Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
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Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#2I was delightfully surprised by the positive and reflective attitude taken by this author, I expected the opposite from the title.
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#3The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing us that there is no objective morality. He did this by playing to our appetites: lust, greed, gluttony and above all pride. No one can tell me what to do, that’s just your opinion man.
What that means in practice is that truth is the opinion of powerful.
And so we find it.
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#4In the onslaught of discouraging news that is our world, this piece is downright inspirational.
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#5Violence is the most effective behavior modification because it leverages pain. Every moral good has to be anchored to pain and its avoidance. Tit for tat is rational violence allocation. The golden rule has some "contrapositive" version right? I'll harm you in the way I should be harmed for bad actions.
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#6There actually is another way that the article doesn’t mention.
Separation of power.
https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-scali...
In the above clip, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia mentioned the exact same example that the article mentions. That the Soviet Union’s constitution guaranteed many rights that the Soviet Union never actually gave to the people. He says this is because the Soviet Union had no mechanism to prevent the centralization of power. And when power was centralized into one man (Stalin) or one committee (the Politburo) then the true constitution was really whatever that man said or what that committee said.
So a good mechanism to guarantee freedom, liberty, human rights…is to ensure power remains decentralized and separated into various different groups
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#7The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing us that there is no objective morality. He did this by playing to our appetites: lust, greed, gluttony and above all pride. No one can tell me what to do, that’s just your opinion man. What that means in practice is that truth is the opinion of powerful. And so we find it.
The truth about moral good, as that truth is declared in the law of reason, is practically and concretely recognized by the judgment of conscience, which leads one to take responsibility for the good or the evil one has done. If man does evil, the just judgment of his conscience remains within him as a witness to the universal truth of the good, as well as to the malice of his particular choice. But the verdict of conscience remains in him also as a pledge of hope and mercy: while bearing witness to the evil he has done, it also reminds him of his need, with the help of God's grace, to ask forgiveness, to do good and to cultivate virtue constantly.
Consequently in the practical judgment of conscience, which imposes on the person the obligation to perform a given act, the link between freedom and truth is made manifest. Precisely for this reason conscience expresses itself in acts of "judgment" which reflect the truth about the good, and not in arbitrary "decisions". The maturity and responsibility of these judgments — and, when all is said and done, of the individual who is their subject — are not measured by the liberation of the conscience from objective truth, in favour of an alleged autonomy in personal decisions, but, on the contrary, by an insistent search for truth and by allowing oneself to be guided by that truth in one's actions.
— Veritatis splendor, 61, John Paul II, 6 Aug 1993, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#8A thought-provoking piece, albeit a depressing one, because we've been cooking for decades in the fetid juices of compassion-destroying propaganda (largely to support unfettered capitalism), and the diagnosis here suggests that trying to "uncook" society is impossible; some kind of lightning bolt would be the only salvation and I cannot imagine what that would look like.
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#9Violence is the most effective behavior modification because it leverages pain. Every moral good has to be anchored to pain and its avoidance. Tit for tat is rational violence allocation. The golden rule has some "contrapositive" version right? I'll harm you in the way I should be harmed for bad actions.
Violence is an effective temporary behavior modification tool, people will in fact change their behavior in order to not get beaten by the stick. But the flip side is as soon as they get a bigger stick, the old behavior will be back with a vengeance. So the solution here is overwhelming violence. But then there’s clearly limits to that modifying behavior too (look at the Middle East for example).
Domestically, even with the threat of state violence (imprisonment), most offenders are repeat offenders, so how effective is violence really?
Re: Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
#10A thought-provoking piece, albeit a depressing one, because we've been cooking for decades in the fetid juices of compassion-destroying propaganda (largely to support unfettered capitalism), and the diagnosis here suggests that trying to "uncook" society is impossible; some kind of lightning bolt would be the only salvation and I cannot imagine what that would look like.
The Soviets tried to build The New Soviet Man for 74 years, while having an incredible amount of control over many aspects of society.
The project was... For the most part unsuccessful.
I don't think there is a cure. A society will be largely stuck in the rut that it's in.