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>The hobbit is simply embarrassed into compliance by his elven betters. The ideas he believes become a dangerous mental disease. This diagnosis is written into
by adnzzzzZ 6y ago
>The hobbit is simply embarrassed into compliance by his elven betters. The ideas he believes become a dangerous mental disease. This diagnosis is written into history. The sooner he gives up this nonsense, the better. To help convince him, we'll make this idea quasi-illegal. The sooner he gives it up, the less his life will suffer. Eventually he can be fired for staying an idiot. Everyone will agree that he deserved it.
>This is Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Popper discovers that every real regime must have the apparatus of the Inquisition in its back pocket. If it hesitates to deploy its intellectual rack and thumbscrew, it will be replaced by a regime with no such qualms.
>Popper, read logically, advises the Nazis to repress the Communists, the Communists to repress the Nazis, the liberals to repress both and both to repress the liberals. From his “open society” he comes all the way around to Hobbes, Schmitt and Machiavelli. Next he will tell us, in Esperanto, that “the earth is nothing but a vast bloody altar.”
I think Moldbug reads Popper much more elegantly. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/vae-victis https://graymirror.substack.com/p/vae-victis
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ogogmad 6y agoPopper's point is that if someone wants to curtail your right to free speech, you have the right to curtail theirs. On the other hand, if a political opponent respects your right to speak freely, you should do the same for them. It's not really a paradox; it's about symmetry. By analogy, imagine if someone commits murder. Would putting them to death as punishment also be murder? No. You have the right to life as long as you respect other people's right to the same.
- Knufen 6y agoThe problems always begins with grey and ends in black. Who defines when, where and how someone is curtailing their right to free speech? There is always asymmetry in power.
- mlyle 6y agoPoorly, you mean, because Popper asserts (as I quoted before): ...as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise... It's only when the other side has abandoned discourse and is interested in meeting you with force that tolerance is to be abandoned.