It's so weird to me that these folks don't just retire with a bag of money to a nice beach house and enjoy life. They're always seeming to meddle. And in doing so they take away our, and their peace. It's like they're troubled deeply and they need us to be also? Why can't they just not do demonstrably evil, deeply wrong things?
Because the sample size for "mega-rich" selects for more psychopaths per thousand people than the sample of people who are "just rich".
You can get "just rich" by being a doctor, or a partner at an IT consulting firm, without screwing people over.
But to be "mega-rich", you have to be OK with screwing people over any chance you get. Over time, that behavioural trait has a compounding effect where you don't see things as "right" and "wrong" anymore. That perspective is accelerated further as their money and power insulate them from consequences due to the political and legal latitude it can buy.
Bill Gates plotted to dilute Paul Allen's Microsoft shares because "he wasn't pulling his weight" when he was undergoing cancer treatment. Goldman Sachs' top legal counsel Kathryn Ruemmler accepted expensive handbags from Epstein and called him "uncle" in communications after he was re-arrested on trafficking charges. Bezos, Musk, Zuck, Ellison...need I say more?
The saying _Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison_ should transformed to _Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising the ultra wealthy_.
Well the Forbes Top 1000 (which has a lower threshold of $3.8 B) is missing 30-200 wealthy but totally obscure people. That proportion is close to what HN might consider "smart".
I also suspect there is a vortex of temptation as you become an increasingly interesting person. Rich, famous, powerful, well-connected, beautiful etc are all interesting characteristics to nefarious people since those characteristics can advance their own nefarious interests. I suspect that, as you become an increasingly interesting person, you must actively defend your peace. It's not like they actively undermine their own peace, at least not always.
This vortex of temptation appears to have many points of origin, such as cults like Scientology, or particular persons such as the casually described "gold diggers", or... whatever organization Epstein is a part of, etc.
It takes a certain personality to continue hoarding wealth even when you know that it comes from exploiting others. The reason why they can't just not do demonstrably evil things is that they have relied on doing evil things to get to where they are.
The kind of person that thinks "I've got more than enough money, I might as well use it to help others" doesn't get to be a billionaire.
I have to stop her right there. I stop myself there too. Neither one of us could, in any iteration of life, become billionaires.
(There's a time-travel story for someone. Like the movie Primer but with one person who round-trips through time—placing stock bets and other investments in order to become wealthy. When they screw up an investment they get a do-over.
Life also happens though: a relationship, marriage… This aspect though begins to play on a sense of guilt and he resists do-overs in the relationship.
By the close of the story his pursuit of wealth wanes, evaporates completely. Contentment comes finally from his relationship, from accepting his missteps, from embracing the uncertainty of the future. The machine is scrapped, no more do-overs.)
I'm a fan of time travel sci-fi films and series, but the way that's presented as a romance film (written and directed by Richard Curtis) has always turned me off from it. On the plus side, it has Bill Nighy who I think is superb, but has the film got enough depth for me to get over the romance?
I recently watched a Korean sci-fi series based on time travel - Sisyphus, The Myth (or Sijipeuseu: The Myth as titled in IMDB) that has one character being sent back in time and proceeds to deliberately amass power and wealth.
They have a police/military force whose job is to locate and hunt down time travellers from the future as they can be so disruptive to the economy etc and there's lots of people wanting to travel back from the future due to it being a dystopia.
You are getting closer to realizing that becoming a billionaire demands a psychological detachment most people would find disturbing...
It is not always brilliance that drives the relentless accumulation of wealth, but a deep, unresolved hole...an inner void shaped by trauma, by the need for validation never received from a parent, a world, or a past self.
That constant dissatisfaction fuels an endless pursuit of wealth they imagine will finally provide meaning or peace, yet never does. The accumulation becomes the self justification. The proof of worth in a game that can never truly be won. And from that height grows the contempt... Not for ignorance, but for poverty itself. Not because the poor are seen as incapable, but because they serve as a reminder of everything these individuals fear becoming.
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 have no interest in and 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Somehow there is a lot less discussion online about Thiel and Musk, both of whom are in the Epstein files. These are the most powerful people on the planet, steering elections at every level in America through their spending and connections. They need to be outed.
Thiel appears to be a Russian asset since he meets with Russians at Epstein’s properties per the files.
Musk is different. He simply begs Epstein to let Musk and his then wife Talulah Riley attend the “wildest party” on the island. Epstein even warns him that the “ratio” on the island may not be to his wife’s liking but Musk insists on coming to such a party.
Their approaches to defend themselves are different too. Thiel is silent. Musk has made huge numbers of posts, retweets, and replies trying to pretend he’s not part of the Epstein class, pointing fingers at others, and claiming he’s never been to the island. And he hasn’t ever explained why he was asking Epstein about the wildest parties.
Keep in mind that Elon was asking Epstein about these island parties years after Epstein was already a convicted child sex offender. He knew what was happening and wanted in.
People talk about "inbox zero". I want to learn "inbox Epstein".
Somehow, this guy had time to have regular email conversations with about 1,000 of the most powerful people in the planet (the head of the Nobel Prize Committee was one).
Which I found amazing when one of Musk's tweets to defend himself was to say that if he wanted to have creepy sex parties he could just throw them himself and not need a loser like Epstein involved.
Well, I can accept that Musk didn't know about criminal stuff and just thought it's like a Burning Man and had a big FOMO. Even though I cannot stand buffone Musk, it looks like it to me.
Thiel and especially Trump though are very different story. Trump happily dived in all the crime he could get.
> Well, I can accept that Musk didn't know about criminal stuff and just thought it's like a Burning Man and had a big FOMO.
... Wait, okay, I realise Musk isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but just how stupid do you think he is? Anyone corresponding with Epstein after his first conviction knew very well the sort of person they were dealing with; they just didn't care.
Well… judging by his behaviour on all the times he's been told "no" by domain experts, and that random reward schedules are highly addictive (which in this context means "on some occasions he's even correct when he tells experts he knows better"), I think it's very plausible that someone told him what Epstein was and he ignored and/or fired them for doing so because he didn't want it to be the case.
But that's the positive spin, where Musk actually didn't know and was simply an idiot, and at this point I'm tired of giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Example of the kind of stuff easily findable in 2006 if you ask an underling who knows how to Google to check out the guy throwing sex parties you want to attend:
Oh, yeah, if you were to do any due diligence (which you probably _should_, as a billionaire intending to go to sex parties) the red flags were there long before. But the first conviction really removed any vestiges of plausible deniability.
Thiel and Musk are the two biggest jerks to come out of the tech scene bar none. Zuckerberg and Andreessen must be ecstatic, because those two make them look reasonable (which they're not).
Thiel briefly talked publicly about his relationship with Epstein on the Joe Rogan podcast. It is interesting to see the juxtaposition of the private conversations with the public presentation of the relationship
Oh no, this is definitely something. We need to root out the truth and see that all these people are held to account. You shouldn’t be minimizing the importance of this.
I see Peter Thiel conversing repeatedly with someone who was convicted in Florida in 2008 for procuring a 17-year-old for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute.
You’re writing a lot here to obfuscate that. If Mr. Thiel didn’t know, that is at minimum a reason to question his judgment.
> I love when leftists are so willing to have such a weak grasp on reality that they're able to convince themselves that the sitting president of the united states ate babies.
Quite a statement to protect the president that claimed immigrants ate cats and dogs, and the base had no problems with it. There are problems with the left, but this is a hypocritical take.
> Something about how the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Well, have you tried to educate them instead of insulting them? Like Carlin said, there are a lot of dumb people out there. But belittling them doesn’t seem to be the solution if you actually want a functioning democracy. Education doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the top priority for the right as that’s too woke these days.
> Ah yes, because claiming that people are eating cats and dogs, something that actually happens in some parts of the world, is the same thing as claiming that the president ate babies.
We are actually saying that the president raped teen girls. Which is something that happens around the world - even happens within the orbit of Trump given the conviction of Epstein.
And when your favored divine-right monarchy comes for their "divine right" with your underage daughters and sons? Will you still be willing to give all for the cause?
I'm going to draft a new theory of sociopolitics called Pedophile-Oriented Ontology. It's when someone's political critique becomes entirely oriented around accusations of pedophilia or lack thereof.
Monarchy? Le bad, because the king could be a pedo!
You didn’t answer the question. Is it because:
1. You think the question isn’t applicable
2. You think doesn’t happen
3. You think justice is served for pedophiles
4. The president didn’t do anything wrong and so none of these discussions are valid
Well in this case it would be "is" rather than "could." Maybe Thiel himself doesn't partake in the forbidden underage fruit (although I don't see why we would rule that out, as it seems to be how the Epstein club binds its members). But then Thiel isn't set up to be the king either, right?
But yes such a critique would be interesting! I think all of Moldbug's florid prose about enlightened monarchism would land much differently if the apogee of that enlightenment isn't some sort of assumed societal grand plan or direction, but is rather just the old base desire for increasingly-immoral perverted debauchery.
Tens of thousands of years of political history and the only known paranoia-fueled scandal and suspicion of the elite being immoral pedophiles that I'm aware of is currently happening in a democracy, because a guy who based his identity on knowing as many other powerful people as possible happened to know many powerful people (really??? no way!), and anti-capitalists are desperate for moral superiority so they're willing to psy-op themselves into thinking it's plausible that every person this guy ever emailed must have been a pedo too.
Monarchy never had any of this nonsense. Bring back King George. We made the wrong choice.
You're saying that monarchies never had perverted debauchery? It sounds like you need to read a little more broadly, rather than just contemporary writings that seek to burn down all of Chesterton's fences.
And keep in mind that the monarchies of old were still constrained by religion, and by the lack of digital communications! What is being pushed today is better characterized as autocracy. The "monarchy" label is merely meant to evoke simpler-seeming times that are comfortably in the past.
Also I think you meant "capitalists" rather than "anti-capitalists". That people who were successful under capitalism want to move to a different system does not imply that their favored system is also capitalist! If monarchy/autocracy is "capitalist" then North Korea is also "capitalist" and the word is meaningless.
(also it seems like you're still in denial about the implications of Epstein's emails, regardless who was or was not partaking in the minors)
> Also I think you meant "capitalists" rather than "anti-capitalists".
No, I'm very much talking about talibanized socialists/communists/whatever they want to particularly call themselves. "Eat the rich" has become "The rich eat babies" because it doesn't matter what you try and get people to believe as long as they align themselves with your side and against the people you don't like. The Big Lie of our times, perhaps?
> I'm very much talking about talibanized socialists/communists/whatever they want to particularly call themselves.
So you're just bashing a strawman that you've pigeonholed all opposition into? Okay then...
We had a previous exchange that I ended up dropping. I was a bit sorry about that because I thought it would have been interesting to critique "universalism" on its own merits, rather than the term generally only being mentioned by its detractors.
(For context here I was reading Moldbug while he was writing, and spent a bunch of time internalizing other reactionary writings. I actually credit Moldbug with my transition from a right-Libertarian to an unaligned libertarian that sees left vs right as mere modes of thinking, each with their own merits)
But after seeing how quickly this conversation went downhill, I'm not sure that conversation would have been terribly productive either!
> So you're just bashing a strawman that you've pigeonholed all opposition into?
If you think radicalized left-wingers are a strawman, you live in a separate universe from mine. Unfortunately, I live in the one where I have to wake up and see flyers around my town unironically claiming Trump ate kids.
I understand. In fact, I've been there - I was working on ecash and cryptography before bitcoin and the bastardization of the term crypto. "Code is law" and all that.
I'm sure some of it is due to getting older, but with open cult-of-personality autocratic authoritarianism (aka fascism) upon us I have become quite conservative. I had been taking a lot for granted about the freedoms we do have, and the position of the Western world. Don't let a desire to make things better goad you into wanting to destroy what we do have.
But regardless, if you recoil from the groupthink of the leftists you should be similarly allergic to the groupthink of the rightists. They have taken up the mantles of so many of our longstanding societal problems, only to be led by outright con men and liars who are doing nothing to actually address those problems. And I don't just mean hate-but-hold-your-nose-for-some-greater-good, but rather hold them in the same exact regard as the leftists. Especially as that red tribe groupthink is now in power, and its results are not pretty.
I want a functioning democracy because we have an entire history of monarchies and dictatorships being far worse. And because I want everyone to have a say, not just a minority of elites who are only human and just as fallible as the rest of us.
Since no charges have been laid for all the noise this topic has generated, I can only assume that this is a distraction from another more important operation. Maybe there's war coming, maybe that 1 Trillion dollar interest payment is a very big problem but you shouldn't panic, and we'll help you with that.
A lot of the noise about this is specifically because the entities that are supposed to be investigating and bringing charges on this matter seem to be doing anything but that.
> Since no charges have been laid for all the noise this topic has generated
Considering that both the FBI and DOJ themselves seems to be compromised and more interested in a cover-up than finding the co-conspirators, who exactly would you expect to bring up charges here, if FBI and DOJ basically been put out of play?
It's so weird to me that these folks don't just retire with a bag of money to a nice beach house and enjoy life. They're always seeming to meddle. And in doing so they take away our, and their peace. It's like they're troubled deeply and they need us to be also? Why can't they just not do demonstrably evil, deeply wrong things?
Because the sample size for "mega-rich" selects for more psychopaths per thousand people than the sample of people who are "just rich".
You can get "just rich" by being a doctor, or a partner at an IT consulting firm, without screwing people over.
But to be "mega-rich", you have to be OK with screwing people over any chance you get. Over time, that behavioural trait has a compounding effect where you don't see things as "right" and "wrong" anymore. That perspective is accelerated further as their money and power insulate them from consequences due to the political and legal latitude it can buy.
Bill Gates plotted to dilute Paul Allen's Microsoft shares because "he wasn't pulling his weight" when he was undergoing cancer treatment. Goldman Sachs' top legal counsel Kathryn Ruemmler accepted expensive handbags from Epstein and called him "uncle" in communications after he was re-arrested on trafficking charges. Bezos, Musk, Zuck, Ellison...need I say more?
Yeah, give me some sunshine and relative obscurity and we're golden.
The saying _Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison_ should transformed to _Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising the ultra wealthy_.
Well the Forbes Top 1000 (which has a lower threshold of $3.8 B) is missing 30-200 wealthy but totally obscure people. That proportion is close to what HN might consider "smart".
I also suspect there is a vortex of temptation as you become an increasingly interesting person. Rich, famous, powerful, well-connected, beautiful etc are all interesting characteristics to nefarious people since those characteristics can advance their own nefarious interests. I suspect that, as you become an increasingly interesting person, you must actively defend your peace. It's not like they actively undermine their own peace, at least not always.
This vortex of temptation appears to have many points of origin, such as cults like Scientology, or particular persons such as the casually described "gold diggers", or... whatever organization Epstein is a part of, etc.
It takes a certain personality to continue hoarding wealth even when you know that it comes from exploiting others. The reason why they can't just not do demonstrably evil things is that they have relied on doing evil things to get to where they are.
The kind of person that thinks "I've got more than enough money, I might as well use it to help others" doesn't get to be a billionaire.
Exactly.
The wife too, "If I were a billionaire…"
I have to stop her right there. I stop myself there too. Neither one of us could, in any iteration of life, become billionaires.
(There's a time-travel story for someone. Like the movie Primer but with one person who round-trips through time—placing stock bets and other investments in order to become wealthy. When they screw up an investment they get a do-over.
Life also happens though: a relationship, marriage… This aspect though begins to play on a sense of guilt and he resists do-overs in the relationship.
By the close of the story his pursuit of wealth wanes, evaporates completely. Contentment comes finally from his relationship, from accepting his missteps, from embracing the uncertainty of the future. The machine is scrapped, no more do-overs.)
You may be interested in the excellent film "About Time". It has a similar, though not exactly the same, premise and conclusion.
I'm a fan of time travel sci-fi films and series, but the way that's presented as a romance film (written and directed by Richard Curtis) has always turned me off from it. On the plus side, it has Bill Nighy who I think is superb, but has the film got enough depth for me to get over the romance?
I recently watched a Korean sci-fi series based on time travel - Sisyphus, The Myth (or Sijipeuseu: The Myth as titled in IMDB) that has one character being sent back in time and proceeds to deliberately amass power and wealth.
They have a police/military force whose job is to locate and hunt down time travellers from the future as they can be so disruptive to the economy etc and there's lots of people wanting to travel back from the future due to it being a dystopia.
People probably do that, but they do it as multi millionaires more often than not.
You are getting closer to realizing that becoming a billionaire demands a psychological detachment most people would find disturbing...
It is not always brilliance that drives the relentless accumulation of wealth, but a deep, unresolved hole...an inner void shaped by trauma, by the need for validation never received from a parent, a world, or a past self.
That constant dissatisfaction fuels an endless pursuit of wealth they imagine will finally provide meaning or peace, yet never does. The accumulation becomes the self justification. The proof of worth in a game that can never truly be won. And from that height grows the contempt... Not for ignorance, but for poverty itself. Not because the poor are seen as incapable, but because they serve as a reminder of everything these individuals fear becoming.
Daddy Issues Billionaire Archetype. Many such cases!
That's our success symbol, in this age. A sad time.
Seems the Antichrist is way closer to him than he thinks.
/s (but not much)
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.
Yep it's clever. He's many things but he's not stupid
No. He is stupid...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4ZjhdkOf0_E
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/s-BQhXdCs8Y
https://www.tiktok.com/@eddiethemediatrainer/video/752115237...
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He didn't say anything close to "Shooting people in the street is wrong!"
How did you get that from the linked videos?
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.
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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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No. You were told to ban this 5 year old account, with a karma above 60,000 because it criticized Peter Thiel.
It is easy to see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=belter
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
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 have no interest in and 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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755154 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142554 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605974 (April 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397254 (June 2021)
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.
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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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> He's many things but he's not stupid
evil, sun of satan, bringer of the end of times
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.
I'd argue that's not really stupidity, it's more of a moral and spiritual failing.
IMO those are really two separate axes, you can be very smart and also completely evil or quite dumb but a genuinely good person
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.
True yes, I do get what you're saying
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.
Ah, this is the Boris Bus Distraction technique: https://spectator.com/article/the-boris-bus-conspiracy/ (not endorsing the Speccy, but this is an accurate summary)
I can't believe he was calling Greta a potential antichrist when there's... this
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.
Noted.
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
The cost of any trip to the UK is a constant...
Copium is a powerful drug.
> 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!"
They just got the wrong place. It was Pizza Express in Woking.
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.
But Epstein met the guy in charge of 4Chan the day before /pol got created to "contain" the fascists.
And that's where QAnon started.
So now we have meta-conspiracy theories about who started conspiracy theories.
They just ended up in the wrong kitchen, instead of that particular pizza parlor they were supposed to go to Florida instead...
Always cute to see people speak with such confidence about stuff they know nothing about.
QAnon was always controlled opposition, unlike the website that was monitored then closed by the feds (CF) via false flag attack.
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?
Such efforts are just an SEO/media manipulation game for Thiel.
Try and spread a mind virus, see if a "flock" forms behind him.
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.
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No, some people are actually nutjobs with nutjob beliefs.
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.
0 - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/boris-johnson-google-search...
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.
Smart people are also good at convincing themselves.
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.
Nah, I've met him. He believes plenty of nutjob shit.
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.
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.
He is cool with sexual abuse of teenagers and with Epstein philosophyly, connection to crime, racism, sexism ... all if that.
However, Greta Thunberg stands for evrrything he despises. She should be givimg massages and shut up.
Man, no /s at all. Peter Thiel is demonstrably evil even before the Epstein files come into play.
close? you could say they were right up each others ass, twice a day
Greta??? ;-p
Downvoted? PT fans I guess.:)
Somehow there is a lot less discussion online about Thiel and Musk, both of whom are in the Epstein files. These are the most powerful people on the planet, steering elections at every level in America through their spending and connections. They need to be outed.
Thiel appears to be a Russian asset since he meets with Russians at Epstein’s properties per the files.
Musk is different. He simply begs Epstein to let Musk and his then wife Talulah Riley attend the “wildest party” on the island. Epstein even warns him that the “ratio” on the island may not be to his wife’s liking but Musk insists on coming to such a party.
Their approaches to defend themselves are different too. Thiel is silent. Musk has made huge numbers of posts, retweets, and replies trying to pretend he’s not part of the Epstein class, pointing fingers at others, and claiming he’s never been to the island. And he hasn’t ever explained why he was asking Epstein about the wildest parties.
Keep in mind that Elon was asking Epstein about these island parties years after Epstein was already a convicted child sex offender. He knew what was happening and wanted in.
Both members of the South African contingent of the Paypal Mafia
What are the chances that AI czar / All In podcast host David Sacks had NO IDEA that his close friends Musk and Thiel were Epstein affiliated?
People talk about "inbox zero". I want to learn "inbox Epstein".
Somehow, this guy had time to have regular email conversations with about 1,000 of the most powerful people in the planet (the head of the Nobel Prize Committee was one).
And he did this before LLMs.
You can answer a lot more email if you type badly. And don't care about not recording federal crimes in a durable medium.
There were some occasions he replied to questions as "not for email".
The trick is to keep it short and send off your first attempt at it. Takes a few seconds.
Almost like he had a couple secretaries
Musk's brother Kimbal had close ties to Epstein too.
Which I found amazing when one of Musk's tweets to defend himself was to say that if he wanted to have creepy sex parties he could just throw them himself and not need a loser like Epstein involved.
What a way to totally burn your brother.
Well, I can accept that Musk didn't know about criminal stuff and just thought it's like a Burning Man and had a big FOMO. Even though I cannot stand buffone Musk, it looks like it to me.
Thiel and especially Trump though are very different story. Trump happily dived in all the crime he could get.
> I can accept that Musk didn't know about criminal stuff and just thought it's like a Burning Man and had a big FOMO.
There is a meme for this.
> Well, I can accept that Musk didn't know about criminal stuff and just thought it's like a Burning Man and had a big FOMO.
... Wait, okay, I realise Musk isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but just how stupid do you think he is? Anyone corresponding with Epstein after his first conviction knew very well the sort of person they were dealing with; they just didn't care.
Well… judging by his behaviour on all the times he's been told "no" by domain experts, and that random reward schedules are highly addictive (which in this context means "on some occasions he's even correct when he tells experts he knows better"), I think it's very plausible that someone told him what Epstein was and he ignored and/or fired them for doing so because he didn't want it to be the case.
But that's the positive spin, where Musk actually didn't know and was simply an idiot, and at this point I'm tired of giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Example of the kind of stuff easily findable in 2006 if you ask an underling who knows how to Google to check out the guy throwing sex parties you want to attend:
https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/sex/billionaire-palm...
Oh, yeah, if you were to do any due diligence (which you probably _should_, as a billionaire intending to go to sex parties) the red flags were there long before. But the first conviction really removed any vestiges of plausible deniability.
elon musk, a guy touted for being a literal genius, didn't know what happened on the epstein island?
Just me, or are email like this quite suspicious, knowing what we do now:
https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA02588512?view=personCode? Can't just be a mistake, there's too many of them: https://jmail.world/search?q=1&from=pid%3Apeter-thiel
Bummer. I Don't want him to lose his Kiwi status. Can't wait for him to escape the apocalypse to NZ, that's gonna be hilarious. Not for him though...
Why do you hate NZ that much?
people too nice, country too majestic
Thiel and Musk are the two biggest jerks to come out of the tech scene bar none. Zuckerberg and Andreessen must be ecstatic, because those two make them look reasonable (which they're not).
Thiel briefly talked publicly about his relationship with Epstein on the Joe Rogan podcast. It is interesting to see the juxtaposition of the private conversations with the public presentation of the relationship
https://youtu.be/klRb0_BAX9g @ 2:11:11
Okaaay... Except Thiel is the one guy we know wasn't fucking any underage girls.
The emphasis is on the wrong word
So you're saying he was drinking their blood? That makes sense.
Yeah not girls… just the boys.
You lack imagination.
We know that. Just go ask Jeff Thoma- ohhh right he got murdered.
> Thiel is known for his libertarian political views and became a prominent supporter of Donald Trump
Apparently AI does deadpan sarcasm now?
More seriously, is there a technical write up on how they are generating these wiki pages from the emails?
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Oh no, this is definitely something. We need to root out the truth and see that all these people are held to account. You shouldn’t be minimizing the importance of this.
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I see Peter Thiel conversing repeatedly with someone who was convicted in Florida in 2008 for procuring a 17-year-old for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute.
You’re writing a lot here to obfuscate that. If Mr. Thiel didn’t know, that is at minimum a reason to question his judgment.
I love when people happily come out and defend people in contact with a known pedophile and sex trafficking ring
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> I love when leftists are so willing to have such a weak grasp on reality that they're able to convince themselves that the sitting president of the united states ate babies.
Quite a statement to protect the president that claimed immigrants ate cats and dogs, and the base had no problems with it. There are problems with the left, but this is a hypocritical take.
> Something about how the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Well, have you tried to educate them instead of insulting them? Like Carlin said, there are a lot of dumb people out there. But belittling them doesn’t seem to be the solution if you actually want a functioning democracy. Education doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the top priority for the right as that’s too woke these days.
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> Ah yes, because claiming that people are eating cats and dogs, something that actually happens in some parts of the world, is the same thing as claiming that the president ate babies.
We are actually saying that the president raped teen girls. Which is something that happens around the world - even happens within the orbit of Trump given the conviction of Epstein.
And when your favored divine-right monarchy comes for their "divine right" with your underage daughters and sons? Will you still be willing to give all for the cause?
I'm going to draft a new theory of sociopolitics called Pedophile-Oriented Ontology. It's when someone's political critique becomes entirely oriented around accusations of pedophilia or lack thereof.
Monarchy? Le bad, because the king could be a pedo!
You didn’t answer the question. Is it because: 1. You think the question isn’t applicable 2. You think doesn’t happen 3. You think justice is served for pedophiles 4. The president didn’t do anything wrong and so none of these discussions are valid
Well in this case it would be "is" rather than "could." Maybe Thiel himself doesn't partake in the forbidden underage fruit (although I don't see why we would rule that out, as it seems to be how the Epstein club binds its members). But then Thiel isn't set up to be the king either, right?
But yes such a critique would be interesting! I think all of Moldbug's florid prose about enlightened monarchism would land much differently if the apogee of that enlightenment isn't some sort of assumed societal grand plan or direction, but is rather just the old base desire for increasingly-immoral perverted debauchery.
Tens of thousands of years of political history and the only known paranoia-fueled scandal and suspicion of the elite being immoral pedophiles that I'm aware of is currently happening in a democracy, because a guy who based his identity on knowing as many other powerful people as possible happened to know many powerful people (really??? no way!), and anti-capitalists are desperate for moral superiority so they're willing to psy-op themselves into thinking it's plausible that every person this guy ever emailed must have been a pedo too.
Monarchy never had any of this nonsense. Bring back King George. We made the wrong choice.
You're saying that monarchies never had perverted debauchery? It sounds like you need to read a little more broadly, rather than just contemporary writings that seek to burn down all of Chesterton's fences.
And keep in mind that the monarchies of old were still constrained by religion, and by the lack of digital communications! What is being pushed today is better characterized as autocracy. The "monarchy" label is merely meant to evoke simpler-seeming times that are comfortably in the past.
Also I think you meant "capitalists" rather than "anti-capitalists". That people who were successful under capitalism want to move to a different system does not imply that their favored system is also capitalist! If monarchy/autocracy is "capitalist" then North Korea is also "capitalist" and the word is meaningless.
(also it seems like you're still in denial about the implications of Epstein's emails, regardless who was or was not partaking in the minors)
> Also I think you meant "capitalists" rather than "anti-capitalists".
No, I'm very much talking about talibanized socialists/communists/whatever they want to particularly call themselves. "Eat the rich" has become "The rich eat babies" because it doesn't matter what you try and get people to believe as long as they align themselves with your side and against the people you don't like. The Big Lie of our times, perhaps?
> No, I'm very much talking about talibanized socialists/communists/whatever they want to particularly call themselves.
Ad hominem attacks for me but not for thee?
> I'm very much talking about talibanized socialists/communists/whatever they want to particularly call themselves.
So you're just bashing a strawman that you've pigeonholed all opposition into? Okay then...
We had a previous exchange that I ended up dropping. I was a bit sorry about that because I thought it would have been interesting to critique "universalism" on its own merits, rather than the term generally only being mentioned by its detractors.
(For context here I was reading Moldbug while he was writing, and spent a bunch of time internalizing other reactionary writings. I actually credit Moldbug with my transition from a right-Libertarian to an unaligned libertarian that sees left vs right as mere modes of thinking, each with their own merits)
But after seeing how quickly this conversation went downhill, I'm not sure that conversation would have been terribly productive either!
> So you're just bashing a strawman that you've pigeonholed all opposition into?
If you think radicalized left-wingers are a strawman, you live in a separate universe from mine. Unfortunately, I live in the one where I have to wake up and see flyers around my town unironically claiming Trump ate kids.
Can we swap?
Oh no, flyers? That changes things. Flyers are the worst. How do you even manage?
I get by by resenting democracy and the political process. It ain't much but it's honest work.
I understand. In fact, I've been there - I was working on ecash and cryptography before bitcoin and the bastardization of the term crypto. "Code is law" and all that.
I'm sure some of it is due to getting older, but with open cult-of-personality autocratic authoritarianism (aka fascism) upon us I have become quite conservative. I had been taking a lot for granted about the freedoms we do have, and the position of the Western world. Don't let a desire to make things better goad you into wanting to destroy what we do have.
But regardless, if you recoil from the groupthink of the leftists you should be similarly allergic to the groupthink of the rightists. They have taken up the mantles of so many of our longstanding societal problems, only to be led by outright con men and liars who are doing nothing to actually address those problems. And I don't just mean hate-but-hold-your-nose-for-some-greater-good, but rather hold them in the same exact regard as the leftists. Especially as that red tribe groupthink is now in power, and its results are not pretty.
I want a functioning democracy because we have an entire history of monarchies and dictatorships being far worse. And because I want everyone to have a say, not just a minority of elites who are only human and just as fallible as the rest of us.
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Since no charges have been laid for all the noise this topic has generated, I can only assume that this is a distraction from another more important operation. Maybe there's war coming, maybe that 1 Trillion dollar interest payment is a very big problem but you shouldn't panic, and we'll help you with that.
A lot of the noise about this is specifically because the entities that are supposed to be investigating and bringing charges on this matter seem to be doing anything but that.
> Since no charges have been laid for all the noise this topic has generated
Considering that both the FBI and DOJ themselves seems to be compromised and more interested in a cover-up than finding the co-conspirators, who exactly would you expect to bring up charges here, if FBI and DOJ basically been put out of play?
You're wondering why the people who report to Epstein associates aren't prosecuting them?