Maybe you can solve this by just not caring about what Z believes in the first place? If you think his views are reprehensible so you support him being fired you’re already in a failure state. This whole discussion of whether it’s really ok to cancel A because he’s friends with B and B is a Jew is actually a net negative. It just cements the idea that it’s ok to cancel B in the first place. I picture the Soviet Politburo arguing whether or not it’s ok to send friends of political dissidents to the gulags or if the KGB is going a little bit too far.
These sorts of discussions move the Schelling point and never actually work as pushback towards the problem they’re discussing.
People don’t behave very differently based on their stated beliefs. There’s White Nationalist programmers and there’s Black Power programmers and they program about the same. Maybe they hang out with different people on the weekends and play different board games, but that doesn’t matter because their job is programming. Nor does it quite make sense to fire either of them because some mentally handicapped people who spend all day on twitter decided to gang up on a programmer today.
You can choose to draw your bounds of tolerance as broadly as you like!
On a prescriptive level, I’m offering a coherent alternative that’s between “tolerate everybody” and “tolerate nobody”.
On a descriptive level, I’m pointing out why you encounter consequences when you damn the torpedoes and try to personally tolerate every fringe believer.
Maybe you can solve this by just not caring about what Z believes in the first place? If you think his views are reprehensible so you support him being fired you’re already in a failure state. This whole discussion of whether it’s really ok to cancel A because he’s friends with B and B is a Jew is actually a net negative. It just cements the idea that it’s ok to cancel B in the first place. I picture the Soviet Politburo arguing whether or not it’s ok to send friends of political dissidents to the gulags or if the KGB is going a little bit too far.
These sorts of discussions move the Schelling point and never actually work as pushback towards the problem they’re discussing.
People don’t behave very differently based on their stated beliefs. There’s White Nationalist programmers and there’s Black Power programmers and they program about the same. Maybe they hang out with different people on the weekends and play different board games, but that doesn’t matter because their job is programming. Nor does it quite make sense to fire either of them because some mentally handicapped people who spend all day on twitter decided to gang up on a programmer today.
You can choose to draw your bounds of tolerance as broadly as you like!
On a prescriptive level, I’m offering a coherent alternative that’s between “tolerate everybody” and “tolerate nobody”.
On a descriptive level, I’m pointing out why you encounter consequences when you damn the torpedoes and try to personally tolerate every fringe believer.