https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/28/health/cdc-warning-boars-head-deli-meat/index.html

https://www.tumblr.com/aquasine0/759552071146094592/j-aliens

Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.

It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.

Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.

Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.

Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion, and it might help. (KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)

Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!

You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!

If you want it in a simple phrase:

You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can't shame them into being a good person.

It was nice to see this put so clearly. This election cycle has left me exhausted and demotivated, and this hits it square on the head.

stolen from https://grungekitty-77.tumblr.com/post/754482938951892992/fun-fact-that-was-literally-what-inspired-me-to

The court said Israel has no right to sovereignty of the territories, is violating international laws against acquiring territory by force and is impeding Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

It said other nations were obliged not to “render aid or assistance in maintaining” Israel’s presence in the territory. It said Israel must end settlement construction immediately and existing settlements must be removed, according to a summary of the more than 80-page opinion read out by Salam.

written in the fucking 1970s

I know it's spelled "minute". That was a typo and I am not going to fix it.

...really, we've not really incorporated it into our understanding of the natural world, either. The closest we got was the late 19th century project to justify the racism we were already doing (or "Social Darwinism", when it's attempting to appear grown-up and respectable).

The way we talk about class is still firmly grounded in 18th and 17th century ideas. An evolutionary perspective would have us thinking about this along multiple generations, across enough spans of time that the individual is incidental - a part contributing to a greater system. On this scale, it doesn't matter how good, how just, how longsighted this or that president or industry titan or """great man""" is, cus soon they'll be dead. Someone else moves in to take their position. It's the structure around them that truly continues, that defines the flow of history.

That kind of thinking is anathema to the US civic tradition. We are discouraged - in schools, in churches, on television, in our art - from such broad considerations. It doesn't matter that statistically most people here die in debt having worked all their lives -- they just didn't do enough willpower! So they must deserve their sorry plight! The Elect, whether chosen by God or the Market (not much of a distinction, for a lot of people here...), are thus equally deserving of their 'success'.

Even our atheists think like this! They've just replaced 'God' with an Operating System. They belittle religion for projecting a familiar patriarchal figure into the great unknowns of the cosmos, then turn around, point to the sky, and say it must be a desktop interface. And non of the underlying assumptions change! The aesthetics and the words are different, but we're still trying to cram a planetary biosphere of billions of people down the throat of a framework that refuses to consider anything bigger than the individual!

(id look up the quote, but it's funner to butcher ideas and re-arrange them in new language)

i feel like that's not just the US as a nation state, but Yankee culture and society in general. Like, I'm starting to think we're just not capable of incorporating new experience into our collective learned behaviors. Not even after COVID - the polite thing isn't to mask up or even hand-sanitize when you have cold or flu symptoms, it's to pretend like nothing happened (and AIDS barely gets talked about and only in the past-tense...)

Most of the art and music and literature getting remixed remade and referenced is from the 20th century, or has roots beginning in that time. In terms of infrastructure, very little built this century seems to have any amount of longevity in mind.

Geopolitically we're still doing Cold Wars and proxy-conflicts -- even when those have been rendered obsolete by our own fucking actions the previous (and first...) time there was a big Cold War. And we never stopped funding and arming settler colonialism, even with practically unanimous condemnation in the UN (take away our VETO for the love of all things good TAKE IT AWAY)

i don't know that i have a conclusion for this. On a personal level, living in the 20th century US but having 21st century tech reminds me way too much of Fahrenheit 451. It's maddening. Like I'm trying not to notice the great big Amygdalae on the Healing Church; there's no outlet for the Insight so it's just hovering there and i'm scared to walk too close to it for fear of how others respond.

stolen from https://conzoop.tumblr.com/post/744316560609525760

but tumblr wants a login for that blog so see it here https://punkitt-is-here.tumblr.com/post/744320980025999360

spam this at the /r/neoliberal dorks if you want