This guy is the worst. His writing and beliefs are like the worst parts of Silicon Valley distilled into one human being.
His main arguments are that politics divides, democracy favors the 51% at the expense of the 49%. He is for smaller government, less political divides, and the abandonment of the welfare state that creates a government dependent population with incredible waste. His ideas are not all that radical, considering debt spending by world governments is currently unsustainable.
People are largely irrational & bias. The thing about morality is everyone thinks they have the answers leading the government to be this odd form of paternalism where seemingly simple statements like "No drugs" are taken to this extreme that lead to more societal harm than good.
Even if that’s so, my problem is he thinks he should be one of the babysitters. That’s what elected officials are for.
All I owe Peter Thiel is letting him live his life. If he wants to co-opt the agency of others without consent, I don’t even owe him that.
Workers build the world. Thiel is not the smartest man in the world. There are engineers and scientists doing useful work while he grifts off government corruption he claims to hate.
When he’s participating in the management of the real human mess that enables him, he’ll have earned his place. Right now he’s a lazy nobody who has convinced people he’s worth a number that means something special.
The only number that applies to Thiel is he’s 1 of 7 billion+. Nothing more.
It’s almost as if he’s the sort of person who will take whatever position fits his immediate need.
If Thiel was a genius he’d be more than another rich businessman.
I am close friends with an engineer that worked on a power transform system for the LHC. He’s a moron.
Given humans had to rely on innate intuition of acceptable effort for survival early on; quantity of food, etc, before formal language, I’m leaning into the idea human language are a cognitive boondoggle forced on us by tribal warlords.
Most humans have the same cognitive capability as Thiel, but none of the relative network access, or political burden.
So many old ways are now seen as illegal and manipulative of people too ignorant to falsify them. Thiel is no god and political corruption is everywhere. I see no reason to believe he’s special.
Print out all his dollars as official currency and they all have some words on them claiming they’re property of the US Government. Thiel’s power is reliant on big government.
Citing beats merely repeating the claim.
Google is right there and I suggest you do the legwork forming your own opinions.
I’ve merely stated my own and take the position I’m not trying to influence you. Coming here for insight, well, you get what you pay for on free social media.
I don’t do nuanced work for free.
>Right now he’s a lazy nobody who has convinced people he’s worth a number that means something special.
Hardly know how you can call him lazy when he's on the board of multiple companies and is the CEO of one. I'm sure he's consistently working 70 hour weeks and his impact with paypal on the world alone has made him an impactful and important figure.
(There is, obviously, no real freedom for anyone without participation in the distribution of power, i.e. democracy.)
Democracy will never create a free society, but neither will dictatorship. Democratic societies tend to be more free than dictatorship, but that's not always the case.
If there was an enlightened and rich dictator, he could decide to make weed legal, impose zero taxes, grant freedom of speech. Compared to most of the western world, where weed is mostly illegal, taxation is imposed forcefully and freedom of speech is disappearing - that would be a freer society.
The real way to have a freer society is to decentralise power away. It's not about granting 60 millions people an infinitesimal choice for an outcome shared by everyone. It's about each individual having a different outcome.
It really isn't. Maybe "Western-style, representative democracy" implies that. But democracy in general, to me, is any system where people rule themselves. I'm not really big on voting, for one.
> If there was an enlightened and rich dictator, he
would become a horrible authoritarian within six months, no matter how good his original intentions were.
> The real way to have a freer society is to decentralise power away.
I fully agree! The world needs more food co-ops and worker-owned businesses.
It is probably fine to prevent someone from polluting water sources by a democratic vote.
It would be an overreach to prevent someone from grilling steaks on his porch because his neighbours are vegetarians and do not like the smell of meat.
Zoning of residential areas is somewhere in between.
Not too long ago, there was a case in Switzerland where a British person was denied citizenship by the initiative of her neighbors, because she complained too much about various topics (bells ringing too loudly etc.)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/woman-annoyi...
Is it legitimate to take opinions of your neighbors into account when deciding your citizenship application? It is certainly more democratic than not doing so, but at the same time, it might degenerate into a popularity contest.
You can't just ignore the negative aspects of a system because it doesn't suit your sensibilities. Can you do the same for a system of government you're diametrically opposed to?
> Of course those that are more affected by an issue should have more of a say in it.
So you're fine with the electoral college then, right?
> Of course democracy must be founded on basic, inviolable rights. That's the whole point.
Not really. Democracy is simply a system to decide on policies that govern a group of people and there is little inherent value in it itself. It can be used to oppress just as easily as it can protect the rights of individuals living in the system. It's dependent on the voting population. Critics of democracy simply argue that it is too easy to oppress when you give individuals direct access to the power to do so.
What I said was, if a system of government allows one group of people to turn another group of people into slaves, then it isn't a democracy. By my definition, a democracy does not allow slavery, because a democracy must treat all citizens equally.
> Democracy is simply a system to decide on policies that govern a group of people
To me it's more than that. It's a principle of governance. Not just the how of the system, but the why.
> So you're fine with the electoral college then, right?
You mean the American system for electing presidents? I don't know exactly, I am half a world away. I will say that from here that country looks pretty bad all in all, but the fact that a single person holds so much power seems a lot more problematic than how that person is picked - although it would be interesting to see what would happen if they somehow managed to find a good one. As far as I know that's never happened.
You're using a different definition than Thiel is. His definition is simply a description of a system. If a country is a representative democracy or a direct democracy, where each person gets to vote, then it's a democracy by definition. Your definition pertains to an outcome of a system, such as equality. Neither of these are wrong definitions, since they're both commonly used in regular conversation, but you are talking at cross purposes.
Under his definition, which is what we should be talking about if we're addressing this in good faith, democracy (the system) and freedom are at odds because democracy is just majority rule. Women who can't get an abortion, rich people that have to give up 50% of their money, minorities that are discriminated against in law, victimless crimes being prosecuted (weed), and so on.
These are examples of the majority using their vote to strip the freedoms and property and time of other people.
Each day that I go to work, 1/2 of my day goes directly to the state, merely because a majority of the electorate thinks they are entitled to it. This isn't literal slavery (where 100% instead of 50% of my time is taken from me), but it's certainly not freedom when 1/2 of my productive energy is taken from me by threat of prison time if I do not comply.
Your 'definition' here doesn't coincide with reality, where a group may easily be oppressed by the majority. The fact that the example is at the most extreme does not invalidate that. Democracy does not require any sort of protections for those it is governing, just that they have a vote.
> To me it's more than that. It's a principle of governance. Not just the how of the system, but the why.
But it's not that. The principles you are ascribing to democracy are neither unique to nor a requirement for democracy. In fact quite frequently they are not. That is my point, people keep conflating democracy with these qualities that it does not possess. Advocate for those principles, not democracy.