For all his obsession with innovation, Peter Thiel has some stone-age views – The Guardian
The billionaire is bankrolling a pro-drugs model of the Olympics, however does he care about the entire women-having-rights factor? Nah
Have you ever ever dreamed up a very deranged enterprise concept however lacked the money to execute it? Peter Thiel, the secretive tech billionaire who co-founded Paypal, doesn’t have that drawback. He, together with a gaggle of different enterprise capitalists, is at present deploying a part of his huge fortune to assist bankroll a pro-drugs version of the Olympics referred to as the Enhanced Games. It’s precisely what it feels like: a sporting competitors wherein individuals are inspired to take as many performance-enhancing substances as they’ll get their steroid-enlarged fingers on. All within the title of science and innovation, naturally.
Actually? It sounds superb. I might 100% watch. It’s an actual disgrace Thiel, who at present runs spy tech firm Palantir, doesn’t spend all his sources on actuality TV concepts masquerading as science as an alternative of his many different dystopian tasks. Thiel, you see, isn’t only a man who actually likes the thought of bionic boxing: he’s a libertarian and ideologue who has an exerted an outsized and pernicious affect on American politics and tradition. Max Chafkin, who has written a biography of Thiel, has mentioned he thinks the billionaire is “secretly an important particular person in Silicon Valley. He’s this behind the scenes participant, who’s behind so most of the actually essential issues which have occurred over the past twenty years.” I wouldn’t disagree.
For all his obsession with innovation, Thiel has some stone-age views on the world. He doesn’t appear utterly bought on the entire women-having-rights factor, for instance. In 2009, for instance, he published an essay lamenting that ladies being given the correct to vote had dealt a blow to libertarianism. His precise phrases: “Since 1920, the huge improve in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to girls – two constituencies which are notoriously powerful for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Thiel additionally isn’t a fan of range initiatives, which he has referred to as “very evil and very silly”. This man, let me remind you, is a key participant in expertise and one of many first exterior buyers in Fb. With individuals like him on the helm, is it any surprise social media has such a large misogyny and racism drawback?
Thiel, like each obscenely wealthy particular person in America, has used a big chunk of his cash to attempt to influence politics. He threw his weight behind Donald Trump in 2016 and backed quite a few anti-abortion candidates. Curiously, nonetheless, it seems to be just like the billionaire is taking a step again from political funding on this election cycle. One motive for this appears to be the truth that he realizes (shock horror!) that Trump was dangerous and incompetent. Thiel, who’s homosexual, has additionally mentioned his his husband doesn’t need him to provide the political candidates he formerly backed any more money. I’m wondering why that’s? Perhaps, simply possibly, it’s as a result of these candidates spend half their time yelling homophobic conspiracy theories about LGBT people being groomers.
In fact, the truth that Thiel is stepping again from direct political donations doesn’t imply he’s not going to meddle in politics any extra. It doesn’t imply he’s any much less terrible or harmful than he’s all the time been. Nonetheless, we will grasp at straws can’t we? I, for one, am looking for any motive to be optimistic about the way forward for our present hell world. And so I’m selecting to see Thiel’s retreat from the entrance line of politics and his embrace of drug-powered sports activities as a optimistic. Please, Mr Thiel, I implore you: spend much more of your time on steroid-fueled Olympics and fewer time on stripping away our civil rights.
The wide-ranging invoice – proposed by Baptist pastor turned state senator Dusty Deevers – makes viewing “obscene supplies” a felony, and defines “obscene” extraordinarily broadly. Nevertheless, it does have some very particular exceptions. As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown explained: “[The bill] additionally incorporates this bizarre clause the place it says, this isn’t meant to go after married {couples} who’re speaking with one another. So it has this bizarre carve-out in the event you’re sexting whereas married.”
It’s not clear if this invoice will go. What could be very clear is that Republicans are utterly obsessive about porn.
That’s based on a Financial Times analysis of Gallup data that’s gone viral. “Within the US, Gallup knowledge reveals that after a long time the place the sexes have been every unfold roughly equally throughout liberal and conservative world views, girls aged 18 to 30 at the moment are 30 proportion factors extra liberal than their male contemporaries,” the FT notes.
It’s an identical story all over the world–and in South Korea and China the distinction is much more dramatic. The #MeToo motion helped spur this gender divide. And it appears very doubtless that influential “manosphere” influencers like Andrew Tate are additionally a part.
Girls account for as many as 80% of all circumstances of autoimmune ailments. No person is aware of why that is but a new study means that it’s on account of a molecule referred to as Xist (which feels like a reputation Elon Musk would give his child) that’s made solely in feminine cells.
Signal as much as The Week in Patriarchy
Get Arwa Mahdawi’s weekly recap of an important tales on feminism and sexism and people combating for equality
after publication promotion
Carroll has mentioned she plans to spend the cash on something the former president “hates”. Nevertheless she in all probability received’t get the cash for some time, if in any respect: Trump has mentioned he’ll enchantment the choice and this may take a while. So whereas it’s a victory for Carroll, the actual winners, as standard, are the lawyers.
Tech govt Nicole Shanahan thinks they may – and he or she is spending $100mn to seek out out. The Financial Times has a fascinating long read on Shanahan’s pioneering funding in girls’s reproductive longevity.
“If she is profitable, this new information might have the form of profound penalties that got here with the arrival of the contraceptive capsule,” the FT notes. “And the ovaries, it seems, may supply clues to extending the lifespan of all people.”
“Though every state with an abortion ban has some form of exception that ought to theoretically permit for abortions in medical emergencies, docs and sufferers throughout the nation have mentioned that the bans are worded in such a manner as to be unworkable in actuality,” the Guardian studies. Now girls who’ve been denied medically necessary abortions are suing.
Don’t find out about you, however I’m fairly certain that “Missing monkey trapped by yorkshire pudding in Scotland” is the perfect headline I’ve learn this week.
