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Re:The End of Industrial Society by tablespoon on Sunday May 08, 2022 @07:54PM (#31309137)
> You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq intellectual who will be the nobility and not a feudal worker, why is there any doubt?". Everything starts making sense then.

A real king would probably slaughter people like Thiel and his hangers on and take whatever money they have.

The schadenfreude from seeing that would be one of the few up-sides of finding myself under a new monarch.

Re:The End of Industrial Society by donkeybeer on Sunday May 08, 2022 @08:22PM (#31309270)
The best solution for people proposing autocratic solutions is to give them exactly what they want, good and hard. (Of course the collateral damage to innocent people is not worth it.)
Re:The End of Industrial Society by sportanova on Monday May 09, 2022 @12:16AM (#31310560)
America + Europe have been getting Democracy! good and hard for quite a while, time to shake things up
Re:The End of Industrial Society by donkeybeer on Monday May 09, 2022 @07:03AM (#31312685)
If anyone wants an autocratic system we should give in to their wish, and give them, and only them exactly what they want. If they don't want rights and want to be ruled by a dictator I am sure they would have no problem with it. Leave the rest of us alone please.
Re:The End of Industrial Society by CryptoPunk on Sunday May 08, 2022 @08:29PM (#31309295)
Do you have a source for the claim that Thiel supports a return to monarchy?
Re:The End of Industrial Society by beaconstudios on Sunday May 08, 2022 @09:29PM (#31309576)
has Thiel ever specifically claimed to be a monarchist? not that I'm aware of - but he has close ties with Curtis Yarvin who is a technocratic monarchist, has explicitly expressed anti-democratic sentiment, and hangs around in a mixed crowd of paleolibertarians (a system which leads directly to the sort of hyper-capitalist corporate monarchies Yarvin yearns for) and crypto-fascists like Trump. His behaviour, the company he keeps and his stated beliefs all point to him being a reactionary.
Re:The End of Industrial Society by JaimeThompson on Sunday May 08, 2022 @10:15PM (#31309781)
"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 he clarified this way after so much outrage.

"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."

[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

Re:The End of Industrial Society by beaconstudios on Monday May 09, 2022 @08:20AM (#31313204)
What about this paragraph, then?

> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

His talk of women being a "problem" in politics is just one example of this broader theme in the article. He talks about establishing a new territory (where /who/ would rule exactly?), he complains about welfare recipients and champions economic depressions without a care for the lives they ruin.

This isn't even taking into account the evidence for what libertarian politics actually create (the Gilded Age is instructive) or the fact that capitalists who get too fed up of either liberal reform or socialist agitation tend to ally themselves with, or outright create, fascists, as Thiel is doing nowadays with Trump, Yarvin and Blake Masters.

It's clear to me that he's moving down the pipeline from libertarian to fascist, as many have done before him.

Re:The End of Industrial Society by JaimeThompson on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:10AM (#31314187)
Oh, I agree, I just ran out of time to say it which you said in a better way then I could.