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Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This is being very economical with the facts.
Gawker outed Thiel as gay against his wishes. And while the guy was in Saudi Arabia. Then they published a revenge porn tape of Hulk Hogan, which is what Thiel used to get them.
https://medium.com/@owenthomas/gawker-peter-thiel-and-me-f80...
Free press is already under attack in so many countries, it is dangerous that now a single rich guy can weaponize his unlimited resources to wage legal war over his own personal vendettas because his ego got hurt.
It's not like Saudi Arabia cares whether some billionaire Western businessman is gay or not. They also don't care that he's a bigot and an Islamophobe, and he doesn't care that they are Arab, outwardly Muslim, or any other thing he detests. They all worship money.
All of these people really deserve each other.
Edit: also for bonus points, him getting outed in such a dangerous place is ironic as all hell, given that he didn't need to be there apart from wanting money out of the Saudi royal family.
Like I wouldn't want to be outed while there either, but my answer is I wouldn't fucking go to Saudi Arabia with a gun to my head, and I certainly wouldn't be sucking up to the crown prince for m(b?)illions of dollars for my disinformation machine. But I guess principles are for the poors.
Didn't Gawker publish an illegally obtained sex tape of Hogan and refused to take it down even after a court order?
Summary:
- first publisher said: you can't publish this b/c you could go to prison and we could get in trouble financially
- second publisher: you are going to publish this. If you go to prison, we will support your family financially for the entire time you are in prison. If you lose your house, we will buy them a new house.
You can read about it here: https://tim.blog/2021/06/30/michael-pollan-this-is-your-mind...
People talk a LOT about defending free speech but this story has always stuck out to me as what that really means.
Minor pedantic correction: same publisher, different lawyer
edit - kind of curious why this was flagged and removed?
Bravo. That's the way to approach this. Let thousands of such courts of public opinion bloom, with competing epistemic standards. We should definitely be experimenting with all different forms of truth seeking, and there's a great new toolbox to build them with, combined with infinite social forms.
I can't think of anything more valuable to humanity than making even modest progress on the process of separating fact from fiction. We should be cheerleading attempts, however goofy.
No one in their right mind is going to do anything other than ignore and/or delete an email this stupid.
Remember, Thiel and Musk are both immigrants.
The U.S. legal system is very often a war of attrition. One side can relentlessly sue until the other side is broke, or just threaten. This is the basis of many plea deals, or worse, in the case of Aaron Swartz.
Billionaires seem to like it.
Bad people can do good things.
Evaluate the things, you may do so being aware of their provenance, but if you use that as the starting point of your conclusion then you are just asking for your biases to be confirmed.
There does need to be a higher form of journalistic accountability. If Thiel, or any other person on the planet, proposed a fair mechanism that was free from influence, I would support it.
For this I don't neet to know who is behind it, I need to know what its goals are, how it operates, and how does it maintain integrity.
Certainly coming from an odius person increases the chance it will not measure up, but for fucks sake, at least do the measuring.
PolyMarket and Kalshi are sort of doing that, you could say, adjudication is a valuable service for gambling.
I've always thought that the chatbots were much better judges than lawyers. Some real US courts are adopting chatbots for clerical tasks. Hard to say if you can directly sell the services of judging in a general sense, seemingly the only way that is done is for gambling.
separately, @dang, is it possible to just cut out the vamping about anything at the top level that isn't really about what is being written
@dang does nothing, email the mods if it's something you care about. Downvoting and flagging are the usual ways to deal with off-topic discussions, though the mods do occasionally create a "stub for off-topicness" and move comments under an auto-collapsed comment of theirs. Again, though, @dang won't reach him, email the mods.
>“It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
>Among other criticisms, D’Souza dismisses the value of anonymous sources, believing they are discrediting, no matter the justification