> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).

Apparently folks in Virginia don't appreciate the disregard for zoning that is wildly transforming their neighborhoods.

Personally I'm YIMBY for more housing and other community services (grocery, community gardens, cafes, shopping). DCs are a whole different ballgame, essentially anti-human. DCs don't even produce that many jobs once they're built.

He's one of the clearest examples of the Waluigi effect in humans. Although it was first discovered in LLMs, it sure looks like it's a general principle: when an entity gets consistently rewarded for taking immoral actions in one domain, they sometimes start carefully finding the worst thing to do in lots of domains and then executing on that, getting results substantially more negative for others than pure Machiavellianism.

I agree. This seems like another manufactured internet culture war. One of the most interest podcasts I listened to was around his ideas on democracy and aging demographics. Specifically, as many nations become older, older voters are voting for conditions which benefit themselves at the expense of the young. As they make conditions for the young more and more intolerable, they have fewer children and exacerbate the demographic issues. The effect is self-reinforcing and inexorable. He posits, "maybe this is just how democracies end?" Many Western nations have been using high immigration to plug those demographic gaps, but this isn't a permanent solution. Nations are facing ratios of two working people for every retired person in the coming years and decades, and unless we see some pretty massive technological improvements (or radical economic transformation), things are going to collapse.

I also very much appreciate his positions on how we've allowed physical engineering and sciences to stagnate. It's true. We flew to the moon 57 years ago and basically gave up exploring space. As a space nerd, SpaceX is a breath of fresh air.

Every time the Antichrist gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than a lesser demon.

I find the Antichrist interesting. His views on...

Probably because Peter Thiel shares many techno-authoritarian views with Curtis Yarvin.

He does not care about you, at all. He does not care that you, or anyone you care about becomes a casualty in the consequences of his act.

He would be interesting if he were a character in a book and not a real man who weilds an insane amount of influence over the future of America during what appears to be a very critical time. It's hard to consider a man who controls AI and considers the pope as the antichrist as merely "interesting"

Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.

The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.

He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.

There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".

> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).

That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".

Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.

"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.

A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."

Because he doesn't even try to pretend he's not an oligarch, he's directly responsible for putting JD Vance in the Whitehouse for example, and is likely more successful than Musk at pulling the strings in an attempt to unravel any semblance of democracy in the US.