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Comment by anon9384929 | Hacker News Reader

You’re taking a utilitarian and relativistic view on this, which feels disingenuous in this context. He is already backing people who {support, condone, downplay} violence that has already happened.

I don’t find it debating on good faith to ignore real violence by countering with hypothetical violence. Furthermore, he could easily advocate for a more hawkish view on China - a wildly popular view across the entire American political spectrum - while using his platform to disavow the real violence already done against Americans (that is also dividing us at a time when we need to have a united front against China.)

So, sure, we could do mental gymnastics to find some weird, hypothetical justification, or we could just look at the evidence in front of us.

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These aren't the views of the poster you're responding to -- they're just speculating about what Thiel's unstated motivations could be. So accusations of bad faith don't really apply here as far as I can see.

Thiel seems pragmatic, if nothing else, so it's not a leap to speculate that he's thinking in terms of tradeoffs here (minor violence now vs major violence later).

He could do as you propose, but that might not be an effective strategy (seems likely not to be), however pure it might make him in our bubble's calculations.

Why is that disingenuous? Plenty of people/governments/whatever have backed awful people for "the greater good." His theory of change might be that it's worth destroying American democracy in order to preserve American hegemony because he believes it's a fundamentally better world with America as the sole superpower; my point was I don't have any special insight and that people are really complicated and sometimes just because they do things we don't like, doesn't mean they're bad people.

> His theory of change might be that it's worth destroying American democracy in order to preserve American hegemony because he believes it's a fundamentally better world with America as the sole superpower

This is the logic of autocrats. In this supposed less violent future, I'm guessing Peter Theil sees himself and rich people like him as the elites in charge of post-democratic American hegemony, don't you think?

I'm sorry if I'm not convinced that this billionaire, who owns a mass surveillance company literally named after a fictional surveillance technology that was used to deceive people, is advocating for the destruction of American democracy and the subsequent elevation of his own power for altruistic reasons.

I think “destroying American democracy” can pretty firmly put you in the “bad” camp unless you start doing some odd mental gymnastics.

I also think “destroying American democracy” is by definition unconstitutional, simply by what the “un-“ preface means in English.

I agree people are really complicated but thankfully, there are lines people can cross that allow us to straightforwardly recognize them as “bad” without making the only bar for that something extreme like Satan.

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