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Look up James Damore if you want one of the more canonical examples of this. Essentially, "tolerance" has been redefined as a term to essentially just mean "li

Look up James Damore if you want one of the more canonical examples of this. Essentially, "tolerance" has been redefined as a term to essentially just mean "liberalism"; whenever you hear someone suggesting that one "be tolerant", you can just mentally replace that with "be liberal". The term is leveled at folks like yourself, who are deemed intolerant and illiberal for having and trying to perpetuate a different value set. If taken to the utmost extreme, which admittedly few people actually do, this boils down to excluding tolerance of _actually_ different beliefs and ways of life; only tolerance of different looking liberals from different backgrounds is actually included. Different cultures are tolerated as long as they're far away and out of sight and mind. The irony of all of this is completely lost on them, of course; they don't think about it like this at all. They truly believe themselves to be tolerant, good people, even as they do this! Most of them are actually trying to be good people, too; if they had been raised in your household they would have grown up to be good Christians, if they had been raised in India they'd be trying to be good Hindus, and so forth. They were raised under the aegis of liberalism and are doing their best to stand up for its own moral principles. The big problem is that they're incapable of seeing that same kind of goodness in people like you, preferring to boil you down to a reductionist caricature. This same problem rears its head in Christians who don't see the goodness in others, as well; they'd do well to remove the log from their own eye, and so on. Stepping back from this, I for one find generalized "tolerance" to be a fairly useless mechanism to espouse, anyway. Like any right-thinking person, I have my own moral code of what I believe to be right and wrong, based on philosophies ranging from Christianity to the best atheist thinkers to a variety of Eastern ideas. I'm not going to start believing an action is right when someone else does it that would be wrong if I did it - for a system of morality to make any sense and have any actual purpose it has to attempt to be objective and independent. Importantly, it only applies to the actions of individuals, not to aggregated cultures, races, or other intersectional groups. When someone commits an immoral act, the context of their identity is only important so much that it might explain their motivations; it does not excuse their actions, unless they're perhaps someone who should not have their own power of attorney, so to speak.

jonathanyc 6y ago
Hey! Thanks for replying with your explanation. Personally I am not sure if I can see Google’s firing of James Damore as being evidence of liberal bias given the news (feels like it’s increased trust this past year?) they also fire AI researchers and union organizers. I think for me it seems more like Google is just very much against people speaking up about anything. I also agree with your comments about how people think they are being tolerant while they are actually being intolerant, but from my personal experience I can’t really ascribe this to either liberals or conservatives particularly. I feel like I’ve had worse experiences with this outside of CA, and I can’t see CA as being particularly intolerant this way. I appreciate you writing back though. If you have personal experiences with intolerance in CA being worse than other places I’d be particularly interested to hear them.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > I think for me it seems more like Google is just very much against people speaking up about anything. Perhaps you're right; certainly I would cleave off Google's private interests (shutting up people who damage their business prospects) from Google's idealized public position (good, diverse, modern liberal values, a trusted source of information, etc). Few people know what their management _really_ thinks or talks about, but we do know their public position well. Consider this, at least: when firing James Damore, it was absolutely not necessary or expected for them to say anything about how this shouldn't impact efforts to continue to make sure white males are represented in the workplace - quite the contrary. > from my personal experience I can’t really ascribe this to either liberals or conservatives particularly. If you reread my post, hopefully it should be clear that I actually did ascribe this behaviour to everyone. The issue in CA is that, at least in urban areas, the liberal value set is the norm, and is enforced as such, much as Christianity would have been enforced a century ago in many cities. For those implicitly doing the enforcement, ranging from thought leaders to city politicians to moms posting on Facebook, it's just the water they swim in; virtue is on a single axis and like most good people they want to swim upstream. It's not "particularly intolerant" in the grand scheme of things, compared to other such cultural centers throughout history, but it is particularly intolerant of anything outside of postmodern American liberalism today, and is perhaps (outside of maybe NYC) the biggest enclave of such thought in the world. > If you have personal experiences with intolerance in CA being worse than other places CA and the Hollywood->SF corridor in particular export their value set to the entire world, never mind just America. The intolerance for free speech, conservative or third position values that we see on social media today stems from this. It's not enough to enforce it within their own cities, rather it seems that they need to export it in the form of regulations and propaganda that continually escalates in intensity over time. It's not far from the proselytizing behaviour that religion has had forever; memetically speaking, it's actually entirely logical that any successful cultural set of values and ideas would have to propagate itself via word and deed in order to survive and grow generationally. In many ways, liberalism is just a third-rate religion; it may have some improvements in select places over the traditional value set that it replaces, but has lost the ability to truly create communities somehow in the process.

jonathanyc 6y ago

Hey! Thanks for replying with your explanation. Personally I am not sure if I can see Google’s firing of James Damore as being evidence of liberal bias given the news (feels like it’s increased trust this past year?) they also fire AI researchers and union organizers. I think for me it seems more like Google is just very much against people speaking up about anything. I also agree with your comments about how people think they are being tolerant while they are actually being intolerant, but from my personal experience I can’t really ascribe this to either liberals or conservatives particularly. I feel like I’ve had worse experiences with this outside of CA, and I can’t see CA as being particularly intolerant this way. I appreciate you writing back though. If you have personal experiences with intolerance in CA being worse than other places I’d be particularly interested to hear them.

core-questions 6y ago
> I think for me it seems more like Google is just very much against people speaking up about anything. Perhaps you're right; certainly I would cleave off Google's private interests (shutting up people who damage their business prospects) from Google's idealized public position (good, diverse, modern liberal values, a trusted source of information, etc). Few people know what their management _really_ thinks or talks about, but we do know their public position well. Consider this, at least: when firing James Damore, it was absolutely not necessary or expected for them to say anything about how this shouldn't impact efforts to continue to make sure white males are represented in the workplace - quite the contrary. > from my personal experience I can’t really ascribe this to either liberals or conservatives particularly. If you reread my post, hopefully it should be clear that I actually did ascribe this behaviour to everyone. The issue in CA is that, at least in urban areas, the liberal value set is the norm, and is enforced as such, much as Christianity would have been enforced a century ago in many cities. For those implicitly doing the enforcement, ranging from thought leaders to city politicians to moms posting on Facebook, it's just the water they swim in; virtue is on a single axis and like most good people they want to swim upstream. It's not "particularly intolerant" in the grand scheme of things, compared to other such cultural centers throughout history, but it is particularly intolerant of anything outside of postmodern American liberalism today, and is perhaps (outside of maybe NYC) the biggest enclave of such thought in the world. > If you have personal experiences with intolerance in CA being worse than other places CA and the Hollywood->SF corridor in particular export their value set to the entire world, never mind just America. The intolerance for free speech, conservative or third position values that we see on social media today stems from this. It's not enough to enforce it within their own cities, rather it seems that they need to export it in the form of regulations and propaganda that continually escalates in intensity over time. It's not far from the proselytizing behaviour that religion has had forever; memetically speaking, it's actually entirely logical that any successful cultural set of values and ideas would have to propagate itself via word and deed in order to survive and grow generationally. In many ways, liberalism is just a third-rate religion; it may have some improvements in select places over the traditional value set that it replaces, but has lost the ability to truly create communities somehow in the process.