Peter Thiel Sours on Donald Trump | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel Sours on Donald Trump

vanityfair.com

30 pointscmurf20 comments

And now we reach the point where opportunistic douchebags who used Trump/alt-right crowds for their own benefit and those who felt that it gave them license to say and post things that they previously would have kept to themselves or to 4chan start to see the writing on the wall and begin looking for the exits. Unfortunately for them, the internet never forgets and the stink of this will cling to them for the rest of their days. I never had a high opinion of Peter Thiel, but for the past year or so my policy has been to avoid any company or organization that took money from him starting in 2016. This policy is not going to change. Ever.

Where can I get that list of companies?

" But the disruption that Trump has brought to Washington doesn’t appear to be the kind that Thiel was betting on." Whoops? The thing about chaos is that it doesn't have a discernible vector. When you throw chaos into a situation to shake things up, all directions it could go are equally probable. And no matter how bad you think things are currently, there is a large surface area of possible directions that makes things worse.

The whole "shake things up" meme was among the dumbest. It made me think of:

"Honey, the toilet isn't working again! Those dammed plumbers don't know WTF they're doing. I'm calling an electrician to shake the f'n toilette! We'll just see how that works!"

Seriously, this is kakistocracy levels of thinking, but that's what happens when people are a.) legitimately frustrated and b.) have no idea how to vent it. So they basically just role the dice and go with the stink bomb approach. All I can think of is we're just going to have to collectively suffer, and hopefully learn from the mistake but at this point the pain level isn't high enough for a proper feedback loop to kick in. Everyone is still really attached to the idea their tribe is just inherently obviously vastly superior and the others are either stupid or traitors.

Politics by emotion. And embrace of denialism.

I have observed that engineers (myself included) are especially bad at evaluating the challenges faced by a politician in the course of doing their job. That lack of understanding makes it difficult to evaluate which 'change solution' might be the most effective.

In what way is it dumb if the alternatives looked even worse?

If you follow the metaphor, the idea of shaking a toilette to fix it is stupid as is hiring an electrician. Rationally, you'd find another plumber, maybe choosing a different selection metric.

Extending the metaphor, the electrician has a long record of saying demonstrably untrue things about both water, electricity, and plumbing.

And the idea that alternatives look worse is just more stupid denialism, the idea that literally all alternatives are worse than someone who poops on all the furniture is just non-credible nonsense and begs for ridicule because it is that ridiculous. It's not rational.

Regardless of what you think about Trump, he distinguished himself enough from the rest of the field that he became the only viable choice for enough people at the right stages to push him through. Apparently your lofty rationality isn't developed enough to see that. What does rationality even mean in this context? I'd love to know where you draw the line between a rational choice and an irrational one when it comes to voting.

> ... he distinguished himself enough from the rest of the field ...

...by not being a plumber?

The idea that only professional politicians should be admitted to office would've incensed the left 10 years ago. These days, because Trump made it in instead of say, Jon Stewart, the left is suddenly very pious about political office.

Of course people without professional political career can be presidents, even great presidents sometimes.

However, if the main differentiating factor of your favorite candidate is that he had zero experience in politics, it's hard to take that argument seriously.

People considered Bernie Sanders an outsider, and he's been a senator since 2007. Trump isn't an "outsider": he's simply unqualified.

It depends. If you consider political experience (especially extensive political experience) to be a marker of corruption and ingrained hypocrisy, political inexperience can look good by comparison. There seem to be enough people sufficiently cynical these days to see it that way.

Birtherism.

That is the sole datapoint a thinking, rational, ethical person needed to know to properly character assess Trump. If you still voted for him, you either liked that sort of blatant Nixon southern strategy 2.0 type of bigotry; or you're dismissive of it as a problematic attribute in a leader for this country.

And sure, Clinton necessarily must have been a fundamentally flawed candidate, hindsight being 20/20, to lose to that. But I put more blame on Democratic and Republican parties for sabotaging the Electoral College with party loyalists. Dead people would have done a better job, randomly selected people likely would have too, and contemplative people even more reliable. The two parties get way more blame from me for this setup to failure, than the people I think are deeply ignorant people in some form of denial for having voted for the Celebrity Chaos Clown.

>If you still voted for him, you either liked that sort of blatant Nixon southern strategy 2.0 type of bigotry; or you're dismissive of it as a problematic attribute in a leader for this country.

Ok, but neither of those are irrational, they are judgements based around premises that are different than yours. You can argue whether those premises are rational, or ill informed or whatever, but then you're basically just wading into the usual swamp of political discourse - these issues haven't been definitively resolved and just dismissing the whole stance out of hand by calling it irrational doesn't get you anywhere. You're effectively just venting.

He saw opportunistic possibility to get ahead and it backfired.

The problem with Trump government is that dysfunction shadows opportunistic cynicism by wide margin. Nobody can question his authoritarian tendencies. He just lacks the executive skills.

I'm not quite so forgiving of "opportunistic possibility" that just isn't working out to Thiel's advantage.

First a person had to cross the birtherism rubicon, it wasn't something you could just skip over claiming you didn't know about it. Either you went with "YES! MORE GIVE ME MORE OF THAT!" or "Yeah that's pretty derp, but I'm going to overlook it as irrelevant to a proper assessment of one's character: someone who's making a personal and racist attack, attacking the office of the presidency, and also really attacking everyone who is willing to believe such an obvious lie - yeah that's who I still want as a president, someone who thinks I'm a moron." And just tick that box.

And then there are the Stern interviews. The bankruptcies. The widespread pooping on all the furniture approach to business.

And the 1999 Russert interview where he said we must preemptively bomb North Korea, we have to do it. And last year out loud asked why we hadn't used nukes yet.

The data points for a kakistocracy are all there plain to see. But there was and still is a deep attachment to tribalism and denialism that resulted in where we're at.

"sources say" ... sometimes I trust sources like this, sometimes not. Really hard to get much out of this article. However, it does push all the buttons for those of us on the left, and hence, it exists. If it's true, it's hard to imagine that people like Peter Thiel honestly thought Trump would be any different than he is right now.

"Reed Hastings" (Netflix ceo) was spot on when he said he will lose points on evaluation. Frankly, he should be fired from the FaceBook board.

Maybe, maybe not. Honestly, I don't put much faith these days in what Left-leaning publications report on personal dealings within the Trump administration. Particularly when it is sourced to multiple anonymous sources.

This is probably planted in the media by Thiel himself.

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