I don’t see that as the issue, and I don’t think anyone is complaining of such.
The issue is whether such behavior is suggestive of hypocrisy, in that liberals are supposed to be more tolerant than conservatives, but speaking ill of Glenn Beck for instance is evidence of intolerance and thus hypocrisy.
There are many people, such as Bennett, Bricker, and me, who do not consider gambling to be vice. One is not “keeping it off the table” if one does not believe it to belong in the set. Bricker did, in fact, make that point, repeatedly. If you wish to claim that he was “keeping it off the table”, you must establish that gambling, per se, is a vice. No one involved in the argument ever did that.
I think this is technically true, but is an insufficiently suitable defense for Bennett regarding charges of hypocrisy. I don’t think you can set yourself up as an arbiter of values, write a book called “The Book of Virtues”, speak very broadly and generally about moral versus immoral behavior, and then post-hoc say, “Oh but I never specifcally mentioned gambling.”
Michael Kinsey had a good take on this in Slate:
So, is he a hypocrite specifically because he gambles and he never said anything was wrong with gambling? No. He’s hypocritical in that he advocates for morality and virtue and for the generalities cited by Kinsey, for example, and then excises a small island of what many people would call less than virtuous behavior that also just happens to coincide with something he likes to do.
Of course it is. “We are tolerant of everyone except those who disagree with us, and those people deserve to go blind or die horribly” is not a useful definition of tolerance.
If you are claiming to be tolerant on those terms, you are not making a claim of any meaning at all. The Ku Klux Klan is tolerant like that.
Regards,
Shodan
Are we talking about, “you know, we could reduce crime by aborting black babies” William Bennett? Who gives a fuck about his gambling?
Quite so. Serves me right for skimming the thread.
As a liberal, I think that:
I know, huh? Especially when it happens at Christmastime, and almost more importantly, to people whose lives were already pretty grim.
Good thing that no liberal has ever claimed to be tolerant on those terms, then, isn’t it? Because as we both know, liberals don’t claim to be “tolerant of everyone.” The general liberal claim is for tolerance on specific issues - race, religion, gender, and orientation, to name a few off the top of my head. No liberal has ever claimed universal tolerance as a liberal virtue. Indeed, precisely the opposite: liberalism requires intolerance of specific beliefs and actions. Racism, religious bias, sexism, and homophobia, to name a few of the top of my head.
As far as Glen Beck goes, the concept of tolerance applies to him this far: as a liberal, we are behooved to tolerate his right to shoot his fool mouth off on TV as long as some network is craven enough to give him a platform. And that’s about it. We don’t have to like him, or feel sorry for him, or hope that only good things happen to him.
The argument I loathe the most usually happens in MPSIMS. Somebody posts about something that made them feel depressed and begs for sympathy. Over the top example:
Original Post: My cat’s kittens died. Here’s how… Can I get hugs?
Monkey: No, you can’t get sympathy. You put the kittens in a pillow case and drowned them. Why the HELL should I give you sympathy?
bad argument poster: Why attack him? He obviously feels bad about it. Don’t add to his pain.
If the poster did something wrong and posts about it, I am going to call him or her on it. I am not going to have sympathy just because they want it. Maybe the poster should feel bad. Don’t validate the guy.
Oh lordy. I had forgotten those threads.
That’s the problem. Saying that you have tolerance and respect for diverse opinions and all that, except if you disagree, effectively means that you have no tolerance at all.
Which means that the general claim for tolerance is meaningless. Everyone is tolerant of people who agree with them - liberals, conservatives, the KKK, Phred Phelps - everybody.
There was some Victorian writer - possibly Lewis Carroll - who said “I am fond of children - except boys”. The qualification makes it clear that you are saying something rather different than what it is supposed to sound like.
All men are equal, except for blacks.
People have rights, except for gays.
Everyone is entitled to respect, unless they disagree with me on my hot button issues.
There is essentially no difference among these three statements.
Regards,
Shodan
Why are you slipping respect into the discussion? Perhaps if you would be so kind as to define what you mean by tolerance, we can tell you if it is a realistic description to ascribe to liberals. I don’t think liberals ever claimed to *respect *all opinions. I think people like you either have a cartoonish belief about liberals, or make ignorant statements because you’re just too stupid.
Look at that, I called you stupid, and me a liberal and everything. That does not compute. Aren’t I supposed to love you as I do myself and turn the other cheek and go heal lepers or something?
Bennett certainly was a hypocrite for gambling away at least 8 million dollars because he set himself up as a moral arbiter and general scold of general weaknesses. He wrote books on morals and virtues. The fact that he never mentioned gambling in his list of weaknesses only indicates that he knew he was screwing his family out of his hard earned money through such a weakness and wanted to save gambling from his list to protect himself from scolding by family and the public when they found out. Well, that didn’t quite work out for him.
Rush Limbaugh rarely blabbered about drug abusers in his radio beat-offs because using 4,000 Oxycontin pills a month is too many to fool even oneself that it is not abuse. Is Rush enough of a general scold and moral arbiter to make this hypocrisy? Does his deafness as a result of Oxy abuse mean the universe understands irony and karma so that he cannot hear his venom?
He will die. But not from that. The wages of sin is death. We’re all gonna die. We are all sinners. QED.
Can’t someone dislike Beck just for being a mealy mouthed jerk?
Not if you’re a liberal, because then you are a hypocrite, since you promised to tolerate and respect mealy mouthed jerks.
I’m sorry if I am using terms with which you are not familiar.
I mean respecting people, even if they are different from you.
That seems to be a concept that liberals on the SDMB have a great deal more trouble with than the conservatives here. It never fails - some liberal dies or encounters some calamity, like Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer or Ted Kennedy and his brain tumor or whatever. We get the conservatives like Bricker and Mr. Moto and Sarahfeena and so on all chiming that “we disagree with him, but don’t wish him any ill based on that”.
But when Tony Snow gets colon cancer, the Usual Suspects all chime in with “I hope he dies and it’s painful”. Purely because he is a Republican.
:shrugs:
Regards,
Shodan
Ah, the old “Republicans think Democrats have bad ideas while Democrats think Republicans are bad people” piety. Bullshit. You’re just better at keeping a straight face.
“You think YOU have problems? Be grateful you’re not one of the billions of people on Earth who live on a dollar a day in a shithole of a country!”
This one is trotted out when someone posts about some difficulty they’re having in their lives. It’s stupid because perhaps the poster *is *deeply grateful they don’t live in a shithole Third World country somewhere and because it does absolutely fuck all to actually help the poster, or anyone else with similar problems who might be reading the thread for ideas. The Dopers who fling this poo-statement at their fellow Dopers do so claiming they’re giving them ‘perspective’, when what they’re really doing is saying ‘I don’t care about your problems, so therefore you should feel ashamed of caring about your problems!’
Actually, Shodan does a piss-poor job of keeping a straight face. And his posts, passim, are my cite that some Republicans DO think Democrats are bad people.