On tolerance.

Shortly before running in the front door of the room marked "tolerance" and running out the back door, we lived in the world that John Stuart Mill made.

This will probably come as a surprise for those who think I am the living embodiement of intolerance because I hold definite opinions - and who don't seem to notice that I hang out with people who don't belong to my intellectual tribe - but, in college, one of my areas of study was John Stuart Mill, and particularly his ideas on tolerance.

A second surprise for a lot of people is that Mill was advocating for social tolerance - not just legal tolerance - so that people with unpopular ideas could flourish.  He thought this was good because - as a true heir to his father's utilitarianism - those ideas just might be useful.  So, Mill was against social ostracism as much as he was against legal sanctions being used against ideas.

This is a short clip from someone named "Molotov Mitchell" who runs a series of these "For the Record" shorts.  They are obviously designed to catch the extremely short attention span of the post-internet generation.  There is something very Millian about Mitchell's description of his social ostracism for speaking his conscience and in Mitchell's advice not to sell out.