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I'm perfectly willing to:

a) Understand violent criminals have made amends and are rehabilitated

b) Believe that people who were once racist are no longer racist

Both issues are, to me, a 'sad result of circumstances'. So all of that seems fine.

As am I.

The point I was trying to make was that there isn't really a "path to rehabilitation" for people who have made very minor missteps online. In the case of the linked TED talk, the persecuted woman made a mistake, and was not a "career-racist". I think even accusing her of racism is a distortion of the word — she made a bad joke in bad taste.

Meanwhile, there is an established, albeit broken path to rehabilitation for ex-convicts. There is also a certain faction of the left which seems to be more willing to accept prison reform than "tweet-reform".

I think it should be far more easy to rehabilitate oneself from a bad tweet than a murder, and that they are entirely different classes of offences.

Oh I agree entirely that we lack paths to rehabilitation for both the (a) and (b) cases, couldn't agree more - it makes the judgment call to hire that much more difficult.

I'm glad we can agree on that.

While that's true, there's no comparison between (a) and (b) in terms of how bad the original offense is. One is murder and the other is a thought crime.

I can compare anything I like, actually. That's my right and my responsibility as the one who determines who comes to work with me and my colleagues.

You can say that all "though crimes" are incomparable to legal indictments, and when you are hiring people that is your right as well.

I didn't mean that there's no way you can make a comparison in a literal sense.

I mean that it takes a particularly screwed up and deranged individual to think that murder and racist thoughts are somehow equivalent on the moral scale. Also, I'm not claiming that this is the position you are taking, only that it would be deranged if it is the one you are in fact taking.

Thanks for making this point. This is what I was trying to get at. Racist thoughts, to some, are seen as offences in the same way murder is, while they're not.

Murder is a very clearly defined criminal act, to tweet something racist is an expression of free speech. Racism is inexcusable, but in an entirely different way than murder.

This whole conversation started off with "any crime" vs "a definitively racist tweet", not "murder" vs "thought crime".

Trying to consider any of these things in isolation is worthless and not really something that makes sense to discuss, it's just a sillier version of the trolley problem. Context is going to be everything.

Could someone convicted of murder be worth hiring? Yeah, sure, I'm not willing to say that that's not the case - what if they had an untreated medical condition, just as one potential contextual element? It's not worth discussing because it will end up with a "but what if but what if but what if".

The point I will definitely make is the original point I made - that if I determine someone to be a racist that is important to me, and if I find that someone is a criminal I will need more context before I determine that it is important to me.

Would you prefer to be murdered or to recieve a racist remark directed towards you?

Do you think this question is relevant or clever? I would rather a racist remark me directed towards me. I hope that satisfies whatever you're after.

just trying to suss out if you thought there are levels of severity of various crimes / negative behaviors, which I was unsure of based on earlier comments.

> people perceived as racist are permanently marked as being ideologically dangerous.

I don't think this is necessarily true. We just haven't seen many racist people make amends and ask for forgiveness. I believe people can change and if they do, they should be reintegrated into the workplace.

I hadn't given it much thought before, but I asked myself if I would hire or work with a former criminal qualified for the job. It's a touchy subject, but I decided I would if they are rehabilitated: shown remorse, served a sentence, and working to integrate society.

And I realized the same goes for a racist statement (or sexist or anti-LGBTQ). Racism get tried in the court of public opinion, and then there is a sentence of being shunned in the form of unemployability. But if the formerly racist person shows remorse and publicly states they have changed, I would be willing to hire/work with them.

> Racism get tried in the court of public opinion, and then there is a sentence of being

Placed in high government office?

My point is mainly that the two "offences" (if we are to class racism as an offence), are vastly different, and in entirely differently classes.

To rehabilitate someone who made a joke in bad taste should be far, far easier than to rehabilitate a murderer. The two just cannot be equivocated. One is a criminal act, the other is expressing an opinion, albeit a very bad one.

Obviously, they are different, and the length of sentences reflect that. A murderer is in prison for 10-20 years and a really bad racist joke makes you unemployable for a year or 2.

There's also a problem with the verb "to rehabilitate" because much of the rehabilitation comes from the subject themselves and can't be imposed by society. The murderer who serves time, shows remorse, and studies programming to reintegrate society is different from the racist who doesn't apologize sincerely or believably for the bad joke and complains that nobody will hire them.

Finally, look at the environment that the rehabilitated person gets put into. Someone who got into drugs and gangs as a teen, went to prison, and then turned their life around is not a threat in an office environment. A racist or sexist may still cause disruption in a diverse and gender-equal work environment. The ex-gang member can't go back to the 'hood, but the racist or sexist has made it much more difficult to work in any office--or with people so that's pretty much any job. Though like I said, if they apologize and repent, I think the racist should be given a second chance as well.

This talk is about Justine Sacco. Within 7-8 months of being fired, she got a new job and has continued to work her way up the corporate ladder ever since [0].

You're right. Your line of reasoning is nonsense.

0 - https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinesacco

Yes, a joke in bad taste is richly deserving of mass public humiliation, getting fired, and not having work for 8 months. I love our brave new world!

> On the other hand, people perceived as racist are permanently marked as being ideologically dangerous.

This is pretty demonstrably untrue. Cenk Uygur comes to mind, off the top of my head - he's lost out on opportunities from things he said in the past that were perceived as racist, but nobody in good faith / nobody who matters considers him to continue to espouse those views. It helps that he quite vocally criticizes those views.

What is probably actually true is that, statistically, many people who were racist in the past are still racist, and many people who murdered in the past and went to prison commit no further violent crimes (for many reasons).