161–170 of 206 posts
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> I have no evidence as to how Peter Thiel truly feels about privacy in general Thiel founded Palantir.
Which would have been a wonderful fact to include as supporting evidence, yet it was not. Like I said, I'm not defending Thiel, I'm condemning accusations without good evidence. I wouldn't have had anything to complain about if that was included.
I'm having trouble reconciling the following two quotes > I am proud to have contributed financial support to his case. I will support him until his final victory — Gawker said it intends to appeal — and I would gladly support someone else in the same position. > A free press is vital for public debate. Since sensitive information can sometimes be publicly relevant, exercising judgment is always part of the journalis…
But what about when Gawker(or other media) can afford lawyers but people legitimately harmed by Gawker cannot? I am not sure why Peter Thiel is being made out to be the bad guy here because he is a billionaire. The courts decided where the line was and Terry Bollea was awarded. What he did was charitable. I don't think those quotes are inconsistent.
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> now it is a really shitty thing to do to out someone as gay. but let's not pretend this wasn't thiel's payback. It's absolutely payback, I'm saying I don't have a problem wiht it. I think gawker is getting exactly what they deserve. Thiel/Hogan had to go and prove their argument in court. Do you not trust the court system to preserve free speech? Does this argument apply to everyone, or just billionaires who actual…
> Do you not trust the court system to preserve free speech? Bankrolling a plaintiff going up against a financially inferior defendant means that the plaintiff's argument may be framed more convincingly than the defendant's. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the jury opted to imperil Gawker's free speech; juries are even more susceptible to impassioned pleas to "think about the real victim" than a judge. The ma…
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Those are both decisions regarding preliminary injunctions , so your claim that they were found "not illegal" is erroneous. It's explained pretty clearly in the short paragraphs you linked to.
Fair to say, but I believe they were testing the waters again and again just to find a venue that was favorable, undermining whatever notion the original commenter was attempting to conjure about the definitive nature of legality here. If the legality of a case like this is also supposed as a proxy for the (universal) morality of the verdict and the arguments Thiel likes to make about Gawker's journalistic sins it ce…
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I was referring to the popular reaction, not legal implications or moral realities. The general public tends not to see this as being as serious when the victim is male.
Aren't you forgetting there was a second person in the video?
The balls on this guy. The sheer cynical audacity of trying to market yourself as a "defender of privacy" when you serve on the board of a company so antithetical to privacy that they're under federal supervision for twenty years [1] is breathtaking. Please tell me no one on Hacker News is dumb enough to fall for this. My Google-fu is failing me on the exact link (can someone help?), but Marc Andreessen once penned s…
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If the anti-poison faction resigns, they cede any remaining influence over the organization to the pro-poison faction. Voting "no" is better than giving up your vote in favor of someone who will undoubtedly vote "yes" (and get paid for doing so).
>Voting "no" is better than giving up your vote in favor of someone who will undoubtedly vote "yes" Is it? What do you think does more to further the cause and draw awareness, a no vote that doesn't matter and gets no attention or news articles Peter Thiel resigns Facebook board seat over moral objections to FB Privacy Policy ?
There's a place for grand gestures. Giving away real, tangible power, even if unable to be expressed most of the time, in lieu of increasing awareness about an issue that everyone already knows about is not what I consider a smart move. To have any gain, it would at least need to increase awareness of the issue. I'm not sure that's even relevant in this case, given the widespread public acknowledgement and numerous media outlets addressing the issue already.
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My take on Thiel is that he sees himself trying to help navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. On one side, I think he agrees that too much surveillance and data gathering is a problem. He calls himself a libertarian, after all. He just sees the other side as being just as much of a problem, as in this quote (mostly relating to his involvement in Palantir): "As a libertarian, I don't think we should have had the resp…
I have a hard time taking his libertarianism as anything other than a cynical maneuver to clear the way for corporate autocracy. He writes manifestos arguing against democracy, sits on the board of not one, but two private surveillance firms, and wrote a book about how the best business to be in is monopolies. It's like some negative image of Leninism, where the vanguard party is venture capitalists so the revolution…
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> Again, assuming FB and Gawker have the same privacy issues, what you point doesn't really matter. They're not comparable. You give information willingly to Facebook and accept their terms of service. I know plenty of very social and successful people who don't use Facebook. Maybe you feel that there should still be additional regulations on Facebook; fine, that's a debate for another day. But it's very clearly diff…
> They're not comparable. You give information willingly to Facebook and accept their terms of service. Sure -- I agree that they're not comparable (that said, I don't necessarily agree that FB is better than Gawker privacy wise just because it's a different model. In fact I believe the opposite -- and don't particularly care for the "volunteer" part. People volunteer to all kinds of societal harmful stuff). But my a…