Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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:
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
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'm going to steal this line. Great post.
(“Wenn ich Kultur höre...entsichere ich meinen Browning!”)
Hanns Johst (1890-1978)
German playwright and Nazi SS officer
"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."
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
I 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.
Also, Hogan was never going to earn $140million for the rest of his life. That judgment was ridiculous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
----
[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.
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.
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.
It also seems to me that this has the effect of driving moderates to the right.
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."