GitHub blocked in Russia

The problem I do see is that the "other side", specifically the UN, is not really any better. Freedom of religion is constantly under attack in the general assembly, and so is freedom of speech.

Take for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_of_religion_and_the_... (TLDR: attempts to introduce blasphemy laws world-wide supported by the UN) ... details a constant campaign against freedom of religion that's entering it's third decade now of majority support in the general assembly. And this is but one of many examples. This makes it clear that defending human rights using either the UN of the ICC is like asking Putin to solve Ukraine's internal government crises. Whatever the solution is to guarantee freedom, it's not the UN.

Sad part is, if anything, these groups are growing, not shrinking.

I know it doesn't look like it in the middle of the US, but you should remember that the US is barely 350 million people. The number of people that would like their country to attack the US today, no matter how stupid an act it would be, world wide, is bigger than that. The number of people that would like to see the US taken down several notches even includes >50% of Europeans, so you can imagine what it is in the rest of the world (talk about a moronic position : China will replace the US should that happen, and it is blatantly obvious that will not be an improvement, not even for Chinese, although most Chinese I've talked to argue otherwise). In most places it doesn't even have anything to do with the US, other than that the US culture is leaking into their countries perhaps. In Europe, it's mostly political jealousy, the US has all this power, and is not using it "for good" (good can mean climate change, economic stuff, various wars, and now that 10% of europe or so is muslims "because it is destroying islam", not that you can ever get a straight answer of what that means, though references to Gaza seem common). It's not exclusively the US either. India seems to be as hated as the US sometimes, except for in Europe. And this is ignoring the wild cards, like how >30% of Europe constantly votes for the extreme right, more than that even in some countries (and less in Germany, but it's being repressed, so there's no real data on the actual number). Japan is re-arming at a speed that if you told me 5 years ago that might happen I would have laughed).

Russia is but one example of a nation that seems to be regressing to the situation before WWI. Turkey is similar. As we know, most of the middle east and northern Africa sees a return to the pseudo-roman-empire caliphate of the 7th century as a solution. China pretty much is an empire, including conquered colonies, and however dictatorial the current government is, from talking to Chinese people here I believe it would actually win an election, should there be one. All want an empire, and of course their own empire to win.

None of these attitudes seem rational to me, as people are worse and worse off, yet that only seems to fan the flames. All of these empires are calling for war, to some extent. I fear that as time goes on, the amount of sparks needed to light the powder kegs seems to be going down, and I feel really queasy about how little energy it took to start the ISIS war in the middle east, for example. How much sparks would it take to start something similar in Europe ? (yes there's less muslims there, but it's not like ISIS has even 10% support in Iraq)

However, I can tell that you are confusing democracy per se (or even ochlocracy) and liberal democracy.

It works like this:

- they push some content deemed illegal in Russia to a github repo (something like instructions on committing suicide or on growing marijuana).

- then they themselves post a complain to the Russian internet regulator, accompanied by the link to illegal content;

- the ugly bureaucrats machine (which is mostly automatic) bans the whole of Github.

- at some point later in the day a human intervenes and unblocks the site, as happened several times in the past.

However, by that time the media has picked up the story, and many oppressed Russian developers who don't know how to use a US proxy, have received job offers.