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[return to "Why Americans Are So Awful to One Another"]
1. mschus+72[view] [source] 2023-08-15 10:00:10
>>helsin+(OP)
> Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.

This, this right here - and it's not just the US where this shows up (although it's definitely the most extreme). At the core, I think, it's all about "free speech": when you have a constitutional right to say whatever you want, without any limitations, you will first get a bunch of contrarians yelling all sorts of offensive stuff around "for the lulz"/"because they can", and eventually that sort of stuff gets normalized, and then societal cohesion (especially when the offensive stuff is directed towards minorities) and eventually society itself gets poisoned.

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2. _Micro+x2[view] [source] 2023-08-15 10:05:15
>>mschus+72
This feels like the right time to remind people of the paradox of tolerance [0]. Here's the summary of the article:

"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased 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."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

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