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Comment by tomerv | Hacker News Reader

Direct link to Patreon's statement: https://blog.patreon.com/on-the-removal-of-come-back-alive

I’m so disappointed with their stance here. Russians are slaughtered these folks and they can’t get funds to defend themselves? Sickening.

While I wouldn't have stopped this myself, I think its perfectly reasonable for a crowdfunding website to not want to host campaigns used to purchase military grade weaponry.

Freedom. What is being defended here is the right to have a website like this at all. The west has a long way to go to wake up to what's at stake here.

Patreon isn't against "freedom" and they most certainly know what's at stake here. What they're against is having to decide whether a cause is just or not. After all, one side's "freedom fighter" is another side's terrorist. In this case it might be pretty obvious, but they don't want to get in the habit of having to make calls, because there are far more cases that are less clear cut.

No, it is not. Freedom != mass purchase of weapons through crowdfunding.

Patreon hosts tons of youtube channels focused only on weapons including purely military ones, how to make guns more effective (aka better at killing), how to tweak ammo to be more destructive.

That's one fucked up schizophrenic stance, especially from US company in this specific conflict. Does Trump have any influence there by any chance, given his recent statements?

> Does Trump have any influence there by any chance, given his recent statements?

Interesting take to say the least.

Trump campaigners and other alt-right types don't like Patreon due to prior disagreements; they literally founded an alternative platform with a parody name, to avoid it -- Hatreon.

And how well is that doing?

I don't really care :-)

There is a difference to funding a gun blog or shooting-focused YouTube channel, versus training army personnel and buying guns for them.

The difference is that the former is pointless frivolity, and the latter is, in this case, defending against a literal invasion.

Exactly. My point is that they are materially different.

A person may disagree with Patreon’s policy, but you have to agree that it is not in fact hypocritical (or “schizophrenic”) to allow funding to one but not the other.

And you, my dear pister, are waffling on the freedom to self-organize, and falling into the Kissinger trap.

Soft power; Sickening thing. Once you have it you're responsible for everything. In this case, the U.S. trying to once again get entangled in another spat.

Once you start binning which transactions are really appropriate to happen, you're de-facto making policy.

Now you’re just stringing random words together. What is the “Kissinger trap”?

The topic was the freedom of an American corporation to not finance warfare. There is no moral or legal imperative for them to permit their users to finance a foreign country’s military, whether that country is an ally or adversary.

Of course they are free to do so. Nobody has said they are not.

What people are saying is that they are cowards for doing so, and that they will from now on refuse to do business with them. As I am sure you can agree, they are free to do.

The Kissinger Trap. As good a name as I can think of. Rule through soft power as enacted top down from a Global power. Basically "sensible defaults" as applied to foreign policy, as interpreted by diplomats.

It leads to delegatory attitudes wherein people should cede agency to "the authorities" to broker things out and any type of personal agency being disencouraged or quashed.

Works great when people aren't interconnected to the degree we are now, but at the cost of the action potentials being much more strongly gated and open to the idiosyncracies of Heads of State, rather than genuine support across the populace.

Now you're faced with reality where funds can potentially be transfered somewhere they can do good. The reliance on a centralized facilitator is technically lower.

It'll be interesting to see if the "Game of Kings" plays out the same way when the pawns can signal betwixt themselves more easily.

When a conventional army starts using that channel's videos for training, does that mean they magically stop receiving funding?

As long as there's a plausibly non-military use of such projects (ie. entertainment), it's fine. It's not any different than funding some open source project, even though the open source project can theoretically be used for weaponry.

> Patreon hosts tons of youtube channels focused only on weapons including purely military ones, how to make guns more effective (aka better at killing), how to tweak ammo to be more destructive.

This is a straw man argument unless you can produce some sources.

I mean you've had to do some pretty serious stretching to compare the two there.

Essentially saying there's no difference between e.g. a video game store selling games that have guns in them and actual rifles. Come on. Basically the entire non US western world would find that absurd.

Lets be clear. There is no difference between weaponry and military grade. That people entertain the notion is a sign of the softening of language and perversion of meaning by the political classes to justify breaking their own founding document to centralize power (in the case of the U.S.)

There is weaponry, and there is volume. And if you want to completely sidestep these issues, get a mill, some metal, and get fabbing.

Save the squishy little handwringers their conscience. My heart goes out to you folks. Give 'em hell.

Well it doesn't really matter. I can't blame them for not wanting to fund weaponry of any sort on a crowdfunding site.

Europe has promised 1.2 billion in aid and has been sending them armament for a while now. I much prefer countries and politicians sending them large sums than the small donations - of which Patreon and any payment processor in between gets a big cut - given by well-wishing common folk.

That said, the US denied them financial aid though, Trump got impeached for withholding $400 million in military aid to Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impeachment_of_Donald_Tr...) if they didn't investigate Joe Biden and took the blame for Russia's intervention in the 2016 elections.

Are we even at a point now where money can make a difference? It seems like within 2-3 days the existing governmental structure will be seized, along with (I assume) funds that are being donated. Is it plausible that Ukrainian gov officials will retreat into NATO territory and continue to coordinate resistance from there, along with the still-pouring-in funds, or is that a pipe dream?

In WW2 several countries invaded by Germany (and the USSR) set up "governments-in-exile" in London, so it certainly isn't unprecedented.

The government of China fled to Hong Kong and is still there today... some people say.

You mean Taiwan

Thanks, it's amazing the things I know and still botch.

For what it's worth plenty of nationalists did actually flee to Hong Kong. Had a friend whose family was from HK, his grandfather was a banker and supposedly a personal friend of Chiang Kai-Shek and he hid under a pile of dead fish on a fishing boat to escape the communists and go to HK.

They have a valid point in not wanting to be used for funding military support, however the way they express concern for the safety of Ukrainian people without criticizing or even taking distance from Putin and the Russian invasion looks quite strange to me. Ukraine wasn't hit by a tornado or an earthquake; there's people behind the invasion, and Patreon seem to ignore that. Expressing disapproval against people behind the facts, and not merely the facts, is important.

> Expressing disapproval against people behind the facts, and not merely the facts, is important.

The platform is in a position to actually help beyond denouncing but they abstain. It is lip service nothing more.

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