"And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist." I'm guessing this is just because it's never come up. Maybe it's because I live in the midwest or something but I know a number of creationists, republicans, people against gay marriage etc. and interact with them. While my social circle is certainly influenced by my more liberal politics when there are so many people around I don't see how you can't interact with them as friends, neighbors, coworkers etc. But unless you specifically talk about issues like creationism with them it can easily not come up, we tend to assume people share our politics/opinions unless proven otherwise.
I know a surprising number of creationists in urban Seattle. They hide in plain sight because everyone simply assumes they don't exist, and the people that are creationist never say anything unsolicited that would indicate it. It is like the opposite of the meme about vegans, CrossFit, et al.
You see a similar pattern with gun owners, which every statistic suggests exist in vast numbers even in neighborhoods with politics strongly aligned with anti-gun activists, but almost no one ever publicly admits to owning one. Like with creationism, being a member of this group isn't nearly as much of an affectation of political alignment as people assume.
There are many polite fictions like this in society.
Also living and working in urban Seattle. There’s churches all over the city. It seems odd that people can drive by them all the time in their neighborhood but assume most people in the city are not theists.
For quite a while during my tech years i was one of those people. I assumed most people in the city didn’t believe in that stuff. But it’s so obvious that is a huge group despite the association on a national level of theists being republicans and Seattle not having many republicans. In the city it’s a lot of gun owning, liberal or at least not-republican, theists.
To hit on the gun topic, I’ve discovered so so many people that carry in their vehicles, which as a gun owner I find disturbing. Many more who own but don’t carry. Almost none of the people I’m aware of have stickers or advertise their gun ownership.
I now work at a hospital and it’s made me realize how popular religion is here. So many people working here are some flavor of religious. It really was just a tech thing to assume religion is not followed regularly in the city or amongst coworkers. I wonder if it’s just the heavy antisocial aspect of tech workers to assume everyone around them comes in the same flavor as themselves.
The gun owner example isn't a great one. one of the first rules of gun ownership is to never tell anyone. It's a valuable and deadly asset which gains value from people NOT knowing that you have it.
I do think the gun owner is a good example for the given situation it's referring to.
I'm not sure 'never tell anyone' is a first rule, although I do agree that in many situations one could gain more value from other not knowing you have it.
There are some situations in which sharing possession of such a tool and the knowledge of using one could be beneficial.
Although most of the time, in most situations one would gain advantage in having defensive ability without broadcasting it to the world, and as the parent comment eluded to, one often gets by / through social interactions just fine, and due to some group's disdain for such, often gets by better, without advertising such. imho.
I'm not sure why that makes it a bad example. That's a specific reason why people would avoid bringing it up, but it still means that it's not a prominent affectation that would come up in everyday conversation.
It's a bad example because this specific reason doesn't generalize to other political beliefs like creationism which is what the others in the thread are talking about.
A normal person has as much reason to admit they own a gun as they have a reason to admit they own a mixer. As in, unless you discuss specific topics, it is completely irrelevant.
The difference is that if you go out of your way to tell you have mixer, you are weirdo. If you go out of your way to tell you have a gun, then you are someone who brags about having gun unnecessary, which means weirdo too, but in different way.
I do see what the parent poster meant. Here in Canada, about 1 in 4 households have a firearm. It's over 10% even in large cities like Toronto. Statistically speaking, it seems likely several households in my condominium have firearms. Not quite at American ownership rates, but firearm ownership is far from scarce in Canada. You wouldn't get impression though; most owners are very discreet about it. That same sort of vibe seems to exist in parts of the USA, too.
Do you think people who own guns who live in non-rural areas do so for (a) personal protection, (b) hunting, or (c) sport shooting? I'm not a hunter myself, but (b) and (c) seem pretty reasonable anywhere that you live. However, I never understand the (a) crowd.
For the record, Finland also has very high gun ownership.
It's illegal to conceal a gun here in most cases, particularly a handgun. It technically is legal to walk around with a firearm openly if you have a valid reason to (such as carrying it to and from hunting). But you'll certainly get in trouble if you do that, outside of rural areas where polar bears roam. (One of the most common reasons to own a firearm is protection, but from animals. The bears here can and do eat people.)
It's generally illegal to carry anything as a weapon with the intent of using it as a weapon against a person, even in self-defence, unless you have one of those very rare concealed weapons permits. Knives, pepper spray, and tasers are also illegal in Canada to carry around for self-defence. Though the law does let you use whatever is coincidentally at hand, if you truly must use force as a last resort, to defend from an attacker.
So officially, no, people aren't supposed to be carrying firearms around for protection. American-style "right to defend oneself" with firearms is a bit taboo here. You're also not supposed to keep a firearm loaded at home. But I imagine quite a few do keep shotgun shells nearby and their shotgun safe can be unlocked very quickly.
(a) is common. I don't know that there's anything particularly complex to understand about it - to people who are interested, owning a gun for personal protection is just like owning a stash of food and water for disaster preparedness.
I live in America, and work in agriculture as an agronomist, but live in a very “left leaning” Oregon city.
In rural areas my impression is it a mix of A, B and C in different ratios per person.
In urban areas, it seems primarily A, especially for women. Here pistols are favored, because they are discreet and Supreme hasn’t released an AR-15. Yet. You probably wouldn’t suspect for example my ethnically ambiguous gym coach and his hispanic girlfriend to be packing, but they are very enthusiastic about having the capability of defending themselves from strife. Police after all cannot be relied upon to do anything other than start paperwork about the the mess a criminal or group rioters/looters leave. Consider the sentiments of survivors of Hurricane Katrina are likely to hold.
My impression is there are also periodic mass renewals of interest whenever we elect a new president, or some massive thing like covid or a depression occurs. Obama was often called “gun salesman of the year” in regards to conservatives, and Trump did a bigly job convincing many liberals that the whole “perhaps I need a gun because government” sentiment most commonly associated with rural/conservative areas wasn’t so outrageous after all. Now, for all the posturing and larping of some blowhards, there are vanishingly few who actually think having a civil war would be a grand time. But it doesn’t hurt to be ready, just in case. Especially with the worlds most powerful military involved.
That said, the future of effective defense against governments will be drones, with the classic “heroic personal stand” being far less desirable for obvious reasons.
I myself don’t hunt, but I occasionally shoot for recreation. An AR-15 is basically an engine you can easily modify, playing around with weights, springs, muzzle devices and ammo to achieve silly low recoil. I also for some reason just love troubleshooting firearms. This is a great video about how things function, and how the use of gauging can be used to help find tolerance issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv6a1hs9U5o
And of course then there’s the whole making holes close together from far away aspect as well. Really tickles my nerdy white guy autism (at least once I got a suppressor, because funny enough I don’t like loud sounds lmao). I didn’t really understand “car guys” who were always fucking with their car until I realized I was doing the same thing.
I tend to mostly carry when I’m up doing agronomy in the foothills, because bear, mountain lions, methheads, deer and dogs (the last two are what I’m most likely to be attacked by). I also have bear spray, and a knife, allowing me to actually deter something not already deterred by my ATV engine, and to react to an ambush attack by a mountain lion (in the event I manage to not immediately have my neck snapped). Now, an actual incident is very unlikely and I certainly don’t operate under some kind of omnipresent terror or anything. After an initial scan of an area I basically go about my day completely preoccupied with other things. But if a motherfucker wants to take me down, they better do it right the first time because I am prepared and willing to drag them down to hell with me.
Fortunately though we don’t have moose here. Those are “I can’t even make you regret it” scary, unless you want to carry a repeating large caliber rifle.
Very good breakdown. I do have to ask, though--have you been attacked by deer before? I've never heard of a deer attack once in my life, unless you count a deer jumping into my windshield an attack.
I haven’t been attacked by a deer, but I’ve had a scary encounter. Came around a corner on my mountain bike and a very large male deer, in season, with a huge rack was aggressively staring me down from 30 yards.
Also had encounters with yaks that were scarier than that (and I know of incidents with cows/bulls).
It seems people think of deer as giant harmless bunny rabbits. But you can get into situations where the big animal with horns feels trapped and threatened and shows you their horns. Bluff charges are a real thing, they show you what’s up.
Fortunately I’ve never actually been charged by an animal, and I’ve seen bears, mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, yaks, deer, etc at close range in the wild. 99.9% of the time they are just as surprised to see you and book it. Except big cats—they just walk off like bosses.
I've not been attacked by deer yet, but it's a distinct possibility. So far it's only a few badgers (out in kansas) that decided they wanted to be persistently aggressive, though we came to an understanding with some persuasion from a shovel.
Deer are absolutely capable of attack though. While they normally try to just fuck off, there are a few situations where otherwise can happen:
1. For unprovoked attacks, Male deer can be territorial, especially in a rut where they basically get seasonal roid rage and decide to square up even with the creepy things that walk around on two legs. Getting stabbed with antlers and pounded by hooves is dangerous.
2. If deer (male or female) become used to humans because they are being fed, then they lose their timidness and can get mean if they think it'll get them what they want, though they are unlikely to have the goal of killing.
3. They can also attack if their young are nearby. I come across baby deer roughly once a year, and while usually the mom is somewhere else for most of the day, that may not always be the case. I've been in hazelnut orchards, only to realize I almost just stepped on a fawn laying at a base of a tree. Pretty sure this raises both of our heart rates for a while.
4. Deer can also sometimes attack if they feel trapped and panic, generally from entering a neighborhood and having curious humans start coming around.
5. If you hunt deer, sometimes they'll decide to fight back or not be as dead as you think. Fair enough, TBH.
6. They can also become rabid. This is a good time to remind everyone that all animal attacks should immediately be followed up with a medical examination, no matter how minor any injury. You are vastly more likely to survive trying to commit suicide with a gun, than untreated rabies. Tuberculosis and all the other diseases and parasites they carry are also a consideration.
Horses and Cows will also wreck serious shit if they become inclined. Deer, horses and cows each cause something like a few dozen deaths (not to be confused with attacks, which is far greater) each year, similar to dogs. While bears cause something closer to just 1 death per year when averaged out, and mountain lions and rattle snakes are something like 0.25 deaths per year averaged out. All these numbers are very rough, as this is from foggy memory from past investigation, rather than a nice and neat source I have on hand. As an aside, most rattlesnake deaths are from a drunk deciding to mess with a snake, getting bit, and decide they're fine and go to sleep instead of the hospital. Big rattlesnakes aren't really a danger, just take a hint and leave them alone, they are fat and lazy and really don't need your shit.
Comparatively, things like driving my truck around, or even my ATV is a far larger source of danger, with ATV deaths being in the several hundreds per year I believe. But most of those are not likely from people puttering slowly around like me for crop inspection work.
Only slightly related, but prior to Oregon's partial drug legalization a short while ago, there was a non-zero danger of running into someone in the mountains looking after their million dollar weed plots and no interest in witnesses. There were areas that law enforcement would straight up refuse to go because of Reefer Rambos crawling about.
I like how thorough you are, even on a throwaway hacker news comment. I lived in Iowa for most of my life, so we're no stranger to a lot of this. I've never even thought of deers getting rabies, but it makes sense.
We've had out fair share of horse and cow accidents around these parts. Them back hooves are deadly. We used to joke that you have to exceed the number of cow-caused deaths to declare something a serious problem.
> Only slightly related, but prior to Oregon's partial drug legalization a short while ago, there was a non-zero danger of running into someone in the mountains looking after their million dollar weed plots and no interest in witnesses. There were areas that law enforcement would straight up refuse to go because of Reefer Rambos crawling about.
Here, you have to be steering clear of meth labs and moonshine operations out in the woods.
I've seen more of those since living in the southeastern USA, than I ever did in the northeastern USA... despite having lived in Connecticut where gun laws were, until recently, fairly lax for a blue state and there were quite a few stealth gun nuts.
I've almost always heard "creationism" used in a much narrower sense:
> The term creationism most often refers to belief in special creation; the claim that the universe and lifeforms were created as they exist today by divine action, and that the only true explanations are those which are compatible with a Christian fundamentalist literal interpretation of the creation myth found in the Bible's Genesis creation narrative.
It's going to depend on who you are around. Among Catholics, for example, its very common to explicitly distinguish between Young Earth Creationism (YEC) and Old Earth Creationism (OEC) since both positions are considered permissible theological opinions. I try to never use "creationism" unqualified since all Christians and many/most (all?) other religious groups are going to believe in some view about the creation of the universe by some entity or being, the specific way in which that happened will be disputed but ultimately "creation" is universal in that regard.
I’m not sure what you mean by “whole creationism.”
Do you mean a transcendent God who exists outside spacetime and created it ex nihilo? The three Abrahamic faiths definitely believe that.
However there are other faiths that believe spacetime is eternal and that the Creator created the world or possibly the universe out of eternally existing matter. I get the impression that Hindus and maybe Mormons believe something along those lines.
If we abstract we can identify eternal universe vs created universe and intelligently designed universe vs random but we sure did get lucky universe as two independent dimensions. I don’t know of any created/lucky faiths, but the standard model is compatible with eternal/lucky.
Just for the record, there's a fundamentalist Muslim supporter of child marriage and Islamic Jihad (not US-backed-IS version) self-taught software developer who is interested in I2P network, Raku and Theseus OS right here on HN. He is me.
Society is indeed a lot more diverse than 'mainstream' or 'normal' people assume.
Even in San Francisco Trump got over 30% votes. Republicans know better than to publicly voice their affiliation, however, as the career repercussions can be severe.
Most atheist are agnostics who decided they will not arbiter if one religion is more right than other, at least that's my case and most atheist I've discussed with.
I like rites (catholic funeral and Muslim marriage would be my perfect combo) and I enjoy talking spirituality and belief systems with people who believe in one more god than I do. I think Shintoism led to the most interesting discussions in general, but Jehovah's witnesses are the most consistent ones (also I always take so much of their time and they're too polite to tell me to stuff it, I always feel bad after).
This. A decade+ ago I made a Jesus-riding-dinosaurs type joke around a friend I’d known for years. He called me out on it. I knew he was from TX, homeschooled, and a devout 2A supporter, but for some reason I was floored when he said he believed in Creationism and I was wrong. I struggled reconciling that with him being a well educated Bay Area tech worker. A short time later I watched a train wreck on Facebook where a college friend (rigorous engineering school), who had an aptitude for maths and physics, become a Flat Earther.
After that I stopped assuming anything about what others are likely to believe. The past decade has proven that, unfortunately, to be a wise decision.
> (rigorous engineering school), who had an aptitude for maths and physics, become a Flat Earther.
I'd love to hear their math-aware rebuttal to the usual proofs against FE (stuff like horizons, the day-night cycle). Although debates of the sort rarely end well.
I can comment on this since I had a similar co-worker. Well educated in Mechanical Engineering (or perhaps Electrical?) but working as a software engineer. He was a vocal supporter of flat earth and enjoyed debating the subject.
The conversation was always 100% focused on what I could prove in the moment. The general form of his argument was a radical skepticism. If you question the vast majority of people enough you will be able to find a place where they are not solid on the science. He would expertly find and exploit these areas. He was also very conspiratorial, specifically believing that NASA was a government plot to hide government spending that was going towards a corrupt elite.
He was also amazing at not understanding simple concepts when necessary. I remember he had an argument about high-quality photos of the earth seen from space distributed by NASA. It was based on some evidence that they were composite images. He had some totally clueless argument about no being able to project 2d surfaces (like those of photos) onto 3d surfaces like spheres. I mean, that is a pretty standard thing to do in 3d graphics texturing so I asked him about that and he would just get confused. It would almost be like you couldn't explain why 1 + 1 = 2 to him in those moments. Every step of the argument was drawn out and made excruciating.
I became cynical about it eventually. He was reasonably intelligent on almost any subject. I figured he just liked being a Socratic debater type, in the sense that he just loved to push people into corners of science they didn't quite know and prove to them that their own beliefs weren't as solidly founded as they thought. Once I realized that I just stopped any debate on the topic immediately after it started.
That kind of rhetorical mental gymnastics is quite often what happens when we debate people that have a vested interested against a commonly held and supportable belief. The problem I see is that skepticism and contrarianism are commonly conflated with educated, informed criticism by people even well educated and informed in a topic area, but now we have to debate things as fundamental to many other things holding up like the concept of gravity. The implications of a flat earth, for example, are incredibly outrageous and when people want to go to any length to explain away their tightly held and emotionally motivated position it’s not going to turn out to be a very productive conversation whatever topic may be at hand anyway.
Most forms of decently productive discourse tend to involve multiple parties going back and forth with observations and some criticism that’s not taken personally at least so some semblance of an agreed, cogent world is formed from the discussion. This really doesn’t work if people don’t have some very basic fundamentals agreed upon sometimes, especially if they are relevant to the topic. Like it doesn’t matter if someone’s a creationist on an accounting application development team but it probably matters a lot as a policymaker for public sector.
I felt the same way, but if you spend enough time reading FE forums, you’ll find people are presenting themselves pretty earnestly. No doubt any FE’rs on Reddit or 4chan are mostly just baiting, but there are some very real disciples out there.
It’s a little hard to follow the arguments, but I think they’re being made out of honest conviction. It’s a fascinating little corner of the internet, one has to wonder if it will live on.
Are you quite near to where he was in 2014? He said in the article that he lived (at time of writing) in a pretty conservative area:
> I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
I agree with OP that it's much more likely that he did meet them, just in contexts where it doesn't come up.
I think that was because he was doing his residency in a place where he would not normally choose to live.
As typical, during that time he was probably so overworked he didn't really interact with any of the locals until his time was up and he moved back out to a self-selected community.
It might not be that these topics just "don't come up" like it's some kind of accident. When people hold these "weird beliefs" as he puts it, [I think] they generally know they are weird and would be embarrassed to bring them up.
I don't think I know any Flat Earthers, but if I actually do, they probably deliberately keep it to themselves because they know that they'd look like kooks by outing themselves. To get more extreme, maybe some of my friends are Nazis, but they sure aren't showing me their memorabilia, not because "it just doesn't come up" but because they know it's wrong and don't want to ostracize themselves.
Maybe eventually people work up the courage to probe a little, they'll use code words and innuendo, and soft dogwhistles, maintaining plausible deniability until they identify their fellow outgroup members. I think I see this behavior in a few of my friends, but they wisely don't come out with it.
Culture war topics being literally banned on /r/ssc combined with that community's imperfect ability in "keeping it together" when some conversation does sneak in leads me to believe that it would be extremely easy to be never found out if you were among them.
A) at the time this was written, Scott lived in the Midwest
B) Scott worked at a hospital at the time, which selects a bit against those who are creationists. In my opinion, probably 40% of the nurses in such a hospital would be creationist, but maybe Scott disagrees with me about that assessment
C) in terms of socialization outside of work, Scott is not an extrovert, so I can imagine arbitrary levels of selection and that it is plausible he did have 0 creationist social acquaintances (maybe the quote is only even talking about his social acquaintances, not his work ones)
I would suspect that as an introvert he just doesn't realize what his social circle really holds, even lightly.
Lots of it doesn't come up, and the "higher in the US money/power structure you get the more you learn to be quiet".
Another is to remember that many people may be technically creationists (the protestant church they go to is young-earth) but they just don't ever think about it at all.
I lived in both places. Almost all the parents of my kids friends in public school in Hayward regularly went to church. I knew not a single person that attended church in Chicago.
I don’t want to like “exception that proves the rule” here, but I overgeneralized the area. I think Scott is in Oakland and runs in pretty specific circles. Probably very different from Hayward. And then Chicago isn’t exactly typical Midwest.
The rate of creationists would also heavily depend on how the question is phrased, because there's not one "creationism" but several, sometimes incompatible, ideologies. Compare these questions:
> Do you believe that a supernatural force created the universe?
> Do believe that God created the earth 6000-10000 years ago?
The first is much broader and would also probably include the origin stories of many non-Abrahamic religions. The second is referring to a specific school of Christian "young earth" creationism.
In the article Scott says he lives in a Republican district in a state with a Republican Governor, so he wasn't in San Francisco at the time he wrote this. I live in a Democrat district in a state with a Democrat governor so I can't imagine the political demographics of where we live are that divergent.
> When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.
> “Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.
> “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?
But if instead you phrase it as "i can tolerate anyone except those who attack my in group", it is perhaps not noble but much more understandable, as everyone protects their own.
This article stinks of that assertion/misunderstanding that "Tolerant of all but the intolerant" is a paradox or contradiction. It's not. It's a social contract and if you violate it you are no longer covered or protected by it. Put another way, give everyone a basic level respect until they demonstrate they aren't deserving of it.
It's worth mentioning you can take punitive, intervening and/or remedial action against someone and still be respectful.
The actual problem is that “tolerance” is undefined in that statement. If you make it concrete the “paradox” either disappears or is obvious.
As an example, say the definition of tolerance is: “I will not physically harm based on spoken words.”. Then the phrase becomes: “I will not physically harm people based on spoken words unless that person will physically harm people based on spoken words.”. No paradox.
Say we define it as: “I will not initiate violence.”. “I will not initiate violence on a person unless that person initiates violence on people.”. No paradox.
“I will never harm a person unless that person harms people.” No paradox.
It is just a problem of lazy definitions and not defining your terms.
> The actual problem is that “tolerance” is undefined in that statement.
Disagreed. You can be pedantic about semantics and doublethink your way out of anything, but that's not productive discourse, so I'll dismiss that out of turn.
> If you make it concrete the “paradox” either disappears or is obvious.
Strong Disagree. If you make it concrete, then you introduce a catch-22 by forcing others to conform to your perspective before a discussion can be begin. If there's any paradox at all in this, it's here.
> It is just a problem of lazy definitions and not defining your terms.
Lets start with tolerance then, because your example (Say we define it as: “I will not initiate violence.”) provided above is WAY off base:
> Tolerance: the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with
You can concretely define your terms all you want, doesn't mean people will agree, use, or perceive your use of them in that way.
You have completely missed the point. The definition of “tolerance” you quoted uses the word “tolerate”. What does “tolerating a behavior” mean?
“Tolerating a behavior” means taking or not taking some action in response to a behavior. The crux of the “paradox” is that the condition and action are wholly undefined resulting in a nebulous mushy concept battle.
As soon as you define, even vaguely, the conditions and actions you wish to use as “tolerating”, the “paradox” disappears. The examples I provided are there to illustrate the concept using a relatively simple condition/action model.
I am not imposing a definition beyond defining what constitutes a “concrete” description. I literally could not care less what you choose.
You can choose the definition that you want that is infinitely favorable to your perspective and the paradox will still disappear. I do not even need to agree with your definition. The mere act of defining causes the paradox to disappear (or be trivially inconsistent) in your own axiomatic model as far as I can tell.
The paradox of tolerance is just the paradox of being too lazy to define your words so you can move the goalposts.
My point is the logic is inherently self contradictory regardless of the definition.
To use a analogy. It is like I am saying: (A or TRUE) == TRUE. And someone is quibbling about the value of A. It literally does not matter. Pick any value. The sheer force of the rules of logic make the value of A irrelevant. That is analogous to my assertion, though obviously much stronger due to its basis in the underpinnings of propositional logic.
If you want to disprove my statement then all you need to do is unilaterally propose literally any condition/action which results in a non-trivial paradox.
I do not know how to make my argument any clearer. It is up to you if you want to think of a proper counter example or not, but I have said everything I care to say. Have a good day.
I'm very weary of the at times bad faith, at times ignorant, assertion of this "paradox."
For me it seems rooted in a sort of Angloamerican philosophical analytic realism I associate with e.g. Quine,
which is IMHO not just inane but pernicious in as much as it contributes to such things as this "debate" and, say, Constitutional Originalism.
Words are how we use them.
A civil open society has not just a right but a need to defend itself from those whose actions (words and deeds alike) threaten the stability of the society itself, not to mention, trespass on the rights and wellbeing of its constituent members.
This is so obvious I find it hard to find examples I am willing to accept as "ignorance."
Bad faith, albeit cloaked from introspective view perhaps by willful refusal to do so, is far more common.
Have you noticed the interesting way most everyone in this thread who has taken an adversarial stance uses language? If not it's a shame, because it is really something to see.
If everyone agreed who the bad people were and who the good people were, what is just and what is injust, the world would be a simple place.
The reality is that nobody agrees on where the line is or what even is good and bad.
And while i agree that you can in theory respectfully take punative action against someone, if they don't deserve the punative action you are still a bad person no matter how respectfully you punish the undeserving victim.
It is a paradox. His point about ISIS vs Republicans is pretty on the money. I think a lot of people in the West are so saturated with tolerance that they don't even recognize what it is. There are countries in the world where being an atheist or being raped is punishable by death and plenty of people there cheer on. In that light, republicans I know are very tolerant people on the whole, possibly even more so than the average Democrat. They have strong feelings about what the government should or shouldn't do, but I haven't met one yet who would actually advocate killing someone for things we think about in terms of tolerance.
If you truly think that the entire republican party, a huge portion of the country's population, have all broken the social contract, I don't think that social contract is worth much.
We can have reasonable debate and differences of opinion over economic policy, but when one side is denying that people have human rights and trying to restrict their right to live and for people to learn about them, it's not a "both sides are the same". https://apnews.com/article/florida-transgender-health-care-a...
It's not innocent mistakes. After the most corrupt presidential administration in US History, with a President slinging lies and abuse on Twitter every day, nearly half the country still voted for him anyway. What social contract?
The fact that your opponents' party got into power recently and just barely got defeated in the last presidential election says that there jolly well can be differences of opinion whether you like it or not. Instead of futilely insisting otherwise, it's time to start figuring out how to appeal to the electorate so your opponents don't gain power again.
Have you considered whether you're overly attached to the ingroup/outgroup thing with how you characterize the above?
A bunch of liberal people shut down the Seattle capitol for a few days at the height of Black Lives Matter and ironically shot several young black men in the process. Yet I never hear a word about it. They were the ingroup.
So there no difference between storming the national capitol because your candidate lost and you would rather violently overturn the election because you lost and a group protesting the injustices built into our society?
Nuance is important and if you want to say BLM and jan 6 are the same you are severely lacking it.
The Jan 6 rioters injured 114 law enforcement officers (leading to one death) in a few hours. The leaders expressed a desire to overturn the government unlawfully and their followers proved they were willing to use violence to do so.
The fatal Seattle shootings happened more than three weeks after the CHAZ/CHOP zone was established, and when most of the protesters had gone home. The organizers were using their illegal occupation to push for political reforms through the local government.
Those are substantively different situations.
P.S. It’s clear that the CHAZ/CHOP organizers lacked the skill to maintain security for such a large area. Whether they bear criminal liability is up for the courts to decide. (Just like it is for the Jan 6 rioters.)
> your candidate lost and you would rather violently overturn the election
Yes, so violent that entered the US capitol building unarmed, and just broke some decorations, taking selfies while laughing, and never attacked anyone (EDIT: talking about inside the capitol building, I didn't watch footage of the streets outside). It's just like the storming of the palace during the French revolution!
Seriously, the most extreme footage I could find shows the attackers running past the police guarding the doors instead of stopping when told, but the police repeatedly turn their back to them and no one even attempts to hurt them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibWJO02nNsY . At one point the guy in the lead ends up just debating the police calmly.
Wikipedia says they caused $2.7M in damages. Assuming that figure is anywhere close to true, it's probably less damages than your average "fiery but peaceful" BLM riot, which totaled 2 billion in damages. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/22/fac... )
Do you think you might be overselling the severity of either the Jan 6 capitol breach or downplaying the severity of the BLM riots? Or maybe your post is satire of how liberals do this systematically, if so then A+, you got me.
If the capitol breach had been done by BLM protesters, the media would be running stories about how the rioters didn't do nothing wrong, and the reaction to the verdicts would've been more riots. Surely even in the worst Twitterati echochamber they must realize this when they lie down in bed at night and do some honest introspection without having to virtue signal in public.
Nah, they are not tolerant. They are just less murderous then ISIS.
> They have strong feelings about what the government should or shouldn't do, but I haven't met one yet who would actually advocate killing someone for things we think about in terms of tolerance.
There have been multiple mass shootings literally in that category. Compared to ISIS places, yep, it happens significantly less often. Plus, I have seen such calls against transgender and clinics. And acts of violence against both in fact do happen.
Thinking that half of society has broken the social contract is a truly horrible way to live. I've found that I'm much happier if I do my best to steelman my opponents. So are the Republicans furthering our great country? No. But they haven't done anything as a whole to break the social contract. Most of them are doing their best to lead a fulfilling respectful and valuable life.
That resolves the paradox of tolerance for you, but not for everyone else. What happens when you think that I'm being intolerant, but I disagree? Back to being a paradox.
While that might work as a personal moral code, i don't see how you can extrapolate something like that to govern a society at large, which is the topic at hand.
Yeah, this line of argument is a perfect example of the "Motte and Bailey" fallacy. The structure of this argument works just as well if you replace "intolerance" with "segregationist" or "misogynist". The only takeaway I have from this argument is "it's easier to condemn things which you disagree with". There isn't any discussion of whether the intolerant action is actually intolerant or harmful.
---
Digression, this is a pretty audacious way to minimize Apartheid.
> South African whites and South African blacks ... So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences.
Every single human conflict can be described as "small differences" because humans are very similar to each other. Also, it's harder to be in conflict with people far away from you.
> Every single human conflict can be described as "small differences" because humans are very similar to each other.
He's obviously talking about differences which are small by human standards. The rest of the paragraph:
> If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.
How were the differences between the colonial SA Afrikaners and the local SA Zulu smaller than the differences between the Yugoslavs and the Zulu, other than proximity?
Sure, in the immediate aftermath of colonization colonial SA Afrikaners and Zulu were about as different as you can get. But then they shared (for some definition of "shared") the same plot of land for literally hundreds of years
The relevant outgroups animating Afrikaner nationalism aren't the Zulu (or Xhosa, or Tswana, etc.) as a whole, but rather the rapidly growing black working class on the one hand, and English-speaking elites on the other. Of course Afrikaner society was and had long between hideously racist, but so was the British colonial government. It was the perceived "threat" of racial integration (and the attendant economic competition) driven by English liberals that made race the primary focus of Afrikaner politics.
Of course if you mean smaller differences that weren't in part ultimately caused by proximity, there aren't any, but that's almost tautological.
> The relevant outgroups animating Afrikaner nationalism aren't the Zulu ... It was the perceived "threat" of racial integration driven by English liberals
The article compared "South African whites and South African blacks". It sounds like you're comparing Afrikaners and the English?
--
The article links "narcissism of small differences" to the wikipedia page which says:
> [It] is the idea that the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other.
I don't think this even slightly describes the "outgroup conflict" in South Africa. Furthermore, I think that Scott using this as an example minimizes the sources of conflict, e.g. Apartheid, because the rest of the article is solely about outgroup hatred.
I'm comparing Afrikaners to the English and to South African blacks who were integrating into colonial society (among whom the Zulu were likely the largest ethnic group, but certainly not an outright majority). Afrikaner national identity initially formed in opposition to the former and shifted to defining itself against the latter as the country began industrializing.
> There isn't any discussion of whether the intolerant action is actually intolerant or harmful.
People towards the upper side of a social hierarchy, who are not seriously discriminated against tend to find it very easy to discuss discrimination in the abstract, as a kind of intellectual game of chess.
The game's a lot less abstract for the pawns on the board, though.
Yeah I'm not sure why "small" had to make it in that argument. I guess it's to say that the differences _may_ be small because large differences, regardless of proximity, is obviously a source of conflict?
I think that the article is a countervailing idea against the idea of the "paradox of tolerance."
If you accept the paradox of tolerance, then the truly intolerant are the ones you should not tolerate. Taken to its extreme, you can apply the paradox of tolerance to shun anybody that does not conform to ideological purity.
There is a balance to be found between the two extremes.
That's why I think paradox of tolerance should be applied recursively - as in, if in pursuit of the "intolerant" one is causing real collateral damage, then perhaps it's them who are the "intolerant" the society needs to get rid of first.
How much collateral damage? Any non-zero amount? [1]
Or does it only become a problem with it becomes some amount that's disproportionate to the damage that is allegedly avoided, as a consequence of those actions?
[1] If you believe any non-zero amount of damage is inappropriate, could you provide me with a single example of social progress[2] (or hell, any human, legal, or moral system) that was made with zero amount of collateral damage?
[2] Unfortunately, we have in the past, and currently live in a society where people need to scream, and shout, and break things for even the grossest injustices against them to be taken seriously. It's a natural consequence of self-interested democracy.
Except those people may be overestimating (kindly) or pretending (unkindly) the harm they suffer from those attacks. To consider a defensive action as ethically sound, the defender must show real harm. Otherwise it's vulnerable to abuse and opens up lines of reasoning along the following statement (with gay and straight flipped around): "As a gay person, I hate straight people as they threaten my sexuality/orientation/way of life."
Even this is difficult. There is a case to be made that Trump being president for 4 years caused predictable actual harm to some people. Does this mean that considering anybody who voted for Trump (and especially those who voted for him in 2020) is a legitimate target for hate?
This is a non-hypothetical because I have heard this exact argument advanced without irony.
I think the legal concept of mens rea or a similar concept is applicable here. For example, I'm a type one diabetic and will cut off a friendship with people who vote republican because they agree I should not be able to afford insulin. My grandparents vote republican because taxes and don't consider the other effects.
Basically it comes down to intent and knowledge for me. If causing harm is part of why someone voted a specific way I think that it's fair to hold them partially accountable for that harm then it is carried out.
> There is a case to be made that Trump being president for 4 years caused predictable actual harm to some people.
How many presidents are there for whom this wouldn't be true? Are there any? You could probably expand this to most positions of any significant power.
> "i can tolerate anyone except those who attack my in group"
Yeah, this essay is misleading about why Eich was so disliked. Eich wasn't just homophobic, he actually worked to help eliminate rights for gay people in the state of California by donating money to the corresponding political campaign.
> he actually worked to help eliminate rights for gay people in the state of California by donating money to the corresponding political campaign
Note that 52% of California voters also worked to help eliminate rights for gay people in the state, by voting for Proposition 8. As strange as it seems now, this was a very common position in 2008.
> Note that 52% of California voters also worked to help eliminate rights for gay people in the state, by voting for Proposition 8.
Yes, and those that publicly and proudly done so and were unrepentant about it would have been problematic for the role for the same reason as Eich (and, in most cases, for lots of other reasons, some more significant, as well.) “The rule you propose would also rule out lots of people who would never have been under consideration for the role” is, here, a valid observation, but not any kind of counterargument.
> > “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?
> But if instead you phrase it as "i can tolerate anyone except those who attack my in group", it is perhaps not noble but much more understandable, as everyone protects their own.
But that's not the same thing. The outgroup is the group that is attacked by the ingroup, not the group that attacks the ingroup.
I mean, this is obviously untrue. To take the example of homosexuals and homophobia, in what way did homosexual people "attack" first or how are they one of the two tangoing.
The question isn't "did both sides attack" it is "do people on both sides feel attacked." I'm sure there are plenty of Russian's who feel attacked by the Ukraine; that doesn't mean the Ukraine started the current war.
Consider this mindset (to be clear, not my mindset):
1. The US is, and always has been a Christian nation
2. Homosexuality is unchristian
3. For the past 60 years, anti-christian liberals have been trying to (and in large part succeeding) in legalizing many sinful behaviors, at least one of which is tantamount to murder (i.e. abortion)
4. Following the legalization of the sinful behaviors comes normalization via indoctrination in schools
From this mindset, it's easy to see how e.g. legalization of homosexual behaviors (and then of homosexual marriage) is seen as an attack.
As far as attacking first, well that's simple: all those people who attacked, beat, or killed homosexuals were isolated incidents and e.g. the raid on Stonewall Inn was just the cops doing their job (these people were breaking the law, after all).
Alright, cool, FEELING attacked is valid of course. But then, if it's factually wrong - if in this case gay people aren't causing them personal harm, just objections to their personal convictions - who has to change?
The other. It is always the other that is supposed to change. Never assume that these kind of conflicts/positions are completely rational, or even can be solved by an appeal to rationality.
One example: declaring broadly that an entire group of people (say, Trump supporters) are homophopic. It only requires that literally two Trump supporters are homophobic for the statement to be literally true.
System 1 thinking is terrible for practicing set theory, and Sysyem 1 seems to almost always take 100% of CPU power during such discussions. The irony is delicious.
The example in the article is about Brandon Eich who was supporting a specific amendment banning same sex marriage in California. This isn't saying all people who support a specific politician are homophobic, this is saying people who support a specific homophobic law are homophobic.
Yeah but you also need to look at the facts; ARE you or people in your group, in fact, under attack?
This is the right-wing fallacy / mental gymnastics. They take it personal. They're not under attack, but their policies - the ones that cause quantifiable harm - are.
I mean,i don't think any dispute has ever been solved by imploring the other side to think hard about how they are actually wrong.
Presumably they really believe they are under attack so that is why they act like they were under attack. If they ernestly believe they are under attack telling them to think deeper about it is not going to change their minds. Humans don't work that way.
I have no idea how "intolerance" is remotely coming to overlap "white" or "American" except in the delusions of some fringe lunatics who believe both that Confederate statues must remain up (to protect heritage) and also history about black people must not be taught.
Sometimes you'll hear it expanded as "The Fine Article" or just "The Article".
Often, it really does mean just "the article". People use the acronym without expanding it out or thinking too deeply about it. At one point, decades ago, it may have connoted some kind of hostility (e.g. "If you had read the f---ing article..."), and it's still meant that way in "RTFA" (read the f---ing article, meaning "that was already answered, so you clearly haven't read the thing that we're supposed to be discussing")
But now, it's mostly just a kind of in-joke, and TFA means nothing more than "the article", with the F entirely silent.
What does it even mean for a "group" to "attack" another "group"? What constitutes an attack? How does someone have to be related to the attacker or victim to be considered part of the group?
Are all Muslims guilty of attacking all Americans? Are all Americans guilty of attacking all Afghans? Does a "gamer" saying mean things about a girl on the internet justify intollerance against anyone who plays games?
Is it all just framing used to justify hating people for bad-think?
I'd be lying if I said I didn't get it. Democracy is interesting. It enables sufficiently large groups to turn their thoughts into actions through the works of a few representatives. That's a good argument for bad-think being dangerous. But on the other hand, refusing to tollerate someone for bad-think surely leads to resentment and division until one side inevitably gains the upper hand and uses it to crush the other.
A lot of these definitions and groupings are highly artificial and more-often-than-not, mostly manufactured by media interests - who certainly understand that controversy drives engagement, as well as the economic necessity to have a loyal partisan base of subscribers and followers in the internet media age, and that one way to do that is to cultivate anger and distrust of social out-groups. One conclusion of this view is that Americans get served at least as much manuipulative propaganda as Soviet citizens did, and possibly a good deal more effectively as it goes through many different channels, instead of coming purely from the state organs of information.
Getting an alternative view is rather difficult, but there are some tactics that are used by researchers in fields like economics and ecology to get a good sample of their populations. For example, one approach is the 'straight line transect' - i.e. draw a straight line from, say, San Francisco to Boston and sample people's views and opinions from every community/individual who lives within 100 miles perpendicular to that transect. Then compare that to a Seattle-Los Angeles transect and a New York-Miami transect.
This woould, I think, reveal that most people have many common concerns: job satisfaction, housing/energy/food costs, crime and safety, good educational systems, clean air/water/food issues, etc. These topics are often ignored by the media and politicians because they don't drive the kind of divisiveness and negative engagement that they find beneficial.
One interesting question is just how much of the button-pushing emotional-response-driving controversial material is the product of deliberately engineered mass manipulations strategies run by a shady cabal of some sort, and how much just arises naturally and is then exploited by media and political figures?
> The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, [etc. etc etc.]
I'm so confused as to where poorer people of color fit into all of this. This seems to highlight Scott's small social circle if all the members of the "non-Red Tribe" are white yuppie coastal elites.
My experience is that rural Southern Black people are similar to stereotypical white "Red tribe" people except on the question of race.
Also, there is a lot more mingling between white and Black poor people than a typical "coastal elite" would expect who never spent time in the South.
I grew up around racist people who all had friends of the other race. They just consider their friends an exception to their general dislike of the other race.
The thing I heard all the time growing up was "I don't hate black people, I just hate N-words." The idea is that it's not the race that a racist person has a problem with, just the cultural practices (laziness, lack of class, etc.) they associate with people of that race. A member of that race who rises above those associations is welcomed with open arms. Of course, they are oblivious to the idea that associating those cultural practices with a race is the racist part. But it makes it very easy for them to be racist and have friends of the other race without feeling any dissonance.
It cuts both ways too. I also had Black friends growing up that had no problem being friends with me or other white kids but wouldn't hesitate to disparage "crackers" as a whole if they were in a safe enough space to do so without being harmed.
I don't know what groups poor urban people of color end up feeling affinity to.
> Also, there is a lot more mingling between white and Black poor people than a typical "coastal elite" would expect who never spent time in the South.
I was floored by how racially segregated Southern California is when when I moved here in the '00s. I grew up in the Midwest and spent a few years in central Georgia.
> The thing I heard all the time growing up was "I don't hate black people, I just hate N-words." The idea is that it's not the race that a racist person has a problem with, just the cultural practices (laziness, lack of class, etc.) they associate with people of that race.
I saw similar attitudes in all 3 places, but in the Midwest and the South it was whites (and even some blacks) who had these attitudes. In SoCal, I mostly see it from hispanics and asians.
Chris Rock used that phrase in one of his stand-up shows as well. It's probably easy to find on Youtube.
Also, I disagree with the logic that the statement is inherently racist. I understand that everyone in the USA is hypersensitive about race and has been conditioned to automatically scream "racist" at the mere mention of that word, but analyzing the position behind the statement logically: in this context it is being used as a class signal, not a race signal.
> they are oblivious to the idea that associating those cultural practices with a race is the racist part
Is the issue here that English doesn't have a word/concept like "culturism"? If there was such a word, would it be fair to call those people racist when they specifically are saying they don't care about race but cultural practices instead?
Quite honestly, probably another tribe. One that is more closely aligned with red and gray on distrust of government. And likely even more than one tribe.
Although the tribes have pretty diverse subtribes. Red has a very poor temporarily embarrassed millionaire quite separate from the actual owners. They still align with some of the same tribal calls and signaling.
Scott's political ontology seems intrinsically limited to white middle class. It doesn't really make sense in poorer parts of America and really falls apart once you start trying to correlate belief systems in non-white communities.
The article is discussing, at length, the author's view what constitutes the "blue tribe's" outgroup. Poor people of colour wouldn't, pretty much by his definition. be part of that outgroup.
> This seems to highlight Scott's small social circle if all the members of the "non-Red Tribe" are white yuppie coastal elites.
This is an uncharitable reading of text. I mean, you may be correct, but it isn't supported by the goal of the essay.
Having grown up a poor POC, a different tribe. Each POC group also will have its own set of social and political mores. For example, many POC who fled from Communist countries will vote for anti-Communist rhetoric. Many poorer POCs also tend to be more okay with anti-feminist or anti-LGBT stances. On the other hand, recent immigrant POCs often dislike groups that stereotype them or are anti-immigration as they obviously feel solidarity towards recent immigrants.
The main condition that you're talking about is having a high population. Chicago has a lot of murders because it has a lot of people. The murder rate per capita is a little above 2x the national average, but not an outlier by any means.
I guess I got caught in the narrative. I still remember Spike Lee's movie Chiraq.
from 2003-2012. During that nine-year period, 4,265 citizens were killed in Chicago, which is nearly the number of U.S. soldiers who were killed in Iraq.
The idea you have as much risk being shot as an American citizen in the war zone of Iraq as you would walking the streets of the south side of Chicago.
The risk of a man 18 to 29 years old dying in a shooting in the most violent ZIP code in Chicago — 60624, a swath of the West Side that includes Garfield Park — was higher than the death rate for U.S. soldiers in the Afghanistan war or for soldiers in an Army combat brigade that fought in Iraq, according to a study in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. Among men 18 to 29, the annual rate of firearm homicides in that ZIP code was 1,277 per 100,000 people in 2021 and 2022, the study found, compared with an annual death rate for U.S. troops in a heavily engaged combat brigade in Iraq of 675 per 100,000. The most violent ZIP codes in Philadelphia surpassed the risk of combat death by military service members, too, but the death rate there was lower than in Chicago, the study found. New York and Los Angeles didn’t have any areas that were so deadly.
Soldiers in Iraq wear armor, travel in armored vehicles, have trained medical first responders seconds away, and can call in a helicopter medivac in minutes. They are disproportionately likely to survive a shootout versus a random civilian.
That may be true for some definition of Chicago, but no other city I know of has websites dedicated to the murders of its inhabitants. https://heyjackass.com
And even that shows there's lots of "barely murdering at all" parts of the city that bring the averages down into line.
It is always Chicago, because of right-wing echo chamber. One would think an honest economic study would try to control a bit for being mere miles from Indiana. And yet it is always Chicago.
I'm not so sure, it's well covered that trust of police is low because of corruption like Burke's history of sponsoring unconstitutional black sites for torturing suspects. And I think the history of redlining and corruption when it comes to investment in education and infrastructure is well known... what would be controversial to say?
Isn't this a caricature too? In what way are socialist beliefs, which generally push for more unions and worker power, "viciously classist"? "Eat the rich" is a "blue" meme, not a "red" one.
I have never heard "eat the rich" or any of the associated rhetoric from anybody lower class. It's classic struggling upper class making 100k in a super HCOL and living paycheck to paycheck with student loans. Core blue demographic. There's a reason why Democrats want to bail out student loans borrowers, but not actual poor people in debt.
I only saw one mention of HN's stereotypical in-group (the gray tribe) in this already massive thread, so I suspect the author's conclusion (that it's painful to be honestly critical of your own in-group) is spot-on.
Here's an attempt at criticism of the gray tribe. Writing it felt a little uncomfortable, maybe I have one foot in the gray tribe and the other foot somewhere else. If this post doesn't get downvoted to 5% opacity then I wasn't honest enough:
1. We rail about over-complicated systems yet we inevitably make them more complex.
2. We claim to love precision but one of our most important values is "progress".
3. We're just as nepotistic as everyone else but we claim to be a meritocracy.
4. We think we're good problem solvers but we just might be better at making them.
As a leftie my opinion is that tolerance is a means to an end and not itself an end. The Allies did not tolerate Julius Streicher's virulent and anti-Semitic Der Stürmer and had him hanged in Nüremberg. Intolerance against assholes is often virtuous.
There's a kernel of truth here in that bigotry/bad behavior is ignored/tolerated when it comes from the right people or for the "right cause", and conversely, the out-group is deemed immoral because they "endorse"/tolerate bad behavior from a subset of the larger group. It's tiresome, but that makes up a large chunk of shit-posting about the other political tribe.
"Republicans are bad because of January 6th! They are anti-democratic!"
The irony of using intolerance of anti-Semitism as a defense of the virtues of intolerance while so many here are trashing the sincerely held religious beliefs of the conservatives[1] should not be lost on us. If "intolerance against assholes is often virtuous", perhaps it the intolerant left as well as the intolerant right that the rest of us should not be tolerating, arf arf.
A man takes a dump in the communal pool and is asked to leave. The man comes back the next day and shits again. Story repeats until the man is banned. The man cries about intolerance and censorship. The man gets backed up by internet's peanut gallery. Because oh gosh those darn liberal pool operators are hypocrites that don't even tolerate natural bodily functions!
It's wild how many people can't seem to wrap their heads around the very simple framing of tolerance as a contract. We have chosen to engage in tolerance, which means that we will BOTH be tolerant of each other. Once you engage in intolerance, the contract is broken. We are now not BOTH tolerant, so the contract of 'tolerance' has become void. It's not that I can't tolerate intolerance. It's that the logical structure of 'tolerance' is terminated when any of the active parties stop participating. I'm not 'intolerant of your intolerance'; I'm no longer affording you coverage of the contract that you voided until you engage in earnest action toward repairing that relationship, at which point you will be eligible for reinstatement to the contract parties.
Anyway, your pool analogy is great! It's just frustrating that people even need it. =/
I didn’t finish reading the whole thing yet—need dinner first. But maybe the reason they never interact with gun loving, immigrant-hating, uneducated yayhoos is because they’re looking at a statistical amalgamation of individual beliefs. Most republicans won’t fit that mold because they’re a mass of individuals with different beliefs and these lumps of commonality are weak, but natural modalities of a social species. In other words they hate a caricature—an enemy that only really exists in statistics but not in the real world.
The thing is, there's already a set of concepts that unpack this issue: it's called intersectionality. Intersectionality is the idea that we have overlapping sets of privilege. For example, while I might be a straight, heteronormative man, I'm also a dark-skinned POC who grew up poor. So while I benefit from not being singled out, harassed, or hurt for my choice of gender expression or who I date (somewhat, people often disapprove of interracial dating with darker folks, and it's come up a lot in my life) I can get treated badly due to how I look and the stereotypes around what people like me do. We all benefit from and are hurt by a combination of our privileges and the negative stereotypes surrounding us, and it helps define our experiences.
Intersectionality is complicated, but ingroups and outgroups are a lot more fun. Humans tend to be wired into finding tribes and a lot of people use social media to find their tribe and, regrettably, find outgroups to isolate from and criticize. An interesting manifestation of this is watching white LGBT spaces debate Islam. There's generally an obvious outgroup effect in those discussions and it definitely adds a temperature to the discussion that I think wouldn't be present if Islamic POCs were considered more part of those ingroups.
> people use social media to find their tribe and, regrettably, find outgroups to isolate from and criticize
Yeah some people are very ridiculous in this way.
The other day someone responded to one of my TikTok videos with a video of his own.
He apparently had some sort of problem with the fact that I enjoyed something, that he enjoyed too, but which he thought I was too enthusiastic about.
In his video he told me that I need to go outside and experience the real world, instead of thinking my hobby was important.
As you can tell I am annoyed by this. Otherwise I would not be talking about it now.
Anyway. If he had taken time to visit my profile, instead of going off telling me his opinions based off of one video he saw. He’d have found that I am already spending a lot of time outside. He’d have seen that I am traveling, visiting countries, experiencing the world.
What an annoying moron that guy was.
I didn’t respond to him, because I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that his rude expressions affected me in any way. But I wish he’d just stay away from social media in the first place, instead of coming there to shit on one of my videos.
You got trolled. You're engaging with a troll. You've given the troll what they want. They won't go away, and you cannot wish them to go away. You only have control over yourself and - in this case - how much you choose to engage with a troll.
This isn't new btw, it's as old as the internet, probably much older (think Diogenes).
I'm curious what you find troll-y about my post but obviously you don't have to respond. I've been posting on HN for many years. The post fluctuated quite a bit score-wise, so I'm curious what about it came across as such, just for my own feedback. If you don't want to respond have a nice day.
I don't know about the account, but what they posted is what intersectionality describes itself as. There's absolutely nothing troll-y about this post.
This is one of the few things I like being autistic for – I don't think I'm socially capable of having out-groups.
I have racist friends, sexist friends, homophobic friends, but also antifa friends, feminist friends, homosexual friends. I get on with them all just the same... I don't even like labelling them as such because it's weird to categorise them in those terms. I might disagree with them on things, but I don't dislike them or have any negative emotional feelings towards them as people.
If I have an out-group it's probably intolerant people. And again it's not that I dislike them, but I've lost several friends who won't tolerate me defending "intolerant" people. But there's not much I can do about that. I get on with everyone who wants to get on with me.
Being highly tolerant is socially difficult which is probably why more socially-abled people seek groups and are susceptible to group think. How do you get someone who believes women shouldn't have the right to vote to hang out with a feminist? This is an issue I have in my life constantly. Everyone I like hates each other. To some extent our societies probably depend on group think and intolerance – otherwise why form a society at all? Unless your bound by some shared ingroup beliefs forming a society makes no sense. And if you're born into that society if you know what's good for you you'll want to adopt those beliefs!
It would be a weird world if we were highly tolerant, i think... I question if my tolerance is moral often. To be highly moral you probably need to have good intolerances which I'm not capable of. If we were all like me the world would probably be a worse place. I would have been fine with the Nazi's. I disagree with them and I'm glad they lost the war, but I don't hate them enough to fight against their views. I'd rather we try to find a way to all get along.
My inability to form out-groups is why I don't vote anymore because as much as people don't like others, embracing tolerance is probably the only way to ensure people will fight and disagree more.
> How do you get someone who believes women shouldn't have the right to vote to hang out with a feminist?
Well by forcing the feminist to accept she has to listen about her own inferiority without pushing back too much. And by her forcing her to accept inferior position in that social group.
> I've lost several friends who won't tolerate me defending "intolerant" people.
I mean, there is tolerating them and then there is defending them or defending harm they cause to others. I do not know what went on with your friends, but in my experience, tolerating sexists literally always means that I have to tolerate insulting things about myself whereas push back is seen as me being rude. (I live in a pretty sexist place, so that situation actually happens regularly and I push back when it seems to make sense. But I did noticed the dynamic.)
> I question if my tolerance is moral often. To be highly moral you probably need to have good intolerances which I'm not capable of.
Don’t forget the incredible subjectivity of morality. And defining the intolerable things that would constitute a “highly moral” person is extremely tricky because one could easily argue that tolerance is innately tied to morality.
I would love to learn more about philosophy because I’m unsure how the answer isn’t always “I don’t know.” Though maybe it is. The more I think about these things, the more I understand the underlying nuances, but invariably walk away thinking “I don’t know.” It’s frustrating but fun
All that you need to understand this gong show (Earth, 2023) can be found within philosophy...supplement it with some psychology/neuroscience/"mindfulness" and you're all set to have a much better and amusing perspective on The Big Show, including comment sections like this one.
> I question if my tolerance is moral often. To be highly moral you probably need to have good intolerances which I'm not capable of.
I don't know about that, there's this one Jewish guy who is taken to be largely morally right that summed up most morality with "And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." and at another point said "Love one another". So I don't know if intolerance is really a good thing morally speaking.
I'm much like you, but its not just merely intolerant people (everyone is intolerant, racist, has some measure of bias), its only really highly intolerant people which I exclude.
The post 2012 era of people maximalist positions on every conceivable issue also makes it really have to have reasonable discussions with about difficult topics.
Trump made some of this harder, if for no other reason the people who I might have an ideological or philosophical disagreement with, simply wouldn't shut up about it.
I do vote however, I vote for the things I find desirable and people I find honorable. Being gay has made me very well aware of the fact that I cant ignore politics, I must be active and encourage others to do so.
> its only really highly intolerant people which I exclude.
Do you actively exclude them? I try to be their friends I just inevitably end up saying something that makes them mad.
> I do vote however, I vote for the things I find desirable and people I find honnorable.
I don't have well adjusted opinions on what the ideal society would look like for the average person.
For example, you're assuming that tolerating homosexuality is what society desires. While I agree with you that this should be what society desires because I don't see any real harm to homosexuality, the same could also be true of other things which you may not be in favour of.
I asked here recently what is wrong with teenage pregnancy and why are people so mean to those who want to be teenage mums? You could argue it's not in the child's best interest, but then neither is having poor parents or two dads. You could argue that the teen should have a chance at an education and career, but you could argue family is equally if not more important.
This is the problem with my extreme tolerance. I'm tolerant of things that 99.9% of people here would find problematic. Even on the gay-rights issue I question if the state should be allow enforce tolerance towards gay people with force. It seems intolerant to use force on business owner who morally disagrees with homosexuality and doesn't want to serve those they see as "evil". And while I could come up with arguments why we should use state force here I'm too tolerant of both positions to form a strong opinion on it myself. So I suppose my default position here would be closer to "let individuals discriminate against individuals" rather than the state taking either side.
I have too many anti-social views to be feel confident that me voting would be in the best interest of society. I'll argue in favour of homosexuality, but I'm not willing to vote and attempt to make the state force my views on others.
Your opinions are perfectly valid, even if I might disagree - my belief firmly is that the world gets better with more participation - not less.
Particularly here in the states, if we could get 90% of the voters who show up for the general to show up in the primary, the results of elections would look different in general.
Even as a gay person, I'm generally anti-authoritarian to an extreme - I dont think you can legislate politeness or ethics, that said, my belief, quite firmly is if you're operating any kind of public accommodation, you waive certain rights by doing so. I cant dictate to individuals that they accept me, I can reasonably dictate that they tolerate my presence in the public sphere.
What this works out to is in my eyes if people operate a facility where the general public might dwell, sell to the general public, or employ people outside of close family, they have to follow some modicum of equality. If people dont want to do that, they dont have to do those things. I'll note that leads whole kinds of self employment wide open to folks too.
Rights are not absolutes either those to demand tolerance or to be intolerant, much of whats wrong with the states is people treating all rights as absolutes.
to expand on what you say: there is no outgroup. there can't be an outgroup. we are all part of a community and we need to learn to get along with everyone in that community. even criminals. they need of course be appropriately punished and maybe put under surveillance to protect others, but they also need a chance at rehabilitation, and that can't happen if we place them in an outgroup. the same goes for everyone else who we think is harmful to others. we need to work with these people, and help them find their place.
what bothers me most is when groups who claim that they want to build a new society then go and exclude people they don't like or that don't like them. that was the trouble with communism for example. a social philosophy that wants to reach everyone must be able to integrate people that reject the philosophy itself. if it can't then it is not suitable for any community to adopt.
i am not sure if my trail of thought here makes sense, but the conclusion seems to be that any general social philosophy must be built on tolerance and openness and work to eliminate discrimination. anything else will result in tyranny against those that don't fit in.
or to put it differently, if we allow for anyone to be excluded from a community, that means we allow for someone to be socially isolated, which is a punishment that noone should have to suffer permanently.
Your categories of friends are pretty basic. I’m sure if you tried to categorize them as say “honest” aka “courage to share opinions” they’d all fit in one category.
That may be true for you but I don’t think it generalizes to all autistic people. Anecdotally in US leftwing (like actually left not Democrat) political groups it’s very common for the most involved people to be 1. on the spectrum 2. have strong outgroups (eg basically every ML group hates other ML groups) even to the point of it including people nominally in agreement on 99.9% of issues 3. are willing to purity spiral and reject anybody in their outgroup.
You shouldn’t generalize about autistics on almost any topic, because they have a much wider range of behavior than the set of all neurotypical behaviors.
Without negating the observation of timelessness, it jumped out at me how Russell Brand is now on the “conservative” end of the spectrum (both how he is painted by media, as well as revealed by polls of his audience on a variety of topics), all without a drastic change in his own beliefs/philosophy.
It's not surprising that he gets painted as conservative when he promotes Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson while spreading conspiracy theories about Fauci, Obama, Biden etc.
I would classify Brand more as counter-culture liberal than a conservative. He’s still very much a liberal in terms of his views, he just hasnt reduced himself to partisan tribalism. Im sure I disagree with him on many things and from different directions but I think its commendable that he doesnt subscribe to a mold.
I would qualify Russel Brand as a contrarian. And, in my (perhaps personal consistency) defence, I never liked Russel Brand, he always seemed to "hippy" and not at pragmatic enough for my liking.
Perhaps his views haven't changed but he's definitely broadcasting different a different set since 2020. He's not particularly right wing but he's definitely most palatable to the Conservative in the American Republican sense for a reason.
I think it's because his bread and butter content moved from socialist philosophy to rugged individualism and anti-vaxxer rhetoric.
Not that I particularly blame him, it's probably a fairly easy trade-up now in 2023. Why would he retain his smaller collectivist left wing audience, given he's managed a 2700% increase in online viewership by talking about vaccine mandates and how to circumvent them?
Agreed. However I do give Maher a lot of credit for not being afraid to call out his tribe’s occasional ridiculous hypocrisy. Maybe one only feels that confident as they age and have attained wealth. When you have more to lose (your livelihood) you are going to be more careful with your words and objections.
That said I’ve watched Maher for 15 years and look forward to his show coming back after the strike. I say this as someone who probably disagrees with more than half of his hot-takes.
I saw his stand up at DPAC a few months ago and loved it. He is a funny guy and very entertaining.
A north carolina segregationist who graduated college in say 1940 saw their political stance go from moderate & mainstream to fringe in their own lifetime. The fact that social-political culture norms shift isn't a very interesting or useful statement about the people it shifts around.
Maybe not when it shifts in a lifetime, but I beg to differ when it shifts in less than 10 years. It was also not meant to be an interesting statement about the person, rather the shift itself.
The rest of that sentence is important don't cut it out! It's not an interesting observation about the individuals; it certainly is about the cultures though.
Sociologists and historians both spend tremendous amounts of time on this, some devote their enter careers to small facets of this single dynamic.
Timeless, yes. But I must have first read it in 2016 because the example I have in my mind are the people who cheered Justice Antonin Scalia’s death but questioned the instinct to cheer the death of Osama Bin Laden.
I think there were a lot of people that cheered the deaths of both, myself included.
I don't know anybody that didn't cheer the death of OBL actually. I did see some morons on Twitter/X try though, but they were pretty fringe even among the left.
The main reaction to Osama's death I remember was disappointment. Disappointment in the weakness of the US. Disappointment that they didn't even pretend to be on the right side of history. Disappointment that they just killed Osama rather than capturing him and having him face justice, like Israel did for Eichmann. Disappointment that Obama acted like Putin, while Bush at least managed to capture Saddam.
I find your idea that capture was impossible bizarre. It would certainly have been difficult, and it could also have been unlikely to succeed. But the fact that capture was not even attempted turned the operation into a show of weakness.
Many governments assassinate undesirable people around the world. It doesn't take that much effort. Capturing them alive and bringing them home is much more effective as a show of strength. And having them face a public trial can be an effective way of demonstrating that your actions were justified.
In the "war on terror", the US set up large-scale torture programs and killed millions of innocent people, all based on lies and blind hatred. I will cheer no part of that bloodbath. bin Laden was horrible. We were no better.
If you want to celebrate bin Laden's death while burning an American flag, be my guest. But don't celebrate it while waving one.
> So when members of the Blue Tribe decide to dedicate their entire life to yelling about how terrible the Red Tribe is, they make sure that instead of saying “the Red Tribe”, they say “America”, or “white people”, or “straight white men”.
Right there, a triple sommersault on water skis, using a shark's back as a ramp.
While some liberals who preach tolerance and inclusivity may be closet racist and hate that about themselves, they are not literally performing the above substitution.
E.g. if a thought like following crosses their mind, they won't fill "white people" into the blank:
"I won't walk through an inner-city neighborhood because of all the scary ___________ who live there."
A broader definition of blue vs red that generalises to other western counties would be pro globalisation (eg pro immigration, free trade) vs pro national/local focus (eg pro self reliance).
Isn't globalization and free trade questioned a lot even in the blue tribe today, what with sanctions against russia and china, with self reliance like producing your own chips, being highly priced, worth billions in subsidies?
Globalization and free trade should be completely rejected by left-leaning people. I guess unless imports coming from countries where human rights an economic externality are either taxed to death or banned.
Globalization is indeed unpopular with those who lean left economically. Because it means more opportunity for exploitation of workers, mostly. It's capitalists who like it (which tend to be center to right economically).
Both the GOP and Democrat parties are, in practice, dominated by free-trade liberal interventionist capitalists. The actual policy differences between the parties around those subjects are basically a matter of finetuning.
I don’t think it is possible to come up with a definition of “blue vs red” that generalizes to other countries.
The fact that our left wing movement in the US is so tiny that it somehow got gobbled up into our liberal party makes it very difficult to compare to other countries.
"Vote blue no matter who" attitudes can be thanked for this. People have been scared into never taking a 3rd party seriously. The Republicans are unthinkably bad so it is too risky to split the vote on the left. The only option is the Democrats. Corporations simply migrated their lobbying efforts slightly further over to the left side of Congress during the Obama admin. With strategically placed Senators like Gilibrand for Wall Street and Manchin for the coal/energy industry the corporate oligarchy has pretty good control over things now, the actual political desires of the electorate be damned. Notice how the democrats are politically leading the war/defense efforts now as well, something that used to be a more conservative aim.
People aren't scared into not taking 3rd parties seriously, our system is just fundamentally designed to only have two realistic parties. It's just inherent in a first past the post system.
Yeah, fix the voting system to allow ranked choices and you'll find third parties doing a lot better. Until that voting third parties is sadly irrational until one of the top two parties becomes dominant, at which point switching out the party in second becomes potentially feasible.
The UK uses FPTP and has at least three major parties in Parliament (Lab, Con, SNP) and in the past Lib Dems were big enough to enter into coalition. There are also smaller parties in the Parliament too, like the Greens and sometimes independent candidates.
The reason the US only has two parties is because those parties are sufficiently loose and internally democratic enough that there's no need to start a third party, when you can come in as an outsider and take over one of the existing ones. Parties in the UK exercise much tighter control over who can lead them, and so there's more pressure to set up alternatives. If the US big tent parties worked the same way you'd have more than two parties as well.
I think we could more comfortably vote for a third option if failing to elect the least bad of two did not result in using women as medical equipment and insurrection against the federal government.
Classic sacrifice everything to gain nothing take from a leftist. Third parties can not work in our country with the way elections are designed. You are advocating for wasting your own time
David Goodhart would break it down to "Somewheres” and “Anywheres”
The Somewheres attribute a large part of their identities to their place of origin or local communities and are less likely to move. The Anywheres, on the other hand, form an identity based on their life experiences rather than a place of origin; they are a highly mobile population usually congregated in large urban cities like New York, London, or Tokyo.
David talks about this in the context of Brexit, but it is a split everywhere
I disagree. You're talking about neoliberal versus xenophobic conservative but even then, mainstream conservative politicians love free markets spoitting cheap labor and illegal immigration.
And then you have a particular left wing contingent that understands the issues with unlimited export of labor to lower income countries, which is why unions and some left-wing politicians opposed NAFTA and the trans-pacific partnership.
Trump might be the only Republican leader in recent history to explicitly desire a crackdown on global supply chains.
> You're talking about neoliberal versus xenophobic conservative
I dont think you are even attempting to be fair towards critics of globalism. This sounds like cheerleading and makes me think you’ve never thought through the dynamics of globalism.
It looks like you didn't read my second paragraph.
My point is that few if any Republicans want to do anything about the labor impacts if globalism, until signing onto chip factory subsidies.
(Well, that and domestic oil production, which contributes to destroying the goddamn planet. But I get the idea that if we're gonna burn it we might as well burn ours. Unless we're playing a long game of exhausting global supplies and sitting on a rarer resource.)
Yes, conservative voters are probably more sympathetic to domestic production, but so are progressives in some instances. Cheap foreign factories and illegal immigration drags down wages and weakens unions.
You can demand domestic companies and importers document and attest to domestic standards of living and welfare (health plans, etc). You can tariff items which are made by slave/subpoverty labor. You can subsidize critical industries.
Or, if the concerns are less about "how bad things are there" and more "what about jobs here", we could be spinning up more government jobs programs, more free college, more welfare here so that it doesn't matter if we lose textiles or manufacturing.
>You can tariff items which are made by slave/subpoverty labor
What are 'normal', middle-class wages in developing countries are 'extremely cheap' by US standards. You can't really solve that problem unless you tariff literally everything.
Subsidizing critical industries- sure, I guess. What's the definition of that? Does it include cars? Clothing and shoes? Appliances? Vacuum cleaners? I don't think anyone's disputing that like military goods need to manufactured domestically, but kind of by definition 95% of goods are not 'critical'
Sure you can, that's a matter of foreign policy change or, as someone else pointed out, import tax hikes and export bans (on e.g. chip technology, but also up until a few decades ago, encryption technology)
This essay falls into the same trap I see among a lot of my liberal (as opposed to socialist) peers: it assumes tolerance is something admirable, desirable, or fundamentally good. That's how you fall into the "tolerance of intolerance" paradoxical rabbit hole, and IMO, it's largely performative.
My stance on the subject, in contrast, is that tolerance isn't good enough. I'm not "tolerant" of gay people, as that suggests that their sexual orientation should disqualify them from my in-group, but that I would tolerate them anyway. No, I just don't see sexual orientation as a qualification for my peer group. Same goes for any other immutable characteristic of someone's existence. People, tabula rasa, are people, and that qualifies them for my respect.
But of course, people by the time I'm interacting with them are not blank slates. They have opinions, stances, and world views that they have acquired and incorporated into their identities, which they then act on to form histories. These perfectly mutable facets of their existence are entirely open to judgement. I'm tolerant of the merely tolerant, not because it's some unqualified good, but because it's just not bad enough to warrant exclusion from my inclusive-by-default in-group. People willing to openly state their bigotry towards people I consider my peers disqualify themselves from my respect. People willing to act on those bigoted beliefs cross the line into "evil".
In my opinion, this forms a far more consistent world view compared to the "tolerance is an unqualified good" stance.
> The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”
> Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.
> The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.
> Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”
> The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”
> And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”
My point was that you gain no merit for tolerating them even if you did have something against them. Tolerance is not a virtue. There is virtue in having nothing against as many people as you can.
Sorry to keep quoting parts of the essay in here, but I think the essay puts it better than I would:
> To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.
> I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.
While I get the rest of it, I don't follow on using immutability as the test of what you are non-judgmental towards. People can have immutable qualities that are completely incompatible with any form of social contract. I'm thinking violent behavior attributed to various mental disorders. Disorder being applied not as a judgment, but simply to indicate it doesn't allow them to have what they consider a fulfilling life, what with the rest of us commiting them involuntarily. There may or may not be medications or treatments that might modify those situations. If there are, then we are asking them to modify their natural state to be accepted. I think in that specific case and perhaps others it is reasonable of me to demand that of my in-group. I don't want to get stabbed because they were instructed by a command delusion. I know the medicine and treatments are not ideal. And if they fail to comply with treatment, or it doesn't work, I reserve the right to judge them for their nature.
The parallels for orientation are clearly there, and given enough clockwork orange type abuse, I'm sure you could make me attracted or repelled by just about anything, but I don't choose to judge people with sexual orientations that differ from mine, not because it is their immutable state, but because there are no valid arguments for it harming me or society at large. Population seems to be managing itself. If it was runaway, I might judge people who engaged in behavior that might add to the population, and if there was barely a breeding population of us left, I might judge those who didn't.
Some will argue that "bigotry" has suffered from concept creep though. People will readily call me one for saying I believe gender is immutable or that I believe intercourse with the same gender is a sin, but I'm not wishing any harm to those who disagree.
You are entitled to your beliefs, and I don't think that you're engaging in bigotry in this discussion, but I would consider it bigotry if you expressed those same beliefs as part of an argument that gay people should not have equal legal or financial protections.
(Clarifying, because you brought up disrespect, that I don’t believe in disrespecting them for their beliefs; they are just humans like you and me with their own struggles.)
I don’t use the word “bigot” because of the flimsy usage I’ve observed from others. Enough people use it to mean express anger/dislike (like how someone uses “ouch” to express pain) that I don’t associate it with semantic content.
I didn’t bring it up, it was a quote from the article that was being discussed upthread.
I don’t believe in disrespecting anyone because of their beliefs prima facie. It’s how they react to those beliefs being challenged that I find myself losing respect for them over.
It’s like the difference between “suffer the little children, for they know not what they do” and “ whoever hardens their heart falls into trouble”.
Now I can’t speak for the article’s author or the other replies above us, but to me that is the kind of bigotry I have problems with.
In my experience, people who hold beliefs like “black people innately are more criminal” react more immaturely to discussion than people discussing the underpinnings of astrophysics do.
Also note that my spectrum for respect is orthogonal to my spectrum for love/hate. Just because I don’t respect someone due to their beliefs doesn’t necessarily mean I hate them or think they are evil. But I’m less likely to be influenced by their opinions in the future, or to even give them the time to listen to what their opinions are on other things.
Let's define our terms. Bigot:Extreme intolerance of the beliefs and opinions of an individual or group, particularly racial or religious.
You can be extremely intolerant from either direction. A college which refuses to hire Republican professor's is acting bigoted. Programs which exclude on the basis of race like a Black Leadership Summit are acting bigoted, and in so far as they say people of other races need not apply they are openly expressing bigotry.
That's crossing the threshold from a difference in opinion to a difference of morality. You can talk about someone about a disagreement, like who is going to do the vacuuming on mondays, but it's a lot more involved and much more higher stakes to talk about who gets to live.
Bigotry is prejudice, as in, judgement without (yet) having facts, or even in spite of them. That's not simple disagreement, it's willful and obstinate ignorance. I agree it's not worthy of respect.
You could have saved a lot of words by just writing "there are good people and bad people, and I, of course, am one of the good people." Have you really never considered the implications of the fact that your bad people also think they are the good people?
Other people believing in different ethical frameworks only matters if you think other people can't be wrong. I fully acknowledge that just about everybody says that they aren't evil. Yet there are still plenty of people doing evil things.
That leaves three possibilities: Either people are lying about thinking their actions are good (I like to think this is rare, as I have a generally positive view of people), I'm wrong about what is good and what is evil, or they're wrong about what is good and what is evil.
I like to think that the fact that my beliefs are based on an axiomatic framework of suffering bad, free will good, and innocence by default makes them more likely to be correct than a knee-jerk disgust response of "gay people are icky", but maybe I'm biased.
Regardless, between the latter two possibilities, in terms of praxis there is little difference. When two people hold fundamentally contradictory axiomatic beliefs, I fully expect both the fight to protect them and theirs. I don't fault them for choosing to fight. I fault them for the beliefs they're fighting for.
I think the point being made is that there is a limit to tolerance and what might be called multicultural or post modernism. I took the original comments point to be: all humans deserve respect intrinsically, but evil does exist and should not be tolerated. Yes, evil doers think they’re good. Is there a way to objectively judge this? No. This is the classical liberal dilemma re military action.
Let’s be tolerant of everyone except those who belong to groups explicitly making the world worse. Is that a subjective measure? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn’t, to use a modern phrase, “punch Nazis”? No, punch away.
Everyone has the moral authority and responsibility to act to reduce suffering.
If everyone has the moral authority, then you realize that your enemies think the same way, right? And you realize that you have just given them license to punch you too, right?
How can you believe that other people can err in their judgement of themselves and others and at the same time assume that you are immune to the same error? It's completely ridiculous.
Oh but that's the entire point! I do not assume I'm immune to the same error - in fact introspecting on this continuously is absolutely vital.
What I'm arguing against is inaction in the face of uncertainty.
The phrase "punch nazis" polluted my point. Violence against the violent is justifiable. Yes, my enemies can think the same way; this is why armed conflict exists in our world, and why being blanket "anti-war" or "anti-violence" for that matter is unfortunately naive.
Alright. Imagine a non-violent Nazi. They're not punching anyone.
Your natural move is to claim (their) speech as harmful. This inevitably descends into "My violence is merely political speech, but their political speech is violence," inverting the meaning of things.
A Nazi who believes in and practices non-violence isn't actually a Nazi. Their entire ideology (or whatever you want to call it, it isn't actually logically consistent enough to be honestly called one) is based around a violent struggle for power and racial supremacy.
They might, however, be a 'useful idiot'. Which, in its original definition, is a person propagandizing for a bad cause, originating from a devious, ruthless source, without comprehending the cause's goals.
Sadly, there's no shortage of those people in mainstream discourse.
You can't be a non-violent Nazi, violence and the idea that racial groups are constantly at war with each other is an inherent part of the ideology. There is at best a Nazi who due to the circumstances around them is not choosing to engage in violence yet.
You know the funny thing about those terrorist violence stats is that a lot of them seemed to cut off around 1974. I noticed that a few years ago. Then I did some digging and it turns out that the cutoff just magically happens to be "just right" for excluding a lot of far-left Weather Underground bombings.
The thumb has been on the scale to discount violence like the Berkley Bike Lock basher. Or, wasn't there a right wing figure punched, sans provocation, right there on video, and the judge threw that one out? I don't track those guys so I don't recall the name, but I do recall the outcome.
The cutoff for the article i linked is 2001, not 1974. It is also of killings so wouldn't include the Weather Underground anyway, neither would the other examples you give. I also don't think it is particularly relevant if far left violence was higher in 1973 because that was 50 years ago and lots of things have changed.
The fact of the matter is that today the far right commits much much higher levels of violence then the far left, if you have specific statistics that are different from that, not just some random anecdotes, please supply them.
this seems more like questioning whether or not some people have been mislabeled as X rather than whether or not violence against violence is understandable/forgivable.
This is a braindead, Hannah Arendt-level take. Not all violence is made equal. Offensive violence and defensive violence are different. Defense of the innocent is an uncontroversial good thing. Nazism advocates violence against the innocent. That makes violence against Nazis defensive in nature. Which makes violence against Nazis a good thing. Nazism has no such justification for its violence against the innocent. That makes the Nazis rounding up minorities and exterminating them offensive violence, and in case it needs to be said, a bad thing.
Nothing feels as self-justified as pre-emptive revenge. They might hurt us, I know this in my heart, so I must destroy them first.
Of course, you are the one who gets to define who is innocent, yes? That they are defending their innocent children against your influence means nothing. "I think those people want to subject my children to medically unneeded procedures, maybe sterilize them. I am defending the innocent. Therefore ..."
I think your approach lacks humility, allowance for genuine disagreement, and the general principle of not attacking first.
But Nazis want to murder me, like it's a central part of their ideology and they murdered millions of people when they were in power. You are the one who lacks humility because you want to take an ideal and apply it to the most extreme examples in the real world instead of accepting that their are some ideologies that can't be engaged in that way.
That sounds good, but then remember that someone will point a finger at some political figure and refer to them as a Nazi. Are they? Is the finger enough? Are you looking at the finger and not seeing the person?
My basic point is that when you combine two very popular flavors of the day ("punch/kill Nazis" and "that person is a Nazi"), you get a recipe for more or less random bloodshed based on little more than conjecture. It's like the Satanic Panic of the 1990s all over again, driven more by self-righteous bloodthirst than reaction to anything anyone has actually done.
You said "Imagine a non-violent Nazi", you asked about a hypothetical where someone was a Nazi, now you're trying to change the conversation about "Imagine a person who may or may not be a Nazi" which is a very different conversation and trying to act like I answered the second instead of the first.
Absolutely not. You're missing a very real situation, and that situation is "That guy's a Nazi."
You hear it over and over. This person is a fascist, that person is a Nazi. Go head, hit Google, search for (and use quotes) something like "Donald Trump is a Nazi." You'll find thousands of results returned. So, can we just go be violent at someone because someone else says "They're a Nazi"? That's what I'm talking about. You have a person, you haven't seen them do anything, they haven't done anything to you, but Rick says "He's a Nazi," so do we go punch them on Rick's word?
I keep hammering on this because we have people feeling fully justified in physically attacking others who haven't physically attacked anyone else (non-violent), but someone has ascribed Nazi to them. This isn't just a hypothetical, take that bike lock basher guy. He struck seven people on the head with a bike lock. (Interestingly, at least one of them was friendly fire.)
Now, you won't get anyone to call that left-wing terrorism, for some odd reason, and the guy completely skated. So we have these non-violent people just standing there, someone thinks "that person is a Nazi," and attacks them. That's my non-violent Nazi. Are they actually fondling an Iron Cross at home? Doing a little seig heil before bed? We don't know, and we generally will never know.
And I focus on that because, let's be honest, there's almost no actual Nazis. Probably some elderly "were Hitler Youth" hanging out in Brazil, but aside from that, it's just really sloppy slang, and I've had to hang with some people who will gleefully refer to anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as a fascist Nazi.
I fully expect my enemies to do worse than punch me. The purpose of having a coherent philosophy is understanding who I have irreconcilable differences with (such as Nazis) and deciding whether the appropriate course of action is to ignore them or to fight them. In the case of Nazis, they pose a substantial threat to innocents, so the correct answer is to fight them.
I punch Nazis. The people I punch are Nazis. Anyone I punch is definitionally a Nazi, regardless of what they state their beliefs are. Even if they do happen to be wearing a Bernie Sanders shirt while I'm smacking them with a megaphone.
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The problem with the idea of "punch Nazis" is that it's really, really easy to go from "I punch people because they are Nazis", to "I punch people, therefore they are Nazis". This is made worse when "Nazi" and "fascist" are general epithets thrown by the left at anyone to their right.
Pre-emptive self-defense is valid. You don't have to wait for them to swing their fist into your nose. But imminence requires imminence. You do have to wait for them to be squared up and about to swing. You can't just sucker punch them from the back.
I agree and boy I wish I had not used that phrase. Ideally the other words surrounding that phrase shows that yes, I agree completely.
Just because there is no objective way to measure evil does not mean one shouldn’t attempt to fight it when one can. No, I don’t punch my political opponents.
Nazis are not monsters, they're people just like you. Their existence does not cause suffering per se, and punching a Nazi does not reduce suffering, it increases it. If you think a particular worldview is inherently evil you're not going to eradicate it by dehumanizing those who adhere to it and advocating for violence against them. The only way to achieve that is to get them to understand that they're wrong, and to do that you need to engage with them as human beings.
Needless to say, tolerating Nazis does not mean tolerating all actions inspired by Nazism.
> Nazis are not monsters, they're people just like you.
No, actually, they are monsters. Just like Jeffrey Dahmer was a monster. Pointing out that he is not that different from me is an utterly absurd equivocation.
> Their existence does not cause suffering per se
Their existence as some kind of side-effect-free theoretical-spherical-cow, no. The things they do that make them nazis, as opposed to some other group of people, like, say, a knitting club, yes.
If you choose to uphold an ideology, then you are taking responsibility for its consequences. Nazism is inherently violent, so resisting it is merely defending the innocent. After that it boils down to tactics: Punching a Nazi is a somewhat ineffective strategy, but it does tend to drive them out of the public sphere where they can gain legitimacy and the power to enact their evil. More permanent solutions are better.
"you're not going to eradicate it by dehumanizing those who adhere to it and advocating for violence against them. The only way to achieve that is to get them to understand that they're wrong"
I think you need to read a history book on WW2, because that is definitely not what happened to get rid of Nazism.
Or "Neo-Nazi Marine Plotted Mass Murder, Rape Campaigns with Group, Feds Say
While tasked with protecting the nation, Matthew Belanger was plotting a killing spree against minorities and to rape “white women to increase the production of white children,” according to federal prosecutors"
Weird that you apparently feel compelled to downplay the threat.
Um, yeah, okay, there is a crazy dude who was engaged in violent asshole behavior. I don't see how it's helpful to get all outraged and apply Nazi labels.
There's a few holes in that. First, you've got sexual orientation as an immutable characteristic. From some queer people I know saying that they had experiences which changed their mind or that there was some choice (that "lived experience" people go on about, as well as some of my own) to the quite obvious political stratagem of saying someone was "born that way" as a way to deflect blame (which never really held much water; a group willing to accept Original Sin as a concept would find Born That Way to be little more than a speedbump).
And then you bring in tabula rasa, which itself contradicts "born that way." But sure, let's just ignore that paradox. Can we think of other born characteristics we might not find appealing? Quite a lot of personality disorders appear to arise from genetics, and yet you might find someone with Borderline Personality Disorder less than optimal company. Must you tolerate that?
Consistency, if anything, is a poor metric when it comes to anything as complex as people. "Destroy anyone not of my ethnic group" is consistent and simple. Do not fall in love with either.
If anything, the concept of tolerance itself is a trap, creating dividing lines everywhere. Worse yet, it allows someone to feel "just." This is perhaps one of the more dangerous emotions one can experience and consider as moral. A person who thinks of themselves as just is "justfied." Examine the words associated with "justified," even the television show. Consider the history of those who thought of themselves as justified. I feel just, I may then relent on my self-examination. It's a way to sidestep the endless labor of wondering, "Am I doing something right?" Observing, thinking, considering: these are all weights that humans quite naturally want to put down.
How easy, how self-satisfying it is to say "Punch that Nazi!" And of course you first must judge that person to be a Nazi, but even before that you're twiddling your definitions, making them expansive enough to pin that label on someone, all for the simple joy of feeling like it is okay to hit someone, that they are evil and deserving. The ecstasy of self-righteousness ought to be Schedule I.
Give me uncertainty and doubt. Dispel that self-assurance. Going around deciding whom to tolerate invites judgment, as if one were all-knowing and infallible. We are not.
Sexual orientation being immutable or not really isn't that big a deal. Not hating people because of their immutable characteristics was chosen as relatively uncontroversial manifestation of my axiomatic belief of innocence by default. People are good, unless they do something bad. Probably should have phrased it as the more accurate "non-harmful" characteristics, in hindsight.
Once your philosophy is consistent, there's little room for philosophical debate. Faced with someone with the philosophy of "Destroy anyone not of my ethnic group", the course of action isn't to debate philosophy with them. It's to shoot them. That's why it's important to have a consistent ideology: So you know when the time for words has ended. At that point, "Punch that Nazi" is a good start.
So, if you have two individuals or groups with self-consistent philosophies that are not congruent to one another, you auto-default to violence?
I am remembering that Jane Elliot experiment with kids, blue eyes vs. brown eyes. If the brown-eyed kids think they are the best, and the blue-eyed kids think they are the best, the time for words has ended. Let's start the slaughter.
Most of the time the two groups can just ignore each other. That's fine. The violence came from the fact that the offensively violent ideology (the "Destroy all other ethnic groups" one, to be clear) attacked people my ideology sees as being in our in-group (approximately everyone who's not trying commit violence upon other people at random), justifying defensive violence in response.
If half the class thinks blue eyes are superior, and the other half think brown eyes are superior, but no one's attacking each other and no one's oppressing each other, then there's no conflict. It's still not going to useful to sit around and argue philosophy.
I'm less concerned with wasting time arguing philosophy -- which I tend to find a bit of a dead end anyway -- and more concerned with pre-emptive violence.
"Rick is threatening me." "Rick holds beliefs which might eventually threaten me." "Rick holds beliefs that might eventually threaten someone in a group I care about." "My interpretation of the beliefs I think Rick holds might eventually threaten someone in a group I care about." "I heard something about Rick's group memberships and my interpretation of the beliefs I think those groups hold might eventually threaten someone in a group I care about." And on.
You just described yourself as tolerant. Tolerance in this context isn't the casual use, rather it means that you don't treat people differently for those immutable characteristics, however you get there.
I don't think I agree with tolerance being performative. I currently live in the Midwest and deal with many people who do foul things because of their intolerance. People here disown gay sons and daughters, then try to commiserate with me about how hard their life is when they fucked someone's life who wasn't hurting anyone. These people are clearly intolerant in the way these "performative" liberals want to end societally.
Signaling to others, via things like pride flags, indicates that in some context, they will be "tolerated". For being black or gay, at PayPal offices you won't be attacked, fired, denied financial services, but at Farm Credit you very will might be. Simply waving flags is imperfect, but some signal is better than none, I had to work at farm credit to see the racism first hand (and quit because of it). While my peers at PayPal have mechanisms to defend themselves and their peers from issues around this even thought it is imperfect.
The essay above was all about how there's no virtue in tolerating those that you have no issue with. That requires that a given individuals belief system includes two overlapping sets of people, between those that you have no issue with, and those that you treat with basic dignity. The difference between those two sets are the people you merely tolerate.
