"He seems intelligent and thoughtful, but has scarily extremist views" might be a better angle to take.
Are you trying to inject a identity narrative?
His head-over-heels support for a decidedly anti-libertarian candidate like Trump is in itself quite extremist. This has always been one of the standard tools for (crypto-)fascists and closet authoritarians of all ilks to get into positions of influence -- by using people of nominally "opposing" viewpoints as, in effect, wedge instruments to disrupt the system as violently as possible -- and then step into the emergent vacuum.
And somewhat secondarily, there are the antics of his pals at the Seasteading Institute in blatantly courting partnership with the government in Honduras (basically the most murderous government left in the hemisphere) in order to set up a libertarian microstate in the heart of certain piece of "jungle" that just so happens to also be claimed by one of the region's poorest and most ill-treated ethnic groups.
Thiel's own role in this venture (if any) is unclear -- but his association with the SSI (and the principle actors in this "venture") is well-established.
Is Trump anti-libertarian? His policies seem fairly libertarian to me. I suppose being anti-abortion could be considered anti-libertarian, and maybe you could frame his immigration stance as non-libertarian? But i'm not sure. Libertarians don't necessarily extend their liberty to non-citizens.
Are you thinking of some others? I'm perfectly willing to be wrong about this. I just can't think of any major instances where he deviates from what i'd consider to be a libertarian agenda.
2) He didn't get half the country to vote for him. It looks like around 55-60% of voters turned out this year (the whole tally isn't calculated yet). Of those, he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him). So at best he seems to have gotten around 30% of the voters to vote for him. Not everyone is a voter (age, other disqualifying factors). So even if he had somehow gotten 50% of voters (which, again, he didn't), he'd still have less than half the country voting for him.
Trump could never be elected into office here in Canada, even with a low voter count because his views are far outside of the norm of how many Canadians think. America is different with a different culture, and the only evidence we have (polling data) suggests that the views of a great many Americans in 2016 line up pretty closely with the views of Mr. Trump.
An election is basically a poll of whose views the population supports. So any person elected by that population must be a person with views that said population does not find extreme.
I think this is a problem with modern liberalism in that "extreme" has become synonymous with "people who disagree with me" or "people who don't share my right kind of opinions"
a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or
religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates
extreme action.
Nothing about this requires viewing them only through a local and not a global lens, either.
And just because people voted for Trump doesn't mean they agree with all or even any of his positions. (Anecdata) I've spent the last several days speaking with numerous people who voted for him despite disagreement on many of his policy positions, strictly because they were voting against Clinton.
However this was not considered an extreme position in the 1800s because, unforutnately, it was the majority position.
The problem you are having is you are defining extreme with reference to what you and the people around you believe to be extreme and fanatical rather than defining it based on what the majority consider extreme and fanatical, and the best evidence we have for the majority view in America is a very recent poll.
In particular, though, that view is demonstrably false. Anyone holding it can be considered an "extremist" just on the grounds of holding onto false beliefs (though falsification still has to occur).
A modern example is (not a majority view) the anti-vaxxer crowd.
Another one which is closer to a majority view (certainly a significant minority), is the anti-climate change crowd.
How about the anti-evolution crowd (which has a lot of overlap with the above two), a significant minority in the US as evidenced by our K-12 biology textbooks.
Obviously these people have a very different interpretation of the evidence and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. To suggest they are crazy because they disagree with you or find your evidence unconvincing is the same kind of smugness that cost Ms. Clinton and the democratic party this election.
People who believe vaccines cause autism (today) are fanatics.
People who deny climate change is happening (today) are fanatics.
1 The climate record started in 1800 which was one of the coldest periods in history - 1816 is popularly called the year without a summer and there had been a little ice age that started in the 1600s and ended during the 1800s (of course it's been rapidly warming since then)
2. Recent NASA observations show glacial retreat and warming on Mars that happened exactly at the same time as global warming on earth suggesting possible solar origion of climate change rather than human caused.
3. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that conclusively links a warming climate with human released CO2. All we are told is that CO2 makes things warmer and that humans are releasing more CO2 than before. That's not enough, for climate change to be plausable they have to show that human released CO2 is enough to make a meaningful impact on atmospheric composition such that it makes the earth warmer. I don't think we have enough understanding of how atmosphere behaves or even of how much gases we are releasing to make those kinds of conclusions.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
2 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/31/mars-also-un...
now my purpose isn't to get into a debate on climate change here, all I want to demonstrate is that the people who deny man made climate change aren't crazy or fanatical, they are ordinary rational people that for whatever reason have reached a different conclusion and we should not be so quick to dismiss them. The hallmark of rationality is willing to inquire and debate for the validity of opinions, not dismiss opinions outright as fanatical or crazy without at least looking at the other side's evidence.
Many are, until recently the most common talking point was "it's cooled since 1998".
1. We have temperature data going back lot further than that, just not direct measurements.
2. Mars has an extremely different atmosphere than ours, Our only commonality is the sun which is actually in a cool period.
3. Can you propose a better explanation for the observed warming? It's a massive amount of energy that has to come from somewhere. When there is a theory that fits the data and you want to challenge that then you need a better theory. Galileo faced the same problem.
Now, I don't know much about climate change either, so I googled it. The IPCC 2007 report outlined how the last 20,000 years of glacial record show a warm period very similar to the four warm periods in the 600,000 years prior. However, the CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O levels in the last 250 years have continued to rise beyond the normal peak, currently exceeding previous records by over a full range. So it's evident that something has been releasing unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the remarkably short time since the industrial revolution.
As for CO₂ in particular, it's merely the most direct byproduct of burning wood, coal, and oil. It's not the strongest greenhouse gas, it is the simplest causal link between the massive sustained burning of carbon and vast quantities of CO₂ spontaneously appearing. If you want to know more about how CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, I'll be happy to google that, too.
What is a full range? does that have a number, is it a million kg per year? 5 million? And how does that compare to the actual atmosphere composition given that the atmosphere forms a 300 mile thick radius around the entire planet. Is the amount of greenhouse gases released by humans enough to make a dent in something large enough to form a 300 mile thick layer around the planet? Lets face it - you and climate science doesn't have the answers to these questions and until it does it will remain a hypothesis.
The six gases in the atmosphere that appear above 60 ppm have a combined mass of about 14.85 g/mol. Removing 100 ppm of CO₂ would reduce the mass of the atmosphere by 1.23 g/mol, or 8%. To convert that to kg/year, we have to take 8% of the mass of the atmosphere, roughly 5.14E18 kg, and divide by 100 years.
So a range is 4 thousand million million kg per year, or 4000 short scale gigatons per year, and is absolutely able to make a bulge in the atmosphere.
edit: I re-calculated the mass of the atmosphere. assuming that CO₂=C+O₂. This time I got 14.3790 g/mol, where replacing 100 PPM of CO₂ with O₂ reduces the mass by 0.0012 g/mol or 0.008%. That would correspond to 4 gigatons per year, whereas current estimates are 40 gigatons per year.
A more likely reason for holding the extremist position of an anti-vaxxer or climate change denier is the usual cognitive biases against incorporating new information inconsistent with one's current mental model.
Oh the irony. Political correctness played a large part in this election especially for the youth vote.
The left says: here is a list of things you can't say. Here are the punishments for saying them (public shaming, etc.).
The right says: say anything you like.
Unless it's in reference to a certain political candidate's hair, that is:
http://www.thewrap.com/gawker-says-peter-thiels-lawyer-threa...
What do you mean by this exactly? Trump lost the popular election with 47.5% support to Clinton's 47.7%. How did you come up with the "around 30%" figure?
http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/eligible-voter-turnout-for-201...
231,556,622 eligible voters
59,791,135 for Trump (25.8%)
60,071,781 for Clinton (25.9%)
I just grabbed the first website in the search results that had numbers, which are based on projections. I'm not standing behind their accuracy (I don't even recognize the site), but I have no reason to suspect they'd be purposefully wrong. And we're talking ballpark figures anyway.
Mrs. Clinton also got less than 50% of the votes. Neither one won a clear majority of the popular vote.
EDIT: Out of curiosity I looked some numbers up, going just by the ones that did turn out to vote, she has 47.52% of the cast votes, he has 47.19%. The difference in votes is around 400k.
Well, you wrote, 'he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him),' which means that the reason Mr. Trump received less than half the votes is that Mrs. Clinton received more than half the votes, which isn't true: both of them received less than half the votes because some voters voted for neither.
It's interesting that I'm being downvoted because folks think I'm a Trump partisan (I'm not!) I'm just pointing out facts, not opinion.
This does not, strictly speaking, imply that the winning (by plurality rules, not majority rules) candidate has over 50%, it merely sets the bounds on what all other candidates can have.
Clinton has more votes (popular vote) than Trump, ergo, he cannot have had 50% of the vote. That was my statement, and it's a factual statement. You interpreted it to imply that she, then, must have had over 50% of the vote. That was not my statement nor my intended implication.
He argues that "climate science" is not real science because it has "science" in the name. I'm serious.
Pseudo-intellectual tripe which we're supposed to take seriously (because he's a billionaire, I guess).
If climate science is real science, it's because another reason than because it's labeled science.
> A vampire is a being from folklore who subsists by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living.
The desire to extend your life at the expense of other people is incredibly disturbing to me and I'm not sure how it's a defensible position.
They'll be getting some burrito money in return. So don't say it's not a fair trade.
I have no idea whether that's true or not, but misquoting him is not contributing to an intelligent dialogue.
Would it be fair to compare this to saying "I think architecture was better in the ancient times, when low-paid craftmen fashioned each stone by hand"? If I said this, I don't think it should be assumed that I'm in favour of eliminating living wages for laborers.
I agree with you on your last point. I don't think Thiel is too concerned with people misunderstanding him, and he certainly could be more specific.
And it's pretty darn stomach-turning and creepy, any way you slice it.
He also said that 'democracy and freedom are incompatible' because the masses don't vote for his libertarian paradise.
In any case there's also this precious quote
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Which, if read properly, is very revealing about the vision he has in mind for society.
If we're going to debug what's wrong with America, this comment is like ground zero. Start here, and work backwards.
This is a lie, and it's exactly the kind of lie that Thiel is trying to call out as insufferable oppression on campus and in intellectual discussion.
Having lived in very 'multicultural' places, and fairly homogeneous places, it's clear to me that there are both advantages and disadvantages to each - and to quash all discussion in one direction is totalitarian and oppressive.
Japan is the most orderly and civilized place on planet earth and it has a lot to do with the homogenous nature of their culture. Nordic countries, though they are 'intellectually liberal' - are culturally extremely conservative and traditional and 'homogenous' in culture and thinking, and this is one of the key ingredients to their social successes, and why simple socialist policies will not reproduce what they have. Sweden has a very popular Monarchy, and official religion (Christianity), a state Church into which 1% of tax revenues goes. Of course they are not very religious at all, but can you imagine a 'state religion' in America? And 1% of taxes going to it? That would be considered 'extreme, extreme right wing' - and yet it is a very real fact in Sweden. It's one piece of the 'underlying base social fabric' there.
I'm not arguing for or against multiculturalism, other than to say there are many drawbacks of multiculturalism, and that in North America especially there is a vicious oppression of ideas and debate in this area, fostered by comments such as the one you made. The issue obviously can be commandeered by populists racists (which is scary), but it never gets that far because someone yells 'racist' and shuts down all intelligent thinking.
I grew up in very Multicultural Toronto and thought it was superior. After living around the world I now live in a very 'Quebecois' part of Montreal that is nearly homogenous - and though I'm definitely a 'minority' and not part of that culture, I like it much better. People here are happy, civil, and there is a sense of community that absolutely does not exist in Toronto or Vancouver (or San Francisco, for that matter).
So enough with the knee-jerk reactionary hyperbole, try to allow for a little more nuance in issues like this.
1. Peter Thiel indeed wrote a book called 'the Diversity Myth' and
2. that book claims that multiculturalism exists to destroy white culture
If you're going to argue that the above claim is a "lie", you are obliged to show where that lie is.
Your only plausible avenue (as I can see it) is to somehow object that 'multiculturalism' is not essentially the same thing as meant by the term 'race-mixing', but your response here only convinces me that you agree that in this context the two terms mean effectively the same thing .
> If you're going to argue that the above claim is a "lie", you are obliged to show where that lie is.
If you're going to claim that Thiel's book states that multiculturalism exists to destroy white culture, then aren't you obliged by your own logic to show proof of your claim?
I don't have a horse in this race, but it's irritating to see you make a claim and then say that any contradictor is required to show proof when you haven't actually done so yourself.
My point was, edblarey objecting "that is a lie!" and then decrying that multiculturalism is bad is nonsensical.
Is the lie that Thiel wrote the book? Its existence is a matter of public record. Does he instead mean that it is a lie that the book makes the claim that "multiculturalism exists to destroy western culture"? Did Bloomberg fabricate the quote? Or does the quote exist but when considered in context mean something different than Bloomberg claims?
All of these are certainly possibilities, but we can't hope to divine which one edblarney means because he spent his comment defending the multiculturalism-is-bad angle (irrelevant to whether Thiel made the claim in question) rather than point out how Thiels claim either does not exist, or does exist but has a different meaning in context.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-21/the-strang...
https://www.amazon.com/Diversity-Myth-David-Sacks/dp/0945999...
The book is not arguing against multiculturalism or diversity but rather it is arguing that multiculturalism and diversity are being used as an excuse to stifle free speech and silence dissenting opinions in institutions of higher learning. You are misrepresenting what the book is about.
Any quotes or anything to substantiate this claim?
It's entirely possible to be 'offended' by the total destruction of one's culture and not so much by any inherent 'race mixing' that may be the result of that.
But yes - multiculturalism will definitely 'destroy' any culture wherein it is implemented - white/black/red or brown. That's a simple fact.
'Diversity' in the world is destroyed with multiculturalism. You get a 'rainbow of skin colours and last names' - sure - but you get a narrowing of culture and ideals. You get the lowest common denominator - not 'multiple viewpoints'.
You don't get 'more ideas' - you get 'officially sanctioned ideals'.
'Cultures' need 'critical mass' to exist, and they cannot be defined by GDP or social policy. Once there are too many cultures, or culturally secular ideals - the 'local culture' is completely abolished.
When you have 'diversity' in a locale - you break down cultural bonds - and replace them with material products - like Starbucks and McDonald's - and culturally secular values.
Example: I was in Tunisia recently, I drank a 'Tunisian tea' (what I called it). It was dirt cheap. The Coca-Cola was 2x more expensive. Paradox: selling 'coca cola' is essentially better for the GDP - 2x more dollars changing hands. Culturally secular politicians and economists will see this 'GDP growth' and push hard on it across all consumer and business sectors. New shopping malls with H&M, Zara, Starbucks, Monoprix, Carrefour etc. etc. - are literally up-ending all of the unique culture of some parts of that country.
After a while, 'Tunis', 'Toronto' and 'Singapore' will be the same place: same secular laws, same products, same services, same clothes, possibly speaking English, working in cubicles, driving the same cars back and forth.
All unique cultural artifacts - and there are many of them - abolished.
Tunisia is a very strange place to me - and that's what makes it great. I'm not looking forward to going back in 25 years when it's all been wiped out by globalism.
'Multiculturalism' is really just a very short transition period between 'culture' (i.e. diversity in the world) and 'globalized, culturally secular nation states'.
America (and Canada) are obviously special places where multicultural identity means something different than say Germany or Tunisia, nevertheless, the conversation should be allowed to had.
We already have a great deal of 'diversity' on planet earth, just get on an airplane! Most attempts to create 'more diversity' in a specific local (usually with the benign objective of wanting people to 'get along better') , actually reduces the 'net diversity' of the world, ironically.
The Church of Sweden is since 2000 no longer a state church. That said, it's been possible to opt-out since 1868, and since 1996 membership is opt-in (upon baptizing) and not inherited based on the membership of the parents. Slightly less than two thirds of the population are still members, and it is losing members far faster than simple attrition would have it (about one percentage point per year).
If you are a member of the Church of Sweden (or any other registered religion), the state will help collect membership taxes for it, but that should be taken more as a measure of Nordic efficiency than as a tacit endorsement of any particular belief.
I take it as neither.
I take it that the 'Church' is a cultural epitaph, not even so much a religious one.
It doesn't matter 'what one believes'. It matters a little bit that colocated people share some common faith, and the rituals, prayers, holidays, sense of spirit, goodwill - are synchronous in some way.
When those are torn apart - and there is no 'common culture' - some of which is based on 'religion' - then there literally is no ethnicity, and arguably no nation.
You mention 'Nordic efficiency'. It's true, Nordic countries are somewhat 'efficient'.
But will Sweden be a 'Nordic' country when it's 20% ethnically Swedish, 10% German, 8% American, 5% Norwgian, 5% Somali, 5% Russian etc. etc.?
What will make Sweden any different from Norway, which has almost the same ethnic composition, the same rules?
The only difference between Norway and Sweden in 100 years might be the colour of your flags. English will be the dominant language, and ethnically, everyone will be 'from somewhere else'.
Anyhow - thanks for your correction, but I don't think it changes the nature of my point.
Multiculturalism has consequences, and it should be a choice, not something that is foisted upon people as a moral position.
You also conveniently cut out the point that the state will collect membership taxes for the Church of Sweden, just as happily as it will for the local catholic branch or one of two registered islamic congregations.
I'm not sure what the rest of your post has to do with mine.
It's certainly the safest. #2 is Singapore, which also happens to be one of the most multi-cultural places on planet earth.
When someone composes an appeal to the tranquil monoculturalism of Japan, the thing they should be immediately confronted with is the fierce racism that makes up the core of that culture. Cultures change; Japan's inevitably will get to where ours is today (hopefully we'll keep making it hard for them to completely catch up).
I'd politely double down on encouraging you to not attempt to win this argument by saying "Japan actually is a monoculture and that culture's core is racism." People will believe you. This is materially less true than the not-a-monoculture argument and, separate from the truth of it, it is internally and externally a dangerous thing to have be believed.
Can you give me a single sentence that you think is closer to the truth, without examples or citations to books?
Would the sentence "Japan is way way more racist than America" work? If not, I'm going to express further surprise, because that is a sentence you have used before.
>> Would the sentence "Japan is way way more racist than America" work? If not, I'm going to express further surprise, because that is a sentence you have used before.
Is this a quote or a paraphrase? I'd be mildly surprised if I said those exact words and did not do an immediate verbal retraction. I have recollection of writing e.g. "[I]s racism a bigger problem in Japan than e.g. in the United States? Yes."
Consider it from the perspective of a government bureaucrat who has the brief Protect Japan From Threats. In the formulation "Japan is a fiercely racist society", and his goal is to protect Japan from threats, anyone opposing racism is a threat. In the formulation "Racism is a big problem in Japan", his goal can plausibly be "Reduce racism in Japan", much like it could be "Reduce poverty in Japan" or "Reduce unemployment in Japan." I like making/keeping space available for people to embrace that second interpretation.
I take your meaning about being careful not to lock in an unsatisfactory status quo with rhetoric. I think you know that's not what I'm trying to do.
Here, the connection between the comment I was replying to and my summary about Japanese society is particularly powerful. That commenter is selecting an attribute of Japanese society for praise that you and I know is deeply problematic. I know you agree with me: importing the cultural attribute that commenter is referring to would be a tragedy.
I know you're not trying to lock in the status quo. If I had a guess, you're trying to win a message board debate? Which is something I'm sort of onboard with. So, just as a tactical discussion between two message board debaters who are approximately on the same side here, you've got tactical option #1 "Grant the untrue premise of an argument which you believe is damaging and then attempt to litigate an implication of it in a fashion which, if your opponent was savvier, he'd be saying feeds the Thiel narrative and which, independently of message board debates, is a net negative thing to have believed in the world" or tactical option #2 "Counter the untrue premise by destroying it in detail with actual facts; score lots of easy Internet debate points with specificity and style."
Since you're retracting your Wells Street comment, could you add some additional value and maybe explain to people not privy to our conversations why I might believe that Japan is far more racist than the US?
Which of those two predictions are correct?
> I do know that japan's last "miss japan" was biracial
Yes, and America doesn't have any race issues since the current president is biracial.
I believe Trump to be deeply racist, and I recognize a fiercely racist strain of his followers. But those people also make great television. I think Trump's followers are willing to abide racism, because the alternative is a status quo that promises hopelessness for their children. I don't condone racism and I think the mainstream middle-aged Trump base will eventually be ashamed to tell their grandchildren they supported Trump --- but that's because they have a moral core that does not accept racism.
I do not believe you can make the same generalization about Japanese society --- or about many other societies in the world! It's a sign of the health of our culture that we so openly confront our racism.
Based on a YouTube video mentioned in another comment thread (https://youtu.be/CoxxGhLFbw4?t=2m30s), I wouldn't regard him as intelligent by any means.
He says this in the video:
> Whenever you hear someone use the word science it's like a tell that they're bluffing
Try to make sense of it.
Someone that graduated from Stanford twice is definitely intelligent by some means.
> Someone that graduated from Stanford twice is definitely intelligent by some means.
I just don't pay attention to his Stanford degrees as much as I do to his words. And they certainly don't impress me. Now, you may have a different opinion and you're free to do so. But I don't agree with it.
It’s short and to the point. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
I wonder if he doesn't know or if he doesn't care how that might sound to people who were legally denied basic citizenship rights in the 1920s, or the descendants of those people. The 1920s were politically bleak for quite a few Americans.
Palantir worked for the Clinton Foundation.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/45010
For at least several years and definitely before Trump was on the map politically.
The Podesta Emails literally have Alex Karp, the CEO, paying 100k to talk to Bill Clinton.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/11/05/02/3A142FF40000057...
99% of Silicon Valley disagrees with Thiel, the simplest explanation is that Karp is from that group also.
The alternative explanation appears to be Karp and Thiel conspired to make Trump US President in 2012.
I mean wow. Just wow.
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
A few summary points:
- Did a BA in philosophy at Stanford--an analytic department--in the late 80s.
- As Reaganism was reaching its apex, he became a libertarian.
- The 90s were a period of pessimism. As the Reagan revolution was in retreat, and as conservatives retreated with it, the "smartest" libertarians sought to move beyond it. So he registered the crisis of libertarianism acutely, and went looking for the solution outside politics altogether--hence the rhetoric from early Paypal about creating a "new world currency" that would bring about the "end of monetary sovereignty". The point was to create new forms of being which would be free simply by virtue of being new. (Nothing wrong with that, and Marxists have a term for it: reification.)
- While the crisis of 2009 further confirmed the bankruptcy of the political project of libertarianism, he thought its understanding of the world was still fundamentally true: "Exhibit A is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government." But here the answer is the same as it was in the 90s: retreat from politics and build "new worlds."
What's remarkable about Theil is that he fully grasps the crisis of bourgeois society, to the point where he says, "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron."
This was widely denounced as both misogynistic and racist, but it wasn't: he is saying that the 1920s was the last time the crisis of bourgeois democracy might be have been resolved. This is pure Reaganite ideology, but like all ideology has a measure of truth. (It's worth noting that the Left agrees in a sense, but sees the failure of the German revolution, which also meant the failure of the October revolution, as the decisive moment.)
He recognizes the fatal contradiction at the heart of bourgeois society. Clearly. For him libertarianism is the answer that bourgeois society forbids itself because it holds itself to the promise of democracy. Each time the capitalist crisis emerges, Theil becomes anti-political, looks for a "new space for freedom," new avenues for the accumulation of capital. Cyberspace, outerspace, seasteading.
Post-2009 we saw Theil flirt with the Reactionary- or Dark-enlightenment, which while more reactionary than he's ever been nonetheless suggested a renewed desire for politics in the depths of the recession.
Theil remains revolutionary in the sense that he can claim to be in the tradition of Rousseau in the same sense Lenin, for example, could. That may be hard to recognize but it's there.
What is most interesting about Theil and Trump is that if you think of Theil as expressing intellectually the bourgeois ideology of the Reagan period (and he's pure late-80s vintage, no doubt), he has just signed on to work in the administration of the man who single-handedly ended the Reagan Coalition.
In my view what you're calling Thiel's anti-political phrases are important. I know you see them as the spread of virus-capitalism, but I think without that kind of frontier building the world would be a much more boring place. I take it you're familiar with Patri Friedman's thesis. What did you think then of Balaji Srinivasan's Exit Ycombinator talk?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
I know presently the anti-Trumpists are getting a lot of airtime with their talk of secession, but to be honest there is something much deeper beyond the current election fallout which is worth looking at. From a right perspective I have been wondering for a long time whether Silicon Valley's interests are ultimately orthogonal to Washington but appear to be similar in the present because they're competing for the same thing.
This is a strand of Rene Girard's philosophy, which Thiel is a big fan of (he knew Rene at Stanford I think), many of his ideas revolve around ideas of mimesis and scapegoating. Interestingly; he had a Girardian rationale for investing in Facebook. Never say reading philosophy doesn't pay off! I would love to have a photo of his library.
John Strange is very wrong about Thiel's activities being random. I was asked to write essay on Medium which I called "Peter and the Wolfe", which was an attempt to explain the deeper undercurrents around some of his recent decisions.
The main content of it was written before Trump got into power, so it makes it more interesting retroactively. If you recall, many people on HN were calling him mad, stupid, trying to get him kicked out of Ycombinator and Facebook's board etc. Here is the original comment:
So Theil's anti-political phases are interesting to me as a demonstration of how ideology and capital condition each other.
On Silicon Valley, the anti-political technocratic ideology it seems to be producing is a minor phenomenon. There may be something to the notion of bits vs. atoms as the "stuff" of production, but what gets obscured is that capital and the law of value rules here nonetheless.
On Girard, Theil's affinity with those ideas seems to me to be bound up with his struggle to reconcile his libertarianism with Christianity. My guess is that if he dropped the Christianity, the Girardian thought would fall away.
My main point is that Theil is a particularly good "personification of capital" and that if you drop the stupid anti-capitalist politics and see capital as neither good nor bad but simply the ruling principle of the world, then it can explain a lot.
Interesting. I wasn't expecting that. I'm sure you're familiar with self described communists who identify with Agent Smith's description of humankind in the Matrix, so you know where I got that impression from.
> On Silicon Valley, the anti-political technocratic ideology it seems to be producing is a minor phenomenon. There may be something to the notion of bits vs. atoms as the "stuff" of production, but what gets obscured is that capital and the law of value rules here nonetheless.
We may mean different things by anti-political. I didn't see Thiel's exploration of unusual fringe ideas as being the complete rejection of all politics, but an attempt at making a new kind of politics through technology. So here anti-political meant 'outside of the mainstream' for me. Out of the world of Washington, not out of the broader world of political philosophy.
Along the same lines I think SV ultimately is competing with Washington. An old form of politics vs a new form, similar to the competition of monarchy and democracy.
I think it is in a nascent stage yet, I just think we're being fed the idea their interests are parallel merely because they have converging interests, and I believe that to be a very big mistake because of Girard's ideas about mimesis, namely conflict is more likely, not less likely, because of similarity.
I agree with you though, the same economical laws are ruling still despite this talk of a new economical world order from Wired. It is remarkable as Thiel has been pointing out, just how few new forms of wealth have been created ex-computation in the past few decades. There is a terrific amount of talking but little impact and often the Ted-Talk-People portion of the middle class becomes intensely uncomfortable when this is pointed out to them.
> On Girard, Theil's affinity with those ideas seems to me to be bound up with his struggle to reconcile his libertarianism with Christianity. My guess is that if he dropped the Christianity, the Girardian thought would fall away.
I believe Thiel has noted of himself before, that he likes to have (and looks for in others) paradoxical or perhaps contradictory ideas. I think he believes there is some kind of gap between oppositional ideas that either spits off new thoughts or at least keeps you on your toes.
> My main point is that Theil is a particularly good "personification of capital" and that if you drop the stupid anti-capitalist politics and see capital as neither good nor bad but simply the ruling principle of the world, then it can explain a lot.
Agreed.
Not that this makes things substantially better. But maybe a little bit? Hopefully?