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I think its perfectly fine to shun people if you think they're awful. Continuing association with someone who is, for example, is supportive of ethnic cleansing

I think its perfectly fine to shun people if you think they're awful. Continuing association with someone who is, for example, is supportive of ethnic cleansing, is expressing that you condone those things. Choosing not to decide is still a choice. The question at hand is whether you believe isolated private communications to be representative of true nature.

listless 5y ago
I don’t think that’s true. If you visit a convicted rapist in prison when nobody else will do you condone rape? Or are you performing an act of kindness? I think the ironic and not obvious answer here is that we stop committing people to the garbage heap of humanity via religious-like shunning. That reaction is what gives bad ideas power. People are complicated. You can’t boil them down to a true nature that is “good” or “bad”. That’s “us vs them”. Only ideas can be judged that way and history decides what the bad ideas are.
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  Now you're conflating a crime that was committed vs. an uncovered privately held belief. Visiting a repentant criminal doesn't condone their crime, obviously. Visiting a rapist who speaks freely, or privately just to you, about how much he enjoys rape certainly begs the question of why you're doing what you're doing. Employing such a person who says these things speaks volumes about your concern for the feelings of people who feel threatened or have suffered sexual assault in the past, especially on your team. All of this boils down to how much legitimacy we're willing to offer people based on what we know about them. If you want to offer the worst of the worst people just enough legitimacy to have a human conversation once in a while, I think that's defensible. If you think one's reputation doesn't have massive reprecussions on which social groups you welcome them into I think you're naive.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  " Only ideas can be judged that way and history decides what the bad ideas are." Well, historians do. Subject to change.
  - listless 5y ago
    Accurate. Although I suppose I was referring to "history is written by the victor". America is a great nation, but had the revolution failed, it would have been a disgraceful insurrection instead.
    - jfengel 5y ago
      Honestly, it wouldn't even be that much. It would be a trivia question. Even now the American revolution is kind of a non-event to the British. It is of less interest to them than the French revolution, which led to the Napoleonic wars and ultimately the rather drastic reshaping of European nations. George III is the villain in the American version of the story, but he's mostly known in the UK for his long, sad descent into madness. They had their own Civil War in the 17th century, and even that tends to be glossed over in British history classes. They've just got so much more history than Americans do that it's just unfathomable. They don't really spare a lot of thought for the successful revolution, and an unsuccessful one would have been a footnote.
- cjohnson318 5y ago
  Visiting a criminal in prison does not condone their crime. Associating with someone that commits crimes, while turning a blind eye to their criminal behavior, does condone their crimes. What do you mean by "stop committing people to the garbage heap of humanity via religious-like shunning"? Do you have a social group in mind that does not enforce its own social norms?
  - mistermann 5y ago
    > Visiting a criminal in prison does not condone their crime. Associating with someone that commits crimes, while turning a blind eye to their criminal behavior, does condone their crimes. To me, this does not seem logical (for the dictionary definition of "condone"). Would you mind explaining your reasoning?
    - cjohnson318 5y ago
      This was related to the parent comment that asked, rhetorically, if visiting an incarcerated rapist meant that you condoned rape. I was pointing out that visiting a criminal does not directly imply that you condoned the actions that landed them in prison. However, if you know someone that is committing crimes, and you do nothing to stop them, then you do condone their behavior. I hope that clears it up?
  - smolder 5y ago
    Everyone enforces norms some way or another, but their statement implies an unwillingness to forgive transgressions, which isn't a given. Nowadays people's mistakes quite easily become viral memes that are their legacy. Huge mobs of shallowly interested detractors are unforgiving and can cause disproportionate harm.
  - listless 5y ago
    I don't think you have to "turn a blind eye". It's not a zero-sum game. But it does mean you have to engage with people. Shunning would be the opposite of that. The best modern-day example of how we should all live is probably Daryl Davis... "It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something in common." https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
- xenadu02 5y ago
  There is obviously a balance to be struck here and I don't think we yet have a great framework for thinking about such problems. A lot of what makes a nice society is social norms and conventions. The group must have a way of punishing bad behavior or that system falls apart. If there are no consequences for "acting like a Karen" what is the social incentive to stop behaving like an angry toddler anytime you don't get your way? Now extend this to even more extreme behavior like people who say you should be killed just for existing because you're an abomination. Is the argument that we should just get along and there shouldn't be any social consequences for that? Such a view would be incredibly naive at best. On the flip side clearly people's views do sometimes change, people make mistakes, etc. Changing minds and hearts is a process, not a one-time event, so complete shunning for any perceived slight is rather extreme and can be counterproductive.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    > A lot of what makes a nice society is social norms and conventions. The group must have a way of punishing bad behavior or that system falls apart. Yes. But it's a problem when different cultures coexist and see each other's good behavior as bad. Societies that kill their "abominations" are also enforcing their social norms. And they may even be right to do so given the environment they live in and their desire to continue existing as a society. Modern western culture has the luxury of being very tolerant of diverse types of people because we're so wealthy and safe, but many societies or their members are closer to the brink and the presence of too many ineffective or counter-productive members is an existential threat.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Interestingly, the most common use of Karen I have seen is women being assertive and actually right. Yes, sometimes it is in racist or exaggerating context. But, most often, Karen is used to shut up woman who don't want to be doormat or is telling you off for good reason.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      You can respectfully communicate your feelings about somebody without being horrible and hurting people or losing control and getting laughed at. It's not easy but women shouldn't aspire to be bitches because they might succeed and then everyone suffers.
- plank_time 5y ago
  > we stop committing people to the garbage heap of humanity via religious-like shunning There’s also religious-like forgiveness too. Some incredible acts of forgiveness were accomplished by very religious people. Pope John Paul II immediately forgave the person who almost killed him.
umvi 5y ago
> Continuing association with someone who is, for example, is supportive of ethnic cleansing, is expressing that you condone those things I disagree. Why should associating with someone automatically mean you condone all of their beliefs/actions? You can disagree with parts you disagree with. Otherwise that's like a religious person saying they have to shun all democrats, because to associate with them is to condone abortion.
- XorNot 5y ago
  That's irrelevant: this is a social issue not a legal or technological one. "Associating" is covering an awfully broad amount of ground there.
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  If you employ jack and jill, and jack tells jill he wants her to be killed, your relationship with jack is not isolated. The way you treat jack signals whether you think it is important that jack hates jill. If you go grab a beer with jack and hang out on weekends, that sends a strong message. If you do nothing, that means its ok for jack to think jill should die and jill can fuck off. If you fire jack, you've sent a strong message in the other direction. This doesn't materially change if instead everyone finds out jack says these things to randos on a weird forum on weekends, unless jack decides to persuade people that those opinions are not representative of who he is. That would be an entirely different problem. A religious person who hangs out with pro-choice individuals is condoning that its ok to be pro choice. That's not the same thing as saying pro choice is the right ideology, but that it is a tolerable difference of opinion. It's basically tautological. If you refuse to accept pro-choice individuals and then hang out with them, you're just an inconsistent person. If you share employment with someone with a different religious background and that really bothers you, but you remain employed, you're ultimately deciding that being employed is more important to you than the virtue of your religious objections. No amount of politicalization will erase the fact that social reputation is an important part of how humans socialize.
  - em-bee 5y ago
    If you refuse to accept pro-choice individuals and then hang out with them, you're just an inconsistent person you seem to suggest that disagreeing with an opinion requires me to reject the person as a whole. but that is wrong. i can, even must accept you as a person, even if i violently disagree with your opinions. if i don't then it would be impossible for us to have any dialogue, and for me to learn and understand why you have this opinion, and also for you to learn and understand mine. this idea that i must not associate with people who i disagree with is a core problem. we must get away from that otherwise we won't ever be able to resolve our differences. virtue of your religious objections there is no virtue in objecting to someone elses religion. that's just pure intolerance, which is something that needs to be eliminated.
ramblerman 5y ago
You are conflating your individual right to hang out with who you please with that of an institution like a school or company. Nobody would disagree with the individual right.
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  Nobody should be banned, hands down, from working at a company, generically (that is. legally unemployable). But companies are run by people. And people make decisions about who is allowed to work in their company specifically. It's nonsense to suggest that managers of companies cannot factor reputation into their consideration of the pros and cons of having a person in their employment. I would fire someone in a heartbeat if I heard they were a self identifying Neo Nazi or klansman, and they affirmed this when confronted. I don't want to work with nazis. I don't want my team to have to work with nazis. I don't want people to think I work at a company that knowingly employs nazis. The converse is you need to offer a way for people to change. The point of social pressures like this is to get people to stop being the worst. We say "echo chamber" like its unilaterally bad, because in america 'muh freedom' means whatever the individual wants is what the individual is entitled to preach. But honestly there's a lot of basic social norms that are healthy to enforce, without embedding it in legal code.
smolder 5y ago
There's also the question of how to reform people who misbehave and whether shunning is appropriate or effective for that purpose.
will4274 5y ago
Have you ever watched The King and I? The original

listless 5y ago

I don’t think that’s true. If you visit a convicted rapist in prison when nobody else will do you condone rape? Or are you performing an act of kindness? I think the ironic and not obvious answer here is that we stop committing people to the garbage heap of humanity via religious-like shunning. That reaction is what gives bad ideas power. People are complicated. You can’t boil them down to a true nature that is “good” or “bad”. That’s “us vs them”. Only ideas can be judged that way and history decides what the bad ideas are.

klmadfejno 5y ago
Now you're conflating a crime that was committed vs. an uncovered privately held belief. Visiting a repentant criminal doesn't condone their crime, obviously. Visiting a rapist who speaks freely, or privately just to you, about how much he enjoys rape certainly begs the question of why you're doing what you're doing. Employing such a person who says these things speaks volumes about your concern for the feelings of people who feel threatened or have suffered sexual assault in the past, especially on your team. All of this boils down to how much legitimacy we're willing to offer people based on what we know about them. If you want to offer the worst of the worst people just enough legitimacy to have a human conversation once in a while, I think that's defensible. If you think one's reputation doesn't have massive reprecussions on which social groups you welcome them into I think you're naive.
thatguy0900 5y ago
" Only ideas can be judged that way and history decides what the bad ideas are." Well, historians do. Subject to change.
- listless 5y ago
  Accurate. Although I suppose I was referring to "history is written by the victor". America is a great nation, but had the revolution failed, it would have been a disgraceful insurrection instead.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    Honestly, it wouldn't even be that much. It would be a trivia question. Even now the American revolution is kind of a non-event to the British. It is of less interest to them than the French revolution, which led to the Napoleonic wars and ultimately the rather drastic reshaping of European nations. George III is the villain in the American version of the story, but he's mostly known in the UK for his long, sad descent into madness. They had their own Civil War in the 17th century, and even that tends to be glossed over in British history classes. They've just got so much more history than Americans do that it's just unfathomable. They don't really spare a lot of thought for the successful revolution, and an unsuccessful one would have been a footnote.
cjohnson318 5y ago
Visiting a criminal in prison does not condone their crime. Associating with someone that commits crimes, while turning a blind eye to their criminal behavior, does condone their crimes. What do you mean by "stop committing people to the garbage heap of humanity via religious-like shunning"? Do you have a social group in mind that does not enforce its own social norms?
- mistermann 5y ago
  > Visiting a criminal in prison does not condone their crime. Associating with someone that commits crimes, while turning a blind eye to their criminal behavior, does condone their crimes. To me, this does not seem logical (for the dictionary definition of "condone"). Would you mind explaining your reasoning?
  - cjohnson318 5y ago
    This was related to the parent comment that asked, rhetorically, if visiting an incarcerated rapist meant that you condoned rape. I was pointing out that visiting a criminal does not directly imply that you condoned the actions that landed them in prison. However, if you know someone that is committing crimes, and you do nothing to stop them, then you do condone their behavior. I hope that clears it up?
- smolder 5y ago
  Everyone enforces norms some way or another, but their statement implies an unwillingness to forgive transgressions, which isn't a given. Nowadays people's mistakes quite easily become viral memes that are their legacy. Huge mobs of shallowly interested detractors are unforgiving and can cause disproportionate harm.
- listless 5y ago
  I don't think you have to "turn a blind eye". It's not a zero-sum game. But it does mean you have to engage with people. Shunning would be the opposite of that. The best modern-day example of how we should all live is probably Daryl Davis... "It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something in common." https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
xenadu02 5y ago
There is obviously a balance to be struck here and I don't think we yet have a great framework for thinking about such problems. A lot of what makes a nice society is social norms and conventions. The group must have a way of punishing bad behavior or that system falls apart. If there are no consequences for "acting like a Karen" what is the social incentive to stop behaving like an angry toddler anytime you don't get your way? Now extend this to even more extreme behavior like people who say you should be killed just for existing because you're an abomination. Is the argument that we should just get along and there shouldn't be any social consequences for that? Such a view would be incredibly naive at best. On the flip side clearly people's views do sometimes change, people make mistakes, etc. Changing minds and hearts is a process, not a one-time event, so complete shunning for any perceived slight is rather extreme and can be counterproductive.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  > A lot of what makes a nice society is social norms and conventions. The group must have a way of punishing bad behavior or that system falls apart. Yes. But it's a problem when different cultures coexist and see each other's good behavior as bad. Societies that kill their "abominations" are also enforcing their social norms. And they may even be right to do so given the environment they live in and their desire to continue existing as a society. Modern western culture has the luxury of being very tolerant of diverse types of people because we're so wealthy and safe, but many societies or their members are closer to the brink and the presence of too many ineffective or counter-productive members is an existential threat.
- watwut 5y ago
  Interestingly, the most common use of Karen I have seen is women being assertive and actually right. Yes, sometimes it is in racist or exaggerating context. But, most often, Karen is used to shut up woman who don't want to be doormat or is telling you off for good reason.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    You can respectfully communicate your feelings about somebody without being horrible and hurting people or losing control and getting laughed at. It's not easy but women shouldn't aspire to be bitches because they might succeed and then everyone suffers.
plank_time 5y ago
> we stop committing people to the garbage heap of humanity via religious-like shunning There’s also religious-like forgiveness too. Some incredible acts of forgiveness were accomplished by very religious people. Pope John Paul II immediately forgave the person who almost killed him.

umvi 5y ago

> Continuing association with someone who is, for example, is supportive of ethnic cleansing, is expressing that you condone those things I disagree. Why should associating with someone automatically mean you condone all of their beliefs/actions? You can disagree with parts you disagree with. Otherwise that's like a religious person saying they have to shun all democrats, because to associate with them is to condone abortion.

XorNot 5y ago
That's irrelevant: this is a social issue not a legal or technological one. "Associating" is covering an awfully broad amount of ground there.
klmadfejno 5y ago
If you employ jack and jill, and jack tells jill he wants her to be killed, your relationship with jack is not isolated. The way you treat jack signals whether you think it is important that jack hates jill. If you go grab a beer with jack and hang out on weekends, that sends a strong message. If you do nothing, that means its ok for jack to think jill should die and jill can fuck off. If you fire jack, you've sent a strong message in the other direction. This doesn't materially change if instead everyone finds out jack says these things to randos on a weird forum on weekends, unless jack decides to persuade people that those opinions are not representative of who he is. That would be an entirely different problem. A religious person who hangs out with pro-choice individuals is condoning that its ok to be pro choice. That's not the same thing as saying pro choice is the right ideology, but that it is a tolerable difference of opinion. It's basically tautological. If you refuse to accept pro-choice individuals and then hang out with them, you're just an inconsistent person. If you share employment with someone with a different religious background and that really bothers you, but you remain employed, you're ultimately deciding that being employed is more important to you than the virtue of your religious objections. No amount of politicalization will erase the fact that social reputation is an important part of how humans socialize.
- em-bee 5y ago
  If you refuse to accept pro-choice individuals and then hang out with them, you're just an inconsistent person you seem to suggest that disagreeing with an opinion requires me to reject the person as a whole. but that is wrong. i can, even must accept you as a person, even if i violently disagree with your opinions. if i don't then it would be impossible for us to have any dialogue, and for me to learn and understand why you have this opinion, and also for you to learn and understand mine. this idea that i must not associate with people who i disagree with is a core problem. we must get away from that otherwise we won't ever be able to resolve our differences. virtue of your religious objections there is no virtue in objecting to someone elses religion. that's just pure intolerance, which is something that needs to be eliminated.

ramblerman 5y ago

You are conflating your individual right to hang out with who you please with that of an institution like a school or company. Nobody would disagree with the individual right.

klmadfejno 5y ago
Nobody should be banned, hands down, from working at a company, generically (that is. legally unemployable). But companies are run by people. And people make decisions about who is allowed to work in their company specifically. It's nonsense to suggest that managers of companies cannot factor reputation into their consideration of the pros and cons of having a person in their employment. I would fire someone in a heartbeat if I heard they were a self identifying Neo Nazi or klansman, and they affirmed this when confronted. I don't want to work with nazis. I don't want my team to have to work with nazis. I don't want people to think I work at a company that knowingly employs nazis. The converse is you need to offer a way for people to change. The point of social pressures like this is to get people to stop being the worst. We say "echo chamber" like its unilaterally bad, because in america 'muh freedom' means whatever the individual wants is what the individual is entitled to preach. But honestly there's a lot of basic social norms that are healthy to enforce, without embedding it in legal code.

smolder 5y ago

There's also the question of how to reform people who misbehave and whether shunning is appropriate or effective for that purpose.

will4274 5y ago

Have you ever watched The King and I? The original