There’s all sorts of other crazy options to consider like simply “stretching” this term out for a while. Any emergency will do.

South Korea should try out the people’s razor on this one, just to make sure execution is still bad.

I think there’s a bit of a political drive to try to label chronic conditions as “lifestyle” diseases tbh, hence the loose definitions.

I don’t really understand how this pans out like that. The US seems to be tanking its own economy at an alarming rate, Russia is still basically a heavily militarised Italy in terms of its economy. Europe is going to suffer but it seems like the only leverage Russia really has is military and gas reserves (which Europe has since hedged against after the energy price spike) at this point.

If you ask me the whole alliance between Russia and the US is notable mostly because it creates a one-sided nuclear hegemony where they each have significant missile defences and other countries don’t have enough arms to overwhelm those, essentially undermining the MAD idea. But you know that’s not economic, that’s “might is right.”

It might not be nutritionally optimal or particularly appetising but like 9 cans of tinned meal of your choice will get you through that kind of period and won’t take a lot of space.

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!”

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.

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

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