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This is the article's second sentence: "Thiel’s lurid, apocalyptic view of world politics may be ludicrous or even deranged, but his wealth and power mean that we can’t afford to ignore it."
Power might be hard to ignore, but wealth you literally just can.
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It’s intentionally blunt. That’s exactly the issue right now: fascists and communists are going at each other and tearing apart what remains of our liberal world.
I think "facists" is a tiring word to describe them. I would recommend christian nationalists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the article's second sentence: "Thiel’s lurid, apocalyptic view of world politics may be ludicrous or even deranged, but his wealth and power mean that we can’t afford to ignore it."
Yes we can actually. I think it has something to do with Silicon Valley's obsession with money. To SV-people, billionaires are like gods. They are worshipped and invited to all the events worth going to (meetups, hackathons, etc.). Everyone wants to be like them. And it seems to me to be a geographical problem too. In NYC, billionaires are like supervillains. Nobody particularly likes them (outside of select finance…
This is absurd to the point of being cartoonish. No one treats billionaires like supervillains. How many billionaires are in supermax prisons right now in New York?
> Nobody particularly likes them
This is not relevant, regardless of whether it’s true. A ton of people hate Thiel and Trump. Disliking a billionaire doesn’t take away their power.
And here I thought he was just trying to wrap his techno libertoonian worldview in the Book of Revelations in the hopes that the religious right would get behind it. Did I miss something?
Odd for a gay man to court those who support Leviticus stoning of gays. Self hating? Or just savvy?
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I agree on the first part - I could not care any less about those insane superrich. But they use their money to influence people - this part is dangerous and must be stopped.
You mostly hear about their views from contrarian articles warning of the dangers of their views.
Thiel's ramblings seem so unhinged, delusions of grandeur. I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out.
Why not, it’s not as if you’d face any real consequences for your own reckless stupidity.
Maybe slightly off topic to the article, but I don't really care what Peter Thiel has to say. I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone. It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention. I think that's a much more interesting discussion :).
Sorry, but that take is complete garbage. Wanting to “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone” from rich people you dislike isn’t a brave stance against inequality, it’s straight-up authoritarian censorship based on net worth. In a free society, people choose who gets attention. If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him, but don’t fantasize about silencing citizens because they’re successfu…
The Wealthy and powerful have never had to worry about the freedom of their speech in history. They determined what speech was acceptable.
Take a break from defending those actively destroying our society through their actions, intentional or not, and learn the foundations of why free speech is designed the way it is.
Maybe slightly off topic to the article, but I don't really care what Peter Thiel has to say. I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone. It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention. I think that's a much more interesting discussion :).
Having listened to a fair amount of Thiel, he tends to be very, very mischaracterized. He relies on metaphor and allegory to describe the world, and is very philosophical and analytical–all of which opens the door to broad interpretation. For instance, his use of the phrase "Antichrist" has been wildly (and deliberately, IMO) misinterpreted by the commentariat and intelligentsia that dominate our sense making institu…