The death of tolerance

[IMCC965]

You will never find a post of mine that represents that, never.

I will complain about their message, sure, point out how ignorant it is, how useless, how absurd, but not against their ability to protest.

I'm all for protest. I am one of the very very few on here who have argued for the Westboro baptists on here. Go for it gay-haters, wave those ignorant banners!

My bad. If you have, good for you. My apologies for putting you in a negative light.

But I hate those Westboro asshats.

 

[theIowaHawk]

My bad. If you have, good for you. My apologies for putting you in a negative light.

But I hate those Westboro asshats.

Nothing wrong with that, feel free to swing away....provided that you are off duty of course.

 

[joelbc1]

Please Trad, don't try and tell me that "tolerance" has died at the hands of liberals. To do so is not correct. The right, the cons , the tea party and the evangelicals have hardly been a paragon of virtue and tolerance for these oh, so many decades.

 

[theIowaHawk]

If people surround your car and keep you from moving, you have a right to drive through them. It's very simple. They assume total risk of injury when stepping in front of the car.

I like you, post more.

 

[The Tradition]

Please Trad, don't try and tell me that "tolerance" has died at the hands of liberals. To do so is not correct. The right, the cons , the tea party and the evangelicals have hardly been a paragon of virtue and tolerance for these oh, so many decades.

The liberals are attempting to redefine the word "tolerance" to mean "acceptance of things that liberals agree with"....

 

[TexMichFan]

We used to argue to be heard now we argue to try to stop the side you don't agree with to be heard.

 

[tarheelbybirth]

If people surround your car and keep you from moving, you have a right to drive through them. It's very simple. They assume total risk of injury when stepping in front of the car.

Not really, you know.

The liberals are attempting to redefine the word "tolerance" to mean "acceptance of things that liberals agree with"....

EVERY group tries to define it that way.

 

[TJ8869]

No they didn't. There was no detention. And wasting some ones time is not a violation of liberty. Grow up. You are arguing for a police state to save yourself the possibility of a disagreement. You should go to bed because you are all kinds of wrong tonight.

Would it be considered "force" or "violation of liberty" if a group of anti-abortion protesters physically prevented a woman from entering a clinic and made her look at pictures of aborted fetuses for 10 minutes?

 

[aflachawk]

How has it happened that at this moment of history, large numbers of young people have come to associate exposure to dissenting views with suffering an injury so egregious that it requires university administrators and professors to respond by publicly validating the wound and stamping out further expressions of dissent?

The best explanation can be found in a recent Atlantic cover story by constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Titled "The Coddling of the American Mind," the article traces the unprecedented fragility of today's college students to the attitudes of their parents and schools about safety. Consistently taught that the world is a perilous place — with everyone and everything from sexual predators, playground bullies, and hit-and-run drivers to monkey bars and peanut butter threatening to inflict damage or injury — young people have learned the following lesson: "Life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well."

Growing up in an era of ideological polarization and reared on social media from a formative age, young people today have also learned that disagreements are often rancorous — and that comfort can be found in forming communities of the likeminded that define themselves against outsiders. (Talk among the Yale protesters about how their residential college should serve as a "place of comfort and home," rather than an "intellectual space," seems to follow from this model of social-media interaction.)

The point is that the protesters didn't spring into existence out of nothing. Their preferences and convictions aren't self-evidently true. And they aren't giving voice to common sense. They are thinking and feeling a certain way, and making specific demands, because of how they were raised — by their parents, by their schools, and by their culture.

By our culture.

We made them this way.

This should give all of us pause — and not only because, as Lukianoff and Haidt point out, today's student activists could well grow up to become miserable adults suffering from acute anxiety and depression.

It should also trouble us because of the likely civic consequences.

Can a liberal democracy thrive if a good portion of its citizens embrace the blatantly illiberal proposition that freedom of thought and tolerance of dissent are incompatible with human flourishing and should therefore berepressed?

A corollary of the American myth of spontaneous self-generation is the view that any and all human beings, if given a free choice, would choose to live as we do, to abide by liberal democratic norms and institutions. But this, too, is a fiction. The truth is that liberal democratic citizens need to be made, and then they need to be reproduced, cultivated. (If the failures of our multiple democratization projects in the Middle East and South Asia over the past 14 years haven't taught us both how essential and how monumentally difficult this task often is, I don't know what would.)

The United States is a liberal democracy that is producing significant numbers of citizens who do not think and act like citizens of a liberal democracy.

If the trend continues and spreads, it will not end well.

A wise man once wrote: "To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian." Striking and maintaining the right balance between absolutism and relativism, confident self-advocacy and intellectual humility can be a tricky business. Achieving it is indeed a mark of civilized life.

But it is also a precondition for liberal citizenship, which demands that people stand up for what they believe in while simultaneously remaining alive to the inevitable partiality of their perspective on the truth — and therefore to the possibility that someone else just might end up being right.

Toleration is the name we give to this moral and epistemological balancing act. It is the preeminently liberal virtue.

Which is why the rejection of it by so many on our college campuses — and our response to that rejection — is so important.

How can we inculcate the virtue of toleration in those who reject it? What good does that virtue serve? And how does it fit into higher education and a good human life?

http://theweek.com/articles/587967/yale-mizzou-death-liberal-toleration

The left views their own intolerance as a virtue. Hopefully the right will not fall into that trap

 

[unIowa]

This conversation made this pop back up in my mind, probably not a good example, but very funny and we all could use a laugh...constant discussion of racial issues can be depressing regardless of ones perspective.

Also, "you are blocking my freedom of movement."

 

[The Tradition]

This conversation made this pop back up in my mind, probably not a good example, but very funny and we all could use a laugh...constant discussion of racial issues can be depressing regardless of ones perspective.

Also, "you are blocking my freedom of movement."

View embedded media

What a freaking dumb ass. They should have zapped him a few more times.

 

[TJ8869]

This conversation made this pop back up in my mind, probably not a good example, but very funny and we all could use a laugh...constant discussion of racial issues can be depressing regardless of ones perspective.

Also, "you are blocking my freedom of movement."

View embedded media

Was that guy for real? He sounded like a caricature of one of those sovereign citizens or something.

 

[hexumhawk]

We are now seeing the result of the American progressive education system of jumping rope without a rope because some kids can't do it and they'll feel bad if put in that situation.

No dodge ball because some kids aren't good enough. No musical chairs because it's unfair when one kid doesn't get to sit down. No cowboys and indians on the playground because it's insensitive. No biting a pop tart into the shape of a gun because it's dangerous and there is NO tolerance for violence in the schools.

It's all happening right before our very eyes. Funny thing is, many of us saw it happening and said something, but others just laughed at us and told us not to worry about it. It's harmless and the right thing to do.

Well, it's not harmless and it wasn't the right thing to do because now we have this bullshit in Missouri and our police fighting young adults because they feel threatened even thought they're breaking the law.

This is exactly it. Feel good baby boomers' kids that have never experienced any real pain or loss. Never had to lose and not get a medal. We have created a bunch of entitled children that are now adults...kind of.

 

[NoleSoup4U]

Getting in your face. But not force. Freedom is hard.

Trying so hard to justify your views, eh? It's force. If you impose yourself into my personal space, that's force. I would be well withing my rights to give you a crooked nose.

 

[naturalmwa]

Trying so hard to justify your views, eh? It's force. If you impose yourself into my personal space, that's force. I would be well withing my rights to give you a crooked nose.

Just so we are clear, you're on the side of the police state here.

 

[naturalmwa]

Would it be considered "force" or "violation of liberty" if a group of anti-abortion protesters physically prevented a woman from entering a clinic and made her look at pictures of aborted fetuses for 10 minutes?

Watch the video, that's not what was happening. No one was physically preventing anyone from leaving or moving around them. Anti-abortion protesters do stand in front of the clinics and the customers simply go in the side door.

 

[NoleSoup4U]

Just so we are clear, you're on the side of the police state here.

Nope. I'm saying that if you get in my face, then that's a use of force. If you want to argue with me while not being threatening, then that's okay.

 

[naturalmwa]

Nope. I'm saying that if you get in my face, then that's a use of force. If you want to argue with me while not being threatening, then that's okay.

So you support the protesters?

 

[NoleSoup4U]

Watch the video, that's not what was happening. No one was physically preventing anyone from leaving or moving around them. Anti-abortion protesters do stand in front of the clinics and the customers simply go in the side door.

See, I'm not that guy. I'm going in the front door.

 

[NoleSoup4U]

So you support the protesters?

It depends on what they were doing. The only thing I really haven't supported was your comment. Now, maybe you misspoke, but I'll leave that up to you to explain.

 

[naturalmwa]

It depends on what they were doing. The only thing I really haven't supported was your comment. Now, maybe you misspoke, but I'll leave that up to you to explain.

Watch the video. Do you support the right of citizens to act like they did?

 

[IMCC965]

Watch the video, that's not what was happening. No one was physically preventing anyone from leaving or moving around them. Anti-abortion protesters do stand in front of the clinics and the customers simply go in the side door.

I think YOU need to watch the video again. The car WAS trying to go around them and they kept moving as a line to prevent it. It's easy to see.

 

[NoleSoup4U]

Watch the video. Do you support the right of citizens to act like they did?

View embedded media

Up until the point where they impeded traffic.

 

[Hoosierhawkeye]

Wait another 5-15 years, and then post the same article. It will be exactly the same as the ones posted in 2010, 2005, 2000, all the way back to the 1960s. Remember the pink locker room lady?

There isn't much a difference between the youth of today and you guys. They just have a really powerful and effective social media presence that allows their stupidity to reach the masses. Whereas you could say your idiotic crap in the dorms of Burge or the tables of the Airliner, without anyone but your friends knowing...

I was going to say that it seems different as I'm constantly hearing about perpetually offended college students but I realized that when I was in college an economics professor demanded that an ROTC student stop wearing his military uniform because it offended him. Made the school newspaper.

I was in that class, the economic's prof seemed like a bit of a hippie and was certainly old enough to have been one.

So I will say it's happened before, with far older people then college students.

However that all said I don't think people should cave to the perpetually offended crowd. It's unfortunate that the student had to cave to his econ prof but he didn't want to fail. University administration should have stepped in to protect their student here. Was disappointed that they didn't.

 

[naturalmwa]

Up until the point where they impeded traffic.

So you value order too. You're on the side of the police state just as I suspected.

 

[theIowaHawk]

Would it be considered "force" or "violation of liberty" if a group of anti-abortion protesters physically prevented a woman from entering a clinic and made her look at pictures of aborted fetuses for 10 minutes?

You are missing the important step, defining the "physically prevented", just because Tradition envisions this:

Doesn't mean that is the only possibility.

 

[theIowaHawk]

However that all said I don't think people should cave to the perpetually offended crowd. .

Of course not, but the great thing about America, democracy, and everything we have here, is that you have to be prepared to encounter consequences. If you don't care that you "offended" someone and won't make it "right", be forewarned that other "offended" people might come and protest you. It is the American way.

But, I agree, you shouldn't just give in, that ruins a lot of the fun.

 

[NoleSoup4U]

So you value order too. You're on the side of the police state just as I suspected.

I'm not sure how not wanting to allow people to infringe on other people's liberties is being pro police state.

I mean, the protesters are the ones acting like a police state at that point in time.

 

[theIowaHawk]

Nope. I'm saying that if you get in my face, then that's a use of force. If you want to argue with me while not being threatening, then that's okay.

I agree with this, "getting in someone's face" can certainly be threatening and even illegal, but it is always a matter of degrees. When one person claims someone "got in their face", another person might completely disagree. Another reason this age is so fun, because we get to see a lot of video.

 

[theIowaHawk]

I'm not sure how not wanting to allow people to infringe on other people's liberties is being pro police state.

I mean, the protesters are the ones acting like a police state at that point in time.

So, as always, I presume there is a line?

Apparently you believe ten minutes was too much and = Police State. What time frame doesn't?

 

[theIowaHawk]

Trying so hard to justify your views, eh? It's force. If you impose yourself into my personal space, that's force. I would be well withing my rights to give you a crooked nose.

I just want to point this out, didn't a lot of this entire thing have to do with "safe space"? Is the disagreement just over whose safe space it is, or how much space that entails?

 

[NoleSoup4U]

So, as always, I presume there is a line?

Apparently you believe ten minutes was too much and = Police State. What time frame doesn't?

You're either infringing on people's liberties or you aren't. Time frame does not matter.

 

[naturalmwa]

I'm not sure how not wanting to allow people to infringe on other people's liberties is being pro police state.

I mean, the protesters are the ones acting like a police state at that point in time.

I fully believe you're not sure. That's why you are a cheap libertarian. You prioritize convenience over speech. You think you have a right not to be bothered, where I think I have a right to bother you.

 

[NoleSoup4U]

I just want to point this out, didn't a lot of this entire thing have to do with "safe space"? Is the disagreement just over whose safe space it is, or how much space that entails?

This was me responding to a post of natural's, in which he evidently misspoke.

 

[NoleSoup4U]

I fully believe you're not sure. That's why you are a cheap libertarian. You prioritize convenience over speech. You think you have a right not to be bothered, where I think I have a right to bother you.

It's not that you don't have a right to bother me. It's that you don't have a right to impede me while I'm trying to get to work, or any other activity that would be considered the "pursuit of happiness."

 

[naturalmwa]

It's not that you don't have a right to bother me. It's that you don't have a right to impede me while I'm trying to get to work, or any other activity that would be considered the "pursuit of happiness."

So Selma should have been stopped?

 

[hansenhawk]

Everybody is a victim looking for a handout.

Welcome to Obama'a America.

 

[theIowaHawk]

I've posted it a few times, but nobody has seemed to respond to it.

Are the posters on this board adamantly opposed to sit ins?

If so, bummer.

 

[theIowaHawk]

Everybody is a victim looking for a handout.

Welcome to Obama'a America.

Crikey, posts like this are the absolute worst. "This time is the worst (or greatest! time in history, nobody has it worse off than us..." And in a thread largely talking about peaceful protests by college students against their administration.

Maybe I imagined protests/riots in the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, before that we'd have to ask Lone.

 

[hansenhawk]

60's, hippy JFK's America
70's, moron Carter's America
80's, Bruce Springsteen's America
90's, Clinton's America

Common theme here.