This is a touchy subject because it gets into the realm of the people are not the regime. Its terrible that everyone gets wrapped up in international conflicts, but I always have to ask what is an alternative plan? In the case with China, no amount of diplomacy would have worked to get them to renegotiate on trade. I'm not sure about other posters on HN, but I know I personally am strongly for stopping nuclear proliferation around the world and it doesn't end with Iran. I want to see India and Pakistan give up their weapons because the doomsday clock there always seems its a minute to midnight. Its a tough, controversial subject and I feel for innocent people caught in the crosshairs.
An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
71–80 of 186 posts
Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#72Iranians need to realize that if they don't anything now about their oppressive regime, they might never be able to. look at China, with their social score, Mass face recognition tech and surveillance. If there were no sanctions, you would be heading the same way. even with santions, it's just a matter of time until every authoritarian Regime in the world is impossible to overthrow. China will export its 1984 tech to…
Sanctions only strengthen the regime, while economic prosperity strengthens the progressive people and weakens the regime. Both regimes desperately need an enemy to survive.
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Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is straight up racism >> No it's not, [banks are scared if the US] Yes, banks are scared of the US. And perhaps the racism stems from the Italian bank, perhaps it stems from the US government, perhaps it stems from the Iranian definition of citizenship, perhaps all share a part of the blame. But regardless of who gets the blame, it most definitely IS straight up racism.
You do realize that Iran means "the land of Aryans"?
Interesting, but so what? Can Aryans not be the victims of racism?
Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reasons for the power asymmetry do not affect the severity of the asymmetry.
I’m trying to understand and make this analogous to what you were replying to: The reasons for the act (racist or not) does not affect it being racism?
I think part of the problem is the fact that there's a real phenomenon that's important to talk about and describe, but rather than invent a new term, that the word 'racism' has repurposed to describe it instead.
200 years ago, everyone would have understood "racism" to mean what you have implied it means: conscious individual racial prejudice. And of course, one problem that (say) blacks in the US face is widespread, individual, conscious racial prejudice.
But there's yet another problem blacks face: the mechanisms of society as a whole disproportionately cause problems for black people, even when nobody involved is consciously prejudiced. When this was pointed out, people would respond, "But nobody in this organization is prejudiced". Well, it doesn't matter if the people are prejudiced or not, the emergent property of the system as a whole affects black people as though it was set up by people who are racist; and so the system is called "racist", even if nobody in it is trying to be racist.
I think the argument here is the same: Iranians are facing persecution for no other reason than the country they were born in. It doesn't matter if people making the policies of the US government is prejudiced against Iranians as individuals or not; the net effect is the same.
(FWIW I think the concept of "institutional racism" is useful, but the overloading of the term 'racist' to describe it is counterproductive in the long run.)
Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#75I'll note again the snowball effect that the Google Cloud block has (Google Cloud totally blocks Iran on a network level). Now, your services that you host on Google Cloud are not available. Say you are Gitlab, and you host there (they do!). Now, if you put your Open Source project on Gitlab, that project is not accessible to Iranians either (as well as other sanctioned countries). As someone you spends a couple of w…
Google Safety & Security Blog: An update on state-sponsored activity (2018) ... Detecting and terminating activity on Google properties "Actors engaged in this type of influence operation violate our policies, and we swiftly remove such content from our services and terminate these actors’ accounts. Additionally, we use a number of robust methods, including IP blocking, to prevent individuals or entities in Iran from…
This doesn't really have anything to do with what I posted.
Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#76This is a touchy subject because it gets into the realm of the people are not the regime. Its terrible that everyone gets wrapped up in international conflicts, but I always have to ask what is an alternative plan? In the case with China, no amount of diplomacy would have worked to get them to renegotiate on trade. I'm not sure about other posters on HN, but I know I personally am strongly for stopping nuclear prolif…
That's the dream, all we need right now is support from the tech community to come to an agreement for opening new windows for innocent people who have contributed a lot to science, tech, art and culture of the entire world.
They can make a change, a real difference
Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#77Please to all the posters, stick your head out of your butt for a sec, this Iran thing is not something related to just some poor dev unable to publish on their store, it is a world wide dumb reaction all started from the USA foreign agenda. I'll give you an example to highlight how f'd up is the situation, in Italy, country with a quite respectful relation with Iran, banks started kicking out clients (with a one mon…
That is straight up racism.
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Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#78Iranians need to realize that if they don't anything now about their oppressive regime, they might never be able to. look at China, with their social score, Mass face recognition tech and surveillance. If there were no sanctions, you would be heading the same way. even with santions, it's just a matter of time until every authoritarian Regime in the world is impossible to overthrow. China will export its 1984 tech to…
My general impression, that I don't know how to back up, is that the last Shah of Iran was overthrown, fled the country and died in exile in part because Iranians viewed him as a puppet of the US. Sanctions against Iran in some form or another go back decades, likely rooted in those events. I think Iran perceives itself to be fighting for its right to self determination. I don't think this is likely to be resolved wi…
Keep in mind that an extraordinary amount of current population of Iran are in their teens or early adulthood. They can only be tampered for so long before they start to fight back (as an example, look up the resistance against hijabs in Iran).
The best thing us outsiders can do to help them out is to provide them with an unlimited access to the information, not the opposite. The amount of young people that are willing to sacrifice their own chance at a good life for something as meaningless as self-determination can only be made smaller by making the education more accessible.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with being patriotic. In practice, there's very little to be patriotic about when your national identity pulls you down and becomes another hurdle that you have to deal with -- a hurdle that other young people don't have simply because they were born somewhere else.
Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#79Judging from the quality of discourse in this thread, Hackernews are evidently some of the least enlightened people I encounter in a peer-group setting.
Re: An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m trying to understand and make this analogous to what you were replying to: The reasons for the act (racist or not) does not affect it being racism?
Perhaps it makes more sense if I phrase it thusly: the consequences of the decision do not depend upon why the decision was taken. It certainly sounds like a discriminatory practice, based on what is indicated. For sure, even if it had a decorous reason behind it, the consequences thereof are no less severe and irksome.
In this case, it seems that the companies are following a reasonable interpretation of the law of the land in which they operate. I don't the vast asymmetry of "break this law, do a [relatively] small amount of good for a [relatively] small number of people, put a substantial amount of the company at risk" makes any kind of logical business sense.