@axeln @meganL @mattmay #Thiel knows what he's doing alright, but on some level he doesn't understand what he's doing: he named his company Palantir after #Palantír, the crystal ball in the Lord of the Rings books. In the books the Palantírs were accurate in foretelling the future but unreliable for showing guides to action.
B
bongolian@mstdn.social
@bongolian@mstdn.social
Posts
-
If you told me in 1990 that a coalition of Opus Dei and Italian fascists were going to platform a gay billionaire Republican to challenge the pope on end-times doctrine, I would conclude that one if not both of us was having a stroke -
If you told me in 1990 that a coalition of Opus Dei and Italian fascists were going to platform a gay billionaire Republican to challenge the pope on end-times doctrine, I would conclude that one if not both of us was having a stroke@axeln @mattmay Regarding billionaires such as Thiel, historian Timothy Snyder had a very interesting essay in January of this year about a lecture to schoolchildren that J. R. R. Tolkien gave in 1938, in which Tolkien compared the very wealthy to dragons. The lecture was in part an explanation of Tolkien's thought process behind his 1937 book, The Hobbit.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/tolkiens-dragons-and-ours -
If you told me in 1990 that a coalition of Opus Dei and Italian fascists were going to platform a gay billionaire Republican to challenge the pope on end-times doctrine, I would conclude that one if not both of us was having a stroke@mattmay Thiel had a warm-up lecture series in San Francisco on this topic last year, hoping to attract supportive techbros. The lectures were characterized by one critic as "meandering musings". He though Greta Thunberg or Eliezer Yudkowsky might be the antichrist (!), yet the characteristics for the antichrist that he gave sounded more like himself: "They can do it if they're young – or – get rich young, since 'money has this remarkable velocity.'"
#thiel #antichrist
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist -
We knew this was coming, but now the clock is running.@briankrebs In summary, if this change goes into effect, when leaving the US, don't plan on coming back.