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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately there are also many people in Ukraine who didn't personally do anything to deserve what's happening. Consider the country filter a small reminder of the ongoing war and a suggestion that you might find better opportunities outside Russia.

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Are you really claiming the moral right to tell somebody to leave their own country, and if they don't you will do what you can to punish them? That doesn't seem right. What if they have elders to take care of? One can imagine a million circumstances. It seems to me that holding someone's national origin against them is the sort of thing that leads to wars in the first place. I love your articles and I'm sure you're a good person and just want to do something to support the victims of the war, but collective punishment is not the way. It's one of the worst things we can do to reinforce pain, resentment, and division.

Stay neutral. Please don't get political. Your technical article are great but things like this will only cause divisiveness.

Serious question: why can't he choose who accesses his blog and use it for a small political message? Tech doesn't exist in an apolitical vacuum.

I come here to read about tech, not indulge in virtue-signaling identity politics. There's far too much of that on the Internet as it is.

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"woke" is only one of the recent and prominent examples of it. I'm opposed to the war too, but there's no need to antagonise the helpless visitors of a technical blog for the actions of a government they didn't choose.

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anti-Russian like anti-Putin and his band of murderers or anti-Russian as nationality? If it is the latest then it is disgusting.

> I come here to read about tech, not indulge in virtue-signaling identity politics.

If you're complaining about finding politics "here" (i.e. on Hacker News), you should complain to the person posting the article, not to Ken Shirriff. Ken Shirriff can't control what you're presented here.

Nothing wrong with political messages. But I for one was surprised to see someone presumably highly intelligent who believes in collective responsibility and that it’s okay to discriminate against 130+ million people based on their country of birth.

I wasn't asked about country of birth when I viewed the web page. Certainly many people remain in the country of birth, but not all.

The overwhelming majority of the affected users aren’t immigrants I imagine and they’re punished for being born in the wrong country or for not leaving it, regardless of their political views or ability to leave the country.

>"...a suggestion that you might find better opportunities outside Russia"

This is so fucked up in multiple ways I do not know what to say. Even if person is trying to flee Putin's regime - the West is actively denying entry to those people. I would understand if you were Ukrainian but it appears you are not.

This brings such an interesting moral dilemma.

Are our inherited sins worse than our committed ones? In other words, is it more disgusting to be born Russian, or to choose to work at Google?

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