Tuesday, June 23, 2015

THE INTOLERANT LECTURE US ON TOLERANCE

The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway has posted an unstructured, meandering, relentless whiny diatribe about the growing movement to take down flags and other items that honor the Confederacy. She quotes Solzhenitsyn and Heine; she compares the orderly removal of Confederate flags and statues to the destruction of ancient Buddhas by ISIS.

Ultimately, we get to the gist of her argument:
Basically it’s just such a hysterical atmosphere at this point, that no one can conceive of a person who is against something but also willing to tolerate the expression of that thing....

Listen, it’s great that we’re aiming to be an anti-racist society. That’s very, very good! But it’s bad that we are slowly forgetting how to dislike something without seeking its utter destruction.
This argument might give me pause -- except that I know it comes from a representative of a conservative movement that disapproved of what a handful of ACORN employees said on videotape and responding by destroying the organization altogether. I know this movement is trying to destroy legal abortion in America, and government labor unions, and, ultimately, non-government labor unions. I know the movement wants to destroy Obamacare and the public school system and the Postal Service and Amtrak. I know the movement wants to hobble Social Security and Medicare until they cease to exist, and would abolish the minimum wage if that were politically feasible.

Here's the Heine quote from Hemingway:
And how we manage these processes of disapproval truly is important for civil society. To quote Heinrich Heine, a man who definitely knew of what he spoke, “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning men.”
If Hemingway objects to the "burning" of people, let me give her a list of names: Lani Guinier, the Dixie Chicks, Shirley Sherrod, Sandra Fluke, Graeme Frost, Van Jones, Dan Rather, Eason Jordan. And can we talk about the developers of the Park51 project, aka the "Ground Zero mosque"? I'd say they were singed. Did Hemingway have a problem with that?

No modern movement conservative has any standing whatsoever to lecture anyone else on intolerance. It's that simple.

5 comments:

Arthur Mervyn said...

Lani Guinier was the first crack in the Clinton facade for me. When President Clinton hung her out to dry and didn't defend her when the Republicans attacked, I started to lose my respect for him.

Anonymous said...

Hemmingway is incoherent. I will absolutely tolerate her right to be an asshole, but she has to understand that when she does I will call her an asshole and she needs to tolerate that too.

The objections to the treasonous rag flying over the statehouse in SC right now (and Mississippi) is that it is state sanctioned assholishness. And that's something that we should be trying to stamp out. Private individuals can be assholes, but the state is supposed to be representing all of its citizens.

Victor said...

What @nonynony said!

BKT said...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but asking the state government of South Carolina to remove an object that has expressly been used to foster hate and divisiveness, not to mention used as a way to threaten violence against an entire class of citizens, is hardly a penny-ante maneuver on behalf of political correctness.

Anyone who defends the use of that "expression" does not grasp the depth of intolerance it represents.



Anonymous said...

The basic point is simple. It's Always Projection. Any accusation leveled at its Enemies by any modern Republican is always what the GOP has done, is doing or is about to do. Sure, it's an excuse to feel aggrieved and resentful, but that's always going to be there. That's not what's important. You have to have a justification, pre-emptive or not, for your actions which you know will be seen as illegal, immoral or fattening. That way, when you do it, (or you are found out to be doing it) it's just a response to the provocations of Them. Anyone who's raised children knows how that works.