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Two Soylentils wrote in with an update on Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker. After these stories were submitted, it appears to have been confirmed by The New York Times that Thiel paid $10 million to fund the lawsuit.
Peter Thiel Funded Hulk Hogan's Lawsuit Against Gawker
Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist and libertarian who we have reported on several times, reportedly bankrolled former wrestler Hulk Hogan's (real name: Terry Bollea) lawsuit against Gawker. After Gawker published a sex tape featuring Bollea, Bollea sued and was eventually awarded $140 million by a jury. That decision is being appealed.
Thiel has had several run-ins with Gawker's reporting on his political and financial decisions, but the most prominent incident was in 2007, when the website's then-running gossip vertical Valleywag outed Thiel's sexual orientation in a post titled, "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people."
Thiel, who is now open about being gay, later called Valleywag "the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda."
Although the exact details of the arrangement between Thiel and Bollea are unknown, if Thiel negotiated for a share of the lawsuit's proceeds, he may get to stick it to Gawker while earning millions of dollars.
[Continues...]
Hulk Hogan's Sex Tape and a Tech Billionaire's Revenge on Gawker
El Reg reports
Hogan's legal team specifically dropped a part of his lawsuit that would have seen Gawker's insurance company pick up the tab. On top of which, Hogan reportedly turned down a $10M settlement offer from Gawker to stop the case going to court.
Increasingly, it looked as though, [rather than compensating Hogan,] the lawsuit's main focus was to ruin Gawker--which does not have $140M in assets and would have to declare bankruptcy if the judgment stands.
Previous: Hulk Hogan Awarded $115 Million in Privacy Suit Against Gawker Media
(Score: 2) by moondoctor on Saturday May 28 2016, @09:11PM
Don't matter... 'Private' in this context means non-governmental, so either your personal blog or a corporate blog is fine. If the libel laws are fair and you are held financially liable by the government then yes, you pay up.
Real journalism is held to a higher standard and handled differently. Democracy cannot function without an informed population, so journalism is a fundamental part of the process. The founding fathers understood this. By being an 'entertainment' company many media outlets avoid any responsibility that old-school honest journalists felt a duty to follow. Do no harm is one of the tenets of proper journalism and that site seems to go for the opposite. Fuck 'em.
Sorry about the bitches and any offence caused. I meant nasty and malicious.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday May 28 2016, @09:39PM
Sorry about the bitches and any offence caused. I meant nasty and malicious.
Lulz, it's pretty hard to offend me. I just think that the implications some words have in certain contexts go unexamined sometimes, and I appreciate that you were open to my ribbing criticism instead of becoming defensive! My point was merely that the use of the word "bitch" as an insult is an insult by comparison with women, which seems sort of problematic. I still catch myself using it in spoken conversation sometimes, but I think I've cut it from my writing.
'Private' in this context means non-governmental, so either your personal blog or a corporate blog is fine. If the libel laws are fair and you are held financially liable by the government then yes, you pay up.
I'm wondering if you see your word use here as being consistent with your earlier statement:
In my opinion as a privately owned entertainment site Gawker is out of the scope of the first amendment.
Inconsistent word use between comments is totally understandable, I just don't want to be misinterpretting you. Between the two statements, I read this as saying that non-government entities are outside the scope of the first amendment, which doesn't seem reasonable to me given that the Bill of Rights was all about spelling out certain things the government couldn't do to people. I think I must be misunderstanding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2016, @10:20PM
Don't be such a fucking cunt, bitch.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday May 28 2016, @11:03PM
Spoken like a wimpy, whiny fish-taco.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Sunday May 29 2016, @12:40AM
My point was merely that the use of the word "bitch" as an insult is an insult by comparison with women
That depends entirely on the intentions of the person using the word. No words are inherently bad; it depends on how you use them. And of course, a single word can have multiple definitions and uses.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Sunday May 29 2016, @12:57AM
I definitely agree that the meaning of a word depends on context, and I did say "as an insult." You're right though, this is still overly broad; I can think of hypotheticals where it isn't an implicit comparison. But I think that if you're using "bitch" to mean "nagging," "whiny," "emotional," etc., or when the term is applied to men who are acting effeminate, I think it's pretty obvious that this use etymologically comes from a comparison to negative female stereotypes. I think the use in question, which referred to a gay Gawker writer outing Thiel as a "bitch fight" and said that Gawker "acted like bitches and got bitch slapped" seems to fall under this umbrella. I'm not accusing anybody of being purposefully sexist or homophobic, I really just see it as unexamined language (now explicitly examined, hopefully to positive affect).
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Sunday May 29 2016, @01:03AM
P.S.
I think you're focusing on conscious intention, and I'm focusing on how the term came about. I think both are interesting, and different, lenses to view it from. I think language can imply something without that thing being intended by the author.