This is a pretty run of the mill opinion in Libertarian circles. As a Libertarian, it's hard not to feel that way as you see decades of what the majority of people vote for and what the majority of people put up with in their elected officials. Unless your argument is that Libertarians, generally, are unlikable, in which case, you may have a point ...
I'm totally with you, but if you read the article, this wasn't Thiel's argument. His solution was to establish societies in new frontiers: Cyberspace, the Ocean, and Space.
I tend to agree with him. Look at what happens whenever we put things to a popular vote in this country. Even in places that re known as being very liberal, like California, half the population regularly votes against gay marriage and marijuana legalization.
Either way, someone expressing a loss of belief in something makes them unlikable? You don't like Peter Thiel because he's become cynical about democracy?
> Even in places that re known as being very liberal, like California, half the population regularly votes against gay marriage and marijuana legalization.
First, California is only very liberal in certain places. It is very conservative in others (the Central Valley)
Second, gay marriage opposition had a huge campaign by a religious organization. That religious organization should have been fined heavily or lost its tax exemption for doing so.
Third, it takes time for the attitudes about things like marijuana legalization to shift. That moment was, in fact, the last moment when the legalization opponents could have won. And they were backed by large amounts of money being thrown around by things like the alcohol lobby who are deathly afraid of legalization affecting their profits (they are correct).
It's actually unequally-weighted doubly indirect representation with structural incentives (but no guarantee) for the representatives actually tasked with choosing the voting representatives to both delegated that task to the citizenry and a separate set of incentives and abide by the results and a separate set of incentives (and, again, no guarantee) for the set of voting representatives to vote in accordance with the preferences expressed by the voters by whom they were elected.
And neither of those sets of incentives is, unlike the doubly-indirect structure itself, part of the federal Constitution; they are both much more recent federal statute and state law incentives.
Because animals are not able to give consent, nor are they capable of the thinking required to do so. Suggesting that homosexuality and zoophilia are two points on the same line is a very tired and inaccurate point to try to make.
> If marijuana, why not cocaine?
Actually a fair question. There's an interesting line of thought in legalising all drugs to bring them out into the open.
Thiel is correct. Any centralized system wherein multiple cultures must fight for a majority with which to impose their culture on everyone else, does not respect the freedom of slightly under half its citizens.
("Red Tribe" and "Blue Tribe", as one may call the collection of traits held by the average conservative and average neoliberal, respectively, are effectively different cultures[1].)
On the other hand I'm not sure how this essay's viewpoint would help in this regard. From my vantage point, Thiel doesn't seem to have much respect for the opinion of other voters who don't share his philosophy, with two groups ("women" and "welfare recipients") called out specifically. It seems like there is little attempt to figure out why not every person is enthralled with Thiel's brand of libertarianism, and much of the essay is devoted to dreams of tribal utopian colonies (which historically often end in disaster). The impression I get is that he views himself as better than almost everyone else, to be honest... that's not a very likable trait if so...
Oddly enough, I personally find that Thiel's support and stances in relation to Gawker vs. Hogan a bit contradictory to this dream. This is less a commentary on the lawsuit (I found Gawker detestable personally) but more how Thiel's Gawker vs. Hogan lawsuit embrace is a dip into the very same complex American legal system that usually is harshly criticized by libertarians.
You can enact laws that respect and support multiple points of view. See: national service but with exemptions for reasons of faith, mixed public private medical systems etc.
Also, I would say that you are using a shallow definition of culture.
As best I understand, having a single system with aspects of both extremes, has not brought out the advantages of either. We'd be better served by having a public system and a market that competes with it; except that nobody in good health would find the public system to be competitive, and that thus the public system would devolve into a public charity for the chronically ill/injured/etc.
> national service but with exemptions
That's all well and good, but exemptions become more difficult for a number of other things.
For instance, rural residents (a.k.a. "Red Tribe") generally prefer to be taxed less and receive less subsidized services overall in return; whereas many urban residents wish for a sort of Northern-European "nanny state" which provides every service imaginable in exchange for having negligible post-tax net income.
And here's another example which speaks more directly to geography. In rural areas there are (a) hostile and/or food-bearing wildlife, (b) large wooded areas devoid of humans (or, at least, demarcated with warnings that all humans within must wear high-visibility vests) and (c) an abundance of soft, bullet-absorbing ground. For this reason, rurals see firearms as a useful tool that can be handled safely enough to not cause injury to humans or damage to human property. (Unless, of course, one is an outlaw who intends to do so.) In urban areas, by contrast, there is scarcely any direction at all in which one can point a muzzle without "flagging" something valuable or someone; either directly, or on the ricochet from the hard materials that are common in urban areas, or even penetrating through a wooden wall/floor/ceiling of your apartment. It is no surprise, then, that many urbans see no purpose to civilian firearms ownership whatsoever; and would never see such a thing without entering a rural area; and would thus have no empathy or respect whatsoever for their rural neighbors who are so wary of firearms restrictions.
"Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...