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“My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

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Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#361
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like the US has become what the USSR was As somebody who actually lived in the USSR I call bullshit on this. There's a huge difference between arresting people for saying something the powers don't like and restricting business links to certain aggressive dictatorial regimes. True, many citizens of those regimes suffer twice - once because they live under a dictatorial regime and second time because of the…

... there's absolutely no indication US is anywhere close to have it ... what I am hearing every day is how there's too much free speech and how it should be suppressed ... You said this in 2 consecutive sentences. Please reconsider your position. -- another USSRian

> You said this in 2 consecutive sentences. Please reconsider your position.

There's nothing to reconsider. There are people that hate how free the speech is in the US, but their efforts are largely limited to the environments where they have full cultural and administrative control over - such as certain university campuses, or online platforms they own - and once you go outside these censorship areas, your speech is free, and the government - absent occasional local stupidity outbursts routinely corrected by courts - is not able to suppress speech in any meaningful way, and the courts are determined to keep it this way.

TLDR: some people want speech not to be free in the US, but so far they fail.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#362
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like the US has become what the USSR was As somebody who actually lived in the USSR I call bullshit on this. There's a huge difference between arresting people for saying something the powers don't like and restricting business links to certain aggressive dictatorial regimes. True, many citizens of those regimes suffer twice - once because they live under a dictatorial regime and second time because of the…

> arresting people for saying something the powers don't like You just described what's happening in the UK or Canada. Yet, I give it, neither have "free speech", but moral point remain that what happened in the USSR is happening today in the western world.

I never claimed UK has free speech. It is obvious they do not for a while. I was talking about the US though. Canada is kind of borderline - their "human rights courts" are a travesty but afaik still not as bad as in the UK (though I've not been keeping tabs on that for a while so I may be wrong about Canada).

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#363
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia will give it back? They are still occupying parts of Georgia.

Eventually. Voluntarily with reparations or after Russian state collapse.

I highly doubt that in all honesty. But it's good to think positive!

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#364
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arresting people for saying something the powers don't like You just described what's happening in the UK or Canada. Yet, I give it, neither have "free speech", but moral point remain that what happened in the USSR is happening today in the western world.

We have hate crime laws in the UK under which you can get arrested for making statements which are grossly offensive towards someone's ethnicity, creed etc... . That's vastly different from arresting people for criticising the government.

No it's actually not different. It's trivial to prove with a bit of motivated reasoning, here watch this: (for people not watching it closely, the following is not my opinion but a demonstration how one could prove censorship of political opinions is necessary if one is allowed to censor "offensive speech").

UK is a democratic country. In a democratic country, the government is elected by people, and can exist only while people support it. Not literally everybody, of course, but a significant part of people must support any government system for it to be able to function as a democratic society. By attacking the government, you offend these people and their deepest held beliefs, and imply that they are either not smart enough to figure out how the government should be, or are too lazy to go and vote for a proper government. Moreover, if you argue that a particular elected official is stupid, or corrupt, or bigoted, or criminal - you also imply people who voted for that person either are OK with these things or are too stupid to recognize them (at least if these things were known before the election). Both can be deeply offensive to people. Of course, some people would be OK with being called bigots or idiots, but many would take it as a gross offense. Similarly, calling their chosen representative such words would be possibly a less personal, but no less hurtful offense - after all, if somebody insults your friend, you'd be also hurt as if they'd have insulted you, wouldn't you? Maybe a bit less, but same goes for your representative.

Thus, it is clear that political speech can be grossly offensive. Moreover, I would go further and claim that it is more offensive than, for example, a racial insult. You do not choose your race, so if somebody insults you on the base of your race, it has very little to do with you personally - it's not directed at you as a person, but at a vague concept of race which largely exists in the mind of the speaker and nowhere else. You could shrug it off as empty words having nothing to do with you specifically. Insulting your political creed goes much deeper to the core of your identity and hurts on much more personal level - it is offending part of your identity that you yourself chose and built!

Thus, one can consider proven that criticizing the government is as much and maybe more hurtful than regular slurs and insults, and must be prosecuted at least as harshly.

(for people not watching it closely, the above is not my opinion but a demonstration how one could prove censorship of political opinions is necessary if one is allowed to censor "offensive speech").

The solution of this problem is that government should not ban any speech (with obvious and well-known exceptions, blah blah) and not be allowed to determine what is "offensive" and prosecute people for that.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#365
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would've been nice if we called it Ukrainia in English from then on. It would make sense with the conventions for transliterating cyrillic country names.

How so? There's no "ia" there.

I put the i on the wrong side, then added it in one place but didn't remove it in the other.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hilariously think China is actually more free for the average human Until you're critical of the party leadership, or have forbidden religious beliefs, and then you get whisked away to a concentration camp (if you're lucky!) or get surgically parted out for organ transplants, often without anaesthetic. The US has plenty of problems, but to say China is more free is a very distasteful and not particularly funny joke.

Is that not right there in my comment? Y'all need to take a serious fucking step back and evaluate the words said here. I love America and everyone in it. People stateside are incredibly nice people on the whole and sometimes you need a rude foreigner to say some blunt stuff for the sake of honesty. Get a grip on these criticisms mate. I stand by everything said above. It's fucking true and challenge you to prove oth…

> China is far more free. 100% stand by that statement. Have you tried living there lately?

I haven't but I heard from people that did that you can't even connect to the Internet there without government interference. That's some definition of freedom that you don't find in every dictionary.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#367
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not right there in my comment? Y'all need to take a serious fucking step back and evaluate the words said here. I love America and everyone in it. People stateside are incredibly nice people on the whole and sometimes you need a rude foreigner to say some blunt stuff for the sake of honesty. Get a grip on these criticisms mate. I stand by everything said above. It's fucking true and challenge you to prove oth…

I spent a bit of time living in one of the post-Soviet central asian states, and after a while there this was a conclusion I came to, too. Living in a dictatorship, but feeling more personal freedom than I ever had in the US. On a day-to-day basis, there's significantly more curtailment of personal freedom in the US than there was in one of the stans. The one thing I wouldn't feel safe doing there? Openly speaking ag…

Wikipedia says that BLM founders are:

Alicia Garza - alive and well

Patrisse Cullors - alive and well

Opal Tometi - alive and well

Under "key people" - Shaun King, DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie, Tef Poe, Erica Garner. Of those, only Erica Garner is not alive - she died in 2017 of two heart attacks and the following brain damage.

BLM is a decentralized movement, so there are a lot of people that could be called "leaders", but clearly claim that "nearly every leader" has been killed is false. I suspect none were actually killed for any activities related to BLM (I did not check that but consider it plausible), though in large enough group of people there would always be people that die prematurely, either due to illness, or accidents, or crime (many BLM activists live in places where crime situation is not very good).

I think you'd better to put down the conspiracy Kool-Aid for a while.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Ukraine" referred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union. no disrespect, but there is this coming from?!

Ukrainian society is ill and this is one of the recent inflammations that hurts. Being unable to fix roads or economy, they have directed their frustration towards symbolic things, fighting everyone who calls Kiev "Kiev" instead of "Kyiv", renaming streets, etc. Now they have decided that "the Ukraine" is somehow referencing Ukraine as a territory and not a state. God knows where any of this comes from, but any "patr…

As someone who learned Russian and am interested, do you personally say "в" или "на" Украине?

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fighting everyone who calls Kiev "Kiev" instead of "Kyiv", renaming streets, etc. It's an organized effort, part of government propaganda, not an ill society. Society is so healthy, that it didn't trust the government at all and voted all those people out. Really, it doesn't get healthier than that.

changing one oligarh for another is hardly healthy (Poroh for Benya). Ukraine deserves better.

Previous president of Ukraine was a literal power hungry oligarch, who engaged in war, war mongering, censorship, propaganda, fake comments trolling bots, policy washing through his international friends, fake-fighting of corruption to gain power over judges, ordered raids on opposing media and industries, switched politics to right-wing to ride the propaganda machine he tried to create, etc. New one is a freedom of speech supporting businessmen, not an oligarch, who found himself fighting him and the whole establishment through utopian/dystopian political tv shows over the last five years. And newly elected parliament has plenty of people who have no ties to the establishment or fought the last president too, like the head of the most active organization fighting against internet censorship (pretty successfully) who joined the new president's party.

Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

#370
post #72
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean this to sound aggressive, but would you agree then with sanctioning the U.S. after its actual military shot down an Iranian passenger plane, inside Iranian waters [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Someone always brings up 655. Say what you will, the US government at least paid out to the victims (although never officially apologized). While Russia denies all involvement to this day and lawsuits are still ongoing.

Ignoring your initial tone, I see what you're saying, and agree these aren't identical cases. Though it should be emphasized they only payed out to the victims because Iran brought it to the international courts and they wanted to settle. They never, as you said, apologized, or even thought they had any legal obligation to the victims. Feels like your splitting hairs with "Russia denies involvement" as being dramatically different -- both seem like terrible events that neither super power really feels responsible for despite being the ones who put those weapons where they were without legitimacy.
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