Ah, now I see the connection with this thread and this one Tolerance
I think the word liberal has been considered a nasty word since the 1980’s due to ineffectual liberal hypocrisy at its best. “The other” should be universally tolerated, except when the other is intolerant of another’s views. In other words, the liberal feels we should be free to practice life the way we want to, so long as we don’t force our way of life onto others. We should be free to privately believe what we want to, so long as publicly we all appease each other and “get along”. If a person asserts a different worldview onto us(liberals), as an unconditional “better” worldview than ours(liberals), and then demands that we(liberals) engage it, then that demand equates “harassment”. This logic is both counter-productive and socially stagnating. Political discourse is supposed to engage the other. Discourse is supposed to be both intellectual and aggressive. Politics implies points of contention, clashing ideas, inevitable antagonisms, heated disputes, intense disagreements. Politics, in the real sense, are about human lives, since humans are effected by the policies of their society. Thus, by abandoning the antagonistic, linguistically aggressive dynamics of political discourse, liberals have abandoned politics, itself, and as a result, they have inadvertently abandoned the suffering individuals, whose lives they claim to champion. By abandoning political antagonism, liberals have allowed the status quo of capitalism to thrive. Liberal tolerance fits seamlessly, then, into the ideology of corporate capitalism. It does not cause “friction”; it allows liberals to “feel free and independent” of the status quo, while never affecting the “social machine”, itself. The status quo remains intact. Thus, liberals are rather useful to corporate leaders and politicians, themselves. Liberal-capitalist ideology crumbles with this, “The right to be different” and “multicultural societies” as the focus of “human rights”. “Culture” and “differences” have nothing to do with “human” rights. Culture and the differences between cultures, are not the focus of “rights” and “ethics” at all. This is because culture is already “outside” of the human. Human rights focuses on the human, in its essence. Culture is external to the mind and body of the human being, not an intrinsic part. Thus, culture is a non-issue. Human rights, real human rights, focus on the human, intrinsically. It focuses on what can and cannot be done to the mind and body of any human being, regardless of a person’s ethnic, cultural, or gender identity, and regardless of the historical conditions involved. Real human rights are totally “a-cultural”. Cultures, differences or not, do not factor. Furthermore, since so-called “tolerance” does not focus on real human rights, we can say that it is an ideology void of human-oriented ethics. As such, liberal tolerance is both “a-ethical” and “unethical”.
In the other thread about tolerance, link above, I answered to at as follows. It fits in to what I said, here, thus far.
Tolerance is a self-contradictory principle. It is self-contradictory because it is reflexive. That is, as a principle it acts upon itself, or it includes itself in its scope. As a principle, tolerance dictates that we must be tolerant of everything. We cannot pick and choose what we will tolerate and what we will not. If this is so, then tolerance requires us to tolerate even intolerance. Thus, if somebody is preaching or practicing intolerance, the tolerant person cannot, in principle, speak out against what the intolerant person is doing, since speaking out against intolerance would itself be an act of intolerance. In other words, the principle of tolerance requires us to grant intolerant people the right to be intolerant. This is clearly self-contradictory, since tolerance cannot condone what it specifically sets out to be against (intolerance), but it nevertheless requires itself, logically, to do just that. Tolerance as a principle, then, is clearly illogical, and therefore, irrational.
This site gives a nice outlook both on what I’ve written and they give a scientific outlook.
“Outlook on liberal”:http://www.culturism.us/booksummaries/critiqPurTolrnce.htm
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