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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

How far down the "flew 8,000 miles to get there, climbed over the barbed wire fence, licked both his thumbs, and pressed them against the shiny parts labeled 'DANGER! 25,000 VOLTS!'..." rabbit-hole-of-stupid should one have to go, before it's 100% okay for me to stop caring whether or not his sentence was just?

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Five years seems pretty mild when you consider the chief purpose of sanctions is to provide an alternative to war as a means of settling disputes. And this man is willfully undermining the ability of his country to levy sanctions.

Surely actively undermining the security of ones country is a serious offense.

> as a means of settling disputes

As a means of forcing someone to unwillingly settle a dispute in your favor that is.

I have no sympathy for North Korea, but sanctions are not an alternative to war. Sanctions are an alternative to bullets.

> As a means of forcing someone to unwillingly settle a dispute in your favor that is.

what kind of strange take it is? What do you think war is ?

Someone recently explained their view, that sanctions are akin to siege warfare in days of old. Whether you agree with that analogy or not, there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence. We use the term cyber warfare as another example.

> there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence.

All warfare requires physical violence. If it's not physically violent, “warfare” is being used as a loose metaphor, not a factual description.

> We use the term cyber warfare as another example.

Cyberwarfare not directed at or effectuating physical destruction of materiel and/or persons is merely metaphorical rather than actual warfare, or is part of the information component of a broader war. (OTOH, cyberwarfare can be, in fact, a direct means of achieving physical destruction of materiel and/or persons.)

No, sorry. It doesn’t. You can destroy bridges. No violence there. Yet now you can’t feed the troops.

That is still a form of warfare.

Is destruction of property still violence?

Sanctions aren’t hindering anyones property, it’s just refusing to do business with your hated enemy.

Cyber-warfare is in most instances comparable to sabotage as used in warfare.

I can see the point you're making about sanctions being similar to siege warfare. The main difference being that sieges separate you from your own forces and allies in a way that sanctions don't.

They are more like blockades, they just use diplomacy and legal systems instead of parking ships with big guns outside the harbor.

And I suppose the difference between a siege and a blockade is pretty much whether or not you fire those big guns into the city.

I mean, they're really more like trade embargoes, which have existed for hundreds of years. Thomas Jefferson reacted to the Chesapeake affair, for example, by cutting off all international US trade. In retrospect, probably a pretty ineffective foreign policy choice, since it tanked the US economy and didn't particularly hurt the Brits, who were happy that France could no longer trade with the US. (This occurred during the background of the Napoleonic wars and the Royal Navy impressing US sailors).

Yes, but when people say war in isolation, the vast majority of the population take that that, rightfully so, to refer to the conventional bullets flying tanks rolling, literally death dealing war.

Axlees post above reads in amazingly bad faith. It's just a "oh, you're not using this nonstandard definition you fool" type sarcastic response to dismiss the point, contributing nothing in itself.

Yes, but when people say war in isolation, the vast majority of the population take that that, rightfully so, to refer to the conventional bullets flying tanks rolling, literally death dealing war.

They can be analogous to war, but the whole response about"oh no, what sanctions are also war" is just playing rhetorical games.

When people say war, the vast majority of the population will take it to mean boots on the ground, military involved, bullets flying war. The sarcastic

That’s what he’s saying. Sanctions are war without bullets.

War is diplomacy with bullets.

Sanctions are economic warfare.

By that standard, all international intercourse is one or another form of warfare.

When intended to harm one party, yes. When the US technically and financially supported the groups that caused the illegal removal of the previous elected Brazilian president, it was warfare.

When Putin financially supports the French far-right, it’s also warfare.

Sabotaging your own military's weapons still sounds an awful lot like treason

I think we'd have to be in an actual formally declared war with someone first.

This is accurate for a technical definition of treason in the US.

Sanctions have never ever in human history worked, so more like sabotaging one's placebos...

The sanctions imposed on South Africa in the 1980s absolutely crippled the country and are widely seen as a successful contribution in the efforts of bringing down Apartheid.

> The sanctions imposed on South Africa in the 1980s absolutely crippled the country and are widely seen as a successful contribution in the efforts of bringing down Apartheid.

They played a role, but Western institutions are biased to exaggerate it and gloss over the fact that the sanctions regimes were only adopted after the reinvigoration of the armed struggle fueled by stepped up material and training support from the USSR brought into serious doubt the survival of the South African regime even with continued active support.

The West didn't want South Africa to lose, and wouldn't concede to it losing until the alternative was it losing anyway and armed struggle and support of the Communist bloc being the entire narrative for why, which they didn't like for either international or domestic political optics.

Sanctions have absolutely wrecked many hostile countries aconomy, crippling their ability to conduct war. There's a reason why North Korea's army is 50s technology held together by duct tape.

Unfortunately, it creates a lot of collateral damage.

It at least worked so far in preventing another Korean war. It didn't topple the Kim regime, but South Korea is mostly safe now.

> It at least worked so far in preventing another Korean war.

It would have to work at coercing a final end to the 1950- Korean War before it could have a chance to succeed or fail at preventing another one.

> In regards to the effectiveness of the sanctions, supporters concede that multilateral sanctions have been found to work 33% of the time.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20034049

Does that matter? If someone tried to sell state secrets to another country and their buyer turned out to be a CIA agent undercover and the secrets were fake info planted for them to sell, they still likely will be prosecuted for treason despite all that.

Unless they faked the information themselves and, instead of conning the Russian government they conned the CIA.

Do you have any sources for this?

Fidel Castro, Kim jong Il, and Vladimir Putin.

Those are the only three instances where sanctions were used "ever in human history"?

Most recent attempts thus most applicable to today’s world. Yes.

The sanctions of the last 8 years have probably played a significant role in diminishing the RF's capacity to effectively occupy Ukraine.

OTOH, Russia successfully elected a POTUS that helped cripple Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

A simple google search shows lots of examples, even recent ones, where sanctions clearly worked.

They're doing great at diminishing NK's industrial capacity, which it is hell-bent on using it to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Having nuclear weapons is the only sure way to prevent someone from “liberating” you through an invasion.

How are bullets and war different?

Sanctions are war.

This is a dumb statement every time it's asserted. Sanctions are not an act of war in any sense. Not in theory nor in a pragmatic sense. The distinction between war and other modes of interstate hostility is an important one which we should not abandon. "Sanctions are war" is the same sort of statement as "speech is violence": it's sophistic, and it collapses nuance instead of encouraging it.

It really depends on the particularities of the sanctions, the target of the sanctions, the degree of willingness of other states in the sanctioning process, and how the sanctions are enforced. A blockade that leads to starvation and enforced by the threat of overwhelming force against blockade runners is -- and always has been -- an act of war.

None of that nuance is necessary in this case. To be clear, kids: helping a despotic regime with ICBM ambitions evade currency controls so its ruling class can enjoy luxury and fund WMD weapons programs while its citizens literally starve is A Bad Thing.

Politics is just a continuation of war by other means. :)

"Go beat/kill this guy" is violence, yet it's just words. Putin haven't killed people with his bare hands(at least for a few years...)But who wouldn't call him violent?

If your sanctions cause people to die, of hunger, sickness or anything else, it's violence.

I'm not against sanctions depending on the circumstances, but you're just wrong

1. "Go beat/kill this guy" is specific targeted incitement.

2. Sanctions are not the same as a blockade. What you're describing is a blockade. To be more specific, suspending trade is not the same an active blockade. I haven't seen any indication to see the current sanctions could even function as a blockade.

Just a note on 1. It’s not incitement when it’s orders. Putin is in a position to give the orders.

> cause people to die, of hunger, sickness or anything else, it's violence

Which would imply famine, poverty, the flu are forms of violence.

This distortion of the English language is so tortured it's just nonsensical at this point.

When one nation causes another to suffer famine, poverty, and a devastating epidemic, that should pretty much qualify as a form of war.

Sanctions are saying “we will not trade with you”. Refusing to trade is violence?

Is it violence if you walk past a homeless guy who is hungry and you don’t give him food?

if you imprison every person who gives or sell food to him then it's violence

If people don't follow Putin's orders, they get imprisoned or executed. His orders are not "just words".

The same as the guy in the article was imprisoned by the United States?

EDIT: Putin puts people in jail for not following marching orders. The U.S. puts people in jail for not following sanctions. It doesn't seem logical to draw a distinction on what is or is not warlike (bullets vs sanctions) based on who jails people, since they both jail people who disobey orders. I assume other factors would be more relevant?

Well only because people follow his orders to imprison those who aren’t following his orders.

You can't force someone to trade with you - while being able to trade within your state is a right, international trade is a privilege. This privilege is negotiated at the state level. If you decide to thumb your nose at your trading partners they can stop trading with you, because they don't owe you trade.

If you built an economy entirely dependent on foreign trade for the survival of your own citizens it's best not to bite the hand that feeds, eh? But making sure your citizens survive is your responsibility and yours alone - not that of your trading partners.

Is this the vibe you are going with?

https://original.antiwar.com/daniel_larison/2021/05/03/sanct...

Edit: more sauce: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/what-are-sanctions-ra...

Is also a Putin line, so take as you will.

More sauce: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/what-are-sanctions-ra...

It’s war, without bullets.

Sometimes bullets are amongst the items sanctioned, so not necessarily

"Sanctions are Economic Weapons of Mass Destruction, We Must Carefully Consider their Consequences": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFCpMOCVdAw

> Sanctions are an alternative to bullets.

I'm going to have to disagree there. Sanctions once enacted are definitely an alternative to war, after all, bullets all by themselves don't constitute an act but sanctions are an act.

War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.

While often treated as a conclusion, its worth noting that that's the antithesis in a thesis/antithesis/synthesis triad.

Sanctions aren't an alternative to war. We like to imagine dropping bombs on someone is less polite than starving them to death, but it's just an illusion.

> Surely actively undermining the security of ones country is a serious offense.

The information he shared in North Korea is widely available online. Perhaps unethical but I wouldn't qualify it as a serious offense.

"Man involved in community that regularly gets away with illegal shit surprised when he goes to jail for illegal shit"

I'm definitely not defending him, but I can see why he'd feel confident not getting caught

It sucks but the world seems to punish people who are honest (like this guy) and help people who lie (like everyone who did what this guy did and lied about it). In the same vein, police get away with brutal abuse because they know what lies to tell to justify it ("I felt afraid for my life", etc). But the police would not get away with it if they told the truth, ("They showed me disrespect and I knew I wasn't going to get caught so I beat and arrested them on trumped up charges.")

It similarly sucks that our justice system punishes the clumsy criminals and lets the really skillfully sneaky ones go unpunished. Nobody has yet faced charges for robbing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

That's why I find the fact that real murder and attempted murder have different sentences to be a grave injustice. Criminals should not receive a discount on their sentence because they happened to be a bad shot or because the good trauma surgeon was on duty that night.

From what I've been told, the reason for the disparity is to discourage trying again or escalation.

If attempted murder and murder have the same penalty, there's no reason for a psychopath to not attempt it again. On the net, it might even be better for them since dead people can't testify.

I've heard a similar argument for why we should lower penalties for drug crimes. When people routinely have enough drugs laying around to be charged equivalently to murder, the law ceases to be a deterrent. There's no additional penalty for more crimes, because we've already maxed out the punishment. It's not like we're going to make them live to 270 so they can serve out their full sentence.

Unfair as it may seem, it's better that the legal system limit itself to actual occurrences and not extrapolate to hypotheticals

Interesting, I see both sides. I agree completely with you that they shouldn't extrapolate. But in the case of attempted murder, wouldn't this just mean proving beyond doubt that someone tried to kill? If there is doubt that the accused meant only to harm, for example, then I get it. But if they provably tried to kill, however you prove that, then I see the argument that it's irrelevant whether they succeeded or not.

Anyway, it's moot imo because I don't believe in a retributive justice system, I think the only concern should be preventing recidivism. But your post has made me think a bit, I'm still not sure what the "right" answer is here

> in the case of attempted murder, wouldn't this just mean proving beyond doubt that someone tried to kill?

I'd assume yes. Otherwise, it would be a charge like gross negligence or assault+battery.

FYI: There is a famous robbery from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museu...

This might qualify as high treason, as defined in the Constitution rather as used as an insult. The U.S. and North Korea are still technically at war, and this act was definitely aiding the North Korean government.

I’m not sure we really are. The perpetual warfare in the absence of a treaty doesn’t really seem to hold water in a world where South Korea has opened factories in North Korea or the PRC and ROC openly trade.

That said, even if it does qualify, that doesn’t seem to be the charge pursued by the Prosecutors so moot.

I'm not sure about the exact threshold, but in this case we have definitely crossed it.

The bottom. We should all care about justice.

He was imprisoned for teaching. You have to construct quite a mental abstraction for that to be a legitimate criminal offense.

You say it like he was teaching the gospel of Christ. Teaching a hostile foreign power how to evade sanctions is a crime for a reason, and if he wants to be a martyr against that principle then let him be one.

Free peaceful expression should never be a crime, as there is no victim and no one is harmed.

Teaching itself is never inherently harmful. Sanctions are authoritarian nonsense.

Come join my free class in which we work through comprehensive instructions on how to make extremely powerful and compact fusion bombs starting from a US-1950s industrial base! It's super interesting! As a capstone project, we'll be building our own ICBMs which take our bombs to any point on the planet with an accuracy of five meters!

By your logic, Osama bin Laden and/or rather the instructors under him were only engaging in free peaceful expression when they were training men how to be engage in war and acts of terrorism against the United States and the West.

There has to be a limiting principle, and we have one in the law: giving comfort and aid to enemies of the United States and exporting controlled technology to sanctioned countries are prosecutable offenses. Sounds scary, but even those laws are limited.

> By your logic, Osama bin Laden and/or rather the instructors under him were only engaging in free peaceful expression when they were training men how to be engage in war and acts of terrorism against the United States and the West.

Yes, that is correct. Teaching people is never directly harmful.

Invoking bogeymen by name is an emotional argument. What I said holds true.

Except that they did so with the intent of engaging in Acts of Terrorism and Warfare against the United States and the West. Intent matters, as does knowledge of intent such as when someone specifically, as a US citizen, teach a country how to use a technology to bypass a sanctions regime knowing they intend to try and use it to bypass the sanctions regime imposed by the United States.

We have a democratically elected Constitutional government which engages in foreign policy. It is not the place nor the right of a private citizen to undermine that foreign policy.

I partially agree but there was clear intent in theory but in practice the action was deeply unethical.

Wouldn’t you go to jail if you taught someone how to plan a murder, with the knowledge they clearly planned on using that information?

He was teaching them how to manipulate distributed database entries that they have the explicit permission to use via their own private keys. If that is anywhere near equivalent to murder then I have a bridge to sell you.

Next up teaching north korea how to farm better and how to dodge sanctions importing fertilizer is bad, because then their people wont starve as much and therefore can do more evil in the world via more energetic soldiers.

Helping the North Korean government do anything is assisting a government happy to let their populous die while resisting sanctions.

I don’t think I compared it to murder from an immediate seriousness perspective, but I’m sure the impact of Bitcoin on NK would cost more than one life’s worth of quality of life (improving the bottom line, helping the country resist sanctions for longer, etc).

Teaching a human being something is not the same thing as helping a government do something.

You know governments are comprised of humans right?

You sound like moral, ethics and laws should work like a child sees the world.

He wasn't just teaching a country to manipulate bits and bytes he purposefully ignored all risks and existing laws to help break sanctions decided against a country based on geopolitical situation guided by matter experts.

Sooo?

You assume teaching is purely positive?

If I teach someone else my company secrets I only 'teached' or did I share company secrets?

If I go to north Korea did I teach the about some technology or did I just helped a country to circumvent sanctions?

You have a very easy perception of right and wrong if you think that's an acceptable excuse.

Very similar to the antivax people in Germany who broke demonstration laws by saying they just walking.

Right? Anyone can see this case have too much evidence.

you don't need two brain cells to see that either A) guy was a dumbdumb and nothing he said could have been better than leaning it on tiktok with a dance on top; or B) he knows the stuff and would never say something as dumb as this.

...My guess is that they didn't even had to fabricate this. Having access to all digital data from someone for years, they could probably find that conversation on my grandma's facebook memes if they wanted to frame her instead.

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