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.
Or glam metal albums that glorify satanism?
We've been through this before.
> Would you also support banning hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?
If we're talking no-platforming, I don't think the question is whether society bans it; I think the question is "Would you compel Wal-Mart to sell hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?" And I would not. But it's a sliding scale which is, as you've noted, tied to the likelihood of the group in question seizing enough power to concretize their ideas. In the US at least, hip-hop artists aren't an organized political structure intent on overthrowing the US government.
White supremacists are another story entirely. It's pretty unambiguous what "blood and soil" or "Jews will not replace us" mean. And a lot of Americans are deeply concerned with the risk that that ideology has its tentacles extremely deeply embedded in one of the two primary parties at the federal level in the US.
The conclusion was that parental advisory stickers are cool and will help sell your album, and I'm glad we got there as a society.
Incidentally, Wal-mart in particular was on the conservative side of that culture war episode, and they did in fact refuse to sell those albums while also selling entire racks of guns.
Indeed they did. And the US government did not compel them to sell the albums, nor should they have. The albums found their audience in spite of some channels deciding it wasn't a kind of speech they would tolerate on their premises.
Similarly, some of the speakers who have been no-platformed will find their audience without a university's help; that doesn't imply the universities should be compelled to help them. And some toxic moderators and editors will continue to be toxic on some other site; that doesn't imply that site must be Wikipedia.
But I was mostly just nitpicking improper usage of the paradox of tolerance. Righteous censorship of 'bad' ideas might feel good but it's probably not a great instinct to have in the long term -- this cultural moment will pass, the meta-ideas about when it's ok to censor are longer-lasting.
Wal-Mart carries plenty of stuff, though. If you're going to move towards that kind of regulation for free information services, there has to be some other basis for it.