Authoritarians pursuing military conquest and territorial expansion hasn’t been “the norm” for the past few decades. The world is changing with Ukraine and Hong Kong, and soon Taiwan.
Not saying these examples in the article are all models of how we should design things in the future. But the world is changing and norms will change alongside it.
Barring, you know, the current suspect.
According to whom? According to Putin, they invaded ukraine to "denazify it". On the other hand "US invades country for oil" is a pretty popular narrative on the internet.
Guy murders your kids anyone can murder anyone from now on, no big deal
Even if you want to support Ukraine, some things have certainly gone to far, like discriminating against anybody and anything with Russian origins (professor being told to not teach Dostojewski for example, as posted on HN a couple of days ago).
And demonstrating the international monetary system is not reliable at all, not sure it is a good thing.
That's the norm now, right?
On the one hand, I cannot deny the right of Iraqis to defend their territory from a criminal war of aggression. But do I need to stand up for what he is doing? Should I put money in his paypal account? Do I have to agree that all soldiers are legitimate targets, even when there is no military objective other than "exacting a cost?" Can I ask who pays that cost? Is it the war criminal George Bush, or just some grieving American family somewhere? If twice as many families have sons, brothers, fathers taken from them, would a future George Bush think twice?
Back to the topic at hand. Of course we can understand the motivation but at the same time the question for us is whether we in the open source community want to preserve software as a humanitarian sphere which is not necessarily neutral in conflict but, at least, part of civil society and not involved in or drawn into cyber-warfare as far as possible.
That fact that hostilities have broken out does not mean that everyone has to camp at one ridiculous extreme (kill them all) or another (total capitulation) and it's perfectly reasonable to try to find a path between them which is consistent with our own moral and ethical code.
(I should mention that Russia already does tolerate destructive hacking against the West, and has been doing so for a while - that doesn’t change my opinion, but it would be unfair not to note.)
This notion that somehow 'FOSS' is a moral ideal that stands above others is rubbish.
If you're helping Russians drop bombs on Mauripool that's a choice.
You can also choose not to do that.
That concerns an 'ideal'.
There are issues at hand of much greater consequence and idealism that 'internet librarians' pretending that they are consequential in this context.
'More Average People', like accountants and teachers, are literally right now upholding their 'ideals' by learning how to use a weapon and defending their homes with their lives against literally the Russian Empire. That is an 'ideal' thankfully none of us will ever have to contemplate upholding.
That isn't as persuasive a point as you might want it to be. It may be the case that we are, now, simply being more comprehensive in defending against a descent back into those awful cold war times. Once we were already in the thick of it during the Cold War, even a little bit of cooperation was useful in not descending even further.
It's like a phase transition. When society is already functioning at a higher level of cooperation, appropriate consequences of deviating from that are highly exclusionary. But the game-theoretic risk/reward balance changes when society is functioning at a more adversarial level. At these different phase states, an action that may incentivise de-escalation in one phase state may have a different (even inverse) effect in another phase state.
But now that you've raised the question, it's difficult for me to think of any stretch of decades that was definitively better, certainly not in the last 100 years. I might look far back to the Pax Romana, but that couldn't be considered global in nature. I'd argue that it's probably only at some point in the past 100 years that regional civilizations became interconnected enough for us to even consider things as a truly global system.
Please note that I'm not claiming the last 20 years have actually been good in terms of global peace, stability, accord, etc., just that it seems a bit better than the recent decades prior to that. By one narrow metric, per Capita war-related deaths, we're doing quite a bit better. Of course these things are far from evenly distributed across the globe, and it seems like wider stability sometimes relies on allowing awful things to happen on a smaller scale. And I don't think it's much consolation to those dying in conflicts to tell them "no really you should be joyed to live at a time when so few people have their lives torn apart the way yours is right now".
All of that strays from the topic of my original comment though, which again compared current times to cold war times.
peaceful is an vague term, but some of the language I have used is not much more precise. However I did mention one somewhat narrow metric, per-capita wartime deaths, and the world has been much better in this area during the the last 20-30 years than previously. What are your thoughts on that aspect of this discussion?
On the more ambiguous connotations of what I wrote, I will clarify the idea that was uppermost in my mind when I made my comments:
Essentially, a conflict that is catastrophic for the entire world is less likely (at least prior to recent events) during the last 20-30 years. The fall of the Soviet empire left no two adversaries so antagonistic to each other, each with world-destroying capabilities, that we have had to constantly worry about such a conflict breaking out. We have not had to walk so carefully on egg shells to avoid reaching that point. North Korea has only recently become the nation most likely to initiate a nuclear conflict, and I would still rate that as a lower probability than cold-war era direct US <-> Soviet conflict, and the capabilities of North Korea in this area are still too primitive for a conflict with them to inflict the same scale of damage as direct Soviet/US aggression.
Certainly horrific local and regional conflicts have still prevailed in some areas of the world, perhaps only slightly reduced (arguably not reduced at all, and worse in some regions) but their potential to spill over into a wider world-scale conflict remained exceedingly low compared to prior decades. They are less dangerous to the wider world because some of those cold-war era conflicts were proxy wars that risked escalation to direct conflict between military super powers.
Consider that the Vietnam War could easily have been won by either the US or Soviets if either of those powers had been willing to bring their full and complete military might to bear against their proxy opposition within that country. Indeed there was a constant tension that such a thing might happen and bring the puppet masters behind the North & South Vietnamese into direct conflict with each other.
This was perhaps even more true during the Korean War, with the added risk of more significant Chinese involvement & explicit threats by the US that nuclear options were on the table. The only thing that mitigated the potential for global nuclear war was that US nuclear capabilities were still relatively limited, Soviet nuclear capabilities even further behind, and Chinese nukes a decade or more away from completion. (by which point we'd progressed past the sino-soviet split so an alliance between those two powers was pretty much off the table) But during that conflict there was still significant possibility that a conflict on the scale of WWII, with slightly more advanced technology, could erupt & include a major nuclear component as well.
And of course there was the idiotic brinkmanship if the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Nothing of that scale has been anywhere near as probable after the end of the cold war. Having grown up in the twilight years itf the cold war, I can directly attest to the global tension of those times, and the global sigh of relief as they ended. In the years since then we have never approached that level of tension until today, with the Ukrainian invasion, where small echoes of those times can now be felt.
This is the thrust behind my comments. That perhaps local & regional conflicts have seen little change, but world-wide existential threats from military conflict are-- comparatively-- a much reduced concern.
Racism isn't the point, crippling the Russian state is. Assuming anything else smells like bad faith.
One incident related in the story is someone slipping malware into a node library which appears, among other collateral damage, to have deleted the archives one NPO had collected of the war hoping to document Russian war crimes. So really I'm not sold on it being that different.
Draw your own conclusions about authenticity but it doesn't sound implausible.
But there is also the tactical issue of whether such attacks would have the desired effect. Imagine if Russia would attempt to "cripple the US state" to stop the war in Iraq... I think the average Joe in America would feel quite threatened by that notion. As a corollary, consider this: as a response, would Joe be more likely turn against his state, or realise that he desperately needs to support it, in order to defend his way of life?
Technically, there is a way to hurt a state while helping its citizens -- help them move away, to a better place.
Of course, actually targeting elites in power isn't something elites in power want to promote.
It would be nice if there was a link to those sources. This isn't worth much more than "trust me bro"
Which ever of the polls you choose to believe, this is not a war largely unsupported by its citizens.
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/07/russia-s-tricky-opin...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/russia-publi...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/02/europe/russia-ukrain...
> Iraq dominated the headlines throughout the fall of 2002 and into the winter of 2003. Public opinion on the wisdom of war, however, stabilized relatively early and slightly in favor of war. Gallup found that from August 2002 through early March 2003 the share of Americans favoring war hovered in a relatively narrow range between a low of 52 percent and a high of 59 percent. By contrast, the share of the public opposed to war fluctuated between 35 percent and 43 percent.
Earlier reporting had it in excess of 70% support: https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-america...
In a historical sense, it's very geographically dependent. Before states got rid of established churches, Virginia, for instance, established the Episcopal church, while Massachusetts established the Congregational church.
The modern American culture simply descends from Calvinist culture, by no means it is the same. Just like you wouldn’t expect a fish to explain its ancestry to you, you wouldn’t expect an American to do the same.
Some people seem to believe that if you remove a belief in God, a sudden discontinuous cultural gap appears. But there is no reason to assert such thing. An absence of belief in God doesn’t make Americans culturally more similar to Buddhists than to their ancestors, they still inherit similar values and social practices. The American culture experienced an abrupt shift from the British culture due to the founder effect, but from that point it pretty much developed continuously. (Well, of course like all cultures, it experienced outside influence but it wasn’t as impactful.)
> In a historical sense, it's very geographically dependent. Before states got rid of established churches, Virginia, for instance, established the Episcopal church, while Massachusetts established the Congregational church.
There is a book called The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes, it covers explanation of the sheer influence Calvinism had in the US.
By the way, is it surprising that (1) Harvard originally had a Calvinist church. (2) Harvard is located in New England, the land of radical Protestants aka Puritans. (3) Harvard is the most prestigious university.
My point is simply that American “average people” are in no way simply average people if such thing even exists.
I am close to an average person in this regard because I am a free-rider on other people's enlightened steering: all I do is install stuff and in exchange I get privacy and security.
But putting pressure on people to make them do what you want is a fairly accepted strategy. Hell, Russia is following the same strategy, except they’re dropping bombs and missiles on cities, which also (even mostly) impacts civilians that have nothing to do with the war.
As much as it sucks, it’s the only way to retaliate.
So did Putin. Dying isn't ideal.
And so on.
Not that this kind of pretty bad take hasn't been pervasive in the past month. It's just funny in a horrifying way to see a century worth of lessons just evaporating in 3 weeks. Just go on any social media and you will see the exact same argument used to justify and even promote literal war crimes against the russians because they started the war. But no, even an invading soldier does not deserve to be tortured.
So it a fair game, as far as international law goes.
Which leads me to my next point: an essential attribute of a state under the rule of law is that the law is applied impartially, irrespective of who the victim and the perpetrator are. Doesn’t always work out, but it’s certainly what most people find fair and what we strive for.