@piggo and we thought Germany was the impostor...
@piggo That's a great shame indeed. For now there is a significant push in the country to "move something" about this, but I wouldn't have high hopes for it to go anywhere. We'll see. Ostrich politics at work in this little land of innocent and ignorant.
But let's not pretend it's all rosy elsewhere. I recommend reading kamilkazani's twitter - it is very instructive - the guy is stirring the pot on German, Czech and other military exports to Russia quite a bit (especially Rheinmetal et al). For instance this thread (and related ones from September) are a good start: https://nitter.it/kamilkazani/status/1567882093585203200#m
And his findings lead to news stories later picked up - for instance that Czech stuff ended in October in mainstream press in CZ and the German connection findings too.
@wolf480pl I agree. But either way, it's on us, the civic society to check on them too - after all, money tends to trump morale, so relying on the govt only is probably naive.
@FailForward @piggo
At the same time, I don't think companies and NGOs should apply sanctions extrajudically, nor be pressured by the public to do so.
At the start of war I saw many organizations jump on the hype train of "russia bad" and do whatever they can to be mean to Russians without any government coordination or thought whether such actions will be effective or whether they'll just make ordinary Russians hate the West more without any effect of Russia's capability to wage war.
@wolf480pl We are living in a free society. Individuals and companies are free to "apply sanctions" as they see fit, there is nothing wrong about it - as far as they are also wiling and prepared to bear the consequences of those decisions. I am not obliged to do business with people I don't like, or don't want to do business with. Is it stupid from somebody's perspective? Maybe. Silly? Perhaps too, but that is how freedom works. I don't need to coordinate with my government on that.
Whether I am interested in not alienating ordinary Russians is also besides the point. They do the job better than I ever could (c.f., e.g., https://nitter.it/JuliaDavisNews, or francis_scarr's feed).
@FailForward @piggo
AFAIU if a company refused service to a customer because said customer was black, or a Muslim, that'd be illegal in most countries.
And where it wouldn't be illegal, it would be wrong by our western morality.
Why should this principle not extend to nationality of the customer?
@FailForward @piggo
Also, for example, in Poland, refusing to sell a product that is intended for retail sale is a civil offense, except when such sale would be illegal.
Now this would not affect selling CNC machines to a business but it's another example that no, just because we live in a free society does not mean business owners can refuse service to anyone they don't like
@wolf480pl And yet we agreed not to sell alcohol to under-18s, or weapons to members of societies we don't like. See, it's not all black or white. I guess we both agree what is going on and why it is so. Where we perhaps differ is where we stand on the spectrum between the reality vs. where we wish the reality were.
@FailForward @piggo
We agreed through the means designated for it by legal orders in each country - for example by voting for representatives who then voted for acts of law that establish a bill that prohibits sale of alcohol to under-18s.
Same how we can agree that someone should be put in prison by passing laws and then having a court of law hold a trail and find that said person did commit the acts that warrant sanctioning them with prison.
We don't just go out and lynch people.
> We don't just go out and lynch people.
Sure. And that's a good thing, I hope we agree on that. I also don't observe e.g., Czech companies doing it - which was start of this interaction. So where do we disagree?
@FailForward @piggo that refusing service to a customer abroad is equivalent to the country you are in harming the country your customer is in
@FailForward @piggo In other words, can we all agree that the government should have monopoly on discriminating based on citizenship and countey of residence?
@wolf480pl While I see where you are probably coming from (philosophically), I rather believe that in terms of social interactions people are free to do whatever they want as far as (at least) 1) it's legal in their jurisdiction; 2) they are not harming other people, and 3) are ready to bear consequences of their decision.
While 1 is clear, to add to 2, I do not see personal refusal to engage with somebody else as harm. At the same time, when a group of people does the same, that is different up to a point of becoming discrimination which is harmful indeed. And somewhere in between lies a thin boundary when a freedom of group of people negatively affects safety of others and that is to be tackled. As for 3, anybody is free to dislike me back, no problem with that. Yes, it hurts sometimes, yet, it is people's right and also their personal responsibility.
@wolf480pl But of course there are many subtleties to all this (which are however irrelevant to our original discussion). Such as behaviour called "stonewalling" in romantic partnerships. That type of non-engagement is harmful indeed. But that's a different story than simply refusing to do business with a company my company for whatever reason dislikes.
@piggo
Ok, so let's focus on the case where a group of people does the same.
Or in this case, a group of companies (which I don't think deserve to have the same freedoms a person would, but maybe that won't matter here).
If a group of companies refuse to to do business with a certain country, does that mean they harm the country?
@FailForward @piggo
Note that I think harming others is sometimes necessary, and we have ways (eg. courts of law) to try to make it happen only to the extent necessary, and limit the chance of doing it by mistake.
Sometimes it may even be necessary to harm whole countries, and we have diplomats and defense ministers to decide whether and to what extent it's necessary.
@wolf480pl But our conversation right now is not about necessity, rather you asked whether me deciding not to engage with customers in some country is equal to my country "harming" their country. Which I find absurd.
> If a group of companies refuse to to do business with a certain country, does that mean they harm the country?
No, not necessarily. Unless they are driven by some malevolent collusion scheme - which would be a case of cartel, in which case for most jurisdictions the touched country could probably start an arbitrage case.
Excluding such a collusion and not assuming their respective governments forbidding them to do business with the said country, you can bet one of the competitors would jump in and start selling. Because that's how markets work. Companies are (for better or worse) not driven by morale, but by profit (or the lure of it). So if for whatever reason your competitors do not engage with an attractive market X while you legally can, you'd be stupid not to. And that is what indeed happens and how this conversation was started: because US and West-EU companies had qualms about delivering dual-purpose technology to Russia, Czech and some German companies (and possibly Slovak intermediaries) happily jumped in and now they pay reputation price for doing so. Business as usual.
@wolf480pl That seems to me a bit overreaching. Why would you draw equivalence between A) my personal decision not to engage with somebody and B) my "country" harming their country? No, we certainly don't agree that A equals B here. Nor am I able to understand why would anybody actually take that stance. Those are 2 different things to me.
Hmm ok, let's bisect.
Imagine that Gazprom was an independent company making decisions independently of Russian government.
If such imaginary Gazprom hypothetically decided to abruptly end its business relationship with PGNiG (the primary gas company in Poland), and as a result there was a gas shortage in Poland, would that be Gazprom the company hurting Poland the country?
@wolf480pl Yes, such a hypothetical company would be certainly harming Poland in this story. But what is wrong about it?
Just as a side-note to show that this situation is not very realistic even if hypothetical, suppose such a Gazprom would exist. That would most likely mean that either 1) natural gas is abundant, or 2) totally unimportant matter - in both cases to a point where commercial companies have a sovereign powers over it - in which case the hypothetical Poland would just switch the provider, because if one Gazprom could exist, then so can 2, 3 or more.
In reality, in Gazprom case we are dealing with a state owning its own resources and using them as a strategic weapon against others - and all that just covered up in a structure of a commercial company. But that is a rather normal state of affairs, isn't it?
I think your example would be more fitting if instead of Gazprom you'd say Apple (also big and important) refusing to open a subsidiary and thus do business in say, Burundi (nothing against Burundi, it just crossed my mind). And that is a totally usual configuration, isn't it?
@FailForward @piggo
Except you can still make ICBMs without a Macbook
@wolf480pl Of course you are right, there are limits to a company's and individual's freedom. In the case you cited, it would be unconstitutional in most countries I care about. But it's more subtle than that.
* **freedoms**: A company or an individual are free to do business as they see fit as far as it is 1) legal and 2) they are ready to bear consequences of their decisions. Moral or not. It boils down to a simple thing: I am free to chose my friends and business partners. And I also am not obliged to be friendly to everybody. And on top, nobody has a right to tell me who I shall be friends with. You have that right too. And I am sure you exercise it as well.
* **society in/out dichotomy** In the end, while we agreed as societies that discriminating against our own citizens/fellow society members on the basis of race, religion, etc. is wrong (for good reasons) = non-discrimination against fellow society members; note, nothing stops us (at this point in history) to discriminate against citizens of other societies = discrimination against non-members of our societies. And it is a thing happening every single day: did you notice the last time you flew different queues for "home" passport holders and "alien" passport holders? Or the whole visa, or residency concepts... In other words, discrimination against non-members of a society is at this point in history an accepted thing. And personally, I see the point of it, even if I would wish to live in a society where that were not true.
I did not, in fact, fly, let alone abroad.
Also, visas, passports, etc - that is all done by governments.
It's the governments and their diplomatic branches that define relationships between nation states.
For example, if you made a trebuchet and launched a rock onto the territory of a neighboring nation state, that would, AFAIU, be an international incident, and it'd involve the governments of the country you were in and the country you launched the rock into.
@wolf480pl Well, our conversation started with the question whether it's OK for a company to choose where and with whom it does business with. And there indeed it's anybody's choice - as far as otherwise legal, morality is not an issue, it's a freedom of choice. Here we are sliding into a somewhat different territory.
@FailForward @piggo
IMO it's on governments to check the exports and block those that would violate agreed upon embargos (and also to make sure the embargos they agree upon are effective and don't have major holes).