I was watching ‘Sunday Morning Live’ earlier today. There was a woman on there trying to argue that sex education was harmful to young teens and shouldn’t be taught in schools, something which would naturally strike a lot of people as somewhat closed-minded and bigoted. However, when one of her fellow panellists put this to her, she accused him of being intolerant. This is something I’ve noticed a lot recently in my dealings with right-wingers online: they seek to deny other people their rights to freedom of expression, but when someone tells them to shut up and stop being intolerant, they exclaim that they are being denied their freedom of speech. It is totally hypocritical, an really gets me wound up. What’s more, for me it just goes to show how juvenile right-wing and especially far-right-wing politics is: it spews all this hatred and intolerance onto others, yet demands others tolerate their hatred. I know there is a paradox at the heart of liberalism which says one should tolerate all but intolerance, and that part of being a liberal is to be conscious of and to meditate on that paradox, but as I once wrote here and probably in other entries too, what is in the left a paradox is in the right a blatant, arrogant hypocrisy. It demands tolerance but denies it to others, which I think must be a sign it hasn’t been thought through philosophically.