Thiel hasn't even done that. His position seems to be that American companies should work with the US Military, but shouldn't work with the Chinese military. Such a position is certainly partisan, but it isn't hypocritical.
Try patriotic, or more cynically nationalistic.
1. An adherent to a party or faction. 2. A fervent, sometimes militant, supporter or proponent of a party, cause, faction, person, or idea.
Maybe that word isn't judgemental enough for you, but it fits and I used it carefully.
It’s Google leadership capitulating to the (imo naive) politics of its workforce to not work with the USG, while continuing to support the governments of adversaries (because largely American politics ignores the plight of people in places like KSA and China under a weak kind of moral relativism).
If you genuinely believe that, then putting ever more powerful intelligence gathering tools in the hands of western governments, even at some risk of threats to freedoms in the west, might seem reasonable.
That’s especially true if you have good confidence in the checks and balances in the free west to prevent the worst abuses of such tools, and that the threats are truly dire.
Otherwise more attacks will happen and the reflexive response will be an increase in authoritarianism at the expense of western ideals.
I don’t personally agree with his support of trump (I see it as a partisan blind spot because of his Cato institute Republican identity) to me trump increases authoritarian risk in the US. Otherwise I agree with a lot of Thiel’s positions, even where I disagree it’s rare that his position is not thoughtful.
As much as I dislike Thiel, he does have a point there: Russia is actively funding misinformation campaigns with the aim of splintering Europe (e.g. by funding far-right political parties like the AfD in Germany or the Brexiteers in the UK), and China is a threat on a geo-political level (New Belt Road) as well as a military threat (e.g. Taiwan), not to mention their Third Reich-inspired genocide against the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
The world is in a "war of cultures" indeed - the remnants of the Western democracies versus strong authoritarian governments. And we haven't found a way to counter Russian or Chinese political ambitions yet.
> That’s especially true if you have good confidence in the checks and balances in the free west to prevent the worst abuses of such tools, and that the threats are truly dire.
Under normal circumstances, that confidence would be valid. Unfortunately, we have our own actors who have an interest in tearing down these "checks and balances" for their own gains (e.g. the Republicans systematically destroying trust in public institutions, from elections to the integrity of the FBI, or Poland and Hungary where the rulers want to stay in power and enrich themselves and their friends)... which means we as Western nations are in a "lose-lose" situation. We can't combat propaganda effectively for a variety of reasons, and as a result of that the propaganda tears down our societies.
I believe such a struggle exists as well. But I have my doubts whether one would find him fighting AGAINST the authoritarians.
He's just pro-Western civilization and pro-US.
It's better to figure out an exit (imo) than continue to capitulate on these kinds of things, particularly in a country that is hostile to foreign companies and IP (and particularly if one of your company values is the privacy of your users).
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>>Peter Thiel: Well I think, again those aren’t the only two possibilities, I don’t think they created very much, I think a lot of it was just handed over from the west so it wasn’t even stolen.
You know, I criticized Google a few years ago for refusing to work on its AI technology on Project Maven with the U.S. military, but working with Chinese universities and Chinese researchers. And since everything in China is a civilian- military fusion, Google was effectively working with the Chinese military, not with the American military. And there was sort of this question, “Why Google was doing this?” And one of the things that I was sort of told by some of the insiders at Google was they figured they might as well give the technology out through the front door, because if they didn’t give it – it would get stolen anyway.
>>Peter Thiel: I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that.
https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2...