I agree, Angela. Btw, I'm attacking the person Wanderlust not an ideaology. The dude's a jerk. In my last post, I was going to lay out how Wanderlust and leftists academics who obsess over intolerance like him also tend to be intolerant and continue this cycle of anger and hate in America.
You ever hear of something called the paradox of tolerance? I'm going to go ahead and assume not.
Philosopher Karl Popper defined the paradox in 1945 in
The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. 1.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
What’s always so amazingly disingenuous and insidious about the right’s railing against “PC Culture,” the horrors of supposed “intolerant” liberalism, etc… is that
1.) There is usually some glaring hypocrisy afoot. For example, some (usually the loudest amongst them) conservatives will whine and cry about the freedom of speech being stifled on college campuses and cry about the removal of racist, traitorous Confederate monuments built to intimidate black people AND WITH NO SENSE OF IRONY, still cry and moan about the unAmericaness of NFL players who take the knee in expressing their freedom of speech. HUH???
2.) Liberals are painted as intolerant because they resist traitorous Confederates (who lost and whose asses we kicked over 150 years ago) and Nazi sympathizers (who lost and whose asses we kicked in WW2) walking around with punk as* tiki torches, targeting elderly people in churches and college students, while yelling “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” SERIOUSLY??? The right seems to want intolerant liberals to let them espouse and carry out beliefs that are, innately, centered on bigotry and prejudice and that call for (directly and indirectly) the disenfranchisement and/or slaughter of innocents.
Somehow in some of their delusional brains, not letting Alt-Right loser and tittyboy Richard Spencer speak at a university is on the same level of egregiousness as being intolerant of people who think gays should be denied service because of their sexuality; who think transwomen should be forced to use the men’s restroom and even worse, shouldn't be allowed in the military; who think creationism and climate denial should be taught in schools because it’s just as valid any scientific analysis; who think government should be able to dictate what women do with their bodies (even though these same people supposedly hate big government). I could almost literally go on and on with the double standards and hypocrisy (more often than not, confined to the right) when it comes to the alleged intolerance of liberals.
The thing is, there is MOST definitely an argument to be made that liberalism can go too far in stifling debate and discussion about certain hot button issues. But the problem is that many of the right deal in false balances, where they think that their positions deserve to be voiced even when the underpinnings of their rationale are counterfactual and flat out lies. It is more than acceptable and reasonable to take two different truths, based on factual/properly contextualized data, and have a hard debate, and absolutely unacceptable to let absurdist, conspiratorial, batsh*t ideas be given the same platform alongside verified, actionable empirical data and cogent, reality based arguments. How some don’t get the inherent fallacies with these double standards, I’ll never know. For example, it’s fine to be open to debating travel restrictions from areas known to be terrorist/recruitment hotspots but when most of the countries on the ban list haven’t produced a terrorist that’s actually harmed us in decades, if at all, and suspiciously exempts countries that have (Saudi Arabia, first and foremost), then THAT’S A PROBLEM. But have Fox news tell it, that’s all perfectly rationale. Conservatives need to look to themselves when it comes to the stifling of truth and the embrace of paranoid, fear based, anti-rational hyperemotionality.