Yeah, I think this unfortunately heralds the end for the international internet. If you're not a core US ally, being heavily dependent on US services is now a risk, so I imagine we'll see a wave of states moving to develop their own like China did.
This is the end of the international internet? 20-25% of internet users have been behind behind a firewall for decades that cuts them off from huge parts of the internet.
The internationality of the internet has always been inversely proportional to its accessibility to the masses.
My impression is that both services are widely used in "Slavic" countries, not just Russia. In particular, my relatives in Ukraine use both mail.ru and VK. I wonder if this will trigger a move to equivalent American services, like Facebook or Gmail, for some.
It seems to force iPhone users to switch from Russian services to services from the United States, which provides a certain finanical benefit for the United States.
Gotta love how my accurate characterization of causes of current dived comment was flagged. Russia is divided away from rest, because of Genocide and nuclear threats. Russia acts that way because of their own ideologies, history and feeling of entitlement.
The app store apps removal is very minor and does very little to further already existing divide.
With their insidious plan to put an anti-Russian military alliance on their borders. You obviously understand the depths of Putin's genius. He's playing the long game.
It's more than dumb. Russia's current actions are actually only now making NATO presence in the region tangibly stronger (see: Sweden, Finland). This wouldn't happen without Putin invading Ukraine.
The difference is whether or not you're on the open plains leading to Moscow. The eastern edge of the Carpathian Mountains has always been a hard line for Russia, going back to the middle ages, because once the plain to Moscow opens up, it's nearly indefensible. That edge is in eastern Ukraine.
It's a very 19th/20th century view on 21st century geopolitics, but hey, that's modern Russia for you.
That is the overwhelming global intelligence consensus, yes. Even Russian allies aren't fully behind the conflict - if Russia were provoked, allies would be offering materiel or training, no?
...or Iran which has a sizeable weapons industry, or India. Maybe even North Korea given that Russia seems to be in the process of buying/has already bought artillery shells from them.
Hopefully with the UK in economic freefall, Italy electing a far right government and the EU about to have a cold winter, among Russia faltering and losing ground, a stalemate and truce/peace deal will be reached by next year. The rhetoric around this war is too hot and maybe the economic fallout on all sides will show people that we need to cool off.
On all sides? India has seen massive GDP growth, mostly by acting as intermediary for products that Europe used to refine itself. Europe on the other hand is in recession and has a massive economic crises and rising populism on its hands. While Russia has a small contraction ~2% it's nothing like what quite a few of the European economies are facing. Meanwhile Russian sanctioned companies made more profit since the beginning of the war than the entirety of 2021 thanks to idiots like Ursula von der Leyen and the children book author Habeck. I'm absolutely baffled at how you think the war is at a stalemate when even the western analysts that have infinite praise for Ukraine are admitting unsustainable casualties of both Ukrainian trained troops and military hardware.
Hardware does not grow on trees. It has to be built with energy and resources. Where do those come from? Usually when you pick a fight with a big warmachine you don't just dive in nose first, you first build your energy independence and then join in not the other way round.
For example the "The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies" describes this shitshow in the following way:
> In short, US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.
> The US is not the only country facing this challenge. In a recent war game involving US, UK and French forces, UK forces exhausted national stockpiles of critical ammunition after eight days.
> I'm absolutely baffled at how you think the war is at a stalemate when even the western analysts that have infinite praise for Ukraine are admitting unsustainable casualties of both Ukrainian trained troops and military hardware.
Are we going to ignore the fact Russia just started a draft? Russia is not winning this war. Ukraine isn't entirely either. Russia also has unsustainable casualties (evident by the draft) and military equipment. Russia is depleting it's modern equipment/weapons and relying on more old equipment/weapons that's less accurate and dependable.
If Russia didn't call for mobilization to replenish their forces, Ukraine is on it's way to bulldozing Russian defenses like they're currently doing in the Kharkiv offensive.
Ukraine has had 7. There's literally no one left to fight. Most EU countries populations had a willingness of under 20% to sign up for war. The next biggest "European" army is Turkey and they will certainly not fight Russia for you.
"A new poll suggests Americans are growing weary as the US supports Ukraine in its war against Russia."[1]
I think it's time you put your evil/good ideology aside and face the reality that most economic publications have admitted by now that Russia has by all accounts won the economic war and that there is absolutely no way that Ukraine(which is by the way in default, the US taxpayer is paying people in public office in Ukraine just like they did in Afghanistan before it collapsed) can win the war.
7 drafts? Their country is being invaded. If there isn't anyone left to fight, why hasn't Russia taken Kiev yet? Why did Russia lose Kharkiv? Who is Russia fighting?
Why would they? Controlling a population that is hostile towards you is an absolute nightmare. Americans should know, they tried it many times. So did the Soviets and it never worked out. Kiev's population has a Russian minority of less then 15% while in the eastern two breakaway republics the majority is. Have you ever looked at a map of Ukraine?
The problem with people like you is that you don't actually listen. You don't really have to agree with what the other side says, but you should at least listen instead of just believing what you want to believe and what the voice inside of your own head says.
Were you paying any attention at the beginning? Russia attempted a capitulation strike aimed at Kiev from the north and northeast (including an airborne operation) at the same time as starting a shock and awe campaign with ballistic and cruise missiles against every major and regional city.
That was their grand plan. Take Kyiv in 3 days and subjugate the populace which is >90% hostile to you. Absolute madness. Dictator syndrome to the fullest. Only a chain of lies going to the top could have led Putin to believe it was possible.
> I'm not sure what world you live in but the majority of the global population is by all accounts on Russia's side albeit silently.
This is one of the most insane things I've read on the internet today, and that's saying something. I'm sure that most of the "global population" is on the side of a genocidal psychopath who thinks that imperialism and wars for territory are still OK.
The modern world has moved past this, and past you. Please educate yourself or stfu.
> I'm not sure what world you live in but the majority of the global population is by all accounts on Russia's side.
Would you be able to back up this claim? I haven't seen any signs of support from Russia. Even China says Putin should try to solve the problem with diplomatic means. And India tells him it's not a time for war. I heard the leader of Nigeria supports Putin but I don't know if it's confirmed.
>I heard the leader of Nigeria supports Putin but I don't know if it's confirmed.
I'm Nigerian...This isn't true (even though our current leader is an oaf). Most African countries aren't supporting Russia...they're just not actively opposing them, and for the right reasons. We're too poor to attempt any sanctions, and we'll rather maintain as much trade as we can with any country.
It'll be dumb for countries whose economies are in shambles to enact sanctions against Russia like the rich western countries that can afford to weather economic pain in the short term.
I have this conversation often with my Russian friends. Usually it goes like this:
- Ukrainians provoked this war because they were shelling Donbas for 8 years killing many people!
- You realize they wouldn't shell anyone if Putin hadn't started the war in 2014, right?
Sometimes they also argue that after the Euromaidan the Russian population felt "threatened" (which is not true BTW). To which I reply that most of these people are either refugees or dead now.
Sometimes they even use the official argument made by Putin that he had to start the war otherwise Ukraine would join NATO. Which is one of the most absurd arguments as Ukraine was repeatedly refused NATO membership and even joining the EU was considered a very delicate affair. Even now, when the cards are on the table, nobody is treating Ukarine's membership in NATO seriously - Zelenski realizes the future of his nation will be Israel-like, focused on external and internal security backed up by Western allies.
I am a bit conflicted here.
On the one hand I hate VK because it has censorship, they provide tools to police to monitor conversations and crack down on people.
On the other, now that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are banned it leaves even less means of communication and spreading information inside Russia, as bad as VK was.
If only it was kicked out before Russia banned Facebook (it allowed hatespeach towards Russians) people might have migrated to Facebook or something, now there's going to be a void.
Well, VK Web version is just as functional as the app, so maybe not such a big hit.
Also, in Russia most people use Android, so Google Play ban would be more effective.
The app continue to work for everyone that has already installed it.
And you can still redownload it from your purchased page.
So it shouldn't be a major issue.
VK has not been targeted with sanctions, despite what the article implies (though with scare quotes). VK's CEO is personally sanctioned due to being an "adult child of someone who had been a Russian government official" (source Reuters[0]), but VK the company is not sanctioned.
This is a shameful unilateral decision by Apple, let there be no ambiguity.
>due to being an "adult child of someone who had been a Russian government official" (source Reuters[0]), but VK the company is not sanctioned.
I get the intention behind this rule for applying sanctions, but it still seems unfair to me that the son pays for the sins of the father and can't even atone for him.
VK and such are state-own basically. This guy was appointed because of his father. It is not like he built the company. Pavel Durov, the founder, was basically exiled from Russia years ago.
If Apple sold phones in Russia, do they also have to delete those apps there? If the answer is yes, that's very troubling, and it goes beyond complying with US regulations IMO.
it bears repeating that laws do not follow morality though, of course.
Personally: I find it deeply uncomfortable that nearly all tech seems to come out of the US, where sanctions and rules are applied unilaterally, with only relatively minor pushback.
I have even had issues supporting users when I was transitioning from bare-metal to cloud due to US sanctions blocking Cuba, Iran and a part of Ukraine (Crimea) which is nearly impossible for us to avoid selling our product to accidentally, dooming anyone living there to buy a product that can never work.
The app store is a separate business than hardware. They don't have to delete already installed apps, but continuing to distribute them I imagine the US government definitely does have the power to stop.
The point being made isn't that warrantless data harvesting by corporations on behalf of a hostile spy agency is the moral equivalent of a corporation assaulting the ability of innocent civilians trapped in a despotic regime to access outside information, it's that "the government told us we need to" is not a good excuse for perpetrating any social ills.
Would you like to present a case that it's somehow a positive for American companies to condemn innocent Russian civilians to an echo chamber of pro-Russia sentiment, and that freedom of information is somehow a bad thing for those unarmed women and children?
If you were concerned about the civilians trapped in a despotic regime, why would you give the regime leverage over the people you are trying to help? It would make sense in that light to do exactly what Apple is doing, and nudge people to other platforms.
Deliberately reducing the number of platforms that are accessible from the outside world is what gives the regime MORE leverage, not less. If you take Russians offline, you're just submerging them into state-run TV.
If you let them stay on VKontakte, you let them have more exposure to covert American media campaigns. In the cold war, a huge source of information for people east of the Berlin wall was Radio Free Europe, which was a covert media campaign.
Russians do not have access to just switch to other platforms on a whim the way you seem to think they do. Banning VKontakte from the app store is not going to encourage them to move to a platform like Facebook in a country where people disappear when they circumvent the country's blocks on foreign social media. It's much more analogous to destroying the radios of the Eastern Europeans during the cold war so they can't access any outside news at all.
What makes you so sure all of these actions don't have the opposite effect?
Let's say hypothetically Putin completely ceases in Ukraine and then loses the next Russian election. Now what? Do you think all of that economic damage inflicted upon the Russian people just vanishes?
Isn't it possible the Russian people elect someone even more radical than Putin and make the problem worse? History is full of examples of this.
None of this is really Apple’s responsibility, nor is it reasonable for them to be playing the 4d chess that you’re entertaining.
Apple isn’t a geopolitical humanitarian strategist organization. They’re a for-profit tech company. They sell widget to people with money unless they think it’s in the interest to not do so. Period
> None of this is really Apple’s responsibility, nor is it reasonable for them to be playing the 4d chess that you’re entertaining.
It's okay to put that burden on the Russian people, but not Apple? Why is Apple so special here?
If you're going to make the consequentialist argument that a consequence of the Russian's allowing an echo chamber is Apple can remove apps, then you also need to apply that to Apple. You can't selectively apply logic when it's convenient to your argument and disregard it when it's not.
Russia’s internal affairs are not Apple’s responsibility to fix. Nor is it within their power to do. I entertained someone else’s consequentialist argument above but I never made one myself.
> a consequence of the Russian's allowing an echo chamber is Apple can remove apps
Those are independent things, not a consequence of the other.
It is already fragmented by socio-cultural borders.
If you are an Internet user in Europe, or even India, I would expect that you have absolute zero prior knowledge of Lewd Dreams meme. From the western borders of China all the way to Bering Strait it’s as basic of a knowledge as it subtly being inserted into or even exploited in totalitarian state propaganda.
But you haven’t seen it, because you have no reason to(no offense intended); there are invisible cultural borders already, in this global platform.
In all likelihood, it won't be completely unnavigable. North Korea blocks all US traffic, but if you use a proxy located in mainland China, you can browse the North Korean "internet" from the US.
Nah, failed dictatorships are incompetent and can't push their economies overall, on par with regular countries. And due to this economical deficiency their companies will never be globally competitive, including competitive software and webservices. So will be forced to to keep open access to the internet to feed on the major web platforms and services. That's why all these nutjobs like Iran always restore internet access to the outside after some crisis has passed.
The only exceptions could be either successful self sufficient dictatorship (only China today), or complete nutjobs at the end of their rule, who disregard all concerns about local businesses.
Is it possible to understand that Russia is the aggressor but also oppose sanctions? Russia has absolutely committed more atrocities than Iran and Cuba, but none of these countries are democracies, and therefore I find it difficult to support measures that disproportionately affect the citizenry over the ruling class in any of these countries.
I also hope the dialogue in these threads can improve. The quality of the comments, at the time of writing mine, are poor and quippy.
It doesn’t matter what form of government Russia has on paper when they’ve invaded a separate sovereign nation and worst than that: appear to be very serious about genocide and also appear to be very serious about using their nukes in some capacity.
They can stand equal among nations with advanced financial markets, medicine and technology if they want. I have no problem with that, but it comes with a price: checking their territorial ambitions at the door. At this point I would even add on to that fully surrendering their nuclear arsenal because the leaders they’ve either chosen or “chosen” (and for the purposes of this conversation it doesn’t really matter which anymore) have proven to be irresponsible caretakers.
Russians do not consider us a separate nation and consider our language a "broken Russian". They are in fact trying to erase our language and our culture. They call anyone who considers themselves Ukrainian and not Russian a "nazi" that should be killed. This is a genocide.
I am Russian, so I am going to explain the way I and my friends and relatives that I speak to think about Ukrainians.
We consider Ukrainians brothers in the best way possible. We don't care what language you speak, but it feels especially warm when we hear that you can speak Russian as well. Like you are speaking to a relative.
The government propaganda is trying hard to convince Russian population that they are fighting a small group of Nazis who took over government and against NATO mercenaries, not Ukrainians, because they know Russians don't want to fight them.
It may be hard for you to accept, given what's happening, but this is the bullshit that propaganda made some people believe.
I am telling you this as a person, whose girlfriend has heated arguments with her grandmother over a phone every week. It goes something like this:
"grandma! There are no mercenaries! They are fighting Ukranian military! Destroying cities! Where would they find so many mercenaries??? I don't care what you saw on TV! ... ".
The same thing every time.
There are probably ~3-5% of people who are fucked in the head and hate Ukranians, but most people do not.
>We consider Ukrainians brothers in the best way possible
Lets hope you dont start considering the rest of the world brothers.
> It may be hard for you to accept, given what's happening, but this is the bullshit that propaganda made some people believe.
That same bullshit propaganda has been spewed out by Russia for years and no one inside Russia did anything against it. When Nemstov was killed you all cowered away, when the first arrests for speaking out against the Ukraine war were made the rest of you hid away. This is your mess. This is on you to fix it. The rest of us have to deal wiuth the shit you allowed to come into power, and through inaction and ambivalence you allowed to to accumulate more and more power until we get to where we are today.
According to Wiki "Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people, usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group...".
The initial goal of this war was to change Ukraininan government to a more friendly one. I have no idea what the current goal is, but it's very clear it's not killing people. Propaganda is trying very hard to deny any killings of civilians that do happen, if the goal was genocide they would try to portray Ukrainians as less than humans, the way some Germans considered jews to be vermin during Hitler.
Russians identify deeply with Ukraine, many have relatives and roots there (myself included). For this reason propaganda is trying to say that they are not fighting Ukraine, but NATO mercenaries. Again, this is horrible but does not sound like genocide.
> Propaganda is trying very hard to deny any killings of civilians that do happen, if the goal was genocide they would try to portray Ukrainians as less than humans
I fail to follow the logic here. If I beat you with a baseball bat, and will try very hard to deny that, does it mean my goal was not to beat you with a baseball bat? What if at the same time I will post articles in popular blogs about how you are a great human being and we are basically brothers?
Let me rephrase it: if the goal was the genocide then there would be much, much more civilian casualties. For now, civilian death count is slightly more than a total deaths from the car accidents in the whole country in the previous years. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
It may be semantics, but even by law a murder is different based on person's motivation.
If John kills Jane because she is black it is different than killing her by reckless driving.
In this war civilians are getting killed because of disregard for human lifes while trying to kill the military, not intentionally because of the group they belong to.
I am not trying to say they are not killing people, it's the intention that I am questining. How can it be a genocide of Ukranians if Putin is killing a bunch of Russians that live there as well? And if there are many Ukranians in Russia's military doing the same thing.
The Holocaust is not the end all be all of what defines a genocide. The man who created the word wasn’t even trying to limit it to that when he was fleeing the Holocaust because he realized that there is more than one way to destroy a people even whilst the Germans were abjectly and mechanically destroying his people in a gruesome manner.
Here is Putin on the record in a speech he gave:
“ Putin said in a Monday speech: "Ukraine has never had its own authentic statehood. There has never been a sustainable statehood in Ukraine."
He argued that Ukraine was a creation of the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin, its first leader, despite extensive evidence of a distinctive Ukrainian culture before that.
Putin also made a claim that Ukraine was a part of Russia's historic territory.
He said in his speech: "Let me emphasize once again that Ukraine for us is not just a neighboring country. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space.”
Maybe there is a cultural dissonance here and what Putin said means something completely different in Russian, but this to me reads as someone walking a fine line trying very hard not to admit that his goal is to erase Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as distinct from Russia and the Russian people. That was in February two days before launching a full scale invasion of Ukraine, and I don’t trust that the “official” reasons are the real ones. Putin is former KGB: deceiving foreigners and citizens alike is literally his bread and butter.
The official reason was not changing government, it's "denazification and demilitarization".
As for "not a real country", there's an opinion that I think has some truth to it, that Ukraine, Russia as well as other states were all forged in the flame of USSR.
As I visit ex-USSR states they are very similar, like different flavors of the same country. National cloth and parts of language is all that is left.
This way there's not much need to change Ukraine to be like Russia, all of us already have the USSR culture.
Yes, Ukraine is also a Slavic culture. That doesn’t entitle one Slavic culture to dominate the rest of them politically and militarily.
Ukraine and it’s predecessor States were separate from any shared territory with Moscow and most of modern Russia’s western territory for something in the neighborhood of 700 years (at least!). There was even a force in Ukraine that fought against Union with Russia (and State Socialism) prior to Ukraine being subjected to Russian domination and eventually the USSR by Russian military force. Ukraine also declared independence from the USSR in 1991. That isn’t nothing either because Russia also went its own separate way and recognized Ukrainian independence. We also had an agreement since 1994 (the Budapest Memorandum) that Russia would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and that should have been the end of it.
But no, apparently that wasn’t enough and here we are, and for that matter you may as well call me British instead of American because apparently a few centuries of sovereign independence and cultural distinction don’t count.
I am not talking about Slavic culture, I am talking about USSR culture.
In my limited experience there's more in common between Russia and Ukraine / Georgia / Kazakhstan than between Russia and Poland / Czech / Croatia etc, latter being Slavs.
USSR did a lot of work to unify culture of its states.
In my personal experience I can never tell if someone is from Ukraine or Belarus until they tell me. I can tell that someone is from EU (including Slavs) just by looking at their back 20 meters away.
The mental element, "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such", is publicly there, in official speeches and everything.
The physical element ticks every box besides "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group", that we know of. The Russian army tortures murders civilians indiscriminately, puts them in grave peril (without access to food, water, heating), and kidnaps children.
I listen to Russian propanganda a couple times per month for educational purposes :-)
Believe me, that is not it.
You are likely right here though, that Donetsk and Lugansk would have likely became a part of Russia. I don't think anything would change for them, however, since these areas are already largely pro-Russian and were already controlled by military affiliated with Russia.
I expect after this war they are going to reconsider how much they want to be in Russia, because after promising to protect them, Putin sent all their young men to war.
It is not only about russians using apps but russian game developers not profiting example my.games small branch owned by vk made 10m $ profit only last ( 7 mil ios 3 android) month majority of vk is owned by gasprom therefore that way money is still flowing even though. It doesnt matter that russians dont have option ti do purchases in app, people world wide buy stuff in game and money is flowing to russia other ways.
I laugh at comments like this. Every major social media network in the US feeds all data directly to the NSA without any kind of warrant.
Did everyone forget about the Snowden leaks? Or did everyone just decide to trust the same people who lied to us about committing the crime in the first place when they said they stopped?
The data was fed to the NSA without any kind of warrant. The FISA court needed to grant a warrant to the NSA to access the data they already possessed.
As others have pointed out, this court was also effectively a rubber stamp machine. Between 1979 and 2015, 38,365 warrants were approved and a grand total of 12 were rejected. That's an approval rate of >99.9%.
Sure, there was a need for warrant, but those were issued by the FISA courts which were secret and were basically a rubber stamp with the judges saying yes to every request. Might as well not be a warrant as you have no legal defense against it or even a way to know about it.
> without any kind of warrant. there was a need for warrant
Nevertheless, you confirmed one part of a two part statement as being demonstrably false. So in conclusion, companies responded to court orders from courts in the jurisduction they were in.
> Might as well not be a warrant as you have no legal defense against it
You might need to take a refresher on what a warrant is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probable_cause is as good a starter as any, the bar is low, very low. Then check in in the Patriot Act, where the bar was lowered even further.
Where I work we were told to remove the option to choose the russian language from any drop down and delete all russian translations from the database. That didn't quite seem right to me since there are people who speak russian who don't live in russia, but they seem to be trying to remove all traces of any sort of connection with russia (the country).
> In January 2016, China banned VKontakte, claiming that it was manipulating web content and cooperating with the Kremlin. According to Russia's media watchdog, the network estimates around 300,000 users based in China.[63] As of 14 February 2018, China authorities unblocked VKontakte and it was fully accessible in the country.[64]
This whole thing has given HarmonyOS a second market. I thought the whole thing would stay China only but it seems that as a result of sanctioning Huawei and by extension HarmonyOS based devices they have now opened a second (fairly big market) to HarmonyOS. I don't understand how there is no one left around these people to advise them of the unintended consequences for their policy decisions.
Interesting how they provide evidence that the apps were removed from the Apple store, but they make the very strong claims that apps are "almost 100% owned" by a governmental agency without providing any links as a source, further proof, or more reading. Doesn't seem like strong journalistic standards... Does anybody have a link for me to do some more reading? Not sure what to search for that won't pull up mainstream media articles instead of primary sources.
I think it's very concerning to see society actively wanting to suppress "harmful" information/apps that've been deemed "harmful" by Governments, and by extension, corporate interests. Society sees these massive companies doing it with statements like "removing harmful misinformation", "aiding in the 'fight against the evil russians!'", etc. etc. etc.
I understand that "yes, Apple is a private company with their own catered app-store experience and can control what they do and don't allow on it".
What I don't like is that there are so few competitors in the phone space - Android app store, and Apple store, the rest are single-digit percentage or low double-digit percentage market shares. And, these current companies do everything in their power to make sure no other competitors enter the scene, even though there's high barriers/costs to enter the mobile device market.
Apple (and all gigantic tech companies) have so much power to sway society and sway public opinion, purely by restricting what apps or content you can or cannot have on your devices - further more they make corporate decisions (which I am undoubtedly sure are done behind closed doors with execs from other companies and/or the US Government) that affect so many people without even a thought. Whether it's been designed that way to allow the US government to have more soft-power over it's people rather than hard power like other countries (China, Russia) or not, it's harmful to everybody.
I wish there was more active/worthy competition in the mobile phone space.
What the hell are you talking about “false pretences”? Trying to tie all that stuff about reddit etc together with the current treatment of Russia, given that is a direct result of their cruel and pointless invasion of Ukraine, is ridiculous.
one would think that after the "WMDs" fiasco it would be harder to manufacture consent of the US public for hundreds-of-billions-of-taxpayer-dollars destabilization of foreign nations with no apparent direct gain for our citizens, but, indeed, it's happening once again, in my lifetime.
one would think that we would now be more resistant to propagandistic conditioning of hatred toward an entire nation, but, indeed, it's happening once again, in my lifetime.
it's as though nobody stops to think about why they feel strongly about something like this, or where these strong feelings came from.
Yes, we must be more resistant to hating nations that invade other nations in Europe, unprovoked. We must judge them entirely by their words and reassurances while studiously ignoring their actions and deeds. Only then will we have atoned.
"it's as though nobody stops to think about why they feel strongly about something like this, or where these strong feelings came from.". Indeed.
look, if you think the US should deploy troops over there, just say so. let's do it. waffling about dumping billions and billions of taxpayer dollars into nebulously-defined foreign coffers while gradually propagandizing the populace into manufacturing consent for yet another military-industrial complex incursion on foreign soil is getting really tiresome. let's just get on with it, it's about time we completely took over the government of some country across the ocean for poorly-defined hard-to-articulate reasons so as to replace it wholesale with Democracy™ and call it a day like we have time and time again throughout my entire life. sure, it would be nice if the lives of my nation's soldiers were sacrificed for some actually meaningful reason that in any way impacts the citizens of my country, but whatever, that ship seems to have sailed before I was born—whatever the politicians and talking heads on the teevee say is cause for war, must be cause for war! let's go police the world!
"waffling about dumping billions and billions of taxpayer dollars into nebulously-defined foreign coffers while gradually propagandizing the populace into manufacturing consent for yet another military-industrial complex incursion on foreign soil is getting really tiresome." Indeed it is, point out where I did that?
One of us is waffling and seemingly willfully ignoring the fact that a country in Europe is engaged in a war of aggression. Thankfully your government sees things more clearly - I'm not American but you so clearly are.
At least you were able to read it. The rest won't be able as it's censored now. I called you out to check some facts, even you won't be able to deny. But you're too scared to look at UN numbers on official UN websites that prove me right.
But you have been saved by your mods and can now enjoy an uninterrupted hegemony of opinion. As long as you keep to your internet shitholes, few challenging thoughts will ever reach you.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that Google needs to help distribute them. Google is responsible for what they do with their servers, not what you do with your phone.
I believe Google Play is still available in Russia [1], just not the billing part. Since these are free apps that doesn't impact them.
Regardless, whether or not you allow Russian users to download apps is an independent question or whether or not you allow anyone to download these particular apps. As I understand it Apple's action is world wide. It does appear that the apps in question are still available from Google (though I didn't try installing them...) [2]
Many would argue that the US deserved and deserves comeuppance for its actions abroad, yes. If other countries felt it to be their prerogative to remove US software or products as part of that, it would not be absurd.
Really ? Yet, we label all nations that do that dictatorial repressive regimes. In fact people frequently do so on this very forum. Maybe they are, but come on let's have some consistency in our behaviour.
Behavioral consistency? That's a tall order for citizens of a country where the average citizen is purportedly fluent in 0.7 languages and only about half the population even votes.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, I read that nuclear options were considered for Vietnam war but were never publicly used as a threat. I'm guessing same with Korean war?
More broadly than the VK and mail.ru apps mentioned in the article as being pulled by Apple, but not (yet?) Google, there's an Ars article today [1] looking at a bigger picture:
> Google and Apple have removed hundreds of apps from their app stores at the request of governments around the world ...
Great for deepening the divide between people & countries.