Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

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562 pointscodybrown1,292 comments

Relevant column:

"I don't see a moral obligation for anyone to serve in a Trump administration. But people who opposed Donald Trump, on both the left and right, should commit right now to one thing: We will not tar good people for joining the Trump administration. Their motives will not be questioned, and if things do turn out as some of his critics fear, the people in his foreign and domestic policy apparatus will not suffer guilt by association. It is just too important that Trump have good advisers.

Trump will be the least policy-savvy president in history. He has built no ideological framework for future policies, much less a set of detailed proposals. He has few advisers, in part because so many of the usual contenders have come out against him."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-09/there-s-n...

I don't think we can assume that just because somebody accepts a job working for the President necessarily means they necessarily condone the tone of his campaign or ever judged him to be a good choice for president. They can of course be judged on how they influence and shape policy proposals, and their participation in the process might well be much better or much worse than a principled boycott.

Peter Thiel is not somebody who has simply refused to rule himself out of serving, however. I do think we can judge people for donating large sums of money to the Trump election campaign and subsequently being appointed to a position of power, both because they signalled strong approval of Trump and his campaign with their wallet and because (like major donors appointed to high office in other administrations) they can readily be accused of paying for positions of power.

You can definitely judge him for supporting the campaign.

But do you judge him even more for pitching in after the election? As an admirer of Thiel and... the opposite of Trump, I find the whole thing confusing, but I'm definitely glad to have a sharp voice outside the Christie/Gingrich/Guiliani-axis involved.

Thiel is not some random rich fat cat who buys an ambassadorship. He's an extremely capable and accomplished man, and to me it looks like he's the one doing Trump a favor, not the other way around.

I realize reasonable people can differ on that part :)

We judge him for how and why he pitches in, bearing in mind that a Trump presidency is something he wanted to actualise rather than mitigate the effects of.

I don't doubt Thiel is capable and accomplished, but I also don't doubt he's ruthless, ambitious and tends to see things in black and white. It remains to be seen which of the ideas he's championed on he chooses to focuses his efforts on, of course, whether that's encouraging the government to support breakthrough research and entrepreneurship, slashing higher education funding and creating new tax shelters for the ultra rich, or just ensuring Palantir is well-positioned for contracts on new surveillance systems. Of course, reasonable people will still probably argue over what his contribution has been after he's made it. :)

No, but his financial and verbal support for Trump before the election colors his participation in the administration.

I agree entirely with McArdle on this. At this point, I would be extremely reassured by an administration that is "wrong within normal parameters".

That's not what we're likely to get. We've gotten the following trial balloons for appointments:

* John Bolton or Newt Gingrich for State

* Larry Kudlow or Steven Mnuchin for Treasury

* Joe Arpaio for DHS

* Steve Bannon for Chief Of Staff

* Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani for AG

I do not believe we should cheerlead the spectacular failure of a Trump administration. While I'd rather see Trump serve 4 years than 8, if massive infrastructure spending restores jobs to Ohio and Wisconsin and cements the Rust Belt vote for Trump in '20, so be it. I'm not a Republican, and I think much of Republican ideology is wrongheaded, but I also know the country needs to flip back and forth between the two parties, almost by design, and some of what the GOP does that sticks will be good, and the bad can be corrected.

But what we're looking at now is wrong beyond normal parameters. The suggested appointments I just listed are comically unqualified. One of those State appointments is ideologically opposed to the concept of diplomacy. Their DHS suggestion is (or was) about to be indicted for launching politically motivated bogus prosecutions against local politicians! The people of Maricopa County just tossed him out on his ass. One of those AG trial balloons would have, as a first order of business, the task of excusing himself from an upcoming felony prosecution. The other has made a name for himself in 2016 by loudly proclaiming his intent to lock up Trump's political opposition.

There is every reason to believe that a candidate famous for bragging about his vindictiveness and ability to retain a grudge, working with a party whose best and brightest almost uniformly refused to support him, will run a disastrous, counterproductive, dangerous administration.

I completely agree with McArdle. If Trump appoints Jaime Dimon to Treasury, I will be grateful and relieved. Not because I think the apotheosis of the Wall Street Elite belongs at the head of Treasury, but because at least it's a sign we're getting a normal GOP administration. I am not hopeful.

It's such an insane thing to have to hope for, but the best case scenario is that Trump is... George W. Bush. That he'll be impolite, but not undiplomatic. That he'll start one, maybe two wars, and keep them non-nuclear. That we'll see a declining market economy, not an authoritarian state. I oppose Paul Ryan on nearly every economic ideal, but I have to hope he pushes his agenda through, as opposed to... Alex Jones?

Most terrifying on the list is Steve Bannon. Rumor is that Trump likes him, and the only one close to him who doesn't is Ivanka. Probably because she's Jewish enough to fear the top adviser to the president being a white nationalist itching for the Day of the Rope.

The Democratic party did not have a right to the 2016 election. We knew the bench was thin coming into this cycle, and that the GOP bench was particularly strong. I do not mind that the administration is changing party hands. I mind it going to a febrile pumpkin. You know who else has this problem? Much of the Republican party.

How about Sarah Palin for State?

People laughed when she warned about Russia, Hillary supposedly hit the "reset button" on the relationship, and then... Russia invaded and annexed Crimea.

Like Arpaio, another official who left office in disgrace (this time, resigning abruptly before she was even ousted), in a red state with a red local government, after costing taxpayers millions of dollars defending her unlawful abuses of power.

Arpaio, Gingrich, Palin --- these aren't serious Republican thinkers. They're people riding a GOP gravy train. Each chose to court publicity instead of doing their job, and each is being rewarded under the Reality TV Administration of Donald Trump.

Is Joe Arpaio really the suggested option for DHS?

Yes. The transition team has floated his name. Another name is David Clarke, who thinks we should outlaw Black Lives Matter.

These are all trial balloons, of course. I hope they're just posturing, and that we're going to get people in the vein of John Ashcroft --- wrong (very wrong), but within normal parameters.

Setting aside the implication that Thiel is "good people", this is totally wrong. They will suffer guilt by association in a quite literal way:

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

I think the point is they shouldn't suffer the guilt, not that they won't.

He gave over $1M to Trump's campaign. If anything, he just paid his way into being a presidential advisor.

Sure, I may not know his exact motives for supporting Trump's campaign, or his motives for joining his administration, but if something stinks I'm not going to ignore it.

I'm done giving politicians the benefit of a doubt, because they always just disappoint me in the end.

>He has built no ideological framework for future policies

Sounds like a positive thing

Not when you are getting strong-armed by the likes of Putin. I can only imagine how Trumps "business-sense" will fail him upon entering Beijing, much like Bush and Clinton failed to keep their resounding statements of "strategic competitors" and "butchers of Beijing"[1] after arriving during their respective terms. Trump has even less foreign policy acumen than the other two and I can only imagine he will bow down to both Russian and Chinese demands. The manufacturing jobs he claims China has taken from the US have moved from China to cheaper nations like Bangladesh and Vietname [1].

Obama made a push to conserve the rapid "manifest destiny" of China into the pacific. I can only imagine how Trump will shirk at any sign of conflict, much like he failed to condem the well-documented wrongdoings of his most xenophobic supporters. We can only hope that good people with a foreign polic background will understand how unprepared Trump is for foreign policy relations and will volunteer their service for the betterment of the country.

[1]: WSJ November 10th, 2016 China's World: In Trump Win, China Hopes for U.S Retreat by Andrew Browne

> I can only imagine he will bow down to both Russian and Chinese demands

My worry is the opposite.

Trump's style is furious counter attack at the slightest provocation. That's obnoxious when you're a jerk billionaire. It's more serious when you control the deadliest military machine in history.

Choosing not to build an ideological framework because you want to sort of wait and see what happens is different from not building one because you are too ignorant to do so. I'd agree with you that this is a positive thing if it was the former but I think it's pretty clear that it is in fact the latter.

I'd probably add "duplicitous" to "ignorant". Of course, there's also a tenable argument that absence of an ideological framework is an improvement on the ideological framework of some of the alternative candidates that could plausibly have won the election if he hadn't announced his candidacy. But it says something about a president when the nicest thing you can say about most of their stated intentions is that they're a mountebank without the integrity or ability to actually follow through.

Thinking is impossible without ideology. You need some principles, otherwise you're just floating in empty space with no way to decide anything, because you couldn't even judge outcomes.

His ideology is mostly "might is right". That's actually quite convenient, because it sanctions any outcome. Grandmother robbed at night? Why did you leave the house? Grandmother killed at home? Shoulda worked harder – winners can afford better locks.

what is the point of this. When one says he doesn't have much of an ideology, they mean he's not operating with a battleship of ideology like Marxism. He's not running events through a historical realism filter (and throwing errors when reality doesn't compute.) He seems closer to situational ethics. He knows he cares more about what's close than what's far, he cares more about how things affect where he lives than judging things according to some universal standard. If he doesn't see evidence that something is tangibly good for people he's around, he questions its value. I can see why this confuses the hell out of people, look at how he answers hypothetical questions and what people do with the answers. I'm not even saying this is a good thing, just that all these WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich people have convinced themselves he's some kind of alien because he doesn't get his values from a pedigreed abstract universal code that must explore every corner of the universe's decision tree and be able to prove its philosophically consistent, or it's shit.

Trump is probably gonna fail, if you want to stick it to him hold him accountable by his own standard. At the end of his term, you look at America and say Did you do it, Donald? Where are the jobs? Are people happier and more secure? Do they have better health care? The answer is probably going to be no. There's no internally consistent excuse he could give to this that wouldn't entail his own failure, because results were what mattered. so the only thing he could possibly say, and we already know this is, we could've won but we were sabotaged. So get ready for it, but remember it's gonna be hard to argue against because people will have fought against him, and what's worse they will have fought against him _on principle_, yet again caring more about the "integrity" of the system than the people the system was supposed to protect. Even if he loses and it can clearly be chalked up to his own bungling, he'll be able to point that out and sufficiently mask his own failures because of it.

I mean, this is a really bad situation, same as the election itself was: if he wins, then well, he wins, maybe he'll accomplish some good, but it's gonna come with a lot of bad. If he loses, it's still a sufficient indictment of the system that his criticism still stands. You people don't even realize how fucked you are. He is America's Destroying Angel. By the time he arrives, it's already too late.

Why?

Ideological leaders (on the left and the right) were responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in the 20th century, for a start.

More generally, no ideology can actually capture reality. While they all contain some truth, they are all also fundamentally untrue if you drill down far enough. I'd rather grade someone on results (human happiness) than adherence to an ideological framework. I don't mean this in a simple utilitarian sense, either.

I find ideologies in general a huge impediment to solving problems. It erects imaginary barriers around potential solutions. We can all agree that universal health care at an affordable price is a good thing. Whether that is by market based solutions or by single payer doesnt matter to me. Whatever is most efficient and provides the best health outcomes is what matters, not some belief based upon... faith

Ideologies more often exist to build teams/coalitions than to solve real problems.

>> We will not tar good people for joining the Trump administration.

>> Their motives will not be questioned,

>> [They] will not suffer guilt by association.

Really? I'll do whatever the hell I want. It's perfectly reasonable to blame the enablers and question why they would associate with and help a person who has said and done such heinous things.

> "[...] But people who opposed Donald Trump, on both the left and right, should commit right now to one thing: We will not tar good people for joining the Trump administration."

I'm not one to demonize Trump, but I don't see why someone who does demonizes Trump should not extend this to his administrative team, especially since on a lot of topics, Trump is more liberal that a proper GOPer.

You can't chum the water and not take any responsibility when the swimmers get attacked by a shark.

"We will not tar good people for joining the Trump administration."

Good people like Colin Powell, Gen Eric Shinseki, Tom Ridge, John J. DiIulio, Jr., etc, etc?

Reread 'The Prince'. Any nail sticking up will be pounded down. There will be no tolerance for 'good people'.

A huge issue today is the lack of calm, reasoned debate.

As a Trump supporter I have never been able to properly explain the rationale to a liberal. I believe there is a worthy debate beneath all the political smear, but it is never reached. I believe the reason for this is the liberal media and the incredibly effective Democratic party election machine.

The argument stays at the high level of "how could you vote for someone who said that", "he is a monster", etc. It is "I don't want to listen".

All you have to do to realise what is wrong with this is to ask yourself: "What happens if the situation is reversed and someone said they don't want to listen to me?". What if someone else started to restrict what I could say?

Thankfully, freedom of speech is such an integral part of the US, that there is not one side trying to control what the other can say, and the other doing the same back.

This is what makes the country work. The fact that both sides are not in the business of restricting free speech. This doesn't hold true in many other countries.

> Thankfully, freedom of speech is such an integral part of the US, that there is not one side trying to control what the other can say, and the other doing the same back.

Sure, you and Donald Trump can say whatever you please. Nobody's restricting your freedom of speech. However, what you say betrays who you are. And what Trump said showed he's a liar, misogynist, tech illiterate, arrogant and overall a disgusting human being.

> "What happens if the situation is reversed and someone said they don't want to listen to me?"

People listen up until the point you prove to them you're not worth listening to.

Sorry but your comment simply indicates the problem.

It's quite similar to the post-Brexit discussions, how pro-Bexit people are stupid, etc.

We can talk about what a "liar, misogynist, tech illiterate, arrogant and overall a disgusting human being" he is all we want. It would probably be fine, as in it wouldn't really matter, if he was some random radical weirdo with an audience of a dozen equally weird folks. But he's the President-elect.

So we can continue with this circle jerk rant about what a disgusting human being is and what his voters are like. Or we can try to actually understand why so many people voted for him. But in order to do that, we need to stop the whole rant that never changes.

I am not pro-Trump. In fact, my safety largely depends on NATO and Trump poses a threat. But there's no point in shouting about what a misogynist he is. It's so counterproductive.

> The argument stays at the high level of "how could you vote for someone who said that", "he is a monster", etc. It is "I don't want to listen".

>> And what Trump said showed he's a liar, misogynist, tech illiterate, arrogant and overall a disgusting human being.

And Clinton is not a liar, not a tech illiterate, not arrogant, and not disgusting human being? On misogyny - she has never attacked a woman's character before?

Bias, bias, bias, and bias.

> People listen up until the point you prove to them you're not worth listening to.

Do you believe you are rationale. Everyone is saying that you lost the election because you didn't listen. This has real consequences. ACA will be repealed. Etc. Etc.

And you still have the attitude of: "I don't want to listen". All I can say is thank you - because now it doesn't matter anymore.

> he's a liar,

No doubt. ALL politicians are to some extent.

> misogynist,

because? Misogyny is literally HATRED of women, like, treating them really harsh. I dont think the democrats were convincing at that

> tech illiterate,

He seems to be handling twitter quite great

> arrogant

No doubt about that but sociopathy is a frequent characteristic of leaders

> and overall a disgusting human being

Disgust is visceral aversion, and can be very personal. Not an argument

Are you willing to negotiate any of your positions or are they set in stone? It seems the liberals went full hard-line mode, and ignored half of america.

> People listen up until the point you prove to them you're not worth listening to.

So basically , what the others say is garbage, deplorables, end of conversation. That's the point, swjs broke off the conversation with "you know what i m not arguing with you, you re a deplorable". Thats not how you convince people, you have to try harder.

disclosure: i m not american but watched the war of words from afar.

> People listen up until the point you prove to them you're not worth listening to.

And they decide that based on emotions, which marks them as not being capable of rational discussions.

> Sure, you and Donald Trump can say whatever you please. Nobody's restricting your freedom of speech.

As opposed to who?

My issue with Trump has never really been about his politics. I get that immigration and loss of manufacturing jobs due to globalization are serious concerns for a large swath of the American population. What I don't understand is how anyone could feel comfortable with him as commander in chief, or as the US's representative in the international community. Perhaps that's not what most people are concerned about, but foreign affairs is probably the area where the POTUS has the most impact. The election could have and should have been his in an absolute popular vote landslide, but that didn't happen because he kept blundering into so many unforced errors during his campaign - errors that anyone with a modicum of self restraint would have avoided.

> how anyone could feel comfortable with him as commander in chief

I understand what you are saying here. He struggles to speak eloquently, and does not have a statesman-like persona. He is no traditional president.

But look at the last 15 years of foreign policy from "statesmen". We had two wars, Obama missed seeing the rise of ISIS, Syria is a humanitarian nightmare, we had a huge financial crash, and terrorism is on the rise.

Trump opposed the war (was not a strong supporter before, and immediately after was certainly opposed to it).

No one likes him and he doesn't owe favours to anyone. The bankers, the lobbyists, the establishment. Everything that we would agree is wrong with the country.

And he did not run on a conservative platform of religion - which has nudged the entire Republican party to the left.

And he use to be a Democrat.

There will never be another candidate like him. But sadly no one can look past the ad-hominem character attacks.

Hi masondixon!

> But look at the last 15 years of foreign policy from "statesmen". We had two wars, Obama missed seeing the rise of ISIS, Syria is a humanitarian nightmare, we had a huge financial crash, and terrorism is on the rise.

So is your argument that "statesmen" have failed to avoid crisis, therefore someone who is not a "statesman" will be able to better avoid crisis?

Would it be fair then to say that because doctors have failed to cure patients, that we should stop having doctors treat the sick? Or that because people with drivers licenses have crashed cars, that we should allow people without them to drive cars?

There are factors in play here beyond the background of the US president; Global politics, foreign leaders, policies in other countries, civilian actions, etc. To say that the US president being a "statesman" caused all of those things is a massive leap in logic.

https://xkcd.com/552/

To an extent, I agree. And wouldn't it be great if people understood the President should have a much more limited role than they expect now? The Affordable Care Act being called "Obamacare" shows the way presidents establish all kinds of policy. He's put executive actions on immigration, power generation, and more.

If only pepole expected the Legislature to do that, then we wouldn't be in a position of worrying that Trump will undo almost every policy achievement of Obama's.

It will suck to go backwards in climate agreements.

Why not have a go here, I'd be interested to hear your rationale.

On a less important note, re the argument being at a level of "how could you vote for someone who said that". That may not be people refusing to engage with what you see as the important points, but them focusing on what they see as the most important points. That doesn't make it right but if it is the case you may do well to understand their point of view holds that someone with his behaviour and character can't be trusted with power, they may see everything else as somewhat irrelevant. If that is the case at least understanding it may help you frame the discussion with such people, and hopefully not dismiss their arguments as petty since they think they are the most important points.

Anyway, aside complete. Let's hear the rationale for being a Trump supporter, I would be genuinely interested to hear it even if I may ultimately disagree.

> they may see everything else as somewhat irrelevant

Yep. But this is what made everyone miss what was happening. It was an emotional response.

But in this case Clinton provided so many analogous examples, which were ignored, which is just plain bias. As bad as someone is you always have to ask: could the same be said as my candidate? And with Hillary is was a yes on everything.

It was always a question of "How could there be so many racists, sexists and xenophobes?". The answer was...there is not. It was the wrong question.

> Anyway, aside complete. Let's hear the rationale for being a Trump supporter, I would be genuinely interested to hear it even if I may ultimately disagree.

I've already posted it in a reply to this comment somewhere.

Mainly corruption - the ultimate poison of a democracy. Counter productive political correctness, money out of politics, bullying and irrational feminists, sjws, and blm supporters. If you don't agree with everything they say you are sexist, racist, misogynist.

I'm having trouble with this implied connection of corruption and feminists, 'sjws', etc.

Another issue: are you agreeing with _anything_ feminists are saying?

I agree that Hillary is corrupt. Trump is also going to be corrupt, and is already corrupt. I'm not sure what you gained here.

> Yep. But this is what made everyone miss what was happening.

What is it that you think was happening?

> Thankfully, freedom of speech is such an integral part of the US, that there is not one side trying to control what the other can say, and the other doing the same back.

Let's hope _other_ people's freedoms aren't being taken away thanks to your vote, though.

I also don't see why you would Trump will actually listen to you. Because he says so? You trust what he says?

I understand and will not debate that you feel like you haven't been heard by the American political system (I immediately take your word for it), but that just doesn't mean the alternative to staying on the same path isn't significantly worse. Or do you think your life couldn't be any worse? Worse is _also_ an alternative you may have voted for.

> Let's hope _other_ people's freedoms aren't being taken away thanks to your vote, though.

Such as?

> I also don't see why you would Trump will actually listen to you. Because he says so? You trust what he says?

I'm not talking about Trump listening. I'm talking about liberals listening to trump supporters trying to explain to them why they lost, and why they feel they are taking away freedom of speech.

> I understand and will not debate that you feel like you haven't been heard by the American political system (I immediately take your word for it), but that just doesn't mean the alternative to staying on the same path isn't significantly worse. Or do you think your life couldn't be any worse? Worse is _also_ an alternative you may have voted for.

The past 15 years have been a disaster. War, humanitarian crises, terrorism. I mean its always been a cruisy life for a white male software engineer though. But I just can't stand irrationality (as I perceive it), but more than anything the biggest risk is the attacks on freedom of speech through the liberal's bullying, public shaming, and ad-hominem attacks.

> Such as?

Well, I'm thinking mostly same sex marriage, maybe the freedom of religion (which seems to be OK for most, unless you're a muslim). Trump promises a conservative SCOTUS nomination, so everything that comes out of that as a side effect has a risk of people's rights being take away, mostly the progress made under the Obama administration

> I'm not talking about Trump listening. I'm talking about liberals listening to trump supporters trying to explain to them why they lost, and why they feel they are taking away freedom of speech.

OK screw people who want to take away your freedom of speech (but I admit that I don't know exactly what the problem you mention is, because I don't live in the US) but the point still stands as far as I'm concerned: I understand that you're pissed off, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to abuse the presidential elections, unless (of course you really agree with Trump's ideas, in which case I understand a vote for the man), obviously. I seriously doubt it'll lead to any improvement for this group of people, which would certainly make me wonder what the _next_ elections would look like.

>The past 15 years have been a disaster. War, humanitarian crises, terrorism.

I'm confused. There's a large group of white males that feel left behind, and that's because of war, humanitarian crises and terrorism? Not things like a very high unemployment rate (it's <5%, doesn't seem very high?) And if it's about war, humanitarian crises and terrorisme, you vote _Trump_, who has the tendency to throw oil on the fire, to fix that? How is this outcome REALLY going to make your life better? Do you honestly believe it will, and if so, how?

I mean, I hate irrationality as much as you do, but I'm still trying to understand the issue, and why exactly it's all Clinton's fault and how Trump is going to help? (I mean, a possibly rich businessman is not really part of the angry group so I don't see how it makes sense that Trump would represent a group he treats poorly)

Do you not perceive the chanting of "crooked Hillary" and "lock that bitch up" to be examples of bullying and public shaming?

> but more than anything the biggest risk is the attacks on freedom of speech through the liberal's bullying, public shaming, and ad-hominem attacks.

The latter strikes me as something that is an essential part of free speech. How would you address 'bullying, public shaming, and ad-hominem attacks' without also attacking free speech in the process?

That's an honest question, by the way.

Would you be willing to articulate your argument for Trump here? I promise not to argue against you, and certainly not to slur you. Can't speak for anyone else, though.

We now HAVE Trump coming in as US president, so frankly I'd welcome a bit of hope that he might be good. I can't promise to agree with you, but I'm very willing to listen to arguments from those who hold opposing positions to mine.

> I promise not to argue against you, and certainly not to slur you.

Please argue! And thank you for not slurring :)

> Would you be willing to articulate your argument for Trump here?

I supported Obama. I always considered myself a liberal. I support gay marriage, I support gun control. I support universal health care. I support decent welfare and a safety net.

As a programmer, the formative moment for my Trump support came when a prolific open-source developer was forced to leave the community because he would not accept a trivial change to the documentation to change gendered pro-nouns to non-gendered pro-nouns. His reason was he didn't want to mess up the revision history with a trivial change like that. And he was from South America where nouns are all gendered anyway. But one of the big companies came out and said that "they would have fired him". http://www.dailydot.com/news/github-gendered-pronoun-debate/

This was non-sensical to me, and was bullying. But I soon realised that this overly sensitive behaviour had pervaded all walks of life and all aspects of society and I soon discovered the cliched political correctness run wild with third-wave feminist bloggers, social justice, Black Lives Matter protesting of clearly non-racially motivated attacks, and that was it.

Its ironic that my biggest reason for voting Trump is to stop the bullying from the left - who are protesting against...bullying (sexism, misogyny, racism).

One side is for freedom of speech, the other side is for controlling what you can say.

One side thinks controlling what you can say will be abused and unfairly target people, the other side thinks that freedom of speech is a means of control by the entitled.

There's a calm, complex, and nuanced debate to be had here to find a middle ground.

But unfortunately there is no Liberal ready to accept that this is the debate that needs to be had.

The alt-right, the new right, the Trump supporters - we are ready and waiting to have this debate...

I think you're right about the need for debate around how identity politics can be better expressed and that is a debate that seems to have been slightly suppressed on the left. I would say two things about why I don't think this is a good reason to support Trump:

1. The situation you describe is fundamentally about freedom of speech vs the right not be be offended. Trump is not an advocate of freedom of speech and doesn't believe in a free press. In my estimation this is much more dangerous than what you describe.

2. This doesn't even register on my scale of the pros and cons of Trump. The Presidency is not about who decides who gets to say what to whom, that is a matter for society at large. As has been described elsewhere in this thread the damage he will do (if he enacts even half of his platform) to immigrant and womens rights, America's standing in the world and free trade will outweigh a hundredfold any small gains you get from a backlash against political correctness.

You've hit the nail on the head. Liberalism has spent the last 10 years being the language and thought police. Where is the liberalism that brought us social security and desegregation? Why isn't liberalism talking about and fighting for basic income? None of that, just "use phrases and words as I want you to".

I am reminded of a common quip, which I am going to modify:

First they came for the word nigger, and I stopped using it because it was hurtful to black people. Then they came for the word faggot and I stopped using it because it was hurtful to gay people. Then they came for the word retarded and I stopped using it because it was hurtful to disabled people. Then they came after the words he and she, and I was called a bigot, racist, xenophobe for not bending my knee to "they".

So you were worried that the repercussions for saying whatever you like may be too high, and in exchange you were willing to potentially sacrifice women's rights, minorities rights, lgbt+ rights, the environment, business regulations, and whatever else conservative Trump appointments might do?

If only the third-wave feminist bloggers, social justice warriors, black lives matters activists, etc, had kept their mouths shut! It's good they were shown there are repercussions to saying whatever you like.

> One side is for freedom of speech, the other side is for controlling what you can say.

There was just one candidate in this election that wants to control what you can say. And it wasn't Hillary.

“We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”

> This was non-sensical to me, and was bullying.

I agree that it was bullying and that it shouldn't happen. But again, one side wants to fight against online bullying and the other side thrives on it. Just check the Trump's twitter account if you want to see what bullying looks like.

On one side you're saying you're all for free speech, on the other hand you're against the people exercising the right. Especially people you don't agree with (like Black Lives Matter). This all just sounds like a front to silence people who are pushing society in direction you don't want it to go (social justice things like fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, ...).

Keep in mind that Thiel sued Gawker to stop freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Trump doesn't care and will appoint Thiel to a major position in his administration anyway. Trump also repeatedly sued (or threatened to sue) newspapers who published factual stories about him as well as women who he sexually abused. This is a chilling precedent for free speech: if you are rich enough, then you can just sue to silence the opposition. I don't know how you can ignore the bullying by the right.

Would I be way off in saying you're voting against the left more than you are voting for the right, then?

Sorry, but this notion that Trump supporters are being unfairly criticized is a complete straw man. Vigorous criticism is what we should all expect for someone who fans the flames of mistrust and xenophobia in order to accomplish their goals. There are certain lines you just don't cross. You don't imply that 20-25% of the world population (Muslims) is unfit to enter the country. You don't peddle conspiracy theories. You don't mock disabled people. You don't brag that you can do whatever you want to women just because you're famous. You don't do even one of these things, but he did all of them and more. Trump supporters need to own up to all of this instead of whining about being called out for it.

You also shouldn't expect us to take you at all seriously if you comment with a throwaway account named after the Mason-Dixon line which, at one point in history, separated territories where slavery was either legal or not legal. Don't evoke civil war symbolism and slavery and simultaneously expect to have a calm, reasoned debate.

>Thankfully, freedom of speech is such an integral part of the US, that there is not one side trying to control what the other can say, and the other doing the same back.

That is exactly what the recent HN front page articles proposing that Facebook 'stop misinformation' are aiming to accomplish.

Wise decision to create a new account for this comment!

I have the same problem trying to explain to my european friends why trump won and why it is not all crazy.

I'm European, and British. I voted Brexit. I understand.

If the rust/bible belters feel the same as Northern England, I fully understand.

;)

I'm curious:

> I have never been able to properly explain the rationale to a liberal

Have you ever had explained the liberal rationale to you and did you understand it?

I'm wondering if it works one way, or everyone struggles to understand the other. Thanks.

> Have you ever had explained the liberal rationale to you and did you understand it?

My Medium daily update newsletter is full of feminist, progressive, black lives matter articles. I read all of them. I read all the comments on Reddit, and on HN.

Everything is labelled as racism and misogynistic and full of vitriol. There is no priority on sound and valid argument. Its all about feelings.

Maybe I live in a filter bubble, but I would love to find a good example of a liberal having a rationale debate with a Trump supporter about political correctness, black lives matter, etc, that doesn't revolve around something being inherently "racist" or simply ad-hominem attacks. I cannot find anything like this.

The basic issue is people now a days are not using language properly. Its hard to accurately convey what you are actually trying to convey. When you are writing on some topic, its easy to read what you have just wrote and correct it if it came out wrong. But when you speak, unless you are speaking to a calm and patient crowd, if anything comes out wrong then that will be used against you to smear you. That is what makes politics dirty and out of reach for most people. People often wanting the same things are just fighting each other believing that everyone else is wrong. One should learn to use language properly. Another important point is do not resort to personal attacks at all. Personal attacks makes sure the other person won't listen. Everyone needs to be civil and consider what the other side is saying and the reason why they are saying it. Media needs to report actual facts of things, which is very very rare now a days. Unless these kind of basic issues go away, democracy is a lost case.

Is it fair to acknowledge that the feelings expressed in the articles you reference are valid feelings and feel true to the people who share them?

Edit: Is it fair to acknowledge that the people of the United States have a history of discriminating against minorities?

So, I'll try to respond as someone who voted in support of Johnson, and can get the appeal of Trump as well as the Clinton, as well as visceral hatred of either.

I get that huge swaths of the electorate feel like this system hasn't been working, and that' it's all manipulated by career political insiders who have their own brand of benevolent authoritarianism. I get the distrust of a liberal culture that overvalues its own contributions to society, and has a false sense of how correct they are and why they are where they are, and overlooks their own serious problems and prejudices. I understand how the media plays into this, and believe that a lot of what Trump has said has been taken too seriously or distorted, that he was projecting a character rather than an argument, and in doing so, demonstrated empathy with a huge group of the population. I get that population has been so screwed by the current system they just want something different, whether that be Sanders or Trump.

However, I strongly believe that there's a false equivalence in these discussions, and that calls for "reasoned debate" on the American right are often intentionally or unintentionally meant as a negotiating tactic, to cover up arrogant intransigence on their part. They don't get what they want, so rather than contributing something constructive, they accuse the left of "not having a reasoned discussion" or not "compromising." When the GOP and Trump talk about the left "not compromising," they're really meaning "we're not getting what we want."

Relatedly, do you really believe that the things that Trump has said about minorities, women, and so forth are acceptable ways of leading the United States, or treating those who disagreed with you? What would the GOP do if the liberal candidate said the same things about Trump?

Which party shut down congress repeatedly rather than have a reasoned discussion? Which party has been obstructing and crippling the supreme court because they didn't get their way?

The reality is that the GOP lost this election in terms of votes, and yet are still entering the white house because of a broken electoral voting system. Like it or not, Clinton won more votes than Trump. So Trump and the GOP are going to undo everything the majority voted for to get their selfish agenda, because they don't care about the majority of the electorate that voted for someone else. Who is being unreasonable in this situation? It's not the liberal party.

I have plenty of reasons to be angry with both parties, but Trump is dangerous in a way that Clinton was not. Sure, I could find some bright sides to his ticket, but it's overshadowed by a lot to be terrified by.

I'll add my two cents.

I could not in good conscience vote for either Trump or Hillary. Both were appalling candidates.

Why was Clinton appalling? 25 years of scandals. DNC biasing the primary in her direction. The email server. (I've worked in internet security; that was a horrible decision. It was also completely against policy, which gave the impression that she thought rules were for other people. And it at least looked like she did it to avoid any emails coming home to haunt her presidential run.) The Clinton Foundation at least gave the appearance of "pay for play".

Also, she was very much the establishment candidate. In an election where many people were extremely dis-satisfied with the status quo, that was fatal.

My impression is that some people genuinely bought Trump's message - but not enough of them to win the election. There were a large number of "not Hillary" voters who put Trump over the top. That doesn't make them "pro Trump", it makes them "anti Hillary".

> a broken electoral voting system

Would you really be saying this if Clinton lost the popular vote?

> calls for "reasoned debate" on the American right

We are not talking about discussion at a political level. This isn't about the GOP. The GOP hates Trump. Its at an interpersonal level. Person to person. Comment to comment.

Look at this thread as a case in point. You will see a perfect sample of the kind of discourse you get when you start talking with liberals. Plenty of accusations of sexism, racism, xenophobia. And I'm just a username on a forum. I could be a gay, female, muslim, illegal immigrant and I would still have been called these things. And also would be called out for betraying the liberal cause. :(

As a Trump supporter, you should first and foremost brush up on your knowledge what the terms "liberal" and "liberalism" actually mean.

So how can you explain the rationale?

Its in this thread somewhere.

This is good news, I think? Thiel has some extremish views, but I generally regard him as intelligent and thoughtful. And he's in close contact with other smart, influential people (e.g. Musk, Sam Altman, etc.), which gives them some indirect influence.

Not that this makes things substantially better. But maybe a little bit? Hopefully?

Thiel has some extremish views, but I generally regard him as intelligent and thoughtful.

"He seems intelligent and thoughtful, but has scarily extremist views" might be a better angle to take.

How about "not afraid to make reasonable insights that run the risk of being misinterpreted as politically incorrect"? I watched his RNC speech for the first time today (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTJB8AkT1dk). I couldn't fault it. Maybe if we could park our bourgeois principles for a moment and listen to the voices of the economically depressed regions in the country that voted for Trump, we could unite and find a common solution? It seems to me this is what Thiel stands for. Half the country has been suffering at the hands of technological progress, environmental regulation and globalization for almost three decades, while the Bay Area has thrived in its economic bubble. What is progress for if it doesn't help people?

Income was pretty strongly positively correlated with voting for Trump over Clinton. The 'white working class revolt' narrative is only a small part of what happened on Tuesday.

Any specific highlights?

In addition to what others have said:

His head-over-heels support for a decidedly anti-libertarian candidate like Trump is in itself quite extremist. This has always been one of the standard tools for (crypto-)fascists and closet authoritarians of all ilks to get into positions of influence -- by using people of nominally "opposing" viewpoints as, in effect, wedge instruments to disrupt the system as violently as possible -- and then step into the emergent vacuum.

And somewhat secondarily, there are the antics of his pals at the Seasteading Institute in blatantly courting partnership with the government in Honduras (basically the most murderous government left in the hemisphere) in order to set up a libertarian microstate in the heart of certain piece of "jungle" that just so happens to also be claimed by one of the region's poorest and most ill-treated ethnic groups.

Thiel's own role in this venture (if any) is unclear -- but his association with the SSI (and the principle actors in this "venture") is well-established.

He's a climate change denier, it would appear.

He doesn't believe in global warming, for one.

> I generally regard him as intelligent and thoughtful

Based on a YouTube video mentioned in another comment thread (https://youtu.be/CoxxGhLFbw4?t=2m30s), I wouldn't regard him as intelligent by any means.

Yeah, he went to Stanford for undergrad and law school - he's obviously a dunce.

What's with mentioning that he went to Stanford law school? This is the second such comment (the other commenter deleted it for some reason). Is someone incapable of having illogical thoughts because they went to "Stanford law school"?

He says this in the video:

> Whenever you hear someone use the word science it's like a tell that they're bluffing

Try to make sense of it.

I always post this but if anyone wants to know why this is remarkable news, Mr Thiel wrote his “manifesto” and made it public.

It’s short and to the point. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

"The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics."

I wonder if he doesn't know or if he doesn't care how that might sound to people who were legally denied basic citizenship rights in the 1920s, or the descendants of those people. The 1920s were politically bleak for quite a few Americans.

"A member of the Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan, Jackson became involved in several political scandals...."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_L._Jackson

It's understandable that people would like everything to be connotation managed so their sensibilities are never offended, but it's also a very valuable skill to be able to turn off the ability to be offended and just try to comprehend the intended meaning of something. It makes communication so much more viable.

Oddly, both the title and the article skip over the fact that Thiel was a founder of Palantir Technologies (which has plenty of government contracts). Conflicts of interest be damned

Not this again. This just so wrong.

Palantir worked for the Clinton Foundation.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/45010

For at least several years and definitely before Trump was on the map politically.

The Podesta Emails literally have Alex Karp, the CEO, paying 100k to talk to Bill Clinton.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/11/05/02/3A142FF40000057...

So he plays both sides then. You haven't invalidated any argument.

Most powerful, wealthy interests support both sides. The only thing truely frightening for the status quo is probably someone like Bernie Sanders being in the white house. Dow Jones would not be popping up if that was the case.

Somebody who has "some extremish views" is advising Trump, who has some extremish views of his own. That's good news? Not from where I sit, it isn't.

Theil is very interesting from a Marxist point of view.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

A few summary points:

- Did a BA in philosophy at Stanford--an analytic department--in the late 80s.

- As Reaganism was reaching its apex, he became a libertarian.

- The 90s were a period of pessimism. As the Reagan revolution was in retreat, and as conservatives retreated with it, the "smartest" libertarians sought to move beyond it. So he registered the crisis of libertarianism acutely, and went looking for the solution outside politics altogether--hence the rhetoric from early Paypal about creating a "new world currency" that would bring about the "end of monetary sovereignty". The point was to create new forms of being which would be free simply by virtue of being new. (Nothing wrong with that, and Marxists have a term for it: reification.)

- While the crisis of 2009 further confirmed the bankruptcy of the political project of libertarianism, he thought its understanding of the world was still fundamentally true: "Exhibit A is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government." But here the answer is the same as it was in the 90s: retreat from politics and build "new worlds."

What's remarkable about Theil is that he fully grasps the crisis of bourgeois society, to the point where he says, "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."

This was widely denounced as both misogynistic and racist, but it wasn't: he is saying that the 1920s was the last time the crisis of bourgeois democracy might be have been resolved. This is pure Reaganite ideology, but like all ideology has a measure of truth. (It's worth noting that the Left agrees in a sense, but sees the failure of the German revolution, which also meant the failure of the October revolution, as the decisive moment.)

He recognizes the fatal contradiction at the heart of bourgeois society. Clearly. For him libertarianism is the answer that bourgeois society forbids itself because it holds itself to the promise of democracy. Each time the capitalist crisis emerges, Theil becomes anti-political, looks for a "new space for freedom," new avenues for the accumulation of capital. Cyberspace, outerspace, seasteading.

Post-2009 we saw Theil flirt with the Reactionary- or Dark-enlightenment, which while more reactionary than he's ever been nonetheless suggested a renewed desire for politics in the depths of the recession.

Theil remains revolutionary in the sense that he can claim to be in the tradition of Rousseau in the same sense Lenin, for example, could. That may be hard to recognize but it's there.

What is most interesting about Theil and Trump is that if you think of Theil as expressing intellectually the bourgeois ideology of the Reagan period (and he's pure late-80s vintage, no doubt), he has just signed on to work in the administration of the man who single-handedly ended the Reagan Coalition.

Appreciate your analysis defgeneric, though we probably don't see eye to eye.

In my view what you're calling Thiel's anti-political phrases are important. I know you see them as the spread of virus-capitalism, but I think without that kind of frontier building the world would be a much more boring place. I take it you're familiar with Patri Friedman's thesis. What did you think then of Balaji Srinivasan's Exit Ycombinator talk?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A

I know presently the anti-Trumpists are getting a lot of airtime with their talk of secession, but to be honest there is something much deeper beyond the current election fallout which is worth looking at. From a right perspective I have been wondering for a long time whether Silicon Valley's interests are ultimately orthogonal to Washington but appear to be similar in the present because they're competing for the same thing.

This is a strand of Rene Girard's philosophy, which Thiel is a big fan of (he knew Rene at Stanford I think), many of his ideas revolve around ideas of mimesis and scapegoating. Interestingly; he had a Girardian rationale for investing in Facebook. Never say reading philosophy doesn't pay off! I would love to have a photo of his library.

John Strange is very wrong about Thiel's activities being random. I was asked to write essay on Medium which I called "Peter and the Wolfe", which was an attempt to explain the deeper undercurrents around some of his recent decisions.

The main content of it was written before Trump got into power, so it makes it more interesting retroactively. If you recall, many people on HN were calling him mad, stupid, trying to get him kicked out of Ycombinator and Facebook's board etc. Here is the original comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413

I don't really see the spread of capitalism as a virus, and indeed none of the founding Marxists did either. While capital's inherent drive to expand is the core of most imperialist theories (and therefore "bad"), the accompanying spread of bourgeois ideology to the entire globe--and with it the social integration of the whole of humanity on scale which was previously unimaginable--is unquestionably a good thing.

So Theil's anti-political phases are interesting to me as a demonstration of how ideology and capital condition each other.

On Silicon Valley, the anti-political technocratic ideology it seems to be producing is a minor phenomenon. There may be something to the notion of bits vs. atoms as the "stuff" of production, but what gets obscured is that capital and the law of value rules here nonetheless.

On Girard, Theil's affinity with those ideas seems to me to be bound up with his struggle to reconcile his libertarianism with Christianity. My guess is that if he dropped the Christianity, the Girardian thought would fall away.

My main point is that Theil is a particularly good "personification of capital" and that if you drop the stupid anti-capitalist politics and see capital as neither good nor bad but simply the ruling principle of the world, then it can explain a lot.

I think you overestimate the significance of random asshats with some 80s BA in philosophy from Stanford. He somehow came to decent amounts of money, that's about all there is to say about Thiel's intellectual achievements. Nothing against the fact that an ordinary businessman's can have various more or less well-argued world views, but comparing him to Rousseau or Lenin is, frankly speaking, ridiculous.

I agree he is of minor significance compared to Rousseau or Lenin. I mentioned those two in particular because it's not often recognized how Lenin consciously thought of himself as fulfilling the French Revolution as a Rousseauian. Theil's American libertarianism is also indebted to that tradition in a particular way. The ideological kinship is worth pointing out because it's somewhat provocative and unexpected.

Yes, the guy who had to be shamed out of attending a libertarian meetup with a heavy white nationalist presence has some extreme views.

He's probably going to be the propaganda tsar since he's known for suing the press.

Definitely interesting, but still to early to tell.

If nominated to the post of Surgeon General, do you think they'd let him have direct access to a blood supply.

Now go back and read all the HN comments from 26 days ago about how Thiel was flushing money down the toilet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716514

I don't think many of Thiel's detractors denied that he was buying himself this seat at the table. In fact, many of us were animated by exactly that concern.

"He might as well burn that money. Talk about bad investing."

"What is the point? He must know that Trump won't win."

"I think he is living in a capitalistic illusion"

"He's putting his Gawker money to good use."

"Maybe he just needed another write off?"

Nice selective quoting.

Disagreeing with each other's views on the economy, international relations, even the environment is good for the country. We need different points of view on important issues.

But using race baiting to gain political power crosses a line that should never be crossed. He should not be helping to legitimize this.

I very much dislike Trump and would never vote for the man. Both sides use race baiting. Spurious use of the word "racist" against those who dislike government intervention and entitlements has basicly denuded the term of its once-quite-considerable power. They called Bush racist, wasn't true. They called Romney racist, a laughable claim. They called Trump racist and maybe this time there're right, but what does "racist" even mean again?

When someone is racist and sexist, it is everyone's duty to call what they are: racist and sexist.

Being opposed to urban people getting entitlements, but in favor of rural people getting entitlements, is approximately racist, when you factor in demographics.

At this point, I'm not even sure what's more racist: calling a group of people "lazy and unintelligent", or molly-coddling a group of people because "they need special attention".

The way the left treats minorities is pretty patronizing, to be frank.

(I say this as a minority)

I am not sure what molly-coddling means in this context, but as a single data point you can look at the platform page of a minority advocacy group: [0]. The actual low-level details of many of the policies (if not the headlines) share a lot in common with Sanders' platform, for instance.

I'd like to think that, for the most part, trying to address a societal problem like [1] is better than denying that any action is needed, even if the increased visibility causes strife—[2] is of interest here—or we don't get it right the first time. It's hard to discuss because many Americans begin on vastly different pages with vastly different experiences.

[0]: https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/

[1]: http://www.benjerry.com/whats-new/systemic-racism-is-real

[2] https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

When you start calling every Trump supporter a race baiter, bigot, or racist without understanding their viewpoint, it's time to stop using those words and take a look in the mirror.

Disagreement is one thing. Outright blindness to issues that could destroy humanity, and that are not in question, such as global warming, are something else entirely. But it is too late to fret over that - what is important now is supporting those people who CAN work with Trump to make better decisions. So whether you like Trump or Thiel or think they are dimwits, we'll get a better result by helping them vs. bitching about things on the internet.

(In two years, this cycle starts all over again. Save your energies for that time.)

People here giving Thiel a free pass on his views and support for bigotry is just disgusting.

Here's Peter's speech at the National Press Club:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4

Could you point out anywhere that Peter supports bigotry? Or even, a single crazy statement in Peter's speech? (I wouldn't defend Trump. I'm defending Peter, who I respect a lot).

The speech runs from 2:40 to 15:50, and can be watched in 7 minutes if you change speed to 2x.

(Thomas, I respect you a lot too. I've never seen or known Peter to do anything like you describe. I posted this video because it helped me understand his position on the election).

How is this a coherent argument? "Here is an individual moment from someone's life. Use it to prove they're bigoted."

How about we cite other moments in his life? Like the (multiple!) Stanford peers he had who recounted his support for apartheid, or the book he wrote about the evils of diversity, or the blog post he wrote for Cato in 2009 lamenting that women had obtained the right to vote? How about getting up on stage and calling a person who repeatedly said that Muslims citizens of the United States should be forced to register themselves --- at their mosques or at lots of other places, we'll figure it out! --- the most honest candidate in the race?

There's a point at which the challenges you choose to raise cross a line into gaslighting --- who are you going to believe, Thiel or your own lying eyes? --- and while you haven't crossed it, writing in a tone that suggests it's unreasonable to question Thiel's inclusiveness definitely brings you right up to it.

> or the blog post he wrote for Cato in 2009 lamenting that women had obtained the right to vote?

He said no such thing in that article[1]. I have no idea about the rest, or about Thiel in general, but I did read the article. Your statement is as bad and inaccurate as any one-liner soundbite on right wing media.

The section in question (emphasis mine):

  As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a 
  *libertarian politics* appear grim indeed. Exhibit A
  is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and
  leverage, facilitated by a government that insured 
  against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that
  the response to this crisis involves way more debt and 
  leverage, and way more government. Those who have
  argued for free markets have been screaming into a
  hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any 
  remaining hopes of *politically minded* libertarians. 
  For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our 
  education culminates with the knowledge that the 
  broader education of the body politic has become a 
  fool’s errand.

  Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been 
  going the wrong way for a long time. To return to 
  finance, the last economic depression in the United 
  States that did not result in massive government 
  intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp 
  but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian 
  “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. 
  The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so 
  strong that historians have forgotten the depression
  that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in
  American history during which one could be genuinely
  optimistic about politics. 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's talking about the poor receptivity he (and apparently other libertarians?) believe those groups have to libertarian ideals, specifically of getting them to vote for libertarian policies; he's not lamenting their existence per se.

Indeed, there's a follow-up on this exact topic posted at the bottom of the article:

  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.

And finally:

  I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why 
  I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys 
  relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world 
  is us versus them; good people versus the other.

He may be naive or disillusioned or depressed or whatever, but your misleading soundbite perfectly illustrated his point.

[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

"They(Mexicans) are rapists and murderers" Take a look[1] you may have been stranded on an Island the last 2 years and perhaps you did not hear what Trump have said.

Now, not all Trump supporters are racists (maybe Thiel isn't? who knows!), but all of them are telling us implicitly that racism and bigotry are not deal breakers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37zvOZ17eSE

Trump said that illegal immigrants are "rapists and murderers and some good people", "not their best people". You can disagree strongly with Trump's claims about what motivates illegal immigration, but Trump's stated view is not racist: he discriminated between two groups within a single race, and did not distinguish between races.

Note that this Trump (mis)quote is in response to asking where Thiel says anything that supports bigotry.

> "They(Mexicans) are rapists and murderers"

Actually "they’re not sending their best" explicitly doesn't mean "Mexicans" (i.e all/any Mexicans). As such, that should be:

> "They(some Mexicans) are rapists and murderers"

http://www.breitbart.com/live/vice-presidential-debate-fact-...

Can you tell me which specific Mexicans he was talking about?

It's called dog-whistle politics. It's subtle, so you have to listen hard, but here it is: "To the people who are used to influencing our choice of leaders, ..." and he goes on to describe "wealthy" and "successful" types of people. Basically he's talking "to" and "about" people like himself, namely, white men. The man is a bigot, and like all modern bigots, he hides (and shows) his bigotry in coded language like this.

edit: just to clarify, "people who are used to influencing our choice of leaders", I am interpreting in the context of voting rights in the United States, which of course were originally denied to everyone but white men. So those are the ones who are "used to it."

Seems clear to me that "people who are used to influencing our choice of leaders" means people who give 1M to campaigns, buy TV ads, etc.

He supports a Presidency which built its campaign, to a large extent, on abject racism and outright sexism. A ticket whose VP supports electro-shocking gay teens to turn them straight.

How, exactly, do you give such people $1.25 million and join their team without at least implicitly endorsing such views?

Love it. -4 and not a single reply. Pathetic.

Ironically, bigotry is defined as "intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself". I'm not defending Trump but it's fairly obvious to any non-partisan that the left wing is just as guilty of this.

Call me when your American Left Wing creates a system where Christians, Republicans and Libertarians are forbidden to dine in restaurants because of their identity, or are prevented from using restrooms, or are afraid to call the police should they be victims of crime, because they expect that the police will either make things worse or at best not take their experience seriously.

"just as guilty" is a false equivalence. The Left has much to answer for certainly; but the claim that there is somehow comparable bigotry in both sides of the political spectrum is not remotely credible.

Bigotry is a state of mind, not a manifestation. I'm not arguing against the existence and dominance of a WASP authoritarian power structure. My point is that accusing someone of being a "bigot" without providing a valid argument for what constitutes that label is no more compelling than any other ad-hominem. All it does is reduce social justice to an empty virtue signaling buzzword that fails to evoke the struggle and pain behind those victims of discrimination that you fight to protect. You will never get your message across to Trump supporters if you continue to lump them all into a basket of deplorables that is beneath contempt and not even worth a thoughtful interaction. Modern liberals, particularly the "social justice warriors", aren't helping progressive causes with their dogmatic approach to political discourse. They could all benefit from reading Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power [1].

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam met with the KKK in 1961 despite mutual hostility that would never be ameliorated [2]. In 2016, your entire career can be ruined simply for holding the "wrong" opinion. Boy how things have changed.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/48-Laws-Power-Robert-Greene/dp/014028...

[2] http://www.vice.com/read/when-malcolm-x-met-the-nazis-000062...

For decades the strongest core of such policies you're describing was the southern Democrat.

So by your line of reasoning, we should feel bad because we don't tolerate neo-Nazis?

Difference between "necessary" and "sufficient".

"hold(s) different opinions from oneself" isn't the only characteristic of Nazis, they have other attributes which do justify not tolerating them.

But yes, if it wasn't those attributes, you could still "tolerate" them, in the sense of allowing their opinions to be heard. You don't have to agree. You can even explicitly argue with them.

That is the classic definition, but the liberal definition of "bigotry" is more like "intolerance/hostility/oppression to those who have different skin/gender/lifestyles/culture/etc (all the protected class stuff)"

Look, it's not rocket science:

    Tolerant of   |   Tolerance | Yes
    Intolerant of |   Tolerance | No
    Tolerant of   | Intolerance | No
    Intolerant of | Intolerance | Yes

It's a little nicer as a 2x2 table, but whatever.

"hold different opinions from oneself" is subjectively tolerance/intolerance. This table exploits word games, because the first column is "in/tolerant to hearing the opions of", and the second is "holds opinions I believe to be exclusive to a special sub-community of society".

You cannot correctly come to a decision about the latter, without listening, which requires the former.

Except that to me racism is not a political view neither climate change.

racism and views on climate change are opinions, what else could they be? climate change is a complex and speculative topic that no one understands completely. no one has a climatechangeometer.

"The fascists of the future will be the anti-fascists"

HN being full of sociopaths is well known. Being apologists for Thiel's odiousness is a new low.

The man clearly states what he means, trying to 'clarify what he exactly means' is convuluted apologism and revisonism. This is like saying slave trade is wrong but you support it. Ok.

If you agree with his views defend them on the platform of reason.

Let's not get carried away here. Trump has not won because he is racist, nobody now thinks racism is ok. He has won because of the disenchantment with the establishment and his opposite number being widely perceived as a crook.

If you think minorities and women are somehow different from you it will appear as bigotry unless you can offer some evidence or reason beyond generalising entire sections of humanity for some self serving and dubious cause.

> HN being full of sociopaths is well known

citation needed.

Left-wing mccarthyism is as bad as right-wing mccarthyism. People should be able to support one of the two candidates without having to stand up to so much shaming in SV circles. Given the binary choice there may be multiple reasons to pick Trump over Clinton even if you disagree with him on a lot of issues.

Words mean things. McCarthyism was a movement that questioned the citizenship of people who supported socialism, and which demanded of the citizenry that they root out, report, and maintain blacklists of people who weren't stalwart supporters of that effort. McCarthyism had the force of a government behind it.

What you're seeing here isn't an organized movement to find and punish Thiel-supporters. It's people lamenting that other people continue to do business with one specific person, who is being singled out for his own speech and actions. It's an embryonic boycott movement. Boycotts --- something far more specific, pointed, and impactful than what we're seeing in threads like this --- are not "McCarthyism".

We should value tolerance towards minority (in our circles) opinions. Unless you believe half of the country are bigots, you would conclude many people who voted for Trump did so reluctantly and despite all the stupid things he said, and not thanks to them. They prioritized his economic policies or felt Clinton is too indebted to the current establishment to be able to change anything. I know some people who did that and I respect their opinion. Regarding difference between McCarthyism having government support behind and our media/social media rage not, I am worried that popular opinions become policies in a democracy. If on both ends of the political spectrum people stop respecting each other completely, it won't end well.

"Given the binary choice there may be multiple reasons to pick Trump over Clinton even if you disagree with him on a lot of issues."

If you're willing to see past the proud racism and misogyny, then sure. If you're willing to see past the blatant disregard for objective facts, then sure. I, for one, would vote for pretty much anyone else before supporting that.

It is. HN loves rich men with opinions.

This thread is sad. We are ALL Americans. President-elect Trump is OUR president. You know how we can make this next four years a success for all of us, realize the Constitution sets out a process for how we elect our leaders. Go read it. No really, now many of the people burning flags, talking about "end of days" BS, and other nonsense have ever read the Constitution? Let alone swore an oath to defend it? Yeah. As I suspected.

Stop the hate online. Stop the hate in the streets. Stop talking about states leaving the union (not going to happen). Stop judging people for their choice--voting freedom is sacred. Many have died defending it. Regardless of how you voted get behind the President of the United States of America. America is still the greatest nation the world has ever known. If we all work together and stop this hate, America will be become even better.

> Stop the hate in the streets.

Go tell that to the people scrawling white power slogans, painting swastikas, putting up signs for "colored" drinking fountains, wearing blackface, calling people "niggers", etc.

> voting freedom is sacred

No, your right to vote is enshrined in the constitution, but you have no right not to be judged a horrible human being for your choice.

> people scrawling white power slogans, painting swastikas, putting up signs for "colored" drinking fountains,

These things are considered acceptable by the majority of republicans/trump supporters/whites?

That is one way of looking at it. But the hate is already being spread and has been spread by our new president's campaign. For non-white people his election is a direct threat against their well-being.

If the anti-trump protesters are being sore losers then the KKK are being sore winners.

Don't expect him to protect net neutrality just because he is an exec from Silicon Valley: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_te...

Given the choice between Thiel (favors reconstitution of our political establishment and believes in science and technology) and the rest of the Trump hangers-on (are ambivalent towards reconstitution of the establishment and are anti-science), this is a decent outcome.

"believes in science and technology"

Not really, since he denies global warming: https://youtu.be/CoxxGhLFbw4?t=2m25s

He seems to believe that climate change is "more pseudoscience" [than science], at least that was his opinion when Glenn Beck interviewed him in 2014.

I'm afraid what Theil wants is a reconstitution of the Reagan Coalition, which was resoundingly defeated in the primary this year.

That would be a complete waste of time, especially considering its opposite, the New Left, will die along with it. Please let's kill two birds with one Trump and move past the neoliberal era.

I come to HN because of the high level of intelligent conversation.

This article, and ever more sadly so the comments herein, are a huge disappointment.

Trump is the non-establishment candidate the left asks for from Republicans every presidential election. Hillary is, at the very least, the establishment candidate the left profess to despise.

The propaganda is strong in this one.

Grow up everybody.

I don't think the left ever widely professed a desire for a non-establishment candidate from the right.

They were much more worried about how the Republican party has veered right over the years. This has led them to adopt extremist views such as branding entire ethnic groups as dangerous, and rolling out laws that inhibit the ability of minorities to vote.

These are just some of the worries that the left in America has with the Republican party.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/02/this-...

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/04/10/150349...

I don't know why but I've got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

Most of us do - the next four years should be a tour de force of everything that's wrong with our society.

I could guess why:

- Thiel is a founder of Palantir, a.k.a. the private branch of the NSA.

- He also has strong vested interests in the health of hedge funds and the financial industry, as well as strong opinions favoring deregulation.

- He does not believe in global warming or the urgency of combating it.

- His statements in the past have shown lack of respect/consideration for minorities and women.

Interesting that the moderators found it important to remove the "YC partner" part from the submission. It also seems the submission is getting less exposure than other submissions even though it's newer and has more upvotes.

For example this submission has 349 points and was submitted 6 hours ago and has rank 17 while "Halite: An AI Programming Challenge" has 158 points and was submitted 12 hours ago and is rank 16. The Leonard Cohen post has just a bit more upvotes and was submitted also 6 hours ago and is rank 2. "Island generator was also submitted at the same time and with just barely over 100 upvotes is rank 7.

Can some mod please give some insight into this? I'm gonna give HN the benefit of the doubt, probably some invisible factors playing into it but the ranking plus the editing could look a bit like the story is getting burried.

Post with more comments than upvotes are penalised as a proxy for controversiality (remember HN doesn't have downvotes for posts)

You'll just get the line that HN readers don't like to talk politics so it was flagged into oblivion.

Is there a kind of "political correctness" that refuses the acknowledgment of facts and likelihoods that sound similar to irrational dismissal? Does that kind prevent people from hearing the following things which I think most people would agree to be true?

-Donald Trump says he wants to completely deregulate the banking industry, which will most likely, in the long term, lead to a crisis on par with or greater than the last banking crisis in 2008. That will probably harm most YC companies in just about every sector, and will negatively influence the value of YC's holdings.

-Donald Trump and Paul Ryan plan to strip approximately 20 million people of health insurance, and millions more of food stamps, decimating our already weak safety net for the poor. He will do more harm to the poor and disadvantaged in his first six months than YC's non-profit efforts have ever achieved and maybe will ever achieve, probably by orders of magnitude.

-Donald Trump is part of a movement to dismantle pluralism in the United States, including the marginalization of immigrants and their descendants. He has stated, and his followers are now performing, an antipathy toward people from other countries, and views their economic success as directly opposed to the success of white Americans. YC is a network that includes many diverse people of all backgrounds, including many immigrants. These people will be persecuted by Trumps followers and oppressed by his government.

-Donald Trump has appointed a "climate skeptic," which means, "dangersous liar," to head the Environmental Protection Agency Transition. He has already sent out many other signals that he intends to cease any US efforts to combat Global Warming, which will have the effect of destabilizing the various international agreements that might have ameliorated its effects. It currently seems likely that Trump will single-handedly prevent the world from achieving a viable response to this threat for another four years. This gravely threatens the entire world, and will cause rippling suffering around the world. Every person who interacts with Y Combinator and their descendants will be unambiguously worse off because of this.

YC should not reject Thiel because "he holds opposing political beliefs." YC should reject Thiel, cut off all relationship with him, publicly condemn him, because he has joined an organization, the Donald Trump Administration, which has stated its intentions to do massive harm to YC and the people of the world. If YC continues its relationship with Thiel, if it fails to acknowledge its association with him as a black mark on its standing among people of conscience, and if it does not muster all of its leverage, economic and otherwise, in the fight to curtail the power of Thiel's organization (The Trump Administration), than they are part of a problem that should terrify anyone who prefers economic growth, the reduction of human suffering, political freedom and the viability of earth as a home for humanity.

Now is a test for many people and institutions in American life. YC doesn't have many days left before it has failed.

"Donald Trump and Paul Ryan plan to strip approximately 20 million people of health insurance, "

No - they said they are going to repeal and replace Obamacare with something else. That does not mean they are going to strip people of their health insurance.

"Donald Trump is part of a movement to dismantle pluralism in the United States, including the marginalization of immigrants and their descendants"

This is a lie. Trump has consistently supported all legal immigrants, and voiced concern against those entering the country illegally. Again - your position misrepresents reality and paints anyone who is against illegal immigration to be against all immigrants, and a 'racist' etc..

As a non-Trump supporter, you should easily be able to win someone like me over - but you can't when you mix in so much hyperbole.

It's comments like this that basically made me stop supporting progressive causes about 10 years ago, even though in general, I do support a lot of it ... I never give them the benefit of the doubt anymore.

> Trump has consistently supported all legal immigrants

Trump confirmed his own opposition to people of Mexican descent when he said judge Gonzalo Curiel had a conflict of interest.

He said that Curiel, who is descended from legal Mexican immigrants, could not rule fairly on a Trump trial, because Trump wanted to build a wall on the Mexican border.

Note that Trump did not claim that Curiel was an illegal immigrant, or that his predecessor were illegal immigrants. It was Mexican heritage generally that Trump claimed caused the conflict of interest.

And Trump of course has repeatedly spoken in favor of banning all Muslims from coming into the country, even legal immigrants.

These are just off the top of my head; there are many more examples. If you won't be convinced, that's on you.

I'm the furthest thing from a Trump supporter, but it is a significant leap to take his believe that a judge with Mexican heritage would be biased against him due to his anti-Mexican agenda, and turn that into an opposition of all people of Mexican descent. Trump has said some despicable things, but saying that a person of Mexican descent might be biased against him because he's basically a dick to Mexico seems reasonably logical. Now, claiming that that's grounds for the judge to recuse himself is quite a stretch, but I don't personally see it as racist. I also think that stretching to label questionable things as racist is counter-productive; it dilutes the meaning, and makes it more difficult to call out the extreme, blatant racism that's going elsewhere.

There are generations of families --- literally millions of people --- that are linked together through people who are in the US "illegally". People were brought here as children and have known no other life. People who were born in this country and are unassailably citizens, deserving of all the protections previous generations of Americans died on beaches to defend for them, whose parents were brought here illegally as children.

Do not casually dismiss these people by appealing to "legal immigration". The Obama Administration had to fight hard to secure continued residency for some of these children, and Trump's 100 Day Plan includes a pledge to revoke that security.

This is a real concern deserving your careful consideration. It's not a sound bite. You can disagree, but if you're disagreeing that we should be concerned about a pledge to rend families apart, you owe a more careful and honest articulation of your disagreement than you gave here.

Why are you scare quoting "illegally"? They are here in violation of the law. If you don't believe in controlled immigration, just state that up front rather than trying to hide behind an appeal to emotion via stories of tearing families apart.

Your argument seems to be either that long time violators of a law should gain immunity to the law; or that we should grant citizenship to anyone who enters the country. Which is it?

> No - they said they are going to repeal and replace Obamacare with something else. That does not mean they are going to strip people of their health insurance.

The only "something else" that has been mentioned thus far is the utterly inadequate notion of savings accounts. If Donald Trump manages to produce the magical pony that provides affordable health care for individuals regardless of pre-existing conditions while not requiring an individual mandate or bankrupting the health insurance industry, then I'll believe he actually is a genius.

So if Trump's problem is only with illegal immigrants, I'm sure he and his supporters would be more than happy to relax immigration policy and regularize the illegal immigrants that are already in the U.S., thus solving the issue?

If someone steals money from you, you don't gift it to them to stop them from being a thief. The illegal immigrants that are here should have to go through the same process as the rest of us immigrants. Otherwise it's just moral hazard disincentivizing immigrants from following the legal process.

Well, he seems to plan the J1 and the H1B Visas. So, he is seemingly against potential legal immigrants too..

-Donald Trump has appointed a "climate skeptic," which means, "dangersous liar," to head the Environmental Protection Agency. He has already sent out many other signals that he intends to cease any US efforts to combat Global Warming, which will have the effect of destabilizing the various international agreements that might have ameliorated its effects. It currently seems likely that Trump will single-handedly prevent the world from achieving a viable response to this threat for another four years.

The president does not appoint cabinet level officials, the president nominates them and they are approved by Congress.

And there hasn't been a formal nomination, just a floating of the name.

Anyway, the point is that everyone who votes to approve the various cabinet officials should be held responsible for the things that follow, not just the president.

You're right, I mispoke. He was appointed to head the EPA Transition, which is different. Edited now.

And I agree, it's not just Trump. It is his administration and his party. All the more reason why YC must repudiate Thiel.

It seems that if you oppose an elected government, as in "muster all of its leverage, economic and otherwise, in the fight to curtail the power of Thiel's organization (The Trump Administration)", you're opposing democracy.

Organised protest is a right. You can accept the result of an election, and then fight the elected government in court. Checks and balances and all that.

Nobody is forcing me to be friends with Peter Thiel.

This is a critique you could have lobbed at every protest movement in the history of the United States, from Women's Suffrage to the March On Washington to the Vietnam War. You can't possibly mean to say what your comment seems to say.

No. More people voted for Hillary Clinton. And the Electoral College is constitutionally enshrined to stop candidates like Trump. From wikipedia:

James Madison argued against "an interested and overbearing majority" and the "mischiefs of faction" in an electoral system. He defined a faction as "a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

Whether you respect the Electoral College or don't, Trump should not be the President. But given that he will be, we have an obligation to stand against him. And to shame those who refuse to stand against him and his administration. Sadly this appears to include YC and its leaders.

You are not being consistent.

Yes, the Electoral College was designed to stop the populist candidate if they are deemed unfit for President. And if said system ends up electing Trump, shouldn't you revise your belief, rather than sticking with it?

The meme that more people is voting for Clinton is tired, and meaningless. You can't just assume with a different fundamental, the votes would have been the same: there are different campaigns, different voters. Even if you just look at the current votes, a popular vote system would have completely removed all third party candidates out, and I wouldn't be betting that most votes (around 3-4% of the votes) from Gary Johnson (libertarian candidate) going to Clinton.

This would be fantastic...the closest of getting Elon Musk into the driver's seat. Mike Pence being a huge space advocate and Thiel wanting nothing more than technological progress to pick up speed, this is a very positive development.

I feel like there's a conflict of interest here...

There's a conflict of interest in each of his secretary picks, too. It's disgusting.

I don't write often, or even blog, but I felt the need to vent on some of the issues of the picks here: https://medium.com/@joshbrody_36224/dear-president-elect-tru...

Did you scrutinize Obama's picks just as heavily?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-14/most-important-wiki...

Why should that matter?

I'm not the OP, but I was 16 when Obama formed his administration, and I was uninvolved in politics at the time. Does that disqualify me from tracking and critiquing the Trump Administration?

Yes I did, not that it's relevant now? Remember when Trump was gonna drain the swamp lol

Whatever Trump might do policy-wise with regards to freedom of speech and our democracy, realize that Thiel literally sued a popular media company out of existence over things they wrote about him. I don't think this gets better soon.

As Bezos said, contrarians are rarely right.

But rare does not mean always.

Humans tend to underestimate rare events. http://shiny.statwonk.com/birthday-problem/

Just googled Peter's feelings on clean energy.

Well I'm hopeful. He has made investments into clean tech. He is both smart & a business guy. So Trump will listen to him & that's good.

He is also a connection back to Tesla & energy storage.

Hmm. Maybe this Trump thing isn't so bad after all (for the planet).

Trump may want more oil -- but the reality of that is that oil is controlled by the market.

Maybe there can be some seasteading experiment after all? I'd be really curious to see how it would play out. Seems like a crazy idea worth trying despite all the counterarguments I can think of simply to collect data/experience as it might be valuable for future "crazy" endeavors like populating a different planet.

I don't understand how a gay man can support a political party who's platform wants to reverse marriage equality.

His Reddit AMA has some interesting comments on that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_te...

He was asked "Why do you financially support so many anti-gay GOP politicians?" Which is exactly what you're wondering about. And lo, he answered:

"If I thought they were anti-gay, then I would not support them. I do not find myself fully on the side of any of our political leaders -- because none of them are fully on my side."

Reading some of his other stuff, this turns out to be a recurring theme: he's on board with approximately zero electable politicians, and kind of disgusted by the whole mess, so any viable political strategy will necessarily involve kissing a few toads. If you've been near a voting booth recently, you probably did the same.

(I admit that Trump is warty even by the standards of toads, but Hillary probably wouldn't have taken someone with Thiel's... mixed reputation.)

Just because he's gay doesn't mean he supports marriage equality. Given Thiel's political views I would guess that he thinks that the government shouldn't care about _anyone's_ marriage, gay or straight. So rather than fight for marriage equality for gay couples he'd fight for marriage deregulation for everyone, including straight couples (e.g. no special tax treatment, no special legal protections for spouses).

Just as an historical counterexample: Leonardo DaVinci was gay but tried to keep that fact away from the Church (very influential at the time), doing otherwise would have prevented him to access many books, and therefore would have stumped his contributions to humanity. And there is a chance some people at the time may have assumed it was all to retain money and power (which he had), but that's irrelevant in perspective.

If you're really in the power game, it's assumed that you accumulate enough blackmail to destroy anyone who wants to harm you. And among other powermongers, that means the situation only appears stable because of mutually assured destruction.

So, in essence, no social policy or law is going to be of particular importance to Thiel; it's all positional in his worldview - all the rules are made to be broken.

The Nazis put most homosexuals in the camps (and the Allies put them back in jail when they emptied the camps) , but Goering did pretty well out of it.

He is now in the best position of anyone in the world to influence them to be less anti gay. Seems pretty smart to me.

I am far to the left but I believe that demonising someone for political viewpoints different from mine is wrong.

So do I, but I am comfortable demonizing people for political viewpoints that go beyond reasonable norms of discourse.

Trump gets to work helping LGBT Americans by tapping anti-gay Ken Blackwell to his transition team.

“I think homosexuality is a lifestyle, it’s a choice, and that lifestyle can be changed,” Blackwell told the Columbus Dispatch at the time. “I think it is a transgression against God’s law, God’s will.”

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/10/1596184/-Trump-ge...

It was a brilliant play by Peter Thiel - it was gamble of 50:50 (I believe he started supporting him only at the Republican Convention).. There would be backlash by technology community, and when you have lot of money and networking available to you; there is no one in the technology community that will stop doing business with you.. Kudos to the HN crowd about the Freedom of Speech, sometimes - I guess you need to be extremist in either being Left Wing or Right Wing..

So the man whose company was funded by the CIA to conduct mass big data surveillance is now going to be helping to decide the structure of the executive branch, with "Law and Order" Giuliani probably as Attorney General.

What could go wrong?

IMHO, YC had their chance to divorce themselves from Thiel. They can still do it, but this is their last chance. Silicon Valley is not going to forget this conflict of interest.

>Silicon Valley is not going to forget this conflict of interest.

The Silicon Valley that was giving Hillary millions so they could vie for the same positions? Or Google staffers that met at the White House over 427 times, during the same administration that expanded surveillance against Americans?

Yay, downvoted by a Trumpster.

I still stand by my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12915345

TL;DR; It's probably a good thing for Silicon Valley, considering the alternative outcome (all other things equal): Trump still winning the election without a single Silicon Valley influencer.

I like the idea that Thiel was just willing to fall on the sword to get inside. It's a hopefully & almost certainly wrong, but hey...

Is this (post, thread) on-topic for HN? Seems to fall pretty definitively into the politics / TV news category.

(Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.)

I respect Thiel's loyalty to Trump. As people are hiding from Trump after the bus incident, he comes out writing a check and giving a speech about why trump is the right choice again knowing he will get crucify in the Valley. Hope he does well now considering his influence in the Valley.

What Paul may have failed to consider in taking his "tolerant, neutral" stance towards Thiel's activities is that, in politics, one absolutely is 100% guilty by association with the forces of darkness that one allows one's self to come into (sufficiently close) contact with. Or as that most prescient saying, variously attributed, goes: Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent ("He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas").

On the other hand, if he's finding "heat" that he'll inevitably be taking, by ever-rising degrees, for his association with Thiel (and hence, Trump and everything he stands for) to be not to his liking -- it's still not too late to get out of the kitchen.

Besides the whole Gawker incident, does Thiel have an obsessive need to settle scores like Trump?

Mark my words, if Trump starts to raise the national debt by a large amount, pull out of markets and put into bitcoin.

Ironically, Palantir has an engineering office in Singapore.

Explain the irony?

If there is anyone I want at the helm of America, it's Peter Theil. If I was going to bet on anyone to solve the nation's problems it would be him. But then, I would be surprised if he accepts the role. He seems like a very private individual and someone who is interested in capital than in politics. It would be a great personal sacrifice for him to turn his back on his business ventures to look into stuff like this that will give him very little return and take up an enormous amount of his time and resources.

Good to see a conservative government put up a Libertarian gay tech person as CTO of USA.

i guess soon we'll see if conversion therapy really works...

Ahead of schedule, and under budget.

The hatred spewing out from the Left defies description. Instead of supporting Thiel he is now the enemy. How sad.

It turns out you can buy access to the president elect.

Peter Thiel's "Mein Kampf" excludes women and minorities, who he feels have "damaged" democracy: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

"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."

Wow. That is...troubling

As a Marxist, I actually agree with his point here. Of course he was being provocative but I don't think malicious, not by any means.

He did not mean women should not have been given the vote. And "welfare beneficiaries" actually doesn't refer to minorities there (although they'd be included among the beneficiaries of the New Deal).

What he said and meant, translated into Leftist language, is that it was clear by the 1920s that there was no longer any hope for resolving the crisis of bourgeois democracy. In other words, democracy and capitalism had become contradictory, incompatible. That's true, and had been true long before 1920, but the concept of history he articulates isn't totally incorrect. At least he thinks.

It is worth noting that the 1920s was also the decade when the German Left collapsed, all but sealing the fate of the October Revolution with it. Theil misrecognizes history when he blames the failure of the bourgeois revolution on politics, but he isn't wrong to recognize the importance of the bourgeois revolution. He just doesn't go far enough--only the socialist revolution could fulfill the promises of the bourgeois revolution (Great French Revolution).

I give a sort of point-by-point critique of his essay here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12928487

You're just posting bullshit lies about Thiel everywhere you can. He said it pretty explicitly:

> 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.

He also points out that the "most intense reaction" was to the factual "commonplace statistical observation about voting patterns that is often called the gender gap".

Lying is one of the main reasons the Democrats lost. Learn something from their failure.

This was obvious from the RNC speech and further reinforced when Thiel donated $1M to Trump. A contrarian bet, sure, but $1M is a pretty small price to pay to have a 50/50 shot at CTO of the USA. I'm sure he'll see a very significant ROI on his $1M once the government starts awarding contracts very conveniently to companies of which he owns a portion.

I had very negative feelings about Thiel, and those were magnified 10x after his endorsement of Trump, but I'll at least concede he's a very shrewd individual.

Here is what I said 25 days ago:

> I think Thiel is hedging for both himself and as a proxy for Facebook. If Trump wins, Facebook gets the most favored corporation status currently awarded to Google. If Trump loses, Thiel perhaps assumes everyone will forget soon enough and Zuckerberg can diss-avow any Facebook connection.

In retrospect, the one thing I think I was wrong about were the odds. I thought it was a long shot.

Facebook has sentiment analysis and definitely had a better guess on how the election would turn out than perhaps anyone else in the world. While pollsters were trying to extrapolate on what the entire population would be doing based on small samples and proprietary methods, Facebook just had the data. Not only can Facebook say you are a Trump supporter, but they can know by how much and as time series!

Make no mistake, "Most favored tech company" status just swapped Google with Facebook.

I don't support Trump, I believe very, very little of what he has said he supports or will do. However, I am fairly upset about the public support Hillary received. From foreign policy to domestic issues, her track record is appalling and with the exception of pro-war moderates, everyone who supported her should at least be embarrassed about it.

> I'm sure he'll see a very significant ROI on his $1M once the government starts awarding contracts very conveniently to companies of which he owns a portion.

Wasn't Trump rallying against such crony corruption aka 'pay for play'?

I love how much the right complained about Clinton's "pay to play." http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/videos/2016-11-03/trump-bl...

We've seen this during his entire campaign. Anything he attacked Clinton for came up as something he was guilty of.

He is certainly shrewd. Regardless of some of his views I disagree with, I guess I do now hope that he becomes an advisor to Trump because at least some of his friends are people I respect. And there's a good chance someone else that Trump/the GOP might choose instead would be even worse than Thiel.

Also, having an openly gay advisor gives some hope that Trump might stand up to the anti-LGBT majority of the Republican party, perhaps even nominate a supreme court justice that doesn't want to overturn marriage equality.

Thiel having called climate change pseudoscience as recently as 2 years ago on the other hand, and having actually acted on the authoritarian impulses he shares with Trump to shut down media organizations out of revenge, is not encouraging.

This doesn't mean he's a part of the Administration, he is joining the Transition Team which helps pick appointees to Administration posts.

To be fair, for Thiel $1M is practically nothing, basically just a token gesture. His press conference speech probably commanded 10x that in airtime value.

I think it's impossible ( or soon will be ) to ignore that it tapped into a lot of energy, and I can't blame Thiele for placing a bet.

Trump "hacked" the electoral process. Whether he broke things remains to be seen. It's one thing chasing a bear, and quite another catching one.

No. I don't think it is about "money" anymore for billionaires. Intentions may be evil, but not about personal financial gains.

The investment has a huge ROI for Palantir too.

> I'm sure he'll see a very significant ROI on his $1M once the government starts awarding contracts very conveniently to companies of which he owns a portion.

why is that?

> 50/50 shot at CTO of the USA.

To be honest, I've always had the feeling that it was more like 10% - 90%.

Shrewd seems unfair. Political views and ethics aside, it turns out he's a genius.

That's just pure speculation because you do not like Trump or his policies.

Thiel is a very good person to advise on the tech sector and which direction technology might lead society to since he obviously called many major developments and made huge profits on these bets.

Thiel also happens to align with the Republicans on certain issues so why should Trump not ask for his advise or Thiel offer advise?

It's great that a true Libertarian like Thiel even gets the chance to influence the direction of the government.

Do you realize that $1M is chump change to Trump?

Great, another climate change denier https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-views-of-the-Thiel-Founda...

He's not a big fan of democracy either: "Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

Nothing in that post explains why Thiel is a climate change denier. The only thing I see that could be construed that way is that he said it hasn't gotten warmer the last 15 years. It depends on when Thiel made that statement whether it was true or not at the time. The warming that occurred over the last year meant that there was statistically significant warming, but before about February the warming over the last 15 years was not statistically significant.

At worst getting the facts wrong by a few months doesn't make Thiel a climate change denier.

https://youtu.be/CoxxGhLFbw4?t=2m30s

Meanwhile, Trump's already got an RFS in waiting:

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-says-he-...

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

The longer YC waits to do the right thing on this, the worse it will get.

"The right thing". Tolerance means recognizing that people have different world views than your own.

Sometimes the people you do business with have political opinions you don't agree with. The melodrama over Thiel's political opinions is pointless. If you demand Thiel steps down, are you personally just going to stop doing business with 49% of the country that voted differently?

Personally I lean liberal, but I'm pretty disgusted with all the theatrics I've seen in this election from the left. The Trump phenomenon arguably occurred because half the country felt ostracized and decided to lob a brick through the window of washington in the form of donald trump. Maybe we should all get to understand our neighbors instead of doubling down on us-vs-them tribalism.

Don't agree!

I'd blame the democrats alone (the party, leadership, delegates, superdelegates and a section of voters + ~~liar~~ media) for giving away the presidency to Trump. For free, literally.

How is Peter Thiel or anyone else (Trump's supporters) responsible for what comes out of the man's mouth when at the same time the other party is clearly doing what's downright corruption/stifling a democratic nomination?

ICYMI, Peter Thiel did mention that he'd have preferred a race between Sanders and Trump instead (watch his interview to the press club) -- where he quotes: "because they get it" -- and that Trump gets the big things right even though his behavior isn't acceptable.

I don't see any reason for YC or any other organization to follow through with your advice. It is also mind numbing that a portion of democrats who made a joke of Trump when he said "he will accept the results only if he wins" are unable to accept the result of the election themselves.

Move on folks, open your ears and do your job.

On downvotes: I'm pretty sure downvoting over here is symptomatic behavior of a community that doesn't like to listen. Thank you for proving the point. I am happy that Trump is leading us and he is the elected premier for this country despite his weaknesses.

Yes, that's a great plan for YC. Go up to the next President of the United States and stick their finger in his eye. That'll really show him. That'll Win Friends and Influence People. Can't possibly harm their startups, either, to stick a finger in the President's eye like that. I'm sure they never want to fund a startup ever again that might interact with the Federal government in any way.

As usual, the media distorts what Trump actually said.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/nov/24/...

What is "the right thing"?

YC's got a friend with a direct connection to the president-elect, they're not going to do a dang thing about Thiel now.

> NOV 20 2015, 9:27 AM

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it

Peter Thiel is a neocon nightmare who thinks the 19th Amendment was a mistake.

Can we have a black bar for America, please?

Palantir, one of Thiel's companies, will now be able to embed itself even deeper in the surveillance state. It's what Trump needs to "get even" with people who make fun of him or oppose him.

Excellent. I look forward to seeing Peter's expertise help Trump continue the wonderful progress we have made in improving tech in government under the Obama administration.

A chance to once again demonstrate the truth of the great man theory of history. May they be favored by fortune.

Not surprising that this website doesn't see the problem with Thiel's bigotry.

Can you share a link that concisely demonstrates Thiel's bigotry?

Don't paint us with a broad brush, there are many represented opinions here and we are having a healthy discussion.

You are part of this website too --- a prominent part of it, in fact, more invested in it than most of Thiel's HN defenders. Speak for yourself.

Which website are you referring to?

I hope this will lead to the so called "revolution" by Thiel in the beginning. He had vision in the past and hopefully that will not become extreme and lead to something bad. I don't think there is no one can control Trump..

There will never be one.

I am a Canadian, so I neither have a say, or really can comment on American politics.

This Saturday, my two daughters (ages 11 and 8) are driving a 1,700km journey to North Dakota to show our support for the #NoDAPL movement. I am doing it because my eldest is really into Aboriginal rights right now. These people are just trying to preserve their land.

I hope we don't get shot by Peter Thiel.

Perhaps California's exit from the union will hep YC re-establish its moral integrty. Sam Altman, you wanted to radically change the word (in a positive way)? Well now is your chance!

It might be the morally correct choice (I reserve judgment on that) for California to secede from the US, but it's certainly not a good idea pragmatically.

Trump doesn't really have any consistent ideology about most things, but the one thing he never wavers on is his commitment to protectionist trade policy.

If California seceded from the US to spite Trump, Trump will do everything in his power to block commerce between California and the United States. California's economy will tank, and all the tech companies there will be practically worthless.

Is this satire?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com