Billionaire Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker (Report)

jezebel is quite possibly toast, though.

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He is a Menā€™s rights activist.

Thielā€™s rather extreme views might best be captured in an essay he wrote for Cato Unbound in which he described his dismay at women having been given the vote and his hatred of welfare

http://fusion.net/story/301043/donald-trump-peter-thiel-alt-right-heaven/

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What about a shakedown? Does that make Gawker liable? Is it still ā€œjournalismā€?

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Iā€™m not going to define journalism. Stop trying to get me to. Fuck if I know where journalism ends and not journalism starts. Iā€™m just saying, WE NEED TO BE REALLY FUCKING CAREFUL IN HOW WE DEFINE JOURNALISM or else we are going to further fuck up the already fucked up freedom of the press in this country. This conversation is exhausting me, I feel like we are walking in circles, and I am definitely starting to repeat myself. Itā€™s around 11:50 PM here, Iā€™m tired, and I get grumpy and snarky when Iā€™m tired, so ya know what? You win, and Iā€™m going to bed. See yaā€™ll tomorrow, goodbye!

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A jury composed of six good citizens, who are presumably impartial and intimately familiar with the case, strongly disagree with you.

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https://img.pandawhale.com/post-36877-agree-to-disagree-gif-Anchorma-kFLi.gif

Now Iā€™m actually going the fuck to sleep, but feel free to spend the rest of the night responding to my comments here. Or we can just agree to disagree and get back to it tomorrow. You do you boo.

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I do believe in your earlier posts you did just that.

I smell a fallacy. From what I can tell, you are equating what is happening to Gawker (sued because they are stupid and corrupt) with what has happened to The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Washington Post (acquired by rich assholes with an axe to grind). Those strike me as dramatically different topics.

But, maybe not. Would not be the first time I missed the boat.

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As I recall, Gawker didnā€™t publish the sex tape, they They showed one minute and 41 seconds of the tape, which included just nine seconds of sexual content.

Not to say what they did is right (or wrong) but does 1:41 of the tape really rise to a bankrupt-able offense?

Hereā€™s hoping the penalty is made more reasonable on appeal.

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A gay MRAā€¦ Have any of those been spotted in the wild before?

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have you noticed how there arenā€™t any lesbians in the areas that have been gentrified by gay males? or people of color? or trans people? or straight women? obviously there arenā€™t any poor people either. misogyny in the gay male community is very real, and itā€™s not the only problem.

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We have come to the point where any idiot with a WordPress account calls himself a journalist. Bankruptcy cannot be a defense against libel. Moreover, should poverty be a reason to accept being defamed? If I canā€™t afford to sue the NY Times do I surrender my rights?

The Supreme Court ruled that you cannot restrain the press from publishing, the only recourse is litigation that therefore must be ruinous for egregious behavior.

FWIW, Mother Jones claims to have spent millions of dollars defending themselves from a lawsuit that was seeking $75,000 in damages. So, who is abusing the system? It seems to me that deep pocketed media corporations like Mother Jones and Gawker can only be taken on by billionaires. If it werenā€™t for the billionaires who would look out for the little guys?

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Which is the argument par excellence that highlights the problem with liberal tolerance. There shouldnā€™t be any tolerance for fascists, period. Asking where we draw the line at who we donā€™t tolerate is easy because the answer should be: fascists. As a few other countries have done to varying degrees by outlawing fascist parties and certain symbols and speech (like the swastika).

Relying utterly on the idea that we must protect everyone in order to protect anyone is historically incorrect and disempowering, because as a practice it asks us to never organize ourselves, but to rely on ink and paper whose words are written and administered by corrupt elites. It is ultimately the peopleā€™s ability to win and guard its freedoms (like that of speech) through direct action that guarantees the persistence of those freedoms, and failing such self-organization, those freedoms will disintegrate under constant attacks from elite interest groups (including the state itself) even though the laws might say otherwise. Which is why people in the US find themselves in a situation where labor rights, womenā€™s rights, and quality of life are in steep decline, especially for the younger generations.

Regarding Gawker and journalistic media silence, I donā€™t think that this case is as important as people are saying. Itā€™s not as if big outlets arenā€™t already engaged in sanitizing if not outright censoring their stories, for which the NYT has grown famous going a long way back.

Iā€™m reminded of the Slate article several years ago from Glenn Greenwald in which he talks about how the Obama administration uses the word, ā€œmilitant,ā€ to refer to any of-age male killed in a strike zone, and how, more disturbingly, the overwhelming majority of ā€œjournalismā€ outlets simply use the same language without bothering to even acknowledge what is being done either to the dead civilians or to our language. The press are also free to be owned by unscrupulous capitalists who want to be on the good side of those in power because they share the same interests, and to make lots of advertising dollars, so the resulting situation is such that so-called ā€œfreedomā€ of the press yields work that is already ā€œchilledā€ and sanitized in advance.

A spat amongst the rich and powerful shouldnā€™t have any greater effect on corruption, any more or less than Citizens United, often pointed to as a turning point, as though before that things were comparitively great, which they werenā€™t. To me, the greater issue at play in this whole story is the historical amnesia that forms the basis of the liberal position, and how this amnesia feeds into the very same corruption and rot that the liberal position claims to oppose.

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Investing/betting on lawsuits is a pretty old practice that has seen a resurgence lately, and if I was a rich businessman presented with an opportunity to make a pretty sure-fire investment that had the added benefit of totally screwing some people who did the same to me for no good reason, Iā€™d take it.

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You should really watch Hot Coffee (the documentary, not the GTA sex thing) before speaking out in favor of popular tort-reform or damage cap proposals. The film makes some really effective points that I think youā€™d be hard pressed to argue.

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Are you being sarcastic, or is my perception colored by living in SF? Yes, the Castro saw an influx of wealthier white gay men (now in the slow process of being straight-yuppie gentrified, itā€™ll be the West Village in another ten years,) but there are still plenty of lesbians and POCs and transpersons around. The bias in housing is economic, not flagrant bigotry. RuPaul and Laverne Cox can buy a house pretty much anywhere they want to, and their neighbors would be ecstatic about it.

If thereā€™s misogyny in the gay community wrt to, for instance, unflattering drag portrayals of certain female icons ā€“ and thatā€™s a whole can of worms that Iā€™m not at all qualified to open ā€“ itā€™s from a very different place than MRA misogyny.

But again, I acknowledge that I live in a bubble (two, if you count the real estate market! rimshot) and furthermore am observing it from the margins, so YMMV.

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No, thereā€™s no rule that if you own a business in bankruptcy, you canā€™t also own a second business. In fact, thatā€™s the whole point of corporations, to keep things separate. (Well, one of the points.)

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These are not the rights Iā€™m looking for.

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Urgh, this is a tricky one, one where iā€™d be quite happy if both sides lost out :wink:

But if i step back and ignored just who the two sides were exactly, iā€™d side with gawker (ouch) on this.

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once i realized there was a lot of racism and misogyny in some gay neighborhoods, i would sometimes mention it to people. women of color, invariably, were basically like ā€œyeah no shit. are you a moron?ā€ i grew up in columbus ohio, and thereā€™s a documentary about a neighborhood there where realtors are literally going block by block kicking out black families any way they can, to sell to young gay dudes. and you donā€™t want to hear the racial slurs that get tossed around at gay bars in that part of town.

iā€™ve usually lived in the midwest, which is already really segregated - chicago, for example, is the most segregated place iā€™ve ever stepped foot in, and boystown is just full of rich white gay men who donā€™t give a fuck about anyone else, especially women, unless theyā€™re selling coke. it sounds like a stereotype, and that really bums me out. but itā€™s true. like, they really hate women. itā€™s a real culture that exists. it sucks.

edit: that doc is called flag wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Wars

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Requiring a takedown without damages would do little constructive and might actually encourage. Publish whatever you like because the worst thing that may happen is that youā€™re required to unpublish it later? That would be the death of journalism.

Seems to me that there needs to be some manner of accountability beyond, ā€œOur bad.ā€

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