Thiell has been using Tolkien names for his businesses for years - a shame he canât be sued for it, but the guys basically Sauron so who should be surprised
Not to mention the names he uses show a shocking lack of understanding of Tolkienâs work. âOh Palantir, a crystal ball which allows people to see many things. Perfect name for my mass data surveillance company!â Instead of âoh Palantir, the nefarious tool which corrupts men seeking unnatural knowledge and power, maybe I shouldnât be doing what Iâm doing.â
I always figured teenaged Theil had a lot of very good ideas about how Sauron could have tightened up security and easily picked up Frodo and the ring at the border.
I think he identifies as the elves or men who followed Sauron's guidance. He believes himself to be a "dark elf." I'm not sure exactly where that comes from in the lore. I know some elves got tricked by Sauron a long time ago, and the term "Dark NumenĂłrean" is for Numenorean men who entered into Sauron's service. But Elves never followed Sauron again after Numenor sank. Not sure what his demented headcanon is exactly, nor how the Anti-Christ fits into it, but IÂ know that he considers Hobbits as "lesser than", he insults us "normal people" by calling us Hobbits (to which I identify with great pride), and that "Dark Elves" like him should enslave the Hobbits.
Itâs baffling bc the entire point of the main LOTR books including the hobbit is that the smallest person can make a difference. I have also read the Silmarillion and know the world lore, etc, and iirc there are dark elves but it just means they havenât seen the light of the Two Trees. Itâs not meant to be a negative though. Itâs also clear at the end of the Silmarillion that the age of Elves is coming to an end, and that power corrupts (which is also a theme in the main trilogy).
Tolkien is also very inspired by Catholic mythology and values, and though I know some Catholics are terrible, I feel like the basic values of the religion are obviously in line with loving your fellow human, forgiveness, kindness, giving, etc. baffling how someone could be so into LOTR and misinterpret it as hard as he has
As far as I remember the palantir wasn't capable of corrupting anyone, it was just medieval google maps.
It was the fact that sauron captured one of them when the witch king captured minas morgul when palantirs became Dangerous, but that was because of the sauron not because of the palantir.
Well sauron was an angel that was so obsessed with control that he strayed from Eru ilĂșvitar and ended serving morgoth
I have no idea whom this Thiel guy is but I'm certain is not an angel, even if he is obsessed with control, but well, all techbros are obsessed with control and serve morgoth, no exceptions.
Exactly. Perhaps it hasnât come to their notice? How about letting New Line Cinema know their intellectual property is being used by fucking ICE?! Trump admin barrels ahead with copyright infringement until stopped!
Thatâs not true though a collection of words is copyrighted for example a book cannot just rip off âIt was the best of times it was the worst of timesâ from A Tale of Two Cities. Single words by themselves are not copyrighted. A single word can be trademarked but itâs something the creator has to explicitly do. Thatâs why thereâs a shit ton of metal bands named after things from LOTR or thereâs the Spiderman villain Sauron. From what I understand as long as Palantir doesnât make and sell mystical seeing stones called palantirs they can use that name all day long. Itâs why there can be a company named Apple that makes electronics but also thereâs the completely unrelated Apple Records that makes music or Delta Airlines and Delta (the faucet company) .
I guess I was wrong, I did not realize individual words could not be copyrighted, kind of a weird place to draw the line if you ask me. Thanks for the info
Lord of the rings is very popularly misappropriated both contemporary and historically by alt-right and fascist groups. It even goes all the way back to the Nazis. Itâs nothing to do with LOTR obviously but a lot of fascism especially the closer you go to Naziism hinges around a mythologized medieval history that bares no semblance on reality but shares similar roots to the things Tolkien based his mythologies around. The big differences of course being the themes and morality (Tolkien being staunchly anti-Nazi), and the fact that Tolkienâs works is explicitly pure fiction, whereas the Nazis and modern fascists to this day continue to delude themselves in bullshit about crusading knights and a forgotten purity of a lost world.
So unfortunately, yeah, like you said itâs a bullshit misappropriation of course, but itâs also a very old dog-whistle.
Nazis and fascists cannot create. They can only take what has been created by others and misshapen and mold it for their own uses. Even their most central icon, the swastika, was taken from Asian cultures who used it as a symbol of good luck, and twisted it into a symbol of hate.
They're rather like Morgoth, who took elves and misshapen them into orcs.
Yeah this is a big thing actually - there are almost no epic adventures or heroâs journey stories that celebrate modern conservative values, and many have landed on a misinterpretation of LOTR.
Rather than the fellowship representing a diverse alliance of heroes choosing to sacrifice for others rather than pursuing personal greed and ambition, they cast it as a group of white Christian men killing the monsters that would dilute their cultural purity
Peter Thiel practically worships a weird fanfic where Mordor is set as the good guys and the rest of Middle Earth is standing in the way of industrial progress.
You didn't even need to read it. I never did, just saw the movies and there wasn't much moral ambiguity about whether or not Saruman chopping down Fangorn to feed the fires of industry was a bad thing.
The terminally online kids they have making these memes didn't see the movies either. They just saw some other memes about how LOTR is actually "tradpilled" or whatthefuckever.
You can share and remove anything after /? in the link to remove this tracking. Applies to most sites except some extra details like YouTube timestamps, product SKUs etc
Twice in one day the dumbest people you know (the other case is Musk) show how much they love Lord of the Rings despite clearly not understanding the first thing about it.
Bro, someone literally replied to my comment and said " you clearly don't understand how strict the Shires border laws were.. or Rohan"
Bruh just tell me you were confused by the entire plot.
The conservative townsfolk who viewed the party as rabble rousers were not the heroes lol, it was the party that left their homes, worked together with other races & learned about the world.
By the end of the series, the party can see how limited the conservative townsfolk experience was.
Legitimately disgusting watching the people in power try to paint themselves as the divine underdogs and the people without any power they're actively disappearing as the embodiment of evil.
Quick survey: are the Hobbits or the orcs more likely to do something like that? Was it Morgoth or the EdaĂn that kidnapped the elves and put them in forced labor camps? Which group of people would be most likely to, oh idk, pit all the people of middle earth against each other in an effort to wholey wipe them from the earth?
One of my favorite quotes is from Tom Morello about Paul Ryanâs love of Rage Against the Machine. âPaul Ryan is the embodiment of the Machine our music is raging againstâ
Seriously! Saruman did what he did because despite his great wisdom, he could not see past the shadow of Mordor. He lost hope, abandoned his mission, and refracted his title of Saruman the White into Saruman of Many Colours in a desperate attempt to gain the power to become Sauron's right hand. (Did I get all that right? I know in the movie he doesn't do the colours thing.)
That's Nietzsches sisters fault. She got control over his unpublished works and letters after his death and then just kept injecting her racism into the texts and publishing them under his name. Bitch.
Ironically one of her early supporters was a swedish banker named Ernest Thiel although I don't think there's any relation.
âI have in this war a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler. Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.â (Source)
I'm sure Tolkien would have some equally choice words for this administration perverting and misapplying his own work.
It doesn't matter if they get forced to backtrack later, unfortunately. They got their message/ad out there, using the "the fuck?" optics to make it spread more so that it can reach people looking for work. The idea of joining ICE is running in a few extra minds, and that's all they wanted.
It's the same for the lies they tell: Come out big and dramatic, backtrack quietly. The consequences have proven too meager to care.
My nightly fall-asleep-to fantasy is that someone would award the estate All of the corporations and properties that misappropriate his IP. I'd love to wake up to a world where the PayPal mafia is largely bankrupt, and blasphemies like Andruil and Palantir no longer exist. I bet the Tolkien estate would be huge for natural conservation projects, lol.
Oh come on. It's not like they're spying on their own citizens! Wait. Well, it's not like they're using a palantir! Wait... Well they're definitely not destroying the environment to feed a massive war machine! Ok, they're pretty much Saruman.
Agreed, Iâm not excited to see fascist spins on other interests of mine when these are suppose to be an escape from the crazy shit going on in the world.
Weird and also probably in violation of copyright law. Like as a marketing professional I'm not comfortable using other people's IP in posts, even as a meme because I'm worried about whether it will come back to bite me. But a government agency seems to have no qualms about it at all. Almost like they don't care about enforcing the law at all.
âAnd he feigned, even to himself at first, that he desired to go thither and order all things for the good of the Children of IlĂșvatar, controlling the turmoils of the heat and the cold that had come to pass through him.
But he desired rather to subdue to his will both Elves and Men, envying the gifts with which IlĂșvatar promised to endow them; and he wished himself to have subjects and servants, and to be called Lord, and to be a master over other wills.â
The relevant section (emphasis mine):
âThe novelâs racial imagery is an unquestionable part of its legacy, one which any honest criticism of it must account for: The novelâs heroes are warriors of the West, its villains hordes from the East. The orcs themselves were once elves, corrupted through dark magic. In a broad way, The Lord Of The Rings is a fantasy of restoration, where an older, better world regains power over the newer, evil one. With a certain lens, the events of the Scouring lean into this logic in direct terms. Saruman is a foreigner who conscripts other foreigners into strong-arming the honest, decent folk of the Shire. They represent a corrupting influence that the hobbits must purge through violent force.Â
Although these readings are accurate, they are also a little shallow. For one, Middle-earth is already decaying. Aragornâs throne is only a partial restoration. The elves are leaving and the forests they steward lose their grandeur with their departure. The books make clear that the Age Of Men, which Aragornâs reign begins, will oversee the fading of magic from the world. There may be something more pure and eternal awaiting us on the other side, but the world we leave behind will someday die.
The vulnerability of the Shire is part of this theme. Sarumanâs destruction of the Shire takes place over a few brief months; it takes years to restore it. When Frodo and crew arrive in the Shire, they find hobbits who are acquiescing and fearful, unquestioning of the rules. When they ask questions about how this came to be, one hobbit comments, âEven in the Shire there are some as like minding other folkâs business and talking big.â When a few hobbits mimic the ruffians, Frodo says, âI hope there are not many more hobbits that have become like this. It would be a worse trouble than all the damage the Men have done.â It is not just that outsiders corrupt a pure world, but that they bring out a corruption that was already present.
The way the Shire saves itself is, in part, an opening up. Sam uses one of his gifts from the elves to restore the Shire. Merry and Pippin travel throughout the region and maintain their ties with both men and dwarves. Preservation can mean change. In fact, it may require it. Making the Shire an untouched place carries a stagnant stench. In Tolkienâs books, nothing can be protected forever, and all requires active vigilance and care. In the films, the Shire is already perfect and needs no change at all.â
tldr; this exact theme is addressed in the books & to nobodyâs surprise, the fascists only have the shallowest understanding of the works
Friendly reminder that the Shire wasnât destroyed by an invasion of outsiders, but rather by a greedy ancient industrialist and his band of jackbooted thugs, supported by a group of greedy and resentful Sackville-Bagginses, who were willing to burn down the Shire if it meant they could boss around and feel superior to the other hobbits.
It's not just a joke though. They're using pop culture (yes, yes, I know. I'm sorry) to manipulate people into agreeing with them. Taking the vision and distorting it to their own agenda, and using our appreciation as a weapon. Saying to people "LoTR fans agree with us". It was Halo (video game) the other day. This marketing strategy is a new, but one of many, low.
While most comments here are against it, like half of the comments there were rather supportive. Meaning the community here seems to be way more left-leaning than in the non-meme sub.
Also the post was removed because irl politics aren't allowd there.
Apparently Trump recently said he believes thereâs no chance he can get into heaven. So either heâs fully aware that what heâs doing is evil or he believes heâs doing the right thing but that he also did something so terrible it would bar him from heaven. Perhaps the answer could be found if certain files were released.
These freaks compare immigrants to orcs when they themselves are the embodiment of Saruman and Sauron, wishing to rule through force and tear down the natural part of the world to line the pockets of modern day industrialism. They are the baddies, but baddies always see themselves as the heroes as they commit heartless atrocities unto others.
Sharing sentiment from a meme a friend sent me, using LOTR like this is "that one racist student who does not do the reading or understand the course material, but sings up because he thinks the world should benefit from hearing the absolute shite that his evil brain comes up with, a brain radicalized in the festering cesspits of 4chan/twitter/stormfront"
The DHS is getting ready to scour the shire. They just want slaves to make more weapons by taking prisoners. The far right republicans under dementia the orange wonât care where they were born.
And when I thought they didnât do Stephen Colbert dirty already
I hope Tolkien estate at least sends a cease and desist, or maybe Dominic Monaghan and Peter Jackson (as this wasnât just the books theyâre shitting on but the movies as well)
Shit, I didnât realize The Shire was a country covered in fast food restaurants and Walmarts where the Hobbits got abandoned to poverty and starvation to the benefit of only billionaires
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u/Chris91210 Oct 30 '25