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>My "justification" is not usable identically, word for word, by the same people who believe the opposite of my beliefs, because they do not believe my beliefs.
by endominus 4y ago
>My "justification" is not usable identically, word for word, by the same people who believe the opposite of my beliefs, because they do not believe my beliefs.
"If we tolerate {people with out-group beliefs}, they will take power and restrict our civil liberties, therefore we must guard {Sacred Value} from them" can be - and is - used by both sides to justify restriction of civil liberties.
>All the examples you cite (a CNN host, individuals talking about physically opposing self-identified Nazis, "comedians jailed for jokes", teenagers jailed for singing) are individuals.
I didn't know quite how to parse this. Are you saying that the victims are all individuals, or that the oppressors are? In both cases, that's not necessarily true. There were many people involved in calling that teenager a terrible person and harassing him - the force of the media, hate mobs on Twitter, and the like. And the people chilled into silence by "cancel culture" form a large group themselves. All of these groups, of course, are composed of individuals, but that doesn't seem to weigh on either direction. Of course the people who most acutely feel oppression are going to be individuals; how else would that work? Of course the oppressive group is going to be large; how else would it have any power?
>One group is cancelling the civil liberties of another, visibly, but they are keeping those rights for themselves.
And this is exactly what I mean about the symmetry of these arguments. I have heard this same idea repeated by right-wing people about the left! And they are able to produce examples of the same - that's what their complaints about cancel culture are. Here's an example of that; in the wake of the #MeToo movement, I have seen people on this very forum put forward the idea that allegations of sexual assault and rape are so serious and so traumatizing to the victims, that they should be assumed to be true and damning in the absence of evidence or trials. That is, that the accused should have their right to a fair trial, the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, revoked. That's a really damned worrying thing to hear as a liberal who's actually interested in protecting civil rights! Apparently some people have never heard of Emmett Till.
The thing is, the pop-culture paradox of tolerance - the idea under discussion - is literally about being able to declare some ideas "intolerant" and thus remove them from the discussion. It's a claim that some ideas are so dangerous that the public needs to be protected from them, and the claim that the group presenting that paradox are the people who should make that determination. I don't trust any group with that power. To do so would be to willingly place myself under the power of a despot.
- harimau777 4y agoIt's not in-group vs out-group, it's tolerant versus intolerant. If, for example, someone believes that homosexuality is a sin, but they treat gay people with respect and support them having the same rights as straight people, then there's no problem.
- revolvingocelot 4y agoThe people "chilled into silence by "cancel culture"" have let you know about their situation on talk shows and Twitter. They have not only not really had any rights taken away, but they are individuals being "oppressed" by individuals. The power of a mob of individuals deciding that they don't like you is not comparable to those in control of government making decisions about everyone's reproductive rights. >Of course the oppressive group is going to be large; how else would it have any power? Those in control of such government are actually in the minority; abortion and gay marriage and social programs are actually pretty popular. That's why they need Project REDMAP: to maintain power. The beneficiaries of endless tax cuts are an even smaller minority. But this is all just by the numbers, not how it makes a celebrity on Twitter feel, as platformed by a multinational news conglomerate. Emmett Till "was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States." [0] Just so we're clear, you're suggesting an equivalence between Emmett Till being actually lynched -- not an isolated event, but a zenith of decades of racism and oppression -- and the suggestion, not implementation, that those accused of sexual assault receive no fair trial? Are these the symmetrical arguments you're referring to?! They might have a symmetric character, but what those arguments are actually for aren't realistically comparable under anything like human morality. Unpunished murder as a result of systemic oppression versus angry suggestions on a forum are not the same, but I can't imagine what else you could be trying to say. If you're not actually American, you should be aware that you're carrying water in their culture war. One is what happened, one is powerless angryposting about what might happen. One group has taken away reproductive rights (for some, see "only moral abortion", above); one group is trying to prevent their own rights from being taken away. Symmetry! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till