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The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? T

The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? They have demonstrated that they are not shy about using gangster tactics. One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. I don't see that in Russia. So, I would not be surprised to see the US strong-arming US companies, but they would do this with sham/flimsy legal cover. The result of non-compliance would be at worst asset seizure and/or imprisonment. Both of these can be examined and contested. I imagine that the penalty for non-compliance in the Russian system would max out at having an unfortunate accident. Gangsters all, but the level of gangsterism and possibilities for investigation/redress matter. All that said, I'm not a US citizen (although in a Five-Eyes country), so I do worry about using US-hosted services.

skeptikal 5y ago
- layer8 5y ago
  Russia is free to ban Microsoft Defender et al.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Which is the entire point of their argument? The Russian government is objectively worse by any honest metric.
  - naoqj 5y ago
    - xur17 5y ago
      Did you read the GGP? > One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. I don't see that in Russia. > So, I would not be surprised to see the US strong-arming US companies, but they would do this with sham/flimsy legal cover. The result of non-compliance would be at worst asset seizure and/or imprisonment. Both of these can be examined and contested. I imagine that the penalty for non-compliance in the Russian system would max out at having an unfortunate accident. Gangsters all, but the level of gangsterism and possibilities for investigation/redress matter.
    - davrosthedalek 5y ago
      Is there an equivalent of the EFF or ACLU in Russia?
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > Is there an equivalent of the EFF or ACLU in Russia? If there was, it's been shut down (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)#Intimidation_and_order_to_close,_2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)#Intimidatio...).
    - bboozzoo 5y ago
      That's funny as the thread is about contrasting Russia with US, but I don't seen to recall US invading any neighboring countries under the false pretense of defending some minorities.
      - robin_reala 5y ago
        May I turn your attention to the Bay of Pigs invasion?
      - laurent92 5y ago
        I remember a woman testifying that they were killing babies in Kuwait, and she was later discovered as being the daughter of an ambassador. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony I remember the late Colin Powell brandishing proof of WMD in Iraq at the UN Counsel. He will never land in the TPI, neither will the UN Counsel for basing a judgment upon unverified allegation causing dozens of thousands of illegal killings by the US army.
        Bud 5y ago
        The difference is that Powell wasn't intentionally lying, of course. Easy to gloss over that. But it does matter.
      - kelnos 5y ago
        Right, I mean, at least when the US invades a neighboring country, we don't try that hard to create false pretenses for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War). But, seriously, if you remove "neighboring" from your statement (which seems to be not particularly relevant to a discussion of morality and respecting the sovereignty of other nations), I'm sure we can find plenty of bad examples perpetrated by the US, many of them much more recent than the Mexican-American War.
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      I, as non-US citizen, thus having sub-human rights in eyes of every US 3-letter agency, still prefer very much US approach to, well, practically any matter compared to Russian one. For Russians, they really don't like anybody else. All that slavic closeness is crap as we can see in Ukraine and elsewhere. Heck, they don't care about other Russians neither, just a cannon fodder and poor fuckers to exploit and then throw away like garbage. They may very well like to see the entire world burn in nuclear hell if they don't get what they want, that's why current situation is really one of those moments in history when future is decided. It would sure as hell help US image in entire world to actually backtrack a bit all those spying initiatives towards friendly, democratic and in all-important-US-aligned countries. Showing some respect with deeds and not just empty words and so on. I don't know how much that was/is visible from inside, but Trump made huge amount of damage to that, although to be fair he was just a continuation of overall trend.
      - laurent92 5y ago
        It would help US to condemn Colin Powell for brandishing supposed proof of WMD at the UN Counsel in 2003, which they never found after invasion. It would help for the US to stop Predator attacks. Most of the world is convinced that they are illegal and illegitimate. And as a French person, I preferred Trump, because he didn’t trigger any new war and he calmed down Little Rocket Man. He even shook his hand! And donated 100% of his salary to charities! Biden is back and the war is back: Bad negociation tactics, Hunter Biden shenanigans with billions transferred as a chairman of an oil company in Ukraine, female ministers of defense in all of Europe, focus on having transgender soldiers, so Putin believed we were weak and the field was open. The result is a war. We could have avoided this war. PS: I’m not saying female ministers of war are incompetent, I’m saying they make no-one afraid. It was way more frightening when Krouchtchev’s general responsible for the nuclear button was a crazy alcoholic: When you’re faced with an madlad, you take him seriously.
        TheGigaChad 5y ago
        kelnos 5y ago
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      Regarding freedom of speech, _relative_ freedom of association and the ability to do business and to criticize governments, the US is miles ahead of Russia.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      I'm honestly trying to figure out here if you are trolling, or if you genuinely believe that. If you do genuinely believe that the US government is worse (or at least just as bad) as the Russian government when it comes to citizens' personal liberties, I'd be very curious to understand why you believe that to be the case. Certainly I (as a US citizen living in the US) am biased, but I do believe I have a healthy level of criticism and skepticism of my own government, and yet I cannot see how we even come close to how bad the Russian government is.
  - klibertp 5y ago
    > The Russian government is objectively worse by any honest metric. Any metric you and I would like to use, yes. The govt of Saudi Arabia, which is an ally of ours, murders journalists with a chainsaw on a foreign soil and smuggles the body out of the host country in suitcases - yet no Saudi company is penalized. Supporting a proxy war in Yemen is not that different from Russian invasion, but somehow it suffers no consequences for doing so. It's actually easy to justify: for the vast majority of Saudis prince MBS is a good ruler. Who are we to judge how their government works, given completely different cultural backgrounds, religions, and different expectations resulting from that difference? We'd be happier if Saudi Arabia was a democracy with a rule of law instead of chainsaw, but if the majority of Saudis prefer the latter, we shouldn't try to force them to change, even if homosexuals can be legally stoned to death there. It's an easy argument, but it undermines the "objectively" part of your statement. If we accept MBS, we should accept Putin. If we don't accept the way SA works, as we don't accept Russia's, then we should not trade with the Saudis. We do trade with them, though - we (Poland) even increased (2x or more) the amount of oil imported from them this year, and they continue being our friends and valuable allies in the region. The situation is frankly schizophrenic. Either there are objective metrics, in which case they should be applied everywhere equally, or we allow Saudis do what they want, but then we have no grounds on which to condemn Putin. If we want to still stay close to Saudi Arabia and condemn Putin, we have to agree that we condemn Putin based on something else than objective standards of governing. I'd really like for our foreign policies to stay true to the ideals we hold dear, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. Putin is an actual, real threat, so we don't accept him and his buddies, while MBS only dismembers his own citizens (and he even allowed women to drive!), so we accept him. That's also a kind of "objective metric", but it's far from what you meant, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable TBH.
    - Bud 5y ago
      In fairness, when you say "no Saudi company"...there ARE no companies in Saudi Arabia which we could sanction. Not really. There's the oil business, which basically is the same thing as the regime itself. Saudi Arabia doesn't do anything else. Doesn't produce anything else.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in <insert power country>, without being at least partially beholden to the <insert powerful country> government? The problem with this kind of Mad Libs argument is that it falsely implies the substitutions are equivalent when they're not. Also your quote shears away the context of the original statement that made it meaningful.
  - alimov 5y ago
    Please explain how they are not equivalent. Just because two governments are on good terms or are in some kind of partnership does not guarantee that one or the other will not take actions that benefit only them. What am I missing here?
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > explain how they are not equivalent Press. Political competition. Courts. Broadly, the rule of law. Nobody is perfect at any of these. But if the FSB wants a code change in Kaspersky, they're getting that code change. There is no independent press to report it. No opposition incentivized to call them out on it. No court in which they could lose.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        >> explain how they are not equivalent > Press. Political competition. Courts. Broadly, the rule of law. Exactly. Mad-libs "arguments" typically boil down to an invitation to ignore salient differences (which the structure cannot call attention to), make a superficial comparison, and finally arrive at a false equivalency.
      - alimov 5y ago
        While the methods may differ, is this not true of any governments intelligence agencies? Whether or not there is press/courts/rule of law. For press to report on an event they have to be aware of it, for courts to intervene they also have to be aware of it, for rule of law to matter then no part of a government can operate outside of it in any manner, so no extrajudicial actions either.
jeffwask 5y ago
> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets > in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? > They have demonstrated that they are not shy about using gangster tactics. To be fair, the US government has used gangster tactics to get US companies to install backdoors and allow encryption breakers.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  The very next sentence in GP directly addresses your comment.
mjevans 5y ago
I live in the USA, therefore I need to consider it as part of my threat model mostly in the blunders / withholding exploits (thanks CIA ~.~) senses. For everything else I try to vote informed and support a combination of the EFF, ACLU, and other organizations that can be better informed experts on the law and it's applications.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. That point would be a lot stronger if the US government hadn't demonstrated shocking callousness and disregard for international law in their efforts to catch notorious whistleblowers Snowden and Assange. I remember when Belarus downed a plane to catch a political dissident and all western countries acted shocked, even though these countries had tried to do the exact same thing to Snowden on the US's behalf, with a presidential plane no less.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jjeaff 5y ago
  International law isn't really a thing if it has no teeth. I would be more worried about the US breaking its own laws. Which they of course do, on occasion. But there is a lot of pushback and not too much fear of reprisal if you call them out and fight them on it. For example, we are in the process of appointing a supreme court justice that, during her career, has fought against US Government overeach and represented alleged terrorists imprisoned (oh sorry, "detained"), in Guantanamo.
  - PoignardAzur 5y ago
    My point isn't "the US is bad because it doesn't respect international law". My point is that the US is willing to go pretty damn far to put some high-profile dissidents in a hole and throw away the key, and there is very little pushback both internally and internationally, which kind of undercuts the whole "the US government would hesitate to do X because whistleblowers would stop them" argument.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      Are you talking about Snowden? Because that is one person and he isn't in a whole. They haven't even caught him. Another I can think of is Chelsea Manning who ended up getting a presidential commutation of sentence.
iudqnolq 5y ago
> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. I think the key misconception behind this argument is the idea that harmful governments is a binary flag, such that if you're subjected to one adding more makes no difference. In fact, different governments have different concerns. This means if you're subject to the US and Russia you're significantly more constrained than if you were just subject to one. As such, it makes sense to reduce exposure even if you obviously can't eliminate it. (I also believe the US govt is much better than Russian, but I'm leaving that out because I my argument doesn't need it and I'm uninterested in that argument)
timcavel 5y ago
u801e 5y ago
> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? The same could be said for businesses that have offices and physical assets in the US.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  The argument is the US system is more accountable, fair, and able to be resisted. Not perfect by any means, but I see a lot of daylight between the two governments.
  - u801e 5y ago
    The way companies have to deal with National security letters and compliance with sanctions, amongst other things, suggests otherwise.

skeptikal 5y ago

layer8 5y ago
Russia is free to ban Microsoft Defender et al.
edgyquant 5y ago
Which is the entire point of their argument? The Russian government is objectively worse by any honest metric.
- naoqj 5y ago
  - xur17 5y ago
    Did you read the GGP? > One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. I don't see that in Russia. > So, I would not be surprised to see the US strong-arming US companies, but they would do this with sham/flimsy legal cover. The result of non-compliance would be at worst asset seizure and/or imprisonment. Both of these can be examined and contested. I imagine that the penalty for non-compliance in the Russian system would max out at having an unfortunate accident. Gangsters all, but the level of gangsterism and possibilities for investigation/redress matter.
  - davrosthedalek 5y ago
    Is there an equivalent of the EFF or ACLU in Russia?
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Is there an equivalent of the EFF or ACLU in Russia? If there was, it's been shut down (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)#Intimidation_and_order_to_close,_2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)#Intimidatio...).
  - bboozzoo 5y ago
    That's funny as the thread is about contrasting Russia with US, but I don't seen to recall US invading any neighboring countries under the false pretense of defending some minorities.
    - robin_reala 5y ago
      May I turn your attention to the Bay of Pigs invasion?
    - laurent92 5y ago
      I remember a woman testifying that they were killing babies in Kuwait, and she was later discovered as being the daughter of an ambassador. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony I remember the late Colin Powell brandishing proof of WMD in Iraq at the UN Counsel. He will never land in the TPI, neither will the UN Counsel for basing a judgment upon unverified allegation causing dozens of thousands of illegal killings by the US army.
      - Bud 5y ago
        The difference is that Powell wasn't intentionally lying, of course. Easy to gloss over that. But it does matter.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      Right, I mean, at least when the US invades a neighboring country, we don't try that hard to create false pretenses for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War). But, seriously, if you remove "neighboring" from your statement (which seems to be not particularly relevant to a discussion of morality and respecting the sovereignty of other nations), I'm sure we can find plenty of bad examples perpetrated by the US, many of them much more recent than the Mexican-American War.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    I, as non-US citizen, thus having sub-human rights in eyes of every US 3-letter agency, still prefer very much US approach to, well, practically any matter compared to Russian one. For Russians, they really don't like anybody else. All that slavic closeness is crap as we can see in Ukraine and elsewhere. Heck, they don't care about other Russians neither, just a cannon fodder and poor fuckers to exploit and then throw away like garbage. They may very well like to see the entire world burn in nuclear hell if they don't get what they want, that's why current situation is really one of those moments in history when future is decided. It would sure as hell help US image in entire world to actually backtrack a bit all those spying initiatives towards friendly, democratic and in all-important-US-aligned countries. Showing some respect with deeds and not just empty words and so on. I don't know how much that was/is visible from inside, but Trump made huge amount of damage to that, although to be fair he was just a continuation of overall trend.
    - laurent92 5y ago
      It would help US to condemn Colin Powell for brandishing supposed proof of WMD at the UN Counsel in 2003, which they never found after invasion. It would help for the US to stop Predator attacks. Most of the world is convinced that they are illegal and illegitimate. And as a French person, I preferred Trump, because he didn’t trigger any new war and he calmed down Little Rocket Man. He even shook his hand! And donated 100% of his salary to charities! Biden is back and the war is back: Bad negociation tactics, Hunter Biden shenanigans with billions transferred as a chairman of an oil company in Ukraine, female ministers of defense in all of Europe, focus on having transgender soldiers, so Putin believed we were weak and the field was open. The result is a war. We could have avoided this war. PS: I’m not saying female ministers of war are incompetent, I’m saying they make no-one afraid. It was way more frightening when Krouchtchev’s general responsible for the nuclear button was a crazy alcoholic: When you’re faced with an madlad, you take him seriously.
      - TheGigaChad 5y ago
      - kelnos 5y ago
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Regarding freedom of speech, _relative_ freedom of association and the ability to do business and to criticize governments, the US is miles ahead of Russia.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    I'm honestly trying to figure out here if you are trolling, or if you genuinely believe that. If you do genuinely believe that the US government is worse (or at least just as bad) as the Russian government when it comes to citizens' personal liberties, I'd be very curious to understand why you believe that to be the case. Certainly I (as a US citizen living in the US) am biased, but I do believe I have a healthy level of criticism and skepticism of my own government, and yet I cannot see how we even come close to how bad the Russian government is.
- klibertp 5y ago
  > The Russian government is objectively worse by any honest metric. Any metric you and I would like to use, yes. The govt of Saudi Arabia, which is an ally of ours, murders journalists with a chainsaw on a foreign soil and smuggles the body out of the host country in suitcases - yet no Saudi company is penalized. Supporting a proxy war in Yemen is not that different from Russian invasion, but somehow it suffers no consequences for doing so. It's actually easy to justify: for the vast majority of Saudis prince MBS is a good ruler. Who are we to judge how their government works, given completely different cultural backgrounds, religions, and different expectations resulting from that difference? We'd be happier if Saudi Arabia was a democracy with a rule of law instead of chainsaw, but if the majority of Saudis prefer the latter, we shouldn't try to force them to change, even if homosexuals can be legally stoned to death there. It's an easy argument, but it undermines the "objectively" part of your statement. If we accept MBS, we should accept Putin. If we don't accept the way SA works, as we don't accept Russia's, then we should not trade with the Saudis. We do trade with them, though - we (Poland) even increased (2x or more) the amount of oil imported from them this year, and they continue being our friends and valuable allies in the region. The situation is frankly schizophrenic. Either there are objective metrics, in which case they should be applied everywhere equally, or we allow Saudis do what they want, but then we have no grounds on which to condemn Putin. If we want to still stay close to Saudi Arabia and condemn Putin, we have to agree that we condemn Putin based on something else than objective standards of governing. I'd really like for our foreign policies to stay true to the ideals we hold dear, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. Putin is an actual, real threat, so we don't accept him and his buddies, while MBS only dismembers his own citizens (and he even allowed women to drive!), so we accept him. That's also a kind of "objective metric", but it's far from what you meant, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable TBH.
  - Bud 5y ago
    In fairness, when you say "no Saudi company"...there ARE no companies in Saudi Arabia which we could sanction. Not really. There's the oil business, which basically is the same thing as the regime itself. Saudi Arabia doesn't do anything else. Doesn't produce anything else.
tablespoon 5y ago
> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in <insert power country>, without being at least partially beholden to the <insert powerful country> government? The problem with this kind of Mad Libs argument is that it falsely implies the substitutions are equivalent when they're not. Also your quote shears away the context of the original statement that made it meaningful.
- alimov 5y ago
  Please explain how they are not equivalent. Just because two governments are on good terms or are in some kind of partnership does not guarantee that one or the other will not take actions that benefit only them. What am I missing here?
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > explain how they are not equivalent Press. Political competition. Courts. Broadly, the rule of law. Nobody is perfect at any of these. But if the FSB wants a code change in Kaspersky, they're getting that code change. There is no independent press to report it. No opposition incentivized to call them out on it. No court in which they could lose.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      >> explain how they are not equivalent > Press. Political competition. Courts. Broadly, the rule of law. Exactly. Mad-libs "arguments" typically boil down to an invitation to ignore salient differences (which the structure cannot call attention to), make a superficial comparison, and finally arrive at a false equivalency.
    - alimov 5y ago
      While the methods may differ, is this not true of any governments intelligence agencies? Whether or not there is press/courts/rule of law. For press to report on an event they have to be aware of it, for courts to intervene they also have to be aware of it, for rule of law to matter then no part of a government can operate outside of it in any manner, so no extrajudicial actions either.

jeffwask 5y ago

> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets > in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? > They have demonstrated that they are not shy about using gangster tactics. To be fair, the US government has used gangster tactics to get US companies to install backdoors and allow encryption breakers.

andrewflnr 5y ago
The very next sentence in GP directly addresses your comment.

mjevans 5y ago

I live in the USA, therefore I need to consider it as part of my threat model mostly in the blunders / withholding exploits (thanks CIA ~.~) senses. For everything else I try to vote informed and support a combination of the EFF, ACLU, and other organizations that can be better informed experts on the law and it's applications.

PoignardAzur 5y ago

> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. That point would be a lot stronger if the US government hadn't demonstrated shocking callousness and disregard for international law in their efforts to catch notorious whistleblowers Snowden and Assange. I remember when Belarus downed a plane to catch a political dissident and all western countries acted shocked, even though these countries had tried to do the exact same thing to Snowden on the US's behalf, with a presidential plane no less.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jjeaff 5y ago
International law isn't really a thing if it has no teeth. I would be more worried about the US breaking its own laws. Which they of course do, on occasion. But there is a lot of pushback and not too much fear of reprisal if you call them out and fight them on it. For example, we are in the process of appointing a supreme court justice that, during her career, has fought against US Government overeach and represented alleged terrorists imprisoned (oh sorry, "detained"), in Guantanamo.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  My point isn't "the US is bad because it doesn't respect international law". My point is that the US is willing to go pretty damn far to put some high-profile dissidents in a hole and throw away the key, and there is very little pushback both internally and internationally, which kind of undercuts the whole "the US government would hesitate to do X because whistleblowers would stop them" argument.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    Are you talking about Snowden? Because that is one person and he isn't in a whole. They haven't even caught him. Another I can think of is Chelsea Manning who ended up getting a presidential commutation of sentence.

iudqnolq 5y ago

> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. I think the key misconception behind this argument is the idea that harmful governments is a binary flag, such that if you're subjected to one adding more makes no difference. In fact, different governments have different concerns. This means if you're subject to the US and Russia you're significantly more constrained than if you were just subject to one. As such, it makes sense to reduce exposure even if you obviously can't eliminate it. (I also believe the US govt is much better than Russian, but I'm leaving that out because I my argument doesn't need it and I'm uninterested in that argument)

timcavel 5y ago

u801e 5y ago

> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? The same could be said for businesses that have offices and physical assets in the US.

edmundsauto 5y ago
The argument is the US system is more accountable, fair, and able to be resisted. Not perfect by any means, but I see a lot of daylight between the two governments.
- u801e 5y ago
  The way companies have to deal with National security letters and compliance with sanctions, amongst other things, suggests otherwise.