I have read it. If you have a point you want to make, you're welcome to make it.

If you didn't get the point when Karl Popper explained it, I doubt I'll be any more effective at conveying it here.

Including myself, there's probably many other people reading this who have not read it and would like one or two of its salient points.

The basic idea is that tolerating totalitarianism is self-defeating, even when done to prop up one's fondest notions of cultural relativism.

This is a good read for the notion. I found it a good starting point when I dug into this a little while ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

I'm generally happy to write walls of text to debate ideas, but I'm not very inclined to do it for people who just drop links. I will however drop a link of my own:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

TL; DR: Everyone hates their outgroup, and everybody has one, including you and me. Isn't it rather convenient to convince yourself that everyone in your outgroup is intolerant totalitarians, so that you can continue to hate them and justify any kind of tactics against them while also patting yourself on the back at how tolerant you are? (The 'you' there doesn't mean anyone in particular, just a general statement).

Tolerance means not hating your enemies, your outgroup, and is genuinely hard and pretty rare. Everybody likes their friends and allies, and there's nothing particularly special or virtuous about it.

> Isn't it rather convenient to convince yourself that everyone in your outgroup is intolerant totalitarians

That's a pretty extreme strawman. I disagree with lots of outgroups, and I only call a couple of them totalitarians.

If someone hates all of the outgroup, they are almost certainly hypocritical and lying to themselves about being tolerant.

If someone hates none of the outgroup, we can agree they're virtuous and special, sure.

If someone hates 15% of the outgroup for specific reasons, that's probably okay. It doesn't automatically imply that they are secretly intolerant. Most people that claim to prioritize tolerance are here, and most of them are telling the truth.

I think we have a disagreement on the definition of the term "outgroup". The article I linked goes into more detail, but I'd say that an outgroup is defined by being the group that you hate, not necessarily just those who are different from you in some way. It doesn't make sense to talk about what percentage of them you hate when it's defined as being the people that you hate. There's no test to determine exactly what it is, but you can sometimes tell by people's behavior. Tolerance, then, is determined by behaving respectfully and with consideration to those you hate.

And perhaps that statement was an oversimplification, but as I understand it, that's essentially the point of the Paradox of Tolerance. If you had to sum that up in a sentence or two, how else would you do it?

If it's defined as the people you hate, then size matters a huge amount. If you only hate and would discriminate against two people, then you're amazingly tolerant.

The paradox of tolerance is not particularly difficult to deal with. You prioritize the preservation of as much tolerance as possible. If someone is trying to reduce the levels of tolerance in the world by a large amount, it's important to fight them, even if it means minor short term intolerance. And even then you tolerate them in all other ways.