4 ms·
We should not make offensive moves - down that path lies further escalation. We need to isolate Russia using non-violence. Primarily, refusing to buy their oil
by jl6 5y ago
We should not make offensive moves - down that path lies further escalation.
We need to isolate Russia using non-violence. Primarily, refusing to buy their oil and gas.
Remote bricking all iOS devices in Russia would be an offensive escalation because it would directly harm Russian assets.
Barring Russia from SWIFT… does that amount to a refusal to trade with them? That feels appropriately non-violent, but I’m unsure exactly what it would involve.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Remote bricking all iOS devices in Russia would be an offensive escalation because it would directly harm Russian assets It's still nonviolent.
- mukesh610 5y agoSo right to repair right out of the window?
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> right to repair right out of the window? This...never existed in a military/geopolitical context? Does Ukraine get to sue Russia for materiel it's blowing up?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mukesh610 5y agoI don't see the connection, but I know of a bunch of people who'd be pretty mad about how a corporation can remotely cut off an entire country's digital access.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> know of a bunch of people who'd be pretty mad about how a corporation can remotely cut off an entire country's digital access Of course. Same with SWIFT cut-off. Doing it in a way that is not arbitrary would be key. (I don't know how one would do that. There is no precedent for that type of action, and it is not being seriously considered by senior policymakers.)
- sneak 5y agoNot really, remotely disabling the mobile phones of ~every medical doctor, firefighter, and EMS in a country of a hundred and fifty million people with no warning would likely cause on the order of 10k deaths. It would be more deaths in 24h than the entire Ukraine invasion so far. You can pretend such would be nonviolent, but it's basically a terror attack on civillian medical infrastructure.
- bcrosby95 5y agoThe powers that be have decided cyber "war" isn't actually war. This stuff happens even in peacetime, and shots are never fired over it.
- sneak 5y agohttps://www.theverge.com/2019/5/5/18530412/israel-defense-force-hamas-cyber-attack-air-strike https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/5/18530412/israel-defense-fo...
- w0de0 5y agoThere are no "powers that be," this is just a popular reduction used to construct simple thoughts. There are humans, existing in a complex society. All meaning is negotiated all the time. All the expectations of behaviour from which your confidant hueristic analysis springs are at all times liable to be contradicted. For instance, few would have thought that the "powers that be" would permit massive conventional war in Europe at this late date. There is no platonic, eternal, divine legal system in which we encode what is and isn't actually war or which escalations are permissible in discrete scenarios.
- mr_sturd 5y ago> Remote bricking all iOS devices in Russia would be an offensive escalation because it would directly harm Russian assets. This would also be helping the Russian government prevent the spread of information outside of their own sources, regarding the conflict.
- w0de0 5y agoYou’re right that this is a form of escalation. You’re right to see danger in such further provocation of a nuclear rival - of an autocrat lost in historical delusion and bloody revanchism. I believe you’re wrong to think the escalation is inherently a mistake, or never a path out of conflict. It is common wisdom to observe that bullies may only be stopped with escalatory tactics. So it seems to me that the West must find some way to show a spine and push back, short of open war. The alternative cedes European hegemony, and the fate of those democracies, to Moscow’s cold hands.