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.
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.
> 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.
Not really. Civilians are certainly affected by sanctions. But government itself, oligarches, people with power are affected much more.
Also making population unhappy gradually is a good motivation to make some changes.
But here it will affect general population in the first place. It will remove ability to get other side of the news.
Cutting the internet is in a lot of cases what government actually wants (and does). Right now they shutting down sources of information (fb, yt, twitter). And here they suggest to shut it down completely. Russia government will probably thank them for this.
A measured response is appropriate. Actions can be scaled so that if the same thing is applied back to you for a fraction of a transgression, then the public can figure out who's overreacting.
> 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).
> 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.
> Many things that have happened historically did because leaders felt some grand moral imperative
I agree, actually. For example, the original Islamic expansion, and later the crusades that were a response to it, were both explained in moral terms. (these demonstrate how manipulating consensus reality is a core competency for rulers). And the people who fought in these wars genuinely honestly believed they were acting morally and serving a higher purpose.
Or, a more recent example: part of the reason NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999 was that they were ashamed they hadn't done so in Bosnia a few years earlier.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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…
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" ;)
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.
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.
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.
Wonder how commenters like this will feel when Russia/China/Iran have their own sphere with an alternative to SWIFT like CIPS.
Your complete inability to be a fair global hegemon is the reason nobody respects or trusts your government. Cuba is still needing to ask Uncle Sam for permission to import syringes during a global health crisis, we're still backing a genocide in Yemen, doing all of these terrible things while acting like global arbitrage. USA isn't the global police. If you're going to undercut the WHO, the UN, etc. then you don't get to act like it's about freedom and democracy or the rule of law.
Might makes right is an inane policy for Machiavellian wonks. Just because you can do whatever you want doesn't mean you should. The US imports a lot of things too, and a concerted global effort would at the very least require an isolationist USA. Where are you going to get your silicon chips from if the Republic of China reunifies with the People's Republic of China?
US wants to play by different rules than everyone else, not sure that works long term. Either invasions are globally kosher or they aren't, over a million dead and 38 million displaced over a "war on terror" that didn't do shit is a war crime. If we're not going to call an invasion on false pretexts that killed and displaced millions of civilians a war crime the word has no meaning and the discussion is moot.
And if the US can do war crimes but only China/Russia/Iran face consequences for them because we're a "big powerful country" I hope you're ready for the era of multiple US-hostile nuclear powers. Almost ruined the Earth when only two nuclear powers were butting heads in the 20th century and now we've got several to pick from :)
> Wonder how commenters like this will feel when Russia/China/Iran have their own sphere with an alternative to SWIFT like CIPS.
If they want to, that's up to them. It wouldn't surprise me if China did do something like this.
> Your complete inability to be a fair global hegemon
Hey, (1) I personally am not a global hegemon. (2) I was describing the way things are not how they ought to be. You should work on distinguishing is from ought; if you can't you'll never understand anything.
FWIW I personaslly think a fair bit of US policy is both immoral and self defeating. But, again, that's irrelevant, because as I said, geopolitics isn't a morality play.
> Where are you going to get your silicon chips from if the Republic of China reunifies with the People's Republic of China?
I'm European and I think the EU should be self-sufficient in chips. This is because any polity that isn't won't in the long term be fully independent.
> US wants to play by different rules than everyone else, not sure that works long term.
"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" is a rule thast's worked so for for all 5000 years of recorded history (with a few counterexamples). Is that lnog term enough for you? Is that just? No. Does it matter (i.e. affect the course of events)? Not usually.
> I hope you're ready for the era of multiple US-hostile nuclear powers.
A world with lots more nuclear powers may well happen, depending on the result of the present Russia-Ukraine war.
>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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
In this hypothetical do the Saudis promise to do this for all eternity or until the U.S. stops killing people with tanks and guns and withdraws from occupied territory?
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
'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.'
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You have no idea what my positions are, and you're doing a bunch of wild finger pointing.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t be so sure, but also I don’t have reliable data.
At this point, I also doubt anyone (including Putin) has reliable data - from what I do know, it’s common place for all the low level folks (equivalent of mayors, low level bureaucrats, city police departments) to fudge numbers the way it’s expected to look.
Even opposition politicians, independent reporters (even those that have fled the country), and folks I know with family there have been pretty straightforward in saying he has historically been very popular however.
The 60-70% polled support number has seemed quite legit to them. Propaganda is powerful, and most of the base of support he needs to keep the country running isn’t (ever) going to hang out on Twitter, post on Reddit, etc.
And the propaganda for a long time has been how the west is trying to bring otherwise strong Russia down. Which is, rather explicitly what the west is doing now (albeit for legit imo reasons).
If the opposition can muster enough support to meaningfully impact things, then that’s awesome!
That he does seem to be sweating means maybe it will work, I hope it does.
I’m just hoping to make the dynamic more visible, and caution against the same kind of thinking that had everyone seemingly convinced that Trump wouldn’t get elected in 2016.
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)
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Pointing out double standards is not futile or pointless. It exposes the true intentions and interests of those who have them. In this case, for example, the double standards of Western governments and elites show that they do not really care about the suffering of people, rather they act based on their (geopolitical? economical? general?) interests. So, in some occasions they themselves help destroy countries and have no problem with it (Not caring about people's suffering: confirmed), then an opponent creates suffering and they react (is it because of the suffering? No, they proved they do not care.). It is relevant to this, past and future situations, because it helps (those who wish to understand things, at least) shake off pretenses of the various players and see the real motives clearer. Repeat for any other section where double standards exist to get a clearer picture.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 an average Russian person for the actions of Putin like how it would be equally dumb to blame american person for the actions of US govt. and military industrial complex.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
I am picking the side I have because I support representative government and liberal democracy, and am against oppression of free peoples. I am against dictatorship and cronyism. I support the rights of free people. I am against unjustified wars of conquest but am in favor of wars that will protect the principles value. I am disappointed that my country isn't doing more and faster.
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.
Is this about the chemical weapons, that were confirmed to exist by the NYT itself, as well as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons?
> 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?
>>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 mean, yes?
America is a functioning democracy. The leaders have been elected, and stay in power based on the mercy of the electorate. Some recent challenges in that respect notwithstanding, I feel it's almost a tautology that America and Americans should be held responsible for things that America and Americans do - even MORE than in authoritarian countries. Same for Canada and UK et cetera et cetera.
I don't know what viable alternative to sanctions affecting citizenry anybody is proposing - targeted assassination of heads of state one disagrees with? Mlitary response? Just ignoring it? Yelling loudly? How else do we propose to send a message to a state "Please don't DO that" without involving the electorate that either demanded, participated, or allowed such actions?
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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 ...
> 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
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.
> 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).
You shouldn’t censor yourself because of meaningless internet points. Getting downvoted doesn’t hurt, I promise.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Certainly, I didn't claim to have anything conclusive. I think it would be interesting to see some research and data. It's pretty much established that the Russians have been seeking to sow discord within Western democracies for years.
Or it could be the collapse of western democracy from the inside. After all, the alternative is a bunch of people genuinely believe for 3 weeks that Trudeau was Hitler because he waited 3 weeks, asked people nicely to stop unlawfully occupying the capital and stopping international commerce, then had the police move in and as peacefully and quietly as humanly possible, removed them. Last I checked, this is not the behavior our mustachioed friend was known for. So that would leave politics in a sad state indeed.
Your so-called take-down isn't the victory you think it is haha. Either I'm right, and we lost recently, you're right, and we lost a long time ago.
Invoking the modern equivalent (and direct descendant) of war measure laws over a protest is totally unprecedented in the recent history of the western world . Maybe the comparison to hitler were extreme but that's because the laws invoked were also extreme ;). Whether you agree with the government or not I think it's reasonable/normal that you'd see a very strong opposition to Trudeau without any foreign interference.
Sadly I think I agree with the last part of your comment. It's actually why I really dislike the "russian bots are everywhere" narrative, because it distracts or obscures from the real problems we actually have. I think it's a cop out to blame foreign interference for very real tensions and disagreements we have in our society. My point wasn't to attempt a take down or to win an argument, it was mostly to drive home the point that it's all maybe deeper than just russian trolls after all ;)
It is also unprecedented to occupy the capital and block international trade for three weeks, while making demands that couldn't be met (such as asking the federal government to override provincial restrictions). Over conspiracy theories about dead baby tissue and "graphene oxide" in vaccines. 2/3 of Canadians agreed with the use of this measure.
The restrictions in place were lawful and in keeping with the charter. Canada is a rule of law jurisdiction and judicial avenues existed for the resolution of these grievances. As did normal protests. I welcome normal protests, and I welcome the truckers to return to Ottawa and picket - without their trucks. Their goal though was to overturn the results of the last election - of a minority government they only have to wait an average of less than a year to see fall on its own.
I didn't vote for Trudeau last time, I won't vote for him next time, and I completely agree with his use.
> My point wasn't to attempt a take down or to win an argument, it was mostly to drive home the point that it's all maybe deeper than just russian trolls after all ;)
It might be, but it could also be normal disagreements that are having a wedge placed in them by foreign adversaries.
Or it could be completely unrelated. I am very open to that.
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 makes a lot of sense actually. Did you not see the result? Weeks of chaos and world attention. For the investment of a few bucks. The trucker campaign is also a replay of the Chilean trucker strikes.
I guess my question to you is: do you think a 16 year veteran of the KGB - a warmonger with a lust for the Soviet Union - and a vendetta against the west for brining it down, with total control over an enemy state is more likely to or not to be conducting destabilization campaigns in enemy states? I think a study would be interesting and I would be happy to hear either outcome. However, I strongly suspect there's nothing anyone would tell you that would change your mind one way or the other.
Before you answer, remember, he is currently trying to set fire to Europe's largest nuclear reactor.
Further, you seem to be alluding to American politics, I am not talking about America at all.
> do you think a 16 year veteran of the KGB - a warmonger with a lust for the Soviet Union - and a vendetta against the west for brining it down, with total control over an enemy state is more likely to or not to be conducting destabilization campaigns in enemy states?
I'm sure it was the KGB behind the thousands small amount donations from verifiable United States and Canadian citizens.
The Spetnaz are probably behind the bouncy castle and hot tub the protester brought! Look at these dangerous criminals! [0] [1]
> Further, you seem to be alluding to American politics, I am not talking about America at all.
And yet it’s the same tactics and media spin across the borders. "but this time it really is the Russians! Just trust us..."
Your sarcasm is as obnoxious as it is irrelevant. Of course the KGB no longer exists - it's the FSB now - I was referring to Putin's work experience. They need not be behind very specific instances to be responsible for sowing discontent in general and fostering division.
These are exactly the kinds of operations the KGB carried out during the cold war, and is a core part of Russian military doctrine to this day. [1] The fact is, if you refuse to accept that it's a possibility (even as I accept it may not have been) then the system works doesn't it.
The thing is, when it works, people don't realize they have been influenced and they flat out refuse to believe it could have been by a state actor. The only politicians people complain about at work are bad politicians - the good ones already convinced you their idea was right. Ditto here.
> And yet it’s the same tactics and media spin across the borders. "but this time it really is the Russians! Just trust us..."
What do you mean "this time?" The Russians have never come up in the context of Canadian politics in my recent memory. Not as far as I can recall. Can you, or are you projecting American politics again?
You know for all the pictures of bouncy castles, they also built a shack downtown and filled it with diesel and propane [2], were arrested with significant quantities of weapons [3] and also the leadership has ties with white supremacist organizations and white nationalists [4]. They pissed all over national monuments. [5] They stole food from homeless shelters. [6] And they fought people inside the Rideau Centre mall forcing it to close to protect workers. [7] All while blocking international commerce. This is just a choice few selections. Good riddance I say.
For the record, 2/3 of Canadians support the Trudeau government's use of the Act, and only 1/3 voted for him - so I'd say that's a heck of a broad base of support.
But go on. Tell me more about my people. You're not Canadian, are you?
> These are exactly the kinds of operations the KGB carried out during the cold war, and is a core part of Russian military doctrine to this day.
The Canadians feds were also notorious for planting bombs back in the 70’s and try to pin it down on political opponents.
> The Russians have never come up in the context of Canadian politics in my recent memory. Not as far as I can recall. Can you, or are you projecting American politics again?
Absolutely. 4 years of “the Russians have to be behind this” and nothing happening here in America. And then suddenly we start hearing the same thing from the (liberal) media over there. What a coincidence. Almost as if they tried everything to see what would stick!
> You know for all the pictures of bouncy castles, they also built a shack downtown and filled it with diesel and propane
How else were they supposed to fuel their trucks? The city could have offered to hook them to the power grid but they preferred the trucker bring fuel apparently.
> were arrested with significant quantities of weapons
Second amendment & Legal weapons. Notice no crimes were committed using said weapon and they refrained from answering the question whether these were legally owned.
> and also the leadership has ties with white supremacist organizations and white nationalists.
Are those organizations illegal? Or just not liked by the government and state media?
> For the record, 2/3 of Canadians support the Trudeau government's use of the Act
They had a vote on it?
> But go on. Tell me more about my people. You're not Canadian, are you?
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.
"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 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...
> 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.
"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?
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
Dictators stay in power by force: they kill, torture, jail and brainwash people. They control the media and monitor all communications and anyone who speaks against them will suffer dire consequences.
Perhaps you ask, well why don't people just "rise up"? Take up arms and overthrow the regime? Well in that case, the government would rather flatten the entire nation with airstrikes than let the rebels win..
Even after painting the streets with their own blood and somehow accomplishing this, there is no guarantee that a democracy would take place if the central government is weakened..
Still don't believe me? Look at the Arab spring and where it led the people of Egypt and Syria.
Honestly, the comments on HN regarding this matter are very naive..
PS:
If you think you have the stomach for it and want to _actually_ see what this path ends up looking like, have a look at The Cave:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7178226 (Warning: very graphic)
I don't know how people keep missing this. It's especially ironic, considering we just came from 4 years of hearing "I hate Trump he's not my president I wish we could kick him out but my voice is too small".
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?
> 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.
> 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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately that also removes the possibility of using American media such as Disney as a cultural weapon. IMO it's further splitting the two worlds and making it only more likely to end in animosity
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
Drone striking middle eastern children didn't do it for you? Something about this rhetoric I keep seeing is just so.. selective. So nakedly biased. If people feel so strongly about Russias actions in Europe, how is it that millions of dead Muslims are inconsequential?
That question is rhetorical, I think it's obvious why that really is
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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure it'll just end up being pirated by those who can, and those who can't will just move on. I don't see parents waging a revolution because they can't get Disney. Media can be easily substituted if it's the only option
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Interesting you say that since US has played a big role in crushing democracies here and there
There was no internet during these periods and the media was either complicit in omission or narrative (they were BAD democracies corrupted by the drug cartels!) so the outrage was limited. Again, this isn't some mystery to ponder. Tribalism is alive and well and the narratives do their job.
> 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."
I didn't say anything about importance. Please don't misquote me to push your agenda.
It sounds like you're rationalizing racism. What does "mostly Christian" and not exporting oil have to do with anything?
>Cultures that are alike tend to by sympathetic to each other. That's it.
So Saudi Arabia is like the US and that's why it is supported by them?
It is abhorrent what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Thankfully the international community is reacting appropriately. It is also equally abhorrent what is going on in Yemen (which the US has a part in). Unfortunately, the international community is not reacting appropriately here. It was also abhorrent when the US invaded Iraq (on false pretenses).
Afghanistan supplies drugs(opium poppy) to pharmaceutical companies for turning into American painkillers. I don't know why it should matter if a countries main export is oil anyways?
Also who exactly declared a holy war on other countries? That seems like a vaguely anti Islamic charge that doesn't really apply to most countries in the middle east. Perhaps Iran(long after western intervention I should add) and one or two others.
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.
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...
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).
Exactly, and we agree completely on that. I think Vietnam may have heped, but it was Iraq what Putin had in mind, actually, when he decided to attack Ukraine, as there was zero consequence for Britain and the USA even after they went to war against the UN Security Council's advice, and against many European nations... unbelievable how they got away with that with no sanctions or any sort of reprimand even.
No, what Putin had in mind was how he unilaterally invaded Georgia after setting up two breakaway regions and didn't face any sanctions at all. He did exactly the same thing in Ukraine, but the West had prepared for this months in advance. If Putin cared about Iraq, he would have organized sanctions against the US himself. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/02/united-states-russi...
Yes, the US should be punished if it invades a country unilaterally. If another despot gains political power, their hands should be tied to only causing problems at home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
Bush also extensively used "free speech zones" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) to cordon off and split up protests so that they would not be seen or reach a wider audience.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
The West is a vast place and what you say about censorship is not universal, and I very much doubt it is absent at all. Tell me about Assange or Snowden. And if you want to hear what happens in Greece (a Western country you, in another country, probably hear nothing weird about in the news apart from new austerity measures) it is like Northen Korea with capitalism, and I must struggle to think why this could be a stretch except from executing people - oh wait, that is a thing too, if you piss off the wrong people. Plus, on the censorship side, social media did ban russian sources, and governments did ban russian channels from operating.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
There is no question that there is no "Russian democracy". Putin is a dictator - just not one as powerful (inside his own country) as Kim or the Chinese ruling elite or Stalin/Brejnev/Hrusciov etc. For an example of this, there is public opposition to Putin in Russia (Navalny, Kasparov some years ago), and even though it is repressed (imprisoned, covertly poisoned), it is not brutally obliterated like it would be in, say, N Korea, or in Stalin's USSR.
And even in the worst dictatorships, mass public protests will almost always lead to the regime being toppled (perhaps only to be replaced by a worse regime, unfortunately, but still toppled). The population of any country is simply too huge to completely ignore, if it turns against the regime en masse.
If you don't believe any of this, then tell me - why do you think Russia is investing so much resources in internal propaganda? Why are they pretending to hold free elections? Why does Putin pretend he has a noble goal in Ukraine? It's certainly not fooling world leaders, so if his own population can't do anything about it, why even bother?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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./
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.
under gTLD rules (the TLDs that private companies can buy/invest in), TLD operators cannot host any records outside of NS and RRSIG/other cryptographic record types, so they can't host email or webpages at the TLD itself. ccTLDs (country code) are effectively "owned" by the nation state themselves so ICANN generally doesn't impose too many rules on how they're used.
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/
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.
> 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:
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)
You're right that they would have to take some action, but nothing would stop Russian ISPs from taking over *.root-servers.net, or responding with authoritative responses before reaching those.
Now, to be fair, significant, though temporary, damage could be done to them from the outside (who knows how many Russian systems have their DNS configured to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8, for example).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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?
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.
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.
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?
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, because I believe that's the truth. And the world is overwhelmed by western propaganda. If you believe in freedom of speech, whatever I say shouldn't be a problem, am I right?
God save you if you ever hear an opinion that is in disagreement with your beliefs.
> If you believe in freedom of speech, whatever I say shouldn't be a problem, am I right?
No, not at all. I can believe in free speech and still believe that it's harmful to spread misinformation.
> God save you if you ever hear an opinion that is in disagreement with your beliefs.
The problem is not the fact that your opinion is in disagreement; it's the fact that your opinion is objectively, demonstrably wrong. People who point that out aren't clutching their pearls because they're so offended you have a dissenting opinion.
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.
> if you're the USA, you can bomb european countries too (eg. serbia), or middle eastern ones, or african, south american, asian
One of these things is not like the other. Serbia was a conflict in which NATO intervened; the US wasn't acting unilaterally to murder civilians. So it's not strange that they didn't face blowback from the broader community of nations. In general, the US is going to tread much more carefully on the European continent than it does in the developing world; don't expect drone strikes in Athens or Berlin.
> but even now, people here are more afraid of americans stirring shit up and starting a war here, than of russians
That's your prerogative, but of the US and Russia, only one of them is invading one of your neighbors without provocation and it's not the US. And most of the Balkans aren't members of NATO, so ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Any ideals, anywhere, from the USSR to the US to Thailand or Oman, will always be subject to decay. The law of impermanence (無常) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Russia doesn't need to prove anything they just need to increase the noise to signal ratio to the point where proof and facts are irrelevant.
Russia faked satellite pictures of a Ukraine fighter jet shooting down MH17. They are obvious fakes too the plane is missing Malaysia markings but any western news source that proves they are fake is considered western propaganda / fake news, any Russian critics are labeled as western spies and are arrested.
Putin is in power he doesn't need the consent of his citizens or the rest of the world he doesn't need facts or truth and can easily poison that well until no one can drink from it which is exactly what we are seeing with Putins holocaust claims.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
The whole point is that we all DO understand the way the man talks and acts, and we ALSO all understand the way you talk and act too: dishonestly and delusionally. Admitting you're delusional with a sarcastic tone doesn't cancel it out. Pretending that you believe Trump doesn't make us believe you. You're fully aware of and fully supportive of his lies.
He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
"He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies."
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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."
Why are you repeating a propaganda rhetoric that was designed specifically to target people who don't understand how computer networks and infosec works?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Do you mean stopping internet traffic from Russia accessing websites hosted on Cloudflare/AWS or stopping Russian customers from hosting on Cloudflare/AWS services?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.