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Is Crimea In Russia? Internet Companies Have Different Answers
judgecorp (778838) writes "Three weeks after Russia asserted that Crimea is part of its territory, the social networks have a problem: how to categories their users from the region? Facebook and the largest Russian social network, Vkontakte, still say Crimeans are located in Ukraine, while other Russian social networks say they are Russians. Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, an edit war has resulted in Crimea being part of Russia, but shaded a different colour to signify the territory is disputed. Search engine Yandex is trying to cover both angles: its maps service gives a different answer, depending on which location you send your query from."
stuff that matters? This is a trivial detail, and in due time all websites will list it under Russia.
Russia annexed the province by use of force. Any and all counter-arguments like "but they voted" are meaningless: first, the voting took place under the "gentle" guidance of Russian military. Then, even if you think, it is legitimate for a referendum on whether to join a foreign power to take place while under occupation by that same power, the vote was fraudulent. For example, in Sevastopol the number of people showing up for vote was 123% of the eligible voters.
And, finally, even without the above two arguments, would Russia accept a referendum by residents of the Kuril Island, for example, on breaking away from the Motherland and joining Japan? Would the US accept the results of Southern California (or Southern Texas) voting to break away and join Mexico?
Neither would, of course. The Crimean referendum is a joke. A sad joke perpetrated by Russia-the-bully on Ukraine weakened by internal strife and years of mismanagement (to which Russia heartily contributed just for this purpose, BTW).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
they are Russians.
Call it Crussia.
Companies will likely be influenced by economics decisions when displaying who Crimea belongs to. The same thing happened to Taiwan -- you see it on a map in China and it's part of China; http://www.computerworld.com/s...
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
what was breaking Kosovo from Serbia than? "use of out-of-this-world-force"?
NATO fucked up when it broke sovereign state by use of ... flowers?
I could go with statement that Crimea is annexed by use of trickery and lies. But force... that just laughable.
Does anyone actually get legitimate traffic from the Ukraine anyway?
Sure, the real-world violence and power struggles are sad. But from an internet perspective, I have a hard time seeing much to care about.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
This might provoke countries to lie about their nuclear ambitions!
What's next, fabricating attacks so that you can have a rationale to go to war???? !!!
Or will Allan Greenspan discover that Wall Street has greedy people? The world is waiting with baited breath.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Nuclear weapons require a lot of upkeep that's very expensive. Ukraine's military budget in 2013 was $1.9 billion. With any fraction (or even all of it) their weapons would be worthless today.
Moreover Soviet Ukraine's defense establishment was manned by the same Russian nationals who are voting to join Russia. Do you think Ukraine would be safer if the Russian separatists in Ukraine had nuclear weapons today?
Crimea is to Russia, the same way the UK is to the USA, as we both pretend we're an independent country.
Guess the percentage of currently existing and valid borders that weren't.
And while the Crimea case may be dubious according to international law, it is utter hypocrisy to insist upon that only when it happens in a part of the former Soviet Union and, this time, serves Russia, while Western countries fell all over themselves when it came to accepting the self-proclaimed status for each and every former Yugoslavian region, ripening it for all the economical exploitation by Western capital which was about to happen.
Why don't we ask the people of Crimea who they pay their taxes to?
It's always funny when two puppet governments fight over who is the less puppetty.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The Crimea is Putin's Sudetenland.
The Ukraine will be Putin's Czechoslovakia.
See http://www.rossde.com/editoria....
Google Maps shows Crimea as part of Russia to users from Russia, and part of Ukraine to the rest of the world.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/12/302337754/google-maps-displays-crimean-border-differently-in-russia-u-s
This is nothing new. As the article above mentions the name of the Arabian Gulf also changes depending on where you are, and mentions that there are many more cases. I believe Taiwan may be another. This approach is clearly a compromise, and like all compromises, makes no one really happy.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
A few years ago we had some Chinese exchange workers come and work for us. At the end of their stint, they did a bit of a presentation about similar work in China. They did a bit of background on China, and were still calling Taiwan part of China! I was a bit flabbergasted...
Different perspectives or propaganda I guess. Eye opener either way.
Only the Russian websites will do so. The rest will list it as "Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation". Unwieldy, perhaps, but reflecting the truth.
Or, as they keep saying about Jerusalem, it will go something like this: "Annexed by Russia in a move not recognized internationally."
Did most websites - read organizations - recognize Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania - as independent, but under Soviet occupation, during the Cold War? Do most websites - or organizations - recognize Tibet as an independent country under Chinese occupation? The US recognized and recognizes all of them as occupied but independent, but was that true about anyone else?
Jerusalem has always been a part of Israel. Only disputed part was East Jerusalem, which was a part of Jordan before the Six Day War, and became a part of Israel after that. Unlike the rest of Judea & Samaria, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, just like they did the Golan Heights, so both territories are legitimately part of Israel. Yeah, the rest of the world disputes it, but a good portion of them are in bed w/ the OIC, which in fact recognizes all of Israel as 'Palestine', and would like to replace Israel w/ a Pali state.
If anyone disputes that, they might also want to dispute territorial ownership elsewhere in the world, such as Srpska, whose status is identical to the Crimea, except that Serbia isn't as militarily powerful to reclaim it, the way Russia is for Crimea.
It made sense for Ukraine to give that up. The controls were all still in the Kremlin: it's not like someone in Kiev could have turned them on and launched an attack on Turkey, or Moldova, or Romania, or Slovakia. Those nukes could, however, have been turned on from Moscow. Why would any regime in Kyiv keep weapons on its soil that it had no control over? The Kremlin could theoretically turn them on and send them all at US troops in Iraq, and a retaliation could have involved the bombing of Ukraine. Once the Soviet Union came unravelled, it made sense for Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to turn over all their nukes to Russia
Soviet nuclear weapons outside Russia
- Belarus had 81 single warhead missiles stationed on its territory after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. They were all transferred to Russia by 1996. In May 1992, Belarus acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[59]
- Kazakhstan inherited 1,400 nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union, and transferred them all to Russia by 1995. Kazakhstan has since acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[60]
- Ukraine has acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Ukraine inherited about 5,000 nuclear weapons when it became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, making its nuclear arsenal the third-largest in the world.[61] By 1996, Ukraine had voluntarily disposed of all nuclear weapons within its territory, disassembling them in Russia.[62]
Kazakhstan & Belarus turned over the weapons to Russia, while Ukraine got them sent to Russia and disassembled.
Ukraine would have lost such a war easily: they'd even lose if Russia decided to conquer Ukraine. I agree - the US should take an aggressive policy against fence jumpers. If the US dealt w/ Mexican immigrants in the same manner that Mexico deals w/ Central American immigrants, they wouldn't have an illegal immigration issue.
I don't know about any of this nonsense. I always thought Crimea was on the continent of Tellius and had been part of the Begnion Empire.
You know I was thinking just the same thing. To me this is like Jaffa Cakes. Are they cakes or biscuits? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
The world will never stop arguing about them nor this.
... as they keep saying about Jerusalem, it will go something like this: "Annexed by Russia in a move not recognized internationally."
I recently too a course titled "Ethics in International Relations" at a major college. (This was to fulfill a distribution requirement for an "ethics" class and the particular course had the bonus of also fulfilling an international affairs requirement.)
One of the first points made:
* Which regions are part of which countries is NOT a subject of international ethics.
A fait accopli is accepted as is. (This was taken as a universal, part of the definition of the boundaries of the field (as taught), which otherwise studied many different, often conflicting, schools of thought.
I interpret this as follows: "International Ethics", as a dicipline, is an attempt by academics (and the rich people who fund them - such as Andrew Carnegie, who largely founded the field) to influence governments, primarily to improve their treatment of the people they rule and otherwise use force upon. ("Improved" being viewed throught the biases of the academics in question.)
In order to sway the behavior of rulers - especially those who are oppressing their long-standing citizens, recent conquests, or those with whom they are considering resolving a dispute with force, they have to appear non-threatening to the rulers' core issue: that the ruler is in charge. So they must strictly avoid challenging WHETHER the rulers rule, sticking to issues of HOW they rule.
So don't expect academia to support any move for self-determination by the people of an occupied region. The rulers that make the claim and have the power to enforce it will be passively accepted.
DO expect them to oppose such people arming themselves to assert a right to self-determination, or even anyone speaking in a way that might "lead to conflict" rather than passification and quiet (but mainly non-violent) suffering. Thus you see them supporting things like censorship of speech an arms blockades to regions of conflict - which are then selectively enforced and lead to "ethnic clensing" genocides by the side that more successfully evades them against the side that is now largely disarmed.
(Example on censorship: During the period where the Benghazi attack was being blamed on a video posted on YouTube, Sarah Chayes, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote an op-ed for the L.A. times calling for its censorship.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Untermenschen. Covers all the cases.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I wonder if their location puts them in Crimea, the Ukraine, or Russia, and if their policy to ignore copyright laws plays a part in their decision.
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Everyone has noticed there are a lot of very pro-Russian people popping up on websites and I can't really understand them. The facts seem very apparent that Russia has done some extremely objectionable things, and threatens to do even more objectionable things, and the justifications for those actions seem extraordinarily weak.
Maybe some of the commenters are paid by Russia (I think that's been documented with some blogs), but a lot of them seem to be sincere westerners and I can't figure them out. Do they have Russian ancestry that makes them pro-Russia? Are they just really counter-cultural and suspicious of Western interference in the East?
Personally I'm fairly pro-West, anti-authoritarian, and have Ukrainian ancestry so I have strong feelings on the subject, but I still think I make a fairly impartial assessment of the situation. I just can't figure out the ideology that drives the Russian supporters.
I stole this Sig
The difficulty in creating a nuclear weapon isn't the command and control, it's creating the warheads and the delivery vehicles. Slapping on different electronics to control the missiles would've been a trivial task compared to the job of developing warheads and rocket technology required for delivery.
It's probably the one thing about creating nuclear weapons that your average bedroom hardware hacker could do with physical access to the missiles.
Though it should also be noted that many of the USSR's weapons were created in the Ukraine in the first place, so the Ukraine probably still has some of the guys who actually made these things to start with, regardless of the fact that actual command and control was in Russia.
good job www.blossomsquare.com "Three weeks after Russia asserted that Crimea is part of its territory, the social networks have a problem: how to categories their users from the region? Facebook and the largest Russian social network, Vkontakte, still say Crimeans are located in Ukraine
"Three weeks after Russia asserted that Crimea is part of its territory, the social networks have a problem: how to categories their users from the region? Facebook and the largest Russian social network, Vkontakte, still say Crimeans are located in Ukraine. www.blossomsquare.com