The first paragraph is misleading enough that I stopped reading; there's no evidence that Thiel has NZ citizenship "as a hedge against the looming apocalypse" (?), and he recently sold that "500 acre estate".
He was given citizenship by a conservative-leaning Prime Minister in the hopes that he would invest in the local tech scene, which he has. The $50 million he invested is not a lot by silicon valley standards but it is a fair amount for New Zealand, and it went to some of NZ's best startups (possible bias, I worked at one).
One of the people he's shitting on in that sentence is Laura Deming, who's raised investment funds for companies working on stroke and biotech research as well as running a foundation that searches out disadvantaged people exhibiting special talent.
We get it dude, Peter Thiel is a jerk who doesn't vote like you and that really chafes your britches.
> ‘They were – nearly all of them – boys,’ as Chafkin points out, ‘and, almost to a person, they shared Thiel’s social awkwardness.’ One 17-year-old was hoping to extend the average human lifespan by three hundred years; a 16-year-old was developing a workaround to China’s Great Firewall. Unsurprisingly, these dreams came to nothing.
> stroke and biotech research as well as running a foundation that searches out disadvantaged people exhibiting special talent.
Might be worth mentioning it is life extension research it is primarily focused on. The stroke thing is great, they may have initially started out trying to hibernate billionaires like bears to let them make it to the singularity, but the enzymes may prove useful for humans too.
I think the main thrust of the article is that Peter Thiel's libertarianism is hugely unprincipled and inconsistent with itself. which might describe of lot of the more famous libertarians out there actually...
not relative to their time. in a world of weak institutional and little in the way of medicine, most children die before adulthood. those that do are your only insurance policy in old age.
Whats interesting is that people often mention that he secretly funded a lawsuit against some low quality news website, yet in his letter to NZ asking for citizenship he stated his Founders Fund is the primary supporter of an organisation called the Committee to Protect Journalists, "a non-profit group that prmotes press freedom and defending of the rights of journalists "to report news without fear of reprisals".
Are they trying to persuade? I figure they were just trying to signal their "loyalty" to some audience they have in mind.
I found this hilarious:
"The Thiel Fellowships, which began in 2011, initially provided $100,000 each to 22 high school students with big ideas for changing the world… Unsurprisingly, these dreams came to nothing."
Because of [0]:
"He dropped out of university in 2014 when he was awarded with a grant of $100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship, a scholarship created by venture capitalist Peter Thiel and went to work on Ethereum full-time."
Which I guess is "nothing" for these sorts of people.
If you ignore the costs of the trust issues between participants (as well as a lot of physical infrastructure apart of trust chains) and how that plays out through the entire system, and a lot harder to trace CO2 values on (esp those that people will all agree on).
Here's one persons take on this with Banks vs BTC wrt CO2[0] with their numbers from last year that I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with in one form or another (usually without numbers of their own).
There is a book (political hit piece) about Peter Thiel coming out by a Bloomberg reporter this is part of its press tour along with the hit piece in Bloomberg.
What stood out for me was the assessments of Peter Thiel's involvement in politics by Steve Bannon and the author of this piece. They both seem way off in those assessments to me, given both the success of Palantir and Anduril and his ongoing ties to the conservative establishment - e.g. his recent appearance at The Nixon Seminar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVOHakxXbMw)
> As a political disrupter, Thiel was a flop. Steve Bannon considered him too flaky for the serious graft of government, which is saying something. But this wasn’t really the game Thiel was in. Mainly it was just for show. What he wanted was to get close to government contracts.
[emphasis mine]
Surely the success of Palantir is a data point in favor of the thesis of the piece?
Perhaps, but his reception at that talk I linked suggests there is more to his involvement than that to me. (I am not American though, so might be reading too much into it)
I don’t think that shows any aptitude for “the graft of government” or goes a ways to disproving the characterization of him as an ideologue whose focus is to assist fiscal conservatism (reduce costs) and to have a cosy relationship with the military industrial complex (increase revenue).
This piece is mostly an odd attempt to parallel construct a working philosophy that the author imagines is behind Thiel’s various interests and actions. It comes off as a hit piece. But the last couple paragraphs raise some interesting points that are worthy of debate independent of Thiel. Isn’t the point of a capitalist effort to ultimately become a monopoly? And how do we get the best of a free libertarian society with sovereign individuals without the runaway power of unregulated monopolies taking away the same sense of freedom for others? And does accepting government contracts make you less of a libertarian or is it just surviving within the system as it exists? I found those ideas more interesting than the earlier parts of this piece.
>>Libertarians would have us believe that unregulated, free-market capitalism is somehow diametrically opposed to state capitalism. One encourages innovation; the other stifles it. What Thiel demonstrates is that unregulated, free-market capitalism is in fact closely aligned to state capitalism. Deregulation means that nothing constrains the monopoly power of the security state and nothing gets in the way of people selling it their bogus and corrupting wares
Absolutely ridiculous characterization of "unregulated, free-market capitalism" and libertarianism in general. The logical fallacies, in particular the non sequiturs linking Thiel's decisions to some imagined definition of "free market capitalism" that allows for abusive expropriations of private property to expend on wasteful security state initiatives, is particularly egregious seeing as how the author is intelligent enough to be aware of them.
This is pure bad faith ideologically motivated sophistry.
Free market capitalism simply means markets free of prohibitions on mutually voluntary interactions, including interactions that involve the exchange of money (gasp!). If you want to claim that interactions between parties with different wealth levels are inherently non-voluntary because of power/information asymmetries or some other superficially plausible but ultimately cockamanie ideological talking point, fine we can have that debate, but don't mislead the public about the plain definition of free market capitalism.
Oh and free market capitalism is not unregulated. There are foundational regulations, encapsulated in common law and that the statutes that codify it, against fraud, assault and any other violation of others' human rights. Under this governance doctrine, the courts are the parties who determine what constitutes a breach of anothers' rights, as they are the only body capable of engaging in the impartial deliberation required to do so effectively.
Free market capitalists exist in the world as it is now, which involves a capitalistic state apparatus. Pointing out an alliance, however temporary or opportunistic, between these groups is not sophistry. The piece is describing the world and actions and actors within it, not abstract ideology.
The author is not merely pointing out an alliance between an alleged free market capitalist and the state. They are drawing broad generalizations from this anecdote about free market capitalists in general. They are also giving a false definition of free market capitalism. You want to argue against the purported freedom of an imagined ideal free market capitalist society? Fine. You want to argue that such an ideal society is impossible to achieve, and will lead to the outcome we see today? Fine. These are debatable points where one can take either position without being clearly deceitful.
But don't characterize violent expropriations of private property by the state, to enrich special interests in the security state, as "free market capitalism". This is pure sophistry/propaganda. And it's shameless/immoral when it comes from someone intelligent enough to know better.
Where is this characterization made? Is it the comparisons with Goodfellas and The Usual Suspects? I think you’re taking it far more literally than intended. Is it a description of taxes? Sorry, but if so, that’s very funny.
>>Libertarians would have us believe that unregulated, free-market capitalism is somehow diametrically opposed to state capitalism. One encourages innovation; the other stifles it. What Thiel demonstrates is that unregulated, free-market capitalism is in fact closely aligned to state capitalism. Deregulation means that nothing constrains the monopoly power of the security state and nothing gets in the way of people selling it their bogus and corrupting wares
There is absolutely nothing in the principle that we should not have prohibitons on mutually voluntary interactions, or expropriations of private property from peaceful individuals, that would elicit resistance to the state having rules governing appropriations to ensure tax dollars aren't being wasted. This is such a ridiculous and shameless formulation by the author that it discredits everything else they wrote, and exposes them as an ideologue who puts advancement of their ideological agenda above truth.
I’m aware of the basics of this school of thought, so I think the fact that I can still genuinely find no trace of “violent expropriations of private property by the state” in that quotation shows who the ideologue is.
He was given citizenship by a conservative-leaning Prime Minister in the hopes that he would invest in the local tech scene, which he has. The $50 million he invested is not a lot by silicon valley standards but it is a fair amount for New Zealand, and it went to some of NZ's best startups (possible bias, I worked at one).