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.
> 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.
My impression is this is a story being told by the media and seems true when you spend a lot of time on Twitter. If it weren't for 24 hour news telling me so, and occasionally spotting some weirdos like the "Patriot Guard" walking around a city, I don't think I'd have any sense of this being real in my day to day life.
> and are now proposing state-wide abortion bans, taking over school boards to ban books and alter health and science curricula, and more.
The abortion issue has been being battled forever now, and it's odd that one side is being seriously labeled "facist" all of a sudden, now that the tug of war game has pulled the flag a bit to their side. And I have seen books "banned" (i.e., excluded from small public school libraries) for one reason or another by "both sides" my entire life.
The fact you think half of the things you listed Republicans are doing are either fascist or fascist adjacent shows why this is such a bad idea. Most of those things are things every ruling party does or aren't fascist.
Not to mention, just calling Brazil, Italy and whoever else potentially fascist is ridiculous.
Fascism has no meaning anymore because people like you. If you want to actually fight against fascism don't call everybody fascists.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance