The latter is possibly dismissable as "Well, that's just your opinion, man..." but he gives muscle to his opinion by making business decisions with strategic policy implications (e.g. turn off Ukraine starlink service at strategig moments..)
The twitter vandalism is very clearly "his works".
Social media has always been cancer, some people just want it more preferenced to their sort of cancer by a centralized system.
But otherwise I see little evidence it's actually stopped anyone from using it other than people giving heartfelt anecdotes on HN and lots of talk about Mastodon that unsurprisingly died off quick.
I would decline such a request, too. It’s not popular to be anti-war these days, given the amount of spend that has gone into promoting the “just war” narrative against the US’s geopolitical adversaries.
Details matter. Get them right, don’t just read the headlines and Twitter hot takes.
If you believe, as I do, that Ukraine’s ability to export shale gas to the west is a literal existential crisis for Russia as a state in the long term, then it makes sense that they would go to quite significant extents indeed to ensure that that remains impossible, right up to things that would mostly destroy Russian society in the process, tragically.
That’s why I don’t think Russia would actually retaliate in any significant way to the use of starlink.
They know it’s not an existential threat and that’s why they continue to draw red lines and when they get crossed literally nothing happens.
The invasion isn’t good ROI for them otherwise, even if it went well, which it does not appear to be.
I think the USSR restoration empire building narrative is overblown.
Also, if what you say about red lines were true, the US would not be so hesitant to provide lots of advanced aircraft to Ukraine, which they have not done as yet despite this clearly being a full enemy-of-my-enemy proxy war.
Signs point to everyone trying to avoid escalation.
You should tell that to Russian media who posted this very long very USSR restoration empire building victory article a handful of days into the war.
>>https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20...
> Also, if what you say about red lines were true, the US would not be so hesitant to provide lots of advanced aircraft to Ukraine, which they have not done as yet despite this clearly being a full enemy-of-my-enemy proxy war.
They are literally starting training on the aircraft next month iirc, and will receive them in 4-6 months after that.
Nothing happened when all of Russias red lines were crossed, the Americans are merely boiling the frog to avoid escalation.
I think Russias red lines are akin to chinas final warning now days, a joke.
There's the war going on.
Unfortunately those teenagers in the aggressor's army have to be targeted, otherwise they'll play to the aggressor's hand.
Do you like to make decisions like that?
You don't need to answer.
A lot of this paragraph is objectively false I don’t think conscripts are the ones that man boats and submarines.
Destroying those Russian missile boats and submarines would have taken out a large amount of the ships that where intentionally targeting Ukrainian civilians with cruise missiles.
Let me see if I have this right. We know that the Russian government spends inordinate time and money intentionally spreading false propaganda on the internet. We know Russia loves Musk because he supports their illegal invasion of Ukraine. We see sneak here talking about how the "existing geopolitical engineers" (unspecified; is this a dog whistle?) hate Musk because he's so strong, and how Ukraine is committing "mass murder" for resisting the illegal invasion of their country. And I get flagged for calling him a Russian propagandist? Are we really doing the Emperor's New Clothes thing? Can we not just call a spade a spade here?
I get "assume good faith" -- it's a good rule -- but does it really have no limits? We really have to assume good faith in those who are claiming that destroying military targets that are being used by Russia in an illegal invasion of your country is tantamount to mass murder?
I reject the concept of “just war” in general in all instances and think all war is mass murder, definitionally. “Military targets” is a euphemism designed to diffuse blame for premeditated mass slaughter of human beings. It’s not something anyone wants to do, feel, or think about, so euphemisms like these are practically essential to our ability to cope with the world. There is another conflict happening simultaneously where you can see the exact same labelling-war playing out. The scores of dead children remain dead, the hospital remains in ruins regardless of whether it was a failed terrorist missile or a solemn and justified defense of a victim of illegal invasion. It takes two to tango.
As I said, it’s not popular to be anti-war these days. Humans seem to like retribution and righting of perceived injustice more than they like peace. We still have the death penalty, for instance, a clear violation of our widely agreed-upon standard of human rights.
Furthermore, even in your worldview, an American citizen using nominally American-jurisdiction hardware to enable airstrikes in a war zone that has nothing directly to do with America is an unforced escalation in the proxy war unrelated to “illegal invasion” that invites retaliation against Americans and American space-based assets. It’s a fool’s game even if you subscribe only to Realpolitik and don’t care one whit about the lives of enslaved Russian teenagers.
> We know Russia loves Musk because he supports their illegal invasion of Ukraine.
I have seen precisely nothing to support either of the claims in this sentence. They are speculation, not fact. “If you don’t support me, you de facto support my enemy” is not sound reasoning in war. One may simply be against violence in all forms, which seems much more plausible, given what we know about humans on Earth, especially skeptics like Musk who tend to resist pro-just-war state messaging.
Okay, fair, there's a self-consistent point there we can work with. I also am extremely dubious of the idea of "just war".
> It takes two to tango.
It really only takes one to start a war. You seem to be under the assumption that Ukraine had a choice about whether it went to war or not. It didn't have that choice. War was forced upon it. Indeed Ukraine is not fighting a "just war" by any stretch.
It sounds like you're saying: it's bad that Russia is invading Ukraine, but it's also bad that Ukraine is trying to defend itself? Obviously we'd all prefer the world where Russia does not invade Ukraine. Given that Russia did invade Ukraine, what is the next best world? For me, 2nd best is that Ukraine defends its sovereignty with as little unnecessary death as possible. For you, it sounds like (and please correct me if I'm wrong) 2nd best is that Ukraine rolls over and lets Russia completely annex its territories, commit genocide on its civilians, reduce its cities to rubble and ash, execute or permanently imprison its current government, and install a puppet government, so that it is better positioned to do the exact same thing to the rest of Eastern Europe. Is that right? I think we'd both like to minimize death and suffering, but my intuition is that your 2nd best scenario has a lot more death and suffering than mine.
And again: the idea that Ukraine defending its sovereignty is "just as bad" as Russia invading it is yet another common Russian propaganda line. It may be complete coincidence that your statements happen to exactly match Russian propaganda lines, but they do. If you talk about how you found some cheap viagra at some link you post, you may feel like you have a legit reason for doing so and that you're not a "true" spammer. But to everyone else, you're just another spammer.
I will abstain from attributing the quote in an effort to avoid an appeal to authority, but this neatly sums up my feelings on it.
I am also of the belief that death is preferable to participating in war.
Then you must be for a swift Ukrainian victory right?, cause anything else just raises tensions in the region and increases the chance of another war in the near future.
> Furthermore, even in your worldview, an American citizen using nominally American-jurisdiction hardware to enable airstrikes in a war zone that has nothing directly to do with America is an unforced escalation in the proxy war unrelated to “illegal invasion” that invites retaliation against Americans and American space-based assets.
The war in Ukraine isn’t a proxy war it’s just a plain old war between Russia and Ukraine with both sides having allies that help supply them, and I’m not sure why “illegal invasion” is in quotation marks that’s exactly what it is.
> One may simply be against violence in all forms, which seems much more plausible, given what we know about humans on Earth, especially skeptics like Musk who tend to resist pro-just-war state messaging.
This is an easy view to have when you live the luxury of being able to choice whether or not to be involved in a war.
Ukrainians had no such choice war was forced upon them by the Russians.
And we know that people on the side of Ukraine, including lots of commentators in the west do the reverse. So maybe try to find the facts and use logic.
> We know Russia loves Musk because he supports their illegal invasion of Ukraine.
He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine. That's just such an idiotic believe, its really next level stupid.
Please tell me one other private person literally in the world who has helped Ukraine more then Musk. I'll wait.
He literally gave Ukraine free material when the war started, before most governments had even reacted.
Not enabling Starlink in Crimea makes sense because that would literally enable the Russians to use it. Dynamically enabling and disabling it depending on Ukrainian war needs would be a crazy thing to do.
> I get "assume good faith" -- it's a good rule -- but does it really have no limits?
What you should maybe ask yourself is if "bad faith" assumptions has limits.
Twitter is irrelevant; he is doing product design on electric cars, battery systems, rockets, internet access satellites, brain computer interfaces, solar, humanoid autonomous robots, and tunnel boring machines, in approximately that order.
Twitter is like 20th on the list, but it’s a great target for narrative-based outrage (“the bullied one gets rich and buys the playground” etc). Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that. Freedom of expression for all is far more important than censoring racists (which doesn’t stop them from being racist or stop the spread of racism anyway).
What version of Elon Musk are you thinking of here? Read literally anything he says and it's immediately clear that he's always been the bully. He wasn't some underdog who was bullied and pulled himself up by his bootstraps to prove everyone wrong, he's the son of an apartheid emerald mine owner who made some good business bets and has now figured out how to scale up his bullying to a national scale. The already-rich bully bought the playground so that nobody could stop him from bullying everyone even more.
> Also note that if you truly believe in freedom for one-to-many publishing of all legal speech (as I do) then an increase in racist publishing is naturally going to be a consequence of that
Ah, the old "I'm free to publish racism but you're not free to call me out when I do so". These free-speech "absolutists" always abandon their morals as soon as they get the opportunity to censor someone who is making fun of them for being a douchebag.
> but you're not free to call me out when I do so
in the GP post, literally or in meaning. So... I think you're at least exaggerating too much, at least in some places.
However I do see your point.
People who actually value personal freedoms understand that there are always tradeoffs: you cannot simultaneously have freedom-to-bully and freedom-from-bullying. It's a difficult problem. People who claim it's simple are not actually interested in solving it. The people who say that freedom-to-bully is infinitely more important than freedom-from-bullying (as all "free speech absolutists" are inherently claiming) are, quite obviously, bullies that want to get away with bullying.
> I've never seen a counterexample
Perhaps that Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" was made too much in jest and didn't really correspond to some real events, before or after. Or people like Vaclav Havel, who got to the power from the power's opponents, didn't have opportunity to refrain from silencing a political adversary. I don't know.
Which is petty and stupid. But AFAIK he has not censored political content he disagrees with, so I much prefer it to the previous regime.
And FYI, if your 401k has some index fund exposure you're probably the partial owner of some cobalt mines in Congo that have questionable labor practices.
Can you back that up, with actual data, and not the politically motivated articles from democrat aligned media?
The only specific cases of this I’ve seen was an actual bot network saying the n word a lot when Elon took over, which was obviously a coordinated attack.
Other than that, where is this racist hell hole that twitter has become apparently? Where is the proof?
But Ukraine is literally using services from a SAR satellite right now, which is run by a private business.
https://www.universetoday.com/157208/ukraine-crowdfunded-a-1...
And yet theres 0 noise or even evidence anyones even thinking of blowing it out of the sky.
> if he didn't capitulate on Ukraine then Russia would knock his satellites out of orbit
Kinda hard to comment on flagged origin.
Do you see why it's a conspiracy theory?
This is a farcical statement.
This makes absolutely no sense, yet people keep repeating it
TWZ: Do you trust Elon Musk?
KB: (Laughs) In what sense?
TWZ: There was the discussion over Walter Isaacson’s book excerpt and whether Musk shut off Starlink to prevent a Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol last year, or whether as he claimed he denied a request to provide it.
KB: Look, [Starlink] is a private property of a private person. Yes we really very widely use his products and services. The whole of the line of contact talks to each other to some extent using his products and services. The only thing I can say here is that without those services and products it would be a catastrophe. But it is true that he did turn off his products and services over Crimea before. But there's another side to that truth. Everybody's been aware of that.
TWZ: So he did turn it off?
KB: This specific case everybody's referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn't at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I'm not aware of. But I'm totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.
TWZ: But did he ever put it on and then shut it off?
KB: There have been no problems since it's been turned on over Crimea.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/exclusive-interview-wi...
That's my point though. I am not judging the content of his opinions. I am concerned about the fact that he is voicing them with little care. Everybody has some weird opinions and half-baked ideas. It's very different to have these thoughts in your head vs sharing them with friends and family or to to voice them to 160 million followers. He can think in private whatever he wants and I wouldn't care or judge him unless it starts to impact other people. I think lots of weird shit, but it just makes my wife roll her eyes. Nobody is gonna die from it.
Starship and access to orbit, as well as Starlink (which cheap access to orbit enabled) are indeed insanely powerful geopolitical tools. Many of the existing geopolitical engineers would hate to see him not be firmly subordinate to themselves.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the FAA’s decision is being used as a bargaining chip here. You don’t get to do things like this in the USA unless you play ball 100% with the existing people who control access to orbit.
Nobody is richer or more powerful than the people who presently control the satellite-based weapons and surveillance systems that the US operates. Nobody will be able to be in a position to replace or supplant them without some sort of negotiation with them.
Imagine it: with a working Starship, Musk could replace GPS, Keyhole, and whatever the rods-from-god system is codenamed, in a matter of months (or perhaps weeks, if the payload design work is already underway), for anyone on the Earth who he thinks would benefit his goals. A lot of the leverage that exists against him (and can presently be used to constrain him) would be gone, never to return. It’s already fairly obvious that the geopolitical status quo on Earth is not very important to him.