Peter Thiel's Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
"Thiel’s lurid, apocalyptic view of world politics may be ludicrous or even deranged, but his wealth and power mean that we can’t afford to ignore it."
Raw power > wealth (see Putin, Vladimir: he doesn't need wealth or even to "own" anything, his raw power gets him everything wealth can buy and more). But for weaker people who aren't so powerful to control the system itself, wealth can get you a lot of power within that system.
More recently, purchasing a social network and then flooding it with your worldview.
Power based on consent likely existed throughout the Holocene: “Big men” with their gift-giving and elaborate feasts, chiefdoms comprised of aristocratic lineages… the gameplan has always been to collect favors by promising future returns, religious blessings, and the like. You can see the parallels to present-day VC. These pre-historic admin dudes emerged alongside the steepening wealth inequality gradients and population growths of agrarian societies.
Comforting to know their influence is limited and precarious, as the social following can always fragment. This is what anthropologists call segmentary structures. More interesting, if severely depressing, is the theory that power based on consent is arguably the precondition for scaling social cohesion beyond kin and villages to cities and civilizations, thereby serving as the foundation for more durable power structures.
The comment in question didn't make a point, it provided only this unsupported opinion that happens to be flatly wrong: "It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention."
In fact, good buddies Thiel and Musk came from S Africa sharing similar librarian attitudes and both worked hard at circumventing the banking regulations while being part of the "PayPal mafia". They are both very keen on remodeling the government around the libertarian idea of uncountable corporate power.
“They went from scrappy guys dodging government regulation to now they are the government, in a generation” said Steve Blank... an adjunct professor of management science [1]
That cannot be done without using concentrated wealth to conquer people's attention. Sure enough, Musk proceeded to acquire Twitter at a great cost and to proclaim his idea of corporate control of speech through control of attention reach: "Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" [2]
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/how-musk-thiel-and-sac...
[2] https://www.chiefmarketer.com/twitters-musk-touts-new-freedo...
Thanks
I think it has something to do with Silicon Valley's obsession with money. To SV-people, billionaires are like gods. They are worshipped and invited to all the events worth going to (meetups, hackathons, etc.). Everyone wants to be like them.
And it seems to me to be a geographical problem too. In NYC, billionaires are like supervillains. Nobody particularly likes them (outside of select finance bros), and people openly express disdain for them and their greed.
So, the issue is really just that he has far too much power, as an individual
This is absurd to the point of being cartoonish. No one treats billionaires like supervillains. How many billionaires are in supermax prisons right now in New York?
> Nobody particularly likes them
This is not relevant, regardless of whether it’s true. A ton of people hate Thiel and Trump. Disliking a billionaire doesn’t take away their power.
"Supervillains" are comic book entities who are rarely in prison
But this is really not my point. Billionaires == Supervillains is not a commonly held view outside some echo chambers.
Batman is a billionaire too in comic lore.
I think you may be confusing 'power' or 'impact' with wealth in this take.
Paul Graham wrote about this in a blog post [1].
In NYC, being rich is cool, even if you just inherited it all. Having lived 12 years in NYC, I agree wholeheartedly. It's what everyone aspires to have; the Tribeca loft and the Patek watch.
In SF, PG wrote that nobody cares that you inherited a bunch of wealth unless they're a real estate agent. I think this is true — flashy wealth isn't impressive in SV/SF. Impact and power and the scope of what you've built and created is what's impressive, for better or worse. (I just moved to SF for this reason).
Just look at some of the comment threads here. So many replies essentially White-Knighting for a billionaire! Why does one take time out of their day to post an impassioned defense of this guy? He doesn't need your help. Do y'all think he's going to Venmo you $100 every time you defend his honor online?
Same thing for Musk. Say one thing bad about him, and the Musk Defense League reliably crawls out of the woodwork to passionately argue for him and downvote criticism. What's the point?
California is/was New Money and comes with optimism and change and progress and was able to keep up the façade until fairly recently. Now the FAANG world is richer than god and has no reasons to even try to maintain illusions
Voting is the only power we have but the voting booths are at the stadium.
b) regardless of who hears about Thiel's philosophy, it still has impact. He funds political candidates, companies, think tanks etc and directly affect the world.
Wanting to “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone” from rich people you dislike isn’t a brave stance against inequality, it’s straight-up authoritarian censorship based on net worth. In a free society, people choose who gets attention. If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him, but don’t fantasize about silencing citizens because they’re successful. And honestly, Thiel’s worldview has real strengths: he’s been early and right on remote work, the stagnation of atom-based industries, the broken incentives in higher education, the dangers of bureaucratic overreach, and the need for bold technological breakthroughs instead of endless regulation. PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX (as an early investor), and backing young founders through the Thiel Fellowship have created massive value and progress. Dismissing all that because he’s rich and contrarian is lazy.
Kind of hard to do this when he has so much money to buy influence anywhere. An example is how the current vice president of the United States is a protege of the guy.
But scroll this comment section for any critique of Thiel and you’ll see the pattern: his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do.
Take the “Antichrist Thesis” everyone mocks. It’s Rene Girard-speak for centralized, charismatic authoritarianism that weaponizes morality and scapegoating to grab power. Think Sam Altman preaching about AGI danger while lobbying the gov for openai prioritizing and startup stifling policies. Fed government using big tech censorship for preventing hate speech. He’s been dead-on about that danger for decades.
This is false. His ideas get attacked plenty because it's clear that his ideas are destructive to society. But there are only so many times one can have the "holy shit his ideas are destructive to society" conversation without talking about how the only reason his destructive ideas are front and center is because of his money.
He uses alot of coded language, hence why he is often called a Crypto Fascist (Crypto as in encrypted language, not cryptocurrency) To anyone knowledgeable enough to own a basic mental cypher, they can decode fascist and monarchist language. He's very clearly a selfish person in the business of consolidating his own power over others to fulfill his outlandish fantasies.
He's deffinately not the only person in the world holding these sorts of views, there is an overabundance of sociopathic elites in the world. But Thiel is able to operate on an influence level beyond that of most sociopaths and thus his wealth is one of the most pressing issues regarding his person. This particular nutjob being far less powerful and wealthy, would preserve alot of our social order.
HN seems very ready to defend the rich and powerful from attacks that don't even exist and its weird to come here and say how great he is while also seeing what his efforts have actually wrought - nothing positive on education or government overreach via the Trump admin. Paypal may have been ok at one point, but is generally considered to be a terrible company to work with, Palantir is a murderer for hire, and SpaceX burns billions to get us not very much with its continued explosions in the sky with hilarious mars shot promises regardless of its other commercial successes.
The Wealthy and powerful have never had to worry about the freedom of their speech in history. They determined what speech was acceptable.
Take a break from defending those actively destroying our society through their actions, intentional or not, and learn the foundations of why free speech is designed the way it is.
It's not that free speech absolutism is fair, it's that there's not really an alternative that's any more fair.
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/02/21/world-news/germans-cant-insult...
Taking away the microphone is not censorship. We're not talking about taking away Thiel's right to speech, we're talking about taking away undue amplification of Thiel's speech.
You are allowed to stand on a soapbox and shout your politics.
But if you amplify your speech on that soapbox you're given a little bit of slack because of "free speech" but then are rightly arrested for public nuisance and/or noise violations.
Name me one serious, intellectually honest critic of Thiel—say, Malcolm Harris, Evgeny Morozov, Shoshana Zuboff, Mariana Mazzucato, or even random Substackers with 100k+ followers who’s struggling to be heard because Thiel bought all the megaphones.
They all have huge platforms, book deals, TED-level reach, or blue-check amplification. The “undue amplification” crowd never points to a single silenced dissident; they just dislike that Thiel’s ideas are winning in the marketplace anyway.
If every prominent counter-voice already has a bigger megaphone than 99.9 % of humanity ever will, the complaint isn’t about access it’s that voters and readers keep choosing the “wrong” rich guy.
Edit: I think there's a much stronger case for some kind of corruption charge against Trump, since he's been using the office to enrich himself.[1]
That should be sufficient. We need to start the process of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and we need to do as much as we can to enforce existing laws against dark money and enact as much as we can while Citizens United is in effect.
the resort to violence can be wielded by everybody. therein lies its limitation as an unreliable means to control people and resources. power based on consent, ie, power from below, is predicated on promises proffered by patron-brokers who trade resources for allegiance. it's a comparatively stable structure until it reaches a certain scale. to get to that point, the stakes had to have been raised through manufacturing consent in the forms of ritual, ideology, capital, bureaucracy, and all the other goodies that Girard and Thiel love discussing. throw in the compounded accumulation of resources through arbitrage and leveraged betting, and you're left with social structures characterized by skewed wealth distributions and leaders who get to wield power asymmetrically. there's a clear historical and logical sequence where power by consent leads to power by coercion embodied in hegemony. given that's the current state of affairs, (and no sense in contesting this point since Thiel grapples with this fact himself in his investments and mythologizing of the US through this antichrist/katechon dialectic), it's pretty obvious what tools are left to those who no longer have any control to surrender via the consensual framework. suboptimal as it may be, at least violence-or the threat thereof-can be wielded by both sides.
now, where we land individually on the matter is one thing, but i'm afraid yours is the genteel fantasy.
Nothing really disqualifies you from tremendous economic success because inheritance exists.
Can you be more specific? I see similar claims thrown about him, but they don’t really hold up to scrutiny and often o. The basis of straw men claims.
Read it yourself
The claims about “tech CEOs as feudal lords,” plans to dismantle the government, or to “buy up its assets for pennies”—is not supported by any of his public remarks or writing. He's never endorsed corporate feudalism, asset seizure, or authoritarian rule.
He's said there are "Satanic" components to AI.
"fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism."
"Monopolies are good"
He's said the country should be lead by a monarch or "monarch-like figure".
The guy is a fucking nut.
> "Competition is for losers"
He didn't actually originate this. The NYT did, in a review of his book. It was so catchy he ran with it. Of course, beyond the provocative headline is the idea that startups should seek green fields, not enter hyper competitive areas where margins are competed away.
> He's said there are "Satanic" components to AI.
Metaphor.
> "fate of our world may depend..."
Keyword here is "may". Clearly a conjecture on his part. And like most things he says, part of a larger narrative he is weaving via symbolism.
> "Monopolies are good"
Bad faith interpretation. A VC/founder achieves a monopoly insofar as they invent or revolutionize a market, typically via breakthrough technology. Facebook and Google rose to dominance bc their products were 10x better than the alternatives.
> He's said the country should be lead by a monarch or "monarch-like figure".
No, he didn't. If you can find a legitimate source for this, I will eat crow.
You may not like his ideas. But I encourage you to not rely on the interpretations of others (i.e. media headlines from left leaning outlets, etc.) and to steelman his arguments when you seek to criticize them.
Because of human nature, the two are inseparable, and influence over people's attention is power, especially when those people hold seats of power.
The question is about what perspective society takes towards wealth/power concentration at any given time, and that usually ends up correlated with how the non-wealthy and non-powerful are feeling.
I've said this about celebrities for two decades now. Most people don't care though; they love the gossip, I guess.
IIRC it covers things like how to maintain proper oxygen levels and sustenance while still blocking frequencies in the human audible range with the sand around one's head.
That said, buying airtime/ads does is not sufficient to create traction with your ideas. I have worked at plenty of foundations that spend a lot of money to "raise awareness" on various issues, which ultimately goes nowhere.
IMHO the zany, outlandish claims by Thiel, are gaining attention because of their inherent shock-value. I sent a text to my girlfriend last week, incredulous that Thiel was reported to claim the Pope is now an antichrist (¡). Definitely not because I agreed with that claim.
I think the root issue here is deep to human nature -- heightened awareness of danger, that adrenaline amygdala response. Social media helps these messages spread, but news publishers have been putting train wrecks on the front page since the 1800s. A growing handful of savvy operators, Thiel included, have learned how to manipulate this primal instinct to garner fame and influence.
I'm not sure how to change human nature. I do think that education about these tactics helps -- the magic trick is not as impressive when you know how it is done.
I find the premise of projects like Ground News -- trying to de-bias media -- really compelling.
That said, a de-biasing site isn't much help if people don't read it. Infamously, people's politically-melded worldviews are increasingly divorced for reality -- there's a famous example of people in surveys saying they "hated Obamacare" but "loved and relied on the Affordable Care Act" (for international readers: those are the exact same thing, which a simple google search would reveal).
Thiel very much plays the game in your second sentence, he's just smart about it. Thiel is gaining attention because he's put in the work, for a long time. Not because of shock value. And he's leveraging his soft power/contacts/PR sources/exposing his power level/drawing on what he built pretty hard now. Why?
he's exploring these esoteric tasks 1) cuz he wants to, and 2) because he knows they'll sell with the right demographics
Only time, reality shock or meeting a proportionate external force are the antidote. And even these can be stretched via the constant propaganda drip.
There is a great Charles Mackay quote applicable here: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
It has long been a belief of the "religious right". For decades, and their predecessors for centuries.
I don’t even think the claim has shock value anymore. I have a buddy who has thought that about the last 3 popes.
Just because Thiel is saying it doesn’t mean that it is all of a sudden gaining traction. You could throw a dart at a random spot on a map of the US and probably find 10-15 preachers within a hundred mile radius of the landing spot saying the same sort of thing to their congregation at any time over the last 75 years. Certainly in aggregate reaching far more people with far more influence than Thiel could hope to with his latest efforts.
Thiel is courting Christian nutjobs whether or not you pay attention to it. I’m personally not gonna stick my head in the sand.
And what about the influencers with millions of followers (recent Qatari influence campaign comes to mind)? What about Hollywood (again Qataris and their influence campaign, if you notice how some famous actors started to speak on certain topics)
Alas, it's what Likud wants and we can't let their bloodlust frame America's future.
I hate having to listen to rich people. To me its as bad as having to listen to politicians, but these people affect my life (whether I like it or not) so I have to listen to know what's coming.
One cannot ignore his views (for the reasons stated) and yet there needs to be a feedback loop to limit the spread of their views using their wealth and influence.
The writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley
Something has to change. The superrich act as parasites and broken all inter-generational promises. The USA really messed up here - they should have put down control systems to prevent this parasitic situation.
Saying weird/extreme shit and then building a movement is a way of qualifying initiates and those willing to rally to the cause. It's part of the cult programming playbook. You build an in-crowd and you aim their energies at the out-crowd. It often leads to more unhinged positions too.. these things don't self-correct.
Thiel's a loon, Elon's a loon, Trump's a loon, Vought's a loon.
Pointed dismissiveness completely misses the point.
A half dozen preachers at medium to large congregations reach and influence far more people with these kind of ideas without his billions and press at their disposal. He’s actually small potatoes in this apocalypse space.
I say let him talk, who cares?
They are getting funded because people are tapping into the zeitgeist, so the message is popular and presented in ways people find interesting and compelling. Money abounds whenever people are listening.
> the best scientists are getting deplatformed
Because they are not tapping into public mood or in a lot of cases simply unable to communicate effectively to the populace in a way that attracts platforming and financial interests. The sensible or realistic apocalypse stories just aren’t as sexy as the magical and supernatural ones.
propaganda works, and the US spent 80 years post-WW2 talking about how Communism = evil.
That's not just a statement about how long it can remain irrational. Federal irrationality can kill you in several ways.
Because really?
Greta Thunberg is the best that a nearly omnipotent second only to the Creator itself can do? Did he ever watch The Omen movies? Insist on nothing less than Sam Neill's portrayal of Damian Thorn as the Antichrist.
In contrast, Greta Thunberg would be the six-fingered AI slop of antichrists. Is he insinuating that Satan has been replaced with generative AI? If so, times are much worse than I thought.
As a libertarian, I certainly have my problems with the progressive orthodoxy. But every time I've tried to work out current conservative principles, by generally appealing to what they claim to be, I've basically just gotten a brush off of why those traditional ideals are not applicable and then a bunch of whataboutism to justify why they have to kill our society to purportedly save it.
This is kind of understandable, because that reactionary talk radio was always a form of managed dissent. They kept getting tricked by it, and as communications democratized they somewhat realized this (hence the whole RINO thing). But as usual they're unable to see the larger overall picture, and so direct blame at whomever scapegoats their new info-bubble managers point at.
I don't think that bodes well for our geopolitical competitiveness in the long run. And you can already see it in the irrational hatred of renewables on the right and the irrational hatred of AI on the left. Meanwhile, enough of the rest of the world has better things to do that we seem destined to become a geopolitical NPC.
As for the "irrational hatred" of "AI", isn't that what laying the groundwork for controlled opposition and regulatory capture looks like? There have been serious problems from lack of business accountability and responsiveness, now exacerbated by AI. But pigeonholing it all into an "AI bad" narrative is basically setting up to defeat any specific reforms.
But I agree they have become the useful idiots for regulatory capture. The right's hatred of renewables is just stupid.
if these supposed elected representatives can't take the responsibilities of their jobs and they just want the perks, they need to resign to make room for someone better. Not holding my breath there.
See also: the success of the "Southern Strategy" in converting racists in the southern US from Democratic to Republican voters, taking advantage of the Democratic Party's focus on civil rights.
As long as Trump keeps hurting the people they don't like, they'll continue to support him.
Interesting perspective, considering that you said this only 5 minutes later in this same post:
> There's a communist who's just been elected to Mayer of New York.
The two-party system seems pretty cooked at this point.
https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
For one with less confusion about the speaker: "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law." --Oscar R. Benavides, President of Peru from 1933 to 1939
The problem is that in much of the world (e.g. the UK) Catholics are historically left wing, AND uninterested in apocalyptic ideas so it seems a big ask.
The article does not leave me with any understanding of what his ideas actually are.
From https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
#WorstAntiChristsEver
It also explains some of the contradictions in JD Vance - if Thiel is influencing him, or if he is simply saying things to keep Thiel's donations coming in.
If you don't think so, play this game: how would things change for Peter Thiel if he was of a different race? It wouldn't. Greed is blind to these superficial facets that drive the normies up the wall. It's truly by design. And it's so broadly accepted you don't even need to hide these things anymore which only adds insult to injury.
they already pander to trump, who is about as un-christian as you can get.
thiel will make all of the right moves and do the secret "actually one of us" handshake and those idiots will eat it up; his billionaire buddies will do the rest.
Thiel warns about Antichrist, while doing the very thing that's enabling his coming. Unrestrained technological expansion is exactly what's erasing the human spirit and replacing it with a machine culture.
It is a classic tactic of fascism, called [accusation in a mirror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror)
The notion that there is an antichrist and that "international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise" is ludicrous.
The only reason we listen to his nonsense is because he has money, and with that comes power in this country.
I suggest he take some shrooms and chill...
18 Children, it is the last hour; and just as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. This is how we know it is the last hour. ... 22 Who is the liar, if it is not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, who denies the Father and the Son.
It has also always been a Christian belief that Jesus will return, the current world system will end, and God will establish new heavens and a new earth.
2 Peter 3 talks about this. It's too long to quote the whole chapter but here are some call outs.
https://biblehub.com/bsb/2_peter/3.htm
4 “Where is the promise of His coming?” they will ask. “Ever since our fathers fell asleep, everything continues as it has from the beginning of creation.” ... 8 Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9 The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise as some understand slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance.
"Dozens of churches withdraw investments from fossil fuels"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dozens-churches-withdraw...
I could have used some more explication on the connection between Thiel's ideology and Palantir's project portfolio. I felt like this article was structured like "Part 1: Thiel is Crazy, Part 2: Palantir is Awful, Conclusion: They are Related", without really making clear what the relationship between them was. It seems pretty contradictory that someone concerned about "The New One World Order" would create a global police technology apparatus, so deep-diving into the cognitive dissonance there (and how it is soothed by the ideology) would have been interesting (to me).
The restrainer (2 Thessalonians 2:6&7) is a bit of an enigma, but has been variously interpreted as the Holy Spirit, the Church, human government, or the archangel Michael.
But to let Scripture speak for itself, here is an except from 2 Thessalonians 2:
1 Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to Him, we ask you, brothers, 2 not to be easily disconcerted or alarmed by any spirit or message or letter seeming to be from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord has already come. 3 Let no one deceive you in any way, for it will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness—the son of destruction—is revealed. 4 He will oppose and exalt himself above every so-called god or object of worship. So he will seat himself in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.
5 Do you not remember that I told you these things while I was still with you? 6 And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. 7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but the one who now restrains it will continue until he is taken out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of His mouth and annihilate by the majesty of His arrival.
9 The coming of the lawless one will be accompanied by the working of Satan, with every kind of power, sign, and false wonder, 10 and with every wicked deception directed against those who are perishing, because they refused the love of the truth that would have saved them. 11 For this reason God will send them a powerful delusion so that they believe the lie, 12 in order that judgment may come upon all who have disbelieved the truth and delighted in wickedness.
I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out.
He's a weak, frail manchild masquerading as a cartoonish supervillain. Fuck him.
Fortunately, Silicon Valley has now provided a machine to do that for you.
I'd be somewhat concerned that this type of severe detachment from reality may become more common as LLMs make the obsequious ego-buffing that was previously available only to billionaires too cheap to meter.
Why not, it’s not as if you’d face any real consequences for your own reckless stupidity.
The truly insidious calculation they all eventually got to is that in Trump you have someone that is somehow even more insecure and craven than them and can be straight bought and sold to the highest bidder. They give Trump the superficial credibility of having ostensibly smart people behind him, and Trump gives them the benefits of being adjacent to his non-stop corruption and self-dealing machine.
The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.
IMHO, that's the obvious end-state of AGI: the economy eats the world and a few trillionaires sitting atop AGI armies control the economy, and nearly everyone else becomes powerless, irrelevent, and eventually "ended."
That's not actually a problem with it.
For a business owner, customers and employees are actually just a means to an end (customers yield profit, which is money, which is power and control within capitalism; employees are the means of converting money to power and control).
AGI could let a select group of well-positioned business owners to skip straight to power and control. There will probably be a transition state while they suck the resources out of the rest of society by providing some product or service, but once that's done they can just use AGI to use those resources for their own ends without needing anyone else.
An economy with AGI would be a radical change from our current economy, and would work very differently.
Basically: imagine Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos owning all the vast majority of all resources of the world, made invincible by AGI drone-swarms, harnessing those resources to build whatever whim they have. Does Musk want cover New York City with massive pyramids built in his honor? AGI will demolish it, mine the needed materials, and build them for him.
> Thiel by contrast is profiting from the use of AI weapons targeting systems used in the Ukraine war and the genocide in Gaza.
Thiel is IMO not doing this for profit. He is deeply ideological, which should be more worrisome.
It is profit. The craziness is just the cover for it.
You haven't given away your money. Does that mean everything you do (including writing the above comment) is for profit?
They don't spend it - if you think someone with a net worth of X has that money in cash then you need to go to school.
Even if they did - that's a greedy person's way of thinking. They invest money they do have, which employs people and pushes world R&D forwards.
"it's the same because they're both bad"
ok...
My family is from a communist country and I can assure you, that is communistic.
Trump sent a bunch of government checks to people during Covid and no one called him communist for this.
Giving people money on a temporary basis is the opposite of the government opportunistically taking over areas of the market.
We've had those for ages. Called commisaries. Here's a picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_020813-N-364...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Commissary_Agency
> the government will seize buildings from bad landlords.
We've had eminent domain since the founding of the nation.
The US army have their own government owned supermarkets. And there are plenty of US states and other countries with public stores which are definitely not communist. Is the US army communist ?
In Berlin we voted to seize housing from megacorp landlords profiteering from housing, I don't think Berlin is communist either. https://qz.com/2065655/berliners-voted-to-seize-housing-from...
In Berlin you didn't realise that population increase is what enriches landlords and screws regular people, but you still vote for a lot of immigration. Population increase in a finite, well-settled country is what gives rise to landlords.
They dehumanize and kill everyone equally.
I think the West (US especially) has a great system of government figured out, and I wouldn't try to say any group attempting to break that is better than another. It's not disingenuous to say that both are authoritarians who kill millions.
I disagreed and said that they are both equally horrid.
Expressing equal hatred for people and systems that kill countless millions through starvation, gulags/concentration camps, and disappearing them, is not childish. I have a ton of solidarity with victims of other evil regimes.
Communists left the chat in 1989, grandpa. There are multiple factions competing for power but communists aren't really in the ring right now. It's mostly different flavours of establishment factions and alt-right factions.
They're both wrong, just in different ways, and observing this is not "bothsidesism."
there's lots of stupid brigading on HN, but sometimes dumb comments get the downvotes they deserve.
It’s a magazine with a professed socialist view point but it’s more aligned with left-of-center American politics. Think Sanders or Mamdani rather than Stalin or Mao.
> Sanders or Mamdani
Sanders and Mamdani are about as far left of center as one can get at the moment, such that they almost meld into Stalin or Mao.
The mental gymnastics you’re doing to blunt that fact is absolutely incredible.
No, they aren’t. They are about as far left of center as you can get and be competitive in US elections, maybe, but that’s a very different thing. There’s a lot to their left (as you an see from the by the opposition from leftist as sellouts to capitalist/imperialist/etc. institutions both have.)
... Oh, come on now. I can't tell whether you're extremely confused about Sanders and Mamdani, or extremely confused about Stalin and Mao.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/25/bernie-sande... would have gone very differently if Sanders was Mao, for a start.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s a no-kidding literary tool used throughout history.
Stalin was an ideological authoritarian that executed political rivals and used lethal force, price controls, and other governmental tools to control the economy and the general working population. The idea that Sanders and Mambani advocate anything close to that is laughable.
The rhetoric on both the right and left that liken today's politics to extremism in the 20th century is a ridiculous anachronism that needs to be called out more often.
So, when's Mamdani's Great Purge coming? Do you think he's gonna stand by the standards of his historical ideological equivalent, Stalin, and execute a couple hundreds of thousands of elites (if we're going by the same proportions as the USSR), or is he going all out - maybe he could get a million deaths in? Maybe he could also start a famine or two on the way there?
The utter insanity of American politics baffles me. "Anything left is abhorrent totalitarian communism in the making" isn't just a meme, it's a foundational piece of mainstream American ideology that has been at its core for nearly a century now.
This is unfortunate but perhaps inevitable. There are not that many left that remember the horrors of either ideology clearly.
I could follow an argument that Jacobin is naive, but it seems silly to make the direct comparison to someone who thinks we're approaching some predictable end of days and say they're the same.
Ever will? The "capitalists" have already killed far more. Did communists wipe out a continent full of native americans? Did communists killed more people than the Nazi germany, the US, british empire, chinese empire, japanese, etc in ww2? Did communists kill more people during both the vietnam wars?
> Communism only ever exists when paired with an authoritarian government and cannot exist without one. Capitalism can (and does) exist without an authoritarian government.
Fine, that's an actual argument that can be discussed. But why lie outright about reality. But pretty sure the natives would have loved to live under their own authoritarian government rather than being wiped out by the capitalist paradise.
> There is a reason why the only people that defend communism have never lived under it.
Must be why you are so good at lying. Because you grew up under communism?
Then neither did communism. The governments did.
> And even then, the "system" in place at the time was mercantilism, not capitalism.
Sure. Just like the soviet union, china, north korea, etc are not true communists. Idiots on both sides always make the same excuses.
> Once again, growing up under communism implies with 99% certainty that you do not want communism.
If that were the case, a certain percentage of the world wouldn't have had to spent trillions to undermine and overthrow communism.
> It is an implication, not a bi-implication.
Morons on both sides love to throw around logic terms they don't understand to buttress their shitty argument. That and silly statistics. 99% certainty. Good one.
I mean, he looks perfectly human; but once he opens his mouth.
It will end him, and his insanely stupid ideology. He is obviously a sociopath with very deep childhood trauma. Karma will get him. Probably cancer as he seems to be genially rotten soul.
“ Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. ”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
This ambivalence mirrors the paradox of American empire, where the United
States sees itself simultaneously as a guarantor of global order and a
bulwark against world government: the “world’s policeman” unbound by
international law.The irony of this being on a site called jacobin is palpable.
...and man, did Haiti turn out to be a perfect example of Third-Worldism. Ethnocide, ecological disaster, full on regression into a post-civilizational nightmare.