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Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

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Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#331
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it's a stand against a movement which opposes their moral principles. To Pao (and, to the extent that it matters, me), D. Trump's movement is so vile that any prominent supporters of it waive their right to being tolerated. I am sure you'd agree that doing so would be acceptable if Thiel supported Strom Thurmond, Viktor Orban, or Mao Zedong; it's just a matter of how bad D. Trump is.

How come Viktor Orban support is bad as Mao Zedong?

It's not.

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#332
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot be in a startup that is the next Google and be a supporter of someone who is a proven pathological liar and pu$$y grabbing sexual predator. That simply defies logic, if not the rules of common decency, and you need to be good at logic to be Google, or anyone (other than Trump)

Well that's just a ridiculous claim. Are you literally saying that no (successful) startup has ever been founded by anyone who is a pathological liar and a sexual predator? I'd love for you to be right, but I really, really doubt it. And as is often pointed out by women, sexually predatory behavior is much more common than most men realize. (not sure if you are a man or woman, but putting it out there for other peopl…

You're being ludicrous. A million startups can be founded by pathological pu$$y grabing liars but that does not make them the next Google. Does Monsanto have pathological liars at the top, sure but they're not Google. To be Google you're head has to be screwed on right.

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#333
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot be in a startup that is the next Google and be a supporter of someone who is a proven pathological liar and pu$$y grabbing sexual predator. That simply defies logic, if not the rules of common decency, and you need to be good at logic to be Google, or anyone (other than Trump)

Well that's just a ridiculous claim. Are you literally saying that no (successful) startup has ever been founded by anyone who is a pathological liar and a sexual predator? I'd love for you to be right, but I really, really doubt it. And as is often pointed out by women, sexually predatory behavior is much more common than most men realize. (not sure if you are a man or woman, but putting it out there for other peopl…

[deleted]

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#334
post #92

Trump is uniquely dangerous and I would fully endorse YC cutting ties with prominent supporters/backers of his...if that would do anything concrete to reduce Trump's chances of winning the presidency, by even one epsilon. I don't Thiel doing office hours for YC companies gives him any sort of tactical advantage he could parlay into assisting Donald Trump's campaign, though I'm willing to entertain arguments otherwise…

> Trump is uniquely dangerous ...

Not at all unlike the uniquely dangerous threats of the past - terrorism and communism immediately come to mind. I probably haven't paid enough attention to pick up on the uniquely dangerous threats between McCarthyism and the 1% doctrine.

I would advocate restraint, not blacklists.

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#335
post #307
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "this isn’t a disagreement on tax policy, this is advocating hatred and violence." Also to this point: Trump has been attempting to delegitimize the election. This is very dangerous. If he has evidence of "rigged polling places", he should share that evidence. But inciting myths is dangerous for our democracy.

there is evidence... Have you seen the hidden-cam video of Alan Schulkin, NYC commissioner of board of election claiming that they are in fact rigged? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUDTcxIqqM0

Project veritas / James O'Keefe have zero credibility. They've edited videos and set people up so many times that no one pays attention to them anymore[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O'Keefe

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#336
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing seems only natural to me. Very few people sit entirely within the spectrum of one of the two parties - they have to evaluate both and see which has the most pluses. If you're gay, the Republican party is threatening your ability to get married and live without discrimination, so I can believe that might seem more important than relatively minor shifts in economic policy.

I am Gay. Hillary Clinton is on the record her entire career as opposing gay marriage. Trump, when questioned what he would do if he found out an employee was gay said "it makes no difference". As far as I'm concerned, the Clintons (Bill signed the "Defense of Marriage Act" in the first place) are the anti-gay ones (and add Obama to that too) Not all of us are gullible to the blatant pandering and fear mongering demo…

This is asinine. It was one Clinton who signed DOMA, not Clintons (plural). 224 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted in favor of it, compared to 118 Democrats. 1 Republican voted against it, compared to 65 Democrats. In the Senate 53 Republicans voted for it, none voted against; 32 Democrats voted for it, 14 voted against it.

So you have a slightly moving, changing Democrat party; and complete bigotry then and still now in the Republican party. Yet you stopped being a Democrat based on this vote? That's fine, but it's completely absurd.

Democrats are the conservative party, and have always had to be dragged kicking and screaming to get anything progressive done in all of history. It does not make sense you'd use DOMA as the point in time to switch to the crazy party. You know, the bat shit insane where it's OK to "get away" with gawking at girls getting dressed in the changing room, but it's perverse for a female identifying transgender to take a piss in the women's bathroom - something that's been happening for a very long time without anyone giving two shits until Republicans got a fucking clue it was happening.

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#337
post #22

Tl;dr >We agree that people shouldn’t be fired for their political views, but

The problem is that this election is not about a difference of opinions over the fundamental issues. It's become a spite-driven, rage-fueled, all out fear mongering and hate breeding spectacle. Trump's supporters have, in some cases, started talking open revolt if he doesn't win. On Twitter, there was a hashtag of #RepealThe19th, which essentially said they wanted to disenfranchise women in efforts to ensure Trump is…

Or the fire bombing of a GOP headquarters and physical assault of Trump supporters at rallies. Both of those are significantly more serious than people saying mean things on twitter. I couldn't, in good conscience, vote for either candidate, but your examples are incredibly one sided.

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#338
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we're playing the "you moved the goalposts" game. This started with your intellectually dishonest claims about Hillary Clinton and Robert Byrd. "States' rights" is a dog whistle phrase for racism.

No, I did not. Why don't you provide the full quotes, in context? You didn't even provide a source for your quotes. Convenient. You have absolutely no room to be calling someone else "intellectually dishonest". Edit: if this "1998 interview" exists, Google appears to have no knowledge of it.

> Edit: if this "1998 interview" exists, Google appears to have no knowledge of it.

It's always interesting to me how technologically literate HNers suddenly forget how to use a search engine when they don't want to acknowledge a point. It took me like 15 seconds to Google. Bottom half of the page:

https://books.google.com/books?id=UjO6L2hv0mIC&pg=PA341&lpg=...

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#339
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most sitting presidents and secretary of states in the past 50 years have had to call for violence against other nations. It's part of the role and maybe she's made mistakes. But there's a difference between Secretary of State allowing an airstrike and being a owner of a company inciting others to violence.

So she is OK with killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands but mean comments are a cause for purges? It's either dishonest or insane. The difference is that one of these doesn't matter.

Trump's comments include a promise to commit war crimes (targeting the families of terror suspects).

Re: Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

#340
post #287

Excerpt from the current Hacker News top 30: 2. China's Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission (101 points, 3h ago) 7. Quantum computers: 10-fold boost in stability achieved (63 points, 4h ago) 30. Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions (this thread) (348 points, 2h ago) I recognize that the Hacker News ranking algorithm takes more criteria into account than just current number of points and time posted, but th…

This thread received a large number of user flags and was also heavily penalized by the software flamewar detector, but we've turned that off.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12729270.

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