It's a kind of "have an open mind but not so much that your brain falls out" situation.
Too many people think their brain is going to fall out of even the slightest deviation from their moral code is tolerated these days.
Too many people think their brain is going to fall out of even the slightest deviation from their moral code is tolerated these days.
We can be intolerant of things which are “obviously” wrong, like hate and other intolerance. We shouldn’t be intolerant of the gray area, where something is controversial but still justified.
The fundamental truth is that you are intolerant, because speech leads to action. People like to think of themselves as tolerant and not sensitive, and maybe some people are tolerant to speech which doesn’t lead to action and can take insults for days. But when a majority may hold an opinion you don’t like (e.g. cancel your favorite TV show, or food, or just flat-out kill you and harvest your organs), you want to censor this opinion. You may also want to censor speech when it affects those who aren’t so thick-skinned, like your mom or 5-year-old daughter or the other 75% of the population whose mental health is affected by words.
If your laws tolerate enough speech, the bad guys may team together, take over your government and change them - hence, the Paradox of Tolerance. But they may not, and they may also manage to take over your government without tolerance or speech or even teaming up. In an ideal world we’d allow all speech but have no “bad” speech, but in practice we have tape and plywood to prevent speech when the alternative would very clearly, very significantly hurt more people than censoring.
I also think there are also exceptions to tolerance in the case of an emergency, with the distinction that it has to be an actual emergency universally (agreed on by logical people), and also temporary unless it’s really, really bad (like everyone dies once we stop). e.g. covid in January-May 2020. If we had a super strict, solid covid lockdown when the virus first broke out, we may have actually eradicated covid. Yeah we’d be violating essential freedoms, we’d have to lock up or possibly execute people who go outside, and may even have to curtail anti-science speech. But with said lockdown we may have actually eradicated covid, IMO that is worth being intolerant of dissent for 3 months. However, covid mandates once we realized covid would become endemic, those are debatable, because a) the emergency is no longer universally agreed, and b) some of those mandates could be argued indefinite.
But the other fundamental truth is there’s no right answer. There’s no “do policy X and everything will work out”, hindsight 20/20 but we have no idea the “bad” speech (speech which causes real suffering) of the future will be. There’s no “objectively moral” answer. Ultimately it comes down to, well, your opinion or the opinion of those in power.
It doesn't work. Whenever someone wants to say an opinion in the black area, they'll say the closest thing on the boundary of the grey area, instead. Their followers, who do the same thing themselves, understand this as if it was the original opinion in the black area (or something close to it).
A current topical example: "<Person> should be allowed to sell lists of spies to enemy states" is in the black area, but "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is in the grey area.
"<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is a completely valid argument. But when you realize the person is the unstable former US president, he was presumably searched out of genuine suspicion (I wouldn't consider it just "politics"), and then it contained a list of foreign spies and other documents it wasn't supposed to - now it's no longer reasonable. But I would also say you're no longer really arguing "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons".
The two are barely connected. Yeah they are connected, but no rational person would jump from "home search for political reasons is unjustified" to "leaking spies to enemy states is justified". An extremist would understand, but extremists can figure out codes to communicate with each other as long as any speech is allowed.
Radicalizing sensible people is absolutely a real phenomenon which is happening right now in the US, and has happened many times before. But it's not free speech which has caused this. It's actually poverty and other societal flaws which make people upset, and when the "good guys" don't fix those flaws, people start listening to the bad guys. Sensible people can listen to garbage, but they can also listen to your side, and if they're still reasonable they can make rational judgement.
I'm sorry, but this is just a bizarre argument. I don't see how the outbreak of a disease with a 1% death rate [1], or even the initial 3.4% estimate given at the start of the pandemic, could ever justify executing people for going outside. Even China never went that far, is this really something you believe "logical people" would agree upon?