One morning early this year there was a black sign stuck on the front door with some edgelord crap from Palantir:

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114356523256174674

I feel like a real dope because Thiel’s minions got me to buy a Rene Gerard book.

I still can't decide which mechanism is at work:

Person is a nutter -> nutters more likely to be at the extremes of achievement (success and failure) -> you see the successes -> there's a bunch of insane people who became billionaires

versus:

Some people win at the success game -> they start to think they are special -> environment encourages them towards extremes of thought -> bunch of crazy billionaires

One way the negative traits are merely uncovered by getting rich. Other way the negative traits are actually developed along with getting rich.

I’m honestly thinking he saw all the attention Elon got and wanted some for himself. For real - ten years ago if you asked anyone if they knew who Peter thiel was, maybe 4/10 would be able to tell you. But even among those 4 if you asked do you know what Peter thiel looks like they might all have shrugged. Now, at least to me, it seems like Thiel has decided to do interviews and public appearances like he never did before. And more and more people now know who he is and how crazy he is as a result. Not sure it’s had the effect he’s looking for.

I am so constantly confused by the level of greed and insanity these kinds of people reach. My theory is that once you are so divorced from the material world and what the value of anything is, your brain turns to mush.

I agree. I think people who are criticizing him have similar behavior when it comes to their own beliefs, but they're hiding it from the public. What makes Thiel seem crazy is the fact that his behavior is slightly more mainstream than the average individual.

Not if you're always getting the tranfusion from the same person

Drugs

I don't like a balance that adds evil but go on

> I want my nerdy hacker people back, working on stuff that makes the world better through the use of technology.

There are still people like that out there. They just haven't been captured by venture capital.

It's a shame that the Money has decided that authoritarianism is the way to go, but hopefully the pendulum swings back in our lifetime.

Wasn't the US giving money it doesn't have though?

I also read the headlines that say millions of deaths in Africa due to starvation and HIV... Do we have some support for that in e.g. excess deaths statistics since the funding was cancelled?

When searching I see one headline say 74k excess deaths in Africa by 2030 and another headline say 500k deaths in South Africa alone in the next 10 years. Which one is right?

If giving more money to Africa helped saves more lives, should the USA do it? I.e. should it have tripled the aid instead of cancelling it. Should it raise taxes to give Africa more aid? What is a non-emotional/rational way to think about foreign aid? What part of the aid is getting to where it's really needed? How efficient are the organizations delivering it?

One way to think about foreign aid is that it buys influence. I think this is why the US does this. But countries like South Africa are openly confrontational with the USA despite the aid they receive and work against US interests. If South Africa e.g. prefers to align with China and Russia (e.g. in BRICS) shouldn't China and Russia take on this aid?

What about the rest of the world?

I think the observation that "Silicon Valley" is starving children in Africa is at least inaccurate. I'm sure there are rich people in SV who are trying to do more. It's not one uniform group. It's also not clear what is actually the best thing to do.

> Now they have money and power and use both in pretty obscene ways, like starving children in Africa to death by yanking the aid that was keeping them alive away.

It’s because there’s lot of corruption in places receiving aid, look it up. Fixing problems is not as simple as giving someone money, there needs to be lots of accountability, which is often missing. There are fake NGOs and non-profits which essentially treat these foreign aid monies as slush funds. It makes sense to tighten the purse strings for now while the national debt crisis is looming large. It would also be great if other high GDP nations would contribute to this kind of development.

It's kind of hilarious when he gets asked about the whole "mark of the beast" thing and the fact that his entire fortune is based on implementing massive surveillance, and has absolutely no rebuttal. A man with this much power is incapable of anticipating a simple question like that.

> Part of the freedom of religion is accepting that other Americans really do have religious beliefs that differ from your own sometimes, and that's okay

That's incorrect. The government can't make laws respecting religion, but people can think that some beliefs are not ok, shun and mock people for believing crazy shit, and oppose their attempts to impose their nutty beliefs on others.

> Part of the freedom of religion is accepting that other Americans really do have religious beliefs that differ from your own sometimes, and that's okay.

Absolutely.

However, another part of freedom of religion is that people shouldn't impose their religious beliefs on others, which is precisely what the politically energetic Christians are trying to do. Thiel is doing it as well, but in a slightly more indirect way.

Thiel is bankrolling Yarvin’s ideological push among others.

A man who’s written essays claiming that “the obvious statistical differences in the average talents of human races” justified eliminating the system of representative government.

Does that sound like someone who would share his country peacefully with you?

You’re asking sheep to be tolerant of the approaching wolf.

"But we do need to share this country peacefully with people who don't have the same religious beliefs that we do."

That is something the hardcore Bible believers don't want to do. They want to "take back the country"

It's alright for people to believe crazy things. But it's much less alright for extremely powerful people to believe crazy things.

If Peter Thiel was a guy who lived three doors down and occasionally told me about the latest wacko stuff he saw online, that would be one thing. But he's not some random nut, he's trying to remake the country, and succeeding to an alarming degree.

What does it mean to share the country peacefully with someone who does not want to share the country peacefully in return?

This is why I'm opposed to billionaires. Inequality, shared prosperity, all those are nice things, but the most important thing is that money is power and having people with extremely large amounts of money means having people with extremely large amounts of power, people who were never elected to any office.

Broadly speaking I agree with you.

That said, when it comes to peacefully sharing the country with people with different beliefs I'd probably be more worried about the President-bankrolling military-industrial complex billionaire looking for a literal antichrist to be the Girardian scapegoat to renew the social order than the tech journalist wondering if that's a bit weird...

When the person adopts religious terminology to attain additional leverage in their particular form of murder capitalism, yes, you should think "this is so crazy."

Well the Anti-Christ as a character and literal demon, mirror image of Jesus, etc is a misinterpretation of the anti-Christ attitudes/behaviour the bible is discussing. Which alludes that the end times are when people are no longer pro-Christ. So yes it is so crazy.

>Is it really so crazy for one venture capitalist to believe that the Antichrist is real?

I think it's pretty crazy to take a man at face value who claims to believe in the real presence of the anti-Christ and literalist reading of scripture but is also married to another man and has boyfriends who mysteriously fall out of windows.

Religious crazies exist everywhere, but only in America would someone continue to listen to a person with all those things going on at the same time and think they aren't bullshitting. If I genuinely believed in eternal hell I probably wouldn't live like Peter Thiel and in all likelihood neither would he. "Venture capitalist afraid of the antichrist" is in itself pretty funny given what scripture has to say on God and Mammon

Those same religious nutjobs want to erase the identity of other equally nutty groups like trans people etc - basically everyone in America is crazy in some form or another, we should judge people not on their particular flavor of it but on how tolerant they are of the other crazies, which doesnt seem to be the case for Thiel.

The issue is rich people buy media and politicians and thus propaganda and power.

No journalist working at the washington post doesn't know that Bezos ultimately signs their checks. Pretty hard to not paint a flattering picture of him when that's the case.

Decades of media portraying the rich as being superior beings which aught be revered takes a toll on society.

This propaganda effort dates all the way back to movies like Anne showing the wonderful kindness of a wealthy person and the greed/corruption of poor housing for children.

Ideally we'll get past the idea that being smart makes someone worth listening to, even in the absence of any special knowledge, wisdom, virtue, or insight.

Not to say that I think Peter Thiel has always lacked insight, just that his views on the Antichrist aren't an area where he's demonstrating any.

> One day we’ll get past as a civilisation assuming rich people are smart or worth listening to solely because they are rich.

I hope so, but I doubt it. Along with that, I'd like to see us get rid of the delusion that beauty and good are correlated.

I think it's more mundane: Thiel, Andreesen, et al., are just rotting their brains on X and in group chats. Marshall McLuhan was right again.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...

> F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said in The Great Gatsby “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me."

The current crop of ultra-rich in the US seems a lot more like Jay Gatsby than Tom Buchanan.

Thiel wasn't born rich but he did spend his early child hood being taught he was inherently superior to like 90% of the country which probably has a similar effect.

I think the average HNer is just like Thiel when it comes to their own beliefs. Give them money, a podcast, and just sit back and watch the horror.