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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17795 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Civil right legislation aside, I think that in many cases the market would solve this problem to everyone's satisfaction.

If you have five food trucks, and one of them is run by a KKK member who only wants to serve White people (and not the wrong White people, either), I think the market can solve this. Likely he will mostly be serving burgers to Neonazis, and the four wiser food truck owners will pick up his mainstream customers.

There are of course situations where a market failure is more likely. If our KKK member has leased the only cafeteria at a workplace, or is the only decent ISP in an area, they might deserve more regulation. (Things get messier if there is a prevailing sentiment of customers distorting the market, like "places willing to serve Blacks are low-class". Or if the government leans on businesses, but I already mentioned that.)

I think most businesses are aware that preemptively banning outgroups means opening a can of worms which they do not want opened. "We do not preemptively ban anyone" is an easy Schelling point to defend. Once you saying you will not serve people who are convicted of sex crimes against children, that is as good as saying that you are positively willing to serve people who have committed sex crimes against adults, or non-sexualized violence against children, or murder, or large scale fraud. And once they also ban all of these, people will demand they ban people with BLM or MAGA outfits, and no matter what they decide they will lose a fraction of their customer base.

There are of course situations where a market failure is more likely. If our KKK member has leased the only cafeteria at a workplace, or is the only decent ISP in an area, they might deserve more regulation. (Things get messier if there is a prevailing sentiment of customers distorting the market, like "places willing to serve Blacks are low-class".

Okay, now backport this to your original idea, which is that it's fine to blacklist ICE employees, and to reveal their identities so they are easier to blacklist. What if this makes it hard for the ICE employee to participate in large swaths of society, just like it does in the "KKK members lease everything" scenario or the "customer sentiment" scenario? How exactly is "places willing to serve blacks are low-class" different from "places willing to serve ICE employees are fascist collaborators"?

(Except that you can probably tell who is black without having to reveal their identity first.)

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