Quote:
Originally posted by Chewbacca:
Perhaps Dr. Kings underlying ideaology and practice differed so greatly from the underlying ideaology and practice of racial intolerance that using the same word to describe his vewipoint would not be exactly fitting or fair, no matter how technically accurate it is?
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Boo yah! I think you nailed it Chewie! Don't stretch the meaning of the word 'intolerance' to encompass actions that it does not entail. I think Dr King was a pretty decent guy, had some great ideas and enough charisma and willpower to convince people to do (not necessarily
think) as he said. But he wasn't about tolerance, no way. He was about equality, which is very different.
To be honest, universal tolerance isnt possible anyway. You can be tolerant of individual people's actions (which can link us back to the smoking ban issue). But you can't be (in)tolerant of abstract concepts such as 'hate' or 'prejudice', because 'tolerance' itself is essentially an abstract concept, and when you go abstract, you go subjective. Everyone has their own ideas as to what abstract concepts are, whether or not you can effectively communicate your ideas through language is another thing entirely. Hence all the hissing and scratching between Yorick and yourself [img]smile.gif[/img]
My stance is that it is folly to apply tolerance to abstract social ideas. Because I don't think that 'tolerance' is necessarily a 'good' (oooooh, another abstract concept) thing. Conflict is necessary in order to create your reality. To preach the benefits of tolerance, it is necessary to create sweeping, dogmatic principles of social order, conduct, and physical law. Yet, dogma is subjective. And this subjective knowledge must be justified by personal conviction, otherwise it is merely a collection of words, sounds and visual symbols. And this personal conviction creates individual verifiability (ie: it is right/true because I personally believe it to be so')which in turn conflicts with the concept of detatched, unpersonalised universal knowledge. So tolerance ultimately, is intolerable... in a universal framework ('universal' again being a subjective abstract term).
Bad logic, yes, but I don't care, I'm tolerance-intolerant.