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Comment by rmnc | Hacker News Reader

So after five plus years of being a client, a private company will be deciding whether I'm worthy of their service or not based on whether I got my teeth kicked in during the protest actions for the past few days?

Should I e-mail some photos of my bruises left by police batons on my ribs? Or maybe I should kneel?

This is humiliating, and you know it. You're just making more problems and creating more danger for absolutely innocent people, just in spite.

This is the essence of cancel culture, now on a national level.

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> This is the essence of cancel culture, now on a national level.

We need to lose that term. It's not cancel culture to decide who you do and don't want to associate with, or do business with. That's freedom. The people being rejected only think their own freedom matters. Unless they are a protected class, that simply isn't true.

Sadly its either these actions or tanks. And if the west would send tanks to Ukraine it'd be WW3. Its the lesser evil now sadly.

Apologies for the language -- but are you mental?

I do get the idea of sanctions -- I'm legally prevented by publicly commenting on this due to some Russian law -- but I understand if a foreign business body has to terminate its business relations with a Russian one.

But kicking out paid customers just based on their nationality, knowing that they have no direct control over situation, and still blaming them for it? This is f**d up, I'm sorry.

Please don't cross into personal attack. I know you're under pressure, and other people are in terrible situations. We can't allow HN users to start taking that out on each other.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It would be much preferable for Russians as a whole for the West to send tanks to Ukraine to engage the invading troops. And no, it wouldn't automatically be WW3, either. It would be if the tanks crossed the Russian border, but they don't have to do so to break the invasion.

Putin called for the nukes to be put on High Alert before there was any threat of direct NATO action (and there is still no talk of any). What is the next step? "Higher" alert?

MORE direct combattants, _especially_ from other superpowers, is the last thing that we need. Adding additional powerderkegs to the existing fire does nothing to stop it.

>What is the next step? "Higher" alert?

Essentially yes. The current step is the equivalent of DEFCON 3.

To extend on your fire analogy, it's not just a fire, it's arson - and the arsonist is still there, sprinkling gas around and throwing matches. You can't extinguish the fire without dealing with the arsonist.

As for Putin, he's basically a gopnik. There's a Russian word for what these guys do - "быковать", literally "bulling", but it's basically a display of aggression to establish oneself higher in the hierarchy and to make the victim afraid to fight back. If you acquiesce to gopnik's demands, he will come up with more, until the point where he "justifiably" takes away your phone and wallet.

I hate to break it to you, but Russia started a war! Russia, the place where Russian citizens live, protected by an army of Russians. Russia is not some ephemeral theoretical quantity, it's a state governing its people with their consent. The preferences of their citizens are not a priority and, if you feel that consent has vanished, the only one who can do anything about it is you.

I'm not sure how this relates to anything in my comment.

>And if the west would send tanks to Ukraine it'd be WW3

that tired misconception should be dropped. West can send any weapons to Ukraine, and volunteers from West, trained tank drivers and pilots, can drive those Abrams tanks and fly those F-16 planes. Russia and China has been doing "volunteer" trick just fine.

World needs to start to learn to deal with such situations. China/Taiwan is coming and total sanctions regime wouldn't be possible with China.

I cannot shake the weird feeling that in the united states almost everything is left to the free market, even sanctions.

It's a shitty enough situation that some of those things would seem to be necessary in order to persuade your service provider to keep service up. Automatically billing your credit card for a few years doesn't really say as much.

It's not even spite. Spite at least has some emotion in it. This is lazy virtue signaling of the kind that sounds impressive when you've been bought enough drinks to forego further explanation of who this is actually helping.

To reduce the actions of a company protecting the interests of Ukrainian employees to Western political buzzwords is facile.

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