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.
Last week the U.S. and its allies enacted sanctions which should for all intents and purposes be understood as a war crime. From a purely consequentialist/humanitarian perspective sanctions are totally unjustifiable. They will impoverish millions of people not only in Russia but the many countries which are economically reliant on and integrated with the Russian economy. Impoverishing millions in effect means killing tens of thousands.
This is from Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs's 2019 paper "Sanctions as Collective Punishment.”
I have not looked into their methodology, and the 40,000 number may be wildly inflated. However, that its even plausible that U.S. sanctions could cause 40,000 deaths in Venezuela over the course of one... (read 653 more words →)
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 prob is overly abscessed with shaming, and I fully understand why LW has guidelines which limit specific types of... (read more)