Comment by exizt88

Easy to say when you are not the target.

Making me use 50% less electricity is one thing. Having to move all my domains would be quite another.

I'm there with you, but the opposition is disproportionately reliant on VPNs and foreign cloud hosting. It is required to have any shot at tipping the scales at all. The Twitter and Facebook are blocked already at this point.

Blocking SWIFT was for the little people to suffer, same as what Namecheap is now doing. Russian gas company still uses SWIFT and they are not banned it's all theater by the Germans. Germany and France could have prevented this catastrophe but they choose not to.

Economic damage is probably one of the most precise weapons we have that will damage a government yet which doesn't kill people (directly, I know quite well the impact of losing your income on your life in winter).

Could the US (UK, France, Germany, etc) hit Putin directly with a drone or missile strike? Quite possibly (though chances are pretty high that would look a lot like your "coward in a crowd" scenario).

But - pertinent to this conversation - can Namecheap's CEO hit Putin directly with a conventional weapon strike? No. He doesn't have bombs, drones, missiles, or guns. He has domain name registries and web hosting, and the ability to offer and not offer those services to others.

They could have done a 0 day warning. The rock they picked may not have been the absolute perfect rock, but they are making decisions quickly as imperfect people with limited knowledge and trying to make a just but humane action in support of what’s right. So I don’t fault them. Although I also would be quite upset at them if it put me in the situation of many of the commenters, especially if I had made sacrifices to fight against Putin.

War is cruel.

> Don't pretend the West has no more precise option

You are welcome to name what it is.

There is just no way to sanction someone like Putin directly, though. If Putin wants to transfer money or buy foreign currency, an FSB agent in Austria will contact some FSB near lawyer on Malta to set up a fake company in Liechtenstein to arrange a fake sale of goods from Romania - or whatever it takes. Unfortunately, the only way to have any effect is to affect the economy as a whole.

As we speak, the whole Ukrainian economy and infrastructure is destroyed, cities are bombed, hundreds of thousands are fleeing, and people are dying in Ukraine. While you're complaining that you have to transfer your Namecheap domain names. You need to get a sense of perspective.

That someone who's on your side is inherently supplying money in the form of taxes to their Gov who is committing war crimes. We don't want sanctions to continue indefinitely, just until they get their troops out of Ukraine.

Yes, understood. I get where you are coming from, but at the same time I totally understand that for a company with such a large footprint in Ukraine it is absolutely unacceptable to continue to do business with what is now properly termed 'the enemy'. The price for access to the global market is that you behave like a team player and that you don't willy nilly invade other countries.

Even if isolation does not necessarily correlate with regime change that is still something that in the end gets decided within the country, not outside of it. After all, regime change is exactly what Putin was after in Ukraine so that would seem to be fair turnabout.

All of those countries have support from larger countries that aren't party to the sanctions/embargoes they face. Russia is the entirety or a substantial part of that support. Who does Russia turn to that wouldn't worry about being similarly isolated?

True however isolation does help limit the damage they can cause through influence and soft power

Russia has been propping up Venezuela. Maybe there will be quite a few regime changes this year?

That's beside the point. With the presence they have in Ukraine they are forcing their employees to trade with what is at the moment their mortal enemy. That's impossible.

Personally I think the tax bit is thin, but I totally understand the pressure on their employees and that that does not feel right. They are waiting for the next missile impact while at the same time they are working to keep the websites of their enemy up and running, that's not something you should want or expect.

How many Russian people are gonna die because of losing the ability to have their domain registered with Namecheap?

And yes, people will suffer, that's what happens when one country invades their neighbor in an unprovoked attack. You're placing blame in the wrong place here.

More or less than during the war in Ukraine?

In the country where the problem originates or in some other country?

As someone that protested frequently and usually has a "short fuse" regarding abuse of authority, I find that unlikely. Marching down a street can cause collateral damage, you slow down emergency services when you do that. Same with picketing government buildings, people providing essential services just can't show up to work that day.

A modern "government" is a controlled civil war in the same way a modern engine is controlled explosions. I day dream and have the stamina to engage in endless friendly debates about how we can improve or change this, but let's not pretend there's a clean way to engage with "the system" because there's not.

Protests almost by definition cause collateral damage.

If you are blocking off streets, you are slowing down people getting into work, slowing down emergency services...

If you are not doing any of that, you are not getting heard and there's not much "protesting" going around.

I think GP's point was that these protests, while aligned in spirit, might actually work against each other. Non-Russian companies stopping to provide service to Russian-protesting entities will mean that they can't achieve their protest objectives anymore.

But his government is directly killing innocent people in Ukraine right now, which is worse.

Different times call for different measures of protest, albeit these two people still share the same goals against the same aggressor.

For sake of perspective.

Let's say Belgium was invaded and I had to to handle a support ticket from the same nationality as the agressor.

I'm not sure if I would have the clarity to handle it with the "expected" care, if I just had to flee my home. While standing with your employees is one thing, I'm not sure if the same support quality can be achieved.

The whole continent received nuke threats by now, making it worse.

Commenter said they are fleeing Russia, should have more options available outside the country, no?

Wasn't intended to be snarky. It was a bit of shock and surprise at the anger towards Namecheap and intended to point out the fact that while his country literally kills, terrifies, and displaces a country of people, he's on an internet forum complaining that some company inconvenienced him by no longer providing him a service. His anger is misplaced and misguided; his country is at WAR.

This is petty, the comment is factually accurate and not written in an inflammatory manner.

These are the consequences of the decisions made by exizt88’s government, it is not unfair to point this out. Nobody is blaming him.

E: How could this comment possibly deserve to be flagged?

Indeed. And given the state of democracy in Russia and in the US (for now), you could argue that the average US citizen bears more responsibility for the actions of the US government over the last decades than the average Russian for the actions of the Russian government.

I know at least one person who, around the time of the Iraq war, mostly stopped working and no longer pays taxes. It can be done, but it's a pretty serious lifestyle choice.

While there's a lot to criticize about US foreign policy, invading a western nation with a democratically elected government isn't on the list. You really can't sympathize with Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. I wouldn't (and didn't) stop paying taxes over it.

If the US government invaded Mexico or Canada, I might.

Civil disobedience is a personal decision. Judging other people on their decision to practice it is also personal.

In the U.S. it is even coded into the Declaration of Independence.

Quakers in the United States have been lobbying for this for decades. It has no hope of succeeding but, hey, at least they're trying.

Taxes stopped supporting war in the US a long ago because people don’t like paying for wars they don’t support. The “department of defense” finances its wars by borrowing from the FED. These credit card wars inflate the money supply instead and although everyone still loses its a sneaky way to steal money from people.

Specifically Re: hypocrisy. The scale of the issue is the crux to the yes/no answer to your question. Plenty of people drew the line to choose "yes" for the US war efforts in the past. I personally do not believe it would be justified right now.

Yeah but the main point is America mostly doesn't kill Europeans, certainly not western(ised) ones.

Nobody remembers Iraq anymore and the million dead Iraqis, the destroyed country, the resulting vacuum that produced ISIS, the destruction of Syria, and all under false pretense. Oh, and Afghanistan, that unconquerable land that makes a mockery of all its invaders. Or Libya. Or Arab Spring. Or... And these are just the last 20 years.

Of course, Putin should be condemned, but it is interesting how nobody held the US to a similar standard.

There are multiple ways to not pay Russian taxes that go towards war effort against Ukraine besides starving to death.

Protesting the war is one of them. Leaving is another.

Being complicit and dying are not the only two options.

Indeed. They pay taxes at the source in Russia, so that humans get to know and discuss their net salary only.

It's dehumanizing and depoliticizing and should be changed once Putin is out of power.