What does it say about you when your boyfriend/friend with benefits/boytoy says the relationship is toxic yet you continue? Thiel basically snuffed the life out of a close person. If that is how much he cares about close people, he does not care the least bit about the American population and anything he does should be met with skepticism.
I don't get how bankrolling people who actively support policies that hurt minorities (like the LGBT community) can bring any upside to him. What is his endgame here?
Trump and the tea party MAGAs are a way to get that influence since it is a "new world order" and displaces Koch and Murdoch as the principal power brokers. The reason Tucker is so pro-Trump is because Murdoch wants to keep his power.
The pro-Putin stance is also a direct play to the MAGAs which is an evolution of the get the US out of Nato crap.
Meanwhile, conservative policies favour those who have a lot of money, like him.
The whole thing seems utterly contradictory to me, but clearly principles are flexible when money and power are concerned.
Why? Because he realises that people are selfish and he would act in the immigrants situation the same opportunistic way thus feels sympathy. But at the same way sees opportunistic immigration is a mayor problem for society thus supports hard regulation.
That way leads to situations where you are personal friends with people that you on a systemic level attack, without having a true moral conflict.
But he's definitely willing to walk down same road with those who are much more clearly and visibly on the fascistoid spectrum (such as the candidate he supported for president in 2016 and 2020) in order to advance his own goals. All while being smart enough to understand the sociopolitical landscape, the parallels to history and all that.
See also: Frederick The Great, who was power hungry, belligerent, effective, and gay as hell. That whole Prussian discipline thing? Oh yeah, basically ramped up to 11 with Fred. Aside from loving opera and fashion, he also was all about large men and large horses.
> So, let’s sum up. Peter Thiel believes he belongs to an elite group, often understood in implicitly or explicitly racial terms, that is entitled to set aside democratic governance in favor of pursuing a program of technological progress and national restoration. He believes the political means to accomplish this is through a charismatic leader with manipulative, populist appeals to past national glory and against parasitic immigrants and culturally decadent liberalism. For him, even the most milquetoast, reformist liberalism is “tantamount to communism.” He’s obsessed with romanticized fantasies of absolute power, domination, and control. He dreams of wielding the the national security state against enemies both foreign and domestic. He envisioned a kind of imperialist world-state controlled not through deliberative bodies like the U.N. but directly by the intelligence and secret police bureaus. He combines the ideology of white collar, petit-bourgeois intermediary class with its emphases direct management techniques and closely-held ownership with the grandiose, world-spanning designs of an industrial titan. There’s really no contradiction within Peter Thiel’s politics, they are quite consistent: he’s just realized, more clearly than his opponents often, that there’s ultimately a contradiction between the rule of capital and democracy, and the way to deal with this contradiction, as far as he’s concerned, is to do away with democracy.
To understand Thiel's position, you have to broaden your idea of harm past immediate harm to a single group of people.
While I'm sure Thiel has personal economic concerns, his stated primary moral concern is preventing wealth redistribution, socialism, and the mass-scale violence that those programs have caused in the past. You can choose to believe him as to whether this is his true motivation or not, but you asked for an explanation of this worldview and that's what he's stuck with over 10+ years now.
While you might be more worried about Nazis, Thiel is more worried about things like 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions, the ensuing Red Terror, and mass starvation/poverty. About 20M people died in Russia during this time, mostly from starvation but up to 200,000 dead by being executed by the state for having the wrong political beliefs. And many more during the various violent uprisings and civil wars.
Some of you reading this are going to huff and just disregard it, but for Thiel, preventing potential massive tragedy in the future is likely worth a tradeoff of some people being "harmed" now.
Edit: the number of replies to your comment which basically amount to "he just doesn't care about others/he's rich so he's evil" indicate that even the Hacker News audience is not immune to believing in lazy explanations and supernatural forces. Google "The Myth of Pure Evil" for more on this.
If we wants to prevent revolutions, he should be advocating for gradual change and a reduction in inequality, not fomenting culture war. Extreme inequality leads to revolution, and the civil war his people seem eager to instigate also seems contrary to his goals.
A quick search suggests figures ranging from 1 million to 40 million per year. So if you want to compare that to 100 million deaths by communism over the past 100 years, then preventable disease seems to kill at least roughly the same number of people, and possibly 40 times as many.
This isn't saying the USSR or the Bolsheviks weren't horrible, but one must put their crimes against humanity in the proper context and not turn them into super inhuman villains as much as we did with the Nazis (they too were horrible, but sadly they were very much a product of the mainstream values of their time).
Plus, the claim that allowing for social democratic policies like UBI, IP law reform, and the like to come to fruition isn't going to create another Red Terror. If anything, it's the most conservative thing you can do (see German Empire and the institution of Social Insurance by Otto von Bismarck) since it retains capitalism but tames its worse aspects for a time. This is why I roll my eyes at folks like Thiel since they rarely have anything that would be a viable alternative than status quo and lying about how bad things are for many people today. And I say this as someone who's far left of many folks being a Mutualist and an anarchist.
The really high end figures for the worst[0] man-made disaster of all time (the famine during the great leap forward) are 42 million, no idea where you'd get the rest of the numbers from.
[0]: edit: I thought it was the worst: apparently there were several previous famines in China in the 19th century that were more deadly.
> While you might be more worried about Nazis, Thiel is more worried about things like 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions, the ensuing Red Terror, and mass starvation/poverty.
That political violence was caused by competing authoritarian regimes, not socialism and wealth redistribution.
If socialism were the cause, the US would have had a violent revolution after WW2, a time of very high wealth redistribution and the implementation of programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Much of the current unrest in the US is caused by the stagnation of workers wages and quality of life in politically relevant places, not the opposite. That's far more like the situation in Germany prior to the rise of the Nazis.
Let's say I agree with Thiel on this matter. We agree so much that I intend to drone strike Thiel.
Is this position good or bad? How does it differ from that of Thiel?
Now if I was to design, test, and debug these devices, then release the blueprints along with a manifesto that lists what I feel are problems in society and who I feel are causing the problems, how would that be different from what Thiel is doing?
> Some of you reading this are going to huff and just disregard it, but for Thiel, preventing potential massive tragedy in the future is likely worth a tradeoff of some people being "harmed" now.
What I'm asking is how many degrees of separation is needed to make what OP is saying Thiel is doing acceptable.
If there wasn't something substantial on the table we wouldn't be having this discussion.
It's kind of like asking contemporary Christians how they get away with not focusing on the Spanish Inquisition. Why would someone today view that as "their own horrific history"?
In the future, please follow the HN guidelines. I'm done responding to you now. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Someone on this forum the other day suggested reading the book "Who Owns the Future?" by Jaron Lanier. I am only a few chapters in but it has been interesting to see the argument that Walmart prevented WW3 with China and at the same time the amassing of computation, digital networking and information is hollowing out the middle classes and driving economic inequality.
Fascinating stuff that any true capitalist should read.
As far as any personal inconsistency is concerned, humans are naturally inconsistent, and give themselves exceptions to their professed rules.
I say this having been loosely associated with that circle of people for a short time several years back.
> Thomas said that he felt like he had made strides with Thiel, though his effort was cut short earlier this month, on March 8, when he died tragically.
For context, SVB failed on March 10th.
According to the article he had been speaking to 'democrats and progressive activitists' about Thiel's hypocrisy. Considering how relentless Thiel was to Gawker... I can see how one can make the connection he could have been involved in the guy's death. This was NOT on my bingo card to say the least!!!
I am not a fan of his politics at all but his book was really good. However this development - the sudden death of his gorgeous kept lover - was unexpected.