He's providing a platform and cover for a child pornographer, live, in realtime, in public. There is something profoundly wrong in your worldview that's going to snap in one direction or another, and it's probably time for some self reflection.
Too often people believe that if they write and think in a detached and dispassionate way that their approach is intrinsically superior. Terms like "partisan pitfalls" and "irrational extremism" stake a claim that these things this person disagrees with are inherently bad.
As you say, we don't need a nuanced take on the "difficulty" of tolerance for intolerance. This is a solved problem, and well understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Musk may be brilliant in engineering (Many claim he doesn't, but I'm willing to give him at least some credit for the clearly revolutionary technical advancements both Tesla and SpaceX have achieved. I think the idea that both companies only thrive in spite of him is patently ludicrous.), but he has a teenager-level emotional maturity when it comes to social and societal issues. And it shows when it comes to his explicit tolerance and encouragement of discrimination on Twitter.
Esther, meanwhile, is an admitted escapee of a genuine cult, that somehow missed all the signals, and dove into the same patterns headfirst when it came to Twitter post-Musk. I'm not going to psychologically diagnose someone from afar, but I suspect she needs help of the type neither Musk nor Twitter nor Hackernews can provide.
I'm not a fan of this flavor of discourse, and frankly find it offensive. But I will tolerate it.
This is a person who formed an early part of her internet identity as an "escaper from a cult". She wrote articles about her time in a cult, and how she didn't realize she was in it until she got out.
Then Musk bought twitter, fired thousands, and she excitedly posted pictures of herself sleeping in the office, and for a few weeks was Musk's primary mouthpiece on Twitter about upcoming changes, posting product updates first.
Then he fired her too.
Some people have addictive personalities and is why they have to learn to go cold turkey from any type of addictive stimulant. Some find it so difficult to escape that they simply must replace one habit for another (a lot of recovered heroin addicts end up smokers).
Likewise, there are certain mental and personality attributes that make some people more susceptible to cults. Proper cults, or even more societally acceptable ones like religion or multi-level marketing.
The author has a demonstrated track record of this, and as such is difficult to see as an impartial observer of her time at Twitter because it is necessarily coloured by this lens.
2. On one hand, you accuse the GP of cargo cult intellectualism, on the other hand, you "did not" psychologically diagnose the OP.
And as you point out, the "solutions" are themselves intolerant, and if abused or do not match the expectations of the rest of the populace, also create something that feels like authoritarianism and intolerance to some of the population.
When confronted with this conclusion, you have two options:
A) Decide that authoritarianism and intolerance is inevitable, and simply aim to be on the right side of repression, aligning yourself with whoever is the most powerful and violent.
B) Try to understand what level of intolerance is the relevant acceptable one for the majority of your culture/population, and strive to find a balance, even if it's not the balance a different culture/people's/nation on the other side of the planet would take.
I choose Not A.
2. I responded to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015214
It seems to me that, in the context of Popper's idea, what should be tolerated vs. what should not can be largely subjective and is often just weaponized against ideological opponents.
And yet, it's also self-evidently true at the margins -- we cannot tolerate Nazism or those who call for ethnic cleansing and so on.
But it's so overused on social media as a way to say - "I find your politics to be gross, and I will use the Paradox of Tolerance to claim moral superiority."
For example, I have seen people claim you should not tolerate Republicans or fundamentalist Christians or figures like Jordan Peterson. That seems quite extreme to me, as these are all within the American mainstream.
I also am very uncomfortable with it, because like many progressive ideas like this that are based on value-based judgement it is susceptible to be abused by anyone with different values. (Even, in the extreme case, by actual Nazis who may claim that ethnic cleansing and racial purity IS a moral virtue that is worth pursuing).
I also don't know how to draw the line, but I would proclaim that it's fine to draw A line. The truth is there is no such thing as a universal human common sense on such things. Countries and societies and patterns draw out of the median expectations of that society. Some cultures are more collective and collaborative, some are more individualistic.
Which is why in the US, free speech is considered more sacred than stopping Holocaust denial propaganda. But most of the developed world believes otherwise. I see both perspectives (and am personally in the latter camp, because I believe nuance is important and the US seeks very harsh lines in the sand that I don't think are practical)
So I don't think there is a universal answer for what you can or cannot choose to Intolerate (not a word?). Canada is typically closer to the US with its perspectives on the subject than Western Europe, but it also bans holocaust denial, and considers deliberate denial of trans people's preferred gender identity as the same class of discrimination as against gay people or black people. Yet in the most recent years the conservatives have settled in a very comfortable sweet spot of hate speech that isn't illegal but not supported by most Canadians. It's the same message as in the US - the whole "Trans people are pedophile groomers", and we are wrestling with what its doing to our society. For Canada, Jordan Peterson IS quite extreme. He started with occasional nuanced takes on male vs female gender roles, and a thought-provoking (even if i ultimately disagreed with him) conversation about whether recognition of pronouns was "compelled speech". But at this point, even you must admit that he's embraced the full wing of the American internet-savvy right wing.
Which is where we come to my last point - Shapiro, Walsh, and Peterson may be within the American "mainstream" but American mainstream is wildly outlandish compared to the rest of the world. It's hard to treat the Republican party as a serious group of voters when 54% of them would still gladly vote for Donald Trump today after everything that's happened over the last 7 years.
https://twitter.com/PokerPolitics/status/1684300589268709377