How about, instead of causing harm to innocent Russian people by such pointless escalation, the US makes a serious and meaningful effort to secure their critical national infrastructure. As they should have done in the first place.
Sure, the fervor was, as were lots of emotional aspects of the post-9/11 wave of Islamophobic hysteria. And certainly the opinion and commentary programs of the major TV news networks were often engaged in that (Fox, of course, but also MSNBC and CNN, both of whom reacted to Fox in the early 00’s even before 9/11 by chasing the bias in Fox opinion/commentary — not so much actual news — which definitely contributed to their slant and the reinforced the national post-9/11 mood well pay the beginning of the Iraq War.) This effect was smaller in the print media (but even greater in blogs, which were taking off as the new distinctly online media and didn’t tend to segregate fact and commentary or otherwise act like traditional media.)
That’s why the widely disseminated debunkings of the WMD propaganda in news coverage were also widely disregarded, but there has since become a revisionist narrative which pretends that the WMD propaganda was generally presented as unquestioned fact and contrary information suppressed by the news media.
A very naive statement. The Russian government doesn't work like that. They NEVER admit they were wrong. They don't care about civilians. They have culture of complete denial, even in the presence of indisputible facts. They will say US attacks on Russia is yet another proof of US' hostile, aggressive behavior towards Russia in a greater geopolitical game (especially when presented proofs of Russia's involvement are pretty weak, like "the hacker group never attacked Russian infrastructure" - I bet they never attacked North Korea either), giving Putin an excuse to crackdown on opposition and restrict/reduce Russians' freedom/human rights even more, further militarizing things and increasing attacks on US infra.
Actually strengthening security is the only proper solution, to make that kind of attacks futile and unprofitable. It's usually not some ingenious attacks but just simple negligence of the targets.
Source: I'm from Russia
I find as world events unfold these last few years I have drifted away from my isolationist/non-interventionist views. I wouldn’t say I’d advocate for a military response (either electronic or physically destructive) at this point, but I wouldn’t think badly of our government if they did something like that.
Americans have become a rather stupidly optimistic/ignorant people. Russia and China will absolutely destroy us if we don’t aggressively counter their military aggression. And that’s what attacks like this are: military aggression. We ought to start acting like it.
“One need not destroy one's enemy. One need only destroy his willingness to engage.”
― Sun Tzu
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We can entirely, safely remove Russia from the global Internet and we can do it trivially. That's exactly what we should do if they press attacks too far: isolate them. They have the increasingly government controlled Runet to restrict their people's access to the outside world, we should barricade them in.
Their economy is small, close to meaningless. It's nearly a rounding error at this point in the global economy and it'll continue to shrink in that relationship. The sole thing to be concerned about with Russia is their nuclear arsenal.
At some point, you have to tat.
Sanctions against key people are probably more effective while not causing too much anti-American sentiment in the general population or a rally around the flag effect. Hard to rile up the people because a dodgy oligarch can no longer keep his roubles in a London bank, where Babushka Svetlana freezing to death 'cuz the Yankees cut the gas is a martyrdom event.