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It's easy to come up with these kinds of excuses for not tolerating the opinions of people you disagree with. If you disagree with me about abortion, you are ei

It's easy to come up with these kinds of excuses for not tolerating the opinions of people you disagree with. If you disagree with me about abortion, you are either trying to murder babies (and hence I shouldn't have to be civil to you) or you're trying to control women's bodies (and hence I shouldn't have to be civil with you). If you disagree with me about health care reform, that's a life and death issue and hence I shouldn't have to be civil with you. If we disagree about a military intervention, that's a life and death issue and I shouldn't have to be civil with you. Justice Ginsburg and Justice Scalia disagreed on just about all of these issues and got along fine. I don't think that's because they didn't care about their respective principles and about the issues that were at stake. I think it's because, as a point of fact, we have to live in a society with each other regardless of our differences. And most of those differences are genuinely rooted in good or at least understandable intentions in the first place.

TeaDrunk 6y ago
I think this is an easy handwave to ignore that some people get more disagreement than others about whether or not they deserve civil rights, life, etc. While you espouse a need to listen, you’re not really listening at all here or even trying to understand what is being said.
- philwelch 6y ago
  It's not a handwave and it's not even remotely easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't have taken centuries of bloodshed for humanity to develop the basic concept of peacefully tolerating disagreements over fundamental values.
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    Millenia, not centuries. Living in relative peace is a novel and stunning development in world history.
    - jbotz 6y ago
      I really don't think that's objectively true. The "relative peace" is quite relative after all, depending a lot on where you live, and at best it's less than a century old (75 years since the end of WWII). I think there have been many other societies that have passed an occasional century or so in relative peace throughout history. It's just that the wars are more prominent in the history books than the boring peaceful years between them. I'm not saying we haven't achieved anything... wide-spread recognition of basic human rights, near abolishment of slavery, valuing democracy and self-determination have all been taking to new heights over the last few generations. But at the moment all this is looking pretty fragile. And personally, RBG's death today left me feeling more than ever that we're on a knife's edge, and that we could fall right back into those millennia-old patterns that are only occasionally interrupted by a century or so of "relative peace". Or worse. And I'm not even an American nor live in the US!
      - philwelch 6y ago
        Classical liberalism/the open society/the Enlightenment all came about centuries before WWII. There were wars (WWII included) fought against people who explicitly rejected these principles, but coming up with those principles in the first place was the part I was referring to.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > It's not a handwave and it's not even remotely easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't have taken centuries of bloodshed for humanity to develop the basic concept of peacefully tolerating disagreements over fundamental values. As a general principle, sure. BUT. I don't think it is reasonable to expect anyone to peacefully[0] tolerate fundamental values that fundamentally challenge their right to exist. We may admire genuine saintliness, but expecting it (and taking people to task when they don't measure up) is a bridge too far. You may have the right to say that you think I and my extended family should be exterminated, but I damn well have the right to — at the very least — get in your face about it. After all, the solution to bad speech is more speech, right? [0] Note that one can be non-violent without being peaceful.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      I don’t think you need to be friends with people who explicitly and literally advocate for genocide. If you are just making that point to introduce that particular nuance for the sake of completeness, I think I can agree with everything you said. My reservation is that most of the time this kind of argument is made, it’s because someone wants to take the most extreme cases and use them to construct some dubiously over-generalized argument. For instance, over a hundred years ago the Supreme Court themselves did this, notoriously stating “but certainly there isn’t the freedom of speech to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater!” and then using that to construct an argument to justify throwing someone into prison for distributing pamphlets about resisting the draft. In the here and now, there is a far bigger problem with people taking normal political disagreements and catastrophizing them into excuses to break friendships and disown family members than there is with people literally advocating for genocide.
      - TeaDrunk 6y ago
        > My reservation is that most of the time this kind of argument is made, it’s because someone wants to take the most extreme cases and use them to construct some dubiously over-generalized argument. This is literally the opposite of the original claim which is to try and understand where people are coming from and to listen to them as if they’re reasonable actors. You are doing the exact shit you’re accusing others of- assuming bad faith in their intentions and arguing against the bad faith intentions in a discussion about how to take good faith intent in arguments.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  You could not have written a more ironic post and you didn’t even realize you did that. We don’t have to tolerate the intolerant, right?
maxlybbert 6y ago
I enjoy John Cleese’s speech making the same point ( https://youtu.be/wXCkxlqFd90 https://youtu.be/wXCkxlqFd90 ).
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  This is amazing. Thanks.
- dTal 6y ago
  Timeless!
ngcc_hk 6y ago
If I believed in one true (God/Truth/...) why I do not kill you all/crusade into/suppress all/burn you in stake/ Spanish ... It is so hard to accept others and let them articulate their view.
- FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
  Because a lot of times those others want to remove liberties from me or from people I care about, like women or non-straight people.
larkery 6y ago
There's a factor not considered here: to what extent were Scalia & Ginsberg able to get along because of other material conditions? As supreme court justices we can assume that they had a basic foundation of psychological and material security - a position of prestige, a job for life, healthcare and so on. I believe it is a lot easier to summon the "higher thoughts" necessary to be civil when ones personal position is more secure, so to achieve a more civil society it may help to work to make more insecure people secure.

TeaDrunk 6y ago

I think this is an easy handwave to ignore that some people get more disagreement than others about whether or not they deserve civil rights, life, etc. While you espouse a need to listen, you’re not really listening at all here or even trying to understand what is being said.

philwelch 6y ago
It's not a handwave and it's not even remotely easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't have taken centuries of bloodshed for humanity to develop the basic concept of peacefully tolerating disagreements over fundamental values.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Millenia, not centuries. Living in relative peace is a novel and stunning development in world history.
  - jbotz 6y ago
    I really don't think that's objectively true. The "relative peace" is quite relative after all, depending a lot on where you live, and at best it's less than a century old (75 years since the end of WWII). I think there have been many other societies that have passed an occasional century or so in relative peace throughout history. It's just that the wars are more prominent in the history books than the boring peaceful years between them. I'm not saying we haven't achieved anything... wide-spread recognition of basic human rights, near abolishment of slavery, valuing democracy and self-determination have all been taking to new heights over the last few generations. But at the moment all this is looking pretty fragile. And personally, RBG's death today left me feeling more than ever that we're on a knife's edge, and that we could fall right back into those millennia-old patterns that are only occasionally interrupted by a century or so of "relative peace". Or worse. And I'm not even an American nor live in the US!
    - philwelch 6y ago
      Classical liberalism/the open society/the Enlightenment all came about centuries before WWII. There were wars (WWII included) fought against people who explicitly rejected these principles, but coming up with those principles in the first place was the part I was referring to.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > It's not a handwave and it's not even remotely easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't have taken centuries of bloodshed for humanity to develop the basic concept of peacefully tolerating disagreements over fundamental values. As a general principle, sure. BUT. I don't think it is reasonable to expect anyone to peacefully[0] tolerate fundamental values that fundamentally challenge their right to exist. We may admire genuine saintliness, but expecting it (and taking people to task when they don't measure up) is a bridge too far. You may have the right to say that you think I and my extended family should be exterminated, but I damn well have the right to — at the very least — get in your face about it. After all, the solution to bad speech is more speech, right? [0] Note that one can be non-violent without being peaceful.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    I don’t think you need to be friends with people who explicitly and literally advocate for genocide. If you are just making that point to introduce that particular nuance for the sake of completeness, I think I can agree with everything you said. My reservation is that most of the time this kind of argument is made, it’s because someone wants to take the most extreme cases and use them to construct some dubiously over-generalized argument. For instance, over a hundred years ago the Supreme Court themselves did this, notoriously stating “but certainly there isn’t the freedom of speech to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater!” and then using that to construct an argument to justify throwing someone into prison for distributing pamphlets about resisting the draft. In the here and now, there is a far bigger problem with people taking normal political disagreements and catastrophizing them into excuses to break friendships and disown family members than there is with people literally advocating for genocide.
    - TeaDrunk 6y ago
      > My reservation is that most of the time this kind of argument is made, it’s because someone wants to take the most extreme cases and use them to construct some dubiously over-generalized argument. This is literally the opposite of the original claim which is to try and understand where people are coming from and to listen to them as if they’re reasonable actors. You are doing the exact shit you’re accusing others of- assuming bad faith in their intentions and arguing against the bad faith intentions in a discussion about how to take good faith intent in arguments.
lawnchair_larry 6y ago
You could not have written a more ironic post and you didn’t even realize you did that. We don’t have to tolerate the intolerant, right?

maxlybbert 6y ago

I enjoy John Cleese’s speech making the same point ( https://youtu.be/wXCkxlqFd90 https://youtu.be/wXCkxlqFd90 ).

lawnchair_larry 6y ago
This is amazing. Thanks.
dTal 6y ago
Timeless!

ngcc_hk 6y ago

If I believed in one true (God/Truth/...) why I do not kill you all/crusade into/suppress all/burn you in stake/ Spanish ... It is so hard to accept others and let them articulate their view.

FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
Because a lot of times those others want to remove liberties from me or from people I care about, like women or non-straight people.

larkery 6y ago

There's a factor not considered here: to what extent were Scalia & Ginsberg able to get along because of other material conditions? As supreme court justices we can assume that they had a basic foundation of psychological and material security - a position of prestige, a job for life, healthcare and so on. I believe it is a lot easier to summon the "higher thoughts" necessary to be civil when ones personal position is more secure, so to achieve a more civil society it may help to work to make more insecure people secure.