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- cross-posted to:
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Elon Musk says he refused to give Kyiv access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea to avoid complicity in a “major act of war”.
Kyiv had sent an emergency request to activate Starlink to Sevastopol, home to a major Russian navy port, he said.
His comments came after a book alleged he had switched off Starlink to thwart a drone attack on Russian ships.
A senior Ukrainian official says this enabled Russian attacks and accused him of “committing evil”.
Russian naval vessels had since taken part in deadly attacks on civilians, he said.
“By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via Starlink interference, Elon Musk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities,” he said.
“Why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?” he added.
The row follows the release of a biography of the billionaire by Walter Isaacson which alleges that Mr Musk switched off Ukraine’s access to Starlink because he feared that an ambush of Russia’s naval fleet in Crimea could provoke a nuclear response from the Kremlin.
Ukraine targeted Russian ships in Sevastopol with submarine drones carrying explosives but they lost connection to Starlink and “washed ashore harmlessly”, Mr Isaacson wrote.
Starlink terminals connect to SpaceX satellites in orbit and have been crucial for maintaining internet connectivity and communication in Ukraine as the conflict has disrupted the country infrastructure.
SpaceX, in which Mr Musk is the largest shareholder, began providing thousands of Starlink satellite dishes to Ukraine shortly after Russia launched its full-scale assault on its neighbour in February last year.
Responding to the book’s claim, Mr Musk said on X that SpaceX “did not deactivate anything” because it had not been activated in those regions in the first place.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he said.
“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, eight years before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine
In the past, Mr Musk has said that while the system had “become the connectivity backbone of Ukraine all the way up to the front lines”, “we are not allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes”.
Mr Musk reiterated the point to Mr Isaacson, asking: “How am I in this war? Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
He also offered a personal opinion, calling for a truce and saying that Ukrainians and Russians were dying “to gain and lose small pieces of land” and this was not worth their lives.
He provoked anger last year when he proposed a plan to end the war which suggested the world formally recognise Crimea as part of Russia and asking residents of regions seized by Russia last year to vote on which country they wanted to be part of.
Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said that plan displayed “moral idiocy”
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Nationalize Starlink and SpaceX
We already had a nationalized SpaceX. We defunded it and gave grants to private companies like uh… SpaceX.
While I agree that NASA shouldn’t have had any funding cut, supporting a privatized space industry isn’t a bad thing on its own.
But giving Elon Musk a defense contract was a fucking stupid idea.deleted by creator
and we have an idiot in charge who shares his time between defending anti-semitism and interfearing in global conflicts.
Bruh, Trump has been out of office for like 3 years now. Have you been living under a rock?
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Those that live in glass houses should not throw stones.
That “shiny metal detritus” is currently providing internet to Ukraine that allows them to fight in this war.
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@MattMastodon @SCB
It is not his data. He’s just transporter.I’m quite comfortable with it.
If the government wants a private citizen’s data and resources, they can contract with them for it. I find it bizarre that you think the government should just be able to take whatever it wants from people.
If you give them that power, some day, the cause will not be noble.
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A privatized space industry is indeed a bad, bad idea. A VERY bad idea.
Didn’t NASA used to just have companies like Boeing or Lockheed manufacture things?
Private companies been US advantage during the moon race, and allowed them to win against the URSS
But that’s socialism /s
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Nationalise.
It’s a Z in American English. Both spellings are correct.
Nope, it comes from Old French which used the same “s” as Latin whereas the “z” is greek. The French standardised to the “s” in the late 1600 which informed the English which had bounced between the Greek and Latin but formalised on “ise” not “ize”.
So, nationalise is the correct one here.
You’re entitled to your hill, but as linguistically correct as you may be, linguistics take a back seat to common usage and national variance.
Nationalized and nationalised are both English terms. Nationalized is predominantly used in 🇺🇸 American (US) English ( en-US ) while nationalised is predominantly used in 🇬🇧 British English (used in UK/AU/NZ) ( en-GB ).
Yeah what kind of linguistics dweeb doesn’t understand that language is fluid and shapes with time and location.
I’d love to see this tool be held to the spelling standards of old English. You know… to preserve the English language.
Butan hwi?
Literally the first thing you learn in linguistics is that the malleability in language is why linguistics exists.
Which is literally why “literally” and “figuratively” as practically interchangable due to misuse of ‘literally’ as hyperbole. Its figuratively killing me.
This is the hidden most based take in the thread.
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How is dismissing a correction with a blunt “nope” nice and tacking on etymology when we’re talking about modern use of the word?
Ah, the cruel barbs of irony. Your English is actually quite atrocious.
There wasn’t a proper sentence in that reply. There was hardly a coherent thought. Perhaps it is time to put your phone down, finish your drink, and go watch a sport.
Oh, get bent, you bell-end! There is no point in trying to be nice and discuss things on here any more; let’s be honest. You lot just love to circle-jerk how much you hate Musk to the detriment of everything else. God buoye ond god spede.
FTFY.
Everyone should just report this idiot and move on. You can’t fix stupid.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nationalize
You thought you were smart to correct what you thought was a mistake. You were mistaken, because you’re less smart than you think you are, and not smart enough to know that you don’t know that much.
Rather than admit that you’re less smart than you think you are, you’ve doubled down and become rude about it.
Vanity, it’s the devil’s favourite sin.
Obviously, it’s pathetic. We’ve all been there, but you really should learn when to walk away rather than doubling down.
Wow, this really upset a bunch of the Lemmy toxic club didn’t jt. Honestly, Reddit may be crap but lemmy is doing it’s best to ape it’s toxicity.
You came up in here with your irrelevant pedantry and you call other people toxic.
Nobody gives a fuck how you spell nationalize you gobshite
Upvoting for gobshite
Jeez dude, can we all just chill out for a second?
God damn just accept you’re wrong. You look like an absolute fool at this point.
Yes, for sure. You are indeed being toxic.
There’s obviously a lot of crossover between musk-dislikers and z-worshippers.
Butbut… “gEt BeNt YoU bElLeNd” though
From https://www.etymonline.com/word/-ize#etymonline_v_25713 :
-ize
word-forming element used to make verbs, Middle English -isen, from Old French -iser/-izer, from Late Latin -izare, from Greek -izein, a verb-forming element denoting the doing of the noun or adjective to which it is attached.
The variation of -ize and -ise began in Old French and Middle English, perhaps aided by a few words (such as surprise, see below) where the ending is French or Latin, not Greek. With the classical revival, English partially reverted to the correct Greek -z- spelling from late 16c. But the 1694 edition of the authoritative French Academy dictionary standardized the spellings as -s-, which influenced English.
In Britain, despite the opposition to it (at least formerly) of OED, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Times of London, and Fowler, -ise remains dominant. Fowler thinks this is to avoid the difficulty of remembering the short list of common words not from Greek which must be spelled with an -s- (such as advertise, devise, surprise). American English has always favored -ize. The spelling variation involves about 200 English verbs.
So in 1694 “-ise” was deemed correct in French, but English has always bounced around between the two spellings, both before and since then. American English has always favoured “-ize” spellings. It’s not really reasonable to try to impose the standards of French in 1694 on English globally in 2023.
Thank you for turning dickish pedantry into something actually interesting and worth reading.
And why, dare I ask, should the French form of the suffix be prioritized over the Greek? Latin actually used the Z when the suffix was borrowed from Greek. In French, the letter Z essentially didn’t exist, as even in Latin it was (nearly?) exclusively used for Greek loans. As French evolved from vulgar and unwritten Latin, the Z was replaced by S, which is pronounced as /z/ when between vowels anyway.
So again, why exactly must English hold the etymologically corrupted French form above the actual original one?
GET A ROOM, YOU TWO!!!
It’s not about what must be done. It’s about what has been done. Language isn’t about how things should have been. One person rarely gets much of a say in how language will develop. If you try to hold language up to best possible practices, you will be disappointed by the actual outcome every time.
Well, in the spirit of what has been done, -ize has been standardized in American English, and so here we are.
What a worthless comment
I mean, the irony here is quite strong even you must sense it.
Nope. Everyone just thinks youre a joke worthy of a circus act.
Yep
People learn words in different fashions. In Jeopardy (an American quiz show) they accept written answers in the last round that are spelled incorrectly as long as it’s clear, phonetically, what they were trying for.
This is done in part because some people learn words by hearing them and not seeing them written, just like some people might have read a word but not know how to pronounce it.
Did you comment this to be superior or be helpful because it comes across as superior.
To add the same low level of information and discourse that all of these click bait, musk hate posts of late contribute to “news” and “technology”.
Did you comment to feel superior or were you feeling left out?
Neither. I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that others didn’t and share something I learned that gave me a different perspective.
Just like I’m treating this question as genuine, though I suspect it’s snark.
Elon Musk says he refused to give Kyiv access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea to avoid complicity in a “major act of war”.
So, in the classic trolley problem, Elon’s choice is to remove the track switch that his company produced so that no one else could use it to make a choice.
“Sorry, guys. Looks like those innocent civilians tied to the tracks are going to have to die so that I am not tangentially and tenuously responsible for your choice to save them in exchange for the deaths of Russian soldiers attacking your sovereign lands and people (cough and lose money from the Kremlin as a result cough)”
There’s no “right” answer to the trolley problem. But there are definitely wrong ones.
Musk is the kid in the video that moves all the people to just one of the tracks, gets praised by everyone for thinking outside the box, and then proceeds to run the trolley down that track.
If you choose not to decide. You still have made a choice.
I love Rush
People would rather just have no accountability, you see.
His logic seems to be that Ukraine is to blame for all the bloodshed of the Russian invasion because they didn’t roll over and surrender without a fight.
Victim blaming. Classic asshole move.
Did Elon have a stroke at some point that we don’t know about? It’s amazing how consistently he makes a huge ass of himself now.
One of his kids came out as trans, his partner left him and later dated a trans woman, and he got caught trying to give one of his employees a horse for sex, so he decided to join the political side that hates trans people and doesn’t hold people accountable for being shit as long as they continue waving the banner.
His midlife crisis needs to get the fuck out of my sight.
He is the Most Divorced Man in the World. And Grimes wasn’t even married to him!
Grimes really said “not even if you’re the richest man alive” and it’s driving him crazy
That I don’t think is his logic
He’s said about that - Ukraine should negotiate with the Russians and give them territory because war is so killy.
There’s no “right” answer to the trolley problem. But there are definitely wrong ones.
That depends on your moral basis.
Fair enough. My moral basis says that using my personal power and authority to undermine deals that I specifically sought to make in the first place, upon which others are dependent for literal survival, in order to backpedal my involvement in their survival attempts which I knew from the beginning was the entire point of the deal, the result of which directly and predictably leads to the deaths of hundreds/thousands of innocents… I consider that a moral failing. How about you?
This is the same bullshit take propagandists and Musk himself are spreading.
Musk sabotaged an active military operation in an effort to save Russian assets and materials, by disabling access to Starlink in that area, to halt the operation. And then refused to undo what he did.
All to protect Russian assets in an illegal undeclared war of annexation where Russia is the aggressor.
Musks actions enabled the death of thousands of civilians in Ukraine and likely will cause far more through his actions which extend how long this illegal invasion will continue.
Musk should be stripped of his US citizenship and booted right back to South Africa. America stands by Ukraine, South Africa tries to pretend they are neutral but the agreements they have with Russia and the opinions of rich fuck South Africans like Musk make it clear they stand with Russia.
And anyone who keeps spreading these press releases with his propagandist take on the subject rather than saying how things actually happened, should be ashamed of themselves and monitored until all this is over.
He should be charged with treason or something similar for doing this during wartime to a US ally. Enough of this narcissistic POS.
Yeah the Logan Act is what they could charge him under.
People always mention Elon doing so and so against a NATO ally and therefore it’s treason without ever mentioning the inverse which is Elon aided a war crime for a country who is a direct enemy of the US, which is the real treasonous crime imo.
Private citizens don’t get to make those decisions.
It’s time to nationalize Starlink & SpaceX.
Jesus. It says it all.
He is responsible for the deaths of children.
It’s okay, he plans to replace them with his own progeny. What’s he up to now, 12?
His father is even crazier about this, seriously. His father is very active, creating more muskeets …
Not much of a story, if he wouldn’t be doing it with Elon’s stepsister.
Lol…he switched it off as a personal favor to Putin.
It was never turned on in the first place. Read the article, not the clickbait headlines that have circulated (this one is on point though, credit to BBC)
Doubt it. The smart money says that he did it because he does a ton of business with the Chinese and is very nervous about being seen to actively take sides in a way that would cause them to see him as a potential security threat.
Hey guys, look, this guy can read minds!
It’s clearly speculation, calm down
You would have a point were I simply speculating, but I’m not.
I am simply stating what the most well-informed and knowledgeable sources are saying.
You would know this if you had sanitized and healthy media consumption habits, but you obviously don’t.
Which media sources do you advice ?
I won’t name any specific organizations, but the upshot is that you need to consume a variety of news sources from different countries and in different formats. It also pays to get into very specifically focused news organizations.
Ok…
Correct imo
The up arrow is right there, bud
👎
Go away, trumper.
Censorship is terrible. Except when I want to do it and pretend like I’m the best politician. Then it’s great.
LOL self-defense is escalation now
Musk does what putler tells him to do.
Russia has anti satellite weapons. Why should he risk it for zero reward? At least the defense contractors are getting paid. Elon does it for free.
Yeah, sure. Have you ever heard of ‘reactions to actions’? What do you think would happen if Russia were to start targeting foreign satellites? How confident are you that they actually possess the technology to disable around 2000 out of the 4000 Starlink satellites to clear paths above Russia/Ukraine? Or, what do you think Russia is capable of in this regard? and did you really belive musk does this for free and with no ulterior idea? 😂😂😂, but there’s no such thing as free. Here’s just one example: Link to CNBC article on Pentagon awarding SpaceX a Ukraine contract for Starlink satellite internet https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/pentagon-awards-spacex-with-ukraine-contract-for-starlink-satellite-internet.html
Pretty sure putin owns musk.
Why ISPs need to be neutral. Musk was never elected or appoints be a general. Otis not his place to decide what strikes happen or not. The blood of the people those ships have attacked are now on his hands.
From my understanding, he didn’t pull the rug, instead he just never turned on satellites that he never said he would turn on
He did in fact “pull the rug”
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
The escalation he was trying to avoid is shelling children. Elon Musk is why I hope hell is real.
Musk is really speed running having his LEO satelites nationalized
Now there’s a great idea. Especially since he never would have built SoaceX without so much public support via NASA.
Get fucked, you boot licking weasel.
