Trying to shame someone who has different political beliefs via social pressure seems like bullying to me. One of the big reasons why so many people are voting for Trump is because people like you (and liberals in general) like to shame people for beliefs by calling them racists, sexists, homophobes and all that.
If someone votes for Trump because because they oppose the shaming of racists, sexists, and homophobes, they deserve the shame they feel. They have the right to express their noxious beliefs, but no norm of justice or civics or our Constitutional system protects their feels from my right to warn others of their noxiousness.
>because they oppose the shaming of racists, sexists, and homophobes,
They oppose unjust shaming. If someone believes in stronger borders and they get called a racist for that it's an unreasonable form of shame that happens way too often.
Trying to make expressing those belief dangerous to the point of losing one's job, income and business is. Trying to make not participating in implementing the above as dangerous as expressing those opinions, through guilt by association, is. If you don't like somebody's speech, speak against them, not try to ruin their life and lives of those that don't run to help you to do that.
That's exactly what's being done here. And, I'll remind you again:
* Thiel is not an employee of Altman or Graham's
* Graham himself publicly claims that a strength of startups is that one can choose business partners without regard for moral norms, unlike employees.
These are tiny details, which are immaterial for the large point - that supporting unpopular point should be ruinous, and mere association with somebody doing this must be a blemish one has to work to remove, or else.
Thiel is billionaire and he probably has way over fuck you money. He can do anything he wants. Most of us don't have fuck you money, and that's exactly the point - creating the climate in the industry where not being politically conformant, expressing or supporting unpopular point of view, doing something not conforming to the majority opinion or fashionable opinion - means being ostracized, being denied job prospects, being fired, being uninvited from conferences, being target of personal destruction campaigns, etc. Being a pariah.
Thiel is not the point, he'll be more fine than 99.999% of people here in any case. Creating the intolerant lynch mob culture is the point. They may be building this machine to use it against Thiel or Eich or some other large target, but once it's working, the potential target would be everybody. Such things are never put in storage after the first use, they are only used more and more. And what I am seeing that not only this machine is being created and successfully tested, people are enthusiastically cheering it because it's being used against people they dislike. That's always how it starts - but it never stops there.
Honest question: what makes me a large target? I'm not in the "one percent". I have to work to eat. Not whining about it, just saying: I do not have f.u. money.
I agree with you on "the potential target would be everybody."
Lynch mobs were a real thing. They're aren't a literary device. Mobs of white people really did grab black men and boys, torture them, and then hang them to death from trees. People are alive today who witnessed this happening.
