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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
How do you think you’re supposed to attack the leadership’s wealth? The majority of the sanctions imposed on Russia, for example, do exactly that.
Though really, the idea that sanctions are somehow immoral is nonsense from the start. They’re no more or less immoral than any other form of economic competition.
Let’s not resort to whataboutism here either on the subject of election tampering.
Edited by archonspeaks on May 3rd 2019 at 2:00:59 AM
They should have sent a poet.![]()
Everytime I read the word "Santions" being treated as a unspeakable crime, I want to punch something.
Edited by KazuyaProta on May 3rd 2019 at 4:02:57 AM
Watch me destroying my country![]()
Because are you then referring to her, or her father (and Fox News host) Mike Huckabee? This is why fiction has a One-Steve Limit.
Edited by ironballs16 on May 3rd 2019 at 5:05:17 AM
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"Tax havens are very protective of the blood money they hide, you’d have to invade the tax havens and take the money by force, that’s if you can identity which tax haven is holding the money. Assuming you don’t end up with it being some of the tax havens/money launders that are immune to invasions due to being protected by nuclear weapons.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThey're not an unspeakable crimes, but they are far from morally neutral. When children die from lack of access to medicine because you want a regime change, you better have a damn good plan to replace them, that can make up for the damage you've caused. "I'm promoting someone who's friendlier to the interests of my oil companies" ain't one such plan.
Please show me how the sanctions on Russia affected the wealth of the oligarchs or lessened Putin's stability. Show me their effect on Saddam or Franco or Castro's regimes.
You know when Iran's government was on the verge of being overthrown? When the Iran Nuclear Deal was signed, the sanctions were lifted... and the populace saw that things stayed just as bad for them while their elites got wealthier and wealthier. Now that they're back on, national solidarity and siege mentality have turned the anger outward again, and funnelled the public into rallying behind the regime. Again.
Edited by Oruka on May 3rd 2019 at 2:24:13 AM
You have been paying attention to the news, right? The sanctions on Russia have been utterly devestating to their 1%.
And on the issue of morality, frankly that’s just tough shit. Any form of national or economic competition is going to hurt someone somewhere. As I said, sanctions are no more or less moral than other forms of competition.
Edited by archonspeaks on May 3rd 2019 at 2:22:06 AM
They should have sent a poet.@Russians being desperate to lift sanctions: sources, please, and thank you.
@Tax Havens: they're either controlled by the countries imposing the sanctions and their close allies, or are said countries. Financial secrecy and illicit financial flows are the largest reason by far that poor countries stay poor, dwarfing government corruption by an order of magnitude.
While that's a topic for another time, I really do wonder how much blood money (or even sweat
-and-tears
money) in the USA gets laundered through Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, among other gaping loopholes.
Thank you for making my point for me, my dear Social Darwinist.
Edited by Oruka on May 3rd 2019 at 2:40:49 AM
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Take the case of Oleg Deripaska, who actually sued the US Treasury after sanctions slashed his fortune by half. [1]
He’s a longtime Putin ally and considered a critical member of the “oligarchy”, and it’s not just him. The richest Russians lost billions upon billions of dollars [2]
to these sanctions, and have been agitating desperately to get rid of them. What is that if not a targeting of the ultra-rich like you originally proposed?
To be quite frank, this is common knowledge, and asking for sources on it is an underhanded debate tactic that’s somewhat disappointing to see here. Good to see you resorting to slinging insults too.
A point so weak it can’t be defended without bad faith tactics is barely a point at all.
Edited by archonspeaks on May 3rd 2019 at 2:43:50 AM
They should have sent a poet.Charles: If he gets a significant lead, that is. Who knows how the rest of this year will turn out.
I do think your right in that if someone is obviously leading the pack by the time voting is on the horizon, Obama will endorse them to rally the party together. If no one actually carves out a decent lead and we go into a brokered convention territory, Obama will be the kingmaker and push someone as a compromise candidate
Edited by Parable on May 3rd 2019 at 2:42:06 AM
Yeah thus my point, you’re asking the US to turn on it’s closest allies and start wars with them for this.
I’d love for us to clean us the tax havens, but it’s not a replacement for sanctions, it’s a separate issue that needs to be dealt with both because of international blood money and because of domestic blood money. Plenty of taxes that should be paid in the US aren’t because the money gets hidden in US tax havens.
You’d be declaring a literal war on the ultra-rich. I’m not opposed to it, but it’s a long term project that’s liable to end in another Business Plot even if done with careful consideration.
Sanctions can work, they did (past tense, current US sanctions on Iran are worthless) a lot of good with Iran (because everyone was part of them and because the public was able to express its anger at the Iranian government) and South Africa is another solid historical example.
They work best when targeted at countries where a big chunk of the population is able to vote to elect leaders that can implement meaningful change that can get the sanctions lifted, as happened in both Iran and South Africa.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran@Ultimatum. Huck was a damn cool kid. He grew up surrounded by slave culture and yet his conscience would have him rather damn himself to Hell in his own mind than not help a slave run away. Just for that, he's one of the greatest heroes in literature, braving what he was taught was God's will for the sake of doing what his gut told him was the right thing. Now that's The All-American Boy.
Well, that sounds like excellent news, and I'd love to be wrong. Sources, please?
So long as we agree they're a tangibly violent method, I'm happy to admit that they might sometimes be worth the harm they inflict.
Edited by Oruka on May 3rd 2019 at 3:03:07 AM
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TLDR. Santions are complex things
Edited by KazuyaProta on May 3rd 2019 at 4:47:26 AM
Watch me destroying my countryDon't abuse words, social Darwinism would be if they said that those people deserved to die because they were weak.
They didn't, therefore it's not social Darwinism.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangPutin's history is basically his attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union step by step and he did a fairly decent job of it by the same methods of murder, lies, bribes, and rhetoric.
But the one-two punch of "oil not being as expensive as it used to be" and "sanctions" plus NATO/EU getting wise to his shit means that he is basically not going to be the world power he wants to be anymore.
Not that Russia ISN'T a world power.
As we see with the fact they have troops in Venezuela that Trump denies exists.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
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If you consider sanctions violent, then you’re opposed to all forms of competition between nations. Again, they are no more or less violent or immoral than even the other methods you yourself have proposed. If you think cultural imperialism or top-down regime change don’t hurt anyone you’re fooling yourself.
Opposing all competition is a totally ridiculous position to hold, but at least a consistent one.
At this point I’d say Russia is more a regional power than a world power, considering how thin they’ve stretched their ability to project force with their current deployments.
Edited by archonspeaks on May 3rd 2019 at 3:02:05 AM
They should have sent a poet.Europe has been making dramatic strides towards improving financial transparency. Iceland has been extremely successful. It can probably be done bloodlessly, with judicious use of amnesties, pardons, and get-out-of-jail-free cards. See US Revonstruction, and bloodless democratic revolutions in Europe, Tunisia, South Africa... I'm happy to let monsters get away with murder and a yacht if they willingly let their ability to monster be crippled forever.
I'm opposed to competition where people's lives are at stake. Nations exist to serve the people that make them up, not the opposite. Most people don't want to get stuff and power at the expense of others' lives. Or, at least, they wouldn't admit to it.
They didn't, therefore it's not social Darwinism.
"It's okay for losers to die because competition is inevitable" is different from "losers should die because competition is good", but they're functionally the same: an effort to numb your conscience and make you complicit in the face of horror. Certainly not what one would say if one were on the losing side of the competition.
Edited by Oruka on May 3rd 2019 at 3:13:07 AM
It's not simple stuff to source, I don't have access to my old IR textbooks currently and a lot of what I'm saying won't be directly sourced stuff as much as a combination of textbook extrapolations, lecture information and the culmination of years of discussions and analysis on the subject.
Your best bet for further reading is going to be looking at the two examples I've given (Iran being the Iran treaty was made by Obama and South Africa before the end of Apartheid) and doing research on how sanctions were implement (in both cases with large global action and over a clear specific issue) and how the public in the country was able to express its anger at being harmed by the sanctions (again in both cases by a form of democratic election where more reasonable voices were able to run on a platform of conciliation).
I'm not gonna pretend that sanctions are a simple or easy thing to do, there are people who know a lot about this subject who can't tell beforehand if a set of sanctions will have the intended impact or not, it's bloody complicated.
Edit:
Lives are always at stake, welcome to national and international governance, almost every actions results in people dying in some way.
Iceland is one country and Europe is a continent, the EU has made limited moved that have been hampered internally by the likes of Cyprus, Ireland, the Netherlands and everyone's favourite [insert expletives here] Luxenbourg. That's before one gets into the number of wrenches that the UK has thrown into the process.
The same UK that is in the middle of leaving the EU because much of its wealthy elites are vulture capitalists who want to run The City as a mob laundromat, loot the UK public services and hide all their wealth in British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories.
The UK is one of the biggest providers of tax havens in the world, and we're in the process of becoming more hostile to international financial regulation.
Edited by Silasw on May 3rd 2019 at 10:14:15 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Sanctions are an implicitly violent measure that not only can and often does cause suffering in the working populace while leaving the elites relatively intact, people in those countries read newspapers and know exactly who to blame for the sanctions, and that's the foreign power imposing them.
What does work is attacking the leadership's "loot". Get their money in the tax havens and freeze it or apply civil forfeiture. A dictator lives and dies on his ability to keep his top brass satisfied with its wealth and afraid of replacement. If they store their wealth in foreign assets, seizing them is better than any assassination.
If it's not a dictatorship but a properly representative democracy, where the leader's continued power depends on the support of a very large segment of the public, your task has become much more difficult, though not insurmountable. But then, no self-respecting democracy,
would indulge in election meddling
, only evil dictatorships and oligarchies do that, da?