7 ms·

The Nixon Seminar with Peter Thiel

58 points by kervokian 6y ago

roschdal 6y ago
Video, please
- creddit 6y ago
  https://vimeo.com/533792077/e3aabe6c8f https://vimeo.com/533792077/e3aabe6c8f
stuaxo 6y ago
Let me guess, Peter Theil thinks he wasn't all bad ?
- kgantchev 6y ago
  Turns out that it's not about Nixon...
  - marricks 6y ago
    Thiel may want to rethink the title then.
    - kgantchev 6y ago
      Which title?
    - Thrymr 6y ago
      It's a named seminar sponsored by the Nixon Foundation: https://nixonseminar.com/about/ https://nixonseminar.com/about/
  - kervokian 6y ago
    This is why it's called The Nixon Seminar: "The Nixon Seminar on Conservative Realism and National Security is monthly gathering of senior statesmen and rising specialists in various aspects of great power competition and American national security, to discuss issues of current and continuing importance to the nation’s interests abroad co-chaired by former Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and former National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien. Dr. Henry Kissinger serves as Honorary Chair." https://nixonseminar.com/about/ https://nixonseminar.com/about/
- creddit 6y ago
  Pretty much entirely unaddressed so all in all a pretty bad attempt at a pithy political statement.
hyko 6y ago
Should this title not be “BIG TECH AND CHINA: WHAT DO WE NEED FROM SILICON VALLEY? starring Peter Thiel”
woodruffw 6y ago
I've done two quick passes over this transcript, and a theme stands out to me: Thiel and company repeatedly claim that there is no meaningful difference between the Chinese military and individual Chinese nationals who work for American companies, because China is essentially a fusion state where the government dictates the flow of capital. In this account, America is supposed to be distinct: there is a clear division between capital and state, and the US government (overwhelmingly) does not interfere with capital interests. I don't think this is particularly accurate (in either direction), but that's the claim that I see staked out. But then there's a turn-on-a-dime: Silicon Valley should be held to account by the US government, and should be made by state authority to advance specific domestic and foreign policies. Thiel and company are explicit about the policies they'd like to see the state advance by strongarming private capital: strategic investment in Taiwanese technological interests, not banning hateful content, &c. So my question: what gives? The latter is very explicitly a "fusion" (i.e., Chinese) approach to state and capital; isn't that exactly what the Thiel and paleoconservative types are claiming to be against? Is there some inner logic to this that I'm not perceiving, or is this all just Kissinger-style realpolitik?
- jerf 6y ago
  Dunno if this is "new" per se or if I've just seen enough over the years to finally identify it, but a lot of the "correctness" of a political opinion today depends not so much on the content, but how it is phrased and whether or not it is in a "proper" environment. If you wrap a heavy interventionalist policy in the guise of "we have to defend ourselves against the Chinese doing it!", you might get one group sagely nodding about how it may be a bit sad but is clearly necessary while another group is angrily denouncing the racism or whatever. Turn around and propose the exact same policy (for the sake of argument) in terms of controlling domestic extremism and "nudging" the masses properly, and the people previously angry will be nodding sagely while the other group is now angry. From my viewpoint, there are very few people left proposing anything like freedom. It's all a fight now over who gets to use the government to impose their views on the US and its individual citizens, not whether views should be imposed by the government. Within my lifetime, this was not the case.
  - 6y ago
davedx 6y ago
Thiel is a textbook pseudo-intellectual. Thinks he’s super smart because he made a ton of money as an entrepreneur and believes it makes him some kind of statesman. While I think there are some successful entrepreneurs out there that do have some of these qualities (maybe Gates?), Thiel sure isn’t one. As you point out, his intellectual bankruptcy is in plain sight
- justapassenger 6y ago
  I don’t think it’s exclusive to entrepreneurs. A lot of people who happen to be successful, by their standards, assume it’s thanks to their superiority. You can see that clearly in software engineering. There’s tons of people who consider themselves super smart and experts on world problems, just because someone is paying them $200k per year to move around buttons in css.
  - Analemma_ 6y ago
    "As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable. But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence." -- idlewords, emphasis mine
    - clairity 6y ago
      yah, logic is an idealization--a linearization in a decidedly non-linear and stochastic universe--that works in a constructed context but not beyond it. it's how newtonian mechanics is so very useful at our scale but cannot fully explain ourselves, much less the world or the universe. understanding thiel requires understanding that he decidedly comes at issues with self-interest and ego first (and a bit paranoia) rather than priciples, despite the contrary image he tries to project.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
I am still trying to grasp how Thiel intellectually went from ultra libertarian to American statist cofounder of Palantir. What happened? He realized the threat of China and changed his mind? He’s hedging his bets? He sees a strong American state as fundamentally necessary for libertarian values? No snarky replies please. I am genuinely curious.
- davedx 6y ago
  He doesn’t have a coherent or consistent politics. He’s just not that smart. Genuinely not being snarky - guy’s an effective entrepreneur but no kind of great political thinker
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    This is a snarky reply and specifically not what I asked for. I have watched quite a few videos with Thiel. He has degrees in law and philosophy and is quite financially successful. Thomas Jefferson he is not, but I don’t think he is “just not that smart.”
- bitdizzy 6y ago
  What people say are their values and the values revealed by their actions can be different. Moreover one can express certain values in pursuit of goals that are incompatible with those values. This is styled hypocrisy and the bourgeoisie such as Thiel are very used to this.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  I have seen a recent interview (last few years) with him where he still refers to himself as a libertarian, but I agree that in practice he does not seem that way. He is heavily influenced by Leo Strauss[0] however, so he may be taking an "esoteric" view of what libertarianism means. [0]: Strauss was a political philosopher who advocated reading the "esoteric" meaning in works of literature. I.e. he thought that thinkers did not write what the actually thought but wrote in a veiled way so that their true meaning was apparent by those in the know, but not to casual readers.
- 6y ago
ttam 6y ago
video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJcKWtiFzIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJcKWtiFzIY
AbrahamParangi 6y ago
A behavior I see here and elsewhere in recent years is this idea that everyone I disagree with is an idiot. Kind of like the intellectual equivalent of total war, it seems deeply unpopular to believe that people you disagree with have merit.
g8oz 6y ago
It's fascinating to watch the hawks fashion their strategy of maximum confrontation with China. Watching them sell it will also be interesting. Will they use some of the tactics they used to build the momentum for the invasion of Iraq? How will they differentiate the messaging for different constituencies? I'll be watching, popcorn in hand.
thinkcontext 6y ago
While I find just about everyone participating in this event contemptible (including Nixon) there are reasonable points made about the challenge that China presents. A few of the potshots that are taken at "the woke crowd" bear commenting on since there is some extreme revisionism going on. - The progressive left opposed China's admission to the WTO citing human rights (Tibet in particular) and the effect on US workers - The progressive left yelled and screamed about human rights for Uiygurs and supply chains in general for years. The Trump administration ignored it for most of his term, not mentioning it until the pandemic and scapegoating China for "Kung Flu". - The progressive left would embrace a carbon border price in a heartbeat. Pompeo's former boss of course said the opposite, calling climate change a Chinese hoax. Biden would do well to propose a border tax.
- dnissley 6y ago
  It's been a while since China's admission to the WTO, and things have changed rapidly just in the past 5 years or so -- I think it's probably fair to say that the woke crowd would not oppose such a thing today. In my experience woke folks are very pessimistic about any narrative of progress that would make the US seem better than other countries -- they would quite literally want to defend the idea that the US is no better than China on the whole. Not sure any way to validate that sentiment objectively, so that's just my gut feeling. The plight of the Uiygurs is definitely a progressive talking point, but for better or for worse, it has very much taken a back seat to issues of racism here at home. I can't recall the last time I saw it mentioned in the nytimes for example -- whereas you will see something about some woke cause (racism, sexism, trans rights, homophobia, etc.) every single day. I think I'm in agreement on your third point though.
  - thinkcontext 6y ago
    > I think it's probably fair to say that the woke crowd would not oppose such a thing today Why would you think that? To use one example, Bernie Sanders opposed it then and he would still oppose it today for basically the same reasons. Human Rights Watch et al wrote reports and did investigations about Tibet then and they do reports and investigations about Uighurs now. > In my experience woke folks are very pessimistic about any narrative of progress that would make the US seem better than other countries -- they would quite literally want to defend the idea that the US is no better than China on the whole This is a Fox News caricature of wokeness. To be sure, such people exist and Fox et al seeks them out and amplifies them but mainstream progressives have no problem recognizing that there are important differences. > I can't recall the last time I saw it mentioned in the nytimes for example What are you talking about, there are dozens of stories covering it over the last year https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/uighurs https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/uighurs
Leary 6y ago
Peter Thiel may be libertarian, but Palatir is certainly totalitarian.
cpascal 6y ago
This is unrelated to the actual content of Thiel's remarks, and perhaps I'm just oblivious/ignorant. Why would anyone want to associate themselves with anything to do with Nixon? It's surprising prominent figures would want any association to Nixon and his disgraced legacy. I think overall its peculiar how much influence and esteem Nixon managed to retain after his resignation.
Traster 6y ago
It really is interesting to see the conversation here framed so narrowly within an understanding of China as some comical all powerful, omniscient entity coming to steal your children. Practically no consideration of the structural weakness of China. Everything is framed in a "they're coming to get us" way and nothing is framed in a "We should probably adhere to the values that we think are valuable and they don't share". It just reminds me of the kind of distusting behaviour that happened post 9/11 where the concepts being defended were destroyed by those who claimed to be concerned about defending them. It's also funny to me that Thiel talks about how big science can't exist, as if CERN, NASA and many universities just disappeared off the face of the earth. It's always interesting how glaring claims like that go unchallenged in conversations like this. Or how he just casually suggests the logical thing to do is bomb North Korea and everyone just sort of sits there doing an uneasy smiling - as if he isn't suggesting millions of deaths on the North Korean side, hundreds of thousands of deaths on the South Korean side, and a humanitarian crisis that would primarily have to be handled by China.
- remarkEon 6y ago
  >It really is interesting to see the conversation here framed so narrowly within an understanding of China as some comical all powerful, omniscient entity coming to steal your children. I'm not sure we read the same transcript? Part of the second quarter of the seminar is spent talking about how China is so obsessed with their surveillance state because they, perhaps, perceive their situation as weak or fragile. This makes a lot of sense to me, and checks out with how other authoritarian states have behaved in the past. It's not even that profound of an observation if you couch it in the context of the larger history of 20th century totalitarian regimes. There's a burgeoning nervousness that exists on both sides, the West (broadly defined) and China, about the access to high tech semiconductors. All of that represents a discussion of weakness or single points of failure for both parties here. Since Thiel and Pompeo are such polarizing characters, to say the least, perhaps it's helpful to read things like this and imagine different names there in the transcript. A lot of this is just old fashioned Realpolitik, which I get it it's kind of frowned upon today for reasons that don't really make much sense to me, but it's just another IR lens to use to look at what is a return to Great Power Conflict.

58 points by kervokian 6y ago

roschdal 6y ago

Video, please

creddit 6y ago
https://vimeo.com/533792077/e3aabe6c8f https://vimeo.com/533792077/e3aabe6c8f

stuaxo 6y ago

Let me guess, Peter Theil thinks he wasn't all bad ?

kgantchev 6y ago
Turns out that it's not about Nixon...
- marricks 6y ago
  Thiel may want to rethink the title then.
  - kgantchev 6y ago
    Which title?
  - Thrymr 6y ago
    It's a named seminar sponsored by the Nixon Foundation: https://nixonseminar.com/about/ https://nixonseminar.com/about/
- kervokian 6y ago
  This is why it's called The Nixon Seminar: "The Nixon Seminar on Conservative Realism and National Security is monthly gathering of senior statesmen and rising specialists in various aspects of great power competition and American national security, to discuss issues of current and continuing importance to the nation’s interests abroad co-chaired by former Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and former National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien. Dr. Henry Kissinger serves as Honorary Chair." https://nixonseminar.com/about/ https://nixonseminar.com/about/
creddit 6y ago
Pretty much entirely unaddressed so all in all a pretty bad attempt at a pithy political statement.

hyko 6y ago

Should this title not be “BIG TECH AND CHINA: WHAT DO WE NEED FROM SILICON VALLEY? starring Peter Thiel”

woodruffw 6y ago

I've done two quick passes over this transcript, and a theme stands out to me: Thiel and company repeatedly claim that there is no meaningful difference between the Chinese military and individual Chinese nationals who work for American companies, because China is essentially a fusion state where the government dictates the flow of capital. In this account, America is supposed to be distinct: there is a clear division between capital and state, and the US government (overwhelmingly) does not interfere with capital interests. I don't think this is particularly accurate (in either direction), but that's the claim that I see staked out. But then there's a turn-on-a-dime: Silicon Valley should be held to account by the US government, and should be made by state authority to advance specific domestic and foreign policies. Thiel and company are explicit about the policies they'd like to see the state advance by strongarming private capital: strategic investment in Taiwanese technological interests, not banning hateful content, &c. So my question: what gives? The latter is very explicitly a "fusion" (i.e., Chinese) approach to state and capital; isn't that exactly what the Thiel and paleoconservative types are claiming to be against? Is there some inner logic to this that I'm not perceiving, or is this all just Kissinger-style realpolitik?

jerf 6y ago
Dunno if this is "new" per se or if I've just seen enough over the years to finally identify it, but a lot of the "correctness" of a political opinion today depends not so much on the content, but how it is phrased and whether or not it is in a "proper" environment. If you wrap a heavy interventionalist policy in the guise of "we have to defend ourselves against the Chinese doing it!", you might get one group sagely nodding about how it may be a bit sad but is clearly necessary while another group is angrily denouncing the racism or whatever. Turn around and propose the exact same policy (for the sake of argument) in terms of controlling domestic extremism and "nudging" the masses properly, and the people previously angry will be nodding sagely while the other group is now angry. From my viewpoint, there are very few people left proposing anything like freedom. It's all a fight now over who gets to use the government to impose their views on the US and its individual citizens, not whether views should be imposed by the government. Within my lifetime, this was not the case.
- 6y ago

davedx 6y ago

Thiel is a textbook pseudo-intellectual. Thinks he’s super smart because he made a ton of money as an entrepreneur and believes it makes him some kind of statesman. While I think there are some successful entrepreneurs out there that do have some of these qualities (maybe Gates?), Thiel sure isn’t one. As you point out, his intellectual bankruptcy is in plain sight

justapassenger 6y ago
I don’t think it’s exclusive to entrepreneurs. A lot of people who happen to be successful, by their standards, assume it’s thanks to their superiority. You can see that clearly in software engineering. There’s tons of people who consider themselves super smart and experts on world problems, just because someone is paying them $200k per year to move around buttons in css.
- Analemma_ 6y ago
  "As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable. But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence." -- idlewords, emphasis mine
  - clairity 6y ago
    yah, logic is an idealization--a linearization in a decidedly non-linear and stochastic universe--that works in a constructed context but not beyond it. it's how newtonian mechanics is so very useful at our scale but cannot fully explain ourselves, much less the world or the universe. understanding thiel requires understanding that he decidedly comes at issues with self-interest and ego first (and a bit paranoia) rather than priciples, despite the contrary image he tries to project.

ceilingcorner 6y ago

I am still trying to grasp how Thiel intellectually went from ultra libertarian to American statist cofounder of Palantir. What happened? He realized the threat of China and changed his mind? He’s hedging his bets? He sees a strong American state as fundamentally necessary for libertarian values? No snarky replies please. I am genuinely curious.

davedx 6y ago
He doesn’t have a coherent or consistent politics. He’s just not that smart. Genuinely not being snarky - guy’s an effective entrepreneur but no kind of great political thinker
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  This is a snarky reply and specifically not what I asked for. I have watched quite a few videos with Thiel. He has degrees in law and philosophy and is quite financially successful. Thomas Jefferson he is not, but I don’t think he is “just not that smart.”
bitdizzy 6y ago
What people say are their values and the values revealed by their actions can be different. Moreover one can express certain values in pursuit of goals that are incompatible with those values. This is styled hypocrisy and the bourgeoisie such as Thiel are very used to this.
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
I have seen a recent interview (last few years) with him where he still refers to himself as a libertarian, but I agree that in practice he does not seem that way. He is heavily influenced by Leo Strauss[0] however, so he may be taking an "esoteric" view of what libertarianism means. [0]: Strauss was a political philosopher who advocated reading the "esoteric" meaning in works of literature. I.e. he thought that thinkers did not write what the actually thought but wrote in a veiled way so that their true meaning was apparent by those in the know, but not to casual readers.
6y ago

ttam 6y ago

video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJcKWtiFzIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJcKWtiFzIY

AbrahamParangi 6y ago

A behavior I see here and elsewhere in recent years is this idea that everyone I disagree with is an idiot. Kind of like the intellectual equivalent of total war, it seems deeply unpopular to believe that people you disagree with have merit.

g8oz 6y ago

It's fascinating to watch the hawks fashion their strategy of maximum confrontation with China. Watching them sell it will also be interesting. Will they use some of the tactics they used to build the momentum for the invasion of Iraq? How will they differentiate the messaging for different constituencies? I'll be watching, popcorn in hand.

thinkcontext 6y ago

While I find just about everyone participating in this event contemptible (including Nixon) there are reasonable points made about the challenge that China presents. A few of the potshots that are taken at "the woke crowd" bear commenting on since there is some extreme revisionism going on. - The progressive left opposed China's admission to the WTO citing human rights (Tibet in particular) and the effect on US workers - The progressive left yelled and screamed about human rights for Uiygurs and supply chains in general for years. The Trump administration ignored it for most of his term, not mentioning it until the pandemic and scapegoating China for "Kung Flu". - The progressive left would embrace a carbon border price in a heartbeat. Pompeo's former boss of course said the opposite, calling climate change a Chinese hoax. Biden would do well to propose a border tax.

dnissley 6y ago
It's been a while since China's admission to the WTO, and things have changed rapidly just in the past 5 years or so -- I think it's probably fair to say that the woke crowd would not oppose such a thing today. In my experience woke folks are very pessimistic about any narrative of progress that would make the US seem better than other countries -- they would quite literally want to defend the idea that the US is no better than China on the whole. Not sure any way to validate that sentiment objectively, so that's just my gut feeling. The plight of the Uiygurs is definitely a progressive talking point, but for better or for worse, it has very much taken a back seat to issues of racism here at home. I can't recall the last time I saw it mentioned in the nytimes for example -- whereas you will see something about some woke cause (racism, sexism, trans rights, homophobia, etc.) every single day. I think I'm in agreement on your third point though.
- thinkcontext 6y ago
  > I think it's probably fair to say that the woke crowd would not oppose such a thing today Why would you think that? To use one example, Bernie Sanders opposed it then and he would still oppose it today for basically the same reasons. Human Rights Watch et al wrote reports and did investigations about Tibet then and they do reports and investigations about Uighurs now. > In my experience woke folks are very pessimistic about any narrative of progress that would make the US seem better than other countries -- they would quite literally want to defend the idea that the US is no better than China on the whole This is a Fox News caricature of wokeness. To be sure, such people exist and Fox et al seeks them out and amplifies them but mainstream progressives have no problem recognizing that there are important differences. > I can't recall the last time I saw it mentioned in the nytimes for example What are you talking about, there are dozens of stories covering it over the last year https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/uighurs https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/uighurs

Leary 6y ago

Peter Thiel may be libertarian, but Palatir is certainly totalitarian.

cpascal 6y ago

This is unrelated to the actual content of Thiel's remarks, and perhaps I'm just oblivious/ignorant. Why would anyone want to associate themselves with anything to do with Nixon? It's surprising prominent figures would want any association to Nixon and his disgraced legacy. I think overall its peculiar how much influence and esteem Nixon managed to retain after his resignation.

Traster 6y ago

It really is interesting to see the conversation here framed so narrowly within an understanding of China as some comical all powerful, omniscient entity coming to steal your children. Practically no consideration of the structural weakness of China. Everything is framed in a "they're coming to get us" way and nothing is framed in a "We should probably adhere to the values that we think are valuable and they don't share". It just reminds me of the kind of distusting behaviour that happened post 9/11 where the concepts being defended were destroyed by those who claimed to be concerned about defending them. It's also funny to me that Thiel talks about how big science can't exist, as if CERN, NASA and many universities just disappeared off the face of the earth. It's always interesting how glaring claims like that go unchallenged in conversations like this. Or how he just casually suggests the logical thing to do is bomb North Korea and everyone just sort of sits there doing an uneasy smiling - as if he isn't suggesting millions of deaths on the North Korean side, hundreds of thousands of deaths on the South Korean side, and a humanitarian crisis that would primarily have to be handled by China.

remarkEon 6y ago
>It really is interesting to see the conversation here framed so narrowly within an understanding of China as some comical all powerful, omniscient entity coming to steal your children. I'm not sure we read the same transcript? Part of the second quarter of the seminar is spent talking about how China is so obsessed with their surveillance state because they, perhaps, perceive their situation as weak or fragile. This makes a lot of sense to me, and checks out with how other authoritarian states have behaved in the past. It's not even that profound of an observation if you couch it in the context of the larger history of 20th century totalitarian regimes. There's a burgeoning nervousness that exists on both sides, the West (broadly defined) and China, about the access to high tech semiconductors. All of that represents a discussion of weakness or single points of failure for both parties here. Since Thiel and Pompeo are such polarizing characters, to say the least, perhaps it's helpful to read things like this and imagine different names there in the transcript. A lot of this is just old fashioned Realpolitik, which I get it it's kind of frowned upon today for reasons that don't really make much sense to me, but it's just another IR lens to use to look at what is a return to Great Power Conflict.