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370 points sillypuddy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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tomcam ◴[] No.16407696[source]
Why was supporting Trump absurd?
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1. makewavesnotwar ◴[] No.16418325[source]
I'm not sure if you mean in general or with regard to my original comment, but in general I think supporting a guy who personally claimed to have molested women and who was in the middle of several fraud lawsuits to run the country is absurd in my book. Maybe you have a different definition of absurdity. Trump was also making absurd comments about our 2 biggest trade allies Mexico and China saying that he was going to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it (aside from being an idiotic idea for a number of reasons - there was no way he was/is ever going to get Mexico to pay for the wall) and stating as a matter of fact that China was manipulating our currency and created the "hoax" of global warming. All absurd and senseless in my book.

Secondly for Thiel, there's the whole question of why on earth he would go on national TV to support Trump when he is completely outside the general demographic that Trump caters to. Trump's biggest supporters were some combination of baby-boomers (and to some extent their children), gun owners and Christians. Some of the ultra-rich may have been his biggest financial supporters and the ones that stand to gain the most from his presidency - but they are only a sliver of his actual voter base and an even smaller percentage of the American populous. By speaking out the way he did - he essentially put a spotlight on himself as someone willing to sacrifice the welfare of the people if it helps his own bottom line. He could have supported Trump indirectly and it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election. I would say the way Thiel supported Trump was especially absurd.