> Peter Thiel is an unlikeable human for many reasons...
Care to elaborate? I always thought he was just a startup investor, albeit a very successful one.
Care to elaborate? I always thought he was just a startup investor, albeit a very successful one.
"Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
Either way, someone expressing a loss of belief in something makes them unlikable? You don't like Peter Thiel because he's become cynical about democracy?
Nothing to be "correct" about.
Because animals are not able to give consent, nor are they capable of the thinking required to do so. Suggesting that homosexuality and zoophilia are two points on the same line is a very tired and inaccurate point to try to make.
> If marijuana, why not cocaine?
Actually a fair question. There's an interesting line of thought in legalising all drugs to bring them out into the open.
And neither of those sets of incentives is, unlike the doubly-indirect structure itself, part of the federal Constitution; they are both much more recent federal statute and state law incentives.
First, California is only very liberal in certain places. It is very conservative in others (the Central Valley)
Second, gay marriage opposition had a huge campaign by a religious organization. That religious organization should have been fined heavily or lost its tax exemption for doing so.
Third, it takes time for the attitudes about things like marijuana legalization to shift. That moment was, in fact, the last moment when the legalization opponents could have won. And they were backed by large amounts of money being thrown around by things like the alcohol lobby who are deathly afraid of legalization affecting their profits (they are correct).
("Red Tribe" and "Blue Tribe", as one may call the collection of traits held by the average conservative and average neoliberal, respectively, are effectively different cultures[1].)
[1]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
Also, I would say that you are using a shallow definition of culture.
As best I understand, having a single system with aspects of both extremes, has not brought out the advantages of either. We'd be better served by having a public system and a market that competes with it; except that nobody in good health would find the public system to be competitive, and that thus the public system would devolve into a public charity for the chronically ill/injured/etc.
> national service but with exemptions
That's all well and good, but exemptions become more difficult for a number of other things.
For instance, rural residents (a.k.a. "Red Tribe") generally prefer to be taxed less and receive less subsidized services overall in return; whereas many urban residents wish for a sort of Northern-European "nanny state" which provides every service imaginable in exchange for having negligible post-tax net income.
And here's another example which speaks more directly to geography. In rural areas there are (a) hostile and/or food-bearing wildlife, (b) large wooded areas devoid of humans (or, at least, demarcated with warnings that all humans within must wear high-visibility vests) and (c) an abundance of soft, bullet-absorbing ground. For this reason, rurals see firearms as a useful tool that can be handled safely enough to not cause injury to humans or damage to human property. (Unless, of course, one is an outlaw who intends to do so.) In urban areas, by contrast, there is scarcely any direction at all in which one can point a muzzle without "flagging" something valuable or someone; either directly, or on the ricochet from the hard materials that are common in urban areas, or even penetrating through a wooden wall/floor/ceiling of your apartment. It is no surprise, then, that many urbans see no purpose to civilian firearms ownership whatsoever; and would never see such a thing without entering a rural area; and would thus have no empathy or respect whatsoever for their rural neighbors who are so wary of firearms restrictions.
Not a yank, have no knowledge of the US medical system.
In my own country the public system is single-payer with a user-pays "gap" in billing to disencentivise unnecessary treatments.
Private hospitals / providers exist in paralel with the public system.
> rural residents (a.k.a. "Red Tribe") generally prefer to be taxed less
Rural areas are very often net recipients of govt aid. There may be a dislike of govt spending in these parts but they still take the money.
> every service imaginable... negligible post-tax net income.
That's some fine hyperbole.
This is rather more true in abstract/rhetorical terms rather than concrete terms, especially on the spending side.
Oddly enough, I personally find that Thiel's support and stances in relation to Gawker vs. Hogan a bit contradictory to this dream. This is less a commentary on the lawsuit (I found Gawker detestable personally) but more how Thiel's Gawker vs. Hogan lawsuit embrace is a dip into the very same complex American legal system that usually is harshly criticized by libertarians.
The Economist's description of him as a "corporate Nietzschean" (https://www.economist.com/news/business/21699954-tech-billio...) to me seems more on the mark these days.
I don't know what feudalism is post-middle ages, but being opposed to multiculturalism is fairly common and wouldn't make anyone more or less likeable to most people than being in favour of multiculturalism.
If only Europe would learn...
In this case, even though I'm pretty far left by the standards of HN, I would have to point out that the "far right" hardly has a monopoly on political violence.
I see you are London-based, so it should be clarified that we are talking about American libertarianism. Your comment is difficult to parse in that context, as libertarians embrace far-right views here. The angle from which they arrive on those views is what defines them.
This is pretty far from being an absolute. You likely mean Libertarians, as in the Libertarian party, not libertarians in general. There are plenty of left leaning American libertarians, myself included. The Libertarian party has some weird ideas, but I would caution against conflating them with the extreme right. Libertarian is a value on a different political axis to left/right, and is counter to authoritarian.
nailer is saying that Thiel cannot be far-right because he identifies as a libertarian, but it's Thiel's far-right views that would make him far-right, not his identity as a libertarian.
I haven't seen anything you post refute that point. Look at the examples given at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics - you'll see the KKK, EDL, Patriots of Ukraine, Blackshirts, etc - the common thread of these groups is their use of violence.
> Thiel's far-right views that would make him far-right
Thiel's views are fairly common libertarian / conservative views. The far right, is by nature, further to the right of regular right wing views.
Even the Libertarian Party (in the US) is not necessarily "far-right". Libertarianism in general almost always leans heavily left on social issues by definition of libertarianism, and the Libertarian Party line is no exception AFAICT.
This leaves the economic issues, and the full spectrum from anarcho-capitalists to socialist libertarians tends to identify with the Libertarian Party. Gary Johnson was/is somewhere in the middle-right, I'd guess.
I don't see any mainstream source that equates libertarianism with the far right - indeed, the far right (like the far left) embraces governmental authority over individuals, which libertarianism expressly rejects.
You are defining "far-right" to require the embrace of government authority, but as that page and the linked "Libertarianism in the United States" page[1] demonstrate, that is not a requirement.
For instance, the Tea Party purport to be anti-government and are considered to be "far-right", yet over 40% of them also identify as libertarian.
You've artificially constrained your definition to disqualify any counterexamples that Thiel has to support political violence to be "far-right".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_in_the_United_S...
I've only linked to that page once. What part of it aren't I reading? The Libertarianism page doesn't discuss requirements to be in the far right at all. Why would it?
> Tea Party are considered to be "far-right"
By whom? The other page I linked to was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics. The Tea Party is very different from the groups that you see discussed there - eg the KKK, Blackshirts, EDL, etc.
Edit: the only mention of the Tea Party on that page is:
> the term hard right and Alt-right have been used to describe groups such as the Tea Party movement and the Patriot movement.[17][18]
Which is true, but doesn't support your argument. The vast majority of groups mentioned are violent groups, the term (and a completely unrelated term) being used to describe one non-violent group doesn't prove your point.
When you provide a source to support your argument and then disqualify examples from that source, it becomes a No True Scotsman.
He was asked to provide a reason why he thought Thiel was unlikable and he answered. You proceed to blatantly and outrageously twist his words. Nobody said he was evil or terrible. Don't pretend it was implied, either.
And I responded to the ridiculousness of such reasoning.
"Nobody said he was evil or terrible. Don't pretend it was implied, either."
Don't pretend it wasn't. It very clearly was in the article. In fact, the very apparent and specific implication is that he is so evil and terrible that by mere association with him, Hulk Hogan is also evil and terrible and deserves to have his privacy violated by the likes of Gawker, and that Hulk Hogan is therefore to blame for the alleged "chilling effect" on the R. Kelly reporting because he dared to stand up for himself.
The idea that such irredeemability seems to come from Thiel being associated with Trump makes this whole thing doubly ridiculous.
Put differently:
"What is wrong with you?"
Absolutely nothing is wrong with me. Absolutely everything is wrong with disliking someone because of an association with someone else who is associated with someone else who is subjectively believed by a portion of the country to be a bad person.
I believe it's just a classic case of mixing literal and connotative meanings of phrases. The poster does not mean Peter Thiel is inherently an unlikeable person, but that the poster himself believes Peter Thiel to be an unlikeable person, i.e "I don't like Peter Thiel."
E-prime doesn't have this problem.
Now, that sounds insane and unlikely. However, I've seen it mentioned a number of times. I guess the claim is that it is from an interview. I'm unwilling to invest more time to look into it. I don't actually care and I'm not sure why, if true, it would make him a bad person. I have to assume it'd be voluntary, if true.
To be clear, it sounds rather unlikely. I share more to show what folks are saying, than to pass any judgement in his character.
I was able to find two vanity fair pieces on the topic, if only because I had a better place to start: "Thiel blood boy"