[TwoPhonesOneKid]

Hulk Hogan also destroyed gawker because he was too cowardish to admit he's a sex freak. Obviously Peter Thiel was involved because he's too cowardish to admit he's gay, but the takeaway is that our society is run by toddlers who never learned to regulate their emotions (let alone manage the wealth a capitalist society allegedly demands. Eg people outside of Buffet demanding to be taxed more and Chuck Feeney making the gates foundation look like money-grubbing assholes).

[nemo44x]

Gawker destroyed itself because they let a reckless drug addict make editorial decisions while high and drunk which ended in the demise of the company. Fortunately that editor has recovered and has a neat blog/newsletter that focuses on substance abuse.

[epistasis]

Gawker destroyed Gawker, they acted like toddlers themselves and lost in a way that seemed like they were trying to.

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

Gawker still acted more mature in terms of the defamatory content than any given social network. This is as clear a case of revenge-murder as you can find. I just want to know who convinced Hulk Hogan anyone cares about him who doesn't already love him. As far as I know he's still the mustache guy of unknown import who was in that funny nanny movie in the nineties I saw at age four. who cares if he swings?

This was obviously about a man's insecurity leveraging the courts to destroy a publicly-valuable business beyond any reasonable conception of justice. Somehow the new york times was never held to the same standard when they published blatant lies and enabled the invasion of iraq and a million murdered.

[epistasis]

Here is a very brief excerpt from a lot of shocking testimony from Gawker's editor; it was Gawker's own self-destructive behavior that destroyed them. Without testimony like this they would still be operating:

> “Can you imagine a situation where a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy?” asked the lawyer, Douglas E. Mirell.

> “If they were a child,” Mr. Daulerio replied.

> “Under what age?” the lawyer pressed.

> “Four.”

https://archive.is/2016.03.10-033848/http://www.nytimes.com/...

[janderson215]

>> publicly-valuable business

“Valuable” is doing a lot of work here. This is a tabloid you’re talking about. This is not an institution like NYT or WaPo.

[jrmg]

It was more than just Gawker, it was a whole collection of blogs that I’d say were indeed ‘valuable’. The whole story is too much to convey in a post here, but Wikipedia has good (or, at least, comprehensive) articles about it.*

I’m what TwoPhonesOneKid calls a ‘centrist idiot’ in their peer comment (hey, look, I’m treating them with decorum!), and I don’t think it was more valuable than the NYT, but Gawker Media was a blog staple with a wide reach, and those blogs did real journalism in a wide range of fields in addition to click bait. Some of them arguably recovered under new ownership, but many did not.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker_Media, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

Gawker was a far more valuable institution than both of the above. I'm not sure how you could claim otherwise: both papers just regurgitate ap headlines with misanthropic assholes managing the editing. Gawker at least managed to break news and contribute to discourse beyond the ivy-league toadies that contribute nothing substantial beyond dogmatic reverwnce for broken institutions that were wildly out of date a hundred years ago.

Centrist idiots blathering about institutional integrity and decorum destroyed this country. I refuse to let them gain power again. I far prefer gossip rags to imperial stooges: at least they're honest about their dishonesty. They also never stooped to the level of the new york times endorsing an obviously illegal invasion.

Granted, both are equally willing to cater towards the american demand for blood rather than justice. But at least I can blame the poeple actually at the capitol for january sixth. Who the hell can I blame for the mass-complacency and dogmatism of college-educated liberals aside from the very same ignorant mass? Until a better scapegoat arrives, the editorial boards of ivy-league-catering newspapers will have to do.

Why do people not read manufacturing consent? It's the only text american adults should be reading. Everything else doesn't matter.

[Dwedit]

I think the multiple N-bombs in the tape were the much bigger problem.

[vasco]

Weird attribution of morality when buffet gave $40B to the gates foundation. Also, aren't we all toddlers who never learned to regulate their emotions? You and me just cause less hubris because we don't have as much power and the time to convince ourselves we deserve it.

[noduerme]

It's interesting that we ended up with Hogan, Ventura, and Trump as figures in our politics. I feel like the last time a republic got to that point, there was a lot of lead in the water. I guess now it's mostly plastic in the brain.

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

Yea it turns out when you divorce politics from anything that matters it just becomes reality tv. Americans are too moronic to wield the power they claim today so it's hard to feel anything negative about this.

[somenameforme]

I'm not sure it's fair to mock the public figures, because it's not like the guys in between them were anything particularly remarkable either. Democracy doesn't select skilled leaders, it selects charismatic ones with 'flexible moral values' of the sort that are useful for gaining sufficient backers. It's fairly predictable that democracies with relatively wide suffrage would trend towards electing pop figures.

This also is exactly democracy was mostly felt to be an unsustainable system by the ancient philosophers. And in reading Plato's assessment of democracy, and its cycles, in "The Republic", he sounds like much more like a prophet than a philosopher.

[epistasis]

Don't forget Schwarzenegger too, but both he and Ventura are objectively less evil than Thiel.

[fakedang]

Are we forgetting the original one, Ronald Reagan? Guy was a literal middling actor, whose only claim to fame was snitching on Communist sympathizers in Hollywood when it was cool.

[fwip]

I'm pretty sure all of them, as well as the most reliable voter age bracket, all grew up with lead in the gasoline still.

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

This theory has held up poorly to other theories, such as the federal legalization of abortion. Positing a single cause, even a single dominating cause, is an incredibly, incredibly hard claim to demonstrate. I do believe that unleading gasoline had widespread social impacts, but this narrative is just lazy reduction with no benefit.

Personally, I think the easiest theory is simply economic prosperity. Most American problems these days can be described in terms of relationship to wealth. changes in education take decades to reflect in aggregate effectiveness. If nothing changes, I think we'll be facing a similarly-violent time period for likely the rest of our lives, even if we aren't there yet.

[pests]

Eh, we had Reagan and Schwarzenegger and others before too

[wqaatwt]

They put in some effort to not behave like clowns after getting elected, though

[zimpenfish]

Schwarzenegger, maybe, but Reagan? The man was a horror show as president.

[wqaatwt]

Not sure, I’m a bit too young but the standards seem to have been much higher back in those days. Reagan’s [public] behavior would still be pretty tame nowadays.

Of course broadcasting your deranged random thoughts to the whole world in the middle of the night wasn’t really and option and listening to Nixon’s tapes the way they behaved in private was well.. quite something. I don’t even believe that Nixon was especially egregious either he just decided to record everything anyone said in his office due to whatever reasons.

And then you had career politicians like Johnson who might have been even more vulgar than Trump..

[zimpenfish]

> Not sure, I’m a bit too young

I, sadly, am not and he was a horror show.

> but the standards seem to have been much higher back in those days.

He was a service-cutting, union-busting, lunatic military hawk guided by Nancy's astrologer. Sure, he's not as overtly and in-your-face as bad as Trump (who could be?) but that doesn't preclude him being a horror show in and of himself.