If I need to match a culture's values in order to have an open discussion, that culture is intolerant.

No one is calling for absolute tolerance where Nazi pedophiles and sexually harass people. But perhaps firing the CTO of Mozilla because be donated to Prop 8 is too strict a level of intolerance.

I guess I've lived here most of my life and it's normal to me. You can literally strike up a conversation without almost anyone random and you won't get a disdained look back.

I think, in Texas at least, don't know about other areas of the south, many people will be surprised from how open people are in the cities. Now, in rural areas... yeah, no promise there. Rural people will love you at first site, but if you mention anything anything that contradicts their bible or the right to have a gun, most likely not. The cities surprise people who visit here though. They were not expecting the acceptance of things they thought everyone in the south was against.

I lived in Dallas, it was the only place I've lived where people would yell "faggot" at me on the street. People there aren't that friendly if you look different.

I came out in college in a big city in TX and it was fucking brutal.

Someone who thinks SF is intolerant has no fucking clue what real intolerance looks like.

Ive found it's much easier to shrug off discrimination based on my skin color than it is to shrug off discrimination based on my core beliefs.

I'd love to see some research on this - do people who can be discriminated against based upon sexual orientation (which can be hidden) have it a lot easier than people who can be discriminated against based on skin color (which they obviously can't hide)?

Are you white?

Is the contradiction here intentional self parody?

I think you have to compare apples to apples here. San Fran to Dallas/Houston/etc. You can't compare rural west Texas to San Fran or the rural wine country around SF to Dallas.

And I'm in Dallas, way better than Houston ;)

Values are like the vitamins of culture: You don't notice how helpful they are until you get scurvy.

If I may ask, where, more specifically?

I grew up in southern California, and my wife grew up in Columbus, Georgia. We met in the midwest and lived there 15 or so years, and so visited Columbus frequently. For the last 4 months of her dad's life, we lived in Columbus.

We've lived in the SF Bay Area for the past 8 years.

> [SF Bay Area ...] most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture

I think I know what you're getting at, and I don't necessarily disagree out of hand.

I will say that there is an enormous difference in day to day racial tension in west Georgia compared to the SF Bay Area. In Columbus, from McDonalds to hospitals, there was barely submerged but obvious tension between blacks and whites.

I don't mean this to be a counter to what you're saying, I think it's a different thing.

Probably because Columbus GA is 45% black and San Francisco is only 6.4% black. Hard to have black/white tension when one of those groups comprises such a small percent of total population.

As someone who grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Boston, I'm also familiar with tension, and I remember it being far more racially-defined within the poor communities than elsewhere. Upon moving to nicer areas, however, the tension felt more like rich vs poor, with race (very sadly) often signaling to someone's level of wealth. They also seemed less tension-prone overall, in comparison to the poorer communities.

What I mean to say is that:

1. Tension between races seemed to primarily exist at the poorer levels, and that at the wealthier levels, the tension between classes very much overrode any tension between races.

2. Wealthy communities just seem to be more educated and accepting, as they see the better [1] individuals of all races of people.

I haven't spent too much time in the Bay Area, but would you possibly say that:

1. The wealth inequality in the Bay Area creates enough of a class divide to where the racial divide isn't noticeable?

2. Alternatively, does the racial diversity in the wealthy of the Bay Area remove stigmas that result in racism altogether?

I'd be interested in your thoughts! I'm not aiming to counter either, but just curious.

[1] By 'better,' I don't mean to pass judgment on any people; just that people in worse conditions in life will often be forced or incentivized into worse actions. For example, a child's friend is far less likely to steal their toy or game in a wealthier community than poorer. It's not evil, it's just worse conditions resulting in worse actions.

However, I think Sam occupies a rare position that he may be blind to: He is famous and the media is paying attention to what he says. That makes saying interesting things, which require taking risks, more dangerous, because more strangers are listening to him, his comments are more likely to be removed from their context, and reporters seeking clicks will deliberately misconstrue him.

So while I don't think he's wrong, I think his perception of this environment of outrage and right-thinking is exaggerated by his own celebrity. Famous people are forced to be more careful in what they say. That is less true for the rest of us.

what you're feeling in that smugness is an exercise of social power on you. my guess is that you're white, which is why you didn't feel racism in the south but did feel the smugness of the "coastal elite" (and why you tie those two things together in your mind).

But honestly your comment is so vague I'm unsure exactly what you want to be heard from your words

Can you clarify what kinds of oppression you noticed in SF and the kinds you noticed in other places

When you speak so indistinctly everyone is forced to fill the holes themselves

Those that agree that SF is oppressive will fill those holes with their own aggravating experiences and those that see SF as progressive will read your comment as "I just want to tell my coworkers that their lifestyle is offensive to god but SF is too intolerant of me and my wants"

I'm not sure what this has to do with "political correctness." People being jerks isn't the same as demarcating hate speech and saying that it has no place in public discourse.

I think what happens is that someone will propose something that another constituency worries will have violent outcomes for them, and they push back saying "that's unacceptable." Then the first party gets defensive and says that they're being tone policed instead of engaging with the substance of the complaint. For people like me (white men) this can sometimes be the first time when our presuppositions are challenged, or that we're told that we might not be totally objective, rational observers in a chaotic universe and its very very easy to get defensive.

Further, it's important to understand that people who worry about "PC" as a threat to the free exchange of ideas are actively having their rhetoric coopted by others on the far right who are actively trying to move the overton window into a place where they are able to espouse things like racism in public without backlash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFYRkzznsc0

The man is an elected official in Alabama. Also an idiot and a bigot who think only Christians can be elected to Congress. It's okay to look down on him for being ignorant, but a lot of the comments attack his regional accent. That's not okay.

To the extent that tolerance is a virtue, it refers to tolerating other people for what they are, not what they do. There are gray areas here of course, but there are plenty of places where that distinction is clear.

I don't think political tolerance is inherently virtuous. If a coworker tells me they don't think women are suited for technical work then I don't feel any moral obligation to be "tolerant" of that viewpoint.

The gray areas are miles wide in many cases. Tolerance of what people are is fairly easy for most people to agree on, but in some cases what people do and what people are is disagreed upon. That is, to some degree, the crux of the debate about homosexuality still. People disagree on whether it's something people do, or are. At the same time, an older debate under similar grounds (but, ironically with less evidence for it being towards the are end of the spectrum) is religion. Are you a Christian, Jew or Muslim, or do you just practice those religions?

I don't think boiling it down to are and do particularly helps for a lot of the really controversial topics we are currently dealing with.

"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." [1]

"Tolerance" has a clear power dynamic. One group allows another group to exist. It is therefore shouldn't be looked at as the ultimate goal of a just society. Instead we should simply ask that people are "good citizens."

Whether your coworker believes women don't make good tech workers should be irrelevant to you. What should matter is whether they are a good employee and whether their views manifest themselves in anyway that hurts anyone else (e.g. they should not be in a position to supervise other employees if they can't prevent their beliefs from harming those employees)

[1] - https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

As recently as two nights ago I helped entertain some startup founders from SF who were genuinely suprised that Houston (the 4th largest, soon 3rd largest city in the US) wasn't just a few strip malls.

As an aside, there was a study many years ago about the friendliest cities, and New York and Houston were at the top of the list; both were considered surprising by the authors, I guess based on reputation. While the deep south was way down the list well into the "unfriendly" category, which also seemed surprising to the authors given the reputation for "southern hospitality", but I'm from the deep south and I wasn't surprised, at all. The deep south is, by and large, insular and mistrustful of outsiders, except in a few larger cities. Poverty makes for higher crime, as well (one of the tests of "friendliness" included leaving a wallet in public places and seeing whether it made it back to its owner with cash intact...in NYC and Houston it almost always did, in some other places, not so much), and the south is pretty poor on average.

But, Houston is not a "southern" city. It is an international city with a huge amount of people who've moved there from other states and countries. It doesn't feel southern, though it does feel like other big Texas cities to some degree. I don't really consider Texas the south, though small-town Texas kinda looks like small-town Georgia or whatever. But, also, small-town California is kinda like small-town Texas...lots of cow towns, oil towns, and farm towns, just like Texas. And, tends to be Republican-leaning, just like small-town Texas.

It's probably got a good deal more Latinos (Angleton, or any town as you head west), it's probably got more Vietnamese and folks of Vietnamese descent (coastal towns, Port Arthur), it's probably got a more functioning economy (notable exceptions like Rockport).

In some ways (if you look up the statistics above) rural Texas most resembles rural California.

But I think the whole concept of "deep south" vs the "new south" is where you see the differences come into play. Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, and many other NC areas, are great, diverse places that have far more in common with Dallas/Austin/Houston than with whatever the stereotypical image of "the south" is that most folks have in their heads. So in other words, I think TX is just as southern as NC is, and that isn't necessarily anything to be ashamed of.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=644311...

San Francisco values gets repeated by Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, Rush, ... at every opportunity. Sorry to link to Breitbart, but here's Roy Moore ranting on about San Francisco.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/03/hes-said-...

Who exactly is he ranting to?

The real divide in this country is rural vs. urban. Cities in the south are plenty progressive, and rural areas in the rest of the country are plenty conservative.

I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.

Second, acting like an entire region as a monoculture is stupid and unproductive. We're all very, very different, and while there are some trends that are more prevalent in a region, that doesn't mean that the people who believe those things are backwards. Perhaps it means that you just haven't tried to see things from their perspective.

The lack of empathy and the unwillingness to consider that other people have different backgrounds and codes of ethics and a dogmatic insistence that "this way is the right way" is what's killing our cohesion as a country. And, as a whole, I've seen more of the "live and let live" philosophy in Atlanta than in a whole lot of supposedly liberal places.

But it remains that really starting with Gingrich that conservatives have mounted a long media campaign against liberals which has been personified as Pelosi and codewritten as San Francisco values.

The reverse is not the case. This was one sided but it was also Gingrich and Republicans only path to power. It worked as an election strategy but not as a governing philosophy. So if you are complaining about the cohesion of the country, you really should start there.

I lived in the South. I have family in the South.

We're all vulnerable to cultural brainwashing. I think that's part of what the article is complaining about. It's hard to be an iconoclast, especially when you're treated as an immoral person if you dare to think for yourself.

Again, the way to save the country is to call out all demonization of "the other". Of course I call it out when I see it, to the point where my liberal friends think I'm conservative and my conservative friends think I'm liberal.

It worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Fox_News

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

To be a real iconoclast, and I don't see Altman as any sort of iconoclast, you have to take your lumps. You have to be indifferent to your lumps.

Care to say what you experienced in Boston?

Please don't personalize or (so to speak) group-ize this here. I know the feelings are strong, but this temptation needs to be resisted because it leads to battle, which is incompatible with thoughtful exchange. You did it again downthread ("you" vs. "we") and it strikes me as no coincidence that this subthread is by far the worst of the ones I've scrolled through so far. Which I'm sure is not your intent and is definitely not all your responsibility—it's just that things predictably happen this way, given such initial conditions.