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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: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday April 29, @04:10PM
Let's start with the antisocial behavior person. My take on that is that he or she is merely an excuse for the group's antisocial behavior. Sooner or later, the group, member by member, grows out of the phase and the antisocial person is dropped. There's no significant issue here. On the second example, so what? Even when it happens, it's usually irrelevant and easily rebuttable. Nazis are a small sliver of the population and they're not going anywhere. And the vile acts institutionally and routinely associated with Nazism in the past have no comparable evil in any alleged negative behavior of blacks. Alternately, he could be talking about the vast collection of people and groups who are routinely labeled "nazis", but aren't. More on that later.
As to the "equal time" example, this is more a routine ploy to harvest eyeballs for a news story. Start with the facts and then present as a token counterexample, some batshit crazy. As a bonus, you might be able to get some sweet pull quotes and headlines. It will continue because people will keep reading it.
Overall, it's mundane and partly imaginary problems listed. The journal has the same problems: which genocidal fucking psychopaths are being overly tolerated? My bet is that it's all by the intolerant side. You won't get anything out of threatening to intolerate them more than you already do. More on that later. Same with "can't behave like a civilized human being". Routinely misapplied. Even when it is a problem, intolerating (such as via ostracization) such behavior can make it worse.
The second fault is that there's no rational basis for defining what intolerance should be targeted and even if there were, it's easy to set up a web of delusion so that you think you're rationally doing something, but not. I already have listed [soylentnews.org] an example of Hitler's early views on antisemitism. He already had a huge array of excuses. If these had been real, then they would have qualified. If a group actually were doing the things he claimed Jews were doing, then some sort of defensive action would be justified. But they weren't. And those imaginary threats would, decades later, justify some of the most evil acts of the 20th Century.
Third fault, intolerance tit for tat makes genuine problems worse because the intolerant are better at the game. For example, a common behavior of cults (depending on your definition of cults, sometimes this is a key part of the definition of a cult) is that they isolate their members from the rest of society. Closely related is that groups that practice intolerance commonly are much better at it than the Popperian resistance is. Here's an example of both: in nearby Montana there's a religious sect called the Church Universal and Triumphant [wikipedia.org] or CUT for short. CUT has all the typical trappings of a cult - isolationist, thinks doomsday is around the corner, and prolific preppers (bunkers all over the place).
So you have yourself a typical intolerant cult. Solution is simple, right? Intolerate them back! The problem was that even saying something unflattering about CUT was enough to get you ostracized. You didn't want to talk with them, right? What's the problem? Well, if you're running a local business or working for one (which covers a lot of non-CUT people in a tourist region), those loose lips means a good portion of the business's former customers refuse to shop there. By this perfectly legal means, CUT was able to strangle local criticism of the cult - basically limiting opposing speech to people who had nothing to lose. The intolerance only worked one way. Even if somehow the locals could maintain a system of intolerance, it would work to CUT's advantage - because a key part of maintaining a cult is isolating the members from outside ideas and information.
Engagement remains the better strategy. Being exposed to the groups that one is intolerant of shows that the basis for intolerance is a lie. The person can continue to ignore that, but I find it has an effect just the same. If you can't manage that due to lack of time or interest, ignoring the problem will work better than feeding the problem.
That leads to my fourth observation: namely that intolerance of intolerance doesn't move us in a positive direction. It's just a brazen display of hypocrisy and delusion. While those aren't the worst things ever, we don't have a desperate need for them either. How about instead of being part of the problem, let's do stuff that works?