What he basically did was say, "don't ever print anything negative about a billionaire because they can take down your entire business". So now if a billionaire really does do something newsworthy and negative, places like the New York Times might think twice about publishing that story, for fear of the cost of defending a billionaire's lawsuit.

That's why people dislike him (other than his Trump support, although to be fair I haven't heard anything about him supporting Trump anymore).

No, he didn't. Gawker died on its own merits; in an alternative world where Gawker continued to flaunt the law because someone couldn't afford to fund a lawsuit, I'm OK with this outcome. Not to mention, Gawker did themselves absolutely no favors, from ignoring a federal judge to flippantly answering questions under oath, they garnered no pity from me.

But it's important to remember that the judgement was only the death blow -- defending the lawsuit was what gave them a slow death. Even if Gawker was right and won, they still would have died.

Just-world fallacy. If I had an axe to grind with you and had unlimited funds - how many of your negative interactions with (contractors|coworkers|neighbours|acquaintances) in the past couple of years could be escalated to financial ruin? If you survive the first suit, how many more could you stomach before declaring bankruptcy?

By accident or design, the fact that legal action is expensive acts as a brake on suits without much merit (to a degree).

Hogan got an injunction to take down the sex tape and Gawkers response was an article titled "A Judge Told Us to Take Down Our Hulk Hogan Sex Tape Post. We Won't."

They sealed their own fates with their muckraking tabloidism.

[1] http://gawker.com/a-judge-told-us-to-take-down-our-hulk-hoga...

If that suit didn't happen, would reddit been as fast to stop the "fappening" exchange on their website?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...

At least if you are a celebrity with deep pockets you have a good chance of getting your leaked photos wiped.

You're out of luck however if you are just an ordinary person, and partner uploaded your pictures to some "amateur" website as "revenge porn".

It was defending the suit, whether right or wrong, that killed them. The judgement was just the death blow.

Would you feel the same way if the suit had been against a more reputable organization like the New York Times?

Number 2, the New York Times would be much wiser in how they interacted with the courts than Gawker was.

Number 3, people do sue the New York Times. The New York Times pays the legal costs, and keeps publishing.

Do you really think that a billionaire can bankrupt the New York Times with a lawsuit? I'm pretty sure they can't...

Never backed down that claim.

Here is the pamphlet, from 2009: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

Quote: "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

If that is ok for you - ok.

Personally, I find this a very immature and troubling world view. Should tell the CEO of StitchFix that she is preventing capitalism with her IPO.

I think people are upset because they assume that it's implied in Thiel's statement that he believes women shouldn't have received the right to vote. But it's important to note that he has never advocated for that. Not in this quote, anyways. He was merely pointing out a few shifts in the past century that have made it extremely hard for libertarians to win elections.

He proposes the creation of a new society, on an oilrig or on Mars, than can be ideal. Thereby outlining there would be no voting rights for women there.

And by the way, if you accept universal suffrage as hindering your cause, mayheps you take a good look in the mirror.

Things like these rot our society to the core by creating class and race divisions. I am very proud of YC for having distanced itself from Thiel, I just wish they were more vocal about it and that they'd done it earlier.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Support_for_politi...

So I went back to the pamphlet and looked if it defined the term only to find that the above quote is the first time he uses "capitalist democracy". The only thing that then make sense is to look above in the text to see what if anything related to either capitalist or democracy. However the only thing he say is that "capitalism simply is not that popular", and "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible".

So I can only really make a blind guess what he is trying to say. In 1920 9% of women were working, while about 90-95% of men were working. It might be this difference that the pamphlet is referring to, but if so, it is also missing the historical context of that date. World War 1 ended in 1918, and during that year the US congress had planned to issue a female war draft because they ran out of men to fuel the war machine and the voluntary female work places did not attract enough women. Naturally you can't force people into the military without rightfully open up the issue of voting rights. The draft, and associated discussion regarding voting was more or less decided, but then the war ended. The female draft became first delayed and then scrapped. The question of voting as we all know did however get voted in.

It is in the context of those first few years after world war 1 that the pamphlet bring up that quote. It seems to have no insight to 1920 economical environment, and even less so with the economy of 2009, that its hard to figure out what the intended meaning is supposed to be. Maybe the whole pamphlet was written to say that women should not vote because 1920s enjoyed political optimism?, but that too would also just be an other guess to what would be a very odd thing to write.

As you outline, he is thoroughly confused.

He proposes evasive techniques for libertarians like him, like seasteading, to escape and build the perfect society - I guess with no voting rights for anyone but cool dudes like him.

I took your comment as genuine, not some bullshit attempt to deflect through focus on some minute detail. Hope I am not wrong.

Yeah, who cares about pesky details, am I right?

I don't think his association with Trump deserves him anything beyond disapproval from someone who also disapproves of Trump, definitely not hatred. And I've almost never seen any hate-filled comments directed towards him on HN that weren't downvoted.

But to suggest that he is only "remotely" associated with Trump seems like a blatant misrepresentation of his activities during and after the election.

Libertarian, on the Committee for Protection of Journalists, but hey I don't like what you said about me. I'm going to lie in wait for 8-9 years and then secretly fund a lawsuit against you with a possibly winnable case. (PS: I don't want to see a Hulk Hogan sextape anymore than Hulk Hogan wanted it released)

Gay, but will willingly support candidates who are against gay people: Ted Cruz, Donald Trump. Whomever will push his agenda.

Also, Thiel didn't hide that he was gay, he was only "in the closet" when it affected him financially. Despite what you wrote, the tech industry is not very liberal. SF is liberal, and a lot of tech companies are in SF but a lot of VC money is not in SF, and most VCs I don't think most people would consider very liberal.

And his hedge was Trump wasn't as bad as he was going to be during the campaign, that it was all theater. But he's rich so none of that matters to him if he's wrong. Worst case scenario is he flies to New Zealand to survive any fallout.

But that seems to be a common pattern for narcissist writing self-help books: the first conceptual part can be useful, insightful and reasonable; the rest just shows how their general lack of creativity, of knowing how to actually do something, self gratification, and 'the end justifies the means', irresistibly and invariably takes over their mind... sad...

Its part of why he wants to be so friendly with Trump. Many more billion$$$$ of lucrative no-bid government contracts for Palantir and Thiel personally.

Here is an article from The Intercept that adds more detail: https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...

Its titled "HOW PETER THIEL’S PALANTIR HELPED THE NSA SPY ON THE WHOLE WORLD". One excerpt:

In the demo, Palantir engineers showed how their software could be used to identify Wikipedia users who belonged to a fictional radical religious sect and graph their social relationships. In Palantir’s pitch, its approach to the VAST Challenge involved using software to enable “many analysts working together [to] truly leverage their collective mind.” The fake scenario’s target, a cartoonishly sinister religious sect called “the Paraiso Movement,” was suspected of a terrorist bombing, but the unmentioned and obvious subtext of the experiment was the fact that such techniques could be applied to de-anonymize and track members of any political or ideological group. Among a litany of other conclusions, Palantir determined the group was prone to violence because its “Manifesto’s intellectual influences include ‘Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, [and] Cuban revolutionary Jose Martí,’ a list of military commanders and revolutionaries with a history of violent actions.”

His support for Trump fits into that, though, because it's seen as part and parcel of Thiel's neoreactionary politics.

It's really unfortunate that politics has turned into some kind of tribal warfare and polarized the USA to this degree. From the perspective of an outsider it seems like there either side is somehow morally superior to the other. Of late I personally tend to hear things like "taxation is theft" and "property is for fascists" on a disturbingly regular basis from voices that seem to grow louder as time goes by. Where did all the moderates go?

"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

He seems pro democracy but then seems to think that some people's voting patterns threaten it.

He clarified the statement with:

"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better"

So he doesn't like voting at all? Isn't that a pillar of democracy? Strange and I am libertarian leaning...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/peter-thiel-donates-don...

(The implicit assumption here is that these particular voting groups are statistically more in favor of a welfare based system than a merit based one.)

Therefore, if one were to believe that the Orcish way of life equals "making things better", and one is living in a democratic system where the Elves are allowed to vote, then I would "have little hope that voting will make things better", since voting would lead us away from an Orcish way of life, which I assume to be superior.

He loves voting

He thinks taking away voting rights is absurd

He has little hope that voting is going to make things better, given the outcome of those votes.

The opinion here is "capitalism good, libertarianism good, democracy good, XYZ groups tend to vote against my political philosophy". The rest is facts.

Given that the democracy votes the way it does, and is heavily affected by the votes of XYZ groups given their sizes, factually, voting will not make things opinionatedly better, as an outcome.

Honestly, it's because he's a jackass. Don't forget his absurdly libertarian stances regarding regulation, to the point where he funded studies that completely ignored the ethics/regulations around human medical testing. He's also espoused the views that women being allowed to vote is a bad thing, and that people like him should just run the place as a cabal.

"So that leaves one final option: The reason that people hate Thiel is because he made enemies in the Liberal press, they smeared him relentlessly and people internalized this without doing their own independent thinking or research."

No. Assuming that people don't agree with what you think simply because they haven't "done the research" is extremely uncivil. I have done the research, and I think he's a jackass.

"I feel the tech industry is now a worse, less free place when demonization of this type has become so endemic."

The only way you could think that is if you don't feel the rest of us have the right to express our opinions.

I'm of the opinion that university is good for everyone, even people who don't strictly need it for their jobs. Democracy only works if you have an educated public that values critical thinking.

Thiel has openly said that democracy has become incompatible with his notion of freedom (and seems to prefer the latter given the conflict), so its not hard to see why he might not support something essential to the function of democracy.

At what cost?

Thiel never says "university is a waste of time", his position is that it's often not a sound investment of time and money, which is uncontroversial, given the number of graduates who incur 6-figure debts and find themselves to be unemployable.

In your judgement, what is the threshold (in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of inescapable debt) at which university ceases to be "good for everybody"?

What I understood was more like it's a waste of money, considering the outrageous price you pay for it and it's ROI.

Of course university is good for everyone, but if it comes along with a huge debt? He blamed the education system for bubbling up the prices and not providing enough value, to the point alternatives should be considered.

I really liked his point that people should stop believing university is all you need to be successful in life and blindly throw money at them because they have no better idea.

IIRC, he was paying people to run with their startup idea rather than wait until after they finished college. It was far different than just paying random students to drop out.

> Democracy only works if you have an educated public that values critical thinking.

That doesn't mean that the university is good. Do the universities really teach people to value critical thinking? Or do they teach them to value thinking that supports the currently prevailing viewpoint? Too often, it's the latter.

Note well: I'm not a Thiel fan or supporter. What he did to Gawker was both dirty and hypocritical.

The sooner we detach a degree from the concept of “being educated,” the better.

College degree != educated

Many educated people have a college degree but they aren’t educated by virtue of that degree. My dad isn’t a high school graduate who was a precision machinist who built high tolerance devices for NASA. He worked with Dr. Smalley at Rice University and built some incredible things — stuff that led to Smalley’s Nobel prize. He’s hardly uneducated and unable to think critically.

Education IS important, but college is just a means, not an end.

It's pretty well understood that both Gates' and Zuckerberg's success is owed in part to their parents' means (pun intended) and what it afforded them early in life, including attendance at elite private schools and living in prosperous, stable communities, and attending, though not graduating from, an elite university.

They are hardly examples of poorer people becoming big successes without college.

And how would we distinguish the truth from the fiction, given the ease with which we fall into us-vs-them thinking, the halo effect, and boolean-valued morality, or treat arguments are soldiers for Us in an eternal struggle against Them?

I could see people with an even harsher take on his various super-individualistic projects, though.

Given what I've seen/heard from alumni I (or friends of me) have met, they largely seem to be doing very well. Giving someone a 3-5 year headstart can be a significant boost. The only way I see the fellowship having bigger opportunity cost than university is if you subscribe to the school of thought of making "Harvard connections", which can turn out to be more advantageous.

Care to elaborate?

It's not complicated!

Isn’t your percentage of those who bothered to vote?

40-50% (everywhere quotes different numbers) of eligible voters didn’t vote in 2016

>why Peter Thiel so so hated.

he just receives back what he gives. I mean there is huge difference between being disappointed/critical/etc. (i'm not a big fan of humanity myself) which is necessary for the progress and being hellbent on promulgating hate for and destroying, just for the sake of personal comfort, those few good things we, humans, have been able to achieve so far.