Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

The truth is the exact opposite. Google got very favorable treatment from fiber cities: https://techliberation.com/2012/08/07/what-google-fiber-says.... See also: http://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-seattle-....

The difference between Mountain View and Kansas City isn’t that that Comcast has somehow managed to out-lobby Google in Google’s own back yard. That’s absurd.

I was trying to point out that even though it is immoral, that's how things are done in US. The article went out of its way to paint this as some kind of freaky evil thing, even threw "Trump" in there for a good measure a few times. But sadly, that's how business is done. This kind of lobbying has a pretty good ROI as others pointed below.

It would be better and it could be worse. It could all be completely hidden. Here at least we are talking about it, they have to disclose it and so on. It could a secret bank transfer to a cousin who lives in a tax haven, which is how "business" is often done in other countries.

> which ends up sounding a lot like basic whatboutism and, as such, like some form of blame-shifting.

What he was doing is not that unusual. In other words I didn't see much blame to start with. There is blame to be shared across the whole system of influencing and buying power, and is not really isolated to Thiel. Single Google was mentioned, I used them as an example.

> When Bloomberg writes an article about Google's shady business, then by all means, let's discuss that at length.

Like you said, the article is a bit light on details and I think Google lobbying and influencing exceeding those of what we traditionally think as "evil" companies is an interesting side conversation.

> about the reason why Peter Thiel would care so much about Google and hurting Google specifically

Well now we are talking. Not just Google but Amazon as well. Officially he talks about being a libertarian and he thinks those two companies are huge monopolies, they control what is bought, sold and read, searched and seen. But he is also an investor in Facebook and was founder of PayPal which is now part of eBay. Those two companies compete with Google and Amazon so it seems he also has purely financial reasons to support some companies and lobby against others.

Also I am personally worried about Google as well and I think many still believe it is this cutesy startup-y little underdog so pointing out that it lobbies and controls the government to a greater degree than even traditionally "evil" companies.

> relationship between money and elected office in the US has taken a turn for the worst in the past 5 to 10 years.

Agree. A clear manifestation of that is people voting in candidates like Trump and Sanders - a TV personality or an unknown old white socialist guy from Vermont. Even though traditional candidates have had billions more in funding and the backing of large media conglomerates, Wall Street and so on.

I'm pretty sure Thiel donated because A applies to him. The question is wether B applies to him though.

Yes and no. The article is trying to imply that he paid off a politician to carry out his vendetta against Google, which is illegal. They don't come out and say it directly, because they know he'd sue them into oblivion. But that is what they are implying. They're saying "there's smoke here...must be a fire somewhere!"

But I could watch this happen at the black barbershop next door to my parents business when we would get haircuts, or the Mexican restaurant on the other side when everyone switches to purely Spanish when they would see us or the barbers walk in, but you could hear the "mayate" and "guero" get dropped into the conversation. Mind you it was the patrons of those businesses is where you would hear it from, and the proprietors of the businesses all genuinely respected and enjoyed each other.

I think what's happening now is you're seeing racists feeling empowered by an atrocious human being who used racism and economic misery to weasel himself into power, which a lot of that rage was in reaction to Obama being in office for 8 years. Obama used the same frothy rage of unhappiness and economic misery to get into the White House, much in reaction to 8 years of Bush. But I heard plenty of racist remarks in the background when Obama was elected, it just had no power, and was in fact fomented in part by the feeling of having no power.

The other aspect that I believe we're seeing is amplification. The Internet and social media have so much more power than they did in 2008, both in it's influence, and our perception of that influence. But in reality, it's the same human dirt that has been there forever, with water added, and flung father than ever before.

However, the quote you posted in your original comment is subtly different than what you've said in your response to mine. The way you understood the quote, I'm assuming, is that he was saying there aren't any racists. The way I read your original quotation was that he was saying that there aren't racists everywhere. We can split hairs on that one, and English definitely doesn't provide any help, but I certainly don't want to dig in even a millimeter defending Trump's or Thiel's intent.

I'll get into that in the next block, but I've seen activists on both sides create mountains out of molehills with regard to parsing the intent of a poorly phrased statement.

> So why not just say this instead of saying that there really aren't racists? How is saying that there really aren't racists not a form of gaslighting?

I guess I would say it would depend on the intended audience. If they were trying to convince PoC that there are no white racists at all, then I would definitely consider it gaslighting. But if they're saying no one of any ethnicity is a racist, I would tend to treat that as a political (and more "positive") spin of what Trump said about Charlottesville.

If their audience are whites, then I would say it's appealing to their base, who, while all prejudiced, the majority of which are not racist, but who are often spoken about as if they were, or should be ashamed for being a part of racism.

And there is the possibility it's both, which is the dark side of effective use of political speak. You can encourage "us" and try to discourage "them", while holding onto deniability about intent.

But personally, without having read or heard Thiel's exact statements in the interview you quoted, I don't want to guess at the intent of those specific comments.

And I think that Trump (and culturally, his entire regime) is a natural genius about using language to incite both sides to action or reaction, and yet he can play all sides to his advantage.

There are reams of ways to use language to not only avoid responsibility, but associate ideological contrary statements so that your average political base may feel compelled to endorse it even if they add qualifications and disclaimers around it (which are all ignored by the opposing side).

Kinda like my entire set of comments, I guess, though I am completely opposed to them, I think nuance on both sides is needed, moreso during these times :)

Okay, I can give a specific personal anecdote, but I have seen many other examples from friends who were even less fortunate than I was.

When I was in 8th grade, in the school I went to, the students were made up of 400 African Americans, 300 Latinos, 70 Caucasians, and 13 Asians. The teachers were mostly PoC, and the few that weren't, were incredibly activist minded in their feelings on race.

As a fat white kid, I was jumped or physically bullied more than once, 3 of those times in class, had a knife pulled on me, called a blue eyed devil and honky, and even had an African American English teacher make a joke about my weight to the entire class while I wasn't in class.

In the cases of getting jumped in class, there was no repercussions for those involved, both times with some implied statement that the reasons I was jumped were because I probably had it coming or that they would talk to the other students because they knew they had a hard home life (which applied to almost everyone at that school).

I don't mean to paint myself as an innocent victim (I hadn't yet learned how to keep my mouth shut and head down all the time, and would proffer an opinion even when not explicitly asked for) or that I even had it the worst.

But some of the kids of color, not even including the Asian kids, were from families who were in a higher socioeconomic stratum than many of the white kids. But income wasn't really ever a thing in that environment, at least not really amongst the kids themselves. Everything tended to be racially self-segregated for the most part.

I have seen similar situations in not just other schools, but even as I've gotten older in whatever bubble you happen to be in, such as an office, business, or any other group setting where there is a power differential between whoever is the majority and who is the minority.

We often speak of racism as if it were only an issue on a macro scale, and I don't even think what I experienced actually is racism, technically, but I think things like that are far more often what happen day to day in a million different ways, and what society describes as racism when the victim is a person of color, and the perpetrator not.

What I do think those all are though for sure is institutional effects of prejudice.

And when you say "anywhere near", it's a pointless metric. No one person experiences all of racism at once, they all individually experience it at varying degrees. I think trying to average it all out and comparing by quantity as a measure of validity is wrong because they all suck when they happen and they all harm the person on the receiving end.

Is this really such a difficult position to hold?

I mean, just to avoid doubt, I do like democracy so to the degree that someone enables democracy then I do like their politics.

I'm just saying, Thiel giving a small (for him) donation to some random AG doesn't necessarily mean he's particularly interested in that race.

I would guess he has given equal or larger donations to many other politicians and political action committees.

This is true. It's also true that it's an utterly trivial amount of money to somebody like Peter Thiel.