Poutine, or not Poutine
On 2 December, SUP announced the first Fifty And Fifty Day Plan for its new acquisition, Livejournal. In the interests of fairness, justice, intellectual honesty, and other even-handed concepts that are completely alien to the ruling cliques in Russia, we have refrained from commenting until the 100 days expired.
The 100 days expired to-day, 11 March. This is our view of progress against the targets SUP set itself, against the Five Tests we proposed for Livejournal in June 2005, and the Implicit Zeroth Test we made explicit six months later.
We are of the opinion that SUP is so closely linked to the Poutine regime as to be an integral part of it. SUP had a chance to demonstrate its commitment to freedom of speech by standing up for democracy in Russia, by publicly distancing itself from the policies of Mr. Poutine and his hand-picked successor. It failed to take that opportunity, and we work on the presumption that this was deliberate inaction.
Our conscience does not permit us to support SUP's policies of censorship, intimidation, bullying, and deceit. We do not support the execution of those policies, and we do not wish to fund them in any way, nor do we wish to encourage other people to fund them. SUP's aims are clearly at odds to the values we hold, and at odds to the subset of values that we hold as non-negotiable.
The status quo shall apply.
We are unable to resume posts to Livejournal so long as Livejournal's owners are in breach of the Social Contract, and so long as those owners are imposing conditions of censorship. This includes direct comments to posts on SUP-owned servers. We do expect to continue to send emails, where this is possible, and where we deem this appropriate.
We will continue to permit the Tiny version of this site's RSS feed to be syndicated on Livejournal, out of respect for the readers. Any interference with this syndication - including its censorship, or the introduction of commercials into the feed - will result in its immediate and permanent cessation.
We will continue to authenticate through our existing account so that we might read secure posts. We encourage those contributors who post securely to explore alternative methods, and we hope to lead by example.
We have recently established a Trusted blog, held on our own server space, which will contain those matters we do not wish to expose to the entire public.
