That (caring for poor people) is anti-christ to the goals of Thiel, who wants to get rid of democracy and create city states governed by autocratic rulers.
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
Is taking leave of one’s intellectual powers and good sense a common end-stage pathway for billionaires?
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
I assume it's a natural thing to happen if somebody gets a lot of power. If not being extra careful, they will automatically get surrounded by yes men and start drifting in odd directions. Happens to dictators too.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
As this phenomenon is so common, do we have enough science about it to make it a base for laws, so future generations could avoid this state of collective psychosis it seems to lead to?
I think it is widely accepted that power corrupts. It is the basis of democracy, and why we would defend it so jealously. Democracy was fought for and won, and we should never forget the alternatives are much worse. This requires peaceful debate, free speech, and free and fair elections.
As soon as I personally attained a modicum of financial security I automatically started giving fewer fucks about things than I used to. I assume the number of fucks given (about people, ideas, values) asymptotically approaches zero as your wealth increases. Or at least it does if you don't work at it.
It's not yes-men. Power and money tend to convince people they are successful in every aspect of life. Our society emphatically endorses this viewpoint and even idolizes it. Look at our celebrity/businessman worship.
Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.
Likewise here. If I accidentally become a billionare I’d donate most of it to good causes after making sure family and close friends will be able to reach their own goals without becoming filthy rich. Creating a dinasty of wealth is cursing your own family.
There's really only so much money a person even needs anyways
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
If you are the sort of person for whom some finite amount is adequate, you will probably not make billions. I mean this in a nice way. If you are a person who thinks certain things outside money and power are more important, you are unlikely to do the odious things necessary to make billions.
That's the thing, with this mindset you are very unlikely to become a billionaire, you either need to shed it completely, like most, or sublimate it in such a way where achieving extremely high levels of wealth accumulation becomes part of your "good cause".
For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.
It doesn't mean the money they have couldn't be put to better use serving others.
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
A theory I've been playing around with is that they can't justify to themselves why they're deserving of their immense power and wealth and others aren't. If the real answer is they got lucky by circumstance and aren't "special", that their efforts aren't wholly responsible for their results, they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the realization and moral implications.
Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day [0]
It's fun to make fun of rich weirdos because they always have their money to comfort them, but the current crop of tech weirdos, because of their excessive influence, are bad for the tech industry as a whole.
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
Being (exorbitantly) rich in the USA buys you many things.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant and only to be admired and envied. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
"US tech toxic outside of the US" what does this mean?
"support of Trumpism" .. you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions, and it made our society a better place for it. Communism ruins everything. No wonder people start liking the only strongmen who can have a chance to stand up to the institutions.
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
Yes but you just have to make the other side extreme and voila now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics. wasn't like that before my time. trying to delete my comment, forgot to never speak my mind here unless it conforms to whats on tv
> now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics. wasn't like that before my time.
What are you talking about? The US was founded by getting people out into the streets and countryside to fight over politics. The Civil War was a fight over politics (the politics of slavery for the South where they wanted to keep it legal). The US has constantly had fights, actual violent fights with many deaths, over politics. It isn't something that just started after you were born.
> now you have people fighting in the street over stupid things like politics.
Politics is how we interact with each other as a group, how we make decisions as a society and put those decisions into effect. That seems like one of the least stupid things I can think of.
> wasn't like that before my time
As the great William Martin Joel once said, "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning."
> you probably dont know that once in the country it was acceptable to have differing political opinions
...
> Communism ruins everything.
The absolute irony here aside, when, specifically, was communism involved in anything in this country? When, specifically, did it "ruin" anything, let alone "everything"?
Surely you're not just repeating bumper stickers? Right?
There’s a reason it’s called “fuck you money” and the wealthy tech guys really lean into the “fuck you” part. They seem to think it’s fun. It’s also the mark of a sociopath!
Every time Thiel gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than Mark Zuckerberg.
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
He would be interesting if he were a character in a book and not a real man who weilds an insane amount of influence over the future of America during what appears to be a very critical time. It's hard to consider a man who controls AI and considers the pope as the antichrist as merely "interesting"
What, about the pope? I'm not Catholic, I just prefer the people who are in control of massive amounts of power and absurd political influence to be less extreme than unironically thinking everyone who says things against him is the antichrist
Apparently there are many supporters of the Antichrist, his greater and lesser demons actively working to make earth a living hell. Unfortunately they're not as enthusiastic about empathy and humanity.
Because he doesn't even try to pretend he's not an oligarch, he's directly responsible for putting JD Vance in the Whitehouse for example, and is likely more successful than Musk at pulling the strings in an attempt to unravel any semblance of democracy in the US.
He's one of the clearest examples of the Waluigi effect in humans. Although it was first discovered in LLMs, it sure looks like it's a general principle: when an entity gets consistently rewarded for taking immoral actions in one domain, they sometimes start carefully finding the worst thing to do in lots of domains and then executing on that, getting results substantially more negative for others than pure Machiavellianism.
I agree. This seems like another manufactured internet culture war. One of the most interest podcasts I listened to was around his ideas on democracy and aging demographics. Specifically, as many nations become older, older voters are voting for conditions which benefit themselves at the expense of the young. As they make conditions for the young more and more intolerable, they have fewer children and exacerbate the demographic issues. The effect is self-reinforcing and inexorable. He posits, "maybe this is just how democracies end?" Many Western nations have been using high immigration to plug those demographic gaps, but this isn't a permanent solution. Nations are facing ratios of two working people for every retired person in the coming years and decades, and unless we see some pretty massive technological improvements (or radical economic transformation), things are going to collapse.
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
Gave up exploring space? Are we living in the same reality? Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots. We’d never have pictures of Pluto if we were hyper-focused on manned missions.
We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.
> Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots
This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.
For the cost and effort of a single manned Mars mission we could learn much, much more by sending many robotic missions, including returning samples.
From a scientific perspective there is currently little reason to send humans anywhere.
You can argue we’ve explored space much more than we would ever have if we focused on manned missions, making space exploration more alive than when we sent humans to the moon.
I've mentioned it explicitly, people like me don't want learning, we want exploration, actually getting to stuff. We don't want any new information, we've already got plenty of that, we want an actual change of our physical location in the Solar System.
More generally, I think that this insistence on "learning" instead of "exploring" is similar to how in the late Middle Ages the scholastics were all too happy to rehash the same treatises on Aristotle and the like, seeing that as the epitome of the intelectual human condition. It took some Portuguese and Spaniards from the outskirts of the continent to put all that upside down and actually discover the world at our disposal.
We are exploring. We no longer need humans to explore. I’m sure humans will eventually explore Mars, but we’re nowhere near ready for that. And likely won’t be in our lifetime.
If we can’t even return rocks from Mars, how are we ever getting a person back? It’s not even a given that we could get a human to Mars alive.
If people with your mindset were in charge, I think we would get there sooner, but there would be many lives lost and untold money wasted first. For what? To plant a flag?
That’s not even remotely in the same ballpark. South America had already been inhabited by humans for roughly 50,000 years by the time Europeans showed up. And of course “European man” had no problem inhabiting South America once they decided to.
I'm with the other guy. Humans exploring space is fun an exciting to me. Sending drones into space is cool, but far less fun and exciting. I want to explore space. I want recreational spacecraft for humans. I want technologies which allow humans to explore the outer regions of our solar system. You might think flying to Mars is a waste of time but I think that's incredible. I would have signed up before I had a family, even if it were a one way trip.
Science has progressed a lot in the last 57 years. And probably SpaceX can do what it does now also because of some of those progresses (computational, communication, materials, etc.). 50 years ago you would not have a need for a Starlink constellation, so nobody built enough capacity to make one.
Science progressed, but it didn't bring the kinds of physical innovations we expected. At least, not until recently. Where are the flying cars? Why haven't we cured ageing? Why don't we have a base on the Moon? Why isn't energy effectively unlimited and free? We had an explosion in information sciences. The internet is a marvel. iPhones and chip technology are incredible. AI is unbelievable to witness. But why did we slow down so much on physical scientific innovation?
Space exploration is wonderful, i quite saw Armstrong walking on the regolith.
But if we dismantle NASA and its supporting ecosystem to hand it over to the private sector, which is precisely what is happening, we ought to be asking ourselves why there is no funding left to invest: The reason is that trillions, globally, have been funneled into financial speculation, a trend that has accelerated dramatically over the last 25 years.
And it is not just space; the entire economy is caught in this same current.
And these people are talking about the "Antichrist"? It’s no wonder some get riled up.
These ideas regarding demographics and democracy have been debated for a long time, they may be inevitable trends, or perhaps they could be mitigated; but this individual and his friends consistently -forget- to explain about one of the root causes: the fruits of progress and modernity are increasingly benefiting a shrinking number of people. Instead of reinvesting in the medium-to-long term fostering genuine progress and development for everyone (themselves included, this is the wonder), the -real- productive economy, they fuel massive, short-term speculation for their own exclusive gain. Smart.
Forget the "Antichrist"—, that’s a fairy tale by comparison. The global economic and financial system, the true (private) power behind any contemporary (public, wide, collective) policy, is effectively sawing off the branch it sits upon. Global public debt has reached astronomical, science-fiction levels, yet that money hasn't simply vanished, it has ended up in the pockets of a few (major) private entities, and not going in real economy, this, in turn, generates ever-widening poverty, lower wages, reduced consumption, contracting economy, demographic decline, migration, crises, and cuts to everything, except for speculation, all fuel a downward spiral that keeps repeating itself. Very smart.
And every big new thing that appears, (guess.. AI) heavily touted as the latest miracle and pushed onto global markets—is increasingly just an expression of speculation, rather than a response to people’s real needs.
Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.
The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.
He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
Imo, the right is experiencing an intellectual renaissance rn - but this is much more aligned w/ recovering normative morality, re-enchantment and multi-polarity than it is with the libertarian, anti-democracy strain of thought that you describe. I was stunned to find out that a friend was using the word "monarchy" in it's premodern sense, denoting distributism and strong practical limits to the enactment of power, which is totally opposite to how libertarians used the word. There's a lot going on that is interesting, useful and hopeful.
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
What does "support" even mean? He's not up for election. My interaction with Peter Thiel has been listening to interviews he's given and reading essays he's written. I don't know much about his companies. While I don't agree with him across the board (for example, I strongly believe in liberal democracy), I think he's worth engaging with.
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
Sorry, you have read his essays and listened to interviews but don't know his companies??? That, frankly, is not believable. The article above goes into detail about the problems with his companies. Who reads essays by Thiel but doesn't know about Palantir and his hand in the creation of facebook? You know about the "meme-level comments" but don't know about what they're criticizing?
Bizarre is this passive defense of him you're doing.
I suspect I have a higher bar for "knowing about something" than you. I know about Thiel's views because I've read his essays. I know comparatively little about his business dealings, and everything I do know is hearsay.
Ultimately people disagree about things and I think your worldview doesn't really have room for that, which seems unfortunate.
> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.
Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.
> “He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI and even the Pope of being possible Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
Thiel who's been a longtime supporter of Trump said a few weeks ago that the US “should not have” launched the Iran war and that "there were a lot of mistakes that were made and that US may lack both the hard power and the soft power to prevail". i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
> i think at least he doesn't blindly support the admin and is true to his beliefs being opposed to neoconservative interventions.
And I never said or implied so, but I think he shares a lot of domestic political enemies with them.
> on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
IIRC, an AI not "gone rogue" could be an antichrist, too.
I have a theology background. The key feature of the Antichrist, at least in Catholic Theology, is that he stands as an alternative Messiah to Jesus: a different way by which humanity may be saved or may save itself. Ironically, if you listen to Accelerationists like Peter Thiel, they talk about AGI and Superintelligence in bluntly messianic terms. For them the only way to save humanity is for humanity to put all its energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything and usher in an era of peace and prosperity.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
He accumulates vast amounts of money and AFAIK isn't very into charity or helping the poor, which directly contradicts Christian teaching. By the most direct interpretation of the Christian gospels he should be giving most of it away, but even a more moderate interpretation says he should be doing a whole lot more philanthropy.
He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.
Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.
He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)
Not sure where your getting that Christians can't be wealthy or accumulate wealth. Theres nothing is Christen teachings that says you must give away your wealth. Historically and currently there are many Christians that have vast amounts of wealth.
I'm not sure about the elitist funding or the human grading. Please give a source on this along with the exact biblical text that contradicts his actions.
>> No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
The point is I can grab any verse and sell it for whatever my narrative is. The fact is the OP wants it interpreted the way they read it. I don't see any connection forcing someone to dispose of wealth to be part of a religion.
Extreme wealth has nothing to do beliefs or your religion. What the theme here is that to be a devote X you need to follow every rule and belief to claim yourself an X. Thats nonsense and anyone who did would carry the label of religious fanatic. 99 percent of all religious people do not follow or believe 100 percent of whatever their following.
So your point is that scripture is irrelevant, but you are asking for scripture to defend a statement. Also, there have been at least 4 other verses mentioned in this thread.
Really, what has happened here is that you have failed to give an alternative interpretation. Your entire argument stands on your ability to do so.
I already went over the relevance to extreme wealth in another comment, I encourage you to address it there.
On the other hand, the people Christ and his followers most often condemned were the rich and powerful.
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
I probably have a few orders of magnitude less material wealth than many of these characters; but if it’s down to a Faustian bargain I’ll hang onto my cognitive abilities, such as they are.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
Its what a normal person does with excess wealth, as opposed to sociopaths and megalomaniacs.
It's what a decent person does. It's not what a "normal" person would do.
just because they're not filthy rich =/= they'll be any nicer with big money.
For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.
And then there's Mark Cuban, who is a tech billionaire but who also still seems to have a working brain.
If there's a law of dimishing return on money owned, the only rational thing is to share with the less fortunate knowing that, say, $5,000 is not even a penny on the ground to you but could feed a family for a year in most parts of the world. Maybe you fed the next Einstein, or helped the next Peter Thiel develop empathy.
Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day [0]
[0] https://x.com/LouLakeyDraws/status/1488076999105323011
Their support of Trumpism has made US tech toxic outside the US, when historically half the revenue of a tech company you start in the US ends up being earned outside the US. If that stops being true, you can discount the value of US startups by half.
But that's not all. Normies don't like the rich tech weirdos. Normies know Putin is bad. They know shutting off your satellites in the middle of a battle costs lives.
For example, if it doesn't buy you full on immunity, it buys you lawyers other people can't pay. And if they mess up, your wealth will buy you a pardon.
Also, it automatically buys you a whole clique of people who will defend you online (for free!), by telling criticasters their opinions don't count because they're jealous or not smart enough, because they automatically assume rich people are brilliant and only to be admired and envied. Musk and Thiel are pretty clear examples.
It's wild how just having the facade of wealth will get you a following in the US, for free.
Americans blindly idolize the wealthy. It's crazy. Truly a "not get millionaire" mindset for a lot of this country.
"acceptable to have differing political opinions" is not the same thing as "all political opinions were acceptable". The former was true, and still is. The later never was true, and never will be. But supporters of deeply unpopular opinions always try to pretend those two things are the same.
What are you talking about? The US was founded by getting people out into the streets and countryside to fight over politics. The Civil War was a fight over politics (the politics of slavery for the South where they wanted to keep it legal). The US has constantly had fights, actual violent fights with many deaths, over politics. It isn't something that just started after you were born.
Politics is how we interact with each other as a group, how we make decisions as a society and put those decisions into effect. That seems like one of the least stupid things I can think of.
> wasn't like that before my time
As the great William Martin Joel once said, "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning."
You haven't done much reading about history, did you?
...
> Communism ruins everything.
The absolute irony here aside, when, specifically, was communism involved in anything in this country? When, specifically, did it "ruin" anything, let alone "everything"?
Surely you're not just repeating bumper stickers? Right?
I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
About the fact that people may tend to judge people as characters in a book and not as real people with influence.
I find the Antichrist interesting. His views on...
I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.
We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked up.
This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.
For the cost and effort of a single manned Mars mission we could learn much, much more by sending many robotic missions, including returning samples.
From a scientific perspective there is currently little reason to send humans anywhere.
You can argue we’ve explored space much more than we would ever have if we focused on manned missions, making space exploration more alive than when we sent humans to the moon.
I've mentioned it explicitly, people like me don't want learning, we want exploration, actually getting to stuff. We don't want any new information, we've already got plenty of that, we want an actual change of our physical location in the Solar System.
More generally, I think that this insistence on "learning" instead of "exploring" is similar to how in the late Middle Ages the scholastics were all too happy to rehash the same treatises on Aristotle and the like, seeing that as the epitome of the intelectual human condition. It took some Portuguese and Spaniards from the outskirts of the continent to put all that upside down and actually discover the world at our disposal.
If we can’t even return rocks from Mars, how are we ever getting a person back? It’s not even a given that we could get a human to Mars alive.
If people with your mindset were in charge, I think we would get there sooner, but there would be many lives lost and untold money wasted first. For what? To plant a flag?
As was most of South America to the European man when Magellan did his thing.
Since the 1960s, the worker-to-retiree ratio halved indeed, but productivity went 4x.
These ideas regarding demographics and democracy have been debated for a long time, they may be inevitable trends, or perhaps they could be mitigated; but this individual and his friends consistently -forget- to explain about one of the root causes: the fruits of progress and modernity are increasingly benefiting a shrinking number of people. Instead of reinvesting in the medium-to-long term fostering genuine progress and development for everyone (themselves included, this is the wonder), the -real- productive economy, they fuel massive, short-term speculation for their own exclusive gain. Smart.
Forget the "Antichrist"—, that’s a fairy tale by comparison. The global economic and financial system, the true (private) power behind any contemporary (public, wide, collective) policy, is effectively sawing off the branch it sits upon. Global public debt has reached astronomical, science-fiction levels, yet that money hasn't simply vanished, it has ended up in the pockets of a few (major) private entities, and not going in real economy, this, in turn, generates ever-widening poverty, lower wages, reduced consumption, contracting economy, demographic decline, migration, crises, and cuts to everything, except for speculation, all fuel a downward spiral that keeps repeating itself. Very smart.
And every big new thing that appears, (guess.. AI) heavily touted as the latest miracle and pushed onto global markets—is increasingly just an expression of speculation, rather than a response to people’s real needs.
Forgive the rant; better to look at the stars.
The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.
He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.
There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".
Thiel is very interesting, but not for good reasons. It's amazing to see someone who is simultaneously very proficient at what they do, yet also incredibly shallow, decorating himself w/ whatever bits of pieces of cultural material that allows him and others to confuse "good investment" with "good for people". Is it just me, or does this guy flake out entirely under pointed questioning?
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
Bizarre is this passive defense of him you're doing.
Ultimately people disagree about things and I think your worldview doesn't really have room for that, which seems unfortunate.
Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.
Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.
IIRC, for Thiel, the "Antichrist" is disagreement with or opposition to his techno-libertarian ideas.
on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
Hahaha. Haha. You serious?
And I never said or implied so, but I think he shares a lot of domestic political enemies with them.
> on a separate note, Anthropic has been having private meetings with religious leaders about Claude’s possible consciousness and moral status. I fear the anti-christ could just be an AI gone rogue.
IIRC, an AI not "gone rogue" could be an antichrist, too.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Further reading, nos. 675-677 at the bottom of this page: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1V.HTM
Peter is properly, openly and deeply Protestant. Jesus Christ is his Christ
E.g. I think what your getting at is something akin to, "you can't be Catholic if you are for abortion".
you cant be a catholic if you are for abortion. stop being dense.
your religion is a nest of child rapists why dont you talk about that?
He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.
Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.
He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)
I'm not sure about the elitist funding or the human grading. Please give a source on this along with the exact biblical text that contradicts his actions.
Matthew 19:24
No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
Isn't the exact opposite problem much more prevalent here? Namely, that extreme wealth simply buys access and exceptions to these ethical teachings.
>> No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
The point is I can grab any verse and sell it for whatever my narrative is. The fact is the OP wants it interpreted the way they read it. I don't see any connection forcing someone to dispose of wealth to be part of a religion.
Extreme wealth has nothing to do beliefs or your religion. What the theme here is that to be a devote X you need to follow every rule and belief to claim yourself an X. Thats nonsense and anyone who did would carry the label of religious fanatic. 99 percent of all religious people do not follow or believe 100 percent of whatever their following.
Really, what has happened here is that you have failed to give an alternative interpretation. Your entire argument stands on your ability to do so.
I already went over the relevance to extreme wealth in another comment, I encourage you to address it there.