[that]

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."

[soundnote]

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.

[swivelmaster]

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)

[that]

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.

FYI it would be a frame-dependent 'Proving too much' fallacy, not a 'slippery slope': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much

[swivelmaster]

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.