Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing bold about halting trade with Russia right now; as far as can be told there is a great deal of social and political support for anyone making such a choice.

To be honest, companies making emotional decisions is more concerning to me. It is reasonable and to be encouraged if businesses want to be a moral-less dumb pipe. Spotify is not equipped to make geopolitical judgements about what is and isn't a just war or propaganda & can achieve nothing against the Russian military. If they just stick to following the law that is fine. If something is required of them then the military leadership can ask them to do it.

View on HN

This is an extreme position, and IMO unrealistic. The key term here is "a moral-less dumb pipe."

I'm not sure it's even realistic to expect "dumb pipes" to me morally neutral, but that doesn't matter because Spotify is not trying to be a dumb pipe.

This is about podcasting, so let's stick with that. We already have/had a dumb pipe for podcasting. RSS. Podcasting is more free than most online media specifically for this reason. It uses an open protocol instead of a corporate platform. Notice how there is no post about RSS' policy regarding this war.

Spotify is, currently, trying to obtain exclusivity over top podcasts... taking podcasts off the "dumb pipe." The goal is to eventually dominate podcasting as they do streaming music. That's the opposite of platform neutrality, dumb pipes, decentralized moral choices, etc.

If you want dumb pipes, that idea is not really compatible with corporate fiefdoms in 2022 practice.

> This is an extreme position, and IMO unrealistic.

We're watching an escalating conflict that could easily involve nuclear armed powers. Maybe we should try something extreme that doesn't involve asking Spotify to escalate the situation further? Heaven help us, now is the time to be de-escalating rather than throwing more sticks and stones at Russia that do nothing but annoy people.

I don't see how this relates to my comment. Where did I imply that spotify should escalate, or do anything for that matter?

How is it that you think a corporation is not capable of making geopolitical judgments? You don't think they have a PR department? You don't think they have leadership that can read the news?

“Reading the news” hardly gives you the ability to make geopolitical judgments.

Why not? How else would you make geopolitical judgments?

The traditional way has been to organise a panel of bureaucrats and a large diplomatic/informant network spread over multiple countries, where individuals often have multiple decades of experience in their area of the globe. Which still throws up some pretty terrible misjudgements; but that is the baseline for a serious try.

Any group who's state of the art information gathering includes having "a PR department" and reading the news shouldn't be trying to make moral judgements in countries half a world away. They're going to get it wrong, regularly, and start sanctioning people who shouldn't be sanctioned. The news is not reliable enough to make snap commercial decisions.

The only strategy that works in practice at scale is providing a dumb service. These companies are not up to the job of international politics, it is too fraught. If they think they can dip a toe in safely they're just taking on risk for no real gain. At best they can maybe blindly support the US position, which is the more morally questionable side a fair chunk of the time. Ukraine is unusual for me in that a country is being invaded and the US troops aren't explicitly involved.

reading the news shouldn't be trying to make moral judgements in countries half a world away

How should we make moral judgments about what’s going on in the world?

How is deciding to be a dumb service in a country when clearly innocent people are dying as a result of official actions of that country not a moral judgment? Or should we just not care?

> How is deciding to be a dumb service in a country when clearly innocent people are dying as a result of official actions of that country not a moral judgment?

Because it is a position that fundamentally says "I don't know how reliable this information is". Obviously if we took news at face value then it would be necessary to approach the world very differently than people do. But the media lies/is wrong/works to sway consensus/doesn't uncover the most important issues/are only human and so it would be stupid to respond to everything that gets reported.

There hasn't been a crisis in my lifetime where the consensus position 10 days in was useful for making good decisions. People were still saying COVID wasn't human transmissible and laughing at peppers at this point, for example. Or Iraq, my go-to comparison, where people were convinced Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The news coming out about the Russia/Ukraine war is unreliable no matter how much people think that this time it will be an open and shut case.

At some point people have to bow to overwhelming evidence that even though every single time it looks like this time is different, it probably isn't different. The reliable information here is that Russia has invaded the Ukraine. That isn't enough reason for businesses to start throwing out random punitive mini-sanctions. We've seen a lot of invasions over history and that isn't a usual or useful response.

If you are not sure what’s going on, then yes, I agree with you. But what if you’re sure? Personally I have received enough information to be sure about what’s happening there. Maybe the Spotify’s CEO feels the same way you do. But if not - he should make a moral judgment and prioritize that over profits. This is what great men do.

Sure about what?

At any given time it is normal for the US to be engaged in active invasion or occupation of multiple countries. Nobody is calling for Spotify to boycott US propaganda. The parts we can be sure of don't justify anything other than business as usual. Which is typical.

Agree to disagree.

Honestly? You shouldn't. There is so much we aren't privy to, and today's 240-character news cycle is full of rumor, hearsay, and lies, so any opinion or judgement formed is almost guaranteed to be flawed.

> Al Kelly, chairman and chief executive officer of Visa Inc., said in a statement: “This war and the ongoing threat to peace and stability demand we respond in line with our values.”

From the New York Times. Someone seems to be able to make these judgements. Also kind of absurd given Corporations status as legally people in the US. If they get those protections, shouldn't they also bear the responsibilities?

> Spotify is not equipped to make geopolitical judgements about what is and isn't a just war or propaganda

how hard it is? when only one of the 2 sides bombs civilians and causes millions of people to run away (as of now 1.4M, mostly women/children/elderly, have already crossed the border while many more is still running toward the border) just for the reason of ethnical difference, and thus committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Edit in response to comment below:

>No one had ever mentioned Ukrainians being "discriminated" by Russians before the war

well, sounds like you are completely unfamiliar with history there. I'm btw a Russian, half-Ukrainian, and your lecture here on that national issue is just fully incorrect.

>This is a desperate attempt by some Ukrainians to paint a picture of Russia as being equivalent to Nazi Germany, playing the same Hitler card that Putin did to start the war.

that is just Russian propaganda, and completely unsupported by any facts.

>They are doing that to try to make the West feel morally obliged to act even if that means war spreads to the whole of Europe and potentially, turns into a nuclear war.

that again is Russian propaganda, trying to scare the West by nukes.

>Even though there is a lot of suffering happening in Ukraine

the suffering has ethnical reason and thus it is genocide

> and Russia is indeed bombing cities in the fight with the Ukrainian army

that it Russian propaganda. Russia is bombing cities without any connection to any fight. Just look at all those aftermath videos - there is no Ukrainian tanks/etc among the destroyed buildings/etc. For example, today they shot down a pilot bombing a city and interviewed him - "They told us the city was empty", and of course he lied as it was a guy well known for his Syrian civilian bombings. He didn't even try to say anything about any military targets.

On the other side there are tons of videos of Russian armor burnt in the cities. Why did they come into cities endangering the civilians?

> just for the reason of ethnical difference...

How the hell has this suddenly become an explanation for the war (or even a thing in the first place)??? No one had ever mentioned Ukrainians being "discriminated" by Russians before the war, quite the opposite, Russian-ethnics and Ukrainians have lived peacefully in Ukraine AND Russia for generations (except for a small minority of far-right nationalists).

> committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.

This is a desperate attempt by some Ukrainians to paint a picture of Russia as being equivalent to Nazi Germany, playing the same Hitler card that Putin did to start the war.

They are doing that to try to make the West feel morally obliged to act even if that means war spreads to the whole of Europe and potentially, turns into a nuclear war.

Even though there is a lot of suffering happening in Ukraine and Russia is indeed bombing cities in the fight with the Ukrainian army, it's an absolute disgrace to compare that to a genocide, and the claim Russia is trying to ethnically cleanse Ukraine should be as strongly rejected as the claim by Russia that Ukraine is governed by people with Nazi beliefs, both being ridiculous.

> This is a desperate attempt by some Ukrainians to paint a picture of Russia as being equivalent to Nazi Germany, playing the same Hitler card that Putin did to start the war.

You can't deny there's similarity in how they operate, the excuses they used for "reasons" ( that's not a country, people there are Russian) and the even flimsier excuses they used for the "provocation" (false flag operations) they're "responding" to. There's even the "foreign element we just want to get rid of"(Nazis vs Judeo-Bolsheviks).

Heck, even their strategy is similar, and they even get slowed down by the same mud.

The comparisons are very apt.

Yes, it is a genocide to try to clean out the local population of a city through destruction to settle it with your own (Mariupol).

No, I can deny, there's no similarity at all.. There's no concentration camps. There's no gas chambers. There's no ideology of a supreme race. Nothing at all is similar.

While I do agree Putin's speech was based on flimsy excuses, the actual trigger of the war was the West's refusal to accept Russian terms in their ultimatum[1], which you seem to have forgotten, which only asked one thing of Ukraine: to abandon plans to join NATO.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/russia-issues-...

> the actual trigger of the war was the West's refusal to accept Russian terms in their ultimatum

The actual trigger of the war was Putin’s order to invade. The list of demands issued to the West prior wasn't even cited as a pretext for the special military operation when it was announced, though it had some conceptual overlap with a subset of the very long lost of grievances and excuses cited in the announcement of the “special military operation”.

> which only asked one thing of Ukraine: to abandon plans to join NATO.

This is true in a sense: the only thing the ultimatum demanded of Ukraine was that it be permanently prohibited from entering NATO. BUT it also demanded of NATO that it be permanently banned from any further expansion, that it withdraw all troops and equipment from all countries that joined NATO after 1997 (which is a weird date, as no countries were admitted to NATO between 1990 and 1999, so it really means 1990), and that it be banned from holding drills in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, or the Caucasus without advance permission from Russia.

While the invasion was targeted at Ukraine, the ultimatum was targeted at NATO, and specifically at removing it's capacity to interfere should Russia choose to invade, or threaten to invade as a means of dictating internal policies, it's neighbors (including existing NATO members) in the future.

I can agree with you on most points. Where we seem to disagree is at the point where subjectivity is required to interpret the intentions of either side.

> BUT it also demanded of NATO that it be permanently banned from any further expansion...

That was not a demand that involved Ukraine, and my assertion about what the ultimatum asked "of Ukraine", not of NATO. So there's no disagreement here. The other demands were unacceptable to the West, but probably thrown in for leverage in negotiations, but the West's response was that even Ukraine not joining NATO was out of the question, so we'll never know for sure if that would've been enough to prevent war.

> the ultimatum was targeted at NATO, and specifically at removing it's capacity to interfere should Russia choose to invade...

That's your interpretation of what the demands were aiming for... here's another:

"the ultimatum was targeted at NATO, and aimed specifically at stopping it from expanding into Russian neighbours and placing weapons there, including atomic weapons (which is a requirement of nations that join NATO[1]), threatening Russia right at its border."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing

> the West's response was that even Ukraine not joining NATO was out of the question,

No, it wasn't. Ukraine not joining NATO is the status quo. It is obviously acceptable to NATO, though Ukraine isn't too happy about it.

Ukraine’s response was that permanently ruling out NATO membership was unacceptable.

NATO's response was that every single other element was unacceptable, including the permanent ban on NATO expansion (which, of course, would ban Ukraine from membership whether or not Ukraine accepted what was demanded of it.)

> including atomic weapons (which is a requirement of nations that join NATO),

That description is simply false as a characterization of the nuclear sharing arrangement you cite to support it. NATO nuclear sharing agreements all predate the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and no country that has joined NATO since Turkey (and only a few of the earlier ones) has one. They are not required of countries that join NATO, or even available to them.

Also, pedantically, describing them as dealing with “atomic” weapons is incorrect, as that phrase refers to a specific subset of nuclear weapons, and all weapons known to be deployed under nuclear sharing arrangements — because it's what the dual-use aircraft they are tied to are made to deliver — are B61 thermonuclear, not atomic, bombs.

> Ukraine: to abandon plans to join NATO.

No, for Ukraine and NATO to sign a guarantee Ukraine will never join NATO. Which is a ridiculous thing to ask, just like Danzig, or the Autro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia was. And of course, it was 1) deliberately unacceptable 2) all for show, as Kadyrov's leaked communications show ( he's talking about the impeding invasion weeks in advance).

The lack of complete parity doesn't impede drawing parallels where they exist, and there are a lot of them.

> The lack of complete parity doesn't impede drawing parallels where they exist, and there are a lot of them.

The parallels you're drawing could've been drawn with every single other armed conflict in history.

Do share a few examples where:

* the aggressor makes an impossible to accept ultimatum

* claims their enemy isn't really of a different ethnicity and historically belongs to the aggressor

* stages false flag operations to excuse their invasion

None of these is in any way new, or revolutionary, and wasn't invented by the Nazis, or the Austrians in WWI, but it's not a mandatory element of every other armed conflict of history. And even if it were, it's still valid to compare to other such conflicts, like WWI and WWII, including the Nazis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com