https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It is necessary to be intolerant of intolerance.
Someone somewhere said something smart:
View Tolerance as a contract. If someone is tolerant of others, tolerate them too. But if someone is intolerant towards others, they don’t get to be tolerated either.
I really dont understand how anyone can look at the modern era of politics without a consideration for game theory, it is so useful for resolving these more nebulous or philosophical idea when it comes to thought conflicts. If your ‘opponent’ is constantly escalating and you arent responding, you are functionally forfeiting. and we all know the fascists are escalating as often and as hard as they can. if you seek peace or de-escalation you have to negotiate, and they wont do that. if you seek neutral ground you have to respond with equal escalation. and if you want to win you have to apply overwhelming force.
most conflicts in politics are not zero sum like this so its not a useful tool most of the time, but fascists are literally out for the destruction of democracy by definition, its existential by nature.
It gets easier to comprehend when it’s tempered by the knowledge of global literacy rates. In the US, for example, 54% of adults read below a 6th grade comprehension level.
More than half the planet can barely analyse the nuances between two similar statements, let alone comprehend anything that takes a formal education to learn. As a result many people lack the communicative skills that enable us to avoid conflict because they literally lack a conceptual understanding of the many words they don’t know or understand correctly.
Hell, try even explaining concepts like context and nuance to many people and their eyes glaze over. I’d like to think it’s a largely fixable problem due to insufficient education, but another side of me remembers all my classmates in highschool who failed English.
If it’s the same writing I’m thinking of I’ll try to remember to link it when I get home.
"Tolerance isn’t an ideal, it’s a contract you’re automatically entered into at birth. The contract protects all involved who agree to the contract, but if you break the binds of the contract you are no longer entitled to it’s protections. To be intolerant of an intolerant person does not break ones commitment to the contract because the intolerant person is no longer protected by the contract. "
Paraphrased AF
These people never seem to realize that even at its most basic level, ensuring equal rights and freedoms requires a level of forfeiting individual freedoms. In order for everyone to have equal right to physical safety, you forego your freedom to punch them in the face without consequence.
These people go to talk about democracy, describe anarchy, then get upset when reality doesn’t meet their expectations. Your expectations don’t meet reality, bud.
They also don’t understand that protecting rights usually means defending awful people being awful. Rights are meaningless if only the right people get them.
But intolerance to intolerance should be the last resort and not the default. You should try all the other methods of civilized discourse first.
Not having civilized discourse with people whose political goal is to wipe me and those I love from the face of the earth. Also, “civilized discourse” requires at least two parties who are capable of such a thing.
I’m all with you that you have to gauge the person you’re interacting with. But if intolerance becomes the goto solution then we give up what we’re fighting for. If my son shows intolerance to people of other skin color I will try civilized discourse first and not throw him out of my house at the age of 10. If he’s an adult and all discourse has failed then I might show intolerance.
It’s always good to point out that that is philosophy, not science (neither political or any other kind).
https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU?t=306 rowan atkinson (mr bean) has an interesting opinion about it, I’d recommend watching the whole video.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/BiqDZlAZygU?t=306
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Random person: Hey Hitler, can you please stop doing the Holocaust.
Hitler: Nein.
Random person: Damn, guess I can’t do anything. If I used force to stop Hitler from committing a genocide I would be just as bad, because everyone knows killing a Nazi who wants to kill every Jew and killing an innocent Jewish person are equal moral acts.
I honestly don’t understand how people think like this. All they do is enable fascism and the imperial ambitions of more aggressive nations. As long as we live in a world with sovereign nations, some of those nations may do something extremely wrong that requires a war to stop, and that doesn’t mean you just let them do it. Ultimately, war is bad but genocide is worse and sometimes sacrifices have to be made (exclusion existing for nuclear war, which would render humanity and most of life on Earth extinct).
Neoliberalism is how people think like this. In order to stop the wave of strikes, protests, and violent demonstrations for workers rights the capitalist ruling class started heavily pushing the doctrine that “All acts of violence are always morally wrong”. They indoctrinate children into it through the education system and mass media. The intent was to stall the progress of workers rights movements in the long term, and it worked exactly as they intended.
The biggest thing people don’t understand is that governments exerting control necessitates violence, as laws are only recommendations otherwise.
You’re correct, it’s just a bit demotivating. There must be some way to reinvigorate the labor movement both in the United States and globally, but I’m not entirely sure how. I think the labor movement in the U.S. has recovered a bit from the massive damage that the Reagan administration caused it, but it’s slow-moving.
People have taken the line “violence is not the answer” to the extreme. It is true that violence is rarely the answer. However, there are times when violence is the only answer, because words will literally never work.
They were taught their whole lives that violence is always wrong. That it’s never the correct solution. They can’t concieve of it being the only way out. When you trust liberals to run an education system, you get people with ingrained useless liberal ideas.
*To be clear, using “liberal” from a leftist perspective.
Your problem is comparing Hitler’s holocaust to anything self proclaimed nazis do today. It’s far more effective to just ridicule the handful of them instead of trying to be violent.
It is absolutely an apt comparison. Genocide is a favored tool of fascists because it’s an effective way of quickly wiping away dissident civilians and destroying the mythical enemy they have in their heads. The Nazis alive today would absolutely do the Holocaust again given the ability, and fascism is too popular in too many countries for ridicule alone to work.
Something they might do isn’t worth worrying about. They don’t have any means to actually commit genocide on an organized scale. You lose credibility when you overreact or overstate reality.
“Germany plz stop occupying Poland”
More like “Germany plz stop occupying Czechoslovakia”.
Much of Europe celebrated the Munich Agreement, as they considered it a way to prevent a major war on the continent. Adolf Hitler announced that it was his last territorial claim in Northern Europe. Today, the Munich Agreement is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become “a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states.”
“Ah, darts. We didn’t appease the discourse hard enough. You can keep Czechoslovakia if you pinky-promise not to invade any more countries! If you do, we’ll be forced, to, uh, you’ll see, and you better believe we’ll do it!” (Narrator: They didn’t, in fact, do anything when Germany invaded Poland).
It was a whole bunch of that.
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Remilitarization of the Rhineland.
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Anschluß of Austria.
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The Sudetenland.
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The actual invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Nazi Germany really pulled “whatcha gonna do about this, bitch?” and got away with it for a surprisingly long time.
Appeasement doesn’t work. It did not work out for European powers, it did not work for Stalin, and more recently it did not work with Crimea/Ukraine.
Yet every time a portion of the population will wholeheartedly support appeasement policies out of what I can only assume to be a mix of abhorrent cowardice and a pathological compulsion to submit to authority. I can only imagine the kind of fucked-up childhood these people lived, to make them so afraid of fighting back even when they’re the ones holding the bigger stick.
“If you could stop killing people by the millions in a mass cultural genocide, that would be great. Thx.”
Never thought I’d say this about the fucking Nazis, but to be fair, most of the world was entirely unaware of just how bad the concentration camps were until after the war, and those that were aware didn’t become aware until the war was already past it’s height and starting to wear down as Nazi Germany was slowly colapsing under its own weight.
Honestly, more of the world (and especially the US) was strongly opposed to the Nazis during WWII than the population now, because it’s been so long. Which makes the fact you gave even more frustrating for me honestly. Because we have the information now. We know. There’s no excuse for present day.
Asking nicely and tolerance aren’t the only other options or even necessarily the opposite of violence. Sometimes, it’s just a necessary measure and last resort. Beating people rarely changes their mind, other methods must be used, like reasoning and education (preferably even before the person has gone fascist). Obviously, the reasoning isn’t gonna work with everybody, in which cases you do whatever must be done to ensure safety.
Think of fascism as if it’s a zombie pandemic. Once it’s in progress, you save those that you can and liquidate those that are too far gone. But the real method against a zombie pandemic is to have preventative measures in place, like not letting Umbrella Corp. develop the virus in the first place.
I would say yes, it’s out, but fortunately, it still hasn’t hit critical mass. We can still make it if we invest more into medicine and move to Madagascar.
The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it’s obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.
In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.
Note that it works because its instinctive. We don’t like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don’t have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.
Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don’t feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.
Otherwise, we’re going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they’ll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they’ll start a civil war.
If we don’t want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that’s what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.
Once civil war breaks out, though, or they’re harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.
rising genocide of transfolk
Are you saying modern society is less accepting of trans people than a few decades ago? From my perspective, it seems to be the opposite.
Currently there are an awful lot of bills currently in process in federal or state legislation in the US that aim to restrict healthcare, education, legal recognition, access to gender-separated public spaces and so on. Furthermore, hate crimes against trans folk, and suicides by transgender persons are at elevated levels and have been since 2016.
It may be specific to the US, the UK, Australia and a handful of other countries, but right now a lot of bad shit is going on. Yes.
Do I know when it was last this bad? No.
For most of recent history, we were routinely beaten and raped by cops, and legally murdered by men who felt insecure in their masculinity. Things got better for about a decade, and now they want us to return to the way things were. If the GOP were trying to bring back sundown towns, forced labor for made up laws, Jim Crow laws, etc. we’d call that a genocide too.
Bringing back 1950s racial politics would be evil, but I’m pretty sure that even under the loosest definition, it’s not genocide. See, the idea was to oppress and use black people intergenerationally, not wipe them or even all their cultural practices from the face of the earth. Want to use the word “genocide” to make a political statement on the attempted democide of trans people? Go nuts. But check your definitions. There are lots of kinds of evil.
Yes, people are saying that because it’s true:
Human Rights Campaign https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2022#introduction
ILGA-Europe Annual Review (under page 9, bias motivated violence) https://ilga-europe.org/report/annual-review-2023/
Anti-Defamation League https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/online-hate-and-harassment-reaches-record-highs-adl-survey-finds
Contemporary Untermench Nazi Toilet Stains: We’re going to terrorize innocent people and threaten them with violence and jump them simply because they exist and we’re gonna celebrate past genocides with flags and marches and then we will overthrow the government and create the third reich with even more atrocities and and and…!!
Everybody else: Well, we’re going to fight you every step of the way and respond to your violence if necessary.
C.U.N.T.S: SO MUCH FOR THE TOLERANT LEFT!! I’M ENTITLED TO MAH OPINION!!1! YOUR OPPRESSING ME!!¤#!!! 😨😰😥😢😭😱😖😣😞😓😩😫😤😡😠🤬👿
