7 ms·

One thing I dislike about our new moral arbiters is their view that intent doesn’t matter. They will use anything (e.g. a microaggression, a usually inadvertent

One thing I dislike about our new moral arbiters is their view that intent doesn’t matter. They will use anything (e.g. a microaggression, a usually inadvertent tiny slight) to justify cancelling someone. Tolerance for them also only has only one meaning: tolerate us.

Spartan-S63 5y ago
It's the paradox of tolerance. If you tolerate intolerance (regardless of intent), you pave the way for intolerance to take hold.
- light_cone 5y ago
  Of course, no one has ever felt to be the intolerant one in the story.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Oh, that's not true. I lived in a town, briefly fortunately, where the folks did, in fact, know they were intolerant when they ran off black families that dared to move in through various harassment tactics (horribly, mostly directed at the children since the adults had thicker skin). They just didn't care.
- RattleyCooper 5y ago
  >If you tolerate intolerance (regardless of intent) So should people tolerate people who don't tolerate the intolerant? And should other people tolerate them? I feel like Mr. Garrison's take on it sums it up really well. Tolerating someone doesn't mean you like them or support their views. It just means you have to live with them. And you kind of do, or you have to be willing to remove them from society by any means necessary. And at that point, you're kind of worse than the intolerant people so long as they aren't actively trying to remove people from society by any means necessary. I guess it all depends on how you define intolerant. When I hear the word I take it as "refuses to tolerate and will not allow coexistence". If that's the case, and that form of intolerance is what cannot be tolerated, then it's a full-circle mind fuck that makes no sense unless you put yourself on a pedestal where you're brand of intolerance is the only intolerance that must be tolerated. And yeah, I don't think that kind of intolerance should be tolerated, however I don't think it's as common as people make it seem, and I feel like people conflate too many things with the genocidal form of intolerance than they do with someone who might think something is morally wrong but doesn't actually do anything about it. For instance, I know some religious people think being gay is morally wrong but they don't care what people do or if they can get married. I think they're morally wrong for having those beliefs but so long as they don't violate the rights of gay ppl I don't see why it matters. I mean, I can judge them as much as they can judge me.
  - light_cone 5y ago
    I agree, that is exactly what I think people always misunderstand about tolerance: You cannot tolerate something you agree with. That is called agreeing, not tolerance, by definition. Tolerance is the wise behavior you should have, reserved for things you don't agree with, or even detest.
- sreque 5y ago
  You should read Michael Knowles' Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. Political radicals have explicitly defined tolerance to mean "don't tolerate dissenting views". I don't have the exact quote on hand at the moment or I would share it, but they were very explicit about their censorship goals. The book also discusses how there has never been unbridled free speech. There has always been a standard of speech that allows some things said and disallows other things said. What's changed over time is the standards themselves, and many would argue they have changed for the far worse in recent years.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  Popper (the source of the "paradox of tolerance") was very close to a free speech maximalist. His footnote containing this often cited paragraph was a small limited acknowledgment that in some extreme circumstances we as a society must place limits on intolerance.
- defaultprimate 5y ago
  Who defines intolerance?
awb 5y ago
Intent does matter but it’s only half the picture. The impact is the other half. If you don’t intend to run over someone with your car, but you do, you still get in trouble (assuming their intent want to get run over). You need to be more careful because your actions (even unintentional ones) impact others. From the post, they say that they have a conversation with anyone that’s the subject of a complaint at which point if you express some interest and concern about the impact you’re having on the community, your intentions will probably be respected more than if you just want to focus 100% on your intent, impact be damned.
- sreque 5y ago
  A better analogy is if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong. Results do matter more than intentions, but sometimes results are out of your control or even disconnected from your actions. You may say something perfectly reasonable and yet someone takes unreasonable offense. Who is to define what is reasonable to say and what is reasonable to take offense to? In the past decades, the political left has taken us too far in the direction of giving a small minority tyrannical censorship power to silence by taking offense at whatever they dislike, and then cancelling the person who said it.
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    > if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong. Not if you are in a pedestrian crossing (especially unsignalized one).
  - awb 5y ago
    What? I can’t call someone a “f*** f*” anymore? Every generation thinks the next generation’s rules are tyrannical. Speech and culture is messy and it’s not black and white. To say it’s all been bad is ignoring a lot of violent speech that is no longer acceptable and the benefit that has brought to the the same small minority groups you’re referencing, from being less subjected to verbal attacks.
profmonocle 5y ago
> They will use anything (e.g. a microaggression, a usually inadvertent tiny slight) to justify cancelling someone. Are there any examples of this happening in a prominent open source project? The debate over COCs is a few years old at this point, so if this type of abuse were a common problem I'd imagine there'd be some major examples right now. (I freely admit there may indeed be some, and I'm just not aware.)
- type0 5y ago
  > Are there any examples of this happening in a prominent open source project? Open Source Initiative itself expelled Eric S. Raymond (a founding member) from their mailing list
  - nmjohn 5y ago
    ESR didn't get cancelled for microaggressions. It was because he has a long history of being utterly vile towards black people and women, amongst other very much not "just a microaggression" behaviors.
    - terracottage 5y ago
      Whenever I hear this sort of second hand and third hand information, I assume it's a wild exaggeration, amplified through a whisper network. If there is something concrete to point to, with evidence, people do. In the absence of that, I assume it's just malicious gossip. Hasn't failed me yet.
      - nmjohn 5y ago
        I mean, have you bothered to look? It's not a secret nor in private. Defending eugenics in the comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20210419141913/http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3974#comment-344083 https://web.archive.org/web/20210419141913/http://esr.ibibli... Claiming black people have a lower IQ than everyone else (in an argument that black people shouldn't own guns as a result): https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833 Claims LGBT people are making it up: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/769730601872044032/photo/1 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/769730601872044032/photo/1 Lots of racist comments: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848/photo/1 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848/photo/1 This is what I could find in less than 5 minutes of searching - the receipts are there, it is not "a wild exaggeration"
TheCondor 5y ago
Doesn't this address inadvertent slights and micro aggressions?
- google234123 5y ago
  The concept of micro aggressions is based on teaching people to feel harmed by inadvertent slights
jsight 5y ago
I only dislike it when its asymmetric. Our policy says intent doesn't matter for you, but the policy itself is vague and only works if you trust the implementers intent. I don't see anything obvious in this policy that would cause such an issue.
SquishyPanda23 5y ago
> our new moral arbiters Can you be specific about who you are referring to and what your concern is?
gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
Plus the arbiters tend to be the least moderate, and most forthright in their views. It’s considered ridiculous when a small town dweller attempts to force their morality on the world, but apparently perfectly fine when it comes from the Californian chattering classes.
- honkdaddy 5y ago
  Having talked with enough hyper progressives on the subject, the answer I've gotten and am eternally frustrated with is that progressive-social-justice-california-politics are objectively right and small-town-rural-conservative-politics are objectively wrong, therefore it's completely fine for a ruling class to force the former down our throats because they are ultimately Correct.
_moof 5y ago
I agree that cancelling someone over an accidental transgression is a vengeful overreaction. Separately, let me ask you this: If I step on your foot, does it hurt less if I didn't mean to?
- type0 5y ago
  that depends if you are wearing high heels or not
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- indigochill 5y ago
  If you say you meant to, I will exclude you from my dancing events to protect the other dancers' feet. If you say you didn't mean to, you know, my foot still hurts but you're still welcome to my dancing events because it probably won't happen again. My foot hurting actually has no bearing on whether or not you're welcome. Conversely, if you say it's an accident but somehow you have a conspicuously high foot-stomping incidence among many dance partners, I probably will exclude you because I will stop believing the foot-stomping is accidental (or you're just very unfortunately clumsy, terribly sorry, but I still have to protect the other dancers' feet).
  - _moof 5y ago
    > My foot hurting actually has no bearing on whether or not you're welcome. Of course - that was my point about cancelling being an overreaction to accidental transgressions. I think the thing that gets missed is that an accidental transgression still causes harm, and harm warrants the making of amends. "You break it, you buy it" applies whether or not you meant to knock that lamp over. If I step on your foot I apologize. Etc.
    - indigochill 5y ago
      > and harm warrants the making of amends Generally, yes, of course. Though once we leave the realm of hypothetical foot-stomping for politics, things can get more complicated. For example, we might look at the John Cena incident where he "acknowledged Taiwan as a country", which somehow led to him later making an apology video (in Chinese?) for this "offense" against mainland China. So sometimes accusations of "harm" are merely manipulation. It can take discernment to judge when amends are actually warranted.

Spartan-S63 5y ago

It's the paradox of tolerance. If you tolerate intolerance (regardless of intent), you pave the way for intolerance to take hold.

light_cone 5y ago
Of course, no one has ever felt to be the intolerant one in the story.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Oh, that's not true. I lived in a town, briefly fortunately, where the folks did, in fact, know they were intolerant when they ran off black families that dared to move in through various harassment tactics (horribly, mostly directed at the children since the adults had thicker skin). They just didn't care.
RattleyCooper 5y ago
>If you tolerate intolerance (regardless of intent) So should people tolerate people who don't tolerate the intolerant? And should other people tolerate them? I feel like Mr. Garrison's take on it sums it up really well. Tolerating someone doesn't mean you like them or support their views. It just means you have to live with them. And you kind of do, or you have to be willing to remove them from society by any means necessary. And at that point, you're kind of worse than the intolerant people so long as they aren't actively trying to remove people from society by any means necessary. I guess it all depends on how you define intolerant. When I hear the word I take it as "refuses to tolerate and will not allow coexistence". If that's the case, and that form of intolerance is what cannot be tolerated, then it's a full-circle mind fuck that makes no sense unless you put yourself on a pedestal where you're brand of intolerance is the only intolerance that must be tolerated. And yeah, I don't think that kind of intolerance should be tolerated, however I don't think it's as common as people make it seem, and I feel like people conflate too many things with the genocidal form of intolerance than they do with someone who might think something is morally wrong but doesn't actually do anything about it. For instance, I know some religious people think being gay is morally wrong but they don't care what people do or if they can get married. I think they're morally wrong for having those beliefs but so long as they don't violate the rights of gay ppl I don't see why it matters. I mean, I can judge them as much as they can judge me.
- light_cone 5y ago
  I agree, that is exactly what I think people always misunderstand about tolerance: You cannot tolerate something you agree with. That is called agreeing, not tolerance, by definition. Tolerance is the wise behavior you should have, reserved for things you don't agree with, or even detest.
sreque 5y ago
You should read Michael Knowles' Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. Political radicals have explicitly defined tolerance to mean "don't tolerate dissenting views". I don't have the exact quote on hand at the moment or I would share it, but they were very explicit about their censorship goals. The book also discusses how there has never been unbridled free speech. There has always been a standard of speech that allows some things said and disallows other things said. What's changed over time is the standards themselves, and many would argue they have changed for the far worse in recent years.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
Popper (the source of the "paradox of tolerance") was very close to a free speech maximalist. His footnote containing this often cited paragraph was a small limited acknowledgment that in some extreme circumstances we as a society must place limits on intolerance.
defaultprimate 5y ago
Who defines intolerance?

awb 5y ago

Intent does matter but it’s only half the picture. The impact is the other half. If you don’t intend to run over someone with your car, but you do, you still get in trouble (assuming their intent want to get run over). You need to be more careful because your actions (even unintentional ones) impact others. From the post, they say that they have a conversation with anyone that’s the subject of a complaint at which point if you express some interest and concern about the impact you’re having on the community, your intentions will probably be respected more than if you just want to focus 100% on your intent, impact be damned.

sreque 5y ago
A better analogy is if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong. Results do matter more than intentions, but sometimes results are out of your control or even disconnected from your actions. You may say something perfectly reasonable and yet someone takes unreasonable offense. Who is to define what is reasonable to say and what is reasonable to take offense to? In the past decades, the political left has taken us too far in the direction of giving a small minority tyrannical censorship power to silence by taking offense at whatever they dislike, and then cancelling the person who said it.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  > if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong. Not if you are in a pedestrian crossing (especially unsignalized one).
- awb 5y ago
  What? I can’t call someone a “f*** f*” anymore? Every generation thinks the next generation’s rules are tyrannical. Speech and culture is messy and it’s not black and white. To say it’s all been bad is ignoring a lot of violent speech that is no longer acceptable and the benefit that has brought to the the same small minority groups you’re referencing, from being less subjected to verbal attacks.

profmonocle 5y ago

> They will use anything (e.g. a microaggression, a usually inadvertent tiny slight) to justify cancelling someone. Are there any examples of this happening in a prominent open source project? The debate over COCs is a few years old at this point, so if this type of abuse were a common problem I'd imagine there'd be some major examples right now. (I freely admit there may indeed be some, and I'm just not aware.)

type0 5y ago
> Are there any examples of this happening in a prominent open source project? Open Source Initiative itself expelled Eric S. Raymond (a founding member) from their mailing list
- nmjohn 5y ago
  ESR didn't get cancelled for microaggressions. It was because he has a long history of being utterly vile towards black people and women, amongst other very much not "just a microaggression" behaviors.
  - terracottage 5y ago
    Whenever I hear this sort of second hand and third hand information, I assume it's a wild exaggeration, amplified through a whisper network. If there is something concrete to point to, with evidence, people do. In the absence of that, I assume it's just malicious gossip. Hasn't failed me yet.
    - nmjohn 5y ago
      I mean, have you bothered to look? It's not a secret nor in private. Defending eugenics in the comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20210419141913/http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3974#comment-344083 https://web.archive.org/web/20210419141913/http://esr.ibibli... Claiming black people have a lower IQ than everyone else (in an argument that black people shouldn't own guns as a result): https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833 Claims LGBT people are making it up: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/769730601872044032/photo/1 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/769730601872044032/photo/1 Lots of racist comments: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848/photo/1 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848/photo/1 This is what I could find in less than 5 minutes of searching - the receipts are there, it is not "a wild exaggeration"

TheCondor 5y ago

Doesn't this address inadvertent slights and micro aggressions?

google234123 5y ago
The concept of micro aggressions is based on teaching people to feel harmed by inadvertent slights

jsight 5y ago

I only dislike it when its asymmetric. Our policy says intent doesn't matter for you, but the policy itself is vague and only works if you trust the implementers intent. I don't see anything obvious in this policy that would cause such an issue.

SquishyPanda23 5y ago

> our new moral arbiters Can you be specific about who you are referring to and what your concern is?

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago

Plus the arbiters tend to be the least moderate, and most forthright in their views. It’s considered ridiculous when a small town dweller attempts to force their morality on the world, but apparently perfectly fine when it comes from the Californian chattering classes.

honkdaddy 5y ago
Having talked with enough hyper progressives on the subject, the answer I've gotten and am eternally frustrated with is that progressive-social-justice-california-politics are objectively right and small-town-rural-conservative-politics are objectively wrong, therefore it's completely fine for a ruling class to force the former down our throats because they are ultimately Correct.

_moof 5y ago

I agree that cancelling someone over an accidental transgression is a vengeful overreaction. Separately, let me ask you this: If I step on your foot, does it hurt less if I didn't mean to?

type0 5y ago
that depends if you are wearing high heels or not
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
indigochill 5y ago
If you say you meant to, I will exclude you from my dancing events to protect the other dancers' feet. If you say you didn't mean to, you know, my foot still hurts but you're still welcome to my dancing events because it probably won't happen again. My foot hurting actually has no bearing on whether or not you're welcome. Conversely, if you say it's an accident but somehow you have a conspicuously high foot-stomping incidence among many dance partners, I probably will exclude you because I will stop believing the foot-stomping is accidental (or you're just very unfortunately clumsy, terribly sorry, but I still have to protect the other dancers' feet).
- _moof 5y ago
  > My foot hurting actually has no bearing on whether or not you're welcome. Of course - that was my point about cancelling being an overreaction to accidental transgressions. I think the thing that gets missed is that an accidental transgression still causes harm, and harm warrants the making of amends. "You break it, you buy it" applies whether or not you meant to knock that lamp over. If I step on your foot I apologize. Etc.
  - indigochill 5y ago
    > and harm warrants the making of amends Generally, yes, of course. Though once we leave the realm of hypothetical foot-stomping for politics, things can get more complicated. For example, we might look at the John Cena incident where he "acknowledged Taiwan as a country", which somehow led to him later making an apology video (in Chinese?) for this "offense" against mainland China. So sometimes accusations of "harm" are merely manipulation. It can take discernment to judge when amends are actually warranted.