We want thoughtful, substantive, and above all curious conversation on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

From my perspective it was an observation of my experiences in a variety of cultures and how certain social problems don’t flourish in those environments because people are more conscious about the perceptions of others, and how I see a tendency to replace those social mechanisms with “strong” authority figures as problematic for a functioning democracy… but… it seems I really hit a nerve for some folks and it got taken way out of the intended context. Sorry about that!

An astonishingly large number of people got hooked on legal prescription drugs which were pushed by billion-dollar pharma companies and the medical profession as a whole. Shame is what drives people away from admitting their addiction and seeking treatment towards illegal means of procuring a fix.

The mind boggles at just how phenomenally stupid this thread is.

Your story is a good example of how shame can be harmful, it may have kept her from seeking help. That is certainly a negative effect of shame as a behaviour moderating factor, and I’m sorry that it affected your family in the way that it did.

I think your response is the only valid counterpoint I’ve seen here, since most people seem to think I was talking about shaming people or that shame would somehow prevent addiction… none of that was my point. But your story is a good example of how exactly what I was talking about can also have harmful effects, and that is an excellent point.

People should never be led to believe that seeking help is shameful.

My mom died of cancer in her 40's. My mom also died an addict. Two of her sisters also had cancer, found because of her diagnosis. Both became addicts as well. I don't see how they couldn't have. Chemo is rough. It is a long and painful treatment that we _should_ be giving painkillers to those receiving it. But it is shame that makes it difficult for people to get treatment. It is shame that prevents people from even admitting they need treatment in the first place.

The hard truth is that grandma is an addict and she needs to be unashamed of going to the methadone clinic.

So it was truly, truly all income levels interacting in our public schools (which are pretty highly rated).

I graduated in 2009. Close to 10% of my graduating class (~400), all income levels, died of opioid overdoses or suicide. The shame of talking about our town's problem and wanting keep up appearances killed scores of people.

BBC did a documentary on our town, called Smack in Suburbia, focussed on my age group. 30 minute watch, but, it really drives this point home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7ynJ5S9c58

All of this tragedy was the direct consequence of shame as public health policy.

Perhaps if you thought about it just a little bit more you'd understand that treating addiction and substance abuse as a normal medical problem as opposed to a shameful sin to be hidden actually results in positive outcomes.

Hell, look at Indonesia, a nation which has a huge amount of shame-based societal pressures including the death penalty for drug smuggling and in some places corporal punishment for sex out of wedlock. They have one of the highest rates of smoking. Want to guess why? Thats right, Tobacco companies have practically zero restrictions in terms of who and how they market, including to children.

How about instead of shaming people we treat public health issues as health issues and stop allowing corporations to subject millions of people to catastrophic addictions.

Also, I'd suggest a friendlier tone in your discussions. Being condescending can push people away, even if you have great insights. Respectful communication can make a big difference.

I also want to emphasize that we're all here to discuss and learn. Just because a view is well-received doesn't mean it's the only valid one. Everyone's perspective adds to the conversation. This isn't about who's the center of the universe—it's about discussing solutions to a complex problem together. No need to take it personally.

(*) https://youtu.be/jxOlwO_WHrg

I dunno, seems to me the effective thing wasn’t “shame”, but:

(1) Making it progressively more difficult for tobacco companies to recruit new customers by prohibiting many forms of advertising/marketing and forcing countermarketing about harms to be included in what marketing (including product packaging) is allowed, and

(2) Driving up costs with targeted taxes, and

(3) Prohibiting smoking in most workplaces and other public places, limiting environmental exposure to the addictive substances for people not actively choosing to participate and narrowing the contexts where people who do choose to partake are permitted to do so.

It's also extremely divorced from reality. Even if you've never met an addict and seen how many want to get off the drugs (maybe you've met someone who is addicted to something else, like food, alcohol, or bad habits), but that the very fact that people don't flaunt it is proof of that shame. Now maybe some are unabashed now, especially in big cities, but similarly if you call someone "a fatty" enough they'll either: fix themselves (lol), hide their eating while trying to show effort or justify their weight, or just stop giving a fuck.

> people got hooked on legal prescription drugs

I want to address this, not because I think you're making this argument (your wording suggests not), but because it can be common. Many people set up the situation as if there are one of two directional graphs. Drugs -> homelessness or homelessness -> drugs (with variations on paths and some other nodes). But the effect in reality is coupled. Both can be true. It's a clique to drink your sorrows away and everyone knows the call of a stiff drink after a hard breakup or the call to eat a tub of ice cream. Of course losing your livelihood and having difficulties putting it back together can lead to that kind of addiction. But similarly we've seen people go off the deepend and take a bender too far, so of course that can lead to losing your livelihood. Most things in the world are not DAGs. There's lots of complex and coupled phenomena with feedback loops and many paths to reach certain steady state solutions. The danger is oversimplifying it and pretending these are trivial to avoid or trivial to escape. But the nature of their existence is proof of the lack of triviality, while a single counter example is not proof that they are.

Similarly it boggles my mind that a comment about shame is the solution. As if the Victorian times were well known for their safety and high prosperity. As if highly religious cultures have demonstrated exceptional prosperity (Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever). That we're seeing similar comments about punishment, as if North Korea, Russia, and Iran are pinnacles of prosperity, wealth, and morality. How people are unabashedly hand waving away any nuance and pretending that the solutions are simple. But if they were then the examples before would be utopias, and that we'd speak of the many historical draconian eras in high regard.

I’m not even addressing addiction, but rather the socially disruptive manifestations of drug addiction related activities that are becoming increasingly common, especially in the United States.

Obviously my (now suppressed) comment was poorly written if it gave that impression.

I was suggesting rather that the disruptive social circumstances that we are seeing in the USA surrounding drug addiction are partly a result of people not feeling that they need to keep disruptive behaviours to a minimum out of a sense of personal discretion.

I have lived all over the world, and in many areas with serious addiction problems, but the kind of overt behaviour common in the last decade in the USA is uncommon in most of those cultures, and i posit that is a direct extension of the addicts themselves retaining a sense of personal dignity.

The idea of personal dignity and it’s corollary, shame, seems to be conspicuously missing in the subcultures where these kind of problems are recently erupting compared to subcultures with similar base problems where the public presentation tends to be more benign. But that is just my empirical observation from living amongst different peoples and cultures.

Furthermore, I think that replacing personal standards and self moderation with stronger regulations and reductions of civil liberties is a dangerous path that can jeopardise the functioning of a healthy democratic society.

In summary, I see shame ( not being shamed by others, but rather feeling shame in oneself) is an undervalued component in the moderation of behaviour and has utility that we ignore at our peril.

Some commenters have pointed out that shame sometimes prevents people from seeking help for addiction or other circumstances. I think that is an excellent example of where a usually useful thing can sometimes be tragically harmful. It’s an excellent counterpoint, though I never meant to suggest that shame was universally a good thing, only that it is often a useful thing. It’s definitely worth mentioning though, since my examples do tend towards being unreasonably rosy in that regard.

Personally, I strive to be able to look back at my actions and words of 5 years ago and feel a deep sense of shame- this is an indication that I have grown as a person and have transcended behaviour that I earlier would have thought of as being nominal. That’s just one example of how I find shame to be useful in my own growth.

It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

Sean Carroll has a recent podcast episode descrying the "crisis in physics", which he (partially) articulates as a problem of perception. As much as he himself always wanted to be a science heretic, he notes that all previous successful heretics were experts in the established state-of-the-art, and now if a member of the public researches physics, ALL they hear from are "heretics" who don't know the first thing about established physics. It's like the act of rebellion itself has eclipsed the utility of the specific act.

Using the idea that millions of people are just morally deficient as public policy is a proven failure. There’s always a reason when millions of people are doing the “wrong” thing, and the job of public policy is to assess the return on investment to society of removing those reasons or otherwise disincentivizing the behavior.

Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate

In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same."

The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk.

What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?

> Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?

Most people who would be in any way affected by a society-level shame campaign already feel that way. You're talking about small pockets of communities that aren't fazed by mainstream society's norms. Mostly ones in small-town conservative areas that are heavily shame-based, but just about different things from what you care about.

So it seems it's not more shaming that you want, it's just that you want everyone to be shaming people in line with your personal system of morality.

Edit: also relying on shame for enforcement will ultimately just reward the shameless.

but they do. All those "eat healthy", "don't do drugs", "play outside 2 hours a day"? They were all funded by some government if they were displaying in public schools. It's not the only nor even primary pillar, but it is a big one.

And of course I don't need to specify how they indirectly teach/punish personal responsibilities with subsidies. Slashing the subsidies on corn would cause more radical changes than any sort of propganda they show on ads.

You are conflating a flawed justice system (prison) with teaching morality. They are not the same.

I read it as using the failure of the justice system as an example of his larger point: Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate.

The justice system was one example of a failed attempt to publically mandate morality.

Asian and other immigrant groups have done that and you can see the results. (In a country overrun by “white supremacy” poor Asians have almost three times the income mobility from the bottom quantile to the top quantile as poor whites in the US.) It works, so long as you can keep your kids from becoming Americanized.

Another example is Mormons. They should be poor like Appalachians. They fled persecution to arid parts of the country nobody else wanted. But Mormons today are disproportionately likely to be middle class or upper middle class.

Well, many don’t believe in personal responsibility. Some argue individuals are inextricably bound by the shortcomings of society and society must account for that.

Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

For one thing he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory to make good on its initial promises nor the murky waters of anthropic claims and metaphysical notions of beauty, etc., used to keep it suspended like Wile E Coyote after running off the cliff of empirical support.

As non-crackpot physics profs and postgrads (e.g. [1], [2]) have pointed out, this has not engendered public trust and is a key ingredient in whatever "crisis" the discipline is undergoing.

Not that Carroll doesn't make plenty of good arguments to support his views, but his seeming equation of any criticism of the field with crackpotist heresies is a cheap trick for a philosophy prof.

1: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=8

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

I'd argue that implies you don't know where string theory fits in the "pantheon" of physics. It applies to the realm well below the radius of the proton, required to explain only the most exotic times and places (like the moments after the big bang, or the boundaries/interiors of black holes). Carroll's point is that basically ALL of "everyday physics" is known - everything above the radius of a proton, which governs all the stuff and signals we are and deal with in our solar system and local chunk of galaxy. String theory is an example of a "weak" theory because it's not unique, but it also applies only to exotic things and it's haziness does not affect our understanding of the larger regimes.

The residual feeling that academic recruitment and budgets have been dominated by what essentially turned out to be physics vaporware is a large part of the perceived crisis that Caroll doesn't appear to want to fully acknowledge.

Can you clarify who you actually mean here by neoliberalism? It seems a very loosely defined ideology. Do you just mean ‘the mainstream West’, or something more specific? It’s a strange -ism. It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting.

Is there a name for the phenomena? Its almost like a strawman but not really.

I actually think the OPs comment was fair a d not maligning, but this is a real rhetorical trick. Perhaps not exactly the same but it makes me think about how many Atheists read the bible like fundamentalists.

> For instance, Corey has fun rebutting an atheist who accuses a “devout” Christian girl of hypocrisy for having tattoos, because those are supposedly forbidden by the Bible—if you read the Bible like a fundamentalist. As a Christian myself, I’ve been accused by atheists of inconsistency for holding that neither Christians nor theists in general need believe that God created the universe in literally six 24-hour periods, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. It’s as if I can’t be a creationist at all without being what’s called a young-earth creationist. That would be news to St. Augustine as well as to many respectable contemporary Christian thinkers

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2017/08/why-atheists-read-th...

In this case, you have someone who disagrees with an ideaology insisting on what the ideology is, in spite of many genuine believers espousing less extreme ideas.

is not the strong argument you might think it is.

Go to reddit.com/r/neoliberal, there are lots of people claiming to be neoliberals there.

How can culture not be an aspect of a social creature’s systemics?

I don't need more people being shamed for being gay, for wearing the wrong outfit or for not fitting in. Shame just doesn't work well at a practical level. To say nothing of the superpower that gives the shameless.

Meanwhile, I find your alternative of "well if we don't have shame, we'll just have to make explicit laws about it" to be not a bad thing at all. You called it fascism with no real reasoning. Explicit laws that we can change and discuss seems like a good way to manage things!

> I don't need more people being shamed for being gay

Well he never said anything about being gay. Perhaps you’re reading some other concerns into his comment.

Imagine two worlds where there is no murder. The first has no murder because no one feels inclined to murder. The second has no murder because there are very strong rules which stop people who feel inclined to do it. Can there possibly be any case made to choose the 2nd over the 1st?

Japan is a good example of this principle. Things are a lot more orderly despite a lot weaker enforcement mechanisms.

You know why talking about gay people _is_ a good example? Because you probably forgot that not even 10 years ago gay marriage wasn't legal in the US, or most of the world. In fact, only 10 countries did. 10. You probably forgot how heated that topic was. How people would try to shame two men for holding hands in public. We're not talking about some super flamboyant guy like that Key & Peele skit, but the other side of that. I mean just ask any Catholic how well shame works. Cultures change fast. Far faster than just the old people dying. But you don't get to be selective about what should be shameful or not. Times change and what was shameful in the past is considered fine now. In fact objecting to some things, such as gay marriage, have now reversed. Shame isn't defined objectively, just like our morals. So the argument doesn't work without this condition.

Speaking of Japan, you know where gay marriage is illegal? Japan. Just June the courts ruled that the ban is constitutional (but other courts have said it isn't). Which just became legal in Korea this year. Didn't even recognize the marriages of foreign diplomats till 2019. In fact, there are only two countries in Asia that have gay marriage: South Korea and Taiwan (2019 but not full rights till 2023). You can probably ask these people about how good shame is too.

You're going to need some strong evidence to convince me that Japan's low murder rate is because of its laws.

A country like Japan is largely homogenous for good or for ill and their rate of immigration is low so newcomers assimilate.

The US is much more heterogenous, especially in large metros. There is subsequently less overlap in cultural norms. That comes with both benefits and downsides such as topics like drugs and gay marriage and many more.

I read something too about stable cultures have the rate of newcomers that is low enough that they can learn the cultural norms from the legacy folks vs. becoming more of a free for all because almost everyone is new so the blind are leading the blind. I think it was in reference to events like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Trying to turn this into:

- Harsh punishments stop crime: doesn't work because we've tried it for thousands of years and we even tried it in the 90's and no credible paper says that's the reason for the subsequent decrease.

- Cultural homogeneity is the only solution so west is fucked: is just a non-starter explanation and doesn't lead anywhere to solving the issue. It is also stopping shy of actually explaining anything. If homogeneity were "the answer", then it either it is just a confounder or the foreigners are doing vastly more crime than the citizens.

I'd suggest that actually the underlying issue at hand is that everyone is trying to get simple easy to understand answers. That this idiotic belief that the world is simple is why we're grinding so many gears. Nearly nothing in the modern world is simple. We've solved those problems a long time ago. We had thousands of years to work on these and it should make sense that the simple problems got solved first.

What's going on is now people's propensity to both care too much and too little is harming us to such a degree that it makes problems too difficult to solve. People care enough about these problems to make strong statements and virulently fight one another. But at the same time they don't care enough to look into the problem and try to understand any nuance or depth to it. When they end up doing so they often turn to conspiracy which ends up being another easy explanation such as "wizards did it." The classic "if it weren't for 'them' then everything would be solved." Which is closer to this homogeneity argument, since Japan has a lot of problems (as well as good). It is easy to romanticize places. The clique works both ways: the grass is always greener can be about your neighbor's lawn compared to yours or the other way around. Seemingly paradoxically they can both be believed by the same person. If only the world were that simple, where at least such a claim is measurable.

As you say "Shit is complicated".

I fully agree. On one hand people in the US only show medical bills that don't include insurance deductions, which are exceptionally high. While most people have insurance, so never face these payments, most people that don't never make the full payments and do get reductions. There are exceptions, but exaggerating the problem (which it still is a problem!) is not helpful but actively harmful to the conversation since it creates an easy to tear down strawman. Similarly romanticizing the healthcare of other countries is problematic. I'm going through a situation right now where my gf went back to her home country which has a nationalized health care only to find that she's paying more that we paid here. Where we didn't even max out our deductible for a near death experience that led to months in a hospital. But costs are wildly variable and this makes it hard to wrap our heads around because the systems are not easy to compare.

> r.e. Oregon

I'm curious if anyone clicked on any of the links that the article offers. While the article says "Last year, the state experienced one of the _sharpest rises_ in overdose deaths in the nation..." the "sharpest rise" link goes to a CDC website (https://archive.ph/7MbUn) that seems to only work in Edge browser. But that those numbers are based on predicted rather than reported, and that there are similar or even larger increases in Washington (24), Mane (17), (put Oregon here (14.5)) Wyoming (13), Nevada (12.5), Oklahoma (12), Texas (10.5), and Alabama (10) (rounded to nearest .5% of increased change). Interestingly here Oregon has one of the smallest gaps. Similarly the data only goes up to Feb 2023 which is only 2 months of the law being in effect. The sharp rise appears to be October to December of 2022 and a reported fall thereafter (only time that Oregon's reported and predicted values diverge). The article does not actually make a strong evidence based case around Oregon, but rather focuses on emotional with a sprinkling of policy and facts. But of course this is the case, as there's absolutely no way we could accurately judge if Oregon's experiment is a success given that it has only been running for 7 months and we'd need several years worth of data to make such a judgement (especially as we'd expect early results to have higher variance as a learning curve exists). Any data right now is more likely the result of coupled effects rather than actual policy. I mean it isn't like addictions are cured in a few weeks. And if I recall, Portugal had similar initial strains and that it has widely been discussed that people predict initial increases before overall trend downs, made long prior to even Oregon discussing decriminalization. I'm pretty sure we see a similar effect with weed. Like I said, shit is complicated.

I think what is instead happening is that due to the lack of any real evidence people are grasping at weak ones, and pretending their straw armor is made of steel because it supports their prior beliefs. Who knows if Oregon will be a success or not, but it is far to early to tell or have strong opinions.

I don't know how you could read that in the comment that started this and think this was generally about cultural norms. It was specifically and explicitly about shame, which I think is a terrible tool that has a negative effect on society in 99% of cases.

What are Japanese ashamed of vs US Midwesterners vs. US Californians, vs. their religiosity, individualism, collectivism, etc.

(edit: typo)

If anything, things are probably worse from a sentiment perspective for gay people now because a bunch of heterosexual liberal white women use pride parades to act completely shamelessly under the guise of being warriors for a movement they aren’t otherwise a part of.

Because people will give you disgusted looks when lots of other people are around, maybe they'll be brave enough to attack you. But when it's just them and their mates around, they _will_ attack you.

According to the FBI, in 2013 there was 334 hate crimes committed against LGBTQIA+ people [1]. The US population back then was 315 million [2]. In 2013, according to Gallup, 3.6% of Americans identified as LGBTQIA+ in 2013 [3]. Which means the crime rate was 1 per 33,952 persons, or normalizing to per 100,000 as crime is usually reported is 2.94 per 100,000 which is on par or LOWER than any other category of heinous crime for that era. In fact, 2013 has one of the safest years on record [4].

Furthermore, public sentiment had already switched in favor of same-sex marriage before it was even legalized, according to Pew research [5].

What world were you living in?

[1] https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim... [2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population... [3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-tick... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-... [5] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2013/03/20/growing-supp...

The one where in 2016 this happened and was part of a very large country wide discussion, with the exact same conversation about the cake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COItiKtHWyg

Are you sure __YOU__ aren't the one creating a non-existent history? Talk about calling the kettle black.

Either you've forgotten the past or more likely were just never exposed to those things. It is important to remember that our lives are not always identical to others, even those in close proximity.

I am definitely old enough to: remember my gay cousin having to hide any notion of his sexuality, and trying to deny it himself; the secret shame my aunt and uncle had for having a gay kid, never talking about it and doubling down on religion; the protests in 2008 where people said that gays had all the same rights but it was about the "sanctity of marriage," and how a "no" meant that they were going to teach children gay sex in schools; I'm old enough to remember it being a big deal that our president got a blowjob from someone that wasn't his wife, that such a shameful act was enough to impeach him, where saying "I didn't inhale" was ghastly let alone something like "grab 'em by the pussy"; I'm old enough to remember getting smog poisoning; I'm old enough to remember waking up early for cartoons, knowing where my friends are by finding the pile of bikes, and having the dad answer the phone when I was calling to ask a girl on a date.

Yes, it was that prop 8, and I did grow up in California. Not a rural part, all this happened in Orange and LA county. This isn't an uncommon thing.

But to catch you up on some things, here's some other things you might not have experienced. A little over 5 years ago I dated a black girl (I'm white) in a major Southern city and we both got looks, comments, and overall different treatment, especially when we weren't out with a group of white friends. This is something I, or her, didn't realize was as bad until it happened. A few years back (on the west coast), when I dated a South Asian girl I got comments asking why I don't date a "real" Asian, "one of the better ones", accused of liking submissive women (clearly they never met an Asian woman), being a colonizer, and other such comments. I had "shame" to tell my parents about the fact that I'm currently dating a Korean woman because I get accused of having "yellow fever," since they just ignore all the other women I've ever dated. The white women, the Latina women, or others I've chased or had crushes on (which btw, still got racist comments for any non-white girl). That I was actually introduced and set up to those last two girls rather than actively seeking them out. That this is just how the dice fell and it is probably unsurprising given that I'm in grad school in a west coast city. That I still get some of the same comments as before, that there's pressure on her for not dating a Korean, Asian men (even non-Korean) give me comments about how I'll never fit in and heavily imply only Asians should date Asians. Or again how people think I want to just dominate this woman, who is undeniably fierce and independent. All this still fucking exists.

You're not wrong about people virtual signaling. It annoys the fuck out of me too. You may notice some of those comments above aren't things a conservative would say... But you're swinging the pendulum in the other direction rather than dampening it. That's not any better. You can call out hypocrisy without perpetuating a fictitious dichotomy. By the very nature of only complaining about white liberal women you actively are perpetuating this dichotomy. Taking us further down the rabbit hole. I'm sorry, the world is complicated and it wouldn't be better if you just made all the liberals disappear (and similarly wouldn't be better if you made all the conservatives disappear). It's not a bunch of wizards lording over, pulling magic strings in the sky, it is because the world is exceptionally complex and we're all fucking idiots barely able to comprehend our small little corner.

To also help, let me explain the differences between conservative and liberal racism, with an example from my Muslim friend: Liberal racists randomly walk up to her and tell her how brave she is for wearing her hijab, conservative racists tell he to go back to where she came from. No, neither is great, but I bet you can tell one is preferred over the other. The real truth of the matter is, is that a lot of people are the same, they just ascribe to different tribes. They sing the same songs and dance the same dance, but pretend they're fundamentally different because it is in a different key. I have a lot to say about all this, but I don't want to start my morning angry.

Reading the past by todays standards are why social progressives are starting to lose ground. They just can't accept their win.

Of course, it could be as you allude and I have a tendency that most (a lot? :)) of people don't and that you indeed should stay away from me. Nevertheless, I should add that in my 5 decades of life I've felt this only 1-2 times (the other is so long ago that I'm not sure) and neither of those times led to me acting on it. Why didn't I act on it? A combination of reasons: I knew it would have been ethically wrong; I didn't think I could do it without getting caught and I didn't want to face the consequences of being caught.

In my society not valuing individual freedom girls have/had been shamed into not wearing jeans/skirts, going out for night movie show or even cutting hairs.

Second, it doesnt follow that shaming 1 thing means shaming everything. And surely you can recognize that there exist some things that people should be ashamed of?

Various religions and political groups have used and continue to use shame against the lgbt community, using monikers like sinful or perverse to shame them for who they are by grading them against some flawed ideal that they themselves often fail to attain.

Sorry, I really had to :)

Or I guess… it’s probably a bit darker and they are not talking about a western country.

There is a show on Netflix called "Old Enough!". It's worth watching to see how some of the high-trust works in practice, and also to perhaps think through if we could be comfortable with the same in our own neighbourhoods and countries. My guess for most people in the Anglo West, the answer would be "No".

Japan is the former and Singapore is the latter. Both end up in good places to live, but one has to have the full discussion about the reasons and causes for each.

All of East Asia is homogeneous. Every country is highly paternalistic and legalistic. North Korea is probably both the most homogeneous and authoritarian country on earth.

In reality heterogeneous societies are significantly less prone to this. You could not turn India or the US into comparable police states because nobody would even agree on how to get there. Singapore gets away with it because it's effectively a small city state. A country of similar composition but 10x larger, which happens to actually exist just North, Malaysia, could never maintain that level of repression.

They seem to be perfectly fine with it in Kashmir.

Also I’m not convinced that executing people for non-violent crimes is a good tradeoff in the first place.

I don't know where this idea that "Japan has no immigration" comes from – it isn't true.

According to OECD statistics, in 2019 Japan (population 125 million) had net permanent immigration of 137,824 people. Compare that to fellow OECD member Mexico, with almost the same population, which in 2019 only had net permanent immigration of 38,704. [0]

In 2019, Japan's population was 2.2% foreign nationals. [1] While that is at the low end by OECD standards, it is still ahead of Hungary (1.9%), Lithuania (1.7%), Slovakia (1.4%), Turkey (1.1%), Poland (0.6%) and Mexico (0.4%).

According to MIPEX [2], the ease of gaining permanent residence in Japan is on par with the US and New Zealand, modestly easier than France and the UK, significantly easier than Switzerland or Australia. The worst country was Saudi Arabia, with UAE not far behind; equal first in ease were Brazil and Finland, with Sweden, Mexico and Ukraine equal second, and Hungary and South Africa equal third.

[0] https://data.oecd.org/migration/permanent-immigrant-inflows....

[1] https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-population.htm

[2] https://www.mipex.eu/permanent-residence

EDIT: Just want to add that of your comparisons, the two I’m familiar with, Poland and Hungary, are notoriously anti immigration (at least within the context of the EU).

The largest immigrant group in Japan is Chinese (including PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong); second largest is Koreans. Many of the Korean ethnic minority are descendants of those who immigrated in the first half of the 20th century (when Korea was ruled by Japan), much of whom have never become Japanese citizens (Japanese citizenship is based on descent not birthplace–a very common policy worldwide), although there has also been much more recent immigration from South Korea. Another major immigrant group are Brazilians of Japanese descent.

I've only been to Japan once (on business), but while I was there I was introduced both to Koreans and to Japanese Brazilians; my Brazilian colleague was not expecting conversing in his native tongue to be a feature of that trip.

> the two I’m familiar with, Poland and Hungary, are notoriously anti immigration (at least within the context of the EU).

Poland and Hungary are opposed to accepting large numbers of refugees, especially non-European refugees.

But they aren't opposed to immigration in general. In 2021, legal foreign residents of Poland included [0] over 250,000 Ukrainians (mostly refugees), over 30,000 Belarusians, over 20,000 Germans, over 12,000 Russians; Poland doesn't restrict immigration only to the EU (or Europe), since the fifth highest foreign citizenship in Poland is Vietnam (over 10,000) and the eighth highest is China (over 6,000). Similarly, in 2022 Hungary [1] had over 17,000 legally resident Chinese citizens (third only to Ukraine and Germany; a decline from its 2018 peak when it was almost 20,000) and over 6,000 legally resident Vietnamese citizens (sixth most common foreign citizenship).

Citizens of most OECD countries do not find it difficult to be accepted for immigration by Poland or Hungary; low demand is a bigger limit on their numbers than government policy.

If you want to talk about a country which really is anti-immigrant, Saudi Arabia is a good example – although it has millions of temporary foreign residents, gaining permanent residency was basically impossible prior to 2019; now it is available, but only if you can afford the fee–over US$200,000. Acquiring citizenship is still extremely difficult, up to the selective whims of very senior government officials; the only people who have reasonable odds of being successful in their application are foreign women who marry Saudi men. Becoming a permanent resident or even citizen of Poland or Hungary is vastly easier.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Poland#Immigra...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary#Foreig...

You'd think no one wanting to murder you is the best state, but practically people will have strong feelings about a lot of things in life, and it's hard to imagine a healthy society where "that would look bad on me" is enough to restrain you from your deepest anger moments. Having no immediate way to murder you + an active police to protect you should be the barrier to avoid a tragedy.

Japan is no exception. People get murdered everyday, but there is a lot of prevention and arrangement to limit the impact of a single individual going berserk. Police patrol will catch you walking down an empty street at 3 AM with a kitchen knife in hand.

Is this a coy way of saying not all diversity is good? Sure you have more would-be-murderers but obviously Id take a less diverse group if thats the diversity.

My point with Japan was not about murders. They have laws against murder. Even still, the prevention mechanisms are weaker. Less lethal equipment and training, not positioned in schools, etc.

It was more about social expectations that are not enforced but are more strictly followed than in the west because of a sort of shame.

The point is not even that more social shaming is strictly better, just that it’s certainly a stronger guide rail on behavior than rules that people otherwise sont care about.

In a way I think Japan is paying that price in that it has a harder time to adapt to change and is slower to adapt new ideas. Japanese people are inventive and come up with a lot of good ideas, but society's homogeneity and stability means the hurdle to get any idea past the critical point is that much higher. Cash is still the only payment method allowed in a ton of commerce for instance, when Japan actually has so much advance regarding electronic payment variety and barrier to use.

On would-be-murderers, I am supposing they're not just different in their murdering intents, but also have different ideas, views of the world, and can deal with some situations better than the more obedient people. I'd see it as the best of both world if we could let them bring new ideas and try different things, while keeping active systems and arrangements preventing them from going to the dark side.

I wonder if Canada for instance is succeeding in this balancing act. I don't hate Japan as it currently is, but I think it stagnated way too long and it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue.

That’s really not the (main or significant) reason why Japan has a low murder rate.

Many European countries where there is little societal pressure, direct control and enforcement, drug use is fairly widespread and low level crime is rampant in large urban centers (compared to Japan of course) have comparable murder rates.

In this regard US is a huge outlier compared to pretty much all other “first world” countries.

In comparison, european countries are more connected and the networks will be a lot more international. For instance Marseille has a kind of violent crime that comes from guns and drugs smuggled at the port that won't happen as much in Japan (Fukuoka is a city of its kind in that regard...)

On police presence, you'll see crime rate similar to Japan in well funded districts that have a very local and always present police. That makes them part or the everyday life, they will be more relaxed, more aware of the oddities and weird behaviors, and residents will also rely on them more as they are familiar instead of being some kind of alien presence.

Of course these cities will also probably spend more on school equipment, libraries, public infra etc. This costs money/taxes that not every city has or is willing to spend.

However we have countries like Switzerland were firearms are widely accessible (IIRC according to estimates more than half of the gun in the country are not even registered since they did not require that before joining Schengen) and there there is basically no frontier if you’re traveling on land.

And yet the murder rate in Switzerland is not that mich higher than in Japan.

Really shame and accountability only work at small scale. Which should be rather obvious given that you like your friends and will associate with family members who you highly disagree with on fundamental issues, but you wouldn't have a tenth of the patience for some rando at a bar who's even closer to your opinions than those people.

As for laws and prevention, we have thousands of years of evidence for systems that don't work. Murders are even rather high in places with exceedingly draconian laws around them and weapons. Maybe, just maybe, it isn't the core reason that people don't murder. Maybe, just maybe, it has to do with something else. I mean it isn't like we give women stronger punishments when they murder and that's why they murder at nearly an magnitude lower of a rate than men.

This is a strawman argument. I think what we're talking about is shame for having a reckless disregard for others. The way I think of it is we are increasingly living in a world where people are viewing other humans as "NPCs".

I get it — let’s have shame for the things that “we” want there to be shame about. I just don’t think there is good consensus on what that is.

My whole point is that to a surprising degree of divergence, addict culture in the USA particularly has abandoned those norms in favor of overt caustic social interaction.

So what function did shame serve in that society?

Shame in third-world societies (like the one I have lived in for the last 15 years) serves many important functions.

In my case, it is a matriarchal culture. The worst thing that can happen to a person is that your mother would feel ashamed. So people go out of their way to not do shameful things like stealing, lying, being disorderly intoxicated, and other socially hostile activities. I find that it is effective at keeping social order, and one of the worst insults is to imply that someone was ill - raised.

It is also the peak of naïveté to assume any mechanism of social control will remain restricted to our pet favorite cause. Isn’t that what every discussion here about encryption backdooors ends up concluding?

Unfortunately, my writing was unclear and many people (understandably) misunderstood the context. Sorry about that.

If shifting social mores was able to change laws in some places, I see no reason to assume that the shaming system cannot.

Being ashamed of being an addict could lead to avoidance of treatment, so that might be a better example of a negative outcome of shame.

That was fear, not shame.

Fear (of shame itself, and/or of the concrete social consequences for yourself or others of shame that you might be subject to) is the entirety of the mechanism bt which shame acts as an influence on behavior.

> being in the closet is/was mostly about fear for yourself of hard repercussions - disownment by parents (if young), getting physically attacked, that kind of thing.

Yes, that's how shame as a social constraint works. There has never been a society in which shame worked as a social constraint without there existing hard social consequences, from ostracism (including exclusion from the material support mechanisms available to others in society) to outright honor killings, for having shame attach to you.

Not sure why people in this thread are romanticizing societies that center shame more than the modern West.

So is people imposing those material consequences because shame also attaches to those in social proximity to the trait to which society attaches primary shame, such as family members of those openly tolerant of it. Which is a big part of the source of the fear of consequences.

And let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today. Our relative decline in economic importance is probably caused by other economic trends, but it’s pretty wild to say “shame doesn’t work” despite the evidence to the contrary.

this is absurd, there are plenty of countries who have high levels of shame where aids is still running rampant. and to even imply that we (the us) didn’t have high levels of pre-marital sex in “the good old days when we could shame people” is naive to an extreme.

> let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today.

if you’re suggesting that i should intentionally live under rigid repression to “be a world power” i say nah, thanks tho. i’d rather we were a middling country where people are free and not living under some authoritarian religious kooks or whatever power would be repressing me “for my own good” because they have deluded themselves that they “know better than we do” what will make us happy.

Are you serious?

Pre-marital rape is a massive issue there, as is underage rape, and rape "to just teach those women a lesson".

I imagine, though, that while the numbers for various rape types are probably relatively high compared to other countries, those crimes still affect a tiny minority of women and wouldn’t move the broader needle on HIV rates. I would guess that date rape is also extremely lower than in the west due to courtship practices being very different (which would work against high HIV rates).

> Then women who end up in such situations anyway are considered fair game, more or less.

Would you say this part is accurate?

Not sure why you are trying to invoke shame for something that is a well-known effect of economic conditions, and which has been observed to change with those conditions much faster than (and likely driving rather than driven by) cultural change.

> America had 100,000 people die of drug overdoses last year, whereas societies that shame people for drug use have far lower rates of overdoses.

So do countries that shame people less, like most of the rest of the developed world.

> Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-marital sex largely managed to avoid the AIDS epidemic that gripped similarly poor countries in other regions.

Which is some good luck for them, but one of the reasons it spread so much and i nterventions were so difficult jn Africa was strongly shame-centering cultures interfering with both prevention and treatment (and even acknowledging the fact and nature of the problem.) So, kind of not helping your argument.

Ascribing it to “economic conditions” blinks reality. Americans are economically better off now than they were in the 1960s, when TFR was much higher. Wealthier states like Massachusetts have much lower TFR than poorer states like Idaho and Nebraska. And whites are much more affluent than Hispanics, but have much lower TFR.

The effect of culture is apparent even when you dig further into subgroups. Asian Americans have the lowest TFR, despite being the most affluent and educated. But Muslim Americans, who are also wealthy and educated, have a much higher TFR than whites and other Asians. Both are more collectivist and less individualistic cultures, but there’s a long history of population control ingrained into East and south Asian culture, while there is a strong emphasis on procreation in Islam.

Frankly, it makes me laugh when I hear it. Poor Hispanic and Muslim immigrants are hard at work raising the next generation, but college educated white Americans “can’t afford kids.” Right.

No, it reflects well-established reality.

> Americans are economically better off now than they were in the 1960s, when TFR was much higher.

Yes, exactly. Globally, on a by-nation level, prosperity in general and social safety nets in particular, as well as access to birth control, are close and immediate drivers of reduced fertility. When family is your only old-age, disability, or unemployment support network, the economic incentive to have a large family is greater. When those are socially provided, raising children is a cost without as much of an economic purpose.

> But Muslim Americans, who are also wealthy and educated, have a much higher TFR than whites and other Asians.

Muslims in the USA are not more educated than the general population, having college degrees at about the same rate as the general population (31% in 2017, vs. 34.2% for the general population). [0][1] They also aren’t more affluent, being similarly likely to have an income over $100,000 but more likely to have an income under $30,000 than the general population. [0] Also, Muslims aren’t categorically Asians or categorically non-White (in fact, more are White than Asian, racially [0]), so you should either not use “other” for either racial category or should use “other” for both; the non-parallel use suggests you think Muslims are categorically a racial subgroup of Asians.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/07/26/demographic-...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attai...

> And let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today

Great point, it’s interesting how eager people are to perform large scale social experiments in rapid succession and with no roll back button.

Alcohol?

Was it significantly more rigid and repressive than in other countries at the time? I don’t think so.

Also your AIDS and sex related crime statistics seem to be imaginary?

These sound like the arguments I hear from people that wish BD should have stayed East Pakistan.

> Devaluing shame instead of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed

As the other comment said, you’re also discussing “being shamed” whereas the original comment is about “feeling shame”. Similar but far from identical.

No, not really. OP clearly advocates for "the need of an authority figure" to force his personal views onto others he feels are lacking in the way of morals. OP's puerile take on "shame" is just a thinly veilled desire to oppress everyone and anyone around them that does not comply with his personal views.

> Without shame, many people unfortunately need an authority figure to step in and moderate their behaviour.

This is an argument against relying on authority figures to replace the role of shame and implicit social contract. I honestly don’t know how they could have made that more clear than when they continued with this:

> It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.

Again, the argument is that _without_ shame and a shared social contract, the replacement by explicit state authority to moderate harmful behaviors drifts towards fascism.

The argument is plain wrong. Fascism and nazism were driven by fear and shame from day one. You can find transcriptions from early talks from the dictators and others.

Regarding the role of shame in the rise of fascism (and the NSDAP). I agree it played a role, but I would characterize that as an (all too successful) exploit of human psychology.

My opinion is that “shame” as a basic human emotion does perform an important function in our social fabric, and trying to inoculate ourselves against it en masse is not without its downsides.

You're introducing these things into a thread about shame and drug usage. It's a complete non-sequitur.

The original commenter is more right than any of us can conceive. So many societal problems would be solved if people had raised their kids to learn to feel shame. Trumpism, gun worship, climate change denial, post-truth mindset, anti-vaxx, treason, insurrection, racial hatred and discrimination,etc... the thing so many of people with these views have in a common is they feel no shame about the harm they are causing.

If in your own opinion you did something wrong, you should absolutley feel shame. What is more evil than being proud of doing wrong by your own standards? You can debate what is right ir wrong or even what morality is but refusing to feel shame is embracing evil.

If society only used shame for truly reprehensible, amoral, antisocial behavior, then sure, the original commenter is making a great point. But shame has been weaponized. Look around you. People are being shamed for being poor, fat, disabled, lazy, oversexed, undersexed, voting wrong, not voting, you name it. So some of us live in a state of constant shame for innocuous behavior and others of us cope by becoming shameless. Even here, you're trying to cast shame upon the shameless, with "refusing to feel shame is embracing evil".

You are conflating guilt and shame. You should feel shame when you do wrong just as much you should feel pain when your body is harmed. I have no desire to debate specifics of morality and get off topic, but if your guilt is correct then your shame is always correct.

A person who does not accept their guilt cannot feel shame.

It isn't society pressuring you to feel guilt, it is society pressuring you to use a specific way to measure right and wrong. You can reject that way and talk about other ways by using logic and reason. But ultimately, it is impossible to not have a means of determining right and wrong even that is only "unprovoked physical harm to others" unless you are a complete sociopath. And if you do have such a system, you should feel guilt when you violate that system.

You have a choice when encountering guilt, to justify your actions or find excuses or to feel shame. A healthy mindser in my opinion would not be imprisoned by shame but empowered by it to self-correct and make amends. That way, you can be at peace with yourself and others.

I agree with your statement that "guilt is society pressuring you to use a specific way to measure right and wrong", and shame is similarly the internal effect of society's pressures to measure your very being against that same code of morality.

But whether society is pushing your emotional buttons from the inside or the outside doesn't matter. In the end, I know I have felt deep shame for being something completely harmless and acting accordingly. I've spent years working to overcome this, and I will say in no uncertain terms that this is not justification or excuses, but a definitively healthier mindset--and my therapist and partner and community would agree. And if you would say that it would have been healthier to use my shame to instead alter my behavior and/or self (if that latter would even be possible), I would tell you and all the homophobes and Pauline Christians to go straight to hell.

I actually think you're right, that guilt/shame can be huge opportunity to evaluate your actions and your habits and your self, and to ignore it completely is to become the amoral shameless sociopath that you're decrying. But it needs to be a balanced and holistic examination, which unfortunately is not possible from a position of feeling such shame. This is the value of having someone, a therapist perhaps, to hold space for you to examine your true values, detached from the electric shock of shame. Then you can decide with your whole being whether to ignore the shame and become inured to it, or to accept that it accurately reflects your values and "self-correct" as you say.

This way is how you can be at peace with yourself and others.

Mentally well people don’t defecate on streets, at least not under anything less than extreme privation. Those experiencing that privation likely already feel ample shame over it.

Ok I'll bite.

How do you expect to treat mental illness through shaming?

Wait, is that your definition of mental illness?

Read the thread. You're commenting on discussions you're ignorant and oblivious about. You're in a thread where GP talks about mentally unwell people who "defecate on streets" and you're now trying to pass it off as mere narcisists?

You said "How do you expect to treat mental illness through shaming?"

My interpretation of the first statement is that lack of shame is a characteristic that is present in some mental illnesses.

My interpretation of your reply is that you were portraying the original statement as saying that people that are mentally ill should be shamed in order to get well. Which I thought was very far from my own interpretation.

Due to this I went to google and searched for lack of shame as a trait of mental illnesses to check if there were any, and NPD came up as one example. So it seemed like the original statement was correct while saying nothing about how to treat people which is what you implied.

Meanwhile, I used "gay" as an example because a lot of gay people feel shame about it and it's very bad for those people. It's an example of something with shame attached that clearly shouldn't.

> it's very bad for those people

I don't get it, are you saying shame is bad for gay people because their guilt is justified? I have to disagree with that, you can talk about the guilt that precedes shame but shame in itself is a corrective tool.

As you say, shame works very well. I'm baffled as to why you would assume that people who hold beliefs different from your own would raise their children without leaning upon the very effective "shaming" mechanism.

I'm also baffled as to why you would think that anyone would be ashamed of their beliefs when they were raised to believe those things. It appears that the left side of your argument isn't aware of what the right side just said.

Edit: In conclusion, your argument does not hold water. It assumes that your opponents do not think deeply upon contentious matters, and only you and yours do (and so, by your account, anyone who shares your beliefs should never feel shame, because they are simply correct). You are dismissing the beliefs of your opponents without bothering to look into the nuance of any single individual's personal stance, and instead painting half our population as extremists. You label all Republicans as "Trumpists" because they didn't vote for Biden. Give me a fucking break. Even the "Bidenists" aren't happy with Biden.

You are the one who should be ashamed, but you know all about that, right? Maybe you should take a break from trying to save everyone else, and talk to a therapist about your savior complex. You might discover that you need some saving yourself.

It isn't an assumption, it is my observation. Those examples are types of people that typically (not always) know they are causing harm and even by their own standards their actions are immoral. The nuances of individual's beliefs matter, just not for my brief example. But also, these nuances end up being mental gymanstics created as a result of cognitive dissonance and self deception, to avoid self-confrontation that might result out of shame.

> You label all Republicans as "Trumpists" because they didn't vote for Biden. Give me a fucking break. Even the "Bidenists" aren't happy with Biden.

I did nor label all republicans anything but trumpists are either sociopaths or shameless people. Knowing the objectively observable acte of that man, you would have to create so many excuses and claim every fact before you as a conspiracy or "fake news" to avoid feeling shame for supporting him. Republicans as a whole (democrarts too in their own way) are quite the shameless insidious bunch, either willfully ignorant or intentionally malicious to their fellow man. Keep in mind, I am judging people here based on my own beliefs, but my argument is that any reasonable moral system (especially Christianity) that the people i listed hold agrees with my belief.

There are things, like cruelty for the sake of it or tormenting children that just don't give you any gray middle ground for excuses so you have to challenge reality and facts to allow your behavior to continue without shame.

> You are the one who should be ashamed, but you know all about that, right? Maybe you should take a break from trying to save everyone else, and talk to a therapist about your savior complex. You might discover that you need some saving yourself.

You don't know anything about me but yes, in my own way I have my own mountains of shame, I hope I am not being shameless about anything I did wrong. I am not saving anyone else, I only mentioned those groups you objected to because they cause harm to me or people i care about without feeling shame, I am merely reducing harm and danger to me and mine. Anyone that claims they don't need saving are too busy digging a hole they can't climb out of.

They are very proud of their ways and proudly defend their self-deception.

Anyway its making me wonder, has the US ever been strongly rooted in shame as a non-homogeneous nation? If so when and why did we stop? Growing up in the bay area I feel like I might have a pretty warped view...

> the thing so many of people with these views have in a common is they feel no shame about the harm they are causing.

> If in your own opinion you did something wrong, you should absolutley feel shame

It implies that the list of people you don't like think they did something wrong but refuse to feel shame about it.

To me, all those people are not shameless - in the sense that they don't feel shame _at all_ -, but don't feel shame because they don't feel like they did something wrong (how can you think you're wrong when you don't _believe_ in climate change ?).

So shame in itself is not the problem.

Someone please explain to me how sexual degeneracy doesn’t exist. Its by definition bad, right? So if its not a problem doesnt that mean it doesn’t exist?

indeed, your conclusion appears to desire the very thing OP was calling in to question without justification - the existence of that authority figure.

why do you think people should be told how to be? remember it’s more frequently been the law that has outlawed being gay, or say, more recently in florida, wearing the wrong thing.

This individual has always been self absorbed and useless. His daughter asked him to change for her, he wouldn’t. His daughter’s counselor basically told her to decide how to remember him, it’s unlikely he will make it a year.

Personally, I feel the individual is a PoS and hope he suffers but it’s heart wrenching to see the affect it’s having on his daughter.

Addition: this is happening in one of the more permissive and “progressive” communities in CA.

Well, some people will choose, willingly, to waste their life away living on the streets from one high to the next. The difference between most types of poverty and this, is that they *chose* this path.

Bodily autonomy has powerful upsides, as well as downsides. Here's one of the downsides.

If they wanted to 'get out', I'd be there to help them if I knew them. But they have to want to. Forcing your viewpoint on them makes you just as a horrible person as the judges throwing people in locked boxes for decades for a bit of white powder they injected.

In an ideal world, I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves, of course, so as best to preserve bodily autonomy. I think you can make the case that the Oregon experiment is showing how in practice that doesn't happen.

Overdoses are at an all time high in Portland. The entity that responds usually gives the person overdosing Narcan, addiction help is then offered for those who recover and 99% of those offered recovery options refuse.

https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/08/01/overdose-911-call...

Firefighters (and others) are quitting due to the trauma of responding to these calls over and over and over, with no concrete progress. It takes it's toll mentally to respond these calls which are taking up and increasing percentage of the calls they have to respond to.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/portland-do...

The main failure of this experiment, imho, is the missing component of forcing detox/rehab/etc when x amount of drug related crimes are committed. The measure explicitly said the addict has to seek the help on their own volition. That might work for alcohol and cannabis, but the vast majority of opioid based drugs are so addictive they can't even fathom not getting their next high or life without it.

Have you thought this through? This is beyond evil. Same energy as "no organ transplant if you didn't get the vaccine"

1) Drug runners drive to Oregon (or wherever - but it's always going to be Oregon first) and pick things up and take them back to their home state.

2) When the first state goes recreational - people expect that things are generally becoming more LAX and eventually it will be allowed there too. And often that LAX expectation is what literally pushes that state to go there too, voters gonna vote.

But I'm definitely guessing the pandemic in general was just a huge event that has pushed probably millions (potentially billions worldwide) of people into general depression.

>> "I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves" I agree with this statement. Criminalizing hard drug use simply because it is associated with behaviour causing societal damage is not only inconsistent with the legality of alcohol use, it is also a slippery slope to justifying far more insidious laws. For example, a similar justification could be used to criminalize violent tv shows/movies/video games if the government believes consumption of such media is associated with societal harm.

The obvious solution is to simply criminalize the acts, such as theft and property damage, that actually harm others/society, rather than indirect upstream actions such as drug use. This "Oregon experiment" involves far more than just decriminalizing drug use, but also (effectively) decriminalizing many other domains of crime such as retail theft, daylight robbery, urban camping, property damage, etc. not unlike what we have here in SF.

Sure, if someone is addicted to drugs but is still able to maintain a home and otherwise take care of themselves, then that's not society's problem, at least, yet. I still think they'd be better off not doing drugs, but it's not yet to the point where their problems are imposing on other people.

Surely there are adults and kids doing this in their homes, and we usually don’t notice them until a tragedy occurs (eg a teenager tries fent for the first time…and they are dead).

Someone needs to be of sound mind to make a choice. Clearly you can't sign life-changing legal documents, or testify in court while drunk.

A range of other conditions, like deep depression, state of shock, etc. count. Does addiction?

Surely a definition of addiction is that you cannot stop, i.e. its a mental condition.

Like if someone ia diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, do we ask them if they want treatment? No, we have to treat then anyway.

I do not think this is a slippery slope, the conditions are fairly well defibed.

That is not true in all US states. One cannot be committed to a mental institution against one’s will unless ordered by a judge. And one can’t be forced to ingest antipsychotics unless committed against one’s will. It’s a very high bar to get a judge to commit a person against their will, and it only lasts 30 days or less.

Externalities: the costs of caring for the addicted are high, and the quality of life in neighborhoods where addicts congregate is horrendous, between violence, insecurity and insalubriousness. I don't think a lot of people feel comfortable raising kids in places where there's public defecation on the daily. So yes I feel somewhat entitled to force that much of a "viewpoint" on my fellow citizens.

That addicts "chose" the path that they're in, I think reasonable people could disagree about it. To some folks, all behavior is the responsibility of the individual, and claiming otherwise is paternalistic overreach. Personally, I think it's fairly well established that some substances cause powerful long-term addiction in some people, well above the person's willpower. I don't care for locking up users, but I do think dealers and traffickers deserve the worst punishments for knowingly causing long-term harm to users.

Are you an anarchist? If not, then please explain how every law you support is not forcing your viewpoint on others?

Do you want to live in a world were the "powers that be" can force medical intervention and/or forced detention for a competent person who's opposed to it? As the cops mentioned: being a dick isn't illegal, and there's no societal-level solutions to dicks, the best we can do is try to avoid them as individuals.

I'm all for rehabilitation - but it has to be voluntary (and humane, probably has to be well-funded too) - that's what liberty is. Anything less is too authoritarian for my tastes.

(Ideally, jail would just _be_ help, but unfortunately that's not the case. And there's a long tail of criminals who _aren't_ mentally ill or addicts, so let's assume jail still exists.)

I am a _staunch_ supporter of liberty, but I reject the notion that you can repeatedly pollute, steal, and commit violent acts on the streets without any recourse from the rest of society. And I absolutely support compassion as the first step of that recourse! Housing, counselors, harm reduction, and other treatments for addiction (esp opiate blockers) should all be on the table for people that need it.

But the alternative to that choice has to be jail. Because the status quo is not cutting it, and you're not "free" to infringe on people, their homes, and their businesses.

Being a drug addict is utterly miserable. We can all see that misery with our own eyes. I don't think we are willing to confront the much wider epidemic of misery that is driving people into addiction and perpetuating addiction.

I think this is where you'll get a lot push back because I have absolutely zero trust in my or any government to make this determination and not abuse it. I'm "mentally ill" a few times over, Johns Hopkins says 24% of adults have a mental disorder.

As much as I agree with you in theory that getting people help is good it requires a government of angels. It's the same thing with the war on drugs, the reality is much much worse than the theory.

This is a critical part of the comment you are talking about. Everything you say is irrelevant if you're already objectively guilty of crime.

Legalization of drugs doesn't mean legalization of behavior caused by drugs.

> This is a critical part of the comment you are talking about. Everything you say is irrelevant if you're already objectively guilty of crime

This sounds like an expansion of "three strike" laws to include petty crimes.

I'm all for living and let live for people don't harm others, whether they're addicted to drugs or not.

I think most addicts are also casualties of the drug war. If the government supplied clean drugs with very little markup from the production costs, and intervened for users who harmed others (using some combination of imprisonment, forced rehab, and counseling) I think we'd be much better off.

Add to that, drugs could be both cheaper than current street prices (less motivation for things like theft), on top of being a source of revenue to fund the social programs

But I don't think people actually prefer the sensation of the high, right? Like, you can do enough heroin for an equivalent sensation, you just have to do a lot more of it.

So it sets up this situation where fentanyl is the easiest to smuggle in 1 billion doses, so it's the cheapest, so people prefer it, but it's actually way more dangerous because the difference between a dose that feels nice and a dose that kills you is too small to measure for most people.

Yeah, maybe don't make fentanyl legal, but make heroin legal and make it price competitive with fentanyl

edit: and really, isn't fentanyl like $10 / dose on the street? I'm pretty sure heroin could be produced for a fraction of that if it was done legally. Sell it for $5 for an equivalent dose, people will make the switch

Too late to edit, but I forgot another massive benefit of this: Cutting out the cartels, and funding of global terrorism in general. But I'm not convinced the powers that be aren't doing dirty dealings, and thus want to maintain existing power structures

There's been plenty of evil done by do-gooders, who are so certain in their rectitude about what's best for others, that they feel justified in imposing that rectitude upon them.

I can’t hit people with it, I can’t transport it onto private property, I can’t use it to yell all night, I can’t sell organs, the list is endless.

Anything we do, we do with our body, and every law ever applies to what I do with my body. The question is: do we think the costs of law the restriction outweigh the benefits? You may think so, but you have to argue for it, you can’t just invoke a principle which has never existed.

In case you aren't, being able to do what you want with your own body does not include a right to harm others. Remember, we are talking about ingesting drugs, not hitting other people.

Is there a point at which drug use should be considered antisocial and unacceptable?

You have to make the argument that drug use doesn’t harm others. In a libertarian thought experiment maybe it doesn’t, but in the real world it does.

In particular, we tend to criminalise behaviors that increase the risk of harming others. Consider drunk driving. Nobody is harmed if I don’t have an accident. But the risk of an accident increases, so we criminalize it. The same is true of hard drugs. The probability I will harm others conditional on meth addiction is higher than the background probability.

I also said nothing about do-gooders. I never said I supported do-gooders. What sorts of legal measures ought to exist is a prudential judgement. In this case, it's clear that drug use should be criminalized.

> The very idea that you can do absolutely what you want to yourself is incoherent

You being confused has nothing to do with the idea.

> That annihilates all morality.

Your morality. Not mine. Here's where you learn morality isn't really a tangible thing, and everyone disagrees about what is moral.

Morality is something different from what laws are, rights are, and what crimes are.

> I never said I supported do-gooders

Imposing a moral code on others is what do-gooders do.

> Imposing a moral code on others is what do-gooders do.

Is murdering people fine then?