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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing to see how the left latched onto this as a "billionaire buys lawsuit" narrative, as opposed to the much more accurate "shitty darling of the left that habitually engaged in abuse got its comeuppance" narrative.

Gawker repeatedly, knowingly, unabashedly, broke the law. They repeatedly, knowingly, unabashedly, tried to ruin innocent people's lives. They absolutely deserve everything that happened to them and more. Thiel is a goddamned hero for the part he played.

Edit:

>Also. This has nothing to do with left v. right.

Only people on the left believe this. GawkMedia was loathed by the right as pretty much the worst example of how bad leftist media could get. Trust me, we were all popping champagne and lighting off fireworks when we got the news on this side of the aisle.

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Darling of the left? Is that really how Denton has been described? I don't know anyone -- left or right -- who thinks Denton is anything more than a scumbag.

Not Gawker directly, but Gawker Media is certainly a darling of certain (unkind) parts of the left. Jezebel is a Gawker label, and it's been top source for share-on-Facebook level left-journalism for years.

> They repeatedly, knowingly, unabashedly, tried to ruin innocent people's lives.

Can you actually prove that anyone's life was ruined?

They mostly "reported" on sex tapes and other weird stuff, like the origins of Trump's hair. And my opinion, as I can imagine 99,9% of others, about Hogan's wrestling persona or skills has nothing to do with his out of wedlock shenanigans.

And if you see a 140MM win from a lawsuit for Hogan as a form of ruining someone's life, then by all means please have someone ruin my life the same way!!!

They released the list of all NY gun owners, complete with their addresses. Some people had gotten their guns as a measure against their stalkers, which now had their legal addresses. This also increased the risk of the relevant houses being hit by thieves, who could then use their new illegal guns for crime purposes.

The primary event for "ruining lives" is the gay rival CEO Denton outed (who was married to a woman), not Hogan.

That's "a life", not "lives". Anyone else?

Justine Sacco, Greg Gopman

Not sure where this "darling of the left" thing is coming from. Disliking both Gawker and Thiel is one thing that can unite us all.

> Disliking both Gawker and Thiel is one thing that can unite us all.

Speak for yourself. I've nothing but respect for Thiel.

For what, his libertarian values? While backing Palantir and engaging in stuff like this?

the use of civil courts is a libertarian value

> and engaging in stuff like this?

Only the left has a problem with his support of Hogan, because it was an attack on your tribe. Stop assuming the rest of us share your outrage. We don't. Thiel essentially insured Hogan's lawsuit, so that Hogan could proceed without fear of losing millions in legal costs. That's it. Billionaire swoops in and enables aggrieved party to sue evil corporation for abominable behaviour. It's practically an Erin Brockovich story.

Buddy. Give the 'the left' stuff a rest. We're talking about a libertarian going way out of his way to attack a (horrible, tabloid) press organization here. Same guy bankrolled/backed one of the biggest private enablers of security state overreach in the country. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy.

Also, as far as you deciding what 'the left' thinks and then feeling superior to them for it.. I mean, whatever floats your boat, but it's not exactly the path to enlightenment.

whoa, lets not equate spying on people to release their secrets publicly for ad revenue with secretly spying on people to maintain a status quo of peace. without defending the security industrial complex, we can pretty much all agree that unconsentualy publishing private sex tapes for money is a different type of moral turpitude than big brother.

i dont think hypocrisy is the right word

also the 'left' has Soros, who has more power than Thiel... not a peep about that, too

There is a subset of the left that absolutely loved Gawker.

A subset and some very well-to-do SV personalities who should have no tangible connection to Gawker but seemingly are much invested in its future, hmmmm?

With good fortune it should end in a battle of fisticuffs.

I don't think anyone, left-or-right thinks of Denton as anything except a gossip peddler.

It is hard to judge, but the divisions in this case don't appear to be right vs left. It seems to me it has more been aligned with people's views on a right to free speech vs a right to privacy. There seem to have been plenty on the right who think that the right to free speech should have trumped the right to privacy in this case.

I would agree that left vs right isn't the best way to categorize the disagreements here, but I think its understandable that some people might think that 'the left' was championing Gawker. There were quite a few low brow leftist media outlets who jumped to Gawkers defense and tried to demonize Thiel.

>quite a few low brow leftist media outlets

maybe a better explanation is that "aggregators" republish whatever is outrageous and visible that day. the "news" is an echo chamber of people that spend their day surfing reddit and ending their contributions to the fourth estate with h/t

Yeah, you might be right. Maybe there should be third axis in the left/right divide? Left|right|stupid.

Not disagreeing with your points on Gawker's despicable behavior, but this doesn't answer the question of how the damages were calculated. It also doesn't address the precedent issue, beyond voicing support for exacting revenge as justified.

What precedent, exactly? That doing illegal things is still illegal, even if you're a journalist? Or that you can get sued into oblivion, which could and did happen before this case?

I believe the precedent the GP was referring to, to which the parent was replying—and to whom I replied—is a billionaire using the legal system and a case to which he's not a party to seek revenge by bankrolling that case. I see no one disputing the legitimacy of suing Gawker or defending Gawker's disgusting and illegal behavior.

You realize that this is the same mechanism used by groups like the EFF, ACLU, and NAACP to bring cases? And what about a lawyer agreeing to take a case on contingency; isn't that technically the lawyer funding the case, and not the plaintiff?

Also, what is the alternative here? Sure, Hogan maybe has enough money that he could have funded the case. Could Joe Smith working his 9-to-5 have funded that case? If not, how is he supposed to get justice, if this exact situation happens to him? Money is already a problem in court, isn't restricting the funding sources of the common person therefore a negative outcome?

Finally, this was discussed the last time this case came up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11878742

I'm not sure why you've decided to argue with me. You seem to have erroneously concluded I have some issue here for you to fix. The GP is the person who had questions. I merely replied to someone who made a fairly combative and unnecessarily political reply to point out the GP's concerns were in no way addressed—such is the way of political rants.

Sorry; I assumed that by replying to you and you replying to me that we were entering into a conversation. I am attempting to address your interpretation of the concerns raised by GP. Replying to your interpretation of the concerns seems like a natural place to do that.

As it is, your reply here was not really necessary.

they probably calculated the valuation of Gawker and then added some extra. 'pain and suffering' 'damage to Hogan's brand and earning power' In some instances the judge will reduce it. This time they didn't.

Hopefully the GP who asked sees this. Seems a sensible enough explanation of the "how" asked for.

>Also. This has nothing to do with left v. right.

Only people on the left believe this.

I suspect this was before they learned that Thiel would be speaking at the Republican Convention.

> They repeatedly, knowingly, unabashedly, tried to ruin innocent people's lives

Others might simply call that reporting.

Is this some sort of gamergate leakage, that makes Gawker "left" because they are united with Kotaku, who gamergate hates, and social-justice fighers hate gamergate, and social-justic fighters are "left", so Gawker is "left"?

Gawker Media, along with Vice, Salon, Vox, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, etc., are left wing online publications. It has nothing to with GamerGate. It would take some impressive sophistry to claim they're not left wing, just as it would take quite some sophistry to claim Breitbart, Daily Wire, National Review, etc weren't right wing.

Well, you could get a little less myopic, zoom out of the purely American perspective where left=Democrat and right=Republican, and see that none of the publications you named are left in any way.

(Vox sometimes has leftists writing for it, but I wouldn't call it left as a whole.)

I mean, you can make the connection way easier via Jezebel, which is an unabashedly left-wing Gawker Media imprint.

Gawker defends progressive ideas and bashes conservative ideas.

Of course in a world where you can get kicked out of your job as a CEO of Mozilla for defending the traditional family, it may look like there's no other option.

Edit:

Lot of words, only to realize I may have misread your post entirely. Redacting.

Pretty much.

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