I respect their opinion and do not support the war, but locking out data is just insane. I know there are a lot of independent Russian journalists and activists who use Mailchimp and now we have even less freedom of speech inside the country.
Thanks Mailchimp.
Many young Russians are quitting the country. Probably the safest solution now that your president has going so mentally unstable as to equal a maternity full of women and newborn with a nazis den.
Russia can just aim for a pyrrhic victory. Then will suffer a hard recession and faces a very bleak future.
You have a bigger problem that Mailchimp access. If you can, quit the country.
One analysis I keep hearing is that economic collapse means that they will inevitably submit to western liberal democracy because living in a stone age economy with no proverbial coke or blue jeans is just too intolerable for people.
The other analysis is that most Russians live quite independently of the economy, have never heard of any American chimpanzees delivering mail, have no interest in any western luxuries, and are happy as long as they can hear soothing messages from the state media about their greatness, and get drunk off the gourd on cheap vodka (which will practically be free if nobody buys Russian grain anymore).
If the former is true, obviously pile on as many sanctions as possible. But if the latter is true, sanctions could make Russia less likely to change, not more. You'd want to get more people hooked on western goods, services and culture. I'm sure both groups of people exist concurrently, since Russia is anything but homogenous. But without actually living on the inside for a long time it's hard to tell which way the bias leans. And then there's the question of how strong the bias would need to be to justify one course of actions over the other.
Not, economic collapse means that Russia will became a serf from China.
Coca cola, blue jeans and jewels are easily replaceable; Russia not having anymore Intel CPUs, or Taiwanese chips for fixing computers, or even neon gas required to make their own chips will not be so funny.
And by Computers I mean all that is basically a computer now: cars, trains, machine, TV, phones, appliances... the "stone age" one is a good metaphor. Everything can be smuggled, is just more expensive, but "Smart" products can easily be redesigned to refuse to work inside Russian frontiers, for example.
Of course Russia could buy (almost) everything from China instead, paying with raw materials or asking China to buy all things in their name (Many African countries are doing exactly that now), but then China will write the price. Russia will not have much leverage to negotiate in that position.
I don't know what's the Mailchimp policy on this, but that's a path I would try. Of course, that would require a lot of correspondence with the support and finding an actual person outside of Russia whom you trust.
Very few governments initiate wars.
It‘s only in this specific and utterly exceptional situation that yes, the citizen's should be cancelled because their government started a war and sanctioning them is our only less-than-WW3 option.
No, if I asked why the Saudis aren't getting sanctioned despite causing the deaths of a hundred thousand Yemenis, that would be whataboutism.
Hello,
As part of Intuit, Mailchimp is no longer supporting accounts based in Russia. This account is now suspended, and it will be necessary that you find a new vendor.
If you believe that your account has been disabled in error, you may reply to this email. You will be asked to submit information demonstrating that your Mailchimp account complies with regulatory requirements and/or corporate policies.
We join the millions around the world calling for a quick and peaceful resolution to the war. To find out more about Intuit’s position please click here.
– Mailchimp
This is likely Mailchimp complying with those sanctions.
Did anybody read this part?
I see a lot of comments along the lines of "well we're at war with you" or "you'll get your access back once Ukraine stops being bombed", with the justification that anyone living in Russia has the duty to "rise up" and stop the war locally. To be these responses seem thoroughly un-nuanced and flippant. Its absolutely true that to stop the war, you need to get rid of Putin, but its not clear that there's a connection between dropping clients and getting rid of Putin. In fact this is probably counterproductive and strengthen's Putin's grip on the population even further.
The usual mechanism given is "if we annoy the people enough, they'll rise up on the streets and demand change". First, this assumes that if you annoy people, they'll transfer their anger to the regime. This is only true for a subgroup of affected people; the rest will just be angry at the sanctioning party and direct their anger through the regime into even stronger pro-war support. But for the people who might be motivated to protest, its not clear whether or not their actions will be effective. Because we're talking about a dictatorship, individual action carries both high personal risk and is unlikely to be very effective. There are exceptions to this rule, for example, Marina Ovsyannikova, but ordinary people going to the streets and holding up signs is only likely to end up with more people in jail (and potentially more people conscripted into the army). There is also the objection that mass-protest will make a difference, which, perhaps it will, but that requires co-ordination and a critical mass.
The second thing to say here (relevant to what I quoted from OP) is that Mailchimp is infrastructure which is in use by the local resistance. By blanket cutting-off Russia, you're also hindering the local resistance as well. If one wants to take a principled stand, its probably fine to cut off regular businesses that have nothing to do with it (with the caveat that you might just make them angry at you), but throwing out the baby with the bathwater and cutting off the local resistance is just completely counterproductive. Due to the inability to make payments outside the country, their only options for replacement infrastructure are local, which are more likely to be under state influence and censorship. So now their only options are to shut down and stop organizing the resistance to the regime, or engage in self-censorship, which might as well just be shutting down.
As a side note, it looks like Russian 'below-the-threshold' invasion of 2014 significantly altered American strategy and made it more versatile. We'll just have to wait and see if it changes the end game, though.
Unless you take to the streets. They can't arrest you all (or maybe they can, idk)
I don't understand why keyboard warriors in liberal democracies seem to think that Putin is going to be toppled by street protests. As terrible as Putin is, he is objectively less terrible than Stalin. Yet, nobody was able to topple him.
How much of it was motivated by a a desire for democracy versus the resentment of the Sunni majority against perceived Alawite domination, I don't know.
With Tunisia going back to authoritarianism, Libya/Yemen at war, Egypt already back to military control and Syria holding the status quo.... I'm not sure what massive change you are talking about.
People dont seem to understand that foreign interventions are complicated seem to almost always go wrong.
Its not as simple as oh Saddam is a dictator, get rid of him, all done we good.
What pisses me off the most is that these gov agents face no consequences for any failed interventions. They dont really care if people die as a result, cities are leveled refugees etc..
they’ll move on to get a promotion in the white house somewhere else and work on other stuff. I find it disgusting and dehumanizing.
Apologies for the rant.
This is really out of touch coming from childless Western men with email jobs. Revolutionary ideas guys.
Public activism (well targeted) is how you turn those things, particularly the military rank-and-file.
I mean, it's not like the same thing wasn't true of the Tsarist regime when the various forces opposed to it started demonstrating.
When Jacob Zuma was jailed, people went on pro-corruption riots. Pro-corruption, not anti-corruption. It's possible the same thing will happen in Russia if Putin is toppled too. Protesters may not only have to deal with the police, they might also have to deal with an angry pro-Putin lynch mob.
Did Putin personally send millions of refugees out of Ukraine? No, but he ordered the invasion and bombardment. And that's what lead to it happening.
Did Putin personally supply Ukraine with German defensive weaponry? Ditto.
Did Putin personally do whatever blowback occurs? Ditto.
Evacuating refugees and supplying weapons to Ukraine helps save civilian lives. What exactly does locking out OP from his mailing lists achieve?
Far from being blowback, this is virtually zero cost, zero impact corporate virtue signalling.
Leave behind an economic scorched earth to hopefully deter future wannabe warmongerers from deciding to war monger.
Sorry for OP but tbh, his pain is nothing compared to literally dying as many Ukrainians are right now.
Right, because it's small tech blogs that are the backbone of the Russian economy, not its state owned energy companies which still continue to sell to Europe.
> literally dying as many Ukrainians are right now
I mean sure, it's great perfomative activism but how exactly does cancelling OP helps them?
The EU has quite detailed and widespread plans to fuck up the Russian economy on a near permanent basis. They'd basically already done so by taking climate change seriously while Putin tried to pretend it wasn't happening, now they're hitting fast-forward on that plan and specifically targeting Russian carbon first.
Russian coal and oil is the easy bit to do and it hurts Russia more, so they're doing that first. It's like shouting at someone with a sniper rifle, "why don't you come out and fight me like a man?". Because it would be strategically unwise and totally unnecessary in order to beat you, is one potential answer.
But as to your point, yes - I also think this is mostly virtue signalling - you'd need to lock the columns of the government's power out, i.e. specifically target any members of police/government institutions/military (Edit: as private persons, not only at their workplace).
Edit2: Also, specifically targeting only them has a much larger effect than blanket-banning everyone. But I guess it's technically unfeasible without resorting to nation state levels of intelligence resources.
I think the nuance is that you don't only care about civilian lives. Even peace may be purchased at too high a price. The government of Ukraine thinks that loss of sovereignty is a much higher price to pay.
As to what it achieves, well at the very least it's conveying some information that Russians won't be getting via their usual media.
Why is my blog down? Oh because my country is murdering innocent people again.
I thought people who used the phrase 'virtue signaling' liked and supported Putin? So kind of confusing to use it to critique actions taken against him and try to excuse him from blame for the consequences.