This story reminds me of my own growing up in Serbia in 90s under UN sanctions. One of the side-effects of it was that we couldn't access Internet directly for a while, we were almost completely cut off (Belgrade University was half-illegally exchanging emails once a day over a private link to Greece thanks to some professors at University of Athens, but otherwise all connections to the world were cut off). And at that moment, first half of 90s, users of Internet were mostly young educated people grouped in and around academia, and they were 99.9% against Milosevic's government. So by bureaucracy applying blindly the rules, not thinking about side-effects of those action, they basically directly targeted and alienated those very people who were pro-west and progressive and their best bet for allies in the country - stopping them from communicating with the world and receiving free news and information, thus directly aiding Milosevic's propaganda.
“My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
271–280 of 406 posts
Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Crimea is a defacto Russian state now and for the most part a large portion of the population and the current government is participating in it. The sanctions are for the most part per the request of the Ukrainian government. If Catalonia becomes a separatist state tomorrow and Spain and its allies sanction it everyone in it will be under sanctions regardless of who or what they support. This is what happens…
"The idea behind the sanctions is in the end to make the life of the populous sufficiently difficult so they will rebel." Isn't it evil? I mean, if you don't believe the results of referendum and subsequent Gallop's poll, than sanctions are intentionally hurting people who are victims of Russian occupation. And if you do believe that overwhelming majority of Crimean people support reunification with Russia, the sanct…
> I don't remember any sanctions on Chechen republic after it separated from Russia, for example.
The double standards are all explained by geopolitical maneuvering. Western powers pulled Kiev into their orbit and threatened to use that influence to harm Russia's economic and military capabilities.
The tl;dr is that Russia needs access to warm water ports. They were happy to lease a port from the Ukraine until rumors began spreading in Kiev that Russia's lease would be ended.[1][2] Because the Russian economy and military couldn't afford to lose access to a naval base with a warm water port they decided to take drastic action.
Another odd footnote about this situation is that Crimea was given as a "symbolic" gift to the Ukraine while the USSR was still strong.[3] It's not like it's some ancient sacred Ukranian land. It's just very valuable for trade and military purposes.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/na...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea#Compli...
Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has nothing to do with free speech - the sanctioned account was able to open an issue on GitHub complaining of the way their account had been handled. The account is the victim of a trade embargo, not a gag order.
Their Github Pages page was censored. They are unable to participate in the maintenance of an open source repository. This was done, according to Github, as a requirement to comply with the laws of its state. If that's not a free speech issue, there are no free speech issues.
Free speech applies to the US. Last time I checked Crimea was in Russia.
US companies have to follow US law. I worked for a company that was fined because they still had employees working in Syria when the war started.
Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#274Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has nothing to do with free speech - the sanctioned account was able to open an issue on GitHub complaining of the way their account had been handled. The account is the victim of a trade embargo, not a gag order.
This seems like it’s more a free press issue than free speech. Through its trade policy, the US government has restricted GitHub, a US company, from publishing certain material (the tkashin.tk website). Trade policy can reasonably apply to some of GitHub’s services, certainly, but I don’t see how a trade embargo that prevents a publisher from (virtually) printing some material passes Constitutional muster.
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Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI: It's just "Ukraine", not "the Ukraine". "The Ukraine" referred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union.
"The Ukraine" referred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union. no disrespect, but there is this coming from?!
> "After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians probably decided that the article denigrated their country [by identifying it as a part of Russia] and abolished 'the' while speaking English, so now it is simply Ukraine.
> "That's why the Ukraine suddenly lost its article in the last 20 years, it's a sort of linguistic independence in Europe, it's hugely symbolic."
(Oksana Kyzyma of the Embassy of Ukraine in London is being quoted in the sections of the article that I'm quoting.)
Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Western intellectuals like Chomsky say they have been "censored", they mean that that their publishing house asked them to leave out or add stuff because they felt that such changes would help the book sell better, as their goal was to make money off authors they published. That's quite a bit different from the threats of jail time that Eastern Bloc intellectuals faced.
A modern westerner doesn't really get how it was in the Soviet block. "Wasn't much better than USSR" is such bullshit on so many levels that it's hard to even to begin. In the US: - you didn't have quotas to write "correct literature" - you wouldn't disappear in a gulag for 10 years - you didn't have to worry about standing in a queue for 1-2h to get fresh bread and sausage (it's easier to contemplate stupid shit whe…
I wasn't expecting to find such a nice summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_repression_in_the_So... . It deserves to be here.
Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would that really change anything? I think what we’re seeing is the inevitable result of the internet and tech companies becoming the most important aspect of modern civilisation. I think what we are seeing is the implementation of authoritarian governments, something that has been on the increase nearly everywhere, in the last 20 years. People have in the developed world had it, too good for too long. Complacency…
I’m Danish and in our very recent election we voted the authoritarians and populists out, by a large margin. Margrete Vestager is from a very liberal (as in free) Danish party, and she’s pushing some of the toughest regulations on big tech companies that we’ve seen in years. So I’m not convinced it’s really authoritarian. We have a big scandal right now in Denmark, because a company secretly sold jet-fuel to Russians…
I don't think things like censorship are restricted to authoritarian, populist, or right-wing parties. It's just the reasons differ. Right-wing parties will censor the internet to "stop terrorism" and "protect families and children", left-wing parties will censor the internet to "fight hate speech", but the end result is the same.
Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not thanks to Russia for the occupation?
The US punishes with sanctions the population of occupied Crimea. Where is the logic in that?
The only illogic is that is not having Russia to a similar degree while doing so. The point of the sanctions is to give an extra cost to their ambitions and limit the growth in power of the targetted entries.
Re: “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're actually comparing Soviet-era gulags to US prisons? Have you actually looked into them?
Have you? Find it very hard to believe that there's such a disproportionate number of criminals in the US. China is locking up huge numbers of Muslims simply for having a religion and it still comes no where near the number of Americans incarcerated today without even having faced trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
Have you? [1]
"The emergent consensus among scholars who utilize official archival data is that of the 18 million who were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million perished there or as a result of their detention."
yeah... prisons in the US are definitely worse.