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Comment by yostrovs | Hacker News Reader

Advocating for collective punishment is a serious breach of the site guidelines and is not allowed here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are on a topic. No more of this, please.

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

There's a fine line between advocating for collective punishment and just acknowledging the fact that populations who more-or-less fail to advocate and/or work towards responsible government within their own countries will eventually reap what they've been (perhaps inadvertently) sowing-- if only by getting caught in the resulting cross-fire. The latter is an important point and it should not go unsaid in such a challenging situation. No one sane is happy about average Russians' current predicament. But it is what it is.

Sorry, didn't realize, but the context is the question of collective punishment, which really is being imposed by the world. I'm explaining what is rather than calling for anything that hasn't come to pass. Thanks dang for keeping this place intellectually functional on a daily basis.

I think he meant punishement as in sanctions

The burden is on the commenter to distinguish their comment from sickening tropes of inhumanity.

It's astonishing how quickly these things come back to the surface and feel ok and perfectly justified. They're not ok, they're not justified, and this is no way to react to the atrocities and suffering happening right now.

The guidelines do not contain any mention of punishment.

And if a sanction is punishment, we are not allowed to discuss if sanctions and what level of them is okay?

The site guidelines for comments begin with Be kind. It's hard to imagine an uglier absence of kindness on the internet than advocating for vengeance against an entire population. If you want to make a policy point you can do it without that level of inhumanity.

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

Edit: you've already managed to break the site guidelines repeatedly in multiple threads on multiple topics. That's not a good sign. If you'd please review the guidelines and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

It's one thing to say "I recognize that individual Russians are not at fault, but in the middle of a total war civilians inevitably get caught in the crossfire. At least with these economic weapons no one is getting killed."

It's another to say "you are all at fault, even if indirectly, and so you all deserve to be punished."

That second comment would violate at least "be kind" and "comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Modern international law is based on the acknowledgement of popular sovereignty, which has an unavoidable "collective" dimension. What's wrong with making the argument that, like most everything else, sovereignty comes with rights but also responsibilities when the country that one's "sovereign" on starts engaging in bad behavior towards others? Average Germans have had to apologize and be responsible "collectively", at least to some extent, for the Nazi regime's atrocities. Was that inhumane, too?

For the purposes of what kind of comments are acceptable on HN, the HN guidelines supersede international law or your interpretation of it. Fulminating at an entire nation is pretty straightforwardly not ok.

> And that punishment is not decided by the one being punished.

Ah, so that's what it is. Not the mechanism of economical pressure on a dictator, not the attempt at containment or instigating political unrest inside the country. Punishment. Thanks for being straight.

Well, we'll see how well this works. I doubt it will do any good in the long run, unfortunately for everyone.

What Republic of Utopia are you from? By those standards, the Ukrainian people should be punished for their persistent history of corruption. After all, in 2014, Ukraine was parallel with Nigeria on a global corruption index - and it has been significantly below too. As for the Ukrainians doing "a lot" to fight corruption, it seems not yet to have worked so well. Zelensky himself is featured in the Pandora Papers[0] where he is believed to have participated in the offshoring of 41 million. His closest associate, whose private ski resort he was visiting just before the invasion, was Kolomoyskyi - who has been sanctioned by the united states and had 2billion in assets seized. In 2018, he stated to journalists that Ukraine needed to "return to Russia"[1]. A strange creature to associate with.

I do not disparage Ukraine or its leaders. I do not support Russia. But it isn't all so simple.

1. https://archive.ph/3IbFz

2. https://www.occrp.org/en/the-pandora-papers/pandora-papers-r...

"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ukrainians revolt, and then try a new guy. Russians, in the other hand, overwhelmingly support the same guy through everything he does. There's almost no resistance. The population feels they have no responsibility, that the higher ups always do what's right. And this is the result, Russians confused about why anyone may be upset at them.

On what basis you say that 'there's almost no resistance'? Have you seen anti-war protests? Do you know the potential personal costs of such protests?

Have you been protesting?

Yes.

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