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Diary
By lm (Mon Apr 07, 2008 at 10:46:06 AM EST) (all tags)
Update [2008-4-7 13:26:7 by lm]: I hope I can write like this when I grow up

Doxos is doing so well that I earned a full penny from Google's Adsense last month. Clearly, I'm well down the path to fame and fortune. While February saw 130 unique visitors across 4 continents, March saw 345 visitors across every continent save Antarctica. The most popular essay was Why I'm not a Republican closely followed by How the Classical Idea of Justice Ought to Underly the Debate Over Victimless Crimes such as Prostitution. If the most popular essays are about Republicans and Prostitutes, I suppose that if I were interested entirely in increasing traffic, I'd make the next piece about Republican Prostitutes. Google is now driving almost half of my traffic. The funniest combination of search terms for the month was ``malatesta alcohol'' which evidently took someone to Yo-Yo Ma as a Philosopher King in an Ignorant City. Other than that, I could probably make a good guess on what term papers in philosophy classes are being written in which parts of which country based on the prevalence in a given week of particular search terms.

Most of Saturday I spent chipping paint off of a wall in the upstairs apartment. I had intended to only chip away the paint in a couple spots where there was water damage from the past. Turns out that the paint covered wall paper and once I started, I was obligated to finish. I should be more careful. My hand aches and burns. I'm none too gentle with a paint scraper it would seem.

On the bright side, I got to show my eldest daughter how to properly cut and hang drywall. `Why are you teaching me this?'' she asks. I replied by telling her how much it would cost to get a repair guy out to do a small job. ``Why would anyone pay that much money for something they can do themselves that easily?'' was her next question. I left it to her to come up with an answer for that one.

Late last week, I went down to the local branch of my library to pay off my fine. Once again I'm capable of checking items out of the library. I reserved a title for an essay I'm working on in the back of my mind. Unless I hear something that inspires me on the radio, I think that I'm about done picking the low hanging fruit. From here on out, it'll be hard work.

Friday night and most of Saturday, my youngest daughter was busy with a local chess tournament. She ended up winning 3 of the 5 games she played so she didn't do well enough to get trophy. She also got beaten by a grandmaster during the pre-tournament exhibition. Since my wife accompanied her this left me with large swaths of time alone. I don't get such alone time very frequently. It was good.

Sunday was my friend Kassia's birthday. We had her over for dinner for an impromptu birthday soiree of sorts. It was fun. Regrettably my soup didn't turn out as well as I would have liked. But the cake turned out quite well. Although some of the womenfolk complained about the lack of chocolate.

Sunday was also almost a riot. I found myself acting as a substitute teacher for the fourth grade class at Sunday school again. The mission this week was to make hundreds of sacked lunches for one of the local food pantries. We had all of the classes lined up in assembly lie fashion. One class dropped in juice boxes. Another class dropped in an orange. I supervised the joint efforts of the fourth grade through high school aged kids making peanut butter sandwiches. It was chaos, total and utter chaos. And much fun was had by all.

Update [2008-4-7 13:26:7 by lm]: Stanley Kurtz's review of Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East RTFO.
< Let me make this abundantly clear. | Quick review of "Goya's Ghosts" by Milos Forman >

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- Have we no shame? Well, no, we don't, not in a democracy. And that's a shame.
- I hope I can write like this when I grow up
- Why I'm not a Republican
- How the Classical Idea of Justice Ought to Underly the Debate Over Victimless Crimes such as Prostitution
- Yo-Yo Ma as a Philosopher King in an Ignorant City
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Tales of a mundane and cosmic weekend | 15 comments (15 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback
No shame? by R Mutt (2.00 / 0) #1 Mon Apr 07, 2008 at 11:03:45 AM EST
I think there's a strong element of public shaming in the public sex offenders lists that have become popular lately.

Also name and shame is a very popular buzzword in UK politics, though not usually amounting to much. Using shame instead of legal penalties is a fairly prominent part of communitarianism.



name and shame by Merekat (2.00 / 0) #2 Mon Apr 07, 2008 at 11:09:54 AM EST
aka give gossip plz.

[ Parent ]

Sure, there's elements of shame by lm (2.00 / 0) #5 Mon Apr 07, 2008 at 02:07:39 PM EST
There are quite a few innovative ways that various governments have attempted to use shame as retribution for various criminal acts.

But that's not really what either Plato or myself was getting at. Rather than making an act illegal and using shame as punishment, the idea is to mold the mind of the public to think that the act is shameful. Towards that end, the commercials the US government had produced to associate smoking pot with funding terrorism is more along the lines of Plato's suggestion. There was more of this in the forties and fifties with government campaigns about victory gardens and waste and what not.

But in recent years, it's an approach that isn't discussed much. By and large, the citizens of liberal democracies seem to me to be an a path that increasingly decouples the teaching of morality (whether something is noble or shameful) and governance.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Well by R Mutt (2.00 / 0) #7 Tue Apr 08, 2008 at 05:01:54 AM EST
Shaming is pretty major part of communitarianism (quick Google for evidence).

Communitarianism is about the biggest political development of the last couple of decades in Europe, and has some influence in the US I believe.

So shaming isn't really something that politicians/political scientists are ignoring.

Also the concept of the moral entrepeneur working to make behaviours morally acceptable or unacceptable is very well established in sociology.

So, I think both using shame and changing what is shameful are pretty well-established parts of the political armoury.

[ Parent ]

I recall reading an article about that ... by lm (2.00 / 0) #8 Tue Apr 08, 2008 at 10:22:28 AM EST
... back in the early nineties the Utne Reader spotlighted a communitarian thinker. I don't recall much in the way of discussion more recently. In fact, the Wiki link you sent me to says ``no major party and few elected officials advocate communitarianism'' and that ``there has been very little systematic criticism of ideological communitarianism, if only because its exact premises and policy consequences are difficult to pin down.'' That would tend to support my view that it isn't something that is receiving wide discussion. In fact, I suspect that you apparently haven't been able to think of any modern campaign in either the UK or the US that attempts to guide society through the use of shame as good evidence that the idea is not widespread.

It does come up from time to time. And, in fact, I gave a couple of examples of efforts at the use of shame in my article. There are others hear and there. For example, Bill Cosby's so-called pound-cake speech that set off a tizzy in the Black community in the US a couple of years ago. Certainly it is something that some people are aware of. But it isn't something that is used widely in liberal democracies and I suspect that has something to do with the very structure of liberal democracies themselves.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

That's just the usual by R Mutt (2.00 / 0) #9 Tue Apr 08, 2008 at 11:01:30 AM EST
True Marxism/Capitalism/Communitarianism has never been tried guff.

Blair, Schroder, and their parties consciously tried to create a Third Way based on Communitarianism as envisaged by academics.

When the rubber of theory hit the road of reality, the academics immediately complained that the real-life implementations were nothing like the shiny pure ideas that they'd envisaged.

In fact, I suspect that you apparently haven't been able to think of any modern campaign in either the UK or the US that attempts to guide society through the use of shame as good evidence that the idea is not widespread.
Except for, like, the 24 frigging pages of BBC news results for "name and shame" I linked to earlier. OK, how about the 4,210 Google results for searching gov.uk for it?

Ok, specific example from the number 1 Google result: Buckinghamshire County's illegal dumping "name and shame" campaign.

Specific example from the number 2 Google result: Barking and Dagenham's litter policy.

You can fill in the next 4,208 yourself...

[ Parent ]

Except as I mentioned in my first reply by lm (2.00 / 0) #10 Tue Apr 08, 2008 at 11:46:52 AM EST
Using shame as the penalty in addition to existing penalties for a criminal offense is really a whole other ball of wax and not what I'm talking about at all. I thought I'd made that clear. My apologies if I didn't.

This is using shame as punishment for a criminal act when the question under discussion is the use of shame at the societal level for actions for which being made illegal would not reduce the actions under consideration. Hence the Prohibition example. When the sales of `intoxicating liquor' was made illegal in the US, per capita consumption stayed constant. Yet the various temperance leagues managed to use the pressure of shame prior to Prohibition to decrease per capita alcohol consumption by at least one order of magnitude.

So, let's rephrase the question to be more clear, what discussions have their been in Europe where communities are deciding to use public shame to change behavior for actions which are not illegal?

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Google Result Number 9 by R Mutt (2.00 / 0) #11 Tue Apr 08, 2008 at 12:09:20 PM EST
Barnsley Council's soft drink overpricing campaign.

I did have to scan almost a whole page to find that one though.

[ Parent ]

Okay, so that's one by lm (2.00 / 0) #12 Tue Apr 08, 2008 at 12:26:44 PM EST
... as I've said before. I'm not claiming that isn't something that isn't being used at all but something that isn't being used regularly. Pointing out a single  anecdote that references no history of the practice hardly suggests that its something in widespread use.
There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

A few things by R Mutt (2.00 / 0) #13 Wed Apr 09, 2008 at 01:49:50 AM EST
First, that result was from the first page of Google results. It's pretty likely given the large number of results that there are other further down.

Second, when I point you at masses of data, like the Google and BBC results, you reject it for not being specific. When I point you at specific examples, you reject it because it's not evidence of "widespread use". Hmmm.

Third, I don't really see why it makes such a big difference for you that shame is used alone. I think you're making a bit of an assumption: that the use of shame actually works.

Shaming was a trendy idea for a while, but like many lovely ideas, there was an unfortunate lack of evidence that it actually worked. So politically, you've either got to use it alongside things that do work so you can pretend it does, or else confine it to things like soft drink prices where you're making a purely token effort.

The important thing is that you're using an innovative new strategy that your political opponent didn't think of first.

[ Parent ]

First, let me say I don't know that shame works by lm (2.00 / 0) #14 Wed Apr 09, 2008 at 07:31:58 AM EST
What I'm actually looking for is evidence that it does. What I did in my essay is to say that `I find this idea presented by Plato intriguing and have noticed that we don't really use it very much in this day and age and here is probably the reason why we don't use it.' This isn't an argument that shame should be used in a certain way, it's the beginning of a discussion on whether or not not shame even can be used in a certain way.

Second, I didn't reject your Google results for being too general. I rejected them for being about something entirely other than the question I was discussing. I fail to see how a tendency by governments to use shame as a punishment for illegal acts addresses the idea that some behaviors breed disrespect for the law if made illegal and, even though they cannot effectively be controlled by the law, they can be controlled by shame if the government is able to shape the non-government sources of what people consider to be noble or shameful. Even the projects you linked to that don't cover something illegal, don't really take this approach but attempt to use shame entirely punitively based on an assumption about what society will think is shameful.

Third, I have alleged that this idea was not particularly widespread in the past few decades. You've said that I'm off my rocker and that it's been a hot topic, perhaps one of the hottest topics for the past twenty years. If it has been such a hot topic, I would expect a tremendous amount of discussion. But you've yet to point me towards any evidence of such discussion except, possibly, for one link to a local governing authority which might be applicable.

What I think happened is that you saw the word `shame' and though to yourself `oh, he's talking about X' which is all over the news when in fact I'm not addressing X at all. It's as if I were talking about a moral campaign to increase voluntary contributions to governments and you replied with a bunch of links about mandatory taxes. Such discussion about taxes just isn't relevant to the idea of voluntary contributions.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

The shame of blogging for cash by Alan Crowe (2.00 / 0) #3 Mon Apr 07, 2008 at 12:22:02 PM EST
I commented on Reddit disparaging blogging for cash. I find it shameful in two ways.

First, it corrupts the blogger, tempting him to write catch-penny posts. Not only must he neglect the matters about which he is truly concerned, but being merely human he must soothe the pain of this by denying the depths of his true concerns and cultivating an interest in topics that he previously dismissed as tawdry and commercial. At length the corruption will eat right to his core.

Second, it obstructs the honest blogger. We can only build a better world if we focus our writing on what is important. Focus is not enough, we must also be read, but in the other side of our lives, as readers, we hit a horrible problem. Some bloggers are trying to attract us to writing that they believe is important. Other bloggers are trying to attract us. They just want the page views. The second lot, the bloggers-for-pay, have a great advantage. They can ferret out or psychological weaknesses and pander to them. Soon  our attention is siphoned away and the sincere blogs left unread.



I was joking about the income by lm (4.00 / 3) #4 Mon Apr 07, 2008 at 01:49:24 PM EST
But I see your point. Paid blogging is certain to wreck the blogosphere in much the same way that paid writing has wrecked the publishing industry.
There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Whoops, humour failure, sorry. by Alan Crowe (2.00 / 0) #6 Mon Apr 07, 2008 at 02:21:01 PM EST
Mind you, my Reddit post was in response to a story about two cash-bloggers dropping dead, perhaps with the stress of churning out the pot boiler blog posts, so I claim that tragic deaths caused my temporary humour failure.

...paid writing has wrecked the publishing industry.

That is a snappy comeback. I'm impressed. On the other hand newspapers do seem to be dying and newspaper publishing is turning into a train wreck.

Some see the problem as direct competition from the blog-sphere, but I see something else. After you have been on the internet for long enough and been trolled on Usenet and /. the penny finally drops and you recognise modern journalism as basically trolling. OK it is not getting bites, but it is getting eyeballs for advertisers, sucking people in with the same old crap about how the dangerous new drug, alphabet soup, will cause terrorist to have sex with our children. So I see people wising up to the crapness of paid writing.

[ Parent ]

ick- wallpaper by LilFlightTest (2.00 / 0) #15 Mon Apr 14, 2008 at 09:25:49 PM EST
badly prepared walls make me sad. this is why i'm just now getting around to painting my kitchen- i've been too busy removing wallpaper, fixing the damage the paper did, and preparing the wall to accept and hold paint. with any luck at all i've completely sealed in the badness, and i won't ever have to deal with it again.
---------
if de-virgination results in me being able to birth hammerhead sharks, SIGN ME UP!!! --misslake


Tales of a mundane and cosmic weekend | 15 comments (15 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

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