> As far as i'm concerned, this question is like someone doubting the existence of gravity.

Please leave comments like this out in the future. It adds nothing to the conversation, and escalates people's emotions pointlessly.

Every single example you've given is a very complex situation where shaming isn't the most relevant thing:

> Fashion is an industry that built its foundations on shaming.

Maybe in part, but there's a lot more going on there--a lot of it is just getting stuff in front of people. The original idea of having a skinny model was actually not about body shaming people or even about the model being attractive (that wasn't what was considered attractive at that time). It was about having someone the clothes hang off of so that the focus on the clothes and not the person (this became complicated as standards of attractiveness changed).

> Kids are shamed into buying iphones, and designer shoes.

Shamed by wbom? I don't see much ads these days, but the last ad I saw for an iPhone was literally just them showing a disembodied hand using the iPhone to do something. They have a damn good product and they know it, so to sell it they just show that it's good. No shaming needed.

Designer shoes: shame isn't the emotion I'd associate with that. Pride, actually, makes more sense.

> Millions of kids are being shamed into early sex (ashamed of being virgins),

If we're comparing things to gravity, sex drive is pretty arguably a force of nature. We've had millions of years of the genes for people who don't want to have sex literally removed from the gene pool.

> and trying out drugs to be deemed COOL.

Maybe they're trying them out because they think they're cool? Because they're curious? Because doing drugs obviously is fun (at least in the short term)?

I've been in some pretty druggie cultures (i.e. Burning Man, lots of similar smaller stuff), and literally never felt shamed because I didn't do drugs.

> For programmers - PHP programmers are being shamed right here on HN.

Where?

> When Google and other high profile companies do something really stupid like locking someone's account unjustly or some new policy, Twitter and Hacker news use shaming to get these guys to speedily reverse course.

This may be the best example on your list. But realize that that public shaming a company whose business is based on users, isn't targeted at the company, it's targeted at users. So the applicability here is pretty limited.

> Isn't the video in question is an example of shaming - the police?

No, it's very much not.

We're not trying to make the police feel ashamed. We're trying to put the police who did that in jail, and we're doing that by making sure that everyone knows they are murderers, because they can see it. And in a larger sense, we're not trying to shame police so they behave better: it's clear the police aren't going to change their behavior. It's to show people that the idea that police protect and serve is wrong, so that we can persuade people to reduce the power we give to police and have more accountability, without the permission of police.

Do you really think the police feel shame about any of this? If so, they certainly haven't acted on their shame. Their reaction has not been shame, it's been defiance and violence. Shame has no relevance here.