Thread by @normative

This got about a thousand times creepier when I hit the bio and realized the author was a college professor.

https://twitter.com/aricohn/status/1412437870502203399

This is an inadvertently perfect reductio ad absurdum of demands for “political neutrality” (whether from social media platforms or other institutions). Because obviously there are tons of odious political views nearly everyone thinks OUGHT to be romantic dealbreaker.

I assume that if the students also said they weren’t interested in dating ISIS fighters, anti-Semites, or admirers of Joseph Stalin, the author wouldn’t think that was “discriminatory” (let alone “authoritarian”)—he’d be worried if those things WEREN’T dealbreakers.

The tacit premise is either that you have some objective meter of odiousness, or that it’s wrong to be repulsed by views *large numbers of people currently hold*, even though all those other views have been widely held at various times & places.

I, too think there’s a zone of reasonable disagreement within which it would be unhealthy to completely shun people for differing views. (Conveniently, my own views fall safely within that space.) But that is itself a substantive judgment, not a function of percentages.