If anyone ever dared to assert that I support US war mongering just because I live the US..... lord
It's not the same, the majority of the population are ethnic Russians, a large number of them actively support what Russia did.
There was a referendum, and countless polls, it doesn't excuse the annexation but reality isn't black and white.
You need to be intentionally misleading to not acknowledge the fact the Russian presence in Crimea and in fact their actions are supported by a sufficiently large part of the Crimean population to make this situation very problematic.
This isn't Russia occupying Belgium, the geopolitics behind this situation don't make anyone look good.
Hence why I gave the example of Catalonia not only it's a good western analogy but it appears that Crimea has more pro-Russian support than what the separatist movements in Spain or other places in Europe like Italy have.
However our current legal system does not allow individuals to simply say "i don't want to be part of your legal system any more" hence why these referendums are essentially illegal. And while we do need to face reality sometimes and make exceptions these have to be exception otherwise the "sovereign citizens" movement would actually become a reality since you can't simply put a cap on how many people want to break away from the existing legal system you enforce on them.
I'm not saying "get out if you're not all in", I'm not trying to be dismissive. But your citizenship and temperament are accidents of your birth, and you have the power to rectify the former.
This is an incredibly naive/somewhat condescending statement, considering that it is far beyond the reach of the vast majority of people.
... how about we agree that I personally did not want the government to use my tax money to bomb civilians in Eurasia and I desperately would like to find a way to prevent those weapons from being launched.
But I think we would have to replace something like 70% of our elected representatives to force that to happen
Can we also agree that zero civilian casualties during war is at least adjacent to impossible?
Can we also agree that a country unwilling to protect its people and interests with military action would be a much less secure country than the ones we have today? Indeed, that the threat of rapid, devastating response is the key reason why we are as close to world peace as we are today and have been for decades?
The only path to citizenship that's open to anybody is naturalization, and that requires you to already be a legal (often permanent) resident. While there are a few countries where you become eligible after two or three years - notably Canada - many require five, ten or even fifteen years. So before you even start the process, you have to deal with immigrating to your country of choice from your current country of citizenship/residence. And while that's not exactly the cheapest of undertakings[0], the real problem is that your application first of all generally needs to be sponsored by someone (typically strictly a relative or employer, so good luck if you don't have family in the country in question or don't work in a field that tends to hire across borders) and secondly is most often quite literally at the mercy of bored officials behind glass walls who have the power to deny you on a whim and owe you no explanation.
If by some convening of application strength and sheer luck you do get a residence permit, you then get to have your freedom of movement curtailed for however many years[1] during which simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time can set you back to square zero[2] and you still get slapped by the effect of sanctions like these, as you're still a citizen of whatever country you came from. Or you could also just make some exorbitant "investment" (often hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth) and effectively straight-up buy citizenship.
So yeah, the vast majority of people are rather powerless to do anything about their citizenship, especially when they don't have passports that let them travel anywhere on a whim (as tends to be the case for people in the sort of countries that one would want to escape citizenship of lol).
0: The cost of a passport, visa, plane ticket and rent deposit is easily $2000 plus depending on the part of the world (a friend of mine recently spent close to $4000 out of pocket relocating to Germany).
1: It's not enough to simply hold residency - there are often requirements for how much time you must have spent in the country in order to be eligible for naturalization, and leaving the country for an extended period of time will often itself jeopardise one's residency status.
2: In the US, for example, various misdemeanours - for instance drug possession - are grounds for deportation, after which you might as well forget about legally entering the country to talk of becoming a permanent resident again.
Sanctions were pushed by the US for the most part.
> The idea behind the sanctions is in the end to make the life of the populous sufficiently difficult so they will rebel.
The idea is to flex power for the enemy government and other countries, nobody cares about the people. People are definitely not going to be happy about the west after that and even less likely to participate in organized rebellion against the government, as all sides are bad now.
Nothing is stopping this person from sending email patches like they do in the Linux kernel project. No sanctions are involved in this person hosting a Git installation in Crimea that the rest of the world can access.
The problem isn't politics. The problem is that programmer culture currently conflates "access to Github" (which is a service run at the whims of an American defense contractor) with "free or open-source software" (which is a spectrum of opinions about copyright law). They are not related concepts, no matter what Github's marketing team has convinced the world.
I therefore agree with the view that 'free software' is a social movement, while 'open source' is a development methodology.
OSS is full of commercial interests well beyond hobby interests. Joel Spolsky pointed that out in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ :
> I noticed something interesting about open source software, which is this: most of the companies spending big money to develop open source software are doing it because it’s a good business strategy for them, not because they suddenly stopped believing in capitalism and fell in love with freedom-as-in-speech.
The free software movement is itself political - as are all social movements. For example, the emphasis on end-user freedoms related to copyright protection conflict with the emphasis on worker rights embodied in the Anti 996 License.
This isn't a free speech issue. It's not even a corporate free speech issue. This is commercial activity.
Whether this is good policy or not, is another matter but it isn't a free speech matter.
Seeing free/open source software in the same light ideologically is not that much of a leap. There is precedent.
GitHub is a subsidiary of Microsoft, a US company with lucrative interests in the US government. While this does indeed stifle OSS activity for people in Crimea it isn't really about OSS.
These sanctions tend not to be universal and some services can continue to be provided, however the price of violating said sanctions can be very severe.
I don’t know how many people who work at Github or PayPal especially senior management are willing to risk fines not to mention jail time for something as simple as some Russian officer buying a DVD on the internet while being stationed in Crimea or a local IT guy from the current pro-Russian government making a pull request.
Then don't use github. I don't. It's completely toxic.
Isn't it evil?
I mean, if you don't believe the results of referendum and subsequent Gallop's poll, than sanctions are intentionally hurting people who are victims of Russian occupation. And if you do believe that overwhelming majority of Crimean people support reunification with Russia, the sanctions punish Crimeans for exercising their right of self-determination and reek of double standards. I don't remember any sanctions on Chechen republic after it separated from Russia, for example.
The double standards are all explained by geopolitical maneuvering. Western powers pulled Kiev into their orbit and threatened to use that influence to harm Russia's economic and military capabilities.
The tl;dr is that Russia needs access to warm water ports. They were happy to lease a port from the Ukraine until rumors began spreading in Kiev that Russia's lease would be ended.[1][2] Because the Russian economy and military couldn't afford to lose access to a naval base with a warm water port they decided to take drastic action.
Another odd footnote about this situation is that Crimea was given as a "symbolic" gift to the Ukraine while the USSR was still strong.[3] It's not like it's some ancient sacred Ukranian land. It's just very valuable for trade and military purposes.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/na...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea#Compli...
The sanctions are for the most part per the request of the Ukrainian government.
If Catalonia becomes a separatist state tomorrow and Spain and its allies sanction it everyone in it will be under sanctions regardless of who or what they support.
This is what happens when your sanctions are geographical in nature.
No one has the capability to validate if a person in Crimea is a Russian supporter or not.
The idea behind the sanctions is in the end to make the life of the populous sufficiently difficult so they will rebel.