Here is my own take on Ukraine sanctions, if and idea can generate anything of value released into the web.
The main goal of withdrawing sanctions is to get a better deal for the people of Ukraine (even those that might theoretically end up in Russia when its all done).
We are holding something like $640B of Russian foreign reserves hostage is my understanding.
If ending the sanctions is one of the things that ends the conflict, that $640B should go towards rebuilding Ukraine.
Now you might not be able to swing that as reparations. And if Russia does well it might even be the "rebuilding eastern Ukraine that we now control fund". But basically I don't think that money should go back to Putin directly. Instead I'd like to see a large chunk of it go towards direct periodic payments to residents of places like Donbass who agree to remain or move back to those areas for a period of time and try to rebuild. That's where I would put most of the money. Maybe some could also go to specific rebuilding projects, but mostly I trust the individuals with the money. Double for any young people that move back.
That seems like a way for Putin to "get a win" with the actual win being for the actual people on the ground.
Is ‘social media’ new? ‘ Hyper-connectivity – Rapid messages (within minutes) between any two members of the group is possible and messages can be sent (directly or indirectly) to a majority of key people in the group within minutes via the same process.’
Weren’t pulpits and church services, congregations, Sunday Schools, Bible classes, social media’ - and didn’t the messaging travel fast? Hasn’t traditional social media just been replaced by secular, modern equivalents using electronics?
In fact the 3 conditions attributed to NSG are exactly those of religion. Religious services/events were held, regularly, routinely and all attended and where the moral panic of the day could be spread. And nothing does bullshit either by flood or firehose quite like organised religion. The term propaganda was borrowed from the Catholic Church: ‘Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide’.
The Covid panic was a unique experience of our lifetime and it is not clear to me what factors were most important in creating that panic.
A key moment of the panic was the NBA canceling games and suspending its season because a player, Rudy Gobert, tested positive prior to a game in which he was going to play! That's right. The first domino to fall to alter "normal life" in the USA was a healthy athlete, scarcely sick, testing positive for the virus. Note, Rudy Gobert survived Covid and continues to play in the NBA.
So what setup this singular NBA moment in March 2020? What inputs created the basis for the league to respond to a positive test for a disease, that was never an elevated threat to healthy people, by suspending play? I don't think these decisions were driven by social media. The NBA leadership had to be receiving guidance from "experts" and not from Twitter.
I believe that if our institutions had not panicked in their response to Covid then the panickers on social media would have never been that influential.
But moral panics are real. The rush to judgment of the Sandman kid was driven by both social media and professional media. The resistance to ending Covid protocols has been supported greatly by social media. At the same time social media was a great resource for giving understanding about the true risks of Covid
I think the social media response to immediately sympathize with Ukraine and to attack any who are less than 100% enthusiastic for Ukraine's defense is an important data point. Hating on Russia / Putin is understandable. But why the need to sympathize so greatly with Ukraine? Why the emotional demand to accept personal sacrifices to help Ukraine? Americans did not respond this way to the other Russian military aggressions?
Here I think social media is a real, powerful influence. But I'm inclined to think social media's greater role is in training people how to conform and how to signal that conformity. That social media can create flash mobs of moral outrage is a reality. But the mob will dissipate unless the cause can be sustained by ongoing narrative.
I don't agree with Cactus about groups and moral panics. Your post, however, is terrible. First, although I like to separate "the intimate world" and "the remote world" --as Gordon Tullock implied long ago with his separation between us and them-- you are confused about our remote world. It's not about celebrities, criminals, and politicians, but about ordinary people like us. Today celebrities, criminals, and politicians are as far away from us and they were 100 years ago.
Today, "the remote world" is much closer to our intimate world, but we continue distinguishing between them and us. This is not a question of distance -- in the apartment building where I live I regard all other residents as part of my remote world (as a matter of fact, I know nothing about them even though I have been living in this building for the past 12 years). I know, however, much more about the ordinary people of my hometown, the one I left 60 years ago, because everyday I could read about what is going there in the local press which I access via internet (I still have friends and family there but more importantly I'm interested in understanding how their social environment has been changing).
Unrelated to groups, what you call "moral panic" is just an outraging shock, that is, a sudden, unexpected, and unpleasant event or experience, but unpleasant to the boiling point of outrage. A few shocks reach the boiling point thanks to the old mass media and the new social media, but their intervention is not an emotional reaction but an intentional one on behalf of some political factions. Centuries ago some politicians were interested in inflating some shocks to that boiling point but they lacked good and cheap means (they relied on rumors and shouting "the British are coming"). Today is quite different because ideas can be transmitted faster than viruses and we have a hard time determining how reliable they are and how relevant to the understanding of specific issues they are. You may remember how optimistic we were 50 years ago when F. Machlup was writing his series of volumes on knowledge, and how difficult it's now to argue seriously about "the epistemologic status" of any idea (you can entertain yourself by reading again Sowell's "Knowledge and Decisions" and thinking about the ideas that motivated decisions in the experiences he considered).
All shocks, outraging or not, have a life cycle. Politicians cannot control their endpoint but they can rely on their media servants (including bloggers) to erase them from people's radar.
I am not sure Russia invading an independent Eastern European state would have been a non-event in America 50 years ago. In 1972, during the Cold War. That might have been a pretty big deal, although of course at the time Ukraine was part of the USSR and many American journalists were still claiming there was never a man made famine there that killed millions. Russia invading, anything in Europe, other than maybe Finland would have started a shooting war and possible nuclear crisis. Of course, those on the left would have been more likely to support the USSR than condemn it, but still.
Again, you have this blind spot: "Today, the Twitter mob drives foreign policy."
Twitter is a tool- the foreign policy makers use it, not the other way around. It would be more accurate if you described it like this: "The Twitter Mob are the foreign policy makers themselves."
Here is my own take on Ukraine sanctions, if and idea can generate anything of value released into the web.
The main goal of withdrawing sanctions is to get a better deal for the people of Ukraine (even those that might theoretically end up in Russia when its all done).
We are holding something like $640B of Russian foreign reserves hostage is my understanding.
If ending the sanctions is one of the things that ends the conflict, that $640B should go towards rebuilding Ukraine.
Now you might not be able to swing that as reparations. And if Russia does well it might even be the "rebuilding eastern Ukraine that we now control fund". But basically I don't think that money should go back to Putin directly. Instead I'd like to see a large chunk of it go towards direct periodic payments to residents of places like Donbass who agree to remain or move back to those areas for a period of time and try to rebuild. That's where I would put most of the money. Maybe some could also go to specific rebuilding projects, but mostly I trust the individuals with the money. Double for any young people that move back.
That seems like a way for Putin to "get a win" with the actual win being for the actual people on the ground.
Here’s something to think about.
Is ‘social media’ new? ‘ Hyper-connectivity – Rapid messages (within minutes) between any two members of the group is possible and messages can be sent (directly or indirectly) to a majority of key people in the group within minutes via the same process.’
Weren’t pulpits and church services, congregations, Sunday Schools, Bible classes, social media’ - and didn’t the messaging travel fast? Hasn’t traditional social media just been replaced by secular, modern equivalents using electronics?
In fact the 3 conditions attributed to NSG are exactly those of religion. Religious services/events were held, regularly, routinely and all attended and where the moral panic of the day could be spread. And nothing does bullshit either by flood or firehose quite like organised religion. The term propaganda was borrowed from the Catholic Church: ‘Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide’.
The Covid panic was a unique experience of our lifetime and it is not clear to me what factors were most important in creating that panic.
A key moment of the panic was the NBA canceling games and suspending its season because a player, Rudy Gobert, tested positive prior to a game in which he was going to play! That's right. The first domino to fall to alter "normal life" in the USA was a healthy athlete, scarcely sick, testing positive for the virus. Note, Rudy Gobert survived Covid and continues to play in the NBA.
So what setup this singular NBA moment in March 2020? What inputs created the basis for the league to respond to a positive test for a disease, that was never an elevated threat to healthy people, by suspending play? I don't think these decisions were driven by social media. The NBA leadership had to be receiving guidance from "experts" and not from Twitter.
I believe that if our institutions had not panicked in their response to Covid then the panickers on social media would have never been that influential.
But moral panics are real. The rush to judgment of the Sandman kid was driven by both social media and professional media. The resistance to ending Covid protocols has been supported greatly by social media. At the same time social media was a great resource for giving understanding about the true risks of Covid
I think the social media response to immediately sympathize with Ukraine and to attack any who are less than 100% enthusiastic for Ukraine's defense is an important data point. Hating on Russia / Putin is understandable. But why the need to sympathize so greatly with Ukraine? Why the emotional demand to accept personal sacrifices to help Ukraine? Americans did not respond this way to the other Russian military aggressions?
Here I think social media is a real, powerful influence. But I'm inclined to think social media's greater role is in training people how to conform and how to signal that conformity. That social media can create flash mobs of moral outrage is a reality. But the mob will dissipate unless the cause can be sustained by ongoing narrative.
I don't agree with Cactus about groups and moral panics. Your post, however, is terrible. First, although I like to separate "the intimate world" and "the remote world" --as Gordon Tullock implied long ago with his separation between us and them-- you are confused about our remote world. It's not about celebrities, criminals, and politicians, but about ordinary people like us. Today celebrities, criminals, and politicians are as far away from us and they were 100 years ago.
Today, "the remote world" is much closer to our intimate world, but we continue distinguishing between them and us. This is not a question of distance -- in the apartment building where I live I regard all other residents as part of my remote world (as a matter of fact, I know nothing about them even though I have been living in this building for the past 12 years). I know, however, much more about the ordinary people of my hometown, the one I left 60 years ago, because everyday I could read about what is going there in the local press which I access via internet (I still have friends and family there but more importantly I'm interested in understanding how their social environment has been changing).
Unrelated to groups, what you call "moral panic" is just an outraging shock, that is, a sudden, unexpected, and unpleasant event or experience, but unpleasant to the boiling point of outrage. A few shocks reach the boiling point thanks to the old mass media and the new social media, but their intervention is not an emotional reaction but an intentional one on behalf of some political factions. Centuries ago some politicians were interested in inflating some shocks to that boiling point but they lacked good and cheap means (they relied on rumors and shouting "the British are coming"). Today is quite different because ideas can be transmitted faster than viruses and we have a hard time determining how reliable they are and how relevant to the understanding of specific issues they are. You may remember how optimistic we were 50 years ago when F. Machlup was writing his series of volumes on knowledge, and how difficult it's now to argue seriously about "the epistemologic status" of any idea (you can entertain yourself by reading again Sowell's "Knowledge and Decisions" and thinking about the ideas that motivated decisions in the experiences he considered).
All shocks, outraging or not, have a life cycle. Politicians cannot control their endpoint but they can rely on their media servants (including bloggers) to erase them from people's radar.
I am not sure Russia invading an independent Eastern European state would have been a non-event in America 50 years ago. In 1972, during the Cold War. That might have been a pretty big deal, although of course at the time Ukraine was part of the USSR and many American journalists were still claiming there was never a man made famine there that killed millions. Russia invading, anything in Europe, other than maybe Finland would have started a shooting war and possible nuclear crisis. Of course, those on the left would have been more likely to support the USSR than condemn it, but still.
Again, you have this blind spot: "Today, the Twitter mob drives foreign policy."
Twitter is a tool- the foreign policy makers use it, not the other way around. It would be more accurate if you described it like this: "The Twitter Mob are the foreign policy makers themselves."