Seeing ignorant comments like this, it’s not hard to understand why so much of the world is sick of Western hubris.
What Github does is no doubt for business and regulatory reasons, but also moral: after decades of downright malicious behavior on the international stage (not to mention the preceding 70 years of pure evil), Russia finally sunk so low in the world's esteem that doing business with or within Russia has now become "not done"; it's seen as enabling evil to continue. Even businesses that are not affected by the sanctions now hesitate to do business there (shipping, for example).
It's unjust for ordinary Russians to get caught under these sanctions, and is perilously close to collective punishment, but Russia simply, finally went too far.
What is non-negotiable on the other hand is that whoever you are and wherever you are, the rule of law must be respected. You may correctly point out that not even the west is perfect in this regard, but then go be better than the west. Be the place we should want to emigrate to, not the other way around.
You might say that a truly liberal nation would have managed to stop him nevertheless. Could be, but things like this often hang by very thin threads. E.g. as we know, the American democracy was very nearly destroyed in the previous presidential elections. It could have very easily gone south.
What's their excuse?
The US invaded and occupied a sovereign state based on outright lies less than 20 years ago, and I doubt even the strongest critics of that war were seriously considering a revolution.
Expecting some programmer in Russia to do it, and punishing them with sanctions for not doing it, is frankly insane, and since the leaders implementing these sanctions must know that, it's dishonest too.
The US treatment of both Assange and Manning no doubt serve as a potent warning to anyone considering a similar leak in the future. Russians have also had plenty of similar warnings.
From the start of this thread:
> If you share liberal values with the rest of us, you need to emigrate. If not, well, perhaps you can create a github clone for Russia.
Even after clearing the enormous hurdle of emigration, Russian citizens face discrimination in opening bank accounts, getting jobs, starting businesses and so on. Even GitHub will likely force them to prove somehow that they are no longer tied to Russia, which may be very difficult depending on where they emigrated to and how they got there.
The treatment of ordinary people who had nothing to do with the war this way is against all the values we claim to hold, and ultimately damages the credibility of the countries complicit in it.
Yes, I did do that. My bad.
> Even after clearing the enormous hurdle of emigration, Russian citizens face discrimination in opening bank accounts, getting jobs, starting businesses and so on.
I’m sure this is not terribly different from the checks that the western world would (and, I say, very well should!) do on every citizen immigrating from a hostile country. It’s not a perfect situation, but nothing in this whole situation is exactly perfect.
Did you read about the Russian spy that was caught trying to infiltrate the International Criminal Court? He had been working on a cover story since 2010. That’s the level of the threat that we need to be prepared to thwart.
Of course, this diligence should be handled by the authorities and once a person passes all those checks, they should be considered just like anyone else.
Could you give some examples of kleptocratic dictatorships that have fallen due to a revolution bottom-up, as opposed to external force or a change of power at the top, for inspiration?
One example I can come up with myself is Ukraine, but in that case US explicitly supported the change and its representative was present on the ground during critical time*. If US were willing to do the same for Russia, I'm sure this could make a difference.
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-victoria-nuland-wades-into-u...
I'm curious if you have any list of revolutions that have succeeded and failed. I can't really think of any in recent times. I don't think revolutions in Africa or the Middle East to be a good comparison and those are the only ones I can think of.
1. The culture is different. It may work, but I feel like Europeans are a bit more passive. As long as things aren't too bad they will let the status quo remain.
2. The Middle East / Africa had a lot of weapons that Europe doesn't. In some areas they had CIA training as well (albeit a few decades ago in some area).
3. Several of the Arab Spring required the West to get involved to aid in the overthrow. It is possible the CIA or others had to help in the others. There is no guarantee the West would be willing to get involved to oust Putin especially since he has nukes. Seeing how the West is mostly providing monetary aid and surveillance in Ukraine and not direct military support we could possibly see the same in Russia.
4. I think the Russian surveillance state is better than the Arab Spring countries. Might not make a huge impact, but it could stop things before it got started.
I am curious, since I don't keep up with the Middle East a huge amount, how many of the countries are in a better state now then they were 10 years ago? Didn't ISIS take over part of Syria? Having a successful revolution doesn't mean anything if a worse government gets in power.
Perhaps I'm just being cynical. I just don't think it is quite comparable.
Indeed, I'm sure Western support would be forthcoming if a movement gained traction — but the effective surveillance state and history of severe suppression make that exceedingly unlikely. The risk is enormous and the likelihood of success tiny.