CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
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Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: Peter Thiel is looking for paradise in New Zealand  Sat Feb 24, 2018 2:17 am | |
| Peter Thiel is looking for paradise in New Zealand. History is against him
The Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump backer Thiel is not the first white man to want to abandon his home in the northern hemisphere for a South Pacific paradise, writes Scott Hamilton
Peter Thiel seems to like New Zealand. In 2011 the billionaire IT investor asked for and very quickly received New Zealand citizenship; later he bought a house in Queenstown and a 477 acre sheep station near Lake Wanaka.
In an essay for the Guardian, Mark O’Connell explains that, like a number of other Silicon Valley billionaires, Thiel fears an apocalypse in the northern hemisphere, and sees New Zealand as a place where he can flee from such a disaster. O’Connell reports that Thiel’s two favourite books are Lord of the Rings and The Sovereign Individual, an anarcho-capitalist tract published 20 years ago by William Rees-Mogg and James Davidson.
Rees-Mogg and Davidson predicted that globalisation and the internet will make the nation state obsolete. As the rich use cryptocurrencies and offshore banks to avoid paying their taxes, health and education systems will become unsustainable, and police and soldiers will go unpaid. Insurrections and wars will follow. But out of the rubble of the old West a new civilisation will emerge, where entrepreneur-kings “operate like the gods of myth’” watched in awe by the ordinary mortals they employ.
Thiel has sometimes expressed the desire to have his own private country. In his application for New Zealand citizenship, he said that “no country aligns more” with his “idea of the future” than ours.
Matt Nippert, the New Zealand Herald journalist who investigated the fast-tracking of Thiel’s citizenship, believes that the billionaire considers this country a bolthole, where he can safely wait out the collapse of civilisation. In 2016, Thiel’s fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman said that he and Thiel had agreed that, if some disaster overtakes America, they will fly in a private jet to New Zealand, and make for Thiel’s sheep station.
Peter Thiel is typically presented as an innovator, a man whose ideas are as new and as radical as the technology that has made him rich. But Thiel is not the first white man to want to abandon his home in the northern hemisphere for a South Pacific paradise.
As Mark O’Connell points out in his article for the Guardian, the first organised settlements in New Zealand were the work of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a well-to-do British hustler, who wanted to create a new nation in what he mistakenly imagined to be empty islands.
More: https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/24-02-2018/peter-thiel-is-looking-for-paradise-in-new-zealand-history-is-against-him/ |
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RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
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| | Subject: Re: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: Peter Thiel is looking for paradise in New Zealand Sat Feb 24, 2018 2:25 am | |
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- CovOps wrote:
- History is against him
Bah, history is obsolete!
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CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
| | Subject: Re: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: Peter Thiel is looking for paradise in New Zealand Sat Feb 24, 2018 2:36 am | |
| - Quote :
- Bah, history is obsolete!
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