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Comment by russdill | Hacker News Reader

That's a super broad brush. Throwing in the "exactly" makes this particularly overbroad. It's perfectly OK to think that people with certain views are intolerable and that isn't some path to fascism. There are people I don't want to associate with because of views I deem intolerable.

I think the necessary addition is "and they need to be stopped".

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To be fair, I am not red-teaming my comments or spending hours agonizing over each word.

But to a second point, it should be clear that "exactly" isn't meant in a mathematical sense of "literally every single thought". I don't think the people shouting about social justice and similar morality or other hot political issues want to go to war over whether or not you like poppyseed muffins, there's no reason to take words to their extreme when there isn't a question if a reasonable person would mean something like that.

Finally though, I actually do mean exactly. Find me someone passionate about their political and social opinions who is doing the yelling driving this societal problem who does tolerate different opinions on topics they care about. Few and far between. The problem is explicitly that the median person in these yelling groups actually doesn't tolerate any differences of opinions on a wide array of topics.

This is semantics with the word ‘tolerance.’ Tolerance means something akin to ‘permissible deviation.’ It doesn’t mean associate, it directly means the thing is permissible and thus isn’t stopped.

Eliminating the word fascism from discourse, and replacing it with a description of the thoughts and attitudes you find intolerable, would clarify your claims are here. It's not an invitation to argue about those views mind you, but if you had said "whoa, it's totally fine if we don't have racism, sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, etc expressed anywhere in polite mainstream society" then suddenly it becomes clear

1. you expect us all to have about the same definition of those terms (yours), and

2. you expect/condone zealous policing of those boundaries, (because these are by definition intolerable and one does not lightly oppose the intolerable)

Taken together, it's pretty clear how good intentions lead to puritanically speech-constrained society. The real tolerance paradox is that even the intoler (-ant/-able) speech must be tolerated.

Tolerated is taking on a wide range is meanings here. On one the of the spectrum, absolutely no, part of a free society is not forcing people to tolerate speech they find intolerable. If I go to a TED talk about fixing poverty and the speaker talks about his plan for eugenics and a final solution, I will walk out. In the other end of the spectrum, the government may disappear people who's speech they or the society that votes them in intolerable.

You can be anywhere along that spectrum without it being some inevitable slide towards the government disappearing people. Freedom to associate is a form of expression.

Toleration here means commitment to combat the bad ideas in the sphere of debate, and not to work the refs e.g. by appealing for bans. It doesn't mean you have to listen to it, but that your strategy for opposing it is to debate against it, not prevent it from being said and heard.

No. It's not wrong at all. THIS is the obstacle to free expression.

If you want to police actions according to societal laws, that is moral. Policing speech you don't like IS fascist.

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