Posts and replies

@itsOasus
It also disappears if you don't think of it as tolerance. I don't feel like I tolerate black people, because there's nothing about black people that needs to be tolerated. They exist, and if someone has a problem with that, that's just something they need to get over.

I don't tolerate people actively trying to harm other groups of people, arbitrarily, and I don't feel the need to be tolerant of them.

@itsOasus More precisely, the paradox of tolerance ceases to be a logical paradox if you reject tolerance as a deontological moral precept. You could just easily look at it through a utilitarian lens - i.e. the important thing is maximizing tolerance to the extent possible, rather than applying it in all circumstances. It’s only a paradox when you insist on being absolutely tolerant all the time, even to the intolerant, which is why usually it’s used to argue against tolerating the intolerant.

But either way, the enforcement isn’t easy, especially when certain forms of intolerance are normalized. What degree of intolerance becomes a breach of the social contract?

@itsOasus A short and simple explanation of the limits of tolerance without any definition of what you mean by tolerance, nor any examples of the consequences of this logic.

Specifically, does this logic apply only to individuals, or would you say this applies to public policy, with the full force of government coercion behind it?

In other words, is this an argument for criminalizing impolite behavior because someone is offended? Because that would be wrong…

@itsOasus the issue is muddied when you look at the motives of the sources of intolerance vs. the intolerant people themselves. It's like the old mythos surrounding drug traffickers: they don't use their own product. Yes we have to deal with misguided people but radicalization is a tool that takes hold when mental health is ignored.

tldr: societal problems are more important to address than biting back on the ignorant.