Many people are passively tolerant. That is, they begrudgingly accept other people's differences.
I advocate active tolerance. That is, not just accepting other people's difference, but expecting (demanding?) it.
If everyone were just like me it would be rather boring, I suspect.
Even more so, I would think, if we were all like you, gentle reader.
That said, the point of this post is not tolerance, but it's anthesis.
The passively tolerant are commonly also tolerant of intolerance, since they incorporate the mindset of the intolerant, while suppressing that mindset in order to 'get along', and in some cases, the intolerant may be expressing the very suppressed internal intolerance that the passively tolerant are not voicing.
So the sensible thing for the actively tolerant people to do is to stand up to intolerance (essentially, not tolerating intolerance).
This will cause some distress in the passively tolerant, due to cognitive dissonance.
And that's the point (shaking this system up, and fixing it).
It doesn't really matter to me whether someone (for example) beats up gay people or simply donates to Prop H8, or whether they merely defend speaking out against gay marriage (passive tolerant).
There's no reason to tolerate intolerance in a civil society.
(just so it's not 'topical')
It doesn't really matter to me whether someone (for example) is a lying snitch, or simply supports the concept of anonymous names on warrants, or whether they merely defend people who support the concept as 'being tolerant' of other views.
It doesn't really matter to me whether someone is a sadistic cop, covers up sadistic cops, or merely doesn't think it's a problem (essentially, 'being tolerant' of the reporter as a 'conspiracy' theorist, since the nightly news doesn't report that this is a problem).
It's not particular, in other words, to me, how or why people are hateful and nasty to each other.
It's simply not civil.
And we need to *actively* stop tolerating it.
Particularly the complacency theorist nut-jobs who have a stranglehold on political discourse.
There are some HORRIBLY evil things that go on every day right here, and those things feed a bigger evil that goes on above, which feeds into the biggest evils that feed on the top.
Tolerating this at a local level is where this needs to always be stopped.
And I'm not declaring a 'jihad' on some particular topic (which is why I varied, and didn't even mention the drug war, or 9-11, or any of the myriad issues where this faux tolerance mucks up the works).
The only point here is that if you really are intolerant of some thing, and cover it up, it still shows, eventually.
Myself, I'm only really intolerant of intolerance.
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