
Peter Thiel: Fake Culture Wars Only Distract Us from Our Economic Decline - spking
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/07/21/thiel_fake_culture_wars_only_distract_us_from_our_economic_decline.html
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thedevil
Which is more brave?

(a) for someone to say that they're proud to be gay at a republican convention

(b) for someone in Silicon Valley to openly support Trump

I'm actually not sure.

~~~
shrewduser
he got an extremely positive reaction for being proud to be gay in the video.
i think obviously it's b.

~~~
thedevil
It's a little disappointing that it takes so much bravery to disagree in
Silicon Valley. Supposed, it's a place of brave ideas and independent
thinking. But in reality, there's a giant groupthink going on there.

Disclaimer: I don't live in Silicon Valley but I mostly admire it. Also I
disagree with Thiel myself though I don't hold it against him.

~~~
internaut
Agreed.

The majority of interesting projects to me have been fairly radical with
political, social or economic propositions behind them even if that wasn't how
they were advertised.

All the interesting things seem to happen on the peripheral. Whether the
opinion is right or wrong for all time doesn't matter so much as it being
divergent from regular thinking.

It is not that conventional thinking is bad. It works 99% of the time or it
wouldn't exist. The problem with it is the same as with any habit. The
population gets into a rut and begins to think there exists One True Way.

That's a big part of why I enjoy Less Wrong's Sequences and Slate Star Codex.
It's so easy to fall into lazy thinking habits and sometimes the right turn of
phrase or analogy can snap you out of it.

Examples (perhaps poor, you be the judge):

House prices go up. Why? Shouldn't they depreciate like cars? What's the
difference between the English and Japanese housing market? It is culture or
central bank policy?

Democracy will exist in the future. Why? They never lasted more than 2
centuries before, has that really changed?

This is not to say democracy shouldn't exist or house prices should rise, only
that we ought to question our priors.

~~~
dragonwriter
> House prices go up. Why?

Supply and demand.

> Shouldn't they depreciate like cars?

If you had to cannibalize key elements of existing vehicles to make most new
cars, cars might not depreciate either. Real property and tangible personal
property are different.

> What's the difference between the English and Japanese housing market? It is
> culture or central bank policy?

Perhaps neither. I mean, 0.6% annual population growth vs. -0.2% annual
population growth is going to produce a pretty big difference in the housing
market, all other things being equal (other things between the UK and Japan
obviously are _not_ equal, of course, but that difference alone is going to
have an effect on trajectories in the market.)

> Democracy will exist in the future. Why? They never lasted more than 2
> centuries before

Iceland (lonest span 930-1430), the Iroquois (since perhaps ~A.D. 1142), and
Switzerland (since A.D. 1648) suggest that your "never lasted more than 2
centuries before" is mistaken. And, obviously, these previous long-running
examples spent all or much of their existence in their adherence to democratic
norms was a notable exception to the surrounding context, one would expect
democracies to last longer when it was a more-universal norm.

~~~
internaut
Very good! We could have a discussion on the subject(s), ranging wide or in-
depth. We might even come up with useful corollaries and ways to test the
validity of claims.

That would be impossible were we to approach those propositions with
mainstream thinking and take our assumptions as givens. Probably this is
connected to the Royal Society's motto "Take nobody's word for it".

------
burnitdown
The two party system really sucks and I find it really troubling when LGBT are
mocked by liberals for being conservative (eg Caitlyn Jenner).

~~~
oh_sigh
That's an old view of the republican party. They were staunchly against gays,
and the democrats didn't exactly embrace gays, but they didn't want to make
their lives miserable for being gay.

But, we have a new republican party now - one that is centered on Trump at the
moment and is entirely concerned with the economics of the middle/working
class. I'm glad to see that's here. I've always been conservative leaning, but
couldn't countenance being a republican because of their old social views
which I thought to be completely backwards.

Now that they've dropped that, and (I think) embraced identity differences, I
am more than willing to throw my hat in with them.

~~~
shrewduser
the biggest problem i have with trump is his seeming stance on protectionism
and anti globalism.

but like most things he says, i'm not sure if he means it.

~~~
Trundle
That's exactly how he plans to help the working class no? I don't want to get
in to whether it _will_ help, just pointing out that you're basically saying
"my biggest problem with Trump is the part of his platform you find
redeeming".

------
amyjess
In general, the whole "social issues are just distractions from economic
problems, which are the only issues that matter" attitude taken by Thiel as a
_huge_ red flag.

Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry about being forced to use the wrong
bathroom. Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry about being impregnated by a
rapist and forced to carry the baby to term. Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry
about shot by the police while his hands are up because the cops are afraid of
his skin color. And evidently Peter Thiel is so disconnected from ordinary
life that he's forgotten that he has to worry about being denied service
because of his partner's gender.

These issues are real issues to matter to real people, and for some of us
(including me, a lesbian trans woman), they are our top priority. The only
reason he's saying this is because either he's lucky enough to be unaffected
or he thinks he's unaffected. If Thiel thinks these issues are "fake", then he
doesn't belong in a position of power, and I am automatically skeptical of any
candidate he endorses.

It's just like last year, when _Obergefell vs. Hodges_ happened, and
immediately the anti-TPP crowd started claiming that _Obergefell vs. Hodges_
was just a smokescreen meant to distract people from TPP being put on the fast
track. I'm sorry, but my and more importantly my friends' ability to marry
whoever we want is deeply important and very much real. All that little
outburst by the anti-TPP crowd did is prove to me that the anti-TPP agenda is
opposed to the LGBT rights movement. They've basically guaranteed that I'll
never speak out against the TPP.

------
ZeroGravitas
I understood this to be an attack on basically everything the Republican party
stands for. Which seemed far braver than saying he was proud to be gay (which
to be clear, was also brave in this context).

But everyone seems to assume that the "fake culture wars" are something the
Democrats made up, and the Republicans are just fighting for the natural state
of affairs, when it seems pretty clear to me that stirring people up about
this stuff (e.g. the southern strategy of driving black people to the
democratic party so that racists white people will vote republican, or
recasting gay marriage as an attack on traditional marriage) is basically what
lead to the modern malaise of the Republican party and Trump. There must be a
lot of people who want "republican" style economic ideas that will vote
Libertarian or even Democrat this year, just to avoid being associated with
hate.

So his comment makes much more sense to me if you replace "but" with
"because":

 _I don 't pretend to agree with every plank in our party's platform.
_Because_ fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline._

That fits in neatly with the bit about stopping fighting expensive wars and
focus on the economy. It also fits in with him being a proudly gay Republican
(and not directly related to Thiel but the most famous transgender woman in
America is also a republican). Yet everyone else is reading this the opposite
way to me, so maybe I'm wrong?

------
cholantesh
>Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don't need to
see Hillary Clinton's deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. She
pushed for a war in Libya, and today it's a training ground for ISIS. On this
most important issue, Donald Trump is right. It's time to end the era of
stupid wars and rebuild our country.

What? Isn't Trump for _escalation_ in the middle east? This makes no sense.

------
foldr
>Similarly for the more rigorous checks of people coming from countries having
known radical islamist ties

I'm not going to touch the rest of your nonsense, but this is an utterly
shameless attempt to rewrite history. You know perfectly well that Trump
called on several occasions for a ban on all Muslims entering the US,
regardless of origin. That is indefensible bigotry. I think you must know that
it is indefensible because you tried to gloss over it.

~~~
dang
When you find yourself impelled to enter a thread like this:

> _I 'm not going to touch the rest of your nonsense, but this is an utterly
> shameless_

... please don't. Nothing good can come of a discussion that begins by
breaking the site guidelines outright. This is true regardless of how
important the issue is or how right you are, indeed gets truer as those things
are more the case, because you discredit your position by behaving this way.
If it's correct, you ought to be able to show that without fulminating.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142296)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
foldr
dang: If it is your policy to selectively tone police people who disagree with
Donald Trump, then you have the right to do that as a moderator of this web
site. But you should not pretend that you are doing something else.

~~~
dang
That's precisely what I'm not doing. You don't get to break the rules here
just because you're anti-X, even when X is Trump. Following the site
guidelines means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

~~~
foldr
If that's how you feel about it, I really think you should just enforce a
blanket ban on political discussion on HN. My understanding was that political
topics typically aren't permitted, and I suppose it's only because of Thiel
that this one got to the front page.

The reason I say this is that political discussion has a moral urgency that
technical and philosophical discussion typically lack. Civility in a political
context implicitly says "I disagree with your view but it's one that should be
taken seriously". I won't stir the pot by mentioning any extreme examples, but
there are some political ideologies that do not deserve that level of respect.
Of course, one may agree or disagree that this principle applies in the case
of Trump -- I don't expect HN to take a position. But asking for maximal
civility in this context is making a demand that's far less reasonable than it
is outside a political context. Someone who sincerely believes that Trump is a
dangerous bigot can't be expected to talk about him as if he's a serious
candidate. And yet to refrain from commenting would leave his bigotry
unchallenged.

So I'd say relax the interpretation of the rule slightly (it's not as if I was
going completely off the rails), or make a firm decision about whether or not
politics is off topic on HN. As it is, you're tending to give too much space
to polite racist nonsense.

~~~
meritt
Thiel has substantial leverage over YC, and Thiel clearly is a very strong
Trump supporter. So I'm not sure why you're surprised that anything which can
be construed as anti-trump is being censored: YC supports Trump and will
silence anyone who disagrees.

~~~
dang
That is so remarkably far from the truth that it feels like the work of an
optimization algorithm.

I don't know if Thiel has any leverage over YC, but if he does it must decay
awfully quickly with distance, since I've never noticed any with respect to HN
and I'm pretty sensitive about that. In fact the very notion strikes me as
absurd, which I mention just as a data point.

As for YC supporting Trump (or rather YC people; I don't imagine YC as an org
would support anybody), the data is both prolific and exactly the opposite.

~~~
meritt
I'd suggest pushing it up internally that Thiel should be removed as a
partner. There's going to be a massive boycott/retaliation against Thiel and
all of his investments. YC would do well to lead the way and disassociate
themselves.

~~~
dang
Even if I agreed with you and had any influence over it, it would not be in
HN's interests to do that.

The reason is that such forms of influence are reciprocal à la Newton's third
law. To attempt to exercise such influence would be to invite it in return. I
think everyone at/on HN and at YC would agree that it's best for HN to remain
free of that.

