
The Gospel According to Peter Thiel - Bostonian
https://www.city-journal.org/peter-thiel
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A4ET8a8uTh0
I have a difficult relationship with Thiel. On the one hand, it is hard not to
agree with some the quotes found in his Zero to One book ( "the most
contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself"
).

On the other, Palantir, based on what we know about it, is the embodiment of
what I do not want in society. I am not sure I am happy what he did with
Gawker debacle.

In other words, I am kinda interested in his gospel, but I am not sure I like
what that gospel results in.

~~~
2squirrels
Agreed. Gawker situation was crazy and vindictive, he not only bankrupted the
company but many of the employees personally.

~~~
anewdirection
And yet, Gawker was not a positive force by any stretch. Its hard to reconsile
two vile things when they seem to have worked out for the greater good.

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dangus
The ideas presented in this article, such as universities being bad, align
closely with right-wing anti-intellectualism.

There’s nothing about university education that turns you into a submissive
drone as the article suggests. It’s just thinly-veiled anti-education, perhaps
even fascism. Heck, Thiel seems to want to run a floating city - perhaps with
himself as the dictator (the article doesn’t say).

Thiel is just another “I’ve got mine, fuck you” billionaire who doesn’t want
to give scraps to the little people. The ideas are being fluffed up as
enlightened, but all I see here is someone paying for followers/disciples/high
risk high reward investment opportunities. It’s easy to come up with radical
experiments when you’ve got billions in the bank to cushion the failures.

Unlike someone like Bill Gates who is trying to improve the state of the
world, Peter Thiel sees it as his playground to poke and mess with.

As a benefactor of two degrees from a top-ranked university and the whitest-
of-the-white privilege career path of _Hedge Fund Manager_ , along with a
perfectly timed startup with no chance of replication if it were attempted
just 10 years earlier or 10 years later, I have to believe and assume that
many of Thiel’s libertarian ideals are based on hypocrisy and willful
ignorance. Change just one input variable and he would not be a billionaire.
If he were not so fabulously lucky he would be just another one of the
conformist worker drones he abhors.

I’d like to think that we can see through this ruse - in reality, he’s just a
wealthy guy who thinks he deserves his status, that it was 100% earned, which
in turn validates a bunch of pseudo-intellectual nonsense. After all, only an
incredibly enlightened smart person with “good genes” could be so wealthy and
successful in the eyes of much of the self-unaware rich. [1]

[1]
[https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-18043-001](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-18043-001)

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viburnum
Thiel is against women having the right to vote because he doesn’t like who
they vote for. Knowing this makes Thiel fans angry, because they worship
wealth.

~~~
jger15
[https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/1054898254649802752?la...](https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/1054898254649802752?lang=en)

~~~
dangus
I don’t think the full context makes him look much better.

I don’t know how one argues that the full quote isn’t making the argument that
women’s suffrage was a net negative.

As we learned from people like Donald Trump, you don’t have to directly say
sexist/racist things to be sexist/racist.

Not only that, the idea being presented is completely unsubstantiated. It’s
just lumping women into a group based on their possession of ovaries.

