But why is he making the donation now? That logic would have made a lot more sense when Trump's odds looked a lot better. You have to multiply the upside by its (low) probability. I also think the reputational cost is more severe than you let on: look at what happened to Brendan Eich, and his "crime" was a lot less than supporting Trump.
I didn't know about Brendan Eich. That makes me angry. He made a personal decision to donate a small amount to Prop 8, and extreme political activists completely annihilated him and forced him out of his job.
"Critics of Eich within Mozilla tweeted to gay activists that he had donated $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California until 2013, when it was declared unconstitutional and marriages were allowed to resume. Eich stood by his decision to fund the campaign, but wrote on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Gay activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with OkCupid declaring they would block access to the Firefox browser unless he stepped down."
I was working at Mozilla when this was going on. I likely would've quit if Eich had remained.
I've written at length about Proposition 8 and the fact that it was not simply a matter of opinion or personal belief. It was, shorn of all the attempts to make it sound non-controversial, about taking a basic premise of a free society -- equality of all people under the law -- and putting it up for popular vote. Proposition 8 was literally a ballot measure to say "these people shouldn't be equal to everyone else". I am OK with applying social pressure to people who attempt that sort of thing, to make them feel as alienated from the core principles of society as they actually are.
> I was working at Mozilla when this was going on. I likely would've quit if Eich had remained
I don't know you or what you did at Mozilla: if it were up to me, I would rather had you quit than Eich (no offense). Frankly, Mozilla has lost focus and I think it would have done much better under Eich.
Edit: more thoughts on the politics. Eich's opinion was far from controversial- half of Americans held the same belief. I would guess half of Mozilla users in the US also had the same opinion: were those people also disposable?
Supporting prop 8 (to me as a lefty) is more benign than supporting Trump; yet I don't see any calls to boycott or quit companies with executives that support Trump.
Finally, it was a dangerous precedent for left wing politics to adopt, what if the right wing had adopted it and gotten someone fired for affronting beliefs held as strongly as yours?
Just to clarify, Eich did not get fired - he got pressured into resigning. Note that people in fact have been fired (in some cases, allegedly - I'm too lazy to verify all the stories I just googled) for being gay, supporting Occupy, supporting Obama, or more trivial reasons like bikini photos on facebook or because the employer found their short stories offensive.
As I've said in other comments, I think the line is when you decide to move from "I believe this" to "the law should enforce my beliefs on everyone".
There have been plenty of people calling to pressure people who support Trump; pg is one of them, and has been getting lit up on Twitter recently for continuing to work with Thiel.
Finally, you seem to think this is something unique to "left wing politics". Which is perhaps true: left-wing movements tend to resort to social pressure, boycotts and similar methods. Right-wing movements tend to attempt to outlaw or in some cases just literally exterminate the people who disagree with them. Which sort of world would you rather live in: the world where people who disagree with you simply refuse to associate with you, or the world where people who disagree with you seek to have your existence made illegal?
(and for the record, I no longer work for Mozilla, but that's unrelated)
>left-wing movements tend to resort to social pressure, boycotts and similar methods. Right-wing movements tend to attempt to outlaw or in some cases just literally exterminate the people who disagree with them.
Do you have any evidence that those politically aligned to the right are more accepting of, say, murder than those on the left? Because I don't believe it.
> I didn't know about Brendan Eich. That makes me angry.
It makes me angry too, but also raises (for me) some interesting political questions around what level of disagreement is "too far." I would never fire someone for being a Republican and personally/privately opposing gay marriage. But I would also immediately fire someone if they were a Nazi. So where is the line if what's an acceptable level of tolerance (and where does Trump fall on it)?
I'll just repost an old comment, advocating that the limit is: is it speech and ideas? Then do not fire.
"I fundamentally disagree with you about this very important issue, and we should still find a way to cooperate" is a crucial idea, hard won and, as we are seeing, easily lost. It underpins multi-religious societies, working democracies, and in general, any group of people that need to do something. Unfortunately, right now we have groups of people that say the polar oposite: "It is good and moral to shun people who disagree with X".
I totally agree with marriage equality. But I think it can be (and mostly was) won on dialogue, not shunning. And I will always be against the shunners (though I hope not to shun them :P).
btw, all I just said applies just as well to klanspeople/nazis: Are they harming the employees? No? Are they aligned with the mission? Them keep them. And tell them they are stupid over a beer. Talk the shit out, and fight their stupid ideas in the right places. Do not allow political disagreement, even of the most grievous kind, to cut oportunities for dialogue and cooperation.
What if you have an employee who consistently comes in and talks about how he'd like to kill all the non-white people? What if he talks about how many guns he has? I think this would make the office an unworkable environment for most of my other employees (particularly any PoC) and I would be very justified in firing them.
So consider Proposition 8. This was a ballot measure whose sole purpose was to enshrine in law the idea that "this group of people over here aren't legally equal to everyone else".
Privately believing someone has done something wrong, or belongs to a bad group, is one thing. Trying to enshrine that belief in law and disenfranchise the targeted person or group is quite another thing, and if you honestly are unable to see the difference between the two I'm unsure how to assist you.
Look at the timeline. Eich donated after Prop 22 was overturned (Prop 22 restricted marriage to same-sex couples). He wasn't trying to keep the status quo, he was trying to change the California constitution to outlaw something that the court had previously deemed legal. The end result of that difference is subtle, yes, but I find the spirit of the difference significant. Which is to say...much worse.
I wrote something too long about your confused post (for example, you must have meant "opposite-sex", not "same-sex"), then set it aside. I'll just note that of course I supported Prop 8 after the California Supreme Court overturned Prop 22 in its May, 2008 "In re Marriage Cases" ruling. Prop 8 was not even on the ballot until June, 2008!
Your argument that my support was pernicious is based on bogus chronology.
As for "status quo", that was exactly the issue, or one of two big issues. Judges do not make law, they are not our dictators, not even in extremis. It's up to the people and the legislature to correct course, based on judicial review and judicial nullification at the limit, but with new law coming from the legislature and the ballot initiative process (in California, anyway).
A lot of us in California supported Mark Leno's work over more than a decade prior to 2008 to enact CA Domestic Partner law, precisely to address injustices, even as Leno, et al. did not attempt to redefine marriage. That we saw judicial overreach and moved against it does not make us opponents of the status quo.
If you think courts should rule us, just wait long enough. The "next Trump" may give you the judges you deserve. I sincerely commend rule of law and judicial restraint to your attention, even if you don't agree with me on anything else.
Thank you - I think that is the thing that pro-Eich people consistently ignore. The Prop 8 campaign to retroactively strip people of human rights once those rights were re-affirmed by the state Supreme Court was an act of pure malice and spite. I don't know what Eich's personal reasons for donating were, but it speaks very poorly of his character that he did.
Retroactive or ex-post-facto law is unconstitutional. I am a big fan of this principle. It protects all of us.
> it speaks very poorly
Speaking ill of me based on false information does not reflect well on you. Let's back off and perhaps we'll meet on better terms another day. (FYI, I do not support Trump.)
As I walked home from work yesterday I was listening to a podcast about economics which mentioned that the Trump brand has been permanently devalued by his campaign -- people no longer want to stay in a Trump hotel, for example. And people have been leading efforts to drive potential students away from his "Trump University", and potential customers away from his other businesses.
It's possible you haven't seen such efforts, but that is not identical with "no efforts are occurring".
I've definitely heard about direct economic effects for Trump (though I think he'll end up gaining a lot more economically from the massive diehard fanbase he has now built) but why hasn't there been more backlash against Thiel? In my book his cause is a whole lot worse than Eich's.
Would you feel comfortable working at Peter Thiel's company?
Non-flat taxation are an attempt to make the impact of the law be equal on everyone.
Affirmative action is an attempt to alleviate the impact of prior laws and practices which made people unequal.
I am generally fine with trying to redress previously-enforced inequalities, and suspicious of anyone who isn't (protip: Google "libertarianism, starting right now" for an explanation of why this is important that you're more likely to agree with if a "LOL look how hard I rekt that dude by shoving affirmative action in his face" type sound-bite is the first thing you reach for in this kind of discussion)
Maybe it's just practicality: there's not much business sense in having leaders that publicly work against some of the most deeply meaningful interests of a significant portion of their employees.
Yes. Please take your Holocaust apologia elsewhere.
Killing millions of people for no other reason than that you don't like their ethnicity is pretty much the baseline of immorality. Heck, killing millions of people for more legitimate reasons (being Nazis) also would be pretty abhorrent.
Also, for the record, "we" are not generally okay with senseless wars. There's a reason that murdering innocent civilians is considered a war crime.
I wonder what kind of outrage will be exhibited, if any, in this case and which companies that Peter Thiel has stakes in would be boycotted en masse. My guess is nothing.
I'm not in favor of Brendan Eich's personal choice, but I feel the reaction was far too strong in that case. Here we have something more than a thousand times larger that supports many oppressive things.
It's not just multiplying the upside by the probability. The upside depends upon how many people are in the crowd with you. Right now, everybody else is deserting Trump - and so if Thiel doubles-down on his bet, Trump and his loyalists will remember that all the moreso, and so if Trump wins Thiel stands out even more from everyone that deserted Trump but then came crawling back when times looked good.
Eich and Trump are in very different roles. Eich was CEO of a non-profit: as a non-profit, they depend crucially on his ability to fundraise, and so pissing off big Mozilla donors makes it impossible to do his job. Thiel is an investor of his own capital: pissing off other people is generally neutral to him, as he doesn't depend on anyone else for anything, and being able to piss people off allows him to take risks that are underpriced because other people are too afraid of pissing others off.
> It's not just multiplying the upside by the probability. The upside depends upon how many people are in the crowd with you.
Sure, it's true that his upside is greater thanks to Thiel's unitary status. But I don't think that effect is any greater now: Trump enjoyed 0 SV support a month ago, so the investment would have had just as much impact then as now, but the probability is much lower now.
> Eich and Trump are in very different roles.
Absolutely, Thiel and Eich have very different roles. But to think public image is unimportant to Thiel is also naive: I could easily see this having a negative impact on his deal flow, either because founders are personally offended or because they'e afraid of tainting their reputation. There's a reason that VCs have PR and at least pay lip service to things like Women in Tech.
