Is Musk actually a midwit posing as a genius?
Once again tech zillionaire Elon Musk has managed to light up the internet like a pinball machine with his tweets about a possible peace deal in the Ukrainian war.
In fact, this latest move by the South African business maverick even dropped Kanye West's "White Lives Matter" T-shirt stunt down a relative black hole, starving the music and fashion entrepreneur of all that lovely publicity oxygen he was counting on by playing America's giant race card.
In fact, this latest move by the South African business maverick even dropped Kanye West's "White Lives Matter" T-shirt stunt down a relative black hole, starving the music and fashion entrepreneur of all that lovely publicity oxygen he was counting on by playing America's giant race card.
Here is Musk's first tweet on the "peace plan":
Ukraine-Russia Peace:- Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).- Water supply to Crimea assured.- Ukraine remains neutral.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2022
There are some obvious criticisms of what seems to most midwits a reasonable plan:
The annexed regions are depopulated war zones and would need years to recover, so no referendums there would mean anything. Crimea also voted to exit Russia in 1993. Forcing Ukraine to remain "neutral" would infringe its sovereignty and make it a de facto Russian client state, etc., etc.
But, really, quibbles like this are rather akin to arguing about how many angels can dance on a pinhead -- an esoteric exercise in nothingness. There is a much bigger and simpler problem with Musk's attention-grabbing peace manoeuvres.
Musk is a businessman and businessmen do deals all the time, but central to all these deals is trust in the party with whom you are doing the deal. You want to be sure they are going to keep their end of the bargain.
In fact, Musk pulled out of a rather prominent business deal recently with the very platform he exploits for free publicity because he didn't quite trust some of the data that Twitter was providing. Yet here he is, saying we should do a deal with someone who launched an unprovoked assault on a neighbouring country, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, widespread destruction, and countless war crimes.
In fact, Musk pulled out of a rather prominent business deal recently with the very platform he exploits for free publicity because he didn't quite trust some of the data that Twitter was providing. Yet here he is, saying we should do a deal with someone who launched an unprovoked assault on a neighbouring country, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, widespread destruction, and countless war crimes.
See how that sounds now? Musk seems to be saying miscounting bot accounts is worse than raping children.
Really, you don't need to go into all the tedious detail of who should get to keep this bit of charred land or whether the water supply to the Crimea should or should not be maintained, etc. It's all meaningless because Putin has rendered himself meaningless by the simple act of shitting on all previous agreements -- and there have been many.
The main flaw with Musk's plan is simply: You can't do a deal with a dealbreaker. A man who understands rocket science should understand that.
What Musk's tweets ultimately reveal is that when peace comes, as surely it will, it can't be a peace with Vladimir Putin. On February the 24th, the day of the invasion, Putin downgraded himself from a statesman with a few rough edges, one that you could still do slightly soiled deals with, to a rabid dog that needs to be shot or hung from a lamppost for peace to happen. His choice.
Putin's latest speech in Moscow on "Annexation Day" was the ranting of a madman, spouting Duginist nonsense about the West being run by "Satanists." Whether the West is "Satanic" or not is even beside the point. If that's what Putin is saying or thinking, then there is no possibility of a peace deal, either from our end or his. Talk about someone burning his boats!
Any deal we make with Putin won't be worth the paper it's written on. Hitler had the same problem back in the 1930s. Or we had the same problem with Hitler.
The main flaw with Musk's plan is simply: You can't do a deal with a dealbreaker. A man who understands rocket science should understand that.
What Musk's tweets ultimately reveal is that when peace comes, as surely it will, it can't be a peace with Vladimir Putin. On February the 24th, the day of the invasion, Putin downgraded himself from a statesman with a few rough edges, one that you could still do slightly soiled deals with, to a rabid dog that needs to be shot or hung from a lamppost for peace to happen. His choice.
Putin's latest speech in Moscow on "Annexation Day" was the ranting of a madman, spouting Duginist nonsense about the West being run by "Satanists." Whether the West is "Satanic" or not is even beside the point. If that's what Putin is saying or thinking, then there is no possibility of a peace deal, either from our end or his. Talk about someone burning his boats!
Any deal we make with Putin won't be worth the paper it's written on. Hitler had the same problem back in the 1930s. Or we had the same problem with Hitler.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).
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