It draws attention and coverage to the issue. It forces people to listen. Protest has to be disruptive to the norm to achieve that, and there will always be people who don't like that. That's the point.
As I say, I don't think this one is effective or proportional given the lack of control someone in Russia has over the situation, but just saying "nothing should ever be damaged in protest" is, I think, naïve at best.
If Russia were a state with a reasonable guarantee of a fair legal process, I would argue a moral obligation to disruptive protest to end the war. If the UK (where I am) were to invade another country like this, I would hope for a general strike, and civil disobedience of all kinds, including vandalism. The fact that Russia has such a hard line against dissidence makes this obviously more morally difficult, although I greatly respect those that still choose to protest, I can't expect it of anyone.
People will disagree about how effective a thing is, and how justified it is. What the Russian state is doing is monstrous, and that increases the level of justified disruption to me. That doesn't mean this was justified—I feel it wasn't—but pretending that all "vandalism" is inherently never reasonable as protest is, in my view, wrong.
“Every protest ever has had people saying that the disruption to them is over the line”
So which crimes would not be acceptable in a protest? And if people will always complain about the line being crossed, does this mean there can be no line at all?
Highly illegal and immoral, destructive and violent, killed some five-digit number of press-ganged soldiers and civilians, met all of its political goals...
But I'm not really seeing the connection here or why it invalidates the Unabomber example.
The long and short of it is - just about any destructive, devious, and murderous form of protest is considered acceptable, as long as you can convince a large enough segment of society that it's end justifies the means.
It's circular logic, of course, but that's all there is to it. There are no involatile, unbreakable taboos when it comes to seeking political ends - you just have a harder time convincing some people that your cause is worthwhile, when you are using more extreme ones. And even if you win, you might still be condemned by history for your methods.
On the scale of extremes of methods, this thread's subject is notable, novel, interesting, but is more on the 'misdemeanour hooliganism' side of that spectrum.
Clearly that doesn't mean all protest methods are always justified, and I even said I think that this is over the line given this particular set of circumstances, but I reject the premise that it would always be over the line.
Neither is invading another country.
Someone didn't delete the files. You deleted them yourself by blindly trusting 3rd party software that you got for free with no guarantees of anything.
Indeed. Except, did I elect this president? No I did not (and elections in Russia are more of an illusion anyway). Can I do something to stop him? No I can't. What's the point of this act then? Putin and his allies don't use npm. This can't affect them by any stretch of imagination.
> Someone didn't delete the files. You deleted them yourself by blindly trusting 3rd party software that you got for free with no guarantees of anything.
Yes, of course, npm is at fault here for downloading untrusted code and running it with no sandboxing whatsoever on behalf of your OS user. This kind of stuff used to be called an RCE vulnerability and used to cause people to issue urgent security patches, but somehow, now it's considered a perfectly normal way of doing things. At the very least, there should be a permission request if this untrusted code tries to access anything outside of the project directory.