<i>You can&#x27;t choose your skin color or where you were born, but you can choose your political beliefs.</i><p><i>...a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them.</i><p><i>it&#x27;s a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.</i><p>Is this what we really want? A society of distrusting, hating separatist camps that vilify and exclude each other? Using organizational authority to actively punish &quot;thoughtcrime&quot; should be anathema to fellow liberals and those who espouse humanist values. However, there is (and always has been) a collectivist&#x2F;identity&#x2F;responsibility camp who thinks such authoritarian stances are ok.<p>A tolerant society needs to tolerate the free expression of dissenting and even reprehensible speech. A tolerant democratic society should tolerate legal political expression. As much as an enlightened company should have room for projects to experiment and &quot;fail fast,&quot; a society should afford its citizens the opportunity to choose &quot;the wrong&quot; side. Really, the whole point of a democratic society, is that there&#x27;s no one entity above imposing their idea of right and wrong over the populace.<p>Collectivism isn&#x27;t evil and it is a deep part of what it means to be human, but it can&#x27;t be allowed to trump the rights of the individual. People are best protected and served when collectivism and individualism are in balance.