Had Trump lost, Thiel would have probably diminished his standing with the Clinton administration significantly. But, due to the crowded field, it would have been a small standing to begin with.
And here's the crux: Thiel has held controversial opinions for a while. He probably figured his association with Trump wouldn't really move the dial on his likability much, and he seems to enjoy being contrarian anyway.
So, anyway, there's my theory. Risk asymmetry. A lot to gain in the event of a Trump win, little to lose in the event of a Trump loss.
Not making a partisan argument, as I don't affiliate with either party, just stating that both sides exhibit support for DoD/IC activities and both were likely to support equal, if not increased, levels of spending on them
https://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+presidency+dod+budge...
And then the massive DoD budget increases under Bush, post 9/11 and Afghanistan/Iraq related which kept a lot of large and medium sized defense contractors riding the gravy train for a very long time.
As best I can remember Obama did not significantly shrink the DoD budget as a whole, though it did drop a bit from the 2006-2007 peak under Bush, though some programs were cancelled.
It could be that, like many right-wingers or libertarians, he saw in Trump an opportunity to break with the status quo and had the vague impression he'd get the things he wanted, or could manipulate Trump in the right direction.
But has Thiel personally profited in any way from this? He's reviled in Silicon Valley, and the Trump association hasn't obviously brought him anything new.
Have Thiel's ideological priorities been satisfied? He's known for being a hard libertarian, and he supported a man who was openly nativist and who has implemented tariffs. Failure on that score.
Thiel seems like a fairly callous person when it comes to race (as a student, he backed apartheid[1]). Trump may be more aligned with him there.
[1] https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/my-conversation-with-pete...
A Biker/Gang Member may not be attractive to most people, but to the portion of the population that prefer someone like that, they have much fewer anti-social males to choose from, and those individuals can do well at the bar.
Given Trump's blatant admiration for authoritarians and authoritarianism, I'm skeptical that Thiel's support had anything to do with libertarianism.
Indeed, given Thiel's founding and constant promotion of Palantir (which feeds at the trough of the military-industrial complex and government contracts), I'm skeptical that he makes many life decisions based on libertarian principles.
Here it is: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/high-probability-clinto...
On election night, Fivethirtyeight gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning the electoral college. Not a 71-29 poll result, a nearly three-in-ten chance of winning. Let that sink in for a second, and reevaluate the media narrative that the pollsters got it wrong.
In fact this is true of most anything you do in life - when you drove to work this morning you played the odds and the wager was your life against your salary. I'm sure you didn't think about it that way, but you took the bet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
The current division in the US is urban vs rural, with turnout differences and suburbs deciding elections.
E.g. Carter carries 24 states and Ford carries 27; Carter wins 297-240.
> The current division in the US is urban vs rural
I.e. you have to look at populations of states, not just state counts themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
(The election even included a faithless elector, something you don't see every day.)
It was also notable for being the first electoral vote for a ticket with a woman.
Which is to be expected in a two party system.
0: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/politics/ryan-zinke-diversity...
The goal should always be equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
I think that a white factory worker could add way more insight into how other communities views things, than hiring a black/female attorney does...
Having said that, I'm really afraid what the backlash against this type of diversity-thinking will be. The system will surely corrects itself in the future (it's already starting), but I'm not certain going back to another extreme would be very wise...
> stories such as the Republican appointee to the DoI saying "diversity isn't important" [0] lead some people to conclude that there's effort to cast other goals as more important than diversity.
Diversity being negative, and diversity being unimportant are two different statements.
I assume you mean pretty much all Presidential elections (because otherwise it's not true; lots of elections aren't close, and some electoral districts are so structurally guaranteed to be not close that elections are usually uncontested), but even then polarization does nothing to explain that, but the incentive to seek a winning coalition with minimal compromise on issues in a two-party system does.
If Trump lost Thiel would move along to doing the best he could with the winners, who wouldn't have a reason to shun him for irrelevant past actions.
Trump had ~50% odds of winning but general betting odds were <30%
What was the reward?
Machine learning/machine vision just killed a person on a well lit street. You people need to calm down on the thinking that Silicon Valley data scientists have figured out everything others haven't other than how to boost ad dollars (and even that is in dispute as recent articles on Hacker News have pointed out.)
Well how many other companies are there with the capabilities of Palantir? If the answer was "none" then he knew for sure the Clinton campaign couldn't match Trump on social media manipulation. Which means he must have been pretty confident
https://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-workin...
Not "our data suggest he may win" but "our data suggest we can help him win".
I have started wondering what could be driving this guy to make what at first seemed like believable allegations, that now seem more and more wild. I have been unable to find any current employer for him. My suspicion is that he is out of work and thought the attention from this would get him hired somewhere, not realizing that nobody - even the most liberal of firms - will hire him because he has proven, in the most public of ways, that he can't be trusted to not disclose confidential information.
According to [1], he is a dyslexic high school dropout with ADHD who sued his elementary school because he was bullied and "...he describes himself as the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating "Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindf--k tool." That is certainly a grandiose claim, but there seems to be no evidence that this tool even worked, and in fact there is some evidence to the contrary [2]. It appears that campaigns hired CA not because its data analysis techniques were helpful, but because doing so was a prerequisite for obtaining campaign contributions from the Mercer family [3].
So, we have an out of work programmer with social issues who has no degree and can't be trusted, whose most famous work apparently didn't work at all (according to its customers), and whose biggest asset is that the media will take everything he says as fact. My guess is that Wylie's claims will get even more bizarre as he and his stories quickly disappear from the headlines with no work forthcoming.
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/christopher-w...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...
More importantly, some very big players have decided that Wylie is very credible. Channel 4's investigation, which featured Cambridge Analytica's CEO bragging about conducting campaign bribery and blackmail on camera, was based primarily upon his whistleblowing to The Guardian's Carole Cadwalladr. Britain's libel laws are quite strict, so Wylie was extensively vetted before Guardian was confident enough to publish without fear of being sued. And Channel 4 approved the undercover investigation of CA on the basis of Wylie's information. Also, with these kinds of blockbuster investigative reports, the legal department gets involved in vetting whistleblowers.
Based on all this, along with Wylie's testimony to parliament today, as well as his willingness to testify under oath to the US Congress, I'd say his credibility is quite high unless specifically proven otherwise.
I pasted his own quote. That is how he describes himself in the media. That is the only reason I found it relevant - because he found it relevant. In the quote I copied, he also said that he is both Canadian and a vegan, but somehow you didn’t take issue with that. Is it now not PC to copy and paste exact quotes from people? The rules change so often...I can’t keep up.
With regard to the rest of your comment, again, my comment was in response to his Palantir claim. Did he present any evidence of his Palantir claim?
You brought it up in the context of questioning his motives and credibility. By the way, I'm a big admirer of folks like Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson, just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. I hate PC. But I also can't stand ad hominem attacks, and a very significant part of your comment discussed things that have no bearing on your argument.
> With regard to the rest of your comment, again, my comment was in response to his Palantir claim. Did he present any evidence of his Palantir claim?
There's turned out to be a ton of evidence to back up his Cambridge Analytica claims. And his Palantir claims just came out today. On the basis of those two facts alone, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he's lying, I'm sure it will come out. But I'm skeptical he's making this all up.
At 3:01 in the hearing, they get into a discussion regarding Wylie pitching the company he was at in January, 2016, to the VoteLeave people (but not being accepted). Wylie was doing something in Canada at the time though.
You should not feel bad. You earned your money.
I took out a bet on Trump when Thiel became open with his support. It was driven by my belief that he was operating with deeper knowledge about the state of the nation precisely due to his association with Palantir (mostly) and Facebook. I feel dirty about winning that one.