6 ms·

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.

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.

> 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.