something something paradox of "please ban things I don't like" something what good is tolerance if people end up disagreeing with me
A society ends up nourishing something that destroys it, because the intolerable is under no obligation to play fair.
Germany wrestled its censorship laws from hard history lessons.
Anything short of that and the logic falls apart -- there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.
> there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.
If that intent is demonstrable, there's no reason to assist them in their goals.
The paradox isn't "you don't have to tolerate intolerant people because they're bad and tolerance is our goal", the paradox is that tolerating people who then proceed to seize power and outlaw all disagreement with them undermines tolerance.
Unless there's a credible threat, it's a misuse of the quote.
If you're talking about anti-Nazi laws in Germany, fine, but I see the quote trotted out all the time to justify eg twitter banning some alt-right-adjacent nerd for having bad opinions.
Nobody paid much attention to what that guy on gab was saying to like-minded folk on gab... Until he grabbed a gun and massacred everyone in a religious building.
When the threat evaluation models aren't trusted, the spread on evaluation of "credible threat" increases.
The paradox of tolerance would be if we decided to be tolerant of a pro-mosque-shooting political party and they took power and instituted mandatory mosque shootings every Friday. We would have messed up in that case.
It's not, "I demand people who disagree with me on less clear-cut issues be silenced because they're bigots, according to me".
Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Do we all agree? I think a lot of people do. There's a disturbingly large number who do not. And there are corners of the Internet perfectly willing to entertain their fantasies of establishing such a political party.
I think whether one should cut that off at the knees by monitoring such sites and, when necessary, squelching the channel or one waits until someone has grabbed a gun to act on the ideation is an intensity slider on paradox of tolerance that reasonable people can disagree on.
Given the sliding scale, it's probably a case-by-case issue. Hard to come up with a general principle that's going to universally apply; give an example of something people have been silenced on that they should have been allowed to continue, and there's debate to be had, but on the general principle, both sides can probably agree that there's times to silence and times to not.