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Comment by statictype | Hacker News Reader

* his continued support for Peter Thiel is harming the goal he shares with me of preventing a Trump Presidency now, or in 2020.*

You're worried that someone might read his endorsement of Hillary , then realise a business partner of his suppprts Trump and decide to vote for Trump instead?

I fail to see how anyone who knows who Sam Altman or Y Combinator is would follow that line of thought.

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I don't have to worry about it. I can just read threads on Hacker News and see people rationalize Thiel's involvement and suggest that it implies a Trump Presidency is less dangerous than we think it is. I can look at this exact thread and see numerous people arguing that Trump isn't dangerous at all.

People can believe what they want. But Altman and Graham have a stated objective to convince people not to support Donald Trump. I'm doing them no favors by hiding the fact of how their actions work against that goal.

So, your argument is that people who, because of Thiel's donation, aren't as afraid of a Trump presidency as they should be, those people need to know that Graham and Altman have cut their ties with Thiel, rather than that they simply disagree with him, and that, by insufficiently ostracizing their friend and business partner, Graham and Altman are somehow sabotaging their stated goal of reducing Trump's support?

You also have to consider that Thiel himself very likely is not a racist (and obviously not a homophobe etc.). He likely does not see Trump as racist or sexist. He may be misguided and may hold some crazy and infeasible ideas, but Thiel doesn't seem evil to me. He's probably attracted to Trump's other features and rationalizes the rest of his behavior.

This is the problem with the needle Altman is trying to thread: he is leaving open the question of whether Trump is as bad as Altman himself says he is. I agree strongly with Altman --- as you can probably tell --- that Trump is exactly this bad. If Altman means what he says, he should do what he can to shut this question down.

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