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Comment by WalterBright

1 day ago

Advising Trump makes it Trump's decision, not Musk's.

So you don’t dispute this reporting, don’t dispute that this was Musk’s idea, which implies he lied about it immediately afterwards.

And just so i am clear on your philosophy there is no guilt that rides whatsoever with presenting this capability to the leader of the free world who then goes and does exactly what you suggested resulting in many people dying while a nation fights for its life.

If he really did give Trump the idea, do you see Musk as having no responsibility whatsoever?

  • How the chain of command works is the person making the decision takes full responsibility. In this case, it's the President. The function of his advisors is to give him options (i.e. ideas) and present the pros and cons.

  • There's a lot of conjecture and motivated reasoning from all sides, enough that I'm doubtful that we can know what really happened. So park the actual facts for a moment. Let's just consider the situation in the abstract.

    Musk is many things, but I've never heard anyone seriously claim him to have any particular aptitude or expertise around military strategy or conflict resolution. So if Trump is unilaterally executing on Musk's musings, we can derive two definite (and highly conservative) observations:

    1. Musk has opinions

    2. Trump has dangerously poor judgement

    • Both him and Trump hate Zelenskyy and want him gone. The receipts are there.

      Him possibly suggesting that Trump pressure Zelenskyy to comply with his demands by temporarily crippling Starshield’s performance in an active war zone, which means making it harder for Ukraine to defend itself against Putin’s jet-powered Shahed drones, is not merely an opinion. It’s an attempt to influence policy by proposing a way to harm Ukraine, without regard for the lives at stake.

      We’ve seen this behaviour from him before. He doesn’t care whether any of his actions or ‘advice’ will harm others.

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Trump is an idiot and does what the last person told him. When you interact with such a person, you can't wash your hands and say "I just advised, I have no blame".