Surveillance is nothing without peripherals. I say, hook the system up to a few thousand of those turrets from Portal.
@mufflebutt, are you new here? That is precisely the purpose of Boing Boing - in fact, I hear they are funded by Putin under orders to destabilize not just the media, but reality itself. In the end, we will each have out own amniotic pod, like in the Matrix, but there will be no shared realtiy, only a billion equally true hallucinations.
Except Nimble America was literally run by the moderators of the_donald and only crashed and burned because the subreddit condemned them for taking money that should be going to Donald Trump’s campaign, because they were bought out by HRC and secretly trying to promote her, and because they were making things too real when everyone was just trolling and having fun.
This is all true, so I wouldn’t object if Cory had written “Palmer Luckey, the guy who founded Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then donated to a non-profit founded by some moderators of the_donald, a subreddit which frequently features racist, far-right memes.”
[quote=“Annatar, post:16, topic:102174”]
The only reason there could be something morally wrong with such a thing would be if Thiel funded a bunch of extremely suspect lawsuits to bleed Gawker dry through unreasonable lawsuits.
[/quote]Uh, that’s exactly what he did. He not only funded the lawsuit that hogan eventually won after a lot of venue shopping and bench stacking, he also funded the half-dozen lawsuits hogan brought prior to that, all of which lost, AND the suit that hogan filed after the very publicized win. He also funded other multiple other lawsuits against Gawker, including lawsuits from Meanith Huon, Ashley Terrill, A larger class action suit, Shiva Ayyadurai(in a case that literally no other lawyer would take on because it’s nonsense, claiming he invented email eight years after the first email had been sent), Charles “Chuck” Johnson(multiple times). And that’s the ones we know about, there have been other cases more nebulously linked to Thiel and his pet legal firm, but with no hard evidence so far.
He’s also funding Ayyadurai’s case against the other Tech-press notable TechCrunch(Who also reported on Thiel embarrassingly crashing and burning of Clarion Capital), and has funded a startup to largely automate this process, pairing wealthy backers with litigators hoping for a case against particular entities.
If you don’t see anything wrong here, then I seriously question either your sense of right and wrong, or simply if you’re completely blind. And that’s the Giving-the-benefit-of-the-doubt kinda options.
I somehow doubt that since both are equally accurate. He used his money to fund the racist, far-right meme creation on the_donald and their attempt to launch a non-profit for Donald Trump.
Except he didn’t. Like you said, everyone was just driving trollies and having fun. Nobody paid them.
Except for Palmer Luckey who literally paid the moderators to work a nonprofit. Just because the nonprofit crashed and burned didn’t mean it wasn’t funded by a guy that bragged about funding it.
It doesn’t particularly matter if they would continue for free or if they got funded, the point is that Luckey gave a financial incentive to the ones creating the memes which encourages their creation and even encourages their escalation. That’s the point of the quote we are debating. The fact is that Oculus Founder and alt-right troll Palmer Luckey gave money to the moderators of the_donald to continue and legitimize their work even if the attempt to do so went extremely poorly for the non-profit.
And it Nimble America’s body of work is not the point either, because the_donald’s moderators were already producing racist memes and that’s the qualification Luckey used to fund them. So yes, he did fund a Nazi propaganda machine that churns out Nazi-themed images because the greater body of work of the individuals hired to do the job have dedicated a chunk of their lives to churning out Nazi-themed images in a modern day Nazi propaganda arm.
For example, if Luckey hired Richard Spencer for his social activism then he is funding Richard Spencer to do his Nazi work and his Nazi history even if the job he ended up doing wasn’t goose-stepping across the plaza.
And he’s a member of that alt-right clubhouse. What a coincidence!
Very well, I stand corrected then.
Though I still say that Gawker were their worst enemy. Disobeying court orders and flaunting it on their site was a seriously dumb idea. I understand that some people break the law intentionally for a good reason, where people like Snowden and Manning had convictions and reasons for doing what they did.
But Gawker thought that displaying Hogan’s balls to the world was the hill they wanted to die on. That’s just stupid.
Thiel’s bankrolling of the Gawker suit wasn’t out of some sort of sense of social justice – it was a revenge play, pure and simple. He had it in for Gawker and found something he could latch onto to exact his revenge.
… and the thing is, Thiel has a history of doing this exact thing: bankrolling attacks on media outlets he feels wronged by.
(And I’m not defending Gawker here. What they did was irresponsible and wrong, and they deserved to get sued and lose.)
[quote=“ficuswhisperer, post:33, topic:102174”]
(And I’m not defending Gawker here. What they did was irresponsible and wrong, and they deserved to get sued and lose.)
[/quote]Sort of - I think you might be thinking of the wrong thing he was getting revenge for. The whole “Gawker outed me!” spiel he gave was all bullshit, everybody in the valley knew, and not only was he contacted about the article(as is standard practice), he gave the thumbs up at the time, raised no objection. It just wasn’t often spoken about - which is exactly what the article was about, how Silicon valley was accepting of gay people, as long as you didn’t talk about it or or “act gay”, and how bullshit that was. And still is, considering exactly four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all has changed in that regard.
What it was actually revenge for(and why he’s now going after techcrunch) is their reportage on his crashing and failing his hedge fund, Clarium capital, buy buying into Ron Paul’s sky-is-falling-any-minute-now hyperdeflation nonsense, and extremely embarrassingly managing to crash a giant hedge fund at a point in time where every other hedge fund was making money hand over fist.
Don’t buy into the fake moral high ground bullshit line - It was because the embarrassed him by reporting on him screwing up big time, which damaged his reputation as some sort of brilliant miracle investor.
As for their reportage on Hogan? They ran a grand total of nine heavily censored seconds of tape, basically to prove what they had was what they said they had. Tawdry titilation for clicks, sure, but hardly what it’s been played up to be - frankly, being a member of the media and having a working knowlege of broadcast standards, you can easily get away with worse, without even having to go to basic cable, provided it’s not being played with Dora the Explorer on the other side. Especially since magazine and other sites republished that after the story broke, and Hogan didn’t go after a single one of them. The majority of the reporting was all the awful things hogan also said on the tape, which might have damaged his career. There were also enormous problems with the case and how it was handled, but that’s a discussion for a different time, since this is a thread about Right-wing vampire Thiel, not his shitty puppets.
Thiel had to step in in Hogan v. Gawker:
“One of the striking things is if you are middle class, upper middle class, a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system. It costs too much.”
What can I say, mate? The ultra rich are a different breed to us mere mortals.
Do note, I never said it was a good breed.
I am immediately reminded of H.G Wells’ The Time Machine and the relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks
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