Hacker News Reader

> The guiding principle should be stop being an asshole. Instead, the SJW crowd resorts to yelling about "tone policing" and drives away people who would normally be allies.

> Here's some food for thought. The black civil rights movement in the 60s and the gay rights movement today have enjoyed a lot of success because they emphasized their status as normal people. As soon as you get the kooks who excoriate people for any slight deviation from the One True Faith, you end up failing miserably.

I've started to sympathize with Dr. Kaczynski's view of leftism being some ego-driven movement meant to satisfy one group's desire for power. He puts it bluntly:

> Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.

As it is with SJW's trying to "help" groups they believe to be marginalized.

> Sure. But I think that a lot of people hold various opinions because they just haven't thought about it too hard. They've just gone along with whatever they've been taught from childhood, and they're just kind of parroting their indoctrination. That doesn't make them bad.

It's funny you say this because I was discussing the exact same thing with a friend today. There's some views I have where previously I have been incredulous that anyone could support the opposite view -- "How can anyone possibly support something so horrible and wrong?" But then I think, is 50% of the population really be evil? No, of course not. That's ridiculous. I think most people have good intentions with what they believe, and if they have the opposite viewpoint on something that is important to you, it's not the case that they're evil people who just don't care about morality; it's far more likely that they truly think their viewpoint is moral and just.

I think that this is a great point. It's far too common for people to think, "John is completely opposed to my beliefs. He's definitely not stupid, as I know from other conversations with him that he's thoughtful and sincere. Well, that leaves one option - he's a bad person."

Often, this results from taking the bad intentions of certain people who believe such things and applying them to the whole.

"You're for / against X program. There are people who are for / against X program because they have an immoral ulterior motive. Therefore, you have that ulterior motive too!"

This naturally leads to fingerpointing and yelling.

> if you hold uninformed / ignorant / bigoted opinions, you are automatically an evil person and should be treated accordingly

One could argue that such an opinion is in fact short-sighted and bigoted...

I rather like this entry that goes into this 'paradox', and the concept in general: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration