Some of the comments on the link by James_Miller exactly six months ago provided very specific estimates of how the events might turn out:
James_Miller:
- The odds of Russian intervening militarily = 40%.
- The odds of the Russians losing the conventional battle (perhaps because of NATO intervention) conditional on them entering = 30%.
- The odds of the Russians resorting to nuclear weapons conditional on them losing the conventional battle = 20%.
Me:
"Russians intervening militarily" could be anything from posturing to weapon shipments to a surgical strike to a Czechoslovakia-style tank-roll or Afghanistan invasion. My guess that the odds of the latter is below 5%.
A bet between James_Miller and solipsist:
I will bet you $20 U.S. (mine) vs $100 (yours) that Russian tanks will be involved in combat in the Ukraine within 60 days. So in 60 days I will pay you $20 if I lose the bet, but you pay me $100 if I win.
While it is hard to do any meaningful calibration based on a single event, there must be lessons to learn from it. Given that Russian armored columns are said to capture key Ukrainian towns today, the first part of James_Miller's prediction has come true, even if it took 3 times longer than he estimated.
Note that even the most pessimistic person in that conversation (James) was probably too optimistic. My estimate of 5% appears way too low in retrospect, and I would probably bump it to 50% for a similar event in the future.
Now, given that the first prediction came true, how would one reevaluate the odds of the two further escalations he listed? I still feel that there is no way there will be a "conventional battle" between Russia and NATO, but having just been proven wrong makes me doubt my assumptions. If anything, maybe I should give more weight to what James_Miller (or at least Dan Carlin) has to say on the issue. And if I had any skin in the game, I would probably be even more cautious.
I don't see how to reconcile this with your statement that:
If a government doesn't have popular majority support, and so it would not win a referendum, but keeps power anyway through military force, how does this uphold a group right for self-governance? Wouldn't the group right argue in favor of anyone who doesn't support the government being self-governing and uncoerced by their military powre?
On that view, Russia was wrong in supporting Crimean separatism.
I don't know anything about Native American rights and politics in the USA, but I expect that this autonomy is granted because the majority feels guilty over past conquest and oppression and is trying to make amends. A different group of comparable size (say, people of Chinese descend) would not be allowed to "do a bunch of things that are otherwise illegal" merely because they had a minority ethnic status and wanted self-determination.
The will of government is the will of the group. After Egypt had their revolution the new government still had to pay the debts of the old dictator because they old dictator was recognised to be able to make contracts in the name of the nation. How a dictator comes to power isn't that important for determining whether he's accepted as representing a group.
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