Peter Thiel Gave Money to Attorney General Going After Google

> No one is saying Peter Thiel is guilty of anything, but the article is about the fact that he gave money to officials probing Google's activities, which seems, if not illegal (not familiar enough with American law to judge on that), at least highly immoral.

I was trying to point out that even though it is immoral, that's how things are done in US. The article went out of its way to paint this as some kind of freaky evil thing, even threw "Trump" in there for a good measure a few times. But sadly, that's how business is done. This kind of lobbying has a pretty good ROI as others pointed below.

It would be better and it could be worse. It could all be completely hidden. Here at least we are talking about it, they have to disclose it and so on. It could a secret bank transfer to a cousin who lives in a tax haven, which is how "business" is often done in other countries.

> which ends up sounding a lot like basic whatboutism and, as such, like some form of blame-shifting.

What he was doing is not that unusual. In other words I didn't see much blame to start with. There is blame to be shared across the whole system of influencing and buying power, and is not really isolated to Thiel. Single Google was mentioned, I used them as an example.

> When Bloomberg writes an article about Google's shady business, then by all means, let's discuss that at length.

Like you said, the article is a bit light on details and I think Google lobbying and influencing exceeding those of what we traditionally think as "evil" companies is an interesting side conversation.

> about the reason why Peter Thiel would care so much about Google and hurting Google specifically

Well now we are talking. Not just Google but Amazon as well. Officially he talks about being a libertarian and he thinks those two companies are huge monopolies, they control what is bought, sold and read, searched and seen. But he is also an investor in Facebook and was founder of PayPal which is now part of eBay. Those two companies compete with Google and Amazon so it seems he also has purely financial reasons to support some companies and lobby against others.

Also I am personally worried about Google as well and I think many still believe it is this cutesy startup-y little underdog so pointing out that it lobbies and controls the government to a greater degree than even traditionally "evil" companies.

> relationship between money and elected office in the US has taken a turn for the worst in the past 5 to 10 years.

Agree. A clear manifestation of that is people voting in candidates like Trump and Sanders - a TV personality or an unknown old white socialist guy from Vermont. Even though traditional candidates have had billions more in funding and the backing of large media conglomerates, Wall Street and so on.

I understand the general concept of what Google might do if it was actually doing this, I was looking for some kind of evidence that it was actually happening in reality.

I watch a vlog about EVs on Youtube, and the host of that complains about being demonitized by some new algorithm. I'm fairly sure he's not a fascist that's been put on some list by the Googlestapo, so it seems likely that other people may just be jumping to conclusions.

You “understand” everything, it seems. You just choose not to see it.

I'd like to say that I really appreciate the civil discourse and detailed answer, even though my initial response was unnecessarily provocative and snarky. Thanks a lot.

On your first point, I think those same vehemently racist beliefs have been there this whole time, only because as a white guy, those racist or just plainly prejudiced other white guys would feel more comfortable expressing those opinions around me until I would bring around a black ex-girlfriend or a Latino best friend, and the conversation on that topic would get contorted into a weird dance around the topic filled with qualified euphemisms. And this was even during the Clinton era.

But I could watch this happen at the black barbershop next door to my parents business when we would get haircuts, or the Mexican restaurant on the other side when everyone switches to purely Spanish when they would see us or the barbers walk in, but you could hear the "mayate" and "guero" get dropped into the conversation. Mind you it was the patrons of those businesses is where you would hear it from, and the proprietors of the businesses all genuinely respected and enjoyed each other.

I think what's happening now is you're seeing racists feeling empowered by an atrocious human being who used racism and economic misery to weasel himself into power, which a lot of that rage was in reaction to Obama being in office for 8 years. Obama used the same frothy rage of unhappiness and economic misery to get into the White House, much in reaction to 8 years of Bush. But I heard plenty of racist remarks in the background when Obama was elected, it just had no power, and was in fact fomented in part by the feeling of having no power.

The other aspect that I believe we're seeing is amplification. The Internet and social media have so much more power than they did in 2008, both in it's influence, and our perception of that influence. But in reality, it's the same human dirt that has been there forever, with water added, and flung father than ever before.

However, the quote you posted in your original comment is subtly different than what you've said in your response to mine. The way you understood the quote, I'm assuming, is that he was saying there aren't any racists. The way I read your original quotation was that he was saying that there aren't racists everywhere. We can split hairs on that one, and English definitely doesn't provide any help, but I certainly don't want to dig in even a millimeter defending Trump's or Thiel's intent.

I'll get into that in the next block, but I've seen activists on both sides create mountains out of molehills with regard to parsing the intent of a poorly phrased statement.

> So why not just say this instead of saying that there really aren't racists? How is saying that there really aren't racists not a form of gaslighting?

I guess I would say it would depend on the intended audience. If they were trying to convince PoC that there are no white racists at all, then I would definitely consider it gaslighting. But if they're saying no one of any ethnicity is a racist, I would tend to treat that as a political (and more "positive") spin of what Trump said about Charlottesville.

If their audience are whites, then I would say it's appealing to their base, who, while all prejudiced, the majority of which are not racist, but who are often spoken about as if they were, or should be ashamed for being a part of racism.

And there is the possibility it's both, which is the dark side of effective use of political speak. You can encourage "us" and try to discourage "them", while holding onto deniability about intent.

But personally, without having read or heard Thiel's exact statements in the interview you quoted, I don't want to guess at the intent of those specific comments.

And I think that Trump (and culturally, his entire regime) is a natural genius about using language to incite both sides to action or reaction, and yet he can play all sides to his advantage.

There are reams of ways to use language to not only avoid responsibility, but associate ideological contrary statements so that your average political base may feel compelled to endorse it even if they add qualifications and disclaimers around it (which are all ignored by the opposing side).

Kinda like my entire set of comments, I guess, though I am completely opposed to them, I think nuance on both sides is needed, moreso during these times :)