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"I find people who don't think exactly like me to be intolerable" is the bread and butter for controlling a population. People look at the past and think to themselves "those people in the past were wrong, that's why the one acceptable way to think being enforced with power was immoral, on the other hand, my opinions are right, so the ends justify the means". Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally just…
No question about the title, but there's an elephant in the room here that's being ignored...
and weaponized speech, such as disinformation and other tools for sentiment steering. Which is arguably now a significantly worse problem for most societies than mere suppression.
Not to mention merely venal "corporate speech" and the deluge of commercial speech (much of it undisclosed).
"I find people who don't think exactly like me to be intolerable" is the bread and butter for controlling a population. People look at the past and think to themselves "those people in the past were wrong, that's why the one acceptable way to think being enforced with power was immoral, on the other hand, my opinions are right, so the ends justify the means". Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally just…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
This is a technically correct point that is always used to justify declaring people you dislike "intolerant" to justify being intolerant.
> The level of democracy enjoyed by the average citizen around the world in 2021 has regressed to 1989 levels Sounds ominously like the iron curtain is falling back into place, this time more dispersed, not just concentrated in the Soviet bloc. > 70 percent of the global population lives under dictatorships, according to VDem’s data. That’s a rise of 20 percent over the past decade. That's pretty disconcerting. Witho…
Judging from this map alone, one would logically conclude that Homo Sapiens is a pretty corrupt species.
The average human being lives in a corrupt dictatorship.
"I find people who don't think exactly like me to be intolerable" is the bread and butter for controlling a population. People look at the past and think to themselves "those people in the past were wrong, that's why the one acceptable way to think being enforced with power was immoral, on the other hand, my opinions are right, so the ends justify the means". Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally just…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
Too many people think their brain is going to fall out of even the slightest deviation from their moral code is tolerated these days.
"I find people who don't think exactly like me to be intolerable" is the bread and butter for controlling a population. People look at the past and think to themselves "those people in the past were wrong, that's why the one acceptable way to think being enforced with power was immoral, on the other hand, my opinions are right, so the ends justify the means". Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally just…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
Is it just a public sphere that needs to observe tolerance or is tolerance something demanded of companies, associations, churches, families, internal thoughts, etc
As your demands for tolerance become more pervasive, you invite authoritarian tendrils into increasingly private spaces.
"I find people who don't think exactly like me to be intolerable" is the bread and butter for controlling a population. People look at the past and think to themselves "those people in the past were wrong, that's why the one acceptable way to think being enforced with power was immoral, on the other hand, my opinions are right, so the ends justify the means". Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally just…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
For anyone who'd like a deeper dive into the logic behind this, Bertrand Russell's Barber Paradox[1] is a fun one (not to be confused with Lewis Carroll's "Barbershop Paradox.")
Much like how the American right has stopped calling the US a democracy, instead calling it a republic.
Or how Google changed their motto from the specific “don’t be evil”, to the ambiguous “do the right thing”. After all, whose to say that being evil isn’t sometimes the right thing…
The problem of course, is that if you bootstrap on good principles and then replace them with dubious principles, your past success is no longer predictive of future success.
It’s like ripping out your home’s foundation - what good is it now that the house is built? It’s just getting in the way of that sweet basement you want to add.
Edit: as I rack up downvotes, I see that complaining about the Left, Right, and Google in a single post on HN is a losing strategy :)
