Thiel used to be roughly identified, including, at times, by me, as a libertarian. One reason was his decision to fund what started as a libertarian-rooted wild idea, Seasteading. Another indicator was his big-money support of an ultimately feckless Ron Paul-oriented SuperPac. These decisions made his warm embrace of Trump back in 2016 confusing, but he has now made it clear he has, and wants, nothing to do with the idea that human liberty is overall good and enriching.One of the comments following the article contains a handy list of things Thiel's President buddy has done:
Instead, Thiel has some interests and some enemies, and he wants to use the power of the state as a weapon to help one and harm the other. The main enemies are Google, China, and the U.S. university system. He advocated vigorous police actions against the first and third, and a trade war (at least) against China.
You probably can’t but try to imagine how fast Obama would have been thrown out of office and probably arrested if he had done and said the a 10th of things Trump has said and done in office. Whether it’s threatening people, paling around with dictators, using the public office to enrich his businesses, spending $100 million dollars playing golf, putting his children in positions of authority, lying everyday, inviting foreign help in his election, engineering a disaster on the border for political gain, encouraging police to beat people up, encouraging his supporters to commit violence, the obstruction of the special counsel investigation, the attempt to rig the census, singlaling out certain states for punitive attacks such as withholding disaster aid or writing a tax law designed to damage states that didn’t vote for him and more. I can’t help but chalk up the double standard to racism but maybe it’s partisanship which probably comes from the same place in the brain as the racism. Anyway one day a future generation is going to look and this time from a detached perspective and they will recoil in horror at the madness of it all just as we do so now at the madness that existed in our past.
* Yeah, I would agree if the thought provoked was "what an outrageous and dangerous nut, using his influence on the dumb-as Trump to try to incite investigation of a rival company."
18 comments:
This is one reason some of us had to distance ourselves from the libertarians. They were becoming useful idiots. The commenter is particularly idiotic. The Usurper Soetoro wasn't even supposed to be in the White House. He's ultra-Teflon.
I will take 'Asian Latham' as a compliment
you still think everything is OK with our culture steve? it's basically snowflakes and Salem style witch hunts
https://twitter.com/primalpoly/status/1151876505762332672
Obviously, I have never said everything is OK with Western culture.
And equally obviously, I thought you would have guessed my response to the latest bit of Quillette/Thiel level handwringing: fights within academia over political correctness (Pinker), or the corporate response to it (Folau) are just not "the biggest problem" in the world, or Western society.
You never come up with any evidence to show how its harm seriously extends beyond the unfair treatment of some individuals - instead it's all "poor X, he (or she) might lose his job over this" or "poor Andy, he got beat up by some Leftist thugs", both of which incidents might indeed be injustices (yeah, Andy's definitely was, but as if the problem in Portland is anywhere near the widespread rioting we saw in the US in the late 1960's, which we have been reminded of in the Apollo docos on TV this week.)
A somewhat extreme version of political correctness has had a revival in academia and spread easily through social media.
But the populist Right, in its revival under Trump, is just patently obviously a much greater concern to both American and international society - or do you just want to gloss over the treatment of illegal immigrants (including those whose children have gone to serve in the US military), the outright bans on abortion in many states, the climate change denial helping ensure world wide disasters in the near future, their out of control budget, and trade wars claiming other countries as collateral damage?
Or go back to Quillette to get your daily dose of "oh my God, everything wrong with the world is the fact of the political and cultural Left".
The biggest problem in the world is relentless fractional reserve usury. Sucking the value out of all productive endeavours. These other problems are a symptom of this vampirism as the dynastic forces seek to degrade their hosts to maintain control.
So it’s all just the one problem. It’s no series of problems to be ranked.
Jason
You must be stoked. Latham is the premier political intellectual in Australia at the moment. You idiot, stepford.
Of course you like Latham, JC. He's a bloviating loudmouth, like you.
And by the way, how can you bear to still be appearing in Catallaxy, where the open threads are now like a creepy nursing home where the residents spend all day talking about sex: past, present and imagined.
Yes Latham is terrific. He stayed loyal to his constituency, and Australian values, even when his party turned loony and went off with the fairies. Latham is a true patriot. Its not the least bit surprising that he would rub Steve up the wrong way.
It's giving me much pleasure whenever I find Jason & JC getting back up from a man who believes in ancient glasshouses on Mars, speculates about raising cows on Ceres, and believes that the Apollo missions, climate change, and relativity are all Jewish inspired hoaxes.
Do you want me to post the photos again you inbred degenerate?
What are these hey dopey?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTDPbhc6BH8
Lets have that hypothesis hey dummy? A bit of the old science hey Steve?
My comments on the video. The problem is once you see these things you cannot un-see them. I like this idea of a new medieval world where we would just take a Jew like Steve out to the centre of town, put him in the stocks, and throw rotten fruit at him until he admitted the truth.
We know what they are. They are farms. They cannot be anything else and they are exactly how we would build farms on Mars. When we go to design farms on Mars, we won't be able to design them any other way. Except perhaps just do everything under the ground, with rock and glass ceiling. But on Mars you want to take advantage of the sun so you really ought to make it an above ground operation. And there may be enough of an atmosphere on Mars to disrupt easy electricity access. Whereas no such problems would be encountered on Ceres. So Mars naturally lends itself to above-ground farming. Since the sun would be very important to the operation. On Ceres the Sun would be somewhat marginal to the operation, electricity would be readily tapped, and so underground is perhaps more natural.
We don't need to wait for the truth. Its so glaringly obvious. In any factory settings you have tubes that look like this when the inside of the tube has to be different from the outside. Obviously if you want to run cattle and grow things on Mars you need to establish a higher pressure on the inside. To do this economically you have to use local materials. You have all the energy you need, since space is Chock full of electricity. So on Mars you need metallurgy, glass industry and the ability to work well with stone to provide your needs. Because you don't have a planet-wide economy. The glass tubes have to be large enough to run cattle and plant trees. But they cannot be wider than they are or the air pressure would cause the glass to shatter. I don't know how anyone could think they were anything else but linear farms. Since thats the exact way we would make them if we had to make them again like our ancestors.
I think we are so used to seeing food arrive as if by magic on Star Trek we forget that we are unable to provide these things without a global economy. So we have no choice but to farm if we go to Mars. Even with anti-gravity technology ... an anti-gravity cargo machine will be a high-tech thing, with a crap payload, difficult to load .... I mean it will WORK but its not as if we are ever going to be able to wave a magic wand and make things float. We have electro-gravitics and we have aether disruption through swirling Mercury perhaps. But neither system is going to be great for large-scale cargo transport from the home planet. So to make the whole thing profitable you are going to need to have a lot of production on site.
"speculates about raising cows on Ceres,"
This fellow is such a dope right? I mean everything we do in the human world has to be done at profit. How are you supposed to make a profit mining the asteroid belt, with your hub on Ceres, if you don't have a farm on Ceres? How could that even be contemplated?
You going to send out for a couple of rib-eyed steaks and some pate from a restaurant in Geelong every time you get a bit peckish? Or does this fool think that the future is Vegan? Is he supposing that THE PAST was Vegan? Of COURSE you are going to have to have farms within a place like Ceres if we want to have cheap asteroid belt mining??????? How could it even be otherwise? Anti-gravity is clunky, difficult and high-maintenance. Rockets are next-to-useless. Heavy cargo accompanying human transport will always be really difficult.
How does Space engineer Steve propose we solve these problems without permaculture on-location?
Dog-ate-your-homework Steve?
Of course you like Latham, JC. He's a bloviating loudmouth, like you.
And by the way, how can you bear to still be appearing in Catallaxy, where the open threads are now like a creepy nursing home where the residents spend all day talking about sex: past, present and imagined.
Stepford
I'm treating your comment as a complement too. Thanks.
Yes, the downside of the open comments section there is that you end up with a large number of undesirables. But look at it this way. You have Homer Paxton!
Imagine how cheap mining the asteroid belt is, if you have good human transport for short trips, and a full-blown permaculture farm on Ceres? No gravity to contend with and unlimited electrical energy? By comparison mining of anything but base metals on earth would make no sense. Now imagine the cost structure if you've got to get all your supplies all the way from earth? There is simply no comparison.
Mining on Ceres at least, and perhaps on Mars also is going to be SO MUCH cheaper than on earth. Because mining is just energy energy energy. But you need to be able to do at least 95% of machine maintenance and 99.9% of food production locally. Or you could never make a profit. It would always be a drain on public finance. But the mining would be so easy and one small bonus would be all the helium 3 imbedded in the rock surfaces. You wouldn't use it in space but that would just be an added bonus to export home with your high-value metals.
We have the lights on Ceres .... probably a psychological operation admittedly. But we had the open cut mining on Mars antiquated photos. Another psychological operation? Maybe. But why assume this is controversial unless you have been highly conditioned by the oligarchy to be overwhelmed with embarrassment whenever these things come up?
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