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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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You, a stranger on the internet, will not achieve anything by "shaming" another stranger on the internet.

Edit (because of much confusion) - Shaming works if the right people shame you in the proper context. For example, a teenage boy might not take a shower ten days in a row if his mom tells him to, but will shower 2x a day for the rest of his life if his crush calls him stinky (even as a joke). Work backward using the demographics of motte users and determine if shaming is a good tactic for the modal motte user.

Your edit is good stuff, but without it your original post is just so wrong as to be jaw dropping. And here, of all places! Honestly, I would be embarrassed if I were you. (Not really, but this post is more about practical application than discussion.)

without it your original post is just so wrong as to be jaw dropping.

Hardly. The original post was obviously correct to me, and it was surprising that others were willing to do confidently (and incorrectly) declare it wrong. The point @f3zinker was making from the beginning is what he clarified in his edit: to Aella (or anyone else reading people here for that matter), you are a nobody who doesn't matter. You can't possibly affect behavior by shaming people from such a position of unimportance to them.

Oh you sweet summer child...

Is another example of a regularly successful attempt to affect behavior by shaming people from a position of unimportance. Is that not shaming in your eyes?

No, not at all. Why would I care if someone thinks that?

You are typical minding then. Every interaction on the internet is a status game, and the vast, vast majority of people are insecure enough to let statements like 'you sweet summer child' or 'ok boomer' or a picture of captain Picard holding his face modify their behaviour. Not from a celebrity, from a nobody - maybe a friend of a friend on Facebook or Twitter, but usually just a complete stranger - and all they have to do is drop a meme that makes them feel stupid for saying whatever they said. If you couldn't change a stranger's behaviour with shame, cyber bullying wouldn't be a concept. Kiwifarms would never have existed. Gamergate wouldn't have happened. Tyler the creator wouldn't need to tell people to look elsewhere.

That's... certainly a take. I think it's an exceptionally poor take, but I don't suspect I can convince you. The idea that every interaction on the internet is a status game is... just wildly incorrect IMO.

You could try, I engaged with you specifically to understand your perspective - if I wasn't interested I would have just left it like I normally do when someone other than jiro doesn't get a joke I made. I also think it's really shitty behaviour on this forum to tell someone they have an exceptionally bad take but you can't be bothered explaining why you think that.

Perhaps you didn't mean it this way, but I interpret this post as you attempting to imply that I am so far beneath you in intelligence that you don't know where to start explaining why I am wrong. Perhaps instead you only want to convince other readers that I am so far beneath you in intelligence that you don't know where to start explaining why I'm wrong. Perhaps you realised you were wrong, but didn't want to admit it, and this is an attempt to avoid having to do so.

But what I would really like, is for there to be a completely different reason you wrote that post that way - starting off by implying my post is so wrong you had to search for an inoffensive way to describe it (pausing before calling it 'certainly a take', a format which has been used for decades to imply something is stupid), calling it exceptionally poor but not in a way you can explain (using convince to imply the agency is mine and therefore implying it is me who isn't up to the task of being explained to), then narrowly focusing on the one part of my post that doesn't prove that you absolutely can change a stranger's behaviour with shame and calling it incorrect with no explanation - a reason that doesn't involve status, and one you can explain to me now?

Fair enough. I'm sorry that I came off that way, and I was definitely somewhat rude in my earlier post which you didn't deserve. I don't think myself superior to you (albeit I do think you're wrong about this). In actuality, I don't think I can convince you because I am a middling writer (which by the standards of this forum means I'm a very poor writer), and have very little ability to persuade. Since our perspectives seem to me to have little common ground, I doubt very much that I can persuade you with my skill. But I'll at least attempt to lay out my case.

First, I think you're seriously mistaken that every interaction on the internet is a status game. For some people, sure. But in my opinion they are a small minority, because I think most adults are going to have better sense than that. Children on the internet may not have more sense, but well... they're children. Children are foolish, so one expects foolish behavior from them. But for most people, I do not think they are foolish enough to care what some stranger thinks, or to try to get status in the eyes of said strangers.

But since that seems to be the very foundation of your argument, the rest just kind of falls apart. Like yeah, if you think everything is a status game, then (for example) Kiwifarms makes sense as people gaining status by laughing at low status people. But there are other explanations for Kiwifarms that don't rely on it being a status thing. It just plain feels good to laugh at something you think is funny. It also feels good to enjoy the companionship (even the fairly ephemeral digital companionship) of those who have similar viewpoints and interests as you. You don't have to care one iota what the other Kiwifarms posters think of you, for both of those things to be true. So in the world I propose, where things are not actually status games, there's still a reasonable explanation for why Kiwifarms acts the way it does (quite contrary to your assertion that it wouldn't exist, IMO).

So basically: I think your foundational premise (that everything is a status game) is wrong. And your other arguments, which seem to rest on that, are rendered false as a result. If my interpretation contradicted the facts on the ground, then that would be a good argument against my POV. But I think that the examples you pointed out are actually pretty easily explained by other causes (more easily than saying it has to be status games, IMO). To be honest, your argument seems to me like when a friend in college once told me that every interaction between people is laced with subtext you have to figure out, or when art critics insist that there is deep meaning hidden beneath the surface of some book. You're looking for a layer of meaning that just isn't there.

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