Delete From Users Where Location = 'iran';
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Us Sanctions on Iran
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A developer's Notion account was terminated due to their Iranian location, sparking a discussion on the impact of US sanctions on individuals and the tech industry.
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And if your're someone sliding into nasty leadership / government situation you have to realize there will be a consequence to that and that the perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.
This works about a third of the time [1].
What does is incentivising domestic policy changes. We saw that with the nuclear deal. But then Trump blew it up because Obama did it.
(On another level, sanctions degrade capability. If there is no room for peace, at least you can limit your adversary’s economy and thus martial production. If regime change randomly happens, you can use lifting sanctions to blow oxygen on the new government’s flame [2].)
[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1, page 159
[2] https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-to...
Sanctions punish ordinary people, many of whom are already suffering under the regime. So they end up opposing both an internal and an external enemy. In the long run, sanctions probably destroy and cost far more lives than wars. It's a sadistic way to try to crush an enemy.
> Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions
Nobody said it did.
> don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never
Literally a source with a page number, and, in a neighbouring comment, a table with the specifics.
Like, if you had a button that could convert the world’s hot wars into mutual embargoes, would you not push it? Up the stakes: mutual embargo plus embargoed by their leading trade partner.
…we just had a hot war with Iran. It probably cost us less than our sanctions.
I’ll say this: you’re consistent in your position and I respect that. I just don’t think many people share the view that people getting physically torn apart by munitions is better than have a less-comfortable, possibly borderline, life.
Idk, how much?
That's the theory, but has it ever worked?
That something that never works (not even in cases where it has been going on for multiple generations, as in the case of Cuba or Iran) keeps being tried makes it impossible to believe that the intention is making it "work" in the sense you mean. The sanctions are just to sink those countries for political interest. Which in some cases makes sense (e.g. Russia, as it's invading Ukraine and sinking its economy can be a deterrent in that respect), but in others is definitely evil.
Yes. About a third of the time [1].
[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1 page 159
“The success score is an index on a scale of 1 to 16, found by multiplying the policy result index by the sanctions contribution index” (page 77).
Simpler: Table 4A.1 shows their scoring for individual cases. They break at 9 for success versus failure, so maybe eyeball those to see if they gel with your intuition. If not, adjust and re-run the numbers.
My eyeballing suggests it would be quite difficult to zero out the list.
Overall, we found sanctions to be at least partially successful in 34 percent of the cases that we documented.
By our standards, successful cases are those with an overall success score of 9 or higher. We emphasize that a score of 9 does not mean that economic sanctions achieved a foreign policy triumph. It means only that sanctions made a modest contribution to a goal that was partly realized, often at some political cost to the sender country.
Yet in many cases, it is fair to say that sanctions were a necessary component of the overall campaign that focused primarily on the projection of military force.
Second, we classify some sanctions as failing to produce a real change in the target’s behavior when their primary if unstated purpose—namely, demonstrating resolve at home, signaling disapproval abroad, or simple punishment—may have been fully realized.
Like, during WW2 the UK was being bombed and ration books and supply shortages were the order of the day. They look back on their endurance of the conditions inflicted upon them as a source of national pride, have to imagine that is the case for many in the sanctioned countries too.
It kinda worked in Syria. The combination of sanctions, plus squatting on sovereign Syrian territory and preventing the government from generating income eventually left Assad's military so hollowed out that that the Turkish-backed rebel faction led by former Al Qaeda members was able to essentially drive to Damascus with minimal resistance.
>That's the theory, but has it ever worked?
The point is not to (directly) instigate regime change, but to influence the actions of the existing regime, as well as other state actors not under sanctions, by demonstrating to them how bad it can get. Make an example and so on.
The suffering of the civilians is not the goal of sanctions but a consequence of the choices their - legitimate or not - leaders make, and which ultimately impacts their ability to engage in foreign trade. No country has an obligation to trade with any other, so if civilians suffer after foreign trade is limited, the agency and moral responsibility is with the regime that failed to secure friendly trade relations. Often, humanitarian exceptions are carved out to limit this.
It definitely "works", in the sense that it's often the only tool available, along with positive reinforcements such as aid and support and the threat of stopping them, which is just another flavor of the same. It's hard to have a benchmark for something that "works" better, since countries are sovereign and by definition have disputes and don't blindly follow any established rules or rulers.
Then half a decade shows that point is not relevant or, the overthrowing is not the point at all.
I too wished the wolrd was that simple. But there are dictatorships, who kill, slaughter, coerce, ... and also all the international affairs from which those people are kept an outsider with zero say by the said government. I don't think we can reduce it to "it's people's fault".
No, that's for consumption by population of the sanctioning country. The people in the know know very well that that never works.
The point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA. Classic mafia strategy.
The exception were the sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine war. Those were unprecedented (including the freezing of the national bank assets and blocking of Swift) and it looks like the western powers really believed that those sanctions will cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia.
What percentage of Russia's foreign transactions went through those banks?
Certainly, normal people can't normally transfer money to/from Russia. The same for almost all companies.
This is the symbolic value of sanctions. It’s a part of coalition building and domestic messaging. (Though if you constantly do it this becomes less effective.)
It’s a classic team-building strategy: costly signalling [1]. You see it in mafias, but like, also when a softball team buys matching jerseys.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_e...
In basically every case a bad government is preferable to the destruction, chaos and death a civil war brings. "Just overthrow your government" is ridiculous plea.
Even the Asian parts of the USSR mostly had peaceful transitions into independence (and often into the hands of new semi-dictators, but that's beside the point).
And for some it worked out pretty badly. Hungarians rebeled against communism, but that rebellion was put down brutally.
You are correct that towards the end of the Soviet Union many of the client states and Russia itself had popular uprisings which succeeded, but that that point the Communist Government was already failing.
My point is not that no popular uprising has ever worked or that outside pressure can not force the end of some regime, but that telling people that they need to take up arms against their government is an insane proposition.
Yeah, it will certainly make life better, works every time (no).
Especially if you’ve just been dumb enough to re-elect that nasty leadership / government on behalf of (and at the behest of) the people who benefit off having that ruling party in office.
After the CIA and the US foreign policy had so much trouble overthrowing the old one and putting that one in place?
Then?
We don't sell them weapons, and we try to limit dual-use technology from being freely available.
Defense tech uses a lot of open source software and commercially available software - letting a regime simply buy technological advantage it can't cultivate is a good way to lose that advantage and then also lose the culture which can create it.
Iranians had several mass uprisings that were suppressed by the military. And the top military and religious authorities in Iran have no problems whatsoever living well, even with all the sanctions.
Just like the Russian elites, btw. They can't visit France as easily anymore, but there's always Dubai available. That can't care less where your money comes from.
Very easy to say. Quite hard to pull off. People in authoritarian countries have very little leverage and would like just to live fullfilling lives.
I’m not saying ”don’t do sanctions” but this mechanistic outcome is highly improbable.
”perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.”
Um - the most polite way of stating this is that this view of how political systems work is highly delusional at best.
Ruling party depends on _elite_ _compliance_.
>I read hackernews on a daily basis and I visit lots of different websites regularly. I am almost always on my VPN as I am internally firewalled by the government and externally shooed because of the sanctions, so I am probably missing some of these heart-warming messages:
>>Iranian IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians.
> I actually do not blame the people who do this. I think there is a fundamental misconception that people think because "Islamic Republic" has the word "Republic" in it, it must be a government of people in charge.
Total war and total information war are the side effects of the Democracy meme. Everyone from a taxi driver to a professor is assumed to be a political actor. The rationale runs something like this, "because you have a vote, you are defacto responsible for the actions of your state and political classes. Vote harder next time."
Meanwhile the individuals involved never explicitly consented to be governed. Even if there were a meaningful democratic process, it doesn't follow that the individual could withdraw consent. Ironically one of the suggested avenues for withdrawing consent in a democracy is to refuse to vote.
The key upside of democracy imo is then that most people do not see a reason to use violence; They can vote and never need to withdraw consent that extremely.
Now we have a pacified populace that allows corruption to run freely and keeps repeating "violence is never the answer" while forgetting meaningful change almost always requires it.
Never forget we wouldn't even have weekends if people hadn't died for it.
I wish we never needed violence but it seems to be wishful thinking rather than reality. Will people oppose the next Hitler by ranting on Twitter and peaceful protests? Something tells me that won't work.
It's a bit paradoxical, but almost all real change is done by the threat of violence, and almost none of it is achieved by applying violence.
But you are right that as people more radically reject violence, democracy dies and changes stop. Even though violence almost never achieves anything.
Additionally, companies might be political in ways I might not care. It might be simply a non-factor when deciding whether I give them business or not. But the sheer fact they are politically active, so to speak, and don' focus solely on providing the best services for the best prices with the highest quality, is the red flag that instantly makes me wary of doing business with them in the first place.
Not really? The implication is that every choice has a 50/50 split of support. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
> should be solely in the hands of the individual, not the corporations
The businesses in the article are doing what they did because of legal sanctions on iran. Not because they are making political choices about who to do business with.
But your description of what companies should be doing is describing unfettered psychopathic capitalism. Companies that will break every code of morality or decency as long as it’s technically legal. Chromium in the water? Go for it. Even legality is just a speed bumb. If you can get away with it? If you can bribe your way out of it? Why not do it!
I don’t want to live in that world. Unfortunately that’s pretty much the world we live in already and it shows.
Do they not understand that, instead of helping these people connect to the outside world and improve their life and their country, they are actually increasing the poor conditions and helping the regimes they are fighting against?
The idea is to get the population to put pressure on the leaders.
Not sure if it has worked, but I am sure Russia is unhappy with the unrest that sanctions have caused.
The political situation in Russia is more stable now than before the war. Putin is certainly happy.
The political situation is stable for following reasons:
1. Primary beneficiaries of military spending are small industrial towns and working class. They earn a lot of money now and significant part of it is invested in property or spent on domestic products. The inequality has reduced since the start of war, not something you would expect from oligarchic capitalism.
2. It became much easier to eliminate political opposition. Thousands have left the country, some were killed, many jailed under new wartime legislation.
3. There’s general perception that Russia is winning and it’s already in the endgame (which is true - the West lost the war in the first year).
It's like your local bakery refusing to sell a donut to a random iranian guy.
A US baker cannot send cakes to Iran.
As for sanctions:
> Iran is not the only example in which sanctions have resulted in unintended consequences. Since 1970, unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. have achieved foreign policy goals in just about 13% of cases, according to one study. A recent Congressional Research report evaluating U.S. sanctions in Venezuela found that sanctions “exacerbated an ongoing economic and humanitarian crisis caused by government mismanagement and corruption that has promoted 7.7 million Venezuelans to flee.” U.S. sanctions also exacerbated humanitarian crises in North Korea, reported UNICEF, putting 60,000 vulnerable children at risk of starvation due to limited humanitarian aid.
https://washingtondc.jhu.edu/news/do-sanctions-actually-work...
Please evaluate the historical failure of sanctions. As someone else have mentioned, Putin is happy despite the sanctions, but everyone else is not. These sanctions (from US, EU, etc.) hurt the people, not the people in the Governments. Come on, for the current price of <include basic food that used to be cheap> I used to be able to buy at least 3-5x more BEFORE the sanctions. Talk about sanctions exacerbating economic crisis. They will never learn, I guess, unless intended, but if it is intended, then surely it goes against everything they claim to stand for, as someone else has already elaborated.
is it true? I thought the idea is "harm enonomy of a country by not doing buisness with them".
Sanctions absolutely do apply to Iranians (even dual citizens) anywhere in the world, albeit less intensively.
> not everyone in Iran is Iranian
Swing and a miss. Sanctions are primarily against Iranian nationals, and extend to any non-Iranian who violated the sanctions. If you visit Iran as an American/Chinese/Antractican you don't automatically end up sanctioned.
> The idea is to get the population to put pressure on the leaders
And that makes it okay? Nuking civilians can also be a tactic to pressure the leaders into surrender. And nukes may take fewer lives than decades of intense sanctions.
There is some nuance here. While some "sanctions" may not be applicable, the United States has a concept called deemed export, where exposing a non-US Person (~non-citizen with no green card) to technologies in the US, for example during the course of regular employment, can be problematic. Depending on the foreign citizen's nationality, the level of exposure that is deemed problematic can vary. For Iranian citizens, it is basically almost everything unless open-source. This is why all FANGs regularly apply for a deemed export license before commencing employment of foreign individuals with problematic nationalities.
Do those sanctions even work? North Korea still builds nuclear weapons, Cuba still has a communist government, Iran is still a theocratic regime. You don’t start revolution by trade embargo. You start it by sending more jeans and heavy metal records.
Depriving Iranians of legal access to Western tools opens the market to locals. I suspect that the market is big enough to build a business.
It'difficult to assess gdp impact in this particular area. It's not really dependent on blockable imports.
Russian military industrial output has significantly increased and more importantly they demonstrated the ability to scale it up very quickly. The economy has grown during the war - the effects of the sanctions may become painful in the long term only if they will stay for decades, which is unlikely.
Well, you mentioned "North Korea still builds nuclear weapons," but didn't mention Iran having them. So, something worked. It wasn't 100% just sanctions... But the sanctions certainly hampered their ability to acquire effective air defense.
(The NK sanctions were too late — NK had already started nuclear weapons testing before the sanctions were levied.)
Off the top of my head: I don't think the USSR is still around, and it largely collapsed due to economic pressure; Libya abandoned its nuclear program due to sanctions; and apartheid in South Africa ended largely due to sanctions.
They don't always work, but I've never heard of jeans and heavy metal working either, as nice as that would be. Belarus has plenty of both, but Lukashenko's been in power since the 90s.
Effective air defense against military superpower (and they were effectively fighting against American technology) is something very hard to build, with or without sanctions. Ukraine is a good proof: Russia was denied air superiority using manned aircrafts but they still manage to inflict significant damage with missiles and drones.
> I don't think the USSR is still around, and it largely collapsed due to economic pressure
It wasn’t external pressure at all. Soviet Union had everything to be self-sustainable (e.g. Russia and Ukraine have proven later that in agriculture it’s absolutely possible). They failed to execute transition to regulated market economy the way China did. Gorbachev thought democracy goes first (the entire Warsaw bloc collapsed thanks to “blue jeans” - KGB and Stasi feared Western culture the most, and the West was ready to send more of it).
Regardless, you don't have an answer to Libya's nuclear program being shut down due to sanctions, and South African apartheid ending due to sanctions. Do sanctions have a 100% success rate? No. But they have a much higher success rate than jeans and heavy metal.
On the bright side, your average Iranian grandma can immediately work as a network engineer given the amount of experience she has with VPN protocols.
It feels like I have to own all my data and not trust companies before it's decided I can no longer access my own data.
This is not true. The sanctions definitely hurt countries like Cuba or Russia. They have a far harder time growing their economy. Cuba is stuck in the last century and often has total blackouts that last for days. Russia needs to beg countries like Iran or North Korea now for imports.
Mostly the military, from what I hear. The rest of the economy is in shambles [1].
No matter what: once the war in Ukraine is over by whatever solution, it's going to get nasty. Either Putin (or, more likely, his successor - the dude is old and it's by far not sure if he will be able to stay in power should the war end up bad for Russia) manages to turn around the economy once again from producing tanks and other instruments of war to a regular economy, or they'll keep it that way... and attack another country with all that firepower.
[1] https://kyivindependent.com/amid-dwindling-economy-number-of...
The sanctions significantly slow down Russian development and are more and more making it into just a mineral mining satellite of China. With time the weakened Russia would just split, and the large eastern part will go to China. Some midparts, with Turkic speaking population may even fall into Turkey orbit. Without the oil and gas rich East, the European part of Russia will be just a destitute village on the far margins of civilized Europe as it had been for centuries in the past.
If the sanctions were effective Russia wouldn't be offering entirely one-sided deals that it knows nobody is going to accept, because it would be desperate enough to get those sanctions lifted that it would actually have to concede something in a deal.
Ask a russian about the price of fuel.
The European sanctions are more of a joke.
I you want to Ukraine to win donate to them directly instead of waiting for the cowardly politicians to get their act together.
So they stories no fuel in Russia are just propaganda?
Depends on the claim - some are, some aren't. The problem obviously exists, but the coverup is good enough to make lots of people think that the war happens on another planet and doesn't affect them (e.g. gasoline export ban).
This story is getting better and better.
The above quite is from Malcontent News.
And yes, if US and EU were serious about helping Ukraine win, this would have already happened back in 2022. Or better yet, back in 2014.
As it is, US & EU sanctions seem to be more of a theater mostly for the benefit of the population of those countries, so that their politicians can sincerely say that they "support Ukraine".
Let's not kid ourselves. Russia is still killing Ukrainians right now. They're still occupying Ukraine's land right now. Is this what "work" looks like in your dictionary?
> Ask a russian about the price of fuel.
Oh I see. In your dictionary a working solution is not to stop the war or get lands back, but to ensure average Russian people suffer. Never mind then.
Prices are in RUB/L, 1 USD ~ 80 RUB, 1 EUR ~ 100 RUB.
Then make your own conclusion.
The only reasonable definition of "work" is "stop the thing that motivated the sanction from happening". With that definition, sanctions rarely work (or if they do, not in a very effective way). Russia is still at war with Ukraine. Iran is still developing nuclear weapons. North Korea did develop nuclear weapons.
Less funding of proxies just means Israel gets away with killing more civilians without consequence.
1. Hamas, an Iranian proxy, attacked Israel on October 7th 2023. Until that time, the death toll in the 100 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about 10k Israels to 40k Palestinians. It since became 12k Israelis to 110k Palestinians. I don't think that proxy fulfilled its intention.
2. Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy, attacked Israel on October 8th in support of Hamas. The ensuing war killed about 4k Lebanese. That proxy, too, seems to have failed in its mission to reduce the death tol..
3. The Houthis, yet another Iranian proxy, attacked Israel in support of Gaza. Since then, Israeli counter attacks killed several hundreds in Yemen. Not good.
Now these proxies are heavily damaged, deprived of most strategic capabilities and the death toll in the ensuing battles dwarfed all of the past deaths in the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Yes, there are fines for American companies if they do business with Iranians. That's how sanctions work as I'm sure you're aware. But the story doesn't stop there.
If an American finds out they are transacting with a sanctioned individual, or citizens of a sanctioned country like Iran or North Korea, the stakes go up: $1M USD fine and up to 20 years in federal prison. Oh and that's a personal risk -- you, the manager or executive in charge, and anyone else who is in the know on the transaction is now facing 20 years in federal pounding-in-the-ass prison if they don't immediately cease all communication and break off contact. Hence why they ghost you and remove your data from prod. It sucks, but I would do the same thing in that situation. Nobody should be expected to take that risk.
That's why you have these experiences :(
There are blanket sanction waivers (General License) by OFAC to allow certain things. There's also the possibility to get an OFAC license (as GitHub did.)
The real issue is there is little to no advantage (realistically no money to be gained from Iran) or even awareness (sometimes the cloud infrastructure bans Iran by default and you don't have enough users to even know that's the case to care.) The legal counsels would generally be conservative and advise against it; there needs to be someone from the business side, e.g. a product manager that cares enough to try to push back on the legal. There often is not or it is hard to justify the tiniest risk, hence you block.
Various tools hosted on Github can be considered dual-use (i.e. AES/TLS libraries). Furthermore, Microsoft was made to apply sanctions against Karim Khan of the ICC for his involvement in investigating the genocide of Palestinians; I doubt Microsoft would be granted an exception so they can serve Hamas' greatest supporter after that.
I don't know if Microsoft has applied for any exceptions, but even if they did, I doubt they'd be able to get them. That's on top of the probability of bad publicity ("Microsoft wants to cut deal with Iran") and the lack of incentive you mentioned.
"greatest"? Hardly. A charge was brought before the ICC from South Africa which required the ICC to investigate.
There are much bigger supporters of Hamas, the sanctions against employees of the ICC is just the current US government flexing its retribution muscles.
You are mixing up ICC and ICJ. South Africa brought a case to the ICJ. This is the country equivalent of suing another country so its not really forcing ICJ to investigate so much as south africa is presenting a case which icj will decide on (eventually anyways, icj is famous for being slow).
The ICC on the other hand makes its own decisions on who to investigate/charge. Countries can file referrals to it, but the ICC prosecutor has discretion on what they want to investigate and pursue.
[Anyone who thinks the ICC likes hamas should remember that the icc also filed charges against a hamas leader too. Its difficult for them to investigate hamas because they are only allowed to charge people who are currently alive]
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the United States Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions in support of U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.
So should we (people outside US) sanction these companies, so that they put the same pressure on US government to stop forcing them from applying sanctions?
You either kill someone, or become someone's bitch on the first day, then you'll be alright.
(It's an Office Space reference, btw, but our prisons are genuinely inhumane and not rehabilitative.)
They are forced to work for for-profit companies for minimal pay, which is deducted by their living expenses and basic amenities.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime* whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Slavery is still legal in the United States of America.
It's legal to enslave them, but in general it isn't true that they actually are enslaved.
This is the opposite of being "literal slaves". They are literally not slaves.
...unless you believe that before the 17th century, everyone in the world was literally a slave? It was legal to enslave them too.
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
It also doesn't say that they report being compelled to work. It says they receive benefits from working that they don't receive without working. The fact that voluntary workers get their sentences reduced doesn't convert them into involuntary workers.
Also in the assumption that a foreigner would or could get an Office Space reference, unless they live in a country America has already successfully culturally colonized.
The point is that the homophobic trope doesn’t add anything to the information given, while it does make it more likely to run afoul of homophobic censors in homophobic countries led by homophobes.
First, in this context the popular image, not reality, is what actually matters. Why do people not risk breaking sanctions? Because they don't want to risk prison. Why do Americans fear prison so much? Because of how it is represented in popular media, true or not.
Second, sexual violence in American prisons is a very real concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_Stat...
Finally, I fail to see how it is a homophobic trope? Nobody wants to be sexually assaulted. It's about the violation, not the act itself.
Yes, it’s an ouroboros of confirmation bias: the popular media ad nauseum repeats the trope that what they need to fear in prison is ”gay” sexual violence, when what they really need to fear is the violence of the state and its economic interests that threatens to put them there in the first place.
> Second, sexual violence in American prisons is a very real concern
Even if we assume the worst case scenario and double it, sexual violence in prisons is an experience of the minority of prisoners… does that make it less of a concern for those who experience it? Of course not… does it mean that it’s a reason to fear prison, especially when incarcerated for actions that go against entrenched governmental interests? Not really. Again the state violence is the real fear… especially when you note that any percentage of those sexual assaults are perpetrated by “guards”. Isolation, economic exploitation, and the mental health concerns implicit in being deprived of your agency are all much more important fears than the (again trope) that something ”gay” might happen to you.
> Finally, I fail to see how it is a homophobic trope? Nobody wants to be sexually assaulted. It's about the violation, not the act itself.
Not seeing a trope as a trope is kind of the point of a trope. “Ass-pounding” implies a specific kind of sexual activity, associating it with prison implies that all such sexual activity in prison is non-consensual violence — that’s the trope part identified — and also that the act itself is violence and/or something to be feared… something to be -phobic, about, in other words. Given that prisons are still customarily same-sex segregated, then, there’s also the implication that same-sex sexual violence in the form of ass-pounding is a reasonable thing to fear when in prison. Or, in other words, the trope is communicating a homo-phobia on behalf of a culture that presumes one should be afraid of prison because one is afraid of getting one’s ass pounded.
The violation isn’t implicit in the act being mentioned. The fact that you’ve got to explain to a “foreigner” that the violation is implicit because they didn’t know the trope doesn’t make it less of a trope.
Make the edit requested and nothing of semantic value to the message changes. In fact the actual message gets clearer, while also not servicing as propaganda for a bias you’ve internalized so deeply it’s invisible to you.
Why don't you see people openly joke about regular rape on HN? Why is a joke about regular rape not a phrase acceptable on here? In the same vein as the 2000s gaming "oh man I'm getting raped over here". Oh yes, because it's considered disgusting and offensive.
And even then, it was only acceptable in 1999 because it was a joke about male-male homosexual rape (I doubt it would have been considered funny even back then if it was a joke about a man raping a woman), so on top of being a rape joke, it has some homophobic qualities to it.
(I do remember watching Office Space back in 1999 and finding that line hilarious, but that teenage version of me also thought saying "that's so gay" was a perfectly fine way to be negative about something. Times change, and people grow up and realize that some of the things they thought were funny were actually singling out marginalized groups in shitty ways.)
I think also your use of the phrase didn't really add anything to what you said. Certainly people in the in-group who both know that Office Space reference, and still think it's funny will get it and chuckle, but everyone else will just think it's a weird and/or offensive way to describe it. And leaving it out entirely doesn't water down what you said. If you still feel like you need to emphasize that it's gonna be a maximum-security prison rather than Club Fed, you can just say "maximum-security federal prison", and everyone will understand.
The only reason it's funny is because the subject of these jokes are men (so nobody cares), are engaging in something considered "gay" (which is gross and funny ha ha ewwww).
I don't expect things to change but I'd fight in that war if there was one.
Is always the subtext to statements like yours.
All those software services rely on the payment processor to do business with the economically sanctioned users so they shouldn’t have done anything
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