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- Hacker News
- Makes me think of my boy John Adams; "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Moral relativism is emptiness all the way down, we're reaping what we sowed.by mrngld
- Might have to do with a lot of thought leaders and influencers pushing this.
In my own life/career I have seen that over a long enough horizon that lower shame seems to generally work out for people on the long run if you can back it up with some amount of confidence and competence.
by Tsarp - I think it was Dr K of Healtgygamer that explained it something like non-toxic shame is a useful signal — “I did something wrong and this is a signal telling me so; I need to correct my behaviour” vs toxic shame as in “I am fundamentally a bad/worthless person”. We kinda got the two tangled together and in trying to reduce the second, we probably demonised the first a bit too much.
Could be remembering wrong though.
by Fr0styMatt88 - That's a great point. And it goes probably both ways. The young person doing something annoying might also be annoyed by something different the older person does. Respectful communication is probably the key but why is it so elusive ?by Melatonic
- https://www.johnbradshaw.com/books/healing-the-shame-that-bi...
John Bradshaw defined toxic shame as distinct from a healthy sense of dignity, manners, and modesty. Also, he addresses how toxic shame can be "carried" by people, and passed down in families, as a legacy, so that eventually those who are afflicted need to heal from it, to stop the cycle.
I have personally read this book (found it in community college library) and I found myself wishing I'd paid more attention to his talks while he was active.
- I was discussing this the other day. Shame and shaming are alive and well. Especially if you do not agree with whatever paradigm is being pushed, like supporting sports team X or not holding the prevailing opinion.by nephihaha
- Agree. Shame is very much not dead.
Gen Z is an entire generation paralyzed by social anxiety.
by WorldIQ - People care that much about sports ?by Melatonic
- Shaming being alive and well doesn’t imply that shame is.by layer8
- The "-phobic" seems to be the suffix to use these days.
Just slap it on your favourite term and hurl it at the opponent.
by dude250711 - I don't really know if I would call that shame, though. In Japan if you wear your shoes into someone's house you'll be lambasted with shame, but that's got a deep religious and cultural foundation behind it-- the person being shamed gets their nose rubbed into their mistake so that they don't do it again. There is a "re-centering" of the person so they get another chance.
Nowadays in the west, holding an option contrary to whatever herd you find yourself in falls into a binary label. There is no redemption for you, there is no second chance. "You voted for X? You're nothing but evil thoughts and vacuity where a human could have been".
by shoobiedoo - I recently heard the term _vice signaling_ and it’s very appropriate for this era. While in the past virtue signaling would be used to identify yourself as the member of an ingroup. It’s now common to signal that by doing things that would previously, and by many still are, considered beyond the pale.by trescenzi
- "If we don't do it, someone else will" is a perfect example of vice signalling.
Such an apt term, thanks.
by wartywhoa23 - Interesting I've been calling it sin signalling. It can also be a sort of power peacocking, "Look at me I'm so powerful I can get away with this vile thing." type stuff. It's not a modern creation but it's certainly popular with certain highly visible political clusters atm.by rdmuser
- by amiga386
- There seems to be a bit of a gap vis a vis solutions in the article - someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking. The punishment for tanking should be that the teams performed poorly for no compensation. It's all very well to set up a system to encourage poor behaviour then shame the people who behave rationally. But it is much more sustainable in the long term to make good behaviour also strategically optimal.
> Post-Hinkie, the league experimented with variations of the lottery, but none of them could deter teams from losing on purpose.
I struggle to believe they've tried everything unless they're also talking about players betting against themselves (which probably is impossible to overcome without bans). Incentives aren't easy things but there has to be some system where winning > losing.
On that topic we're actually pretty lucky - in the real world, the winning strategy over long time-frames is almost always talking, prosperity and cooperation. Not obvious why the powers that be are so keen to involve other strategies that routinely deliver worse material and moral results.
by roenxi - > someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking
It's called promotion and relegation.
by jimbokun - > Evil genius is just a lack of shame.
-- Cory Doctorow
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-11...
by dguest - Strange that this short article mostly focuses on the absence of shame in business and politics, which has been a constant for many times my lifetime. And we should blame social media for this, too? The only difference now is that everyone knows about backroom dealing. If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism, I feel like he'd be a step closer to an interesting observation.by zetanor
- > If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism
They awarded themselves Pulitzers for publishing false stories. They don't go back and correct them, they just pretend like they never existed (and one day will silently delete them from the archives.)
They showed some shame after the Iraq War over continuously lying about WMD on behalf of the state, there was a little shame expressed after trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and I guess they decided that they were never going to do that again. They in fact put one of the largest spreaders of disinformation in charge of The Atlantic. The Atlantic is supposedly the leading magazine for the opposition.
Every day that the Washington Post kept the PropOrNot story up, even taking into consideration the lengthy corrections that kept being appended to it, made me realize that these institutions had no shame at all. I'm not sure if people are connected enough to particular institutions to have shame about what they do - they have backers, who will find them another place if the place they're at now becomes too hot for them. Straight from politics into being a lobbyist into journalism into a think tank into a consultant for a Middle East dictator into head of ethics for a tech company into head of ethics for a hedge fund, then back into politics again.
by pessimizer - Sit on public transport and listen to everyone playing music / watching tiktok without headphones. Shame is dead.by plantain
- That’s more about power than shame. When people feel powerless imposing on others is one of the only ways they can take a semblance of power back.
- I think there’s a difference between knowing you’re doing something wrong and not caring, and not even knowing you’re doing anything wrong. What you’re describing is usually the latter.by dmd
- In my experience it's dominantly teen-aged kids who are just figuring the world out, or in more unfortunate but very rare cases 30-somethings who never quite grew up.
I was that shameless annoyance once too. It doesn't mean shame is dead.
by dguest - FWIW I use public transport daily and it basically never happens (I honestly don't remember a single time, it's that rare). Maybe it's cultural thing, I mean country dependent? Loud teenagers of course happen, but they don't play music out loud.by my-huge-pony
- Or their shame of playing TikTok audio in public is less than their shame and anxiety of dealing with the modern world (including crowded mass transit)by Melatonic
- shame only works if there are consequences. if you're not calling them out then you are complicit. you are accepting that, and you need to live with it.
if you want someone to respect your feelings then ultimately you will have to make them. for broke-ass hoodrats, for whom economic factors won't work, that means eventually going to Louis' ultima ratio -- e.g. calling this out may lead to a fistfight on a moving bus.
- That I really don't get (and I experience it a lot using transit for my commute) . It seems more common now, but you'd think it would be less common. Headphones used to be bulky things, now Bluetooth earbuds are tiny things easily put in your pocket -- why not use them?by jhbadger
- Football / Soccer had "flopping" [1], which anyone who watched it in the early 2000s would recognize: every foul was accompanied by a "victim" writhing on the field in agony, in excess of anything you'd see in much more violent sports.
Apparently it's diminished a bit in recent years, but not because it's clearly shameful behavior: the leagues started issuing bans.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_(association_football)
by dguest - Apart from Argentina in the World Cup.by sdcfgy