I’m not sure if you misread my comment but I said the “sheer scale of people jailed for protesting”. Maybe I’m wrong too, but I think 100 people per city is absolutely crazy. I’m not sure 100 people have ever been jailed in my city in under a week, ever.

Otherwise I agree, I think we’re more or less on the same page.

I've got to ask how many times you've been arrested or jailed fighting for justice in your country. It's very easy to talk about this, it's a lot harder to do it, especially in a place like Russia. I've been arrested while protesting twice and once thrown in max security jail (luckily bailed out within a couple days) and I dealt with the follow-up for many stressful years. It stinks.

In any event I encourage you to use some of that passion of yours fighting for what's right in your own country & putting your own life & livelihood on the line. God speed!

Edit: in USA.

Historically, when jails have been cramped the solution has been dead bodies in trenches. Putin has demonstrated that he can be ruthless and he admires ruthless people who preceded him. If I was in Russia and I had a family (as I do here in Canada) I would be very afraid of them losing me because I expressed dissent during an extremely contentious and high-pressure war. Maybe that makes me weak or part of the problem; it’s just where I’m at and I can sympathize with people there who might be responding to the situation the way I would.

Priority 1: Stay alive and take care of my family

Priority 2: Do something about the social and political issues if I can, but not at the expense of priority 1

There is some overlap and conflict there. Maybe the government can put my family directly at risk, for example. In this case that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening unless your family has been sent to fight. For those people, god, I don’t have words. It’s unthinkable.

Siberia is vast, the horizon endless and the seasons extreme -- the bones there from Stalin's time attest that in practice it's a "boundless" jail.

Please, go read Gulag Archipelago, come back when you are done and share your thoughts on the limits of the soviet penal system.

That's really inconsiderate/rude.

I'm a avoid opponent of Putin, but I have the free speech to do it. And I can look things up online to find pretty decent info and different perspectives.

People that have families and live in other regimes don't have the luxury to do what I do here, in Belgium or probably you too.

You should most definitely be aware of that.

People don't pick the situation where they are born into.

This is fun because American ideology makes this question tautological.

Any answer that could possibly be given will be invalid, because we wouldn't have invaded them if they were really a democracy.

Also I don't imagine that dead civilians particularly care whether the invaders who shot them were doing it in the name of democracy or not.

That we know of, El Salvador.

There are quite a few entries in that list, and these are things we are aware of today after FOIA. This list is only confirmed intervention by the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy_of_the_United_S...

There likely was direct involvement by USA in overthrows of democracies of some Arab Spring countries, of Ecuador in the late 2000s, and maybe even Brazil and Argentina.

I seriously hope I am straw manning you, but I don't think I am? Are you implying that invading countries and the consequent devastation of their population is something we should accept or tolerate because they don't have the "right" political system? The same political system where we are supposed to be able to oppose these wars and decide our own future, yet remain powerless to do in spite of largely overwhelming support against them?

In Iraq estimates for the total (and now severely dated) deathtoll [1] range from "just" hundreds of thousands to over a million. That's in a country that had a population of 25 million just before the war (2002). So the higher end of that measurement sees us having killed, or been otherwise responsible, for more the deaths of more than 4% of the population.

Beyond the barbaric and reckless brutality of it all, it also amounts to less than nothing. Democracy doesn't work in countries where people are polarized. In Iraq you have three mostly incompatible groups if Shia, Sunni, and Kurds. And large chunks of each group would be perfectly happy to see the others wiped off the face of this Earth. In this case democracy degenerates into an unstable tyranny of the majority. A problem we're likely to see if divisions within the country continue going in the current direction.

So in our brave new Iraq, the past 4 years have seen endless political assassination, insurrections, and the government killing hundreds of protesters against it all. Since the formation of the new Iraq style of government in 2004, only 2 of 6 prime ministers have managed to complete a single term. And one of the two guys that completed a single term was forced out by an insurrection shortly after the start of his second term.

The vast majority of Iraqis felt they were better off under Saddam. But hey, wrong political system - right? And Iraq looks like a utopia compared to most of the other countries we "democratized."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

I could make a list, and we could argue about it, but also, is "invading a democracy" the only horrific crime that a state can undertake, that it's citizens are responsible for preventing?

The post I was replying to actually said "waging unprovoked war on another nation," it didn't say anything about democracies, you've changed the language already, we can keep restricting the language legalistically until we are confident it applies only to what we accuse our enemies of and never to anything we can ever admit our own country has done and continues to do.

It shocks me that people don't realize how full of war and misery the world is every day, and how much the US government is responsible for. That the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a shameful travesty of violence only makes it more shameful that people turn it into some jingoistic "our population is more moral than their population" thing, that instead of using it as an avenue to empathy with refugees and victims of violence everywhere, we use it as a cudgel to paint some other population of day to day people as especially evil, when we aren't any better at figuring out how to deal with our complicity, in fact this projection is a way of avoiding it. We have nothing to be held responsible for on behalf of our government while living comfortable lives as our government commits crimes that we don't know how to stop, it's only them, who deserve punishment for not being willing to sacrifice everything to do something about their government.

The real relevance of "democracy" is probably on the state committing the crimes. If the USA is more of a democracy than, say, Russia, than the USA's residents hypothetically have more power over it's governments actions, and should be held more responsible for them. (Although I can say I don't feel much power).

As other commentators have said this statement is tautological.

Russians could same something to the same tune: “how many territories have we invaded that don’t have Russian heritage” and you get a similar tautological statement.

I find it surprising that people can be against Russia invading Ukraine but in the same sentence still legitimize the United State’s numerous invasions in other countries.

Why does it matter if it's a democracy?

We invade functioning countries about every four years.

I agree, it is not helpful. I think a lot of Russian civilians are completely against this invasion. They also have zero leverage in this situation. The ones that even think about speaking out face years of hard labor.

> Currently everyone who resists Putins will is arrested or worse. However that is simply not a scalable solution to keep an unhappy population from fighting back

It is not only scalable, moreover the regime is 100% prepared to scale it. The regime's prison/riot control machine will kill 10s of thousands and imprison 100s of thousands overnight if need be.

You clearly have no idea of what's going on there and what the response is like.

Russian people are unarmed (nobody owns weapons and they aren't readily available to anyone on some black market). The police/riot police/national guard are alienated from general population and will retaliate as if protestors are "enemy" (it was the case in every single instance, their never ever went easy on protestors).

The regime change can come either from the army (worst case scenario) or from the cabinet (best case scenario). A crushed civil uprising will just signal to the elites that they need not worry about the masses.

Thus calling for regular russian people to take up arms / topple the government is just pushing the whole thing to a senseless, pointless catastrophe. Painful, direct sanctions on elites AND all of their relatives/close employees (up to 3 degrees of separation), on the other hand..

Most recent police actions on anti-war demos: https://youtu.be/jEDX-TDUfyQ

Website documenting tortures in Russian prisons and other crimes committed by law enforcement: https://gulagu-net.ru