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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

> Thiel's reporting to the FBI was largely limited to foreign contacts and attempts by foreign governments to penetrate Silicon Valley. Thiel has publicly called on the FBI to investigate Google's ties to the Chinese government.

Seems like a lot of words to leave this comment buried in the middle of. The story seems like a soup of hopeful political operators trying to sow chaos, and since they're all on the same side, the publisher is happy to oblige. Talking to the IC at all gives them the unlimited option to call you an informant if you ever get involved in something counter-establishment anyway.

One gets the impression that part of America's new class system is whether you are connected to the intelligence community somehow, as if you have a certain level of responsibility at all, someone who knows someone always seems to be in touch or within a degree of separation.

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Yikes is that really an "FBI informant"?

It sounds logical, consider this news item from yesterday: "Five Eyes intel chiefs warn China's IP theft program now at 'unprecedented' levels"

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/18/five_eyes_china_espio...

Should people here really just accept other nations blatantly stealing and "infiltrating"?

> Yikes is that really an "FBI informant"?

It pretty much is a textbook definition of an FBI informant. I think the issue is people seem to put some kind of moral value on the term.

People (rightly or wrongly) still conflate todays FBI, with Hoovers FBI of 50 years ago, and the tactics he used then.

Should people here really just accept any nations blatantly stealing and "infiltrating"?

You conveniently left out the first part of the sentence you are quoting

Full sentence: "Johnson, who said that he was also an informant for Buma, told Insider that he believes that Thiel's reporting to the FBI was largely limited to foreign contacts and attempts by foreign governments to penetrate Silicon Valley. Thiel has publicly called on the FBI to investigate Google's ties to the Chinese government."

Can you please make the point you were trying to make more explicit? I don't understand your perspective on the impact of what was omitted.

> Thiel has publicly called on the FBI to investigate Google's ties to the Chinese government.

"Thiel has publicly called on the FBI to investigate a company that several of his compete with, using information he is giving the FBI himself..."

That sounds like if I called the police to report something I think isva robbery, now I'm "police informant"? That's not usually what it means.

And it’s working like a charm. Look at half the comments here who didn’t read the article and go off on an anti-libertarian tangent.

Anything posted here about thiel or musk (especially musk) is bound to be full of useless comments that boil down to nothing more than "i don't like him." It doesn't matter what the article is about, if the headline can be used to justify that dislike, those will be the majority of the comments.

Musk, Thiel, Zukerberg, Larry Ellison and their respective company along with Qualcomm. To the point for a number of years ycombinator wouldn't even mention Thiel or Musk at all. Things only got back a little easier in the past 12 months or so.

Frankly a good number of those same people have ideological compasses that spin at a high rate of speed. People think they're punching up so mocking a gay man who just got outted for retribution as a CHS informant on global news doesn't register to them.

While I don't think that his status as an informant is particularly newsworthy, think it is nasty for this article to be published and in fact would praise his patriotism, they don't think they are punching up, they are punching up.

Beyond being a gay man who got outed as a confidential source, Thiel is also one of the most powerful people in the world. He is a billionaire who bankrolled multiple people's campaigns for federal office in the last few years. Your average HN commenter does not approach that level of power and influence and never will.

The problem I see is that these people think that "telling" on criminals and international intelligence operations is wrong, for some reason. That's weird and really negative for our country.

The kind of mental arm wrestling you just engaged in to explain that point is why "punching up", which usually involves some amount of drift from norms and ethics, is problematic. The people willing to engage in that and who think doing patriotic duty is a problem is a near circle.

> The kind of mental arm wrestling you just engaged in to explain that point

What arm wrestling? It's pretty simple: anyone "taking shots" at him on Hacker News is definitionally punching-up because Thiel has more power and privilege than anyone here, power and privilege he routinely exercises on local and national stages. I don't have any issue with his actions working with the FBI here for what it's worth.

It's the timing. There's a time for rife comments aimed at Peter Thiel; I have plenty of those. As I put it before, when a gay man is outted in explicitly stated retributive fashion for being a CHS informant for doing his duty as a defense contractor it starts to color the people who are doing the punching. The whole situation should give us pause, not the reflex to punch someone.

Nobody gives a shit about the fact that Peter Thiel is gay.

It's the palling around with fascists and having massive reach into the political and defense spheres that makes people dislike him.

And let’s be honest about Thiel. He was in the glass closet. Literally everyone in SV knew he was gay. He didn’t hide it. He just didn’t want it published so he could more easily raise money from Mohammed Bonesaw al-Saud.

Then again, since when MBS care about staying in anyone’s good graces?

If Alex Jones was in the news for carrying someone out of a burning building, I'd be acknowledging his good work while continuing to "punch up" on him due to his behavior that seemingly seeks to destroy civilized society (an exaggeration, but not a wild one). Someone doesn't get a free pass from earned mockery on an article-by-article basis, Thiel's civic duty to the FBI in this instance isn't some temporary hall pass for his tangible support for fascistic policies and politicians.

That's he gay is only relevant to you in this conversation, the person critiquing the critique. Why does that somehow give him extra victim status? Thiel is not subject to the power or cultural dynamics individuals in marginalized groups often are. He's being treated like Charles Koch would be were he to do the same thing - that's equality, baby.

"punching up", which usually involves some amount of drift from norms and ethics

what

'Punching down' is fits that description, as it's slang for taking easy shots at weaker people or those who can't fight back. How does criticizing someone in a greater position of power involve drift from ethics?

Because it implies that the metaphorical 'violence' against people you consider 'up' is morally justified, which it is not. It is merely ideologically justified, in some limited circles.

Oh, you're not allowed to express abstract opposition to people in positions of power now? Nonsense. American political language is awash in fighting metaphors. One of Thiel's more famous investment, Anduril, is named after a fictional sword; if he gets to invoke the idea of weapons then you have no standing to complain about other people's rhetorical selections.

If you are looking for something to get upset about, try looking at people who send non-metaphorical threats of violence to librarians, schools, and the like on the regular.

> The problem I see is that these people think that "telling" on criminals and international intelligence operations is wrong, for some reason. That's weird and really negative for our country.

If you think it's weird, you must have grown up very sheltered. Every child knows what happens to snitches. It was common practice to punish both the offender and the tattletale when I was growing up, because "nobody likes a snitch". The vast majority of the population has the same or similar cultural context here.

So the vast majority of the population didn't used to have the same context, not regarding international espionage and serious crimes. Not telling a teacher? Sure. Ragging on someone for telling the FBI about a murder? No.

"Snitches get stitches" works for perpetuating a gang's control through violence but doesn't really help people in a community. It's a terrible norm.

> People think they're punching up so mocking a gay man who just got outted for retribution as a CHS informant on global news doesn't register to them.

What on earth has Thiel's sexuality got to do with this?

And the whole trope about Gawker "outting" Thiel has to stop:

1. Don't want to be "outed" as gay? Perhaps don't fill your social media with pictures of you partying on gay cruises.

2. Whether you agree or not, billionaires are considered public figures by the courts, because of their "outsize influence on public opinion and politics".

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