I brought this up right when it came out: https://awful.systems/post/5244605/8335074
(Not demanding credit on keeping better up to date on hate-reading the EA forums, just sharing the previous discussion)
Highlights from the previous discussion… I had thought Thiel was entirely making up his own wacky theology (because it was a distinctly different flavor of insanity from the typical right-wing Fundamentalist/Evangelical), but actually there is a “theologian” (I use that term loosely) who developed, René Girard, who developed the theology he is describing.
Effective altruism has more than its share of critics. But Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, is unusual in that, when he describes us as the “Antichrist,” he does not mean this as a generic slur but rather as a specific claim that we oppose Jesus Christ in the Second Coming.
O-kay…
My attempted secular version of his argument:
But … why?
With his all-consuming fear of death, Thiel is about as far from being a Christian as one can get. All his antichrist talk is a nakedly transparent attempt to gas up the rubes so they remain on the side of the billionaires even after Trump gives up the ghost. He doesn’t believe a single thing he’s saying.
Having spent too much time listening to his shit, i don’t think it’s purely propagandistic, what he describes is too esoteric to work as effective propaganda, I think some of it is Nazi-being-drawn-to-the-occult type of shit.
Yeah I used to think he was a brilliant manipulator but I actually listened to some of his words and yeah he’s just bonkers and has enough money that it doesn’t matter that he’s bonkers.
@TinyTimmyTokyo All-consuming fear of death is not hardly antithetical to Christianity, merely to its self-presentation. For a great many Christians the whole point of Christianity is escaping death. Fred Clark, himself a Christian, points this out as a major theme in his highly-critical review of the Left Behind books. He’s hardly the only one to notice it. https://youtu.be/tLd7BuiC5co?t=162
I get that, but most Christians don’t make plans to freeze their bodies after they die.
Plus he’s gay so if he dies hell awaits, or so the evangelical worldview tends to go.
Love the Jethro Tull reference! “Not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday” - perfection.
Try not to steelman challenge: level EA (impossible)
Depends what you mean by “steelman”. If you take their definition at it’s word, then they fail to try all the time, just look at any of their attempts at understanding leftist writing or thought. Of course, it often actually means “entirely rebuild the opposing argument into something different” (because they don’t have a basic humanities education or don’t want to actually properly read leftist thought) and they can’t resist doing that!
Steelmanning is great. We can say whatever we want against them, and when they then get mad we can just go ‘well you didn’t properly steelman my argument’, and have them spin around in circles while we do something important, like chores in the house.
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I know that on the American right, every accusation is a confession, but I never thought I would read a scheming cartoon villain accusing his enemies of being the Antichrist! He is even queer-coded, would do great on TV in the 1990s.
When reading the title, I thought it was Peter Thiel vs. Electronic Arts, but wouldn’t be surprised if the neoreactionary billionaires wanted to invest even more into entertainment media, to loosen up the masses for an undemocratic world with 24/7 ever present surveillance.
Not an EA franchise, but in retrospect it was probably a bad sign that Assassin’s Creed started going deep on “maybe the Templar shadow government that rules everyone in secret is actually not that bad?” or “no, actually some of the ancient aliens who enslaved all humanity were good and it was just the one cartoon villain that was bad.”
Like, I think there’s some thematic depth to looking at how in order to combat the evil shadow cult government the Assassins “had to” become a “good” shadow cult government, but as the man once said you do not, in fact, have to give it to them.
