> When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.
> “Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.
> “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?
But if instead you phrase it as "i can tolerate anyone except those who attack my in group", it is perhaps not noble but much more understandable, as everyone protects their own.
This article stinks of that assertion/misunderstanding that "Tolerant of all but the intolerant" is a paradox or contradiction. It's not. It's a social contract and if you violate it you are no longer covered or protected by it. Put another way, give everyone a basic level respect until they demonstrate they aren't deserving of it.
It's worth mentioning you can take punitive, intervening and/or remedial action against someone and still be respectful.
The actual problem is that “tolerance” is undefined in that statement. If you make it concrete the “paradox” either disappears or is obvious.
As an example, say the definition of tolerance is: “I will not physically harm based on spoken words.”. Then the phrase becomes: “I will not physically harm people based on spoken words unless that person will physically harm people based on spoken words.”. No paradox.
Say we define it as: “I will not initiate violence.”. “I will not initiate violence on a person unless that person initiates violence on people.”. No paradox.
“I will never harm a person unless that person harms people.” No paradox.
It is just a problem of lazy definitions and not defining your terms.
> The actual problem is that “tolerance” is undefined in that statement.
Disagreed. You can be pedantic about semantics and doublethink your way out of anything, but that's not productive discourse, so I'll dismiss that out of turn.
> If you make it concrete the “paradox” either disappears or is obvious.
Strong Disagree. If you make it concrete, then you introduce a catch-22 by forcing others to conform to your perspective before a discussion can be begin. If there's any paradox at all in this, it's here.
> It is just a problem of lazy definitions and not defining your terms.
Lets start with tolerance then, because your example (Say we define it as: “I will not initiate violence.”) provided above is WAY off base:
> Tolerance: the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with
You can concretely define your terms all you want, doesn't mean people will agree, use, or perceive your use of them in that way.
You have completely missed the point. The definition of “tolerance” you quoted uses the word “tolerate”. What does “tolerating a behavior” mean?
“Tolerating a behavior” means taking or not taking some action in response to a behavior. The crux of the “paradox” is that the condition and action are wholly undefined resulting in a nebulous mushy concept battle.
As soon as you define, even vaguely, the conditions and actions you wish to use as “tolerating”, the “paradox” disappears. The examples I provided are there to illustrate the concept using a relatively simple condition/action model.
I am not imposing a definition beyond defining what constitutes a “concrete” description. I literally could not care less what you choose.
You can choose the definition that you want that is infinitely favorable to your perspective and the paradox will still disappear. I do not even need to agree with your definition. The mere act of defining causes the paradox to disappear (or be trivially inconsistent) in your own axiomatic model as far as I can tell.
The paradox of tolerance is just the paradox of being too lazy to define your words so you can move the goalposts.
My point is the logic is inherently self contradictory regardless of the definition.
To use a analogy. It is like I am saying: (A or TRUE) == TRUE. And someone is quibbling about the value of A. It literally does not matter. Pick any value. The sheer force of the rules of logic make the value of A irrelevant. That is analogous to my assertion, though obviously much stronger due to its basis in the underpinnings of propositional logic.
If you want to disprove my statement then all you need to do is unilaterally propose literally any condition/action which results in a non-trivial paradox.
I do not know how to make my argument any clearer. It is up to you if you want to think of a proper counter example or not, but I have said everything I care to say. Have a good day.
I'm very weary of the at times bad faith, at times ignorant, assertion of this "paradox."
For me it seems rooted in a sort of Angloamerican philosophical analytic realism I associate with e.g. Quine,
which is IMHO not just inane but pernicious in as much as it contributes to such things as this "debate" and, say, Constitutional Originalism.
Words are how we use them.
A civil open society has not just a right but a need to defend itself from those whose actions (words and deeds alike) threaten the stability of the society itself, not to mention, trespass on the rights and wellbeing of its constituent members.
This is so obvious I find it hard to find examples I am willing to accept as "ignorance."
Bad faith, albeit cloaked from introspective view perhaps by willful refusal to do so, is far more common.
Have you noticed the interesting way most everyone in this thread who has taken an adversarial stance uses language? If not it's a shame, because it is really something to see.
If everyone agreed who the bad people were and who the good people were, what is just and what is injust, the world would be a simple place.
The reality is that nobody agrees on where the line is or what even is good and bad.
And while i agree that you can in theory respectfully take punative action against someone, if they don't deserve the punative action you are still a bad person no matter how respectfully you punish the undeserving victim.
It is a paradox. His point about ISIS vs Republicans is pretty on the money. I think a lot of people in the West are so saturated with tolerance that they don't even recognize what it is. There are countries in the world where being an atheist or being raped is punishable by death and plenty of people there cheer on. In that light, republicans I know are very tolerant people on the whole, possibly even more so than the average Democrat. They have strong feelings about what the government should or shouldn't do, but I haven't met one yet who would actually advocate killing someone for things we think about in terms of tolerance.
If you truly think that the entire republican party, a huge portion of the country's population, have all broken the social contract, I don't think that social contract is worth much.
We can have reasonable debate and differences of opinion over economic policy, but when one side is denying that people have human rights and trying to restrict their right to live and for people to learn about them, it's not a "both sides are the same". https://apnews.com/article/florida-transgender-health-care-a...
It's not innocent mistakes. After the most corrupt presidential administration in US History, with a President slinging lies and abuse on Twitter every day, nearly half the country still voted for him anyway. What social contract?
The fact that your opponents' party got into power recently and just barely got defeated in the last presidential election says that there jolly well can be differences of opinion whether you like it or not. Instead of futilely insisting otherwise, it's time to start figuring out how to appeal to the electorate so your opponents don't gain power again.
Have you considered whether you're overly attached to the ingroup/outgroup thing with how you characterize the above?
A bunch of liberal people shut down the Seattle capitol for a few days at the height of Black Lives Matter and ironically shot several young black men in the process. Yet I never hear a word about it. They were the ingroup.
So there no difference between storming the national capitol because your candidate lost and you would rather violently overturn the election because you lost and a group protesting the injustices built into our society?
Nuance is important and if you want to say BLM and jan 6 are the same you are severely lacking it.
The Jan 6 rioters injured 114 law enforcement officers (leading to one death) in a few hours. The leaders expressed a desire to overturn the government unlawfully and their followers proved they were willing to use violence to do so.
The fatal Seattle shootings happened more than three weeks after the CHAZ/CHOP zone was established, and when most of the protesters had gone home. The organizers were using their illegal occupation to push for political reforms through the local government.
Those are substantively different situations.
P.S. It’s clear that the CHAZ/CHOP organizers lacked the skill to maintain security for such a large area. Whether they bear criminal liability is up for the courts to decide. (Just like it is for the Jan 6 rioters.)
> your candidate lost and you would rather violently overturn the election
Yes, so violent that entered the US capitol building unarmed, and just broke some decorations, taking selfies while laughing, and never attacked anyone (EDIT: talking about inside the capitol building, I didn't watch footage of the streets outside). It's just like the storming of the palace during the French revolution!
Seriously, the most extreme footage I could find shows the attackers running past the police guarding the doors instead of stopping when told, but the police repeatedly turn their back to them and no one even attempts to hurt them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibWJO02nNsY . At one point the guy in the lead ends up just debating the police calmly.
Wikipedia says they caused $2.7M in damages. Assuming that figure is anywhere close to true, it's probably less damages than your average "fiery but peaceful" BLM riot, which totaled 2 billion in damages. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/22/fac... )
Do you think you might be overselling the severity of either the Jan 6 capitol breach or downplaying the severity of the BLM riots? Or maybe your post is satire of how liberals do this systematically, if so then A+, you got me.
If the capitol breach had been done by BLM protesters, the media would be running stories about how the rioters didn't do nothing wrong, and the reaction to the verdicts would've been more riots. Surely even in the worst Twitterati echochamber they must realize this when they lie down in bed at night and do some honest introspection without having to virtue signal in public.
Nah, they are not tolerant. They are just less murderous then ISIS.
> They have strong feelings about what the government should or shouldn't do, but I haven't met one yet who would actually advocate killing someone for things we think about in terms of tolerance.
There have been multiple mass shootings literally in that category. Compared to ISIS places, yep, it happens significantly less often. Plus, I have seen such calls against transgender and clinics. And acts of violence against both in fact do happen.
Thinking that half of society has broken the social contract is a truly horrible way to live. I've found that I'm much happier if I do my best to steelman my opponents. So are the Republicans furthering our great country? No. But they haven't done anything as a whole to break the social contract. Most of them are doing their best to lead a fulfilling respectful and valuable life.
That resolves the paradox of tolerance for you, but not for everyone else. What happens when you think that I'm being intolerant, but I disagree? Back to being a paradox.
While that might work as a personal moral code, i don't see how you can extrapolate something like that to govern a society at large, which is the topic at hand.
Yeah, this line of argument is a perfect example of the "Motte and Bailey" fallacy. The structure of this argument works just as well if you replace "intolerance" with "segregationist" or "misogynist". The only takeaway I have from this argument is "it's easier to condemn things which you disagree with". There isn't any discussion of whether the intolerant action is actually intolerant or harmful.
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Digression, this is a pretty audacious way to minimize Apartheid.
> South African whites and South African blacks ... So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences.
Every single human conflict can be described as "small differences" because humans are very similar to each other. Also, it's harder to be in conflict with people far away from you.
> Every single human conflict can be described as "small differences" because humans are very similar to each other.
He's obviously talking about differences which are small by human standards. The rest of the paragraph:
> If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.
How were the differences between the colonial SA Afrikaners and the local SA Zulu smaller than the differences between the Yugoslavs and the Zulu, other than proximity?
Sure, in the immediate aftermath of colonization colonial SA Afrikaners and Zulu were about as different as you can get. But then they shared (for some definition of "shared") the same plot of land for literally hundreds of years
The relevant outgroups animating Afrikaner nationalism aren't the Zulu (or Xhosa, or Tswana, etc.) as a whole, but rather the rapidly growing black working class on the one hand, and English-speaking elites on the other. Of course Afrikaner society was and had long between hideously racist, but so was the British colonial government. It was the perceived "threat" of racial integration (and the attendant economic competition) driven by English liberals that made race the primary focus of Afrikaner politics.
Of course if you mean smaller differences that weren't in part ultimately caused by proximity, there aren't any, but that's almost tautological.
> The relevant outgroups animating Afrikaner nationalism aren't the Zulu ... It was the perceived "threat" of racial integration driven by English liberals
The article compared "South African whites and South African blacks". It sounds like you're comparing Afrikaners and the English?
--
The article links "narcissism of small differences" to the wikipedia page which says:
> [It] is the idea that the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other.
I don't think this even slightly describes the "outgroup conflict" in South Africa. Furthermore, I think that Scott using this as an example minimizes the sources of conflict, e.g. Apartheid, because the rest of the article is solely about outgroup hatred.
I'm comparing Afrikaners to the English and to South African blacks who were integrating into colonial society (among whom the Zulu were likely the largest ethnic group, but certainly not an outright majority). Afrikaner national identity initially formed in opposition to the former and shifted to defining itself against the latter as the country began industrializing.
> There isn't any discussion of whether the intolerant action is actually intolerant or harmful.
People towards the upper side of a social hierarchy, who are not seriously discriminated against tend to find it very easy to discuss discrimination in the abstract, as a kind of intellectual game of chess.
The game's a lot less abstract for the pawns on the board, though.
Yeah I'm not sure why "small" had to make it in that argument. I guess it's to say that the differences _may_ be small because large differences, regardless of proximity, is obviously a source of conflict?
I think that the article is a countervailing idea against the idea of the "paradox of tolerance."
If you accept the paradox of tolerance, then the truly intolerant are the ones you should not tolerate. Taken to its extreme, you can apply the paradox of tolerance to shun anybody that does not conform to ideological purity.
There is a balance to be found between the two extremes.
That's why I think paradox of tolerance should be applied recursively - as in, if in pursuit of the "intolerant" one is causing real collateral damage, then perhaps it's them who are the "intolerant" the society needs to get rid of first.
How much collateral damage? Any non-zero amount? [1]
Or does it only become a problem with it becomes some amount that's disproportionate to the damage that is allegedly avoided, as a consequence of those actions?
[1] If you believe any non-zero amount of damage is inappropriate, could you provide me with a single example of social progress[2] (or hell, any human, legal, or moral system) that was made with zero amount of collateral damage?
[2] Unfortunately, we have in the past, and currently live in a society where people need to scream, and shout, and break things for even the grossest injustices against them to be taken seriously. It's a natural consequence of self-interested democracy.
Except those people may be overestimating (kindly) or pretending (unkindly) the harm they suffer from those attacks. To consider a defensive action as ethically sound, the defender must show real harm. Otherwise it's vulnerable to abuse and opens up lines of reasoning along the following statement (with gay and straight flipped around): "As a gay person, I hate straight people as they threaten my sexuality/orientation/way of life."
Even this is difficult. There is a case to be made that Trump being president for 4 years caused predictable actual harm to some people. Does this mean that considering anybody who voted for Trump (and especially those who voted for him in 2020) is a legitimate target for hate?
This is a non-hypothetical because I have heard this exact argument advanced without irony.
I think the legal concept of mens rea or a similar concept is applicable here. For example, I'm a type one diabetic and will cut off a friendship with people who vote republican because they agree I should not be able to afford insulin. My grandparents vote republican because taxes and don't consider the other effects.
Basically it comes down to intent and knowledge for me. If causing harm is part of why someone voted a specific way I think that it's fair to hold them partially accountable for that harm then it is carried out.
> There is a case to be made that Trump being president for 4 years caused predictable actual harm to some people.
How many presidents are there for whom this wouldn't be true? Are there any? You could probably expand this to most positions of any significant power.
> "i can tolerate anyone except those who attack my in group"
Yeah, this essay is misleading about why Eich was so disliked. Eich wasn't just homophobic, he actually worked to help eliminate rights for gay people in the state of California by donating money to the corresponding political campaign.
> he actually worked to help eliminate rights for gay people in the state of California by donating money to the corresponding political campaign
Note that 52% of California voters also worked to help eliminate rights for gay people in the state, by voting for Proposition 8. As strange as it seems now, this was a very common position in 2008.
> Note that 52% of California voters also worked to help eliminate rights for gay people in the state, by voting for Proposition 8.
Yes, and those that publicly and proudly done so and were unrepentant about it would have been problematic for the role for the same reason as Eich (and, in most cases, for lots of other reasons, some more significant, as well.) “The rule you propose would also rule out lots of people who would never have been under consideration for the role” is, here, a valid observation, but not any kind of counterargument.
> > “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?
> But if instead you phrase it as "i can tolerate anyone except those who attack my in group", it is perhaps not noble but much more understandable, as everyone protects their own.
But that's not the same thing. The outgroup is the group that is attacked by the ingroup, not the group that attacks the ingroup.
I mean, this is obviously untrue. To take the example of homosexuals and homophobia, in what way did homosexual people "attack" first or how are they one of the two tangoing.
The question isn't "did both sides attack" it is "do people on both sides feel attacked." I'm sure there are plenty of Russian's who feel attacked by the Ukraine; that doesn't mean the Ukraine started the current war.
Consider this mindset (to be clear, not my mindset):
1. The US is, and always has been a Christian nation
2. Homosexuality is unchristian
3. For the past 60 years, anti-christian liberals have been trying to (and in large part succeeding) in legalizing many sinful behaviors, at least one of which is tantamount to murder (i.e. abortion)
4. Following the legalization of the sinful behaviors comes normalization via indoctrination in schools
From this mindset, it's easy to see how e.g. legalization of homosexual behaviors (and then of homosexual marriage) is seen as an attack.
As far as attacking first, well that's simple: all those people who attacked, beat, or killed homosexuals were isolated incidents and e.g. the raid on Stonewall Inn was just the cops doing their job (these people were breaking the law, after all).
Alright, cool, FEELING attacked is valid of course. But then, if it's factually wrong - if in this case gay people aren't causing them personal harm, just objections to their personal convictions - who has to change?
The other. It is always the other that is supposed to change. Never assume that these kind of conflicts/positions are completely rational, or even can be solved by an appeal to rationality.
One example: declaring broadly that an entire group of people (say, Trump supporters) are homophopic. It only requires that literally two Trump supporters are homophobic for the statement to be literally true.
System 1 thinking is terrible for practicing set theory, and Sysyem 1 seems to almost always take 100% of CPU power during such discussions. The irony is delicious.
The example in the article is about Brandon Eich who was supporting a specific amendment banning same sex marriage in California. This isn't saying all people who support a specific politician are homophobic, this is saying people who support a specific homophobic law are homophobic.
Yeah but you also need to look at the facts; ARE you or people in your group, in fact, under attack?
This is the right-wing fallacy / mental gymnastics. They take it personal. They're not under attack, but their policies - the ones that cause quantifiable harm - are.
I mean,i don't think any dispute has ever been solved by imploring the other side to think hard about how they are actually wrong.
Presumably they really believe they are under attack so that is why they act like they were under attack. If they ernestly believe they are under attack telling them to think deeper about it is not going to change their minds. Humans don't work that way.
I have no idea how "intolerance" is remotely coming to overlap "white" or "American" except in the delusions of some fringe lunatics who believe both that Confederate statues must remain up (to protect heritage) and also history about black people must not be taught.
Sometimes you'll hear it expanded as "The Fine Article" or just "The Article".
Often, it really does mean just "the article". People use the acronym without expanding it out or thinking too deeply about it. At one point, decades ago, it may have connoted some kind of hostility (e.g. "If you had read the f---ing article..."), and it's still meant that way in "RTFA" (read the f---ing article, meaning "that was already answered, so you clearly haven't read the thing that we're supposed to be discussing")
But now, it's mostly just a kind of in-joke, and TFA means nothing more than "the article", with the F entirely silent.
What does it even mean for a "group" to "attack" another "group"? What constitutes an attack? How does someone have to be related to the attacker or victim to be considered part of the group?
Are all Muslims guilty of attacking all Americans? Are all Americans guilty of attacking all Afghans? Does a "gamer" saying mean things about a girl on the internet justify intollerance against anyone who plays games?
Is it all just framing used to justify hating people for bad-think?
I'd be lying if I said I didn't get it. Democracy is interesting. It enables sufficiently large groups to turn their thoughts into actions through the works of a few representatives. That's a good argument for bad-think being dangerous. But on the other hand, refusing to tollerate someone for bad-think surely leads to resentment and division until one side inevitably gains the upper hand and uses it to crush the other.
One thing that stood out to me:
> When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.
> “Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”.
> “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?
But if instead you phrase it as "i can tolerate anyone except those who attack my in group", it is perhaps not noble but much more understandable, as everyone protects their own.