Alright, since this is the watercooler, I will elaborate on my perspective a little as long as we keep everything within the community guidelines and it stays in the watercooler. Just remember, you asked for me to share pieces of my philosophy 
TLDR; people, feel free to skip this response too. 
No offense taken. Iâm only answering because Peep asked.
Within reason, yes. It partially depends on what you mean when you say being âtolerantâ of something. I am not going to enable, condone, encourage or support utterly abusive and extremely harmful opinions that blatantly infringe on rights and common sense. This is different from someone having a different perspective or ideology from me. One book I highly recommend to help explain this is now one of my all-time favorite books ever:
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
I believe the author makes a good effort to remain unbiased in this presentation. I first checked it out from the library through Overdrive, but I liked it so much that I bought it on Audible, but then I was saving so many quotes and manually writing down so many quotes from it that I just bought it on Kindle as well so I could just easily highlight and save notes that way. It does a great job at breaking down ethics/morals in a way that helps me to see that even when people have an opposite opinion from mine, it doesnât mean their opinion is necessarily wrong or unethical from the point of view they are taking. It is hard to explain while keeping politics and religion stuff out of the forum, but I highly recommend that book either in print or audio if you want to understand a little better about why I can be âtolerantâ or understanding of others having different perspectives.
Granted, everyone, including myself, will always be plagued by cognitive biases such as Confirmation Bias, Availability Bias, Anchoring Bias, Hindsight Bias, Overconfidence Bias, Self-serving Bias, Fundamental Attribution Error, Bandwagon Effect, and many more. Often people arenât well informed on things and their opinions arenât necessarily malicious as much as they are lacking understanding or not well-thought-out and perhaps inherited. Sometimes it is a product of their experiences, including trauma and certain parts are over-emphasized and emotionally based.
I have had some long life experiences that taught me a very important lesson:
If I TRULY knew a personâs story, their real, whole story, I would love them too.
This has held true with some very shocking examples, including one of me coming to âloveâ the person I most âhatedâ in the entire world at the time about a decade ago. A person who almost everyone would agree was a âterribleâ person. I wonât get into too many details, but suffice it to say that this person would brag that they had dozens of restraining/protective orders against them across multiple states, had many convictions involving violence, etc. A person I completely despised at the time. And again, I wonât get too detailed into why I decided I needed to find a way to âloveâ this person (not romantically), but suffice it to say, that when I did, it changed my entire perspective on life and people. It might be one of the most enlightening experiences of my lifeâŚlearning to âloveâ the person I hated most [at the time].
Judging
Hereâs the problem with âJudgingâ a person as I see itâŚour every judgment is really a judgment of ourselves only. When I judge you, it really only my idea of you that I know, which is very limited and not even close to a complete knowledge of you, and that is what I judge. In this judging, I have to take a thing only partially and not not in its wholeness, which means I abstract this little thing, analyze and fit it into a category. I am seeing the world through a filter of my own creation which includes my own cognitive biases, fixed beliefs, and judgments. In this sense, when when I judge a person as good, evil, stupid, bright, or anything else, it is really only me that I am judging because in a sense I am looking in a mirror and seeing myself reflected back because all I REALLY see are my own categories thought reflecting. This is why what bothers me most in other people is what bothers me most about myself. Judgment is never really about the other person, it is always about me, the me stuck inside my head, the me which is viewing and labeling only my selective abstract of a thing instead of the wholeness.
Judging and criticism often say more about the person judging, criticizing and complaining than it does about the person or thing being judged and criticized. This itself is mostly an observation, and not something negative. It often indicates the emotional turmoil, frustration and pain a person wants communicated, and should not necessarily be received as an attack, though it often wrongly is. Instead, a receiver can remain mostly emotionally disengaged to avoid an escalated cycle, and instead get to the root of the communication. That is a whole other topic though.
You asked for honesty. The truth is, I am not perfect at it, as I am also human and can struggle with cognitive biases and emotions, and limited knowledge and experience, but I do TRY to remember all of the above and value everyone and remember that if I truly a knew a person in their wholeness, and knew their whole story, I would love them too. I may not agree with them, and I may still completely oppose their opinions in some cases, or abusive or harmful things, but to me there is a difference. I like to ask people questions and understand. I can respect difference in preference and coming to different conclusions and I try not to be closed-minded and rigidâŚbut I like to think that I do not condone or enable abuse.
There are some real-life personal examples of this I wonât get into. But suffice it to say, that because âanything goesâ you donât necessarily have to play by âtheir rulesâ and wants. You donât have to stay in that arena. You donât have to play their game. You donât have to engage with them, you donât have to make them a part of your plans or life. You just said anything goes. I would just leave and build my own life/game/rules away from that person. If he outmatches me in brute strength and weapon use, that doesnât mean he outclasses me in everything. I donât have to play his game in his way.
Having said that, I know thatâs not what youâre getting at. Since you said this:
Firstly, if you think that would be counter to my âprinciples,â then you misunderstand. I am not opposed to protecting myself and my family, etc within reason. Just because I would prefer not to have to take drastic action, and would first desire reasonable alternatives, does not mean that my principles dictate that I have to let someone abuse me.
I am also not totally sure if the last 2 questions are contradictions. I think it is possible to wish things couldâve been different while also feeling relief and emotionally triumphant that you succeeded at something you reasonably needed to do. Weâre humans, not robots after all. But it doesnât necessarily mean that I have to hate the person, shame their memory and make things worse either.
Iâve said this in here before, but it is my belief that most people ARENâT terrible people at the their core. EVERYONE is constantly in a life-long battle to work out their cognitive dissonance. Part of life is figuring out how to resolve conflicting values, prioritize and figure out how to meet underlying needs and desires --hopefully eventually in positive, healthy ways.
Iâve got plenty of my own problems and poor choices, past and present, and I wonât claim to be totally free from the perils of Cognitive Dissonance. I have spent a good couple of decades contemplating my life experiences and knowledge of psychology, philosophy, etc to decide who I want to be and how I will accomplish that in general, but Iâm still learning, gaining skills, and deciding to change things over time even nowâŚhopefully itâs always improving the more I learn, but Iâm certainly not static.