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Comment by ganeshkrishnan | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely ridiculous and shitty thing to do. At no point in history has punishing people for the mistakes of their leader resulted in a better situation and more peaceful world.

I suspect everyone is trying to one up everyone else and show their "patriotic duty" by punishing Russia. The propaganda and rabid "i got you" displays far exceeds the post 9/11 drum beats.

Don't bring politics into Tech. There is a time and there is a place. This is not the time and this is not the place. If it was, then similar punishment should have been handed out for destroying Syria,Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam....

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I agree, this all makes me very uncomfortable. The second we decide it's ok to exert political influence over access to tech, there will be a flood of calls for it to happen for every cause you can think of. The goalposts will shift from "we dont do this" to "this is as bad as ukraine, cut them off". Politics don't belong here

At no point in history has punishing people for the mistakes of their leader resulted in a better situation and more peaceful world.

History is full of huge counterexamples to this claim: the sanctions against South African apartheid. Oh and this whole business of "punishing people in Germany, Italy and Japan for the mistakes of their leaders", known otherwise as WW 2.

> the sanctions against South African apartheid

This was done by UN. Not by some random company against some individuals.

>Oh and this whole business of "punishing people in Germany, Italy and Japan for the mistakes of their leaders", known otherwise as WW 2

No, that was WW1. And the sanctions led to WW2 after which US recognized the futility of sanctions and provided EU with economic package under Marshal Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

regardless the whole pom-pom tweeting and thumping chest of how you fired some random russian programmers reeks of cringe worthy maturity of a 5 year old, not a manager from the largest corporation in the world.

> This was done by UN. Not by some random company against some individuals.

Before there were official sanctions, there were popular boycotts for years. Most countries only imposed sanctions right at the end.

(Of course, in this case, there are already state sanctions, and that may be weighing on various companies' decisions to terminate contracts; if nothing else it will likely become virtually impossible to actually _pay_ Russian vendors within days).

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