I find the torture happening on both sides terribly sad. The reason I continue to support Ukraine—aside from them being a victim of aggression—is that I have hope that things will change for the better there. While in Russia I’m confident that things will only get worse. Both countries have the same Soviet past, but Ukraine decided to move towards European values, while Russia decided to stand for imperialism and homophobia. And after writing this, I realised: your linked report says that Ukraine stopped using secret detention facilities in 2017 but separatists continue using them. Some things are really getting better.
ViktoriaMalyasova
Karma: 530
I don’t think these restrictions to freedom of association are comparable. First of all, we need to account for magnitudes of possible harm and not just numbers. In 1944, the Soviet government deported at least 191,044 Crimean tatars to the Uzbek SSR. By different estimates, from 18% to 46% of them died in exile. Now their representative body is banned, and Russian government won’t even let them commemorate the deportation day. I think it would be reasonable for them to fear for their lives in this situation.
Secondly, Russia always, even before the war, had rigged elections with fake opposition parties. That may be why the man in the interview says he had no choice. There are 4 parties in Russian parlament, but they are “pocket opposition”, they all vote the same on all important questions. Navalny wasn’t even allowed to participate in president elections. And if he were to participate and win, the votes would be miscounted anyway. So in Russia 100% of people lack a democratic representation, because there is no democracy.
Ukraine is at least a democratic country. Poroshenko didn’t poison and imprison Zelensky or vice versa. And Zelensky, by the way, started out pretty pro-Russian. His election campaign movie, “The servant of the people”, has a theme that Europe is not so great and Russians and Ukrainians are brothers and allies. He got elected, which shows that Russian-sympathetic views can get represented.
It’s true that Ukraine suspended 11 parties with links to Russian government for the period of martial law, after Russia started a full-scale invasion. That sounds like a reasonable measure to me. I don’t think Great Britain is an unfree country because it banned the British Union of Fashists party in 1940. When I look at those banned parties, it looks similarly justified.
For example, Evgeny Muraev, the leader of the NASHI party which suspiciously shares its name with the NASHI youth pro-Putin movement in Russia, called on Ukraine to capitulate when the invasion started.
The “Opposition platform—for life” party in its program suggests canceling decommunization laws. USSR caused a famine in Ukraine, deported over 191 thousands of people, and now they want to cancel decommunization?! If that was not enough, their representatives reportedly collaborated with the occupants, helping correct fire in Mariupol. Their leader Medvedchuk is Putin’s friend, Putin is his daughter’s godfather. I think this shows that British Union of Fashists party is a good analogy here. A country has to defend itself from foreign government agents and inhumane ideologies.
I haven’t looked at them all. Maybe there is a party there that doesn’t deserve it. But then these parties are only suspended for the duration of martial law. They should become legal again after the war ends.
When it comes to Hizb ut-Tahrir, it seems I was indeed mistaken to believe that they never advocated violence. Calls to destroy the state of Izrael and kill people living there sure sound like calls to violence. I guess I should have investigated further instead of just trusting Wikipedia and ovd-info. Now I am confused why this org is legal in Izrael itself. I see this issue is a lot less clear-cut than it seemed at first. I am going to edit the post.
>> Those who genuinely desire to establish an ‘Islamic Caliphate’ in a non-Islamic country likely also have some overlap with those who are fine with resorting to planning acts of terror
A civilized country cannot dish out 15 year prison terms just based on its imagination of what is likely. To find someone guilty of terrorism, you have to prove that they were planning or doing terrorism. Which Russia didn’t. Even in the official accusations, all that the accused allegedly did was meeting up, fundraising and spreading their literature.
I say I am not writing propaganda because I am describing my honest impressions and opinions on the matter, not cherry picking facts or telling lies to manipulate you. If your definition says that any writing that changes views is propaganda, then your definition is very broad and covers any persuasive argument. When it comes to emotions, I do not believe it is necessary, or rational, or virtuous, to see injustice and pain and remain impassive and neutral. So thank you, but I’ll pass.
I don’t find the goal of establishing and living by Islamic laws sympathetic either, but they are using legal means to achieve it, not acts of terror. I don’t know if the accused people actually belong to the organization, I suspect most don’t. All accused but one deny it, some evidence was forged and one person said he was tortured. Ukraine is supported by the West, so Russia wouldn’t accuse Crimean activists of something West finds sympathetic. They’re not stupid.
So the overwhelming majority of persecuted Crimean Tatars are accused of belonging to this organization. I could go pick some more sympathetic examples, of course, but that wouldn’t paint an accurate picture. I’m trying to describe things as I see them, not create propaganda.
>> Most uprising fail because of strategic and tactical reasons, not because the other side was more evil (though by many metrics it often tends to be).
I don’t disagree? I’m not saying that Russia is evil because the protests failed. It’s evil because it fights aggressive wars, imprisons, tortures and kills innocent people.
The harms you don’t see
Maximal lotteries for value learning
How are your goals not met by existing cooperative games? E.g. Stardew Valley is a cooperative farming simulator, Satisfactory is about building a factory together. No violence or suffering there.
What I don’t get is how can Russians still see it as a civil war? The truth came out by now: Strelkov, Motorola were Russians. The separatists were led and supplied by Russia. It was a war between Russia and Ukraine from the start. I once argued with a Russian man about it, I told him about fresh graves of Russian soldiers that Lev Schlosberg found in Pskov in 2014. He asked me: “If there are Russian troops in Ukraine, why didn’t BBC write about it?”. I didn’t know, so I checked as soon as I had internet access, and BBC did write about it...
So I don’t see how can anyone sincerely believe that this was ever a Ukrainian internal conflict. Egor Holmogorov said: “For our sacred mission, the whole country should lie [about our soldiers fighting in Donbas]”. And I get the feeling that’s what exactly what people do.
He’s not saying things to express some coherent worldview. Germany could be an enemy on May 9th or a victim of US colonialism another day. People’s right to self-determination is important when we want to occupy Crimea, but inside Russia separatism is a crime. Whichever argument best proves that Russia’s good and West is bad.
Well, the article says he was allowed to reboard after he deleted his tweet, and was offered vouchers in recompense, so it sounds like it was one employee’s initiative rather than the airline’s policy, and it wasn’t that bad.
Thank you.
Ukraine recovers its territory including Crimea.
Thank you for explaining this! But then how can this framework be used to model humans as agents? People can easily imagine outcomes worse than death or destruction of the universe.
Then, is considered to be a precursor of in universe when there is some -policy s.t. applying the counterfactual ” follows ” to (in the usual infra-Bayesian sense) causes not to exist (i.e. its source code doesn’t run).
A possible complication is, what if implies that creates / doesn’t interfere with the creation of ? In this case might conceptually be a precursor, but the definition would not detect it.
Can you please explain how does this not match the definition? I don’t yet understand all the math, but intuitively, if H creates G / doesn’t interfere with the creation of G, then if H instead followed policy “do not create G/ do interfere with the creation of G”, then G’s code wouldn’t run?
Can you please give an example of a precursor that does match the definition?
Any policy that contains a state-action pair that brings a human closer to harm is discarded.
If at least one policy contains a state-action pair that brings a human further away from harm, then all policies that are ambivalent towards humans should be discarded. (That is, if the agent is a aware of a nearby human in immediate danger, it should drop the task it is doing in order to prioritize the human life).
This policy optimizes for safety. You’ll end up living in a rubber-padded prison of some sort, depending on how you defined “harm”. E.g. maybe you’ll be cryopreserved for all eternity. There are many things people care about besides safety, and writing down the full list and their priorities in a machine-understandable way would solve the whole outer alignment problem.
When it comes to your criticism of utilitarianism, I don’t feel that killing people is always wrong, at any time, for any reason, and under any circumstance. E.g. if someone is about to start a mass shooting at a school, or a foreign army is invading your country and there is no non-lethal way to stop them, I’d say killing them is acceptable. If the options are that 49% of population dies or 51% of population dies, I think AI should choose the first one.
However, I agree that utilitarianism doesn’t capture the whole human morality, because our morality isn’t completely consequentialist. If you give me a gift of 10$ and forget about it, that’s good, but if I steal 10$ from you without anyone noticing, that’s bad, even though the end result is the same. Jonathan Haidt in “The Righteous Mind” identifies 6 foundations of morality: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Purity and Obedience to Authority. Utilitarian calculations are only concerned with Care: how many people are helped and by how much. They ignore other moral considerations. E.g. having sex with dead people is wrong because it’s disgusting, even if it harms no one.
Welcome!
>> …it would be mainly ideas of my own personal knowledge and not a rigorous, academic research. Would that be appropriate as a post?
It would be entirely appropriate. This is a blog, not an academic journal.
Good point. Anyone knows if there is a formal version of this argument written down somewhere?
I believe that the decommunization laws are for the most part good and necessary, though I disagree with the part where you are not allowed to insult historical figures.
These laws are:
Law no. 2558 “On Condemning the Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian Regimes and Prohibiting the Propagation of their Symbols” — banning Nazi and communist symbols, and public denial of their crimes. That included removal of communist monuments and renaming of public places named after communist-related themes.
Law no. 2538-1 “On the Legal Status and Honoring of the Memory of the Fighters for the Independence of Ukraine in the 20th Century” — elevating several historical organizations, including the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, to official status and assures social benefits to their surviving members.
Law no. 2539 “On Remembering the Victory over Nazism in the Second World War”
Law no. 2540 “On Access to the Archives of Repressive Bodies of the Communist Totalitarian Regime from 1917–1991” — placing the state archives concerning repression during the Soviet period under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.
Venice commision criticizes the specifics of some laws, insisting that they should be formulated more clearly, that sanctions should follow the principle of proportionality etc. Getting these details right is important and I support it. But as a matter of general principle,
“The Venice Commission and OSCE/ODIHR recognise the right of Ukraine to ban or even criminalise the use of certain symbols of and propaganda for totalitarian regimes.”
The Opposition Party—for Life, on the contrary, proposes to repel all these laws. There was no decommunization in Russia after the USSR fell. No lustration or opening of archives. This allowed a former KGB officer to consolidate power and start an aggressive war which many people justify as a way to bring back the “good old times”. Just as there are many people in Russia dreaming of bringing back USSR, there also such people in Ukraine. They shouldn’t be allowed to bring totalitarianism back. This is why decommunization is important.