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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

When he couldn't get women to vote for his crazy libertarian ideas he was floating the idea of taking their votes away.

Is this an attempt to build support for further extending that plan?

edit: I just looked up his response to that at the time:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/01/peter-thiel/suffrage...

> In America, people are imprisoned for using even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government, and forced to bail out reckless financial companies.

> I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian.

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For anyone reading who may be swayed- he is wrong about politics. Politics is how people with different views, beliefs and ideas come together to make decisions as a group. The alternative is force.

It has recently been hyper focused on us vs them (thanks newt and rush) but it’s just folks trying to figure out how to move forward and have their wants met. Politics is finding compromise. And if you are unwilling to find compromise you will eventually find the alternative to politics.

I don’t see how Thiel is in any way libertarian. He seems to support neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin that actually argue for a return to monarchy, and Trump, the most illiberal authoritarian prominent politician in modern US history. He seems like he wants to effectively eliminate freedom, human rights, and liberty entirely- seems like the furthest possible position from libertarianism?

It's the fake rightist "Libertarianism" of freedom for me, but not for thee. The main freedom he desires is the freedom to coerce other people. This is patently not libertarianism, but that doesn't stop these powermongers from cloaking themselves in the label to distract from their goals while assuaging their own egos. Similar to how they use religion.

In a word, horseshoe theory. If you’re on the extreme sides of the political spectrum, you’re essentially authoritarian, even if you don’t necessarily “feel” that you are authoritarian.

The political spectrum isn't left to right, despite some places seeming that way. The political spectrum is both progressive to conservative and libertarian to authoritarian. Although that's a lie and it isn't as simple as that either, because it doesn't work for differentiating green conservatives from regular conservatives, for example.

Green conservatives are still talking about climate change as their main issue. Regular conservatives just want these fucking fascists deposed, in prison, and their deplorable enablers back to being ashamed ^_^

I’d argue the opposite- most people don’t think of politics in terms of goals, philosophy, or policy but in terms of group identity. In that sense, politics is the USA is effectively binary rather than one dimensional.

If you’re going to talk about something like philosophical values, you could have almost infinite dimensions, but you’d find it impossible to place most actual voters anywhere because the dimensions will represent things they have no opinion on and have never thought about.

I've always taken the horseshoe end to be individual liberty, with "centrists" being more the corporate-authoritarian agenda. So that you're construing in the opposite way shows that while the concept might be somewhat enlightening, it's not really a super useful model.

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