Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Define intolerance That thing everyone except the intolerant seem to understand remarkably well, and the intolerant spend a lot of time quibbling over the definition of in a desperate attempt to derail their inclusion in it. Or, more seriously: treating other people as unwelcome or hated or less than human, for reasons other than being hateful and intolerant.
Yes. It is all very obvious. For example, suppose a marginalized group uses the hashtag #killallwhitemen to express the disempowerment they feel from the historical weight of white privilege. This, I think we can all agree, is an expression of righteous outrage through hyperbole, not intolerance. In fact, "white men" in this context does not refer to any person or group of people, rather a self-reenforcing system of…
I understand this is hyperbole, but this is the perfect case of how legitimate grievances are derailed by bad actors. Emphasis on the word "entirely".
We don't and can't think in absolutes as a society. Everyone and everything is imperfect to some degree. Women sometimes falsely accuse men of sexual assault. Police officers sometimes kill unarmed black men for good reason. The problem is that these sorts of arguments strip context entirely away—"sometimes" in each case is well under 10%. No one was talking about "entirely" in the first place, so this just morphs a discussion about equality into a much less serious one about human fallibility.
So, sure, those are issues, but let's focus on the 90% of the actual problem at hand. No one is saying sexism and racism are absolutely 100% responsible for everything. But they are extremely significant factors and, more importantly, factors entirely within our control and of our own making.