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> I think pretty much everyone reasonable agrees that "kill the _INSERT GROUP_" is intolerant I don´t know why but every time I read a sentence that starts wi

> I think pretty much everyone reasonable agrees that "kill the _INSERT GROUP_" is intolerant I don´t know why but every time I read a sentence that starts with "I think pretty much everyone reasonable agrees that ..." I get the feeling that the person saying it haven´t really thought things through and does not see how vastly more complex the world is than they assume. Think about it this way: what if in the mind of the person making that claim, it is one of self-defense and self-preservation? is it still intolerant? Here is an example: As someone who grew up in the middle east, I heard people out in the open say things like: "Jews ought to be killed off" or "the imperialist American fucks deserve whatever happens to them" and if you ask them why they believe and say such evil shit, the answer in some way, shape or form always comes back to: they invaded our land, killed our ancestors and are threatening to do the same to us now, and hence we are not being intolerant but rather, we are just trying to defend ourselves (tribalism in other words). You and I can agree that it is despicable and disgusting that people think that way. But in their minds, you are the unreasonable one. What you call intolerance to them is not that at all. Take away: Perspectives matter in the world; and if you make a hard/deterministic rule based on a subjective understanding of an issue followed by projecting it as "what reasonable people should think", you will always get into some shady edge cases that cannot be resolved by the deterministic rule that you initially set because the world is not made up of a bunch of you:s. You and I probably agree on what is intolerant/tolerant in most cases. However, other people who do not have the same cultural and moral upbringing might disagree with us. Hence the parent´s comment: "I can easily see people disagreeing on what is and is not intolerant"

DonHopkins 7y ago
"I think all right thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired... I'm certainly not! And I'm sick and tired of being told that I am." - Graham Chapman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhaunU2AxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhaunU2AxY
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  Now that is some George Carlin level word play. If you haven´t watch this routing, you owe it to yourself to watch it. https://youtu.be/HEeDRUZIDq8 https://youtu.be/HEeDRUZIDq8
ajross 7y ago
I'm sorry, can you be specific: why shouldn't we burn 8chan to the ground? Which other sites do you want to preserve that would get swept up by our censorship run amok? I'm gathering from your example that you're trying to preserve the rights of a bunch of middle easterners to say things like "kill the jews", and not understanding why you think that's permissible. I mean, the El Paso shooter genuinely believes that the US is under invasion by mexicans too. Everyone has opinions. The point is that some opinions are just wrong. This is like morality 101. You aren't entitled to kill folks, no matter how much you want to. And you aren't entitled to egg other folks on to kill folks either.
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  > I'm gathering from your example that you're trying to preserve the rights of a bunch of middle easterners to say things like "kill the jews" You seem to have extracted the wrong conclusion from the post made because you are thinking in identitarian terms. > The point is that some opinions are just wrong. This is like morality 101. You aren't entitled to kill folks, no matter how much you want to. And you aren't entitled to egg other folks on to kill folks either. You are 100% right, some opinions are wrong. But the point is: who´s to judge which ones are right and which one are wrong? I assume that you, in your infinite wisdom, find yourself to be of such a high caliber that all of humanity should use what is obvious to you as the "gold standard"? You took your inherited moral values from your culture, and projected them as the natural and obvious conclusion we should all reach. Now if that isn´t arrogance, I don´t know what is. And I am not trying to be offensive here, this is what your comment indicates. And that is what you should have gathered from the previous comment. The funny thing is, I agree with you completely here. Again, you and I would probably agree on 99% in terms of what we deem "moral" because both you and I have inherited the those values from our cultures. However, you are in a sense dictating that the moral values you inherited are infinitely more superior than all the others. I mean you are making deterministic statements about subjective issues while calling those who dare not agree "unreasonable" without considering for a second that other people that live in other parts of the world might have different views. Let me put it in a different way: I am not defending group X´s right to say or do Y. No matter the group. I hate identity politics beyond belief. I am merely rejecting the notion that YOU are reasonable enough to make claim as to what people should or shouldn´t be able to say. Because just as you think yourself to be the wise and saintly moral crusader that you are, others think the same about themselves. Soon enough HN user "bjross" will be writing the exact opposite of what you are writing while claiming that he/she is the moral authority on the subject. It isn´t that I am defending the evil doers; it´s that I am opposing your (proposed) evil which I think is far worse as it leads down a slippery slope like which the world have seen many times before.
kyon256 7y ago
Usually whenever I see people evoke the paradox of tolerance they draw more attention to the authority of Popper compared to the nature of it being a paradox. It defers the question of what is tolerant, which depends on perspective as you rightly point out.
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  Arguments of authority are my favorites. It literally takes you 2 seconds to see through the person you are talking to and you can safely assume that they haven´t thought about the problems facing them long enough.
TomMckenny 7y ago
But in these cases there is a blurring of bad national policy with an entire group of people unconnected to it. This is very dangerous. For example, there maybe those who dislike Israel and even want war. But to then say "all Jews are evil" is incorrect. Most don't even live there to control policy. Of those that do, many object to policy. It's like saying some terrorists are Muslim so all Muslims are evil. Or that North Korea is dangerous therefore all Koreans are dangerous. Or America does some bad things therefore all Americans should die. It's all obviously incorrect. You can have a reason to want to fight a _country_ but there can never be a reason to annihilate a complex, nuanced group because of their skin color or religion etc. There can be reasons for war (which is bad enough) but there can never be reasons for genocide. Americans might have reason to hate Japan after Pearl Harbor but to lock up all Japanese inside the country is obviously wrong. More generally, there can be very good reason to stop a group organized around an action (eg Neo-Nazis). But to say "all whites must die" (because all Neo-Nazis are white) is obviously an incorrect expansion. Unfortunately, it's a common blurring that exploitative leaders take advantage of. Today some Western leaders foment hate against all Muslims and some Islamic leaders foment hate against all Jews. In the past it was other groups. It is these leaders that are the danger.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  >It's like saying some terrorists are Muslim so all Muslims are evil. Where is the thresh hold the judgment is made at and will we consistently apply it to all groups? I can think of examples of groups that are reviled by most, yet who have members who don't desire directly evil policies. Some desire forms of what may qualify as oppression that are even seen by the majority as acceptable when you swap out certain groups.
- icebraining 7y ago
  From the POV of someone who says that, the evil actions of Israel are not a fluke, but an inevitable result of the nature of Jewish people, just like genocidal colonialism is seen as the result of the nature of white people, etc. They see themselves as frogs talking about scorpions, to put it in fabulistic terms, and the fact that a particular specimen hasn't stung is no evidence that it's harmless. To someone like me, who believes quite intuitively that humans are generally the same everywhere, it's hard to grasp, but I don't see how I can prove it's objectively wrong.
keithnz 7y ago
well maybe, since the US is finding this really really tricky for some reason, look at what other countries have done around hate speech.... because, you know, it didn't end civilization as we know it, we are all still free ( in fact, in terms of freedom many countries, with hate speech laws, rank better than the US ). It's bizzare that in a country where the kid who goes on a mass shooting, could engage in hate groups online, but until a couple of years ago would have been banned from getting a kinder eggs, coz ya know, it could of hurt him.
- cgag 7y ago
  I'm pretty confident it is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Check back in 50-200 years I guess.
jonnycomputer 7y ago
I agree with most of your points here, but I am not sure I see how this really amounts to an objection to Popper's proposed prescription. Nearly everything is contested by someone, even things as mundane as who is at fault in a motor accident. And yet, we have largely workable, if imperfect, ways to resolve such disagreements, so that everyone can get on with life. So the real objection has to be along the lines of: there is no practical set of procedures that would allow us to resolve the problems of intolerant speech and behavior in a reasonably effective way. More philosophically, however, one important way to take on the problem of subjectivism is to use something like Rawl's veil of ignorance, or Sherner's fairness principle: “The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action, imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.”
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  That's kind of like the procedure for getting people to cut food in half fairly. One person cuts and the other chooses.
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  Not going to lie, I hold an an insane level of disdain toward Rawl´s Veil of ignorance for many reasons that I don´t want to get into right now. That said, the following sentence - I think - is one of the most important ones that I wish more people would pay very close attention to: > ... And yet, we have largely workable, if _imperfect_, ways to resolve such disagreements, _so that everyone can get on with life_ I agree with you on the first part but disagree on the reasoning behind it. I have a framework that I personally use when I think about topics such as this one. It has helped me understand a fair bit about social organizations in general as I see it applied everywhere I look. I´ll write the gist of it down here and you tell me what you think: 1. There are two types of solutions to problems: deterministic solutions (100% perfect solutions that can be algorithmically spelled out) and heuristics (good enough shortcuts that have x% error margin and y% efficiency - What you called imperfect solutions). 2. We desperately want to find as many deterministic solutions we possibly can to any and all problems that we face. And where we fail to do so, heuristics are brought in to help us, as best as possible, approximate that "deterministic/perfect/ideal". 3. Heuristics are things like religion, moral frameworks, political systems, language, etc. - Notice that none of them is deterministic in any way, shape or form. They are all imperfect. However, they are rule-sets that are more or less ambiguous that helps us navigate most of the problem space with relatively low effort. But the trade-off here is that heuristics break at the edges - free speech vs. hate speech is a clear example of a failure in the heuristic. 4. It is important to note that all heuristics have some error rate. If they did not, they´d be deterministic solutions. So whatever heuristic you want to use to solve a given problem, Popper´s, Rawl´s or otherwise, you have to always make sure to take the errors that might emerge into account. The error rate is far more important than most people realize as it is the determining factor for how successful/effective the heuristic is going to be in society. 5. When suggesting alternatives to an existing heuristic because of some apparent flaws - such as replacing our current understanding and notion of intolerance by Popper´s take on the matter - the new heuristic that you propose that should overwrite the old one must have a smaller margin of error. Otherwise, why even bother? in fact, if this isn´t the case, you risk making things worse rather than better. 6. Iterate on the process until you come up with better and better heuristics that increasingly approximates the deterministic solution (lower error rate over time until you reach the holy grail of 99.999999...%). 7. Every once in a while, as humanity is traversing its path, some heuristics will be replaced by deterministic answers. Ex: science replaces religion when it comes to describing the natural world -> moving from heuristic religious interpretation of the natural world to a more deterministic approach. This is how society betters itself over time. It is an iterative process that replaces old systems with newer ones that are less prone to errors. My beef with Rawl´s, Pooper (as I call him) and most of the other thinkers that people read in 1st year college class is that the heuristics they paint are already far inferior than the ones that we currently have. But unfortunately, the academic class (read teachers) cannot see that because they lack a good framework for assessing the effectiveness/error rates of a given heuristic.
elliekelly 7y ago
Your example illustrates something called "moral disengagement"[1] and it's the same thought-process used by a lot of people to justify their reprehensible views. Interestingly, the people who seem to be most "immune" to moral disengagement are individuals with high empathy. Fortunately, empathy is a skilled that can be taught and learned. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_disengagement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_disengagement
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Aeolun 7y ago
> You and I can agree that it is despicable and disgusting that people think that way. But in their minds, you are the unreasonable one. What you call intolerance to them is not that at all. Don’t you think it’s despicable that we don’t think this way? We’re there, killing their wives, children and friends. We’re destroying the infrastructure. But we don’t even have any particularly strong feelings about it. It’s just what’s economically and politically expedient...
wwweston 7y ago
> think about it this way: what if in the mind of the person making that claim, it is one of self-defense and self-preservation? is it still intolerant? Yes. It may be understandable, I get it, I have the same angry impulses as most human beings and it's very easy to feel antagonists should be simply disposed with. But that doesn't distinguish it from being intolerant. Even if there's a genuine existential threat, indulging an intolerant response means you (1) you cut off the possibility for negotiation, and the remaining choices are victory or your own tribe's annihilation (2) it's not like the one source of antagonism/conflict is really just the other tribe, and once you build into individual minds and your tribe the idea and support for this kind of total solution, it's likely to get used again even if/after you "win." I don't expect everyone, especially among populations that have been part of generational conflicts where they already feel they're facing an existential threat, to just sing kumbaya. Maybe it's an important descriptive point to say "not everyone can agree genocide should't be tolerated in valued discourse," but it's not a good normative point. We should be trying to get to the point where genocide is beyond the pale, where people can more finely articulate that many aspects of middle eastern policy at the state or tribal level are unacceptable for a humane civilization without kneecapping any chance for improvement, and in general where we can shape discourse it should be steered away from tribalism. Or I guess we could always try to kill everybody who believes in genocide.
ignoramous 7y ago
> Perspectives matter in the world; and if you make a hard/deterministic rule based on a subjective understanding of an issue followed by projecting it as "what reasonable people should think", you will always get into some shady edge cases Disagreement has been corner stone of any community. It is healthy in some sense, and might even be required for progress of humankind altoghter. That said... > What you call intolerance to them is not that at all. If ignorance, short sightedness, revenge, hatered, jealousy, wickedness is behind a thought or an action, we can universally agree to it being inferior and defective. Like the OP said, moral and philosophical education along with ability to independently think sets reasonable people apart from others, and I agree.
- ColanR 7y ago
  > moral and philosophical education along with ability to independently think That's a fairly good description of Machiavelli.
dingoegret 7y ago
I grew up in the middle east and I still live in the middle east and I never heard anyone say kill da Jews or da imperialists because those kinds of wacky statements can only be conjured up by a Westerner with preconceived notions about what middle easterners are and pretends to be one on the internet for argument points.
bpcog 7y ago
I've thought about this before and respect the open-mindedness. How do you justify words purely meant to harm others and not express ideas, like the n-word?
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8 It will answer your question and make you laugh at the same time. 2 birds 1 stone!
  - bpcog 7y ago
    That really got me thinking, thank you so much!
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  If you think that the n-word is only used to harm others then I assume you haven't listened to any late 20th and 21st century music. Context matters. That said, its use to racially insult people is shameful and not something I support.
  - bpcog 7y ago
    That's a great point, I didn't think about that. It seems like it might be difficult to prove whether or not people had an intent to harm when you allow this kind of speech though.
    - ohithereyou 7y ago
      Do you feel that speech intended to harm should be prevented by prior restraint?

DonHopkins 7y ago

"I think all right thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired... I'm certainly not! And I'm sick and tired of being told that I am." - Graham Chapman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhaunU2AxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhaunU2AxY

wesammikhail 7y ago
Now that is some George Carlin level word play. If you haven´t watch this routing, you owe it to yourself to watch it. https://youtu.be/HEeDRUZIDq8 https://youtu.be/HEeDRUZIDq8

ajross 7y ago

I'm sorry, can you be specific: why shouldn't we burn 8chan to the ground? Which other sites do you want to preserve that would get swept up by our censorship run amok? I'm gathering from your example that you're trying to preserve the rights of a bunch of middle easterners to say things like "kill the jews", and not understanding why you think that's permissible. I mean, the El Paso shooter genuinely believes that the US is under invasion by mexicans too. Everyone has opinions. The point is that some opinions are just wrong. This is like morality 101. You aren't entitled to kill folks, no matter how much you want to. And you aren't entitled to egg other folks on to kill folks either.

wesammikhail 7y ago
> I'm gathering from your example that you're trying to preserve the rights of a bunch of middle easterners to say things like "kill the jews" You seem to have extracted the wrong conclusion from the post made because you are thinking in identitarian terms. > The point is that some opinions are just wrong. This is like morality 101. You aren't entitled to kill folks, no matter how much you want to. And you aren't entitled to egg other folks on to kill folks either. You are 100% right, some opinions are wrong. But the point is: who´s to judge which ones are right and which one are wrong? I assume that you, in your infinite wisdom, find yourself to be of such a high caliber that all of humanity should use what is obvious to you as the "gold standard"? You took your inherited moral values from your culture, and projected them as the natural and obvious conclusion we should all reach. Now if that isn´t arrogance, I don´t know what is. And I am not trying to be offensive here, this is what your comment indicates. And that is what you should have gathered from the previous comment. The funny thing is, I agree with you completely here. Again, you and I would probably agree on 99% in terms of what we deem "moral" because both you and I have inherited the those values from our cultures. However, you are in a sense dictating that the moral values you inherited are infinitely more superior than all the others. I mean you are making deterministic statements about subjective issues while calling those who dare not agree "unreasonable" without considering for a second that other people that live in other parts of the world might have different views. Let me put it in a different way: I am not defending group X´s right to say or do Y. No matter the group. I hate identity politics beyond belief. I am merely rejecting the notion that YOU are reasonable enough to make claim as to what people should or shouldn´t be able to say. Because just as you think yourself to be the wise and saintly moral crusader that you are, others think the same about themselves. Soon enough HN user "bjross" will be writing the exact opposite of what you are writing while claiming that he/she is the moral authority on the subject. It isn´t that I am defending the evil doers; it´s that I am opposing your (proposed) evil which I think is far worse as it leads down a slippery slope like which the world have seen many times before.

kyon256 7y ago

Usually whenever I see people evoke the paradox of tolerance they draw more attention to the authority of Popper compared to the nature of it being a paradox. It defers the question of what is tolerant, which depends on perspective as you rightly point out.

wesammikhail 7y ago
Arguments of authority are my favorites. It literally takes you 2 seconds to see through the person you are talking to and you can safely assume that they haven´t thought about the problems facing them long enough.

TomMckenny 7y ago

But in these cases there is a blurring of bad national policy with an entire group of people unconnected to it. This is very dangerous. For example, there maybe those who dislike Israel and even want war. But to then say "all Jews are evil" is incorrect. Most don't even live there to control policy. Of those that do, many object to policy. It's like saying some terrorists are Muslim so all Muslims are evil. Or that North Korea is dangerous therefore all Koreans are dangerous. Or America does some bad things therefore all Americans should die. It's all obviously incorrect. You can have a reason to want to fight a _country_ but there can never be a reason to annihilate a complex, nuanced group because of their skin color or religion etc. There can be reasons for war (which is bad enough) but there can never be reasons for genocide. Americans might have reason to hate Japan after Pearl Harbor but to lock up all Japanese inside the country is obviously wrong. More generally, there can be very good reason to stop a group organized around an action (eg Neo-Nazis). But to say "all whites must die" (because all Neo-Nazis are white) is obviously an incorrect expansion. Unfortunately, it's a common blurring that exploitative leaders take advantage of. Today some Western leaders foment hate against all Muslims and some Islamic leaders foment hate against all Jews. In the past it was other groups. It is these leaders that are the danger.

SkyBelow 7y ago
>It's like saying some terrorists are Muslim so all Muslims are evil. Where is the thresh hold the judgment is made at and will we consistently apply it to all groups? I can think of examples of groups that are reviled by most, yet who have members who don't desire directly evil policies. Some desire forms of what may qualify as oppression that are even seen by the majority as acceptable when you swap out certain groups.
icebraining 7y ago
From the POV of someone who says that, the evil actions of Israel are not a fluke, but an inevitable result of the nature of Jewish people, just like genocidal colonialism is seen as the result of the nature of white people, etc. They see themselves as frogs talking about scorpions, to put it in fabulistic terms, and the fact that a particular specimen hasn't stung is no evidence that it's harmless. To someone like me, who believes quite intuitively that humans are generally the same everywhere, it's hard to grasp, but I don't see how I can prove it's objectively wrong.

keithnz 7y ago

well maybe, since the US is finding this really really tricky for some reason, look at what other countries have done around hate speech.... because, you know, it didn't end civilization as we know it, we are all still free ( in fact, in terms of freedom many countries, with hate speech laws, rank better than the US ). It's bizzare that in a country where the kid who goes on a mass shooting, could engage in hate groups online, but until a couple of years ago would have been banned from getting a kinder eggs, coz ya know, it could of hurt him.

cgag 7y ago
I'm pretty confident it is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Check back in 50-200 years I guess.

jonnycomputer 7y ago

I agree with most of your points here, but I am not sure I see how this really amounts to an objection to Popper's proposed prescription. Nearly everything is contested by someone, even things as mundane as who is at fault in a motor accident. And yet, we have largely workable, if imperfect, ways to resolve such disagreements, so that everyone can get on with life. So the real objection has to be along the lines of: there is no practical set of procedures that would allow us to resolve the problems of intolerant speech and behavior in a reasonably effective way. More philosophically, however, one important way to take on the problem of subjectivism is to use something like Rawl's veil of ignorance, or Sherner's fairness principle: “The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action, imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.”

DonHopkins 7y ago
That's kind of like the procedure for getting people to cut food in half fairly. One person cuts and the other chooses.
wesammikhail 7y ago
Not going to lie, I hold an an insane level of disdain toward Rawl´s Veil of ignorance for many reasons that I don´t want to get into right now. That said, the following sentence - I think - is one of the most important ones that I wish more people would pay very close attention to: > ... And yet, we have largely workable, if _imperfect_, ways to resolve such disagreements, _so that everyone can get on with life_ I agree with you on the first part but disagree on the reasoning behind it. I have a framework that I personally use when I think about topics such as this one. It has helped me understand a fair bit about social organizations in general as I see it applied everywhere I look. I´ll write the gist of it down here and you tell me what you think: 1. There are two types of solutions to problems: deterministic solutions (100% perfect solutions that can be algorithmically spelled out) and heuristics (good enough shortcuts that have x% error margin and y% efficiency - What you called imperfect solutions). 2. We desperately want to find as many deterministic solutions we possibly can to any and all problems that we face. And where we fail to do so, heuristics are brought in to help us, as best as possible, approximate that "deterministic/perfect/ideal". 3. Heuristics are things like religion, moral frameworks, political systems, language, etc. - Notice that none of them is deterministic in any way, shape or form. They are all imperfect. However, they are rule-sets that are more or less ambiguous that helps us navigate most of the problem space with relatively low effort. But the trade-off here is that heuristics break at the edges - free speech vs. hate speech is a clear example of a failure in the heuristic. 4. It is important to note that all heuristics have some error rate. If they did not, they´d be deterministic solutions. So whatever heuristic you want to use to solve a given problem, Popper´s, Rawl´s or otherwise, you have to always make sure to take the errors that might emerge into account. The error rate is far more important than most people realize as it is the determining factor for how successful/effective the heuristic is going to be in society. 5. When suggesting alternatives to an existing heuristic because of some apparent flaws - such as replacing our current understanding and notion of intolerance by Popper´s take on the matter - the new heuristic that you propose that should overwrite the old one must have a smaller margin of error. Otherwise, why even bother? in fact, if this isn´t the case, you risk making things worse rather than better. 6. Iterate on the process until you come up with better and better heuristics that increasingly approximates the deterministic solution (lower error rate over time until you reach the holy grail of 99.999999...%). 7. Every once in a while, as humanity is traversing its path, some heuristics will be replaced by deterministic answers. Ex: science replaces religion when it comes to describing the natural world -> moving from heuristic religious interpretation of the natural world to a more deterministic approach. This is how society betters itself over time. It is an iterative process that replaces old systems with newer ones that are less prone to errors. My beef with Rawl´s, Pooper (as I call him) and most of the other thinkers that people read in 1st year college class is that the heuristics they paint are already far inferior than the ones that we currently have. But unfortunately, the academic class (read teachers) cannot see that because they lack a good framework for assessing the effectiveness/error rates of a given heuristic.

elliekelly 7y ago

Your example illustrates something called "moral disengagement"[1] and it's the same thought-process used by a lot of people to justify their reprehensible views. Interestingly, the people who seem to be most "immune" to moral disengagement are individuals with high empathy. Fortunately, empathy is a skilled that can be taught and learned. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_disengagement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_disengagement

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Aeolun 7y ago

> You and I can agree that it is despicable and disgusting that people think that way. But in their minds, you are the unreasonable one. What you call intolerance to them is not that at all. Don’t you think it’s despicable that we don’t think this way? We’re there, killing their wives, children and friends. We’re destroying the infrastructure. But we don’t even have any particularly strong feelings about it. It’s just what’s economically and politically expedient...

wwweston 7y ago

> think about it this way: what if in the mind of the person making that claim, it is one of self-defense and self-preservation? is it still intolerant? Yes. It may be understandable, I get it, I have the same angry impulses as most human beings and it's very easy to feel antagonists should be simply disposed with. But that doesn't distinguish it from being intolerant. Even if there's a genuine existential threat, indulging an intolerant response means you (1) you cut off the possibility for negotiation, and the remaining choices are victory or your own tribe's annihilation (2) it's not like the one source of antagonism/conflict is really just the other tribe, and once you build into individual minds and your tribe the idea and support for this kind of total solution, it's likely to get used again even if/after you "win." I don't expect everyone, especially among populations that have been part of generational conflicts where they already feel they're facing an existential threat, to just sing kumbaya. Maybe it's an important descriptive point to say "not everyone can agree genocide should't be tolerated in valued discourse," but it's not a good normative point. We should be trying to get to the point where genocide is beyond the pale, where people can more finely articulate that many aspects of middle eastern policy at the state or tribal level are unacceptable for a humane civilization without kneecapping any chance for improvement, and in general where we can shape discourse it should be steered away from tribalism. Or I guess we could always try to kill everybody who believes in genocide.

ignoramous 7y ago

> Perspectives matter in the world; and if you make a hard/deterministic rule based on a subjective understanding of an issue followed by projecting it as "what reasonable people should think", you will always get into some shady edge cases Disagreement has been corner stone of any community. It is healthy in some sense, and might even be required for progress of humankind altoghter. That said... > What you call intolerance to them is not that at all. If ignorance, short sightedness, revenge, hatered, jealousy, wickedness is behind a thought or an action, we can universally agree to it being inferior and defective. Like the OP said, moral and philosophical education along with ability to independently think sets reasonable people apart from others, and I agree.

ColanR 7y ago
> moral and philosophical education along with ability to independently think That's a fairly good description of Machiavelli.

dingoegret 7y ago

I grew up in the middle east and I still live in the middle east and I never heard anyone say kill da Jews or da imperialists because those kinds of wacky statements can only be conjured up by a Westerner with preconceived notions about what middle easterners are and pretends to be one on the internet for argument points.

bpcog 7y ago

I've thought about this before and respect the open-mindedness. How do you justify words purely meant to harm others and not express ideas, like the n-word?

wesammikhail 7y ago
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8 It will answer your question and make you laugh at the same time. 2 birds 1 stone!
- bpcog 7y ago
  That really got me thinking, thank you so much!
ohithereyou 7y ago
If you think that the n-word is only used to harm others then I assume you haven't listened to any late 20th and 21st century music. Context matters. That said, its use to racially insult people is shameful and not something I support.
- bpcog 7y ago
  That's a great point, I didn't think about that. It seems like it might be difficult to prove whether or not people had an intent to harm when you allow this kind of speech though.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    Do you feel that speech intended to harm should be prevented by prior restraint?