Interesting Interview

So there was an LJ strike [edit: I'm thinking about calling it something other than "strike" but don't know what yet.  Let's say--"organized refusal to produce content" for now] yesterday.  I didn't post, which was probably unnoticeable, since I don't post every day under normal circumstances, but I did notice a dropoff in the number of posts in my flist for the day.   I'm going to post now, because I found this translation of an interview with  Anton Nosik, who is apparently the leader of SUP, which I think is the entity that decided to eliminate the Basic account for LJ newbies, leaving a choice of bandwidth-destroying (I'm still on dialup so this is particularly irritating for me; lj is slow enough without pointless pictures) ads, or paid accounts.

And this is supposed to be the sympathetic translation

I'll just include a brief quote of the translated material (the original is in Russian):

In a situation where people are trying to blackmail and intimidate us, threatening to destroy our business, there are business reasons not to reward this sort of behaviour. This isn't just the psychology of someone who becomes more stubborn the more they're pushed. The issue is that at no point in the history of any successful business, success was not reached by bowing to aggressive, unfriendly force. No decision -- even the most correct one -- should be taken under duress.

Um?  Aggressive unfriendly force?  Whether you agree or disagree with the content strike, it is an expression of discontent on the part of suppliers and customers.  Perhaps in Russia there is so little choice that a business can prosper by alienating suppliers and customers; in the States, not so much.   The person who did the translating tries to explain:

Translating a Russian interview into English directly will make pretty much any Russian sound like a complete dickwad, because cultural expectations are completely different.

Yes; in the USA we are free people and we have come to expect, culturally, a certain minimal level of respect, from one free person to another.

I really hadn't given any consideration to the possibility of leaving LJ before.  I'm kind of lazy and I'll usually choose to do the easiest thing.  Now?  I'm going to sit tight and see what my friends do.  But some kind of alternative service is starting to look more attractive.

Anton Nossik makes All Clear

Perhaps clearer than he intended.

Ostensibly in an attempt to set the record straight, anton_nossik (who would like to mention that he is *not* the leader of SUP, but rather its  "Social Media Evangelist") has put up an explanation of the interview in his livejournal.  Not to worry, he says none of it was his fault; it was a matter of the reporter not accurately repeating the conversation and everyone misinterpreting the parts that were correctly transcribed.  In his own words, here. 

I particularly appreciated the part where after setting everything straight and proving that it was all someone else's fault, he called me and every other basic account user  "freeloaders."

Thanks so much.  I feel much better now that's straightened out.

NOT.