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Comment by dngray | Hacker News Reader

> Would that really change anything? I think what we’re seeing is the inevitable result of the internet and tech companies becoming the most important aspect of modern civilisation.

I think what we are seeing is the implementation of authoritarian governments, something that has been on the increase nearly everywhere, in the last 20 years.

People have in the developed world had it, too good for too long. Complacency and populism is what led to this.

We voted in "strong leaders" and this is what we're gonna get, strong policies that might not really be all that smart.

What these policies forget is a lot of general citizens don't have much choice over the regime that leads them. They are just often people doing their thing.

Free software is actually something which brings us together, as it's about what we do and have in common, rather than race, religion or politics. I think that's why it feels so awful.

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I’m Danish and in our very recent election we voted the authoritarians and populists out, by a large margin. Margrete Vestager is from a very liberal (as in free) Danish party, and she’s pushing some of the toughest regulations on big tech companies that we’ve seen in years.

So I’m not convinced it’s really authoritarian. We have a big scandal right now in Denmark, because a company secretly sold jet-fuel to Russians and that’s been illegal since sometime during the Cold War. Because other industries have been regulated on what they could trade with our “enemies” for decades. The tech sector somehow snuck under the radar on this, but that sneaking has certainly ended, and it’s now being regulated like any other industry.

I mean I could certainly be wrong, but I really do see it as governments being governments. When I was a child there weren’t seatbelts or airbags in cars. Automakers didn’t suddenly start putting them there because it was the right thing to do, or because it’s sell more cars. They did it because regulation forced them to do it and then they later turned safety into a marketing point.

> Margrete Vestager is from a very liberal (as in free) party, and she’s pushing some of the toughest regulations on big tech companies that we’ve seen in years.

Then it's the illusion of freedom. Free when they declare freedom, but not when they don't.

Code doesn't have color, race or politics. It is something that brings us together and we have common ground over. We argue over whether it is good code or bad code.

The fact is embargoes do nothing to benefit anyone here. All it results in is less code being available.

Also it is the very thought control, ie a Government telling me how I will make my code available that annoys me.

I didn't vote my government in, and I don't particularly like it when that Government tells me I cannot communicate, or express my intellectual creations with the people that I want, just because I was born within it's borders.

Code is political, to the degree it matters. See: Bitcoin, Stuxnet, Intel ME, Facebook, Google, missile guidance systems, the Enigma machine, etc.

I don't think things like censorship are restricted to authoritarian, populist, or right-wing parties. It's just the reasons differ. Right-wing parties will censor the internet to "stop terrorism" and "protect families and children", left-wing parties will censor the internet to "fight hate speech", but the end result is the same.

Only problem with your theory is that the number of fully-embargoed countries by the US has decreased over the last 20 years, and all of the still-embargoed countries except for Crimea have been on the list for longer than 20 years.

We started the sanctions on Venezuela in 2014. Why bother posting such obvious nonsense?

Venezuela is not fully-embargoed. The fully-embargoed countries are Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria.

This is quibbling over terminology. Venezuela is in a deep depression caused by USA sanctions. Moving them from one list to another would make no difference to the daily experience of the average Venezuelan.

This lawyering also completely undercuts your original "nothing to see here; move along people!" argument.

US sanctions worsen the already bad economic situation but to claim the problem is caused by US sanctions is extremely misleading. We were already seeing severe shortages way before the 2014 sanctions (which were placed on individuals, anyway). The reasons are too complex to put in a short snippet.

Crimea and Venezuela are hard to compare. While there's the common point of having an authoritarian government, they're different in many other factors such as public support of the government, geography, pre-existing economy and timing and severity of the sanctions.

Though this is very true for both, I think:

> What these policies forget is a lot of general citizens don't have much choice over the regime that leads them. They are just often people doing their thing.

and from the POV of the authoritarian government on the sanctioned country it makes sense to double down upon receiving sanctions because the sanctioning country(ies) don't have a bigger stick than that (unless they resort to military aggression).

GitHub is not blocking Venezuela. The list a country is on is more than just a matter of terminology.

It is just a matter of time. We've been ratcheting up the sanctions regularly, which, again, contradicts your "no problems here!" argument.

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