I'm sad to see him go. I don't know enough about LWs history and have too little experience with forum moderation to agree or disagree with your decision. Though LW had been around for a very long time without imploding so that's evidence you guys know what you're doing.
Please don't take down his post though. I believe somewhere in there is a good faith opinion at odds with my own. I want to read and understand it. Just not ready for this much reading tonight.
I wish I could write so prolifically! Or maybe it's a curse rather than a blessing because then it becomes an obstacle to people understanding your point of view.
Are there any links we can read about non-appeasing de-escalation strategies?
Either theoretical ones or ones that have been tried in the past are fine.
There have been "Nuclear first-use and threats or advocacy thereof" and those are easy to condemn. But as far as I know they are coming unilaterally from the Russian side and already being widely condemned by those not on the Russian side. But it sounds like you are looking for some broader consensus to condemn escalation on both sides.
Unfortunately neither this post nor the open letter you linked give any specifics about what other behaviours you are asking us to condemn. I'm reluctant to risk endorsing a false-equivalence argument by signing a blank check.
Is blowing up the Kerch bridge escalatory? Is Arestovich trolling the occupiers to sap their morale and bolster the morale of the defenders escalatory? I'm not qualified to determine whether the tactical or psychological benefit is justified by the escalatory risk of these sorts of actions and in the Kerch example, we don't even know if it was done by the Ukrainian government, provocateurs, or sympathizers acting independently.
I agree that it's not a binary choice between appeasement and escalation, and I am very curious about the non-appeasing de-escalation strategies you allude to. That's what we should be brainstorming and what you should lead with in your letter for it to be convincing.
The EU approach to getting Ukraine to protect the rights of minorities seems more... sustainable... than Russia's approach, so I propose a different compromise:
How about Russia withdraw all its troops back to the 2014 borders and we all give the slow, non-violent path a chance to work.
I'm not equating the West and Anti-West in terms of power. I agree that the Anti-West is much weaker. That doesn't mean it's incapable of becoming a threat in the future.
Furthermore, it's up to the Ukrainian people to confront their dark past. Not Russians to do it for them.
Just like it's up to Americans to confront and atone for America's history of slavery. Not some neighbouring country to roll in with tanks and turn our historical/cultural/political problem into a military one.
This is basically a false equivalence "there are good/bad people on both sides" type of argument.
If some other country sent troops inside Russia's borders and held a referendum for whether or not the regions they occupied want to be annexed, I would consider Russia to be the victim no matter how screwed up its internal politics are. Furthermore, such a referendum would not be legitimate no matter how honestly executed it is because the presence of foreign troops and displacement of civilians already hopelessly biases the outcome.
For the same reason, until there are no more Russian soldiers inside of Ukraine's pre-2014 borders, I see no reason to treat these referenda and complicated stories about some Ukrainians someplace being Nazis as anything other than Russian propaganda, albeit you deserve praise for well crafted propaganda delivered in a civil manner.
A decisively defeated Russia will have fewer resources with which to coerce him. And if he's smart and keeps his powder dry like he has, he will have more resources with which to resist.
And if he gets overthrown in a color revolution, the Belarussians have not yet gotten so much blood on their hands as to preclude support from the West.
I meant prepping metaphorically, in the see of being willing to delve into the specifics of a scenario most other people would dismiss as unwinnable. The reason I posted this is that though it's obvious that the bunker approach isn't really the right one, I'm drawing a blank for what the right approach would even look like.
That being said, I figured into class of scenario might look identical to nuclear or biological war, only facilitated by AI. Are you saying scenarios where many but not all people die due to political/economic/environmental consequences of AI emergence are unlikely enough to disregard?
So let's talk about dystopias/wierdtopias. Do you see any categories into which these can be grouped? The question then becomes, who will lose the most and who will lose the least under various types of scenarios.