[HN Gopher] ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russ...
___________________________________________________________________
ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia from the
internet [pdf]
Author : 0xedb
Score : 450 points
Date : 2022-03-03 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.icann.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.icann.org)
| zelon88 wrote:
| Can't blame Ukraine for trying.
|
| Would it be easier to appeal directly to Tier 1 networks instead?
| netsharc wrote:
| I... can. Seems like the Ukrainian government is on a roll,
| asking anyone and everyone to help hurt Russia and then hoping
| the court of public opinion (aka Twitter rage army) would get
| angry at organizations/governments that don't comply with their
| wishes.
|
| Yeah they are very much entitled to do this, they're getting
| bombed after all... but something about it makes me uneasy. If
| I had a time machine I'd check if in a few decades they'd be
| walking around oppresing their neighbors feeling entitled,
| since they're a victim now.
| shabier wrote:
| Here's a crazier idea; we shouldn't restrict Russia in any way.
| It's almost a bad idea to silence voices, no matter how much we
| disagree with them. If anything, it is more important to
| challenge their propaganda with better, more accurate news
| debunking theirs.
| dangerface wrote:
| Maybe their news debunks ours, can you prove there isn't a
| holocaust going on in Ukraine right now? It's almost
| impossible to disprove a negative, and any reasonable
| argument can be dismissed off hand as a lie.
|
| In fact if there was a holocaust in Ukraine right now being
| perpetrated by the west wouldn't they just deny it?
|
| The point of Russian propaganda is to create noise it doesn't
| have to be right it just has to make noise.
| megous wrote:
| Maybe if their news were independent.
|
| Holocaust: It happened mostly away from the cities, so
| that's likely how it would be happenig now, too. So if
| Russians wanted to reveal that that is happening, all that
| would need to happen was for them to send some
| scouts/spies/infiltrators to the locations where the mass
| extermination is happening and make a bunch of videos and
| publish them. There would be no need to shell and try to
| siege cities, shoot into civilians, etc.
|
| Instead of this, all we get is a ton of imagery of
| destroyed Ukranian cities, and killings of civilians.
|
| We can't maybe disprove the negative, but we don't need to.
| Russia needs to prove the positive.
| iso1631 wrote:
| It takes far more effort to debunk than to generate, it also
| takes time, and the debunking doesn't spread virally
|
| It's not a solution in the real world
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Assuming this propaganda is generated by government trolls,
| it's pretty easy for their handlers to provide them with a
| VPN that goes through an unlocked country. Blocking their
| direct access solves nothing.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Have you heard of the eternal september?
| zelon88 wrote:
| Ok, but what does Russia offer the rest of the internet
| besides badly written malware, WordPress comment spiders,
| untrue news articles, shady hosting providers, failed login
| attempts and honeypots full of fuzzing robots?
|
| The Russian government actively promotes hacking against the
| west and refuses to prosecute anyone for it.
| shabier wrote:
| > Ok, but what does Russia offer the rest of the internet
| besides badly written malware ... honeypots full of fuzzing
| robots?
|
| Does that even matter? The access to the general internet
| isn't something you have to "earn". You're not more
| entitled to be in this space more than the next person
| regardless of your contribution, beliefs or identity.
|
| > The Russian government actively promotes hacking against
| the west and refuses to prosecute anyone for it.
|
| Our government friends at the NSA are equally guilty of
| that as well, I'm not seeing much outrage over that either.
| rosndo wrote:
| > Our government friends at the NSA are equally guilty of
| that as well, I'm not seeing much outrage over that
| either.
|
| Indeed, all those NSA ransomware attacks on hospitals
| have to stop!
|
| Perhaps they're not actually equally guilty and the NSA
| is far more careful with their approach than the
| Russians?
|
| The NotPetya wiper worm was released by the Russian
| government, the NSA has never been accused of anything
| similar.
|
| This kind of false equivalency is nothing but dishonest,
| you should be ashamed of yourself.
| foverzar wrote:
| Why are you repeating a propaganda rhetoric that was
| designed specifically to target people who don't
| understand how computer networks and infosec works?
| rosndo wrote:
| Go on, explain.
| zelon88 wrote:
| > The NotPetya wiper worm was released by the Russian
| government, the NSA has never been accused of anything
| similar.
|
| Indeed. When the US released Stuxnet it was specifically
| made to be discreet and dormant unless activated on a
| specific target.
|
| Russia just throws a pipe bomb into the room and hopes
| the door is thick enough to withstand the blast.
| [deleted]
| Sophira wrote:
| > The NotPetya wiper worm was released by the Russian
| government, the NSA has never been accused of anything
| similar.
|
| Of course it has. The NSA was accused of created Stuxnet,
| the worm that targeted Iran industrial control systems
| (such as nuclear power plants). Wikipedia[0] says:
|
| > On 1 June 2012, an article in The New York Times said
| that Stuxnet is part of a US and Israeli intelligence
| operation named Operation Olympic Games, devised by the
| NSA under President George W. Bush and executed under
| President Barack Obama.
|
| and:
|
| > A Wired magazine article about US General Keith B.
| Alexander stated: "And he and his cyber warriors have
| already launched their first attack. The cyber weapon
| that came to be known as Stuxnet was created and built by
| the NSA in partnership with the CIA and Israeli
| intelligence in the mid-2000s."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
| rosndo wrote:
| zelon88 wrote:
| Stuxnet was a masterpiece of restraint and engineering.
| It was discreet, controlled, effective, and it didn't
| break the entire internet.
|
| Petya was an international crisis.
| zelon88 wrote:
| I believe you missed an important point.
|
| > Our government friends at the NSA are equally guilty of
| that as well, I'm not seeing much outrage over that
| either.
|
| Not the same. In Russia the only cybercrime that goes to
| court is Russian on Russian crime. Crime against the west
| isn't a crime. Russians are allowed to write malware and
| defraud targets... just so long as those targets are not
| Russian.
|
| If I ripped off 10,000 Russian grandmothers as an
| American; the FBI would find me and prosecute me.
|
| > You're not more entitled to be in this space more than
| the next person regardless of your contribution, beliefs
| or identity.
|
| You probably typed your message on an Intel, AMD, or ARM
| CPU running on 95% American code. Russians are entitled
| to what the west decides to give them unless they want to
| do a better job themselves.
| foverzar wrote:
| > Not the same. In Russia the only cybercrime that goes
| to court is Russian on Russian crime. Crime against the
| west isn't a crime.
|
| Nonsense, that's not how it works.
|
| > Russians are allowed to write malware and defraud
| targets... just so long as those targets are not Russian.
|
| Nope. Article 273 of the Criminal Code.
|
| > If I ripped off 10,000 Russian grandmothers as an
| American; the FBI would find me and prosecute me.
|
| Unlikely.
|
| It seems like you are not entirely aware that we don't
| actually have functioning global anti-crybercrime
| mechanisms. If you think FBI would care what you do with
| Russian part of the internet, you are deluded. Try
| hosting something in Russia, you will quickly change your
| assumptions of the threat model.
|
| Really, it's surprising to see people on Hackernews who
| don't understand how infosec is a thing and why
| cybercrime actually works, when technology-wise
| everything should be more or less traceable.
| shabier wrote:
| > Russians are entitled to what the west decides to give
| them unless they want to do a better job themselves.
|
| Please get off your high horse, that's just disgusting.
| Yikes.
| seanw444 wrote:
| That's a very conversationally-bankrupt response.
| ttybird2 wrote:
| Before zstd existed I was a big fan of LZMA (Created by
| Igor Pavlov). There are some more software over at
| https://github.com/igoradamenko/awesome-made-by-russians.
|
| You can make similar assumptions about a lot of different
| ethnic groups.
| fsniper wrote:
| nginx?
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| shabier wrote:
| > It doesn't work. > Look at Trump, no? pack of lies from
| start to finish and half of the USA believes him.
|
| And they're entitled to that. If anything, we're to blame
| for not being able to make a convincing enough argument
| against Trump.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I had an eye opening moment about how the press covers
| Donald Trump's statements. Just a few days ago on a podcast
| Donald Trump said _" Putin declares it as independent. Oh,
| that 's wonderful"_
|
| And now there are several articles from major publications
| implying he genuinely thinks it is wonderful.
|
| _"As a rule, the number of countries where leading
| officials see the invasion of Ukraine as "wonderful" is
| quite small."_ -msnbc
|
| _" Trump has long expressed admiration for Putin, and this
| week described his war strategy in Ukraine as "wonderful"
| and "genius."_ -Yahoo
|
| Interesting thing is, if you listen to the podcast audio
| Trump is obviously being sarcastic. Have you ever responded
| to bad news by saying "Oh that's _great_ " and then had
| someone literally interpret your statement as you thinking
| the bad news was actually great? If these journalists had a
| modicum of integrity they'd interpret him with context and
| understand that was sarcasm.
|
| I don't think this will actually cause your opinion of
| Trump to change, but I'm stunned at how easy it is to warp
| the perception of the man and how he talks.
| dboreham wrote:
| It wasn't sarcasm.
| zelon88 wrote:
| That one line was sarcastic.
|
| But you are obviously dillusional if you think this isn't
| praise... https://www.clayandbuck.com/president-trump-
| with-cb-from-mar...
|
| "Putin is now saying, "It's independent," a large section
| of Ukraine. I said, "How smart is that?" And he's gonna
| go in and be a peacekeeper. That's strongest peace
| force... We could use that on our southern border. That's
| the strongest peace force I've ever seen. There were more
| army tanks than I've ever seen. They're gonna keep peace
| all right. No, but think of it. Here's a guy who's very
| savvy... I know him very well. Very, very well.
|
| By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I
| been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have
| happened. But here's a guy that says, you know, "I'm
| gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent," he
| used the word "independent," "and we're gonna go out and
| we're gonna go in and we're gonna help keep peace." You
| gotta say that's pretty savvy. And you know what the
| response was from Biden? There was no response. They
| didn't have one for that. No, it's very sad. Very sad."
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Okay, I am delusional. I'm delusional because I can
| evaluate statements from the man using a different
| context.
|
| True to form, he's speaking with his usual Trumpian
| style. I'm going to distill the essence of it: "I'm great
| and my political opponents are totally inept. Putin is
| very smart and he is taking advantage of our leader's
| stupidity. You need someone smarter and savvier than
| Putin, me and only me."
|
| Again, if you understand how the man talks you can see
| the comments in a different light.
| stickfigure wrote:
| That is also a mischaracterization, it wasn't
| _sarcasm_.[1] Trump was demonstrating his respect and
| admiration for Putin. While not quite as bad as literally
| believing that the invasion was wonderful, it 's still
| incredibly offensive. And looking dumber and dumber every
| day that the Ukranians hold out and NATO gets stronger.
|
| Trump's problem isn't that he's pro-Russian (though, that
| has yet to be proven one way or another). Trump's problem
| is that he fawns over authoritarians and thinks that the
| West's democratic principles make it weak. Just like
| Putin.
|
| [1] noun, the use of irony to mock or convey contempt.
| criddell wrote:
| Does that ever work for a population? How do you get your
| version of the truth in front of people who support a
| different truth? They generally aren't looking for it.
| netsharc wrote:
| There are protesters in Russia, cutting them off from the
| Internet would destroy their capabilities to communicate
| and organize.
|
| Which may happen anyway from Putin's side if he declares
| martial law, which is rumored might happen tomorrow.
| criddell wrote:
| It would be a set back for sure. They would have to
| organize like Americans did for civil rights protests and
| Vietnam war protests.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Does that ever work for a population?
|
| Yes; in fact, on this specific population. The collapse of
| the Soviet Union was, in part, helped by increased access
| to information about conditions outside of it, and to
| external goods and services.
| phailhaus wrote:
| That's the same line that was used to defend Trump's use of
| Twitter, and look at how effective his ban has been. The
| reason this wouldn't be a good idea isn't because it silences
| Russia's government, but because it prevents Russians from
| accessing the rest of the world. If it was possible to
| silence just Russian propaganda, it would work.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I obviously support Ukraine in their fight against invaders (and
| I am Russian born), but cutting the internet from Russia would be
| actually more useful for the Russian government than Ukraine.
| Russian government just today closed the last independent radio
| station, blocked the website of an independent tv station , so
| blocking the internet would just be applauded by the Russian
| state for doing what they wanted to do themselves.
| varenc wrote:
| The proposal sent to ICANN isn't about just cutting off
| Russia's internet from the outside world. It would have
| disrupted most all internal Russian government-approved usage
| of the internet as well. If the Russian gov preferred to kill
| all internet usage, they could have already done so. They
| clearly want internet access in some form.
|
| But I absolutely agree that ICANN made the right decision. It
| would have set a horrible precedent.
| 542458 wrote:
| I mostly agree, but I do dispute one thing. While
| technologically there's no difference between the Russian
| government disabling their Internet routing and ICANN doing
| it, politically it's wildly different.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Couldn't agree more with what you said here. I have split
| feelings on punitive punishments like this. I like many others
| have family in Russia, anytime you take a punitive measure like
| this, sure it may punish those responsible, but it's really
| just going to punish every day people that just want to contact
| their families.
|
| Russia getting cut off from financial services is also a huge
| problem for every day people with families there. Right when
| the Ruble collapses, we have fewer and fewer means of
| supporting our families over there. I get the why, we are
| trying to cut off Putin and the oligarchs at the knees, but
| it's sad that everyone else is getting swept up in it.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I don't exactly buy this because if that were the case, why
| wouldn't Russia just cut off their internet themselves? And
| maybe blame it on the West if anyone asked.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Because people will riot if it is done by the Russian
| government. But if it is done by the other side, they'll just
| play victim and be secretly extremely happy about it, now
| controlling all information sources in the country.
| skolos wrote:
| How Russian people would know about this? You are
| underestimating efficiency of Russian propaganda machine.
| Russian government does not shy away from inflicting damage
| onto Russian people and pointing finger to the West.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| More importantly (IMO) I support ICANN. If _they_ think it
| makes sense to cut off Russia from the Internet, I trust them.
| They don 't think it makes sense, so I trust them.
|
| Do I think they made the right call? Yeah, but I'm a dum dum on
| the Internet who has thought about this for all of 5 minutes.
| There might be some better form of this argument that's more
| nuanced than I have time to understand, so I want to be able to
| leave it up to ICANN to figure stuff out like this and do
| what's best.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| Be careful with that kind of reasoning. Appeal to authority
| is a fallacy that can bite you in the ass. Pretty sure many
| Russians trust Putin to make the right choices.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > Appeal to authority is a fallacy
|
| Yes, but it isn't a fallacy which is occurring here.
| Provisionally accepting the reasoned opinion of a domain
| expert is a rational choice in situations where re-
| evaluating everything from first principles is not an
| option. This is not an appeal to authority unless their
| conclusion is taken to be true simply _because_ they are an
| authority, without regard for how that conclusion was
| reached. There is naturally room for error; you 're
| trusting in the expert's skill, experience, logic,
| motivation, and above all honesty to collaboratively
| assembly an argument larger than you could put together on
| your own, and each party must do their part. If the
| expert's reasoning is deceptive, flawed, or misinterpreted,
| then the argument falls apart--but you're not just taking
| their word as fact, you're trusting them to produce
| rational conclusions from the evidence in the same way that
| you would if you had their knowledge and experience (and
| unlimited time).
|
| Naturally, some experts are more trustworthy in any given
| domain than others. Anyone relying on Putin for conclusions
| on just about anything (even his own self-interest) is
| likely to be disappointed.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I'm not appealing to authority; I'm not agreeing with them
| _because_ they 're the authority, I'm deferring to them
| because I trust their decision making process.
| slim wrote:
| I'm curious about what makes you trust the process so
| much. Is it a perfect track record ? or is it a
| particularly transparent or innovative process ?
| antifa wrote:
| Probably waiting for a more compelling augment, from
| either side.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Working with their representatives (admittedly only
| tangentially, mostly via observation) during my time at
| ARIN, as well as their prior body of decision making work
| and how it's positively influenced the outcome of the
| Internet as a whole.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia from the
| internet
|
| Isn't that headline patently false clickbait? The second
| paragraph:
|
| "You have asked that ICANN target Russia's access to the Internet
| by revoking specific countrycode top-level domains operated from
| within Russia, arranging the revocation of SSL certificates
| issued within those domains, and shutting down a subset of root
| servers located in Russia."
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I do think there is a difference between "sever" and "disable
| Russian TLD's". Don't they collect a fee to create TLD's? And
| therefore are directly engaging in commerce with Russia?
| treesknees wrote:
| To answer your question, no it's not a fee.
|
| According to the .ru ccTLD agreement documents [1], the
| "Coordination Center for TLD RU" (the entity which operates
| the .ru TLD) voluntarily agrees to pay to ICANN $30k USD
| annually. The document is worded that ICANN's obligation to
| continue letting them use it will cease if the payment isn't
| made, but it also states "this review will take into account
| all relevant circumstances."
|
| The way I read this is it's an agreement to donate per year
| to cover the infrastructure/overhead of ICANN, but doesn't
| state it's a contractual fee or payment _for_ the ccTLD. If I
| had to guess, if this payment does fall under
| sanctions/restrictions, that would be covered under "relevant
| circumstances" to which ICANN wouldn't just pull the rug out
| from Russia in the name of Internet stability.
|
| [1] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/icann-ru-
| letters...
| netheril96 wrote:
| The West is quick to abandon their own ideals.
|
| All the Western cutting ties with Russia has made most people I
| know (we are all Chinese) much more favorable towards the Great
| Firewall. If the West cut the ties with China, the damage is much
| less given that we are already in an effective LAN.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > The West is quick to abandon their own ideals.
|
| The response here would suggest the opposite.
| netheril96 wrote:
| The people here do not hold power. Those who do have
| abandoned the ideals.
| VectorLock wrote:
| That isn't the Great Firewall's doing. Internet Protocols are
| designed that isolated networks will still work.
|
| The Great Firewall just makes you used to not having free
| access to information, which would happen when a network is
| isolated.
| alphabetting wrote:
| What about the West sanctioning Russia makes blocking access to
| information more favorable to you and your friends?
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| jacknews wrote:
| LOL, it's OK if they cut off our sunshine, because we're used
| to living in the dark anyway.
| netheril96 wrote:
| With the Great Firewall, the Chinese have developed its own
| sunshine. Less quality, but sufficient for most people
| nonetheless.
| olibhel wrote:
| No country should be able to cut off anyone else's sunshine
| (or Internet). Internet, the western version of it, was not
| built and shared with the world with this disclaimer that we
| will cut it off if we feel like it.
|
| If ICANN kicks out a country, we'd very soon see the end of
| ICANN because other countries will have no trust left in the
| organization.
| jacknews wrote:
| I agree, it is a universal service that should be available
| to everyone under any circumstance.
|
| I'm just ridiculing the comment that said 'go ahead, we
| don't need it'.
| scythe wrote:
| Any ideals, anywhere, from the USSR to the US to Thailand or
| Oman, will always be subject to decay. The law of impermanence
| (Wu Chang ) holds fast in politics because humans are
| forgetful. Societies must refresh and rebuild their ideals as
| their inertia is lost to time.
|
| When this happens in the West, you see a lot of political
| discord, as is occurring right now. But when it happened in the
| USSR, discontent built up behind the scenes until it exploded
| in a series of revolts that led to a decade of stagnation and
| corruption in eastern Europe.
|
| So, critique appreciated, but I'll take our flaws over your
| flaws.
| qwertox wrote:
| I don't understand you. The content within the Great Firewall
| is a subset of the Internet, at least from the Chinese
| perspective, as I don't know what I can't see from the outside
| where I am. I also don't know what you can't see outside of it,
| but I assume that the censorship is limited to certain
| political topics and probably adult content.
|
| Russia has not been cut off from the internet. It is suffering
| highly focused DDoS attacks which are not originating due to
| any type of sanction or new law, or as a protest measure from
| companies. These are actions of individual hackers or hacker
| groups. Compared to the actions of REvil or Conti, these are
| absolutely harmless.
|
| The western ideal of the internet is very well described in
| that rejection letter, which might as well become a historical
| document in what it is trying to express. Now, what commercial
| network providers decide to route or not, is a very different
| story. But, from the looks of it, no routes have been dropped,
| and should that happen, peering agreements could provide
| workarounds, even around countries. It's usually the non-
| western countries which are implementing blocking so that their
| citizens have a restricted access, not the other way around.
|
| You seem to confuse the internet with the global market. From
| the perspective of the global markets' current sanctions, I can
| obviously understand your concern and motivation to be prepared
| in the future. But we are also concerned, because the harm goes
| both ways. It's an almost unnecessary recession which will
| affect many areas, where specially spaceflight-related
| decisions are already being very noticeable events, since they
| are so highly dependent on collaboration. Collaboration which
| was successful, until now.
|
| The Minsk Agreement could have been implemented within one or
| two years, the will to do so was there.
| shabier wrote:
| Regardless of how we feel about the current conflict between the
| countries, it is absolutely essential to keep the internet open
| and accessible to everyone, including those who we don't agree
| with.
| samstave wrote:
| Absolutely!
|
| How else will we get information of Bad Deeds (TM) of state
| actors or otherwise when SHTF.
| samstave wrote:
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| Consider; Russia is invading Ukraine.
|
| If they keep at it, they will win; the military balance is too
| much in their favour.
|
| Having conquered, they will then block out all content which
| carries truth and replace it with propaganda, just as it is in
| Russia.
|
| You argue we must keep the Internet open and accessable to
| Russia, both in this situation, and for it to be used in this
| way.
| simiones wrote:
| No one on Earth could stop the Internet working inside
| Russia. The only thing that could be done, in principle, by
| ICANN and EU/US service providers is to block out all content
| coming in or out of Russia. This will have exactly the effect
| of blocking out all content which carries (EU/US) truth and
| replace it with (Russian) propaganda.
| varenc wrote:
| > The only thing that could be done, in principle, by ICANN
| and EU/US service providers is to block out all content
| coming in or out of Russia
|
| I don't think this is true. The root DNS servers ICANN runs
| could stop handling requests for anything on the .ru/.su
| Russian TLDs. Though Russia runs the .ru servers
| internally, from ripn.net, there's still reliance on the
| root servers to point there. This would break Russian
| internal access to their own services.
|
| If you run `dig +trace government.ru` you can see your
| first query is to the various "*.root-servers.net" name
| servers. When I did this my queries went like this:
| A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET -> B.DNS.RIPN.NET -> NS2.GOV.RU
|
| That first step, contacting the centralized root servers,
| is where ICANN could have killed .ru domain lookups. (also
| my knowledge of DNS is shaky, so someone correct me if I'm
| wrong)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Russian ISP DNS servers would just do whatever is
| necessary to make it work, up to not respecting ICANN
| chinathrow wrote:
| > No one on Earth could stop the Internet working inside
| Russia.
|
| Without physical intervention.
| gorbachev wrote:
| You're not going to get physical intervention on Russia
| <-> China connectivity.
| gurumeditations wrote:
| No it isn't. No one needs to access any website in Russia or
| Belarus. The international internet is totally unnecessary and
| nobody will suffer for cutting them out.
|
| In fact, the world will benefit greatly from cutting out Russia
| from the internet! Imagine all the horrible cyberattacks and
| thefts of sensitive private info, money, ransomware attacks on
| cities schools and hospitals, and national security secrets
| stolen. China and Russia both deserve to be removed from the
| internet. They are abusive malicious actors using their access
| to the internet to do nothing but attack the responsible
| internet users.
|
| The naive high horse, think of the slippery slope attitudes
| from know it all HN commenters are part of the downfall of the
| West and freedom and liberty, principles directly opposed by
| those two dictatorships. Those who benefit from those
| principles, yet allow them to be turned around and used by the
| enemy of those principles to destroy those principles, don't
| deserve those principles. Freedom and liberty are privileges
| whose rights belong to those who jealously guard them rather
| than let them be molested and abused by their enemies.
| bool3max wrote:
| You are incredibly naive.
| shmde wrote:
| You act like USA is the pinnacle of freedom and liberty with
| a two party system, systematic racism. Have funded
| wars(iraq,afghan, nam) and terrorist organisations just to
| fill its own pocket and completely destabilized other
| countries for its own profit. With its flawed copyright
| systems, sending legal threats to citizen of countries where
| they don't even have jurisdiction (look piratebay sweden) to
| sinkholing BGP routes for an entire website. So please stop
| acting like the west is the zenith of what freedom and
| liberty should look like.
| darkarmani wrote:
| > In fact, the world will benefit greatly from cutting out
| Russia from the internet! Imagine all the horrible
| cyberattacks and thefts of sensitive private info, money,
| ransomware attacks on cities schools and hospitals, and
| national security secrets stolen. China and Russia both
| deserve to be removed from the internet. They are abusive
| malicious actors using their access to the internet to do
| nothing but attack the responsible internet users.
|
| Can't you already do this if you control your own firewall?
| You can, right now, block all access from IP address ranges
| in Russia and China.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| I agree that this was the right move by ICANN.
|
| There's a discussion to be had about modernization and what
| this means in practical terms. The philosophical internet
| exists in a space unpolluted by things like critical
| infrastructure becoming internet-connected. It's not a safe
| space for these things and was never designed to be one.
|
| Governments have been doing a poor to terrible job of threat
| modeling their critical infrastructure. You saw this in
| Florida[1] and in Texas[2] last year. These sorts of things
| should not be accessible via the Internet.
|
| [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/11/us/florida-water-plant-
| hack/i...
|
| [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/15/us-energy-
| pi...
| amelius wrote:
| > I agree that this was the right move by ICANN.
|
| Should this be decided by ICANN, though?
| BeefWellington wrote:
| As they laid out, it's really not within their mandate nor
| the scope of their operations to do this anyways.
|
| Responding and explaining that is really all they can do.
| judge2020 wrote:
| ICANN has covered all their bases here as most/all rules
| for TLDs don't really apply to ccTLDs or the governments
| that run them since they "own" the ccTLD. This is why
| http://ai./ exists, and the only thing ICAAN has in terms
| of guarantees for .ru is this agreement letter[0]. ICAAN
| specifically states at the end that, even without this
| agreement letter, ICAAN will continue to perform their
| duties to maintain the DNS system.
|
| 0: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/icann-ru-
| letters...
| AviationAtom wrote:
| How exactly does that ai. domain function? I have never
| seen a working URL formatted like that.
| ratww wrote:
| Quick note: the dot at the end is not necessary (at least
| not in Unix), it works without it in
| Safari/Firefox/Chrome plus some tools like
| dig/ping/traceroute. You can test: http://ai/ http://ai./
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| ai is a TLD, and domains technically all end in a "." -
| that is, you're reading this on news.ycombinator.com. ,
| just nobody ever bothers writing the final dot.
| herpderperator wrote:
| I wonder why doesn't Google make a `https://google.`
| since they own that TLD.
| ratww wrote:
| I believe the biggest issue is that it would have to be a
| non-SSL domain, unless Google figure out someone willing
| to sign a certificate for a that. But I also remember
| this being frowned upon by ICANN or some other entity in
| the past. Btw, the dot is not necessary (maybe it is in
| some OSs/browsers): http://ai/
| jaywalk wrote:
| If someone asked you, personally, to cut Russia off from
| the Internet, are you making a "decision" when you reply
| that you can't do it? No, of course you're not. It's simply
| something you don't have the authority/ability to do.
|
| Same with ICANN here.
| amelius wrote:
| Then they should say they don't have the authority.
| hickimsedenolan wrote:
| They've already told that:
|
| >The globally agreed policies do not provide for ICANN to
| take unilateral action to disconnect these domains as you
| request.
|
| Shouldn't be that hard to read a one-and-a-half page long
| document!
| amelius wrote:
| It was a reply to:
|
| > I agree that this was the right move by ICANN.
|
| Which turned out not to be a "move", really.
| dangerface wrote:
| My issue is not that they don't agree with me its that they
| don't agree with the concept of the internet, that people
| should have access to information and communication. Russia are
| actively trying to disrupt freedom of information,
| communication and the internet with their state sponsored cyber
| attacks.
| lessname wrote:
| I wonder how big thre effects were if somehow cloudflare or aws
| decided to stop serving to Russia (or another country).
| shabier wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if AWS would do just that, given their
| history.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Do you mean stopping internet traffic from Russia accessing
| websites hosted on Cloudflare/AWS or stopping Russian customers
| from hosting on Cloudflare/AWS services?
| iso1631 wrote:
| Russia blocked a lot of AWS back in 2018
| whoopdedo wrote:
| ICANN won't do it. But an intermediary resolver, such as Quad9,
| can choose to drop requests it deems unsuitable. They do that all
| the time with domains connected to malware.
|
| Has anyone talked about doing that?
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| ICANN should strive to be as neutral as it possibly can. Very
| glad they rejected this.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I am Polish. When Polish people revolted against Soviets it was
| because we have seen better life was possible. It was exactly
| because we had access to alternate message.
|
| I don't think cutting off a country in a situation like that is
| helpful at all. If anything, it is making it easier for pro-Putin
| propaganda.
|
| I would also remind that Russia itself build capability to cut
| itself off from the Internet. Yes, we would be doing them a
| favour because right now they might hesitate to do it by
| themselves fearing backlash from people who do not care about
| politics or anybody else at all but do care about having Internet
| access.
| foverzar wrote:
| Never thought I'd see the day when Russian "Sovereign RUnet"
| project would actually start making sence.
| benlivengood wrote:
| I think it's important to recognize that some things in the world
| are inherently individual-centric and cross all arbitrary
| political boundaries and the Internet has become one. Even during
| the world wars postal service and telegraph service was
| maintained, notably with censorship imposed. We don't fight
| genocidal wars in large part; the people communicating with each
| other across battle lines will still be friends, family, or
| coworkers when the war is resolved.
|
| War has changed significantly with modern communication and there
| aren't many wartime secrets any more; troop movements and
| logistics are readily seen from satellites and aircraft. It's
| arguable that censoring communication between countries at war
| has no practical war benefit.
|
| As a sanction it is also arguably not effective because as an
| example North Korea enforces extreme Internet censorship and this
| hardship on North Korean citizens does not meaningfully weaken
| the regime. If anything, maintaining open communication to combat
| propaganda is likely the most beneficial approach. There's a
| video circulating of a captured Russian soldier in Ukraine face-
| timing his mother in Russia which would have been blocked by
| severing Russia from the Internet, to what end? Further isolating
| and estranging neighbors and family during a time of extreme
| stress? Finding common shared humanity is always more important
| than tactical warfare because it usually obviates the need for
| continued warfare.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Maybe if Ukraine sends a bribe their way it'll happen. That's
| usually how things go with ICANN.
|
| But cutting Russia off from the Internet isn't a good idea.
| jonsully wrote:
| Oof. This is definitely the right response. That would be a
| powerful, terrible precedent to set -- one that could be
| catastrophic if turned toward a different country perhaps
| exabrial wrote:
| If we learned one thing from Corona pandemic, please take away
| that censorship make things worse, both public and private
| platforms.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Sanctions are necessary to hold back the steppe warlord sitting
| in the Kremlin.
|
| For humanitarian reasons we should make it easy for Russians to
| defect to the west if they want no part in what the Russian state
| is doing.
|
| I don't want to economically hurt Russian civilians more than we
| really need to in order to save Ukraine.
| rvz wrote:
| Another source: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-
| tech/icann-decline...
|
| But very unsurprising. [0] It really was expected to be rejected.
| I mean just look at this extremely weak _' reason'_ from [1]:
|
| > All of these measures will help users seek for reliable
| information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda
| and disinformation.
|
| Just like how RIPE [2] took a neutral stance, there would be no
| chance ICANN would bend and take a side in this either.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30509849
|
| [1] https://pastebin.com/DLbmYahS
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30513540
| [deleted]
| marcodiego wrote:
| I understand that it is possible to physically isolate a region
| from the internet. But, how can one do this 'logically'? Is there
| an international organization that can do so? How?
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Nah should let them stay connected to the internet so they can
| see news from outside Russia. Should completely isolate them
| economically too.
|
| Not a single Russian should be able to receive a single dollar
| from anywhere outside the country until Putin is overthrown and
| they're out of Ukraine completely.
| ukraineally wrote:
| You can't remove Russia from the internet unless you remove
| literally all their neighbours. Kazakhstan for example has how
| many links in and out of Russia? Do they not have the sovereign
| decision to make those connections? You can't just cut Russia
| off.
|
| I think the 1 decision that could be made by the Sanctioning
| countries... At the big tier 1 peering exchanges you could
| blacklist all of Russia. Don't have to worry about cyber attacks
| coming from Russia directly anymore.
| shabier wrote:
| Cyberattacks are not limited to borders or geolocation- it can
| be sent/executed from anywhere at all times. And, like the
| letter mentioned, the request wasn't to "remove" Russia from
| the internet but rather restricting access to the routing
| towards Russian sites.
| ukraineally wrote:
| >Cyberattacks are not limited to borders or geolocation- it
| can be sent/executed from anywhere at all times. And, like
| the letter mentioned, the request wasn't to "remove" Russia
| from the internet but rather restricting access to the
| routing towards Russian sites.
|
| Yes I know. That's why i said 'directly from', sure attacks
| will be proxied through bots or whatever.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Why "cut them off" rather than mark all ru originating traffic
| with a specific header/tag? That way, consumers can decide
| whether to reject that traffic or not.
|
| I'd also support individual services extending this to e.g.
| tagging user accounts. That way you could:
|
| - mark posts in forums based on if they originated in ru i.e.
| better detection of Russian bots/shills in forums where Russian-
| based participation doesn't make a lot of sense.
|
| - firewall forums s.t. different groups of users cannot see each
| other.
| hughrr wrote:
| Good. They need our views and we need their intelligence.
| lettergram wrote:
| The Russians want sanctions, they want UN officials walking out
| refusing to listen to diplomats. It makes the west look petulant
| and will only bolster the reason Putin gave publicly for starting
| the war.
|
| Russia has been preparing to be isolated for 15-20 years. They
| are largely self-reliant and have four massive trade partners in
| Brazil, China, Iran and India. Plus Germany needs their fuel and
| have no alternative.
|
| The more the west sanctions the worse it'll be for the west and
| better it'll be for Russia. Ultimately, the war is over. Russia
| supposedly wants an independent neutral country; I suspect
| they'll take half the country and force the other half to be
| neutral.
| unmole wrote:
| Are they going to ask the ITU to revoke the +7 dialing code next?
| And then ask the UPU stop mail delivery to Russia?
| Mo3 wrote:
| > As you have said in your letter, your desire is to help users
| seek reliable information in alternative domain zones and prevent
| propaganda and disinformation. It is only through broad and
| unimpeded access to the Internet that citizens can receive
| reliable information and a diversity of viewpoints.
|
| /thread
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Maybe we can kick ICANN off of the internet and switch to another
| provider. Nerds, make it happen.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| This is pretty much an open and shut case. The precedent of ICANN
| taking any form of regulatory stance would be enough to tear
| apart the fabric of the entire internet. We would inevitably silo
| off into parallel networks between the various competing
| ideologies of the world, and polarization would go exponential.
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| Is Ukrainian request to cancel Russian Internet a Russian psyop
| to discredit Ukraine? How do we know the comments in this thread
| are not psyop in defense of Russia having internet access? Hard
| to know who to trust anymore.
| Proven wrote:
| pcdoodle wrote:
| What is Ukraine smoking? I want some of that.
| compsciphd wrote:
| as I wrote elsewhere. removing the resolution of .ru isn't
| cutting them off from the internet. It just makes it much harder
| for them to spread their propaganda. Anyone in russia could still
| resolve www.cnn.com and the like.
|
| The only Q would be would Russia retaliate by going all china
| with a great firewall, thereby them actually severing themselves
| from the internet.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| What propaganda has Russia been spreading outside of it's
| borders? At least in the Western media, all the propaganda has
| been pro-Western, with eventually-proven-false narratives
| dominating the scene such as the Ghost of Kyiv (a flight
| simulator) and the Snake Island massacre (they lived).
| MauiWarrior wrote:
| Another ugly face of war. Paralympic ban:
| https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-ne....
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Right now I share a lot of media from Ukraine to show my russian
| contacts what is really happening over there in this unjust
| conflict.
|
| Good job Ukraine on helping Putin establish a monopoly on
| information spread in Russia.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Still surprises me all the bans imposed to Russia. Never heard of
| such a thing with regards (to mention something recent) Israel
| attacks on Palestine. It is definitely one thing to attack a
| European country a total different one to attack some other
| third-world country.
| matwood wrote:
| Every situation is unique, but if you really want to compare
| the two, the Israel/Palestine situation is closer to the
| territory in eastern Ukraine that has been contested for 7-8
| years at this point. No one was banning Russia for that ongoing
| conflict. Heck, even the Crimea sanctions had been mostly
| lifted.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| I Agree. The separatist republics of Donbass and Donetsk have
| been under attack from Ukraine for years. The Ukrainian army
| shelled residential areas and killed civilians in the
| complete indifference of the west. If we really want to force
| a comparison, Ukraine has behaved like Israel here. With the
| exception that in this case "Palestine" has a powerful friend
| on their side, Russia.
| [deleted]
| vharuck wrote:
| >Never heard of such a thing with regards (to mention something
| recent) Israel attacks on Palestine.
|
| There are international groups and loose movements for
| boycotting Israel, especially things related to the occupied
| territories. They're not popular outside of Muslim-majority
| countries, but it's a thing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycotts_of_Israel
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > They're not popular outside of Muslim-majority countries,
|
| They are considered enough of a threat that places that like
| to claim they have freedom of speech have felt the need to
| _actively suppress_ them, including an absolute majority of
| US states.
| xeromal wrote:
| Is it all that surprising that its easier to empathize with
| people more like yourself than others?
|
| I assure you that I don't feel that way, but I understand why.
| It's the same reason people often want to help "their own"
| before helping others.
|
| It starts with helping your nuclear family then to extended
| then to friends then to the city then to the state then to the
| country then to the ethnicity (country and ethnicity may switch
| priorities).
|
| No one can care for the whole world so we have to prioritize by
| some means.
|
| There's also a point to be made that Israel and Palestine are
| already fucked as its been happening for decades now. The world
| has a chance to stop an atrocity from happening now.
|
| Another point can be made that the Israeli and Palestinian
| conflict isn't as obvious as Russian invading Ukraine.
|
| And the final thing I would note is that this post could be
| construed as classic whataboutism.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| It's not the victim, it's the perpetrator... if you're the USA,
| you can bomb european countries too (eg. serbia), or middle
| eastern ones, or african, south american, asian,... basically
| any one country you want, and nothing happens to you. You can
| lie about weapons of mass destruction, you can drone-bomb
| weddings, bomb civil passenger trains, illegally gather dna at
| vaccinations sites etc., and sometimes you even get a nobell
| peace prize for all of that.
|
| I live in the balkans, and I'm against any kind of war
| (obviously)... but even now, people here are more afraid of
| americans stirring shit up and starting a war here, than of
| russians.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Not to mention Iraq or Afghanistan by the USA or Crimea by the
| same Russia in 2014.
|
| What's even weirder is that Ukraine is not part of EU and it's
| not part of NATO.
|
| Double standards indeed.
|
| I'm not sure if it's because of racism (they're attacking a
| country with white people), if it's because we need something
| to forget that covid became irrelevant but the restrictions of
| our freedom are still there or if the west need to justify
| sanctioning Russia for whatever reason.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Just one small example but Ben & Jerry's banned(?
| discontinued?) the sale of their ice cream in occupied
| Palestinian territory[1] and they faced a _lot_ of backlash and
| accusations of anti-semitism[2] despite Ben and Jerry
| themselves being Jewish. So there definitely seems to be a
| knock-on effect when it comes to bans /boycotts. Even when a
| company has a long history of "activism" that's folded into
| their brand identity it can be costly to stand alone in
| imposing these types of bans. And at a certain point, it seems,
| _not_ participating in the ban when everyone else implements it
| can be equally costly. Safety in numbers, I guess?
|
| [1] https://www.benjerry.com/about-us/media-center/opt-
| statement
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/opinion/ben-and-jerry-
| isr...
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Each country has its own group of allies. The more powerful the
| allies of your target country are, the higher the cost you pay
| when you invade it.
| croes wrote:
| Russia threatens to block Wikipedia for covering the invasion,
| Ukraine is helping Russia by demanding that Russia be locked out
| of the internet so that Russians are completely at the mercy of
| Putin's propaganda. Crazy.
| allisdust wrote:
| If ICANN took a side in this, then in a year there won't be an
| ICANN. There will be several miniCANNs catering to different
| countries (at least the large ones).
| sschueller wrote:
| I don't think cutting of Russia from the internet is a good
| solution at all. It will isolate them enough to allow the
| government to push an anti-western agenda.
|
| They need to see the misery of the war they are inflicting and
| the only way is via an open internet. Yes they will push their
| own propaganda to the west but we can deal with that.
|
| Fire-walling them off will result in the people not knowing what
| is going on. Just look how China is able to hide what happened at
| Tienanmen square.
|
| We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of the
| internet. We need our pictures and videos to reach them.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| look. i want to ask a simple question. "anti-western agenda" is
| fine and good but have you ever looked at that? is the american
| media not involved in anti-russia propaganda? or anti-iran
| propaganda?
|
| do you think their propaganda might just be reciprocal to what
| you people are doing?
|
| sure. pictures and videos of guantanamo bay are everywhere, so
| are the works leaked by wikileaks. they paint a similar picture
| of the american exceptionalism the way russians and the chinese
| do to their own people.
|
| remember instead of trying the culprits of that helicopter
| video leaked by wikileaks, the us government is shooting the
| messenger and not targeting the message itself.
|
| what i am saying is, every side of this mess has dirty laundry.
| there are no good or bad sides. you are taking one side because
| you live there or whatever.
|
| how is it free speech if "russia today" is banned by youtube or
| facebook or twitter in the US or EU but if russia blocks
| facebook or CNN in russia then its "attack of free speech?" you
| want your agenda, your propaganda be heard by your enemies but
| you dont want your people to know the enemies agenda. sure
| fine. you can do that but its not exceptionalism.
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| > how is it free speech if "russia today" is banned by
| youtube or facebook or twitter in the US or EU but if russia
| blocks facebook or CNN in russia then its "attack of free
| speech?"
|
| Free speech does not include using speech to lie and defraud.
|
| The Russian State controls the Russian media and what you get
| is and only is propaganda. It is there purely to defaud and
| deceive. This is not about freedom of speech, it's about
| crime.
|
| If you meet a man lying through his teeth to sell you fake
| insurance, you do not protect his actions on the basis of
| freedom of speech.
| D_Alex wrote:
| > Free speech does not include using speech to lie and
| defraud.
|
| The social media is full of misinformation published by the
| Ukrainians, eg:
|
| https://observers.france24.com/en/europe/20220301-video-
| debu...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/60554910
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/60554910
|
| So, should we cut off Ukraine's internet access?
|
| And we barely see any information from the Russian side. Is
| it not better to see the propaganda and expose it? Sunlight
| is the best disinfectant.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| None of your links say that the Ukrainian government or
| state-sponsored media engaged in misinformation. It's not
| even clear that it's of Ukrainian origin.
|
| > Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
|
| I used to believe that, too, but there's evidence that
| silencing misinformation results in less misinformation
| overall.
| [deleted]
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| well who are you to decide?
|
| >If you meet a man lying through his teeth to sell you fake
| insurance, you do not protect his actions on the basis of
| freedom of speech.
|
| strawman argument. media isnt selling you fake insurance.
| even if it did, you have the power to change the channel
| and not buy it. by not allowing the fake salesman on the
| street, you are not letting market forces to decide for
| themselves.
|
| why do you fear market forces would favour their lies over
| your alleged "truth"? if that is the case, the end users
| must surely be able to see white and black. let them
| decide.
| tlholaday wrote:
| > why do you fear market forces would favour their lies
| over your alleged "truth"?
|
| Plato gives Socrates' answer in Gorgias.
| http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html
| Bostonian wrote:
| Free speech in the U.S. does include lying about politics.
| Republicans and Democrats are free to lie about the
| policies of the other party. You would not want to make
| adjudicating what political statements are lies a judicial
| matter. That is the job of the media and the voters.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > Free speech does not include using speech to lie and
| defraud.
|
| It literally does. It also includes "hate speech" and all
| kinds of other stuff we find abhorrent. Otherwise it's not
| free speech.
| foverzar wrote:
| > Free speech does not include using speech to lie and
| defraud. > If you meet a man lying through his teeth to
| sell you fake insurance, you do not protect his actions on
| the basis of freedom of speech.
|
| The same rhetorics is used by Russian government when it
| tries restricting pro-western sources.
|
| And it's not like they don't have a rather solid ground for
| it. Anyone living in Russia and reading western reports on
| it knows how much the real life is different from and image
| painted by journalists in some captivating (almost
| mythological) narrative way.
|
| Does this mean that Russian government does good when it
| restricts access to information? Or does it rather teach us
| that universal unrestricted accees to information is
| imperative, and people should be able to make their own
| decisions, rather then consume what was provided by a local
| journalist?
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| [how is it free speech if "russia today" is banned by youtube
| or facebook or twitter]
|
| Here's the thing about free speech in America that people
| miss in these arguments. The U.S. government can neither
| compel nor deny your right to say or platform your speech as
| long as it isn't a call to act as a threat of violence or
| hate speech. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are private
| companies and don't need to platform anyone they don't want
| to, technically. They might be sued for discrimination, I
| guess, but not for infringement on your right to free speech.
| They aren't viewed as a "public square", as they aren't
| funded by the government.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| > you want your agenda, your propaganda be heard by your
| enemies but you dont want your people to know the enemies
| agenda
|
| Huh? The comment you are replying to literally argues for
| less restrictions on information.
| m00x wrote:
| Did seeing the misery of war trigger Americans to against their
| government during Afghanistan/Iraq?
|
| The only losses televised were American soldiers. People are
| nationalistic to the bone.
|
| > The Iraq Body Count project documents 185,000-208,000 violent
| civilian deaths through February 2020 in their table.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
|
| > About 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and
| Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed
| have been civilians.
|
| https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...
| vkou wrote:
| Eventually, it pushed approval from a hair above 50% to a
| hair below 50%, and contributed some to sinking the
| presidential bid of John 'Hundred Years of War' McCain. [1]
|
| Perhaps if an incredibly comprehensive package of sanctions
| could have been part of the package, it would have changed
| more minds faster.
|
| [1] He's rehabilitated his political image, somewhat, since
| then, but man, oh man, that was quite the foreign policy
| plan.
| 7952 wrote:
| I think it had an effect on public mood in Vietnam, which is
| why press coverage was restricted in later wars. Who knows
| how it could have played out in a modern connected world.
| otherme123 wrote:
| Exactly. When North Korea and China put so much effort to cut
| their citizens from the outside information, one must ask how
| damaging would be that for Putin. To me it sounds like a double
| win for him: he can play victim, while west does exactly what
| he needs to push the internal propaganda.
| atlantas wrote:
| Plus think about the precedent being set here. Punishing
| civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely
| insane and will backfire badly.
|
| Should the global community have targeted all Americans for the
| actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false
| pretenses? Or how about Vietnam?
|
| Realize that our next Iraq or Vietnam this new standard could
| be applied to us or any other country. Will bloodthirsty
| Twitter be cheering on the digital and economic destruction of
| civilians then? Cooler heads need to start prevailing.
| 8note wrote:
| No precedent is being set here. Sanctions aren't new, and
| their purpose is to put pressure on the citizens to change
| their government. It's already been done to the US before as
| well. Eg. The Gulf states raised US oil prices to protest
| America supporting Israel, and Canada recently targetted
| products from key states for tarrifs in response to Trump's.
| Russian misinformation bots are the same thing, punishing the
| citizens to make the government more compliant.
|
| America is a democracy, so influencing the citizens is
| effective. Cooler heads still need to prevail - you can't use
| all your non-war tools, or you'll only be left with going to
| war
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Should the global community have targeted all Americans for
| the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false
| pretenses?
|
| This is not realistic due to the fact that the US is at least
| an order of magnitude more powerful than Russia, both
| economically and militarily. We also made it look less
| sketchy by bribing/begging Britain (and others) to join the
| Iraq invasion and invoking Article 5 for Afghanistan.
| Sanctions against the US were not tenable.
| practice9 wrote:
| > Cooler heads need to start prevailing.
|
| ..in Russia
| rightbyte wrote:
| No. This is not how things work. We need to get back the
| cold war mindset. Moral and righteousness will get us all
| killed. Screw that.
|
| The "West" response need to be carefully thoughtout to not
| trigger an escalation while protecting our borders like a
| knife wielding psycho that somehow still tolerates
| "mistakes".
|
| Todays western politicians are acting in an insane way.
| Look how India and China instinctively stay out of this.
|
| Putin will be dead or out of power in 10 years. There is a
| tomorrow without him too.
| adolph wrote:
| > Look how India and China instinctively stay out of
| this.
|
| I donno how instinctive it is given the hard lessons they
| have been learning.
|
| _The countries have stationed tens of thousands of
| soldiers backed by artillery, tanks and fighter jets
| along their de facto border, called the Line of Actual
| Control. In 2020, 20 Indian troops were killed in a clash
| with Chinese soldiers involving clubs, stones and fists.
| China said it lost four soldiers._
|
| https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14520971
| kortilla wrote:
| > Look how India and China instinctively stay out of
| this.
|
| Because money, not cooler heads.
| rpmisms wrote:
| This is correct. Russia is a bear that is not worth
| poking. Take a look at Soviet tactics in both World Wars.
| This wouldn't be asymmetrical warfare, which is NATO's
| bread and butter, this would be hell on earth, and humans
| have only gotten better at war since the 1940s.
| dunkelheit wrote:
| Your comment is a bit historically illiterate with
| respect to World War I. All of the fighting was done by
| the Russian Empire, the Soviets by contrast immediately
| signed a disadvantageous peace treaty
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk).
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Putin will be dead or out of power in 10 years. There
| is a tomorrow without him too.
|
| So, as the planet, shall we let him be? Or what's the
| right course of action?
| rightbyte wrote:
| I don't know. Something like, throw Ukraine (yes I know
| it is a terrible thing ...) to the wolfs and maybe only
| field NATO infantry to the Baltic states (no armor or
| planes).
|
| The important part is to give the Russian state a fake
| victory. They know it is fake. We know it. But it is
| still a victory.
|
| Prepare for a post-Putin Russia and prevent chaos when he
| dies by economic support and a hug. We don't want those
| nukes in the hand of a regional warchief ...
| bayindirh wrote:
| > The important part is to give the Russian state a fake
| victory. They know it is fake. We know it. But it is
| still a victory.
|
| Somebody already told that, but when one looks to
| Russia's history, they'll see that, the goal is to get
| bigger and bigger for centuries. They want access to
| warmer waters (i.e. Mediterranean waters) for at least
| two centuries now.
|
| So, there's no fake victory, and there's no stopping for
| them. Also, this is not related to Putin only. Russia is
| one of the countries which have a stable strategy for at
| least a century, and they just want to make their goals a
| reality.
| WHAT_IS_LOVE wrote:
| > Also, this is not related to Putin only. Russia is one
| of the countries which have a stable strategy for at
| least a century, and they just want to make their goals a
| reality.
|
| This reads like a personal take on things. Russia doesn't
| have a strategy lasting much longer than the life of its
| current leader. It is as chaotic as any other large
| organization.
| practice9 wrote:
| > The important part is to give the Russian state a fake
| victory. They know it is fake. We know it. But it is
| still a victory.
|
| This clearly doesn't work if you look at the history,
| both with Russia and other similar states.
|
| They are power hungry and will try to take more land
| after a few years, all the while engaging in psypops and
| propaganda to destabilize their enemy and its allies
| rightbyte wrote:
| I am glad I was neither flamed nor downvoted to oblivion.
| Had I wrote this some days ago I certainly would have
| been. (Not aimed at you specifically).
|
| I feel many people think this happening is Hitler
| invading Checkoslovakia were he should have been stopped
| with the benefit of hindsight. There is no reason to
| believe history has to be repeating it self. A fair
| warning, yes. A profetia, no.
|
| I don't know what we should do, but take it chill and
| cold is one of those things.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| I don't think the Ukrainians would be down with that.
|
| They're crazy/brave enough to defend their democracy and
| organize militias to bolster their armed forces and have
| already taken out a Chechen special forces unit and a
| Spetznaz Maj Gen.
|
| I'll let you explain your plan to them.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > I don't think the Ukrainians would be down with that.
|
| Biden and Putin are the only players with agency here.
|
| Furthermore, RemarkEon's answer is excellent.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Here, I'll explain it.
|
| Ukraine is not a vital interest to the West nor NATO, but
| it is to Russia, and short of WWIII which generates a
| very real risk of a nuclear exchange in Europe the
| situation in Ukraine is not changing. This is the same
| opinion Barack Obama held in 2014. People need to think
| about this on a timeline longer than their emotional
| attachment to this issue demands.
|
| Recall when prominent American leaders, Hillary Clinton
| among them, demanded a NATO enforced no-fly zone over
| Syria as an addendum to arming Islamists in the country.
| This absolutely would've resulted in NATO and Russian
| direct combat, and with it war. Cooler heads prevailed
| then and I pray they do so now.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| How is a neutral democratic Ukraine a security threat to
| Russia? Not Putin. Russia.
|
| IMO the best reasonable outcome I see for this war is for
| Russia to annex the Donbas, and possibly the Azov coast.
| Ukraine will commit to neutrality from NATO and no
| missiles, but leave open the possibility to join the EU
| as an economic partner.
|
| Ukraine is shattered right now. There is no good reason
| to further seal their fate by handing Zelenskyy to that
| short arsed madman on a silver platter and turning them
| into a shithole like Russia.
| dunkelheit wrote:
| > IMO the best reasonable outcome I see for this war is
| for Russia to annex the Donbas, and possibly the Azov
| coast. Ukraine will commit to neutrality from NATO and no
| missiles, but leave open the possibility to join the EU
| as an economic partner.
|
| This looks "nice" on paper, but how would this neutrality
| be actually enforced? I'd imagine that a situation where
| Ukraine has a relatively small army and commits to not
| hosting either NATO or Russian military bases would be a)
| quite uncomfortable for Ukrainians and b) highly
| unstable, with the balance bound to tip to one of the
| sides sooner or later. Are there any historical
| precedents of a similar arrangement that worked?
| [deleted]
| rightbyte wrote:
| > How is a neutral democratic Ukraine a security threat
| to Russia? Not Putin. Russia
|
| Their analysis does not have to be correct for them
| acting on it. Was Iraq a significant security threat to
| the US? Or, did the war decrease it?
|
| I agree on your best outcome.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| This seems like it incentivizes egomania and Putin type
| behavior and, to skip straight to Godwin's law, seems
| like the same mindset with Poland and such back in the
| day, no?
|
| I'm also to really sure why should it be different when
| Russia decides it wants to invade, say, Estonia?
| Obviously, they'e in NATO, but so what? Why shouldn't we
| throw them to the wolves as well? Better that than to
| risk nuclear war, yeah?
| practice9 wrote:
| Godwin's law is sadly (or ironically) applicable here, as
| Gestapo / NKVD were collaborating in 1939. And NKVD and
| KGB are in the lineage of current day FSB. They adapted
| it to current time but the purpose and their methods
| aren't much different.
|
| Regarding second paragraph, would existence of NATO even
| make sense if it won't defend one of its members?
| diob wrote:
| On the other hand, perhaps that would have gotten us to
| reconsider the forever war that killed so many and wasted so
| much money for no reason?
| usrusr wrote:
| The Bush Hussein WMD ruse/lie was laughably bad, but compared
| to Putin's "Selensky is the second coming of Hitler" show, in
| hindsight the Bush play seems like Academy Awards material
| compared to that school play where even parents leave. When a
| country is ruled by someone as incompetent as Putin (yeah,
| until recently I considered him very competent, just in bad
| things, but like so many I stand corrected) it's never good
| for the people living there. And the blame for that does not
| lie outside of the country's borders.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Should the global community have targeted all Americans for
| the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false
| pretenses? Or how about Vietnam?
|
| Yes. If anything people in democracies are more culpable for
| the misdeeds of their government than the people of
| autocratic states.
| parthdesai wrote:
| Hey, majority of US wanted Hilary to be the president after
| she voted to invade Iraq based on a lie, and also destroyed
| Libya.
| arcticbull wrote:
| So what if it was based on a lie? History is full of such
| political machinations. The man was a tin-pot despot who
| used chemical weapons against his own people. Do you
| disagree with that assessment?
|
| btw, I was and remain anti-Iraq war but your equivocation
| is clearly wrong.
| parthdesai wrote:
| I mean you yourself said that Russian people should be
| punished because they support Putin. So shouldn't the
| American population be punished as well because they
| voted for Hillary Clinton who was pro war based on a lie.
|
| > So what if it was based on a lie?
|
| Jeez, it's that easy for you to say that eh. Say that to
| a person who lost his family in that invasion.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > I mean you yourself said that Russian people should be
| punished because they support Putin. So shouldn't the
| American population be punished as well because they
| voted for Hillary Clinton who was pro war based on a lie.
|
| You could make the argument that the world could have
| stood up and sanctioned the US - but likely they did not
| because they probably agreed with the action, whether
| they could say so directly or not. 'Should' is not the
| bar. The fact it took a lie to convince folks to go in is
| neither here nor there, IMO. Again, I was against the
| war.
|
| > Jeez, it's that easy for you to say that eh. Say that
| to a person who lost his family in that invasion.
|
| Say _that_ to someone in Kurdistan who suffered life-long
| debilitating injuries due to the sarin and VX gas attacks
| that were then followed by a Napalm run. [1] Saddam
| launched some of the worst chemical attacks in history
| against his own citizens. We can go back and forth on
| this all day. It was life frozen. Life
| had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs
| on one frame. It was a new kind of death to me. (...) The
| aftermath was worse. Victims were still being brought in.
| Some villagers came to our chopper. They had 15 or 16
| beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital.
| So all the press sat there and we were each handed a
| child to carry. As we took off, fluid came out of my
| little girl's mouth and she died in my arms.
|
| If your argument is "ah but Saddam wasn't that bad" my
| guy, you've already lost. He really wasn't great.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_massacre#Chemic
| al_atta...
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If your argument is "ah but Saddam wasn't that bad" my
| guy, you've already lost. He really wasn't great.
|
| We supported him when he did that. And during the 90s, we
| instituted sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi
| children. That's 100 children for every single person who
| died in Halabja. If the question is would you rather be a
| modern country ruled by the iron will of a belligerent
| despot, or bombed into medieval times with every cultural
| institution shattered and orders of magnitude more body
| count than your dictator ever generated, spawning ISIS...
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-
| politics/2001/10/are-1-million-ch...
| arcticbull wrote:
| > We supported him when he did that.
|
| And that's irrelevant to whether taking him down was a
| good decision. Either before or after. Once again, I
| didn't support the war at the time, and I think the
| casualties are horrifying. However, it's not even close
| to the same thing.
|
| > And during the 90s, we instituted sanctions that killed
| half a million Iraqi children. That's 100 children for
| every single person who died in Halabja.
|
| You don't really weigh moral wars this way. For instance,
| the Nazis killed 6 million in the concentration camps.
| However, an estimated total of 70-85 million people
| perished in World War 2, or about 3% of the 1940 world
| population. However, nobody frames World War 2 as
| "costing 10 lives for everyone who died in the camps" and
| therefore a bad idea.
| likeclockwork wrote:
| Russia is as morally entitled to invade Ukraine as the US
| was to invade Afghanistan. It's really that simple. You
| can say moan about Saddam being bad but where from where
| does the US derive the moral authority to impose its will
| onto sovereign nations?
|
| Your framework allows for invasions over fake WMDs and
| fake Nazis alike. Russia didn't sanction the US over
| Iraq, in the spirit of peace and cooperation between
| nuclear states the US could afford them the same
| courtesy.
|
| If you can justify Iraq you can justify Ukraine.
| Personally I don't agree with invasions anywhere for any
| reason not do I believe in the concept of "world police".
| That's just forcing one people's will upon another and
| denying them the right to destroy their own tyrants and
| seize their own destiny.
| [deleted]
| parthdesai wrote:
| You were against the Iraq war; you are not pro sanctions
| against the US people because their government committed
| war crimes. That's the entire point.
|
| Also it's pretty apparent that you view a white life is
| greater than a brown life and you view invading middle
| eastern countries as something that's okay and are going
| to justify no matter what, so there really is no point in
| this discussion.
|
| Re: your source, go do some more digging, it was the CIA
| that helped Saddam deploy those chemical weapons.
| tangent-man wrote:
| So take out Saddam Hussein don't kill a million innocent
| people in the process. I did hear a rumor that it was all
| about the oil anyway LoLz.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > So take out Saddam Hussein don't kill a million
| innocent people in the process.
|
| Do you really think you were the first person to come up
| with the idea of assassinating a head of state as a means
| to end a war? It doesn't really work that way.
|
| It wasn't 1M, it was about 1/5 of that. I'm not of course
| justifying the loss of life, however it behooves us to
| speak precisely instead of hyperbolically. [1]
|
| > I did hear a rumor that it was all about the oil anyway
| LoLz.
|
| That rumor makes no sense if you actually dig in. 72% of
| America's foreign oil imports come from Canada and
| Mexico. Only about 3% from Iraq. And Iraq was exporting
| oil before the war, too. [2] 2T was spent in the Middle
| East. That buys you a heck of a lot of market-rate oil.
|
| [1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/pa
| pers/20...
|
| [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-
| petroleum-produc...
| ipaddr wrote:
| If you dig in a little more you realize control of the
| oil and contracts went to US and British firms after the
| war where previously other nations had those contracts.
|
| Oil is sold at a global price. The US has an incentive to
| keeping prices low so Americans have cheap gas. Plus it
| strips away power from oil financed nations which is in
| the US interest.
| arcticbull wrote:
| They just don't have that much oil. You know who does?
| Venezuela. If increasing the supply of oil was the real
| goal, then they could have taken Venezuela. It has the
| most proven oil reserves in the entire world and a tin-
| pot despot.
|
| > If you dig in a little more you realize control of the
| oil and contracts went to US and British firms after the
| war where previously other nations had those contracts.
|
| And that return is pennies on the dollar compared to the
| two trillion spent on the war. $2T buys you a whole whack
| of oil you can subsidize for your people.
|
| The economic arguments just don't hold up.
| tangent-man wrote:
| 'It wasn't 1M, it was about 1/5 of that. I'm not of
| course justifying the loss of life, however it behooves
| us to speak precisely instead of hyperbolically.'
|
| Yeh? Source pls.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Should the global community have targeted all Americans for
| the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false
| pretenses?_
|
| Who realistically could have done this, keeping in mind the
| Coalition of the Willing [0]? The global "community" was
| clearly not of one mind about this. Sanctions are working
| against Russia because most of the richest countries are
| behind the sanctions.
|
| Other commenters have alluded to sanctioning US/UK over
| Yemen, which sounds reasonable, however, in that the case,
| too, why would European countries impose sanctions for
| conflicts they're taking part in themselves [1]?
|
| Also, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is merely the (very
| large) straw that broke the camel's back with regards to
| these sanctions. Russia went it alone. Let's not pretend that
| Russia was on good terms with NA/EU or that Putin had any
| built up good will, either. The situations are vastly
| different. I'm not sure the precedent being set is what you
| think it is.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing
|
| 1 - https://www.adhrb.org/2021/01/european-involvement-in-
| the-hu...
| tintor wrote:
| "Should the global community have targeted all Americans for
| the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false
| pretenses? Or how about Vietnam?"
|
| Or how about aggression on Yugoslavia?
| cabalamat wrote:
| > Should the global community have targeted all Americans for
| the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false
| pretenses? Or how about Vietnam?
|
| Wrong question. Whether they "should" in any moral sense is
| not a useful way to think about things because geopolitics
| isn't a morality play. Clearly effective sanctions against
| USA were a non-starter because it is too big and rich a
| country and does a lot of trade with the outside world.
|
| > Realize that our next Iraq or Vietnam this new standard
| could be applied to us or any other country.
|
| Nope. Effective sanctions won't happen against big powerful
| countries (or coalitions of countries, e.g. EU, NATO).
| coliveira wrote:
| > Effective sanctions won't happen against big powerful
| countries
|
| The US is applying sanctions to China. The US doesn't see
| any limits to the target of their sanctions, as you seem to
| believe.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| The sanctions aren't effective because China is a global
| power. Russia is not.
| coliveira wrote:
| You're right about China. But people don't understand
| that Russia is not such a poor country as they imagine.
| They have oil and gas exports that can be easily sold to
| China and other neighbors. And the sanctions, as well as
| military building, are helping to propel their own
| industry. I wouldn't be surprised if even the heavy
| sanctions imposed now will prove ineffective in a few
| years. My opinion if that Europe will suffer most with
| these sanctions over the long run.
| ajross wrote:
| It's more the wrong question because the "international
| community" as such broadly supported action in Afghanistan
| and (to a lesser extent) Iraq. Lots of individual groups
| had qualms, but none rose to the level of actual
| policymaking in democratic governments. Obviously in
| hindsight (informed by the results of the occupation and
| the exposure of the extremely spun intelligence that was
| used to justify the war) lots of people would claim to have
| "opposed" the Iraq war, but at the time it was mostly just
| shrugs and silence.
| coliveira wrote:
| There was no international support for the invasion of
| Iraq. The US came up with a meager "coalition" of their
| usual partner states only to appear they were not going
| alone.
| 8note wrote:
| Afghanistan yeah, but you can tell the difference between
| Iraq and Afghanistan by who participated in the invasion.
|
| Lack of actual policy making to me is more that the US
| empire was at the peak of its power. Being punished by
| America at the time would be worse than trying to
| maintain a rules based.
| vkou wrote:
| We don't need to go as far back as Iraq.
|
| The Saudis have been waging an offensive war for years in
| Yemen. Yet there hasn't been a single peep about cutting
| them off SWIFT, sanctioning their royal oligarchs,
| freezing their western assets, etc, etc.
|
| It seems to send a message that yes, repressive
| petrostate dictatorships can get away with waging
| offensive wars... Well, at least some of them can.
| all2 wrote:
| Oil, and by proxy money, protect them from anything
| people might want to do to them. People want their money,
| want their oil, so they turn a blind eye.
| 8note wrote:
| It's not shielding Russia nearly as strongly. Being a
| friend of the US is more important than having oil.
| American friends and allies can do no wrong to the eyes
| of the western world
| all2 wrote:
| It is in China's best interest that Russia is hostile to
| the US. I wonder what it would take for the US to form a
| military alliance with Russia?
| coliveira wrote:
| Only a government change in the US would allow an
| alliance with Russia. Current US government is
| Russophobic to the core.
| jl6 wrote:
| > I wonder what it would take for the US to form a
| military alliance with Russia?
|
| A head-and-shoulders decapitation of a regime change in
| Russia, Chinese irredentism over outer Manchuria, a Han-
| supremacist lebensraum movement targeting Asia east of
| the Urals...
| kilburn wrote:
| Regarding the Iraq war, Wikipedia has an interesting page
| about protests against it [1].
|
| > On February 15 [2003, before the invasion started],
| millions of people protested, in approximately 800 cities
| around the world. Listed by the 2004 Guinness Book of
| Records as the largest protest in human history, protests
| occurred among others in the United Kingdom, Italy,
| Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Republic of Ireland, the
| United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Syria,
| India, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and even McMurdo
| Station in Antarctica.
|
| I don't think "the largest protest in human history"
| qualifies as "mostly shrugs and silence" ;)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Ir
| aq_War
| retrac wrote:
| > Whether they "should" in any moral sense is not a useful
| way to think about things because geopolitics isn't a
| morality play
|
| While I personally agree with this Realpolitik view, I
| don't believe it's actually universal among leaders. Many
| things that have happened historically did because leaders
| felt some grand moral imperative (national unification,
| stopping an atrocity, helping one's close ethnic allies in
| a defensive war, offensive "defences" when the momentum
| felt like it was being lost -- take your pick).
|
| A moral imperative (although one rather out of place in the
| 21st century) seems to be behind Putin's actions, IMO.
| Restore the glory of the Russian empire, practical barriers
| to that will be ignored. It just _must_ be done, for the
| sake of itself. Righteous causes eventually sort themselves
| out, right?
|
| Which brings me to the sanctions. I've not actually seen
| much discussion on whether sanctions against Russia will
| achieve Western geopolitical goals. Much of the discussion
| is presently framed as a moral imperative. We _must_ act to
| _punish_ Putin.
| drekk wrote:
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Plus think about the precedent being set here. Punishing
| civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely
| insane and will backfire badly.
|
| This would not set up a precedent, it's almost the entirety
| of US foreign policy.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| You mean a dangerous precedent like the US drone striking
| schools and wedding parties?
| pfisch wrote:
| I'm not really one for conspiracies, but I have noticed this
| trend that at least half of "people" with pro Russian points
| of view have accounts here and on Twitter that are a month
| old or less.
|
| Your account is around a month old, everyone else in this
| conversation has accounts that are 5+ years old.
|
| Almost your entire history is pro Russian stuff.
|
| It does seem strange and like there is a large scale and very
| transparent propaganda network pushing pro Putin stuff on the
| internet.
| [deleted]
| arcticbull wrote:
| Oh man, when Russia cut off twitter, my timeline cleaned up
| _instantly_. Check out the Trudeau post replies - not a
| single person calling him Hitler. That ended the day Russia
| cut off twitter. Basically all pro-Trucker content ended
| that day.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| After last 4+ years with headlines of Russian
| influence/collusion and indictments/secret
| indictments/charges coming "any day now" (and nothing
| happening!)...
|
| Sure. This time it really was the Russians. Because in
| the middle of the largest military intervention Russia
| had since the fall of the USSR they would devote
| resources and care about what happens in Ottawa.
|
| It all makes sense.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Except that Russia never actually cut off Twitter? It was
| throttled for a few hours at most, but never fully
| blocked. And even if they did cut it off, do you think
| they'd cut off the troll farms and their propaganda
| outlets too? Unless you are saying that normal russians
| are calling trudeau hitler with no state backing?
|
| Your comment is a bit funny since you are forectly
| contradicting yourself. When you (wrongfully) thought
| that russians couldn't access twitter anymore, the
| russian bots just seemed to have... disappeared for you.
| But in reality, nothing changed, so maybe they weren't
| there to begin with, and this is a weird example of a
| placebo effect, lol.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Didn't the emergency orders end at the same time?
| naasking wrote:
| Indeed, post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Did happen same day though. Not proof, just signal. And
| it happened across a broad range of topics. I'll be the
| first to admit this is anecdotal. I would love a study.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I am an established poster here with a mildly pro-Russia
| opinion. I don't think Putin is morally right to do what
| he's doing, but the reasoning is solid. I agree that the
| bots are everywhere, but there are also reasoned opinions,
| we're just few and far between.
| pfisch wrote:
| I don't doubt there are real people with these opinions.
| But there are just way too many new accounts pushing pro-
| putin opinions for them to be real. When I look at them
| nearly 50% are brand new. It just is too improbable.
| atlantas wrote:
| Uh, no. I'm making a pro civilian point. Also realize that
| there are many Russians who don't support the war and some
| are even bravely protesting publicly under the very real
| threat of imprisonment.
|
| Putin is an evil authoritarian dictator who commits far
| worse atrocities than removing people's internet access.
| That should be obvious, but apparently has to be pointed
| out with a disclaimer before any remotely nuanced
| statement? I didn't realize this was Twitter!
| nsv wrote:
| As an American: I agree with your point broadly, but I would
| love to see the world punishing Americans e.g. through
| sanctions for an event like the invasion of Iraq or Vietnam,
| should it happen. Such unnecessary destruction of human life
| should be met with resistance on every level.
| diordiderot wrote:
| > Should the global community have targeted all Americans for
| the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false
| pretenses? Or how about Vietnam?
|
| Fuck yes they should have. Absolutely
|
| Americans were complicit because it didn't (immediately and
| viscerally) effect them, just like Russians have been so far.
| If it effects them enough they'll stop working.
|
| > Punishing civilians for the actions of its government
|
| With few exceptions, governments serve the people under them.
| Pray tell, How popular is Putin in Russia right now?
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| > Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is
| absolutely insane and will backfire badly.
|
| That's what sanctions do. That's what military responses do.
| There's no real way out of the box. If a country responds
| forcefully to an aggressor's actions, the aggressor's
| civilians will pay a large part of the price.
| megous wrote:
| > Realize that our next Iraq or Vietnam this new standard
| could be applied to us or any other country.
|
| Is that a bad thing?
| mywittyname wrote:
| For you and me? Yes.
|
| For the wealthy and powerful who make the decisions? No.
| lazide wrote:
| If it is for you and me? If yes, then it is more likely
| to matter to the wealthy and powerful whose power base
| depends to some extent on us.
|
| Assuming we haven't all been convinced via propaganda
| that this is all a conspiracy to weaken us and we need to
| band together under $glorious_leader anyway.
| [deleted]
| adventured wrote:
| This moral, intellectual con that the Russian people are not
| responsible needs to stop. The Russian culture must change.
|
| Of course the Russian people are morally responsible for
| their culture and its products (including the war in
| Ukraine). That culture has produced the conquest obsessed
| Russian state (including Putin, he is a product of that
| culture). The Russian people have reveled in the atmosphere
| of power, greatness, empire, return to glory, and all that
| bullshit propaganda that Putin has been feeding them for two
| decades. They cheerily rode the highs with him during the
| good oil years, applauding as he stripped away human rights
| one after another, refusing to go against him en masse. They
| now bear the moral responsibility for tolerating him from the
| very beginning (dictators quite often only get more difficult
| to remove with time). Oh now you can't get rid of him? No
| kidding. Oh now a lot of people would have to die to remove
| him from power? No kidding - like the people being killed in
| the name of the Russian people in Ukraine.
|
| The Russian people are responsible for what ideas they hold,
| what they believe, who they follow, what propaganda they
| accept or reject (and they've been willingly drinking the
| propaganda by the liter for a very long time). They tolerated
| Putin's power grab and abuses for many years early on and did
| next to nothing to try to stop him. They have celebrated him
| often, he has been widely popular for most of his reign. How
| many more centuries of authoritarianism need to go by before
| people figure out that the Russian people are responsible for
| their culture and their culture is producing the
| authoritarianism. It's not bad luck producing those repeat
| results. Raise your hand if you think the Nazi ideology
| magically, spontaneously appeared - no, it was an assembled
| mash of ideas that were popular at the time, prevalent in the
| culture of the German region, commonly held by the people
| there. Putin's authoritarianism, his obsession with the
| Russian ethnic superstate (which is quite similar to Hitler's
| obsession with the German ethnic superstate), also did not
| appear out of nowhere, it's directly from their culture.
|
| And - speaking as an American - of course the American people
| are morally responsible if their government does something
| similarly horrible as what Russia is doing in Ukraine. That
| very obviously also goes for what happened in Vietnam. The US
| Government and its presidents are the product of the American
| culture, which the American people are responsible for.
|
| If the other empires of Europe changed (Germany, Spain,
| Britain, France, etc) - their people changed those empire,
| conquest obsessed cultures - then Russia too can and must
| change. Russia is the last major power in Europe still
| clinging to those decrepit, backwards ways. Russia must give
| up the notion of empire culturally and that means its people
| must fully abandon all the related ideas that propel and
| sustain that ideology (which endlessly spawns monsters like
| Putin (who is just another Russian Tsar type)). Until the
| people of Russia change their beliefs, the authoritarianism
| will just keep repeating.
| kolbusa wrote:
| > And - speaking as an American - of course the American
| people are morally responsible _if_ their government does
| something similarly horrible as what Russia is doing in
| Ukraine. That very obviously also goes for what happened in
| Vietnam. The US Government and its presidents are the
| product of the American culture, which the American people
| are responsible for.
|
| It's not an 'if'. The US did a lot of stuff on par with
| what Putin is doing now in Ukraine. The people and
| government of the US never were held responsible. Yes, they
| went through the motions of getting the UN approval, etc.,
| but that does not make the actions morally justifiable. And
| this is what Russian propaganda uses to justify its
| actions.
|
| I don't like pinning Putins actions on ordinary citizens.
| Putin is a dictator. In 2012 there was a big rally against
| him, and it was suppressed pretty violently, and since then
| there were no attempts on the same scale. Look at how
| Belorussians tried to topple Lukashenko. They made a much
| stronger attempt, but sill it did not work out. Are they
| morally responsible for the Belarus participation in this
| war? Are the people like me who moved out are responsible?
| When does that moral responsibility start? 2000s or 2010s?
|
| Sure, there is a large chunk of population that supports
| Putin. They maybe are morally responsible for supporting
| the war. But I don't think they will actually be swayed by
| economic sanctions. Their culture won't change. They will
| be happy to severe ties with 'rotten West' -- they will
| feel like they are soldiers of the economic war. What will
| happen, I am afraid, is Russia turning into a second North
| Korea (or Venezuela).
|
| > If the other empires of Europe changed (Germany, Spain,
| Britain, France, etc) - their people changed those empire,
| conquest obsessed cultures - then Russia too can and must
| change. Russia is the last major power in Europe still
| clinging to those decrepit, backwards ways. Russia must
| give up the notion of empire culturally and that means its
| people must fully abandon all the related ideas that propel
| and sustain that ideology (which endlessly spawns monsters
| like Putin (who is just another Russian Tsar type)). Until
| the people of Russia change their beliefs, the
| authoritarianism will just keep repeating.
|
| In my rather uneducated opinion, the culture did not go
| away. The US is an empire. It is built differently, but it
| effectively is. China is or is becoming one. European
| culture is dominating the world in many subtile and not so
| subtile ways. Russia wants to be an empire, but it fails to
| recognize that empires are being built differently now, and
| tries to build a 19-th/20-th century one.
|
| Disclaimer: I am from Russia, and live in the US. Have
| extended family in Russia. Unfortunately, some of them are
| brainwashed by the propaganda. Some are unable to leave as
| their whole life is to work in government-funded research
| (thankfully not military in any way). Fuck Putin and fuck
| the war. My best wishes to Ukrain and its people -- you
| will will regardless of how this war turns out.
|
| PS. Apologies for the long rant...
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Plus think about the precedent being set here. Punishing
| civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely
| insane and will backfire badly.
|
| I disagree. This is war - it's not meant to be comfortable -
| and a government does represent the people. Putin's approval
| rating over the years has been really high, in the mid-high
| 70s [1]. The only way this ends with minimal bloodshed is if
| the populace exerts sufficient pressure against leadership.
| That means protests, that means civil disobedience.
|
| If the populace doesn't feel the impact of the war, then
| there's no pressure for the administration to end it.
|
| Think of it more like less-lethal weapons. Yah you don't want
| to get hit by a rubber bullet but you certainly don't want to
| get hit by a real bullet. If things escalate then the people
| may get hit by real bullets metaphorically and literally.
|
| [edit] > Punishing civilians for the actions of its
| government is absolutely insane and will backfire badly.
|
| This is an interesting argument, especially for a
| representative government. "You can't blame
| me for what the people I pick do!"
|
| I mean, yes? I can? Even in countries without, governments
| can be overturned internally.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-
| approval-ra...
| Gollapalli wrote:
| I don't understand why it's my war. My congress hasn't
| declared war. My congressman hasn't said anything to that
| effect, and I'd write him a quite angry letter if he did.
| Some bureaucrats in the State Department might think it's
| their war, but that's not the same thing.
|
| If you're in any country but Ukraine think about WHY you're
| picking sides and who told you to do that.
| watwut wrote:
| > you're in any country but Ukraine think about WHY
| you're picking sides and who told you to do that.
|
| The countries near Russia expect to be next. Part of
| Germany was under Russian control prior Fall of USSR.
| Which is why European countries care. NATO has multiple
| members that are members for this reason. EU has multiple
| members that see this as an active threat to them.
|
| The USA should care, because they promised protection to
| Ukraine in exchange of Ukraine getting rid of nuclear
| arsenal back in nineties. Not that USA would be reliable,
| but they should not be completely unreliable.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| Thank you for giving an actual answer as to what our
| obligations are here. It's the first time I've heard
| anyone make mention of that.
| watwut wrote:
| That nato members bordering with Russia see Russian
| expansion and Russian ambitions to restore old glory as
| direct threat is fascinatingly ignored aspect ...
| especially considering that "buffer zone" nonsense is
| being repeated as if Ukraine divided Russia from nato
| before
|
| And that USA is member of nato for own interests and that
| first time there is actual threat to nato they should not
| ignore it entirely is also fascinatingly ignored
| argument.
|
| And they surrounding countries taking in refugees is not
| not particular oddity since surrounding countries always
| have to take refugees when aggressor goes in is also
| ignored argument.
| lazide wrote:
| Near as I can tell, it's just making his power base double
| down.
|
| And 'punishing civilians' when they are part of a society
| (yes, society) who is allowing a dictator to hungrily
| invade a neighbor is about the only way anyone can do
| anything here.
|
| Sanctions CAN impact the economy enough that it starved the
| ability of the nation to make war - but if the country
| keeps doubling down, that is going to require extreme
| measures and produce extreme misery. It would be a blockade
| essentially.
|
| Russia has experience switching to a war time economy, and
| if anything it makes a 'strong dictator' more appealing.
| Stalin did quite well during this time, despite making
| massive mistakes that cost an insane number of Russian
| lives.
|
| In the west we seem to be under the impression some
| relatively cheap to us financial sanctions will solve this,
| but don't bet on it.
|
| The equivalent post WW1 in Germany just stoked WW2. Not the
| same scenario, but there are similarities.
| richiebful1 wrote:
| There are rumors Russia is going to impose martial law.
| Even if those rumors are merely propaganda by the
| Ukrainian government, there isn't a clear broad base of
| support for the invasion.
|
| That doesn't sound like a country that is rallying behind
| the flag in support of an offensive war against Ukraine.
| ipaddr wrote:
| By punishing and cutting off everyday Russians doesn't
| that increase anti-west support?
| usrusr wrote:
| The alternative isn't people thankful for not being hit
| by sanctions, the alternative is people indulging in
| victory posturing. (in the old days, when soldiers were
| actually told that they were sent into a war, victory
| posturing often started before even the first shot was
| fired)
| parthdesai wrote:
| Let's cut off some of the western countries first then as
| well. US has actively destroyed/destabilized countries in
| the Middle East and South America to install a friendlier
| government. You've US who voted to invade Iraq based on a
| lie (along with UK), invaded Libya, bombed Syria, invaded
| Afghanistan among other things. You've Canada, US and other
| nations selling arms to Saudi Arabia that continue to bomb
| the fuck out of Yemen. You've Israel occupying Palestine.
| Let's cut all the countries off as well. Or are you
| implying that Russian invasion of Ukraine matter more than
| all these examples, and if you do so, I wonder why that is?
| (fyi, it's a rhetorical question, I know why that is)
| brabel wrote:
| If we had reacted the way the world is reacting now when
| the USA invaded Iraq under false pretense, perhaps other
| countries would've taken notice that there's actual
| consequences for world bullies and this wouldn't be
| happening now.
| wara23arish wrote:
| dont bother as cliche as it sounds, some lives are worth
| less than others to westerners they either consciously
| block out all their governments' actions or are simply
| unaware of them which i find hard to believe i know this
| is selfish of me, but when i saw all the support for
| ukraine, it bothered me inside.
| ipaddr wrote:
| What makes you think this is about saving lives? This is
| about the security of Europe / NATO. If Ukraine was on
| the other side of Russia we wouldn't be having this
| discussion.
|
| Having Russia missile a few steps away frim Germany has
| caused them to bring back their military.
|
| People act in their own self interest. What other lives
| do you think did not get their due?
| wara23arish wrote:
| I am talking about people's reaction to this. People are
| painting it as a moral type of good/evil situation.
|
| i know and understand that governments are supposed to be
| acting in their own interests. This does not surprise me
| one bit.
|
| What bothers me ( again I understand this is selfish), is
| that the same people that preach about democracy/human
| rights/freedom know their governments are guilty of
| egregious crimes like Russia's and arguably worse. I find
| it hypocritical when they started lecturing and posturing
| about respecting a country's independence.
|
| I hope this explains my pov better.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > I am talking about people's reaction to this. People
| are painting it as a moral type of good/evil situation.
|
| It can absolutely be a moral good/evil situation. As
| would such a war on the other side of Russia even if
| folks reacted differently.
|
| > I find it hypocritical when they started lecturing and
| posturing about respecting a country's independence.
|
| They can be right this time, and wrong other times. I do
| think supporting them when they're right and opposing
| them when they're wrong is the play.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| South America and Saudi/Yemen are the only things
| approaching the same level of realpolitik assholery as
| Ukraine now.
|
| Iraq? Evil dictator. Libya? Evil dictator. Syria?
| Gruesome terrorists/evil dictator.
|
| Israel/Palestine? Messed up and the world still doesn't
| like it, but not on the same scale and certainly more
| complicated.
| parthdesai wrote:
| > Iraq? Evil dictator. Libya? Evil dictator.
|
| Look at what Iraq and Libya is right now. Libya has
| literal slaves right now, I'm sure US feels pretty good
| about themselves. Heck Obama won a noble peace price for
| it.
|
| US supported Pakistan in 1971 when Pakistan was
| committing mass genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh
| now). They overthrew a government that people wanted in
| Iran because that govt. was going to nationalize oil and
| take it away from western oil companies. These things
| have been happening forever in the third world, but
| because it's brown people dying, people didn't care as
| much.
|
| Anyways my enitre point is again, it's dumb to blame
| average Russian person for the actions of the Putin like
| how it would be equally dumb to blame american person for
| the actions of US govt. and military industrial complex.
| wara23arish wrote:
| please go educate yourself on how those evil dictators
| were propped up by the USA itself.
|
| You're wildly out of touch if you actually believe if
| those dictators didn't do everything with blessings from
| the US..
|
| yemen is also 100 times worse off than ukraine its not
| even close
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Let's cut off some of the western countries first then
| as well.
|
| ... first? Why first? Which western country is actively
| invading anyone right now? Which western country started
| a land-war in Europe last week? Why would I cut off
| someone not doing anything for something that happened 20
| years ago when there's a land-war in the Ukraine now?
|
| > You've US who voted to invade Iraq based on a lie
| (along with UK).
|
| On bad pretenses sure, but to overturn a despot who used
| chemical weapons against his own people. He wasn't a
| threat to the US, and the pretenses were wrong - and I
| didn't support the war at the time. But is it the same
| thing? Not even close.
|
| > Or are you implying that Russian invasion of Ukraine
| matter more than all these examples, and if you do so, I
| wonder why that is? (fyi, it's a rhetorical question, I
| know why that is)
|
| Yeah because the Russians launched an un-provoked land
| war in Europe to re-create the Soviet Union - on the
| premise of "de-Nazifying" a country run by a Jewish PM.
|
| Save your whataboutism for once this is resolved.
| parthdesai wrote:
| Well, you've Saudi with the support of Western countries
| and US weapons that is bombing the shit of Yemen. I don't
| see you calling for sanctions there. Where was the
| outrage while that is happening? I like how you choose
| the timeline of right now/last week. US just got out of
| Afghanistan few months, have destroyed countries and
| families for generations to come in the past 10-15 years,
| but you know what let's only count two weeks.
|
| > On bad pretenses sure, but to overturn a despot who
| used chemical weapons against his own people. He wasn't a
| threat to the US, and the pretenses were wrong - and I
| didn't support the war at the time.
|
| Yeah, looks like US actively knew and helped him gas his
| own people though because Iran would've been too powerful
| otherwise, and US can't have that.
|
| https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-
| pro...
|
| > But is it the same thing? Not even close.
|
| Yeah it isn't, while the world looks to sanction Russia
| (which they should btw), US blackmailed other countries
| into invading Iraq and no country got sanctioned. But
| like you said, US only got pretenses wrong, s who whore
| cares that millions of lives were lost as a result and a
| country has been destabilized and destroyed.
|
| > Save your whataboutism for once this is resolved.
|
| Reddit's favourite term to use when you point out double
| standards. I don't support this invasion either, it's
| just the hypocrisy in the outrage that is astonishing.
| But hey I guess, as the media puts it, world cares more
| when it's white people with blonde hair and blue eyes
| that are dying and not brown people you've in middle
| east, so it's different this time.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Nothing you raised has anything to do with _this_
| situation which is what we 're talking about. Pointing
| fingers wildly in every direction isn't going to solve
| this problem. I'll never say the US has a pristine track
| record, however what they are doing right now, I'm in
| support of. Even if they haven't acted appropriately in
| the past.
|
| I can oppose Yemen, I can support Palestine, I can oppose
| the coup in Guatemala - all while I reject the actions of
| the Russians in Ukraine. These are not mutually exclusive
| positions and there is nothing hypocritical about it.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| But the US is supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen _right
| now_. It 's just as much of an ongoing situation so there
| isn't even that excuse of "that was before and now is
| now".
| [deleted]
| pera wrote:
| > the populace exerts sufficient pressure against
| leadership. That means protests, that means civil
| disobedience.
|
| If this is what you want then cutting Russians out of the
| Internet is a terrible idea: consider that most are just
| now learning that they are actually at war and not in a
| freedom military operation (as the state media is making
| them believe).
| arcticbull wrote:
| > If this is what you want then cutting Russians out of
| the Internet is a terrible idea.
|
| I agree. I don't think they should be cut off from the
| Internet. But I do wholeheartedly support economic
| sanctions.
| foobarian wrote:
| In general yes but I wonder if in the case of Russia the
| group that would have the most impact are the other power
| players adjacent to the leader. If it's true that Russia is
| run like the Mob then I wouldn't be surprised if Putin ends
| up "falling out of a window" by accident.
| atlantas wrote:
| Didn't the majority support the war in Iraq initially?
| Propaganda works. Consent was successfully manufactured.
|
| That's not the fault of civilians. That goes even more so
| for those under authoritarian regimes. That's Russia. The
| people are under the thumb of a dictator and bathed in
| propaganda 24/7. And who the hell knows how many actually
| support him or do so out of fear.
|
| How about North Korea? Should we punish their citizens too
| for not rising against their dictator? I think it's clear
| that we shouldn't.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That's not the fault of civilian
|
| Yes, it is, in the specific case of Iraq. The debunkings
| of the propaganda (and even the internal documentation of
| the propaganda effort) were widely published in US/UK
| media prior to the war.
|
| The war was able to be sold not because the truth was
| concealed, but because enough people didn't want to hear
| the truth, they wanted a story which provided an easy
| outlet for their racist bloodlust.
|
| Was that average pro-war citizens _as guilty_ as the
| people actively marketing the war? No. But they weren 't
| innocent, either.
|
| Citizenship comes with responsibility.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The debunkings were published, but major media was
| heavily pushing the official narrative.
|
| To quote the New York Times' ombudsman (a position that
| doesn't exist any more) [0]:
|
| > To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and
| June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed,
| or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed
| unmistakable.
|
| This was the message that the US government, the New York
| Times, and countless other media organizations were
| pushing. People who objected were viewed as eccentric,
| naive, or possibly even cowards who were doing the
| bidding of a dictator.
|
| 0. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-
| public-ed...
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Holding civilians responsible for the actions of regimes
| is central to all justification of terrorism. It's a
| slippery slope, just a heads up.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Holding civilians responsible for the actions of
| regimes is central to all justification of terrorism
|
| No, it's not, because most terrorism is, as was the thing
| for which the name was coined, state terrorism directed
| at citizens of the state (states who engage in such
| terrorism tend to prefer to put the focus on other
| terrorism, of course.) But, even for the kinds of
| terrorism for which it is true, this part of the
| rationale is not the problem with terrorism, in the same
| way that "people are responsible for their own actions"
| is central to the justification for cruel and unusual
| punishment for crimes, but is not the _problem_ with that
| punishment.
| kbelder wrote:
| >Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is
| absolutely insane and will backfire badly.
|
| That isn't always true. Obviously, if the actions of the
| government are bad enough, it sometimes becomes necessary to
| kill many of its citizens. Since that's morally justifiable,
| lesser economic damage is morally justifiable.
|
| It sucks. They're innocent. If damage can be avoided, great.
| But if it's necessary, the blame falls on the aggressor
| nation.
| cgio wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. The fact that in the last century
| or so wars have been having disproportionately high numbers
| of civilian casualties does not mean that this is
| acceptable. When is it necessary to kill civilians and what
| makes it a necessity? And if there is a necessity why is
| there a war criminal court? I suggest we are careful with
| the excuses we give, in this case in order to argue
| "e-casualties" you also argue that if Putin thinks Ukraine
| is the aggressor he can go after civilians.
| devmor wrote:
| > Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is
| absolutely insane and will backfire badly.
|
| I wish people would realize that this is what most of our
| sanctions do as well.
| vkou wrote:
| The reason you apply sanctions is the same reason that you
| shoot at enemy conscripts in a war (despite them _also_
| being victims).
|
| Except in the case of sanctions, you aren't even actively
| engaging in violence (which some moral systems would take
| issue with). You're simply choosing to not cooperate.
| sidibe wrote:
| This. Plus sanctions are also a deterrent, and not using
| them when a state goes over the line will weaken soft
| power in the future. So while it sucks for Russians who
| don't support Putin it will make the Chinese or American
| or whoever is next to egregiously violate what the rest
| of the world considers right take the threat of sanctions
| more seriously.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| How about the civilians in Ukraine who have to cower in
| basements, watch their loved ones die, and flee the the
| country leaving their entire lives behind? The children in
| Ukraine who have to live through a traumatic war losing all
| of the stability that they have?
|
| The suffering of Russian civilians is nothing compared to
| what is happening to civilians in Ukraine.
| 131012 wrote:
| Comparing suffering is useless. There is no objective
| measure for pain, just as diminishing the suffering of
| Ukrainians because Yemen or Palestine is pointless.
|
| Some brave Russian people are now suffering in Putin's
| prisons for speaking out against war. Some mothers will
| never know how or where their children died. Some African
| students in Ukraine are suffering from racism perpetrated
| by other war victims.
|
| It's all bad and they all deserve compassion.
| p_j_w wrote:
| One person suffering is not a good reason to go cause
| some other person who isn't at fault to suffer.
| simonh wrote:
| Civilians in an authoritarian regime still have things they
| can do to undermine or weaken the regime without even
| taking any risks. They can not jojn any of the state
| institutions of repression - the police, army and security
| services. They can avoid doing business with such people or
| organisations as far as possible. They can seek out
| independent information, and disseminate it through family
| and friends. They can peacefully protest if it's safe, or
| in some cases vote or abstain from voting.
|
| They can of course go much further than any of this, but we
| need to make it clear how we feel about their regime and
| it's actions. We need to provide a motivation to resist.
| Yes it sucks, the Russian people are not our enemies, I
| know and work with Russians, including close colleagues.
| Sanctioning the Russian state, and struggling against it
| from within are two sides of the same coin. It sucks that
| anyone has to do any of it, but that's the fight we're in
| whether we chose it or not.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| I agree with you. But there's the problem that the precedent
| already exists. That's what sanctions already do, way before
| Russia-Ukraine.
| avereveard wrote:
| > the actions of its government
|
| Except neither the cabinet nor the oligarchs are the one
| doing the killing, it's the grunts at the bottom.
|
| If every Russian deposed arms, there would be no war.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Should the global community have targeted all Americans for
| the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false
| pretenses? Or how about Vietnam?
|
| I don't think it's fair to compare the democratically elected
| government of an European country to a blood thirsty middle
| eastern dictatorship. At least, they certainly didn't garner
| the same sympathy from people.
|
| As for Vietnam, it's interesting to see that the loosing side
| was where people desperately fled, often risking their lives
| in makeshift rafts. That the people would risk their lives
| for a shot at maybe getting refugee status in America rather
| than live in a communist nation should tell us a lot. Same
| goes for failed states like Venezuela and Cuba.
| staticman2 wrote:
| It's interesting to try to model the type of moral philosophy
| you have that would cause you to write "Punishing civilians
| for the actions of its government is absolutely insane and
| will backfire badly."
|
| I'm guessing the word "complicit" is not in your moral
| vocabulary. Or for some reason you don't feel it applies to
| doing business and helping to enrich a society that is
| murdering their neighboors.
|
| Apparently refusing to be complicit with Russian aggression
| is "punishment".
|
| Let's just same I'm less than impressed with this moral
| argument.
| galactus wrote:
| It's not the whole society that is murdering their
| neighboors. If that were true, all americans should be
| considered criminals.
| staticman2 wrote:
| The Russians are all complicit since they are all paying
| taxes to fund the war and obeying the dictator's edicts
| (unless they are in prison.)
|
| Maybe it's true of Americans for the war in Iraq or
| whatever but my objection is specifically to the weird
| (to me) use of the word "punishment" in the post I
| replied to.
|
| I'd say don't talk about "punishment" as if your position
| has a moral high ground. Let's talk about being
| complicit.
|
| The post above argues we should help fund the war efforts
| to kill Ukrainians through profitable business relations
| with the Russians, and the poster apparently thinks they
| have the moral high ground given the use of the word
| "punishment" to describe the the idea we shouldn't help
| the Russians continue to fund their efforts to kill
| people.
| 4bpp wrote:
| By implication, you are saying that the 9/11 attacks were
| morally justified, right? In fact, there is a case that
| they were strictly more so: as everyone asserts, American
| elections are more fair and free than Russian ones, so
| American citizens would have a better chance to elect
| someone who did not brutalise the Islamic world, and
| American citizens have more money and stronger passports,
| so they would have a much easier time leaving.
|
| (Arguably, 9/11 indeed backfired badly for the
| perpetrators.)
| thereddaikon wrote:
| There are levels to this. The term used by diplomats and
| leaders is Proportionality.
|
| Its already accepted that non violent means that
| nevertheless still negatively impact civilians are
| appropriate measures to apply political pressure. That's
| what economic sanctions are. I don't see how that can be
| considered acceptable yet cutting off digital
| communications is a bridge too far. I consider economic
| sanctions more severe than blocking the Russians from the
| global internet. One means you lose access to
| information. The other means your economy may collapse
| and you might not be able to afford food.
|
| As for the 9/11 attacks, they were deliberate attacks on
| civilian targets which are traditionally considered war
| crimes when carried out by state actors and terrorist
| attacks when not. They are definitely far worse than
| softer measures like sanctions and not directly
| comparable.
|
| And there is nothing arguable about it. They definitely
| backfired. Bin Laden did not hide his intentions or
| feelings. In fact he wrote extensively and publicly on
| it. He expected that the American public, who were
| broadly ignorant to US foreign policy at the time would
| empathize with him and blame their government. The
| opposite happened.
| staticman2 wrote:
| If 911 was an event where a bunch of Saudis got together
| and said they wouldn't sell us more oil or trade with us
| further because Americans did bad things you might have a
| point.
|
| Since it wasn't I see your response as pretty irrelevant.
| 4bpp wrote:
| What if it was an event where they rallied nearly the
| entirety of the world apart from the US to cease trading
| with the US, confiscated or froze US assets abroad, and
| made threats that their media generally described as
| "cratering the US economy"? If this resulted in a Great
| Depression level of death and suffering in the US (which
| seems to be what our leadership is hoping for in Russia),
| would you still be inclined to see it as more akin to a
| minnow like Saudi Arabia unilaterally refusing trade than
| to killing random US citizens?
|
| (On that matter, the last major instance of another
| country confiscating Western assets I'm aware of was the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company,
| which was answered with a CIA-instigated coup.)
| hdmakwlsbb wrote:
| iszomer wrote:
| I think a better question to ask would be `Cui bono`, from
| an individual, group, and macro perspective.
| nicce wrote:
| There are rumors that Russia is about to cut themselves off the
| internet exactly because of this reason, any day from now.
|
| They have been preparing for it for many years, and they had an
| exercise in 2021, which was based on the law introduced in
| 2019.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-disconnected-globa...
| grishka wrote:
| Still way too much depends on overseas infrastructure. I
| remember how they blocked some parts of AWS in an effort to
| block Telegram. Almost everything broke. Even services that
| were supposed to be fully local.
| asats wrote:
| That's exactly right, the internet is a lifeline for both
| distribution of the real information about the current events
| and a powerful coordination tool for the opposition and the
| human rights groups such as https://ovdinfo.org/ that are
| providing free legal help to the 7670 people already arrested
| during the anti war demonstrations in Russia. Shutting it all
| the down would leave russia with state media and gov narrative
| only.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| It's one of the best short term sanctions. In the long run it
| will only drive Russia closer to China and make their anti-
| western, anti-Nato alliance stronger.
| lenkite wrote:
| Thank you ICANN for a sane decision. If Russia gets cut from
| the Internet, a precedent would have been firmly established.
| It will be pretty clear that every nation _has_ to build its
| own independent internet. The global internet will then
| eventually be on the path to become a legacy architecture.
| romwell wrote:
| The title is misleading.
|
| The request wasn't to cut off Russia from the net.
|
| It was to let .ru domains expire, and not issue SSL
| certificates for them. It would only affect .ru and .rf
| websites.
|
| Russians would still be able to get their news from bbc.com --
| but maybe not ria.ru
|
| We all would have been better off. There's currently little-to-
| nothing of value on .ru websites.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Yandex.ru has a lot value for western internet user.
|
| You have three big search engines: google, bing and yandex (4
| if you count baidu).
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| The Russian State is and has been for a long time pushing a
| profoundly anti-Western agenda.
|
| The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way,
| even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it
| for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to
| resist.
|
| The Russian people are not a mechanism by which the Russian
| leadership can be affected.
|
| > We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of
| the internet.
|
| I may be wrong, but I understood the request was to remove
| ".ru" and two other related top levels. It was not to cut them
| off from Internet access.
|
| I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related
| domains, and also of cutting Russia off from the net, if such a
| thing were possible, which I think it is not.
| simiones wrote:
| > The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no
| way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and
| understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them,
| no way to resist.
|
| You say that while thousands if not more Russians are
| protesting on the streets each night against this war,
| despite brutal repression. In any kind of regime, the consent
| of the people _does_ matter - the way that consent is
| obtained just varies. Russia is not the USSR or China and it
| is certainly not North Korea - it is an authoritarian
| country, but nowhere near the level of dictatorial control
| where they can completely ignore their populace.
| witrak wrote:
| > Russia is not the USSR or China and it is certainly not
| North Korea - it is an authoritarian country, but nowhere
| near the level of dictatorial control where they can
| completely ignore their populace.
|
| You are extremely, even naively optimistic. The gap between
| what you understand under the term democracy and what is
| "Russian democracy" is several times bigger than the
| difference between Russia's and N.Korea's "democracies".
| nybble41 wrote:
| > what you understand under the term democracy
|
| You're the only one using the term "democracy".
|
| Even under an authoritarian dictatorship without any
| pretense of democracy, the consent (or at least
| acquiescence) of the populace is necessary for the
| dictator to rule. Civilians far outnumber the rulers,
| after all, or even the military. Even if the entire
| Russian military sided with Putin--and against their own
| friends and relatives--there is no way he could stay in
| power in the face of a mass civilian uprising.
| shabier wrote:
| > The Russian State is and has been for a long time pushing a
| profoundly anti-Western agenda.
|
| We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia propaganda as
| well, we're not innocent of what we're accusing Russia of.
|
| > The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no
| way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and
| understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them,
| no way to resist.
|
| What exactly do you think would happen to the west if we
| censored Russian "propaganda"?
|
| > I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related
| domains
|
| ... And they'll move to another TLD just as easily as they
| were booted off the .ru or even worse; it moves outside the
| scope of the "accessible" web where their ideas are not
| challenged. Overall, a bad idea, IMO.
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| > We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia
| propaganda as well, we're not innocent of what we're
| accusing Russia of.
|
| No. These are not comparable. In the West, you have a range
| of views and there is no deliberate censorship of views by
| the State. In Russia, you get and only get what the State
| produces, and what they've been producing over the last
| several years has been crazy; Ukraine is not a country, and
| we have a holy mission to liberate them.
|
| > Overall, a bad idea, IMO.
|
| It is sometimes better to act than not to act, even if what
| you do is not perfect; it all adds pressure and expresses
| that you are serious about what you're doing.
| shabier wrote:
| > In the West, you have a range of views and there is no
| deliberate censorship of views by the State. In Russia,
| you get and only get what the State produces
|
| I would argue that big tech is making an effort to sway
| public opinion in certain favorable directions, if not
| outright censor them under the guise of safety or
| whatever generic excuse we've heard over the past decade.
| The information we've been digesting is essentially only
| what big tech allows to be heard.
|
| Yes, there are several ways to access information from
| alternative methods but from what it seems like, only a
| fraction of both the West and Russia do that.
|
| By censoring an opposing agenda, albeit anti-west
| propaganda, you will create exactly the same vacuum as
| you accuse the Russian government of.
|
| > It is sometimes better to act than not to act, even if
| what you do is not perfect; it all adds pressure and
| expresses that you are serious about what you're doing.
|
| Strong disagree. We should do the right thing rather than
| just anything that could put pressure on them.
| dangerface wrote:
| > It will isolate them enough to allow the government to push
| an anti-western agenda.
|
| They are already doing this, Russian media is going full
| propaganda everything they say is a blatant lie simply to
| reduce the signal to noise.
|
| The more important aspect is their cyber attacks on Ukraine
| that prevent civilians and militias from organising to escape
| the violence or repel it.
|
| Russia's state sponsored cyber attacks show it has no interest
| in contributing to a healthy internet, they should be banned.
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't think cutting off Russia from the Internet is a good
| idea simply because not everyone inside Russia who uses that
| connection is necessarily a Bad Guy.
|
| Do you want to be cutting off Russia's anti-war protesters from
| the world?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Yet we cut off the athletes from the paralympics. Wouldn't
| the same argument apply to them?
| vharuck wrote:
| The International Paralympic Committee at first did not ban
| Russian or Belarusian athletes[0], but required them to
| enter without any national symbols. Which was how Russian
| athletes completed in the Winter Olympics. After enough
| threats of protests and boycotts that would have interfered
| with the games, it was decided to keep those country's
| athletes out.
|
| Honestly, I'm not surprised. Though they were going to
| march under a neutral flag, they'd have still been
| emissaries of their governments. That's what the Olympics
| and Paralympics are for. Plus, the IPC's decision was
| probably easier because of repeated incidents of Russian
| athletes doping, which is why they were already under a
| neutral flag.
|
| [0] https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/russian-
| athletes-par...
| jl6 wrote:
| Another potential unintended consequence: Russians come to the
| conclusion that Putin has failed to protect them from the
| sanctions, so they oust him in favor of someone even more
| hardline.
| pax wrote:
| What about, instead of plainly denying service, the pages would
| be spoofed _, with slight alterations - showing some bits of
| reality / counter propaganda? might that have any merit?
|
| _not to everybody at once, ideally to selected audiences, so it
| would be spotted & counteracted latter than sooner.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > to allow the government to push an anti-western agenda.
|
| To be honest, not much would change then as of today.
| kubb wrote:
| bro, most russians don't even speak a second language. they use
| the russian internet for everything. nuanced takes from hacker
| news won't reach them
| [deleted]
| paganel wrote:
| Which is why it really surprised me when I learned that Disney
| had decided to leave the Russian market a couple of days ago.
| For whomever lived East of the Well pre-1990 (I did grow up as
| a kid in Ceausescu's Romania) it is well known that things like
| Disney/Hollywood movies (that were still circulating in a sort
| of samizdat way) and mundane consumer products like Coca-Cola
| or Levi's did a lot more at bringing the Wall down than the
| entire US nuclear arsenal.
| dleslie wrote:
| This is more likely because Russia is going to start
| requiring online services to carry a few dozen government
| mandated channels, and Disney didn't want to associate their
| brands with that.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Disney has a finite amount of money to gain in that market,
| and collecting it when sanctions are afflicting the main
| banks is risky and complicated. There's also a PR win to be
| had.
| dunkelheit wrote:
| Many boycotts in the current round don't make any rational
| sense. It is all emotional reaction and desire not to be seen
| as collaborators.
| elliekelly wrote:
| New Hampshire's Governor has ordered state-run liquor
| stores to pull Russian vodka _and_ Russian _branded_ vodka
| from the shelves.[1] So a product made entirely outside of
| Russia where not a single cent of profit finds its way back
| to Russia is still removed under the order if it uses
| Russian "branding":
|
| > Products that use the words 'Russia' or 'Russian' in the
| brand name, advertising, or product description--along with
| products that depict Russian architecture or symbols
| colloquially associated with Russia--are all considered to
| be Russian-branded products and have been removed under the
| Governor's Executive Order[2]
|
| It's hard to see how that's anything other than emotional.
| And, I would imagine, illegal.
|
| [1](PDF)https://www.governor.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt336
| /files/in...
|
| [2]https://www.newsweek.com/vodka-brands-remind-they-arent-
| russ...
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Before long we'll see people attacking and targeting
| Russian Americans like they did Asian Americans and the
| media will justify it.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Just like the media justifies attacks against Asian
| Americans? Give them a little credit; most mainstream
| outlets aren't so outwardly jingoistic that they'd
| celebrate targeting innocent Americans for no reason than
| their ethnic background.
| martimarkov wrote:
| So if the desire by Google, Disney, Sony, Apple, etc. is to
| not be seen as enablers or collaborators to the russian-led
| war, one can assume that it's a rational decision not an
| emotional one... :D
| matwood wrote:
| They are rational in the sense that most of the world is
| trying everything they can to avoid a shooting war with
| Russia. It's the whole of sanctions that will put pressure
| on Russia, not any single one.
| blihp wrote:
| It's entirely rational. To this day IBM is often cited as
| an example of a western company that did business with the
| Nazis.[1] No consumer company wants that kind of stigma
| attached to them.
|
| Also, they are rightly concerned about the longer term
| effects of sanctions and instability as even if Russia
| pulled their troops out of Ukraine today (not going to
| happen), tensions aren't going to ease in the near term and
| sanctions are likely to remain in place for at least
| months, if not years. So it's not like business is going to
| come back in the short term. For the brands that depend on
| a 'squeaky clean' image, trying to keep as far from
| controversy as possible is good business.
|
| [1] See, I just did it.
| cronix wrote:
| > it is well known that things like Disney/Hollywood movies
| (that were still circulating in a sort of samizdat way) and
| mundane consumer products like Coca-Cola or Levi's did a lot
| more at bringing the Wall down than the entire US nuclear
| arsenal.
|
| Interesting. As a young kid in the early 80's (USA), I
| remember going to a Disney movie with my mom and brothers
| called "Night Crossing," which was about a family in East
| Germany escaping to West Germany via a hot air balloon in the
| middle of the night that they constructed. Being less than
| 10, I had no clue what was going on in Europe or the effects
| of post-WW2, but that movie sure stuck with me even to this
| day. It prompted many healthy discussions as a child that
| would probably never have been brought up, or at least for
| another 10 years.
| EnKopVand wrote:
| This is anecdotal and just what I've seen but here in Denmark
| one of the leading Apple retailers and certified repair shops
| is called Humac. Until recently I didn't know they had a
| Russian owner. Now it's become so much of a problem for them
| that they've edited their website to try and hide it.
|
| Companies that don't severe ties with Russia as fast as
| possibly seem to be at a very real risk losing their customer
| bases here in Europe in the wake of the invasion.
|
| I can't even claim to be above it. I cancelled my Netflix
| subscription when it was aired that they complied with
| Russian broadcast laws. Something Netflix no longer does by
| the way.
|
| I've never had an issue buying products from Russia before,
| so if I'm not the only one reacting like this, and it seems
| like my reaction has been amongst the milder here, then you
| may find some of the answer in that.
| rleigh wrote:
| I've certainly bought products and services from Russian
| companies in the past, and would like to do so in the
| future, but today I did cancel my Kaspersky antivirus
| subscription. If this escalates further, could Kaspersky's
| software be weaponised to compromise computer systems
| worldwide? I would like to hope not, but where do you
| balance that risk? It's easier to remove it than take the
| risk. Maybe that's a bit paranoid, but where does the
| influence of the Russian state end?
|
| That wasn't the main reason for my action. The main reason
| was to cease doing business with a nation behaving in
| brutal and barbaric ways we have long considered completely
| and utterly unacceptable, and haven't seen the like of
| since WWII. There has to be a cost, and this is an
| additional cost, albeit minor, on top of the existing
| sanctions. I'll consider re-subscribing when this is all
| over, perhaps. I might not have been able to renew the
| subscription in any case, now that making payments is
| nearly impossible.
|
| We haven't even begun to see the full economic cost of the
| sanctions yet, but from what I can see I suspect it will be
| significant, way beyond what's been reported so far. Within
| just a few days of the freezing of the payments systems,
| commercial contracts can no longer be honoured and are
| being cancelled wholesale. That business is going to be
| redirected to other countries, and I'm afraid that's going
| to be extremely painful for the affected companies,
| employees and families. And that's including for internal
| business projects, and is on top of companies which are
| explicitly pulling out of consumer-facing Russian markets.
| Whether this will actually effect any change in policy I
| don't know, I hope it does, but doing nothing would have
| been worse.
| lupire wrote:
| Attacking Russian expats/exiles is a disgrace.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Absolutely agreed. At some point it's just ethnoracism,
| masquerading as virtue-signaling.
|
| "How does this action help end the war in Ukraine?"
| should be the litmus test, and if the logic to get there
| is too tortured, maybe rethink the action.
| witrak wrote:
| Say openly "I don't care about Ukraine"!
| gran_colombia wrote:
| The other test is also, "How does this action help
| prevent Putin's next invasion?" Actions should not only
| be about applying pressure now, it's about destroying a
| literally imperialist government's ability to win its
| wars. So anything which undermines any aspect of the
| Russian economy is fair game. If we can keep them from
| training people, good. If we can keep them from raising
| taxes, good. If we can keep them from feeding their
| troops, good. If we can usher in strikes over unpaid
| wages, good. If East European stores stop importing
| Russian goods, good.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| tokai wrote:
| Inventive Retail Group Moscow is not an expat by a long
| shot.
| ant6n wrote:
| The Soviet Union had Pepsi.
| paganel wrote:
| Technically we also had Pepsi in Romania, I drank it once
| or twice before 1990, but we didn't have the consumer
| society the West had that made it so you could buy Pepsi or
| Coca Cola from basically almost everywhere.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| This is one thing I've always been curious about, if
| you'd indulge me for a short answer. Or link!
|
| How did consumer goods and food distribution actually
| happen in (commun|social)ist economies? As in, the last
| mile experience as a consumer?
| retrac wrote:
| They varied as much as anywhere, depending mostly on the
| level of economic development. From what I've read and
| from what relatives have told me, in the "good" economic
| years in East Germany, it was almost like in capitalist
| societies today. Restaurants, grocery stores, shopping
| malls, albeit with less selection, quality and periodic
| shortages and rationing of imported and more scarce
| supplies. Bananas were common enough but more of a "wow
| isn't this nice?" food you felt lucky to find in stock,
| rather than a daily breakfast item. Fresh tropical fruits
| were one of the things people were crazy for in the West
| when the wall fell.
|
| Despite the reputation, the government usually was very
| sensitive to the issue of keeping meat or at least a lot
| of bread on the table. When the DDR ran out of money to
| import coffee in the 70s, it was one of the more serious
| threats to their rule and it stimulated the development
| of the Vietnamese coffee industry in "socialist
| cooperation". (Fun fact: to this day Germany is still
| Vietnam's largest coffee buyer.). Prices were quite low
| in proportion to wages, effectively government
| subsidised. Hence shortages, though rarely for staples.
| Hunger was rare after 1950. Dietary boredom was not.
|
| In the not so good economic years, or in many parts of
| the Soviet Union or less wealthy socialist countries,
| similar story, except meat shortages and too many turnips
| and your wages might not afford too many restaurant
| visits. Out in the country there was some subsistence
| agriculture in the poorer places like Vietnam. Some
| places never Stalin-style collectivised the farms, and
| there you saw small market or at least barter economies
| in small towns and rural areas consuming local product
| locally, farmer's markets basically.
| dsign wrote:
| The actual process is essentially the same than in an
| industrialized country: trucks that move goods from A to
| B. It's just that A, B, and the agent moving the goods
| are very different. By "different", I mean "much worse".
| Maladies: bad refrigeration, multi-week delays, places
| crumbling down.
|
| Check this photo of a "bodega" in Cuba (first image in
| this page): https://www.cibercuba.com/noticias/2018-08-01
| -u1-e192519-s27...
| captn3m0 wrote:
| And Pepsi got a warship in return:
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-
| shi...
| mtgx wrote:
| emteycz wrote:
| And the non-Soviet states behind the Iron curtain had Coca
| Cola in Tuzex and similar.
| lupire wrote:
| Disney still actively edits movies to add Chinese government
| propaganda, so obviously this is a short term PR gimmick.
| sitkack wrote:
| Lots of their movies are re-rendered, re-voiced, etc for
| lots of markets. This is in addition to the propaganda they
| already contain. The ability to change digital movies on a
| market by market basis is astounding. Give the protagonist
| a folksy drawl in the south (US), a crisp British accent in
| the north, a Mexican Spanish accent in the west. You can
| basically render out the combinatorial expansion of all the
| parameters.
| MrDresden wrote:
| Potentially by removing the access to these products and
| services, there is a slight chance for the Russian population
| to react in such a way as to force change in their country.
| Isolating them from the internet would though probably
| backfire.
| ivan90210 wrote:
| hellorussianbot wrote:
| netmonk wrote:
| with real reasons.
| witrak wrote:
| Would you name some of these? I mean related to the
| subject...
| netmonk wrote:
| well i confess there is a difference between brainwashed
| and braindead, given the result of latest USA election i
| think we are more facing braindead peoples.
|
| Which could have a clear biological explanation as far as
| USA is the most diabetic country in the wolrd and diabete
| leads to Alzheimer (that some specialists call diabete
| Type3).
|
| Associated with third world education system, and high
| level of self esteem, it's easy to brainwash braindead
| peoples such as USA citizen.
|
| We all remember this Collin Powell little bottle of
| Anthrax.
|
| But what surprise me more is how true american can be so
| proud of themselve as far as they are such liitle dog of
| Israel... That's a pitty.
| djbusby wrote:
| Loads of folk in the "west" are brainwashed too - like
| all the ones who insist Trump won election in USA as one
| example. That same group is now claiming this conflict
| never would have started because Putin was afraid of
| Trump.
| ziml77 wrote:
| It is amazing to me that so many people can think that.
| It's not like the truth is being censored.
| awb wrote:
| In your example it was the introduction of those Western
| products that had some effect.
|
| Now, those products are ubiquitous and it's their withdrawal
| that might have some effect. Most kids through middle age
| adults in Russia don't know what it's like without those
| Western products.
|
| The West seems happy to give Putin the full USSR glory days
| experience.
| rexpop wrote:
| Simply "seeing" the "misery" of war is easier eaid than done,
| although you're right that it's done more deliberately outside
| the reach of the warring parties.
|
| A primer on this subject is Sontag's "Regarding the Pain of
| Others".
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52373.Regarding_the_Pain...
| TrueDuality wrote:
| I agree that cutting off the country in general is really bad
| idea. What I would support is not announcing Russian government
| owned IP blocks outside of the country. It would exclusively
| punish official Russian government institutions and potentially
| cause issues for any officials abroad (think VPN connections).
|
| It would have zero impact on normal residential and business
| internet connections inside the country, and would not impact
| anything sovereign within the country itself. It likely
| wouldn't prevent the government from getting and using the
| general internet as they'd just have to switch over to a normal
| business account, but their hosted services can't switch that
| quickly.
|
| I would feel really bad for the IT staff that had to figure
| that out and work around it...
| ithkuil wrote:
| 1. it could fuel retaliation by the russian government,
| perhaps lying that the cut done by the west is not asymmetric
| and it's actually the reason internet doesn't work for
| russians
|
| 2. isn't it useful that people on the west at least know what
| kind of propaganda people in russia consume?
| deepsun wrote:
| 1. They constantly lying about everything already. Like
| literally 99% of everything they say is lies.
|
| 2. They could always know. But they don't, because they
| don't care. And for the sake of their brains, I wouldn't
| recommend it. Besides, are you proposing to feed Russian
| propaganda to western public?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Are you talking about the US because both of those
| statements remind me of the US government and media but
| instead it is American propaganda
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| WRT #1 - Repeatedly not taking action out of fear of
| Russian retaliation is precisely what has gotten us to this
| point. Putin will step over the line until the west pushes
| back.
| brabel wrote:
| There's an argument to be made both ways.
|
| I've been quite shocked when I moved to Europe and
| noticed that very strong Anti-Russia stance that's openly
| spoused here... if I were Russian, I would be genuinely
| worried about them having facilities to hold nuclear
| weapons, which is what happens when you join NATO [1].
| NATO already borders Russia directly in the Baltic
| states, nearly touches it with Poland (the historic
| gateway of Western armies into Russia), and if Ukraine
| joined NATO, the Russian heartland would become
| vulnerable not only to nukes but to large-scale ground
| invasion, as the border with Ukraine is very long and
| completely devoid of geographical obstacles... so even
| though I despise Putin for starting this war (I despise
| anyone who starts a war... war is a remnant of our
| primitive, violent past where force was accepted as a
| viable solution to problems), I definitely don't hold the
| West as being blame-free in this story. Everyone involved
| knew there was no bigger provocation to Russian than
| installing nukes on its closer, until very recently
| friendly, neighbours.
|
| John Pilger has been warning us that NATO/USA expansion
| even into the Chinese sphere [2] is making the world
| incredibly more dangerous, not less.
|
| "American bases form a giant noose encircling China with
| missiles, bombers, warships - all the way from Australia
| through the Pacific to Asia and beyond," Pilger says.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing
|
| [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/12/6/john-
| pilger-qa-...
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Taking actions is what got us here. Many of the times
| when the West tries to push institutions east Russia
| retaliates. Look at the Georgia war and Crimea for
| example.
| gran_colombia wrote:
| Russia does not invade in reaction to NATO expansion.
| NATO expands in reaction to Russian invasions. Notice how
| NATO does not expand militarily. Not once. Notice how
| Russia expands militarily, every time.
| waffleiron wrote:
| In 2020 NATO said themselves:
|
| "Allied leaders also agreed at Bucharest that Georgia and
| Ukraine, which were already engaged in Intensified
| Dialogues with NATO, will one day become members. In
| December 2008, Allied foreign ministers decided to
| enhance opportunities for assisting the two countries in
| efforts to meet membership requirements by making use of
| the framework of the existing NATO-Ukraine Commission and
| NATO-Georgia Commission - without prejudice to further
| decisions which may be taken about their applications to
| join the MAP."
|
| https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_49212.htm
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 2020 was after the invasions of both Georgia (2008) and
| Ukraine (2014).
| waffleiron wrote:
| Note the December 2008 in the quote, i.e. before Ukraine
| and after Georgia.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Georgia was in August 2008. You have the wrong quote.
| This quote is from from April 2008
|
| >NATO welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic
| aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that
| these countries will become members of NATO.
|
| https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.
| htm
| cabalamat wrote:
| Following the setup of NATO, 18 further countries joined
| it. Most (11) of them joined when Putin was in charge of
| Russia. Putin is NATO's best recruiting sergeant.
|
| Russia is the only country in the world with a massive
| formal alliance of major world powers reigned against it.
| This is because of continued Russian aggression and
| atrocities going back a _long_ time.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Not true.
|
| April 2008 [1]
|
| >NATO welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic
| aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that
| these countries will become members of NATO.
|
| After the meeting Putin said NATO expansion was a direct
| threat to Russia.
|
| The Russo-Georgia War was August 2008.
|
| So Georgia being attacked was clearly after attempted
| NATO expansion east.
|
| In November 2013 the president of Ukraine, Yanukovych,
| decided to not agree to an EU deal. There were protests
| in Ukraine which would end in a coup. Some of the
| European countries try to work out a deal for an election
| but the protesters aren't going for it. Yanukovych then
| flees the country.
|
| The new government is very pro West / EU. What then
| happens in Ukraine starts making anti-Russian moves like
| removing minority (Russian) language laws.
|
| Russia then attacks Crimea in February 2014.
|
| Again, Russia only attacked after Ukraine was attempting
| to work out a deal with the EU and after they showed they
| would use force (the coup) to get it.
|
| Don't get me wrong. I am against Russia attacking both
| Georgia and Ukraine, but it seems quite clear that Russia
| only attacks after they start getting too cozy with the
| West.
|
| [1] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8
| 443.htm
| witrak wrote:
| _-david-_ wrote:
| I am very much against Putin and think his attacks are
| wrong. I documented what I meant here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30543599
| TrueDuality wrote:
| All sanctions could fuel retaliation by the Russian
| government, the point is to punish them for their actions.
| Likewise the Russian government will spread propaganda
| about all of the sanctions regardless of what they are.
|
| This would be a very tricky thing to "punish" and a tricky
| thing to implement in practice because this isn't a single
| government that would need to stop announcing these
| networks, but each private internet organization that is
| peering with Russia (think oversea cables and international
| peer exchanges). It could be mandated by governments for
| their own country, but to be actually effective it would
| have to be all the organizations peering with Russia
| agreeing to implement this. If one country or organization
| decides against the announcement filter you'd have to
| expand the route filtering to everyone that organization
| peers with. There would never be one target for the
| punishment.
|
| As for learning about the propaganda, a large part of what
| we learn is from Russian state TV and actors inside of
| Russia itself which this wouldn't impact. Since the major
| official propaganda channels have already been blocked on
| YouTube and the social media platforms, this would likely
| only impact the propaganda being spread through much
| smaller and harder to track sites if at all since posting
| of that propaganda could still be done from a cell or
| normal business internet connection. Some official
| government supported programs (such as the GRU hacking
| operations) already operate on regular business connections
| to avoid the direct association with government IP blocks,
| I have to imagine their propaganda machines do likewise.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| I wonder how we could crowd source / make a wiki for
| liesyourgovtellsyou dot com website that works for every
| country. I don't think any country or state is innocent
| in this regard.
| netmonk wrote:
| This comment assumes that western peoples are safe some any
| kind of propaganda. Well from my humble opinion i think
| otherwise.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I keep hearting this false equivalence. Sure the west is
| full of propaganda, but what's going on in russia is
| another level. I heard from people on the ground in
| ukraine that the this is a full on aggression and I heard
| from other people in russia that the common people
| literally believe that this is just a special operation
| that meant to overthrow the corrupted government etc etc.
|
| How, in the past similar propaganda happened in the west,
| when the average american thought civilians in afganistan
| or iraq weren't really hurt when the US "surgically"
| tried to punish the "bad guys". I get it; and in the same
| vein I wouldn't think that the solution for that
| propaganda was to cut off the american population from
| actually getting information from abroad.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 90% of Americans were pro-war against Iraq, and most
| Americans actually believed that it was a righteous war
| while most Iraqis saw it as a war of aggression. Like how
| is that different from your own example that russians
| believe that this is a special operation to denazify
| ukraine?
|
| I think you just don't remember or know about the general
| opinion back in 2003 so you think this sort of complete
| disconnect is unique to Russia. Yes the opinion later
| changed and anti war sentiment became mainstream but that
| wasn't in 2003 or even 2004.
|
| We aren't talking about just ignorance about civilian
| casualties in the Middle East but an almost complete
| belief that the invasion of Iraq was righteous and that
| they were actually freeing the country. You can't just
| downplay how pervasive that belief to claim that it is a
| false equivalency.
|
| I get that Americans had a diverse media and that it
| wasn't state controlled, but does that matter when you
| get a 80-90% public support for such a disgusting act of
| aggression?
| neltnerb wrote:
| I'd say that the key difference is that in, say, the US
| -- yes, there's tons of very stupid stuff said by media
| uncritically, and there's stuff the government says.
|
| But it's also easy to find opposition points of view.
| Case in point, mask mandates and convoys. Propaganda
| still works, same as marketing and advertisements, but it
| really does not seem equivalent when it's so easy to
| access information critical of what your government is
| doing.
|
| Unlike when all media critical of the government gets
| banned. No one tried to arrest me for protesting the Iraq
| war, or Guantanamo, or Afghanistan, or...
|
| But the "mainstream" media definitely has huge blind
| spots, implicit racism, and other nasty features from
| either habit or laziness.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I agree and it really bothers me how otherwise well
| intentioned people in my neighborhood in the European
| country where I live fall in the trap of saying that the
| west (and the US in particular) is "just so bad" etc.
| They are pro Russia trolls or whatnot, it's genuine
| widespread confusion. And I have to say that I do blame
| america for creating so many precedents of hypocrisy that
| they fueled this cynicism to an extent that spills over
| the usual group of local conspiratorial nutjobs.
|
| That said, I'd take this hypocrisy every day instead of
| people being actually killed.
|
| I mean it's not a videogame for cry ing out loud, these
| are people's lives. War is a fucking hell.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| That's up to individual service providers, and it wouldn't
| surprise me if some _were_ starting to reconsider peering
| agreements.
| devy wrote:
| > What I would support is not announcing Russian government
| owned IP blocks outside of the country. It would exclusively
| punish official Russian government institutions and
| potentially cause issues for any officials abroad (think VPN
| connections).
|
| That could be perceived as a posture of war by adversaries.
| And it's a really bad idea. Have you considered for the
| innocent Russian people who doesn't agree with the war? What
| about their daily lives in Russia where they need to get
| driver's license online to be renewed but couldn't because
| their DMV website is inaccessible?
|
| Economical / sports / Internet sanctions are double edge
| sword. There are unintended consequences and unfortunately no
| way to do it without collateral damages.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > That could be perceived as a posture of war by
| adversaries. And it's a really bad idea.
|
| IMHO, Putin's Russia has gotten really good at exploiting
| "fears about perceptions" to get away with a lot of shit,
| because it's "sensible" adversaries pull their punches.
|
| > Have you considered for the innocent Russian people who
| doesn't agree with the war? What about their daily lives in
| Russia where they need to get driver's license online to be
| renewed but couldn't because their DMV website is
| inaccessible?
|
| I doubt a Russian DMV site is running on a foreign sever.
| Didn't Russia itself do some kind of test disconnection
| from the internet a year or two ago?
| TrueDuality wrote:
| As I mentioned, this wouldn't impact any domestic access to
| any services. Everything would remain available and
| accessible inside of Russia.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > Have you considered for the innocent Russian people who
| doesn't agree with the war? What about their daily lives in
| Russia where they need to get driver's license online to be
| renewed but couldn't because their DMV website is
| inaccessible?
|
| I assume that a Russian accessing a Russian website would
| be unaffected by any such measures.
|
| Also, I wonder what backdoor facilities the NSA put into
| Apple and Android phones? The US would very much like to
| continue getting any such intelligence.
| practice9 wrote:
| It's a fallacy to consider Russian people are "innocent" in
| this situation. The nation as a whole is complicit to
| choosing the same old dictator for 20+ years. Like Germans
| in 1930s.
|
| Also, why should Ukrainian cities be bombed every day,
| while Russians just happily go about their daily lives?
| It's morally inexcusable.
|
| > they need to get driver's license online to be renewed
| but couldn't because their DMV website is inaccessible
|
| Perhaps, they can go to the DMV office?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Like those Jewish Germans? Would you punish them for
| Hilter's actions?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| This is oddly reminiscent of the justification Osama bin
| laden gave for 9/11 and it's a bit shocking. Why would
| Americans civilians be "innocent" and just happily go
| about their daily lives while middle eastern cities were
| bombed and Muslims were routinely killed by the American
| military?
|
| Do you not see how dangerous that rhetoric is?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| "What about their daily lives in Russia where they need to
| get driver's license online to be renewed but couldn't
| because their DMV website is inaccessible?"
|
| I struggle to imagine a less consequential outcome... A
| whole country of people are being bombed out of their
| houses, vs some portion of people maybe won't be able to
| renew their driver's licenses?
|
| You've convinced me; cut the internet.
| practice9 wrote:
| Didn't see your comment when I posted, but I have the
| same thoughts
| neltnerb wrote:
| I agree, cutting off communication networks that are hard to
| censor is not a smart strategy. During the cold war and WWII
| the ability to reach people with AM radio broadcasts from
| foreign news sources was critical to countering at least some
| propaganda.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Fire-walling them off will result in the people not knowing
| what is going on. Just look how China is able to hide what
| happened at Tienanmen square.
|
| > We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of
| the internet. We need our pictures and videos to reach them.
|
| Completely agree. I think popular website owners should go even
| further and target content specifically to Russian IP informing
| them of the causalities in Ukraine and protests going around in
| Russia.
| roody15 wrote:
| Also vice versa. Although war propaganda is in full swing ...
| there is a bit of truth on the Russian side about NATO
| encroachment since 1997
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Plus I'm sure the elites in Russia will find ways to access the
| public internet. It would depend on how the cutoff were
| implemented, but unscrupulous VPNs in nearby countries might
| work.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| More importantly, it would have set a precedent that nobody
| could want.
| shabier wrote:
| Oh yes, exactly that. This is a slippery slope.
| multjoy wrote:
| Slippery slope to where, exactly? Have you been watching
| the news at all?
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Did you ever watch the news prior to the last ten years?
| At this very moment the US and UK are in multiple
| countries bombing and killing civilians. Should they be
| cut off also?
|
| I'm so flabbergasted people can't see past their nose
| regarding current events, it all reminds me very much of
| OIF/OEF propaganda levels. Be vigilant for real psyops
| (as opposed to the soft army stuff that hit frontpage
| recently)
| witrak wrote:
| It seems you don't fully understand what are sanctions
| against big countries, in this case, one of the
| superpowers, that committed full-scale invasion of
| another one, especially in Europe.
|
| Such an attack isn't something comparable to any war from
| WW2. If the world can't punish attackers painfully
| enough, we will see more similar events...
| brabel wrote:
| This is a really misinformed view... Vietnam, for
| example, was such a huge war that the number of bombs
| employed was actually bigger than in WWII! Just because
| Vietnam is not an European country it doesn't make that
| war any less horrific than Ukraine in absolutely any way
| you look at it (well, as of today, Vietnam was enormously
| larger than the current war, of course, with millions of
| deaths - luckily, so far, in Ukraine, deaths are in the
| low thousands).
| mangodrunk wrote:
| A good example of it would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%9...
| Karsteski wrote:
| It's interesting how the world rallied immediately to the
| aid of Ukraine in a big way, compared to the middle
| eastern countries that have been destroyed by the likes
| of the US and allies, or the South American countries
| that have been completely destabilized by the US
| government.
|
| Really makes you think...
| megous wrote:
| This war can easily mean sudden influx of 13 milion new
| refugees in EU. (just a guess by taking the same
| percentage as with Syria, except most of those are not in
| EU by a long shot)
|
| Makes me think EU and allies want to stop this war as
| early as possible, for some reason, and all these
| reactions is how they think that will happen.
| Supermancho wrote:
| The difference really makes you think what?
|
| Ukraine is a (mostly christian) democratic country who's
| main exports are not drugs or oil. The leadership doesnt
| declare holy war on other countries.
|
| Also there's the focus on the history of the USSR and
| Ukraine in europe, alongside their efforts to join
| western alliances. Afganistan or Saudi Arabia or Iraq
| never tried to join the EU or NATO.
|
| Cultures that are alike tend to by sympathetic to each
| other. That's it.
|
| In regard to US vs Latin America - https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_S...
|
| Commercial interest and local defense. When Putin fueled
| separatist armies prior to the invasion, this was
| equivalent to the banana wars in Latin America, fueled by
| the US. The world stage generally ignores these kinds of
| regional 3rd party conflicts.
| geraneum wrote:
| Interesting you say that since US has played a big role
| in crushing democracies here and there and also in the
| Middle East which of course fueled the anti US rhetoric
| in those countries. For example, look at 1953 coup [1] in
| Iran backed by UK and US with the help of clergy! to
| topple a _democratically elected_ government! The mess
| that Iran is in right now is not unrelated to that
| incident.
|
| We shouldn't downplay the war in Ukraine just because US
| does what US does. Also what's happening there is not
| important just because "Ukraine is a (mostly christian)
| democratic country who's main exports are not drugs or
| oil." but because Ukrainians are fellow humans, like the
| rest of us, and are victim of an unfair confrontation
| against a bully few times bigger than them.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27
| %C3%A9ta...
|
| Edit: grammar
| cabalamat wrote:
| > At this very moment the US and UK are in multiple
| countries bombing and killing civilians.
|
| Which countries are the UK in bombing civilians right
| now?
| parthdesai wrote:
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/saudi-
| arabia-...
| [deleted]
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I do. It's Russia's most powerful weapon where they already
| control the narrative and push an anti-western agenda. Without
| internet, the people of Russia will revolt. When communications
| got cut in Egypt in 2011, people took to the streets which
| resulted in democracy and forming an entirely new government
| all within days.
|
| China isn't hiding anything. They try, but it's a fool's
| errand. The more they try the more people want to know about
| it. No one in China that lived during that atrocity is unaware.
| lupire wrote:
| The new generation in China is extremely unaware.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I don't think so. I run a popular gaming server and people
| from China connect daily. It's a regular topic and most
| folks playing are young. It's not that they're unaware,
| it's just history for them. It's like saying Americans are
| unaware that the US military was the first and only nation
| to use nuclear weapons. We don't like it, but we're not
| unaware.
| newuser94303 wrote:
| Most Americans are told in school that it was necessary.
| Several states are trying to remove slavery from history
| classes.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/texas-
| history-1836-pro... - Texas, Idaho, etc
| witrak wrote:
| Well, interpretation or background may be biased. But
| nobody tries to hide pure facts...
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Depends on where you live and who your teachers are.
| Texas textbooks promote revisionist history where
| California textbooks put more effort into inclusion and
| critical thinking. Most states piggy on the CA or TX
| version, it depends on who makes the purchasing decisions
| at the state level but Americans based on location are
| typically subjected to one or the other.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I don't think cutting of Russia from the internet is a good
| solution at all. It will isolate them enough to allow the
| government to push an anti-western agenda.
|
| Exactly. IIRC, Russia is actually taking steps to build a great
| firewall to do that deliberately. They're just not there yet.
|
| But once they have the technology to connect to the internet on
| Putin's terms, cutting them off will make more sense. Maybe not
| enough sense to actually do, but the option should be re-
| evaluated.
| miohtama wrote:
| Correct. If someone is going to disconnect Russia from
| Internet it is going to be Russian themselves, to limit the
| free flow of information that might be conflicting with the
| official truth.
|
| But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its way.
| Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they still
| need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc.
| For the Russian IT business to work.
|
| Software development and Internet were built on scientific
| principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free
| flow of information. You cannot have one without the other,
| or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient
| software ecosystem.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its
| way. Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they
| still need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront,
| etc. For the Russian IT business to work.
|
| Don't be so optimistic. It isn't the 90s anymore.
| "Information [will] find its way [through]," but probably
| not in ways that can change anything.
|
| > Software development and Internet were built on
| scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This
| requires free flow of information. You cannot have one
| without the other, or you are going to end up with very
| inferior and inefficient software ecosystem.
|
| It's doubtful if that's true, but even if it is, the
| response of dictators everywhere is: "so?" A strong
| "software ecosystem" might be a top priority for _you_ ,
| but they care more about other things.
| shabier wrote:
| I agree with you on that. Isolating them or ourselves from them
| will only trigger those who're already vulnerable to extremism
| to be become even more extreme.
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| > or ourselves from them
|
| Russian media is purely State controlled and is preaching
| justifications for the invasion of Ukraine.
|
| This is not a free speech situation.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Give humanity a little more credit.
| megous wrote:
| Here you have humanity (too):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_pNIGoCybk https://www.y
| outube.com/channel/UCk0Ktc21_lgVNiZRY9Py1Fg/vid...
|
| https://twitter.com/ilya_shepelin/status/1499298510394601
| 474
|
| (I guess a result of the state media control)
| gjvc wrote:
| experience shows that doing so is futile
| shabier wrote:
| Oh please, the same happened in the US after 9/11, and we
| all rolled with it. Cut the free speech nonsense, we're (as
| in big tech) not enforcing it either.
| lolinder wrote:
| These moral equivalencies have to stop. The US didn't
| declare anti-war protests to be illegal and arrest 7000+
| protesters in the course of the first week of the war in
| Iraq. The US didn't shut down independent media outlets
| that were opposed to the war. The US didn't block
| (nascent) web platforms that hosted anti-war discussion.
|
| The US media is often a propaganda arm of the government.
| The Russian government tries to ensure their propaganda
| is _all_ you see. There 's a massive difference.
| waffleiron wrote:
| Plenty of anti Iraq war protesters got arrested
|
| Just one of many examples:
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/chi-city-
| offers-62-m...
| glenstein wrote:
| Parent commenter made the point about "arrest[ing] 7000+
| protesters in the course of the first week of the war"
| and your purported equivalence to that is that "plenty"
| were arrested.
|
| There's a failure of vision, a failure to understand
| differences in scale that is driving these false
| equivalences, that then leads to a bunch of equivocation
| about whether the unlike comparisons can be similar. I
| think the original point stands and this remains a false
| equivalence.
| waffleiron wrote:
| > and your purported equivalence to that is that "plenty"
| were arrested.
|
| 800 illegally arrested in a single city, on a single day
| after the invasion. San Francisco had 2,200 protest
| arrests in the two days. [1]
|
| https://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-
| te.iraq29mar29-story.html
| lolinder wrote:
| For others who want more context for the SF arrests like
| I did: https://www.salon.com/2003/03/20/protest_16/
|
| > The biggest antiwar eruption in the U.S. took place in
| San Francisco, where protesters had vowed to shut down
| the city, and the police reported making more arrests
| than any time during the past two decades. The protests
| began during the morning rush hour, when activists used
| duct tape for purposes that Tom Ridge at the Office of
| Homeland Security would never recommend: blocking the
| intersection at Battery and Columbus, while handing out
| stickers that said "No War in My Name."
|
| > During the morning rush hour, the city's Financial
| District was shut down by human blockades that stretched
| from the Embarcadero to Van Ness Avenue, stopping cars
| and bus traffic for hours and provoking a wave of
| arrests.
|
| > By 4:30 p.m., several thousand protesters began sitting
| down at the busy intersection of Fifth and Market, where
| police began carting off dozens of them to a MUNI bus
| that had been commandeered as a paddy wagon.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not condoning those arrests, but their scope is
| nothing like what we're seeing in Russia, and that news
| article is about the arrested being paid damages because
| the arrests were _illegal_. Even then, all involved were
| released the next day.
|
| The scope of the arrests in Russia is much wider (as a
| percentage of those protesting and in raw numbers), and
| they're legal.
| netmonk wrote:
| ttybird2 wrote:
| _" Can you explain why Snowden is refugee in Russia for
| having denouncing the crime of USA worldwide ?"_
|
| Afaik, you are probably thinking of Assange (who is
| currently under arrest in the UK). Snowden is a refugee
| in Russia for exposing NSA's surveillance.
| waffleiron wrote:
| They were illegal as mass arrest, there were plenty of
| other people who got legally arrested protesting the Iraq
| war (and were not released the next day).
|
| I know the scope is different, but it is also good to
| keep in mind that bad things don't only happen in Russia.
|
| edit: s/mass protest/mass arrest
| glenstein wrote:
| >I know the scope is different, but
|
| This is the hinge on which false equivalences turn. The
| scope is different, they shouldn't be compared, and being
| able to correctly grasp and differentiate different
| scales of moral offense shouldn't be interpreted as "I
| guess they don't know bad stuff happens elsewhere." Those
| comparisons do more to obfuscate than clarify.
| waffleiron wrote:
| >The scope is different, they shouldn't be compared
|
| Then nothing can ever be compared, there is always going
| to be differences between situations. Even just cultural
| differences between Russia and the US.
| lolinder wrote:
| > They were illegal as mass protest
|
| Do you have a source for this? The only instances of
| arrests I can find are things like the above (illegal
| arrests) or people who trespassed on private property and
| were arrested for that. Meanwhile I can find plenty of
| stories of perfectly legal thousands-strong protests,
| which sounds like "mass protest" to me.
|
| > I know the scope is different, but it is also good to
| keep in mind that bad things don't only happen in Russia.
|
| Yes, but it depends on the purpose of placing that
| emphasis. "Even in a democracy we must be vigilant" is
| one thing. "We shouldn't condemn Russia for their human
| rights abuses because we're no different" is a very
| different message, and one that is manifestly false.
| waffleiron wrote:
| Ah! Apologies, I'll edit my post, I meant mass arrest
| lolinder wrote:
| Ah, that makes way more sense! Thanks.
| megous wrote:
| Do you have a similar article where some Russian city is
| proposing financial settlements for arrests of
| protersters from anti-war demonstrations 8 years ago?
| waffleiron wrote:
| > The US didn't shut down independent media outlets that
| were opposed to the war.
|
| Only 3% of media coverage was anti-war, they didn't need
| to.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_
| War...
| lolinder wrote:
| This is the study that that number comes from:
| https://fair.org/extra/amplifying-officials-squelching-
| disse...
|
| That study says only 3% of individuals who were
| interviewed on the 6 studied channels were opposed to the
| war. They only studied coverage across 6 mainstream media
| outlets:
|
| > The news programs studied were ABC World News Tonight,
| CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN's Wolf Blitzer
| Reports, Fox's Special Report with Brit Hume, and PBS's
| NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.
|
| This doesn't tell me anything about the state of
| _independent_ news outlets at the time.
| waffleiron wrote:
| Do independent news outlets really matter if the vast
| majority of people get their news for ABC / CBS / NBC /
| CCN / Fox /PBS?
|
| Again, I agree that the US acted in a different way than
| Russia does right now, but the situation itself is also
| different. The US did not need to take the actions Russia
| has to take, because the majority of people in the US
| where pro-war during the invasion, with only 17% strongly
| opposing the illegal war [1].
|
| [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-
| america...
| lolinder wrote:
| Your "only 3%" comment was replying to my argument that
| to compare Russia's suppression of _all opposing speech_
| to the US 's _voluntary support_ from the mainstream
| media is patently absurd. That the US _had_ overwhelming
| voluntary support from its people isn 't proof that I'm
| wrong, it's exactly my point.
| glenstein wrote:
| Public opposition grew despite media narratives and there
| were ways to clamp down on domestic opposition that U.S.
| wouldn't entertain that Russia would. So these
| comparisons miss the forest for the trees.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Canada did.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| It isn't ICANN's job to control propaganda.
| user-the-name wrote:
| cabalamat wrote:
| > Yes they will push their own propaganda to the west but we
| can deal with that.
|
| Agreed. Keeping the net open helps the West win this war.
| Russians turn to e.g. the BBC, because they know its more
| reliable than their own media.
| [deleted]
| gtvwill wrote:
| Weak response. Its this kind of weak response that got us to
| the point of russia invading a peaceful neighbor. They know the
| response would be weak.
|
| IMHO, shut off their internet, send their economy and comms
| back to the effin dark ages. Block all flight over Russian air
| space (we can legit shoot planes down from well outside the
| country). See if putin survives 6 months then. Russians like
| comfort. Russians like a modern life. Strip it from them for
| their actions. They will fight to get it back on their own
| soil.
|
| Until them. F russia. F putin. F the russian people for letting
| this happen. They are complacent. They are responsible. The
| behavior you walk past is the standard you set.
| shmerl wrote:
| Protesters and dissidents in Russia need Internet to fight
| against the dictator too.
| sAbakumoff wrote:
| Russia will cut itself from the internet in a couple of weeks, no
| need to worry.
| hogrider wrote:
| These guys have blood on their hands.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Which country doesn't? Wasn't the USA "freeing" Iraq and
| Afghanistan until yesterday?
| TZubiri wrote:
| Nice try Ukraine.
| dsabanin wrote:
| Ukraine needs help, they are getting desperate. Yes, they're
| standing and pushing back even, but Russians kill so many
| civilians... I don't think world can afford to watch how it's
| just being destroyed like this. Russian people are brainwashed
| and are under military occupation right now, they can't
| effectively overthrow this government. All the Putin's cronies
| are locked with him in a bunker, under complete control. This is
| a bad situation from all angles.
| api wrote:
| This is a really terrible idea. It would make it much easier for
| Putin to control the narrative in his own country.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Well, we've been using infrastructure (like DNS) as a weapon for
| a decent time. I still remember when CloudFlare decided to drop
| Storm Front thinking... They've opened Pandora's box. I suppose
| this is just the next step.
|
| Sad that it has to get this far for people to suddenly get
| squeamish about it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Being so afraid of a slippery slope that you're too permanently
| paralyzed to take steps on a nice flat plateau has its own
| risks. CloudFlare seems to be doing just fine, and a private
| organization declining to do business with a neo-Nazi forum
| doesn't cause much worry for me.
|
| ICANN's responsibilities are very different than CloudFlare's,
| and the proposed action has much wider scope and impact on
| innocents in the dispute. They're not at all comparable
| scenarios, and I believe CloudFlare and ICANN both made the
| right decisions in the respective cases.
| kingkawn wrote:
| The sanctions can backfire spectacularly, as they often do,
| leading to mass suffering and isolation for the populace, further
| radicalization of the leadership, and less reason for compromise
| as economic/cultural entanglements are severed.
| core-utility wrote:
| This is an interesting approach to modern war. Let's say
| hypothetically the western countries (US, Canada, EU) go to war
| with eastern countries (Russia, China, North Korea). Western
| countries could levy a strong impact by pulling internet service.
| This may inadvertently help eastern countries by blocking
| Twitter, Tik Tok, etc. but would also mean that AliExpress and
| many eastern markets are immediately cut off from that supply
| chain.
|
| North Korea is a bad example here since they have little internet
| or trade, but included them anyways.
| aurizon wrote:
| Keep it open, broadcast Russia's shame(Putin and all Russians
| know it). Putin knows the knives are out for him. All visitors
| are searched and must have a chemical shower(I read, and I assume
| to stop contact nerve poisons) and he sits set apart from his
| guests by about 20 or so feet so a suicide bomber with a bomb in
| his abdomen. There were attempts to kill Hitler as his generals
| cam to know him as a loon of loons, that sadly failed back in the
| day. One can only hope his generals can persuade him or find an
| elegant path past his protections. I suspect he does not walk on
| any balconies facing Red Square either, he lost one of his
| generals to a sniper yesterday?
| UltraViolence wrote:
| The internet should remain a neutral communications platform.
| Once we start politicizing it the dream will die pretty quickly
| and we get segregated networks which don't interoperate or only
| though heavily policed gateways.
| dangerface wrote:
| Russia has state sponsored hackers who's only goal in life is to
| ddos / disrupt / destroy the internet.
|
| Why would the internet entertain a country that has set its mind
| on destroying it?
|
| The only argument I see in comments is that letting Russian
| citizens get on VK is more important than allowing Ukrainian
| citizens to communicate and organise evacuations before the
| Russian tanks turn up. Are you all on crack or something?
| tyrrvk wrote:
| I agree 100% with ICANN's position in this matter. I think their
| reply was level headed and correct.
| gruez wrote:
| See also, the maps from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reactions_to_the...
|
| While most countries took a pro-Ukraine stance, there's a non-
| negligible amount of neutral countries. In particular are India
| and China. I'm sure they wont be very happy if IANA effectively
| breaks their internet connectivity to Russia.
| sidibe wrote:
| gruez wrote:
| Replying to the quote:
|
| China couldn't care less whether they have your "sympathy" or
| not. What they do care is whether ICANN is taking a side or
| not. If ICANN is shown to be basically controlled by the
| west, then they won't want to participate in the ICANN
| internet. Maybe they'll set up their own, just like how there
| are SWIFT replacements. That will be the end of the internet
| as we know it (ie. global network, irrespective of
| alliances).
| waffleiron wrote:
| You can vouch for comments you don't think should be flagged.
| Copying them over to a new comment kinda defeats the purpose
| of the flagging system.
|
| I personally think that the comment makes a false analogy,
| e.g. it does not consider the effects the punishment will
| have on other neighbours or if the punishment is suitable to
| the crime. In this analogy the "actions" taken against the
| criminal would be vigilante justice that affects others.
|
| Finally, if we start removing countries that invade other
| countries from the internet we would end up with quite a few
| countries banned from the internet.
|
| edit: s/effects/affects
| lupire wrote:
| > Copying them over to a new comment kinda defeats the
| purpose of the flagging system.
|
| yes, that's the point.
| sidibe wrote:
| How do you vouch for them? I don't necessarily agree with
| cutting the internet but didn't think it was a bad comment
| and agree with the false neutrality
| waffleiron wrote:
| The vouch button should be next to the flag button for
| flagged comments.
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| Russia has invaded Ukraine.
|
| It's like having a criminal break into your house.
|
| If my neighbours are unhappy with me taking action against that
| criminal - maybe they're friends with him - I'm not much
| inclined, in the situation, to have much sympathy.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| State actors, at some point, have all been criminals waging
| wars to further their goals using taxpayers' money.
|
| I hate all of them, but I wonder why wars in the middle east
| don't trigger sanctions and media attention and this invasion
| does.
| batty_alex wrote:
| This one does because of Russia's previous exploits in the
| area. Most notably, Holodomir:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
|
| Ukrainians know what's next, just like my ancestors did:
| genocide
| edgyquant wrote:
| samstave wrote:
| But perspective is not.
|
| Try to not throw "whataboutism" at something where
| perspective is key.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Perspective isnt key, it was a pure whataboutism
| samstave wrote:
| You are focusing on an event. I am talking in much larger
| scale. I hope that makes sense.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No you are saying, "what about X tho," which is a fallacy
| and a bad faith debate tactic. We aren't talking about a
| larger scale, only you are, we are talking about Russias
| invasion of Ukraine.
| samstave wrote:
| Remove "russians" "ukraine" from the topic.
|
| Explain to me how to navigate subjects 20 years from now.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No, I won't remove the literal topic of discussion from
| the topic being discussed. What the hell are you even
| playing at here?
|
| The topic is Russia and Ukraine, there is no way to
| remove them from it. This is exactly what I mean about
| you throwing out fallacies and being dishonest.
| drno123 wrote:
| And United States have invaded Iraq, Afganistan and Lybia.
| Should all American citizens and companies be cut off the
| internet for that?
| ianai wrote:
| Consider always the ramifications of defeat. If Russia shows
| nothing truly matters against them. If nuclear weapons are all
| anyone makes a decision based on then only nuclear weapons
| matter. Do you think China is watching this? Duh. Do you think
| that translates to further invasions? Duh.
|
| The barrel of options against Russia needs to be exhausted. The
| only way to stop a bully such as this is to hit them the hardest,
| most brutal way, earliest. Putin and anyone supporting him should
| have been routed in the early 2000s. This decision here is
| nothing short of appeasement.
| shabier wrote:
| > The only way to stop a bully such as this is to hit them the
| hardest, most brutal way, earliest.
|
| Only if we had the same attitude against European countries or
| the US. It really seems like a one-sided stance most of the
| time.
|
| One of the few times that a European or US (allay) receives
| similar treatment as they dish out, they completely freak out,
| making outrageous demands or requests such as the one to ICANN.
|
| > The barrel of options against Russia needs to be exhausted.
|
| Strong disagree, we should just retaliate in any way just for
| the sake of it- that's just not effective.
|
| edit: formatting
| dangerface wrote:
| > Only if we had the same attitude against European countries
| or the US. It really seems like a one-sided stance most of
| the time.
|
| The Iraq invasion was unprovoked and unjustified we lied
| about our reasons for doing it if other countries stood up to
| us maybe we would have responded differently.
|
| I protested our government when we did what Russia is doing I
| haven't changed my position one inch, maybe no one else has,
| maybe other westerners are just trying to justify Russia in
| hopes it will some how justify US actions, it doesn't both
| countries are bullies and deserve the same response.
| ianai wrote:
| ICANN and the existence of the internet are products of
| sovereignty post-WWII and free economy. If you want your
| Disney+ then you must agree to the post WWII world. Putin and
| Russia are currently living out a bygone era in the modern
| day. The two are incompatible.
| jgrowl wrote:
| I find myself uncomfortably on your side of the argument,
| against the popular sentiment here.
|
| Russia is bombing Ukrainian communication towers, spreading
| malware, coordinating attacks, in an active unprovoked
| invasion.
|
| From my perspective, I see one country invading another country
| saying "If you try and stop us then we'll nuke the world."
|
| That is not how nuclear deterrence has worked in the past and
| if it not challenged then it will become the norm. Call their
| bluff. Hope that it is a bluff, because if it isn't, then it
| only will delay the inevitable until we are all in a worse
| bargaining place.
|
| To let evil flourish while you sit and do nothing is the same
| as doing evil. If we all die, then let us die doing what is
| right, in good conscience, protecting the vulnerable, upholding
| civilized order.
| ianai wrote:
| Exactly. The current posture seems to be eroding the world
| order by simply reminding people they have nukes. That's not
| a change. They've always had them. They're trying to use them
| in a new way. This new way would have probably been dealt
| with much more severely in the 70s/80s/90s.
| [deleted]
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Thank goodness for such a levelheaded response. Phew.
| charonn0 wrote:
| I get why ICANN doing this would have been a bad idea.
|
| On the other hand, Russian-language countries are a major source
| of malware and other serious cybercrimes.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Didn't America win the cold war because of cultural influence?
| Doesn't cutting Russia off also cut out that cultural influence.
|
| Does a side benefit come with a differently censored internet
| Russia provides where copyright is ignored?
| cphoover wrote:
| I think they made the correct decision here... These are the kind
| of foundational decisions that impact the direction of the
| internet as a whole. Starting a precedent for politicization is
| dangerous idea.
|
| I support fighting propaganda with better more believable
| information. Censoring information is not the answer.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Information is the antidote to war. Don't cut it off.
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