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Comment by MrsPeaches | Hacker News Reader

> The point I am trying to make is an intolerant population is really easy to control by an intolerant state.

I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.

Hitler for example exploited the absolutely dire economic situation of Weimar Germany, directed the hate against a clearly delineated social group who were perceived as wealthy.

Same thing in Uganda, Kosovo, Rwanda etc.

People switch from being tolerant to intolerant in an instant (with tragic consequences) but it is almost always driven from the top.

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> I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.

I think it’s a bit of both. Intuitively the comment you are responding to made sense to me. The thinking around it being, imagine literal nazis somehow taking over the US government and attempting to impose their authoritarian regime. It wouldn’t work. There is no appetite in the population for this.

I think it’s a bit of both in the sense governments do notice things for which the population has an appetite for. And they do grow this appetite and exploit it for authoritarian power grabs.

What makes this hard to see or hard to agree it’s happening is the people craving authoritarian measures and the politicians enacting them don’t see it as such. They simply see it as normal, moral, basic decency measures.

Maybe. America in the late 20s seems like a much more intolerant place than late 20s Germany. E.g. Lynching doesn’t seem to have been anywhere near as prevalent in Germany as it was in the US.

Would you consider America in that period to be an intolerant state?

I feel like we are using this word, intolerant, without an agreed upon definition. We are trying to measure something but we have no metric for it.

To answer your question, we need a way to measure the level of intolerance, whatever this is.

Should we measure the laws in effect? Should we measure the number of tolerable behaviours? Should we weigh these behaviours in our metric? How do we deal with behaviours that are nominally considered immoral but in practice are accepted? How do we deal with regional differences?

I don’t know the answer to your question.

Forget measuring. We don't even agree on which direction the axis runs.

People on the left think "intolerance" is saying that gays shouldn't be able to marry, or that your biological sex is your gender. People on the right think that "intolerance" is saying that you shouldn't be able to own guns, or that you shouldn't be allowed to say the stuff that the left thinks is intolerant. That is, both sides want to define "intolerance" as being anti-parallel to their own political axis.

But that's not right. Either both of those are intolerance, or neither.

So we need a definition (worse, a definition that is agreed-upon, even if only loosely) that isn't tilted one way or the other politically. Between cognitive bias and bad faith, that's hard to get.

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