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Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

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71–80 of 104 posts

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#71
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is quite liberal in accepting countries to the anti-war club, but they need to adhere to some standards regarding human rights, trade, and democracy. If you crash your own party with some people that don't fit in, you will cause the guests you wanted to have to leave. Any countries not in the EU don't want to be in the EU. And that's fine. And looking at what the EU does you don't have to be scared if you don'…

Latvia and Estonia are allowed to have Nazi parades and repress Russian speaking population i.e. non-citizens, language police and criminal sentences for pro-Russian activists. EU looks some other way all the time. See for example https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/outrage-as-s... or https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2019-03-16/ty-arti... This is not how human rights and democracy should look lik…

The US has Confederacy parades, and also has criminal sentences for being an unregisteres agent of a foreign power.

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#72
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and especially the EU, which was mostly built on the basis of confrontation with Russia" Is that a US point of view? As a european, it is the first time I heard this. (Edit: I mean yes, it was founded under the assumption of soviet threat, but it was not constructed especially against russia, which is how I read your comment) The NATO was constructed against communist russia. But the reasons for the founding of the…

If there is to be any post-war justice it will involve serious Russian reparations with their economy already significantly weakened. Add to that the lessons learned by EU member states and I don't see any rapprochement for a very long time.

That's the blueprint for how Europe returned to greatness after The Great War to End all War in the 1920s!

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#73
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latvia and Estonia are allowed to have Nazi parades and repress Russian speaking population i.e. non-citizens, language police and criminal sentences for pro-Russian activists. EU looks some other way all the time. See for example https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/outrage-as-s... or https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2019-03-16/ty-arti... This is not how human rights and democracy should look lik…

The US has Confederacy parades, and also has criminal sentences for being an unregisteres agent of a foreign power.

> The US has Confederacy parades, and also has criminal sentences for being an unregisteres agent of a foreign power.

No wonder the US did everything to save the nazi collaborator responsible for the massacre of ~100k Poles in Eastern Galicia from a post-war tribunal justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykola_Lebed#Post-war_activiti...

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#74
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would win: An unarmed populace vs one of the best equipped militaries in the world? Unless you get a bunch of Russian generals to defect, the people don’t stand a chance.

Have you seen their military?

This guy did see it: https://youtu.be/B02ASaskWTQ?t=2047

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#75
post #44

> Nevertheless, there is no legal way for the authorities to ban it. I thought Putin was long past the point of being restrained by the law. Can't he just order the law to be changed? Or use a bunch of fancy spy stuff to figure out who owns the book, and arrange for them to fall out of windows?

[dead]

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#76
post #67
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Russians are of course allowed to post on HN. We don't exclude people because of their country. In fact we don't exclude any population, not only (or even primarily) for ethical reasons but because it would be bad for intellectual curiosity, which is what we're trying to optimize for ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... ). We do ask HN users, from any country or population, to stick to th…

But this is a lie, "dang".

Your mythical "site rules", don't prevent people here to justify terrorism inside Russia, call to violence against Russian people, or insults of ethnic character. Just as they don't prevent people from doing it on any other major western public forum.

What they do prevent, on the other hand, is expressing point of view which is not aligned, at least partially, to the "point of view" of your state department. There might be no offensive speech in the comments you block, they are just politically unacceptable.

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#77
post #76
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russians are of course allowed to post on HN. We don't exclude people because of their country. In fact we don't exclude any population, not only (or even primarily) for ethical reasons but because it would be bad for intellectual curiosity, which is what we're trying to optimize for ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... ). We do ask HN users, from any country or population, to stick to th…

But this is a lie, "dang". Your mythical "site rules", don't prevent people here to justify terrorism inside Russia, call to violence against Russian people, or insults of ethnic character. Just as they don't prevent people from doing it on any other major western public forum. What they do prevent, on the other hand, is expressing point of view which is not aligned, at least partially, to the "point of view" of your…

I don't know what you are on, I admitted in multiple comments on HN over the past year that I was russian. Never got any "calls to violence" or "insults of ethnic character" or heard people justifying terrorism inside russia in replies.

The few attempts at insults against russians that I've seen on HN (not even against me, but somewhere in deep down in random related threads) were either extremely downvoted or flagged.

If you said "on reddit", that would have been a different story, especially on their large frontpage subs. But reddit comments in general tend to be extremely moronic at times on all sides, so that's not really a surprise.

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#78
post #72
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is to be any post-war justice it will involve serious Russian reparations with their economy already significantly weakened. Add to that the lessons learned by EU member states and I don't see any rapprochement for a very long time.

That's the blueprint for how Europe returned to greatness after The Great War to End all War in the 1920s!

Yes, "justice" can be a dangerous concept in the geopolitical context. There is lots of injustice happening all the time and if you really want justice, you would have to be consequent on all sides, I think. Starting with Iraq, Kashoggi, Assange, Snowden, Turkey, Armenia, Syria, Jemen, ...

And as long as a really great war with china remains possible, a "injust" peace with russia might be preferable, compared to a "just" war, with the NATO against the combined east.

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putin made some comments in the early 2000's to the effect that Russia sees itself as part of the European culture and might like to be part of the EU, but it wants its own viewpoint on things to be respected . I suspect the latter is a crucial caveat. Presumably he'd never be okay with implementing a liberal democracy to EU standards or signing up to EU defence policy. On the other side, I suspect that none of the e…

EU voting power for issues that matter is state based in the European Commission, not population based.

I think that's oversimplified. The European Commission is the executive, not a legislative body. The EU has effectively a bicameral legislature formed by the Parliament and the Council. The Parliament has direct elections with seats apportioned to member states roughly corresponding to population. The Council represents member states directly, but they only sometimes have equal weight, because many things use qualified-majority voting (QMV) where a majority of states and represented population is required. Most things either need to pass through both of these legislatures, or if they're exclusive to the Council, are covered by QMV. The number of things covered by QMV has only grown with time and lots of these would be considered important. There are of course still some matters that require unanimity among states though.

Re: Russians Seem Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End

#80
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really? I mean, I haven't seen any rumor of war between the EU and Switzerland, or Turkey, or the United Kingdom, or really any other of its neighbors other than Russia.

Have you heard of North Cyprus? Also, North Ireland.

That seems to be deviating quite a lot from the concept of the existence of EU causing wars, as you suggested in the message I answered. By a few decades for North Cyprus (or 100+ years, depending from your definition of that conflict) a few centuries in the case of North Ireland.

Or did I misunderstand what you wrote?

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