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370 points sillypuddy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.486s | source
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makewavesnotwar ◴[] No.16407409[source]
Likening people to Thiel is ridiculous. He is personally facing the backlash from openly supporting Trump and being a speaker at his rallies. Nobody else in the valley did anything as absurd or unnecessary. And if he thinks he'll fair better in LA, I think he's sorely mistaken once people start recognizing him en masse. But to my point, this article seems to be generalizing an outlier to make its point. Everyone is being alienated everywhere because the country has a leader who is actively polarizing the populous by demonizing every side that he's not on as an enemy to his agenda, even going so far now as to suggest people who disagree should be labeled as traitors - which coming from the President, is technically a death threat as that is the punishment for treason. Peter Thiel seems to be actively trying to paint a more dystopian portrait of the situation to make himself out to be a victim when in reality people on both sides have been alienated by the dissolution of the "moderate" common ground where we all worked together in favor of a Monday Night Football-esque team based society (or crime drama - good v. bad). More generalizations like this that skew reality aren't going to help anything.
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superquest ◴[] No.16407487[source]
"openly supporting" the winning presidential candidate isn't "absurd".
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tensor ◴[] No.16407645[source]
It is when it implies openly supporting racism and sexism, which is why the reaction is rightly extreme.
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1. sho ◴[] No.16407871[source]
You need to zoom way the hell out, or you will miss the forest for the trees. Whether or not Trump is personally racist or sexist or whatever is basically immaterial. The very fact of his election, and his continuing popularity despite events, is direct manifestation of deep-seated cultural problems in the USA.

Simply dismissing the concerns of tens of millions of americans as "racist and sexist" is not helpful and in fact perpetuates the problem. I am not a Trump supporter, or a Thiel supporter, but it's not self-evidently bad that a person with some means chose to work with the guy in charge to try to make a difference. This kind of lazy dismissal is part of the problem.