Additionally, companies might be political in ways I might not care. It might be simply a non-factor when deciding whether I give them business or not. But the sheer fact they are politically active, so to speak, and don' focus solely on providing the best services for the best prices with the highest quality, is the red flag that instantly makes me wary of doing business with them in the first place.
Not really? The implication is that every choice has a 50/50 split of support. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
> should be solely in the hands of the individual, not the corporations
The businesses in the article are doing what they did because of legal sanctions on iran. Not because they are making political choices about who to do business with.
But your description of what companies should be doing is describing unfettered psychopathic capitalism. Companies that will break every code of morality or decency as long as it’s technically legal. Chromium in the water? Go for it. Even legality is just a speed bumb. If you can get away with it? If you can bribe your way out of it? Why not do it!
I don’t want to live in that world. Unfortunately that’s pretty much the world we live in already and it shows.
Do they not understand that, instead of helping these people connect to the outside world and improve their life and their country, they are actually increasing the poor conditions and helping the regimes they are fighting against?
The idea is to get the population to put pressure on the leaders.
Not sure if it has worked, but I am sure Russia is unhappy with the unrest that sanctions have caused.
The political situation in Russia is more stable now than before the war. Putin is certainly happy.
The political situation is stable for following reasons:
1. Primary beneficiaries of military spending are small industrial towns and working class. They earn a lot of money now and significant part of it is invested in property or spent on domestic products. The inequality has reduced since the start of war, not something you would expect from oligarchic capitalism.
2. It became much easier to eliminate political opposition. Thousands have left the country, some were killed, many jailed under new wartime legislation.
3. There’s general perception that Russia is winning and it’s already in the endgame (which is true - the West lost the war in the first year).
As for sanctions:
> Iran is not the only example in which sanctions have resulted in unintended consequences. Since 1970, unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. have achieved foreign policy goals in just about 13% of cases, according to one study. A recent Congressional Research report evaluating U.S. sanctions in Venezuela found that sanctions “exacerbated an ongoing economic and humanitarian crisis caused by government mismanagement and corruption that has promoted 7.7 million Venezuelans to flee.” U.S. sanctions also exacerbated humanitarian crises in North Korea, reported UNICEF, putting 60,000 vulnerable children at risk of starvation due to limited humanitarian aid.
https://washingtondc.jhu.edu/news/do-sanctions-actually-work...
Please evaluate the historical failure of sanctions. As someone else have mentioned, Putin is happy despite the sanctions, but everyone else is not. These sanctions (from US, EU, etc.) hurt the people, not the people in the Governments. Come on, for the current price of <include basic food that used to be cheap> I used to be able to buy at least 3-5x more BEFORE the sanctions. Talk about sanctions exacerbating economic crisis. They will never learn, I guess, unless intended, but if it is intended, then surely it goes against everything they claim to stand for, as someone else has already elaborated.
It's like your local bakery refusing to sell a donut to a random iranian guy.
A US baker cannot send cakes to Iran.
There is some nuance here. While some "sanctions" may not be applicable, the United States has a concept called deemed export, where exposing a non-US Person (~non-citizen with no green card) to technologies in the US, for example during the course of regular employment, can be problematic. Depending on the foreign citizen's nationality, the level of exposure that is deemed problematic can vary. For Iranian citizens, it is basically almost everything unless open-source. This is why all FANGs regularly apply for a deemed export license before commencing employment of foreign individuals with problematic nationalities.
Sanctions absolutely do apply to Iranians (even dual citizens) anywhere in the world, albeit less intensively.
> not everyone in Iran is Iranian
Swing and a miss. Sanctions are primarily against Iranian nationals, and extend to any non-Iranian who violated the sanctions. If you visit Iran as an American/Chinese/Antractican you don't automatically end up sanctioned.
> The idea is to get the population to put pressure on the leaders
And that makes it okay? Nuking civilians can also be a tactic to pressure the leaders into surrender. And nukes may take fewer lives than decades of intense sanctions.
is it true? I thought the idea is "harm enonomy of a country by not doing buisness with them".
All those software services rely on the payment processor to do business with the economically sanctioned users so they shouldn’t have done anything
Do those sanctions even work? North Korea still builds nuclear weapons, Cuba still has a communist government, Iran is still a theocratic regime. You don’t start revolution by trade embargo. You start it by sending more jeans and heavy metal records.
Depriving Iranians of legal access to Western tools opens the market to locals. I suspect that the market is big enough to build a business.
It'difficult to assess gdp impact in this particular area. It's not really dependent on blockable imports.
Russian military industrial output has significantly increased and more importantly they demonstrated the ability to scale it up very quickly. The economy has grown during the war - the effects of the sanctions may become painful in the long term only if they will stay for decades, which is unlikely.
Well, you mentioned "North Korea still builds nuclear weapons," but didn't mention Iran having them. So, something worked. It wasn't 100% just sanctions... But the sanctions certainly hampered their ability to acquire effective air defense.
(The NK sanctions were too late — NK had already started nuclear weapons testing before the sanctions were levied.)
Off the top of my head: I don't think the USSR is still around, and it largely collapsed due to economic pressure; Libya abandoned its nuclear program due to sanctions; and apartheid in South Africa ended largely due to sanctions.
They don't always work, but I've never heard of jeans and heavy metal working either, as nice as that would be. Belarus has plenty of both, but Lukashenko's been in power since the 90s.
Effective air defense against military superpower (and they were effectively fighting against American technology) is something very hard to build, with or without sanctions. Ukraine is a good proof: Russia was denied air superiority using manned aircrafts but they still manage to inflict significant damage with missiles and drones.
> I don't think the USSR is still around, and it largely collapsed due to economic pressure
It wasn’t external pressure at all. Soviet Union had everything to be self-sustainable (e.g. Russia and Ukraine have proven later that in agriculture it’s absolutely possible). They failed to execute transition to regulated market economy the way China did. Gorbachev thought democracy goes first (the entire Warsaw bloc collapsed thanks to “blue jeans” - KGB and Stasi feared Western culture the most, and the West was ready to send more of it).
Regardless, you don't have an answer to Libya's nuclear program being shut down due to sanctions, and South African apartheid ending due to sanctions. Do sanctions have a 100% success rate? No. But they have a much higher success rate than jeans and heavy metal.
On the bright side, your average Iranian grandma can immediately work as a network engineer given the amount of experience she has with VPN protocols.
It feels like I have to own all my data and not trust companies before it's decided I can no longer access my own data.
This is not true. The sanctions definitely hurt countries like Cuba or Russia. They have a far harder time growing their economy. Cuba is stuck in the last century and often has total blackouts that last for days. Russia needs to beg countries like Iran or North Korea now for imports.
Mostly the military, from what I hear. The rest of the economy is in shambles [1].
No matter what: once the war in Ukraine is over by whatever solution, it's going to get nasty. Either Putin (or, more likely, his successor - the dude is old and it's by far not sure if he will be able to stay in power should the war end up bad for Russia) manages to turn around the economy once again from producing tanks and other instruments of war to a regular economy, or they'll keep it that way... and attack another country with all that firepower.
[1] https://kyivindependent.com/amid-dwindling-economy-number-of...
The sanctions significantly slow down Russian development and are more and more making it into just a mineral mining satellite of China. With time the weakened Russia would just split, and the large eastern part will go to China. Some midparts, with Turkic speaking population may even fall into Turkey orbit. Without the oil and gas rich East, the European part of Russia will be just a destitute village on the far margins of civilized Europe as it had been for centuries in the past.
If the sanctions were effective Russia wouldn't be offering entirely one-sided deals that it knows nobody is going to accept, because it would be desperate enough to get those sanctions lifted that it would actually have to concede something in a deal.
Ask a russian about the price of fuel.
The European sanctions are more of a joke.
I you want to Ukraine to win donate to them directly instead of waiting for the cowardly politicians to get their act together.
So they stories no fuel in Russia are just propaganda?
Depends on the claim - some are, some aren't. The problem obviously exists, but the coverup is good enough to make lots of people think that the war happens on another planet and doesn't affect them (e.g. gasoline export ban).
This story is getting better and better.
The above quite is from Malcontent News.
And yes, if US and EU were serious about helping Ukraine win, this would have already happened back in 2022. Or better yet, back in 2014.
As it is, US & EU sanctions seem to be more of a theater mostly for the benefit of the population of those countries, so that their politicians can sincerely say that they "support Ukraine".
The only reasonable definition of "work" is "stop the thing that motivated the sanction from happening". With that definition, sanctions rarely work (or if they do, not in a very effective way). Russia is still at war with Ukraine. Iran is still developing nuclear weapons. North Korea did develop nuclear weapons.
Let's not kid ourselves. Russia is still killing Ukrainians right now. They're still occupying Ukraine's land right now. Is this what "work" looks like in your dictionary?
> Ask a russian about the price of fuel.
Oh I see. In your dictionary a working solution is not to stop the war or get lands back, but to ensure average Russian people suffer. Never mind then.
Prices are in RUB/L, 1 USD ~ 80 RUB, 1 EUR ~ 100 RUB.
Then make your own conclusion.
Less funding of proxies just means Israel gets away with killing more civilians without consequence.
1. Hamas, an Iranian proxy, attacked Israel on October 7th 2023. Until that time, the death toll in the 100 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about 10k Israels to 40k Palestinians. It since became 12k Israelis to 110k Palestinians. I don't think that proxy fulfilled its intention.
2. Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy, attacked Israel on October 8th in support of Hamas. The ensuing war killed about 4k Lebanese. That proxy, too, seems to have failed in its mission to reduce the death tol..
3. The Houthis, yet another Iranian proxy, attacked Israel in support of Gaza. Since then, Israeli counter attacks killed several hundreds in Yemen. Not good.
Now these proxies are heavily damaged, deprived of most strategic capabilities and the death toll in the ensuing battles dwarfed all of the past deaths in the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Yes, there are fines for American companies if they do business with Iranians. That's how sanctions work as I'm sure you're aware. But the story doesn't stop there.
If an American finds out they are transacting with a sanctioned individual, or citizens of a sanctioned country like Iran or North Korea, the stakes go up: $1M USD fine and up to 20 years in federal prison. Oh and that's a personal risk -- you, the manager or executive in charge, and anyone else who is in the know on the transaction is now facing 20 years in federal pounding-in-the-ass prison if they don't immediately cease all communication and break off contact. Hence why they ghost you and remove your data from prod. It sucks, but I would do the same thing in that situation. Nobody should be expected to take that risk.
That's why you have these experiences :(
There are blanket sanction waivers (General License) by OFAC to allow certain things. There's also the possibility to get an OFAC license (as GitHub did.)
The real issue is there is little to no advantage (realistically no money to be gained from Iran) or even awareness (sometimes the cloud infrastructure bans Iran by default and you don't have enough users to even know that's the case to care.) The legal counsels would generally be conservative and advise against it; there needs to be someone from the business side, e.g. a product manager that cares enough to try to push back on the legal. There often is not or it is hard to justify the tiniest risk, hence you block.
Various tools hosted on Github can be considered dual-use (i.e. AES/TLS libraries). Furthermore, Microsoft was made to apply sanctions against Karim Khan of the ICC for his involvement in investigating the genocide of Palestinians; I doubt Microsoft would be granted an exception so they can serve Hamas' greatest supporter after that.
I don't know if Microsoft has applied for any exceptions, but even if they did, I doubt they'd be able to get them. That's on top of the probability of bad publicity ("Microsoft wants to cut deal with Iran") and the lack of incentive you mentioned.
"greatest"? Hardly. A charge was brought before the ICC from South Africa which required the ICC to investigate.
There are much bigger supporters of Hamas, the sanctions against employees of the ICC is just the current US government flexing its retribution muscles.
You are mixing up ICC and ICJ. South Africa brought a case to the ICJ. This is the country equivalent of suing another country so its not really forcing ICJ to investigate so much as south africa is presenting a case which icj will decide on (eventually anyways, icj is famous for being slow).
The ICC on the other hand makes its own decisions on who to investigate/charge. Countries can file referrals to it, but the ICC prosecutor has discretion on what they want to investigate and pursue.
[Anyone who thinks the ICC likes hamas should remember that the icc also filed charges against a hamas leader too. Its difficult for them to investigate hamas because they are only allowed to charge people who are currently alive]
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the United States Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions in support of U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.
So should we (people outside US) sanction these companies, so that they put the same pressure on US government to stop forcing them from applying sanctions?
* May 22, 2023, Meta €1.2 billion.
* July 22, 2024, Uber €290 million.
* April 23, 2025, Apple €500 million.
* September 4, 2025, Google €2.95 billion.You either kill someone, or become someone's bitch on the first day, then you'll be alright.
(It's an Office Space reference, btw, but our prisons are genuinely inhumane and not rehabilitative.)
They are forced to work for for-profit companies for minimal pay, which is deducted by their living expenses and basic amenities.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime* whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Slavery is still legal in the United States of America.
It's legal to enslave them, but in general it isn't true that they actually are enslaved.
This is the opposite of being "literal slaves". They are literally not slaves.
...unless you believe that before the 17th century, everyone in the world was literally a slave? It was legal to enslave them too.
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
It also doesn't say that they report being compelled to work. It says they receive benefits from working that they don't receive without working. The fact that voluntary workers get their sentences reduced doesn't convert them into involuntary workers.
Trying to spin this as benefits is...odd:
"they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation."
"Denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence" means that prisoners with jobs are considered to be better candidates for sentence reduction by various means. That's true, but it doesn't come anywhere near "being compelled to work".
The ACLU doesn't provide any numbers on who reports being compelled to work. They provide a large number that includes some things that qualify as coercion and some that are entirely innocuous. This is the "prison forced labor" analogue of reporting that large majorities of female undergraduates suffer sexual assault on campus, where the definition of sexual assault includes "unwelcome sexual remarks".
Also in the assumption that a foreigner would or could get an Office Space reference, unless they live in a country America has already successfully culturally colonized.
The point is that the homophobic trope doesn’t add anything to the information given, while it does make it more likely to run afoul of homophobic censors in homophobic countries led by homophobes.
First, in this context the popular image, not reality, is what actually matters. Why do people not risk breaking sanctions? Because they don't want to risk prison. Why do Americans fear prison so much? Because of how it is represented in popular media, true or not.
Second, sexual violence in American prisons is a very real concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_Stat...
Finally, I fail to see how it is a homophobic trope? Nobody wants to be sexually assaulted. It's about the violation, not the act itself.
Yes, it’s an ouroboros of confirmation bias: the popular media ad nauseum repeats the trope that what they need to fear in prison is ”gay” sexual violence, when what they really need to fear is the violence of the state and its economic interests that threatens to put them there in the first place.
> Second, sexual violence in American prisons is a very real concern
Even if we assume the worst case scenario and double it, sexual violence in prisons is an experience of the minority of prisoners… does that make it less of a concern for those who experience it? Of course not… does it mean that it’s a reason to fear prison, especially when incarcerated for actions that go against entrenched governmental interests? Not really. Again the state violence is the real fear… especially when you note that any percentage of those sexual assaults are perpetrated by “guards”. Isolation, economic exploitation, and the mental health concerns implicit in being deprived of your agency are all much more important fears than the (again trope) that something ”gay” might happen to you.
> Finally, I fail to see how it is a homophobic trope? Nobody wants to be sexually assaulted. It's about the violation, not the act itself.
Not seeing a trope as a trope is kind of the point of a trope. “Ass-pounding” implies a specific kind of sexual activity, associating it with prison implies that all such sexual activity in prison is non-consensual violence — that’s the trope part identified — and also that the act itself is violence and/or something to be feared… something to be -phobic, about, in other words. Given that prisons are still customarily same-sex segregated, then, there’s also the implication that same-sex sexual violence in the form of ass-pounding is a reasonable thing to fear when in prison. Or, in other words, the trope is communicating a homo-phobia on behalf of a culture that presumes one should be afraid of prison because one is afraid of getting one’s ass pounded.
The violation isn’t implicit in the act being mentioned. The fact that you’ve got to explain to a “foreigner” that the violation is implicit because they didn’t know the trope doesn’t make it less of a trope.
Make the edit requested and nothing of semantic value to the message changes. In fact the actual message gets clearer, while also not servicing as propaganda for a bias you’ve internalized so deeply it’s invisible to you.
Why don't you see people openly joke about regular rape on HN? Why is a joke about regular rape not a phrase acceptable on here? In the same vein as the 2000s gaming "oh man I'm getting raped over here". Oh yes, because it's considered disgusting and offensive.
The only reason it's funny is because the subject of these jokes are men (so nobody cares), are engaging in something considered "gay" (which is gross and funny ha ha ewwww).
I don't expect things to change but I'd fight in that war if there was one.
And even then, it was only acceptable in 1999 because it was a joke about male-male homosexual rape (I doubt it would have been considered funny even back then if it was a joke about a man raping a woman), so on top of being a rape joke, it has some homophobic qualities to it.
(I do remember watching Office Space back in 1999 and finding that line hilarious, but that teenage version of me also thought saying "that's so gay" was a perfectly fine way to be negative about something. Times change, and people grow up and realize that some of the things they thought were funny were actually singling out marginalized groups in shitty ways.)
I think also your use of the phrase didn't really add anything to what you said. Certainly people in the in-group who both know that Office Space reference, and still think it's funny will get it and chuckle, but everyone else will just think it's a weird and/or offensive way to describe it. And leaving it out entirely doesn't water down what you said. If you still feel like you need to emphasize that it's gonna be a maximum-security prison rather than Club Fed, you can just say "maximum-security federal prison", and everyone will understand.
Is always the subtext to statements like yours.
It's the description of a dynamic sexual act between two participants, using an orifice situated at the end of the digestive tract that has as primary function the excretion of solid waste from the body.
You'll be surprised to learn, that many people of all sexes partake in that activity fully willingly.
Obviously untrue. Iran has 90 million citizens, and multitudes of that number do care out of principle. I am not trying to change your mind, but hope you would be more precise in your language next time to describe why you don’t care.
Petition for change, sure. Complain in public. Protest. But don't martyr yourself for nothing.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...
Now, if we read the original parent post wrote:
> [..] the stakes go up: $1M USD fine and up to 20 years in federal prison. [..] you, the manager or executive in charge, and anyone else who is in the know on the transaction is now facing 20 years in federal pounding-in-the-ass prison if they don't immediately cease all communication and break off contact
That sounds a lot closer to "rounding-up" than "a strong attempt to prevent technology transfers supporting unwanted regimes."
Now for the kicker. Taking into context the US developments of the past 9 months, the people affected by such legal threats are a lot closer to the indiscriminate "rounding people up" part than to the "balanced and reasonable legal consequences" part.
Just a small thing to ponder about before blurting out things such as
> I am not going to risk 20 years in prison for something realistically nobody is going to care about
Yesterday, one might not have cared about communists being rounded up, today it might be "illegal" migrants being ICEed up, who knows what it will be tomorrow.
Democrats and anyone who has ever expressed an "anti-fascist/anti-fascism" opinion online - or attended a recent protest...
Their "regime" leadership has stated as much.
That's the scary part. They are not even trying to hide anymore.
If you want to break that law, go ahead, I will support you all the way, and you will end up in jail anyway.
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
In your linked article Microsoft say they didn’t block “the ICC”, but also mention the “disconnection of an official”.
They were accused of blocking a single individual (the chief prosecutor), and the response is basically “we didnt block the whole organisation”?
I've seen this sentiment so many times from westerners. You all say this, and yet at the same time you levy economic sanctions on countries like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, with the justification that by making their citizens lives horrific, you encourage them to rise against their government.
Their authoritarian militaristic government that doesn't care for human rights.
If you apply the same standard to the North Korean citizens, that they should not be expected to "take that risk", they your country's sanctions are pure collective punishment with no strategic value. You just tortured people for fun.
The US government doesn't reflect the majority of Americans, at all. It reflects capital interests - which the majority of Americans are not. Majority of Americans are laborers.
People either voted, or decided that their vote was worthless enough.
Representative democracy doesn't mean that every possible policy could be enacted by some realistic configuration of elected representatives, even if any particular policy is supported by a majority of the electorate.
that is only true if you flatten your system to two parties.
Again with the "you". "We" did not flatten anything into anything; we were born into an unfair and broken system that we have no power to change.
This is a philosophical disagreement, not an issue of language.
You can become politically active and try to convince others if you don't like current status quo, inaction is also a choice.
Unless you think US isn't a democratic country but authoritarian one(either oligarchy, technocracy or whatever - does not matter) then it is definitely not a philosophical disagreement, but lack of responsibility and wishful thinking.
Why? I never consented to be a part of the system, don't agree with it, and in practice can do nothing to change it. Saying I'm responsible for it because I happened to be arbitrarily born with a particular citizenship is meaningless.
> In democratic system...
There is no reason why I, an unrelated individual, should have to ascribe to the ideals espoused by proponents of the system imposed on me without my consent.
You live in it, and it is part of your reality so your only choices are to emigrate somewhere undemocratic, or be part of it.
It is pure denial of reality otherwise.
People are pointing out the hypocrisy of demonising Iranians for the actions of their government while insisting that Americans are unwilling victims of theirs.
Our western "democracies" aren't nearly as democratic as people like to believe.
At the same time, sanctions also work in other ways: they punish governments that break international norms, they send a signal to the world about what’s considered unacceptable, and they reaffirm shared values. That’s why they’re still used despite the harsh effects on ordinary people. They aren’t a perfect solution, but in Western thinking their role is to combine pressure, deterrence and symbolism, rather than just collective punishment for its own sake.
So, you either take personal responsibility for enforcing sanctions yourself, or you admit that sanctions are a form of collective punishment for no reason. You can't have it both ways.
Maybe the government will do this because the sanctions hurt their people enough to the point where things are too unstable for their liking. Maybe their economy becomes so trashed that the quality of the leaders' lives is impacted too much. Etc.
I don't think anyone in the West genuinely believes that sanctions will lead to citizen uprisings and overthrown governments. At least not after decades where no such successful uprisings have taken place in long-sanctioned countries like Iran.
But it should also be pretty clear that sanctions on countries like Iran aren't causing their governments to choose to change their behavior either. But I think arguably sanctions on Russia since they invaded Ukraine have had a useful effect. While the war hasn't stopped, it's possible that sanctions have slowed down Russia's progress quite a bit.
Not sure what the alternative is, though, aside from just giving up, lifting sanctions, and letting things develop where they may.
They did slow down all kinds of progress in Russia except the progress towards the full blown fascism and the progress of the military complex at the expence of its citizens
Like, democratic elections obviously give the elected legitimacy to govern the populace that just elected them. But sanctions (or military interventions or wars) by their very definition are enacted on a different population, that had no democratic means to influence that decision.
UN sanctions are at least somewhat different because they are supposed to be decided by vote of the constituent countries.
But US sanctions are essentially "some people elected the President because they liked his views on domestic tax policy or trans people, therefore he gains the right to call airstrikes on some place halfway across the world or forbid the entire world from doing business with that place".
It makes no sense.
However, sanctions do have a symbolic value. And I also can't think of anything else short of military action to express displeasure.
I don't know the answers to those questions, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was "yes".
Sanctions or lack thereof definitely impacts quality of life, but Putin put everything on a war economy footing pretty quickly anyway, and in that environment (especially in Russia), it’s suffering all the way down. And Russia excels at Suffering. Russia has oil too, and plenty of minerals, so if anything I expect by now they’re just getting stronger (economically), barring Ukraine wrecking their shit from time to time with a well placed drone strike.
Iran/Israel is an interesting question, but near as I can tell, Iran doesn’t really want to destroy Israel. They just want to make them as miserable as possible, and show they can ‘do harm’ to them when they need to prop up domestic support among the hardliners.
Israel provides a good scapegoat for the Iranian leadership.
With Israel gone, who is the Ayatollah going to use as the big bad? The Great Satan (USA) isn’t as tractable a target when they don’t have a designated ‘local’ they can go after, and if Iran actually meaningfully hurt the US (nuked the White House?), Iran is glass regardless of how otherwise strong they are.
NK got sanctions because they love playing the crazy-dude-with-a-gun-that-just-wants-a-handout, which is also why they eventually got nukes. They might have gotten nukes a little faster without sanctions, but sanctions definitely gave the hardliners huge leverage in the country. Hard to be friendly with the west (as a civilian!) when the west is literally openly starving the country, even if the leadership of your country is egging them on eh?
Near as I can tell, the USSR fell because of jeans and rock and roll. So yes, I think the ‘good guy’ sanctions BS is ultimately self defeating.
It can work if someone is either a) in a tenuous economic position, and b) the ‘sanctioningish’ behavior is not existential.
But any good authoritarian would rather throw their entire population under the bus ‘for the greater good’ than give in on something important for them…
And countries know how to deal with being at war (generally), even if it’s a weird only-semi-economic one.
Russian industry is operating at only 81% capacity, largely due to labor shortages, which make sense considering that about 1% of its labor force join the military every other month. Russia is losing tank barrels, artillery barrels, and infantry fighting vehicles more than 10 times faster than it can manufacture new ones. It will likely never be able to obtain a third rotary forge, required for barrel manufacture, to expand its capacity. It has almost entirely cannibalized its old, defunct Soviet era stock. They are being kept afloat by China, NK, and Iran, but with a much-reduced capacity, and often much lower quality. For example, Russia relies on China for 70-80% of its microchips, but China is dumping defective microchips on them with a 40% failure rate.
Sanctions have absolutely had significant, direct, measurable impacts on Russia’s ability to wage war and sustain war.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/11/21/half-of-russias-ai... https://jamestown.org/program/russia-exhausts-soviet-era-arm... https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-where-are-russias-... https://archive.ph/c17pk https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/is-202... https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-sanctions-have-reshaped-ru... https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme... https://osintforukraine.com/publications/microchips https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/russia_china_semicond...
Are you suggesting the West should have put these harsh sanctions before the war? My recollection of Dec 2021 and Jan/Feb 2022 were that the West was trying to avoid inciting the crazy Russian dictator: Biden had two tele conferences with Putin in December, there were three meetings in Jan (OSCE - Russia, NATO - Russia, Lavrov - Blinken)
And I do not think the situation is unwinnable for the West (it is probably unwinnable for Ukraine as it will not be able to get its territory back). Russia is getting weaker with every man it loses, every tank is destroyed, every young man/woman who decides to leave. I would be surprised if Western Europe will want to do business with Russia for a generation - which basically makes Russia China's vassal for the same period of time.
Russia will be in bad shape for decades. The West will be just fine.
Or do you think all this authoritarianism sprouting everything is just random coincidence?
It’s classic crabs in a bucket, which Russia has always been good at.
The kind of sanctions that we've seen since then seem to be mostly about appearances, with EU trying to pretend that it "really cares" despite this epic failure of foreign policy.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukrai...
Even if Russia ‘wins’ the Ukraine war (takes all Ukrainian territory), it’s even more fucked than when it started demographically.
It’s also spent pretty much all of it’s currency reserves and destroyed it’s normal economy destroying all that ‘new’ land in a way it will be incredibly hostile to productive use for a generation+. Not counting insurgencies and rebellions.
The well is solidly poisoned, regardless of who ends up owning it.
Basically, you are hurting your own economy (non negligibly in the EU-Russia case for example!) to make sure that you outgrow the sanctioned opponent, making any future conflict more favorable for yourself.
There is a lot of evidence that this aspect works pretty well; even if you can sidestep the sanctions with middle-men or substitute local industry, this always comes with additional friction/costs (just consider German synth fuel industry during WW2-- that was an insane amount of ressources that could've gone into planes or tanks or somesuch instead).
For an example of sanctions directly effecting diplomatic outcomes, just consider Jordan over the Gulf wars: They stayed neutral during the first one (which Bush did NOT like), got sanctioned (without western citizens even noticing too much), suffered a lot from that, then during the second Iraq war they basically cooperated with the US (grudgingly!).
I think it is difficult to find many clear examples for this because sanctions typically mostly work as a threat, and being put in place is a kind of failure mode for them already.
Russia went from selling their oil on the world market at competitive prices to selling to mostly 2 customers at heavily discounted prices. And Russia is going to use barter now because of financial sanctions on Russian oil buyers.
All Russian currency reserves are frozen, and the interest these reserves generate are given to Ukraine to buy weapons.
How is Russia economically better now than before Feb 2022?
Manufacturing in general, actually.
Something which had essentially collapsed previously. Also, mining and other resource extraction - they’re necessarily rebuilding domestic production and becoming more independent.
https://washingtondc.jhu.edu/news/do-sanctions-actually-work...
Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...
Trying to use sanctions against another major power isn't guaranteed to work as they can take the hit and pivot to internal industry(which happened), or trading with other major powers that do not sanction them(China).
Or some countries get around sanctions - like buying Russian gas/petroleum products through India - in a way this bypasses sanctions making them worthless.
Is it better than doing nothing? yes, of course. But Russia unfortunately is a major power - just due to sheer access to natural resources - and you can't just bully it into submission with weak sanctions that some EU countries ignore(petroleum case).
That sounds like a positive, though: if Russia's advance into Ukraine has been slowed by sanctions, but everyday Russians aren't affected too much, I'd consider that a huge win. We shouldn't be punishing regular people for the actions of a their dictatorship government that they can't control.
It's working all right. These things take decades. Look at North Korea (first few years they grew faster than South Korea, and they had the more wealthy parts). Now their GDP per capita is around 600-1700 USD vs 33 000 USD in South Korea.
Did you speak with folks from Moscow or St Petersburg or from different regions? Life in the top 2 cities is kept as normal as possible at all costs; that is part of the Putin's approach to handling the elites (you can keep living your comfortable lives as long as you stay out of politics).
But elsewhere the quality of life took a big hit. Even in second tier cities. At least that is what I am hearing. My 2c.
Anecdotally I have also heard that many factory towns are booming because the factories are re-opened or expanded to fulfill all those military orders.
Russian industry is operating at only 81% capacity, largely due to labor shortages, which make sense considering that about 1% of its labor force join the military every other month. Russia is losing tank barrels, artillery barrels, and infantry fighting vehicles more than 10 times faster than it can manufacture new ones. It will likely never be able to obtain a third rotary forge, required for barrel manufacture, to expand its capacity. It has almost entirely cannibalized its old, defunct Soviet era stock. They are being kept afloat by China, NK, and Iran, but with a much-reduced capacity, and often much lower quality. For example, Russia relies on China for 70-80% of its microchips, but China is dumping defective microchips on them with a 40% failure rate.
Sanctions have absolutely had significant, direct, measurable impacts on Russia’s ability to wage war and sustain war. As for regular people, it is hard to think it hasn't affected then, given that last year inflation was 9%, interest rates are 21%, and disposable income is down 20-30%. That feels like a lot of belt tightening.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/11/21/half-of-russias-ai... https://jamestown.org/program/russia-exhausts-soviet-era-arm... https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-where-are-russias-... https://archive.ph/c17pk https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/is-202... https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-sanctions-have-reshaped-ru... https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme... https://osintforukraine.com/publications/microchips https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/russia_china_semicond... https://www.economicsobservatory.com/what-is-the-current-sta...
And many more similar examples. Sanctions will hurt Russia in long term but not now. Because good sanctions requires to understand the country culture + execute only that hurt countries, which didn't do western countries.
Counterpoint: South Africa.
> If the West is expecting any revolution due to sanctions, I have not seen it.
You have now.
I can certainly understand, as a matter of foreign policy, not wanting our companies to be propping up or supplying such regimes, but I don't really get how anyone can think that sanctions are effective at promoting change.
I would say it is a bit more realpolitik than that. An "Evil" leader doesn't care about the common good, but all leaders need subordinates to carry out their orders, security forces to carry out their rules, etc. Sanctions are meant to put pressure on all those people. So either A; the leader changes their actions so as not to risk losing the people that turn their will into action, or B; those subordinates put someone else in charge that will play ball.
It is truly an unthankful job being the saviour of the entire world.
That's (usually) a secondary goal of sanctions, if even that. The primary is to restrict the regime's ability to fund its growth, stability and military operations.
Russia can no longer (that easily) sell its oil and gas? Great, that's less money to invest into rockets and drones and tanks against Ukraine. It's also less money in the pockets of the oligarchs.
Realistically, you can't really push the civilians of a country to revolt with sanctions, or bombing. As Carl Spaatz said:
> Morale in a totalitarian society is irrelevant so long as the control patterns function effectively.
I think the argument is that you deprive belligerent companies from the resources they need to attack and harm others. The suffering their citizens endure is unfortunate, but why should Americans take the blame when Kim Jong Un is so obviously culpable?
No, I don't do this. I'm not in charge of the government. Who is "we" ?
Such hypocrisy.
Also it seems to be a common thing in Europe to refer to other's country populace OR government as plural 'You'. From my small sample size of 3, Americans were always confused by this and thought they were personally attacked.
So what? Even if 99% of the population agrees with doing something, that has no bearing on whether I agree with it or am responsible for it.
And, anyway, no major candidate would have lifted sanctions on those countries, so nobody could have voted against them even if they wanted to.
> Also it seems to be a common thing in Europe to refer to other's country populace OR government as plural 'You'. From my small sample size of 3, Americans were always confused by this and thought they were personally attacked.
Perhaps Europeans, with their higher-quality parliamentary systems, are more likely to uncritically accept the idea that governments actually represent their people, whereas Americans are more likely to realize it's a sham.
You are a cog, participating in system, voting in it and acting in it. You could wash away your responsibility only if you go back to serfdom.
>Perhaps Europeans, with their higher-quality parliamentary systems, are more likely to uncritically accept the idea that governments actually represent their people, whereas Americans are more likely to realize it's a sham.
well.. not really, i would say Europe is worse off as EU is basically one-party system with flavor distinctions. It is different on country-level but that varies on case by case basis.
Nevertheless the idea of democracy stays the same - you vote, directly or indirectly, on issues - every citizen is a participant in decision-making process.
No matter the political system, or ruling entity you have it will always have those 3 goals(in order), cynically speaking:
- self-preservation
- changing resource distribution in it's favor
- expanding it's influence outside the borders
The only thing keeping our rights(and that includes human rights) is the fact that governments can be replaced by different one(in healthy systems) with populace support, or that populace will revolt and reenact french revolution again(in unhealthy systems), or outside forces will take over.
Systems can be changed - either by evolution or revolution. Take your pick.
It's funny that people still believe governments let people elect anything. You can vote, you can ignore elections - result will be the same, your opinion doesn't matter
Or system is fundamentally broken, and You, as in populace, need to change it. you can talk to people, political party allegiance does not need to be a tribal relationship.
take your pick.
Lumping the entire population of a country under the term "you" when discussing contentious actions of the government of a country is inflammatory. You (yes, YOU) are directly accusing an individual by using the personal pronoun 'you'. The general populous of a country has close to zero say in what their government does on a daily (even yearly or longer) basis. Do I have anything against your average Iranian, Israeli, or North Korean? No, not unless they are directly in support of the objectionable policies of their respective governments. Barring evidence of this, I presume they are like most other citizens of a country, mostly along for the ride.
So, perhaps instead of attacking individuals who quite probably had nothing to do with their current government making the decision they made you should attack the governments in question and the leaders of those governments.
Sanctions are there to cut off 1-2% of GDP each year from the dictatorships' economies.
Over 30 years that turns countries into harmless (to the West) backwater shitholes.
The consequences towards the local populations are just a side-effect (sometimes wanted, sometimes not).
You cannot expect people outside of your dicatorship to prioritize your well being over their own safety. It's on you to fix your country. If you won't - people will isolate you to keep their countries safe.
Can't really blame them.
There is a recent study concluding that sanctions kill half a million people per annum: <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...>
I don't know what you mean by dictatorship but I'm not exactly adverse to applying the same term to the US, it being a one-party state with the audacity of having two parties, and either way, it's by far the most hostile and violent of contemporary state powers.
Or the fault of the husband for beating his wife and the fault of the wife for staying in that relationship?
I get it - it's hard. But you cannot expect the whole world to enable your alcoholic husband/militaristic dictator.
Yet US hegemony is collapsing. It is simply running out of the money and power necessary to be a racketeer that cynically calls itself world police.
The West puts Russia in economic prison.
Russians suffer.
US is only a part of the system. Even if you remove US from the picture - EU alone would continue to sanction Russia.
There's absolutely no moral obligation on an individual in any country to defy these laws and risk prison time - if they want change they can petition, vote and protest.
Beyond that the West is not responsible for any deaths caused by governments that refuse to cooperate with us (and therefore had sanctions placed on them) - that responsibility lies solely with the people and governments of sanctioned nations. We shouldn't be forced into supporting those who seek to destroy us based on HuMAnITaRiaN grounds.
This US-centric mindset is so disgusting and emblematic of the narcissism of the west. The country has established itself as the most potent force for violence and economic abuse in the world.
E.g. China sanctions a country then "China is not responsible for any deaths caused by governments that refuse to cooperate with them"
It's entirely the responsibility of each government to ensure the welfare of its own citizens. Anything more is purely goodwill. Anything less is treason.
You're just coping because the US/west is the predominant power.
One could also flip your argument and consider the many decades of US narcoterrorism, regime change operations and so on and the rather long line of failed states in its wake, and draw the conclusion that we ought to actually not submit to this 'world power' regardless of whether it 'dresses itself up' to be 'cooperative' while it engages in these activities or not.
> One could also flip your argument and consider the many decades of US narcoterrorism
I'd agree with you here, I'm speaking purely of diplomatic / trade related activities (i.e. tariffs, sanctions, etc.) - imo putting boots on the ground or funding insurrections are an escalation that 1. no longer respects the autonomy of a country/people 2. are equivalent to military action
There's of course still a lot of grey-zones but hopefully it clarifies my position.
> we ought to actually not submit to this 'world power'
Again I agree, WE (as private citizens) ought not to, however diplomacy and trade are careful games played between larger entities (corporations, governments, etc.). But on the flip side it also doesn't mean we have to go against everything the government does (i.e. it isn't inherently evil).
The tricky line (as in this case) is when the actions of those entities can have an effect on you (the private citizen) like jail time.
I'm not sure what you mean by the South Africa example.
I'm also not so sure it's a tricky line. Civil disobedience is something everyone should consider as a means of political action.
China's issue isn't so much the laws / treaties they've agreed to on paper. The issue more the actual implementation and enforcement of said rules.
> Why should India change its policies around sanctions and start implementing them
I'm not saying India has to, they're perfectly within their rights to ignore requests from the US, but neither does the US have to tolerate that (as they have been) - everyone is free to tariff / sanction as much as anyone else (not withstanding other agreements, but the same argument applies to those). In this way, everyone is free to pursue their own actions and ends. And as such, the US and India aren't forced to trade / cooperate outside of their own mutual benefit (i.e. if trade stops being beneficial to the US/India, they should stop).
This is how I mean each country is responsible for it's own outcomes, don't want to deal with the US? Fine. Just don't expect handouts and cooperation from US entities.
What I'm trying to express is that it's a 2 way street and both parties can walk along it as much as they want - and not a moral issue. I'm not saying there's no consequences, merely that it is OK for a country to pursue actions that (it believes) are in it's own favour.
> I'm not sure what you mean by the South Africa example
Completely fair, I've been diving into SA politics at the moment so it's just at the top of my mind. But there's been a long standing degradation in relations, to the point where recently the SA ambassador to the US was rejected by the US because of some very undiplomatic comments he refused to retract - followed by SA not replacing the ambassador for something like 6 months. Meaning there was no formal point of contact between the 2 countries, independent groups and non-ruling political parties tried to bridge the gap but there's only so much they could do. Another similar example is how while every other country tried to negotiate with Trump about his tariffs, SA refused (or forgot) to.
I think most scholars of international law would disagree on the legality of unilateral economic sanctions, since they are likely to amount to interventions and as such violate sovereignty, and, of course, human rights of the people affected. You also seem to think of US sanctions as if they were in a vacuum and not a preamble to aircraft carriers, narcoterrorism and other JSOC responsibilities, and possibly nuclear warheads, or less commonly, explicitly genocidal actions.
Right, so you meant that South Africa disagreeing with the ongoing genocide in Palestine in which the US is a main offender amounts to sabotage of diplomatic relations. As for refusing to "negotiate [...] about tariffs", why would anyone? If I punch you in the face, shoot a kid in the face, and then tell you to sit down by a table and negotiate how much you should pay me for that service, would you sit down and act as if I'm a reasonable, rational actor?
This is the precise realpolitik of international sanctions, it's just not spoken out loud that often.
Don't believe me, some random commenter. Listen to the Professor of History and Grand Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College explain it: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/B0k5ToABH7o
Some sanctions aim at military capabilities directly - but most just aim to throw a wrench into a country's economy overall. Which does hurt the population - but it also hurts a country's capabilities, which is the goal.
If North Korea wasn't sanctioned to shit, it would have had the resources to build not dozens but hundreds of ICBMs. This is undesirable, so North Korea remains sanctioned to shit.
Is this really a US endeavor by policy?
"You all" is a weird way of putting it. I don't support my government levying sanctions on these countries, but I have zero power to change it.
It's funny, as the gist author points out that he doesn't support the actions of the Islamic Republic, and has no power to change it because it's minority rule by a theocratic dictatorship.
But even in the US, no one I've ever had the option to vote for (and who had even a remote chance of winning) would ever consider lifting these sanctions. So I am similarly powerless to change this situation.
I think sanctions are largely pointless if their stated goal is to get citizens to rise up and change their governments. Asking people to risk their lives (when you're not risking anything at all) is an awful thing to do, and this sort of thing isn't likely to work.
But it's probably not really that; the idea is to choke the economies of these countries so they can't do whatever Bad Thing the sanction-leviers are worried about (like developing nuclear weapons). How effective sanctions are at achieving that goal is an exercise left to the reader. And even if they are effective, there's a lot of collateral damage that hurts people who have no say in the matter.
Not saying Obama’s foreign policy was perfect, but he did do the Iran nuclear deal which lifted some sanctions, and started the process of normalizing relations with Cuba. Like so many other things, these were immediately undone by his successor…
Yes indeed, I agree.
Although: long term foreign relationships certainly can be un-built on top of four year presidential terms. See: current US president and rest-of-the-world.
The US can rebuild most of what they destroyed. It's gone now, and some of it they were already on the process of losing and can't get back. But no country is beyond reconstruction.
As someone who grew up in Russia in the 90s, that McDonald's actually did wonders! The problem is that y'all figured that if you help people who say that they are "democrats" maintain control over the country, it'll all work out, somehow. What actually happened is that many of those people were grifters, some others idealistic incompetents who thought they had all the answers after reading Ayn Rand. On the whole, the people - who were very enthusiastic about the changes in late 80s - by mid-90s felt like they've been robbed, quite rightly so (read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia for some examples), by people now firmly associated with the West and with words such as "liberal". This is the big reason why Western-style liberal democracy very quickly became a marginalized minority political opinion in Russia, and why the likes of Putin could easily take power by promising people that they'll fix the mess.
Relations clearly aren’t poisoned since the EU and US are still closely collaborating on several fronts such as policy towards China and Ukraine.
Don’t mistake harsh words intended for domestic voters with reality.
In any case facts of the story are so brazenly changed in the apology’s telling of the story that regardless of which side you are on, in and of itself is a political interference against the will of the Iranian people. Please also note that the golden era of Iranian prosperity was the decade and a half when he was removed from power by the monarch.
More information on the "Iranian golden age of prosperity" you mentioned:
>During that time two monarchs — Reza Shah Pahlavi and his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — employed secret police, torture, and executions to stifle political dissent. The Pahlavi dynasty has sometimes been described as a "royal dictatorship",[1] or "one-man rule".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Imperial_S...
He prorogued the parliament and was calling for a referendum to overthrow the monarchy against the Constitution. He was terminated by the monarch per Constitution, but he would not leave the post which resulted in uprising from both sides.
> During that time two monarchs — Reza Shah Pahlavi and his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — employed secret police, torture, and executions to stifle political dissent. The Pahlavi dynasty has sometimes been described as a "royal dictatorship",[1] or "one-man rule".
Yeah if you read biased and debunked media and the Mullah supporters and comrades[1] (which is the source of Wokipedia) during the Cold War era, and by the way both sides conspired to get rid of the monarch for different reasons, you might believe such propaganda. If you'd talk to the actual industrious people who experienced it, you might get a very different perspective. Double digit annual GDP growth, #1 is number of international students in the US (not per capita, absolute.) So yes, golden era, indisputably.
[1] Interestingly, we see the same Marxist-Islamist alliance has now hit the West.
So yes, I would unequivocally argue to any extent the intelligence apparatus was actually operating, not only golden era objectively justifies those measures, but even for lots of the troublemakers themselves, turns out letting criminals loose to take over the country actually makes things worse; many of such Marxist-terrorists who claimed they were mistreated under the old regime were treated much much worse, or lost their lives, during the first years of the Mullah regime.
In retrospect, the astute mind would recognize the two may have just been interrelated. In fact, one may have been part of the plan to accomplish the other.
Mossadegh was not allowed to do it.
I was under the assumption that in Western democracies, citizens have a say their government and its enacted laws.
We can't unfortunately assert the same for people of Iran since they don't live in a democracy.
Sanctions are designed to prevent an enemy government from profiting from our western economy. Sanctions are designed to bring hostile entities to the negotiation table. Sanctions curtail the worst behaviors of enemy nations because the sanctions deny those enemies money. Money is power. Little money = little power.
Well, it sounds like you should rise up against your government in violent revolution, then! After all, that's what's expected of Iranian, Cuban and Venezuelan people when the West destroys their countries with sanctions. Get to it!
also what company even can do???? its law from gov
They are somewhat similar at the moment in some very unfortunate ways.
I dont't know what is this based on, but no, sanctions are needed to stop the other party from benefitting from economic activity, not to punish.
That's a total non-sequitor.
GP stated that he will personally face prison time for going against the laws of his country.
Why would anyone risk jail time for you? For your countrymen? Why don't you risk jail time for some other country?
The justification is reduced financial capacity for war and similar atrocities.
That's the PR justification. The real one is "to hurt the countries and make them do as we say" and "because we can".
> you
> you
You don’t understand what the word “you” means.
The point of sanctions is to cripple the middle and lower classes, destroying a country's ability to fund a military. That actually makes it less likely for a dictatorship to get overthrown - the middle class is too poor to organise which is desirable from the West's perspective. Dictatorships are really bad at waging war effectively, they struggle to handle the complex logistics and are easier to distract and threaten.
And frankly; we're talking about something kicked off by 60s US and UK, that map in that wiki article could be mistaken for one of the British Empire. Nothing's impossible but it'll take more than a wiki article to give me confidence that sanctions were the primary political force operative here or that the apartheid system was actually the thing at issue. I would chalk it up as unusual circumstances.
Including most of western Europe, Japan, the whole of the US (including Alaska) etc?
But then it turns out that war is too dirty, cyber stuff isn't dirty enough. So what's left? Economics - sanctions. We've carried out 374 ultra important meetings, and traveled to 73 different countries, to prepare this critical 974th package of sanctions. This time it'll actually do something and be totally more effective than other 973, in spite of the fact that obviously the most impactful things are the first to be sanctioned.
It's obviously little more than theatrics, but it lets politicians feel powerful and like they're exerting influence on their enemies. And indeed, they may be responsible, at least in poorer countries for some people starving, which is then mental gymnasticed into 'Ah hah! They'll blame their government, overthrow them and become our ally, the people making them starve.'
It's really a shock that seems to basically never come to fruition. Well except when you're sanctioning a third of the planet [1], including many of the most unstable places in the world, and any time there's a regime change in these places - 'Ah hah! See? Sanctions work!' The fact that said change would often have happened in any case is kindly swept aside. It's akin to the joke that Zerohedge has successfully predicted 53 of the last 3 economic recessions.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_sanct...
What other options are there, except idly sitting by or invading?
If I personally choose to boycott a sneaker brand because I have a firm belief that they run sweatshops in a foreign country, is that collective punishment? No, I'm just not supporting someone who doesn't align with my values. Even if, as a side effect, the workers won't be getting the pittance that they would have gotten from my purchase.
The USA applied sanctions to the family members and law practice of a supreme court judge from my country literally yesterday. It's said this cut them off from hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
It really kills their champagne socialism nonsense. They destroy my country and then enjoy foreign developed nations on taxpayer dime. You have no idea how good it feels to see these "gods" get what they deserve. I'll be forever thankful to Trump for it.
Iran is a theocratic autocracy. Only the autocrat and his supporters bear any significant responsibility for the actions of the government there.
The key distinguishing factor being that in a democracy powers are derived from the consent of the governed, as opposed to other forms of government (including some "constitutional republics") which do not allow open democratic elections.
Democratic Republic, just like People's Republic, is actually a euphemism for communism.
What you are describing is "representative government" and "self government" not necessarily democracy. The will of the people is an abstract concept that is, depending on the issue, not always accurately measurable by equally weighted vote of a subset of the people that are enfranchised.
You just open company in Brazil or Argentina and you can purchase whatever you want. Before 1989 communistic countries were overcoming CoCom restrictions in this way. Russia is doing this successfully since 2014. Surely Iran, North Korea are doing the same, this is really a no brainer and today and it is not even hard or costly, as nobody needs to physically travel, money transfers go through Kaiman, Netherlands Antilles, City of London Corp., etc. Nobody is able to track them.
More. Nobody even tries to hide anymore. Germany is openly purchasing Russian oil, branded as "Kazakhstani", through Druzba pipe. The Netherlands is buying Russian gasoline branded as "Indian". France is buying Russian LNG and it is not event trying to pretend that it is not Russian.
We will wait very long for those who will pay this $1M fine or go to prison.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kazakhstans-january-...
And here's KazTransoil themselves reporting how much they supplied through Druzhba recently: https://www.interfax.kz/?int_id=21&lang=eng&news_id=75303
> ASTANA. Sept 4 (Interfax-Kazakhstan) - The volume of Kazakh oil transportation to Germany via the Druzhba pipeline system in August of this year amounted to 190,000 tonnes, which is 18.7% higher than the level of July 2025, Interfax-Kazakhstan was informed by the national company KazTransOil (KTO).
So we find that, once again, Germany is buying "Kazakh" oil that is transported by Russia and mixed with Russian oil.
Ha ha ha, it's so funny and harmless to make fun of people in prison, because they all deserve it, right? And the US is a free country?
Sorry but this just makes me incredibly angry.
Do you remember what happened the last time the FBI, CIA, etc. got used the way it is now? Hint: several high profile black Americans got assassinated. Among other crazy others.
There's an Irish comedian who has a bit that goes like this "As an Irishman I don't have white guilt. At all. In Ireland we had potatoes on the ground. We picked them up ourselves. We didn't steal people from another continent to come do it for us. That would be insane."
It certainly didn't seem like the commenter was agreeing with the way the government runs prisons or what happens in them. Again, maybe they do, and I just failed to see it.
This is also not a uniquely US-specific thing, lots of UK dramas have made similar jokes (for just one example, see [3]). Obviously I expect you would find those objectionable too, my point was just that it's not a US-specific thing -- humans have a tendency to make light of things like that as humour and some people understandably don't see the humour in it. Such is the human condition...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBzvMLW0ii4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htCJTPu8GPE [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM8DfCgVWx8&t=19
I can just point to a movie from the 50s-60s and then shout "but it's just a reference, it's just a reference so it's fine!"
Yup, sound logic.
Your point only makes sense if the humour is general. But nobody's hoping on national TV when a female athlete trips going "ha ha she got Ted bundy'd, omg absolutely raped ha!" see how disgusting and vile that sounds?
But you know "pound me in the ass prison" is a cult classic (I still like the overall movie) and nobody would have any problem with airing it on TV.
No point arguing with humans tho, our species is lame.
If only this notion of personal criminal responsibility was applied to other types of private company criminality (2008 gfc, cartelization in many industries, the many private data "leaks", ...)
The problem is that it works too well. As you can clearly see, the solution basically everyone individually applies is to stay clear of anything that might be an issue by several miles.
If you apply the same reasoning to things like private data handling, little things like just shipping stuff will be prohibitively expensive, as no one will want to handle private data like addresses and instead go to a provider, which will need excessive amounts of cash and red tape to do anything for taking on that liability. Building stuff will become impossible, as all of the current red tape will be exponentially expanded with liability checks against any possible pollution. Founding a company will basically never happen, because no one wants to risk 20+ years in jail - and if they do, they'll simply turn to crime, because if your risk profile is that off anyway, not paying taxes will just be a minuscule risk increase.
I'm not saying that there's no political incentive to ignore those issues and keep fines low, but piercing the corporate veil is the nuclear option and there is a reason it's used so little.
You're claiming if data protection laws had actual teeth, google would close up shop and everyone would just go home and not do business anymore. That's laughable. Nobody would claim such BS in good faith.
There is, just read TFA.
> Financial transactions happen all the time and are plenty cheap, they just don't do any with sanctioned entities.
And that's exactly the point. They are cheap because people are protected by the corporate veil (as long as they don't explicitly do something highly illegal). Anything where people are suddenly personally liable, they stay far away from. If we apply the same harsh punishments to all financial crime as we do for interacting with sanctioned countries, people will stay far away from interacting with that and those that don't will either demand truck loads of money or also be shady in other ways (most likely both).
> Nobody would claim such BS in good faith.
Someone reading my comment in good faith would have been able to see the point that I was making, which actually is pretty distinct from what you appear to be arguing against.
> Yes, there are fines for American companies if they do business with Iranians.
Edited for clarity (thanks bloak)
It's just a threat the fedcops get to use to force you to take a plea deal. It's basically a big boy version of how your local prosecutor behaves. Instead of filing BS charges that will never stick in an attempt to "mark it up to mark it down", the fedcops are more equal so they have
Every time you see someone on HN screeching about how we ought to have federal regulation and stiff penalties for whatever their pet issue is remember that this is what that looks like.
If only they applied something like this to the rest of the corporate world, companies would be far better behaved and polite
I was kind of surprised by the whole thing because he was currently employed at another company. We went so far in the process that he quit his other job and we had him in the office for his first day of work, had a big lunch with him and everything. We fucked him on that.
But of course this veil can be pierced when it suits the administration, but not when it'd positively benefit the life of american citizens.
Let's be realistic here. There are no executives or board members who faced charges for prohibited transactions with Iran or NK. It's not like we don't have a steady stream of companies reporting that they inadvertently hired NK citizens remotely.
We simply love to inflict pain and suffering. This is why we circumcise, why we ear crop, tail dock, create animals, put people in solitary, etc.
Women can be SA'd in prison by other prisoners, and additionally have to contend with the petty humiliations from guards taking unnecessary sexual turns that they wouldn't with men.
Nor should a description of prison SA be considered an endorsement.
The problem is decidedly a male one just because of the demographics.
Obviously a terrible thing either way.
Same thing with "sod" still being in common usage. Pretty bizarre to be allowed to get married in some countries now but there's still all these historical bits and pieces.
Even more with Trump's current push to sanction the ICC.
All sanctions are designed to hurt civilians, so that they may overthrow their government. Just a bullying tactic by the US with zero moral justifications, despite how it's framed by the media.
"Your country is sanctioned because your government is being a global ass, wink-wink"
Implying that a change in government will lift the sanctions.
I’m aware there are consequences to sanctions, and the way they are implemented is often half-assed or hypocritical (e.g. the way that russian oil still flows) but to drop all sanctions…
Is that not like saying boycotts hurt employees who had nothing to do with the decisions so we should never boycott?
That's what the US has been doing since forever, even actively participating in the war crimes. If you think any of the stated reasons for the sanctions are real, I have a bridge to sell you.
And you think this is a good thing? Like we should be consistent and support all war crimes instead of just some of them?
Just because we do bad things, doesn’t make it right to do more bad things.
Yes ideally we’d live in a world where this bullshit doesn’t happen. But it does happen, so our choices are to respond with the tools we have NOW or not respond at all.
Objectively untrue. Many of the Russian sanctions, for example, targeted Putin’s inner circle.
There are sanctions targeting governments specifically, but usually government sanctions also target civilians. You can't exactly expect a sanctioned government to be transparent, it'll hide its government business under company names if you let it.
By that definition Putin is a civilian.
More broadly: plenty of sanctions explicitly target military-only kit. Those are not “designed to hurt civilians,” though I guess a civilian working in a munitions factory might lose their job.
That's the thing in a crony dictatorship: these people might not hold public office in name, but in practice they act under direct license, authority and orders of the dictator. We're already seeing this in Hungary, where close friends of the local de-facto-dictator Viktor Orban control almost all media and absolutely use that ownership to further entrench Orban's rule - it's hard to achieve political change when the media simply doesn't care about you.
And now, we're seeing the beginnings in the US, just from another angle - public kowtowing and open extortion, such as with Jimmy Kimmel who got cancelled after a threat to block a corporate merger, and it's not the first time either. And no, the fact that Disney walked back after their stock price took a decent dip doesn't mean that this is the last time such an event will take place.
That requires some blind faith to believe. In that I don't think those applying them really expect overthrowing the government to result. I would guess sanctions are designed to hurt and weaken, to make them less of an adversary. Although that's a harder sell, so doesn't get presented that way.
Even the regime itself.. look I wouldn't to live there. But comparing it to somewhere like North Korea is ridiculous. Even by Middle Eastern standards it's not at the bottom.
Had no idea, interesting!
Now it's just Iran/Cuba/North Korea, but you're essentially letting the increasingly aggressive American government decide who can or cannot publish software. The Americans are not afraid of adding their political enemies from allied countries to the sanction list, as can be seen when they decided to go after the judge in the Israel genocide case. Who knows who will be next now that they're blatantly cracking down on free speech.
The Apple app store/Google Play/Microsoft Store are great conveniences, but they must never be the only way to access software on your device. Apple's EU exception falls short for still requiring an Apple account to pay fees that no judge will accept when the first lawsuit hits. Sure, Epic Games has offered to pay those fees just to spite Apple, but Epic can only pay those fees to people they're allowed to pay.
Either of these three markets can set rules on what device manufacturers have to do in order to be allowed to access the market, and they all use that power - China is particularly infamous (with Apple having had to set up a dedicated iCloud instance to which the Chinese government may or may not have a backdoor), India more focuses on the share of production that happens in China, and the EU is seriously tightening the screws on American companies when it comes to arbitrarily denying store access.
The "your decision" in that response is really off-putting. I know the law is what it is with sanctions like this. However, it is a failing of basic human empathy to blame other common citizens of a country for the actions of their government while we almost certainly do not endorse all the actions of our own government and would probably be a little upset if a foreigner assumed we did.
And this is to say nothing about how it is people that are chosen, not their individual choices. This is why it irks me when people are interviewed about their knowhow with respect to their political stance. It's basically irrelevant. They need a good read on the person of their choice, not a good read on the choices. If it was about a choice instead of a person, it would be a referendum, not an election.
Not really. The number of people who might change their minds and thus swing the result either way is indeed small. But it isn't accurate to say they are the ones that choose.
The people in guaranteed states/counties still choose; it's just that almost always choose the same answer.
But even that doesn't mean they can be ignored. They can be ignored at voting time, but before that political parties have to take them into account. They basically determine where the centre is. For example they are the reason the American centre is so much further right than the UK centre.
If you took American parties and held an election of them in the UK you would find that all those reliably conservative counties who you would say don't have any effect on the result are suddenly not so supportive of the right-wing option.
FPTP is still dumb and frustrating though.
> Not really.
Yes, REALLY. In fact it can be even worse.
See the latest (June 2023) elections in Greece [1] (supposedly the cradle of democracy): First party got a 40.56% on a 53.74% turnout. I.e. around 22% of the electorate. Yet, this was adequate to yield a solid parliamental majority for 4 years.
Also mind that the election system had been changed to allow this travesty by the very same party and PM that won the June 2023 elections.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2023_Greek_parliamentary_...
In any case, the non-voters are OK with whatever party might win, because otherwise they should have made their vote or created a political party that might be agreeable to them.
Also, in practice, no, you cannot make a political party in Greece. There's a country-wide threshold of 3% that you need to exceed to get into the parliament. A lot of well-organized parties struggle (and often fail) to exceed it. So even if you get 100% in an electoral district, you won't get its respective parliament seats. In fact (IIRC the tidbits of the election law), you will be making the first party stronger (and I don't mean by depriving votes from the second party).
This is not unlike other Western democracies. But this is essentially a design to cull any grassroot movements. Not very democratic.
You can quibble about whether a 3% threshold is "democratic" or not, but for all practical purposes if your movement can't get 3% you stand no chance of getting your policies enacted.
One can still fault them of course, but it is a distinct category, and it is not at all a clear sign of consent, if even the active choice ever was.
That alone is pretty un-democratic, no? Certainly politics is a world where it's hard to find an ideal situation pretty much ever, but I think a democracy where a third or more of eligible voters don't want to support any available candidate... that doesn't sound particularly democratic.
The US with its two-party system suffers from this problem, and it's a very bad one. There were more eligible voters in our 2024 presidential election that didn't vote at all (89M) than there were people who voted for Trump (77M) or Harris (73M). It's pretty messed up that more than a third of the electorate was so dissatisfied with their options that they didn't cast a ballot at all.
Whether or not this is a useful/interesting metric is debatable, I suppose.
Swing voters / swing states / whatever the particular country-specific analog is -- this is a symptom of poor voting systems; unfortunately the people in power like how this works, and so it won't change.
It's also, at least in the US, a collective action problem: a state that tries to be more "fair" (doesn't gerrymander, perhaps awards presidential electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote percentages, etc.) will end up giving seats/votes to the "other side" more often than polarized states that stick with FPTP.
"typical modern democracies" don't use the extremely terrible first past the post. It's mostly used in the UK and a few former colonies, but most of the world's democracies (even the flawed ones) have realised its shortcomings and have evolved past it.
This list includes Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, etc...
Not that only FPTP is terrible either - it is just what people evoke when they say "well xy people voted for this, right?". In more fair systems, the voted person or party may not even have been their first or second choice, so that on its own violates this notion again too, just differently.
Now search what happened to the Iran's democracy in the 70s and why their redemocratization stopped in the 90s.
I think however you'd both be in agreement about the broad thrust of the argument - that this is a slightly daft thing to lay at the feet of your average Iranian, who will already be perfectly aware of what its government gets up to.
Even if there was a referendum in the US on whether to drone strike alleged drug traffickers or whatever, it's still a stretch to blame all Americans (with "your" language), because it's there's still a good chance that a given American visitor didn't actually vote for it.
In properly democratic countries you would have more than 2 parties, with more than 2 viewpoints. You pick one that aligns with you, and they actually have a chance at winning.
So what is interesting is that this person is fully able to assign blame to individual Iranians for their government's actions but, one would imagine, is able to separate themselves from the actions of the US government.
I wrote "one would imagine" because there was no reply so we cannot say for sure. But my experience with Americans who do this "all Iranians/North Koreans/Syrians/Iraqis etc are bad!" thing is that they carve out little exceptions for themselves and the USA so that their reasons to hate others never seem to apply to themselves.
The fact that Iran is pretty authoritarian and undemocratic just makes the position even more absurd and drives the point home further.
The common people are responsible for the actions of their government in a democracy.
The US killed 400+ Million people in the past two centuries.
Therefore I hate all Americans.
I have trouble believing this is true by any definition that leaves any large group of people unhated.
the candidates are approved by a religious board, but its got a full set of checks and balances and allows for liberalization. The reality is that given a panel of candidates Iranians have often voted for the conservative candidate
i get there is a large amount of liberally minded people in big cities that feel disenfranchised.. but i wouldnt be surprised if the government is still highly popular with the majority of people
Comparing it to North Korea or China is way to simplistic
The US also did not create political Islam, which predates the US by over 1000 years. Blaming the US for the problems of this region which has always had these problems is counter-factual. The problems of this part of the world - poverty, violence, religious oppression and dictatorships - predate western civilization as a whole, and in fact the oppressive empires from the Middle East / North Africa spread earlier and wider than western empires.
Well they did intervene during the 1952 revolution. The secular democratic government wasn't very convenient so they basically undid the revolution and reinstalled the Shah in power. Then the second time the Shah was overthrown, it was done by Islamists, not by the secular elected parliament.
There are valid ways to punish a country for aggressive or oppressive actions - like sanctions - and there are non-valid ways - inherently blaming and then ostracizing every member of the country, for example. And when you take the position that, "If you don't agree with my actions, you're also part of the problem" you are not doing anything but causing people to get annoyed with you and your position, and reducing credibility for the groups you're trying to advocate for. In other words, you're doing more harm than good.
"American IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Israel so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians."
Sadly, in our world where everyone has a voice, you're going to get a lot of this. There's no avoiding the stupids.
I don't think anyone believes it is easy, but are sanctions not at least an incentive to try?
The only thing they can do is to make dictators more popular and provide them with an excuse for their economic and political failures.
When someone in Cuba is denied something because of Sanctions, they are not going to blame the Castro family, they are going to think, "Hey, Fidel was always right! those Americans are just a bunch of sadist psychopaths that are trying to destroy my country.
In general, a good rule of thumb in life, is that whatever policy people like John McCain or Lindsey Graham defend, the right position is the exact opposite of theirs.
But what you're saying is that sanctions are more of a marketing issue when it comes to who is blamed?
> Economic failures
Hmmm
Sanctions that worsen things for ordinary people really isn't going to change much in countries like this. It would be much more productive to try turn the army against the regime, or organize political and armed resistance.
Where did you get that data from and what do you mean by "hate" in quantifiable terms? (just being "unhappy" with outcomes of certain policies does not mean they would necessarily want to uproot everything for the better)
They have the power to choose who rules them if they want to. Nobody else does. Iranians are responsible for Iran's actions just like Russians are responsible for Russia's actions and Americans are responsible for America's actions.
It's easy to call for action from your comfortable life.
No, the populace does not bear the same responsibility for the country's actions in all countries. Swiss with direct democracy bear much higher responsibility than systematically oppressed populace in other countries.
Failing that, I don't know. I guess they'll have to figure it out as they go. All I'm saying is it's their country, their responsibility. And for example in the case of Russia there's clearly widespread support for Putin and his war so I'm not really expecting nor calling for them to do anything about it. I'm just saying I hold them responsible and I think the rest of the world should too. A leader is nothing without followers.
This screams privilege. I wish you never experience oppression, but please try to understand you privilege.
Obviously I'm not suggesting that it's easy or even possible. Though I also don't think we can completely rule out the possibility of a peaceful revolution. Stranger things have happened. And it certainly would be better than a violent one.
Anyway have a nice day
I agree that the person you're replying to is getting a bit testy, but I think it's a bit justified, as you're being a bit obtuse here.
"Ideally" is irrelevant. We're not talking about ideal cases in these threads, so to bring up that word feels disingenuous. Yes, ideally people in a country where their government is doing bad things can peacefully replace their government with another one that won't do bad things.
But in practice, where in the world does that actually exist? Basically nowhere? So what's the point in bringing it up?
> Though I also don't think we can completely rule out the possibility of a peaceful revolution.
That's a bunch of weasel-word language. Sure, you can't "completely" rule out anything. But for most (all?) of the places under discussion, there's something like a 0.001% chance of that happening, which is far below the threshold of not even bothering to bring up the possibility.
Here's a history on nonviolent revolutions though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_revolution
Yes, there is widespread support for Putin and his war - but by this very reason, how can Russians who do not support Putin and his war can be held responsible for it? What do you expect this minority to do, exactly? You can't hold people responsible for not doing something if you can't even articulate what that something is is.
Your entire argument is premised on the notion that there's a coherent "them". But that is virtually never the case, even in popular dictatorships.
These things affect everyone, that's why we all have a responsibility.
Some even line up to vote for sham Presidential elections of the Mullah regime, whose turnout legitimizes the regime, while inside the United States! Being Stanford educated does not prevent this seemingly cognitive dissonance or perhaps deception; it actually makes that more likely.
Then I recommend some history books. Family ties can be strong and the persecution of the jews was not always as violent and open as it was during the war. It was more systematic discrimination in the beginning, so of course people still travelled back and forth. Uprooting a whole family is not a simple thing.
"Some even line up to vote for sham Presidential elections of the Mullah regime"
What else they are supposed to do?
That is a small option of influence and they use it. You think the Mullahs would loose their power if people just would not vote for them? If that would be true, they would be a democracy.
I am positing perhaps they are a democracy. Many of the "educated people" in question that the GP suggests "hate" the government, may say so but their actions nevertheless are directly and indirectly benefiting the Mullahs. Democracy does not mean good, or effective, or not evil. It might be a collective compromise towards mediocrity and stagnation.
Then maybe take a closer look into how their system works.
Every candidate has to be approved by the Mullah's. So the Mullah's are effectivly in control. Still, there are differences with the candidates. Would I vote under such conditions? No idea, I am struggle to find a party representing my views and I am in a western democracy.
To be clear, I am not defending their system. I am suggesting democracy is not a panacea that automatically guarantees prosperity. Far from it.
No, but I would say it is a precondition for broad prosperity. When the wealth and power lies concentrated with small minority, they tend to use their power to keep it that way. If power is distributed, so will be the wealth usually. And yes, I do see some problems with western democracies as well.
Rule of law is much more important to success and prosperity than fetishizing a mechanism to vote in the head of state. There has been many successful instances of prosperous monarchy in Iran and elsewhere throughout history. The rich Persian Gulf states are prosperous monarchies. Iran was too, a constitutional monarchy, uprooted by Islamic-Marxist ideology partially in the name of “social democracy,” as if that’s a virtuous goal. What they ended up is Mullah. Chaos and tyranny, as Hamilton and Adams would predict.
If you are into that, good luck with that and hope that there will never be a retarted king. Because it all depends on whether the king is nice and capable, or not.
Is that the stability and rule of law I should look forward? And they are all not so long lived either btw.
Plots, intrigues and coup d'etat of people who think they would make a better king is still a thing.
And .. I do make the claim that a real direct democracy does not tend to centralisation of power, as there are check and balances, but politicians left alone surely will aim for that as it make governing easier.
In a democracy if you control all the votes of people you should be able to make changes in the government that the incumbent may not want. You can't do this in Iran.
How are you sure about this? What evidence or statistics do you have that there have been enough people who want an alternative that is sufficiently different? It appears the regime is great at persuading people they want some sort of "light reform" and propagandized the populace to hate taking a risk for real change. It appears lots of people talk the talk but are comfortable where they are and in fact resist change when it happens. Otherwise you should have seen some level of unrest given the lack of water and electricity and the regime at its weakest.
Vice versa, how sure are you about it being true in other countries? Looking at various elections in parliamentary systems like Germany, France, or Canada, it does appear that even a strong opposition has a really hard time competing with the status quo in a "democratic" setup. The system resorts to all trickery including importing voters and creating unnatural coalitions to enforce the establishment agenda. And that is not including physical elimination of the opponent which was attempted in the United States.
That is because they wouldn't be having a family in Germany since they would be dead
Not sure how bringing a family member an iPhone is "benefiting the Mullah's system". It's a rounding error. And those family members are well aware that they can't get an iPhone in the usual way.
> I don't think a jew would have gone back to Nazi Germany to visit family
They might, though, despite the risk! And this isn't really a great comparison, since a Jewish person visiting Nazi Germany to visit family would run a high risk of being found out and sent to a camp (along with the family they're visiting) and killed. I don't think that sort of thing would likely be the case for an Iranian expat visiting family in Iran.
Iran had a democratic government. That democratic government voted to do something against Britian's economic interests. In response America dissolved it's government.
If I lived in a nation where any government instability would be used by wealth foreign powers who didn't care if I lived or died, I would also be hesitant in brewing any anti-government fervor.
You can't hold them wholly responsible when they don't even have the power of true self determination.
I don't care what your history is. I care what you're doing now, and if what you're doing now is killing people over 80 year old beef (or anything else really) then I have absolutely no respect for you nor your history. Get over it, move forward. War should be a thing of the past at this point, we all share one planet.
I'm not sure how Iranian's are supposed to "get over" the fact that America wants middle-east hegemony. My point is exactly that:
You wish the blame the Iranians for the problems with their government, but the underlying problems with their government is because _Americans_ can't stop electing war hawks. The only sin Iranians have comitted in the eyes of the west is being born on top of an oil field. The "beef" might be 80 years old, but the oil is there today and America wants it's cut. Iran didn't want sell their oil to the British while their own people starved and for that they've been a quagmire for 80 years. You are asking them to live as slaves in the name of peace.
Would you tell Ukrainians that they are at fault for the war?
The only part of your claims that I've found information about is the CIA/MI6 orchestrating a coup in 1953, over 70 years ago. Iran was an ally for a long time after that, the Iranian revolution happened two decades later.
So unless you can point to something more recent I really don't think your blaming the US makes a lot of sense. Iran was an ally of the west and Israel for a long time, then religious extremists took over and pissed all over those alliances. Here's an AI-generated summary:
> Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran experienced significant economic growth and secular, Western-oriented modernization under the Shah, with expanded education and some cultural freedoms. After the revolution, however, the economy stagnated, inflation and unemployment rose, and per capita income declined significantly
The revolution was not the fault of the west. Iran was doing well, then the revolution happened and it went to shit. I'm sure the west would be happy to support Iran again if it got its shit together. I honestly don't believe these claims that the US is pressuring Iran for oil. Maybe they were 70 years ago, but that's really not very relevant any more.
Regardless, it's laughable to think that regular Iranian citizens are just as responsible for their theocratic dictatorship as Americans are for the US's (crumbling) representative democracy. Those two things are not the same at all. Your average Iranian has zero influence over what the Iranian government does. The average American... put Trump in office, either by voting for him or by abstaining.
If you want a democratic Iran, both the current government of Iran and its most powerful enemies will do everything they can to stop you.
Now I agree that the policies of the United States may not always be in the interest of the people from that part of the world, but a "mild" dictator like the one that the Saudi Arabia has or the one that Turkey has right now, these are better models sometimes. The SA of 50 years ago had no notion of human rights and severely under developed and could in no way support a democracy. Of course a dictatorship is not ideal, and the people of SA will have to pay a terrible price for it some day, but for now a dictatorship that "bows" to the west is not the worst thing either.
Who would give an honest answer here?
Tales from an insider don't help very much, because people will only report about their own bubble, the city/province/town they live in, their family and friends of similar interest and social status, their workplace, etc. Also, there can be a severe selection bias, people wanting to talk to outsiders on the internet or even leave a country are probably more often critical of a regime and its decisions.
So from the outside, the only sensible thing we can do is see the country as a whole, lump in the government with the people. Because we cannot really know if people think differently and who they are. We cannot isolate or punish "just the government". And if there were a majority against the current government, there would be a revolution at some point. If there isn't one, opposition against the regime just isn't strong enough.
And on the flip side of that, the less educated people are, the more susceptible they are to propaganda.
The actual intent of sanctions is to cause economic damage. In that respect this is an account of the sanctions working exactly as intended: they are making it harder for OP to work as a software developer, which makes it harder for the Iranian regime to benefit (directly or indirectly) from the efforts of software developers in Iran.
It's probably some kind of coping mechanism for not knowing anything about the people they're talking about, or they want to keep their world view nice and clean: we, the good guys, VS them, the uncivilized bad guys. It's as accurate as saying "all Americans are pro Maga white Christians because obviously if they weren't their government would be different"
A shower thought:
Wouldn't it make more sense if country A that considers sanctions against country B provided very "cushy" immigration laws for highly educated people from country B so that country A profits from these people's efforts while country B will suffer from a brain drain?
And by "hold power internally" I don't mean population uprising, I mean to keep the factions within the government (especially the military) united under the leadership by buying them out.
I believe increased population unhappiness is more of a side-effect that can be both beneficial (if it incites anti-government sentiment) or detrimental (if it incites nationalism) to the country imposing sanctions.
Like we did in Afghanistan? Because we lost Afghanistan in the same time we took the country, about two weeks.
The current government of Iran is a direct result of the US's meddling in this way, so I'm not convinced this is a winning strategy either.
It's not looking too likely. You have Google's planned app developer verification, the UK's Online Safety Act, the EU's plans to interfere with E2EE, EU privacy rules causing sites to be riddled with popups, money laundering rules making banking increasingly more tedious, power concentrated in the hands of a few nation-state sized tech companies, countries becoming more authoritarian even in the West.
As an anecdotal example, I'm currently living/travelling between various EU countries, where a few years ago I would have expected a great deal of online freedom. Instead I now have to constantly change my VPN exit point to get around various restrictions depending on what site I'm using and what they have decided to block based on location.
If we can't even get these things right in the so-called free democracies of the West, what hope is there for the world in general? I'd like to be optimistic about this, but it's hard to find reasons to be.
It’s all pretty moronic if I’m honest. I really hope things get better for you.
So, just an advice to all wannabe overseas-dictatorship-overthrowers - be nice, try to educate the people, don't make assumptions about person's wrongdoings and awareness based on their IP.
A good service with a strong message that Russian/Iranian is seeing on a regular basis does a lot more good than a service that throws a perfect insult just once. At least if your goal is to actually change something rather than throwing insults.
The intent was never to change your political stance. It's just plain old hate. Armchair political activists are always looking for "morally correct" excuses to be racist and xenophobic, and "your government did a mean thing so you as a citizen are responsible" is one of their favorites.
I can guarantee that your views would change very quickly if bombs started falling closer to where you sit and killing your friends and people you know.
The problem is not with "bad" countries.
The problem is when a large amount of abusive traffic comes from a handful of countries, it's technically easier to block entire IP ranges and ASNs, than to filter and allow the small amount of well-behaved clients while blocking the rest. This is especially the case when the company has no commercial presence in these countries.
To be fair, the scenario you describe where countries are blocked purely out of political or personal reasons does exist, and I agree that it's morally wrong, even if it's the prerogative of any individual or company who they want to provide service to. But in my experience the blocking is usually motivated by abuse.
In my experience the reason is one of the following:
1. Following the local jurisdiction. By far the most common one, and one I have least questions for. At least not to the companies who implement this policy - someone over here already posted the consequences of not complying. Big companies often care to say "nothing personal, buddy, strictly business", but nothing more as in the OP's case with Microsoft.
2. Avoiding the attacks, as you said. I definitely agree they exist. And I can imagine every Cloudflare block page I've seen is because of that, but in my experience it's maybe 5-10% of all blockings I experienced.
3. Political activism. What my comment was about. It's always either individuals or small companies. It's always outrageously dumb and pathetic (obviously, except when it comes from an actual victim) and just does the job opposite to the proclaimed intention.
Abuse is becoming a much bigger problem lately, to the point that even large western providers are getting the same treatment nowadays. More and more I see people talking about banning Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, and at any given time I can see several of their IP addresses in abuse reporting websites (spamhaus, abuseipdb).
What is the future here? I see no reason for those providers to tighten on abusers, given how long they’ve already ignored it. Pretty sure at some point you’ll have to have your own ASN and IP ranges to be able to do anything on the internet.
As a service owner currently looking at adding widescale blocks based on location... it's not a global business, so the downside of blocking an entire country is functionally zero and the upside of easily removing a tonne of compromised machines from the 'can try to DDoS us' pool is noticeable.
USA is lucky to be in position where others are too afraid to apply this reasoning to them, knowing they do literally the same with their closest ally.
Turns out that they aren't all that hard to develop once the original is unavailable, since lock-in is the main barrier to entry. In this sense, sanctions can sometimes have the opposite effect - by removing the established players from the market, they create opportunities for locals to fill the niches, making the country more self-sufficient in the long run, and thus harder to influence.
for Iranians it's the same. and it's ground truth.
the sanctions actually are designed to push the people of Iran to change their mind and overthrow their gov. it's easier than starting a full-blown war against Iranian that will cause damage or kill U.S soldiers' lives. the sanctions are deliberately implemented to target the people and force them to follow the will of the whom established them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_statute
The EU has since the 1990s gone out of its way to support countries like Iran and Cuba against US/Israeli economic sanctions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_agains...
I always find amusing how the west always blames the people of the rivals "iranians", the "chinese", etc but when something is wrong with their side they blame an entity to detach themselves "the american government", "this administration", "nazi germany", etc
Also, collective punishment is literally as old as written history. I’m not sure if there are writings that provide a coherent moral theory of why it’s acceptable that you could call “collective responsibility” from those times, but it was the norm for thousands of years of warfare.
Mostly because the USSR was the new enemy and Germany had to be an ally after WW2.
While the war was still ongoing there was carpet-bombing of German civilians, and some of the plans for after the war originally included complete destruction of industrial capacities, forced displacement of the population of formerly industrialized areas and forced labour for the whole population (google Morgenthau plans).
The Morgenthau plan was also unpopular in Britain. Churchill only really considered it because he knew he had to keep the Americans happy to win, and Eden hated it. Remember that humiliating the defeated enemy had been tried before in 1918, and it didn't end well.
Notice how I didn't say "collective punishment" yet you put those words into my mouth and argue with that. Collective responsibility was was most definitely enforced on German* culture where it still echoes throughout the norms of education and political systems.
* West German really, as the East remained unreformed: which you can clearly see in the voting patterns today.
Also, while we’re laser-focused on 20th century Germany, we might as well look at it just before WWII. The Treaty of Versailles (in addition to being practically punitive) had a clause that is commonly referred to as the “War Guilt Clause” that justified their onerous treatment after the war, and the Weimar Republic had public debate of what they called the Kriegsschuldfrage (literally War Guilt Question) before the Nazis even came on the scene.
I don’t know if the literal term “collective responsibility” was first used later, but I don’t see how the concept is so different. Sure, the Allies did a better job of driving the concept into public consciousness the second time around via prolonged occupation - but they clearly felt justified in holding the German people responsible the first time.
In everyday speech, people don’t carefully separate “the people” from “the state.” A French person talking about the U.S. usually says les Américains. A German talking about the French will just say die Franzosen — or, if they’re in the mood to tease, die Froschfresser. It’s only in news or diplomatic language that you see “the American government,” “the French government,” or “London” when referring to Britain.
The phrase “this administration” is mostly used domestically, by citizens talking about their own rulers. In Portugal you’d hear "este governo é uma merda", and in Spain the exact same sentiment — give or take a letter or two.
And “Nazi Germany” is only used when distinguishing regimes — Weimar vs. Federal Republic, Estado Novo vs. the Portuguese Republics, the French Fourth vs. the Fifth Republic, and so on.
That might make sense if the email stopped at "Iranian IPs", but it continued with "... due to your decision ..." (emphasis mine). That makes it sound like the author is personally responsible.
Govt proscribing access by law is something, but I cannot imagine a guy going out of the way to put ipblocks.
I grew up in a country occupied by Russians. I really feel for the Ukrainians. Currently, there seems to be a social contract between Putin and middle-class Russians from Moscow and St. Petersburg - they will let him bomb Ukrainian civilians, as long as he shields them from getting really hurt by that war. They can continue living pretty comfortably, as long as they go along with it. To me, this just feels wrong. Yes, it is hard to change anything in a dictatorship. I know that from personal experience. But I believe that ultimately, citizens have the responsibility for what their country is doing. And if what their country is doing is destroying another country, I am OK with making them feel a bit of heat.
I don't know that much about Iran, but the part I know is that they indeed make drones that pound Ukrainians, including their schools and hospitals. Do I feel certain sympathy for Iranian commoners, who might not make those drones voluntarily? Sure. If I were in their place, I would probably not dare to resist, and I would make those drones. But I feel more sympathy with Ukrainians. And if anything could be done to make it harder for Iranians to make those drones, we should try it. Even if it's unlikely to succeed. Even if it makes the lives of innocent ordinary citizens harder. I hope that if I were an Iranian, I would at least understand that.
Analyze who have perpetrated most invasions ("military operations" if you like euphemisms) in the last 40 years and you'll be surprised who you'd need to "block" given your logic.
Of course, you won't block yourself because it's convenient to be a jingoist when it doesn't affect you.
I have. It was Russia. They are indeed blocked and I am not surprised.
> Of course, you won't block yourself because it's convenient to be a jingoist when it doesn't affect you.
No, I won't block myself because my little country has not invaded anyone. If you are assuming I am an American, I am not.
2 prevalent groups of which are retired and people who moved there to make their ends meet, which will be complete around the retirement age.
> Yes, it is hard to change anything in a dictatorship. I know that from personal experience.
How many changes you did under dictators with actual armies, spy networks, chemical and nuclear weapons?
Your second argument - that this is acceptable collateral damage - makes more sense, but it requires demonstrating that there is some connection between the specific measures and "making it harder".
I think I need to clarify what I mean by "responsibility". Many people confuse "you are responsible" with "you did this" or "it is your fault", but this is not exactly true. Let's say I am an alcoholic. I believe alcoholism is an affliction (some people might not agree with that, but that's another discussion - let's ignore that for now and assume it is an affliction). Therefore, I believe it is not my fault that I am an alcoholic - It was just bad luck that I was born that way. Yet, it is my responsibility to control my alcoholism. If I hurt someone while under the influence, I have to bear the consequences. Some might argue it is not entirely fair, and I would agree. But in my view, it is the closest we can get to fair. I have a better chance of controlling my alcoholism than some random person whose kids I might have killed while driving under the influence.
Alcoholism is an extreme example, but if you think about it for a while, being responsible for something that is not your fault is common. I see Russians responsible in the same way. Citizens of a state share collective responsibility for what their state is doing. And the fact that an individual might not be able to do anything about it does not change that.
> Your second argument - that this is acceptable collateral damage - makes more sense, but it requires demonstrating that there is some connection between the specific measures and "making it harder".
Why? This is not a court of law, where you have to prove guilt to inflict punishment. Sanctions are not a punishment (which is also why I do not like arguments about collective punishment used in this discussion and elsewhere). They are an attempt to pressure a state to stop causing harm. And if that attempt is based on somewhat reasonable assumptions (which, in the case of Russia and Iran, I think it is), I am fine with it.
And let's not forget it is a relatively peaceful attempt. Nazi Germany was "persuaded" by literally destroying them to the point of unconditional capitulation. And many people who had nothing to do with Hitler died. In an ideal world, they would not have, because it was not their fault and they could not do anything, but the problem is that we only have very crude ways of dissuading states from causing harm.
While I do agree with the sanctions against Iran for their aid to Russia in their aggression towards Ukraine, It's not like the US is completely innocent from funding or arming aggressors across the globe. How can the software world be mobilized to sanction the US for this? It can't and it won't because lots of the people in tech within the anglosphere have a vested interest in the US maintaining its power
Like burying a child feels, or your beatmaker got drafted?
Your country is sanctioned. You are asking people to put their own freedom at stake so that you can have a Notion account.
Iran is supplying Russia with drones to attack Ukraine. The sanctions against Iran might be hurting people who do not deserve it, but they aren't some unreasonable act of aggression and you are complaining about your Notion account?
There was a lot of interesting stuff went into the article:
1. Microsoft:
> Back when I was a student, I got access to the Microsoft Imagine, and as a result, I got access to the Microsoft Store as a developer.
Then:
> Microsoft deleted my app, my developer account, and all those comments on my app supporting me and suggesting ideas on how to improve the program.. but I assume it's because of the sanctions.
Here, I got a novice question: Knowing this individual is from a sanctioned country, Why you are allowing him in the first place to put a lot of work to build an app but, after having some success, you destroyed him entirely?!
Also, suggesting ideas on how to improve the program after deleting my account is one of the most hilarious things I have ever read. It is a strong indicator that these emails are just templates built automatically with no soul or human touch. Yes, you heard it right: you are just a row in a table!.. but you still manage to have a PRIMARY_KEY!
2. Notion:
> Since It has been suspended permanently, there's still no option to get it back even by going outside those countries. Sorry for the Inconvenience. Take care.
Same as above! Why letting me build a base of data then one day, you delete it permanently without prior notice or the ability to export it then you apologize for the Inconvenience and tell me to take care of myself!
3. Mike Cardwell:
> I read hackernews on a daily basis
Oh, this made me relief a little bit! I hope Hacker News is neither being banned in any country nor blocking traffic from any country.
> Iranian IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians.
Blaming then punishing an ordinary citizen for arming a foreign country to kill civilians without clear evidence is so dumb.
Also, this reminds me of this post entitled Namecheap: Russia Service Termination (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812):
Unfortunately, due to the Russian regime's war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine, we will no longer be providing services to users registered in Russia.
> However, later, GitHub announced that github is now available in Iran
Good News! read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25648585
5. TIL
TIL about this 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons status code. I won't ever return this code for my websites, everybody, from everywhere, is welcome :)
Finally, I have a dream.. the dream to live to the day where a true open internet sees the light where the entire world have unrestricted access to the same online resources.
Let's hope the next gen protocols will make censorship impossible, especially by law.
Damn ... :/
First, there is the law, and many jurisdictions forbid me from providing any services to individuals and/or businesses in certain countries. See other comments here for details, but these are serious matters.
Second, there is my moral beliefs. I go through life trying to draw a moral line and if something is beyond that line, I take action. Your line might be different. You might be a forever-whataboutist, avoiding taking any action and always saying "but what about X or Y?", trying to point out that I am inconsistent in my actions or beliefs. Well I don't subscribe to whataboutism and I believe it is the cause of much of today's world problems. So I refuse to provide service to some countries, because I cannot stand idly while genocide happens. If your country is involved in genocide, target killing of civilians, or actively helps another country to do so, I do not want to deal with you.
Some will say that individuals are not responsible for actions of their countries. I disagree. For better or worse, the passport you hold brings with it certain benefits and obligations, and ties you to a country. That's how we agreed to run this world. If your country commits horrific crimes, it's time to take action: oppose the authorities, escape the country, apply for asylum, renounce your citizenship. Yes, I know all these are unpleasant and dangerous. So are the bombs your country is dropping onto my friends right now. Taking the "but individuals are not responsible" stance means that I have to watch as some people from countries that are killing my friends live well in safe places, standing on the sidelines and waiting things out, while keeping the option to return to their country once things blow over. Writing blog posts about the finer points of modern Apple design while people get raped and murdered by the army of their country. I don't feel that is right. There must be consequences if your country commits atrocities. Don't like the consequences? Don't let your country get to the point that it commits atrocities.
Love how people in glass houses launch these stones.
I think this is the most insidious part. These companies (on which you often depend for very important things, whether you want or not) will just ban you and delete your stuff, or even shadowban you, without (1) so much as an explanation beyond the Orwellian "you have violated our terms and conditions", and without (2) any possibility of appeal or customer support whatsoever.
This goes for google, discord, reddit, YouTube, github, notion, etc etc etc.
---
unrelated but jesus christ I'm so pissed at west as a russian. For years London was welcoming russian oligarhs with their stolen money. Putin was invited to Finland even after 2014 invasion of Crimea. But you fuckers decided to ipmlement sanctions only after the 2022. So if I sell my appartment in Russia and want to transfer money to Europe now I would need to prove this is not money I pillaged from Ukraine. Absolutely disgusting. Supposedly Finland continues to buy russian minerals still, but as a russian I cannot cross the border with Finland, even if I have a visa.
Just stay at home then, whats the problem? If you are so pissed with the West then why is it a problem that you cannot come here? Just stay in Russia then.
I find that a lot of Westerners seem to have what I can only charitably describe as "romantic notions" of an uprising. Americans perhaps the most because of their national mythology around the Independence War.
I am very sorry that this kind of action affects you personally, as I am sure you have nothing to do with these attacks. However, filtering out Iranian, Russian and Chinese traffic in its entirety is the only way to protect my server from the majority of DoS and hacking attempts.
No, this method isn't going to stop a determined attacker that is specifically targeting you, but that doesn't mean blocking the lower-effort stuff has no value.
Yes it's annoying that people disabled your access because of your location, but at the end of the day it is what it is. US companies get hefty fines if they do business with Iran.
She does not support the current Iranian government, and neither do most of the people in Iran, according to her. But publicly expressing disagreement in Iran could have you disappear. That's why people are afraid to protest and speak out.
Regarding sanctions, it's not that hard to find and buy products from Iran. At least in the EU. What happens is neighboring countries import raw material from Iran, then put a label "Made in Pakistan", for example, and sell it. But those who know, can easily find and buy things like Iranian rice and spices.
At this point it should be obvious to everyone, that western money is (transitively) keeping all the worst regimes alive.
People stopped buying south African stuff, as an apartheid boycott, can we get some china boycott going?
That way you don't lose their data just in case sanctions are lifted
This is an absolutely mental take assigning blame on every civilian of a country. Sadly in probably his worst take, Linus Torvalds also said something in these lines while banning all Russian developers. While the action could be justified, this attitude is never reasonable, and I say that as a Finn with the same opinion about Putin's war of aggression as Linus has.
When a service drops a customer for _any_ reason, even if it was the customers own fault, it should become the absolute norm and a the minimum thing that the service would trigger the same thing they'd do when if the user triggered a manual data export off the service. Even for something relatively simple, like for example I didn't log in to my Spotify account for x amount of years and they disabled my account. The only way I could get my collected albums back was through support, and if I had been unlucky, they'd just deleted all my data.
This is NOT something that should be the user's responsibility. There is no norm for automating data exports off services, hell even Google makes you go through menus every time. Maybe time for EU to be useful again?
Their government, quite literally, does not represent them, their views, nor their interests.
If you want to fix “the Iran problem”, help their people as much as possible.
> Russian IPs are blocked here, due to your unjust and unprovoked War against Ukraine. You are responsible for the rape, kidnap and massacre of innocent civilians.
Which is to me an absolutely bonkers statement, clearly made by someone who has never even tried to research anything about my country. Someone who was clearly born into a democratic society and has lived their whole life in it. And has probably never traveled to countries with oppressive regimes and never made any friends there.
It's nothing but performative bullshit.
Just like it's not the people it's the government and their policies, there, it's not the people, but the government and the policies here.
I remember having compliance trainings that explicitly spelled out sanctioned countries. They are being enforced by compliance and legal departments in every company. There's nothing personal on either side here.
The answer would seem to me to be racism – he values Ukrainian lives more than Palestinians and considers non-white citizens in non-democratic countries responsible for their country’s actions, but white citizens of democracies innocent.
https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-bans-companies-majority-co...
When you grant access/resources to expats of a hostile country, you have to limit them as if they were agents of the foreign country. Even if they like your country, you make them vulnerable to threats of torture/imprisonment of their loved ones back home.
(...)
Then in 1962 suddenly another motive was added :USSR-missiles. The US blockade of Russian warships probably loaded with ballistic missiles on their way to construction sites in Cuba, was the closest brink of war yet. My Dad (ARMY) was on alert and packed to go.
With that resolved and no USSR missiles in Cuba the working motive for opposition fell back on (because Castro, Communism) and its economy was hobbled for years until neutral worldwide investors besides the USSR established ties. To this day Cuba is still on the edge with the lines shifting back and forth.
As has Iran since the Shah dynasty ended and American hostages were taken. So Cuba and Iran have lines stretching back into the distance. Probably you and I are young and it all seems so ancient. But Iran is a wealthy country now and (like us and the CIA) and it is now 'on our watch' to make sure money is not being funneled into the wrong places.
This nuclear thing annoys me but I'm a 'radical'. Aside from sweetheart deals and that 'other' country the US gave The Bomb by supplying their initial fissile material... since the USSR split anyone with MONEY has been able to acquire 1,2,3,+ bombs if they want them. "So and so is two weeks from having a Bomb" is generic Boomer slop to stoke fear and justify anything. And by all means if you have uranium, centrifuge uranium. And build out nuclear power.
Don't reply with an answer and place yourself in the crosshairs. But think on or find out for yourself, what number between 3% and 99% was Iran aiming for? If the number is on the higher side don't think in terms of [stupid] nuclear war, think in terms of money being wasted and having to deal with the most sordid people in the world to sell it. A bad direction. Things like this are both funny and sad, and hint at a world that might have turned out differently, better ( https://web.archive.org/web/20150518180531/http://en.wikiped... ). Time to revisit roads we had not taken.
OccamsMirror•4mo ago
barrenko•4mo ago
And if your're someone sliding into nasty leadership / government situation you have to realize there will be a consequence to that and that the perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.
typpilol•4mo ago
ivan_gammel•4mo ago
totetsu•4mo ago
Then?
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
This works about a third of the time [1].
What does is incentivising domestic policy changes. We saw that with the nuclear deal. But then Trump blew it up because Obama did it.
(On another level, sanctions degrade capability. If there is no room for peace, at least you can limit your adversary’s economy and thus martial production. If regime change randomly happens, you can use lifting sanctions to blow oxygen on the new government’s flame [2].)
[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1, page 159
[2] https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-to...
mirzap•4mo ago
Sanctions punish ordinary people, many of whom are already suffering under the regime. So they end up opposing both an internal and an external enemy. In the long run, sanctions probably destroy and cost far more lives than wars. It's a sadistic way to try to crush an enemy.
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
> Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions
Nobody said it did.
> don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never
Literally a source with a page number, and, in a neighbouring comment, a table with the specifics.
Like, if you had a button that could convert the world’s hot wars into mutual embargoes, would you not push it? Up the stakes: mutual embargo plus embargoed by their leading trade partner.
mirzap•4mo ago
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
…we just had a hot war with Iran. It probably cost us less than our sanctions.
I’ll say this: you’re consistent in your position and I respect that. I just don’t think many people share the view that people getting physically torn apart by munitions is better than have a less-comfortable, possibly borderline, life.
mirzap•4mo ago
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
Idk, how much?
fsloth•4mo ago
Very easy to say. Quite hard to pull off. People in authoritarian countries have very little leverage and would like just to live fullfilling lives.
I’m not saying ”don’t do sanctions” but this mechanistic outcome is highly improbable.
”perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.”
Um - the most polite way of stating this is that this view of how political systems work is highly delusional at best.
Ruling party depends on _elite_ _compliance_.
sssilver•4mo ago
cyberax•4mo ago
Iranians had several mass uprisings that were suppressed by the military. And the top military and religious authorities in Iran have no problems whatsoever living well, even with all the sanctions.
Just like the Russian elites, btw. They can't visit France as easily anymore, but there's always Dubai available. That can't care less where your money comes from.
preisschild•4mo ago
1718627440•4mo ago
Al-Khwarizmi•4mo ago
That's the theory, but has it ever worked?
That something that never works (not even in cases where it has been going on for multiple generations, as in the case of Cuba or Iran) keeps being tried makes it impossible to believe that the intention is making it "work" in the sense you mean. The sanctions are just to sink those countries for political interest. Which in some cases makes sense (e.g. Russia, as it's invading Ukraine and sinking its economy can be a deterrent in that respect), but in others is definitely evil.
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
Yes. About a third of the time [1].
[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1 page 159
Al-Khwarizmi•4mo ago
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
“The success score is an index on a scale of 1 to 16, found by multiplying the policy result index by the sanctions contribution index” (page 77).
Simpler: Table 4A.1 shows their scoring for individual cases. They break at 9 for success versus failure, so maybe eyeball those to see if they gel with your intuition. If not, adjust and re-run the numbers.
My eyeballing suggests it would be quite difficult to zero out the list.
don_esteban•4mo ago
Overall, we found sanctions to be at least partially successful in 34 percent of the cases that we documented.
By our standards, successful cases are those with an overall success score of 9 or higher. We emphasize that a score of 9 does not mean that economic sanctions achieved a foreign policy triumph. It means only that sanctions made a modest contribution to a goal that was partly realized, often at some political cost to the sender country.
Yet in many cases, it is fair to say that sanctions were a necessary component of the overall campaign that focused primarily on the projection of military force.
Second, we classify some sanctions as failing to produce a real change in the target’s behavior when their primary if unstated purpose—namely, demonstrating resolve at home, signaling disapproval abroad, or simple punishment—may have been fully realized.
Devasta•4mo ago
Like, during WW2 the UK was being bombed and ration books and supply shortages were the order of the day. They look back on their endurance of the conditions inflicted upon them as a source of national pride, have to imagine that is the case for many in the sanctioned countries too.
1718627440•4mo ago
olelele•4mo ago
1718627440•4mo ago
1718627440•4mo ago
CapricornNoble•4mo ago
It kinda worked in Syria. The combination of sanctions, plus squatting on sovereign Syrian territory and preventing the government from generating income eventually left Assad's military so hollowed out that that the Turkish-backed rebel faction led by former Al Qaeda members was able to essentially drive to Damascus with minimal resistance.
cornholio•4mo ago
>That's the theory, but has it ever worked?
The point is not to (directly) instigate regime change, but to influence the actions of the existing regime, as well as other state actors not under sanctions, by demonstrating to them how bad it can get. Make an example and so on.
The suffering of the civilians is not the goal of sanctions but a consequence of the choices their - legitimate or not - leaders make, and which ultimately impacts their ability to engage in foreign trade. No country has an obligation to trade with any other, so if civilians suffer after foreign trade is limited, the agency and moral responsibility is with the regime that failed to secure friendly trade relations. Often, humanitarian exceptions are carved out to limit this.
It definitely "works", in the sense that it's often the only tool available, along with positive reinforcements such as aid and support and the threat of stopping them, which is just another flavor of the same. It's hard to have a benchmark for something that "works" better, since countries are sovereign and by definition have disputes and don't blindly follow any established rules or rulers.
hks0•4mo ago
Then half a decade shows that point is not relevant or, the overthrowing is not the point at all.
I too wished the wolrd was that simple. But there are dictatorships, who kill, slaughter, coerce, ... and also all the international affairs from which those people are kept an outsider with zero say by the said government. I don't think we can reduce it to "it's people's fault".
hks0•4mo ago
don_esteban•4mo ago
No, that's for consumption by population of the sanctioning country. The people in the know know very well that that never works.
The point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA. Classic mafia strategy.
The exception were the sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine war. Those were unprecedented (including the freezing of the national bank assets and blocking of Swift) and it looks like the western powers really believed that those sanctions will cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia.
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
This is the symbolic value of sanctions. It’s a part of coalition building and domestic messaging. (Though if you constantly do it this becomes less effective.)
It’s a classic team-building strategy: costly signalling [1]. You see it in mafias, but like, also when a softball team buys matching jerseys.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_e...
ivan_gammel•4mo ago
don_esteban•4mo ago
What percentage of Russia's foreign transactions went through those banks?
Certainly, normal people can't normally transfer money to/from Russia. The same for almost all companies.
ivan_gammel•4mo ago
lyu07282•4mo ago
XorNot•4mo ago
We don't sell them weapons, and we try to limit dual-use technology from being freely available.
Defense tech uses a lot of open source software and commercially available software - letting a regime simply buy technological advantage it can't cultivate is a good way to lose that advantage and then also lose the culture which can create it.
t1E9mE7JTRjf•4mo ago
yawpitch•4mo ago
Especially if you’ve just been dumb enough to re-elect that nasty leadership / government on behalf of (and at the behest of) the people who benefit off having that ruling party in office.
constantcrying•4mo ago
In basically every case a bad government is preferable to the destruction, chaos and death a civil war brings. "Just overthrow your government" is ridiculous plea.
dvdkon•4mo ago
constantcrying•4mo ago
And for some it worked out pretty badly. Hungarians rebeled against communism, but that rebellion was put down brutally.
You are correct that towards the end of the Soviet Union many of the client states and Russia itself had popular uprisings which succeeded, but that that point the Communist Government was already failing.
My point is not that no popular uprising has ever worked or that outside pressure can not force the end of some regime, but that telling people that they need to take up arms against their government is an insane proposition.
sjapkee•4mo ago
dvdkon•4mo ago
Even the Asian parts of the USSR mostly had peaceful transitions into independence (and often into the hands of new semi-dictators, but that's beside the point).
sjapkee•4mo ago
Yeah, it will certainly make life better, works every time (no).
marcosdumay•4mo ago
After the CIA and the US foreign policy had so much trouble overthrowing the old one and putting that one in place?
palmfacehn•4mo ago
>I read hackernews on a daily basis and I visit lots of different websites regularly. I am almost always on my VPN as I am internally firewalled by the government and externally shooed because of the sanctions, so I am probably missing some of these heart-warming messages:
>>Iranian IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians.
> I actually do not blame the people who do this. I think there is a fundamental misconception that people think because "Islamic Republic" has the word "Republic" in it, it must be a government of people in charge.
Total war and total information war are the side effects of the Democracy meme. Everyone from a taxi driver to a professor is assumed to be a political actor. The rationale runs something like this, "because you have a vote, you are defacto responsible for the actions of your state and political classes. Vote harder next time."
Meanwhile the individuals involved never explicitly consented to be governed. Even if there were a meaningful democratic process, it doesn't follow that the individual could withdraw consent. Ironically one of the suggested avenues for withdrawing consent in a democracy is to refuse to vote.
adastra22•4mo ago
vasco•4mo ago
tgma•4mo ago
vasco•4mo ago
thayne•4mo ago
palmfacehn•4mo ago
constantcrying•4mo ago
randomNumber7•4mo ago
The key upside of democracy imo is then that most people do not see a reason to use violence; They can vote and never need to withdraw consent that extremely.
Draiken•4mo ago
Now we have a pacified populace that allows corruption to run freely and keeps repeating "violence is never the answer" while forgetting meaningful change almost always requires it.
Never forget we wouldn't even have weekends if people hadn't died for it.
I wish we never needed violence but it seems to be wishful thinking rather than reality. Will people oppose the next Hitler by ranting on Twitter and peaceful protests? Something tells me that won't work.
olelele•4mo ago
randomNumber7•4mo ago
marcosdumay•4mo ago
It's a bit paradoxical, but almost all real change is done by the threat of violence, and almost none of it is achieved by applying violence.
But you are right that as people more radically reject violence, democracy dies and changes stop. Even though violence almost never achieves anything.