If speech is not intolerant that does not mean it's tolerant. It's not one or the other, and they are entirely independent concepts.
> Does that mean someone can be an open bigot and still be considered tolerant if they don't act on that bigotry or incite anyone else to act on it?\
It's possible they could be that and still be tolerant of other people voicing different opinions. It does get pretty complicated with what exactly constitutes bigotry, and where the line is from robust opinions and disagreements to assault, harrassment, intimidation, etc.
Let's take the Clintons and Obamas for example -- they are homophobic bigots who disagreed with the rights of gay people to get married and campaigned on hateful platforms of marriage being between a man and a woman, and yet they (as far as I know) did not censor or attack or intimidate those who disagreed with them on that issue, so we could say they were tolerant of different opinions despite their bigotry. Did they attract hateful supporters emboldened by their speech? Perhaps. Were their voters and supporters complicit in resulting discrimination and attacks on LGBTQI+ peoples? Maybe. It's a pretty tough problem though isn't it. Should they have been silenced, barred from office, imprisoned for what they said? No I don't think so.
I don't pretend there is a simple formula for it that everybody can follow without disagreement. There are no alternatives where that is the case though, except for the old "everybody who disagrees with sig will be punished" dictatorship.
Is there any objective evidence that censorship and intolerance would have better outcomes?
Well I guess that is the heart of our disagreement. The prefix in- means not. Intolerant literally means not tolerant. Not intolerant speech is by definition tolerant speech.
That is absolutely not the heart of the disagreement, just a weird definition that you're wrong about. The disagreement is fundamentally about whether tolerance for speech means allowing people you disagree with to speak.
Tolerant means you are tolerant toward others. Speaking is not itself an act of tolerance toward other people. I could make a post about Linux programming on Hacker News, that would not be tolerant toward trans people for example. It wouldn't be intolerant, it's just that it wouldn't be tolerant because I am not "tolerating" anybody when making such a post.
Or let's take another example in the strange gotcha twitter style you seem to be most comfortable communicating with: You posted an earlier comment which was "Yeah, insiders not knowing the full details of Musk's plan because Musk doesn't have a detailed plan yet seems more likely than WaPo just making some stuff up." There was nothing in that comment that showed an intolerance to Nazis attacking Jews, so you saying that you you are tolerant of Nazis attacking Jews when you made those comments, right?
There is nothing about the in- prefix of the word or anything else about it that means everything must be either tolerant or intolerant, that's ridiculous. Insoluble is the opposite of soluble, meaning it can't be dissolved. Does that mean your comment is insoluble because it is not soluble??
Intolerant: disapproving of or refusing to accept ideas or ways of behaving that are different from your own.[2]
These are the definitions from Cambridge Dictionary and show these words are direct opposites of each other. We can look at it like boolean logic.
True == !False
!True == False
NULL != True
NULL != False
NULL != !True
NULL != !False
Tolerant == Not Intolerant
Not Tolerant == Intolerant (the literal definition of the word)
NULL != Tolerant
NULL != Intolerant
NULL != Not Tolerant
NULL != Not Intolerant
The Musk example is not "not tolerant". It is NULL. It is making no comment about Nazism. The Babylon Bee article was not a NULL value because it was directly commenting on the acceptance of trans people.
[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/toler...
[2] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intol...
A possible alternative position is tolerance for others' words and definitions, and this was the mainstream progressive position up to about 10 years ago.
That is not using your creative definition of the word tolerance, but the common one and the one which was used by progressives when they advocated for that position. So there's an answer for your question I originally answered.
But I am glad you have understood that a comment is not necessarily tolerant or intolerant. That's great progress, it took a while, but I applaud the effort and persistence. Good luck with the rest of the journey.
Haha here we go with the attempted gotchas again. Of course I'm Hitler, right? Not going to work, sorry.
No, I would not call any kind of speaking being tolerant, because that's not what tolerance means. You seem to be struggling badly with this simple concept, or at least pretending to be. It could be intolerant, if you were calling for some action against a person.
Tolerance does not mean anybody's ideas or opinions or beliefs are sacred and protected from disagreement or mockery. It's almost implied in the word really, I don't see why this is such a struggle - tolerance [for opinions I don't agree with].
> True, but that is the paradox of tolerance.
Yes, tolerance is not all roses.
> No one cares what your personal definition is if you keep it to yourself. Those people will only get met with intolerance when they voice their own intolerance.
That's still not what intolerance means, but sure censoring or banning or threatening people who voice opinions you disagree with is an alternative to tolerance, which you seemed to be talking about in the original comment I replied to. It goes both ways, right?