I'd like to add a friendly reminder: if one could foresee such a backlash (as is manifestly obvious based upon the fact that this was OKC proposing a type of boycott), then it is
not a stretch to say that said backlash is being taken advantage of to profit other individuals/companies. The corollary to the previous statement is as follows involving the current issue: if you claim that prop 8 received funds from Mozilla via proxy of an employee and that is wrong, then any browser you switch to that earns money by your using it has made money from said "discrimination", and by your logic that should also be wrong.
tl;dr
Just because you switch to another browser doesn't mean someone else isn't making money on "discrimination", or other "wrongs"
Flatfrog said:
Kinitawowi said:
Flatfrog said:
We've reached the stage where being (publicly) homophobic makes your job untenable. Considering how recently it would have been that being (publicly) homosexual would have the same effect, I think that's progress.
It's flown from one extreme to the other.
Neither of them is good.
The fact that this is regarded as "progress" is an absolute disgrace and should be thrown in the face of
anybody who claims that their movement is about "equality".
No, I disagree. [[1.]]Tolerance and intolerance are not two extremes, and [[2.]]intolerance *of* intolerance is not the same as [[2.a]]intolerance of diversity.
I once heard a great story which I'm often reminded of in cases like this. [[3.]]A mother finds her two children fighting over a cake. Billy wants the whole cake but Suzie thinks they should share it equally. "Now, now", says the mother. "You should compromise. Billy can get three quarters and Suzie can get one quarter".
[[4.]]You can't 'compromise' between inequality and equality. Equality is equality. [[5.]]A belief in equality means that someone who supports inequality is wrong. [[6.]]That's the liberal paradox - it's the same problem as the cultural diversity dilemma: if a different culture supports a practice we find barbaric such as FGM, who are we to oppose them? Aren't their views just as valid as ours? [[7.]]Well - no. Because ours come from a position of equality and theirs come from a position of inequality.
Even writing this makes me uncomfortable. It feels weird to say dogmatic things. But the logic of the position is pretty inescapable.
On a side note very much related to this topic (see "the liberal paradox" or "liberal" logic), it really disturbs me that someone can point out their own doublethink (simultaneously being a proponent of two contradictory viewpoints, often times compartmentalized in separate contexts) and then claim that such logic is "inescapable". Even giving allowance for this being a mostly gaming-centric forum and not one based around philosophy, this "logic" is riddled with problematic language and imprecise or reused terms despite differing meaning in context, not to mention an out of context and poorly structured analogy. It also begs the question, "what are you even referring to when you are saying 'equality' or 'inequality'?"
Were I more like some of the vociferous advocates of what Mozilla chose to do I might simply start LOL'ing at something I saw so faulty, dismissing it with little evidence while providing little to none of my own, all the while misusing language, and generalizing to seem more righteous about whatever cause I support. But, since I really want to believe in people, and in the idea that civil and honest discourse still has a place in society (despite mounting evidence to the contrary) I'm going to deconstruct what has evidenced itself as doublespeak/doublethink. I will break down what Flatfrog said by each positive statement (which I added in [[double brackets]] to make it easier to understand.
[[1.]]If tolerance and intolerance aren't two extreme, or poles as it were, then what are they? A binary? A gradient where someone can be somewhat intolerant but mostly tolerant? It appears that you have mistaken, or simply assumed that your current ideas are actually tolerant, which you then carried into the rest of your points. There are many readily available definitions of the word tolerant, most of them are very similar and go something like: "showing willingness to allow the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with." You are making the claim then, based upon the actual definition of tolerance, that once society was intolerant of some thing such that it was not a tenable public stance; Now society sees another thing as an untenable public stance, and that stance
is tolerant. Phrasing it directly like this displays the initial flaw in this logic.*see footnote
[[2.]]You are right, intolerance of intolerance isn't the same as intolerance of diversity. With little else to the statement though it is almost meaningless. Intolerance of intolerance is intolerance, it couldn't possibly be phrased as being tolerant. It seems as if the argument you wished to make is that one must be intolerant of other intolerant ideas in order to foster tolerance amongst disparate groups of individuals. However, that doesn't remove intolerance from existence, it just changes its form or stance from against one thing to another. Following such a course of logic might have led to some level agreement with the person who disagreed with you though. However, claiming to be both tolerant and intolerant is hypocritical if it is one or the other. If it is a gradient then absolving yourself for being "intolerant"(antagonistic) of one set of things or another just because you are "tolerant"(supportive) of other sets of things because of an arbitrary set of principles you have proclaimed to be right is equally farcical, boiling down to a word game.
[[2.a]]So what then is intolerance of diversity? What is diversity? Mirriam-Webster says "the condition of having or being composed of differing elements : variety; especially : the inclusion of different types of people (as people of different races or cultures) in a group or organization ". Going by this definition intolerance of diversity would be the unwillingness to allow the existence of society(in this context) being composed of differing opinions or behaviors, or groups of people or cultures. This is absolutely difference from intolerance of tolerance, but it again calls into question the logic of ostracizing other people based on their beliefs, opinions and culture.**see footnote
[[3.]]This is actually a very interesting, if muddled, analogy. In this case we have internet communities/users/OKC, a CEO/Mozilla as the 'actors' in what is happening. In the analogy there are also three 'actors', Billy, Suzie, and mother. While the story presented is supposed to be a loose example of what is going on it becomes very problematic. Who is Billy demanding everything? Mr. former CEO? The community that is upset? Someone else? Suzie is presented as the reasonable party wanting to go 50/50 but only getting 1/4. Is that the part of the community that is upset? For that matter who is the "mother" figure that arbitrated over the situation and came up with such a poor, yet mathematically consistent in the context solution? Is the mother the government? Yet everyone has been talking about how there is no need for such an intervention. Perhaps the angry collective is the mother, dishing out what she sees as an equitable portion of justice cake despite it not making moral sense? At any rate such an example even with the given context can easily be turned on its head and doesn't actually make anything more and only provides a moral play about how people are arbitrary, and the reasonable people lose out to the selfish ones that shamelessly demand things from other people.
[[4.]]Again, it is unclear what you even mean by (in)equality, going by strict definition inequality and equality could be seen as binaries. But in the context of what you seem to be trying to convey it seems much more useful to consider how one might mitigate different levels of inequality, or what is 'equal enough'. Even if one believes in some "universal" or idealistic balance beam, where some meta-statistic about every single person existed and could be looked at it would be quite difficult to discover a way to create "equality" and everything else would be "inequality". How would one even go about looking for such a solution? An egregious example would be MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction): if everyone is destroyed all at once in an equally horrific nuclear fire that would indeed be one form of equality (see Tom Lehrer: We will all go together).***
[[5.]]Ahh, the meat of the argument being made: if belief in equality(?) necessitates support of inequality(?) being wrong this implies that equality(?) is inherently right, or good, or correct in some way; whatever inequality or equality means, they were never defined or explained before. But now equality is some thing that is good, and inequality is some thing that is bad. But wait. . . where did tolerance go? You never defined it and here we are on equality. Is equality tolerance and therefore because equality is something that is good, tolerance is equality, which is just something that is good? This is the first time a non-circular argument is presented and there is barely any logic here, only a wispy definition. At least we have a line in the sand though.
[[6.]]This is quite a succinct point you make. Based upon the actual, definitions of tolerance and diversity and their lack of moral meanings or moral context it is paradoxical that anyone could condemn anyone else's practices in a state of such extreme moral relativism. Though a paradox is only the possibility of truth to contradictory statements. I believe the pretext that a paradox might be true, shouldn't default one to the assumption that it is. Instead a paradox should be thoroughly investigated to either come to a better, or more precise conclusion, or see the underlying truth that confounds conventional intuition[I think you might understand which side of this 'paradox' I am on].
[[7.]]Finally the stunning conclusion: the "us" can exclude and or coerce "them" because "our" position is good, and "theirs" bad. Don't forget you already equated equality with good, and inequality with bad so this is no stretch at all. I could see how one might find this logically consistent from a moralistic standpoint had they already given specific ruleset for defining good and bad in a useful, consistent, and objective way. You mentioned FGM earlier and how that is barbaric, what of MGM(often referred to as circumcision)? Is that equality? Or is FGM more inequitable than MGM somehow? Do you not care for infant boys equally as you do infant girls?
Conclusions
The fundamental flaw of this "liberal paradox" is that it evades definition, shirks concrete criteria, and confuses moralistic arguments with objective statements. Relying on vauge, and subjective things such as hurt feelings, and the next hot button topic of injustice it picks and chooses what it chooses is bad and deserving of indignation instead of actually looking into an issue and trying to discover what will alleviate the cause. Instead of engaging in real discourse more often it supplants one moral system for another all the while denying such, and calling it Justice, or liberties. The liberal paradox is treating one group of people or another like a wounded animal, all the while claiming to empower them.
I'll finish with an excerpt from the Dragon Age Codex about Pride demons. Also as an aside, I don't know how many people agreed/disagreed with Flatfrog, but I feel morally obligated to try and help rectify the logic I've seen here and other places, though this is the first time I've been on a forum and seen anyone acknowledge it out in the open and I commend Flatfrog for that.
"[. . .]Think on that for a moment, my friends. Be wary of how prideful you become, lest you find too much in common with such a fiend."
--Transcript of a lecture given by Vheren, templar-commander of Tantervale, 6:86 Steel
Moralistic Footnotes
*When one takes away the associations that "Thing 1 is
RIGHT" and that "Thing 2 is
WRONG" logically the statement doesn't hold. "Aha!", some may say, "but it is good to want the right thing to happen, and not the wrong thing". I can agree with that, in as much as you can actually make a reasonably sound, concrete, and low-bias appraisal of what is or isn't the right thing. But now you are making
Moralistic arguments,
not tolerance based arguments.
**Even more troubling, again, the words tolerance and diversity
CANNOT answer questions of morality as a catchall. Nothing in the definitions so far of diversity, and tolerance are explicitly, or implicitly linked to morality, and thus by themselves cannot be used in moralistic arguments logically.
***Now equality has entered the mix, again without any definition or clear explanation of what it means or looks like. It would appear that in the arguments made one could simply replace the word "equality" with good, and "inequality" with bad and it would have essentially the same meaning and context. Ergo you can't compromise between good and bad, good is good. Again this doesn't really explain, or rationalize anything at all.
