Thanks for the feedback. I will do better to try and meet LW's standards for posting. I agree that I should have offered an alternative. I think targeted sanctions against Putin and his regime are fine, as are weapon shipments. It's hard to do a good cost benefit analysis on this but I think sending weapons has much lower costs and much greater ability to deter/limit russian aggression than does collapsing the Russian economy. Also, while I dont think killing 23 year old Russians should be a primary goal, I am more comfortable with this than sanctions which will harm millions of Russian and non Russian civilians.
I understand that perspective and will try and due better to work within LW's guidelines. Thanks for the feedback. I think the first sentence was justified given the humanitarian costs associated with the sanctions.
Hi. I'm new to LW but really enjoy the culture which is fostered here. I've been reading AC10 and Marginal Revolution, etc for years so I feel like ive already been heavily influenced by the LW community. A week ago I posted "America's Invisible Graveyard: Understanding the Moral Implications of Western sanctions" which got a fare amount of pushback over how it was written as well as a lot of great comments.
In particular, people reacted poorly to my last sentence calling for us to feel shame over western sanctions. Our contemporary political climate ... (read more)
Having political discussions in a way that actually allows people to focus on the issues is hard. As a result we have stronger standards on LessWrong for how to have political discussions. Doing anything that makes it even harder, like calling for shame only, is therefore bad.
Instead of focusing on the implications of the empiric claims you make about sanctions of how they kill people and don't work for changing policy, you should have focused more on backing up the empiric claims. At the shallow level you discussed them I doubt anyone who believes t... (read more)