Peter Thiel, the tech oligarch who believes in the Antichrist

Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), who is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.

And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.

Afail, many antichrists constantly attacking us is not a thing in catholic church or in "normal" european evangelical church.

Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.

He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.

At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.

There are many doctrinal differences between different branches of Protestantism. Lutheranism teaches that while good works do not imply faith, faith does imply good works. The absence of good works can therefore seen as evidence for the absence of faith, from that perspective.

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.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuck_you_money

I was unfamiliar with the second one, which is the one you give.

I was familiar only with the first one: the ability to leave your job, and burn your bridges behind you by swearing at your former co-workers. I think that's the older meaning; I found it in a 1970 book:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Deceivers/XoxBAAAAI...

Other books from the 70s appear to have that sense.

"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.

...

> 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?

It is a confirmation, though always somewhat surprising, to see a deluge of facts and diverse, individually accurate citations, cemented together by unbridled opinions, coalesce into something entirely nonsense. Or perhaps the point is precisely to dilute any genuine discourse with this kind of chatter, which serves to give an air of intellectual depth to the stance of someone who,"having only a hammer as a tool, approaches the world as if it were all made of nails". Unfortunately, he is not the only one who embodies this particular intellectual attitude. He likely identifies with Christ, seeing Antichrists everywhere, or perhaps he simply uses religion to better peddle his own "ideas." And this obsession with "who is in charge" may well stem from an inability to govern (or know) oneself, driving to try and reshape the world in his own image, just to feel secure. ok,too much psychoanalysis...

I get the impression that this is a story seen many times over the last two or three thousand years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We even have samples returned from comets and Mars samples waiting to be picked 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.

Forgive the rant; better to look at the stars.

Since the 1960s, the worker-to-retiree ratio halved indeed, but productivity went 4x.

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.

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?

The author is not even attempting to sound impartial or objective