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Elon Musk's Shadow Rule
tl;dr After initially donating Starlink terminals and providing free internet at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Musk realized that it's actually pretty expensive to keep it on in a warzone, and asked the Pentagon to help pay for it, or he would turn it off. Eventually they hammered out a contract. Also, he proposed a peace plan involving Russia keeping some territory, which was roundly booed.
By all accounts Starlink has been a massive boon to the Ukrainians, since their ability to communicate basically hinges on starlink. But because he wasn't willing to keep providing it for free, he's a pro putin shill and a traitor to the US, and the service should be nationalized. It's not like the US and other governments haven't dragged their feet on providing the best firepower (ATACMS, for example).
Perhaps the counteroffensive grinding to a halt means a new scapegoat is needed.
Most of this article is just a biography of Musk. While it's somewhat interesting, I would have liked to hear more about how he's become embedded in the world of national security.
He had a really bad PR oopsie a while back where he was indeed parroting Putin's propaganda, and he basically called for Ukraine to unilaterally surrender and run "referenda" in areas that the Russians have been aggressively ethnically cleansing. He rightfully received pushback for that. The bit about him being a "traitor to the US" is just you bashing a strawman.
how long will it take ukraine to take back those disputed regions, if ever? at some point concessions will probably have to be made on both sides. even if you disagree, these questions are legitimate
While the current counteroffensive is certainly very lackluster, it's silly to just extrapolate a straight line on the rate of progress and thereafter assume nothing will change.
Also, sliders is correct: Putin has not offered peace on the current lines. Any ceasefire would essentially necessitate Ukraine's unilateral surrender, which would mean giving up lots of territory they currently control.
You're right that it would be silly to just find the angle of the line on the chart and zoom off into infinity - but luckily we don't actually have to do that. Serious people who are interested in these kinds of conflicts can actually take the historical context and modern situation into account when doing their extrapolations... it's just that when you do that you tend to arrive at conclusions unpopular with the PMC. Conclusions like "Ukraine has zero chance of winning this war", "The counteroffensive was a massive failure that wasted lots of Ukrainian lives" and "Putin's propaganda is substantially less effective at influencing popular opinion in the west than western propaganda". People have been advocating for peace and negotiation rather than continued conflict because they (correctly) view the continuing bloodshed as futile, and throwing more Ukrainian lives into the blender is just going to make things worse when the fighting comes to an end. If I actually hated Ukrainians, I'd encourage the US military to send them more fancy toys to encourage them to fight to the death in a suicidally quixotic quest to maximise shareholder returns in the US military industrial complex and degrade Russian military capability.
And just to show that I'm serious about these claims, I'll throw 200 USD in monero into escrow with the bet that Ukraine does not regain Crimea and the breakaway republics by the end of hostilities. If I'm just swallowing Putin's propaganda then this is free money sitting on the table, just waiting for you to pick it up and take it. But I will note that I haven't encountered a single person who believes the western propaganda enough to actually put any money on the line - to me it feels remarkably similar to people talking about how awful racism is then moving their children into 90% white suburbs.
People who are not weird Internet guys don't take bets. Betting because you believe something is going to happen is not a normie thing outside a few restricted cases like sports bets, and even then, that's done more out of the hope that one's team will win rather than the belief that they will.
To be fair, not sure this is true, especially in things like horse racing.
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