Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I would take away from that notion is that large is relative. A large portion of the country still has fewer people than New York City. I am of course, not trying to start a flame war either, but my take on it is that those sorts of issues would be inappropriate to bring up at work or in a job interview in the first place, regardless of your position. Based on your description, I believe I probably espouse the o…
If they don't want intolerant people in their ranks though, then what would that make them?
E Pur Si Muove
331–340 of 853 posts
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understood what you meant, I was wondering if you noticed that you, as a self-proclaimed open-minded Houstonite, made a broad brush stereotype about "Rural people".
Well, I didn't say it definitively. But I suppose you can say that. But this whole thread is one giant stereotype to begin with, so yeah. From my observation is what I should have said. And I'm in Dallas, way better than Houston ;)
Dallaganian?
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#333http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html is very relevant about how we got here. As Paul Graham said then, the biggest threats to free thought and speech come from people who have just enough power to enforce taboos, and not enough to be confident in their power. In this case the political ideology that is stifling thought is one that has nationwide lost Congress, the Senate and the Presidency. Which naturally results in a…
Well, another way of putting it is "Liberals are tolerant of anything except intolerance"
If I want to be a tolerant and accepting person, do I have to accept someone who wants to deny a group of people to marry the person they love? Do I have to tolerate someone who wants to control a woman's body?
This is similar to a love of freedom; I want everyone to have freedom, but that means having to restrict the freedom to infringe on other people's freedom. That might seem to be a contradiction, but it is a paradox you have to address.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#334I get that this is incidental to the point, but since he leads with China as an example, I wonder if it's possible that the topics he thinks will be controversial are simply ones that people are less passionate about in China. Every culture has its own "hot-button" topics.
Try pointing out that Taiwan is a separate country sometime and you'd be absolutely shocked at the reaction you get from some people, even though they have different passports and a separate government. A Chinese engineer at Google once threatened to resign and started a a major firestorm over a dessert called "Free Tibet Goji Chocolate Creme Pie":
https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2015/04/...
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you consider southerners? As recently as two nights ago I helped entertain some startup founders from SF who were genuinely suprised that Houston (the 4th largest, soon 3rd largest city in the US) wasn't just a few strip malls.
Houston is always surprising to people who've never been there (and was surprising to me when I first moved there as a 19-year-old kid). It's among the friendliest places I've ever lived. And, for all its horrible traffic, the drivers are among the most polite I've seen, as well (though they drive terrifyingly fast on average). It's one of the biggest/best cities that nobody's ever heard of or thought about. Great mu…
One follow-on to your final paragraph: the thing is that small-town Texas (depending on the area) does look a lot different from Georgia.
It's probably got a good deal more Latinos (Angleton, or any town as you head west), it's probably got more Vietnamese and folks of Vietnamese descent (coastal towns, Port Arthur), it's probably got a more functioning economy (notable exceptions like Rockport).
In some ways (if you look up the statistics above) rural Texas most resembles rural California.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though it may be true that some liberals who work in technology argue about pronouns, that doesn't mean the entire set of liberals working in technology did anything.
> did anything. ...except maybe tacitly agreeing with people who posited that talking about something was a bad thing, because, you know, in this particular case freedom of speech is trumped by more important considerations. This is, of course, not limited to liberals, or any other political affiliation.
Freedom of speech is part of a legal framework. It means you won't be arrested for something you say or express. Doesn't mean anyone has to have a positive response to everything anyone says.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#337Of the places I've lived (not necessarily in order): - Deep South (18 years - born + raised) - Boston MA (5 years @ college then job) - NYC (6+ years) - Los Angeles (1yr @ startup) - San Diego (1yr @ startup) - Bay Area (6 years, including 4+ at household name tech company) I found the Bay Area (and SF in particular) to be the most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture I've ever lived and worked in. I've never enc…
Considering that 50% of the people in the Bay Area are foreign born, and have no experience of the South, I find your comment "a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country" to be hyperbolic. May be you are projecting based upon a few interactions ?
People don't need to have experienced something firsthand in order to have a "self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude" towards it. In fact, they are more likely to be hostile to things they haven't experienced. This seems to be genetically programmed, as it transcends cultures and history.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
People in the south don't think about San Francisco at all. Only the Fox News anchors based in New York but charged with representing the politics of the south care about San Francisco.
People in SF don't think about the south either besides in political discussions.
Or when it's time for BBQ.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#339Shortly prior to the recent US presidential election, I worked next to a nice, smart young man from California who went to a well-known progressive university in the bay area. Politics was very rarely discussed at work, but in the weeks before the election, there was some cross talk in the isles.
He trusted me enough to message me privately that he was planning to vote for Trump. At that time, I was quite anxious about the thought of a Trump presidency, but I'm pretty far along the open-minded scale, so we chatted about it privately a bit.
My co-worker asked me to not speak about his position and to not let anyone else know about it, because he feared that his 'out of place' political views would, in his words, 'indirectly limit his career options.'
Why he supported Trump is pretty irrelevant, but I found his opinion reasonable, though I disagreed with his overall choice.
You know what? I agreed with his concern at the time, and I still agree with it. Consciously and otherwise, I think that quite a few of the fine progressive folk that we find ourselves surrounded by here in the bay area would hold such an opinion against him in important ways.
I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.
At this point, I can't imagine a path forward that has much of a chance of bearing fruit.
Re: E Pur Si Muove
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The result is, as I've heard it put, Liberals are tolerant of anything except being conservative. That's a clever slogan. But the logical response to that would be to say that liberals are tolerant of everything except intolerance. Which as a factual statement is of course arguable, but as a premise is certainly internally consistent.
The problem with that "logical response" is that it is wrong. Here is a simple demonstration. Consider the conservative argument that when you raise the minimum wage, elementary economics of supply and demand results in fewer jobs for poor people. I guarantee you that if you present this argument to 10 liberal friends, more than half will have a strong emotional response against it. While responding, some are likely…
No, the 'logical response' isn't wrong, it just isn't followed by all self-proclaimed 'liberals'.
Of course some liberals will have emotional reponses to something that is not actually an intolerant opinion, like your example. There is no admission requirements to be a 'liberal', so we can't deny entry to people who don't understand the difference between a moral question and an implementation question like minimum wage.