From Justine Tunney: Welcome To the Working Class Nick Denton!
As many already know, Gawker recently filed bankruptcy and is seeking to sell its assets to cover the Hogan judgement. Justine Tunney, one of the earliest pioneers of NRx (until she was unfortunately expelled), recounts how Gawker tries to ruin lives:
You may remember me as the woman whose reputation was destroyed by your Valleywag writer Sam Biddle, who labeled me a “Pro-Slavery Lunatic.” Tsk tsk. Your staff didn’t even have the professionalism to link to actual tweet for which I was indicted.
Because if you had, your readers would have been able to clearly see I was talking about how we should help Walmart workers, who suffer injustices worse than slavery. But your late media empire didn’t care about the truth. The only thought that probably crossed Sam Biddle’s trustifarian mind was that he could make more ad revenue for ol’ Nick Denton by destroying the life of yet another innocent working class American.
Good points. As usual, in today’s culture of shaming and sanctimonious mob vigilantism, we seldom hear the other side of the story. Once a narrative is established that affirms a preexisting liberal bias, the reputation damage cannot be undone.
But I don’t pity myself. I’m actually quite fortunate compared to most of your victims. I never lost my job.
Kudos to Google for having a spine and defending their employees instead of capitulating, but they need to stop pulling YouTube videos and disabling accounts that accidentally ‘violate’ their intentionally Kafkaesque rules on ‘hate speech’ and ‘copyrights’. Often the latter is used a boilerplate excuse for the former. Someone will report a video that is not 100% PC, and YouTube will invoke some arbitrary ‘copyrights’ rule as justification for pulling it down, such as for music or images used in the video.
Another example, which I forgot, is Pax Dickinson, yet another target of the Puritanical SJW digital lynch mob, who lost his programming job:
Take for instance Pax Dickinson. You got him fired from his job back in 2013 for a joke he made on Twitter a few years earlier. A joke which, twenty years ago, would have just made everyone at a party pause for a moment of discomfort and move on. But his entire career was destroyed. He tried to find work for years, with no success.
His employer was Business Insider, a ‘news’ site that pays interns a pittance to churn out low-quality articles and infographics for page views, and will fire interns who fail to meet page view quotas. Henry Blodget, the founder of Business Insider, like Ivandjiiski of Zerohedge, has a checkered past and was barred from the securities industry by the SEC for conflict of interest violations. Is it any surprise those who preach the most virtue are often the most morally compromised? Not if you understand the hypocrisy of liberalism.
Nick Denton, you’ve committed far more wrong than Pax and I ever have or will, and you deserve so much worse. But I won’t revel in your newfound equality with ordinary Americans.
Unfortunately, I doubt this will have much of a ‘dent’ on Denton, besides lost money. He’ll probably quickly be poached by another media company for a high salary, and the whole thing will start again.