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A GST on Wheat and Wheat Byproducts. Also [sanctions]
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Within which to discuss the impacts of Russia's imperialist invasion of Ukraine, it's resultant international sanctions, and the subsequent impact on global food supplies and economics more broadly.
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In the plus column, sanctions violation is like the one area of the law that rich people and corporations will actually reliably get in serious trouble for and thats very funny.
I think thats what it says on the tin, and thats about it
You aren’t obligated to respond if this is the level of effort you’re going to put into it.
Also helping end Apartheid.
What do you want? Sanctions are billed as an effective relatively bloodless tool. I dont think there's much evidence for that.
Then simply say that instead of trying to impress us with just how profoundly witty you find yourself to be.
This is supposed to be an avenue for discussion, not a soapbox for you to hold a rally on.
Sanctions hurt the innocent, yes. But in the case of Russia we can already see them taking actions to lessen the effects of the sanctions. It does appear that they have had an effect. Sanctions alone will likely not be enough to end the war, but they also make it harder for the war to continue, and considering the alternative to sanctions would be for an escalation of the war. I feel it’s an acceptable trade off.
At least they still have homes
I don't even really care if sanctions have a direct effect on policy
As long as they make Russians suffer they're working in my book
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Saying that something is "generally bad policy" doesn't make it bad this time, so I would need to see more evidence. For instance, is Russia experiencing mass famines and starvation? Are people dying enmasse from preventable diseases?
If you want to complain about the suffering that we don't have to see, then here's a thread she you can show us.
"Russians" arent responsible for anything happening. Its not a democracy.
Its been a week.
They are a means of increasing the effective cost of certain actions beyond the literal expense of bullets and bombs. How much of a deterrent that will be against future acts seems like it is very much a situational question as well as a very specific question in comparison to the notion that Boycott, Divestment, Sanction approaches will have no material effect on policy making decisions among their targets.
Putin is dealing with a sum cost fallacy, where he's going to keep putting money into this war until he runs out. So the goal is of the sanctions is to make it harder for him to keep going.
More importantly, the goal is to help the Russians see things the same way, and realize how little their leader cares about them. There are hardly any Americans that actually approved of Sadam Hussein, the main reason for opposing the war is because the cost of pursuing him wasn't worth it. Likewise, we have no direct control over Russian propaganda efforts designed to convince the Russian people that they're only hunting Nazis, but we can try to convince them that the war is too costly to continue.
"Suffer" can mean a lot of different things.
Mass torture and starvation is a form of suffering, but so is grounding someone with no TV. Both are forms of punishment, but only one of them is inhumane.
I haven't seen any evidence that the suffering in Russia crosses over into in being inhumane.
Putin launched an unprovoked invasion of a peaceful country in a blatant land grab with intent to kill the heads of a democratically elected government and is now just bombing cities and mining "agreed upon" civilian evacuation routes after breaking three humanitarian cease fires. All the while he's got his finger on the Big Red Button and everybody knows direct military intervention is, unfortunately, an unacceptable escalation. If the US could just roll in and bomb the Kremlin into a shiny puddle of glass and call it a day we would've by now. We can't.
Putin is the leader of Russia. Russia is invading the Ukraine and committing acts of terror against the civilian population. Somebody in the other thread mentioned "sanctioning them back into the hunter gatherer age" and frankly that feels like our only acceptable course of action. Eventually the average Russian (or general or Oligarch) will need to make a decision on whether supporting Putin's vague and insane war is worth their economy disappearing. If they want the hurt to stop they can start the work of pushing him out.
It seems a lot easier to rebuild your economy after you start playing nice and sanctions get lifted than to say, I dunno, rebuild your entire fucking country from the ground up after an invading army leveled it and killed your people with actual tanks and artillery.
I really, really hope for everyone's sake in Russia and elsewhere they pick option 2, if they pick option 1, Russia is going to not be a good place, but the myth of Putin having their best interests at heart will be forever shattered for a lot of Russians who had supported him for being a Strong Man
When a state invades another or starts committing genocide or what not, none of the tools that exist to try and stop their behaviour are going to be without negative consequences. And when actual miltiary intervention is off the table, well, sanctions are what you have.
We, as a global community, have crashed the value of the ruble. They cannot open their financial markets because they will immediately crash. If you think a financial situation like that doesn’t result in bodies, mostly poor ones, I’m not sure what to tell you. Like if you think the 2008 financial crash was bad you ain’t seen shit yet. Russia is capital F Fucked in a way that is almost incomprehensible.
I don't even expect them to be able to push him out, especially since the first people to try will get executed.
But at the very least, they can pressure Putin to end the war.
I still think the sanctions should continue even though the war does as long as Putin is in power to prevent him from having the resources to go again, but that's a separate argument for a separate time.
I feel like in many cases when sanctions have been discussed there are glaring inconsistencies in what sanctions and suffering are acceptable or not.
Personally I'm for sanctions because even if Putin isn't a democratically elected leader sanctions put pressure on him from a not fully cowed populace to do what is needed to lift them.
You can recapitalize institutions, you can subsidize individuals and industries to weather economic harm, you cannot resurrect the dead women and children in the Mariupol hospital Russia bombed. There is no way to mitigate their deaths in the way policy decisions can mitigate economic harm.
I agree and accept that is the consequences of sanctions. A lot of innocent people are going to be victims of Putins war both in Ukraine, Russia and to some degree the rest of the world. This was all discussed in depth before Putin chose to start this war.
War is a failure state where there are no good outcomes and only less bad ones. A crash of the Russian economy that puts people on the streets is still preferable to dropping butterfly mines on preschools and shelling maternity wards. Both are terrible because war is terrible.
One is pointless misery and the other might cause pressure to stop some of the misery.
I get that things are scary, but your lack of a Settlers of Catan reference in the thread title is inexcusable.
*spits*
I would love to see Russia peacefully and overwhelmingly oust Putin and his cronies, and then get to reenter the world stage as equals. That's probably never going to happen. It would take an armed uprising.
What I see as far more likely is Putin comes down with a bad case of, let's call it Covid 9x19mm. His replacement, graciously and out of the abundance of love and compassion in his generous heart, calls a ceasefire and withdraws and oh would you pretty please let us have our yachts back by the way?
That may be the absolute best case scenario. Because honestly Putins Russia has been enough of a problem for so long now even if he withdraws tomorrow I don't think the sanctions should be lifted. He can't keep being allowed to fuck around and push the envelope and then get rewarded when he stops hitting somebody. This whole shit we're in right now is the result of that exact formula. It needs to be made apparent to both Putin, and the average Russian, that as long as he's in power Russia is a pariah state. They will not be allowed back into polite society. They will not continue to siphon money out of their economy and jet set around the world and have beluga caviar and... crude oil yacht parties. I don't know what Russian Oligarchs do. Point is fuck em.
The bodies from this will be dropping for a decade or more. The recovery from this is going to take decades. It’s not something that can just get unfucked overnight.
Like I wish I could go pull infant mortality and death in childbirth statistics for the next ten years in Russia but I can’t, I’m willing to bet they’re gonna climb though, and mostly in the poorer regions too.
Omg 😲
I don't know that anyone denies that this, or frankly retaliation of any kind, will affect the poor the most.
Aye. The anti-BDS position is at least coherent. They just don't want to punish Israel and often don't even think they deserve to be punished.
If I’m being real honest, I’m actually a lot more hopeful about the mid terms than I was before because it would seem the bot farms have seemingly gone dark. It cannot be overstated how much Russia has been fuckin with the whole globe. They just spent the entirety of the pandemic pushing anti mask and anti vaxx extremism in a continuing effort to push western democracies towards civil war and collapse.
It's a nightvale reference.
Then what's the plan to deal with the bodies dropping right now then? How is this any different from harm caused by anti-apartheid sanctions that were themselves a response to harm caused by apartheid?
Let's have a little less wishing-harm- against-civilians please.
It's been a lot of funny haha "oh those silly Russians" but no, yeah their cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns and troll farms are an act of war. They've been actively trying to destabilize the US and the West for a while, they're just using Twitter dot com instead of munitions. It's time everybody started taking this shit as a serious threat and reacting accordingly.
The facets to the past few weeks and what have been revealed is just absolutely insane and will take a whole lot of time.
Let Russia just have Ukraine? Worse! We can't just let global fascism win over everything, they wouldn't stop with Ukraine
Fight Russia directly? Yeah no, nuclear war bad
Try and directly help the poorest people in Russia hurt by the sanctions? Putin wouldn't let us if we wanted to
Help the poor in the rest of the world, including at home, who will be hurt by significant increases in wheat prices? Where do I sign up, I am a socialist! I have "increase global food security" as a general goal for all politicians to aim for everywhere!
My combativeness on this topic seems to be because I see very few alternative solutions proposed. If someone has a good way to get rid of Putin's nukes, now's the time to speak up, we have much less destructive options available in that case
Edit: Beau of the Fifth Column has a video on this exact topic that went up today
Beau is a foreign policy expert (I'm comfortable saying that? I feel like) I don't disagree with his conclusions. The most food insecure people, many in nations with no horse in this race, will get hurt by this. Hopefully our governments use some of that pilfered oligarch cash to help them