It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit.
I am also glad that I’m getting away from reddit’s general political shitposting, which was more left leaning. You couldn’t have any proper discourse on there, and even I with my generally more left leaning views recognized that.
Going to bring it up again, the Paradox of Tolerance disappears when you consider tolerance a social contract rather than a moral standard.
Nazis base their identity and politics around not tolerating the presence of various minorities, and therefore aren’t entitled to tolerance themselves.
TERFs base their identity and politics areound not tolerating trans people, and therefore aren’t entitled to tolerance themselves.
Furries don’t base their identity on excluding, invalidating or persecuting someone else, so furries are entitled to tolerance.
So, the furry boards stay but we need to defederate Nazis and TERFs.
There’s always going to be some fuzzy edge cases, unfortunately. When tolerance becomes such an important and powerful thing it will become easily weaponized and subject to misinterpretation, deliberate or otherwise.
Oh yeah, but honestly if we can just keep the big troublemakers out and set a line in the sand we can put up with the fuzzy edge cases. It would also be necessary to consider tolerance a concept that goes beyond interpersonal interaction. Like, okay, this guy is civil but what he’s saying is that genocide is okay. Or, okay, this guy is rubbing me the wrong way but at its core “Archer is a better Captain than Sisko”* is not fundamentally about race, it could honestly be he just prefers Archer.
*Sisko is a better Captain than Archer, this is fact. But sometimes people are just wrong and that’s okay.
Which captain poisoned the atmosphere of a whole planet just for his personal vendetta against one guy?
Which captain initiated the murder of an innocent diplomat just to get his way?
Don’t get me wrong, Sisko made for better stories, but being a good captain is a different category.