Carnism as compared to Statism

[brimstoneSalad]

Any such policy should follow from extensive research.

And isn't that a typical example of the Unicorn Fallacy?

No. While sanctions are usually ineffective (something like 75% of them fail) they can be effective and the reasons for ineffective sanctions are usually pretty clear.
There are a number of studies that show what traits make sanctions effective or not, and it's pretty obvious. Here's one of the first links that came up to a short discussion on this:
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/79414/On-targe ... p17-28.pdf

There are much more involved studies available if you're interested, but to deny that sanctions are *ever* effective is insane and I'm not really interested in arguing something that obvious again.
Most sanctions are conceived and implemented very badly because politicians are not economists, and are too frequently economically illiterate or worse don't care and are just playing up a big act of being tough for their constituents.

The problem is not the theory, the problem is practice due to the people putting them into practice not understanding the theory.

[teo123]

something like 75% of them fail

I am not sure. Wikipedia cites a study that shows that only 5% of economic sanctions achieve desired results.

I'm not really interested in arguing something that obvious again.

I've already told you what I think about "obvious" things. Very few things are as obvious as the Earth being flat (perhaps only the Euclid's first four postulates are more obvious than that), and even the Earth being flat is false.
What you are stating is even less obvious than that the name "Vukovar" means "city of wolves", and that is also false.
Something seeming obvious may even be a reason to be skeptical of it, rather than a reason to accept it.

Most sanctions are conceived and implemented very badly because politicians are not economists

Economics is a very soft science, and economists are not at all immune to believing gibberish. You realize that Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are both masters of economics, yet they don't stop speaking nonsense about it? Maybe they don't actually believe half of the nonsense they are preaching, but they think that nonsense makes them popular (and it might).
Maybe the Croatian politician Miroslav Škoro will do something sensible about Croatian economy if he gets elected as a president, since he has done a PhD in economics. I am not sure what his positions on Israel and economic sanctions are, though (and Croatia is pretty powerless about that).

The problem is not the theory, the problem is practice due to the people putting them into practice not understanding the theory.

Christian Scientists are saying exactly that about their failures, right?

[brimstoneSalad]

@teo123 I suggest you read the link I sent you. It addresses that. A sanction doesn't have to achieve every goal to still be useful.
That said, even 5% is saying something and if you look at WHY that is you'll see a clear trend. Certain sanctions (arguably most) are doomed to failure and nothing more than political posturing, others are more likely successful when the prerequisites are there. Again, there's data to back this up.

I'm sure plenty of people say that about failures, but this is demonstrable. Again, read the short paper I linked. There are more extensive studies on the issue if you're really interested. The evidence here is clear and there's no reason to argue about it.

You could oppose sanctions generally on the basis that politicians are too stupid or indifferent to their success for them to be useful, but denying the cases where they are useful (as few as those are, and as I explained Israel is one of those cases they likely would be) is not productive and it's not something I want to spend time discussing.
Israel is one of those very rare situations where sanctions would probably work if you look at past cases. Even the mere threat would probably work. It's highly democratic and has a lot of corporate influence in its politics too (both forces that would pressure the government to end the sanctions), it's developed and educated enough for the population to control the government and not be thrown into mass famine or anything like that which would be counterproductive, and its economy is highly reliant on trade. Sanctions against Israel would be a huge blow, and to add to that there's already a substantial percentage of the population that opposes their actions in Palestine, so it would probably not take very much pressure to change that behavior that could be so easily changed without much cost to Israel.

To be clear, I'm not endorsing the current BDS movement here; their demands are far too strong to ever have a realistic chance of working. The demands of a sanction have to be practical and less damaging than the sanction itself. E.g. simply stop colonization and expansion without asking Israel to pull out of any conquered lands is a very simple goal, and possibly to grant citizenship and reparations to recent refugees back to some practical statute of limitations -- maybe a sliding scale depending on situation, like ten years for refugees who have not gained citizenship or a home/employment elsewhere and up to five years for those who have.
You can't try to ask for perfection, which is the enemy of the good when it comes to effective sanction campaigns. All that does it harm everybody with no chance of change.

[teo123]

That said, even 5% is saying something and if you look at WHY that is you'll see a clear trend.

In one of twenty cases when we put economic sanctions on some country to change its regime, the regime actually changed. Therefore, economic sanctions sometimes work.
Do I even need to point out the fallacies in this reasoning?
1)Broken Window Fallacy
It's easy to underestimate the damage the economic sanctions had done to the citizens, because we don't see what would have happened if the economic sanctions weren't there. For all we know, the regime would have changed without the economic sanctions, but in a less painful way.
2)Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
The "study" you linked, and I assume other such studies are no better, is using the same dataset to formulate the hypothesis and to test it. That's not how science works, the way to test the hypothesis is to make predictions based on it and see how often they come true. Seriously, how can you even calculate the p-value here?
3)Historicism
It's an attempt to derive general laws from what are, essentialy, historical anecdotes, especially since the number of "successful" economic sanctions is very low.
4)Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Why assume the regime changed because of the sanctions, and not for the reasons unrelated to it, or even in spite of it?
5)Confusing correlation with causation.
So, the study you linked to claims the economic sanctions are more likely to work in democratic societies. However, the statistics cited to support that can also be interpreted as saying that regimes are more likely to change if they are slightly more democratic, irrespective of the economic sanctions.

Again, read the short paper I linked.

Fine, I've found a way to view PDFs on this mobile phone (Google Drive app, which I had pre-installed, can open them, you need to download a PDF, then move it to Google Drive using Samsung My Files, then let the synchronisation happen over the cellular network in the Settings, and then you can view the PDF by opening it in the Google Drive app. Just in case this helps anybody...).
I just don't understand how you can dismiss my linguistic theories as not even worth considering, yet some obviously even less scientific "study" should, according to you, inform the government actions. From my perspective, it's just a bunch of mostly irrelevant statistics which are probably not even accurate, and no attempt whatsoever to calculate the p-value, or establish any form of rigour.

Israel is one of those very rare situations where sanctions would probably work if you look at past cases.

Even if that "study" is telling the truth, hardly so, because the actions of the Israeli government are motivated by religion (they want to be able to build a temple in Jerusalem, which happens to be an important city in Palestine), and that study says economic sanctions are almost powerless against religiously motivated regimes.

I can't spend this much of my time on-line, I've spent 1200 MB of cellular data in the last 15 days, and I only have 1500 MB per month. I've watched only one or two videos (it's also not much pleasure to watch videos over the slow cellular connection), but browsing Quora and Britannica (full of large images) also appears to be prohibitively expensive. Connecting my computer to the cellular network in order to upload some binary files onto GitHub also takes unexpected amount of data, not sure if that's because of the GitHub website containing a lot of images or because of some background apps running on my computer sending noise. Anyway, don't expect me to respond very soon.

[brimstoneSalad]

@teo123
Observations there are in concordance with broader economic theory. That is, they confirm what we would have already expected without even having access to that data. If it were random that would be less likely.
I originally explained the issue with developing a theory FROM a data set, as per the discussions on soft sciences. I also explained that despite some sciences being softer than others I still tentatively accept professional opinion on these matters.

I don't advocate sanctions when there will be collateral damage to civilians, like denying them medication or food. You'd have to weigh the potential risks against potential rewards, and it only makes sense for a more developed country where people will throw a fit if they can't have iPhones or other luxury products. How the U.S. operates sanctions against less developed countries to deny them humanitarian aid is unconscionable.

Even if that "study" is telling the truth, hardly so, because the actions of the Israeli government are motivated by religion (they want to be able to build a temple in Jerusalem, which happens to be an important city in Palestine), and that study says economic sanctions are almost powerless against religiously motivated regimes.

If we did some research and found that to be true and that the secular contingent couldn't easily outvote it (much of Israel is pretty secular, and will not necessarily prefer continuing the war and pushing toward Jerusalem if it means no more luxury products from the U.S.), then you are right that a sanction would not be useful.
Any decision would have to follow from careful research.

Secular Jews make up over 40% of the Jewish population in Israel (around 20% are actually atheists), only 20% are highly orthodox. The rest fall in between somewhere.
And Israel is only about 76% Jewish. Even if 60% of the Jewish population wanted this and wouldn't be deterred by any level of sanction (no reason to believe that), that's 46% of the population. There's good reason to believe they'd lose in a vote, and Israel is democratic. Add onto that the fact that another 40% of Jews could go either way, and there's good reason to believe there would be overwhelming support for ending those practices if there was even a little push.

[teo123]

Observations there are in concordance with broader economic theory.

There being a broader theory, in historical linguistics, usually means, at the very least, being able to line up the sound laws that you think operated in the language you are talking about. It also usually implies being able to translate some short piece of text into that language according to your proposed grammar rules. And many people, including me (and, I suppose, you), think it implies being able to discuss the way to calculate the p-value. There is nothing like that in the paper about historical economics you linked to.

That is, they confirm what we would have already expected without even having access to that data.

Searching for evidence that supports a pre-determined (and probably incoherent) hypothesis is not how science works.

I also explained that despite some sciences being softer than others I still tentatively accept professional opinion on these matters.

Again, where is the evidence of the consensus? And who is even qualified to talk about those things?

I don't advocate sanctions when there will be collateral damage to civilians, like denying them medication or food.

Collateral damage is very hard to estimate. What if the electronical products we ban happen to be suitable for diagnosing some disease, and we prevent or significantly postpone the discovery of that?

There's good reason to believe they'd lose in a vote, and Israel is democratic.

I don't understand what you mean. So, you agree that the majority of Israelites don't support the wars against Palestine and Lebanon. Yet, the Israeli government still wages those wars. And you claim that Israeli government is "democratic"?

I am wasting my time and possibly money discussing this. I am not sure what to do, it's hard to agree to disagree when it comes to pointing guns at people for trading "luxury" products with Israelites.

[FredVegrox]

All the major violence and killing of other people came from governments in place over people. We can not justifiably say that it would be worse for people to be in communities without government over them. Governments always become intrusive. Carnism likewise involves similar intrusive violence.

[teo123]

All the major violence and killing of other people came from governments in place over people. We can not justifiably say that it would be worse for people to be in communities without government over them. Governments always become intrusive. Carnism likewise involves similar intrusive violence.

@brimstoneSalad believes that if governments disappeared, we would start forming xenophobic religions demanding from us to kill people of other tribes, and that genocides would be smaller but incredibly common. If you ask me, that's such an extraordinary claim that no evidence could possibly justify it.

That's not to say that anarchy is the best possible political situation. There are some sensible government regulations. Probably any regulation that reduces the amount of antibiotics used in the egg industry is sensible. So are regulations regulations requiring ISPs not to set up their DNS servers in such a way that they can be used to amplify DoS attacks. Internet would probably be paralyzed by DoS attacks if not for sensible government regulation. But that's it: limited government enforcing a few sensible regulations. Not government which makes it possible for people to vote their way into tyranny.

[FredVegrox]

All the major violence and killing of other people came from governments in place over people. We can not justifiably say that it would be worse for people to be in communities without government over them. Governments always become intrusive. Carnism likewise involves similar intrusive violence.

@brimstoneSalad believes that if governments disappeared, we would start forming xenophobic religions demanding from us to kill people of other tribes, and that genocides would be smaller but incredibly common. If you ask me, that's such an extraordinary claim that no evidence could possibly justify it.

That's not to say that anarchy is the best possible political situation. There are some sensible government regulations. Probably any regulation that reduces the amount of antibiotics used in the egg industry is sensible. So are regulations regulations requiring ISPs not to set up their DNS servers in such a way that they can be used to amplify DoS attacks. Internet would probably be paralyzed by DoS attacks if not for sensible government regulation. But that's it: limited government enforcing a few sensible regulations. Not government which makes it possible for people to vote their way into tyranny.

I see that what we have is not so different from a gang invading and running our lives, just becoming more institutionalized and pushing its propaganda that we need it and it benefits us. The original American patriots who were colonists rebelled against taxation as they were not being represented, which was much less than than what the government puts on us without our input. There were the warnings then of coming corruption.

[teo123]

All the major violence and killing of other people came from governments in place over people. We can not justifiably say that it would be worse for people to be in communities without government over them. Governments always become intrusive. Carnism likewise involves similar intrusive violence.

@brimstoneSalad believes that if governments disappeared, we would start forming xenophobic religions demanding from us to kill people of other tribes, and that genocides would be smaller but incredibly common. If you ask me, that's such an extraordinary claim that no evidence could possibly justify it.

That's not to say that anarchy is the best possible political situation. There are some sensible government regulations. Probably any regulation that reduces the amount of antibiotics used in the egg industry is sensible. So are regulations regulations requiring ISPs not to set up their DNS servers in such a way that they can be used to amplify DoS attacks. Internet would probably be paralyzed by DoS attacks if not for sensible government regulation. But that's it: limited government enforcing a few sensible regulations. Not government which makes it possible for people to vote their way into tyranny.

I see that what we have is not so different from a gang invading and running our lives, just becoming more institutionalized and pushing its propaganda that we need it and it benefits us. The original American patriots who were colonists rebelled against taxation as they were not being represented, which was much less than than what the government puts on us without our input. There were the warnings then of coming corruption.

I agree. The vast majority of government policies are harmful.
Politicians are simply misled by common sense. Like the agricultural subsidies as an attempt to drive the prices of food down. Common sense tells us they do work, but try to explain that using economics. Can you? You can perhaps shoehorn that into Karl Marx'es or the Adam Smith'es economic theory, because they are based on the Labour Theory of Value, but I don't think you can shoehorn that into some modern economic theory. Milton Friedman famously argued agricultural subsidies increase the prices of all food up by increasing the price of arable land, and I think just about every economist will agree with that. But I have little doubt that Franklin Delano Roosevelt honestly believed that the agricultural subsidies he introduced were helping.
People, including politicians, have some pre-conceived notions of how economics work. Just like they do for physics (more massive things falling faster, things naturally coming to rest if no force is acting on them...). But at least for physics, people tend trust physicists to know better than an average person. For economics, people contradict virtual consensuses in economics all the time without a second thought.
That said, sometimes government regulation is necessary. Government regulation seems to be the only sane way to address the massive use of antibiotics in the egg industry leading to superbacteria. Or the problem of ISPs incorrectly setting up their DNS servers, making it possible to massively amplify denial-of-service attacks.