this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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We cannot tolerate intolerance.
That's a paradox. You cannot tolerate everything. That's why there's no such thing as not being bigoted. It's literally impossible to tolerate everything.
You just have to pick what things you're not going to tolerate. Now if only we could always agree on what that is.
Intolerance. Intolerance is the one thing you don't tolerate. It being a rhetorical paradox doesn't mean it's difficult to implement.
It absolutely is because there are things that you where you cannot tolerate both oposing viewpoints. There's also things that you do not want to tolerate.
Unless you believe it's not okay to be intolerant of murder.
I hope that helps illustrate how it's not just a rhetorical paradox. It's a conceptual one too. Much of the time, it's not tolerance vs intolerance. It's picking between two flavors of intolerance.
Well I mean if you're expanding the argument to things as well, then yeah, it becomes rather unwieldy. But if you constrain it to intolerance for people, then it remains rather simple.
Not at all. I'm not talking about just things. I'm also talking about about people.
It is not simple to determine the extent to which to tolerate different groups of people. Unless you're saying that you want to be equally tolerant of murderers, races, all religions, and people who like pineapple on pizza.
Murder falls under intolerance. Religion can exist without being intolerant, but often doesn't. The smell test really is pretty simple: if you're not actively hurting someone besides yourself, you should be tolerated. Along with that, we decide that intolerance for other reasons (ie, because of a person's genetic makeup or mode of expression) is itself harmful.
Now we can find tune and dicker about where that line of injury is, and of course there are special cases where the alleged hurt is spread around and it's hard to decide how to adjudicate that, but that's what the law and all its apparatus is for, after all.
I wouldn't say murder falls under intolerance. It certainly can, but not all the time.
Who gets to define what constitutes not actively hurting someone besides yourself? Is it just as defined by you or do other people get a say? What do you do when someone decides that not wearing a hijab or extra-marital sex is actively harming others?
I hope that illustrates why this is not simple at all. It's incredibly complex.
And as I was saying in my initial comment, it's literally impossible to objectively define tolerance. But, you have to choose to tolerate some things and not others (because they're mutually exclusive). So you end up with different forms of intolerance of behaviors that you deem intolerant.
And we decide that intolerance is acceptable for many other reasons. You don't tolerate ignorant people. You don't tolerate people who cannot arrive on time. You don't tolerate people who are too rude. Intolerance of those aspects
The special cases are the ones where it's actually clear. The majority of the cases are where we struggle to know where to draw the line.