I like how people willingly misunderstand Popper's parable of tolerance and think it's a gotcha. Popper was talking about those people who refuse to participate in free speech in the first place, not just your favorite intellectual enemies.

The people refusing dialog are the one who are most intolerant. That is the intolerance that shouldn't be tolerated.

Exactly, they do not understand that when dialogue becomes forbidden, violence becomes inevitable.

Violence becomes inevitable... because people are can't call black people subhuman in public without being censured?

That's one hell of a take.

The very opposite.

Honest debate requires being open to have your mind changed.

If you believe that killing children is ethically unacceptable you cannot at the same time engage in a debate on when to kill children.

There is a reason why legal systems have a distinction between crimes that allow debate, extenuating circumstances, statutory time limits and others don't have such wiggle room.

This confuses cause and effect.

Intolerance of intolerance isn't just political theatre. It's a deliberate attempt to avoid the kinds of practical horrors that racism etc create in an otherwise liberal culture.

Those horrors includes personal and mob violence, lynchings, rapes, other random murders, institutionalised economic apartheid, privilege (and its close ally, corruption), the reduction of public debate to reactionary dogwhistles instead of future substance - and ultimately, with tedious predictability, torture and mass murder.

There isn't really a paradox here. These are all very, very hard to justify on basic humanitarian grounds.

And if someone wants to say "But communism" - it's not hard to agree that's often been a different brand of authoritarianism which takes root in countries with no liberal tradition.

But the question remains - can "not communism" prove it's better? If it's justifying and accepting racism etc, I don't see that it can - because if you're on the wrong end of endemic social violence you get a very different view of your culture to the people who live in the comfortable and privileged part of it.

And this is not an abstract debate, but something that is going to affect your lived experience, possibly on a daily basis.

> Those horrors includes personal and mob violence, lynchings, rapes, other random murders, institutionalised economic apartheid, privilege (and its close ally, corruption), the reduction of public debate to reactionary dogwhistles instead of future substance - and ultimately, with tedious predictability, torture and mass murder.

Those are real problems, yes. But it should still be allowed to question the solutions people claim to have to those problems. The author here claims that you shouldn't be allowed to question solutions, if you do then you are evil and should get rejected by society.

>But it should still be allowed to question the solutions people claim to have to those problems.

Why should we be having social discussions about whether or not genocide against a particular out-group is acceptable? Would the proposition that slaughtering an out-group be a good faith discourse about the best path forward for society? If not, why should we have that discussion at the cost of other discussions?

Obviously, possessing or expressing an idea is not the same as these "practical horrors" you list. This unfortunately too common line of thinking attempts to rationalize violence against people who think differently than you. There's nothing "liberal" about it. It's nakedly totalitarian.

This aligns with my thinking as well. The problem with any kind of enforcement is of course that it’s fast lane to authoritarian (albeit perhaps distributed) oppression of dissent legitimate dissent.

But it’s very rare to see discussion on this level. As seen in this thread it usually stops way earlier.

If I’m allowed to branch to a separate topic, I think this is reflected in what I believe is a fundamental issue in larger social networks: moderation. It would solve so many problems (and introduce new ones, which can be solved) if, like email, it was by filters set both by user and server (assuming sufficient federation).

This could breed an economy of curation markets/algorithms. If you want to stick to a particular echo chamber, you could.

Conway’s law on global scale.

> There isn't really a paradox here

Correct. It's called paradox not because it's a logical impossibility but simply because some people *incorrectly* assume that a tolerant society should tolerate every behavior including those that harm others.

Meta HN: How does a comment like this become undead after starting out dead?

The vouch button

Interesting, I didn't know about that button, I literally just noticed it (haven't had dead comments enabled for long). If a dead comment that someone vounched for becomes undead, and then dead again, does the voucher lose vouching ability?

I've always been curious about that, but I try to only vouch for substantive comments that are devoid of flamebait (with which the ancestor comment appears to be chockablock). I try not to vouch on agreement / flag on disagreement -- that's what up&downvoting is for. Not for any particular concern about my internet points or vouching privileges, but because I like what HN aims for.

People equating inclusivity and totalitarianism while at the same time downvoting me to -4. Oh the irony.

>equating inclusivity and totalitarianism

Mmm so true. When authorities and regimes imprison their enemies or fire them from jobs over opinions or brainwash their children or put them under constant surveillance, they are simply totalitarians being totalitarian, but when authorities and regimes you like do it, they are the manifestation of inclusivity descending into the material world to defend itself against the nasty totalitarians who need to be put in their place. I'm 100% sure that the only difference between the two is not just you affiliating with the latter, that's a completely irrelevant detail. Just like everybody knows that my religion is right and that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it's mine off course.

>downvoting me to -4

The Horror! what a massive injustice to good men and women everywhere that a database record somewhere contains your words next to a negative integer. Hacker news reader sure do have a lot of totalitarian tendencies for expressing contempt for your opinon in the savage and inhumane way that they did. It worries me a lot, keeps me up at night even.

Have you considered, though, the possibility that hacker news readers decided that you're a threat to tolerance and therefore shouldn't be tolerated ? Surely that's a thing you would support and admire ?