[wpietri]

I think you're not quite getting bikeshaving's point. Certainly in the US, you can't be jailed for past behavior even if it's outlawed now. It seems like Great Britain isn't quite as absolute, but the European Convention on Human Rights bans it explicitly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...

I also think "expelled from society" is a touch dramatic. As best I can tell, not a single famous racist has starved to death, or even been forced back to subsistence agriculture. I think the most extreme penalty I've seen is having to change jobs/industries, or perhaps losing some friends.

[jlawson]

So your standard for whether something is serious is whether someone literally dies as a direct result of it?

For most of us, losing your career and all or almost all your friends is kind of a big deal.

People have committed suicide over this.

Try applying your standards to things you believe in some time. "He says he was a victim of racist discrimination? Well, he still seems to be alive and fed, and has stable employment at Walmart. So that's a touch dramatic."

[wpietri]

That is not my standard for "serious". But my standard for "expelled from society" is actually that they be expelled from society.

I agree that the social penalties for racism can be serious. Although I look forward to you naming 3 people who because of teenage postings lost their "career and all or almost all [their] friends", because again I think you're being hyperbolic in a way that undermines your point.

However, I also think that racism is serious. Perhaps this seems crazy to you, but I'm much more concerned with the many lives destroyed by racism (very much including actual murder) than I am with the social consequences racists (very rarely) experience.

[jlawson]

You're focusing on a turn of phrase used by an earlier poster in order to ignore the larger discussion. There is no value in litigating the exact phrase "expelled from society". Whatever you want to call it, the point is that lives get ruined and people commit suicide over things that don't reflect who they are.

Demanding evidence of ruined lives for 'teenage postings' is again, an arbitary limitation that doesn't make sense given that we are talking about things that will be happening in the future, not things that happened in the past. We need to wait for social mores to change enough since teenage postings even started existing around 10-15 years ago.

However despite you deliberately trying to set a standard that makes no sense given the topic, I Googled for 5 minutes and satisfied it anyway:

Teenage girl killed herself amid fears she would be branded racist over joke photo she sent friends, inquest hears

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/28/teenage-girl-kil...

White teen who posted racist video of black HS classmate eating chicken could face criminal charges

[1] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/white-teen-made-ra...

Teen commits suicide after cyberbullies share explicit messages outing him as bisexual

[2] https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/10/01/teen-commits-sui...

Two of these kids actually died, which I think is even more than losing their "career and all or almost all [their] friends".

Nobody is arguing for racism. What you're wrong about is the poo-poohing the threat that the combination of shifting social mores, eternally-recorded online remarks, and vindicitive power create.

Implicitly you seem to be suggesting that it's okay if some 'racists' have their lives ruined, since the cause is so just and important. Looking at the stories of these kids above dying - do those stories make you think anything different?

Are they acceptable losses, or did they deserve it? Or is there a problem here to fix?

You probably think of yourself as an empathetic person. So try expanding your empathy to more people.

Perhaps you've had the privilege of always believing only things that align 100% with the views of the powerful. You seem to be a wealthy San Francisco leftist, so I can see how you would live under the basic belief that "if power is suppressing it, it must be bad".

Perhaps you think there is a clean simple line between Good People and Those Evil Nazis Who Deserve What They Get. There is not. Humans are complex.

However, try to conceive that someone could be both dissident and not-evil at the same time. If you need to, you can imagine living in another society where the power actually disagrees with you. What then?

And please recognize that your orthodoxy may change. Maybe you'll change your views, or society will. Then you'll be the "racist", or "Nazi", or "communist", or "kaffir", or "heretic", or "reactionary", or whatever label they're using in 30 years.

[wpietri]

I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard. My point was that it was dramatic. If you are truly interested in a healthy "larger discussion" you'll hopefully agree that turning down the rhetorical temperature makes it easy to have a good discussion that gets at the truth.

Of course, given that you've decided to spend multiple paragraphs in a personal fantasy building a very poor straw man of me and my views, I think that a good discussion is not really your goal here.

[jlawson]

>I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard.

Yes you are. I said "serious" and you yourself specifically pulled it back to the literal interpretation of "expelled from society". Another poster used those words casually; you're the one who decided that their literal intepretation was the "standard".

On the rest, this just feels like you're pointing at my tone as an excuse to avoid acknowledging or engaging any of the questions I brought up.

I said "Perhaps you believe X". This isn't building a strawman, it's trying to get to the heart of the beliefs underlying the issue. If you believe something totally different than X it'd be great if you would explain it.

A good discussion is my goal. Is it yours? You smugly tried to shut me down with a demand for news stories that you thought couldn't be satisfied. And now you're refusing to talk - with the excuse that you don't think I want to talk.

In any case, I'd welcome a meaningful response that actually addresses my points and the larger discussion.

Bottom line: You seem to think that it's only very rarely that a few terrible racists get socially punished this way, implying you think the situation is okay. I showed you that it's not, it's kids and normal people, and people are dying. What's your reponse to this new information?

[DanBC]

One thing I'd really like HN readers to understand is that UK newspapers, even supposedly respectable ones like the Telegraph, are FUCKING GARBAGE.

Please stop posting links to them because they're often inaccurate, sometimes deliberately so.

[jlawson]

Phoebe Connop, the girl who died, was British so I think it's kind of reasonable to post British papers about it. But here are some non-British ones if you really want.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/uk-teenager-phoebe-connop-hanged-h...

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/school...