It's obviously off topic; the topic is the news described in the title.
Veering into most-controversial-generic-thing-associated-with-controversial-thing-X is hands down the worst direction politicized threads can take on HN, and they're borderline to begin with. Whimsical or unpredictable tangents are ok, but generic ideological tangents are always off-topic. They're black holes: they suck everything in, including all the oxygen of thoughtful discussion.
Because these things are so generic you can always make a case for their relevance to a specific story, but the proof is in the pudding: what happens when discussions veer off this way? The pudding sucks. This one in particular is embarrassingly terrible. This pudding needs to stop forthwith.
You guys are going to need to find a way to back off on the US politics. I have no idea how... it's all I can think about myself right now, but it's a poisonous topic.
Yep. It's way more important than, say, how to write and maintain a large code base in Elixir. Politics can easily crowd out that kind of thing from the front page. I don't know what to say. I can't think about much else, but sooner or later, maybe things will return to some semblance of normalcy, and I do like the tech/startup discussions here.
No he didn't. He suggested, correctly, that women getting the vote was bad for libertarians, because women vote against it. If you read the quote in context, that is very clearly what he's saying.
> how could it be anything other than a "bad thing" in this context?
"X lead to Y which is bad" is not the same as "X is bad". For example, relative abundance of high-calorie food led to obesity epidemics in the US. Is pointing out this fact means one wants Americans to starve to death? Or just pointing out some things have consequences, some of which are not good, even if things themselves are good? There's no law of nature that says consequences of something we consider good all must be good, and it's often not so.
> Why would you want him in government?
Because he knows how dangerous is raw democracy to freedom, just as folks who made the Constitution knew and thus made specific restrictions on the democratic powers of the Congress? You know, all that "Congress shall make no law"?
"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
It is exactly what that sentence is saying. No amount of post-wiggle words does anything to change that.
I think you might simply not be aware what the point of contention is here. Here is what you can say: "people without libertarian principles make capitalist democracy impossible".
Yet he connected that with gender somehow.
(It's not even a true statement if you think theres some isomorphism between Trump and Thiel. White women polled 53% for him.)
That statement does not at all counter reading that Thiel believes granting women suffrage was a bad thing, and that this, combined with the expansion of social welfare programs, is incompatible with his ideals. It does not actually clarify that he thinks granting women voting rights was good, or something other than bad. All he says is it would be absurd to take it away [now], and it wouldn't solve the problems he cares about.
His original statement was never that woman's suffrage was bad, it was only an (accurate) observation that women do not lean towards libertarianism. People saying that he says 'giving woman the vote was a bad idea' are literally inserting words of their own to imply that reading.
If the statement he made to explicitly counter that reading and to say that such a reading was absurd does not counter that reading, then I'm not sure what does.
I'm not libertarian, and I don't agree with Peter Thiels beliefs, but if you look at the whole point of his manifesto it's that governments interfere, and giving people the power to elect different ones won't make a difference, and therefore people need to build places that are free of government influence (Internet, Outer Space, and on/under the seas).
I suspect that will work out for him as well as Bitcoin has worked out without a central authority, and which is discovering and repeating all the mistakes of the past, and that has ended up with a pseudo central authority anyway.
> His original statement was never that woman's suffrage was bad, it was only an (accurate) observation that women do not lean towards libertarianism. People saying that he says 'giving woman the vote was a bad idea' are literally inserting words of their own to imply that reading.
Either you're being far too generous (from my vantage point), or we're talking past each other regarding what we are determining the contextual meaning of "bad" to be here. And I promise I'm not trying to create a silly semantic argument here.
The paragraph in question follows immediately on the heels of lamenting "that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool's errand." He states that "the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time" (meaning bad, in comparison to what he thinks is good, to put it in simplest terms). He praises the roaring 20s as "so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it" (a claim I think is a bit overblown; people have forgotten, but historians haven't overlooked this). His claim builds its force here:
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.
This statement would rightly catch the attention of even the most under-informed student of history. What could possibly have made the 20s the last optimism-worthy decade in American history, when there seem to many people to have been some of the greatest advancements in social and civil progress after that decade?
Please grant me a moment of latitude here.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women ... have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.
For Thiel, 'rendering the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron' is bad. This is the centerpiece of his notion of what's good. And why have we lost that which was good to that which is bad? Because there are too many welfare recipients and women gained the vote. These are the two causes he identifies as doing the rendering of that which was good into that which is bad.
Based on your comments, you seem to place most of the emphasis for your understanding on the parenthetical aside that is included between the dashes:
> --two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians--.
This is, without a doubt, a very astute observation on Thiel's part. However, at least from the standpoint of reading his statement, in the context in which it was delivered, this parenthetical aside does not define the relationship of the stated causes to the unwanted effects. It only provides an additional thought on those two causes and the difficulty libertarians encounter in their attempts to win them over to the side of what they believe to be good. This is simply Writing 101 here. Parenthetical statements provide additional information and explanatory thoughts within the context of their surroundings. Or, Thiel could have intended his dashes to be understood as comma replacements, in which case he's merely offering an additional identifying bit of information to modify his two causes of rendering what was good into what is bad. Nonetheless, the dashed-off clause is an accurate observation that is related, but does not read as the point of the sentence. Perhaps this charitable reading you are maintaining would make more sense if Thiel is just a poor writer. Unfortunately, the whole of his essay is overwhelmingly well-written and appears quite intentional in its thrust.
Now, back to the bit where we are perhaps defining just what is bad differently. In light of his principles and what he thinks was good in the 1920s, and what would be good now into the future, he states both welfare recipients and extending the franchise to women are bad things that exist and/or happened. He doesn't equivocate in his original essay, though he does in his rejoinder. He affirms that he does not believe any class of people should be disenfranchised. Okay, great. All good there. He states that it would be absurd to suggest such a thing. Alright. Feeling good here still, right? But the equivocation comes in stating that this wouldn't solve the political problems that he believes vex us. You see, that doesn't actually clarify his original statement. He doesn't make a clear statement that extending the franchise to women was a good thing. This would, in my reading, clear the air. Instead, he appears to be holding up two conflicting ideas:
- Welfare beneficiaries and women's suffrage cost us what was good in American life, politics, and optimism for the future, instead giving us what is bad
- No class of people should be disenfranchised, it's absurd to think so, and besides, this wouldn't solve our problems anyway
> If the statement he made to explicitly counter that reading and to say that such a reading was absurd does not counter that reading, then I'm not sure what does.
What he says is absurd is suggesting that women's votes will be taken away or that doing so would solve our problems. So many years later, I'm left assuming that is what everyone was complaining about. But it's not what I'm talking about. So, great ... it's absurd to think he wants to disenfranchise women; it's absurd to think he believes this would solve problems even if we did disenfranchise women. But he doesn't plainly say that it's absurd to think that he suggested extending the franchise to women was a bad thing in the first place. He doesn't clarify that point. Instead, sadly too much like a politician choosing ambiguity to appear to be saying what s/he thinks people want to hear, he focuses on clarifying that he doesn't want anyone to be disenfranchised. At least not now, because voting and politics don't have a chance at solving our problems.
> I'm not libertarian, and I don't agree with Peter Thiels beliefs, but if you look at the whole point of his manifesto it's that governments interfere, and giving people the power to elect different ones won't make a difference, and therefore people need to build places that are free of government influence (Internet, Outer Space, and on/under the seas).
And just a few years later, he donates a ton of money and gets on stage at a national convention to campaign for a politician and tell people they should get out and vote to make a difference.
Everyone wants to government to stop meddling, except when they want the government to meddle on behalf of their pet causes.
I certainly can do the substitution. But there are multiple options for the substitution:
* Substitute from my own hyper-progressive stance. (Great for feeling good about myself and hating on him.)
* Substitute from his stance. (Great for understanding my opponent.)
* Substitute only a logical equivalence.
I recommend the second, but as a neutral starting point to break out of the mindset of the first, I'd recommend trying the third. As in, put yourself in your formal symbolic logic class, replace "women voting" and "good governance and policy" with X and Y and evaluate it.
Your statement, "X doesn't necessarily result in Y" (which admittedly is not his statement), logically means exactly "It's possible for X to happen and Y to not happen."
So, Thiel believes, to use the logical evaluation of your rephrasing, that it's possible for women to vote and for there still to be bad policy.
Women DID vote, so the only the determining the truth of the logical evaluation of your rephrasing is whether we have (or will have post January 20) bad policy. Right now, Trump's promising some bad policy.
"It's bad that over 60 million people died during WWII."
=>
"It's bad that the the Allies fought Hitler."
---
He said that he doubts democracy and freedom are incompatible.
Did he say either one was bad?
Lots of ideals are incompatible.
100% democracy and 100% freedom are are not fully compatible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_rule For example, the minority must be protected from the majority.
Bad for your cause and bad for society aren't the same thing. The thoughts on freedom and democracy are at least as old as Alexis de Tocqueville. Maybe try actually reading some political theory.
In context his suggestion is that women being allowed to vote is incompatible with enacting his ideal philosophy of government. Which in turn implies that the only way to implement his ideal philosophy of government would be to deny women the right to vote.
He didn't suggest they were incompatible, he suggested that they haven't gone hand in hand, which they haven't. You could just as easily imply that he thinks libertarianism has marketed itself poorly to women.
You've stated the contrapositive, which is fine, except that he didn't imply that denying women the right to vote would be a positive strategy regardless of the effects it had on his ideology of choice.
If he could get his Libertopia at the cost of women's suffrage, do you think he'd balk at that? Or do you believe he's not a means-justify-the-ends type?
You could just as easily infer from his statement that he thinks libertarians need to market themselves better to women than that he thinks they shouldn't be allowed to vote.
His ideal form of government is minimal enough that voting is superfluous. That you infer nefarious motive speaks not at all to what was actually implied.
Well, it was started via the initiation of force. Which is one of only two sins in libertarianism, so if someone is a consistent libertarian they can't advocate for that as the way to get going.
The revolution came about first, but the United States government was enacted by a vote of the second continental congress, formed of delegates from the thirteen colonies.
What I'm getting at is that the rulers of the new government voted to start it. That's pretty much what I'd expect from any government.
You left out "capitalist democracy", his point is that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive concepts when women are allowed to vote since they tend to vote for socialism.
I don't think you should claim he said that without inserting the actual quote in the interest of accuracy:
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
In the context, I believe he's claiming that women voting resulted in a distancing from libertarian values, which he disagrees with ideologically. There's a significant difference between that and claiming that "giving women the vote was a bad thing."
Are you able to make an argument disagreeing with those reasons or would you prefer to just cherry pick quotes to present a narrative that confirms your world view?
That statement does not counter a reading that Thiel believes granting women suffrage was a bad thing, and that this, combined with the expansion of social welfare programs, is incompatible with his ideals. All he says is it would be absurd to take it away now, and it wouldn't solve the problems he cares about.
"The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
So if you break down his line of reasoning:
- 1920s were good because one could be optimistic about politics
- This changed when welfare programs were expanded and women were granted the right to vote
- Therefore, granting women the right to vote was a bad thing
I mean I dunno, regardless of how I read it, I can't extract any positive meaning from anything he said. He even said that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. So yeah...
"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
So not that giving the women the vote was a bad thing, just an observation on how women vote.
In follow up comments he said:
"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
In other words, voting isn't enough to bring about needed change (look at the U.S. over the last 2 decades for evidence of this)
Seems like he said that giving women the vote moved politics further to the left and thus was bad for capitalism, not that it was a bad thing in general.
