Glad to see they arent going along with the bullshit of "all russians are evil and deserve to die" that is recently going around. The russian people is under dictator oppression and deserves just as much support as any other people in the same situation.
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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No, not all Russians are evil and deserve to die. But closing your eyes and playing oblivious to what's happening out there, just believing the state propaganda and living in a position "oh it's just the bad leader" is not a morally OK position.
If there is a dictator in your country you have some moral duty to find out at least a bit about the truth.
How do I know?
I'm German.
My grandparent's generation was the one that actively closed their eyes, that actively looked away, that everything that happend was someone else's problem. They were the Generation that arranged themselves, that did good business as long as it wasn't them that were deported, killed or fought at in the war.
This is not a position that is morally OK, but this is what I see of a lot of Russians. Not all, but a lot.
If there is a dictator in your country you have some moral duty to find out at least a bit about the truth.
How do I know?
I’m German.
Last time I heard, your government openly supported the genocidal state of Israel.
Also I'd say many Russians in 1996 wouldn't expect a war on Ukraine.
My grandparent’s generation was the one that actively closed their eyes, that actively looked away, that everything that happend was someone else’s problem. They were the Generation that arranged themselves, that did good business as long as it wasn’t them that were deported, killed or fought at in the war.
See, somewhere around the year I was born (1996) in Russia it became a social consensus that something is wrong and that these new "democrats" are not in fact democratic in any way, and that they also commit enormous crimes. In 1993 it kinda slipped, because the parliament opposed to Yeltsin had an unhealthy concentration of Communists, neo-Nazis, bandits and hybrids of them.
And, well, then the society with that consensus learned that "the civilized world" considers legitimate the people with whom it does business. No exceptions for authoritarianism or genocide.
There were widespread protests, you know? It was common to treat the Russian government like shit since then and till early 00s too, on TV and in private conversations and so on. But that government endured the storm, and somehow by that time the most important figures not associated with it were dead.
This didn't happen the same way as it did in Germany where people looked the other way because they were generally fine with everything Nazi. This happened because people got tired of looking the right way. It's apathy, not hypocrisy.
I like how you just conveniently ignore the part about a dictator oppression.
The key word here is oppression.
A country that is closing its eyes and deserves what they're going to get is the US. In 20 or 30 years when the US is an authoritarian oppressive State then at that point the people don't have a choice, just like they don't in Russia today.
Authoritarian oppressive states don't just let the people think what they want to think. You are groomed and indoctrinated the moment you receive education until the day you die. The easiest way to control a populace is for the populace to not even know they're being controlled.
A key factor to that is limiting and restricting access to outside information. Which is what Russia does which is why the Tor project is so important
So Germany didn't have dictator oppression in the 30s and 40s? You think we didn't have propaganda and we didn't just kill people for another opinion? And we had access to outside information?
I'm talking about a moral duty to oppose, to inform yourself in spite of all that. And I know it is not easy. We Germans failed that miserably.
The plabook Putin is playing, we've been through it and it is was what lead to WW2.
Germany also had that in the 20s, if we are being honest. It wasn't an imperfect democracy and, ahem, it's been ~35 years since USSR feeling really unwell, and ~25 years since Putin coming to power, and ~20 years since people started suspecting he's not going to leave, and ~15 years since Medvedev becoming a president and Russians splitting into the half realizing that they've just been assraped, and the half deceiving themselves with some expectations, and ~10 years since every Russian being assraped again, Crimea and Donbass.
When Hitler came to power, it was just about 10 years since finalizing the mess that happened in Germany after end of monarchy.
Oh, the populace knows it's being oppressed. It's apathetic.
Russia is ruled by very unpleasant people, not very efficient, not very intelligent, but capable of curbing all threats to their power.
I'm confident that if ever the government in Russia changes, rooting out that mafia group will last for another century or more.
This is something more people need to understand. Just because Putin is the bad guy doesn't mean that everyone ethnically or nationally Russian is your enemy.
Hell, with conscription and an estimated death toll of 725,000 on the Russian side, we need to start recognizing this as a profound tragedy for the Russian people. Most of these men don't know what they're even fighting for, and a lot of families are going to end up shattered as Putin continues to use these conscripted men as pawns.
Way too many folks out there ready to celebrate the Russian death toll while flinging around ethnic slurs ("orcs") because they think that they're somehow sticking it to Putin, the man sending his people to their death.
Nope, on top of being a part of an evil regime, a large majority of Russians are very anti-LGBT. So yea, I'm still team "Fuck those assholes" considering most of them hate my existence and want me to die. Also, let's not ignore that if you take away Putin, the whole country still has a culture that encourages deception and backstabbing to get what you want. So yea, they get no sympathy from me. May they freeze in their shit hovels.
Yeah the whole orc thing instantly rings dehumanization bells as we know them from Netanyahu and other fascists like Hitler.
I remember at the start of the war on practically every reddit thread I looked at were full of Russian people wanting peace and cursing their government. Weird to see people dehumanizing the people who wanted nothing but peace and love.
Only commenting on the orc part, but that's what russians call themselves.
Anecdotal, I have Russian friends (a couple and their kids).
The dad is really apologetic for his country. He also laments not being able to go back to visit his parents, because his profession would likely be in very high demand by the military so he doesn't want to risk getting pulled in for service (even though he's in his 40s).
The mom already went back once, with kids. She says that the population in general, in both Moscow and the countryside, seem really oblivious to what's going on. There's a huge disconnect and often even disbelief about what's going on further west. Likely due to govt media propaganda only running special operations victory headlines. Also those that are able, but down on their luck and fortune, are happy to sign up with the military for (relatively) good pay, especially if their role is not something that makes them fight at the front line directly.
I mean its pretty similar to the US recruiting their poor citizens to fight in the middle east. They are often just as oblivious to the fact that its usually entirely one sided aggression or resource wars.
Ok but the information was available. It wasn't being suppressed. You could openly talk about how awful the wars were without being arrested. The ignorance was self-inflicted rather than state-sponsored. That's significantly different.
There is definitely constant industrial, corporate and state sponsored misinformation. All major news outlets including the more left leaning ones fall in line when it comes to war.
But yes i agree, at least in more recent times, there is no need to suppress the truth anymore. I dont really know why that is, but the political landscape is so full of lies next to the truth that nobody believes or cares about anything anymore.
If you want to help but find configuration hard you can easily help by running a Snowflake proxy on your phone or in your browser.
I have configured my phone run a Snowflake proxy every time my phone is connected to WiFi and charging. It's automated and does not require me to do anything. I have turned on notifications that tell me every time I'm helping someone connecting to Tor. It gives me a good feeling every time.
This seems like something easy to do to empower regular people. Will make a lot more difference than those political campaign donations I made last year 😐
So a web tunnel enabled web server not only serves its own pages, but also acts as a proxy to other sites and all the traffic looks like web browsing to the regular web server?
As a token of our appreciation for your volunteer work, we're offering a Tor t-shirt to operators who run 5 or more WebTunnel bridges during this period [November 28, 2024, and will run until March 10, 2025]
Later:
Maintain your bridges running for at least 1 year.
Am I the only one confused by this wording?
That being said, assuming the latter, that's a lot of bandwidth for a T-shirt.
I'd really like to see the major cloud providers donate a portion of their bandwidth to the cause...but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.
Does anyone know if running a webtunnel attracts additional unwanted hacker attempts to a domain more so than just hosting normal stuff? I presume its all bots and the simple act of hosting anything gets lots of exposure regardless.
I honestly don't have an answer to that but from my understanding running a web tunnel from your home IP can have negative consequences in relation to your address being flagged as a public proxy.
With the potential to be added to certain automatic ban lists. But more likely than not you'll be added to a list of potentially untrustable addresses which means you'll be doing a lot more CAPTCHAS in the future