Ex-Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz to Work for Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel
politico.eu
politico.eu
He has become almost a magnet for some incredibly shady characters the past few years with this just being the latest example.
Then I feel like everything I have ever read about him from the gawker incident onwards just paints the picture of someone who and is fuelled by spite and further power.
The part that worries me in particular is that he is by all accounts extremely competent. But in just a few years he has managed to make this transition from successful tech entrepreneur type to someone who is now deeply entrenched in some key parts of society (law enforcement, intelligence community and politics) all while continually making statements that indicate psychopath like tendencies.
He genuinely seems like the absolutely last person you would want involved with any of those groups unless your politics happen to perfectly match up.
So I mean this story itself is a good starting point. Kurtz prior to this was famously caught was caught stealing tax payers funds to bribe multiple groups including journalists, along with others. That is on top of his other best known trait I guess as one of those race baiting shitheads who is intentionally trying to win support by blaming immigrants for all of societies problems and working with other fascist / fascist adjacent groups. [1]
Just a few months ago a biography about Thiel came out that goes into a lot of detail about why specifically he is so concerning. There’s a good interview with the author here which outlines some of those concerns. [2]
Then there is the Cambridge Analytica stuff, the Trump stuff, the Facebook stuff, basically everything Palantir has done etc.
Edit: Sorry I’m doing all this on a phone and trying to put all of this together in a coherent package is a lot of work when I’m not even sure if you have any genuine interest in the question or not. I figure assuming it was a genuine question it’s probably going to be a lot quicker and easier to just check out some things yourself rather than me trying to digest it all for you but I didn’t want to just do the typical “Google it” response either.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/fc574b47-195...
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/magaz...
Admittedly not at all for their own good and purely in pursuit of his own goals.
He is widely acknowledged as a big part of the reason why Facebook is “the way it is” as this pipeline of radicalisation for a huge number of people.
He then repeatedly abused his access to that kind of thing by working with groups like Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon etc for explicitly partisan purposes to further fuck with vulnerable people.
I can’t ever forgive that.
Honestly, that's fine. The Obama campaign was lauded for similar social advertising, and had a direct relationship with facebook. That's how political campaigning works.
The converse is billionaires advocating for information control, and pushing to see that only those they endorse have a platform. So fat as I'm aware, Thiel hasn't done that. My position on him would change significantly if he had.
At its most extreme, suppressing information gives your subject no such freedom. You put them in an intellectual cage. You deny them the ability to choose their convictions.
People are not rational actors no matter how much we want them to be.
Turns out it’s really simple to convince people to act against their own self interest on a mass scale with a few psychological tricks.
Someone who knowingly and repeatedly spent their time, money and resources doing that for their own personal gain when they were already at the top of society is worthy of contempt and maybe worse.
Concealing dangerous information from them turns them into intellectual eunichs, and strip much of the vitality from the human experience.
It seems the guy has malevolent intentions and doesn’t even try to hide it, an ideal representation of the “devil you know is much better than the one you don’t know”.