The Scarlet Letter is not obscure, there was even a major Hollywood movie made a few years ago that was extremely loosely based on it.

Perhaps you need to read more.

Its a reference to the scarlet letter and making bad actors of marriage easy to identify. Here we are identifying bad actors in the field of business, analogous to a marriage.

You people are insufferable.

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It's not actually naive to disagree with you, and at the time of this writing, several other people have disagreed with you as well, including two people giving alternative and less extreme interpretations which also fit the casual usage of the phrase. Several other people have pushed back on what they suggest is you inserting nazis into the conversation.

It's pretty aggressive to tell someone they're being naive because they don't agree with you and are trying to defend someone, in my opinion. Nominally, saying someone is being naive suggests that you can show that something is not just wrong but shouldn't have been believed by anyone sensible. Since you appear to be interpreting the words of a stranger, I doubt that this is the case.

Usually, in my experience, going to the most extreme possible interpretation without direct support isn't actually justified.

If several different people have disagreed with you, perhaps that's a point at which you might reconsider, instead of criticizing everyone as being unable to see what you see. One possibility is that you might be overreacting.

But to be clear, to me, the wording that they used seems to specifically indicate the novel The Scarlet Letter, by Nathanial Hawthorne. This is a culturally significant phrasing with frequent repetition, which is non-offensive, and unlike a mention of the Nazis, actually makes sense in context. In the rest of the text, they are talking about shaming, not wholesale slaughter of human life.

If I wanted to discuss someone wearing a mark of social shame as a pariah, it's quite likely that I would phrase it the same way, and I'm quite startled to realize that anyone might interpret such a comment in this radically other way. It's pretty common to talk about wearing a mark of shame, and you are the first person I've ever seen in my life suggest that that should be associated with the genocidal extermination of people by their religion.

I think that you might be well advised to look at what other people are saying here. Two people have told you that they feel that other interpretations are appropriate besides me, and another two have expressed concern for what they suggest is the inappropriate addition of a genocide to what was being discussed. I'm inclined to agree with them.

It's hard, because earlier in the discussion when you were saying "zero tolerance policy," I was super on your side. I thought that you were one of the few people here discussing solid common sense.

But also, ... I dunno, man, this just seems like an unjustified public shaming, to me.

In my private experience - and this has no attached data, and I could be wrong - but in my private experience, when someone is actually making a comparison like that, they're doing it for one of three reasons:

1. Shock value

2. Demonization

3. It's actually legitimately relevant in context

In all three of those cases, I would expect the person to come out and directly say what they meant, instead of making a vague metaphoric reference. Metaphor defeats shock value; metaphor does not make people look evil; metaphor doesn't have impact when you're trying to make someone face history.

Call me naive if you want, but I just don't think that person said what you claim, and I'm not alone in that.

If someone didn't say "nazi," and there's a reasonable common way to interpret what they said which makes sense in context, when "nazi" doesn't, probably ... probably they didn't mean nazi, friend. Horses and zebra, and all that stuff.