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by londons_explore 1043 days ago
> today he finally issued a public statement condemning the war

Would you issue such a statement in his position? Think carefully. If you don't, you will probably have twitter brigades trying to smear your name. If you do, your family back home might be at risk, and you will probably never be able to visit them again.

Personally, I cannot in good faith demand anyone condemn the war, if to do so, they are putting family and friends freedoms at risk.

5 comments

His family has left Russia back in 2014.
There’s always someone who stayed. It doesn’t have to be the very closest part of your family.
Doesn't really mean they're safe, does it? A whole lot of ex-Russians in other countries have been killed under suspicious circumstances.
Hmm, on second thought, you may be right and I probably overreacted. I still don't really believe Putin would exact revenge on Volozh — Oleg Tinkoff defected back in spring 2022, and I think his family is quite fine — but relying on Russia not being stupid doesn't sound wise right now.
> I cannot in good faith demand

While some people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasyl_Makukh ) sacrificed their lives in protest of Soviet Russia invasion into Czechoslovakia, timely public statement is the least he could do.

“Sir! We demand your sacrifice your life to us now! It’s tour duty.”

Not your call, nor for any other arm chair general.

Right or wrong.

randomly opens a "history of lynching" academic paper while thinking about this...
Nothing to thing about here.

He could've left russia long time ago along with family and friends.

But he enjoys russian money even though he has more than enough for 100 lifetimes.

So yeah, I can in good faith demand from him and most other russians to condemn the war. Because the reason it happened is precisely that everyone does nothing in russia.

Most of them flee the country because they don't want to get into army, and even when they are abroad and in safety - they still don't condemn the war.

So fear has zero to do with their position.

> If you don't, you will probably have twitter brigades trying to smear your name.

Do Twitter crowds actually do that? Do they keep track of anyone more or less prominent, and write in their comments "Have you spoken out against the war yet?" "I haven't seen you denounce the war"?

Remember that time a year ago in February when the Namecheap CEO gave every person with a Russian ID, living inside and outside Russia, 1-week notice that their account is terminated and they have to host elsewhere?

Including expats, refugees, objectors, what have you. Your contract with Namecheap is terminated for being connected to Russia. Prove to us you're not, if you want to keep your service.

His justification? Well we have a lot of Ukrainian staff and you know, we're not with Russia therefore we're against Russia, therefore...

> If we were virtue signaling we wouldn't willingly be giving up a not non significant part of our business. This hurts us financially but it's the right thing to do, at least for us. Your leader/country is already killing innocent civilians/ukranians. They are putting it all on the line with their lives. They didn't ask for this yet they are dying for it. Change needs to come and the only way it can is for the Russian population to put it on the line as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30505789

It mostly happens via private messaging, but yes. It's part of the "you are either with us or against us" mentality of many campaign groups.

See ~2 years ago when every opensource project was forced to publish a code of conduct and diversity and inclusion policy... Often the people asking for the policies weren't even users of the software involved, let alone interested in writing code for the proect. That campaign seems to have ended, and nobody cares if your project has either anymore.

> That campaign seems to have ended, and nobody cares if your project has either anymore.

Has the movement to rename every master branch to main quietened down as well?

This still makes my blood boil. I've seen people dance around the word master now.
GitHub changed the default to "main" so 95% of new projects will default there.
Gitlab too, and there is enough reason to believe the tool itself will change to “main”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26488039
Only because it was successful.
There are many active 'master' branches at work, and many, many active 'master' branches on Github.

By that measure, the movement to rename every 'master' branch to 'main' has been a resounding failure.

(If you look at the events at the time it sprung up, you could pretty safely say that it was encouraged as a way to distract from the then-current "GitHub is doing business with US's ICE!" hatestorm, and man was it successful.)

If your only active metric is "all or nothing". Sure, there's a few.

But the major git hosting platforms are only using 'main' as the default for new branches, and there is significant enough social stigma for new projects that it's preferred to use main.

I don't have precise statistics, but I would happily wager that even though master was the default for so long that the majority of git repositories that have been contributed to in the last 30 days are not 'master' as the default branch name.

To change a default with such inertia as to completely skew the demographic in favour of the new rather than the status quo: I would certainly merit that as success.

I have seen this numerous times on Twitter explicitly with almost the exact phrasing you are indicating.