[rayiner]

People misconstrue this idea. Popper is talking about people who respond to debate with “answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.”

It’s about not tolerating people who make it impossible to have debate, not declaring arbitrary sets of views intolerable or beyond the pale.

[woodruffw]

This is a misquotation. The entire quotation from Open Society is:

> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Note that Popper is not claiming that "fists or pistols" are a necessary condition for not tolerating intolerance: they're a final stage of said intolerance. Popper explicitly says that we might reserve the right to preempt intolerance before it reaches the point of its followers resorting to violence.

[rayiner]

The whole paragraph makes it even clearer that he’s talking about people who would shut down free debate, starting with “denouncing all argument.” He’s actually talking about how progressives are today—ranging from declaring some topics beyond debate to “punch a Nazi.”

[woodruffw]

I think this is the paradox's greatest weakness: whataboutism :-)

Karl Popper is not talking about today's progressives, because he died in 1994. The closest extension we can reasonably draw does not include them either, because Popper exclusively identified totalitarian ideologies with reactionary beliefs[1].

It's very easy to use the PoT as a blunt weapon, and there are some embarrassing applications of it on the political left. But none are quite as embarrassing as suggesting that Popper might seriously entertain "free debate" with a Nazi.

[1]: https://iep.utm.edu/popp-pol/

[rayiner]

I didn’t say he was talking about progressives today, I said what he talked about is applicable to progressives today. When Popper uses the word “tolerance” he’s talking specifically about people who don’t tolerate a free society with free debate, not people who express intolerant views. For example, the Trump voter who is intolerant of immigrants isn’t “denouncing all argument” about immigration. It’s progressives who do that.

I didn’t say Popper would entertain free debate with a Nazi. My point is that, under Popper’s framework, there’s a huge incentive to declare anyone you don’t like to be Nazis, and reframe speech as tantamount to threats to physical safety.

[woodruffw]

I've never met a progressive who "denounced all argument" about immigration. Instead, they seem tired of the same handful of (xenophobic) tropes that get trotted out during national discussions around immigration policy: immigrants as social burdens, as criminals, as drug mules, as "anchors" for some dogwhistled demographic replacement, &c.

Those tropes (and the reactionary politics that underlie them) strike me as precisely the kind of intolerance that Popper might have concerned himself with.

(Separately: it's unclear how progressives have satisfied the "intolerance of intolerance" condition here. Are you claiming that progressives have successfully won some on that front of the culture war? Current policy suggests otherwise[1].)

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-biden-first-year-ti...

[logifail]

> none are quite as embarrassing as suggesting that Popper might seriously entertain "free debate" with a Nazi

(This really is a genuine question) who is to be allowed to determine if our opponents are that, and hence worthy of what one might call preemptive intolerance?

[woodruffw]

That is the eternal question. However, I will submit for consideration that the person we're talking about when we use the phrase "punch a Nazi" is, in fact, a neo-Nazi[1].

Dealing more abstractly: I personally think we are justified in practicing "preemptive intolerance" when the party in question (1) has a bad faith (not merely faithless) relationship with the "language" of our political systems, and (2) demonstrates repeated intent to employ the mechanisms of our systems to subvert them. Both conditions are necessary; the absence of the latter makes the individual a LARPer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Spencer

[teakettle42]

You are advocating behavior that is highly corrosive and fundamentally antithetical to the effective functioning of a healthy democracy.

Weimar Germany wasn’t fertile political soil for extremism because there weren’t enough people punching Nazis. In fact, the opposite — pervasive, normalized political violence gave cover to extremists who could then argue that they were justified in escalating their behaviors.

If I were to follow your own ethos (and to be perfectly clear, I do not), I should be advocating punching you in the street, as your ethos represents a bad faith attempt to undermine and subvert our political systems by using violence to control the words and ideas shared by others.