we interrupt trip updates nobody's reading anyway for something more important

[lagilman]

Even if you have somehow missed the uproar, or don't particularly give a damn, this should be required Civics 101 reading: The Carl Brandon Society's statement re: the Elizabeth Moon controversy.


“Tolerance” does not mean agreement, consensus, likeness, or even understanding. It does not mean assimilation. It does not require friendship, nor even dialogue. It is simple. It means refraining from expressing negativity towards things that are different from or alien to you. Tolerance is part of our social contract: you tolerate me, and I tolerate you; we both refrain from attacking one another; we live and let live.

Yes. And also; yes. Because it is the ideal does not mean it should not also be our everyday goal.

Comments

[varkat.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[issen4.livejournal.com]

Sorry for just butting in...

Is tolerance the ideal? I've always thought it was the bare minimum for society.

[lagilman]

Ideal; adjective, pertaining to a possible state of affairs considered as highly desirable.

The fact that we might consider it a bare minimum does not mean that it IS. Which is why discussions like the link above are still required.

[cepetit.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

I suspect that the problems with tolerance (or agreement, consensus, likeness, understanding, assimilation, etc.) come from a much simpler problem:

failure to admit that the view/behavior/philosophy is not the person

This is a problem both inside the view and outside the view. The misbegotten, hypocritical "hate the sin, love the sinner" propaganda put forth by theistic apologists (in the good and bad sense of that term); the use of shame as the main, and often only, tool of persuasion; inconsistent definitions of "assimilation" (I'll never be voluntarily assimilated into the evils of post-industrial conglomerate agrarianism, even though I live there now); and an inability to ever admit personal or policy-level fault from leaders — all just symptoms.

No, I'm not feeling particularly generous this morning after news of yet more graffiti on the wall at the local mosque after one of the local-outside-of-town yahoo ministers did another version of The Conversion Speech. I may fail at this problem every {insert string of expletives here} day, but I'm trying; unfortunately, the concept of "partial credit" is inconsistent with "suppressing bigotry."

PS I'm a non-native English speaker; my facility with English is dominant, but one can hear the remnants when I begin speaking/writing too quickly and shove the verbs to the end of the sentence where they belong. I thus know a little bit about "assimilation" problems... in 1960s and 1970s suburbia.