That you for linking to this article; I enjoy seeing other people making my point better than I could. Here are some additional thoughts:
My first thought after reading the linked article was “pick your battles”, especially as expressed in Paul Graham’s “What You Can’t Say”. It sounds like the exact opposite of “Atheism+”, and yet they both seem to make a lot of sense… well, how is that possible?
More generally: You hold opinions X and Y, and they are both important to you. Another person agrees with X and disagrees with Y. When should you treat this person as an ally, and when should you treat them as an enemy? Let’s suppose that both X and Y are your core values, so you can’t decide by “which one is more important to you”.
Seems to me that when X is endangered, then each proponent of X is a gift, and you don’t look the gift horse in the mouth. On the other hand, when X is safe—it may be still a minority belief, but it gains momentum irreversibly—it is strategic to associate X with Y as much as possible, to transfer some momentum to Y; declaring “X but not Y” people as the “enemies of the true X (which includes Y)” is the obvious way to do it. You can afford to alienate the few “X but not Y” people if X will win without them too.
This was a strategic analysis in general, but now let’s look at these specific X and Y; namely: What’s could be possibly wrong about asking people to be compassionate and reasonable, and not be a bully???
Well, it depends on your specific definitions or “compassionate”, “reasonable” and “bully”. Yes, the devil is in the details. As long as the vocal people are allowed to redefine these words to mean exactly what they need them to mean in a given moment, and especially if “surely, you said A, but we all know that’s just a code for B” arguments are accepted, it allows to relabel each dissent as bullying, and to ostracize given people not because they disagree, but simply because their behavior is interpreted as ethically unacceptable. (Even pointing out this mechanism will be problematic, because we all know that only a bully would expend their energy to defend bullies.)
That you for linking to this article; I enjoy seeing other people making my point better than I could. Here are some additional thoughts:
My first thought after reading the linked article was “pick your battles”, especially as expressed in Paul Graham’s “What You Can’t Say”. It sounds like the exact opposite of “Atheism+”, and yet they both seem to make a lot of sense… well, how is that possible?
More generally: You hold opinions X and Y, and they are both important to you. Another person agrees with X and disagrees with Y. When should you treat this person as an ally, and when should you treat them as an enemy? Let’s suppose that both X and Y are your core values, so you can’t decide by “which one is more important to you”.
Seems to me that when X is endangered, then each proponent of X is a gift, and you don’t look the gift horse in the mouth. On the other hand, when X is safe—it may be still a minority belief, but it gains momentum irreversibly—it is strategic to associate X with Y as much as possible, to transfer some momentum to Y; declaring “X but not Y” people as the “enemies of the true X (which includes Y)” is the obvious way to do it. You can afford to alienate the few “X but not Y” people if X will win without them too.
This was a strategic analysis in general, but now let’s look at these specific X and Y; namely: What’s could be possibly wrong about asking people to be compassionate and reasonable, and not be a bully???
Well, it depends on your specific definitions or “compassionate”, “reasonable” and “bully”. Yes, the devil is in the details. As long as the vocal people are allowed to redefine these words to mean exactly what they need them to mean in a given moment, and especially if “surely, you said A, but we all know that’s just a code for B” arguments are accepted, it allows to relabel each dissent as bullying, and to ostracize given people not because they disagree, but simply because their behavior is interpreted as ethically unacceptable. (Even pointing out this mechanism will be problematic, because we all know that only a bully would expend their energy to defend bullies.)