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Journal by Azuma Hazuki
Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept.
This is a thorough once-over giving the lie to the "conservatives'" self-serving bullshit squealing that "Butbutbutbutbut if you don't tolerate my intolerance you're a hypocrite!" The short version, as put forth in the article, is this: tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact.
Put another way, it's social technology, just like laws. It allows us, in an ever-more-connected global society, to exist and function. Like a treaty it covers those, and only those, who are party to it.
This means that if you're a genocidal fucking psychopath then no, Virginia, we do not have to "tolerate" your unhinged ramblings. You are cancer in the body politic. You have gleefully ripped your human card to shreds and dropped the pieces in an incinerator, cackling like a hyena on PCP at how you have "owned the libs." You have placed yourselves outside the treaty. We are not obligated to put up with your shit.
tl;dr: if you can't behave like a civilized human being, don't be surprised when you get treated like a rabid animal. Read and be better, or don't, it's your choice, but don't bitch when you get your find-outs.
This is a thorough once-over giving the lie to the "conservatives'" self-serving bullshit squealing that "Butbutbutbutbut if you don't tolerate my intolerance you're a hypocrite!" The short version, as put forth in the article, is this: tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact.
Put another way, it's social technology, just like laws. It allows us, in an ever-more-connected global society, to exist and function. Like a treaty it covers those, and only those, who are party to it.
This means that if you're a genocidal fucking psychopath then no, Virginia, we do not have to "tolerate" your unhinged ramblings. You are cancer in the body politic. You have gleefully ripped your human card to shreds and dropped the pieces in an incinerator, cackling like a hyena on PCP at how you have "owned the libs." You have placed yourselves outside the treaty. We are not obligated to put up with your shit.
tl;dr: if you can't behave like a civilized human being, don't be surprised when you get treated like a rabid animal. Read and be better, or don't, it's your choice, but don't bitch when you get your find-outs.
On Tolerance - For Everyone Who Needs To Hear This
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Agnes' Law:
Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 01, @01:14AM (15 children)
You already introduced a subjective component, interpreting a conditional statement as an absolute one. Here, it was quite clear that he was speaking of this enormous harm in response to a hypothetical enormous provocation ("a future with slavery in it looks pretty damned bleak"). The real mental health question would be how does he determine that these dire circumstances are near enough at hand to issue such a dire warning? Seems pretty thin to me though there are a lot of authoritarians out there.
It's the same with the January 6 protesters. They were protested for a point of view that had already bombed harshly in the courts. Sure, if they really had solid evidence of a fraudulent election, then storming the Capitol in the way they did would be reasonable and effective. But they didn't.
You're attacking the wrong part of the logic chain.
(Score: 1) by dalek on Monday May 01, @03:19AM (14 children)
That's twice that you're used the argument with the form of:
1) X would be a reasonable action if Y is true
2) Y isn't even remotely true
3) Therefore, there is no threat of X
The problem is that Y doesn't actually have to be true for X to occur. If enough people believe that Y is true, whether it is or not, then they may cause X to occur anyway. Y is a sufficient condition, not a necessary condition.
To give you an example of why this is wrong, let's say the following:
X = the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack against the United States
Y = the United States has launched a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union
This was a real problem during the Cold War. Even if there is exactly zero chance of the United States launching a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, it does not guarantee that the Soviet Union would not use nuclear weapons. In fact, there was a very real risk of a false alarm leading to an exchange of nuclear weapons. The false alarm could be the result of such things as misinterpreting radar data or equipment failure. The result would be that they assume they were under attack, initiate what they believe was a retaliatory nuclear strike, and actually end up starting a nuclear war.
That cause of the false alarm would be different in your version of this argument. Instead, there are bad actors who are actively trying to convince people that Y is true for their own personal gain such as political power or monetary profit. Fact checking has been ineffective, and there are a lot of people who distrust fact checkers. Even massive censorship cannot guarantee that people will not wrongly believe that Y is occurring. Moreover, actively trying to convince people that Y is false might actually cause people to believe that Y is true. There is no reliable way to completely prevent people from falsely believing Y.
Although Y is not true, the risk of a false alarm is very real. As long as that remains the case, if there are people who are willing and able to carry out X, then the threat of X is also very real. That is why X is a concern, and why your logic is flawed. People like Runaway would not be preparing for X if they did not already believe there was a high probability of Y being true. Because the risk of a false alarm of Y cannot be fully mitigated, then it is logical to also address X.
Incidentally, if you've read my responses to Runaway, you'll note that I am not only critical of his desire to carry out X, but also about his belief in Y. Both of these are mental health issues. I do not believe it is healthy for Runaway to want X to happen, and he has stated that he would like it to occur. His belief in Y, which is paranoid and inconsistent with reality, is also very concerning.
My point is that because it is impossible to fully mitigate that people will falsely believe Y, we must also take the threat of X seriously. You can fill in the blanks about what X and Y are.
EXTERMINATE
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 01, @06:11AM (13 children)
This basic bit of logic doesn't rule out that any of us could be a menace, thus X could occur for you too. Instead, we default in a situation where we have no evidence of threat to not being a threat.
So what should we be doing about scary people like you, dalek?
What is "Y" here. For example, Runaway speaks of it as:
Let's look at a real world manifestation of that. Title IX was used by the Obama administration to create a weird unconstitutional witch hunting court [reason.com] in colleges which receive public funding:
In other words, an unaccountable bureaucrat wrote a letter which then morphed into a coercion of universities to adopt weak legal processes for sexual assault cases, including suspension of due process, an illegal low threshold for evidence, and forcing crimes into civil court. This is naked authority by force. Colleges were forced to comply by the stranglehold that federal government had over their funding. Having said that, a fair number of colleges had their own Quislings who were just fine with that state of affairs and eagerly contributed to the problem.
Here's more of the abuses [reason.com] in question. Notice that it took a Trump official to reverse this gross injustice.
There's more where that came from.
(Score: 1) by dalek on Monday May 01, @07:21AM (10 children)
There is no one-size-fits-all version of authoritarianism. It comes in many different forms. Sometimes it's the end result of a process that starts with good intentions. Other times, the issue is that the ends cannot justify the means.
Many liberals view conservatives as authoritarian. They are concerned that banning abortion is part of a slippery slope to roll back many other freedoms. They are concerned that many conservatives want to establish Christian principles in law. They are concerned that border security is already seriously violating people's rights.
Let's talk about border security. It's one thing to stop someone at an actual port of entry to verify that they're actually authorized to enter the country. It's reasonable to verify that they're not bringing contraband into the country and that they pay any duty that they owe. That's reasonable. However, border security has gone far beyond that, where Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) claims the authority to stop people and verify they are legally in the country within 100 miles of a border or port of entry. That's a massive expansion of power, especially when ports of entry include airports with inbound international flights. Border security is an important issue for many conservatives, but the means to accomplish it are authoritarian. You shouldn't be able to suspend the Constitution within 100 miles of a border or port of entry.
What's the correct response to an unjust law? What's the correct response when you view an authority as illegitimate?
Runaway's comments have made it very clear that he considers violence and mass murder an appropriate response. The means he supports to accomplish his goals are wrong. It's one thing when combatants are killed on a battlefield. But he goes far beyond killing people who are engaged in combat. He's said he would like to kill all progressives. Obviously he's not directly doing the killing, but he has stated he supports killing all progressives. That's mass murder. That's wrong, and it's not something you should be defending or trying to justify.
That is not the correct response to authoritarianism. There's a difference between civil disobedience and lawlessness. Civil disobedience means following the law except the portions of the law that are unjust. There is precedent for this throughout history. In the Bible, Jesus followed the law ("Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's.") except when it was unjust. Martin Luther King didn't ignore the law and violate it whenever he wanted. There was plenty of civil disobedience, but it involved refusing to follow laws that were unjust. I strongly support jury nullification, which is effectively another form of civil disobedience. Juries should refuse to convict people when the law is unjust or the legal process is unfair.
You have a problem with the law? Fine. There are lots of ways to change it. Vote out elected officials who create bad laws. Circulate petitions to get those laws on the ballot If you have standing, sue and request the courts strike down the law. If you're on a jury, use your power as a juror to nullify the law. Refuse to follow unjust laws. Exercise your freedom of speech to inform people and to protest against unjust laws. And yes, refusing to follow unjust laws is legitimate, too.
The example you cite is a legitimately elected president lawfully appointing an official, and that official lawfully exercising his authority to change a policy. Don't you think that's very different from the lawlessness Runaway is supporting?
EXTERMINATE
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 01, @01:31PM (9 children)
To the contrary, they all tend to be one-size-fits-all. They just disagree on implementation and authority.
Keep in mind the subject of this journal - the principle argument is that tolerance is a sort of "peace treaty" which when abrogated, implies that the other side(s) can and must act in response in ways that would normally be wrong morally. Runaway's statements fit in that constraint - if 50 million progressives are mass enslaving the rest of the US, then their killing though wrong is an appropriate response to the end of tolerance.
My take is that there are several ways this could play out. The various authoritarian-leaning groups may eventually cool down - my take is that a lot of present day turmoil is driven by the stress of labor competition from the developing world combined with poor policy responses in the US. Second, that one or more groups cross the line and start attacking each other for real. I think some of the organizers of the January 6 protest may have attempted to provoke law enforcement into a battle (which would have crossed the line into insurrection for me). The scale and duration of such a conflict is beyond me at present, but it could eventually result in a civil war.
This is a sound argument, but there's a but. "Tolerance is not a moral precept." To apply morality to it is to miss the point of the argument.
Instead of pointless complaining about a potential future conflict that probably won't follow a moral path, let's look at preventative maintenance. My take is that there's several big things that would forestall any sort of large scale conflict: maintain equal treatment under the law, especially by identifiable ethnicity - this helps prevent balkanization [wikipedia.org]; reduce corruption - prevents what's happening now in Russia, for example; reduce regulation - especially the misapplication of one-size-fits-all law (minimum wage laws have helped devastate Puerto Rico which is greatly poorer than mainland US, resulted in about half the population immigrating to the US) and laws that aggressively harm economic/societal progress (the pharmaceutical gamble is a good example of this, all that regulation and it's still a lottery ticket [soylentnews.org] whether you get a viable drug); and sensible compromises on big conflict topics (immigration, crime and police, taxation and government spending, meddling in schools and personal lives, etc).
Finally, people should chill a bit. Runaway didn't go anywhere with his argument for when killing 50 million liberals was justified. But it was in response to other needlessly provocative arguments. Too often I read arguments about various groups doing the mean things. After all, the very first sentence of the journal is:
There's not much point about complaining about tolerating the intolerance, when you're part of the problem. No tolerance existed in the first place so it couldn't be turned off for alleged intolerance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01, @05:34PM (8 children)
^
That is why so few bother engaging khalliw, at the end he just repeats his opinion like he just proved simething.
"No tolerance existed in the first place so it couldn't be turned off for alleged intolerance."
He just lives in a different reality where the KKK are ackshually democrats and J6 was some rowdy protesters. Khallow is a pure propaganda account, no care for discussion beyond a platform to repost their screed.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 03, @03:02AM (7 children)
That's a big reason I quote. Here, the telling line is
The intolerance in that quote is self-evident. When someone is this foaming in the mouth at "conservatives", they're intolerant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03, @05:04PM (6 children)
Sulk all you want, you're the one avoiding simple facts so you can preserve your precious world view. Thought you weren't a conservative, better check your mask it seems to be slipping!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 03, @11:31PM (5 children)
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04, @07:48AM
The facts have been repeatedly mentioned, khallow. You have just consistently refused, or been unable, to recognize them. You have been spanked. You can stop trying to argue, now. You have lost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04, @05:08PM (3 children)
Playing dumb is not a good look, just makes you look dumb or sociopathic. We all know you're not THAT dumb, so that leaves slightly dim sociopath.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 06, @07:11PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08, @04:46PM (1 child)
Calling out fascists has no blowback, unless the fascists gain full power and then you'll start hunting down your detractors. You don't have yo go full fascist tho, so many options for you khallow!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 09, @05:33AM
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07, @11:50AM (1 child)
Why does this keep coming up, raised by khallow? Is this what put an end to his Wingman business? The accusations of rape? (Kind of a Trumpy thing, after all) And the kangaroo court at a campus, where of course conservative young men are cancelled. More and more, I bethinks the man to be guilty, by means of a preponderance of unsolicited whinging.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 18, @07:28AM
The very first reply was
Seems a lot of bad faith arguments out there - I'm both complaining too much and not enough. But I'm sure that with enough help from the stupidest people on the internet, I'll get the right levels of complaining on these weighty topics. BTW, have you considered doing a YouTube video on bungee jumping with piano wire? It'd be a good look for you.