You don't have to stretch out your reading very far to discover that lots of news sites, especially outside the USA, are flooded with comments from people who have been posting to them for years and yet are deeply skeptical about the current wave of anti-Russian stories being pumped by western media. This isn't being "pro Putin", it's about realising that our own governments are so deeply and nauseatingly hypocritical that anything they say can be safely assumed to be the opposite of the truth.
E.g. whilst the western media is busy trying to claim that only evil authoritarian Russians would be so draconian as to forbid anonymous blogging, the NSA is busy de-anonymizing any blogger or any other internet user they wish bypassing the systems of law and democracy entirely. Is that really a false equivalence, or is it just pointing out the painful and obvious truth?
NSA's actions have been indefensible, but they aren't the same as Russia's. Your comparison is itself a textbook false equivalence.
Western governments routinely de-anonymize citizens. E.g. when a serial killer finally gets tracked down despite taking pains to remain anonymous, we normally consider that upholding justice, not subverting law and democracy.
So while the NSA has certainly done some horrible things, merely trying to de-anonymize reasonably suspicious actors isn't necessarily one of them.
And even if we assume the NSA were unreasonably de-anonymizing people as a matter of course, their job would certainly be a hell of a lot easier there if the U.S. could force bloggers to register after 3,000 hits!
On this subject, most everyone do agree. Again note -- that is unusual. Maybe unique. And you claim that is a conspiracy, based on that there are lots of spin used on every subject by everyone with a finger in a pie?
That is exactly what Putin's media writes -- the whole [non dictatorial] world is in a conspiracy against Russia. Because they hate Russia!
(I can tell you how unanimous this is in Sweden: Most of the left wing extremists don't support Putin re Ukraine. These people in Sweden are USA haters which have never supported a democracy in a conflict with a democracy...)
You've already lost this false equivalence.
In that case, what would the NSA do to a blogger, the answer because the US has something called the Constitution, and though you may cynically, the US couldn't throw someone in jail for whatever the NSA dredges up or whatever while in Russia, the same is not the case. There are not any real credible cases of people being poisoned for thought crime.
"The US does bad things as well" is not Putin apologia but a sincere plea for the US to recognise the idea of universally applicable international human rights law.
Edit: The astroturf was obvious in the Swedish language. Very shortly: People with very bad Swedish started posting pro Putin comments, some obviously using G Translate. They were unable to discuss certain things -- like that international democracy indexes class Russia as autocratic. (They'd probably be fired.) There were systematic down votes (10-100 down votes in a minute probably going through a bot net, so web admins couldn't automatically detect it). This spamming with very, very unusual opinions were systematically half of all comments on those web sites I read. (After a few months the Swedish of the posts got better, some halfway to idiomatic.)
Edit 2: Sprint, maybe. But not in the same volume in Swedish and not with that amount of fake votes.
Usually these guys (Putin's apologist not major players) don't know much details about the subject (as well as most other people/all of us) but they use these arguments to justify crimes of Putin's regime.
It is like to justify killing of innocent people in the USSR because Nazi Germany did this too.
Disclaimer: i don't compare the US or other countries with Nazi Germany but used this example as a hyperbole to show the issue.
For example, within the UK David Cameron championed laws in the 80s that made it illegal for goverment to publish material that could promote homosexuality. People shrug off resposibility for this by telling you that "it was a different time". Russia has introduced laws that are not dissimilar to widespread outrage. Whilst we are right to campaign against such things you cannot expect a country to modernise instantly overnight or welcome outside interference.
People should be reminded that all countries are following a path, and some countries are further along than others. The west does not have a monopoly on justice.
These things should all be dealt with equally, no matter who the perpetrators are and who the victims.
Same exact thing with religious debates.
Iran can't have peaceful nuclear tech, but Israel can have their Nukes.
Kosovo is a "special case" allowed by EU, but other parties can't do the same. Even enthnic cleansing argument doesn't cut it - look at Ukraine, same thing pretty much, but KFOR is good, and DNR/LNR are terrorists.
Not "Your country also did something almost similar in other circumstances".
But "A third party did something almost similar in other circumstances".
As I've written multiple times in Swedish -- you must update your argument templates for the local environment!
Edit: Here is a business idea to get round the voting problem by paying money from China, Russia, Microsoft (they stopped after the court cases?) and other astroturfers. A browser plugin you install where you configure the bank account and web sites you have accounts on. The plugin votes for you and a bit of money is put into your bank account. You could instead work on detectors and honey pot comments (to detect these users), before HN et al are destroyed.
Edit 2: It should be possible to hide the voting plugins better by voting up comments on sham accounts, which then are used for down voting. I see a whole new application for data mining to detect this. :-(
We have a simillar law in Poland, good old communist legacy. Formally, you need to register every media outlet with the court. Whether this applies to blogs is unclear, and it's generally not enforced.
But it could be. Which is a situation bureaucrats love.
I'm guessing that this is how it will work in Russia. No one will get in trouble for praising Putin on their unregistered website.
> “One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” -- Ayn You-Know-Who
Hotels, B&Bs and other accommodation facilities do that for you (that's why they want your ID).
You'll have to google translate it, which is the reason I haven't included it to begin with.
This, as I understand it, is now law.
The fact that the US nearly did something (and might manage to by the back door at some point soon) does not affect whether that something is considered draconian. It just means that the US nearly wrote into law something that many consider draconian.
I don't think this will ever change until the citizens rize and overthrow the government.
The ease with which some throw around rizing citizens and overthrown governments is mind boggling.
While I'd agree that revolutions are often a bloody mess there are a number of examples in recent history where that is not the case. (e.g. The Velvet Revolution[1])
France, UK & the USA all also had bloody revolutions that resulted in democracy (or at least the widely understood view of what democracy is).
This is your blog, correct? Then I understand why you wouldn't see any problem with this new law.
That's what that law was created for, to control the opposition. And more of that is coming.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130807/13153224102/sen-f...
Be prepared for more astro-turfing, more main stream media bias, more placed articles, more leaked information, and more chaos in the message.
And yes, I am more worried about the NSA than the FSB: I don't live in Russia.
