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Accusations of cognitive dissonance are fruitless – there's a sizable block of 'gay conservative Christians' who probably think that you're experiencing cogniti

Accusations of cognitive dissonance are fruitless – there's a sizable block of 'gay conservative Christians' who probably think that you're experiencing cognitive dissonance and that their beliefs make sens given their worldview.

shanusmagnus 10y ago
I'm sure that's true about many, perhaps most gay conservative Christians. But Thiel is demonstrably a smart, capable, and educated person, which makes it all the more impressive that his worldview can apparently accommodate what amounts to wizardry, manifested through a dizzying array of fables whose magical interpretation violate both common sense and Occam's razor to a degree I can hardly begin to express. I can understand how this system of beliefs could seamlessly cohere in the minds of children or proto-humans. Thiel, and the rare others like him, are harder to fathom.
- solipsism 10y ago
  It's not so hard to fathom if you abandon the mistaken idea that intelligence is a scalar value. Thiel's capacity to reason and function might be genius in some ways and crippled in others. This idea is most evident when you consider idiot savants (I'm not implying Theil is one).
- Senji 10y ago
  Could you tip your fedora any harder if you tried?
- 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
  The "culture war" is this idea that just because we are gay we're supposed to be democrats. But you're ignoring that Hillary Clinton was campaigning against gay marriage from 1991-2013, basically up until the Supreme Court made the issue moot. It was Bill Clinton, with 3/4 of Congressional Democrats support who signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 -- the last year I considered my self a Democrat. Not everyone who is a republican is a christian. I happen to be an atheist libertarian. Putting me in box, labelling it and then insisting that I must be experiencing "cognitive dissonance" if I'm not a democrat is ... not exactly a rational argument.

shanusmagnus 10y ago

I'm sure that's true about many, perhaps most gay conservative Christians. But Thiel is demonstrably a smart, capable, and educated person, which makes it all the more impressive that his worldview can apparently accommodate what amounts to wizardry, manifested through a dizzying array of fables whose magical interpretation violate both common sense and Occam's razor to a degree I can hardly begin to express. I can understand how this system of beliefs could seamlessly cohere in the minds of children or proto-humans. Thiel, and the rare others like him, are harder to fathom.

solipsism 10y ago
It's not so hard to fathom if you abandon the mistaken idea that intelligence is a scalar value. Thiel's capacity to reason and function might be genius in some ways and crippled in others. This idea is most evident when you consider idiot savants (I'm not implying Theil is one).
Senji 10y ago
Could you tip your fedora any harder if you tried?
20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
The "culture war" is this idea that just because we are gay we're supposed to be democrats. But you're ignoring that Hillary Clinton was campaigning against gay marriage from 1991-2013, basically up until the Supreme Court made the issue moot. It was Bill Clinton, with 3/4 of Congressional Democrats support who signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 -- the last year I considered my self a Democrat. Not everyone who is a republican is a christian. I happen to be an atheist libertarian. Putting me in box, labelling it and then insisting that I must be experiencing "cognitive dissonance" if I'm not a democrat is ... not exactly a rational argument.