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This is disturbing to read. This notion that somehow 'FOSS' is a moral ideal that stands above others is rubbish. If you're helping Russians drop bombs on Mau

This is disturbing to read. This notion that somehow 'FOSS' is a moral ideal that stands above others is rubbish. If you're helping Russians drop bombs on Mauripool that's a choice. You can also choose not to do that. That concerns an 'ideal'. There are issues at hand of much greater consequence and idealism that 'internet librarians' pretending that they are consequential in this context. 'More Average People', like accountants and teachers, are literally right now upholding their 'ideals' by learning how to use a weapon and defending their homes with their lives against literally the Russian Empire. That is an 'ideal' thankfully none of us will ever have to contemplate upholding.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
emodendroket 5y ago
I think it is a little bit more complicated than that when you're taking sweeping actions like banning Russians from sport (something we managed to avoid in the Cold War but apparently not this time). I also wonder if you'd take the same line about someone seizing your bank account, because every American, by the standard we are now using, is culpable for the Iraq War.
- malka 5y ago
  It's not that they are guilty. It is impossible to harm a state without harming its citizen in the process.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    How is the state being harmed by stuff like people vandalizing shops for having Cyrillic letters on the storefront, I wonder.
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      Stupid people do stupid things all the time. Clearly not an educated tactic. No one with an anything above the brain stem would do that, and that's not what's being argued for. Racism isn't the point, crippling the Russian state is. Assuming anything else smells like bad faith.
      - scaramanga 5y ago
        Huge parts of the Russian state are "infrastructure necessary for civil life" attacking those would be contrary to international humanitarian law. But there is also the tactical issue of whether such attacks would have the desired effect. Imagine if Russia would attempt to "cripple the US state" to stop the war in Iraq... I think the average Joe in America would feel quite threatened by that notion. As a corollary, consider this: as a response, would Joe be more likely turn against his state, or realise that he desperately needs to support it, in order to defend his way of life?
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        > Racism isn't the point, crippling the Russian state is. Assuming anything else smells like bad faith. One incident related in the story is someone slipping malware into a node library which appears, among other collateral damage, to have deleted the archives one NPO had collected of the war hoping to document Russian war crimes. So really I'm not sold on it being that different.
        smsm42 5y ago
        Do you have a link describing which NPO was that and what exactly happened?
        emodendroket 5y ago
        https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/issues/308 https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/issues/308 Draw your own conclusions about authenticity but it doesn't sound implausible.
  - tracker1 5y ago
    Targeted missile strikes on the homes of the leadership and military executives would be a way to do so, while minimizing direct harm to the population. Of course, actually targeting elites in power isn't something elites in power want to promote.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Oh come off it, the notion of collateral damage-free missile strikes is a fantasy, and there are obvious reasons not to pursue a hot war with a nuclear power.
      - tracker1 5y ago
        I never suggested that it would be collateral free... I said specifically "minimizing" the impact. That said, I don't support the practice, only making the point that there are in fact better options, including those with military action.
      - formerly_proven 5y ago
        You can observe the difference between a military largely focused on PGMs and a military focused on 152mm artillery and unguided MLRS right now in this very war.
  - Viliam1234 5y ago
    > It is impossible to harm a state without harming its citizen in the process. Technically, there is a way to hurt a state while helping its citizens -- help them move away, to a better place.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  like banning Russians from sport (something we managed to avoid in the Cold War but apparently not this time) That isn't as persuasive a point as you might want it to be. It may be the case that we are, now, simply being more comprehensive in defending against a descent back into those awful cold war times. Once we were already in the thick of it during the Cold War, even a little bit of cooperation was useful in not descending even further. It's like a phase transition. When society is already functioning at a higher level of cooperation, appropriate consequences of deviating from that are highly exclusionary. But the game-theoretic risk/reward balance changes when society is functioning at a more adversarial level. At these different phase states, an action that may incentivise de-escalation in one phase state may have a different (even inverse) effect in another phase state.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I'm not sure I would have described the last twenty years or so as a high watermark of global stability and accord.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I didn't call it the high water mark, just a higher level of functioning & cooperation than the cold war. I think that's an accurate statement. But now that you've raised the question, it's difficult for me to think of any stretch of decades that was definitively better, certainly not in the last 100 years. I might look far back to the Pax Romana, but that couldn't be considered global in nature. I'd argue that it's probably only at some point in the past 100 years that regional civilizations became interconnected enough for us to even consider things as a truly global system. Please note that I'm not claiming the last 20 years have actually been good in terms of global peace, stability, accord, etc., just that it seems a bit better than the recent decades prior to that. By one narrow metric, per Capita war-related deaths, we're doing quite a bit better. Of course these things are far from evenly distributed across the globe, and it seems like wider stability sometimes relies on allowing awful things to happen on a smaller scale. And I don't think it's much consolation to those dying in conflicts to tell them "no really you should be joyed to live at a time when so few people have their lives torn apart the way yours is right now". All of that strays from the topic of my original comment though, which again compared current times to cold war times.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  More than 71 percent of Russians support this war so your conclusion doesn't seem apt: https://t.me/ukrainenowenglish/1935 https://t.me/ukrainenowenglish/1935
  - wartijn_ 5y ago
    > Source: data from two surveys, made by the group of independent Russian sociologists, obtained by Radio Svoboda It would be nice if there was a link to those sources. This isn't worth much more than "trust me bro"
    - emptysongglass 5y ago
      Good point. The true numbers appear to be closer to the mid-60s [1] but Washington Post [2] and CNN [3] both report numbers closer to 50. Which ever of the polls you choose to believe, this is not a war largely unsupported by its citizens. [1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/07/russia-s-tricky-opinion-polling https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/07/russia-s-tricky-opin... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/russia-public-opinion-ukraine-invasion/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/russia-publi... [3] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/02/europe/russia-ukraine-crisis-poll-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/02/europe/russia-ukrain...
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        The looming Iraq analogy fits here too: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rally-round-the-flag-opinion-in-the-united-states-before-and-after-the-iraq-war/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rally-round-the-flag-opin... > Iraq dominated the headlines throughout the fall of 2002 and into the winter of 2003. Public opinion on the wisdom of war, however, stabilized relatively early and slightly in favor of war. Gallup found that from August 2002 through early March 2003 the share of Americans favoring war hovered in a relatively narrow range between a low of 52 percent and a high of 59 percent. By contrast, the share of the public opposed to war fluctuated between 35 percent and 43 percent. Earlier reporting had it in excess of 70% support: https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-america...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

emodendroket 5y ago

I think it is a little bit more complicated than that when you're taking sweeping actions like banning Russians from sport (something we managed to avoid in the Cold War but apparently not this time). I also wonder if you'd take the same line about someone seizing your bank account, because every American, by the standard we are now using, is culpable for the Iraq War.

malka 5y ago
It's not that they are guilty. It is impossible to harm a state without harming its citizen in the process.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  How is the state being harmed by stuff like people vandalizing shops for having Cyrillic letters on the storefront, I wonder.
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    Stupid people do stupid things all the time. Clearly not an educated tactic. No one with an anything above the brain stem would do that, and that's not what's being argued for. Racism isn't the point, crippling the Russian state is. Assuming anything else smells like bad faith.
    - scaramanga 5y ago
      Huge parts of the Russian state are "infrastructure necessary for civil life" attacking those would be contrary to international humanitarian law. But there is also the tactical issue of whether such attacks would have the desired effect. Imagine if Russia would attempt to "cripple the US state" to stop the war in Iraq... I think the average Joe in America would feel quite threatened by that notion. As a corollary, consider this: as a response, would Joe be more likely turn against his state, or realise that he desperately needs to support it, in order to defend his way of life?
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      > Racism isn't the point, crippling the Russian state is. Assuming anything else smells like bad faith. One incident related in the story is someone slipping malware into a node library which appears, among other collateral damage, to have deleted the archives one NPO had collected of the war hoping to document Russian war crimes. So really I'm not sold on it being that different.
      - smsm42 5y ago
        Do you have a link describing which NPO was that and what exactly happened?
        emodendroket 5y ago
        https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/issues/308 https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/issues/308 Draw your own conclusions about authenticity but it doesn't sound implausible.
- tracker1 5y ago
  Targeted missile strikes on the homes of the leadership and military executives would be a way to do so, while minimizing direct harm to the population. Of course, actually targeting elites in power isn't something elites in power want to promote.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Oh come off it, the notion of collateral damage-free missile strikes is a fantasy, and there are obvious reasons not to pursue a hot war with a nuclear power.
    - tracker1 5y ago
      I never suggested that it would be collateral free... I said specifically "minimizing" the impact. That said, I don't support the practice, only making the point that there are in fact better options, including those with military action.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      You can observe the difference between a military largely focused on PGMs and a military focused on 152mm artillery and unguided MLRS right now in this very war.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  > It is impossible to harm a state without harming its citizen in the process. Technically, there is a way to hurt a state while helping its citizens -- help them move away, to a better place.
ineedasername 5y ago
like banning Russians from sport (something we managed to avoid in the Cold War but apparently not this time) That isn't as persuasive a point as you might want it to be. It may be the case that we are, now, simply being more comprehensive in defending against a descent back into those awful cold war times. Once we were already in the thick of it during the Cold War, even a little bit of cooperation was useful in not descending even further. It's like a phase transition. When society is already functioning at a higher level of cooperation, appropriate consequences of deviating from that are highly exclusionary. But the game-theoretic risk/reward balance changes when society is functioning at a more adversarial level. At these different phase states, an action that may incentivise de-escalation in one phase state may have a different (even inverse) effect in another phase state.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I'm not sure I would have described the last twenty years or so as a high watermark of global stability and accord.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I didn't call it the high water mark, just a higher level of functioning & cooperation than the cold war. I think that's an accurate statement. But now that you've raised the question, it's difficult for me to think of any stretch of decades that was definitively better, certainly not in the last 100 years. I might look far back to the Pax Romana, but that couldn't be considered global in nature. I'd argue that it's probably only at some point in the past 100 years that regional civilizations became interconnected enough for us to even consider things as a truly global system. Please note that I'm not claiming the last 20 years have actually been good in terms of global peace, stability, accord, etc., just that it seems a bit better than the recent decades prior to that. By one narrow metric, per Capita war-related deaths, we're doing quite a bit better. Of course these things are far from evenly distributed across the globe, and it seems like wider stability sometimes relies on allowing awful things to happen on a smaller scale. And I don't think it's much consolation to those dying in conflicts to tell them "no really you should be joyed to live at a time when so few people have their lives torn apart the way yours is right now". All of that strays from the topic of my original comment though, which again compared current times to cold war times.
emptysongglass 5y ago
More than 71 percent of Russians support this war so your conclusion doesn't seem apt: https://t.me/ukrainenowenglish/1935 https://t.me/ukrainenowenglish/1935
- wartijn_ 5y ago
  > Source: data from two surveys, made by the group of independent Russian sociologists, obtained by Radio Svoboda It would be nice if there was a link to those sources. This isn't worth much more than "trust me bro"
  - emptysongglass 5y ago
    Good point. The true numbers appear to be closer to the mid-60s [1] but Washington Post [2] and CNN [3] both report numbers closer to 50. Which ever of the polls you choose to believe, this is not a war largely unsupported by its citizens. [1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/07/russia-s-tricky-opinion-polling https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/07/russia-s-tricky-opin... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/russia-public-opinion-ukraine-invasion/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/russia-publi... [3] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/02/europe/russia-ukraine-crisis-poll-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/02/europe/russia-ukrain...
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      The looming Iraq analogy fits here too: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rally-round-the-flag-opinion-in-the-united-states-before-and-after-the-iraq-war/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rally-round-the-flag-opin... > Iraq dominated the headlines throughout the fall of 2002 and into the winter of 2003. Public opinion on the wisdom of war, however, stabilized relatively early and slightly in favor of war. Gallup found that from August 2002 through early March 2003 the share of Americans favoring war hovered in a relatively narrow range between a low of 52 percent and a high of 59 percent. By contrast, the share of the public opposed to war fluctuated between 35 percent and 43 percent. Earlier reporting had it in excess of 70% support: https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-america...