But there is no way I'll let all of those issues start affecting me with an anti-American attitude, and all the same I won't be having an anti-Russian or anti-Chinese attitude. First, I don't have anything to gain. I think China is making the best price/value phones out there at the moment, Russia has JetBrains and some good tools like Yandex for Domains which is free, and the US, well Google/Android/Apple you name it.
In a way it is like the console wars. Instead of going with Nintendo against Sega, just get both consoles and be happy.
Russia and China's citizens are not demons or angels, their moral character, I'm sure, is comparable to anywhere else. But... the governments of those countries wield absolute power over those people. The moral character of the people is irrelevant.
I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry.
Good points
> I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry.
I do separate them, in a moral sense. But in a practical sense, Russian companies can't really be separated from their authoritarian government. What can they do to resist? There are no checks and balances. To be fair, Jetbrains was probably even around before Russia even started to settle definitively into its current authoritarian predicament. But thanks to the Putin regime, how on earth can they be trusted?
Telemetry features (on by default) can/could be used to obfuscate nefarious network chatter.
That's a big ask, because the Russian government's relationship with its citizenry is very different from the relationship of a free country's government with its citizens. Namely, I am confident that there is substantially zero risk that my country might compel me through extra-legal channels to modify my work product to target a foreign adversary. If they did, I would have many avenues to resist them, including the courts and the free press. But we know that this is not the case in Russia, being that they have neither rule of law nor a truly independent media. And we know that the head of that country is at best a violent and evil man, and so is an entity to be feared by those whose interests are misaligned with his.
So, as much as we might want to, it's not quite possible to separate the risks imposed by the Russian government from individual Russian people.
I’m not quite sure which country you were talking about?
While I agree with your general point, it just occurred to me that that could be applied to both leaders. It’s the country and the structure of that country that is different (e.g. leaders will change, vs not).
But he already expressed intention to get Greenland, no?
Yet something tells me that if, say, Mr. Obama did present Point Roberts ( https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Point+Roberts,+WA+98281,+US... ) to Canada (as Khrouschev did with Crimea) then nothing would stop Mr. Trump to take it back.
Whataboutism. And, yeah, that was super bad. So, for that matter, was the whole colonial era. But none of those guys are still the leaders of nuclear-capable nation states, so they're a little less relevant than Putin to our prospects going forward.
> are not proven beyond reasonable doubt.
This is not a court of law. My standard for "observing events as likely true on internet comment threads" falls somewhere below "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" and somewhere above "preponderance of evidence." But I'd say for these cases we're way closer to the former than the latter.
> Wikipedia link.
On the other hand, Russian nationalists and apologists of Russian politics are sometimes criticised for using allegations of "Russophobia" as a form of propaganda to counter criticism of Russia.[14][15]
The argument here is that USA cannot claim moral high ground when USA is actively committing the same act. Blindly claiming whataboutism without even attempting to refute this argument and is, therefore, a form of intellectual dishonesty.
> This is not a court of law, so that's kind of irrelevant.
It is important to make reasonable arguments in defense of your claims even outside courts of law.
> On the other hand, Russian nationalists and apologists of Russian politics are sometimes criticised for using allegations of "Russophobia" as a form of propaganda to counter criticism of Russia.
This is neither here nor there. This whole argument is inconclusive.
I guess I just don't consider an annexation from the 1840s to be "active" the same way I think of one from the 2010s.
> Reasonable arguments outside court
Sure. And I think most reasonable external observers agree that Putin has likely ordered the assassination of at least several of his critics.
I assume therefore, that you must not be Australian [1]
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia...?
It's a russian company with the most people (especially engineers) in St. Petersburg. It's only technically registered in Prague. They have only 50 people there. And around a thousand people distributed across Russia (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Novosibirsk), Munich, Boston and brand new office in Amsterdam.