Yea, all it took was not paying your taxes.

Don't pay your share, no protection of the law, seems pretty simple.

I wish it were an option nowadays, honestly. I'd make that bet in a heartbeat. Statistically id be so much safer I could make a case for my life insurance rates to drop. Statistically I am at my highest chance of death in the presence of a police officer, whether they're in the area because of me or not, so even as a bystander. If I could cut that cord, it's a no brainer. Also my car is getting 20 extra batteries dropped in it wired up in series for parking and pumping 240vdc to every metal part of the chassis. And my property will have a dozen armed sentry's that will fire on anything that moves unless you got the optics for it to sense friendly, which I'll just have implanted inconspicuously into a tattoo.

I was half way through before I realized they weren't talking about making sure parts fit together...

The only way to be anti-fascist is to be fascist against fascists you don't like.

That's the irony of these things, including tolerance, it clearly doesn't work, and that's why in 2023 we still have around 200 countries and each of us still wants to live on their own property and not with a massive group of people.

I don't have to tolerate anyone outside my property, and this has been proven to work for entire human history. Even countries that officially don't like eachother and spam propaganda to their own citizens keep trading weapons and other things, so there's 0 benefit in kissing anyone's ass except to look better in front of others.

Some kind of advanced rhetorical technique, probably.

She could be Canadian

Having worked in public education for nearly a decade now, I absolutely hate your response and how much it validates those entitled parents who call my coworkers overpaid babysitters.

On the other hand, I hate even more the fact that your comment perfectly represents the career choices of about 7-10% of the teachers I know. That's far too high a number of people who decided to influence the life-path of children because they figured it's easy if you're complacent and callous enough.

It honestly reads like everybody is going to stand up and clap or something.

Don’t like to bash on teachers, but I have to agree.

You just used different words to describe exactly the same thing as the OP.

Why do you think we owe one thing but not the other?

What do you see as the difference between tolerance and mutual respect?

This might be fine sentiment in an idealistic way but step outside and see where we're at.

One cannot be unbound from the social contract because someone else breaks it.

That's what "self-defense" is. Someone breaks the social contract and tries to harm you so you are allowed to also break the social contract and harm them.

We get muddy when we move from "physical violence" to "the threat of physical violence". It runs us into the "I'm not touching you" game on one end and Nextdoor paranoia on the other.

Is someone tolerant if they come right up to the line of what defines tolerance and acts like an asshole within the strict bounds of the law? Is someone intolerant when they violate (often unwittingly) some local rule of decorum or social taboo? Is someone intolerant if they are startled into a panic? What if they conspire to sow panic without actually getting their hands dirty inflicting harm? If we're the victim of violence from an unknown source, what then? If we're the victim of violence that we falsely attribute, are we intolerant? Is the falsely accused subject now flagged as intolerant?

The people talking about a paradox want to get credit for “tolerating” just the people they don’t mind having around, but you have to tolerate the people you hate, the people you think are a threat to you. Otherwise you’re not tolerant.

More broadly, how do you tolerate someone or something you don't know or understand? How do you deal with perception bias?

I'm reminded of growing up in the 90s and having people freak out over "loud rap music". The media bias against young black men and their taste in music is very clearly an example of intolerance. But the dialogue of the era framed playing this music (particularly the edgy stuff like NWA or Biggy) as itself an act of intolerance.

How do you square that contradiction? Who gets to adjudicate the offender and the offended? What gets defined as tolerable?

OP's image doesn't really set that out.

This all makes sense when you remember that the underlying topic here is bigotry. Ergo, tolerance is defined in those terms. Not in the more general terms.

The right uses the "paradox of tolerance" to hide what this is ultimately about, a common tactic.

It isn't about tolerating all ideas. It is about tolerating groups of people different from yourself.

Put another way, if society has a rule "don't be a bigot" and then someone is a bigot and gets in trouble, is society bigoted against bigots? No. Of course not. Thinking that would be asinine. Society is enforcing rules against bigotry.

It's formally designated as a paradox because of the way it is originally worded. Those who you mention will abuse it to make it non-logical andnnon-sensic; those who understand realize it is formally a paradox but to all practical matters it is a contract, as we have expressed here.

Or you could be like the teacher in the post, who loves the concept but never happened to think of it...

Exactly! My uncle had a paradox. One was dachshund and the other was some mutt. The wiener dog was kinda an asshole but not necessarily a bad dog, and the mutt was kinda stupid but certainly not broken. Anyway, both of them eventually got old and died and he never really got anymore so I guess now he has nodox?

Also this kind of thinking opens the way for torturing prisoners, revenge killings and stuff. It's not nearly as neat a "solution" as they think.

If someone steals my bike I would totally steal it back, and depending on where you live they execute murderers. I don't think it needs to be a special case.

What counts aa morals seem to fall into two categories. Spiritually enforced dogma or morality sourced from a central premise of what behaviours we adhere to in making a society better to live in. Spiritual dogma is difficult to argue with because you have something supposedly above society that straight up dictates something that must be followed. The consideration places those morals in an untouchable space for those who believe... The second form often is more flexible and covers a lot of smaller infractions and changes with society, technology and so on.

Take littering. Littering is something I argue our modern society considers immoral. If you've ever witnessed someone throw something on the ground deliberately and walk away your reaction might be disgust because it violates an idea of mutual responsibility to make society a nicer place to be and it is a disrespect toward that social construct. A majority of persons sign onto that that is an unacceptable behaviour and shows a lack of morals.

Social contract when violated isn't always responded to in exact kind because reciprocating often undermines the idea that those behaviours make things worse for everyone. Hence if someone litters, steals or murders someone we either fine them or lock them up as punishment because they voided a social contract which has been further codified into law.

For things that the law cannot be used as a tool to stop it's more of a wild west. If someone dumps all the leaves they rake up in their yard over your fence then people won't object if you do the same or slightly worse back to them. The initial slight is considered the immoral one that we click our tongues in disgust over but the equal response to it might elicit a laugh and a clap on the back.

There's only two things in this world I cannot stand. Intolerance, and the Dutch.

Creating a society of clenched buttcheeks?

If 9 people are dining at a table with 1 Nazi, how many Nazis are sitting at the table?

When you tolerate the intolerant what generally happens is you drive those who they target to need to leave to find other places of safety. Hosting intolerance means they are given new avenues to harass, select targets and make people miserable or afraid.

A lot of people have this idea that intolerant people are just people who want in their heart of hearts to be good and should be given that opportunity if you can only wheedle them into realizing what they are doing is bad. But when you try to include them in a mixed space all that serves to do is impress upon those persecuted that the intolerant person is the one who will be catered and adapted to their wellbeing is favored over that of their victims who are made to feel selfish or needy for just not wanting to be picked on. Apologists for intolerance give them secondary access to their victims

Even though it comes from a good place it is not ethical to host the intolerant in the same space as their victims and you can absolutely become a jerk for trying too hard to reform someone at the cost of sanity of everybody else in the room. The social contract isn't a straight forward thing. There's some gray area where you have contested coverage.

Also, what do you have to be willing to tolerate?

Do you have to tolerate people who are lobbying the government to lower the age of consent to 8 years old? Do you have to tolerate people who insist on having violent sex in public places? How about the local cannibal society that openly eats human flesh, but only from people who are willing to donate their bodies after they die, or who are willing to have limbs surgically removed to donate to the cause? What about the modern-day gladiator arena where volunteers battle to gruesome deaths in pursuit of fame and prizes?

It seems like if you're intolerant of any of those things, you're an intolerant, have broken the terms of the contract, and nobody has to tolerate you. But, while that might "solve the paradox", it doesn't seem like a very good place to live.

Yes. If you aren't actively condemning intolerance you implicitly condoning it.

We all do, constantly, on a case by case basis. We know that if someone makes a sexist off color joke, they're probably just joking, and we can choose how much we want to validate or invalidate their tasteless joke. If someone is actively calling for the extermination of a specific group of people, we can decide on a case by case basis how severe our response should be to them.

Do you actively encourage harm to others minding their own fucking business.

Every time I see this question, I have to wonder if it's genuine. Are you genuinely at a loss to come up with a standard for what's acceptable? Is this really difficult for you to imagine? Or are you just pretending to struggle, for rhetorical effect, because you secretly long to be intolerant and are trying to find a way to pooh-pooh requests for tolerance? Idk. You could just be stupid, and "intolerance means not allowing other ways of life to exist" is too difficult for you to understand.

Yes, where is that boundry line drawn?

Yes.

But then you have the paradox of intolerance

Yes, in an ideal world, tolerance would be a moral standard. But in a ideal world bad actors wouldn't take advantage of that moral standard by doing reprehensible shit and hiding behind "well you should be tolerant of my viewpoint" while simultaneously being intolerant themselves.

When we lose the latter, we can have the former - until then, we need to stop putting up with intolerant assholes who destroy lives (whether literally or metaphorically) and then say "but muh beliefs".

Watch out, that could be tolerating intolerance! Better tread carefully /s

It's a clever way bigots came up with to try to show that we must allow people to be intolerant.

It's bullshit like everything else the alt right says.

If the primary rule of society is "be tolerant" and you break it, well, fuck you, there are going to be consequences.

It's that simple. There is no paradox.

bUt ThAt Is iNtoLeRAnT!!1!

No. It's upholding the primary rule of society.

it has no solution or clever workarounds it’s just what it is.

There is, and in mathematics we'd define it as Closure. We define a set such that operations on members of the set will always reproduce new members of the set. The problem with applying this logic to a sociological environment is that - in practice - what we're doing is defining "personhood" as membership in the closed "tolerant" set. Dehumanizing anyone outside the tolerant group is not - I suspect - what the OP was hoping to achieve.

That gets us to the "trivial" solution to the paradox of tolerance, which is to kill everyone. Alternatively, to kill everyone except yourself or to kill everyone who isn't in your tolerance set. Viola! Everyone can express perfect tolerance because the only people alive are the folks who share that same sense of perfect tolerance. We might call this a "Final Solution" to the problem of tolerance.

But like many strictly logical and mathematical approaches to resolving social contradictions, it isn't in any way practical or particularly ethical. It is a brute force approach to solving what is, at its heart, a problem of interpersonal perception, accrued bias, and political manipulation.

The real problem of intolerance comes down to the old Dunbar's Number, the upper limit that human brains can process additional individuals as people worthy of empathy. This is a biological limit, not a logical one. And it produces a whole host of knock-on effects that the simple logical paradox doesn't engage with.

And they all look exactly like this Pepe here!

What if the person likes being flogged and I don't?

What if you don't know how NOT to be a dick?

E.g. My parents love me, but they still have "been dicks" to me my whole life because they don't understand me, at all.

Their ideology on politics, religion, money, society, on what a kid of theirs should become, etc is so far from what I am and aspire to be that every discussion I have with them leaves me saddened.

Out of love for them, to please them, I refrain from outing my inner thoughts, my real desires. My parents get another version of me when I visit them. I want them to be happy, yet I am not. But I need them, because I'm kind of alone. I have this urge to please them.

If I had kids, I'd wish to talk to their real selves, not a stoic version of their take on my perception of what a good kid of mine should be. Blahh.

Sometimes being a dick is not searching to understand others.

Being a dick is also not telling others who you really are.

I like how "don't be a dick" is downvoted. In a functional society you're taught what "don't being a dick" means to such a nuanced degree that defining it should be difficult.

Anyways this meme's got serious "and then everybody clapped" vibes.

Sorry, I dropped the pudding

Well yeah, read the smallprint. In fact, I would go further and say that anyone who's views are determined by an invisible magic dude who lives in the sky should be told politely but firmly to fuck off.

The complexity comes when you can't reliably group people. A lot of Muslims are tolerant. However, a number are not. At what point do the views of the individuals represent the views of the group?

Further, Islam is almost as fractured as Christianity. Does one group's view represent the others? Yes, No, partially? If partially how much?

There's also the complexity of mismatched information. What looks massively excessive from one perspective could look unpleasant but justifiable from another. How do we balance it out?

P.S. I'm personally not religious, however, I've learnt that a "simple and obvious" answer to a complex question is generally quite wrong.

Christians have shown over and over again to be very intolerant on a different level, and also Jews who adopt Zionist ideas. I don't think there is a religion in the world that has not been intolerant. Maybe the Satanists are open-minded and tolerant they seem to be chill.

Alright boys, you heard him, throw his corpse in the ditch.

Edit: When I made this comment, his only said

Tolerance is nonsensical bullcrap whose only purpose is mental masturbation.

There are things I like and there are things I don't like, deal with it. Can't deal with it? Maybe don't ask me anything and I won't give you answers that might hurt you.

He put the rest there to try to make it less shitty

End edit

You sound like someone who doesn't understand the mutual benefit of society in general.

Like sure, have your intolerance. Tell people exactly how you feel without a filter and then tell them to fuck off right after. No one is making you participate in the social contract. The point is that it's a two way street, and you're never going to be the guy receiving the benefit of the doubt.

Just don't be surprised when the only people who want your company are other intolerant assholes like you.

You obviously have the right to like or dislike whatever suits you. But tolerance is a requirement for society to function. Our likes and dislikes come from individual perspective, and no one individual can see the whole picture. Tolerance is a way of accounting for that on an individual level by broadening the bounds of what we deem acceptable by some amount, which allows us to cooperate in a broader, complex society. Generally all this means is lending people the benefit of the doubt if they're not actively harming someone.

It's hard to know what exactly pisses you off about this, because you haven't mentioned specifics about what controversial opinions you have, only that you have a right to have them. And fair's fair, some people would take some opinions away from you on social media platforms, or enact harsh penalties for holding hateful beliefs, and I am not really down with that. I'm optimistic about people and do my best to come at these things with respect, and believe in people's ability to learn and grow. I'm wrong and learn things all the time, it's a good thing!

But man, I gotta say that grace is difficult to offer sometimes. I'm trans, and you'd be surprised how quickly "basic human decency" fades as soon as that comes up sometimes. One example of too fucking many: when I came out, my folks disowned me on the spot. They framed much of it in more or less the same rhetoric you use here - personal truth > your feelings, don't bring it up if you don't want my opinion, I can't match other people's values, "tolerant" people are actually the intolerant ones, etc. Between the accusations of autogynephilia and furious bloviating about the sanctity of their opinions, there was no room to just honestly talk - and so therefore, nobody learned anything.

This line of thinking shuts down opposition by dominating the discussion with your opinions and feelings and crying foul when people feel the need to engage you about it. Unfortunately, this presents a brick wall that not only seals yourself from critique, but also seals yourself from having your views challenged and learning more about the world. It's good for no one and only serves to weaken the social fabric of society.

Hey buddy. I just came back here for a second to provide you with a little light reading. You're in this post accusing the "tolerant" of being intolerant towards you, who are intolerant, like it makes them hypocrites.

I just want you to know that this post is explicitly about the paradox of intolerance which states that within society, tolerant people have to specifically be intolerant towards the intolerant, or risk them taking over.

All of the raving you're doing about tolerant people being intolerant of you, and how that makes them hypocrites, is really only demonstrating that you don't understand the concept at all.

You're just mad at a buzz word that you think is synonymous with woke culture, and not the philosophical concept independent of politics that has been talked about for thousands of years.

Feel free to keep being an asshole, but understand that tolerant people calling you out for that aren't being intolerant, they are just calling out intolerance, which is required in a tolerant society. That's pretty much the point.

Just thought you should know on the off chance you might actually get it.

people that dont agree with your views despite them NOT being intolerant bigots

There are some views I have, that if you don't agree with them, you are definitionally an intolerant bigot. I think trans people exist and are fully human. A lot of conservatives right now disagree with that; they think trans people are mentally ill and need to be cured of their transness. This makes them intolerant bigots. This itself is intolerable.

I understand that we have to live with these people. I'm not arguing that they should be executed or imprisoned for holding their views. But they should not be allowed to express those beliefs in some situations, and they should definitely not be allowed to enact those beliefs.

Yeah, no.

I can tolerate someone who doesn't like milk in their tea.

I cannot tolerate someone who wants to wipe out every Muslim in the world.

Nor, do I believe, is that something I should have to tolerate.

Nor, do I believe, is that something any Muslim should have to.

And if you believe it is, then you are an idiot.

Someone who rides your bumper because you're not driving fast enough for them is an asshole.

Someone who doesn't wear headphones while listening to their music on public transit is an asshole.

Someone who wants to supports enacting policies banning the existence of certain groups of people is a bigot.