My argument isn't that we should be punishing consumers of VW, Audi, and GM. It's that consumers are one of the last people that should be responsible for how their money is used. If you go that route everyone is complicit in something awful. There are better ways to make change than blame the consumer.
Are liberals responsible for DOGE because they own a Tesla? It's nonsense.
These social movements have little room for nuance and decisions of who to target are rarely morally consistent.
After the board finally wakes up and kicks Elon to the curb.
Speaking personally, it could be as soon as Musk leaves the picture, depending on who else takes over.
As for "who decides", I think everyone has to decide for themselves — I won't think worse of anyone who boycotts the Tesla brand for life.
> These social movements have little room for nuance and decisions of who to target are rarely morally consistent.
Welcome to humanity.
If people were immortal, I'd agree.
I think in something like hyperbolic discounting, with each generation having diminishing connection to the atrocities of the past. If I didn't… well, I don't know how much of my family wealth came indirectly from the colonies — I do know one of my grandfathers was a British civil servant and my mother's mother was in the British Raj as either a young child or toddler. I may not be a Christian for the last 25-30 years, but I was raised Catholic and read the Bible, so I know about Matthew 7:5, motes and planks in eyes etc.
I do know that "Sins of the Father" and "Ancestral sin" is a long-standing aspect of human cognition, but I think it's this aspect which itself is the string in our heads upon which demagogues pull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_the_Father
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_sin
(None of that applies to current Uyghur (or other) forced labour, of course).