Paradox of tolerance is resolved when you view tolerance as a treaty. If one side breaks it, they no longer benefit from it.
If two factions are fighting and call a truce, and then one side starts fighting again, it’s nonsense to tell the first side not to fight back because there’s a treaty. The treaty has been broken.
There’s a Sartre quote about that.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
I think a root cause is conservative emotion driven decisions. Some people will look at facts and from them draw conclusions. Conservatives prefer feeling things and from them deciding what to do. Cities feel scary and alien to them so they must be full of crime and danger.
It’s probably not a coincidence that religion, the kind that prioritizes feelings and faith, is also popular among the right.
They’re shitty people by most reasonable metrics.
Thanks for the reasonable response.
In essence I’m contesting that strict language standards are necessary to be understood. I mean, of course some standards are still required, just not strict enough to be all uptight about it when people start to bend them.
We agree on this, I think. I’m mostly a linguistic descriptivist - that is, language is what people speak more than what’s written in a rulebook somewhere. I’m not a linguist but I have an undergraduate degree that required some courses on English language.
It can be annoying when there’s a word for something (eg: enshittification, gaslighting, woke) and people then over extend it to mean “things i don’t like”. There’s not much to stop that, other than as an individual trying to be more precise in language. I think it’s not good for one’s brain to only have a few catch-all words for stuff.
I think “slop” specifically is a very old word (1400ce, if etymology online is to be trusted). But like if there was a word for “low quality LLM content” (let’s say… slopplement), applying that to any low quality writing would kind of suck. it would almost certainly happen, though, because all of us humans are kind of lazy.
Anyway. We mostly agree. I would just recommend being mindful of one’s word choices, because a narrow vocabulary can be a drag on thinking and communication.
You say it’s foolish to enforce strict language standards, but the most important thing about language is that it is understood. You buried that point in the middle of your second paragraph.
Did you read 1984? It has a major thread though it about how collapsing language reduces the ability of people to think. One of the first and most prominent examples in the book is replacing the many words for “good” and “bad” (eg: great, amazing, excellent, terrible, atrocious, etc) with simply “good” and “ungood”. Similarly, the dispossed has some writing in it about how language shapes thought. For example, the prevalence or absence of possessive forms (eg: my house vs the house I stay in)
The reason I used “good” and “ungood” is because those are the preeminent examples in 1984. They’re not a judgement of your post.
I’m not sure why you’re dismissive of “high school reading lists”, but you are coming off as someone who might actually be a high schooler. Your last emoji didn’t render, so maybe that would’ve changed the meaning.
Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.
I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”
So long as you’re understood, it’s fine.
Burying the lede here.
But also like language shapes the way we think. If you just let all your words boil down into “good” and “ungood”, you’re reducing your tools for thinking. 1984 and The Dispossessed are great books, by the way.
Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit and the world is better without him. I will cheer for every unrepentant maga scumbag that dies.
Did the onion write a piece about how we should reflect on Unnamed Nazi #342 in Indiana Jones’s life and family yet? “Sure, Unnamed Nazi #342 willingly joined an organization focused on subjugation and mass murder of people, but it’s important to remember that he also had a family. They were looking forward to living in a house stolen from the people he helped murder, and living off the fruits of slave labor.”
They don’t care about what words mean. They will say anything, anything, to try to secure power. They are bad people. They are bad people.
This small community way of thinking you’re describing is kind of a bad system. It doesn’t scale well and is extremely vulnerable to injustice. It shouldn’t be held up as a gold standard or even an acceptable way to think. I thought most people accepted the law should apply equally to all, but that “small town” mode is going to produce “sure Jimmy stole the car and crashed into the deli, but he’s a good boy. Give him probation. But that [slur] parking in the fire lane? Throw the book at them!”
Two things can share one property without being the same in all ways.
Doctors cut people up and sometimes take organs out, but they aren’t the same as a serial killer doing the same.
Kirk doesn’t deserve a minute of silence. He was a scum bag. His ideas were trash. He got what he was due.
…yes? Is that on the agenda?
Few people cry when Nazis die in movies about the 30s. Why should the modern equivalent get a pass?
Don’t pretend he wouldn’t have gleefully participated in that. He was an ardent trump supporter, and thus an ardent supporter of concentration camps.
Sometimes people are horrible and I’m not upset when horrible things happen to them.
I think people look at the past and go “oh yeah it’s a good thing those Nazis died in the 40s, and it’s a good thing those klansmen died in the 60s” and so on, but when it’s today people are like “oh no this isn’t appropriate”
But also yes something is wrong here and it’s scary. Climate change, the rise of fascism, consolidation of power in the hands of the cruel and stupid, rising wealth inequality. The world is fucked and it’s people like Charlie Kirk who deserve most of the blame.
Few people are saying “go shoot your Republican neighbor” (though I would probably nullify that too, as a juror) but the bigger dogs? Fuck them. They made their choice to make the world worse every day for years.
Shapiro still goes outside. He could still get kirked.
I really really think people over estimate the power of martyrdom.
Do you know who Fred Hampton was? If not, proves my point. I think most people don’t know who he was, and he definitely would have done more for the world if he hasn’t been assassinated.
The word “charismatic” is really not necessary there. Fucking New York Times - going slightly out of their way to coddle right wing extremists.
Well, he’s dead, so that’s a plus. He died in an embarrassing way, so that’s also a plus. Maybe the next would-be shithead will decide “nah, I’m not going to be a right wing grifter. I might get shot dead like Charlie Kirk”. That’s probably the biggest plus.
Never played the original, but I don’t feel a need for remakes.