5 ms·

That's how they justify it, but empirically it doesn't seem to be the case. E.g. liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than

That's how they justify it, but empirically it doesn't seem to be the case. E.g. liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than average conservatives. E.g. muslims are pretty strongly against homosexuals among other things. But they don't receive anywhere near the same level of hate and vitriol even moderate conservatives will get. I think it's just based on how much of a threat a group is. If conservatives were a tiny minority of the population like Muslims are, no one would care enough to hate them. >wants to deny a group of people to marry the person they love? Do I have to tolerate someone who wants to control a woman's body? This is super uncharitable btw. Imagine a conservative saying "why do I have to tolerate someone who literally wants to murder children?"

ThrowAwayFSp 9y ago
Where do you draw the "control a woman's body" line. Let's say a woman choose to abort on partial birth a healthy baby because she do not want it. Is a healthy 9 months gestation newborn part of the woman's body? You're spinning the argument and calling the other side "intolerant". You're part of the problem Altman is mentioning. Sad thing is that probably you are not aware of that.
- dang 9y ago
  This is off topic and we definitely don't need what will happen if we go there.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  Obviously, as you get closer to the edges of situations, you are going to run into differences of opinions. There is nuance, and I don't think you should dismiss people who disagree about the details of that nuance. However, no one is arguing for a woman to be able to abort a fully healthy baby at 9 months. That isn't an operation that happens, so it is a complete straw man to try to argue it.
smacktoward 9y ago
> liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than average conservatives. E.g. muslims are pretty strongly against homosexuals among other things. But they don't receive anywhere near the same level of hate and vitriol even moderate conservatives will get. This is because American Muslims are nowhere near powerful enough to write their prejudices into law, whereas conservatives control all three branches of the Federal government and 31 state legislatures (see https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_composition_of_state_houses https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_composition_of_state_houses). You will always find that people consider your opinions worthy of much closer scrutiny when you reach a position from which you can impose them on everybody else.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  I mentioned that theory in my comment. It doesn't explain everything though. A conservative in California has basically zero voting power and is vastly outnumbered by liberals. Ostracizing conservatives from the tech industry isn't actually helping their cause. And is actively hurting it by giving the other conservatives fuel for a victim narrative. In fact that's the biggest problem. These two groups completely hate each other, but live in separated regions. If they were completely mixed together geographically there would be no issue. People fired from liberal run companies could just go work at conservative run ones. We would have conservative social networks and liberal ones, and the "free market of free speech" argument would actually work.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    > A conservative in California has basically zero voting power and is vastly outnumbered by liberals This is only true in some parts of California, whereas other parts of the state are notoriously deeply conservative. Orange County, for example, was central to the power base of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. (The Nixon Library is in Yorba Linda; Reagan's is in Simi Valley.) Taken as a whole California tilts left these days, and even Orange County isn't the hotbed of conservatism it used to be (it went for Hillary by a few percentage points). But there's still plenty of conservatism in the state -- enough for Donald Trump to win 25 of its 58 counties last year.
UncleMeat 9y ago
But there are muslims who don't hate gay people or who find their relationship to islam to have nothing to do with gay rights. I'm not sure you will find many liberals who are hunky dory with muslims who hate gay people, but instead they will say that it is not okay to hate a muslim person when you don't know their personal stance on things like gay marriage.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  There are plenty of moderate conservatives and christians that don't hate gay people either. I'm not sure what your point is. My point is that, statistically, a Muslim is much more likely to have extreme beliefs on social issues.
  - rspeer 9y ago
    Why would you judge someone by the beliefs they're "statistically likely" to have?
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  There are conservatives, Republicans, Christians, and similar people that don't hate gay people and a good number of them even support gay marriage; see: - [Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage | Pew Research Center](http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay...)
cortesoft 9y ago
> E.g. liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than average conservatives. E.g. muslims are pretty strongly against homosexuals among other things. But they don't receive anywhere near the same level of hate and vitriol even moderate conservatives will get. I think this is a common misunderstanding among conservatives of a certain type. The pattern seems to be: A right-wing person makes a statement saying, "We need to stop allowing Muslims into this country to protect ourselves against terrorism" A liberal response is to say, "That is intolerant. You can't group all Muslims as terrorists. We need to be tolerant of people with different faiths" Right-wing response: "What?! You get mad at Christian conservatives for being anti-gay, but you want us to tolerate Muslims? Muslims are even MORE anti-gay than Christian conservatives!" The problem is that liberals AREN'T tolerant of Muslims who have anti-gay beliefs; we are as against them as we are against Christian's who are anti-gay. The liberal position is that you shouldn't lump ALL Muslims together; there are Christians and Muslims who are tolerant of homosexuals and Christians and Muslims who are intolerant of homosexuals. We are against the latter group. We are defending the moderate Muslims who aren't intolerant against being lumped in with the intolerant ones, but conservatives seem to think that is a blanket support for all Muslims. Now, of course, the reponse when I make this point is usually to link to some tweet or post by a self-proclaimed liberal supporting anti-gay Muslims. However, these are often parody tweets or posts made by a conservative trying to mock liberals support of Muslims, or perhaps some delusional person who calls themselves a liberal. It is NOT an opinion held by the majority of liberals. And yes, my characterization of pro-life as being trying to control a woman's body might be a bit uncharitable. I could have worded it more neutrally.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  >The problem is that liberals AREN'T tolerant of Muslims who have anti-gay beliefs; we are as against them as we are against Christian's who are anti-gay. In principle, yes. In practice they definitely are not. Liberals are not going on mass firing and blacklist campaigns of conservative Muslims. They aren't getting filtered and censored on social medial platforms. There is nowhere near the same level of emotional hatred and vitriol towards them. And anyone that has such hatred is seen as a bigot. But the same level of hate towards Christians is perfectly accepted. This was a big issue in the atheist community. A lot of atheist thinkers became massively successful for mocking and criticizing christians. But there was huge controversy when they started doing the same for Muslims. What happened? Well Muslims might have the same wrong beliefs. But they aren't The Hated Outgroup like the Christians were.
0xBABAD00C 9y ago
> I think it's just based on how much of a threat a group is. I don't think this is the reason. The offending group could be arbitrarily big or small. Today's true problems (from the perspective of likelihood of affecting the civilization or the planet) and today's problems that dominant ideologies care about and feel threatened by, are two completely different things, sometimes laughably so. I think it's entirely about signaling, and that applies to all sides. When a person or movement or another social entity claims they care about X, the real information the entity is conveying is "caring about X is now the color of our flag, raise a flag of the same color if you're one of us". The actual issue of X is largely irrelevant and can even revert if necessary (i.e. if the signal becomes too unreliable to detect potential members). At least this is what I've noticed across cultures, ideologies, languages, continents.. Edit: Incidentally, that's also why you hear complaints about double standards all the time (how come Europeans don't criticize it when... how come Feminists are silent when... how come Conservatives are nowhere to be found when...). Logical consistency is rarely a useful signal as people are not well-tuned for detecting it and have great capacity for bypassing it: by applying self-deception, compartmentalization, a host of biases, and by building narratives and simple models in their heads while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It's difficult to think of even one group that enforces logical consistency as its signal (maybe logicians? who knows?)

ThrowAwayFSp 9y ago

Where do you draw the "control a woman's body" line. Let's say a woman choose to abort on partial birth a healthy baby because she do not want it. Is a healthy 9 months gestation newborn part of the woman's body? You're spinning the argument and calling the other side "intolerant". You're part of the problem Altman is mentioning. Sad thing is that probably you are not aware of that.

dang 9y ago
This is off topic and we definitely don't need what will happen if we go there.
cortesoft 9y ago
Obviously, as you get closer to the edges of situations, you are going to run into differences of opinions. There is nuance, and I don't think you should dismiss people who disagree about the details of that nuance. However, no one is arguing for a woman to be able to abort a fully healthy baby at 9 months. That isn't an operation that happens, so it is a complete straw man to try to argue it.

smacktoward 9y ago

> liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than average conservatives. E.g. muslims are pretty strongly against homosexuals among other things. But they don't receive anywhere near the same level of hate and vitriol even moderate conservatives will get. This is because American Muslims are nowhere near powerful enough to write their prejudices into law, whereas conservatives control all three branches of the Federal government and 31 state legislatures (see https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_composition_of_state_houses https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_composition_of_state_houses). You will always find that people consider your opinions worthy of much closer scrutiny when you reach a position from which you can impose them on everybody else.

Houshalter 9y ago
I mentioned that theory in my comment. It doesn't explain everything though. A conservative in California has basically zero voting power and is vastly outnumbered by liberals. Ostracizing conservatives from the tech industry isn't actually helping their cause. And is actively hurting it by giving the other conservatives fuel for a victim narrative. In fact that's the biggest problem. These two groups completely hate each other, but live in separated regions. If they were completely mixed together geographically there would be no issue. People fired from liberal run companies could just go work at conservative run ones. We would have conservative social networks and liberal ones, and the "free market of free speech" argument would actually work.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  > A conservative in California has basically zero voting power and is vastly outnumbered by liberals This is only true in some parts of California, whereas other parts of the state are notoriously deeply conservative. Orange County, for example, was central to the power base of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. (The Nixon Library is in Yorba Linda; Reagan's is in Simi Valley.) Taken as a whole California tilts left these days, and even Orange County isn't the hotbed of conservatism it used to be (it went for Hillary by a few percentage points). But there's still plenty of conservatism in the state -- enough for Donald Trump to win 25 of its 58 counties last year.

UncleMeat 9y ago

But there are muslims who don't hate gay people or who find their relationship to islam to have nothing to do with gay rights. I'm not sure you will find many liberals who are hunky dory with muslims who hate gay people, but instead they will say that it is not okay to hate a muslim person when you don't know their personal stance on things like gay marriage.

Houshalter 9y ago
There are plenty of moderate conservatives and christians that don't hate gay people either. I'm not sure what your point is. My point is that, statistically, a Muslim is much more likely to have extreme beliefs on social issues.
- rspeer 9y ago
  Why would you judge someone by the beliefs they're "statistically likely" to have?
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
There are conservatives, Republicans, Christians, and similar people that don't hate gay people and a good number of them even support gay marriage; see: - [Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage | Pew Research Center](http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay...)

cortesoft 9y ago

> E.g. liberals are pretty tolerant of minority groups with more extreme opinions than average conservatives. E.g. muslims are pretty strongly against homosexuals among other things. But they don't receive anywhere near the same level of hate and vitriol even moderate conservatives will get. I think this is a common misunderstanding among conservatives of a certain type. The pattern seems to be: A right-wing person makes a statement saying, "We need to stop allowing Muslims into this country to protect ourselves against terrorism" A liberal response is to say, "That is intolerant. You can't group all Muslims as terrorists. We need to be tolerant of people with different faiths" Right-wing response: "What?! You get mad at Christian conservatives for being anti-gay, but you want us to tolerate Muslims? Muslims are even MORE anti-gay than Christian conservatives!" The problem is that liberals AREN'T tolerant of Muslims who have anti-gay beliefs; we are as against them as we are against Christian's who are anti-gay. The liberal position is that you shouldn't lump ALL Muslims together; there are Christians and Muslims who are tolerant of homosexuals and Christians and Muslims who are intolerant of homosexuals. We are against the latter group. We are defending the moderate Muslims who aren't intolerant against being lumped in with the intolerant ones, but conservatives seem to think that is a blanket support for all Muslims. Now, of course, the reponse when I make this point is usually to link to some tweet or post by a self-proclaimed liberal supporting anti-gay Muslims. However, these are often parody tweets or posts made by a conservative trying to mock liberals support of Muslims, or perhaps some delusional person who calls themselves a liberal. It is NOT an opinion held by the majority of liberals. And yes, my characterization of pro-life as being trying to control a woman's body might be a bit uncharitable. I could have worded it more neutrally.

Houshalter 9y ago
>The problem is that liberals AREN'T tolerant of Muslims who have anti-gay beliefs; we are as against them as we are against Christian's who are anti-gay. In principle, yes. In practice they definitely are not. Liberals are not going on mass firing and blacklist campaigns of conservative Muslims. They aren't getting filtered and censored on social medial platforms. There is nowhere near the same level of emotional hatred and vitriol towards them. And anyone that has such hatred is seen as a bigot. But the same level of hate towards Christians is perfectly accepted. This was a big issue in the atheist community. A lot of atheist thinkers became massively successful for mocking and criticizing christians. But there was huge controversy when they started doing the same for Muslims. What happened? Well Muslims might have the same wrong beliefs. But they aren't The Hated Outgroup like the Christians were.

0xBABAD00C 9y ago

> I think it's just based on how much of a threat a group is. I don't think this is the reason. The offending group could be arbitrarily big or small. Today's true problems (from the perspective of likelihood of affecting the civilization or the planet) and today's problems that dominant ideologies care about and feel threatened by, are two completely different things, sometimes laughably so. I think it's entirely about signaling, and that applies to all sides. When a person or movement or another social entity claims they care about X, the real information the entity is conveying is "caring about X is now the color of our flag, raise a flag of the same color if you're one of us". The actual issue of X is largely irrelevant and can even revert if necessary (i.e. if the signal becomes too unreliable to detect potential members). At least this is what I've noticed across cultures, ideologies, languages, continents.. Edit: Incidentally, that's also why you hear complaints about double standards all the time (how come Europeans don't criticize it when... how come Feminists are silent when... how come Conservatives are nowhere to be found when...). Logical consistency is rarely a useful signal as people are not well-tuned for detecting it and have great capacity for bypassing it: by applying self-deception, compartmentalization, a host of biases, and by building narratives and simple models in their heads while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It's difficult to think of even one group that enforces logical consistency as its signal (maybe logicians? who knows?)