Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, Thiel was out for blood, but so what? There's nothing inherently wrong or illegal about feeling vengeful. It's a natural human emotion experienced and indulged by pretty much everyone at some point in time. It's not like we can eradicate it or make it illegal, so complaining about Thiel's goals or feelings seems like a waste of time to me.

The issue, as usual, should be with the system itself.

Is what happened here unjust? Is it wrong for Gawker to have had to pay the $140M? If you believe so, then your complaint should lie with the court. People should expect justice in court, rather than "typically" avoiding it via settlements and insurance. Our judicial system should be robust enough to make the motivations of a lawsuit's participants irrelevant. No matter how badly Thiel wants to destroy Gawker, they should only be liable for an appropriate amount of damages. If the court failed Gawker there, that's the court's fault.

On the flip side, if you believe the settlement was just, then it's Gawker's fault for doing something so bad that it cost them $140M in the first place.

EDIT: At least 6 downvotes now, but no replies. If you disagree, can you defend your reasoning at all?

What you're outlining is what people are worried about here - that uninvolved third parties with means can influence civil court cases they are biased against.

You could argue that this has always been the case, where the U.S. justice system has always been biased in favor of those with the wealth or the means, but does that really justify not pushing back against it?

Keep in mind that I'm not defending Gawker or sex tapes. If it comes down to deciding between a world where the sex tape with my best friend's wife can be published, or a world where billionaires can use their wealth in court to take out press organizations, I'm leaning more towards the latter.

There's nothing inherently wrong with third parties helping each other out. I can't understand why anyone would be worried about that. In fact, a lawyer is an uninvolved third party.

What is wrong is the degree to which wealth influences the outcome of a case. That's the real problem. In an ideal world, a person's case could be presented with equal strength regardless of the money spent for or against them. Obviously we don't live in this ideal world, but imo we should be laser focused on moving in that direction.

What frustrates me is the utter lack of focus on that task. Almost nobody seems to care about the broken legal system itself. All of the attention is being diverted to Thiel, billionaires, etc, and it's maddening. How do we expect to fix problems that we are willfully ignoring?

The media is acting in its own self-interest by framing this as a free speech issue. The "99%ers" are acting in their own self-interest by framing this as a billionaires-vs-the-rest-of-us issue. Where are the "good and just" people who should be acting in their own self-interest by demanding improvements in justice? Shouldn't that be all of us?

It may reach the point of fixing the court process eventually, but understanding why it's an issue is also an important first step.

The how this issue is going to be fixed will probably be a long time coming, unfortunately. Give it time.

An interesting first step would be to include more transparent disclosure of the third parties who speculate on these court cases. Thiel very obviously knew this would backfire if it became public, which is why they kept it secret for so long.

I hope you're right, but I'm not so confident. People as a whole are not systems thinkers. We tend to take systems for granted, and assume they are eternal and unchangeable. I think this case is a perfect example. It's hard to mobilize the masses behind something boring and complex like court reform. It's easy, however, to incite them to hate an individual person, especially if he's a billionaire. Even on HN, it's mostly people attacking/defending Thiel himself.

Also, for what it's worth, the fact that something backfires in the court of public opinion doesn't mean that it's bad. It could just mean the public is under-informed or easily deceived.

Again, you're bringing up the red herring: that this is really just a legal issue that was adjudicated in the court case, and that the motivation and cause of this court case being brought is completely irrelevant to the ethics of what Thiel did.

Saying that vengefulness is a part of the experience does not make the actions you perform vengefully suddenly OK, or else a we'd think a lot more highly of most murderers. Further, this isn't a complaint about his emotions. It's a complaint about his wielding his substantial power in order to bankrupt a company he felt annoyed by—it's about his actions, not his feelings.

Wow, were you really down 6? Per my other comment[1], I couldn't upvote you enough: the problem is that our truth-finding method in the justice system is vulnerable and open to manipulation. It should be robust against investments like Thiel's: roughly, an exponential investment of resources should only have a linear impact on the verdict.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11824193

I think Gawker was wrong, and deserved to be seriously damaged by this (and many other things), but lets not pretend that this wouldn't have hurt them if they weren't wrong. Defending yourself takes an enormous amount of energy, time, and money. If a billionaire hates you they can fund lots of lawsuits against you that would have otherwise never materialized. This would constantly drain you, even if you win, even if you win costs. Since the billionaire is just funding it, they don't even need to step into the court room to ruin your life.

In this case Thiel waited (probably) until Gawker had done something particularly bad (at least liability wise). That's good, but its easy to see what someone of his resources could choose to do with no apparent repercussions. Of course this is disturbing. The fact that our court system is abusable in this fashion doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the individuals who might so abuse it.

The article took this case as proof and omen way beyond what it actually shows, but its not nothing.

So your complaint is that Thiel could have done something else than what he did, and that would have been bad?

In reality Thiel didn't abuse the court system with meritless cases. Had he done that, I would also have been disturbed. But since he didn't, it's hard for me to get upset about it.

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