this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Allowing racists and fascists a seat at the table under the guise of 'fairness' or 'free speech'. Reddit became polluted with far-right astroturfing in the last six years.
It is not tolerance to welcome those persons who seek to harm you.
We cannot tolerate intolerance.
That's a paradox. You cannot tolerate everything. That's why there's no such thing as not being bigoted. It's literally impossible to tolerate everything.
You just have to pick what things you're not going to tolerate. Now if only we could always agree on what that is.
Intolerance. Intolerance is the one thing you don't tolerate. It being a rhetorical paradox doesn't mean it's difficult to implement.
It absolutely is because there are things that you where you cannot tolerate both oposing viewpoints. There's also things that you do not want to tolerate.
Unless you believe it's not okay to be intolerant of murder.
I hope that helps illustrate how it's not just a rhetorical paradox. It's a conceptual one too. Much of the time, it's not tolerance vs intolerance. It's picking between two flavors of intolerance.
Well I mean if you're expanding the argument to things as well, then yeah, it becomes rather unwieldy. But if you constrain it to intolerance for people, then it remains rather simple.
Not at all. I'm not talking about just things. I'm also talking about about people.
It is not simple to determine the extent to which to tolerate different groups of people. Unless you're saying that you want to be equally tolerant of murderers, races, all religions, and people who like pineapple on pizza.
Murder falls under intolerance. Religion can exist without being intolerant, but often doesn't. The smell test really is pretty simple: if you're not actively hurting someone besides yourself, you should be tolerated. Along with that, we decide that intolerance for other reasons (ie, because of a person's genetic makeup or mode of expression) is itself harmful.
Now we can find tune and dicker about where that line of injury is, and of course there are special cases where the alleged hurt is spread around and it's hard to decide how to adjudicate that, but that's what the law and all its apparatus is for, after all.
I wouldn't say murder falls under intolerance. It certainly can, but not all the time.
Who gets to define what constitutes not actively hurting someone besides yourself? Is it just as defined by you or do other people get a say? What do you do when someone decides that not wearing a hijab or extra-marital sex is actively harming others?
I hope that illustrates why this is not simple at all. It's incredibly complex.
And as I was saying in my initial comment, it's literally impossible to objectively define tolerance. But, you have to choose to tolerate some things and not others (because they're mutually exclusive). So you end up with different forms of intolerance of behaviors that you deem intolerant.
And we decide that intolerance is acceptable for many other reasons. You don't tolerate ignorant people. You don't tolerate people who cannot arrive on time. You don't tolerate people who are too rude. Intolerance of those aspects
The special cases are the ones where it's actually clear. The majority of the cases are where we struggle to know where to draw the line.
Reddit was full of racists even back in the early 2010s. /r/Coontown was a prime example of that.
Whether or not it's tolerance isn't directly important.
The mistake that people make is assuming that tolerance is inherently good. It is to a certain degree, but there are many things that you do not want to tolerate. That's where we want to be.
However, many people think of themselves as tolerant and find it difficult to make that conceptual realization.
In the last 6 years? If anything, reddit got less tolerant of the far right since inception, it just became a bigger deal when they banned them in the last 6 years
You believe what you want to. Nothing I say is going to convince you, random internet person.
I had used reddit since the near beginning, and over time the prevalence of 'alternative facts' and other right-wing narratives has risen sharply. You also have communities like r/conservative that participate in open calls to violence and perpetuate right wing dogwhistles for maximum rage bait. The sheer slide of r/politicalcompassmemes going from people role-playing different ideologies to thinly-veiled alt-right propaganda speaks to this shift.
Catering to conservatives and right wing players results in the enshittification of the website.
I think that generally the internet got more of those types of people and they got louder, reddit used to have subreddits whose names were just slurs or subreddits blatantly dedicated to racism. The idea of a "dogwhistle" on reddit didn't exist because the racists just said and did racist things without fear of being banned.
Yeah, you're both right. There's less outright hate now, but more propaganda.
Political Compass Memes is the Fox News version of fair and balanced. It's intended to convert people with a thin veil of "both sides". And that thin veil will be enough for a lot of impressionable kids.
Well yeah, to continue with the fire metaphor, it's hard to put out a fire once you've already let it get out of hand. PLENTY of people were warning about those communities before they grew into the mob that stormed the capital, for example. Reddit only stepped in and did something about them when it became a bad look for them to let them keep shitting on the lawn.
Everyone should familiarize themselves with the paradox of tolerance if they haven't already.
what? reddit was an american "left" "look at how good of a person i am for hating on racists and pedophile" (like congrats?) circlejerk
the racists and fascists were contained in their subreddits and were ignorable
They shouldn't have even had those and they weren't 'contained'