That "antichrist" lecture was an attempt at a reverse Streisand effect - there was a meme that Thiel was the antichrist, but now if you google "peter thiel antichrist" all you're going to see is that lecture.
Pretty clever but to be clear he is an incredibly dodgy human being
Yeah that's what I thought as well. Because even if he hates Greta Thunberg, there are much more extreme people in all the direction. So saying something so absurd seems bizarre. And for sure if anyone is to be tagged Antichrist, it would be war machine profiteer for most people.
Tbh it's kind of a genius move when countless comments like GP tags the antichrist as just slightly malicious or weird comment by him.
The first video says that Thiel is answering the question "What do you make of people celebrating Luigi?" and his response was "There may be things wrong with our healthcare system, but you have to have an argument and find a way to convince people" and that shooting random CEOs "isn't going to work".
Somehow I'm supposed to be led to believe this makes Thiel come across as stupid. My only guess as to how is because the OP must think that shooting CEOs in the street is an obvious rational good and that opposing such is idiocy, or reactionary fascism (in leftist usage, a synonym for idiocy), or so on.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, which is not allowed here regardless of what you're battling for or against.
the submission track of the account, to see you are being untruthful.
The same way you are untruthful, about not disclosing to the community the silently throttling back many of many accounts, not allowing them to post or even reply to comments in a middle of what you decided is acceptable discourse. All the while, at the same time you have here:
Accounts associated with VCs, that do 10 to 20 submissions a day.
You also have been allowing accounts that systematically down vote tech related posts or comments, who are not sympathetic to the current administration. Is that also engaging in political discourse?
And worst you are untruthful, to the community, in not disclosing the main page is manually curated. You actually move posts post with 400 comments within minutes to the 20th or 40th page, if they are somewhat uncomfortable. While pushing to the main page every single submission from OpenAI or Anthropic even if they have 2-3 comments.
Compared to a few years ago, you let the HN main page, transform itself into 90% submissions on Agentic AI. It might serve the 600 billion critical investment of your pay masters, but transformed something where a few years ago, you had posts from Philosophy, Physics, Math, Literature, etc... to nothing more than a marketing poster to the AI VC bros.
Understand that the vast majority outside Silicon Valley, does NOT care about AI, GenAI , AI code generators. They are Hackers...not VCs
No one told me to ban your account, I do not track your views on Peter Thiel, and karma is not a factor.
We've asked you repeatedly to stop breaking the site guidelines and explained to you more than once that using the site primarily for political or ideological battle is against the rules. You've continued to post lots of flamewar comments and even many of the non-political ones have been snarky or aggressive. That's a lot of poison added to the ecosystem. What made you think that was ok? We told you repeatedly that it wasn't:
When I saw you getting aggressive with that other user yesterday, for me it was the final straw and I banned your account. (The other user also, of course, but whether your account was breaking the rules has nothing to do with what someone else was doing.)
You've listed a lot of grievances here, which I suppose is natural at such a moment, but I don't know if it makes sense to go through them in detail. I do want to point out that this bit is wrong: "you are untruthful, to the community, in not disclosing the main page is manually curated": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I/we have nothing against you personally, and if you genuinely want to use HN as intended, we can unban your account. The main thing we'd need to do that is some reason to believe that you've had a change of heart about how to contribute to HN and will follow the rules in the future.
Only a mental five year old would regularly consume tiktoks and YouTube shorts like those above. I'm sorry your brain is fried hard enough that you can only glean political substance from soyboys making short-form clip content.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, which is not allowed here regardless of what you're battling for or against.
People can be profoundly stupid in areas like basic/fundamental morality, while also being in the top 0.001% in areas like manipulating media and making money.
Examples: Every billionaire. Every single one - except Chuck Feeney who proved the rule.
It's not very smart to fail morally and spiritually, over and over, without ever looking into why or trying to correct the issues.
It does take intelligence of a particular kind to examine yourself and what makes you happy, fulfilled. And it takes a certain kind of stupidity to become greedy for more and more and more, neverending.
I don't believe that intelligence is a single axis. You can even have different levels of intelligence on different days for the exact same topic; even on the same day from one hour to the next.
Some people might be great at set theory but terrible at calculus; some people might be great with their hands at sewing but clumsy with glasswork. People are weird and complex.
But what's clear is when people don't even try to be good people. And that requires a particularly dense form of stupidity.
Umm, I am not sure. If you can type on HN you are probably much richer than most in 3rd world countries and you for sure can give majority of your wealth to them. Almost everyone of any richness thinks they are not rich enough although almost everyone in tech probably is.
Which part of what I said are you unsure about? I'm pretty confident about it.
> If you can type on HN you are probably much richer than most in 3rd world countries
Centuries of exploitation, ongoing, that we all benefit from. Yes.
> and you for sure can give majority of your wealth to them.
Well, no, not really. Not if I want to own a house, and be able to retire some day. For those living in America it's even tougher; where a medical emergency can bankrupt a lot of people.
But what you're missing is that the difference between being a millionaire (which I'm not even) and a billionaire is ... About a billion dollars.
And rather than help 3rd world countries, or even the hungry people in their own, billionaires generally do shit like what's in the Epstein Files (which Thiel explicitly is) and the Panama Papers to keep things getting even better for themselves at everyone else's expense.
So, you're conflating two very, very different scenarios.
Apropos Greta Thunberg, I noticed on the top of the "no stupid questions" subreddit the question "How can people like Greta Thunberg afford to be a full time activist?". The submitter was a one-month old account, one of their posts was in the whatismycqs subreddit - a sure tell for bot/farm accounts.
Yet it is rather serious question - most people spent most of their time to sustain themselves. I think that it is pretty bad for democracy that political action is delegated to only those few that are able to gain sponsorship and don't need to work to eat.
We do not need professional activists, quite the contrary.
> most people spent most of their time to sustain themselves
Do they? Or do they get convinced by adverts that their lives won't be complete unless they spend more than they can afford on an endless stream of shiny promises?
I've always found it very easy to put a huge fraction of my income to one side because all my hobbies are cheap or free.
I've sometimes expressed surprise at how much other people buy, or spend regularly, and in one case the response was approximately "of course I need to spend £2500/month after my mortgage, there's the £50/month phone and same for internet, there's Netflix, I eat out twice a week, there's the car (which I like taking across the channel to France and driving around a lot), there's …"
Meanwhile, I'm mostly content living off my €1k/month passive income, of which 25% is spent on mandatory social and health insurance; and the only thing I'm unsure about at this income level is visiting friends and family on the other end of a 2h flight where the airport isn't all that close to any of them.
Yeah, I'll tell my family we need to move to the mouldy 1 bedroom flat because a guy in the internet says so. That'll help with the mortgage bit;
Also kids need to manage their expectations and instead of having active hobbies (that require some minimum hardware but lots of activities), they should try sculpting with clay instead. Especially that with the asthma they'll get from the black mould they'll be in no position to be very active anyway.
I've seen clay on the field, so we'll save money here. We can also collect their art through the winter to bake them in the sun once they're ready (to save on the oven).
School? Right, we need to move to the closest one, why let them have friends or aspirations.
Now work, hmm, that's easy. Instead of going to the work I get paid a lot but commute cost over £5k a year, I'll take something that pays 1/6 of my original salary but we can save on the commute. Will he'll with arguing why we need to move to the smaller place and ditch their activities.
Living costs a lot.
And if I sound absurd so do you by suggesting your life choices are applicable to everyone or they're just convinced by adverts to spend.
You're inventing a fictional narrative unrelated to anything I just said.
Especially as this was in the context of how Greta Thunberg, who, to the best of my knowledge, has no kids of her own and thus doesn't need to also cover the cost of their hobbies or how to get them to school, and furthermore in the context of "how does she manage to be a full-time activist with no obvious means of support?" where such things as "commuting" is more like "hitchhiking on someone else's yacht for 2 weeks": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_voyages_of_Greta...
You can do a lot of travel very cheaply when your reputation alone is sufficient for people to give you a free lift across the Atlantic ocean as part of your own activism against, in that case, the CO2 emissions of flying. Should that be limited, given the travel itself was part of the attempt at activism to move people away from air travel, but also it took 2 weeks and therefore probably wouldn't do any such thing?
(For those without this advantage, I'm reminded of Tom Scott explaining how he managed to do so much on-site filming around the world for relatively little money; my own cheapest flight was under a tenner, an effect somewhat spoiled by the cost of the British Rail ticket from the airport to my actual destination).
> Especially as this was in the context of how Greta Thunberg, who, to the best of my knowledge, has no kids of her own and thus doesn't need to also cover the cost of their hobbies or how to get them to school
And comes from the rich middle-class background. But let's ignore that, because all that matters is small financial discipline.
You are both ignoring what my actual point was, which was that some organized propagandist wants the discussion to be about Greta Thunberg's virtue or lack of it.
That means I phrased my comments badly, to whit I was trying to make the point "this attempt to dig dirt is simply not interesting because…", which is neither virtue nor lack of it, but a lack of stickiness to what appears to be an implicit claim of vice.
> And comes from the rich middle-class background. But let's ignore that, because all that matters is small financial discipline.
I didn't say to ignore it.
I said it's possible to live cheaply.
Vimes' Boots isn't nothing.
You said this was a "serious question"; but do you now recognise that a simple observation of "oh look, she's from a rich middle-class family" (a fairly large group) means it is not?
> my own cheapest flight was under a tenner, an effect somewhat spoiled by the cost of the British Rail ticket from the airport to my actual destination
> Do they? Or do they get convinced by adverts that their lives won't be complete unless they spend more than they can afford on an endless stream of shiny promises?
> Meanwhile, I'm mostly content living off my €1k/month passive income
This means you have sufficient capital to sustain yourself this way, and probably a place to live with no rent or mortgage. This also means you had either a rich family or earned quite a lot in the past what allowed you to collect this capital. And lastly this means you don't have family to support.
Well, maybe everyone could decide to grind few years (though in my country the minimal wage is not much greater than your "passive income", so grind options are limited) and then decide to not have a family and don't buy a phone. We would then have a whole society of full-time political activists, but then there is a question why any action matters.
Your comment reeks of classism. "Oh, they really do not try enough. Just get up earlier and cancel your Netflix sub".
> And lastly this means you don't have family to support.
Last I checked, neither does Greta Thunberg.
As she's the one whose lifestyle you find to be a "serious question", this feels like you're making an "arguments as soldiers" reaction here rather than taking the actual point that it is very possible to live cheaply if this is your goal in life.
> This means you have sufficient capital to sustain yourself this way,
Irrelevant. My income being €1k/month is what matters, not how I get it.
> and probably a place to live with no rent or mortgage. This also means you had either a rich family or earned quite a lot in the past what allowed you to collect this capital.
And in my example I wrote the other person saying "after my mortgage", for a reason.
That aside, it can also mean I live somewhere cheap: I've always been able to live this cheaply, even when I was renting. It's been a while since I was at university so double these numbers for inflation, but University halls were about £70/week at the time for the nice option; the cheap ones (which I was dumb enough to go for in the final year, do not recommend) were £40/week.
I was still paying rent through the pandemic. At every point in my life, when I have paid rent, it has always been low enough that a £1k/m or €1k/m income would have had enough left over for food and bills, yes including during the pandemic. That my income was often higher is of course how the savings I do have, happened.
At university, I made a game of the food options, which was in retrospect not actually sustainable, but what was sustainable last I checked (pandemic) was £1/day. I didn't spend all of my student loan (£3k/year but also that's only spent term-time and see previous point about inflation), even without part-time work at university.
Living cheaply is possible, if that is your goal.
> Well, maybe everyone could decide to grind few years (though in my country the minimal wage is not much greater than your "passive income", so grind options are limited)
She's Swedish, Sweden is in the EU, she clearly has a good gasp of English, so she has many minimum wages to choose from.
> and then decide to not have a family and don't buy a phone.
She's 23. And now you seem to be saying that people shouldn't be free to choose to not have families before turning 23.
Also, there's a big gap between "don't buy a phone" and "spend £50/month on the contract".
> We would then have a whole society of full-time political activists, but then there is a question why any action matters.
I could say this about 100% of professions. Even if we were all farmers, or all poets, or all software developers, or all soldiers. And, of course, politicians, who are, you know, paid to do politics full-time. Or worse, lobbyists, who are what you imagine Greta Thunberg to be, except they wear suits and don't hitch lifts and do get paid enough to support a family.
It's called "division of labour".
> "Oh, they really do not try enough. Just get up earlier and cancel your Netflix sub".
My Netflix example was simply one item on a long, long list. Hence the bit where I wrote about the example person, "spend £2500/month after my mortgage". Because that was what he spent, after his mortgage, every month. On himself. With no family.
This was a real person who made regular trips to France in a huge Lexus and drove without regard to fuel efficiency or indeed the speed limit. They couldn't imagine not spending all the money they spent, having all of the things all of the time. They were also single, living alone in, if I remember correctly, a 5-bed house they owned. They could not even imagine earning less than £60k in c. 2010, when the median UK wages were less than half that (and full-time minimum wages were about £12k) and unlike him those lower wages everyone else had often did support a family.
Overall, a lifestyle such as the visible parts of Greta Thunberg's (I have no idea what her hobbies are, naturally) can be sustained by part-time minimum-wage work.
If her goals in life are to be what she appears to be, that's not expensive, it's about knowing people who let you bunk on a sailing boat for a fortnight; and not a fancy one either, the kind small enough that, to quote: "the Malizia II has no toilet, fixed shower, cooking facilities or proper beds".
If you're complaining that people shouldn't be free decide not to be parents by 23, that people shouldn't be free decide to spend two weeks at a time in those conditions for what they believe in, because *you* prefer to raise a family and find such conditions appalling, that's your mistake, not a "serious question" about her.
Honestly? Your inability to imagine that Greta Thunberg's lifestyle could be anything other than a "serious question" sounds very much like the thought process I saw in my example of Mr. speeding-Lexus-lives-alone-in-5-bed-house, though obviously his specific details were different, he couldn't imagine anyone choosing to have kids for one.
On the topic of projection, I wonder where the "Pizzagate!" frothing-at-the-mouth QAnon geniuses are, now that the actual sex-child-trafficking conspiracy has been revealed, just that it involves their champion fascists.
Hah at one point they were saying an online furniture shop is a website for trafficking children hiding in plain sight, using coded messages to describe said children (something like "leather sofa" meaning "blonde teenager" or some insanity like that). Come on you freaking geniuses, the Epstein emails show that they don't need codes on a public website, they just talk to each other in plain speech, but over email!
A child-trafficking conspiracy was a total fabrication, meanwhile a major child-trafficking conspiracy was happening under everybody’s noses. What a coincidence, huh?
Seems to me, like all legends, it started on a kernel of truth, then it evolved into something of its own. Not sure why you believe Pizzagate to be totally unrelated to Epstein.
I'm asking about where the Pizzagate outrage brigade is... Are they quiet now because it's their own champions who are implicated?
To be honest I haven't been looking out for them, but I imagine the news/the Internet detectives would've covered them.
"Kernel of truth", hah. Feels more like a distraction tactic. "Oh, Trump barged into dressing room of teenage pageants, let's accuse the other side of running a trafficking ring!"
The issue with pizzagate (and a lot of these conspiracy theories) is not that it was directionally incorrect about 'some heinous shit is going down' (which is a good cold reading any day of the week in any age), it's that it jumped to specific and often just unhinged conclusions from basically zero evidence.
The latter part tending to both create more problems and give cover to the existing ones.
No, the only issue is that it was a purposeful distraction from the real heinous shit. The rest is a distraction from the fact that it was a distraction.
Always cute to read people who speak with such confidence but just dole out partial information, seemingly bragging "Ooh I know something you don't".
You sound like yet another conspiracy nutjob, but to be explicit: What website? What controlled opposition, where's your info from? I don't know if I'm just feeding a troll who'll be gleeful because in his brain he "knows" something others don't know, so that makes him special; or if I actually want to learn about whatever other meta-conspiracy that made you special...
qanon was almost certainly foreign agit-prop. it may have started with a real human but if you think they're running false-flags out of 4chan you're literally insane.
the US Gov doesn't need to go to 4chan, they can get headlines in the Washington Post and NBC.
why would Q-anon continue to advocate for Jan 7th and overthrowing the gubmnt even after Biden won?
I know a couple of other politicians as well where I say over and over again, that's not them being a blowhard, that's a trial balloon. They're testing the water for how much of a lunatic blowhard it's profitable to be.
These people want to fill Trump's shoes when he's gone, that's very obvious. But I think - and hope - that Trump's fans will notice what they're doing and not be charmed by it.
Sure they are, but Thiel is not one of them. Or rather, there's little reason to think the nutjob beliefs he presents to you are his sincerely held nutjob beliefs.
You run into people sometimes, where you realize they're testing the waters constantly to figure out where they have you and what they can get away with.
Strong disagree, he's one of them, and he means it. The myth that these guys are 'really smart' should die, they're good at grifting, but they're not so smart they can't have nutjob beliefs and when they say what they think and it is negative believing them will not lead to a less true picture of the individual.
I never said he's really smart. I think he's a garden variety - well, I'd say psychopath, but maybe that's not the whole of it or even the central bit. I think he's one of the quite common people whose first and basically only need, is to always be in control of the situation, including knowing where he has other people. He's willing to lie about what he believes to get that control. He might say something off-the-wall (like bringing up the antichrist) because seeing how you respond to it is more valuable to him than appearing consistent or not-crazy. He probably thinks he can work with it however you respond.
People like this don't hold many sincere beliefs, they spend their time thinking about what they should present to you, not what they should actually believe.
Nah, it's advanced SEO. He almost certainly didn't even come up with it himself; billionaires and even centimillionaires can have teams of PR people just coming up with this shit for them all the time.
Boris Johnson (or his PR team) did it with the bus thing, and cheese [0].
Yes, Thiel has nutjob beliefs. Utterly insane.
No, this wasn't one of them. Too calculated. Too sweaty.
We're talking about one of the guys connected to Cambridge Analytica here.
Maybe we should be clear about which beliefs we're talking about.
If your claim is that he doesn't believe Greta Thunberg specifically is the Antichrist, then sure. But that's just listening to the words that he says. He never says he believes Greta is actually the Antichrist.
"In our world, [the Antichrist] is far more likely to be Greta Thunberg [than Edward Teller or other mad technologist, or implicitly weapons and surveillance tech manufacturer Peter Thiel himsef]."
He does actually believe this.
So yes OP is correct that Thiel said and does actually believe Greta "is potentially" the Antichrist. But that's a different claim than saying that she actually is the Antichrist. There are thousands or millions of people (most unknown to Thiel) who could fit into the Greta-Antichrist category broadly. So it's a much weaker claim than that Greta is herself singularly the Antichrist.
Both claims are equal levels of insane though. If you believe the weaker claim that the Antichrist would be someone like Greta, it requires exactly zero additional insanity to believe the stronger claim that Greta is actually the Antichrist.
Exactly. The literal claim is just a fig leaf for being able to say 'oh, he surely doesn't mean that' whereas the subtext is far more important and he definitely believes that based on this and many other statements and actions in the past.
You can be a nut job with but job beliefs and be smart about it. Obviously our dear friend from Austria wasn't going to directly talk about crematoria.
Traditional response to a non-rich person saying nutjob shit: Are you a fucking idiot?
Traditional response to a rich person saying nutjob shit: That's really interesting, especially as it connects to this thing I am working on that needs funding
Facebook's modern response to anyone saying nutjob shit: Check out this other nutjob shit
ChatGPT's modern response to anyone saying nutjob shit: You've nailed it. You're thinking about this exactly how a professional philosopher would.
One thing we learned from the Epstein documents was that he was very good at controlling people's perception of him. It would be wrong, for instance, to think his derisive use of "goy" was reflective of real beliefs. He just found it useful to come across that way to some people. He took pride in "befriending" both Røed-Larsen (architect of the Oslo agreement, moderate on Israel) and Noam Chomsky (big Israel critic) at the same time he was shooting the shit with ethnic supremacists.
I assume Peter Thiel, and many similar people, are basically the same. If less competent at it. That you've met him doesn't mean you know his sincere beliefs - I think a good default assumption is that he doesn't have many, since sincere beliefs get in the way of getting the kind of power he has.
Ah yes, much better to just assert your own perception of what they believe, even in contradiction to their stated words and visible actions.
Sometimes people just believe insane shit.
"Standard religious orthodoxy for major religion but stated explicitly in relation to modern events" isn't even on the outer perimeter of insane. In principle, billions of people believe most of what Thiel believes.
It's just unusual to hear an allegedly smart person actually say it out loud in earnest, because when you do, a smart person realizes that in fact mainstream religious views (any Abrahamic religion's apocalypse lore) are fucking insane.
But that's just reason to think Thiel has some more courage, more confidence, or less to lose than your standard intelligent Christian. All of which is obviously true. It is not reason to believe he doesn't earnestly believe basic tenets of his own religion, which you have provided no evidence for.
> He took pride in "befriending" both Røed-Larsen (architect of the Oslo agreement, moderate on Israel) and Noam Chomsky (big Israel critic) at the same time he was shooting the shit with ethnic supremacists.
There's literally nothing even contradictory in this, so not sure what you think this demonstrates. One can simultaneously be friends with all of the above characters -- in earnest.
A few reasons have been previously discussed: plenty of diff viewers highlight non-standard characters being a big one, the other bit being if someone does see this error it seems entirely plausible as a
mistake.
Choosing something atypical in a way that is clearly trying to be invisible rather than being an accident will draw a lot more attention than “oops I must have typo’d it”
Yes, but for /whatever/ reason, they programmed their signup form to disallow signups from certain tld's, so a "me@somewhere.uk" (example pulled from hat) triggers their "don't allow from *.uk" error path.
They are not looking at where you "are", just what your email ends with. And why they are bothering to do so I don't know, as they seem to be overlooking the fact that the IRS insists that citizens pay income taxes no matter where in the world they are, and where in the world the income is earned. So a US citizen, living in the UK on a work visa, and earning income in the UK, and with a UK email address, is still required to pay the IRS their due.
I was impacted too: it seems certain payment methods in ApplePay are showing up as "expired" even though they're valid.
For impacted users the services that auto-renew are defaulting: in case there are other cards the transaction follows through in priority order, otherwise it'll just fail.
To check: open Settings.app->Your Name at the Top->Payment & Shipping
/s (but not much)
reply