In his own words:
"Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
"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.