And perversion, too. Must-read by Tom Knott. Also this, from an LBC commenter:
Being a little older than most commenters I can say that I used to be tolerant and now I’m intolerant. No, I didn’t change but the definition of tolerance in this PC country did.
It used to be a virtue. It used to mean that even though I disagreed vehemently with your view, I treated you with respect and kindness. Now it means that I am to accept your view, no matter what it is, as having equal value in the marketplace of ideas. With this definition I’m being asked to call good what God calls evil. Sorry, if God calls it evil, I’m not going to disagree with Him to be PC.
Knott reminds me of a pet peeve. Gentleman is not a synonym for man. Don’t use it that way, please. A gentleman is a “well-mannered and considerate man with high standards of proper behavior,” not just any male. I’ve heard judges refer to thuggish murderers and rapists as gentlemen, and I once heard a cop call a criminal thug a gentleman.
It turns the stomach.
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The whole “tolerance” issue is so construed. There are two totally different defenitions. Positive Tolerance, and Negative Tolerance.
Positive Tolerance is accepting all beleifs as equal (I believe it’s perfectly fine to kill people…so you have to accept that as a fact)
Negative Tolerance: You can have your belief, and I can have mine, but that doesn’t make yours just as true as mine. That’s where we can get into a debate on Christianity vs. other religions.
But with our modern definition of tolerance, we must accept ALL VIEWS. ALL VIEWS means ALL VIEWS does it not?
As I said in an column on Virtue Magazine:
“Say I believe it is all right to steal from a local gift shop because I’ve donated to it before but I never got anything in return for my services. So I decide I’m going to get my reward. But I get caught in the act. According to the view above, I didn’t do anything wrong. I believed it was fine to steal. It’s my truth, and you can’t say that it’s wrong. So with no moral absolutes, and nothing black and white, we have a society that truly has no law. But the law must be absolute—it cannot change from person to person.
Increased lawlessness results from the view of no absolute truth. Because how can you condemn anyone if you believe in tolerating others beliefs? Yes, a tolerant person must even be tolerant of the intolerant. How can you call me a bigot if, according to your view of tolerance, it’s true if I believe it’s true?”
I rest my case (perhaps.)
There is nothing fancy about tolerance. It is only what an individual can endure. If you can not stand to live in the same state with a Roman Catholic, your intolerance will force you to take an extreme action.
Liberals make a big deal of tolerating a wide range of aberant behavior. They equate tolerance of the weird or immoral with the acceptance of varying norms of moral activity.
Not me! If you raise your kids like goats and do drugs in the street while espousing a religion of hate, I will NOT tolerate your idiocy. I am coming after you for the sake of your poor kids and to get your hind parts out of the area.
La Shawn made ironic reference to the use of the word “gentleman.” I recall watching two teen girls scratch, bite, patch hair, tear clothing and curse on a professional level as an adult cried, “ladies, ladies, let’s be civil!” Frankly, I didn’t see a lady anywhere nearby.
Looks like building a center with a bathroom would solve the public urination problem.
La Shawn, you are absolutely right! The word “Gentleman” is not synonymous with ‘Man”. A gentleman will open and hold a door for a woman, a man might make crude sucking noises, and look to his friends for approval! I don’t know when police officers started saying things like “the gentleman forced the fourteen year-old girl into his car, and left the Mall. We need more Truth, less PC. God bless, Tom
“Looks like building a center with a bathroom would solve the public urination problem.”
Yes, and providing convenient trash cans would solve the problem of armed robbers leaving all those empty cartridge casings on the street.
I was born in the great state of Texas. I lived there in my early youth and my summers there through my highschool years. Unfortunately I spent the rest of my life in ultra liberal TAXACHUSETTS! Anyway my point is that my southern lady grandmother from texas never a woman as a lady unless she knew they were ladies. Any other woman she referred to as FEMALE.
The dwindling numbers of judges willing to take a stand for decency and common sense is the cause of a lot of the problems we’re seeing today. The reason for increased malpractice insurance rates (and the steady steram of doctors away from my state) is the fear of a huge settlement. The fear of a huge settlement has become a constant fear because people have been alllowed to sue for stupid reasons. Let’s go all the way back to the case that never should have been: hot McDonald’s coffee in the lap of a woman driving a car.
A normal person would yell and scream and be mad at themselves for doing something like that. This woman decided to sue. Why did she decide to sue? Because someone before her had sued over some other stupid issue. Why are these people allowed to sue over no-common sense issues? Because courts are entertaining these cases. If a judge had the guts to say “Are you crazy? I’m not hearing this case!” These things would dwindle.
The problem is, fewer and fewer judges are doing this. Why? Becuase they’d get sued and some other judge would hear the case.
So now we have gentlemen rapists, misunderstood murderers, and innocent victims of criminally good-tasting and readily available food.
OW! My wrist is sore from typing this! I’m gonna sue! Oh wait…OSHA beat me to it.
‘Course, my stomach is a little bit uncomfortable. Darn that Pizza Hut for making their pizza so good. They made me eat more and now my stomach hurts!
SOMEBODY CALL ME A LAWYER!!
Mark Le Roi #7, I agree. A big part of this “tolerance” movement is the result of our litigious society. To solve this problem, we have to address our laws regarding frivilous lawsuits & what matters can be legally addressed. Lawyers who endager our society should be liable to legal action in the same way as a doctor who endangers his patient is.
We also have to seriously think about the phrase “The Constitution is not a suicide pact”.
We need an Amendment in the Constitution for the seperation of the legal profession & unaccountability.
Loitering…
In my day (and I am not an old man) shopkeepers or the police [pronounced poh-lice] would act to disperse multitudes of loafers and gadabouts.
Public Urination…
I have been known to release without the aid of a restroom [it is an advantage of being male]. I always made sure to thoroughly obscure myself, however.
Tolerance and litigiousness…
I thing Mr. La Roi pretty well summed that up.
“Gentleman” in its original form, in old England, was a reference to a man who owned land and had wealth. It distinguished him from an ordinary man who worked with his hands and rented a home, or a man who was a tenant on a landholder’s estate. A gentleman was educated, raised properly by nannies and such, taught how to behave properly in society and how to eat dinner with nice silver and white linen table cloths and people watching your every move. A gentleman had expectations of him that a working man was excused from, because of the worker’s necessarily less formal upbringing. It is in this that our egalitarian American use of the term found a pathway from “wealthy landed individual” to “any man who behaves as if he was raised properly”.
But it once was a specific term to indicate a specific demographic type or person, and it had NOTHING to do with politeness. Using that word on someone who was not a gentleman would indicate that you were either stupid or a troublemaker. It would be like calling an Army general “sailor”.
I didn’t include that part of the definition because for purposes of this post, it was irrelevant. – Admin
Qoute Rush Limbaugh:
“A Liberal can tolerate anything -
except a conservative.”
I believe that one thing that would help curb some of these frivolous lawsuits is changing the rules, so that if someone sues someone, and doesn’t win, they have to pay the legal fees of the party they sued. I’m not a lawyer, but this seems perfectly simple, and easy to implement, and all it would take would be a few suits like this, where the plaintiff was forced to pay, to discourage frivolous lawsuits.
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