Centerists

I'd argue it's not a paradox because it relies on two different definitions of tolerance.

• Tolerance 1: Intolerant opinions should be allowed to exist without criminal punishment.
• Tolerance 2: Everyone should treat intolerant opinions like other opinions for the purposes of platforming, how you feel about the speaker, etc.

Tolerance 1 is basically the kind of free speech principles adopted by most democratic societies and is probably necessary for such societies to remain free. Tolerance 2 is just silly. If you're in a forum specifically for debating deplorable opinions, fine. But there's no reason that a politics forum needs to cater to deplorable opinions.

Sorry, tone doesn't come across well. I can't tell if you're trying to correct me on a point, because I agree with you.

"Paradox" doesn't mean it's impossible to resolve. Mathematical paradoxes, such as Gabriel's Horn (a horn that takes up finite volume, yet you would not be able to paint it) or the Banach–Tarski paradox (where you can take a sphere, break it apart, and reassemble it into two spheres identical to the original), do have resolutions. They're just not obvious and can be hard to get your head around.

The original Greek word directly translates to "against belief", and basically means something unexpected. It doesn't mean it's logically contradictory, just that it might seem to.

So yes, the Paradox of Tolerance is a paradox. It's not obvious to all people what the resolution is, but explaining it as a peace treaty rather than an unchangeable moral imperative tends to work.

I was recently reminded about the caveats that Germany has on the "no Nazi parties" rule. It's truly insane that it's essentially (this is hyperbole, but less than you'd think) "you can ban a party from running if they're Nazis... As long as they call themselves Nazis, and they've won an election, and the leader is called Hitler, and the leader went to art school. All other parties must be allowed to run"

The people who came out against banning afd are the same ones who absolutely will not have the balls to do what you need to do to a nazi party you don't ban in time as well.

I mean...it's literally not always a man. I get the point but that's a terrible slogan.

Found the apologist.

There's an old joke. The parties change but the message stays the same.

A group of Nazis have cornered a group socialists when a centrist comes along. The centrist listens to both sides, how the Nazis want to kill all the socialists and how the socialists don't want to die. Thinking long and hard on it, the centrist says that there's a compromise to be had, just kill half.

I would say a true centrist is nothing. No beliefs on whether the means of production should be held by private companies or the people. Aka, they either cannot exist or have not formed an opinion on it making it so that their opinion wouldn't matter.

The problem therein lies that we try to tie other things into it that aren't about government, and instead about human rights, and it clearly diverts from being a line to a multi dimensional graph that all means next to nothing when it comes to claims like left right.

Both someone on the left and the right can want to subjugate parts of the populous without having to leave their belief on who owns the means of production.

Unfortunately, large sections of the Fediverse are slowly turning into bubbled echo chambers, each enforcing their own purist "correctness".

They're throwing anybody with remotely different opinions out the window whilst slowly shifting their overton window off into fantasy land.

He sounds like if a sundown town was a human being.

Wenn du friedlich gegen die Gewalt nicht ankommen kannst, ist das letzte Mittel das uns allen bleibt Militanz

Ich denke exakt diese Worte werden von beiden/allen Seiten verwendet, die sich im Recht währen. Das macht sie am Ende alle moralisch gleich.

English:

If you cannot peacefully combat violence, the last resort that remains for all of us is militancy

I think these exact words are used by both/all sides who claim to be in the right. That makes them all morally equal in the end.

But it’s not a debate. They have no interest in listening to you, any facts you present, nor presenting any disputing facts.

the debate is not for them. it is for potential impartial observer who just encountered the problem for the first time and is now forming an opinion.

unfortunately it is really hard, because since the onset of the machine learning generators the pile of crap is literally endless.

But it's not a debate. They have no interest in listening to you,

Adam doesn't debate Bob to convince Bob of Adam's viewpoint. Adam debates Bob to convince their shared audience: Charlie, David, Edward, Frank, George, Harry...

When Bob is ejected from this forum, Charlie, (et al), never hear that debate and are never convinced of Adam's views. They aren't inoculated against Bob's logic. When they come across Bob uncontested in another forum, they may be persuaded; they fall into his echo chamber. When they bring their half-formed ideas back to your forum, they are banned as apologists rather than debated.

Ejecting Bob makes your forum better. Adam debating Bob makes the world better.

The response can also be a closed fist or the end of a bayonet.

Not a first goal, but still a time tested answer.

The response in this context is a preemptive: "not welcome here". We've all heard what the fascists have to say, and it's worthless. Zero tolerance for fascists.

You both don't realize the sheer volume of chuds. It's great, until you realize it's endless.

I believe it helps to be able to identify bad faith actors. If you have never heard their arguments before then you run the risk of not realising its a bad faith argument. This could mean you end up taking them seriously.

How do you know what a toxic idea is if you never hear one. It is helpful to know what is wrong when trying to determine what is right.

I never said let people with bad takes in. I said hear them and disagree with them. Having such terrible takes in the air is a great way to strengthen your position when you are able to point out the absurdity of the bad argument.

If we close ourselves off to all the arguments we dont like then we run the risk of becoming so entrenched in our own opinion being the only right one that we never let anyone tell us we are wrong.

Finding the right path is a group effort, and it takes good and bad views to get there.

Just look at your agument, its so matter of fact. It feels like you have determined the correct position so all other views are wrong. The opening sentence "found another one" is enough to see this. You arent right automatically because you have had enough people agree with you. Especially whn you reject any opposing or even slightly different view point.

The line is where their words cross over from speech to violence. When they call for eliminating people from society, you can remove them by the same methods they advocate.

"Toxic and dangerous" are relative terms. When the moderation team closes the Overton window enough that Chocolate ice cream qualifies as "toxic", the only dissent you can still have is between natural and artificial vanilla flavoring.

there are indeed people with ideas so toxic and so dangerous they need to be removed.

Probably. But the argument is about who gets to decide who they, not whether they exist.

Nazis are identified by their affiliation with the Nazi party. People you think are Nazis are identified by your opinion of them and absolutely nothing more.

If you could provide an objective definition of these 'apologists', we might have something to discuss, but clearly there can be no such definition, these are not facts like the shape of the earth or the speed of light.

We (almost) all agree that some levels of intolerance should not be tolerated, what we disagree on is which opinions confer such a status on someone.

Wait, because your time is limited on earth, you shouldn't learn how to identify bad actors? I think it's a pretty basic and vital skill. Am i misunderstanding you. Are you saying we should all be gullible fools and rely on some unknown force to sheild us from bad arguments?

Lol.

That's great if you can trust the moderation/censorship team to use a rational definition of bigotry. But what usually happens is they begin to enforce the standards of an ever-closing Overton window, to the point that mere disagreement with the hive mind is considered bigotry.

The limits of discourse never stay "this far out". Moderation distills this enforced consensus into a weird, unhinged fanaticism, one "deviant" at a time.

So call out bigots for being fake centrists. When you start attacking all centrists willy-nilly, then you're doing the job of the bigots.