Detention of Mark Bernstein
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
All things considered, it could be much worse.
News that he is converted from "less restrictive" to "more restrictive" sentence won't make headlines.
Dictatorship never happens one day, it always creeps in bit by bit.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Pavel_Pernikaŭ
This is insane. How can this be normalized? Are there people on here who think this is okay? How can this not be downvoted to oblivion? If this is normalized, all is lost, and I do mean all.
> I'm just pointing out that it could have ended much, much worse for Mark.
This is how you're normalizing it. I don't know how you can't see that.
You can twist my stating the facts in whatever direction you want. This however says more about you than it does about me.
I don't know a lot about Russian laws, but that is just cruel.
To me, the comparison of the two is that the conspiracy persecuting Assange is actually much more restrained than the one persecuting Bernstein. Assange had to directly poke the hornet nest to get attacked, while Bernstein seemingly just stated basic public truths.
> Assange is a political prisoner, for publishing a video depicting war crimes conducted by US military personnel.
I mean, both are true, right? Why is Assange's predicament so much less objectionable? Why is it so certain that Assange's detainment is because of one and not the other?
> Assange had to directly poke the hornet nest to get attacked, while Bernstein seemingly just stated basic public truths.
It seems to me than when Assange published the collateral murder video it was congruent with stating "basic public truths". I don't see how his actions were necessarily more inflammatory than Bernstein's; certainly not to the point where the former's detainment is acceptable and the latter's is not.
Have we lost all ability to consider magnitude and context? Or did we never as a society have a good grasp of this most basic part of critical thinking?
It does not seem to me that I have. Now, would you mind answering this with your opinion:
> Why is Assange's predicament so much less objectionable?
Really, I don't get it.
I didn't say that Assange's resulting predicament is less objectionable. I pointed out to end up in that position, Assange had to commit more offensive actions (to the relevant party). This implies the system he pissed off is more constrained, which would seem to indicate progress.
You also can't point to collateral murder as a single action that led to Assange's persecution. Rather, he kept doing things that pissed off the entrenched power, and eventually they had enough.
None of this is to condemn Assange's actions, or justify his persecution. Rather it's only possible to productively reason about these topics with a sense of magnitude - falling into binary thinking leads to contradictions or concluding that many things are equally bad, which is ultimately useless.
By the way, I know way more about Belarus that average HN dweller, and I'd estimate number of "non-government actors supportive of the current Belarus government" same, if not less than government actors.
There are dozens of govt-paid internet trolls/experts/bots working literally from KGB office. They are paid reasonably well ($1k+/month) and are constantly under pressure to report any success up the chain of command. Being so overstaffed, they are not as lazy as regular govt workers, and really do organize cross-agency investigative operations to make arrests of people like those who wrote "NO WAR" or "NOT MY PRESIDENT" on a random wall.
Same as analyzing ISP logs -- they are overstaffed and pushed, so not lazy to do that.