https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000?t=LOqFk4UUjjPEeSSumAEcyw&s=19
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576994262226702336?t=0yI0zEPgv19t9Y2hlvGo8w&s=19
Here are some questions to consider. How will “the people who live in Donbas and Crimea” make their will known “under UN supervision”? Currently, Russian soldiers go house to house and shoot people in the head if they refuse to vote for Russia. Is Musk proposing to send in the UN troops? And have them shoot back at the Russians? That’s a great recipe for de-escalation. Or will the UN supervise remotely in cities and towns with no running water and destroyed infrastructure?
Now let’s try to define “the people who live” there. Do the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had to escape from these regions count? Do they get a vote? Do the Russians who were brought in to substitute the refugees get to vote? Technically, they are living there. If they came in two days ago, do they get a vote? Are they more entitled to decide than somebody who lived there for 60 years and was forced to become a war refugee?
How about the many people in these regions who are hiding from the forced Russian draft? Do they get to vote? My cousin’s husband in Donetsk is one of them. He hasn’t been out of his apartment since February 24. He sends his little boy out to get water and food. Every time he’s terrified the kid won’t come back and he can’t go out to look for him. How is he going to vote?
Now let’s think about the beautiful precedent this brilliant plan sets in terms of international law. It’s now OK to invade a country, kill half of the population, make the rest flee or hide, ship in your own citizens and make them “vote” for annexation. This is a mockery of sovereignty and of the very concept of the nation-state.
It is, of course, possible that Musk is this stupid. It’s also possible that he’s channeling Russian propaganda. Yesterday, every Russian news channel led with Musk’s brilliant proposal that, unsurprisingly, Russia loved. The important thing to notice, though, is that the transnational oligarchy is congenitally incapable of understanding what the nation-state is. Be they politically on the left or on the right, they hate sovereignty. They can never be on our side because for them the nation is nothing.
Clarissa's Blog 
Musk is very brilliant from an engineering/technical perspective. He is IMO not brilliant at all in other ways, for example foreign policy. Another example of this is Dr. Ben Carson. He is among the most brilliant pediatric neurosurgeons on the planet. If your kid needs brain surgery, he is among the best in the world. But otherwise, he is a moron who thinks the pyramids were grain silos. Donald Trump is another one, very brilliant at dealmaking but a bone head in numerous other ways.
Being fantastically brilliant in certain areas != brilliance, or even basic competence, in other areas.
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I think Elon means well, I mean his Starlink has really helped the Ukrainian military, but he is just naive it seems on this subject. No way in hell could Ukraine remain “neutral” with the Russians. Ukraine wants to become a Western-style liberal democracy, and to the Russians that automatically equals pro-West/NATO. The Russians would also incessantly bully and threaten Ukraine and meddle in Ukraine’s politics.
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The idea of bringing in the UN is partially entertaining. Why not just send in NATO troops and hope for de-escalation?
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True. When God or nature gives you a lot in some area, this tends to come at the expense of other areas.
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Yeah. And it seems best to appreciate people for what they’re good at, and tolerate them in their deficiencies as long as those idiocies are not in any areas where they have actual power. It’s OK to think that if you just ruled the world, everything would be better, as long as you have zero actual influence over world governance 😉
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I think Ukraine or Europe should troll Russia by holding referendum for Kaliningrad to join Germany and then show turnout was 90 percent and 98 percent of votes were for joining Russia…
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Great idea! Welcome to Královec: https://visitkralovec.cz/
That’s good trolling.
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