I personally put the blame for his firing more on the blatantly distorted and sometimes even outright counterfactual coverage of his message. The number of mainstream and well respected outlets that falsely claimed he wrote that women are biologically less capable engineers, rather than that they lower predilection to enter the field , was disturbing. After his memo Google announced that they wouldn't set quotas for groups beyond the demographic's representation in the field. The people I know at Google felt that the reaction was overblown.
I'm very disappointed that the rhetoric has devolved into "but they all deserved it so it's ok"...
your filter bubble is showing.
I defined it. Intolerance is not a legitimate viewpoint. It is not the expression of an idea, but the suppression of someone else's. I think I was pretty clear, I consider intolerance the one viewpoint we cannot tolerate. Everything else is fair game.
I've witnessed all 3 of these claims asserted in real life. And note that the latter two are directly contradictory. Just saying, "tolerate all except the intolerant" is an answer devoid of actual meaning. Genuine tolerance is refusing to ostracize or expel people even when you feel that their views are intolerant. Because I guarantee you: there are plenty of people out there who would find at least some of your views intolerant. And it also allows people to use allegations of intolerance as a tool to shut down debate.
Effective codes of conduct focus on specific behaviors or actions, not abstract ideas like tolerance.
> If progressives are pushing for more freedom, more tolerance, then to oppose it you have to, by definition, advocate for less of those.
The framing of this is not correct. The problem is that not all "progressives" are pushing for that, which then undermines the assumption that opposition is therefor automatically intolerant and therefor automatically bannable/deplatformable. Some of the real progressives I follow such as Graham Elwood and Jimmy Dore have frequently had issues with their platforms giving them a hard time (demonteizing, etc) just because their positions or even topics of conversation are controversial, and many of them frequently mention they wouldn't be surprised to be deplatformed for said reason.
To me, the real crux of your position, is that by completely bucking the standard of free speech in which we have legal definitions for speech that isn't tolerable, positions like yours seem to want to expand those definitions (libel, defamation, imminent incitement to violence, etc) to a point that you must now designate some non-legal entitiy as the moral arbiter of what is intolerant/tolerable, and that is indeed a most slippery slope.
I think I have rewatched these two videos of Christopher Hitchens on the topic a good half dozen times each in the last year, and I keep thinking about their content. [1,2] From [2], I will link the timestamp of what I am about to quote [3]: "Whose going to decide? ... Who will you appoint? Who will be the one who says, "I know exactly where the limit should be, I know how far you can go, and I know when you've gone too far, and I'll decide that" Who do you think, Who do you know, who have you heard of, who have you read about in history who you would give that job?... Not for you, but for the people you are listening to and the peoples whose comments you hope to hear in return, for your own education, for your own elightenment, and for your own elucidation, as Mr. Paine says, commenting on Milton, one of the vices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions, because they deprive themselves of the means of changing them."
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
https://boingboing.net/2020/08/21/citing-violence-facebook.h...
This is so tone deaf.
Why is it that conservatives consider intolerance to be their right above everyone else?
Maybe this is just inherent to a conservative viewpoint, I don't know. If progressives are pushing for more freedom, more tolerance, then to oppose it you have to, by definition, advocate for less of those.
I like a spirited discussion, but I believe that intolerance is the one single thing we cannot tolerate. It destroys everything else.