this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
797 points (97.3% liked)

Not The Onion

11851 readers
1553 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I am more so arguing that in the pursuit of not tolerating the intolerant, we just end up becoming intolerant ourselves

Intolerance of intolerance is not the same thing as intolerance of tolerance. The former stops when other forms of intolerance no longer exist; the latter stops when tolerance no longer exists.

But more specifically, defining and understanding what constitutes intolerance is a non-trivial challenge that is often ignored. Oftentimes, a person or view is labelled as intolerant when it does not see itself that way. Oftentimes, the reality is more nuanced.

All we can do is give it our best try. It's better than doing nothing at all out of fear that we can't get everything perfectly right all the time. Intolerance definitionally seeks to destroy tolerance; thus it follows that if we do nothing, tolerance will be entirely lost.

You can see this kind of discourse online all the time. You go to a left leaning forum and find them calling the other side fascists. You go to a right leaning forum and find them calling the other side fascists as well.

The good news is that you don't have to simply take people at their word when they say things. Humans have the unique capacity for judgement.

I'm trying to demonstrate that the paradox of tolerance isn't actually helpful when it comes to decreasing intolerance.

I don't agree, but even so, you haven't proposed an alternative yet.