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Comment by refenestrator | Hacker News Reader

I can only correct this so many times, so here's my drop into the ocean on this thread:

The paradox of tolerance is that if you're too tolerant to nazis, they might take over everything and you wind up with less tolerance.

It is NOT a get out of jail free card for "you don't have to be tolerant to people that you label as intolerant, in fact terminate them with prejudice". You need a credible threat of the 'bad people' taking over and limiting tolerance for it to hold together.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

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You're not "correcting" anything. You're misrepresenting the intent to try to reduce the scope of it. Popper did not target just authoritarianism, but intolerance in general.

He's arguing that, sure, being prepared to use force is a last resort, but he's also arguing that the intolerant must be met by arguments and kept in check by public opinion if possible.

I'm sure some extremists would like to use violence against those they deem intolerant, but when discussing "wokeness" most people fall firmly in the camp of using arguments and using the power of public opinion to keep the intolerance in check.

I'm absolutely trying to reduce the scope from what it has become.

It has become, "person I don't like is intolerant, according to me, and hey paradox of tolerance, therefore I will persecute them with no quarter and no decency". Did you see some of the crazy cancellation stories last summer? One guy was ruined for saying "please don't burn down buildings, especially right next to my house": https://reason.com/2021/06/15/daniel-elder-cancel-culture-ch...

If you think you've found a loophole that enables you to be a McCarthyist rooting out evil, you're the bad guy.

You've set up a strawman with no relevance to what I originally wrote, and use that to imply I've suggested something I never have.

You specifically used the word 'ruthlessness', approvingly, and cited the paradox of tolerance as justification.

People are really out there being ruthless, trying to hurt people, and justifying it using your logic. It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.

Ruthlessness does not imply force or hurting people.

It's a strawman because the situation you constructed implied things I'd never suggested and then used those to attack what I said instead of attacking what I actually said.

> It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.

That's not how strawmen works.

We live in a democratic society. Intolerant ideas, held en masse, have a way of becoming laws. It is worth fighting them, even if they're not wearing swastikas.

"Wokeness" is a reaction to intolerant ideas, that are indeed worth fighting.

Most of the people who lost jobs and such from cancelations were center-left, politically.

No. Just the ones that are most visible in your mind.

And you'd be foolish to assume that cancellation is a thing of the left. What happened to Colin Kaepernick? Or republicans that dared to impeach Trump? McCarthyism? Cancel culture is a tactic that conservatives have used for decades now, only recently adopted by the left.

The people canceled by antiracists are mostly cultural moderates in liberal spaces, and that will always be true, because that's who they can get. They can't cancel conservatives, they can only make them stronger, so it's cancel well-meaning center-left people, or cancel nobody.

Only makes them stronger? Trump lost the election. He was cancelled. Definitely not stronger.

He just barely lost, after getting covid right before the election and looking like a huge fool, while democrats lost seats in the house, underperformed in the senate... no covid, he wins, easily.

If I were a Republican, I'd be congratulating you and handing you as much rope as I had right now. Say defund the police again, please, here's a megaphone, we'll record it for Fox News.

> "And you'd be foolish to assume that cancellation is a thing of the left. What happened to Colin Kaepernick? Or republicans that dared to impeach Trump? McCarthyism? Cancel culture is a tactic that conservatives have used for decades now, only recently adopted by the left."

Is that an admission that the current left is on the same moral footing than the McCarthyites? All this time, I had hope we'd risen above that but if that is so, it's even more cause for those who identify as liberal to abandon and repudiate the left.

It's exactly the same as McCarthyism. And yeah, we should have risen above it by now, but it has only gotten stronger. But where are liberals going to go? The right is even worse...and they have 3/4 of a century of experience doing it.

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