From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Intolerance?
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 92 02:20:06 GMT


In article <1992Oct15.222243.10792@sunova.ssc.gov>
jbaron@dirac.ssc.gov (Jeff Baron) writes:

>Jess Anderson writes:
 
>- In article <1992Oct15.195456.5968@sunova.ssc.gov>
>- jbaron@dirac.ssc.gov (Jeff Baron) writes:
 
>- >Does this mean that one who has a belief in tolerance for all,
>- >but has no tolerance for intolerant people is, him or herself,
>- >a hypocrite?  If one has tolerance for the intolerant, does
>- >that make him or her a fool?
 
>- I think this is simply sophistry.

>It may be, and I'll assume that you didn't mean this as
>an insult, but to me, this is an important question, 

I didn't mean to insult you, and I did assume the question
was serious, but I didn't think you asked the question you
wanted to ask.  What preceded what's quoted above bore (in
my opinion) only a slender relationship (and that tenuous)
to the formulation above.  Rather than try to answer that
complex formulation, which *is* a serious thing, I wanted to
come to the more immediate thing, which I think you now
state clearly:

>your non-answer notwithstanding.

(now being remedied, eh?)

>In the context of the original question, do insults hurled 
>at someone who often uses them him or herself make the 
>hurler subject to the same charge, even if they never 
>partake in that behavior otherwise?

Your "even if" clause makes considerable difference to the
issue, I believe.  I freely use insult, but I don't think
I have to defend that action.  I do it rhetorically, in
the greater half of cases using satire and turning back
language that doesn't seem to me to cohere or be based
on reason.  I wouldn't deny indulging in excess, or some
other form of shooting myself in the foot, but I don't
think anyone could fairly claim that such foibles
predominate.

You realize, of course, that I cannot answer for the insults
of others.  But I am willing to own up to mine, whether one
person or another thinks it's *always* a weak kind of
rhetorical technique or not.

I answer with these specificities pointing toward myself,
not to trumpet my ego around, but to point out that (in my
view) we deal together in a highly fluid, immediate way,
responding more to what's before us on our screens and in
our hearts and minds that to canons of behavior of a more
general, somewhat removed kind.  The exchanges we have here
are primarily event-driven, rather than ideology-driven.
Well, they are for me, at least.

Sorry for the long preamble, but there's another point I
think is quite important and especially pertinent to your
question.  That concerns how one might remain, so to speak,
pure enough to pass the test of your last clause.  In my
view, that can only happen if either you're some kind of
saint, which seems pretty unlikely, or if you never expose
yourself to being zinged good and proper for saying
something that by any measure *deserves* an insult.  In
short, in what I see as the realistic case ...

>I don't think that *either* question is so clear cut, but
>then again, I had to look up the word "sophistry."

...  I used that word because the assumptions of your
question, in the way you've formulate it, don't really
apply.  I think that renders the argument somewhat empty of
real content (by which statement I mean no insult).

I think it's quite pointless to take a rather grand stand on
insult or even on ad hominem attacks.  I think it's
hypocritical in yet another way to require that someone, as
it were, remain free of the taint of being an insulter, so
as to keep other disagreeing parties from carrying on in
that vein.

Tolerance and intolerance, I believe, involve really quite
different issues.  That could be raised as a topic, but I
think not as any generalization of the saints and sinners of
soc.motss, eh?

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson
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