I’ll do my best to try and explain myself since you are all taking the least charitable read of anything I’m trying to get at, here.
A) I don’t personally think ‘self identity’ is as immutable as you suggested previously. People become atheists or change religion. Some bi people become gay. People with coloured skin can suffer from vitiligo universalis. That these aspects can change (through will or just happenstance) doesn’t mean I think it’s ok to discriminate based on them, though. None of these changes should mean a person is treated any differently by society.
But this point probably has the least to do with anything I’m trying to get at anyway, which brings us to:
B) Your internal identity and external identity are two separate things. Consider the closeted gay who married heteronormativity, had kids and took their ‘real’ but unmanifested sexuality to their grave. To everyone else, is this person gay or straight? (again, not saying that should matter). Regardless of what you actually are on the inside, you simply must express yourself externally in some manner for other people to know what you consider to be true about yourself.
C) My final, and most important point - the control of your external identity now lies in the hands of a few tech companies that we have next to no oversight or control over. They are now the locus point of truth for an interconnected sea of otherwise unrelated services that are essential to human life and wellbeing, in a manner that simply has never existed to this scale in all of human history. So when @CraigM and @Telefrog say ‘fuck those nazis! let them starve’ it does give me pause not because I have any particular love for nazis but because the definition of who is, and is not, a nazi is increasingly determined by what facebook, twitter et al have to say about them.
There is literally nothing stopping any of you creating a fox.ferro account on twitter, stealing my avatar (admittedly already purloined from the fantastic Saga comics) following whoever Alex Jones is, tweeting a bunch of racist shit and posting your ‘evidence’ of my nazism back here. Oh, but all I need to do is ‘stop saying and doing racist things’ and all will be forgiven, right?
Which brings me to my next point - I profoundly disagree that to ‘stop saying and doing racist things’ is enough to no longer ‘be a racist’. If Alex Jones took a vow of silence, and stuck to it, would he no longer be a racist in either of your eyes? I doubt it. Even twenty years from now in this little thought experiment you’d still identify him as a racist piece of shit despite him saying or writing literally nothing in the interim. You’d be well within your rights to.
Maybe your opinion of him would perhaps fare better if he was to make some sort of retraction, apology or reparations (though we’re no longer in ‘stop doing’ territory and a firmly find ourselves at ‘make a show of doing the opposite’). Though perhaps he might find that problematic if he’s banned from the only services that matter in reaching people in order to do so. No doubt his riches, power and influence would help in a manner unavailable to me and others, though.
So, no, I don’t think it is easy to stop being regarded as a racist, especially when all the racist shit someone has allegedly said is captured for all time in some database somewhere that they have literally no control over.
Perhaps next week facebook will follow in Experian’s footsteps and implement a ‘humanity score’ which nicely aggregates all these little ‘facts’ it stores about people into a single number. After all, why should any of us have to burden ourselves with reading Alex Jones’ vile output to know he’s a nazi when some algorithm can do it for us? Then we can all agree that anyone with a sub-100 score doesn’t get food any more.
You’re disingenuously misrepresenting scale and power. The first amendment literally forces the government to do just what you’re suggesting, because the government is exceptionally powerful. Don’t forget that people work in, and for, the government. People literally have public sector jobs where they should not refuse to serve to nazis, nor tell them to leave. I don’t envy them.
Facebook et al are also exceptionally powerful. That they are privately held entities unaffected by the first amendment doesn’t automatically mean there aren’t grave consequences for what they have the power to do. Maybe if fox.corp controlled nearly every lunch counter in the country, it should be forced to serve nazis in all their regalia, regardless of how its sexy and suave CEO feels about doing so.
