You do realise that Grischuk is a Ukranian surname, don't you? As well as the fact that Grischuk's first wife was Ukranian and his current wife is of the half-Russian, half-Ukranian descent?

And he's also vocally against the conflict, which matters much more to me than his ancestry. His moral character in this regard is extremely admirable. Many people in Russia have Ukrainian surnames for obvious reasons of proximity, which is why so many Russians are against this invasion.

I don't know anything about his personal circumstances, but it is not inconceivable that he, or his spouse, or both have relatives in Ukraine who are potentially being shelled at this very moment or hiding it out, and that Grischuk and his relatives are in a great distress right now.

My heart sincerely goes out to him. I suspect this weighs on him much more than other circumstances. I think any individual passionate about morality and chess can follow https://twitter.com/Kasparov63 and learn how someone deeply impacted by this situation feels about it.

But this is banning someone who has actively spoken against the war. If you're a Russian doing that, you're exposing yourself to danger in the name of doing the right thing.

This isn't someone who was caught up in broader sanctions, like the innocent Russians whose life savings are being demolished. That's terrible, but in the broader context it is understandable and necessary. This is someone being specifically targeted for his nationality despite the fact - and this is the key differentiator - that doing so in no way does any damage to Russia.

You want to harm Russia? Treat anti-war Russians well. Show that the world isn't blindly taking action out of anger, but rather doing so in a targeted way to harm Putin and the Russian government. Russians who are speaking out against the war are good for Ukraine and the rest of the world, and they're bad for Putin. It makes no sense to punish them.

There's certainly a gray area for Russians who don't comment - they could be pro-war, or they could be reasonably afraid for their safety - but for Russians who say "In my view what we are doing is very wrong from both a moral view and practical view," punishment is counterproductive.

I was against the war in Iraq 20 years ago. I am still ashamed of it, and as an American I bear some shared culpability for it. I would have understood bans and boycotts and would have been at peace even if I were personally impacted. It would have been immeasurably less than what the hundreds of thousands of innocent, dead Iraqis suffered. I think Tyler Cowen is more concerned about this than Grischuk. I wonder why.

You're totally ignoring my point, though - bans and boycotts make sense. I fully agreed with that. Targeting you, specifically, even if you protested against the war, does not. You're pointing out the immense suffering of the Ukrainians, which I think everyone here agrees with, but then you're using it to avoid the question of why their suffering makes it appropriate to punish someone whose actions (speaking out against the war) are beneficial to them.

Also, it's not reasonable to compare the culpability of an American, who lives in a democracy and can choose to spend their time and effort protesting the country's leadership and trying to oust it in the next election, to someone living in a dictatorship who cannot reasonably do those things.

Just because you can speak or write, doesn't mean you should. Nothing you said is reasonable.

Japanese American imprisonment without due process or access to legal counsel during WW2 was condemnable. You advocate the opposite. I mean, nothing was written against then, was it?

Advocating for an individual's human rights and disassociation from their government's actions doesn't mean unequivocal support for the latter.

I think it's pretty reasonable to separate injustices by magnitude. If one doesn't do that, one begins to think things like "being asked to wear a mask is like the Holocaust because in both cases the government told people what to do". It is a lazy way for one to make a point when they struggle to make a point on its own merits.

In fact it is a special and famous case of sophistry to leverage a tenuous connection between two things and declare they are comparable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence. To quote, "This fallacy is committed when one shared trait between two subjects is assumed to show equivalence, especially in order of magnitude, when equivalence is not necessarily the logical result"

You are correct - in both cases, Japanese Internment camps during WW2 and Norway Chess's banning of Russian competitors in a chess tournament are examples of cases where innocent individuals were harmed by collective punishment. I completely agree with you on that.

However, only a very silly person would think both actions are comparable. It would be extremely offensive to suggest they are. While they exist on a continuum, they are very, very far apart and any reasonable person can see that 1) the forced imprisonment of 100,000+ people for multiple years while being charged with no crime and 2) the temporary exclusion of several dozen entrants from an international chess tournament are not in the same moral universe.

The moral calculus of applying pressure to Russia to withdraw from a war of aggression that is killing thousands still isn't easy, and decent people can disagree civilly about it.