.
I'm not a fan of Gawker at all but having a billionaire bankroll lawsuits against publications when his opinion is that they're doing something morally wrong...worries me that it'll stifle.
Gawker pissed off Thiel by doing their standard trashy tabloid garbage and invading his personal life.
He took the opportunity to get even when they went too far with someone else. Good for him. He's not taking part to cover up anything, or for revenge because they exposed some wrongdoing on his part. He's doing it because Gawker is a trashy worthless site.
okay thats just kinda semantics then. he didn't get revenge because he did something wrong. he got revenge because he felt someone else did something wrong. so this is still all about revenge for thiel at the cost of chilling free speech.
thiel saying he is defending free speech is disingenuous when the supreme court has given the press considerable latitude to write about someone's sexual orientation. he is mad about something that was completely legal for gawker to do.
now it is a really shitty thing to do to out someone as gay. but let's not pretend this wasn't thiel's payback.
> 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.
- Nick Denton's comment in original Thiel is gay article on Gawker
[0] http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people?c...
> Do you not trust the court system to preserve free speech?
Bankrolling a plaintiff going up against a financially inferior defendant means that the plaintiff's argument may be framed more convincingly than the defendant's. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the jury opted to imperil Gawker's free speech; juries are even more susceptible to impassioned pleas to "think about the real victim" than a judge.
The main issue for me is that Thiel opted to use another case to exact his revenge against a media company, rather than his own. He made Hogan the instrument for his revenge. Sure, Gawker is a pox, but its right to be a pox should be defended with the same fervor with which Thiel's vengeance was exacted. It wasn't. It couldn't have been. That's why it's generally seen as a bad thing when someone an order of magnitude (or more) more wealthy than a defendant puts their money behind a plaintiff when the case isn't about the financier to begin with.
I see why Thiel is a self-styled privacy champion - the crux of his revenge scheme, after all, is that his privacy was violated. But, to me, it seems like a hypocritical assertion; why didn't he take Gawker down for violating his privacy? Did he not think a jury would be enamored enough with him?
The case stinks all over. It's bad for everyone involved. Thiel loses credibility as a champion of privacy, Gawker is on its way out, and Hulk Hogan's own private escapades were paraded out to the public. The whole mess is toxic.
If Gawker's free speech rights were harmed then surely the ruling would be turned down on a first amendment ground. What are you so worried about then?
Yes, don't worry! Thiel merely wants to shut down worthless, trashy publications like Gawker, and the presidential candidate he supports merely wants to shut down worthless, trashy publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Valuable, classy publications who adopt the proper fellatory posture toward their betters have nothing to fear whatsoever.
That's not it, and I think you know it. If Thiel supported any candidate that championed the importance of the press to an informed electorate, it would be better. But right now, he supports a candidate who openly states his desire to strip citizens, in this example the press, of their constitutional rights.
The Washington Post was revealed in the email leaks to be holding clandestine fundraisers with the DNC that their own lawyers would "never" allow, so it's not clear how far above the board they are these days.
> Hint: the case was named "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission". What does that tell you about who the plaintiff was?
Very little, actually, because Supreme Court case title orders don't tell you who the plaintiff vs. defendant is, they tell you who filed the appeal from the case below. (However, it does tell you that Hillary Clinton wasn't the plaintiff, since she is neither "Citizens United" nor the "Federal Election Commission".)
However, in this case, the plaintiff below was the appellant, so...
But what about when Gawker(or other media) can afford lawyers but people legitimately harmed by Gawker cannot? I am not sure why Peter Thiel is being made out to be the bad guy here because he is a billionaire. The courts decided where the line was and Terry Bollea was awarded. What he did was charitable. I don't think those quotes are inconsistent.
Gawker was a pain in the ass. No one I know liked them. But they didn't deserve to be put out of business because they crossed a billionaire. That's why "so called lefties" are up in arms about this.
Peter Thiel intend to be untouchable. He proposes blood transfusions from young people [1], and wants to live forever.
I daresay his entire motive seems at odds with social contract.
The balls on this guy. The sheer cynical audacity of trying to market yourself as a "defender of privacy" when you serve on the board of a company so antithetical to privacy that they're under federal supervision for twenty years [1] is breathtaking. Please tell me no one on Hacker News is dumb enough to fall for this.
My Google-fu is failing me on the exact link (can someone help?), but Marc Andreessen once penned some breathless, excited editorial about "the future of media", and at one point he talked about the editorial/advertising firewall as a relic that needed to be abandoned. It was so slickly inserted that you could almost forget what he was really saying: that news desks need to be prevented from reporting things that companies rather they didn't.
Every time a VC tries to tell me "what's wrong with the media", I reach for my gun. Everyone: they're not your friends. They're not trying to help you. Their overriding concern is nurturing the value of their investments, and that sometimes means silencing people who report inconvenient truths.
I don't see the OP laying out a case for the article's content, I see them mentioning how it's absurd for anyone to take the author of this article seriously on privacy issues.
That's kind of what ad hominem is... Discredit the argument by discrediting the arguer. The thing is, that has zero effect on whether the argument is valid or not. The fact that I state 10 wrong facts about bananas does not mean that the next fact I state is wrong, even though I've far and away proven myself to not be a trusted expert on banana facts.
>That's kind of what ad hominem is... Discredit the argument by discrediting the arguer. The thing is, that has zero effect on whether the argument is valid or not.
In real life the content of an argument isn't the only think that matters. The motives of the arguer are also important --
what they're trying to achieve/sell by using it etc.
That's because people don't only offer their arguments to have other people discuss them and assess their merits, but also to use them to influence people towards other stuff, often unrelated to the argument.
E.g. "listen how right and eloquently I speak in favor of privacy -- and thus forgive my enormous contribution to privacy violations, or the fact that I killed an online outlet out of spite".
>The fact that I state 10 wrong facts about bananas does not mean that the next fact I state is wrong
No, but it means that pragmatic persons with limited time spans should do better than spend time listening you on bananas -- and thus are more right than wrong to dismiss anything else you have to offer beforehand.
Sure, they might commit to a false negative this way, but it's statistically more likely that they wont (and being quick and mostly right to access stuff is more important than being 100% right but slow, again for people with limited life spans).
Besides a hypocrisy charge is not the same as a "he is wrong" charge.
If I'm trying to sell you a high-efficiency AC unit, I will assert that it's a high-efficiency AC unit that will reduce your monthly bills, so you should buy it. You answer back that of course I would say you should buy it, because I'm selling it... Except that has absolutely zero impact on the fact that the AC unit is high-efficiency thereby will save you money.
This is why ad hominem is a fallacy. It provides zero evidence for or against an argument. It's completely orthogonal.
>If I'm trying to sell you a high-efficiency AC unit, I will assert that it's a high-efficiency AC unit that will reduce your monthly bills, so you should buy it. You answer back that of course I would say you should buy it, because I'm selling it... Except that has absolutely zero impact on the fact that the AC unit is high-efficiency thereby will save you money.
I'm not suggesting you "answer back" anything -- I'm suggesting that you should check if the person praising something has hidden motives.
In fact, I'm saying something even more obvious: if a person praises something, and they don't seem particularly fond of having it or practicing it, then be suspicious.
As for selling something, it is already a great motive to make people lie and present the facts in a distorted way, withhold precious information, etc about a product. It happens EVERY single day in millions of stores, showrooms, ads, etc.
If you are only trying to evaluate the product based on what the seller tells you, you'll be duped. Even if it's 100% true in itself.
>It provides zero evidence for or against an argument. It's completely orthogonal.
Arguments in real life do not live in some platonic ideal sphere, isolated from everything else.
They intermingle with all kinds of "completely orthogonal" things.
Sometimes, judging the person making the argument, and their motives, is even more important (and insightful) than judging the argument.
> If you are only trying to evaluate the product based on what the seller tells you, you'll be duped. Even if it's 100% true in itself.
I never advised that, but nice strawman. I advised to evaluate the arguments on their own ground. This AC is efficient and will save you money -- that is something you can independently verify, if it's important to you to do so. And if you're buying an AC and you care about efficiency, that seems like the type of thing you should care to do.
That doesn't mean that you should automatically distrust a salesman. It also doesn't mean you should trust them, though apparently that's a dichotomy that exists for you. It's a null input -- there's zero actionable information if what you care about is buying an efficient AC.
> Sometimes, judging the person making the argument, and their motives, is even more important (and insightful) than judging the argument.
That's fine... If your goal is to gain insight into a person and their motives. If your goal is to judge their argument, then it's absolute and complete fallacy.
>This AC is efficient and will save you money -- that is something you can independently verify, if it's important to you to do so. And if you're buying an AC and you care about efficiency, that seems like the type of thing you should care to do.
Another AC might be just as efficient. Or maybe I just don't even need an AC and while the numbers are all true, they're overselling the benefits. Merely finding out whether a particular model they're trying to sell me is as efficient as they say doesn't help me evaluate their suggestion in the broader context.
>That doesn't mean that you should automatically distrust a salesman. It also doesn't mean you should trust them, though apparently that's a dichotomy that exists for you. It's a null input -- there's zero actionable information if what you care about is buying an efficient AC.
I'm not sure how we got to the salesmen example.
The example I initially gave was about distrusting people that say "X is good for you", but do not follow X themselves -- and about distrusting X for that.
Whereas distrusting doesn't mean "X is thus bad, period", means "you should better investigate X, something seems fishy".
> True, but that just points to the fact that ad hominem should not be dogmatically a logical fallacy.
No, it doesn't. OTOH, a logical fallacy isn't something that means that the conclusion that flows from it is wrong, or even that the fallacy doesn't provide a useful pragmatic filter given limited resources to devote to fully evaluating arguments.
Strictly, the fallacy involved is tu quoque -- if it is used to rebut the argument which is inconsistent with the persons behavior -- not ad hominem. They are related, but distinct.
Although I suppose if one took the route of:
1. A says X,
2. But A acts in accord with not-X,
3. Therefore, A is a hypocrite.
4. And, because A is a hypocrite, one should disregard A's arguments
You could actually make an ad hominem out of the accusation of hypocrisy.
Sure. tu quoque is just the specific case of ad hominem being used in this instance. ad hominem is any logical argument which attacks the arguer instead of the argument itself.
An ad-hominen would be: "what he says is wrong because he is stupid/bribed/corrupt/a hypocrite" etc.
Saying: "What he says is hypocritical" is not an ad-hominem - it's not an argument on the content or the man, but the relation between the two (what he says and what he does).
You're trying to discredit an argument because the person saying it is a hypocrite, which is also an ad-hominem. If the argument is true, then it would also be true even if the person saying it were hypocritical.
>If the argument is true, then it would also be true even if the person saying it were hypocritical.
And nobody said otherwise -- for the core argument.
But in real life we don't usually know whether the thing (let's call it A) itself that an argument tries to prove is true.
We only know that the argument in favor of A is formulated correctly (follows its premises correctly, etc).
Regarding A though, there might be other premises we haven't checked (and weren't mentioned in the argument), other facts that invalidate it, etc.
Thus it is enlightening to know if an argument for A is being made hypocritically, to evaluate the possibility of A being true in a wider context.
E.g. if I say "A is good for everybody, for X,Y,Z reasons" and I do the opposite of A, then the possibility of A really being good for everybody is somewhat lessened by the prior that "the person proposing A does not follow A".
This is because:
a) nothing guarantees that X,Y,Z (the things mentioned in the argument) are enough to prove that A is good for everybody.
b) the fact that someone proposes A but does the opposite, adds credence to the possibility that there are benefits from NOT following A.
Heck, even if the argument is that "A is good for you for X,Y,Z" and it's correct, someone that knows X,Y,Z (since he put forth the argument) but does not follow A, might know something like A+ or B that's even better, and tries to sell me short.
Thus it is enlightening to know if an argument for A is being made hypocritically, to evaluate the possibility of A being true in a wider context.
That sounds like logic, but it makes much less sense than it sounds. So you're saying it's good to examine the hypocrisy of someone's argument, because of the possibility that there's contradictory facts or implications that the arguer is holding back on us? Not only is that also ad-hominem it's a fuzzy half-logical ad-hominem.
>So you're saying it's good to examine the hypocrisy of someone's argument, because of the possibility that there's contradictory facts or implications that the arguer is holding back on us?
Yes.
>Not only is that also ad-hominem it's a fuzzy half-logical ad-hominem.
It's also correct, and a pragmatic way to find hidden motives in real life.
You're contradicting yourself right here, in a way that seems to indicate that you don't understand the important difference between these two circumstances.
Something that's pragmatic is merely mostly correct or most of the time correct. One could say the same thing about racial stereotypes in the US -- which is to say that heuristics shouldn't be treated as an argument. It's only at best a starting point. Quitting at that point is the worst kind of mental laziness.
I'm convinced that stcredzero is intentionally misdirecting you into arguing about logical fallacies. Based off of her/his other comments in this thread, it doesn't appear that she or he cares much about them. stcredzero's viewpoint is clear and not focused on policing the thread from logical fallacies.
I would say it's a fallacy to harp on logical fallacies; it's not as if everyone has infinite time to convert all arguments to syllogisms. The common list of logical fallacies entered Western culture from the ancient Greeks but shouldn't be taken with religious fervor.
> E.g. if I say "A is good for everybody, for X,Y,Z reasons" and I do the opposite of A, then the possibility of A really being good for everybody is somewhat lessened by the prior that "the person proposing A does not follow A".
"It's good for you to not smoke. Now excuse me while I take my smoke break."
I'm not sure what is the example supposed to prove.
That what I said doesn't always hold?
Of course it doesn't.
That's why I wrote about possibilities, and only said that the prior that the person preaching X doesn't follow X "somewhat lessens" the possibility that X is true.
I never said that someone "preaching X and doing the opposite" proves that X is not true.
If I had said that, your example would be a valid refutation. But I haven't, and it's only attacking a straw man.
Besides, the only reason that your example case seems obviously wrong to you is because you're taking as a given what you are supposed: you already know that smoking is bad.
If you didn't, and someone said to you "smoking is bad for you", while he himself was smoking, you would be justifiably suspicious to consider whether it's not actually bad, and the other person is lying or hiding something from you (e.g. to keep all the cigarettes for himself).
My point is that this thinking is a fallacy precisely because it is orthogonal to the argument being made. It is neither evidence for nor against the argument. You are making some sort of argument for heuristics, but heuristics are called such precisely because they are not solutions.
The correct answer is to independently validate the claims, or evaluate the merits of an argument on their own ground. That's tedious and often not worth the effort, and that's OK. We use heuristics all the time -- you don't ask your friend for his proof, because you use the heuristic of trust instead. But at least acknowledge that it's a heuristic and stop trying to claim it as a solution.
Where evidence is provided which undermines the credibility of the author, this does not qualify as an ad hominem attack. The parent provided relevant background as to why one should doubt the author's objectivity.
Simply playing the "ad hominem" card is not a free pass for the opinions of crackpots to be given equal weight.
Even ignoring the differences between the privacy issues of Gawker vs Facebook, the decisions a company makes are influenced by more than just one person, and nothing posted here says anything of Peter Thiel's views on privacy with respect to Facebook.
>the decisions a company makes are influenced by more than just one person, and nothing posted here says anything of Peter Thiel's views on privacy with respect to Facebook.
Again, assuming FB and Gawker have the same privacy issues, what you point doesn't really matter.
FB's decisions might be influenced by more than just Thiel, but if Thiel feels strongly about privacy (and his views aren't heard on FB) he always has the option of selling his stock and leaving FB...
>Again, assuming FB and Gawker have the same privacy issues, what you point doesn't really matter.
They're not comparable. You give information willingly to Facebook and accept their terms of service. I know plenty of very social and successful people who don't use Facebook. Maybe you feel that there should still be additional regulations on Facebook; fine, that's a debate for another day. But it's very clearly different than a "journalist" prying into your private life against your will to produce a sensationalist and embarrassing article that does nothing to serve the public interest.
>They're not comparable. You give information willingly to Facebook and accept their terms of service.
Sure -- I agree that they're not comparable (that said, I don't necessarily agree that FB is better than Gawker privacy wise just because it's a different model. In fact I believe the opposite -- and don't particularly care for the "volunteer" part. People volunteer to all kinds of societal harmful stuff).
But my argument above checks to see the validity of the parent's comment after "assuming that they're comparable".
I don't particularly disagree with anything you said but even a privacy intruding clock can be right twice a day. The article is merely a pretty conventional discussion of the public interest vs what the public is interested in and what we should expect from journalism. Everything he says is pretty darn standard stuff which has been written a thousand times before, VC or no VC.
I see nothing wrong with a man who feels remorse for assisting in the stripping of online privacy owning up to his mistakes.
"As an internet entrepreneur myself, I feel partly responsible for a world in which private information can be instantly broadcast to the whole planet."
This article is as much an apology as it is a call to turn things around fix things
That is literally what it says, however, most here seem to be questioning the subtext and authenticity. I have trouble interpreting this as an apologetic introspective look at the evolution of privacy and more as a self serving rant.
Theils crusade against gawker killed what I think was a shitty trade rag focused on gossip, at a very steep price. Too much in my opinion.
I had trouble taking his speech at the RNC seriously.
I deeply respected him, probably naively, and I still do; just in a much more narrow context. His intellect and knowledge of technology and macrotrends is amazing, however I find his philosophy in contrast with some of his actions
The firewall is a relic of a lucrative business model that imploded. What news desks can and cannot do anymore is a matter of exigency, not the politics of aspiring plutocrats.
Here's Andreessen on the future of the news business [1]. The part you are specifically pointing out in your comment is thus:
"One start would be to tear down, or at least modify the “Chinese wall” between content and the business side. No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works."
Unless you have something specific to say regarding Peter Thiel's specific contribution to Facebook's current or past stance on privacy, I think you are being far too alarmist with an entirely unsupported position.
For example, it's entirely possible that Peter Thiel is part of a losing faction of the board that values more privacy, and has actually been a force for the better with regard to privacy at Facebook? Is that likely? I have no idea, but it's supported by just as much evidence as you put forth.
Keep in mind, by the logic you've used so far, if we ignore the voting history of congress, then every congressperson must obviously have been in favor of invading Iraq, since that's what the US did.
Note: If you take this as a defense of Peter Thiel you've entirely missed the point. I have no evidence as to how Peter Thiel truly feels about privacy in general, and more importantly that's irrelevant to the point I'm making.
You're intensely equivocating here. The moral calculus of renouncing your massive profit-making association with a company that you serve on the board of if it chooses to do things that you find morally unacceptable is trivial, and entirely different than when you're a citizen of a country that you serve in the legislature of that decides to do things that you find morally unacceptable.
If you're on the losing faction on a corporate board that decides that the best option is to poison the city water supply, and your mournfully cash the checks, you are just as guilty as the winning faction.
Yes, but there are varying levels of 'moral acceptability', and online privacy violations are on the low end of that. I find it hard to believe that most people would act differently from Thiel in that situation.
If the anti-poison faction resigns, they cede any remaining influence over the organization to the pro-poison faction. Voting "no" is better than giving up your vote in favor of someone who will undoubtedly vote "yes" (and get paid for doing so).
>Voting "no" is better than giving up your vote in favor of someone who will undoubtedly vote "yes"
Is it? What do you think does more to further the cause and draw awareness, a no vote that doesn't matter and gets no attention or news articles Peter Thiel resigns Facebook board seat over moral objections to FB Privacy Policy?
The problem with the idea that someone can do no good on a board if they are outvoted on issues based on moral objections is that it assumes all the other people have identical views and motivations, and every vote and issue will be ineffectual. I think that's doesn't match with reality. Look at the supreme court, and the different a single judge can make on the myriad cases they see. People are complex, and have nuanced views. An ineffectual vote six days out of the week may still yield a positive result one out of seven. Do we throw that away out of idealism?
There's a place for grand gestures. Giving away real, tangible power, even if unable to be expressed most of the time, in lieu of increasing awareness about an issue that everyone already knows about is not what I consider a smart move. To have any gain, it would at least need to increase awareness of the issue. I'm not sure that's even relevant in this case, given the widespread public acknowledgement and numerous media outlets addressing the issue already.
Poisoning the water supply is different because the water supply is managed by the local government, and because it's a crime. These add a personal risk to the decision, which your argument is indirectly relying on when you assume it's obviously a bad thing.
You should choose an example that wouldn't lead the executives being personally attacked by prosecutors:
* An oil spill killing ocean wildlife and damaging the look of a beautiful beach.
* A soda company deciding whether to put 10% more sugar in their sodas to increase sales, even though they know its likely to kill statistical thousands of people.
* A manufacturing company moving to China, pressuring local workers into working long hours in poor working conditions and polluting their country.
I believe none of these is a crime, and I wouldn't argue that someone who voted against these should resign from the board rather than help execute on a decision they oppose.
How so? I think I'm being very clear. If you make assertions, you should support them. I do not take at face value that being on the board of Facebook precludes you from caring about privacy. If there is specific evidence as to his actions apart from that, it should be presented. None was.
> The moral calculus of renouncing your massive profit-making association with a company that you serve on the board of if it chooses to do things that you find morally unacceptable is trivial
It is only trivial in the renouncement is morally unambiguous, it is not trivially acceptable that the opposite is true. I submit that it's entirely possible to remain in a position of some power of an organization that is working counter to what you believe is right. In the simplest case, to change that organization. To reject that would be reject the core tenets of democracy, which requires you to participate in a system you may find has resulted in morally reprehensible actions to bring about change and prevent future occurrences of those actions. A board of directors is fundamentally a very democratic form of governance (in that like the United States, the representatives are often elected so it is democratic in its republicness).
> If you're on the losing faction on a corporate board that decides that the best option is to poison the city water supply, and your mournfully cash the checks, you are just as guilty as the winning faction.
But that's not what's going on here. The equivalent here would be if there was a long standing plan to legally dump poison into the water. Feel free to renounce your board membership. The people that are poisoned in the future will feel so much better that you took an ineffectual moral stand rather than alternate action that might have yielded real change.
There is no difference in this than legislative powers. Money and power are interchangeable, to a degree. Should our legislators resign over voted directions of government they do not agree with? They are, be nature of their positions, benefiting from the increase in power and influence the decision may grant them if it increases the standing of the US (but at the cost of the world as a whole).
So, the be absolutely clear, I believe there exists the possibility to have non-controlling power in an organization that you feel is taking morally reprehensible actions, and believe that the most beneficial action to address this is to continue with your position and work to change the organization. To assert Peter Thiel is exhibiting "sheer cynical audacity" and hope that people aren't "dumb enough to fall for this" purely by his association with the board of Facebook without addressing this is not worthy of taking seriously.
To me, that whole line of argument makes no sense. Facebook is at its core and from the start an anti-privacy entity. It relies on encouraging people to post their whole lives and the lives of others. A privacy-friendly Facebook would not be Facebook at all except in name.
Taking your legislation example, a privacy-minded person investing in Facebook would not just like be a legislator disagreeing with a decision, it'd be like a self-proclaimed anarchist pushing for a more powerful government.
The lives of others it is. The funny thing is when I say to facebook users that I will post their pictures or other info to some other social network that they don't use, suddenly privacy becomes important to them. I really don't get this attitude among friends.
A lot of people like the day job because the pay is good and then find ways to work against it at night. Their 'hypocrisy' is actually an imbalance in their universe they seek to correct.
Which would have been a wonderful fact to include as supporting evidence, yet it was not. Like I said, I'm not defending Thiel, I'm condemning accusations without good evidence. I wouldn't have had anything to complain about if that was included.
So to clarify for those not in the know, he does not care about people's privacy, and is happy to build companies that want to spy on your social activities, and sell the surveillance capability to the us govt.
Do you mean social media sites? People voluntarily give up that information to the public, so it could reasonably not be considered private.
The sex tape would be considered private.
Presumably he draws his line somewhere between those two extremes.
Has he done anything inconsistent with the position "The paparazzi should not write scandalous articles about famous people"? For example, has he invested in companies similar to Gawker? If not, I don't see any real conflict in his position.
I think most people consider what they post on social media sites to be for their friends, not the public. Of course, under an American moral definition of privacy, if you tell something to one person ever, it's as public as if you bought billboards across the country. And if you're tricked into releasing something to the public, say by a company which fails to properly advise you when you attempt to share things with your friends but actually publish them to the wider Internet, you have no recourse, legal or moral.
My take on Thiel is that he sees himself trying to help navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. On one side, I think he agrees that too much surveillance and data gathering is a problem. He calls himself a libertarian, after all. He just sees the other side as being just as much of a problem, as in this quote (mostly relating to his involvement in Palantir):
"As a libertarian, I don't think we should have had the response [to 9/11] we did to those buildings blowing up. But all the mass movements, all the consciousness-raising in the world did not stop us from getting the Patriot Act. The ACLU is always good at talking about civil rights, but [despite that] once something happens, protections go out the window right way. I think there's something to be said for trying to figure out some ways to stop another attack which will be used to curtail civil liberties even more. A company like Paypal could not get started in the post-PatriotAct world, because we would be accused of money laundering [based on how we operated] in '98-'99..." (from a discussion with David Graeber hosted by The Baffler, Fall 2014)
And therein lies the heart of the phenomenon. Much evil has been done by good people telling themselves that they can prevent evil by wielding evil's power themselves.
Crime can never be totally prevented. Building a tool that attempts to do so will not stop politicians clamoring for even more totalitarianism when the inevitable does happen.
I have a hard time taking his libertarianism as anything other than a cynical maneuver to clear the way for corporate autocracy. He writes manifestos arguing against democracy, sits on the board of not one, but two private surveillance firms, and wrote a book about how the best business to be in is monopolies. It's like some negative image of Leninism, where the vanguard party is venture capitalists so the revolution is sabotaged before it begins
Pah, if facebook is under federal supervision, it's probably ultimately because they weren't friendly enough to government. That Thiel is on its board isn't in itself especially damning of him.
Far worse, then, that he founded surveillance industry contractor Palantir.
Thiel "acknowledges" this, though. That puts in him in the same boat as Soros, who is also good at "acknowledging" the paradoxes of his position even as he instructs governments, in private, exactly which people they should send out to handle a particular situation.
Intercept is billionaire-funded, too - and Greenwald has written at length about "what's wrong with the media" - most of which I agree with, by the way. We won't get away from the billionaires and their meddling. The best we can hope for is that they're stronger when they're right than when they're wrong.
That posting people's private sex tapes is not OK, is one of the ways Thiel is right.
It's bad in many ways he doesn't elucidate. For instance, in a world where your last shreds of privacy can be obliterated by Gawker or Buzzfeed the moment you catch public attention, there will be some winners, and some losers.
Women, on the whole, will lose, because it seems fewer women are willing to sacrifice privacy for power. Gays will lose slightly, because they have more to lose from catching public attention (not so true in the US anymore, fortunately, but still very true in many countries).
Who are the winners?
First, those who can pay an army of publicity experts, and have had it for years to keep an iron grip on their public perception, so that all embarrassments and scandals (real and manufactured) can be managed most efficiently. And, who have very few ambitions or opinions not conductive to seeking power. In short career politicians.
The second type is people who just have no sense of shame, whose egos are so big they can just shrug it all off. Reality TV stars, or something.
I’m glad that an arena full of Republicans
stood up to applaud when I said I was proud
to be gay, because gay pride shouldn’t be a
partisan issue. All people deserve respect,
and nobody’s sexuality should be made a
public fixation.
From the 2016 party platform[1] of that arena full of Republicans[2]:
In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers
robbed 320 million Americans of their
legitimate constitutional authority
to define marriage as the union of
one man and one woman.
And, to the people who will say 'Obergefell is simply antithetical to Republicans because it's a states' rights issue,' you're not fooling anyone.
----
[1] "A party platform is sometimes referred to as a manifesto[1] or a political platform. Research on American politics suggests that platform positions offer an important clue to the policies that U.S. parties will enact." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_platform
Why exactly do you think those two positions are necessarily in opposition? You can be proudly gay while still believing that 'marriage' is only between men and women. AFAIK this is a pretty common belief among those who are both Christian and gay.
> You can be proudly gay while still believing that 'marriage' is only between men and women. AFAIK this is a pretty common belief among those who are both Christian and gay.
Is there any reason to believe this is a common alignment of views? While I haven't seen things broken out at that detail level (e.g., gay marriage views of gay Christians), in general, belief that society should accept homosexuality tracks pretty well with belief that gay marriage should be allowed; I'd be very surprised if, even among, say, Evangelicals (the Christian religious subgroup polling shows most opposed to gay marriage), the share of that population that is gay isn't mostly part of the 27% (from Pew earlier this year [0]) of that group that says that gay marriage should be accepted.
The post I was responding to claimed a belief that it was a common view among gay Christians; I was asking whether there were facts on which that belief was grounded.
That's a good point – I was just going off of public figures who have stated similar views. I'd like to see that data actually. I know a grand total of one evangelical and maybe 5 non-agnostic Christians, so I can't say for sure what the set of 'gay Christians' believe. Maybe that speaks to a larger problem?
It's perfectly possible to believe that society should accept homosexuality and also be against gay marriage. It's a complex issue. 'Marriage' is a religious ceremony, and freedom of religion and association is a thing. If the Christians don't want to let the gays join their club and do their funny little ceremony, then so be it. Any change needs to be driven by the Pope and the church itself, not enforced by the state.
That is completely distinct from the concept of a legal union as defined by the state, which should be available to all consenting adults. Hell, as a mathematical type myself, if you can get it working in 2 dimensions you should be able to generalize to n dimensions, so why not legalize a union between any n consenting sentient beings while we're at it?
The bigger mystery is why any non-christian gay people would care...?? If you're not Christian, you shouldn't care about a religious 'marriage', only civil unions. If you are Christian, you should take it up with your Church and work on change from within. I mean how is it going to work? If you're a Christian gay and you feel hurt and not included because your faith denies you the right to a religious marriage, are you really going to feel any more included when the state kicks the door down and forces them to accept you? They have to decide to accept you on their own.
"Marriage" had been the English name for the civil unions as well as the religious unions for much longer than the modern separation of Church and State changed those into distinct institutions with the same name.
"Civil union" as an institution name was created in the US for the separate-but-notionally-equal state law institution adopted in some areas while denying civil marriage to same-sex partners.
For what it's worth, I don't think the government should be involved in marriage in any way, shape, or form. States should issue civil union licenses, IRS 1040 forms should refer to one's civil partner, and medical decisions should be deferred to one's civil partner. In that model, a marriage would be a purely symbolic act between you, your partner, and whatever higher power you believe in. Not the state.
Also, out of curiosity, which of the many biblical models of marriage do you subscribe to?
The religious mindset fosters all kinds of cognitive dissonance.
"Sure the GOP will accept us -- as long as we keep a low profile, don't call them on their open bigotry, and don't ask for too much in the way of actual rights" being just another recent manifestation.
>And, to the people who will say 'Obergefell is simply antithetical to Republicans because it's a states' rights issue,' you're not fooling anyone.
You shouldn't just dismiss the most important argument with a snarky comment. The federal government's powers are enumerated and very clearly do not include marriage. If you believe that the primary role of legal marriage in a society is to encourage child-rearing in stable homes, then it's a totally logical position to believe that there is no Equal Protection violation that would warrant the intrusion of the federal courts into a state matter. (edit: Because the professional offense-takers are apparently on the prowl, let me clarify: I am referring to the raising of children by their biological parents. Yes, research proves that gay couples are just as good at raising children as straight couples, which is another reason why I support gay marriage. I'm explaining the legal reasoning argued by one of the parties in the case.)
Now of course, the only reason that there was a legal case to begin with is because some states didn't recognize gay marriage. But believe it or not, American political parties do not represent totally coherent strains of thought. The two-party system requires both parties to be big tents that accommodate different interests. The Republican party is an overlapping and often uneasy alliance between evangelicals, social conservatives, libertarians, defense hawks, and nationalists. There are plenty of Republicans who support gay marriage, plenty who don't, and plenty who don't care.
One data point: I consider myself a Republican and I support gay marriage. I actually agree with the court's decision as well. I know many people who share my political affiliation and feel the same way.
As an aside, marriage law is so broken that I'm surprised anyone, gay or straight, even wants to have a legal marriage.
If you believe that the primary role of legal marriage
in a society is to encourage child-rearing in stable
homes, then it's a totally logical position to believe
that there is no Equal Protection violation that would
warrant the intrusion of the federal courts into a
state matter.
Just to make sure I'm clear, you're not implying that gay couples are incapable of rearing children in stable homes, right?
The child-rearing argument is completely broken. If it was true, then marriage of divorced or widowed senior citizens would be forbidden.
>Just to make sure I'm clear, you're not implying that gay couples are incapable of rearing children in stable homes, right?
I am not implying that. Did you even read the rest of my comment? Do you really think that this "gotcha! you're a bigot" game is a good way to have a frank conversation? It's really one of the most toxic elements of American politics.
I'm not trying to play a gotcha game. I was asking a very genuine question because I know there are in fact lots of people in this country (and world) who believe just that. I was also trying to be charitable, assuming I had misunderstood you, and was seeking clarification before saying anything else.
I love how he's trying to make his personal vendetta against Gawker Nobel, by trying to dub the IPPA as "the Gawker Bill."
From https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/peter-thiel-gawker-new-... :
"It's the Intimate Privacy Protection Act or IPPA," a spokesperson for Rep. Jackie Speier, one of the bill's sponsors, told BuzzFeed News. "I have no idea where 'the Gawker Bill' name comes from, but it's incorrect."
Seeing Hulk Hogan force Gawker into bankruptcy has been so satisfying. After all the sanctimonious nattering after the huge iCloud celebrity nudes leak, and then all the hand-wringing while Gawker gets punished for getting waist deep in the exact same thing has been galling. But after dozens of think-pieces about the troubling implications, bankruptcy court grinds on, impervious.
As far as he being the investor in Facebook which uses your data to advertise to you - You actually agree to Facebook's terms when you sign up for it! In case of Gawker, it was someone who was feeding on destroying the private life of people in order to sell ads.
* Whether this sets a precedent or not - That is another question and can be resolved in future. That does not mean we should support a publication which is just gossiping about the private life of a person.
I mean the lawsuit with Hulk Hogan. Gawker published a sex tape of Hulk Hogan.
Now Gawker has been slapped with a penalty by the court in that case. It is not Peter Thiel who is collecting the penalty using a gun. Clearly since the court has decided at this level, the courts think that Gawker's action is against law. Of course courts could be wrong and Gawker could appeal to higher courts. But since I have limited knowledge of law, I definitely think I know less than the current level of court and hence think that Gawker was breaking the law by publishing the private sex tape of Hulk Hogan in order to sell advertising.
Except that the incident was found to be newsworthy and not illegal in two previous cases, once in federal court and another attempt in Florida state court [1].
Shopping for a favorable venue, and convincing one jury in a civil case does not make for a very compelling argument of "illegality."
Those are both decisions regarding preliminary injunctions, so your claim that they were found "not illegal" is erroneous. It's explained pretty clearly in the short paragraphs you linked to.
Fair to say, but I believe they were testing the waters again and again just to find a venue that was favorable, undermining whatever notion the original commenter was attempting to conjure about the definitive nature of legality here.
If the legality of a case like this is also supposed as a proxy for the (universal) morality of the verdict and the arguments Thiel likes to make about Gawker's journalistic sins it certainly seems like a federal suit would have been a more appropriate arena for proving the point.
The fact that Thiel is still involved with Y Combinator should tell you everything you need to know about the disingenuity of their "commitment" to equality and diversity.
Does tolerance mean no Republicans/Libertarians allowed in any of our social/work circles? Is that where we're going as Democrats? If so I will be putting the Kool Aid down and jumping off the wagon at the next stop.
Yes, it appears to me to be increasingly popular among liberals (esp. among the younger generation) to use any tactic they can to silence, ostracize, and censor dissenting opinions.
It also seems to me that this has the effect of driving moderates to the right.
Implying that objections to Trump's narcissism and probable sociopathy amount to "culture war" is a staggering re-framing of reality. That combined with the gay-conservative-Christian thing suggest that the amount of cognitive dissonance Thiel can endure must truly be Olympic calibre.
I didn't know the term either, so thanks for digging it up. I'm close to, but not quite a psychiatrist, so I think I squeak through on a technicality :)
Implying that objections to Trump's narcissism and probable sociopathy amount to "culture war" is a staggering re-framing of reality.
How about this? The degree of disconnect between the lower middle-class and below versus the upper middle class and ruling economic elites in the US has become a rift large enough to drive a semi-truck through. So how were we surprised when in comes Donald Trump's semi-sized narcissism and sociopathy?
The thing to ask yourself, as a member of the educated elite from either the left or right side of the political spectrum in the US: Have I understood and served all of those who have lost ground economically, or only "my side" while declaring the "other side" to be somehow unworthy and deficient? Trump and Sanders both demonstrate that for many in the US, the answer is the 2nd choice!
Accusations of cognitive dissonance are fruitless – there's a sizable block of 'gay conservative Christians' who probably think that you're experiencing cognitive dissonance and that their beliefs make sens given their worldview.
I'm sure that's true about many, perhaps most gay conservative Christians. But Thiel is demonstrably a smart, capable, and educated person, which makes it all the more impressive that his worldview can apparently accommodate what amounts to wizardry, manifested through a dizzying array of fables whose magical interpretation violate both common sense and Occam's razor to a degree I can hardly begin to express.
I can understand how this system of beliefs could seamlessly cohere in the minds of children or proto-humans. Thiel, and the rare others like him, are harder to fathom.
It's not so hard to fathom if you abandon the mistaken idea that intelligence is a scalar value. Thiel's capacity to reason and function might be genius in some ways and crippled in others. This idea is most evident when you consider idiot savants (I'm not implying Theil is one).
The "culture war" is this idea that just because we are gay we're supposed to be democrats.
But you're ignoring that Hillary Clinton was campaigning against gay marriage from 1991-2013, basically up until the Supreme Court made the issue moot. It was Bill Clinton, with 3/4 of Congressional Democrats support who signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 -- the last year I considered my self a Democrat.
Not everyone who is a republican is a christian. I happen to be an atheist libertarian.
Putting me in box, labelling it and then insisting that I must be experiencing "cognitive dissonance" if I'm not a democrat is ... not exactly a rational argument.
I keep seeing "cognitive dissonance" used in this way, and I think it's incorrect. Cognitive dissonance is not holding opposing views simultaneously. It's having a anxiety because of it.
Although your usage could be taken in that way, I'd wonder why you think he experiences any cognitive dissonance at all.
The dissonance construct is not only about anxiety; it's about structural inconsistency that manifests in a variety of ways, the best known of which is probably anxiety. It's actually a very deep idea that goes to the heart of representation, decision making, and cognition more generally.
if we're talking about free speech here. gawker did not do anything illegal to out peter thiel. a shitty thing to do? yes. illegal? no.
so essentially thiel planned revenge because they did something shitty and he did not like it. again pretty shitty of gawker to out him, also pretty shitty of thiel to chill free speech.
not sure there are any real winners to root for here. bringing down gawker did bring down a lot of the satellite sites that were actually doing really good reporting. very few sports websites were talking at all about the sexual assaults going on in colleges, deadspin (a gawker blog) was probably the foremost site posting about it (and other violations by schools).
I am free to speak but not free to incite illegal acts or acts that result in violence..for example I cannot shot fire in a crowed theater..its NOT FREE SPEECH.
The court ruling stated it was not protected free speech..read it
what does any of that have to do with any of this case? did any of this incite illegal acts or acts that resulted in violence? no. that part of your post has zero relevance to either my post or to the current situation (did someone kill someone? did someone make someone cause someone else to commit an illegal act?)
i said outing peter thiel is not illegal. and in fact the supreme court has ruled that reporting facts is permissible. _but_ it is a really shitty thing to out people.
and the saying is "falsely shout fire in a crowded theater" not just "shout fire in a crowded theater" read up son.
you should also read up because that saying is not "law" and the court case that it originated from was overturned because of its gross ignorance of the first amendment. read up son x2.
>i said outing peter thiel is not illegal. and in fact the supreme court has ruled that reporting facts is permissible. _but_ it is a really shitty thing to out people.
What does this have to do with the case? The case is about a sex tape not outing thiel.
the reason he helped hulk hogan was because gawker, "outed" him about 9 years ago. this article is not about the gawker case. it is... i don't know, thiel gloating? trying to deflect any criticism? trying to continue to punish gawker by posting this article the day before final bids for gawker are being accepted?
Gawker obtained a sex recording and published it without consent of the people in it. That's what was presented at trial and the jury ruled it was an invasion of privacy.
It's that act (and very poor representation of themselves at trial) that has landed Gawker in the position they are in now.
>very few sports websites were talking at all about the sexual assaults going on in colleges
Here's something to consider: a lot of that is sensationalized yellow journalism as well. They take surveys that include behavior that is usually handled at the social level (e.g. guy goes in for a kiss and girl doesn't want it) and count it as part of the headline "Sexual Assault" figure. In the most technical and pedantic sense they are correct, but no victim would ever file that complaint, no prosecutor would ever bring that charge, and no jury would ever convict on it. i.e. Most of the "sexual assaults" that are counted in those statistics wouldn't even be considered as such by the alleged victim. That's not to say that there aren't real sexual assaults that happen at colleges, but it's nothing like the sensational statistics that journalists like to throw around.
Look at what Rolling Stone did to a bunch of innocent young men at the University of Virginia when one of their reporters went "looking for a rape story". Any reputable journalist knows that if you walk around soliciting sensational stories, someone will tell you one. Ultimately, it was all proven false, but it no doubt ruined several totally innocent people. Rolling Stone and the particular journalist are now being deservedly sued for over $30 million. Free speech is not license to spread lies or to intrude into people's personal lives. Political and religious speech is very protected, but there are many reasonable limits on everything else.
from your comment i know you've never read anything on deadspin.
> Here's something to consider: a lot of that is sensationalized yellow journalism as well. They take surveys that include behavior that is usually handled at the social level (e.g. guy goes in for a kiss and girl doesn't want it) and count it as part of the headline "Sexual Assault" figure. In the most technical and pedantic sense they are correct, but no victim would ever file that complaint, no prosecutor would ever bring that charge, and no jury would ever convict on it. i.e. Most of the sexual assaults that count in those statistics wouldn't even be considered as such by the alleged victim.
i mean if you're going to say this at least have something that backs this up.
but regardless, feel free to read the articles themselves and decide for yourself their merit:
I suspect you are confused about the facts of the case – specifically, this has nothing to do with Peter Thiel's outing and everything to do with the fact that Gawker released Hulk Hogan's sex tape to the public and a court found that to be an unethical violation of privacy.
i'm not confused. i am discussing the hypocrisy of thiel saying he's about protecting free speech when the thing he was originally angry about (his being outed) was free speech. he doesn't give a shit about hulk hogan or his privacy being violated. all he wanted was a legally winnable case to get at gawker.
so to say he still supports free speech is laughable when the origin of his "fight" was something that was legally free speech.
Gawker's outing was free speech. Peter Thiel giving money to Hulk Hogan to fight his legal battle was also free speech. There's nothing hypocritical about wanting to protect free speech, yet disliking someone's specific use of free speech.
the hypocrisy is in saying, hey i still believe in free speech, while punishing free speech because he doesn't like what was said. that just means he's all for speech that doesn't affect his bottom line.
Except he's not suppressing dissenting opinions or hushing up stories about his wrongdoings.
He is going after them for outing him as gay. Gawker does this to people as a matter of policy. This policy has lead to people committing suicide, they have fired reporters who disagreed with it. It is a legal policy, they have the right to do this. You can find cases where doing it isn't that unreasonable. A politician with an awful record on gay rights gets caught with a male prostitute, that's news worthy. It is a matter the public has an interest in.
A VC being gay? Why say anything. It's just cruel tabloid gossip.
i am against outing people. gawker's policy of outing people, at best, is terrible. saying people being outed could cause them to commit suicide is true.
but
> He is going after them for outing him as gay. Gawker does this to people as a matter of policy. This policy has lead to people committing suicide, they have fired reporters who disagreed with it.
you're going to have to cite any firing. there have been resignations because nick denton took down an article about a conde nast executive who was gay and the editors disagreed with the article takedown. no one (afaik) was fired. they resigned because their article got taken down. also saying gawker outs being as a matter of policy... what.
also let's talk about thiel's outing. thiel was a huge investor in facebook, therefore he is a public figure. and is it really an out-of-the-closet "outing" if nearly everyone who worked with thiel knew, and told that to people outside of thiel's general circle? you think the author of the story dug through thiel's trash to find out that he was gay? it was pretty much common knowledge regardless of what thiel's dislike of talking about it.
and imo he is suppressing dissenting opinions. cross peter thiel and you better prepare to go through a legal battle for it even if what was said was not libel.
"A politician with an awful record on gay rights gets caught with a male prostitute, that's news worthy. It is a matter the public has an interest in.
A VC being gay? Why say anything. It's just cruel tabloid gossip."
Apropos of anything else and the merits thereof, the courts have held that billionaires are public figures whether they particularly wish to be or not because of the disproportionate level of influence they wield or are capable of wielding.
This has nothing to do with online privacy or the internet, stills and transcripts could have just as easily been published in the Enquirer (where they probably would have been protected), and an article outing somebody could have been in print anywhere. This "Gawker Law", has little or nothing to do with the Gawker-Hogan case. In the courts, the privacy of public figures has always been dealt with differently; if anything, this law will blur that distinction, and you won't be able to publish things about your Senator that you wouldn't be able to publish about your ex-wife.
Also, it's another sex law. If anything, the publication of the video without the consent of the people who made it was a copyright violation, and we already have laws for that that levy tens of thousands of dollars in fines on private citizens for republishing an albumful of music to dozens of people. Peter Thiel is a terrible person who made his entire fortune from knowing the right rich people at the right time. I hope he doesn't find somebody who thinks I may have slandered them in the mid-90s and finance a normally hopeless legal case in order to make sure that nobody who has less than a billion dollars in the bank says anything he doesn't like about him, or anyone he likes, or anyone he may be considering doing business with, ever again. We can call it the Peter Thiel Line of No Good Reason.
In Hulk Hogan's sex tape he goes off on a racist rant. That's the reason the WWE fired him. I'm glad my kids won't be exposed to that racist and I'm thankful for Gawker's public services on that issue.
Also, Hogan was never going to earn $140million for the rest of his life. That judgment was ridiculous.
If a conservative site was outing gays on a regular basis it would have been shut down long ago. But liberal sites outing gay conservatives is considered totally acceptable and even commendable in today's society. Thus the vitriol towards Thiel.
I posted a link to the "Revenge Porn" bill, incase anyone wants to talk about the topic at hand instead of Peter Thiel. The bill is actually a pretty significant one with some big implications for service providers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12295410
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadI don't agree with Thiel on a lot of things but on this one I see his point.
Can you elaborate on that? What crime are you referring to where the victim's gender is significant?
The tension between privacy and speech is a discussion that needs to be had. Litigating it in a Pinellas County courtroom is an odd way to go about having that debate.
Thiel has now demonstrated that those with deep enough pockets can now use the courts to exact revenge in a roundabout way. Yes, Gawker is tawdry but one can't help pondering a chilling effect here on more worthy stories. Were I a journalist, I'd certainly think twice now of pursuing an investigative piece that might offend a billionaire, given that my own financial livelihood could become fair game.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3488027/Gawker-edito...
We don’t have to accept or excuse Gawker’s worst stories to protest Thiel’s dangerous playbook for attacks on institutions of civil society.
Why is funding a case related to a cause you support a perversion of the justice system? Every time an article about the EFF funding another lawsuit pops up do you cringe in horror?
As far as gender goes, one only has to consider that if the rule is going to be "Public figure + sexual aspect to the person's persona (e.g. Hogan talking about sex on Stern) = unlimited right to broadcast sexual material", then no porn star ever has the right to private sex again. Since that is clearly unacceptable, the error must be with the proposed rule.
He vehemently defended his friend's right to yell "Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!" outside an instructor's residence. As he explains in his book, "His demonstration directly challenged one of the most fundamental taboos: To suggest a correlation between homosexual acts and AIDS implies that one of the multiculturalists’ favorite lifestyles is more prone to contracting the disease and that not all lifestyles are equally desirable."
How can someone be so radically opposed to encroachments on free speech, and yet so quick to quietly fund lawsuits against those who criticize you?
> He vehemently defended his friend's right to yell "Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!"
He's gay.
This all started because Gawker outed him years ago.
It appears that we're starting to conflate protected free speech with invasions of privacy. It's not immediately clear that shouting "Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!" falls into the latter category, so I don't really see how that's relevant.
It's certainly possible that someone hearing someone yell "Faggot!" could construe that to mean a foul pejorative. That's wholly different Gawker's type of privacy invasion(s) that explicitly seek to convey, without doubt, someone's private sexual orientation.
I don't see the equivalence.
Well, no, the person who made the tape (not the "star"(s)) absolutely gave "permission". He sent the tape to Gawker himself.
Guess what? He was sued, and Hogan settled with him. For $5,000.
It's not relevant that the "director", if you will, sent the tape to Gawker.
I also think it's noteworthy that the fact that the person who actually breached Hogan's -trust- was "punished" so lightly (granted, he settled, but I wonder how much Hogan would have settled with Gawker for, with and without Thiel's involvement).
> I am proud to have contributed financial support to his case. I will support him until his final victory — Gawker said it intends to appeal — and I would gladly support someone else in the same position.
> A free press is vital for public debate. Since sensitive information can sometimes be publicly relevant, exercising judgment is always part of the journalist’s profession. It’s not for me to draw the line
So this makes me think that, if Peter Thiel considers a journalist's particular article morally wrong, he will help the supposed victim to sue them. In the case of Gawker it's hard to say Gawker was innocent but at the same time what if the next case is something more grey? Peter says he wants a free press but it sounds more to me like he wants a free press by his own judgement.
I'm not a fan of Gawker at all but having a billionaire bankroll lawsuits against publications when his opinion is that they're doing something morally wrong...worries me that it'll stifle.
He took the opportunity to get even when they went too far with someone else. Good for him. He's not taking part to cover up anything, or for revenge because they exposed some wrongdoing on his part. He's doing it because Gawker is a trashy worthless site.
Far as I know they outed him as a homosexual. That's not wrongdoing on his part.
thiel saying he is defending free speech is disingenuous when the supreme court has given the press considerable latitude to write about someone's sexual orientation. he is mad about something that was completely legal for gawker to do.
now it is a really shitty thing to do to out someone as gay. but let's not pretend this wasn't thiel's payback.
> 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. - Nick Denton's comment in original Thiel is gay article on Gawker [0] http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people?c...
It's absolutely payback, I'm saying I don't have a problem wiht it. I think gawker is getting exactly what they deserve.
Thiel/Hogan had to go and prove their argument in court. Do you not trust the court system to preserve free speech?
Does this argument apply to everyone, or just billionaires who actually have the resources to fight against trash like Gawker?
Bankrolling a plaintiff going up against a financially inferior defendant means that the plaintiff's argument may be framed more convincingly than the defendant's. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the jury opted to imperil Gawker's free speech; juries are even more susceptible to impassioned pleas to "think about the real victim" than a judge.
The main issue for me is that Thiel opted to use another case to exact his revenge against a media company, rather than his own. He made Hogan the instrument for his revenge. Sure, Gawker is a pox, but its right to be a pox should be defended with the same fervor with which Thiel's vengeance was exacted. It wasn't. It couldn't have been. That's why it's generally seen as a bad thing when someone an order of magnitude (or more) more wealthy than a defendant puts their money behind a plaintiff when the case isn't about the financier to begin with.
I see why Thiel is a self-styled privacy champion - the crux of his revenge scheme, after all, is that his privacy was violated. But, to me, it seems like a hypocritical assertion; why didn't he take Gawker down for violating his privacy? Did he not think a jury would be enamored enough with him?
The case stinks all over. It's bad for everyone involved. Thiel loses credibility as a champion of privacy, Gawker is on its way out, and Hulk Hogan's own private escapades were paraded out to the public. The whole mess is toxic.
cool. just don't say you (thiel) advocate for free speech when you do that.
Valuable, classy publications who adopt the proper fellatory posture toward their betters have nothing to fear whatsoever.
So if Thiel was a democrat then none of this would be a problem?
Who was the plaintiff? Hillary Clinton.
And what was she seeking to accomplish? Prevent the release of a movie which criticized her political career.
Very little, actually, because Supreme Court case title orders don't tell you who the plaintiff vs. defendant is, they tell you who filed the appeal from the case below. (However, it does tell you that Hillary Clinton wasn't the plaintiff, since she is neither "Citizens United" nor the "Federal Election Commission".)
However, in this case, the plaintiff below was the appellant, so...
Peter Thiel intend to be untouchable. He proposes blood transfusions from young people [1], and wants to live forever.
I daresay his entire motive seems at odds with social contract.
My Google-fu is failing me on the exact link (can someone help?), but Marc Andreessen once penned some breathless, excited editorial about "the future of media", and at one point he talked about the editorial/advertising firewall as a relic that needed to be abandoned. It was so slickly inserted that you could almost forget what he was really saying: that news desks need to be prevented from reporting things that companies rather they didn't.
Every time a VC tries to tell me "what's wrong with the media", I reach for my gun. Everyone: they're not your friends. They're not trying to help you. Their overriding concern is nurturing the value of their investments, and that sometimes means silencing people who report inconvenient truths.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agrees...
(reposted from other submission)
In real life the content of an argument isn't the only think that matters. The motives of the arguer are also important -- what they're trying to achieve/sell by using it etc.
That's because people don't only offer their arguments to have other people discuss them and assess their merits, but also to use them to influence people towards other stuff, often unrelated to the argument.
E.g. "listen how right and eloquently I speak in favor of privacy -- and thus forgive my enormous contribution to privacy violations, or the fact that I killed an online outlet out of spite".
>The fact that I state 10 wrong facts about bananas does not mean that the next fact I state is wrong
No, but it means that pragmatic persons with limited time spans should do better than spend time listening you on bananas -- and thus are more right than wrong to dismiss anything else you have to offer beforehand.
Sure, they might commit to a false negative this way, but it's statistically more likely that they wont (and being quick and mostly right to access stuff is more important than being 100% right but slow, again for people with limited life spans).
Besides a hypocrisy charge is not the same as a "he is wrong" charge.
This is why ad hominem is a fallacy. It provides zero evidence for or against an argument. It's completely orthogonal.
I'm not suggesting you "answer back" anything -- I'm suggesting that you should check if the person praising something has hidden motives.
In fact, I'm saying something even more obvious: if a person praises something, and they don't seem particularly fond of having it or practicing it, then be suspicious.
As for selling something, it is already a great motive to make people lie and present the facts in a distorted way, withhold precious information, etc about a product. It happens EVERY single day in millions of stores, showrooms, ads, etc.
If you are only trying to evaluate the product based on what the seller tells you, you'll be duped. Even if it's 100% true in itself.
>It provides zero evidence for or against an argument. It's completely orthogonal.
Arguments in real life do not live in some platonic ideal sphere, isolated from everything else.
They intermingle with all kinds of "completely orthogonal" things.
Sometimes, judging the person making the argument, and their motives, is even more important (and insightful) than judging the argument.
I never advised that, but nice strawman. I advised to evaluate the arguments on their own ground. This AC is efficient and will save you money -- that is something you can independently verify, if it's important to you to do so. And if you're buying an AC and you care about efficiency, that seems like the type of thing you should care to do.
That doesn't mean that you should automatically distrust a salesman. It also doesn't mean you should trust them, though apparently that's a dichotomy that exists for you. It's a null input -- there's zero actionable information if what you care about is buying an efficient AC.
> Sometimes, judging the person making the argument, and their motives, is even more important (and insightful) than judging the argument.
That's fine... If your goal is to gain insight into a person and their motives. If your goal is to judge their argument, then it's absolute and complete fallacy.
Another AC might be just as efficient. Or maybe I just don't even need an AC and while the numbers are all true, they're overselling the benefits. Merely finding out whether a particular model they're trying to sell me is as efficient as they say doesn't help me evaluate their suggestion in the broader context.
>That doesn't mean that you should automatically distrust a salesman. It also doesn't mean you should trust them, though apparently that's a dichotomy that exists for you. It's a null input -- there's zero actionable information if what you care about is buying an efficient AC.
I'm not sure how we got to the salesmen example.
The example I initially gave was about distrusting people that say "X is good for you", but do not follow X themselves -- and about distrusting X for that.
Whereas distrusting doesn't mean "X is thus bad, period", means "you should better investigate X, something seems fishy".
No, it doesn't. OTOH, a logical fallacy isn't something that means that the conclusion that flows from it is wrong, or even that the fallacy doesn't provide a useful pragmatic filter given limited resources to devote to fully evaluating arguments.
Strictly, the fallacy involved is tu quoque -- if it is used to rebut the argument which is inconsistent with the persons behavior -- not ad hominem. They are related, but distinct.
Although I suppose if one took the route of:
You could actually make an ad hominem out of the accusation of hypocrisy.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Tu_quoque
An ad-hominen would be: "what he says is wrong because he is stupid/bribed/corrupt/a hypocrite" etc.
Saying: "What he says is hypocritical" is not an ad-hominem - it's not an argument on the content or the man, but the relation between the two (what he says and what he does).
And nobody said otherwise -- for the core argument.
But in real life we don't usually know whether the thing (let's call it A) itself that an argument tries to prove is true.
We only know that the argument in favor of A is formulated correctly (follows its premises correctly, etc).
Regarding A though, there might be other premises we haven't checked (and weren't mentioned in the argument), other facts that invalidate it, etc.
Thus it is enlightening to know if an argument for A is being made hypocritically, to evaluate the possibility of A being true in a wider context.
E.g. if I say "A is good for everybody, for X,Y,Z reasons" and I do the opposite of A, then the possibility of A really being good for everybody is somewhat lessened by the prior that "the person proposing A does not follow A".
This is because:
a) nothing guarantees that X,Y,Z (the things mentioned in the argument) are enough to prove that A is good for everybody.
b) the fact that someone proposes A but does the opposite, adds credence to the possibility that there are benefits from NOT following A.
Heck, even if the argument is that "A is good for you for X,Y,Z" and it's correct, someone that knows X,Y,Z (since he put forth the argument) but does not follow A, might know something like A+ or B that's even better, and tries to sell me short.
That sounds like logic, but it makes much less sense than it sounds. So you're saying it's good to examine the hypocrisy of someone's argument, because of the possibility that there's contradictory facts or implications that the arguer is holding back on us? Not only is that also ad-hominem it's a fuzzy half-logical ad-hominem.
Yes.
>Not only is that also ad-hominem it's a fuzzy half-logical ad-hominem.
It's also correct, and a pragmatic way to find hidden motives in real life.
You're contradicting yourself right here, in a way that seems to indicate that you don't understand the important difference between these two circumstances.
Something that's pragmatic is merely mostly correct or most of the time correct. One could say the same thing about racial stereotypes in the US -- which is to say that heuristics shouldn't be treated as an argument. It's only at best a starting point. Quitting at that point is the worst kind of mental laziness.
I would say it's a fallacy to harp on logical fallacies; it's not as if everyone has infinite time to convert all arguments to syllogisms. The common list of logical fallacies entered Western culture from the ancient Greeks but shouldn't be taken with religious fervor.
I'm just convinced coldtea is wrong. The fallacious use of logical fallacies has taken over far too much of public debate.
The common list of logical fallacies entered Western culture from the ancient Greeks but shouldn't be taken with religious fervor.
Sure. Let's apply them with logic.
"It's good for you to not smoke. Now excuse me while I take my smoke break."
That what I said doesn't always hold?
Of course it doesn't.
That's why I wrote about possibilities, and only said that the prior that the person preaching X doesn't follow X "somewhat lessens" the possibility that X is true.
I never said that someone "preaching X and doing the opposite" proves that X is not true.
If I had said that, your example would be a valid refutation. But I haven't, and it's only attacking a straw man.
Besides, the only reason that your example case seems obviously wrong to you is because you're taking as a given what you are supposed: you already know that smoking is bad.
If you didn't, and someone said to you "smoking is bad for you", while he himself was smoking, you would be justifiably suspicious to consider whether it's not actually bad, and the other person is lying or hiding something from you (e.g. to keep all the cigarettes for himself).
The correct answer is to independently validate the claims, or evaluate the merits of an argument on their own ground. That's tedious and often not worth the effort, and that's OK. We use heuristics all the time -- you don't ask your friend for his proof, because you use the heuristic of trust instead. But at least acknowledge that it's a heuristic and stop trying to claim it as a solution.
Simply playing the "ad hominem" card is not a free pass for the opinions of crackpots to be given equal weight.
Again, assuming FB and Gawker have the same privacy issues, what you point doesn't really matter.
FB's decisions might be influenced by more than just Thiel, but if Thiel feels strongly about privacy (and his views aren't heard on FB) he always has the option of selling his stock and leaving FB...
They're not comparable. You give information willingly to Facebook and accept their terms of service. I know plenty of very social and successful people who don't use Facebook. Maybe you feel that there should still be additional regulations on Facebook; fine, that's a debate for another day. But it's very clearly different than a "journalist" prying into your private life against your will to produce a sensationalist and embarrassing article that does nothing to serve the public interest.
Sure -- I agree that they're not comparable (that said, I don't necessarily agree that FB is better than Gawker privacy wise just because it's a different model. In fact I believe the opposite -- and don't particularly care for the "volunteer" part. People volunteer to all kinds of societal harmful stuff).
But my argument above checks to see the validity of the parent's comment after "assuming that they're comparable".
Frankly, I think that's just naivety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
I don't use their service that much so I might have missed it, did Facebook add an update that forces people to post their private data?
--
I'm going to steal this line. Great post.
"As an internet entrepreneur myself, I feel partly responsible for a world in which private information can be instantly broadcast to the whole planet."
This article is as much an apology as it is a call to turn things around fix things
Theils crusade against gawker killed what I think was a shitty trade rag focused on gossip, at a very steep price. Too much in my opinion.
I had trouble taking his speech at the RNC seriously.
I deeply respected him, probably naively, and I still do; just in a much more narrow context. His intellect and knowledge of technology and macrotrends is amazing, however I find his philosophy in contrast with some of his actions
"One start would be to tear down, or at least modify the “Chinese wall” between content and the business side. No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works."
[1] http://a16z.com/2014/02/25/future-of-news-business/
For example, it's entirely possible that Peter Thiel is part of a losing faction of the board that values more privacy, and has actually been a force for the better with regard to privacy at Facebook? Is that likely? I have no idea, but it's supported by just as much evidence as you put forth.
Keep in mind, by the logic you've used so far, if we ignore the voting history of congress, then every congressperson must obviously have been in favor of invading Iraq, since that's what the US did.
Note: If you take this as a defense of Peter Thiel you've entirely missed the point. I have no evidence as to how Peter Thiel truly feels about privacy in general, and more importantly that's irrelevant to the point I'm making.
If you're on the losing faction on a corporate board that decides that the best option is to poison the city water supply, and your mournfully cash the checks, you are just as guilty as the winning faction.
Is it? What do you think does more to further the cause and draw awareness, a no vote that doesn't matter and gets no attention or news articles Peter Thiel resigns Facebook board seat over moral objections to FB Privacy Policy?
There's a place for grand gestures. Giving away real, tangible power, even if unable to be expressed most of the time, in lieu of increasing awareness about an issue that everyone already knows about is not what I consider a smart move. To have any gain, it would at least need to increase awareness of the issue. I'm not sure that's even relevant in this case, given the widespread public acknowledgement and numerous media outlets addressing the issue already.
You should choose an example that wouldn't lead the executives being personally attacked by prosecutors:
* An oil spill killing ocean wildlife and damaging the look of a beautiful beach.
* A soda company deciding whether to put 10% more sugar in their sodas to increase sales, even though they know its likely to kill statistical thousands of people.
* A manufacturing company moving to China, pressuring local workers into working long hours in poor working conditions and polluting their country.
I believe none of these is a crime, and I wouldn't argue that someone who voted against these should resign from the board rather than help execute on a decision they oppose.
Do you have a better example?
How so? I think I'm being very clear. If you make assertions, you should support them. I do not take at face value that being on the board of Facebook precludes you from caring about privacy. If there is specific evidence as to his actions apart from that, it should be presented. None was.
> The moral calculus of renouncing your massive profit-making association with a company that you serve on the board of if it chooses to do things that you find morally unacceptable is trivial
It is only trivial in the renouncement is morally unambiguous, it is not trivially acceptable that the opposite is true. I submit that it's entirely possible to remain in a position of some power of an organization that is working counter to what you believe is right. In the simplest case, to change that organization. To reject that would be reject the core tenets of democracy, which requires you to participate in a system you may find has resulted in morally reprehensible actions to bring about change and prevent future occurrences of those actions. A board of directors is fundamentally a very democratic form of governance (in that like the United States, the representatives are often elected so it is democratic in its republicness).
> If you're on the losing faction on a corporate board that decides that the best option is to poison the city water supply, and your mournfully cash the checks, you are just as guilty as the winning faction.
But that's not what's going on here. The equivalent here would be if there was a long standing plan to legally dump poison into the water. Feel free to renounce your board membership. The people that are poisoned in the future will feel so much better that you took an ineffectual moral stand rather than alternate action that might have yielded real change.
There is no difference in this than legislative powers. Money and power are interchangeable, to a degree. Should our legislators resign over voted directions of government they do not agree with? They are, be nature of their positions, benefiting from the increase in power and influence the decision may grant them if it increases the standing of the US (but at the cost of the world as a whole).
So, the be absolutely clear, I believe there exists the possibility to have non-controlling power in an organization that you feel is taking morally reprehensible actions, and believe that the most beneficial action to address this is to continue with your position and work to change the organization. To assert Peter Thiel is exhibiting "sheer cynical audacity" and hope that people aren't "dumb enough to fall for this" purely by his association with the board of Facebook without addressing this is not worthy of taking seriously.
Taking your legislation example, a privacy-minded person investing in Facebook would not just like be a legislator disagreeing with a decision, it'd be like a self-proclaimed anarchist pushing for a more powerful government.
Sure, it's possible that Thiel has been a silently pushing for pivoting to eg a subscription model or static banner ads. It's just not likely.
Thiel founded Palantir.
The sex tape would be considered private.
Presumably he draws his line somewhere between those two extremes.
Has he done anything inconsistent with the position "The paparazzi should not write scandalous articles about famous people"? For example, has he invested in companies similar to Gawker? If not, I don't see any real conflict in his position.
Gawker dug his own grave but Thiel is a disgusting hypocrite. I hope the history will remember this man that way. And no, not because of Trump.
"As a libertarian, I don't think we should have had the response [to 9/11] we did to those buildings blowing up. But all the mass movements, all the consciousness-raising in the world did not stop us from getting the Patriot Act. The ACLU is always good at talking about civil rights, but [despite that] once something happens, protections go out the window right way. I think there's something to be said for trying to figure out some ways to stop another attack which will be used to curtail civil liberties even more. A company like Paypal could not get started in the post-PatriotAct world, because we would be accused of money laundering [based on how we operated] in '98-'99..." (from a discussion with David Graeber hosted by The Baffler, Fall 2014)
Crime can never be totally prevented. Building a tool that attempts to do so will not stop politicians clamoring for even more totalitarianism when the inevitable does happen.
Far worse, then, that he founded surveillance industry contractor Palantir.
Thiel "acknowledges" this, though. That puts in him in the same boat as Soros, who is also good at "acknowledging" the paradoxes of his position even as he instructs governments, in private, exactly which people they should send out to handle a particular situation.
Intercept is billionaire-funded, too - and Greenwald has written at length about "what's wrong with the media" - most of which I agree with, by the way. We won't get away from the billionaires and their meddling. The best we can hope for is that they're stronger when they're right than when they're wrong.
That posting people's private sex tapes is not OK, is one of the ways Thiel is right.
It's bad in many ways he doesn't elucidate. For instance, in a world where your last shreds of privacy can be obliterated by Gawker or Buzzfeed the moment you catch public attention, there will be some winners, and some losers.
Women, on the whole, will lose, because it seems fewer women are willing to sacrifice privacy for power. Gays will lose slightly, because they have more to lose from catching public attention (not so true in the US anymore, fortunately, but still very true in many countries).
Who are the winners?
First, those who can pay an army of publicity experts, and have had it for years to keep an iron grip on their public perception, so that all embarrassments and scandals (real and manufactured) can be managed most efficiently. And, who have very few ambitions or opinions not conductive to seeking power. In short career politicians.
The second type is people who just have no sense of shame, whose egos are so big they can just shrug it all off. Reality TV stars, or something.
----
[1] "A party platform is sometimes referred to as a manifesto[1] or a political platform. Research on American politics suggests that platform positions offer an important clue to the policies that U.S. parties will enact." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_platform
[2] https://prod-static-ngop-pbl.s3.amazonaws.com/media/document...
Is there any reason to believe this is a common alignment of views? While I haven't seen things broken out at that detail level (e.g., gay marriage views of gay Christians), in general, belief that society should accept homosexuality tracks pretty well with belief that gay marriage should be allowed; I'd be very surprised if, even among, say, Evangelicals (the Christian religious subgroup polling shows most opposed to gay marriage), the share of that population that is gay isn't mostly part of the 27% (from Pew earlier this year [0]) of that group that says that gay marriage should be accepted.
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/05/12/support-stea...
Why does it have to be common? I wouldn't consider it to be a valid position, but I would find it plausible that some people would think so.
The post I was responding to claimed a belief that it was a common view among gay Christians; I was asking whether there were facts on which that belief was grounded.
That is completely distinct from the concept of a legal union as defined by the state, which should be available to all consenting adults. Hell, as a mathematical type myself, if you can get it working in 2 dimensions you should be able to generalize to n dimensions, so why not legalize a union between any n consenting sentient beings while we're at it?
The bigger mystery is why any non-christian gay people would care...?? If you're not Christian, you shouldn't care about a religious 'marriage', only civil unions. If you are Christian, you should take it up with your Church and work on change from within. I mean how is it going to work? If you're a Christian gay and you feel hurt and not included because your faith denies you the right to a religious marriage, are you really going to feel any more included when the state kicks the door down and forces them to accept you? They have to decide to accept you on their own.
I just don't get the whole issue.
"Civil union" as an institution name was created in the US for the separate-but-notionally-equal state law institution adopted in some areas while denying civil marriage to same-sex partners.
For what it's worth, I don't think the government should be involved in marriage in any way, shape, or form. States should issue civil union licenses, IRS 1040 forms should refer to one's civil partner, and medical decisions should be deferred to one's civil partner. In that model, a marriage would be a purely symbolic act between you, your partner, and whatever higher power you believe in. Not the state.
Also, out of curiosity, which of the many biblical models of marriage do you subscribe to?
Hell, even the Ancient Greeks didn't practice gay marriage (as far as I know!)
"Sure the GOP will accept us -- as long as we keep a low profile, don't call them on their open bigotry, and don't ask for too much in the way of actual rights" being just another recent manifestation.
Citation?
You shouldn't just dismiss the most important argument with a snarky comment. The federal government's powers are enumerated and very clearly do not include marriage. If you believe that the primary role of legal marriage in a society is to encourage child-rearing in stable homes, then it's a totally logical position to believe that there is no Equal Protection violation that would warrant the intrusion of the federal courts into a state matter. (edit: Because the professional offense-takers are apparently on the prowl, let me clarify: I am referring to the raising of children by their biological parents. Yes, research proves that gay couples are just as good at raising children as straight couples, which is another reason why I support gay marriage. I'm explaining the legal reasoning argued by one of the parties in the case.)
Now of course, the only reason that there was a legal case to begin with is because some states didn't recognize gay marriage. But believe it or not, American political parties do not represent totally coherent strains of thought. The two-party system requires both parties to be big tents that accommodate different interests. The Republican party is an overlapping and often uneasy alliance between evangelicals, social conservatives, libertarians, defense hawks, and nationalists. There are plenty of Republicans who support gay marriage, plenty who don't, and plenty who don't care.
One data point: I consider myself a Republican and I support gay marriage. I actually agree with the court's decision as well. I know many people who share my political affiliation and feel the same way.
As an aside, marriage law is so broken that I'm surprised anyone, gay or straight, even wants to have a legal marriage.
The child-rearing argument is completely broken. If it was true, then marriage of divorced or widowed senior citizens would be forbidden.
I am not implying that. Did you even read the rest of my comment? Do you really think that this "gotcha! you're a bigot" game is a good way to have a frank conversation? It's really one of the most toxic elements of American politics.
From https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/peter-thiel-gawker-new-... : "It's the Intimate Privacy Protection Act or IPPA," a spokesperson for Rep. Jackie Speier, one of the bill's sponsors, told BuzzFeed News. "I have no idea where 'the Gawker Bill' name comes from, but it's incorrect."
Many people committed suicides because of the way Gawker brought their private life in public. http://www.vox.com/2015/7/17/8992155/gawker-outing-gay-peopl...
As far as he being the investor in Facebook which uses your data to advertise to you - You actually agree to Facebook's terms when you sign up for it! In case of Gawker, it was someone who was feeding on destroying the private life of people in order to sell ads.
* Whether this sets a precedent or not - That is another question and can be resolved in future. That does not mean we should support a publication which is just gossiping about the private life of a person.
I didn't follow the case. What did Gawker do that was illegal?
Now Gawker has been slapped with a penalty by the court in that case. It is not Peter Thiel who is collecting the penalty using a gun. Clearly since the court has decided at this level, the courts think that Gawker's action is against law. Of course courts could be wrong and Gawker could appeal to higher courts. But since I have limited knowledge of law, I definitely think I know less than the current level of court and hence think that Gawker was breaking the law by publishing the private sex tape of Hulk Hogan in order to sell advertising.
Shopping for a favorable venue, and convincing one jury in a civil case does not make for a very compelling argument of "illegality."
[1] https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/hogan-v...
kinda makes this whole thing even more of a shit storm.
If the legality of a case like this is also supposed as a proxy for the (universal) morality of the verdict and the arguments Thiel likes to make about Gawker's journalistic sins it certainly seems like a federal suit would have been a more appropriate arena for proving the point.
It also seems to me that this has the effect of driving moderates to the right.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule
How about this? The degree of disconnect between the lower middle-class and below versus the upper middle class and ruling economic elites in the US has become a rift large enough to drive a semi-truck through. So how were we surprised when in comes Donald Trump's semi-sized narcissism and sociopathy?
The thing to ask yourself, as a member of the educated elite from either the left or right side of the political spectrum in the US: Have I understood and served all of those who have lost ground economically, or only "my side" while declaring the "other side" to be somehow unworthy and deficient? Trump and Sanders both demonstrate that for many in the US, the answer is the 2nd choice!
I can understand how this system of beliefs could seamlessly cohere in the minds of children or proto-humans. Thiel, and the rare others like him, are harder to fathom.
But you're ignoring that Hillary Clinton was campaigning against gay marriage from 1991-2013, basically up until the Supreme Court made the issue moot. It was Bill Clinton, with 3/4 of Congressional Democrats support who signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 -- the last year I considered my self a Democrat.
Not everyone who is a republican is a christian. I happen to be an atheist libertarian.
Putting me in box, labelling it and then insisting that I must be experiencing "cognitive dissonance" if I'm not a democrat is ... not exactly a rational argument.
Although your usage could be taken in that way, I'd wonder why you think he experiences any cognitive dissonance at all.
so essentially thiel planned revenge because they did something shitty and he did not like it. again pretty shitty of gawker to out him, also pretty shitty of thiel to chill free speech.
not sure there are any real winners to root for here. bringing down gawker did bring down a lot of the satellite sites that were actually doing really good reporting. very few sports websites were talking at all about the sexual assaults going on in colleges, deadspin (a gawker blog) was probably the foremost site posting about it (and other violations by schools).
I am free to speak but not free to incite illegal acts or acts that result in violence..for example I cannot shot fire in a crowed theater..its NOT FREE SPEECH.
The court ruling stated it was not protected free speech..read it
i said outing peter thiel is not illegal. and in fact the supreme court has ruled that reporting facts is permissible. _but_ it is a really shitty thing to out people.
and the saying is "falsely shout fire in a crowded theater" not just "shout fire in a crowded theater" read up son.
you should also read up because that saying is not "law" and the court case that it originated from was overturned because of its gross ignorance of the first amendment. read up son x2.
What does this have to do with the case? The case is about a sex tape not outing thiel.
It's that act (and very poor representation of themselves at trial) that has landed Gawker in the position they are in now.
Here's something to consider: a lot of that is sensationalized yellow journalism as well. They take surveys that include behavior that is usually handled at the social level (e.g. guy goes in for a kiss and girl doesn't want it) and count it as part of the headline "Sexual Assault" figure. In the most technical and pedantic sense they are correct, but no victim would ever file that complaint, no prosecutor would ever bring that charge, and no jury would ever convict on it. i.e. Most of the "sexual assaults" that are counted in those statistics wouldn't even be considered as such by the alleged victim. That's not to say that there aren't real sexual assaults that happen at colleges, but it's nothing like the sensational statistics that journalists like to throw around.
Look at what Rolling Stone did to a bunch of innocent young men at the University of Virginia when one of their reporters went "looking for a rape story". Any reputable journalist knows that if you walk around soliciting sensational stories, someone will tell you one. Ultimately, it was all proven false, but it no doubt ruined several totally innocent people. Rolling Stone and the particular journalist are now being deservedly sued for over $30 million. Free speech is not license to spread lies or to intrude into people's personal lives. Political and religious speech is very protected, but there are many reasonable limits on everything else.
> Here's something to consider: a lot of that is sensationalized yellow journalism as well. They take surveys that include behavior that is usually handled at the social level (e.g. guy goes in for a kiss and girl doesn't want it) and count it as part of the headline "Sexual Assault" figure. In the most technical and pedantic sense they are correct, but no victim would ever file that complaint, no prosecutor would ever bring that charge, and no jury would ever convict on it. i.e. Most of the sexual assaults that count in those statistics wouldn't even be considered as such by the alleged victim.
i mean if you're going to say this at least have something that backs this up.
but regardless, feel free to read the articles themselves and decide for yourself their merit:
Florida Hired Football Booster To Oversee Hearing For Player Accused Of Sexual Assault: http://deadspin.com/florida-hired-football-booster-to-overse...
Or better yet, just read the entire saga about Baylor: http://deadspin.com/tag/baylor-bears
so to say he still supports free speech is laughable when the origin of his "fight" was something that was legally free speech.
https://xkcd.com/1357/
Gawker's outing was free speech. Peter Thiel giving money to Hulk Hogan to fight his legal battle was also free speech. There's nothing hypocritical about wanting to protect free speech, yet disliking someone's specific use of free speech.
He is going after them for outing him as gay. Gawker does this to people as a matter of policy. This policy has lead to people committing suicide, they have fired reporters who disagreed with it. It is a legal policy, they have the right to do this. You can find cases where doing it isn't that unreasonable. A politician with an awful record on gay rights gets caught with a male prostitute, that's news worthy. It is a matter the public has an interest in.
A VC being gay? Why say anything. It's just cruel tabloid gossip.
but
> He is going after them for outing him as gay. Gawker does this to people as a matter of policy. This policy has lead to people committing suicide, they have fired reporters who disagreed with it.
you're going to have to cite any firing. there have been resignations because nick denton took down an article about a conde nast executive who was gay and the editors disagreed with the article takedown. no one (afaik) was fired. they resigned because their article got taken down. also saying gawker outs being as a matter of policy... what.
also let's talk about thiel's outing. thiel was a huge investor in facebook, therefore he is a public figure. and is it really an out-of-the-closet "outing" if nearly everyone who worked with thiel knew, and told that to people outside of thiel's general circle? you think the author of the story dug through thiel's trash to find out that he was gay? it was pretty much common knowledge regardless of what thiel's dislike of talking about it.
and imo he is suppressing dissenting opinions. cross peter thiel and you better prepare to go through a legal battle for it even if what was said was not libel.
Apropos of anything else and the merits thereof, the courts have held that billionaires are public figures whether they particularly wish to be or not because of the disproportionate level of influence they wield or are capable of wielding.
Also, it's another sex law. If anything, the publication of the video without the consent of the people who made it was a copyright violation, and we already have laws for that that levy tens of thousands of dollars in fines on private citizens for republishing an albumful of music to dozens of people. Peter Thiel is a terrible person who made his entire fortune from knowing the right rich people at the right time. I hope he doesn't find somebody who thinks I may have slandered them in the mid-90s and finance a normally hopeless legal case in order to make sure that nobody who has less than a billion dollars in the bank says anything he doesn't like about him, or anyone he likes, or anyone he may be considering doing business with, ever again. We can call it the Peter Thiel Line of No Good Reason.
Also, Hogan was never going to earn $140million for the rest of his life. That judgment was ridiculous.