Comment by entropyneur
6 years ago
It's not easy at all. Even in a democratic country with highly functional legal system like the US due process is not available to many (e.g. George Floyd).
Also my idea of shame doesn't include death threats let alone more extreme things like swatting.
It's the impulse that's lead to more shaming that's also pushing to make the police come and arrest you for saying offensive things- at least, this is already the case in europe.
And why not swat someone? If you're going to go after their livelihood and try to stop them from ever having a job again, you're half killing them anyway. People murder each other for less. Be honest and just have their dog shot already ;)
It is certainly no positive development. Shame requires a central authority or is based on the minimal consensus of the majority of society. I wouldn't recommend it. To regulate society, we have laws. Far better and objective system. Doesn't protect you from social prosecution which is restricted to people with a public or know persona on Twitter as it seems. There are also pretty shameless people.
does it include losing your job for wrongthink?
You are pretty far from the mark here... A study as far back as 2002 recognised the US as an oligarchy — i.e. not a democracy. And to call their legal/judicial systems or process “highly functional” is also pretty laughable.
George Floyd shouldn’t have come into the line of fire of these systems, he was an innocent man. The fact that it was and is so difficult to prosecute the responsible officer shows how dysfunctional the system is.
Using shame as a system of justice relies on emotional charge at the point of infraction. I would argue that’s how mob justice starts, not how we end injustice.
Re the US: I only meant that comparatively. Most of the people in the world can only dream of living under a system as good as yours. And for us violent regulation of expression is the norm.
I hear you. The shame-based system is prone to be unjust. TBH, I also think the people pioneering it are wrong about most things. I guess what I'm trying to say is that any violent regulation of expression is unjust, so even if shame-justice is on point 10% of the time it's still an improvement. And in the cases when it's wrong the consequences are less severe.
I had - without questioning it - assumed you were commenting from a Western Democracy yourself. It is beautifully eye-opening to be confronted with my own bias so starkly. In fact, I am British, and I think our system has many of the same issues as that of the US. Of course we have our own issues, mostly stemming from what I perceive as a delicate sensibility which is pervasive in British society, and is the subject of decades of jokes at our expense.
I wrote, and rewrote the rest of this comment 3 times, before I gave up, and started from the top of the thread again. Now I have decided to stop exhausting myself over what might be acceptable to an indefinable demographic (HN commenters reading this individual thread) for me to say.
But over here, we're not moving from the government hurting you for your speech to people shaming you. We moving from less hurt/shame in total to more shame in total. If the 2nd amendment didn't exist, the us would also have more government punishments for speech now than it did before- because that's what the people shaming want.
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