Peter Thiel calls Bitcoin a Chinese financial weapon
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Thiel criticizes Google for working with China in a Uiygur genocide (but admits he doesn’t have proof). He criticizes Facebook for its stance on Hong Kong democracy because there are more Chinese born employees at FB than Hong Kong born (is that “evidence”?).
First thing — these are foreign policy issues from the perspective of the USA. We (the USA people and our government) have done far worse in the foreign policy sphere.
Also worth mentioning that Theil’s Palantir moved out of the Bay Area partly because he and the other execs didn’t like that Bay Area tech employees are activist about politics and things like foreign policy in their job as stakeholders at those companies — a role he seems to advocate in this article (he just doesn’t like the direction of their advocacy).
Also worth mentioning that he made these comments at an event dedicated to one of the presidents that most damaged the USA in both domestic policy and foreign policy (Richard Nixon) and Thiel publicly supported another more recent president who managed to destroy USA institutions even more than Nixon.
Worth taking these words with a giant grain of salt and observing that this man has a giant log in his eye.
Please don’t take anything in this post as supporting China or any of the FANG companies mentioned. I’m only pointing out that Theil doesn’t seem to have a consistent stance on government policy or what constitutes “hurting America”.
The Chinese are supposedly imprisoning or killing millions and the evidence is this one girl who they won't give a passport to, or a google maps satellite image of a school, or a BBC documentary with scary music and shaky cam, or a random person linked with the CIA who managed to "escape".
"Please don’t take anything in this post as supporting China..."
Why you even feel the need to say this is weird.
I just think the USA has done far more to encourage this stupid “love your country or we will treat you as a terrorist” attitude that China seems to have adopted. Also the consequences of my country invading Iraq without a real mission or realistic plan destabilizing the region have caused (far?) more than 200k civilian deaths.
I feel like an American complaining about China (which he has zero influence over) and ignoring the problems in America that he can influence is large hypocrisy and it should be poured out, repeatedly.
In the US, I am free to say "I don't love my country" or "I don't love my government" without going to prison.
I find this similar to the expression “generals always fight the last war”. Freer societies have similar controls on outlier citizens, they just do it through different means. Piss off a mayor and you might see more rigorous building inspectors on your property. Piss off the president and you might find yourself defending against an IRS audit. America doesn’t fight it’s citizens with a gun or a sword, it does it with paper cuts.
The USA has 200k+ crimes defined in law just at the national level (according to the author of 3 Felonies a Day). Prosecutors and LEOs are given wide discretion to prosecute, so someone who violates a traffic law may get much more lenient treatment if they express solidarity with Blue Lives Matter (a political stance) than if they express sentiments like Black Lives Matter (generally; obviously lots of variables). I have police in my family; they complain more about people who threat them with a lack of respect than they do the worst criminals they encounter.
And the famous Free Speech case that gave us the “you can’t falsely yell fire in a crowded theater” opinion was about a man handing out flyers trying to convince young American men to avoid the WW1 draft. He was arrested and SCOTUS upheld his conviction about speech that did not directly incite any violence. The USA is not as virtuous on the subject of speech as the myth suggests.
I’m not arguing that China’s laws are good. I don’t want to live there and I suspect I’ve said enough to get arrested there, but I’ve also said enough to likely be arrested in the USA if USA prosecutors were not so overworked.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Tibetan_program
I'm not sure we can use one CIA scam as an excuse to claim another CIA scam is not a scam.
The average Chinese citizen is less free thanks to these covert/overt foreign interventions.
Are we okay with the idea of well funded Asian intelligence agencies creating, funding, and training terrorist organizations in the USA/UK?
Any reasonable person that has studied the CIAs history in Asia would want it shut down.
I like how Thiel's counter-culture criticisms that seems to go against the crowd gets shut down by big tech and media. It is one of his techniques in his book Zero to One: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” https://fs.blog/2015/11/the-single-best-interview-question-y...
He might just be misunderstood: he is not making conclusions, but asking questions, posting hypotheses or conjectures for further investigation (the scientist method). He is checking against his own biases (investor in Facebook and Bitcoin)
Ex: His support for Trump happened to be a bad bet against the crowd, but he did not endorse him for a 2nd term (after seeing the data). Most Palantir attacks by the tech community are also baseless and political (covered by liberal media).
His suspicions are valid given past observations. Who would blame him for distrusting marketing giants = brainwashing machines like Google, Apple, Facebook and by extension China? Do you see his logic? His law background might actually make him the best advocate for ethics, which big tech hides violations really well with marketing and PR.
Bitcoin may have been countercultural at the beginning, until is was not- right now it is being speculated more like a money making scheme than a promising technology. Thiel's comment might be right onto something, let's not discredit him this early. Remember, he was part of the Paypal mafia...
Gotta wonder if his hate is motivated by his association/investment in Facebook and his alignment with Trump. (I also think that his camp is pretty angry about Oracle losing that lawsuit and looking for new ways to attack.)