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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Can't get away from ol' Lewis on this forum. I prefer Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg "Never be ashamed of who you are". Walk out of that porn store with your pocket pussy held high. It is the act of acting shameful that brings the scorn. Walk out to your Ferrari in a nice suit and people will even try to copy your bold pocket pussy purchase.

C.S. Lewis would probably agree as he was probably a bisexual if not gay

  • -10

Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.

Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.

Shame is a low class cultural marker. If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame. The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat. It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.

Shame is a low class cultural marker.

Shame is a human constant in all social classes.

If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame.

No human has ever or will ever exist in a state where nothing is a threat to them.

The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat.

For every shameless rich person, I can point to ten drug addicts shitting themselves on a sidewalk without apparent shame. Further, it seems to me that the absence of shame is the marker of defeat, when one is no longer even trying for goodness and virtue.

It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.

This at least is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, fear is a necessary and entirely rational response, because there are better states and worse states, and many of the worse states are extremely wretched. Rational fear is a motive force, a protective force. Its absence is a sign of insanity.

The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news. He doesn't feel a "natural shame" when he is fucking #6, or maybe he wouldn't do it. That dumb podcaster science guy being almost the perfect example.

That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part. My behavior isn't always governed by reason. Nor is that the case for most people. But a perfectly rational actor would not feel it. I also have to disagree with the fear portion of your comment. Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.

The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news.

I think both the addict and the rich philanderer have, through their intentional choices, crippled their capacity to feel shame. I don't think this happens automatically; people who haven't intentionally crippled their own capacity for shame continue to feel it. Those who do cripple their capacity for shame in this way have damaged an important part of their own mind, making them less sane in a meaningful sense.

That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part.

I would argue that the boyscout part is a subset of the rational part. Shame is deeply rational. Those who have crippled their capacity for shame are less rational, not more.

Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.

Some fears can be vestigial nonsense, depending on the specific environment. Fear itself remains rational, and always will so long as humans survive.

I don't agree and fuck you.

Man, I dunno what happened here, but chill out.

One day ban.

That escalated quickly. What's the logic here? I don't take it particularly personally, but it seems a bit out of left field.

Bad joke trying to show the suppression of fear and shame leading to irrational behavior. Came back to a ban haha.

More comments

I agree, it's like somebody picked up his phone and started messaging, like a completely different person.

Let's say you fail to keep a promise, a promise made to someone you have a great deal of respect for. Is it appropriate to feel shame then? Or maybe some other emotion?

It might be culturally appropriate, but it has no innate value beyond signaling regret for your actions to others in a group.

Do you ever just like, feel bad when you do something wrong? Like ever?

I do, but I was brought up a certain way. You don't have to be raised to feel shame for certain acts. Can't you model minds outside your own?

Naming your product orfice.ai is almost as bad as calling your new programming language Lolita...

I hate the current year so much. The awful combination of performative histrionic prudishness and obnoxious, ubiquitous safe-horny normie-fap-bait.

Furries go around naming projects after horse diaper fetishes and nobody gives a shit because uwu programmer socks tee hee, but this gets their panties in a twist?

Brother, I’ve got to say that I think you’ve been had.

That YouTube video and “oriface.ai” is top tier rage bait. I mean, real chef’s kiss level.

On par with “it’s ok to be white” or “Islam was right about women.” Or any entry into the Sokal affair.

It’s absolutely beautiful, I laughed for a full ten minutes after watching that short video. I couldn’t believe it, it was an absolute miracle of trolling, perfectly designed to infuriate a maximum amount of people and trivially accomplished through ai trickery.

A toast to the geniuses at oriface.ai, May their enemies be made ridiculous. Legitimately the funniest thing I’ve seen online in months.

Or your image processor GIMP.

Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.

But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.

And that means your alarm can be false. Like people who internalize that they should feel shame about approaching members of the opposite sex even respectfully or who feel shame about feeling sexual attraction at all.

So you can't use the alarm to tell you there is a serious problem. All it can do is warn you that you have internalized that X is a problem. It doesn't do much to tell you if X is a problem really.

My grandfather was raised in an ultra strict Quaker offshoot, where any contact with the outside world was seen to be wrong and that music was sinful. He felt ashamed of listening to a choir in the less strict Church of Ireland he later moved to. Is hearing a Christian choir a serious problem he should have been alerted to? Or was his sense of shame miscalibrated because his society was simply wrong?

In other words, I agree shame and shaming is an intrinsic part of the human condition and that it exists to bring together societies through incentivizing behaviors your society see as positive. What it can't do is actually tell you if those behaviors are or are not positive in and of themselves. Because shame is sub-conscious.

And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers. That is the lesson I personally think all ideologies need to learn. Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.

You might argue the results have been wretched, but obviously enough people felt the previous situation was ALSO wretched enough in order to overthrow it.

And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. ...Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.

It doesn't seem to me that the shaming norms immediately prior to the Sexual Revolution were particularly strict, from a historical perspective. Nor does this comport with my understanding of how revolutions generally work; they generally don't happen when conditions decline past some critical threshold, but rather when things are getting better, but people think they should be getting better faster. Is that not your understanding? In any case, it's hard to believe that 1950s America leaned harder on shame than, say, Puritan America. Why didn't Puritan America result in a Sexual Revolution, under your model?

The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers.

Historically speaking, I do not see the Sexual Revolution being driven by people who had been shamed reaching a critical mass. Rather, what I observe is people who were not being shamed buying into the idea that the shame-enforcement system they were already on the right side of could be dismantled without cost or consequence, that the fences against sexual misconduct were pointless and that tearing them down would have no downsides and only benefits, because We Had Progressed. Without a broad-based commitment to the big lie of Progress and all the "little" lies that supported it, the sexual revolution would not have happened. Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society desperately eager to believe them, the sexual revolution doesn't happen.

Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.

But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.

Is it culturally formed, or is it culturally deformed? We agree that people can be made to feel shame about things that should not be considered shameful. The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.

I'm sure kids aren't born being ashamed of nakedness or of touching their genitals. On the other hand, they aren't ashamed of casual cruelty either; they have to learn that other people exist and to empathize with them, but that doesn't mean that empathy itself is a cultural construction that we can take or leave as we will. I think modesty is similar: you aren't born knowing it, but you learn about it soon enough unless others expend a great deal of effort trying to hide it from you, and even then sooner or later it'll be back.

The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable. The relatively slow pace of that walk-back has been, in my view, only achievable through large-scale deceit and the intentional obfuscation of the horrors the Revolution's architects unleashed and refused to recognize.

Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.

Really? I think that a bunch of people will feel vaguely burned by the SR as adults and retreat towards conservatism, but this won't lead to lasting change and the youth will be even more progressive and sex-positive and weird, and the cycle will repeat just like it did the past two generations.

The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.

Nature changes with time, though, for some people at points in history it was natural and healthy that it was shameful to not own a proper number of livestock. Now, that's not true anymore. People look at their situation and try to judge what should and shouldn't be shameful. Instincts in our genes are evolved, too, and as the environment changes the value of an instinct changes. Better to justify the kind of shame you want than just say it emerges naturally.

Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society

There was a clear utopian dimension to Marx. I've never heard anyone argue against that.

Freud is a more complicated case. He also had some utopian impulses and was on record as thinking that the release of repressed sexual instincts would be a positive social development, but this was also tempered (especially in his later work) by a recognition of how the self-contradictory and self-destructive nature of the psyche can upset utopian social aspirations (it was really Lacan who took this aspect of psychoanalysis and ran with it, and he was consequently much more overtly politically conservative than Freud, but the seeds of it are already visible in Freud).

I recommend reading Freud's essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle before you write him off completely.

The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine.

I don't think that was the pitch, because like every change, there was no single one movement responsible for it. What you had was a coalition who wanted slightly different things, one part wanted gay sex to be accepted, another wanted women to have more freedom outside of marriage, another wanted men to have more freedom without getting married, another felt sexual urges in general should not be shamed as much, etc. etc. There were few would if you asked would have said for example, should we stop shaming sex with animals or corpses? Almost no-one wanted to remove shame from sex entirely.

To be clear almost everyone is shamed under the old model. They just use that shame to behave differently. Every kid who felt guilty about masturbation. Every husband who felt shame at cheating, or even having thoughts of cheating. Every woman who felt shame at sex outside of wedlock, or who had a sex drive society felt was too much. Every gay person who felt shame at being attracted to their own sex. All of those groups constitute probably a majority of people. That's what I mean by a tipping point.

Now as for why Puritan America did not change, well Puritan America was a result of people fleeing from cultures that shamed differently. There is a reason we call them Puritans after all! So they in fact are a product of a "Revolution" of their own (among other things of course). But even more the 20th Centuries Sexual Revolution I would say the sexual norms of the Puritans did not last, they were relaxed within decades. It's just in the New World there was a lot of space for people who felt differently to just..go somewhere else. And practice things differently. But that isn't the case in the US anymore.

Just to point out, I do think shame is important, as is empathy. They are evolved mechanisms given humanity is a social species. And they are important in ensuring societal stability. I'm not saying that shaming sex is bad, or that not shaming sex is good. I am saying that our history shows that shame has limits and ANY society or culture that wants its beliefs and conditions to continue is on a tight rope. Can't shame to much for too many, can't shame too little. Both will result in the destruction of your system. The good (depending on your point of view!) news is that also is true for whatever comes next. I think there are signs that the shame mechanisms invoked by "wokism" are also going too far and will fail.

Social dynamics mean we are not good at simply arriving at a pretty good spot and just staying there. We almost always push too far, or not far enough.

I don't think that was the pitch, because like every change, there was no single one movement responsible for it

You say "because" and proceed with an argument that does nothing to support the thesis. Just because there are multiple movements responsible for a change, doesn't mean the discourse doesn't settle on a main pitch.

Every kid who felt guilty about masturbation. Every husband who felt shame at cheating, or even having thoughts of cheating. Every woman who felt shame at sex outside of wedlock, or who had a sex drive society felt was too much. Every gay person who felt shame at being attracted to their own sex. All of those groups constitute probably a majority of people. That's what I mean by a tipping point.

It's also strange to throw the pitch directly after saying that wasn't the pitch.

Aside of that you're grossly exaggerating the extent to which people were shamed or felt shame for any of these things.

I'm consistently impressed by the reasoning level of people I don't agree with. That is why I stick around.

Looks like you replied to a comment that was not yet approved. And since we're on the subject - can you also approve my latest post?

Grah. Done and done, thanks for the heads-up.

Yeah weird given the poster has been around a while now.

It's because his aggregate comment score is in a crater.

We really should disable that aspect of the feature imo.

The people love mike pence! I'm never getting out!

It’s a good emergency filter if someone new is spamming, but mods already have to manually approve people’s first few comments iirc so it seems redundant.

We've asked, believe me. It's baked into the back-end, apparently.

Surely there's somewhere in the code you could just add 'if username in ['guy1', 'guy2']: return'?

Is there a way to override for specific users, maybe by incorporating a mod bot that manually approves every one of their comments? @ahhthefrench, disagree with him though I frequently might, is clearly a good faith contributor who shouldn’t be caught in the new user filter.

nope. The only workaround is apparently to just manually empty the filter as often as possible.

People get autofiltered when they accumulate downvotes. I don't know if it was always like that, or we pulled some "feature" from rDrama that doesn't fit us, but it seems like this is how things are now.

Autofiltering people who get downvoted too much is like the antithesis of rDrama.

Dramanaughts don't really have an issue with this, dramatic people tend to get upvoted. And it's really probably upstream of them. Remember the Dramacode wasn't written from scratch, it's a customized Lemmy instance.

We barely have any volunteers to implement features we actually want, so I doubt this one, which literally no one, from mods to posters, really wants, came from us.