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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31911 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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What is shame for? Why do we have it? To bully people into doing things that are pro-social. There's a reason why fat people are shamed and it's not just because of cruelty for cruelty's sake, there's value in it as well.

But the value is vastly less than the cost, even before one takes into account the low effectiveness.

The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically. Investing in shaming might well pay great dividends. Japan has quite strong shaming of the fat and the country is very thin. Diet also plays a part in this but the shaming likely has a strong effect.

Personally, I think at this point, it is easier to just wait until the patents of the GLP-1 drugs run out.

Generally, shame is a double-edged sword, because it can enforce norms which are pro-social just as well as norms which are net-negative.

I mean, sure, Japan has very low obesity rates, because most kids would rather kill themselves than being the fat kid in the class, and their shame culture might prevent casual sex, but it is not much use with the TFR, for example.

Shame sure can enforce anti-social norms but the problem then is the norms, not the shaming. Every society does shaming in one way or another.

For instance, consider the complex built up in Britain that it was racist to look too closely into Pakistani grooming gangs or consider what exactly was going on with these naked, drunk 12-13 year old girl 'prostitutes' spending all this time with much older men, despite an otherwise powerful feminist apparatus. Shame works both ways. It can support cover-ups and abuse just as it can produce clean, cities full of orderly and considerate people.

Easy paths are all well and good but sometimes one has to do things that are hard, that's where shame comes in. 'Hard' can be doing very good or very bad deeds.

The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically.

The cost of fat-shaming, in human suffering, is higher.

I refuse to believe that the human suffering cost of being fat-shamed, over and above just being unnecessarily ugly and physically weak, is worse than millions and millions of deaths.

But realistically we shouldn't weigh it against the total suffering that obesity creates; we should weigh it against the amount of obesity-caused suffering that shaming can alleviate. Shaming isn't completely ineffective, but it's not very effective.

It seems fairly effective in East Asia, France, and Sweden.

It’s not perfectly effective, as it is fighting significant headwinds, but it is effective.

Not when you include fatness-related suffering. Obesity is essentially a disability, after all.

I don't think you could possibly insult a fat person enough to make it worse than them being fat in the first place, and I say this as a lifelong fatty who found Jesus (ozempic) and slimmed down enormously.

You have to have ironically thin skin to be more upset people call you fat than you are at being fat.

I'm not yet convinced.

But, even if we grant it, there's also a motte-and-bailey here. Fat people are not just actively shamed, they're ashamed because they know being fat means they lack of some virtue or competence.

It may be that actively shaming them is not that useful, but it never stops there. The next demand is to dismantle or obscure anything that rightfully makes fat people notice their position on the grounds that society, and not their own understanding of reality, is shaming them. Then we start actively lying or excusing bad behavior which is probably even less effective.

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