I'm strongly opposed to these sanctions, and I also think GitLab should've given people notice so they could get their data out. But I'm not sure it's a good place to pull the racism card.
Also worth noting that GitLab has previously banned hiring from China/Russia, so it's no stranger to blanket bans of questionable nature.
1 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/gitlab-considers-ban-on-new-hi...
Economic sanctions against America would not be racism against scots/germans/west africans or whatever.
You can argue against sanctions on all sorts of grounds, but the flimsiest is claiming that they're racist.
I think that singing about how you want to destroy the country, how you want to choke it etc. do prove racist tendencies.
As for armed forces acting outside of borders, you cannot claim that U.S. armed forces are any more 'authorized' to be in these places than Iranian ones, can you?
So in the end, it comes down to nothing more than the U.S. having the ability to implement these sanctions and Iran not, there's no 'principles' in it, just geo-politics.
What is remarkable however is that this pandemic is a uniquely challenging situation even for countries not under sanctions, so placing new sanctions on the country, as was recently done, is plain inhumane.
Oh come on. That is not scraping the barrel but the bare metal underneath for offense. And most people die of hearth attacks anyway.
I wouldn't consider not hiring from countries with aggressive foreign policies and non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens (including employees of said company) as questionable. GitLab's main job is to protect it's company and it's customers not to try to build some sort of utopian post-reality civilization.
If we go by that logic, the U.S. would get on that list.
> non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens
If that was indeed the standard to go by, I'd agree, but the list would then need to be much, much longer and possibly include even some traditionally democratic countries like Australia who have an actual law where they can force employees to secretly install backdoors.
Saudi Arabia infiltrated Twitter and compromised some of its employees to obtain info on regime critics that could endanger their lives, as just another example.
The list would by these metrics include well over half the world.
I put an AND in my statement for a reason, please don't cherry pick parts of sentences.
>The list would by these metrics include well over half the world.
That's like saying that if you don't want to die you should live in a cocoon and never leave the house, rather than just making sure to avoid the most dangerous activities. GitLab is blocking the countries it sees as the most risky and carry the least cost in blocking. I'm sure their lawyers would love to block half the world but that would cost them too much.
As a non US-citizen, I don't really care if the US is democratic or not.
People have voted and continue to vote for terrible things. What matters is what a country does. So actually the US would certainly be on that list.
Unless your argument is, it's not evil if we all voted for it?
This has nothing to do with good and evil which seems to be a point you're missing. It's about risk of coercion to employees of companies. The US government could be turning babies into hand bags but if it doesn't coerce it's residents into acting against their employers then it doesn't create a risk for companies.
edit: Seriously, this was all in the original sentence that you people keep cherry picking from.
> 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account?
> No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted.
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...