Right - finally I've got a bit more time to look stuff over rather than writing over short replies to the odd post.
Regarding the issue of Farage and me calling me intolerant - whilst it might be laudable of him to appeal to the PM over these deaths in particular (although it strikes me as very, very odd that he only wants to offer places to Christians - what makes those people in particular any more deserving of being allowed to move away from their war-torn home country?), that doesn't change the fact that UKIP's policies, not a particular spin on a particular event, are extremely intolerant of migrants. Especially those who aren't what Nigel Farage and the UKIP higher-ups prefer, which this particuar appeal makes explicit with their favouring of one particular group.
Regarding
DynamicSpirit please see the people that have already replied to him. I've already made my position clear on both points: intolerance
has to be broadly defined otherwise it's meaningless - but this has already been gone over a lot. Regarding being rude - it might be correct that I'm more likely to convince people that I'm right if I'm less rude, but you have to understand that politics is more than just debate over abstract issues. It might be messy and annoying to have to deal with, but the fact is that these issues affect many people's lives, and emotions boil over when you see someone calmly and "emotionlessly" (a misnomer if there ever was one) discussing issues that result in a particular group (that you might be part of) being treated in awful, awful ways.
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Yes - I do consider myself intolerant of the intolerant. The reason is because I think it's a bit of a mistake to consider all political views equal from someone neutral and unbiased point of view, for two reasons. a) A neutral and unbiased point of view - an objective view - can still make a judgement about whether a view achieves what it purports to achieve, and many times bigoted views actually end up being worse for things like the economy etc. (
there's an interesting study that shows 20% of all growth in the US since 1960 is down to decreased bigotry). b) And also because I don't actually think a neutral and unbiased opinion is possible - we all have subconscious and internal biases that it's impossible for us to remove from the situation because we simply aren't aware they're there. An example is how people talk about "Chinese food", when actually it's just as diverse as European food. A harmless example, but when you don't know what you don't know it can cause you to make mistakes. In a political context it can be far less harmless, however.
And regarding a march towards political correctness: it's very easy to talk about the world becoming easily offended or oversensitive when the issues don't affect you personally. I'm certainly not saying that this applies to you personally, but it's all too often that I see people getting annoyed about PC and complaining about people taking offence
who then take offence themselves when an issue that affects them does actually come up. The point is that we as a country are becoming far more aware of the problems each of us are facing, and that it's important to recognise that whilst we're all entitled to an opinion, some of those opinions result in genuine harm to real people. I often see UKIP as the party of "don't tell me what to do!", but in reality they're very keen on telling
other people what to do, and get very annoyed when the reverse happens to them. The difference is that being told not to say a slur hardly compares to the long-term effects of being dehumanised and trodden on by people like exactly that. In many cases the "neutral" (and often highly opinionated) reports in the papers can result in
some very real deaths - those bigots don't exist in a vacuum, shielded from public opinion. That Daily Mail link in particular would be deliciously ironic if it wasn't so bashfully unself-aware about its own role in those attitudes. And yes, some of these go the other way too (
whites are the victims of nearly half of all racial deaths - but when whites make up 87% of the population it shows that non-whites are near
four times as likely to be affected).
And regarding your point about open debate: in theory this is great, but there are two problems with it. Firstly, in the meantime all those people who are affected by awful views are still being affected by them. Secondly, it assumes there's no such thing as rhetoric, charisma and loads of other things that skew viewpoints. It's a tired cliché, but Hitler was famous for his speeches and driving them into a frenzy, and he very much got elected on a relatively modest platform which just happened to blame lots of Germany's ills on particular minority groups: the Jews, the immigrants, the gypsies, the homosexuals etc. The death camps didn't come along until 1944, and weren't even public knowledge until Germany was on the brink of defeat. Farage is very likely no Hitler - he hasn't written crazy ramblings whilst languishing in prison after an attempted coup - but it's important to recognise that Nazi Germany is the greatest example of this "marketplace of ideas" (as some libertarian once coined it) utterly failing. It could very well happen again.
