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Dunno if this is "new" per se or if I've just seen enough over the years to finally identify it, but a lot of the "correctness" of a political opinion today depends not so much on the content, but how it is phrased and whether or not it is in a "proper" environment.

If you wrap a heavy interventionalist policy in the guise of "we have to defend ourselves against the Chinese doing it!", you might get one group sagely nodding about how it may be a bit sad but is clearly necessary while another group is angrily denouncing the racism or whatever. Turn around and propose the exact same policy (for the sake of argument) in terms of controlling domestic extremism and "nudging" the masses properly, and the people previously angry will be nodding sagely while the other group is now angry.

From my viewpoint, there are very few people left proposing anything like freedom. It's all a fight now over who gets to use the government to impose their views on the US and its individual citizens, not whether views should be imposed by the government. Within my lifetime, this was not the case.

> Within my lifetime, this was not the case.

When was this? I can't remember such a time in my own lifetime. (Views on Communism and the Cold War being the dominant initial one that the government was pushing.)

Perhaps I was not clear; I'm not saying that it was ever necessarily what I'd call the "gestalt" or "consensus" view. I'm not sure there was ever a time in the US where that was the case necessarily; always the local concerns have some good reason to override freedom today.

But it was at least a voice at the table, and while it may not have "won", it had influence and was a generally credible position. I don't even hear that voice today, and proposing something like "Hey, what if we just didn't force individual citizens to do X?" is just a recipe for getting cancelled because of how you're for or against X, because of course you must be if you think that we shouldn't be using governmental power to enforce it; that, alone, is sufficient proof. Now the only argument is what X should be.

I'm not sure I even agree with that. Something like affirmative action has been fought against extensively - and often effectively - in the past several decades, as well as other things like voting rights laws where the government attempted to enforce an amelioration of the harms of past racism, and to reduce ongoing harm from current racism.

I don't believe the motives of those people were truly "because liberty" versus much more selfish or malicious ones, but it's been not just a credible position but an effective and advancing one.

And I don't recall much in the way of truly libertarian-leaning mainstream voices calling against all government policing of behavior, vs just people on different sides calling against the ones they opposed.

Well, how about there was a time when I could propose there was such a time, and wouldn't have immediately been flooded with accusations that the old times were just full of racism and everyone proposing liberty were selfish people who didn't really want liberty.

I think there was a time when there was a constituency that really did want liberty. But now all HN can see if someone says they "want liberty" is that they want liberty to do wrong things that must be stopped, and there is no other conceivable reason that someone may be resisting your efforts to control them.

> Well, how about there was a time when I could propose there was such a time, and wouldn't have immediately been flooded with accusations that the old times were just full of racism and everyone proposing liberty were selfish people who didn't really want liberty.

So... when you accuse me of that, are you denying that there were racially motivated actions being taken that harmed significant populations?

Because that's quite a claim! Most of my history education came from Bob Jones University "For Christian Schools" textbooks that were hardly trying to indoctrinate any sort of "white Americans are evil" mentality, but if you look at what happened, and who did what to what... it's hard to avoid.

It's hard for me to square the claim that people in the past were BETTER about wanting "liberty for everyone" when I look at how they allowed their society to treat people of different races, sexual orientations, people who wanted abortions, etc... I would need more concrete counterexamples, not just generalizations of the past being claimed to be better.

Were they any worse/more hypocritical/differently motivated than today? Probably not! I don't know that people change that much. But it's hard to say they were BETTER based on their actions.

If there was a time when your claim that people in the olden days were better would go unchallenged, it's probably because the people being harmed in those days weren't very visible to the people you were talking to.

"when you accuse me of that, are you denying that there were racially motivated actions being taken that harmed significant populations?"

You see, we can't even have a meta-conversation about liberty without it immediately going to racism. I had actually considered saying that your prior message contained thinly-veiled threats to fire cancel culture at me, but I thought that went too far.

Yet here you are, doing your level best to fire cancel culture at someone who isn't even advocating for liberty but merely discussing it, as a historical matter, a thing that used to exist in the past.

Yes, people could once say "I'd like to be left alone" and not immediately have their claims translated into "I'd like to be racist". Itself an intrinsically racist belief that only white people want to be left alone and everybody else is happy with your attempt to dictate what they believe.

I agree with this. Liberty, for the most part, is a buzzword in America and most people with major party political allegiances either don't believe in it or have a dwindling idea of what it is.

I’d recommend a quick perusal of first amendment litigation in the early 20th century, it will disabuse you of the notion that we’re living in an unusual decline in liberty. For example the old saw about “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater” is from a case where a man was prosecuted criminally for protesting the WW1 draft.

We live in contentious times, but at least the government isn’t literally jailing people for protected speech and having the Supreme Court affirm their behavior. Or where there’s a standing house committee dedicated to detecting “Unamerican Activities” and creating explicit blacklists for Hollywood actors and writers based on their supposed political beliefs. Or where using the post office to educate people about birth control is a crime.

We as a culture have a wildly incorrect view about how free our society was in the past. There have been points in our society where it was literally a crime to be a socialist or birth control advocate; whatever our flaws, we have much more personal liberty in terms of speech and ideas than most seem to realize.

I'd argue that there is no absolute measure of freedom, or at least, it doesn't matter relative to expectations and feelings of freedom. Expectations and feelings of freedom are widely different today than they used to be -- and we know this precisely because it's a popular thing to say. Everyone complains about cancel culture and mask mandates and vaccination passports and so-on.

McCarthyism in the past didn't have any impact whatsoever on the average suburban family. Now, though, with social media and with everyone living as the main character of their life, "cancel culture" does. There's a deeply libertarian undertone to rural America and it has never gone away. The loss of freedom for socialists in the 1950s didn't matter. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and the subsequent overturn of that case didn't matter. Draft dodging didn't matter.

What's going on today does.

> Everyone complains about cancel culture and mask mandates and vaccination passports and so-on.

There are also complaints about “kids these days” stretching all the way back to Plato. People can, and do, complain about things in a way that does not conform with any form of objective reality. We need a more rigorous way of discussing these things that goes beyond common complaints and memes.

> McCarthyism in the past didn't have any impact whatsoever on the average suburban family. Now, though, with social media and with everyone living as the main character of their life, "cancel culture" does.

I think you need to read more about the red scare before making such proclamations. 15,000 people lost their federal jobs during the red scare, and hundreds were jailed over their political beliefs. If you don’t think that would have a chilling effect, I’m not sure what to tell you.

I think the point he was making is that the government shouldn't allow the private companies to work with the Chinese government while refusing to work with the US government. I don't think he's saying that the US government should force the private companies to work with the US government.

> Thiel and company repeatedly claim that there is no meaningful difference between the Chinese military and individual Chinese nationals who work for American companies, because China is essentially a fusion state where the government dictates the flow of capital.

I didn't get this but I read it a day or two ago so it's not fresh. Can you point where you saw this conclusion? My reading was that the claim is that Chinese companies are not differentiable from the CCP and this feels pretty fair? A great example of this can be seen in this report: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinese-communist-party-target...

What's more is it's not clear per se that Thiel and co. are explicitly against some role of the Government in influencing the private sector's business relations in foreign lands. In fact, no one really seems to be opposed to that given that we have all sorts of laws around bribes, child labor, etc that expand beyond US borders. The problem in their view is that US companies are explicitly aiding Chinese companies which are in turn in aid of the CCP. The argument is that the US should hold accountable US companies which aid through what is essentially a direct way the CCP. Their problem is not inherently that the CCP directs Chinese enterprises nor more generally that a Nation directs its enterprises in some way.

> I've done two quick passes over this transcript, and a theme stands out to me: Thiel and company repeatedly claim that there is no meaningful difference between the Chinese military and individual Chinese nationals who work for American companies, because China is essentially a fusion state where the government dictates the flow of capital. In this account, America is supposed to be distinct: there is a clear division between capital and state, and the US government (overwhelmingly) does not interfere with capital interests. I don't think this is particularly accurate (in either direction), but that's the claim that I see staked out.

The fact that Google and other companies have declined to work with the US government in various capacities proves that there's a distinction to be made here. Do you ever hear about Huawei declining to work with the Chinese government because of its treatment of the Uighurs?

Of course there's no bright line. There is intermingling between US private companies, US defense industry, and US government/military. But that doesn't mean you can't make a distinction between the situation in the US and the situation in China.

> So my question: what gives? The latter is very explicitly a "fusion" (i.e., Chinese) approach to state and capital; isn't that exactly what the Thiel and paleoconservative types are claiming to be against? Is there some inner logic to this that I'm not perceiving, or is this all just Kissinger-style realpolitik?

There's an element of realpolitik, i.e. Thiel doesn't seem to be explicitly against a "fusion." He's arguing that a "fusion" exists in China and not in the US.

The inner logic you appear to be missing is "the United States is an open society" and "China is a closed society". Again, a bright line can't be drawn. But isn't it true that the US is more open than China?

The question is not whether China is more open than US or vice-versa. Rather the question is what is Thiel's argument? Should US move to be more like China? Or should US try to push China to be more like US? It seems that he is in support of US becoming more like China, in order for US to be competitive or whatever.

I think his argument is that we shouldn't just let the US companies essentially work for the Chinese government, while they're seeking to be conscientious observers in the US. In other words, we should do more to block the Chinese government's efforts and he's not arguing that we should do what the Chinese government is doing.

The idea that the US is better than China seems key to Thiel's perspective. Many people simply do not accept that idea, they protest that the US is just as bad as China, or there's no meaningful distinction between the two in moral terms. My point was that, if you want to understand Thiel, you have to understand that value judgement.

I don't think that Thiel is "in support of US becoming more like China," though I understand where you're coming from. His argument is that China is a closed society where industry and research are subservient to the state. He's saying that Americans should voluntarily pursue their national interest, not that they should be subservient to the state. In Thiel's perspective there is a distinction here: it's the distinction between convincing someone and forcing them.

> Do you ever hear about Huawei declining to work with the Chinese government because of its treatment of the Uighurs?

No, of course not, which is why we can feel somewhat proud of America as comparatively freer than China.

This is a little embarrassing to read the start of this with acute China-hawk Pompeo needling Peter to dunk on China. It's like they've wheeled him out to denounce so he can silence any doubts about his loyalties. I wonder what transgression he made to deserve this performative public renouncement. He sure sings a different tune depending on where he speaks from[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27lgYsiH86c

To me the whole thing reads like armchair politics+economics. There's a lot of rehashing the old 'glory days' of the cold war with the Soviet Union and trying to apply that to modern China, while explicitly acknowledging that they collectively have no clue about modern China (the discussion about factions and Xi).

It seems that the conference speakers really wish the U.S. was the very best at everything and believe it deserves to be but the cognitive dissonance is apparent, as you point out in the case of state/capital fusion. Another that stands out is confusion about why the U.S. isn't a leader in semiconductor manufacturing any more, apparently boiling down to the risk of IP theft (which makes no sense from a fabrication perspective). The worry about how many Chinese students are in the U.S. is just sad. The U.S. was only ever exceptional in its efforts to be the melting pot that attracts immigrants, to the limited extent that it did. I'd be quite worried and looking to emigrate if we didn't have a ton of foreign students.

Is it even a reasonable goal in the modern era to achieve or maintain technological superiority in any localized region? That seems to be what the conference is hoping for.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. From how I'm reading this, their issue isn't with the fusion approach of the China, but with the China itself.

In that case, if the fusion approach is effective in taking on the China (which is pretty clearly the point of strategic investment in Taiwan) why not use it?

The comments that struck me were: AI is Communist, Cryptocurrency is libertarian. Both are arguably a fast curtain to a bad second act if taken to their ne plus ultra extreme.

This is a good case study in why one should never fight against something. When you fight against, you end up copying your enemy.

Thiel here argues that America, to counter China, needs to become a lot more like China.

The idea that "competition" is bad because it makes you copy your enemy is the most valuable insight in the book Zero to One by Thiel and Masters, yet here he doesn't seem to be using that insight at all.

I guess in ZTO he's referring to when there are shared ground rules.

With China, there's a clear asymmetry, because they're able to be openly opportunistic without consequence. Idealism vs. realpolitik doesn't last long, and it seems people think the US needs more idealism.

There are ultimately shared ground rules: the laws of physics, our shared ecosystem, etc.

Here's an example of the kind of thinking ZTO would advocate, and that I'd expect Thiel to be advocating:

So what if China eclipses the USA in aggregate GDP? It's easy for them to do that: they have 4X as many people so all they need is 1/4 US per-capita GDP to equal ours.

Per-capita matters more in terms of our subjective experience of our success. We should focus on reversing the decline of our own per-capita wealth, such as focusing on fixing the problems destroying our middle class and domestic industry.

Lets settle and establish bases and eventually offshoot civilizations in LEO, on the Moon, and on Mars instead of worrying about China climbing the hill we climbed a century ago.

The only two policies I would really advocate re: China are:

(1) Making sure we stop treating them like a developing nation and establish fair trade with them instead of trade that is favorable to China. This will require fighting with corporations that have been benefiting massively from unfair trade with China due to wage arbitrage.

(2) Make sure we have a credible military deterrent and pursue a sound game theoretic approach to protecting our integrity.

(3) Pursue technologies that reduce our dependency on anything overseas that China can interfere with, such as using EVs instead of being dependent on the global oil market. Develop domestic sources of resources and domestic high-tech expertise.

... then build us some rockets. The final and eternal frontier beckons. Fuck warring over little bits of mud down here.

It's hard to sustain this kind of thinking. Adversity drags us down into the weeds. ZTO (the good parts) is a manifesto against this, urging us to keep our eyes on the prize. Thiel should re-read his book and maybe stop listening to the "intellectual dark web" crap he indirectly supports.

He and Pompeo repeat the 300K Chinese students in the US and only 36K American students in China as some freedom thing, we're educating all these "spies" (they don't say that, but that appears to be the implication) and Americans are constrained somehow.

Do more than 36K Americans want to study in China? Are applications restricted?

I don't know about the US, but the Chinese visa application process is always a pain.

Because there is a difference between doing things to benefit the society you live in and doing things because someone from the govt told you to do it and you are worried you will get shot if you don't do it.

Contrary to what other people are saying, this is actually a perceptive opinion that requires understanding the functional difference between our political systems. One of the main problems with political comparisons that most people make is that they understand the system they live in very well, nothing about any other system, and so they see everything through the frame of their own knowledge. Saying that being responsible to the US govt is the same system as China is just wrong, they are nothing alike, there is no comparison.

Also, you fail to acknowledge that this position isn't actually a standard conservative position (if we are comparing to pure theory). Saying that a company should be responsible to: people other than shareholders, and to the govt is a heterodox opinion (practically, this viewpoint is classic Eisenhower Republican though...appropriate venue).

But the reason this opinion is controversial is: you have people who don't like their own govt for various reasons (and know so little about other countries that they will make comparisons with places like China), and China has almost totally co-opted the globalist wing of world politics (again, this group usually understands very little about politics...the difference here is that China being like us fits with their globalist ideology, and they are usually getting paid somewhere to support this view).

And I don't understand why any of this is controversial. Whether your favoured political tribe is in power or not, you should strengthen your country. And that is self-evidently distinct from doing what China is doing, not understanding this is a grave error.

It is nothing to do with "realpolitik". I am not sure what you think that is but it isn't related to anything related to this topic.

You either missed the “realism” in the title or don’t understand that fundamental concept and how it plays out in geopolitics. All approaches are “fusion” and none are exactly the same.