| 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. |
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.