Republican Senator Lindsey Graham suggested at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend that Trump’s demand was a clever ploy to bolster declining popular support for the Ukrainian cause. “He can go to the American people and say, ‘Ukraine is not a burden, it is a benefit,’” he said.

I continue to be amazed by how frequently the entire spectrum from mainstream liberal regular conservative to Trumpist conservative fascist fall back on a line which is tantamount to “they’re not tricking you, they’re tricking someone else! Totally trustworthy!”

This from the same people who told you to inject disinfectant and are actively distancing themselves from international medical consensus.

Bill Burr’s project to turn every mansion into Luigi’s Mansion

Without knowing the finer details, my assumption would be that it’s some kind of risk/reward tradeoff.

Ok the nuclear risk is higher, but causing chaos in nuclear security could create opportunities like giving Trump or Musk more direct access to the nukes or removing people who might have prevented them from using them, thereby granting them more personal leverage. This would be in keeping with the Project 2025 aligned executive orders and such.

There might even be commercial opportunities for Musk: “oh well the state management of nuclear security was super inefficient, ApocalypseX will do it”

Remember disaster capitalism is a thing.

I think Hanlon’s razor is a false dichotomy here. Neither stupidity nor malice are required to explain self-interest, which is the far more likely explanation given the people involved and their actions up to this point.

Honestly just proprietary driver, steam and proton works really well for me on stock Fedora workstation.

the guy who thinks detonating masses of nuclear warheads on a planet is likely to make it more habitable rather than less

Yeah I used to use Ubuntu as a Linux desktop a few years ago. I just came back to install Fedora on my desktop and the whole process was super easy. Even for gaming, Nvidia drivers, Steam with proton, etc. all set up with zero command line interaction, troubleshooting or even looking up guides or anything. It was intuitive and works.

Literally the hardest part was I couldn’t find my USB stick and ended up improvising with an old SD card as installation media.

The compatibility for gaming on Linux today is generally really good. The whole experience is really polished.

Yep, it makes sense when you consider the real nature of management and why it actually exists.

A rich man starts a company. He hires 12 people under him. He’s working a bit harder than he’d hoped, he’s constantly fielding questions and such but all is well. He needs to hire two more people. This is too many for him to manage directly, so he appoints two people to manage the other twelve as two teams of 6. All is well again.

They expand up to 30 people and suddenly they find the two managers are too stretched again! So another manager has to be introduced. When the company is over about 150 people, we even need multiple layers of management to keep this whole thing afloat as suddenly there are too many managers reporting to the founder or to the managers.

Yet at no point does the person who owns the company agree to give up any real control. If someone sets a budget he doesn’t like, he gives that control of the budget to someone else. Everyone in that hierarchy is acting on behalf of the owners under this arrangement.

The managers are just sat there with the mandate to make employees do more work under ever-increasing resource constraints, in the name of profit maximisation.

The management hierarchy functions as little more than a way of getting the owner’s instructions down to the employees by people who can interpret them as such, and to feed issues back to whatever level has the ability to deal with them (or declare them not an issue, as is often the case).

Oh great, let’s just give Farage and co. a big old back door to spy on us when he inevitably stumbles into power. Can’t see that being abused in any way.

The very stretched use of the word “voluntary” here also leads one to inspect the meaning of “departure”.

I think there’s a balance, in that if everybody suppressed that speech and refused to take that risk of criticising then those corrupt and powerful state actors would be unchallenged.

They can then become even more powerful and may continue to encroach into private life and speech. While it may be necessary to defend yourself on the one hand, hiding entirely may also present additional dangers.