Thiel: "In my telling of history, the hippies took over. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won." Ah yes, those powerful hippies who ruled in the 1970s. Like Richard Nixon.
These guys say they're against revisionist history?
“In my telling of history…” is very, well, telling of how Thiel views facts and knowledge. It’s all pliable to his will and “reason”. This is so dangerous.
Does make me wonder if this is the reason Tarantino decided saving Sharon Tate’s life would be as historically significant as killing Hitler, though. Gotta be a non-zero chance he and Thiel annoyed each other at a party sometime.
like he learned history from a coffee table book
Those crazy hippies in the Nixon administration doomed NASA shuttle by cutting corners to save money for their war in Vietnam 🇻🇳 Damn them all.
Saw this the other day and wouldn't you know it, Peter Thiel got the itch to wax philosophical and prove OP's point.
Same hippies who are retired and leaving the SS trust empty?
Ha
It would be cool if he didn't exist
Also, Woodstock happened before Peter Thiel (checks notes) celebrated his 2nd birthday, so what a qualified expert to discuss and analyze the sociopolitical trends of the era.
No matter how much wealth & power they amass, sociopathic Peter Thiels of the world must *always* be the endangered victims in their own internal narratives.
He has been saying that his worst fear, above everything else, is world domination by the "antichrist". In a way that what he and his gang are doing with Palantir etc. I remembered a Charles Manson inspired horror movie ("Mandy") in which the demonic villain believes he is possessed by jesus...
The actual response to "the hippies" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F...
Anyway, yeah. The TL;DR is that Peter Thiel thinks Greta Thunberg is the antichrist, and society will stagnate and fail unless we deregulate everything and let Thiel and his buddies take wild risks with everyone else's lives. Thiel is a very rigorous thinker, and a stone-cold sociopath.
> "monopolies are good actually" > "scientific progress is stagnating" someone who is is good at policy please help me. my society is dying
Peter Thiel has never read Before the Storm.
Rigorous thinker but his conclusions drive the path. So he has to avoid questions, evidence. He is a rigorous thought policeman
It's just boredom and hubris. If he could live with boredom, this wouldn't be an issue. The whole talk is reminiscent of 3 am in a freshman dorm.
“We need to take risks, man. We need to take risks…”
He is a warmed-over ubermensch who never figured out how to properly grow up with his Gen-X era scifi/fantasy obsessions. He would be a laughable figure if not for his enormous wealth and fascist ideology. I assume Ross failed to bring up the latter.
A rigorous thinker and a rigid thinker.
Thiel's philosophy is molded by rejecting the implications of Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" (1972) which reflects the concept of planetary limits. To accept limits places at risk the entire Libertarian philosophy as it means individualism needs to be subservient to cooperation.
Private ownership needs to be subservient to public ownership in common. It cannot be understated how deeply antithetical "Limits to Growth" is to Libertarian ideologues. Thiel truly believes that to accept limits is to artificially constrain human ingenuity and progress.
Libertarian's rejection of the mathematical modeling within "Limits to Growth" extends to other mathematical modeling which would support the same conclusions. Global Climate models therefore are simply discounted out-of-hand as being manipulated to provide answers to justify government action.
Taken one step further, Libertarians, such as Musk and Bezos, fear that should a philosophy take hold that accepts limits on earth, restrains economic growth (i.e. de-growth), and constrains human ingenuity might also reach the conclusion that space exploration is a foolish endeavor.
For all his talk about stagnation, it’s remarkable how Pete Thiel’s views are pretty much exactly the same as they were in 1990. The guy convinced himself early on that he was right about everything, and hasn’t challenged himself since.
Many such cases
That is generally what “smart psychopath” gets you. Because the one thing that becomes an issue for that sort of person is suggesting that maybe they DIDN’T figure out how to fix the world in their 20s, at which point they become very violent with whatever power is available to them.
This needs little more unpacking: How many of Thiel's investment decisions are consistent with the libertarian ethos? bsky.app/profile/pkas...
Musk isn’t the only one who doesn’t think things through. Thiel laments stagnation even though it seems pretty clear that the stagnation can be tied to all the things that he advocates for, e.g. deregulation, complete capitulation on antitrust enforcement, tax policy that redistributes $ to the rich
Lol, absolutely missed the first half of this thread where you said as much
He wants the global totalitarian one state and he believes he should be in charge. Poor understanding of history.
Probably makes sense in light of the establishment of the EPA under Nixon (among other things). Ultimately, no matter how genteel or techie-coded, these dunderheads all think that "companies not being allowed to poison children at will" are the shackles holding back all human progress.
Also I can’t think of a more impotent force in American life in the last 40 years than the “Tacoma Park” style libs
Ronald Regan never happened etc etc etc
There's an Ayn Rand essay - which Thiel has surely read - where she counterpoints all the nice people who came to watch the Apollo 11 launch with the dirty commie hippies. Clearly was very influential on Thiel, at a deep emotional level...
Here t is. ari.aynrand.org/issues/scien...
