Of course these individuals have links to their government, you think you can find some rich Americans who aren't somehow linked to their government?
And now we have american media platforms saying 'yeah, it's fine to call for death to Russians'.
Our response to this is getting pretty fucking scary. We need to start dialing this back or we become what we're supposedly against.
Just in case there's misunderstanding about what "seize" means...
Are governments actually taking ownership possession (nationalizing) of Russian yachts or are they removing the assets from the owner's control?
In other words, does "seize" mean:
(1) civil forfeiture like USA police confiscating cash without due process ?
or
(2) freezing an asset like impounding/towing a car away and the owner can eventually get the car back later (e.g. after Russia stops the war) ?
The various reports I've read makes it seem like UK is treating Russian yachts as (2).
In contrast... with the fleets of airplanes leased from Europe sitting in Russian territory, it looks like Russia does literally want to take ownership of them in retaliation to sanctions.
At least in Europe AFAIK. The rationale is to prevent, at least temporarily, oligarchs from benefiting from their assets. And the possibility of getting them back could give these influencial oligarchs an incentive to push for a resolution of the war that might be less catastrophic than where it is headed now.
Yes. And if America invaded Mexico and started shelling their cities, I'd like the world to do exactly the same. Tank the dollar into the ground and seize all assets of American companies and individuals who own over a 100mln dollars and stop all trade. You are benefiting for your government, you are materialy responsible for its actions. In the modern world there's no other way to keep the world sane.
If something is going bit too far is excluding Russian sport and culture. But even that it only mild overstepping since large number of Russians support their government and large part of Russian export of culture and sport is government subsidized.
How strongly the world reacts now is the only thing that can curb future teritorial ambitions of other countries like China. The message should be clear. Starting a war will cost you, your economy and the wealth of your wealthiest. And the world will really shrink for you because you won't be able to enjoy its freedoms.
Who said there's no due process? That's why it's getting seized. Forfeiture happens later if it's proven laws have been broken.
Besides, seizing property is better than more violence. Maybe if the Taliban seized the assets of rich american elites America would have left Afghanistan a lot sooner.
>Our response to this is getting pretty fucking scary.
I'm watching people lose all their private property or worse while the aggressor responsible for the situation threatens “consequences greater than any you have faced in history” to any nation who wishes to step in and stop this. Pretty scary huh?
>We need to start dialing this back or we become what we're supposedly against.
So no military intervention and sanctions. How is this supposed to end? I don't think apathy will do it.
Also, governments can un-seize property back after a while. It's not like this stuff gets immediately liquidated and funneled into defense spending or disaster relief or whatever.
I have Ukranian/Russian roots. My girl, born in Germany, was just pushed by classmates and called nasty words just last week in school.
This reminds me of the racism against Asian people when Covid appeared.
This war only has losers, the Ukranians, the Russian people, the Europeans, the Americans.
Edit: Somehow some posts were deleted from this thread, also my experience with Racism I have faced a few days ago. That is strange.
Amazing how quickly our base, tribal instincts kick in when an "enemy" appears. All pretense to "peace" and "restraint" and "avoid foreign wars" goes out the window really damn quick.
If you're the kind of person who looks back and thinks "man, how could America be so stupid to get involved in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq"? Well, you're living in those times right now.
Hell, that's exactly why we put the Japanese in internment camps. Looks like a pretty good portion of HN would support that even now.
I told my child to say that she has Ukranian roots (which she has, my grandmother is from Ukraine) and deny her Russian roots after she was bullied last week in school. I tried to explain to her the situation and the motivation of those bullies.
I also deny my Russian roots in the volunteer group I support in my city here in Germany. They need Ukrainian/Russian speaking people to help to translate. When I first joined the coordination zoom chat of one group and it was my turn to introduce myself and mentioned my Russian roots (to explain why I speak Russian), I got banned. I later joined another group and there only mentioned my Ukrainian heritage. Now every day I help as a translator for the people who come to my city and I am very happy to do that.
As they cliche goes "the veneer of civilization is thin".
Wishing you the best during these difficult times.
Who would this be? A casual googling shows an individual from Finland has been the director since 2020. What am I missing here?
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-Symphon...
Director at SF Symphony lost a bunch of gigs because the Montreal Symphony cancelled a bunch of performances by a Russian pianist.
This isn't a thing that happened.
Looks like a pretty good portion of HN would support that even now.
No, it doesn't. "It's okay to freeze the assets of the oligarch collective currently invading a friendly nation" is quite far away from "let's round up Russians and put them into camps" and your comparison is ridiculous.
I’m sorry but a state does not go full totalitarian in a week. Putin has been in control for 20 years. This, was predictable and many had been predicting it for a long time.
What happened over the last couple weeks is that “authoritarianism” has lost its sheen. Russian-style strongman authoritarianism has bee a twinkle in the eye of a certain strain of American and Western politician for some years now (I’m looking at you Peter “Democracy and freedom are incompatible” Thiel and Fox News), and people who previously called Putin a strong and capable leader are now either having to get on board with a genocidal war, or eat crow.
A lot of people (on this site and elsewhere) are still even pushing the lines coming straight out of the kremlin (but biolabs! But nato aggression! Think of the poor oligarchs’ seized yachts! Can we really call the invasion and slaughter of Ukrainian people and cultural identity a a genocide?). It’s really quite sad how self proclaimed free thinkers on this site so obviously push the Russian propaganda being circulated in their conservative newsfeeds. These talking points go from the Kremlin, to Fox News, then back to Russia to be aired on RT, and at some point they make a stop here on HN by avid “free thinking“ consumers of this media.
> I’m sorry but a state does not go full totalitarian in a week. Putin has been in control for 20 years.
the point is that it has happened suddenly in the past couple of weeks; let arrests of top FSB officials speak for it.
> This, was predictable and many had been predicting it for a long time.
oh that is absolutely true. every child in eastern europe knows this. the point is, when it happens matters - and it just has.
My point is that invasions don’t happen suddenly. Even if the spark happened in the last few weeks, the preconditions to make this war possible had been laid for years. People pretending that they never saw this coming are the very same who have been cheering Putin and Russia on for years.
note that if not for these laws and arresting people holding blank pieces of paper, there would be a full-blown revolution in moscow now.
it is a war, and the one started by them. They should be grateful of losing only property while people in Ukraine are losing their lives. They didn't afford due process to those Ukrainians. Actually they don't afford due process to any Ukrainian. What expectations of due process they may reasonably expect for themselves after that? After the war these Putin's top supporters should get punished for the war crimes together with Putin. This is the due process they should get.
Limiting blame only to Putin just doesn't make sense. Putin doesn't press the button launching missiles. All Russians in Russia are responsible for what is happening. Just looks at bacchanalia of "Z" symbol celebration these days across all Russia (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/world/europe/russia-lette... - The "Z" is the marking on the Russian armor of the western invasion group in Ukraine, the one which is attacking Kiev for example, and that symbol became the symbol of that war in Russia). You wanna get beaten as a dirty traitor by a bunch of Russian passer-by-s - just make some offensive comment on the "Z".
>And now we have american media platforms saying 'yeah, it's fine to call for death to Russians'.
It is applicable only to Russian soldiers in Ukraine. It would be strange that one can shoot such a soldier, yet wouldn't be able to call for a death of the soldier on FB.
Seizing the assets of a de facto government agent of a sanctioned country is following due process. Governments decided by their own internal deliberation mechanisms to sanction Russia for its aggression in Ukraine. The world didn't magically decide to seize assets of some random Russian speakers because they said mean words.
> And now we have american media platforms saying 'yeah, it's fine to call for death to Russians'.
Nope, they relaxed rules specifically with regard to Russian armed forces[0]. It would be pretty ridiculous to ban a Facebook user in Ukraine that call for the defense of their country by attacking the invading soldiers.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-inst...
Frankly, what kind of communication do you expect from civilians in a kill or get killed situation.
Even during the war you would expect the overseas property to be quarantined to use it as a lever during potential peace talks. As opposed to the unreversible confiscation such as giving it to somebody else to own. I'm not sure if that's what happening here.
Yes, I think most of us would agree it is reasonably acceptable to freeze the assets of people who have close ties with a government currently engaged in an invasion that is being condemned by the people doing the seizing.
Of course these individuals have links to their government, you think you can find some rich Americans who aren't somehow linked to their government?
I'm sure there are – and I hope that if, say, the US decides to invade Mexico and start levelling cities, then other countries seize the property of rich Americans who are backing that invasion.
And now we have american media platforms saying 'yeah, it's fine to call for death to Russians'.
No we don't – you chose to deliberately misrepresent this.
Our response to this is getting pretty fucking scary. We need to start dialing this back or we become what we're supposedly against.
Nah, false equivalence. I think "we are going to seize the international assets of supporters of a regime engaged in a war we consider illegal" is a pretty fine tool, and really not anywhere close to "we are going to launch an all-out invasion of a relatively functional sovereign democracy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_ideologies
Not quite sure which part of punk idealogies you are aligned with, but imo seizing assets of bloated billionaires that support and profit from war is definitely a punk move that I would support.
i agree it's a fine line, but then, these people are undermining western democracies and at the same time seek safety in them. they assumed their assets would be safe and tried to max their payouts.
US oligarches are the people that decide what the government is allowed to do. They can stop any decision that they don't like. If they don't stop it, they are responsible for it. And should pay for it if the rest of the world decides it's prudent.
Yes and it always has been. None of these people are actual citizens of these countries in any meaningful way, and Russia is a mafia state where the sanctioned individuals have more or less committed crime in order to gain these assets in the first place, and they are helping someone that the countries seizing assets believe is committing a war crime.
This is more like having a king and princes and princesses and seizing assets of the princes and princesses conducting the war. These aren’t like “oh shucks” rags to riches wealthy everyday Russians.
> Of course these individuals have links to their government, you think you can find some rich Americans who aren't somehow linked to their government?
Sure you can. And Iran or Venezuela or Russia or North Korea can seize their assets in those countries for committing “crimes” as they see fit. Wonder why nobody has assets in those countries?
But this whataboutism also fails because (insert cartoon CEO villain scapegoat) isn’t giving money to Joe Biden to go personally invade Canada. It’s incomparable.
> “Something something Iraq”
First who cares? We’re talking about Russia and Ukraine.
Second yes countries can decide that they don’t like Americans and seize their assets abroad.
> Our response to this is getting pretty fucking scary. We need to start dialing this back or we become what we're supposedly against.
You haven’t seen anything yet. We’re 100% going to war with Russia or will be engaging them directly unless Putin is deposed and I don’t think that’s going to happen. He wants a war so it’s just a matter of time until he decides to attack resupply missions in Poland directly on Polish soil.
but when a veteran soldier confronts a former US president for pulling pretty much the same shit, he gets dragged and thrown out:
https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/td5wgj/ir...
Like, you're trying to frame it as some kind of hypocrisy, but it's not a stretch to imagine that the people who rage against russia on reddit and the crowds who go to Bush fundraisers don't overlap much.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30548972
Everything that pushes the required narrative gets massively upvoted and accepted as truth without verification, even if falsified later (like the “Ghost of Kyiv” which turned out to be screenshots from a video game)
You can try it yourself. Take a random picture from Google and put a made-up caption on it and note the results.
Have we seen the same video? There's no threat. He said "You lied" and "You need to apologize".
Mind your tongue. It's not seizing, it is just a special legal operation. Absolutely nothing to do with seizing.
I'd also want to remind what Karl Popper said about Paradox of Tolerance.
" Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Yes, it's a war. Deal with it
If they have a problem they can take it up with their boss.
> to this is getting pretty fucking scary
I believe there are kids in Ukraine who are legitimately scared. Getting your megayacht confiscated is just a first world problem.
The countries doing the seizing aren't at war with Russia and seem adamant about currently not being at war.
We're trying really hard to toe the line in order not to start a third world war. But we are at war. We're sending aid and weapons every day by the megatons to Ukraine.
Ukrainians are fighting on our behalf, so that nuclear escalation does not happen. But as far as Russia is concerned, we are at war, and in fact Putin himself said that the various sanctions and such are "acts of war", even if he hasn't acted on it (yet).
i'd google what mr. neville chamberlain did in 1938, though.
German clinic refuses to treat Russian Patients [0] Canada bans Russian pianist from performing [1]
0: https://www.rtl.de/cms/muenchen-iatros-privatklinik-will-kei...
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/05/arts/music/russian-artist...
Do you think that is OK? Because of a lunatic in their home country?
The same things were said about the Jews in the 1920's. We should try to be carful, and keep our empathy.
The clinic has reversed their position by the way
> And now we have american media platforms saying 'yeah, it's fine to call for death to Russians'.
You're absolutely right in both regards but please do not conflate those two.
I'll weep zero tears over Putin's rich friends not being able to play with their yacht anymore, but common Russians having to leave their home country and suffering from heinous mob mentality outside have my dearest sympathy.
This also sets another dangerous precendent, that you can just sieze property of someone you don't like... people protesting against covid measures? Seize their property. Protesting against a pipeline.. sieze their property! BLM, pro-trump, anti-trump, eco-protests, sieze everything!
2. Wars of this scale are not fought between governments but between societies. Anyone who contributes to the economy of Russia (or Ukraine) is participating in the war. Third countries that favor one side of the war may seize the property of those who are contributing to the other side. Legally and legitimately.
3. Property rights are only as strong as the governments guaranteeing them. If no government is able and willing to guarantee them, they cease to exist in any meaningful sense. Once the war is over and the dust has settled, the victors and their friends will sort out who owns what.