There's a ruthlessness to it in large part because of a recognition from many that asking nicely has been met with immense vitriol, anger, even violence in some cases. At some point you stop asking and start demanding.
See also Karl Poppers paradox of tolerance:
The paradox of tolerance is that if you're too tolerant to nazis, they might take over everything and you wind up with less tolerance.
It is NOT a get out of jail free card for "you don't have to be tolerant to people that you label as intolerant, in fact terminate them with prejudice". You need a credible threat of the 'bad people' taking over and limiting tolerance for it to hold together.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
He's arguing that, sure, being prepared to use force is a last resort, but he's also arguing that the intolerant must be met by arguments and kept in check by public opinion if possible.
I'm sure some extremists would like to use violence against those they deem intolerant, but when discussing "wokeness" most people fall firmly in the camp of using arguments and using the power of public opinion to keep the intolerance in check.
It has become, "person I don't like is intolerant, according to me, and hey paradox of tolerance, therefore I will persecute them with no quarter and no decency". Did you see some of the crazy cancellation stories last summer? One guy was ruined for saying "please don't burn down buildings, especially right next to my house": https://reason.com/2021/06/15/daniel-elder-cancel-culture-ch...
If you think you've found a loophole that enables you to be a McCarthyist rooting out evil, you're the bad guy.
People are really out there being ruthless, trying to hurt people, and justifying it using your logic. It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.
It's a strawman because the situation you constructed implied things I'd never suggested and then used those to attack what I said instead of attacking what I actually said.
> It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.
That's not how strawmen works.
And you'd be foolish to assume that cancellation is a thing of the left. What happened to Colin Kaepernick? Or republicans that dared to impeach Trump? McCarthyism? Cancel culture is a tactic that conservatives have used for decades now, only recently adopted by the left.
If I were a Republican, I'd be congratulating you and handing you as much rope as I had right now. Say defund the police again, please, here's a megaphone, we'll record it for Fox News.
Is that an admission that the current left is on the same moral footing than the McCarthyites? All this time, I had hope we'd risen above that but if that is so, it's even more cause for those who identify as liberal to abandon and repudiate the left.