[Banana699]

Ah shit here we go again.

Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is widely misunderstood to be a licence to be intolerant yourself. For the last time : it is not.

Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views.

Until and unless you have evidence of that plausibly happening, there is no Paradox of Tolerance. You can perfectly tolerate people who hate women, who hate men, who hate gays, who hate the rich, who hate the poor, who hate any and every religion, ideology, way of life, identity, worldview or personality type. You can tolerate each and every single one of them, you can tolerate infinite number of them, as long they don't try to make reality conform to what they preach.

It's well known in software that a data structure can have infinite readers, but the presence of even a single writer either necessitates that the data structure is completely private to the writer, or an explicit and consistent writing policy needs to be devised to coordinate the writer with the readers and possibly other writers. Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is a restatement of this basic observation in the context of human societies. You can have infinite tolerance and diversity, as long as not a single ideology or group "writes" their conflicting views to society. If you have a group that does that, then you must choose whether you will cede all control of society to that group, or to set a strong writing policy that is much less permissive than infinite tolerance.

Stop using an argument for tolerance as an excuse for intolerance.

[mr_toad]

> You can tolerate each and every single one of them, you can tolerate infinite number of them, as long they don't try to make reality conform to what they preach.

If you let them say whatever they want on an online forum without any moderation you’ll end up with Voat, or something similar. The intolerant views take over.

Argue all the philosophy you like, practical experience shows that every time someone tries an unmoderated forum in any medium it ends up a cesspit of intolerance.

[Banana699]

> without any moderation you’ll end up with Voat,

I didn't know about Voat, sad that it was closed down. I would have loved to try it.

>The intolerant views take over.

This sounds to me like a you problem. You can very well admit that you don't know how to argue and shout back (in whatever style necessary to win), or that your views are so unpopular that you can't defend them unless to a supportive audience, but don't make this some sort of universal law or inevitable tendency. There is nothing about any view that makes it inherently more popular or appealing.

>a cesspit of intolerance.

This usage of 'intolerance' hints that you don't really understand Popper's sense of the word. Popper wasn't talking about what offends you, Popper was talking about people violently forcing you out of a society. There is no intolerance on 4chan or 8chan or any similar platform, literally everyone is allowed there, everyone is just an anonymous unique number. Only your own offence prevents you from participating, which is not anybody's fault. Every single "bad" tech platform, the ones that allow speech that mainstream progressive-dominated US companies love to rave about, only suffer due to external pressures imposed on them, the audience of those services very much like it, and they don't seem to physically force reality or other people to like what they like. The only one doing the forcing here are the self-appointed tolerance defenders, who are so so worried about tolerance that they are willing to freely dispence intolerance left and right to protect it. It's like how pro-war folks say that war protects and preserves the peace: It's indeed very true in a certain narrow sense, but you can't be doing it willy nilly, or you will risk destroying the very thing you claim you want to preserve.

I also don't understand why defending unlimited expresssion of views must imply defending unlimited expression of view without moderation. There is no reason why we can't moderate any ideology at all, see the subreddit r/themotte for example to see a place where everyone from radical feminists to white nationalists expressing their views in moderated threads.

[dragonwriter]

> Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views.

Where they pose a danger of it.

If you let them do it before reacting, you've already lost, and that's the point.

Anyhow, it's not widely misunderstood, AFAICT, since when it is invoked it is invariably with the strong implication, and usually the explicit statement, that that is the threat being addressed. You might at times question the judgement behind the assessment of the risk, but that's not a misunderstanding of the paradox of tolerance.

[tomp]

It’s usually invoked with the purpose of cancelling someone guilty of wrongthink, e.g. “Donglegate” or 100s of other examples of cancel culture.