Otherwise the word is indifferent. What we see on the Left is not tolerance–they HATE anyone who doesn’t belong to their tribe–but indifference to all non-defined crimes, of which the only obvious example is ideological alterity (to use academic jargon for “otherness”). Fucking goats? Not a problem. Pedophilia? Well, are you claiming oppression and not a Catholic? We can work our way around it. Etc.
Tolerance is a virtue that makes the world more interesting, since it facilitates more actual diversity. Our world is much too homogenized, at least the world in America. Most people, you get two or three data points–music, TV, clothing, where they eat–and you can, I think (I have not conducted a scientific survey), guess many things about them accurately.
Me, I am a cipher. I don’t follow any patterns or belong to any groups. There is something in my thinking and acting to both attract and repel virtually every human being on the planet. I like that about me.
Conversely, I do have some severe constrictions in my emotional flow, at least as expressed in front of actual people. I am, honestly, not infrequently an asshole–certainly more than someone with a site called Goodness Movement would want to admit. I am often Type A, or a DI on the DISC. I grant and recognize that.
But I will channel Michael Savage and do some self promotion (of an ideosyncratic sort, to be consistently inconsistent): I am an intellectual (well, my preferred term is thought worker) who will spend all day tomorrow wearing a hard hat, safety glasses, steel toes, and possibly gloves (depending on the site super), and climbing a ladder and wiring things on a construction site. I will be making far more per hour than anyone there, but I am certainly one of them.
I like construction workers. I get along with them. They are open and honest, in general. And I would rather deal with people who have no chance of understanding any of the ideas I have had that make me special than with people who think they are smart but are really stupid.
The part of life that matters is not the part you can write down, and I think people who read and write too much can forget this far too easily. I can say from personal experience that it is quite possible to sound brilliant at the same time you have your head up your ass, in the lamentable RCIS: rectal-cranial inversion syndrome.
One would hope this would be covered by Obamacare, but unfortunately that is the very illness that produced it.