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Notes -
2 months ago:
Though it does seems he was in Ukraine at some point
Wild claims on his twitter seem consistent with him being a high-agency crazy:
I mean no offense here but some random “they them” with 700 followers and a rainbow flag in their name doesn’t seem like an official spokesthem for the Ukrainian military[1]. Here’s another equally uncredible person saying the opposite: https://x.com/raheemkassam/status/1835440928074736007
Also your first link had like 10 different redirects and popups and stuff. Here is just a direct link: https://x.com/v8mile/status/1804097069876916506
[1]: what I mean is that this person seems focused on some sort of gender crusade. An equivalent would be linking me to a page dedicated to the San Francisco 49ers football team, but that wants to talk authoritatively on Iranian nuclear policy.
Here's a couple other people who had anything to say about him before today (you have to manually click "Search" unfortunately), all on the /r/volunteersforukraine subreddit. As a cautious heuristic I'd consider any random person who had anything at all to say about him before today to be more credible than any random person who has anything at all to say about him after today.
Bonus from that search: here's a reddit account of his that nobody else seems to have found yet.
He was also in a NYT article in March 2023
The thing about western volunteers in Ukraine, which is a scene I've looked into before, is that anybody can just show up and do and claim whatever, it's all incredibly ad-hoc, and it massively disproportionately attracts high-agency crazy people.
I linked xcancel because it's currently a functioning way to read twitter without an account, it's a straightforward mirror of twitter. I've never encountered popups on it, though it has a single layer of bot check redirect thing that kicks in on new visits or every few hours of use.
lmao, "TaiwanForiegnLegion?" So he wasn't just a (attempted) Ukraine volunteer, he also wanted to volunteer for Taiwan? And then he goes off on his own to shoot Trump?
Yeah. "attracts high-agency crazy people" indeed.
But hey, give him credit for "taking heroic responsibility" like a good rationalist. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R4f4RdGBdZsPzyJYk/a-discussion-of-heroic-responsibility)
edit: he has a website too! https://taiwanforeignlegion.com/. And it's really crazy, just a giant block of text with no paragraphs.
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If you had asked me beforehand which special interest would be most likely to produce radicals who try to kill Trump, I would not have guessed Ukraine. Trying to make sense of it in hindsight, maybe the fact that volunteers for Ukraine tend to be violence-oriented boosts their likelihood of committing violence.
Trump has been pretty vocal about ending the war. I’d go as far as saying it’s one of his main talking points.
Frankly I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of this.
If you ignore most of what he or his campaign says, I suppose. It certainly doesn't make his platform, or his campaign website, or most of his speeches, and when more distant campaign associates raise end-the-war proposals, they often come with caveats like 'and if Russia doesn't agree to what we think is reasonable, big increases in Ukraine aid.'
Trump has repeatedly said that, if elected, he will negotiate an end to the war before he even takes office.
Presumably what this means is telling Ukraine they get no more assistance until they agree to a truce.
Trump has also said that if Russia did not agree to his terms he would give more assistance to Ukraine, so the presumption would not only be unfounded, but false.
Where have you seen him say this?
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