Here’s what so many people don’t understand about tolerance.

Criticizing someone, refusing to engage with somebody’s ideas or debate them—that isn’t intolerance.

This is intolerance.
No conservative who ever whined about liberal intolerance has ever experienced actual intolerance.

They've perhaps experienced criticism, distaste, anger, disgust, even hate.

All these as a result of ideas they've expressed or promoted or supported.
But what pharmacists refuse to give conservatives meds *because* they're conservative?

Who seeks to disenfranchise them of the vote?

Or to nullify their marriages?

Or to block them from adoption?

Or to enshrine discrimination as a protected religious practice?

And so on.
Existance and equality under the law is not something you have to earn.

*That’s* tolerance. It’s the base line.

Tolerance is the lowest rung on justice’s ladder.
Tolerance is the medicine suggested for those people you can’t stand, so as to continue, through your distaste, to pursue justice for them.
We *tolerate* the KKK.

By this we mean we don't kill them or lock them up simply because we despise their grotesque bigotry. They shouldn't starve. Their children should have a good education. They should receive healthcare. They're entitled to due process.

*That's* tolerance.
Tolerance is being willing to allow space for people to exist, even though we despise them. It’s the very basic acknowledgement that other people, in fact, exist.

If I feel as if I’m being asked to be tolerant too much, I might want to think about that.
Suppose I am resentful, because I am constantly being urged toward tolerance for an ever-increasing number of groups of people.
Rather than complaining about political correctness, it might be wise to reflect on what that might say about me, that I despise so many people, who must therefore be tolerated, and that I chafe so frequently against this, the most basic of justice’s requests.
It’s a pretty good hint that I’m an intolerant person if neutral reminders that other people exist strike me as aggressions requiring retaliation.
If the existence of an all-female Ghostbusters movie is an aggression.

If a store greeter’s simple ‘happy holidays’ is an attack on Christmas, a salvo in a larger war.

If hearing a foreign language in the grocery store strips me of my very country.
If a gay marriage somehow threatens my straight one.

If a turban on an airplane makes me call the stewardess over.

If it’s an imposition to be asked to remember what words people want used to refer to them.
Tolerance is what happens when we insist there is only one bucket. Those who prefer justice go in that bucket, along w/those who prefer injustice. Tolerance says all humans deserve justice grounded in unconditional respect for basic humanity.

But we don't have to listen to you.
Tolerance is something meant for unjust *humans.* Tolerance is no virtue when applied to unjust *ideas.*

Tolerance doesn't reserve you a space in the campus auditorium, or on the talk show couch.
What unjust people who complain about intolerance are actually seeking isn't tolerance for their beings as humans.

What they want is consideration, acceptance and celebration of their intolerant ideas.
However, if I'm a person promoting injustice, I can’t have consideration, acceptance and celebration; not from those who prioritize justice over order, anyway.

I will have tolerance from them.

It’s not much, but it’s significantly more than I afford others.
“So much for the tolerant left,” is the sneer you see, from someone who's just expressed some opinion harmful to human dignity, who's been met with opposition, or perhaps even called some nasty name as a result.
It can be offensive to be called a nasty name, I know. So, in the interests of tolerance and justice, to any reading this who have been called nasty names simply b/c of deeply held beliefs that other people should lose access to equal treatment under the law, let me say this:
Tough titty, assholes.

🖕😀🖕
See? Now, THAT'S tolerance.

/end

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More from @JuliusGoat

Feb 21
Gay kids will die because of this, which is the desired purpose of the bill.
To those who scold that we mustn’t assume evil intentions into the actions of people who consistently pursue absolute evil with steadfast dedication and unshakable resolve: yes, we should.
I guess the ultimate answer to "you don't know what their true motivations are" is "who gives a shit what their motivations are?"

I care *that* you want to burn down my house. I only care *why* you want to burn down my house to the extent it helps me stop you.
Read 18 tweets
Feb 20
Father: *strangles my brother*
Me: help help my father is murdering my brother
Centrist Cousin: it’s that sort of us vs them thinking that’s tearing this family apart
Me: no look literally he’s murdering my brother right in front of us

Centrist Cousin: he’s never going to want to stop if you keep vilifying him with overheated black and white language; I’ve engaged many stranglers and learned a lot about the complexities

Brother: gkkk gkk gk
Me: Look he’s about to die, for real; I really think we just need to stop my dad from killing him right now

Centrist Cousin: that’s exactly the sort of judgemental escalating bad thinking on our side that we need to criticize, I refuse to let myself become just as bad as he is
Read 4 tweets
Feb 19
If you want to live in a modern enlightened society and you vote for Republicans, no you don't.
To be clear, that's any Republicans at any level for any position at any time, and honestly we may want to expand that to include Democrats willing to work with Republicans.

Shut the whole party down, out, and over.
If you want to live in a modern enlightened society and you vote for Republicans, no you don't.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 14
As a Wordle pro on the tour, I feel I should share the best starting word, which all the pros know. The word is XYLYL.
(My own personal favorite starting word is COCCYX, but if I show amateurs how to guess 6-letter words I will be banned from the Wordle Pro Tour and forced to sit next to Bret Stephens in the NYT cafeteria.)
Wordle is a game of constantly shifting strategy; I recommend you get the latest version of my strategy compendium, v14.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 13
I want to propose a different way of thinking about conservatism and progressivism.

I suggest we think about the two positions not as detectable ideologies themselves, but as situational orientations around an existing order.

getrevue.co/profile/julius…
Specifically with this order. The one that exists. This reality. The way our systems and laws are set up, the way they’re codified and the way they’re operationalized. What they claim to intend to do, and what they actually do.

“The way things are,” in other words.
Let’s think of conservatism as being, in its essence, an orientation that desires to keep the existing order just as it is, or to make slow and deliberate calculated minor adjustments, to the existing order.
Read 29 tweets
Feb 8
In BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Mickey Rooney played I. Y. Yunioshi, dressed up in buck teeth and a cartoon squint, a grotesque caricature of a Japanese person.

So I suppose in that sense “you wouldn’t be able” to make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S today.

Which seems somehow preferable.
Now: what interests me is what it means to say *you can’t* make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S these days.

It doesn’t mean you CAN’T. Unlike teaching, say,The Bluest Eye to Texas schoolchildren, there exist no laws to prevent Will Ferrell from putting in the teeth and playing Yunioshi.
So actually you *can* make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S today, I.Y. Yunioshi and all, and throw in Long Duc Dong if you want.

You can if you want wear blackface and dance around in white gloves, like Fred Astaire in SWING TIME, if you want to.

If you want to.
Read 20 tweets

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