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  • The Billionaires are a bunch of Degenerate Morons who diddle children, much as the ruling class has always been. They're funneling the world's wealth upwards thinking capital will insulate them from the coming climate crisis they're exasperating. How I wish I could be there when they realize that it won't.

  • "If the billionaires are so determined on quitting humanity, perhaps it would be best to give them what they want and sponsor a mission to Mars so humanity can rid itself of them."

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  • Reagan and Thatcher were politically successful, remaking even their center-left opponents such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair into celebrants of streamlined government. But this political success has not in fact solved the problem of stagnation, which remains as severe, by Thiel’s account, as it has ever been. Thiel and his cohorts have gotten everything they want politically, but that has still failed to solve the key problem of our time. The fact that he still advocates a failed economic program suggests the deeper stagnation is in his own mind.

    Since politics has failed, Thiel and the other plutocrats are also toying with another solution: secession from society and the human species. Thiel has long been an advocate of various post-human technological solutions that will allow him and his fellow plutocrats to free themselves from the stagnant mass of humanity: cryonics (to overcome death), sea-steading (to create sea-board libertarian utopias), colonizing Mars, and artificial intelligence.

    I'm all for it. Send them to Mars and make sure they don't come back!

    • One of the things I wish we'd stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They're more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.

      They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they've convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.

      And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that's what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it's only gotten much, much worse.

      So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they've been marinating in some kind of "WH40K-esque" tech religion, it's because they are, and they have.

    • Personally, I would prefer Venus. I want these bastards to melt.

      • Nah, Mars sounds great. A tiny prison of their own making, as the corners they cut slowly come back to bite them? That's poetic

    • Sea steading, BioShock here we come...

      But seriously the fact that anyone ever mentions Mars colonization as a realistic strategy to do better than earth shows how stupid they are. Imagine the least habitable biome on earth where no one wants to live, imagine it even worse by unchecked climate change and realize it's still just ashtoningly easier to live there than the most optimistic expectations of Mars.

      • Anyone who says that is pretty stupid, but I don't think I've ever met someone who actually held that position

        I will say that working to colonize Mars will teach us to fix the Earth... But it would be real nice if we stopped fucking up the Earth in the first place

  • Perhaps they don't have human rights now? Means unaliving them would be legal and their weath is ours for the taking.

  • Unchecked capitalism has failed, and the USA is the first victim. This is what happens when you dumb down a country so much that they can't see the danger for themselves. Too bad for regular Americans but the leopards are going to feast.

    • Uhh, USA is one of the last to fall, off the backs of what we have the nerve to call "third world."

      It's rich Theil refers to a book with a colonial slogan of "no free lunch," after he and his ilk already sucked the husks of humanity dry. Pun intended.

      • It's fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I'm not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.

        He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:

        The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. "We ignored Hitler," he said. "We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all."

        They thought of the government as "They." The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

        He believed in rationally-considered governance:

        If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

        And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don't find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:

        Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

        They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

        Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

        Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.

        All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction... you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein's fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.

      • The main problem with modern civilization is that it's no longer possible to rob rich people. If Peter Thiel's money actually physically existed, in like a vault somewhere, SOMEBODY would have burgled the vault by now, purely because of the insanely favorable risk vs reward ratio - like a lottery where the cost of buying tickets of every possible combination costs less than the jackpot, once the reward is high enough, there will always be SOMEONE who will make the necessary investment to negate the risk. And "robbing the rich" would always have enough popular support that there would be little effort to find the thief as long as the oligarch was unpopular enough. But now Thiel's money no longer physically exists, and it's basically impossible to forcibly take it from him without basically having to destroy the entire global banking system first in order to get at it.

  • Steps to become a billionaire:

    1. Abandon humanity
    2. Step-on children's smiles
    3. Fund a feasibility study on turning poor into fuel
    4. Second study to prove those idiots in the first study wrong
    5. Replace gym equipment in second home with dogs you can kick and hit for exercise. The dogs must be trained service animals in active service to people who need them. You bankrupt those people at great personal expense and then you buy their dogs for pennies.
    6. Lunch
    7. Become billionaire
    8. Take cool pictures with swords. Don't show nobody.
    9. Abandon humanity
    10. Something kardashian related

  • Sorry mate, this "money" thing can only be owned by humans. See, that dog over there, that chair, that building, or that chatbot over yonder, they can't own anything, because they're not human. If you are not part of humanity, you can't own human IOU credits. So, have fun at the island, we'll check in on you in October.

  • Well, they can feel free to fuck right off and find another species that will accept them.

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