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Comment by NathanKP | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly this is the same guy who felt like he needed to use his billions to take down Gawker because he didn't like what they said about him. Evidently he doesn't care about ad messages on Facebook though as long as it doesn't impact him. Or maybe he thinks is okay because he can always use his money to protect himself. Long story short the Gawker incident just goes to show that Theil has absolutely no moral high ground here and that his reason for supporting these ads has absolutely nothing to do with "free speech" or any other positive moral trope.

Super curious what would happen if someone started an ad campaign on Facebook about Peter Theil though...

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Gawker published a private sex tape (Hulk Hogan's) without permission on the grounds that it is "news" in order to make its publication legal. I can't see how anyone could say Gawker had the moral high ground, they were a despicable organization whose only business model was publishing private information/revenge porn for profit

If you don't support the right of others to say things you don't like then you don't support free speech.

Even libertarians don't often expand free speech to include doxing.

As if a celebrity sex tape is so much worse then attacking the core of democracy by deliberately spreading disinformation.

Thiel doesn't care about Hogan's sex tape. He cares that Gawker outed his sexuality. With Gawker and Facebook he cares about information as it affects him personally.

Right, any talk of principles is a smoke screen, the only thing they care about is power.

The discussion isn't about Hulk Hogan v Gawker, it's Peter Thiel v Gawker, via Hulk Hogan. Thiel funded Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, for personal revenge.

The current societal standard seems to be "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences". I don't think it's possible to give a principled reason why "Peter Thiel funding a lawsuit" (which he won) is bad, but "advocating for someone to be fired for having a wrong/bad opinion" is good.

Personal revenge for outing him as gay while he was physically in Saudi Arabia, IIRC. Which I'd consider to be only half a step down from a murder attempt if it happened to me.

(Of course, I'm not a billionaire, so there's a far higher chance that I'd actually end up dead in such a situation. But still)

It was a business meeting too -- great way of tanking that meeting.

But yeah, being gay in Iran or Saudi has serious consequences. Plus Gawker, posing a progressive media outlet via organs like Jezebel, shouldn't be airing anyone dirty laundry like that -- and then they did, repeatedly.

To be clear I don't think Gawker has the moral high ground either. There is no monopoly here on bad morals. It's possible for Gawker to be an asshole here as well as for Peter Thiel to be an asshole.

I bring it up merely to show that Peter Theil doesn't have any problem censoring stuff he doesn't like. Therefore it is pretty suspicious and two faced when he says he thinks that Facebook shouldn't censor ads.

News organisations should not be legally bound to take the moral high ground.

While we can debate about what they should have done (and I agree with you in this case) it's difficult to write laws to define what constitutes a moral vs immoral publication or what is news-worthy.

Consider what would have happened in they had a Clinton-Lewinsky sex tape. Could they have released that to refute Bill Clinton's denials?

It quickly gets very difficult, and I would rather have a totally free press than one that has to worry about running afoul of moral news laws.

This is also a man who bought a huge remote property in NZ (and went so far as to get NZ citizenship) as insurance in case the world goes to shit.

I've read/seen many interviews with people who've known him in the past and very few people have nice things to say about him as a human being, but all agree he's got a "unique" view of things.

Definitely unique. He is one of the few people today who is openly lamenting that women got the right to vote, because it has led societies to adopt more liberal policies than they otherwise would have, especially in the economic sphere, which he believes has led to less prosperity than if we had more of a free market:

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/492380/

re-read what he says. he says that open rights to women was used by capitalism as a way to reduce the benefits of everyone. which I agree with. Before you could raise a family with one salary. Now it is impossible. that is a fact, liberalism very often uses society revolutions against its own people. it is a nice coverup.

"Before you could raise a family with one salary. Now it is impossible."

Demand and offer. If tomorrow some law allowed a couple to send their cat to work in a mine, our shiny lovely capitalistic system would adapt in a matter of months and we'd find that raising a family would cost what it costs today, plus a cat's salary.

The problem is elsewhere, and Thiel knows perfectly from where it comes.

So if wages are flat or lower after inflation and cost of living adjustments, while profits are increasing, it's because women are working? That sounds unlikely.

I am not saying it is the problem. I am saying we re living in a system that profits from any social evolution and plays it against its people. and that is what Thiel is saying. He never says women are the problem. capitalism is.

Since people always do this when Thiel comes up, here's the actual quote:

>The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

I think what he's lamenting is that women tend to find libertarian policies unappealing, and, judging by who publicly brands themselves as a libertarian, this seems like a fairly uncontroversial observation (there just aren't very many women in that cohort).

That’s basically what I said.

Anyway even Thiel as a “libertarian” is very unique in his thinking. Not many libertarians I know turn around and start companies like Palantir to help governments and police departments build a precog surveillance state. I wonder how he justifies that one given his claims of being libertarian-leaning.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/2/27/17054740/pal...

I disagree with the OP article, I don’t think there is anything AT ALL wrong with Mark Zuckerberg being friends with Republicans. However, the real shame of Mark Z’s association with Peter Thiel is the professional one. Peter was the first check in after Eduardo, $500K. His views would make most capitalists blush, eg “competition is for losers, build a monopoly and extract rents!” He writes as much in his book Zero to One. I bet that had a big effect on what Facebook has become and its view of taking the entire social networking space under itself, and its tactics of taking any data it can and storing it to give itself an advantage (eg in Friends you may Know). Oh sure it may apologize if caught but will continue to store the data.

Mark Z’s earlier attitude of “I dunno why they share the data, those dumb f-cks, they ‘trust me’” found a mentor in Peter Thiel early on to retain that militant guerilla approach even as Facebook had to turn into something more respectable and corporate. “Move fast and break things” gave them all the license they needed.

"many interviews with people who've known him in the past and very few people have nice things to say about him as a human being"

Curious, could you provide some links for this statement?

Things I were exposed on YouTube are mostly positive. That for sure is a echo chamber. And I'll need a bit help to break that.

There’s a decade of articles for you to form an opinion on Peter. Stop getting your information from YouTube.

Could you please provide some links for me to the articles, so that I could start search around?

Look for "dark enlightenment", "Peter Thiel" and read sources and criticism. Don't rely on dedicated subreddits because that's just a positive feedback loop.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/06/peter-thiel.html

The one that stood out most was his comments on Apartheid: https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/my-conversation-with-pete...

It's the attitude that even if the basic economic premise was sound(1), was his hyper focus on it and a complete insensitivity to the greater picture. It's like in his mind he could see how he (being white) could have benefited from it, but couldn't see that millions were victims and those who benefited wouldn't "let" black people be part of it.

If you look at a lot of his controversial comments, you'll see a pattern of a lack of empathy being a theme. Although Thiel denies the conversation happened, I'm giving the woman the benefit of the doubt for now other reason than it fits within other comments that he's either said or alleged to have said.

(1)For the record, I don't at all believe that it was. Apartheid-era South Africa's economy, as even the uninformed know, was built around having the black majority population do the menial/dangerous jobs cheaply and holding up the white minority.

Gawker is in no way a clean publication. They outed him.

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