I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
> 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.
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.
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.
If you took San Fran and Chicago, metro Detroit, Minneapolis, they would probably be similar.
There's no great way to know the "real" rate of creationists, when apparently people change their stated beliefs for social reasons.
> 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.
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.
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.
Does having an NRA sticker on your pickup's bumper count? I see those all the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which is deliciously ironic considering how much non-theists enjoy mocking theists "for their 'irrational' thinking".
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology_of_Jehovah%27s_Wit...
In fact, consistency is their major weak point.
Heck, it's such a popular idea that techies have reinvented it by saying we live in a simulation, which obviously implies one or more creators.
> 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.
Others are quite far from that.
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.
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'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.
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.
Society is indeed a lot more diverse than 'mainstream' or 'normal' people assume.
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.
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.
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.
I've got a take that's a bit of a hot take, but experiencies like yours make more sure about it.
I don't think _any_ of the flat-earthers actually believes it. They're just there for the attention/lulz.
Check out this thread - https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=92...
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.
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.
One thing that stood out to me:
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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).
See e.g.: https://source.wustl.edu/2021/08/cultural-backlash-is-lgbtq-...
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a non-hypothetical because I have heard this exact argument advanced without irony.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's worth mentioning you can take punitive, intervening and/or remedial action against someone and still be respectful.
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.
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.
Enough of them believe that to pass draconian health laws that are causing the death of women: https://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-abortion-ban-do...
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?
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.
Nuance is important and if you want to say BLM and jan 6 are the same you are severely lacking it.
It sounds like allegiance is more important than deeds. Ingroup, outgroup.
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.)
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.
EDIT: the only policemen dead was 1 from natural causes (a stroke, 2 protesters died the same way), and 4 suicides long after the riots. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/how-many-died-as-a-result-... . This is your violent revolution?
There are countries in the world where being an atheist or being raped is punishable by death and plenty of people there cheer on.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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.
Incorrect. I'm strongly disagreeing with the core point of what you're trying to say.
> I literally could not care less what you choose.
Therein lies the problem. Your definitions are meaningless if you have no concern (aka tolerance) for how they'll be received.
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.
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.
you're bad at it tho
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.
Do you also think donating money to the Taliban counts as merely bad-think, or is that limited to when the cause is homophobic only?
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725150 - Jan 2021 (44 comments)
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183001 - June 2019 (169 comments)
I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946217 - Jan 2019 (1 comment)
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13248993 - Dec 2016 (2 comments)
I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948575 - July 2015 (9 comments)
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?
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.
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.
They're told to vote blue or they ain't black
> 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.
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.
I have heard this exact phrase (well without the euphemism) come out of many people's mouth in the Midwest.
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.
I think it's completely uncontroversial to say that usage of the word always has a racial component.
Which statements with racial components are also racist is not a discussion that I believe can be usefully debated on a forum like HN.
Yes, but a default association that those with a certain race are likely to have a certain class is racist.
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.
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?
1. "I don't hate people because of their race, I hate them because of their culture."
2. Subtextually, "I think people of a certain race are so likely to have a certain culture I hate that I have a word for it."
Arguably, the first point is not racist. The second point, which is not stated but is certainly understood by both speaker and listener, clearly is.
If you didn't grow up in the area, the second point might not be obvious as a dogwhistle, but it's definitely there.
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.
5. We think growth is sustainable.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
[1] beliefs I do not subscribe to, by the way
Anyway, your pool analogy is great! It's just frustrating that people even need it. =/
So in the end, all the clammering about tolerance is fake - it’s just a political weapon used to silence opponents.
"Republicans are bad because of January 6th! They are anti-democratic!"
"Democrats are bad because they support riots!"
Or one of those hideous "we believe in..." yard signs you see in NIMBY areas, that's another dead giveaway
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.
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.
This isn't new btw, it's as old as the internet, probably much older (think Diogenes).
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.
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.
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.
funny you should say that, i just had a similar argument over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37391008
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
or the sibling comment to this could be likely as well, he’s just a grifter.
It's a fascinating fact people should dwell on more imo. Understanding how moral fashions change and why would be great.
Sociologists and historians both spend tremendous amounts of time on this, some devote their enter careers to small facets of this single dynamic.
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.
Do you have some specific examples? I see clickbait thumbnails, but the contents are, generally, well cited.
Liking some things people do or say doesn't mean you completely agree with them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The only thing Scott Alexander seems to not tolerate is an editor.
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."
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.
This is more about the voters. But actually neither side of the aisle is completely enamored with immigration.
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.
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.
But you can't outlaw foreign competitors from being cheaper than you, any more than you can pass a law against the tide coming in tomorrow
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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not idealism, its pragmatism.
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.
And if you're advocating punching them, then violence is an inherent part of your ideology.
That's why they call it horseshoe theory.
Edit: And to be clear, Far Right groups are responsible for over half of the terrorist deaths in the US, with Jihadist groups being number 2: https://www.newamerica.org/future-security/reports/terrorism...
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Needless to say, tolerating Nazis does not mean tolerating all actions inspired by Nazism.
"Texas mall shooting: gunman expressed interest in neo-Nazi views – report"
Or the guy who shot up a dollar store
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.
...in brigade-level strength, that liberals have been rooting for for almost two years now. Shrug. Don't waste time explaining this to them.
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.
---
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.
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.
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 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 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!”
> 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.
That is to say, people with whom you disagree.
I just wanted to note the progression from "disqualify themselves from my respect" to "wishing harm".
What is your definition of bigotry?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No. This is terrible.
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.
"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.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2009/10/i-sense-a-malign-presence...
> This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
Please excuse a touch of extremely relevant self-promo. I am building a site to address exactly this. I'm calling it RedMeetBlue, pairing folks from the light and dark matter worlds for one-on-one chats. Link in profile. If you are interested in this experiment, or want to participate, I'd love to hear from you.
What does this phrase mean in this context? I may be misreading, but usually "light" and "dark" are euphemisms for "good" and "evil".
That was the meaning of that first bit from the article that OP quoted.
i had a good laugh-through-tears reading "Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia"
in this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
add-on: and "when time goes to the sea" reminded me of Peace on Earth of Stanislaw Lem, about unchecked technological evolution and where it leads to..
He is talking about utils and virtue points as philosophical constructs.
This entire essay went over your head.