Vance has never gotten ANY job without an advance phone call from Thiel.
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This was a good take but is Maher still a transphobic arsehole who suffers from a major case of bothsiderism?
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I’m sadly aware about Vance’s admiration of Yarvin and his toxic ideas. It follows that he’d be interested in that clown Yudkowsky and the rest of the LessWrong set – I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Vance read or even posted there.
Like you, I’m trying to get the word out about these associations, but the neoreactionary stuff is so esoteric and bizarre that it’s hard for most non-geeks to understand how alarming it is that a candidate for VP buys into it. I’ve started boiling it down to explaining that he agrees with eugenicist tech billionaires who think democracy should be replaced with human and AI CEO-monarchs, but even that sounds unbelievable.
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Yeah, he’s doing the now all too familiar slide from has been entertainer to right-wing shill.
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Tangentially related, but it’s been astounding to me to see the hard-right turn of all the YCombinator folks, and the Hacker News community. I’m not deep into this stuff, but I get a digest of HN posts daily. I used to find the comments interesting, because there was a lot of domain knowledge in there. Now it’s shocking the degree to which the community pile on anything done by a non-White, non-male, or even non-American (particularly European from one of the more social progressive countries) person.
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Apparently Nate Silver now works for a company backed by Thiel.
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I thought his particular specialty was being wrong, but somehow people thinking he has something of value to talk about.
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… trying to make a career out of predicting things that cannot be known in advance is a good way to become wrong about stuff 
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there is a concerted effort by right wing extremists to sway opinions online. the number of people on those sites who are fascists might be few in numbers, with loud and artificially amplified voices
( which isn’t to discount tech bros completely. because they do most certainly exist )
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I don’t know about the rest, but they’ve always done the latter.
It’s all “Silicon Valley, Free Market, rah rah”
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I always got that feeling from them, but I’m transgender and lean anarcho-communist so maybe I am a bit more sensitive to when somewhere doesn’t feel good.
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To a certain extent it was inevitable. There are a lot of white and model-minority dudes in that space, many of whom are ultra-wealthy or can realistically see themselves being on the verge of being ultra-wealthy. Like the German industrialists of Weimar, they see fascists as natural allies of capitalism against what they perceive as confiscatory “communism”.
Mix in a dose of Californian Ideology and Yarvin’s and Thiel’s neo-reactionary lunacy also makes sense to a lot of them.
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Do they think that they can control the fascists?
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A lot of them are also up for fighting a land war in Asia.
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They always think that, and they’re always wrong.
(Not just industrialists and fascists, either, but whenever establishment forces ally with extremists of various stripes, they always think they’ll stay on top, and they usually get trampled underfoot.)
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i think that makes sense: when an american libertarian meets reality, their choice is either to jump left - hey, my ideas don’t work: maybe i was wrong; or, to jump right - hey, my ideas don’t work: it must be democracy and/or multiculturalism at fault.
and in my experience there are (were?) a lot of libertarians in tech
( note: this is different than when an american librarian meets reality. they’re pretty much like: see, i told you. )
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Every once in a while, a libertarian will realize that the corporate oligarchy brought about by unchecked capitalism is the biggest threat to individual liberty and conclude that government intervention to check the freedom-robbing excesses of capitalism is actually essential to maintaining personal liberty.
At least, that’s how my personal philosophy developed when I was in college.
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