VK CEO Fired, Says Company Under Kremlin Control 149
An anonymous reader writes "The embattled founder of VK, Russia's largest social networking site, said this week that the company is now 'under the complete control' of two oligarchs with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. In a VK post published Monday, Pavel Durov said he's been fired as CEO of the website, claiming that he was pushed out on a technicality, and that he only heard of it through media reports."
Re:Surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
The US should resume its former campaign of organising cope d'etat in communist countries. Russia is clearly out of control.
You use the word communist, but I don't think it means what you think it means.
Re: Surprised. (Score:2, Insightful)
They both are communist in practice; It's just that the practical definition of communism clashes with the lies of communist propaganda, and that socialists/communists like you are always arguing that other socialists/communists aren't true socialists/communists.
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fascism [wikipedia.org] is far more apt for Russia's state of government under Putin than Communism.
Re:How does that sit with you, Snowden? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think if the Snowden affair has taught us anything, it's that real power in the west is not held by politicians but rather the executive branch (US) and civil service (UK). The bureaucrats appear to be able to do whatever they like, then repeatedly lie about it (USA) or simply refuse to turn up at all (UK) and politicians let them get away with it. What's more, the bureaucracy is now routinely blacklisting and even assassinating people based on no kind of formal process whatsoever, with no democratic oversight, and the people doing it are career government employees who are certainly not elected and in many cases their identities are themselves secret.
For background, in my former job I worked on one of the systems at Google that was compromised by GCHQ (they wrote wire sniffers to decode the login traffic). The root cause of this failure was the incorrect idea that western governments are "good" and the nasty Chinese/Russians/Iranians are "bad" thus internal encryption was only worth the cost when traffic transited wires controlled by "bad guys". But it turned out that they're all bad and the degree of badness appears limited only by their budget, so now Google all wire traffic all the time.
So please get out of this idea that the west is better than Russia. Democracy in the anglosphere has become so weak that lots of people simply refuse to vote at all, or are (at best) single issue voters for things like immigration. Anything national security related is uncontrollable by voting at this point.
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it really be such a bad thing for the Soviet Union to come back?
Yes. The Soviet Union was a nightmare state.
The offered a balance of power. With the exception of a couple proxy wars (not that they weren't bad) we kept each other in check, but never checkmate. Compared to now, the world did its own thing.
Tell that to Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Not to mention North Korea and Vietnam. I'm sure they enjoyed doing their "own thing".
After the fall of the Soviet Union, we immediately elevated ourselves to the status of, "United States of America: Full-Time World Cop." That has not gone well. I sometimes miss the sanity of mutually assured destruction.
What? Seriously, what? How old are you? Do you actually remember the Cold War?
The fact that America is a flawed nation is no excuse for false equivalencies with brutal totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao. Those countries, under those leaders, deliberately killed tens of millions of their own people. We never want to see anything like that again.
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
An Irishman, an American, and an Aussie are talking about republicans. The Irishman describes a bunch of pro-Soviet Socialists who never go to Church (but insist they're Catholic), and think the world would be a better place if someone blew the Royal Family into tiny little bits. The American is talking about a bunch of knee-jerk Anti-Soviets who describe everything they dislike as "socialist," go to religious services at least twice a week, are (mostly) Protestant, and secretly have a major crush on the Royal Family. The Aussie is somewhat generically left-wing in economic terms, doesn't give too shits about religion one way or the other, and thinks the Queen should stop being Queen of Australia but otherwise should be left alone because she's a nice old lady. Whose lying?
The answer is nobody. The word "Republican" has been used by so many political movements over the years that hearing someone is "Republican" without hearing a lot more context tells you precisely jack-squat. "Democrat," "Liberal," "Conservative," etc. are almost as bad.
It's gets even worse with Communism because Communists have never been able to agree on much beyond that one song.