this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
1005 points (98.6% liked)
Funny
6824 readers
486 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'll admit I have not read Popper. But just because he coined the term doesn't mean his conception of it is the only acceptable one. Others have taken the basic idea and taken it in different directions.
Personally, I subscribe to the belief of the shitty crustpunk bartender.
Specifically, if someone is intolerant of others in a way that rejects who they are (as opposed to rejecting something that they believe—so gender and sexuality are on one side of that line, while religion and political ideology are on the other), especially if they do so in a way that creates the feeling of an unsafe environment, we should feel perfectly fine excluding them from that space.
I think feelings and personal beliefs should stay as far as possible from philosophy. Philosophy should never evolve around subjectivity such as feelings; philosophy is an attempt to be as rational and logical as possible in albeit a very subjective world. Much of philosophical arguments are made in same manner as discrete mathematics because of this but with words rather than formulas and rules. Even religious medieval philosophers attempted to be as logical as possible in their approach to explaining religion rather than relying on belief (though often fail despite their best attempts). So the "feeling of unsafe environment" isn't something I see as compatible with any philosophical discussion as a basis of reason. There needs to be an objective as possible pivot.
We see plenty of vastly different feeling of unsafe in social media. Some of which even do so with the intent of not actually feeling unsafe but to garner views and likes. If someone is scared by everything, can we start intolerating everyone else? We don't know where the line can be drawn between being a just society that tolerates freedoms and the one where tolerable can no longer exist.
This is why Popper proposed the entire dilemma. The violence being the pivot of intolerable intolerance isn't his opinion. It is that with violence, tolerable objectively (as much as we can be objective) cannot exist.
Even in your example, you attempt to separate objectivity vs subjectivity in are/is versus believe respectively for the sole correctness of the former. (Even though in my view, proof of what is is going to end up as sum of your beliefs or a cyclic viewpoint.) And then the argument goes back to pivoting in the subjectivity of feelings.
If you rely on subjectivity to draw the line of what's intolerable intolerance, then you will be intolerant of people who you subjectively view as intolerable.