His literal words were “destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.” Your deliberate omission of what he did call for, so the reader might decide for himself whether this purported distinction is indeed with a salient difference, is far more misleading than the extremely close paraphrase.
For further context, EY’s recent post contains this explanation:
So I am misquoted (that is, they fabricate a quote I did not say, which is to say, they lie) as calling for “b*mbing datacenters”, two words I did not utter. In the first 2023 proposal in TIME magazine, I wrote the words “be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike”. I was only given one day by TIME to write it—otherwise it wouldn’t have been ‘topical’—but I had thought I was saying that part quite carefully. Even quoted out of context, I thought, this ought to make very clear that I was talking about state-sanctioned use of force to preserve a previously successful ban from disruption. And absolutely not some guy with a truck bomb, attacking one datacenter in their personal country while all the other datacenters kept running.
It’s like if I say that in the event of a full-scale nuclear attack on us by China, we should respond with nuclear weapons, and you say that I called for nuking China. No I didn’t.
(and the actual thing that I said doesn’t contain anything in the direction of what you claim it does, so if someone says “No, Mikhail did not call for nuking China”, it is not really valid to say that they’re “deliberately omitting” the actual quote, or to say that what they’re doing is more misleading.)
(No, the omission wasn’t deliberate; I didn’t even consider including words irrelevant to my main point.)
His literal words were “be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike”. As something that, as a policy, would be required (to hopefully prevent any datacenters from appearing in an unmonitored fashion). In a discussion of the level of response to the problem that would be needed.
He does not in fact call for existing datacenters to be bombed, especially by individuals/unlawfully. He is calling for an international regime where rogue datacenters do not appear because signatories of an international treaty would be willing to destroy it by an airstrike.
His literal words are very easy to take out of context and misrepresent, but he is very much not calling for immediate destruction of any datacenters, and in general he is calling for a policy that would never need to be used.
His literal words were “destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.” Your deliberate omission of what he did call for, so the reader might decide for himself whether this purported distinction is indeed with a salient difference, is far more misleading than the extremely close paraphrase.
For further context, EY’s recent post contains this explanation:
It’s like if I say that in the event of a full-scale nuclear attack on us by China, we should respond with nuclear weapons, and you say that I called for nuking China. No I didn’t.
(and the actual thing that I said doesn’t contain anything in the direction of what you claim it does, so if someone says “No, Mikhail did not call for nuking China”, it is not really valid to say that they’re “deliberately omitting” the actual quote, or to say that what they’re doing is more misleading.)
(No, the omission wasn’t deliberate; I didn’t even consider including words irrelevant to my main point.)
His literal words were “be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike”. As something that, as a policy, would be required (to hopefully prevent any datacenters from appearing in an unmonitored fashion). In a discussion of the level of response to the problem that would be needed.
He does not in fact call for existing datacenters to be bombed, especially by individuals/unlawfully. He is calling for an international regime where rogue datacenters do not appear because signatories of an international treaty would be willing to destroy it by an airstrike.
His literal words are very easy to take out of context and misrepresent, but he is very much not calling for immediate destruction of any datacenters, and in general he is calling for a policy that would never need to be used.