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The thing is, whenever you invoke Popper, you're calling the person you disagree with a literal Nazi who wants to liquidate millions of people. Anything short

The thing is, whenever you invoke Popper, you're calling the person you disagree with a literal Nazi who wants to liquidate millions of people. Anything short of that and the logic falls apart -- there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.

shadowgovt 6y ago
I'm afraid I don't know what "invoke Popper" means. > there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them. If that intent is demonstrable, there's no reason to assist them in their goals.
- free_rms 6y ago
  Karl Popper's the original author of the paradox of tolerance meme. The paradox isn't "you don't have to tolerate intolerant people because they're bad and tolerance is our goal", the paradox is that tolerating people who then proceed to seize power and outlaw all disagreement with them undermines tolerance. Unless there's a credible threat, it's a misuse of the quote. If you're talking about anti-Nazi laws in Germany, fine, but I see the quote trotted out all the time to justify eg twitter banning some alt-right-adjacent nerd for having bad opinions.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I suspect what has changed is that such "alt-right-adjacent nerds" are increasingly seen as credible threats. Nobody paid much attention to what that guy on gab was saying to like-minded folk on gab... Until he grabbed a gun and massacred everyone in a religious building. When the threat evaluation models aren't trusted, the spread on evaluation of "credible threat" increases.
    - free_rms 6y ago
      I mean, even a mass shooting like that doesn't trigger the paradox of tolerance. It's a terrible tragedy, and a law enforcement issue, but society as a whole is not less tolerant for it -- we all agree, don't shoot up a synagogue or mosque, that is extremely bad form in our society. The paradox of tolerance would be if we decided to be tolerant of a pro-mosque-shooting political party and they took power and instituted mandatory mosque shootings every Friday. We would have messed up in that case. It's not, "I demand people who disagree with me on less clear-cut issues be silenced because they're bigots, according to me".
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        > we all agree Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Do we all agree? I think a lot of people do. There's a disturbingly large number who do not. And there are corners of the Internet perfectly willing to entertain their fantasies of establishing such a political party. I think whether one should cut that off at the knees by monitoring such sites and, when necessary, squelching the channel or one waits until someone has grabbed a gun to act on the ideation is an intensity slider on paradox of tolerance that reasonable people can disagree on. Given the sliding scale, it's probably a case-by-case issue. Hard to come up with a general principle that's going to universally apply; give an example of something people have been silenced on that they should have been allowed to continue, and there's debate to be had, but on the general principle, both sides can probably agree that there's times to silence and times to not.
        free_rms 6y ago
        Would you also support banning hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime? Or glam metal albums that glorify satanism? We've been through this before.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        I'm not sure how satanism factors into it; let's table that. > Would you also support banning hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime? If we're talking no-platforming, I don't think the question is whether society bans it; I think the question is "Would you compel Wal-Mart to sell hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?" And I would not. But it's a sliding scale which is, as you've noted, tied to the likelihood of the group in question seizing enough power to concretize their ideas. In the US at least, hip-hop artists aren't an organized political structure intent on overthrowing the US government. White supremacists are another story entirely. It's pretty unambiguous what "blood and soil" or "Jews will not replace us" mean. And a lot of Americans are deeply concerned with the risk that that ideology has its tentacles extremely deeply embedded in one of the two primary parties at the federal level in the US.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  > If that intent is demonstrable, there's no reason to assist them in their goals. But lacking any chance of success, there is also no reason to allow their existence to spoil my goals; that is, liberalism. I feel like some people read Popper and advocate Censorship as almost the last tool, whereas some people read him and advocate it as almost the first!
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I personally think of no-platforming as almost the last tool. Where I think a lot of people disagree is here: lacking any chance of success... Fascism can take over a government faster than people think, and we're in a global cycle of democracies dallying with fascism again. This is not a safe time.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      I don't think fascist takeovers of governments are that hard to anticipate; I don't think they're likely in most of the cases that people advocate censorship for. Admittedly this may be hindsight bias.

shadowgovt 6y ago

I'm afraid I don't know what "invoke Popper" means. > there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them. If that intent is demonstrable, there's no reason to assist them in their goals.

free_rms 6y ago
Karl Popper's the original author of the paradox of tolerance meme. The paradox isn't "you don't have to tolerate intolerant people because they're bad and tolerance is our goal", the paradox is that tolerating people who then proceed to seize power and outlaw all disagreement with them undermines tolerance. Unless there's a credible threat, it's a misuse of the quote. If you're talking about anti-Nazi laws in Germany, fine, but I see the quote trotted out all the time to justify eg twitter banning some alt-right-adjacent nerd for having bad opinions.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I suspect what has changed is that such "alt-right-adjacent nerds" are increasingly seen as credible threats. Nobody paid much attention to what that guy on gab was saying to like-minded folk on gab... Until he grabbed a gun and massacred everyone in a religious building. When the threat evaluation models aren't trusted, the spread on evaluation of "credible threat" increases.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    I mean, even a mass shooting like that doesn't trigger the paradox of tolerance. It's a terrible tragedy, and a law enforcement issue, but society as a whole is not less tolerant for it -- we all agree, don't shoot up a synagogue or mosque, that is extremely bad form in our society. The paradox of tolerance would be if we decided to be tolerant of a pro-mosque-shooting political party and they took power and instituted mandatory mosque shootings every Friday. We would have messed up in that case. It's not, "I demand people who disagree with me on less clear-cut issues be silenced because they're bigots, according to me".
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      > we all agree Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Do we all agree? I think a lot of people do. There's a disturbingly large number who do not. And there are corners of the Internet perfectly willing to entertain their fantasies of establishing such a political party. I think whether one should cut that off at the knees by monitoring such sites and, when necessary, squelching the channel or one waits until someone has grabbed a gun to act on the ideation is an intensity slider on paradox of tolerance that reasonable people can disagree on. Given the sliding scale, it's probably a case-by-case issue. Hard to come up with a general principle that's going to universally apply; give an example of something people have been silenced on that they should have been allowed to continue, and there's debate to be had, but on the general principle, both sides can probably agree that there's times to silence and times to not.
      - free_rms 6y ago
        Would you also support banning hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime? Or glam metal albums that glorify satanism? We've been through this before.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        I'm not sure how satanism factors into it; let's table that. > Would you also support banning hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime? If we're talking no-platforming, I don't think the question is whether society bans it; I think the question is "Would you compel Wal-Mart to sell hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?" And I would not. But it's a sliding scale which is, as you've noted, tied to the likelihood of the group in question seizing enough power to concretize their ideas. In the US at least, hip-hop artists aren't an organized political structure intent on overthrowing the US government. White supremacists are another story entirely. It's pretty unambiguous what "blood and soil" or "Jews will not replace us" mean. And a lot of Americans are deeply concerned with the risk that that ideology has its tentacles extremely deeply embedded in one of the two primary parties at the federal level in the US.
FeepingCreature 6y ago
> If that intent is demonstrable, there's no reason to assist them in their goals. But lacking any chance of success, there is also no reason to allow their existence to spoil my goals; that is, liberalism. I feel like some people read Popper and advocate Censorship as almost the last tool, whereas some people read him and advocate it as almost the first!
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I personally think of no-platforming as almost the last tool. Where I think a lot of people disagree is here: lacking any chance of success... Fascism can take over a government faster than people think, and we're in a global cycle of democracies dallying with fascism again. This is not a safe time.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    I don't think fascist takeovers of governments are that hard to anticipate; I don't think they're likely in most of the cases that people advocate censorship for. Admittedly this may be hindsight bias.