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.
It's worth mentioning you can take punitive, intervening and/or remedial action against someone and still be respectful.