Not sure if you are arguing with me or reinforcing my point, but it seems we are 100% in agreement when it comes to tolerance.
Hi Slobodan,
I don't see myself as arguing with you at all! Just expanding your points to highlight something I think is important to the general discussion. Since society has lost any belief in transcendent values, we seem to have defaulted to thinking that evil is "only those things that we have codified as illegal." And, that "tolerance" is only to tolerate what some elite (or even hegemonomous) group decides is "fit to be tolerated."
I think this is a distrous development in western culture (in particular) that makes us ripe for the rise of various types of totalitarian control - all of which end up eliminating individual liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and even our rights to our possessions, rearing children, and even our ideas and beliefs.
I'm sure it sounds like histrionics, perhaps, but I'll be there were a lot of people in the early years of Hitler's rise to power that though those who opposed him on similar grounds were just being histrionic.
Same with any kind of rising "ism" regardless of whether it be left or right. It may have seemingly good intent (and that may even be true - think of the eugenics movement in the US in the last century, only stopped by the exposed results of similar thinking in Germany) but always ends up moving toward totalarian control. The "risk" of a real democracy, as has been the grand experiment in the US, is that true liberty leaves open the door weirdos. Sometimes, evil, and harmful weirdos. The democratic way of handling them has been on a case by case basis with appeal to transcendent values as the measure of "just how weird you can get without causing too much harm." A rise of totalitarian "values" merely suppresses and eliminates the weirdos (think Jews, the mentally ill, the physically handicapped in Germany e.g.) on behalf of the "good of the masses." Today we think that nothing like what happened in Germany could "ever happen again, or here." Foolishness if you just look around at the last half of the 20th century "all over the world."
And this is how this ties back to the poor schlub who had the temerity to create his "weirdo memo" thinking that freedom of expression and liberty gave it a fair shot at being discussed. He ran straight into a totalarian wall that saw his "thoughts and beliefs" as dangerous to the masses, and they killed him (metaphorically speaking). Their tolerance did not include tolerating his right to express his opinion / research (no matter how accurate, incccurate, or misguided, or naieve, or whatever). He was outside the limits of the totalarian hive-mind and so they killed him.
Rand