Jiro
20hr ago
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Since he said it in private, it's inherently not going to include caveats and explanations that let you understand it, so you should grant a lot more charity to interpret it than you would anything said in public, like 99% of the cases of "punch a Nazi". This is doubly so if it was selected specifically because it sounds bad (and it was), because that ruins your priors.
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People won't give a pass for punching Nazis because punching Nazis is an act which can be done by a vigilante or a mob. Thiel isn't going to be doing anything to the Antichrist.
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As others have pointed out here, your interpretation is wrong. He did not actually mean what you think he meant.
Jiro
20hr ago
Ironically, since not being allowed to diversify is a bad thing, you need to pay people extra money for them to be willing to take a job which doesn't let them diversify, which means that that would raise CEO salaries.
He already has the downside risk of losing his job. You're not supposed to invest in a company you work for unless you don't mind losing your job and your stock at the same time; diversification is a thing and investing in your own company would be opposed to diversification.
Or, more or less equivalently, a tradition of letting shareholders pierce the corporate veil and personally sue the CEO in civil court for securities fraud or breach of fiduciary duty in the event that the share price declines too much
That's a great way to make sure companies never do risky things. Also, to be fair, he should be able to sue the bureaucracy of his own company and the voting stockholders when they get in his way, since he faces personal liability when they fail.
It's certainly possible they were strategically pretending not to understand. If the assumption is reasonable (and "that doesn't mean someone who produces zero value" is reasonable), strategically pretending not to understand is a way to derail the conversation and is just plain dishonest. You can just respond to the whole thing including the implicit assumption--yes they can say "I didn't mean that", but then they're the one being dishonest since they obviously did. If you really expect that response you can say "even assuming you mean 1000 times an average worker, that still doesn't make sense because...."
Your standard encourages useless nitpicking. The things that normal people say are full of implicit assumptions and expecting them not to use any just makes things worse for everyone. It isn't helpful to not let people say "the sun rises in the east" because there are places where it rises in the west.
Jiro
1d ago
Including that comparison without making it explicit isn't a reasonable thing to do
Communication doesn't work that way. Unless something legal is involved, being too literal is a bad thing and ignores what is actually being communicated.
Jiro
1d ago
In order for it to be possible, all you need is zero, you don't have to have arbitrarily small, because it is certainly possible to produce 1000 times zero.
But it's still nonsense either way because people here are depressingly literal. "Produces 1000 times as much as another employee" implicitly compares an employee to another employee whose production is acceptable. The fact that the words "... whose production is acceptable" are not literally there doesn't change this.
There was actually news about Trump trying to take over bases in South Korea, although it was not last week. I also found this article about Trump wanting to take over a base in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan would not be useful against China. That wasn't last week either, though it was more recent.
Vietnam has a defense policy which would not allow foreign bases, although it's questionable how serious they are about it.
Jiro
3d ago
Japan is too many people killed. Vietnam is somewhat too many people killed. Afghanistan is not enough. The only one that fits is Korea. Checking news shows that Trump actually did talk about bases in Korea recently.
I would not count that as "occupied".
Jiro
3d ago
I would agree. If rare earths are essential for the defense industry, shouldn't they already be sourced only from domestic companies? If we rely on China for them, that's a problem that needs solving, not a way to get cheap materials.
Jiro
3d ago
They figured out that a few million people said "it looks just like a quarter" and the modern dollar coins are colored gold so they can't be mistaken for quarters. They are still the same size and weight so vending machines can handle them.
non-destructively taking a shortcut across someone else's field is one of the textbook examples of malum prohibitum and the law in most places reflects this.
The catch is that a single person taking a shortcut may "cause no damage" but if a lot of people all take the same shortcut, all that "no damage" can add up to damage. We're not in a situation where there's just one illegal immigrant, analogous to allowing one trespass.
The single-time, single-person trespass also doesn't include an analogy to the illegal consuming social services or anything like that.
Jiro
4d ago
What would they say, in your view?
They'd have no principled basis for it at all.
Actually saying "but they have to be evil" would be one step towards allowing their opponents to do assassinations as well, since "he isn't evil" is a much weaker argument than "it's wrong to assassinate".
Jiro
4d ago
My point is that "it's okay to assassinate people, but they have to be evil" is a belief that's held by approximately nobody. All the people who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk would never say that.
Jiro
5d ago
If you are a Republican voter in Alabama, I don't see how Chicago is "your house" in any morally relevant way. If you are a Reform UK voter in Lower Snoring, I insist that my house in London is not "your house" in any morally relevant way,
Okay, whose house is it then?
Open borders proponents always say "well, it isn't yours, so you have no right to exclude anyone". It's someone's. Who does have the right to exclude? It may be an individual, it may be a government, but that right didn't just go away because you don't personally own the country. Where did it go and who has it right now?
Jiro
5d ago
Of course, we understand now that John Brown was in the right when he attempted to secure his moral values through direct, murderous violence against those who disagreed, and of course we understand that similar murderous violence is acceptable when confronted by evil, implacable tyranny backed by force of law. The only wrinkle is that we cannot agree on what constitutes "evil" or "tyranny"
If the left thinks it was good to assassinate Charlie Kirk because it is okay to assassinate evil public figures, and that the only disagreement was whether he was evil, they can say "we think it is okay to assassinate evil public figures, we just disagree whether Charlie Kirk was evil". They won't do this. (And I don't think that's out of fear of being arrested, either, given the rhetoric that is acceptable.)
Jiro
5d ago
There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty.
No plan has good optics when faced by hostile media, as well as protestors deliberately trying to create bad optics.
Jiro
6d ago
To Jay Jones.
Saying that we "don't have the context" for him doing that is giving charity where it is not warranted.
Kirk was going on record that Biden might deserve death for his actions.
You are making a six degrees of Kevin Bacon argument. Saying that Biden should be tried and executed is technically violence, but it's not the kind of violence that someone could listen to him and then do. When you connect that to something Trump said, you're connecting it to something he said seven years apart, and not even about Biden. You're also trying to frame a single statement from Trump as a gotcha. It isn't a single statement that does it, it's a lot of statements from a lot of people.
He made that statement knowing that the general narrative of MAGA is that the justice system is corrupt and protects the DC swamp.
Obviously the statement means "if we get in charge of the government, then we...." He was under no illusion that Biden could be tried and executed under the justice system as it existed in 2023. That still isn't encouraging vigilante justice, unles you think people are going to do a vigilante takeover of the justice system first.
Jiro
6d ago
"Let's not be charitable to someone who thinks the children are little fascists" strikes me as a pretty fair norm.
Jiro
6d ago
With regard to the Kirk quote, this seems splitting hairs.
No, it isn't. There's a reason that it's the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and not the Unfair Trial and Biased Jury and Execution of Charlie Kirk. Assassination is something that members of the public are physically capable of doing, and supporting assassination supports things that can and at some point will actually be done by vigilantes. Nobody's going to vigilante put-on-trial and execute Biden, unless you think that's really a demand that Biden be lynched, which 1) I find unlikely to have been intended and 2) isn't possible anyway.
A conversation leaked by someone who doesn't like Thiel won't be a representative sample of what he says. It'll be disproportionately likely to sound bad and accordingly, the fact that it reminds you of a speech by a demon should lead you to update much less than if his speeches typically sound like they are made by demons.
Also, beware fuctional evidence.
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