This article is fun<p>>Great innovators, great thinkers, great inventors — they are almost always weirdos<p>Yeah, oh boy, racism! Those crazy thinkers, up to their own sillyness!<p>Now onto a real point the article tries to make:<p>> And the thing that is unmistakable about the rise of the National Front — now the most popular party in France — is that what is now referred to in the press as "the demonization strategy" has not only failed but contributed to the National Front's rise.<p>This is categorically and provably false. When the National Front actually made it to the second round of elections, their score went from 17% of votes to.. 18% of votes. of the 60-odd percent of people who had to change their vote between two rounds, only 1% decided to go full-fascist. This was entirely due to a massive media campaign pointing this out. The demonization campaign was a massive success!<p>The only reason the National Front is ahead today is because of a massive, 10 year "de-demonization" process, that went up to full exclusion of the former parter leader.<p>You see the same trope with Trump. "Oh, pointing out he's awful does nothing!".<p>But polls show that going over Trump's scandals over and over actually cause his numbers to fall! Demonization campaigns have worked for a long time, and won't stop working for a while.
I wrote in defence on Sam Altman and YC regarding this topic.<p><a href="https://medium.com/@suar4sure/please-let-ycombinator-sam-altman-and-paul-graham-be-b1b78c5c12c0#.lz9vsqmac" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@suar4sure/please-let-ycombinator-sam-alt...</a>
I guess it needs to be said a billion times more: Thiel isn't just any Trump supporter, he's a powerful billionaire who has donated millions as a Trump surrogate. Thiel deserves all the criticism he is getting precisely because there a huge asymmetry at play here, one that he is taking advantage of to campaign for a con man, racist, chauvinistic sexual predator.<p>I fear this is just the beginning of Thiel's radicalization, that we can expect several decades of his alt/far right advocacy and I find the harm he can cause to be very troubling and disheartening.