We've mentioned several times that when someone says "Be tolerant" it is time to make sure your 9mm is locked and loaded--metaphorically, of course.
Bill Buckley had the same general idea. Here, a Famous Professor is quoted:
"What is required is more not less tolerance—not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship...."
The response from Buckley?
... this, Bill rightly noted, is “ne plus ultra relativism, idiot nihilism.”...
The author of the linked essay, Roger Kimball, goes on to observe:
...“Eating people is wrong,” as Flanders and Swann put it, and you needn’t be Aristotle to extend the list of things unworthy of toleration no matter what a “divergent opinion” might dictate.
“Complete moral tolerance,” as James Fitzjames Stephen noted in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), “is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other—that is to say, when society is at an end.”...
"Tolerance" is applied only to evil. One does not tolerate the good; one tolerates evil--but only up to a point.
We are told that 'tolerance is a virtue.' That's a lie. No established religion has ever defined 'tolerance' as a virtue. It is a tactic which temporarily prevents incivility, whether verbal or physical, but as Stephen notes above, it is also a signal that society is at an end.
Not the signal we want to see, is it?
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