Fareed Zakaria: "Liberals think they're tolerant, but they're not."

I don’t get it. Could you elaborate on this claim?

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Um, thanks?

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Oh for fucks sake. Fareed is the biggest butthurt special snowflake whiner.

“Oh conservatives are being completely silenced. That’s why they own their own news networks and how you can hear me whine”

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Tolerance & free speech don’t mean that anyone is owed a platform or that anyone else must listen.

Good for the students who dissented, as is their right.

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The far-Right has been playing a complex game with university speakers, with the “Young America’s Foundation” bankrolling all their expenses and speakers’ fees, and a local student front group to do the inviting. A lot of the speakers seem chosen to spark as much outrage as possible. (Mainly peaceful outrage until the black bloc types got involved.)

http://www.eri-nonprofit-salaries.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=NPO.Summary&EIN=237042029&BMF=1&Cobrandid=0&Syndicate=No

Some of the director names seem familiar. They also maintain a shrine at Saint Reagan’s ranch.

http://990.erieri.com/EINS/237042029/237042029_2015_0d4c06ec.PDF

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That says you get to talk. Doesn’t say anyone to stick around to listen. Nor, you will note does it say anything about taking turns.

In fact, one could even argue that due to their positions, walkouts and protests of Pence and DeVos fall under “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

I’ll submit that I am horribly intolerant. I don’t tolerate those who hurt and advocate for the hurt of others. I have great intolerance for those who find glee in the suffering of others, who place money over lives, and deny those they have othered the very right to exist. Intolerant, as in I will not allow them space in my life. Unlike them, I do allow that they can have it in their own.

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Sure, there is ‘intolerance’ on both sides. So what. When I take an ‘aerial picture’ of the views versus counter-views and arguments versus counter-arguments out there, I come down entirely satisfied with what views and arguments I agree with and those that I’m not tolerant of. There is, for me, good and justifiable intolerance (i.e., toward GOP’s continuing efforts to place hurdles in the path of minorities via voter IDs; and cutting funds to Planned Parenthood).Then there’s the intolerance that’s fueled and driven by hate and stupidity. Me? I’m proud of my intolerances.

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It is a reasonable reaction to walk out on, silence, or attack people who want to put you in camps or mass graves.
The issue here seems to be that there are a bunch of people who feel that anyone who disagrees with them even a little falls into that category.
An extreme example would be the recent Evergreen College occupation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=bO1agIlLlhg
This is not a discussion, debate, or even an argument. This is a Struggle Session.
Quite a few of the people being targeted are arguably liberals, with long histories of progressive political views themselves, who have been accused of blasphemy, often over slight transgressions or misunderstandings.
Mary Spellman of Clairmont-McKenna is a decent illustration of this. When people immediately turn their “offended and outraged” sensitivity to 11, You cannot have a peaceful society. All of us are capable of saying things that are open to misunderstanding, and we all will run into people who have different opinions than we do. The ability to remain civil in such situations is what separates us from places that are in a continuous state of violent conflict.
We can all do with a little humility, and the understanding that our opinions are just that. Opinions. People like Pence have outdated views on some subjects. And there is a pretty good chance that your views will someday seem outdated, and your grandchildren will find them absurd or even offensive. In our society, those grandchildren will humor us, or maybe give us an eye roll. In a society more prone to act on slights or offenses, we end up like Bo Yibo.

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But I was not referring to those easy ones. I was referring to, say, someone as socially Liberal as you but more sympathetic to big business. Or someone as economically Liberal whose religious influences make them socially more moderate. It’s hard to have a big tent when there’s intolerance of moderate positions, and it creates a fertile ground for wedge issues. I certainly do not mean one must agree with or accept their arguments. But neither should one demonize them for questioning what you take to be self evident.

Didn’t Spellman say that she was interested in helping student that don’t fit “our mold” in reference to the concerns of non-white non-straight students?

And the Evergreen College library sit in a response from a series of events including two black students told they had to go to the campus police where they were held in questioning and denied their legal right to leave voluntarily and the use of the bathroom after a student argued with a black student and reported the incident to the police (the same student that narc’ed also showed up to these protests to protest the protests and no harm came or him). In response to this, and a few other recent racist events (such as “funny” halloween costumes), the faculty agreed that a tradition of PoC students and faculty being absent for a day would be inverted so white student and faculty would be absent instead. A professor raised a stink, and called it oppression and refused to support it (even suggested to give a public lecture on the biological differences between races on that day), his email about it leaked to the students who protested his class, and then he went on Fox News and the Breitbart fodder was born. So yeah, a lot of angry students in their third gathering at the library in a few weeks - and yet the administration is being called cucks by a certain side of the fence for saying no one is getting fired or disarmed but that they would do better and thanked the students for their continued passion.

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Spellman used the word “mold” in what she thought was an inoffensive way.

I don’t really blame the students. I was that age once, and like all of us, I will never be as smart and clever as I thought I was then. But when I tried to educate my parents and professors, they were polite but pretty dismissive. And that was the right response. They remember what that age was for them, and knew that eventually I would develop a little humility, and find over time that my views would tend to mature a little, especially when I learned a little more about human nature.
There is a wrong thing to do when a kid has just taken a few 1st year courses and feels that he suddenly has all the answers to the world’s problems. The wrong thing to do is to indulge him, confirm his intuition that he is the first of the truly enlightened, and immediately start drafting changes to laws and policies based on the student’s superior ethics and grasp of politics.

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I grew up in a very conservative part of Kentucky, and I am very torn. On the one hand, I’ve seen the damage that the prejudiced aspects of a neoconservative ideology can do. I am not a fan. On the other hand, if you don’t listen to the other side you really can’t expect them to listen to you, and often listening to people you don’t agree with is the most effective way to come up with an argument against them. I am worried about the growing distances between the people I grew up with and my current liberal community. I am worried that at some point, if we do not listen to each other, we will lose our common language. I also worry, of course, about the dangers of entertaining or engaging with extremists. Hannah Arendt wrote urgently about that. But she also held some racist views herself. I’ve heard people arguing that we shouldn’t listen to her because of these views. It’s these kind of reductive arguments that make me nervous. People are complicated, conservatives no less so. I fully support protests rooted in drawing attention to our blindnesses, and calling people out for their wrongdoings, but not when they vilify people out of proportion. Reducing complicated people to their very worst parts doesn’t seem to me to be an effective way to encourage them to embrace their better angels. I think when my former neighbors in Kentucky see the walk outs and so forth, it only further convinces them of the frivolousness of elite liberals and the lack of respect for people like themselves.

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The problem here is that those on the right who are crying because “liberals” aren’t listening are labelling anyone who simply disagrees with them as one of the evil liberals and they aren’t willing to do the courtesy of listening back.

Besides, the reason people are walking out is that they have been listening. They’ve heard the speakers’ views before and found them appalling. Why should they have to listen again, then have that “polite respect” be misrepresented as support, especially when the speaker has campaigned before to eliminate their very existence?

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I’m gonna go ahead and say, I’ve heard enough out of the alt-right. They don’t have much to say, and in fact none of what they say is important.

So, why should we tolerate or accept bigots and morons? If you have less than ten million dollars in the bank and are alt-right you’re being fooled, are a fool, or have some kind of malevolence I can’t grasp.

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You’re still here, you’re still whingeing about it, that means you’re being tolerated.

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I don’t buy it. First, I think the complaint about lack of respect is really a Catch-22, because respect doesn’t seem to count unless it comes with ignoring things like racism and science denialism, and then it’s disrespectfully patronizing. I argued this here and here, and don’t think I will do better repeating it.

Second, it seems people don’t actually care if they have anything real to hang liberals as the real villains. It wasn’t that long ago that Obama was being called the literal anti-Christ, an existential threat to American democracy, for passing a health care plan based closely on Republican ideas. At that point, you still think there’s a way we can disagree at all without being vilified for it?

Third, this is the same line you hear for anyone who has ever stood up for civil rights – that they are too bold, too adamant, and it will only serve in turning more against them. Even groups like the suffragettes and MLK who were later broadly accepted were derided with this in their time. So I’d want some real evidence why it is actually true this time.

Sure, Pence has some outdated views, like we all end up with. We won’t consider whether things like his attempts to make it legal to discriminate against LGBTQ people and to stop them from marrying who they want, to defund Planned Parenthood and anti-HIV programs, to keep refugees out of his state might actually affect other human beings. Opinions are just opinions, right?

This is the erasure of victims I was talking about above. Pence was a governor and is now vice president; I find it very telling how rarely you see politicians like him defended without the specious pretense that their attacks on other people somehow don’t have real consequences for them. If you care about a civil and peaceful society, you shouldn’t be making excuses for trying to disrupt the civil rights and peaceful lives of other people in it.

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Yes, well, I’m torn. Some part of me really agrees with you. Actually most of me. And I think students should have the right to walk out of commencement, god knows those things are usually insufferable, I can only imagine one given by Mike Pence. But the article was not solely about protests, it was about a more polarized intellectual culture, and that I am worried about.
I don’t think any conservatives are crying about liberals not listening to them, at least I haven’t met any. Especially since their party now controls the executive and legislative branches. I don’t think they think liberals are evil either; at least no one ever called me evil to my face. (Behind my back? Who knows, I guess.) in fact a lot of people did feel that liberal positions held the moral high ground, but weren’t practical. Why should you continue to listen to these voices? Especially when some of them are stupid and offensive people who say stupid and offensive things? I don’t know. I have to; they’re my neighbors so I really have no choice. Maybe because it’s part of an accurate image of the US, I guess. They are representative of a big part of this country and ignoring them doesn’t change that. They aren’t going away anytime soon. Their problems- racism, etc.- are really our problems, US American problems. Case in point- we can block them from speaking at the universities but we haven’t prevented them from gaining congress.

As a proud Greener alum, I have to step in here and say that this stink about Day of Presence/Day of Absence is not only typical of Evergreen, but pretty low key. The difference is social media. Literally that is all. I was there 20 years ago (OMG) and the Evergreen community struggled through many difficulties - it continues to do so, especially as it has challenged itself as an institution to be multicultural and pluralistic. There are structural differences at Evergreen that make this kind of foment possible and necessary - the administrative duties other than the president are rotated amongst faculty and there are no “departments” in the traditional sense.

I don’t see evidence in the Evergreen community that this instructor is engaging with the greater community outside of his coursework (including co-teaching, which is odd thing not to do at Evergreen) and instead is choosing to put himself in a contrarian position of authority to the students, faculty, & staff. He seems like an arrogant prick who thinks his biology degree gives him carte blanche (these assholes seem to be fucking everywhere - are we sure there’s a STEM shortage?). I see angry, hurt, & frightened students using the tools available to them - but due to their ages and perhaps recent empowerment, exercising poor judgement. I don’t condone alledged threats against this instructor. I do expect more from EVERYONE involved - but so does the college.

I post this not just as a defense of my beloved alma mater, but also as an endorsement of the Evergreen process. It’s engagment, not indulgence.

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Ah, the people who would happily throw me under a bus (and have done repeatedly) because I don’t live my life the way they think I should. That is not being moderate, that is appealing to bigotry.

I may be able to show solidarity on economic issues but I will NEVER be one of them, by their own choice as much as mine.

Since you bring up religious influences, I think this is worth quoting.

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye,
but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye?
Matthew 7:3

Thankfully, here in the UK it is not unknown for a Lord Spiritual to speak out in favour of LGBT rights, reminding people it is possible to be socially liberal/left-wing and religious at the same time.

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