Russia: The stupidest meanest most corrupt and lazy loudest voices since The Revolution

A “funny” joke in the US is asking a non-white person where they’re from and they respond with something like “Indiana”

Americans are fuckin idiots

source: at least two high viewership TV shows

As a US citizen, I care less about where the software comes from, but who hosts that software, so I tend to use FOSS products and services, preferring to self-host where it’s not too annoying.

I don’t think anyone should shun citizens from any country, but we should be wary of trusting citizens from countries where the government has a larger influence. So we should be hesitant to trust people from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran (and a bunch of others, I’m just listing the official enemies of the US), especially if they still live in those countries. That doesn’t mean we should shun people from those countries (I have an awesome coworker from Iran), just that we should hesitate to put them into influential positions. I have no problem collaborating with people from any of those countries, I just think we should be a little extra careful when there’s a stronger incentive for their government to get involved (and manipulating Linux is attractive for pretty much every government, esp. my own).

That’s completely unrelated to contribution to FOSS. The only way it would be relevant is for software projects that do some kind of filtering, so something like Lemmy might be an area where I’d hesitate to put someone from Israel, Gaza, Russia, or Ukraine into a maintainer/moderator/admin role because they could influence what content is viewed by users in a way that paints their country in a better light.

They migrated to lemmy.ml because they kept getting blocked.

After browsing comments on this post I think there’s awful people on basically all instances.

Are you under the impression I’m some kind of strategical genius of political negotiation? I have no idea.

My point is that holding everybody responsible for what the specific form of government of the specific country they happened to be born into is a confortable truth to push back on the much more controversial take of all of us being the very same thing.

And to get slightly more practical, it’s asinine to suggest that anybody that disagrees with a government has the means, or the will, or the duty to straight up move to another country (obviously to a flawless country, good luck with that).

It’s besides the point because with the Linux kernel should be run under a principle akin to net-neutrality where we do not let geopolitics affect it (do you really want Trump’s America to have legal power over it?)

The solution here is simple, just do not kick the maintainers unless they have confirmed ties to the Russian state. It’s not always practical to make sanctions precisely targeted, but in this case it actually is easily so.

Apply sanctions on an individual basis?

Exactly. ACF has published a list of every single person responsible for the war. Most of them are not sanctioned because they are filthy rich and have already bought themselves passports in various EU countries. Targeting Russian passports does absolutely nothing to them as they can just use another.

I would stick with my parents. I also have other citizenship and Japan would require giving up all citizenship to become a Japanese citizen. I would complain that it is bullshit as I do today about Japan’s current citizenship laws.

Is it any 8 years, or continious 8 years? In most places, the requirement is for continious, which is a tough ask. Imagine not being able to leave the country for almost a decade.

And you need a reason to get residence permit. In most cases there are few: living with spouse, reuniting with family, working, studying, or doing business. Of those, only work, study and business are the ones that are realistically achievable.

For work, there’s usually also a requirement for employeer to prove that there are no natives available to fill the role. This is a tough process, which takes a lot of time and no guarantee it’d even get approved. So, not many employees even bother unless you have exceptional skills.

For study, you would have to actually study to avoid expulsion, while somehow earning enough on some part-time remote work to support yourself (or have enough savings to support yourself for years). And then, bachelors is not enough so you must go for PhD. Meanwhile, in both above cases you have to also learn local language. I’m sure there are people who could pull this off, but, again, it’s quite exceptional.

Last is business. Usually the requirement is to invest somewhere in the ranges of $100k to $500k into local economy. That’s not filthy rich, but, for context, for Russian it’d take 3 years of fighting on the frontlines to earn as much, with a wage considered good enough to risk dying for… And then the country can still deny you permit without any reason.

It’s because of this, most people I know, who chose to leave the country keep their passports and either settle in Armenia and Georgia with 182/365 days renewable visa-free entry, or run circles between Serbia-Montenegro or Thailand-Vietnam.

There are also interesting opportunities with digital nomad visas, but, again, the requirements out of reach for most.

But for oligarchs, this is pennies. They can buy a few outright, then fly private jet to the US as tourists with pregnant wives, get children born there, then send them to study in London. Apply for family reunifications, bam, theyre now citizens of US and UK, in addition to all previous ones.

I assume if the Russian maintainers showed that they’ve passed the citizenship examinations and their different citizenship is only a matter of time

It’s the other way around. You have to live for X years to be eligible for the test. Given a common requirement of 5 years, they would have to have started this process 2 years before the war broke out.

responds with wall of text

“if you throw another wall of text I’m just fucking off.”

Cute.

I know in practice it isn’t but the only ones who realistically can turn it into an actual democracy are Russian people.

Don’t hold your breath. Russians are absolutely scared into submission and honestly they’re not wrong to be scared. Political prisoners don’t have any real human rights nor do their families. In a country where the average person can barely scrounge for a car, a well-funded, organized resistance is unlikely to accomplish anything so complex and significant as a revolution towards democracy on their own.

That said, it’s not like there isn’t anything at all being done:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_Vladimir_Putin_in_Russia

Protests against Putin have been going on for a long-time, but Navalny’s death has slowed things down somewhat. More openly acts of anti-government terrorism and openly fighting for Ukraine have been happening also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_and_Russian_partisan_movement_(2022–present)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Organization_of_Anarcho-Communists

These are far braver people than I, god bless and godspeed to them. But also, not something you can expect the average Joe Schmoe to be.

I don’t think we should give them an exception just because their country has gone to shit.

It’s not an exception, it’s the rule. People and governments are almost entirely separate. State is an oppressor of the people that exists to benefit the top 1% and corporations, more often than not it acts in complete opposition to the interests of the people and they have no power to change it, whether it’s outright a military dictatorship, one-party rule (China), practical one-party rule (Japan), two-party system (US), practical two-party system (UK) or otherwise.

It literally is. If it wasn’t a choice you couldn’t choose to become a citizen of a different state.

You can’t choose, you can try to become one but for 99% of people it’s not possible. You are in total ignorance of the realities of immigration. My parents were no oligarchs, but they were definitely really well-off, and if not for that I’d never have immigrated.

Not to mention:

Your initial citizenship isn’t a choice

doesn’t mean you can’t choose a different sex as you grow older.

Yeah, but it also is a helluva undertaking. Transitioning fully takes 10+ years easily in practice and either being very lucky and living in a country with nationalised healthcare and having the patience of a saint to not only wait the eternal waitlists but also fight through both the incompetence, the lack of understanding and outright malice or have tens of thousands of dollars burning a hole in your pocket.

It’s actually why people don’t actually choose to do it. It’s a hassle. In practice, you need to be motivated by something very hardcore, like a disorder that causes ever-present severe mental pain for instance - like Gender Dysphoria - to be able to see it through.

I started 9 years ago, and only just had SRS a few months back, and I still have all the legal shit ahead of me too. There are ways I could’ve optimized it, but hindsight is 20/20, and after countless nights wondering if I could’ve done it earlier and faster, the answer is yes, but only slightly so, or if I was simply orders of magnitude more rich, and not a semi-broke uni student for most of it.

When it comes to immigrating from somewhere like Russia to somewhere like the US or UK, even on top of the 10 years and enormous amounts of luck, talent and constant effort (education, job searching is 10x harder) the monetary figure gets up to hundreds of thousands of dollars easily.

Or should I blame my diarrhea on you?

No, but you should be a pragmatist and understand that it’s not realistic to suggest people never get takeaway at all, because it’s for instance - unhealthy - which is true in many cases.

People smoke, do drugs, drink alcohol and eat sugary foods despite all that, and self-control is kind of a myth, it has a lot more to do with one’s circumstances than oneself. E.g. for someone who’s only source of happiness in a dreary day is a bottle of a beer, it’s gonna be a lot harder to stop than for someone who didn’t care that much for it in the first place because they’re rich and their life is not very stressful.

The “don’t be poor” part of ILR is kinda stupid so if it’s that I get it

That part is a non-issue, because if you’re smart, self-disciplined and patient enough to get a skilled worker job in the first place and your job salary qualifies for the skilled worker visa by salary requirements then you won’t have any problems saving the £3k+. Compared to like 4 years of university at what, £14k a year, it’s barely anything.

have been regularly traveling in and out of the UK.

That was it for me. But I visited my parents for summer holidays when I was a literal child, long before I understood that Russia was not a place I wanted to be or the politics of it all, nevermind intricacies of immigration rules that would only concern me over a decade later, and it’s not like I had anywhere to live in the UK outside the boarding school.

Out of all my peers from that school that wanted to stay, I’m the only one that’s made it anywhere close, the others all have years to go for the same sorts of reasons.

And my point is that while getting a citizenship can be difficult, it is not impossible.

And I disagree. For most, it’s an impossibility. My childhood friends in Russia didn’t want to stay in Russia either, but being working class kids, they were lucky to even have a hacked PSP. Studying at some international boarding school is the only realistic route unless you’re exceedingly lucky and extremely talented and it requires being very well off.

In general a lot of your rhetoric speaks to a meritocratic, individualistic and christian-work-ethic capitalist mindset, which can be a good thing, people should try their best and work hard, and I did, but ultimately I only had the opportunity to because of my environment. It’s good to be conscious of such things as well.

As such nationality in international law can be called and understood as citizenship,[35] or more generally as subject or belonging to a sovereign state, and not as ethnicity.

Yeah, “belonging to a sovereign state” is just citizenship or “origin” in cases where no clear citizenship can be established.

When I tear up my Russian passport and burn it, I will no longer be subject to Russian laws, e.g. conscription, and instead be a subject of the British state in the eyes of the law.

Directly responsible? No. Indirectly? Yes. It’s like people have no fucking clue what a country is. It doesn’t just prop up out of nowhere. Someone somewhere defined a country and when it comes to democracies (even dysfunctional ones like Russia and the US) the people set up the country for themselves.

Please tell me you’re not this naive, or you’re not yet 18. This is not what countries are or how they came about, and the rest of your argument falls apart as a consequence of that. Please read up on the colonialist and early industrial periods (and prior too if you can).

There are recorded stories of people living within nation-states that didn’t even know they did, or what the identity of it was or where/when it started and ended.

Even today, while not a nation state, many (not all, of course) Brits voting for Brexit didn’t fully understand what the EU even was really, or who it included. Heck, I couldn’t name you every EU country off the top of my head, and I’m a big Europe simp.

Also, the dysfunctions of the US democracy are simply incomparable to Russian “democracy”, no matter how bad gerrymandering and electron denialism is, the fact that such things even need exist at all is the very proof of that.

If they’re not responsible then who is responsible for the US supporting Israel? The politicians? Who votes the politicians in power? The people. The Lobbyists? The lobbyists lobby to politicians and the politicians get chosen by the people. The masses being stupid and easy to manipulate is a different topic, but it doesn’t change that despite collectively making bad decisions the people are making those decisions.

Okay. I give you two options:

A) Shoot yourself with a shotgun B) Shoot yourself with a pistol

But if you shoot yourself, it’s a bed you made? That’s absurd. States give people a voice, there is no political model in existence that would actually allow the people to become the nation-state itself, for many reasons, including the fact it would be an absolute clusterfuck.

Even anarchist communes would have to have elected representatives to interact with each other and experts to elect to leave some decisions to on for instance, medical or climate policy, which would become a pseudo-state administration, and it’s inevitable that such people have their own agendas as everyone does that would become divorced from the people, the role of representation (democracy, consensus, e.g.) in such a political system is to provide a check and a balance on it.

In western nations voters are a key to power yes, but only one of many, and hardly the most important one.

You may want to run for president for instance, and given the choice, people might vote for you a 100% and you may be the best president the US ever had, but you’ll never be given that opportunity, plain and simple.

There’s a lot more I could go into, but I’ll leave it up to you to look more deeply into civics. Do it for yourself and for me, I’ve already fled one undemocratic shithole, please do not turn the west into a repressive populist junta and learn more about civics and history, thanks xoxo :)