Trotting out the paradox of tolerance isn't an auto-win for pro-censorship "anti-facism" arguments.
Imagine, one day, one of your own beliefs becomes lumped under the umbrella of facism. Imagine that you disagree with this categorization, but nonetheless, the categorization is made.
How would you feel about someone telling you about the paradox of tolerance in this case? Don't you think it's a bit more complicated than this?
Yes it’s more complicated, obviously, but OP was implying that any censorship at all equates to hypocritical intolerance, which is a simplistic absolutist position.
I’m willing to take the chance with slightly eager censorship than rampant fascism. It’s a literal no brainer and it’s disingenuous for you to ignore that.
Honest question - do Americans really believe fascism is increasing? By most (all?) metrics Western societies are radically more tolerant on racial, LGBT and religious issues than even 2 decades ago.
Absolutely. Elimination of voter rights laws, gerrymandering, rejection of election results, advocacy of violence, tacit support for hate groups, support of authoritarian leaders etc. is happening at a large scale and is devolving quickly.
This isn't the only way to measure it, and IMO not appropriate right now. The real problem is the balance of political opinion taken as a whole; The percentage of the population that holds what one might call far-right fascist views seem to be higher than it's been in the last 50 years if you assume that voters' views are more or less aligned with the politicians they vote for.
Assuming that just because Things Are Okay Now that there's no problem is exactly how we got Trump elected in 2016, and why Italy, Brazil, and the Philippines have all elected far-right or outright fascist leaders since then as well.
Also consider that Republicans have been perfecting a legal minority rule for decades via gerrymandering, court-packing, closing polling locations, enacting (unnecessarily) stricter voting requirements, and focusing on winning states with disproportionate federal representation by population count, and are now proposing state-wide abortion bans, taking over school boards to ban books and alter health and science curricula, and more.
This is all to say that even though the majority of Americans ARE far more tolerant than they were before, the fascists or fascist-adjacent contingent have been not only been growing, but have been amassing power at a rate disproportionate to their size.
Yes, exactly, thank you. Framing every mention of the paradox of intolerance as some kind of slippery slope to totalitarianism isn't constructive or realistic, and basically misses the point of it being called a paradox in the first place.
Since you aren't being very clear, I'm going to assume your point is that the "Paradox of tolerance" justifies PayPal's actions. That's obviously missing the point. IIRC, the "Paradox of tolerance" only argues for intolerance in very specific circumstances, not a intolerance at your "sole discretion" of categories of things you find odious.
The paradox of tolerance has two fairly straightforward issues:
1) It’s a blanket justification of suspending the rules when you believe the rules to be threatened, which devolves to “the most fearful have the fewest restrictions on their behavior” which I’m sure you can see is a problematic paradigm.
2) People often take it as a given that the assumption in the paradox of tolerance, that “tolerance fosters intolerance” is true but that’s not actually clear at all. It might as easily be untrue, or more untrue than not. It could be backwards for all anyone knows.
> 1) It’s a blanket justification of suspending the rules when you believe the rules to be threatened, which devolves to “the most fearful have the fewest restrictions on their behavior” which I’m sure you can see is a problematic paradigm.
That's an incredibly eloquent way to put it. I'm going to use that going forward with your permission.
I've been saying for years, it feels like many orgs in the US are run by cowards, NIMBYs and BANANAs, so the pace of change is abysmal. You can watch your grandkids grow old before those kinds of people ever agree to make a change.
This kind of rejoinder has always bothered me, because this action can be used by anyone, depending on the framing. It could be valid in the sense I think you are using it, but for example it can be used to argue the opposite:
"freedom of speech is so important that paradoxically, the government must ban a small part of it (of those who want to restrict it, like Paypal and HN commenters) to preserve the rest."
This is trivially true if you take an example like, say, Lenin. You kind of really have to stop Lenin getting into power if you like living or anything that's not communism.
The Paradox itself works in this regard, that freedom cannot be absolute. But we can have larger and smaller degrees of it.
Lenin's tolerance matrix of other ideologies is something like this (S = Self, it's a me!, Y = Yay, O = OK, M = Meh, N = ehhh... K = kill):
S-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K
He just wants communism and everything else is disallowed. The situation is obviously awful.
You could have a different kind of ruling ideology:
S-O-O-Y-M-O-N-N-K-N-N-Y
It more or less likes a couple other ideologies that don't really conflict with it, and can allow at least some form of a lot of other things, but would gnash its teeth. But it kills Lenin, because you have to.
This would be a much better situation, but not one of complete freedom.
The problems with the Paradox as used today are not that the Paradox's logic doesn't work when we near some limit of ideological permissiveness.
The problem is that most of the woke and progressivists who incessantly cite the Paradox ARE LENIN-TYPE ACTORS THEMSELVES. They don't actually, in practice, tolerate anything but their own ideology, as we constantly see with DEI loyalty oaths propagating everywhere and people arguing against eg. pushing young kids into gender reassignment surgery getting deplatformed while hospital speakers, behind closed doors, celebrate how it's possible to fund entire clinics on phalloplasty alone). They are the exact sort of people against whom Paradox censure should be applied.
There is a second question wrt to ruling ideologies, separate from their tolerance matrix, which is how disastrous and mistaken they are. Part of the reason we should ensure that Lenin won't win is because he wasn't simply peddling his ideology in a really intolerant way. It was that he was trying to institute communism.
Communism is not bad simply because it has a kill-all nontolerance pattern, but because if the ideology rules, the results are abject garbage: One dystopian society after another and mountains of the dead. As E. O. Wilson put it, Marxism "is a nice idea, but for the wrong species."
Meanwhile, much of Europe was Christian for centuries, and while the religious tolerance pattern was the nastier one, Christianity overall seems much more compatible with flourishing human society than eg. communism is, and in fact resulted in societies that were the envy of the world. It is much more tolerable to live under a sane ideology than one that's incompatible with humanity, all else being equal. (NB for those who need it: I am a lifelong atheist and would chafe under fervent Christian rule)
Woke progressivism, in my view, has that same misfit problem communism does, although it's less actively murderous than its predecessor. Humans are tribal, status-seeking, competitive, religious apes and woke doctrine is essentially weird ostensibly secular Harrison Bergeroning.
But that's neither here nor there, the tolerance matrix thing was the point, and the observation that it feels off because we at least subconsciously know the lefties pushing it are Lenin-pattern kill-allers.
If the argument could be valid the way I’m using it, then the rest of your comment is just playing devil’s advocate. That’s not very constructive (and kind of a slippery slope fallacy of an argument)
Well, it makes a difference when trying to convince in good faith.
If an argument can be used to prove contradictory positions depending on framing, then citing that argument as if it is conclusive without that missing framing is wrong.
Assuming a person making this mistake is acting in good faith, pointing this out is constructive, and allows the opportunity to complete the argument with by adding missing framing.
I appreciate the reference to the 'proving too much' fallacy which tbh I haven't seen mentioned before.
I think there's a misperception (in most responses) that I'm bringing up the paradox as a complete justification for PayPal's actions, which I'm not. Rather, it's a direct argument against OP's apparently free-speech absolutist position. Essentially, so many people here on HN are saying "how dare anybody draw the line anywhere, because the act of drawing the line is actually a form of oppression."
Perhaps from the perspective of someone who thinks purely like an engineer, this black-and-white framing of the issue makes perfect sense. But by the measure of real-world consequences, that's simply not true and perhaps it just takes some time and life experience to realize that. It did for me - I used to be much more of an absolutist on this stuff but I've seen, over the last three decades, how conservatives have used misinformation to change public opinion on issues that should be clear-cut. Simply arguing against them doesn't work because it's much easier to spread emotionally-charged falsehoods than to sit people down and give them the much longer, more complex, correct information.
And to a point you made, it's much more difficult now than it ever was to know if anyone's making the free speech absolutist argument in good faith, because the internet is now rife with people who spend time in the chan communities and are completely aware that "pro free speech" is an easy and effective proxy for "I can share my Nazi-adjacent views with no consequences" that easily tricks moderates into fighting for them.
WHO IS using paypal? They ban accounts daily with very little recourse to get any money. Getting your own merchant account isn't hard. They are just a crappy layer on top of a merchant account you can get today.
Tens of millions of businesses, and when you throw in their Venmo service you can probably double that number, although Venmo isn't typically used in B2C.
And although it's not hard to get a merchant account per se, it is 100x harder than getting a Paypal account which takes 5 minutes and doesn't require any underwriting or paperwork. So people and businesses still use it (and Stripe, Square etc) rather than going through the hassle of getting a merchant account.
As long as the transaction is legal, paypal should allow it to go through. They should not be discriminating against certain groups (as bad as they might be). They should maximize stock holder value as opposed to being biased against some groups. If they are wasting time/money with stuff like this, it really make one wonder what else they are wasting their time/money. I think I need to make sure that any paypal stock (and funds containing it) that I have needs t be sold and not to purchase any in the future.
Unless I am missing something, there is a terrorist watchlist or similar and I don't think it is legal to send to groups on that said list. So, I will stick with my statement that they should not be biased against parties that can legal participate in transactions.
I was banned for telling a black person that "person of color" is a silly term, and that he should just call himself black. The justification cited : racism.
While I wouldn't agree that it is worth banning someone for; telling someone that their preferred term for self identity is silly strikes me as very rude and implies a sense of authority or expertise that you really have no business in.
I suspect though that that is a shortened version of the interaction.
If they were accused of racism for saying someone was black rather than a person of colour, and they said that was silly. That seems more reasonable.
And while perhaps being rude, I don't think being of a certain colour gives or removes any authority or expertise you may have on the subject. If you want to identify as purple, can I not comment unless I also identify as purple?
> And while perhaps being rude, I don't think being of a certain colour gives or removes any authority or expertise you may have on the subject. If you want to identify as purple, can I not comment unless I also identify as purple?
It adjusts the implicit context of what is being said. Which is heavy when it comes to white men telling Black individuals how to perceive themselves. In any case, calling someone's provided identity "silly" is hard to construe as anything but an attack. The best case context here is that you have assumed it is not important to them and thus harmless to denigrate. Which comes with its own loaded baggage of how people of privileged social classes don't consider how or why identity is so central to disadvantaged groups because they never really need to think much about being a "normal" person.
It's not a particularly malicious attack. But it's needlessly abrasive. No, don't comment on someone's identification as purple. Nobody asked for your opinion. If you want to ask them about their identity that's probably ok.
>The best case context here is that you have assumed it is not important to them and thus harmless to denigrate
My reply said it depends upon what actually happened. Your quoted part quotes me as saying it's perhaps rude (perhaps because we don't know what actually happened). So if I'm potentially accepting it's rude how am i assuming it isn't important?
Youre the one that seems to be doing all the assuming here.
What I was disagreeing with is the statements about authority and expertise. It's got nothing to do with authority. And I would love it if expertise came into the picture at all. But I would guess any etymological defense of any word would probably be cited as more evidence of X group subjugating Y group, and as blackness is a lived experience then nobody but yourself is qualified to say whether you're black or not, and any attempt to biologically or socialogically delineate blackness is racist or something and further evidence of subjugation.
>No, don't comment on someone's identification as purple
Theres a difference between commenting on something and commenting on someone who identified as that thing.
It's the difference between talking about obesity and calling someone fat. I have just as much right to an opinion as the person who identified as obese, to talk about obesity. They are no more or less an expert on obesity just because they are (or identify as being) obese.
> My reply said it depends upon what actually happened. Your quoted part quotes me as saying it's perhaps rude (perhaps because we don't know what actually happened). So if I'm potentially accepting it's rude how am i assuming it isn't important? Youre the one that seems to be doing all the assuming here.
The you in my statement was generically directed towards someone calling another person's described identity silly.
> What I was disagreeing with is the statements about authority and expertise. It's got nothing to do with authority. And I would love it if expertise came into the picture at all. But I would guess any etymological defense of any word would probably be cited as more evidence of X group subjugating Y group, and as blackness is a lived experience then nobody but yourself is qualified to say whether you're black or not, and any attempt to biologically or socialogically delineate blackness is racist or something and further evidence of subjugation.
No, this is missing the point quite dramatically. You have no authority nor expertise in telling someone what their identity is, not because you lack credentials or a shared experience, but because you're not them. It is their identity. It's rude to say something like this even if you're Black as well.
> Theres a difference between commenting on something and commenting on someone who identified as that thing.
If someone tells you they identify as X, and you say X is silly, there's an overt implication that you have just called them silly.
> It's the difference between talking about obesity and calling someone fat. I have just as much right to an opinion as the person who identified as obese, to talk about obesity. They are no more or less an expert on obesity just because they are (or identify as being) obese.
You can have whatever opinions you want. But when you share an opinion that implies a negative trait about obese people, you will have insulted any obese people taking part in the conversation, or even implicitly not in the conversation but just known to the participants.
Everything you're saying here seems to suppose that you can only be held accountable for the first order effects of your speech. Which is perhaps how the law works, but it isn't how people communicate and understand each other.
If PayPal isn't the morality police what makes you think you're the language police? Especially when it seems like you decided to police a person of color during a routine business transaction?
Unless you know that person's heritage, you don't actually know. Black as an identity is not a global thing. It's like when that director from Africa was called an African American in the press despite not being American. Forcing black on someone who doesn't identify that way is just as absurd as forcing American on someone who isn't.
> I was banned for telling a black person that "person of color" is a silly term, and that he should just call himself black. The justification cited : racism.
Where did you tell off this person? How did PayPal catch wind of it?
endisneigh: no, I'm not from the USA. But I'm reasonably familiar with its Jim Crow era. I'm not sure what point you think I was trying to make, but I'll try to clarify. I'm not saying anything about how people should refer to themselves, I really don't care. You asked: "why you think one term is somehow more appropriate than the other". I can't speak for swayvil of course, but my argument is that 'black' is much more descriptive than just 'colour' because there are so many colours. "Black" is also a range, but it's a more specific range than just "colour". Reading your question again, perhaps it's the word "appropriate" that's tripping us up? If you're trying to describe something, then it's more "appropriate" to be a descriptive as possible. If that's what swayvil was banned for, that's pretty insane in my books.
“Black” people aren’t actually black. If you’re familiar with the term colored in the context in the United States, I’m not even sure what you’re arguing. Black people like everyone else come in a large range of hues, hence colored.
The point is that if you haven't experienced discrimination (in terms of your ancestors being forced into slavery for the color of their skin or the constant barrage of laws attempted to keep you below others in society because of the color of your skin), you have no place in telling someone else how they should refer to the color of their skin.
This isn't an an issue of semantics that you're trying to make it out to be - it's just not your business in the first place.
Setting aside whether you should have been banned, what you did was incredibly stupid. What made you think that you should go around telling Black people what they "should" call themselves? That's not your business or your job. Just keep your mouth shut about things that you have no right to comment on.
If I take your comment to heart then you should also shut up because its not your business to call people of color, black people. He most certainly has the right to comment. I do, too. I wouldn't want a payment processor to block you or fine you an arbitrary amount for vague rule violation with no legal recourse. Shutting up would mean this discussion wouldn't exist and paypal can continue stealing 2500 because they are always right.
I don't like PayPal but I don't see alternatives for my business use case. I have lots of employees all over the world and some of them can only receive money via PayPal. Wire transfer fees are too high for small amounts of money. Western Union is very expensive.
Surely this won't turn into a political weapon and be used by people who want more control over society and politics to twist definitions of words to attack people they disagree with in order to avoid having a real conversation. It's abundantly obvious that if this was used to punish people who insist on a more authoritarian federal government or who openly hate people of european heritage online this would be an outrage to the usual suspects and not even given the light of day, the fact it's being applauded is a great indicator that this will be used to persecute people who dissent the federal government.
You don't want a welfare state? Must be because you are intolerant to the minorities that use it. 2500$.
You don't want to see a biological male pummeling a woman in a cage fight? obviously rooted in discriminatory ideology! 2500$.
You questioned the election results? You are intolerant to democracy! Oh wait, you were referring to a special election in Georgia? Our bad, we've reimbursed you for our erroneous detection and applied the usual double standard.
You are vocalizing autonomy and authority over your own body? Antivaxxer detected, docking 2500$. Oh, dang, the automated system didn't realize you were referring to an unwanted baby so we've reimbursed you.
PayPal have done this to sex workers and queer artists for fifteen years, so you'll have to forgive me not really giving a shit about the latecomers to this.
We absolutely need to criminalise banking discrimination, but ultimately we are not going to because quite a lot of politicians quite like banking discrimination against their enemies.
Surely the judiciary has a monopoly on punishment of 'crimes'.
But I agree with your overall point. Payment processors should be seen as public utilities that people have a right to. It shouldn't be up to private companies, who has access to that.
In what form? Wait until people start losing $2,500 at a time for questionable reasons?
Is your contention that we should wait to see if PayPal abuses this policy, or wait to see if PayPal rescinds it?
Even if this was communicated in error, it shows how far this policy went internally to show up in customer facing copy. This calls into question any benefit of the doubt I’d usually be tempted to extend.
I think this comment was sarcasm, given PayPal have pulled this sort of stunt for years now (especially against anyone involved in adult content). They have always abused it. It's not new.
Only the type of people who are fine with this (fine) are using PayPal. If you've just woken up from a coma, leftoids use PayPal and Banks and rightoids use Monero and Gold.
Sounds like a great idea on the surface. The question is who's deciding what counts as discriminatory, intolerant, or misinformation.
Obvious examples like unabashed white supremacists aside... what happens in less clear cases, like when a Palestinian rights organization starts posting BDS stuff, and Israelis respond by calling them a terror group?
One more justification for uncensorable, provably non-inflationary digital currencies.
I agree with your view of PayPal's proper role, but as a private business, if they want to choose not to do business with neo-nazis and ilk, that's entirely within their legal rights, and many would say it's morally justifiable too.
What I take issue with more than anything else is the idea of a private business expropriating money from people based on the contents of their speech, as a change of contractual policy, buried deep in the terms of service, that many laypeople cannot be reasonably expected to read and comprehensively understand.
I'm also concerned about this policy being weaponized by bad actors. Say someone impersonates a PayPal user online and posts genuine hate speech, complete with calls to violence. Or someone sends a payment to an innocent PayPal user with a memo that implies the PayPal user was engaged in hateful or malicious conduct. What happens when someone is having a mental health crisis and says some awful things on Twitter due to genuine mental health issues? What happens if a PayPal user's online account on another platform is hacked and used to post hateful content? What safeguards are in place to ensure that only those who are actually guilty are financially penalized?
How does it fail to prevent this? If you are the custodian of your own digital wallet (vs a PayPal account or linked bank account), PayPal cannot just remove money; it's not technically possible. All transactions are user-initiated.
It's fine to dislike crypto, there are valid reasons, but let's be factual here.
He is referring to the finite supply. In 1960 the entire US monetary supply (M2) was $300 billion. Today it's $22 trillion. When there's so much more money out there inflation is inevitable. Monetary velocity is the true driver, but greater supply tends to drive greater velocity.
By contrast sometime around 2140 the final Bitcoin will be mined, and we're already reducing the number mined per block. Inflation can still happen for reasons besides supply, but it's generally much less probable.
My post was not stating that digital currencies are inherently, "magically" non-inflationary.
To me, it sounds like someone is either ignorant or arguing in bad faith for them to suggest that there are no digital currencies which are non-inflationary. BTC will never exceed 21 million bitcoins in circulation.
To address your other concern - the "problem" being addressed is a private company seizing your money over the contents of your speech. With self-custody of digital currencies like Bitcoin, it is not possible for third parties to expropriate your funds, provided you have protected your private key.
Non-inflationary currencies are a bad idea. Without inflation, hoarding is incentivized, and investment discouraged (or at least, decreased). Currency is most useful when people spend it - money in bank accounts is useless for society.
The decision to weigh the needs of society over the rights of an individual to retain the value derived from the productive output of their own labor is not a given.
You own your body. Your labor is just you consciously deciding to operate your body in a manner that fulfills the needs of someone else in exchange for something of value. The value of your money being diluted is, for the worker, no different from wage theft by an employer - the rightful compensation from your productive labor being taken from you without your consent.
Your apple analogy is not applicable here, because inflationary monetary policy is optional and instated by deliberate human choice, the decay of fruit is a non-optional natural process, not the result of deliberate human choice.
Inflation is a tax, albeit an indirect one. It decreases purchasing power of the citizens (with the greatest harm incurred by the most vulnerable), it decreases the value of the nominal debt held by the government, and it's produced outside of a democratic process (federal reserve is, in theory, independent - not subject to the demands of politicians, who, in theory, represent the interests of the people).
A tax that nobody voted for, that harms the poor and helps the government is nothing like the natural decay of an apple. It's value being taken from you without your consent, not unlike a mugger taking value from your wallet in the form of the currency itself.
Many people engage in labor in exchange for value, denominated in currency. Theft of the value of the currency, ultimately, boils down to theft of labor.
Nothing you said explains why retaining value of past work is a human right.
Most results of the productive output decay same way as apple does.
If you trade iPhone for a car, both car and iPhone will lose value over time. But in your world if you trade iPhone for $1000, only iPhone will lose value. That doesn't seem fair.
Furthermore, you're saying it harms most vulnerable, but I don't believe it is generally true.
If both a billionaire and a salaried working class person lose 10% of their wealth, gap between the two shrinks. Of course, laws of nature are such that rich are getting richer, but that's a different story.
This is an often held view. Just for fun. Let me play devils advocate. Yes, currency hoarding (saving) is incentivized. This raises the bar for investing to investing that is needed / has clear value. Similarly, with an inflationary currency, it is real things that are incentivized to be hoarded. Is it not better to save currency and let real things circulate more freely to those who actually need them, as opposed to speculators.
That sure sounds like intolerance to me. Otherwise what are they tolerating?