It certainly would have kept the leaks in the news cycle for much longer and not delegitimized his motives. It’s anyone’s guess whether that would have had any real effect on policy.
If he stayed in the US he would've been thrown into a dark, black hole for all eternity to be tortured by the same types of sociopaths in the US gov't who committed atrocities like Abu Ghraib. I'll take being a Russian "asset" over the wrath of the US intelligence services any day of the week.
I doubt he could have been disappeared after all of the attention. Chelsea Manning wasn’t disappeared despite causing a similar black eye for the US government.
I’d argue he is more physical danger now being in a mafia state near an active war zone.
That said, I wouldn’t come back and subject myself the whims of this administration.
If Lunduke is calling something a conspiracy theory, it probably isn’t. This guy has been playing for a right wing grifting gig but he’s just too unlikable.
He wanted them deported for camping permanently in public spaces? If you think people have no choice to do that based on their race we both know who the racist is.
Is there already a law against camping in public spaces? Apply that law. Any treatment of groups other than according to the law (when the law itself makes no mention of a discriminating attribute) is racism/sexism/etc. One law for all right?
Are you under the impression that I am the co-founder of GNOME?
I was speaking to the conspiracy theory here, that the donations to Omarchy are just a passthrough to unsavory organizations.
It’s, at least, plausible to me for two reasons.
1. Omarchy is just a pre-configured Arch install and doesn’t require large donations for maintenance.
2. The donators (Lutke and Dell) are all Trump-adjacent or have expressed authoritarian views in the past. Lutke, for example, advocates stripping poor people of the right to vote and giving the rich more votes.
He has dehumanized minorities and alluded to using violence against them. I’m not interested in debating whether or not that’s fascist or not. It’s shitty behavior indicative of the modern far right.
The conspiracy theory is that these donations aren’t tech related but are dressed up to be. And that I find plausible given the behaviors of the modern right.
- being a last minute insert when Jack Ryan was caught in a sex scandal (who was already fighting an uphill battle with sharing a last name with the corrupt former governor)
- being a carpetbagger (he didn't live in Illinois at any point until running for senate)
- running as a hard-line social conservative in a state where the GOP is torn between appealing to suburban Chicago fiscal conservatives and downstate Illinois social conservatives
And also being a person of colour, which is tough in the "hard-line social conservative" lane, where that is often a negative with those voters. Against another person of colour, who could pick up the other voters for whom it is a positive.
You can see this as an American thing if you want... but you might look at the rest of the world to ask whether you're trying to convince the world to un-invent gunpowder.
If China gave superior paid offerings we might just start transferring all our data over to them instead. Anyways, have we considered building our compute infrastructure in China's backyard instead?
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