The main points to remember:
- That an individual declares taboos and doesn’t want to socialize with their transgressors is fine. What isn’t fine is extending the social ostracism to the economic sphere, and making it impossible for people to make an honest living in the functional economy according to their skills. That amounts to indirect theft/confiscation and eventually to murder via starvation.
- Aesthetic totalitarianism – that is, the extension of the social ostracism to the functional sphere – is fundamentally incoherent. The reason is that handing down serious punishments to an individual for jokes or words without obvious political consequence, naturally justifies death penalty and similar for anything more serious. How could you justify allowing people to advocate for political policies that could cost us billions of dollars, if you are heavily punishing them for mere jokes? It abolishes the freedom of speech and makes it impossible for anyone to become politically proficient.
- Even the policy itself logically cannot be communicated. John Schnatter (Papa John of American pizza) uttered a slur during a conversation in which he is rebuking racial discrimination, and was fired from his organization. American Marine General David Berger (we can’t tell because the report was not disclosed at the time) apparently rebuked his troops over playing music containing racial slurs, and he was fired.
- Because you can’t communicate the slurs in question, the policy never is defined in a legal way. Because the policy never is defined, everyone lives in terror (to be clear, the Stalinist type of mass fear of every person) because no one knows what the lines are, and the consequences are the ruining of one’s life.
- That an individual has not yet realized this incoherence, or goes along with it – in the short term this is better, because that individual can continue some political debate. However, it socially conditions law enforcement and the private sector to become agents of ostracism and censorship, so when a leader pushes to fully criminalize free speech, the aesthetic totalitarians will have eliminated resistance from the men with guns and power. Hence that policy cannot be tolerated.