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Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

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Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#51

Post by adventured »

mrpopo wrote: post #38
downandout wrote: post #23

While this headline is factual, this is like saying " Man With Pre-Existing Health Conditions Donated to the Obama Campaign, and Now We Have Obamacare ". People shop for candidates that will serve their interests and then try to help get them elected. That is how our system of government works, and there is nothing wrong with that. The article strives to imply that Thiel paid this guy off to bring the action, but pro…

> That is how our system of government works, and there is nothing wrong with that. For most of the world population, wealthy people buying off politicians to serve their interests is seen as unethical, and it is flat illegal in many countries.

There is no country in the developed world where politicians aren't constantly bribed, pandered to, influenced via wealth & power from the private sector, and so on.

There are no exceptions. Routine scandals - only the things that get caught - over the last three or four decades, from Canada to France to Western Europe to Australia to South Korea to China to Japan prove this point dramatically.

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#52

Post by mirimir »

downandout wrote: post #44
ravingraven wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You may, but it's certainly not illegal, and it's no different than what happened here. No one is arguing that it is illegal (not even the article). It is a bad system.

>No one is arguing that it is illegal (not even the article) Yes and no. The article is trying to imply that he paid off a politician to carry out his vendetta against Google, which is illegal. They don't come out and say it directly, because they know he'd sue them into oblivion. But that is what they are implying. They're saying "there's smoke here...must be a fire somewhere!"

Right. If Google had donated to his campaign, and he subsequently didn't investigate plausible antitrust allegations against Google, that'd be suspicious. This is just a guy listening to a supporter.

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#53

Post by ForHackernews »

tryingagainbro wrote: post #28
ForHackernews wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. It highlights the corrupting influence wealthy people have over politics. I'm just saying, Thiel giving a small (for him) donation to some random AG doesn't necessarily mean he's particularly interested in that race. I would guess he has given equal or larger donations to many other politicians and political action committees.

>> I'm just saying, Thiel giving a small (for him) donation to some random AG doesn't necessarily mean he's particularly interested in that race. I agree, especially since he gave the same amount to every State AG in the country. He did, right?

Do you have a list of Thiel's political donations? I'm genuinely curious.

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#54

Post by ForHackernews »

flexie wrote: post #31
ForHackernews wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $300,000 is a sizable donation According to Forbes' estimates, Thiel is worth about $2.8 billion. Donating $300,000 for him is proportional to giving maybe $30 for a normal upper-middle class person.

The important question is what $300,000 is to the attorney general. For 99 percent of us it's more than we could hope to save up in many years.

> For 99 percent of us it's more than we could hope to save up in many years.

This is true. It's also true that it's an utterly trivial amount of money to somebody like Peter Thiel.

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#55

Post by 3pt14159 »

rdtsc wrote: post #5

Yes those who have money buy political favors in US. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/07/amid-antitrust-talk... Google has 25 lobbying firms on retainer and spends at least $15M / year on lobbying. That is more than Verizon, Monsanto and Goldman for example, just to pick a few traditional big and scary companies off the top of my head. Also speaking of Google, it has a pretty wide revolving door: "22 former Whit…

Monsanto is evil for tricking farmers or for unfair business practices, not for lobbying. This is a false equivalency. Google advocates for things that are generally in the public interest and does not abuse those position as many companies of their size do.

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#56

Post by briholt »

downandout wrote: post #23

While this headline is factual, this is like saying " Man With Pre-Existing Health Conditions Donated to the Obama Campaign, and Now We Have Obamacare ". People shop for candidates that will serve their interests and then try to help get them elected. That is how our system of government works, and there is nothing wrong with that. The article strives to imply that Thiel paid this guy off to bring the action, but pro…

Theil is becoming the liberal media's George Soros - the enigmatic billionaire pulling the strings of his evil conservative conspiracy.

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#57

Post by kogepathic »

3pt14159 wrote: post #55
rdtsc wrote: post #5

Yes those who have money buy political favors in US. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/07/amid-antitrust-talk... Google has 25 lobbying firms on retainer and spends at least $15M / year on lobbying. That is more than Verizon, Monsanto and Goldman for example, just to pick a few traditional big and scary companies off the top of my head. Also speaking of Google, it has a pretty wide revolving door: "22 former Whit…

Monsanto is evil for tricking farmers or for unfair business practices, not for lobbying. This is a false equivalency. Google advocates for things that are generally in the public interest and does not abuse those position as many companies of their size do.

> Google advocates for things that are generally in the public interest and does not abuse those position as many companies of their size do.

Yes, they do that now.

What about in the future? There's no guarantee that they won't start lobbying for things which entrench their monopoly and help their business while harming consumers.

Just look at Google Fiber. At one point in time it seemed they might actually disrupt incumbent providers like Comcast, but they figured it wasn't in their interests and mothballed it.

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#58

Post by smhost »

natecavanaugh wrote: post #47
smhost wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is how our system of government works, and there is nothing wrong with that. The system you described naturally consolidates power, and most of society finds it acceptable only if it coexists with a mechanism to redistribute some of that power to the underprivileged class. So there are some things wrong with it. > a man hated by liberals for his support of Donald Trump Liberals hate him for his conservative vi…

> Textbook conservative gaslighting to downplay the prevalence of an issue that they find to be inconvenient. I think depending on your experiences, it may come off as gaslighting, but as a conservative (who loathes Trump and a lot of what Thiel champions), I can tell you that even the word racist is a heavy handed social weapon that has sometimes been used wrongly, or, and this is what triggers conservative anger, i…

I would have been more willing to agree on a common ground before the Trump era. But now it seems as if all of the racists are seeping out of the woodwork, and I'm hearing all of the old racist arguments reinvigorated and amplified, arguments I thought had been defeated. America, for example, is the greatest empire ever to have existed, and the culture that gave rise to that is predominantly white, is it not? Is not true that African Americans are more violent and more stupid, statistically and factually speaking, than other races in America? Isn't it a fact that Jews control Hollywood? Is it not a true fact that LGBT people are more prone to mental disorders? Is it not true that ethnically homogeneous states are more stable? Why can't we talk about facts? And what is wrong, factually speaking, with any of these lines of reasoning?

If you say that there really aren't racists, then I guess I should take your word for it, despite what I experience with my own eyes and ears every day, what I'll experience tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, until I'm fucking dead.

> Again, I'm not saying there aren't racists and that there aren't institutional issues that stem from it, I'm saying that it's frustrating that it's often ignored when PoC exhibit the same behavior, and that it happens when the environment is setup to favor PoC and the white person is the one at the disadvantage.

So why not just say this instead of saying that there really aren't racists? How is saying that there really aren't racists not a form of gaslighting?

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#59

Post by ZeroGravitas »

briholt wrote: post #56
downandout wrote: post #23

While this headline is factual, this is like saying " Man With Pre-Existing Health Conditions Donated to the Obama Campaign, and Now We Have Obamacare ". People shop for candidates that will serve their interests and then try to help get them elected. That is how our system of government works, and there is nothing wrong with that. The article strives to imply that Thiel paid this guy off to bring the action, but pro…

Theil is becoming the liberal media's George Soros - the enigmatic billionaire pulling the strings of his evil conservative conspiracy.

Well, Soros does, in actual reality, fund and support the promotion of democracy and this has made him enemies amongst those who don't like that kind of thing.

Theil and some of his buddies are on record as thinking that democracy is holding their libertarian dreams back, that it's incompatible with capitalism. And that generates pushback from those that prefer democracy.

So, they do seem very neat opposites, but no need to assume it's all based on fairytales.

Re: Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

#60

Post by VeejayRampay »

rdtsc wrote: post #5

Yes those who have money buy political favors in US. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/07/amid-antitrust-talk... Google has 25 lobbying firms on retainer and spends at least $15M / year on lobbying. That is more than Verizon, Monsanto and Goldman for example, just to pick a few traditional big and scary companies off the top of my head. Also speaking of Google, it has a pretty wide revolving door: "22 former Whit…

Amazing comment, you somehow manage to give Thiel excuses ("it's the way it is") and shift the topic to Google's lobbying at the same time.
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