> It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
Thiel isn't opposed to Women's suffrage, he's just noting that it had negative impacts (in his opinion). By that logic I'm opposed to social media.
Instagram, I still keep even though it is owned by Meta. (Just like I still keep WhatsApp even though it’s owned by Meta.) But I don’t use Instagram all that much. Instagram doesn’t even show up in the “Most Used” category in Screentime on my iPhone, for example. So for me, Instagram does not negatively affect me much. Probably mainly because I am not very active there these days.
TikTok, I spend quite a bit of time watching and posting to. But I don’t feel like it’s affecting me negatively in any way.
I deleted my Facebook account ages ago because I noticed that it was a waste of time and a drain of energy.
Reddit I use quite a bit. And your experience there depends greatly on what subreddits you subscribe to.
HN is certainly social media as well, mind you! And out of all, it is the one that has had the greatest positive impact on my life. A lot of my skills are thanks to HN. And even my current job, which I’ve had for a bit over a year now, is thanks to HN (and third party tools for filtering and searching “Who’s Hiring” threads.)
For me, social media has been a net positive. But it has required that I pay attention to where and what I spend my time and energy on. God knows I wasted a lot of hours playing FarmVille on Facebook back in 2009/2010 for example.
This is the first I'm hearing about this, but "opposition to women's suffrage" seems like a significant misreading.
The attitude of "I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it", certainly can apply to voting too, and seems to be at work in this case.
That's the slippery slope people who want to take away rights exploit. Sure, you can believe women shouldn't vote. You can even go around telling people you believe women shouldn't vote. But just because you can say something, doesn't mean you should. If you say you don't believe freedom and democracy are incompatible, I am absolutely going to judge you for it because it's a stupid belief for which there is no evidence. There are several free democratic nations, a much larger number of unfree democratic nations, but there are no free undemocratic nations. And it doesn't take a degree in sociology to figure out why that is the case.
I'll put it another way: I'm anti-Trump. By extension, I think people who vote for Trump exert a negative influence on society by casting their votes in his favor. It also happens that these voters are predominantly rural. I also don't think rural voters should be disenfranchised, and if Trump wins the election, so be it.
Part of the idea of democracy is that you do want your preferred party to win, but that doesn't automatically mean you're against all the other teams having the right to vote. It certainly can be the case that a demographic or rules change makes it harder for your team to win. That doesn't mean you are against that change, whether it's universal suffrage, proportional representation, etc.
Support for fair and legitimate elections are usually a stronger foundational principle than one's support for their own favorite party. Especially because their party's victory would be empty if it wasn't won legitimately.
As for whether libertarianism and democracy are at odds, I really don't know myself. I think it's fine for Thiel to have his own opinion on that.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Yes, that is what he said. Welfare beneficiaries and women are two groups libertarians find are tough constituencies to appeal to, and both of these groups have increased in size since 1920.
The quote says “capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron. If Thiel is pro-capitalism he thinks democracy is a problem. If he is pro-democracy he thinks capitalism is a problem.
He doesn't say either of those things. Considering the context of a pro-libertarian text, what it means is that the capitalism part of "capitalist democracy" is losing significance as the US is moving more towards a EU-style social democracy.
But we all choose to believe what we want to believe. He certainly never said he opposed women's suffrage, as the original commenter claimed.
That position is Peter Thiel's apparent perspective as judged by somedude895, not a claim being made by somedude895 himself.
Since Peter Thiel is a libertarian, it's quite reasonable to surmise that he believes America is moving in the direction of social democracy. And if he has in mind the shifting political preferences of younger generations of Americans, I personally think it's a reasonable position to take. Public polling shows that more funding and reform for social programs is increasingly popular with younger Americans.
There is a leap between "X is bad for me" and "X should be banned". Some people make that leap automatically without even realizing it and assume that everybody else makes that leap too. So for instance, if I say "Soda rots teeth" some people will become indignant, "So you want soda banned?? People have a right to drink what they want you tyrant!"
The trouble is that generally people don't make this leap automatically, and simply noting a problem doesn't come with an implied "therefore ban it." Generally the people who do automatically make this leap have authoritarian mindsets, for whom personal preferences and public policy are nigh inseparable. Watch out for these kind of people, they would likely impose their preferences on you if they ever gain power over you, without even thinking about it. The emperor doesn't care for pre-tattered jeans, therefore he bans them for everybody else too; not a good sort of man to have in charge.
Now, the pertinent question is which of these sorts is Peter Thiel? When this self-espoused libertarian says "X is bad for me" does that necessarily imply that it should be banned for everybody else as well? Is there evidence for him behaving in a way that betrays this kind of authoritarian mindset?
Which is, I suppose, literally true. Any government exists to mediate conflicting rights, and that means limiting freedom.
For many self described libertarians, that conflict is to be decided entirely in favor of their liberties and everyone else's liberties don't matter. Democracy is inherently about everyone trying to have some freedom, which comes at a cost to Peter Thiel's, and apparently that's the only one that counts.
In any reasonable person's mind, a democratic republic (as seen by internet libertarians and conservatives) is a subset of democracy. Same with the democratic monarchies of Northern Europe, and the (more) direct democracy of Switzerland. Splitting them up just confuses people, and makes your point harder to communicate and understand.
never understood why conservative and libertarians americans want to make a difference between republic and democracy, it is literally in the definition of "republic" that it should be a democracy
Because it lets them make the implication that the Democratic party is un-American. And also that somehow the language is unfairly biased against them.
It's absurd, just like the bizarre fetish for using the term "Democrat party" as some kind of slur. But that's the essence of American politics now: a constant culture war, where the primary thing people want out of elections is to hurt the other side rather than pursue actual political goals.
That's an interpretation, sure, i'm not even arguing against it, i truly do not care either way.
All i was pointing out is that leaving out a section of a sentence you are trying to explain your interpretation of is not a good way to convey that you are arguing in good faith.
Especially when that section could be thought of as not neatly fitting in to the narrative you are trying to explain.
What an asinine comment. What is it about Thiel that makes otherwise regular users shift into a reddit-dunk frenzy? He's just a guy, if you even read what you linked you'd find it pretty obvious that's not at all what he meant.
Indeed - every silo wants you to use their own specific markup, but even then they choose what to show. I made a post a while back that gave a different summary on every silo platform https://www.kevinmarks.com/partialsilos.html
Of course, since then some of the silos have died or given up on their own systems, but microformats remains useful if you want to co-operate.
Can you expand on this ? I'd be more impressed by microformats if the microformats website could parse a DTD or schema and launch a structured editor for it.
That's not exactly accurate. The wiki has been edited recently, and change discussions are now done through github issues before updating the wiki, as that is more convenient than inline chat in many cases https://github.com/microformats
Also a lot of the practical discussion of microformats use is at the indieweb wiki - see https://indieweb.org/posts#Types_of_Posts for h-entry for example
Hi Clay, Kevin Marks here. I an help you scrape it out of wordpress into a static site if you like, I've done similar for Dan Gilmor and other old bloggers. Ping me - kevinmarks@gmail.com
Read the post - previously deleted tweets showed the blockquote fallback. Now they get a useless injected blank iframe, removing the blockquote from the dom.
